The Marseille Caper sl-2

by Peter Mayle

  “Good morning, my jewel. How are you today? You should have come for a swim. The water was perfect. I was like a young dolphin.”

  Elena looked up, squeezing one eye shut against the sun. “I did two lengths of the shower.” She reached for her dark glasses. “Tell me something, Sam. What is it that makes you so damn perky in the morning?”

  Sam poured himself some coffee while he considered his reply. “A clear conscience,” he said as he sat down. “And the love of a good woman.”

  There was a dismissive grunt from Elena. She was never at her best first thing in the morning, whereas Sam was instantly-and irritatingly-lively as soon as he got up. In the past, this had led to some dangerous moments over breakfast. But today, the sun and the surroundings exercised their soothing influence, and the two of them sat in peace over their coffee.

  It was Elena who eventually broke the silence. “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “Mimi’s taken a few days’ vacation so she can show me around. Isn’t that great? Saint-Tropez, the Luberon, Aix, all over. And today we’re doing the boat trip from Cassis to those little creeks along the coast.”

  “The calanques,” said Sam. “You can’t get to them by road. It’s either by boat or on foot. Spectacular spot for a picnic-maybe we’ll do that when I’m through with work.”

  “What’s the schedule for today?”

  Sam sighed. “Nothing exciting. I have to go to the project office, register, pick up my credentials, smile at everybody, that kind of thing. Then I want to check that the project model has been set up the way it should be. Tonight should be more interesting. That’s the reception, when we’re all on our best behavior.”

  “Me too?”

  “Especially you. Charming and modest-and no dancing on the tables.” Sam finished his coffee, looked at his watch, and got up. “Have fun with Mimi. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  The project office, overlooking the port in one of the fine old buildings that had been sandblasted, polished, and generally restored to their nineteenth-century glory, seemed to have been staffed by some of the prettiest girls in Marseille. One of them took Sam over to an area that had been screened off, where the project secretary guarded the inner sanctum of the corner office.

  Before Sam had finished his first carefully prepared sentence in French, the secretary smiled, held up her hand, and said, “Perhaps it would be better for you in English?”

  “I wasn’t expecting English.”

  “We all speak English here. It’s part of the Capital of Culture preparations. Even the Marseille taxi drivers are learning English.” She smiled again and shrugged. “Or so they say.”

  She settled Sam into a chair opposite her and asked for identification before passing over a dossier and the forms that had to be filled in. Halfway through the first one, he was distracted by a gust of expensive aftershave as a man walked quickly past him and into the corner office.

  “Is he …?”

  The secretary nodded. “My boss, Monsieur Patrimonio. He’s the chairman of the selection committee.”

  The sound of a buzzer on the secretary’s phone put an end to the conversation, and she was already getting to her feet as she answered. Picking up a notepad, she made her excuses to Sam and hurried through to the office, leaving him to return to his forms. When these had been dealt with, he glanced at the contents of the dossier: a name tag, a thin sheaf of documents, and his handsomely engraved invitation to the reception. He was wondering whether he should leave or stay when the office door opened and the secretary came out, followed by the chairman of the committee and his aftershave.

  Patrimonio was a man who took his appearance seriously. His suit was a poem in lightweight pearl-gray worsted, cut in the close-fitting Italian style that leaves precious little room in the pockets for anything more bulky than a silk handkerchief. An extravagant show of sky-blue shirt cuff protruded from the sleeves of his jacket, with a large Panerai watch worn over the left cuff in the manner of Gianni Agnelli. Tall and slim, his hair dark except for wings of gray brushed back from his temples, he was the picture of distinction. Sam felt underdressed in his check shirt and cotton pants.

  Patrimonio advanced with hand outstretched. “Enchante, Monsieur Levitt, enchante. Welcome to Marseille. Nathalie told me you were here. I hope she’s been looking after you?”

  Before Sam had a chance to reply, one of Patrimonio’s trouser legs started to vibrate. “Ah. Forgive me,” he said, as he slid a paper-thin phone from his pocket before retreating to the privacy of his lair.

  “Well,” said Sam, “I guess that’s the end of our little meeting.”

  “He’s a very busy man.” Nathalie smiled, and picked up some papers from her desk. “And now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  Everyone seems to be very busy, thought Sam, except me. He decided to take advantage of his idleness by strolling down to the Vieux Port for a coffee in the sunshine while he went through the official dossier that Nathalie had given him.

  He found the sales pitches of the fish-sellers on the Quai des Belges much more entertaining than the documents in the dossier, which had suffered from the dead hand of creation by committee, cliche plodding after cliche in a dreary procession on every page. A brief history of Marseille was followed by a puff for the city’s selection as the European Capital of Culture in 2013 (with ten million visitors expected), followed in turn by a heavy-handed description of the charms of the Anse des Pecheurs, a highly technical account of the process used to select the three finalists, and a reassurance-obligatory in these green times-about the total lack of damage the project would cause to the environment. The whole thing was a classic of its kind, a model of self-important bureaucratic verbiage, and Sam made a mental note to tailor his presentation accordingly. Jokes were out. Gravity would be the order of the day. The very thought of it made him yawn.

  Less than three miles away as the seagull flies, Lord Wapping and Ray Prendergast were huddled over a pile of papers in his lordship’s private stateroom. They had been going over Wapping’s portfolio of business interests, and the news was not good; worse than that, it was potentially disastrous.

  The problem was one of excessively optimistic leverage, combined with a couple of what Prendergast described as dodgy downturns in the global economy. Surefire investments had gone sour. Long-shot investments had failed to come off. There were increasingly loud rumblings of discontent from the banks, which were becoming more and more nervous about the huge loans they had made to Wapping. Even the core business of bookmaking was feeling the effects of increased competition, and the money it generated was barely enough to service interest payments.

  “In other words, Billy,” said Prendergast, “we’re stuffed unless this deal goes through. You’ll lose your shirt. Mind you, there’s still a bit tucked away in the Cayman Islands and Zurich, but you’d have to say goodbye to everything else.”

  Lord Wapping drew on his cigar as he contemplated a future without the house in Eaton Square, the duplex on Park Avenue, the lodge in Gstaad, the yacht, the racehorses, the stable of overpowered cars. Gone, all of it. And with it, no doubt, Annabel.

  Prendergast rubbed his eyes and thought wistfully about a pint of English beer. He was exhausted after spending half the night trying to squeeze some good news out of the figures. He’d also had more than enough of life on board, where he was cramped and fed strange foreign food. As for the French he’d met, he wouldn’t give any of them house room. Untrustworthy prima donnas, the lot of them. He’d advised against getting involved with this project right at the start. Ironically, it was now the only chance to save the Wapping empire. “Like I said, if this doesn’t come good, we’re stuffed. So what do you reckon the odds are?”

  Wapping was a gambling man, and this was the biggest gamble of his life. Millions, many millions, were at stake here, more than enough to settle his debts, with plenty left over for a few new acquisitions. That was his business philosophy, always had been: you have to speculate to accumulate.
It had worked well for him in the past, and despite the facts, he remained hopeful about the future. “The trouble with you, my old sunshine, is that you always see the glass half empty instead of half full.”

  “I spent most of last night looking at the glass, Billy. It’s not half empty. It’s as dry as a bleeding bone. Not a drop. You don’t have to deal with the banks, like I do. Take a look at this lot.” Prendergast took a sheaf of papers and fanned them out on the table in front of Wapping-e-mails and letters, all with the same basic message: We want our money, and we want it now.

  Naturally, the terminology was a little more subtle. There were “mounting concerns” about the “unacceptable situation.” References to the “exceptional fragility” of the market. Regrets that Lord Wapping had been so difficult to contact. And, in every case, there was the urgent wish for Lord Wapping’s presence so that matters could be resolved.

  “So there you go,” said Prendergast. “They’re out for blood. Their next step is to call in the law. This is it, Billy. Shit or bust.”

  Wapping was spared further bad news by the arrival of Annabel, burnished from a morning spent on the sunbathing deck and dressed for lunch in white jeans and white T-shirt, both one size too tight.

  “Sweetie,” she said, “I’m just a tiny bit worried about the time.” She looked at her watch, one of Cartier’s finest. “How long does it take to fly to Monaco? Mustn’t be late for lunch-I think one of the royals is going to be there, tres incognito. One of the Monaco royals, of course, but still.”

  Ray Prendergast looked up at Annabel, feeling once again a dislike that he’d done his best to conceal since her arrival last year in the Wapping menagerie. A stuck-up bit of posh, he called her privately, out for all she could get, and with ambitions to become the fourth Lady Wapping. In every way, she was an unnecessary expense. And yet Wapping seemed to dote on her. Prendergast tapped the papers in front of him. “Before you go, Billy.”

  Wapping aimed a shrug of apology at Annabel. “Tell Tiny to warm her up,” he said. “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

  Annabel blew him a kiss, scooped up a crocodile handbag the size of a military backpack, and disappeared in the direction of the helicopter.

  Wapping glanced down at the papers and ground the remains of his cigar into a crystal ashtray. “Right. E-mail all of them. Tell them I’m deeply involved in final negotiations that will secure a massive construction project in Marseille. These negotiations will be concluded within the next week or two, and I will then return to London to share the good news personally with them.” Wapping got to his feet, brushing cigar ash from his shirt front. “There. That should hold the bastards.”

  “Let’s hope so, Billy. Let’s hope so.”

  It is a short, steep walk from the Vieux Port to a magnificent arrangement of buildings known to the Marseillais as La Vieille Charite, or simply La Charite. It was conceived by Pierre Puget, a native of Marseille who became the court architect of Louis XIV, and because of this impeccable architectural pedigree, Patrimonio had chosen it as an appropriate setting for the reception. The evening was to be a kind of premiere-the first time that the three models put forward by Sam and his competitors would be on display, and Sam was anxious to make sure that his model had been correctly installed.

  He made his way up through the narrow, twisting streets of the ancient neighborhood known as Le Panier, where Puget had been born in 1620 (by extraordinary coincidence, in a house overlooking the site of the masterpiece he designed nearly fifty years later). As he walked, Sam went back over some of the history of the area he had picked up from conversations with Reboul.

  Originally, despite its name, La Charite had been little more than a decorative prison, a place to put the beggars and vagabonds that infested Marseille’s streets at the time. Things were so bad that the city was known as a gigantic cour des miracles, an ironic term, to say the least, for a slum, and the merchants of Marseille decided that they could no longer tolerate it. Criminal elements, after all, were bad for business. And so they were rounded up, shut away, and only allowed out to work as forced labor. So much for charity.

  Things got a little better after the Revolution. The elderly and infirm, the destitute and homeless were taken in, but not forced to work. And so La Charite staggered along until it was closed at the end of the nineteenth century. After one final spasm of activity during the 1914–1918 war, when it was turned into a base for a corps of nurses, it was left to rot.

  It wasn’t until the 1960s that Marseille decided to do something about one of its architectural treasures, and after twenty years of painstaking restoration work, La Charite had once again become something that Pierre Puget could be proud of.

  Sam hadn’t known quite what to expect. Reboul’s description had been so extravagant, with so many pauses for fingertips to be kissed, that Sam had prepared himself for a disappointment, or at least a slight letdown. But as he was passing through the double iron gates that guarded the entrance he was stopped in his tracks, stunned by the extraordinary sight in front of him. It was an immense quadrangle, built around a courtyard perhaps a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide. Surrounding the courtyard was a series of three-story buildings, their facades pierced by an elegant succession of arches leading to an interior gallery that ran the entire distance of the ground floor. And in the middle of the courtyard stood a charming domed chapel. Time had softened all the stone to a color somewhere between faded pink and cream, and in the morning sun the entire courtyard glowed.

  Some years before, La Charite had taken on a new role as a home for museums of art and archaeology. Inside the chapel was a permanent sculpture exhibition, and it was here that Patrimonio had arranged to hold the reception. Sam passed through a quartet of massive columns and into the entrance to the chapel, where he was immediately confronted by a large woman holding a clipboard.

  “On est ferme, Monsieur.” The words were uttered-and the inevitable stern finger wagged-with barely disguised satisfaction, as is often the case when French petty authority tells you that what you want to do is impossible. Sam gave her his best smile and showed her his invitation, his dossier, and even his name tag, all of which she peered at with considerable suspicion before standing aside to let him in.

  Inside the chapel, groups of people armed with crates of bottles and glasses hurried to and fro putting the finishing touches to a bar that had been set up in an alcove under the blind stare of a marble statue. Taking up much of the far end of the chapel were three long tables, each draped in a white cloth. The project models, one per table, had been arranged so that the lowest, Reboul’s apartment block, was in the middle, towered over by the skyscrapers on either side. Models were identified by the names of their backers: Wapping Enterprises, London; Van Buren amp; Partners, New York; and Eiffel International, Paris.

  As far as Sam could see, the installations had been done carefully and correctly. He was bracing himself for another encounter on his way out with the dragon at the door-no doubt to include a strip search in case he’d decided to steal one of the smaller sculptures-when he found he had company. A slim, dark-haired woman in a black pantsuit had arrived, apparently also to inspect the models. She was attractive in that slightly vulpine way brought about by years of strict dieting, and, as Sam quickly noticed, immaculately made up. Late thirties, by the look of her, but who could tell for sure with French women?

  “Hi. See anything you like?”

  The woman turned to face Sam, her eyebrows raised, her blue eyes glacial. “And you are?”

  “Sam Levitt.” He nodded toward his model. “I’m with Van Buren.” He extended his hand, and the woman extended hers, palm down, leaving Sam of three minds as to whether to shake it, kiss it, or admire the manicure.

  “Caroline Dumas. I represent Eiffel. So we are competitors.”

  “Looks like it,” said Sam. “What a pity.”

  Madame Dumas inclined her head and attempted a smile. Sam did the same. She turned away from him to r
esume her inspection of the models.

  Back outside in the sunlit quadrangle, Sam wondered if French women took lessons in the art of the brush-off, or if it was something instinctive, implanted at birth. He shook his head, and went off in search of lunch.

  Eight

  It was cocktail hour at La Charite, and a line of guests stretched from the door of the chapel to halfway across the courtyard. The line had formed because Patrimonio, relishing his role as the gracious host, had decided to follow the example of royalty and heads of state and greet each of his guests personally. And so they waited in the evening sunlight with varying degrees of impatience, entertained by a string quartet that was playing Mozart in the long gallery.

  Elena and Sam joined the end of the line, taking a look at their fellow guests as they went. They were mostly Marseille businessmen and their wives, suntanned and jolly, a tribute to the invigorating qualities of pastis. There were also some visiting bureaucrats, with their pallid northern complexions, a three-man team from the local television station, one or two smartly dressed couples-presumably friends of Patrimonio-and a press photographer. There was no sign of Philippe, who had arrived early to take a good look at the models.

  Sam noticed Caroline Dumas, chic in dark-gray silk, talking on her cell phone. They made eye contact. Sam nodded. Madame Dumas raised her eyebrows. “Somehow I don’t think she’s a fan of yours,” said Elena. “Who is she?”

  “Madame Dumas, one of the competition. From Paris. See if you can pick out the one from England, Lord Wapping.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “English, I guess. Bulletproof pinstripe suit, big tie, good shoes, bad teeth-wait a minute. I think that must be him. Over there, with the blonde.”

  Sam’s guess was confirmed by the sound of a guffaw and a loud English voice. “Well, he asked for it, didn’t he? What a prat.” The speaker shook his head and looked at his watch. “If Jerome doesn’t get his finger out we’ll be here all night.”