by Peter Mayle
“Now, sweetie,” she said, “when are you going back to New York?”
It was Andre’s turn to shudder. He had no desire to leave early spring for the bitter tail end of a Manhattan winter. “Over the weekend, I guess. I thought I’d go into Nice tomorrow and do a few shots of Alziari and Auer.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Are they people I should know?”
“They’re shops.” Andre turned in to Saint-Paul and pulled up outside the hotel. “Marvelous-looking shops. One sells olives and olive oil, the other one has terrific jams.”
This was of no interest to Camilla, who could see nothing of any social consequence in olives or jam. Getting out of the car, she looked around, then beckoned imperiously at a Mercedes parked on the far side of the place. “There’s dear Jean-Louis. Tell him to come in and get my bags, would you? I’m just going to check my messages.”
The hectic ritual of Camilla’s departure for the airport occupied the next fifteen minutes: Under the attentive eye of the gendarme, bags were ferried to the Mercedes and stowed; the services of a chambermaid were enlisted to search beneath Camilla’s bed for a missing earring; a last-minute fax was sent to New York; the airport was called to confirm that the flight was on time; tips and compliments were distributed. Finally, with a collective sigh of farewell, the hotel staff watched Camilla cross the courtyard and settle in the back of the car. Through the open window, she looked up at Andre.
“You will have the transparencies in my office on Tuesday, sweetie, won’t you? I’m putting the issue to bed next week.” And then, without waiting for an answer, “Ciao.”
With that, the window slid up, and Camilla set off to take Paris by storm. Hoping that the concierge at the Ritz was braced for the coming assault, Andre watched the Mercedes move cautiously up the narrow street and out of the village.
Now there was the luxury of a free evening and an entire day to himself. After a shower, he went down to the bar with his map, the creased, worn, yellow Michelin 245 that he’d had since university, and spread it on the table next to his kir. The 245 was his favorite map, a souvenir of sentimental journeys, a map of memories. Most of his long summer vacations had been spent in the area it covered, from Nîmes and the Camargue in the west to the Italian border in the east. Fine times they had been, too, despite a chronic shortage of money and frequent romantic complications. He thought back to those days, days when it seemed the sun had always shone, the five-franc wine had tasted like Latour, the cheap backstreet hotels had been clean and welcoming, and there had always been a tanned body next to his, dark against the white sheets. Did it never rain? Had it really been like that? Probably not. If he were honest, he could barely remember the names of some of the girls.
He picked up his kir, and condensation from the base of the glass dripped onto the Mediterranean just south of Nice. It stained the dotted lines that marked the routes of the ferries to Corsica, and as the stain spread across to the tip of Cap Ferrat it triggered another memory, this one more recent. At the end of the previous summer, he had spent two days shooting on the Cap, in the elaborate villa—Camilla’s whispered description was “bourgeois-sur-mer, sweetie”—belonging to the Denoyers, the old-money Denoyers, a family that had been quietly wealthy since the days of Bonaparte. A contract to make uniforms for the many Napoleonic armies had, over the generations, developed into a giant enterprise, successfully providing a variety of textiles to a variety of governments. The current head of the family, Bernard Denoyer, had inherited a well-run company that demanded little of his time, a privilege he enjoyed to the full. Andre remembered liking him. He also remembered liking his daughter.
Photographs of Marie-Laure Denoyer appeared regularly in the smarter French magazines. Depending on the season, she could be seen at Longchamps chatting with one of daddy’s jockeys, on the slopes at Courcheval, at the Red Cross Ball in Monte Carlo, beautifully turned out, smiling prettily, invariably surrounded by a knot of hopeful young men. A graceful wisp of a blonde in her very early twenties, with the permanent light-golden tan of someone who is never too long away from the sun, she was surprisingly normal for a rich man’s daughter: vivacious, friendly, and, so it appeared, unattached. Camilla had disliked her on sight.
Andre decided to change his plans. Instead of going to Nice in the morning, he’d drive over to Cap Ferrat and pay his respects to the Denoyers. With luck, Marie-Laure might be free for lunch. He finished his kir and went through to the restaurant, his appetite sharpened by anticipation of what tomorrow might bring.
Cap Ferrat, elegantly wooded with palm and pine trees, impeccably maintained, furiously expensive, has long been one of the most fashionable addresses on the Côte d’Azur. It juts into the Mediterranean to the east of Nice, villas of the famous and notorious screened by high walls and thick hedges, guarded by iron gates, insulated from the common herd by a buffer of money. Past residents include King Leopold II of Belgium, Somerset Maugham, and the coiffure-conscious Baroness Beatrice de Rothschild, who never, ever, ventured abroad without a trunk containing fifty wigs.
Most of the current residents in these more democratic and dangerous times prefer to be unlisted, unknown, and undisturbed, and Cap Ferrat is one of the few places along the coast where they are able to avoid the jostle and clamor of tourism. Indeed, one of the first things the visitor coming from Nice notices is the absence of hubbub. Even the lawn mowers—heard but not seen behind the walls and hedges—sound muted and deferential, as though fitted with silencers. There are few cars, and they move slowly, almost sedately, with no signs of the normal competitive urgency of the French driver. A sense of calm prevails. People who live here, one feels, never have to rush.
Andre followed the Boulevard General de Gaulle past the lighthouse, turning off down a narrow private road, a cul-de-sac that led to the very tip of the cape. The end of the road was the beginning of the Denoyer estate, marked by ten-feet-high stone walls and massive double gates of heavy iron, decorated with the Denoyer coat of arms. Beyond the gates, the land dropped away steeply, terraced lawns divided by a drive more than a hundred yards long, lined with palm trees, ending with a turning circle, an ornate fountain, and a rather pompous front door. The slope of the land made it possible to see, above the roof of the house, a silvery strip of the Mediterranean. Andre remembered being taken through the tunnel that led from the garden to the boathouse and private beach, Denoyer remarking on the problems of erosion and the high cost of shipping in extra sand every spring for the enjoyment of his guests.
Andre got out of the car, tried the gate, found it locked. He peered through the iron bars at the house below. Those windows he could see were shuttered, and he had to accept the obvious: The Denoyers were not at home. It was too early in the year; they were doubtless still perched on an alp or prone on a beach, with Marie-Laure refreshing her tan.
With a pang of disappointment, he was turning to get back in the car, when he saw the front door opening. The figure of a man appeared, holding something in front of him. It looked like a square, a vividly colored square, and the man was holding it slightly away from his body with extreme care as he turned his head to look toward the side of the house.
Curious, Andre narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun, unable to make out any details. And then he remembered his camera. He had put it on the passenger seat, fitted with the long lens on the off chance of his coming across an interesting shot on the road, a habit he had developed years before. Taking the camera from the car, he adjusted the focus until the figure at the front door was sharp and clear. And, now, familiar.
Andre recognized him as Old Claude (so called to distinguish him from Young Claude, who was the head gardener). For twenty years, Old Claude had been Denoyer’s homme à tout faire, his handyman, caretaker, runner of errands, driver of guests to and from the airport, supervisor of the indoor staff, guardian of the speedboat, an essential member of the domestic establishment. On the shoot, he had been good-natured and useful, helping to move furniture and
adjust lights. Andre had joked about hiring him as an assistant. But what the hell was he doing with the painting?
That, too, was familiar: a Cézanne—the family Cézanne, a very fine study that had once belonged to Renoir. Andre remembered exactly where it had hung, above the ornamental fireplace in the main salon. Camilla had insisted on a series of close-ups, to catch the ravishing brushwork, so she said, although she had never used a single close-up in the article.
Acting on photographer’s instinct as much as considered thought, Andre took several shots of Claude on the doorstep before his body was hidden from view by a small van that pulled around from the side of the house and stopped in front of him. It was a conventional, dirty blue Renault of the kind found by the hundred in every town in France. A small panel on the side identified it as belonging to Zucarelli Plomberie Chauffage, and as Andre watched through the lens, the driver got out, opened the back doors of the van, and removed a large cardboard carton and a roll of bubble wrap. He was joined by Claude.
The two men wrapped the painting carefully and placed it in the carton. The carton went back in the van. The doors were closed. The men disappeared inside the house. All of this recorded on film.
Andre lowered the camera. What was that all about? It couldn’t possibly be a burglary, not in broad daylight in the presence of Claude, the infinitely trustworthy Claude with his twenty years of faithful service. Was the painting being sent away for cleaning? Reframing? If so, why was it leaving the house in the back of a plumber’s van? It was odd. It was very odd.
But as Andre had to admit, it was none of his business. He returned to the car and drove slowly back through clean, respectable, somnolent Cap Ferrat until he reached the coast road that would take him into Nice.
Despite an initial mild and really quite unjustified feeling of anticlimax—Marie-Laure would probably never have remembered him anyway; or else closer acquaintance would have shown her to be a spoiled brat after all—Andre found himself enjoying his day off. Unlike Cannes, which slips into a kind of languid semihibernation once the festivals are over and the tourists have escaped, Nice remains awake all through the year. Restaurants stay open, markets continue, the streets are busy, the Promenade des Anglais is a-bob with joggers who like their exercise with a sea view, the traffic spits and snarls, the town breathes and sweats and lives.
Andre strolled through the lanes of Vieux Nice, with a stop at the Place Saint-François to admire some recently removed residents of the Mediterranean, now occupying slabs in the fish market. He sat outside and had a beer in the Cours Saleya, using his long lens again to take shots of the stallholders and their clients, the worthy housewives of the neighborhood, connoisseurs of the lettuce and the broad bean and the bargain. After a lunch of moules and salad and cheese, he shot three or four rolls of color in Auer and Alziari, bought some lavender essence for Noel, and—smiling at the thought of her wearing it—a genuine, made in the Pyrenees, guaranteed-imperméable-à-l’eau beret for Lucy.
It started to rain on his way back to Saint-Paul, a steady light drizzle that persisted through the night and into the morning, a change in the weather that Andre welcomed. He always found it hard to leave the south of France; harder still if the sun was high and hot; less of a wrench under dripping gray skies.
The palm trees along the road to the airport, moist and morose, seeming to huddle under the rain, gave way to the glass and steel and concrete of the terminal. Andre returned his car to Avis and took his place in the check-in line among the businessmen (were they the same weary gypsies who had flown over with him from New York?) and a scattering of holidaymakers bearing sun-pink cheeks and noses.
“Hi! How you doing?”
Andre turned, to find his window-sensitive neighbor of the flight over beaming at him. He smiled back and nodded at her. It wasn’t enough.
“So. How was your trip? I’ll bet you had some great food. I went to this really neat place in Cannes, maybe you know it, Le something Rouge? Wait, I have the card somewhere.” She produced from her bag a swollen Filofax. The line moved up one. Andre prayed for a full flight and a seat well away from his new friend.
4
LATE afternoon at JFK, a red sun dropping and the air like a knife, the banks of soiled snow a dismal contrast with the bright flower beds of Nice. Andre detached a hardened gobbet of lurid green chewing gum from the seat of the cab as he got in, and tried to make himself understood to the driver. It had been a smooth and mercifully crowded flight, the only distraction a movie in which one of Hollywood’s steroid heroes had systematically wiped out the rest of the cast. There had been ample encouragement to close the eyes and think.
The scene at Denoyer’s villa returned to nag at his thoughts, as it had several times during the flight. The incongruity of what he knew to be a very valuable painting being loaded, however carefully, into a local workman’s van was impossible to forget. And there had been something else, which he had paid no great attention to at the time: The intercom set into the stone gatepost had been dead when he’d pressed the button. Normal enough, if the house had been closed up and there had been no one to answer. But Claude had been there. It was as though the property had been deliberately disconnected from the outside world.
He felt a sudden impatience to see the photographs he had taken, a record more reliable than memory, and decided to go straight to the processing lab and get the film developed. Leaning forward to make himself heard over the swirls and torrents of sitar music, he gave the address to the back of the cabdriver’s turbaned head.
It was almost seven by the time he pushed open the front door of his apartment. Dropping his bags, he went over and switched on the viewing box set into the top of his worktable. The glow flickered and spread into a sheet of pure white light as he laid the transparencies in vivid rows across the glass. The tiny images shone up at him—Claude, the Cézanne, the Zucarelli van and, presumably, Zucarelli himself. Andre rearranged the transparencies, putting them in chronological sequence, telling the story. The details were clear, the focus perfectly sharp even under the magnification of a loupe. As evidence it could hardly have been more conclusive.
But evidence of what? An innocent errand? Andre sat back on the stool, shaking his head. It wasn’t right.
He stared at the bulletin board on the wall above his table, a jumble of Polaroids, bills, newspaper clippings, numbers and addresses on scraps of paper, a menu from L’Ami Louis, expense claim forms, unanswered invitations, unopened envelopes from the IRS, and, like a shaft of sunshine among the gloom of those loose ends, a photograph he’d taken of Lucy in the office. He had caught her during a call to Camilla, and she was holding the phone away from her ear as she looked into the camera, a wide, triumphant grin lighting up her face. It had been the day she’d negotiated his last fee increase with DQ, an increase that Camilla had finally accepted with very poor grace and a great deal of bluster.
Lulu. He’d show her the photographs, see what she thought, get a second opinion. He picked up the phone.
“Lulu? Andre. I just got back. There’s something I want to show you.”
“Is there a problem? Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. How about dinner?”
“It’s Saturday night, Andre. You know? When working girls have dates and go out.”
“A drink? A quick drink? It might be important.”
A short silence. “Can you meet me where I’m having dinner?”
Andre was there in twenty minutes. He settled himself at the half-empty bar and looked around. The last time he had walked past, a few months before, the place had been a run-down hardware store, specializing in window displays of dusty small appliances and dead flies. Now it had been transformed into another SoHo restaurant hoping to be hip—stripped-down decor, hard surfaces, and a lighting level sufficiently high for anyone remotely celebrated to be easily recognized from across the room. The hostess—an aspiring actress, judging by the greasepaint—had the offhand manner and ceremonial swaying walk comm
on to her breed, the menu sprouted with fashionable vegetables, and the wine list was heavily diluted with a dozen brands of mineral water. The owners seemed to have thought of everything; there was no reason why the restaurant shouldn’t be a great success for at least three months.
It was still a little too early in the evening for the hoped-for invasion by models and their escorts, and the diners now reaching the end of their meals had the subdued look of customers who had been thoroughly intimidated by both the prices and the restaurant staff. Tunnel people, Camilla would have called them, who had come into the city from New Jersey and the suburbs for a glamorous evening. They were known to drink little and to tip sparingly, and so were treated with a coolness just this side of obvious disdain by the waiters. On the way home, they would tell each other, with a kind of perverse satisfaction, what a tough town New York was.
Andre could see the entrance to the restaurant reflected in the mirror behind the bar, and each time the door opened he glanced up, looking for Lucy’s headful of black curls. When she finally did arrive he was caught by surprise and had to look twice, so little did she resemble the familiar office Lucy he’d been expecting. Her hair was pulled back, severe and shining, showing off the smooth long rise of her neck; her eyes and cheekbones were subtly accentuated by makeup; she was wearing earrings, two tiny gold studs in each lobe and a short dress of dark silk, cut in the skimpy fashion of the day to look as much as possible like an item of expensive underwear.
Andre stood up and kissed her on both cheeks, breathing in her scent, conscious of the bare skin of her shoulders under his hands, his pleasure at seeing her tinged with jealousy.