Monsieur Pamplemousse on Vacation

by Michael Bond

  For some reason best known to himself, Pommes Frites seemed to be playing his cards close to his chest. Clearly something had been on his mind ever since they arrived.

  More often than not when they were on their travels he shared his master’s room, and it was hard to explain away those occasions when it wasn’t possible. Chiens interdit signs he knew, but the small print on hotel brochures meant less than nothing to him. It would be a shame if he took it personally.

  On the other hand, the saucisson in particular struck him as a good omen. It was a Bâton de Berger aux Noisettes from Justin Bridou. The picture on the label of a man wearing a beret and green jacket – he’d always assumed it was Monsieur Bridou himself, clearly a man of infinite wisdom when it came to the finer points of charcuterie – brought back memories of his time in the Sûreté. In those days it had been his preferred choice of a persuader on those occasions when information had to be extracted quickly and cleanly from people who, by the very nature of their calling, were reluctant to talk. Speaking personally, although they only weighed a mere 250g, he had found them to be even more effective as a blunt instrument than the well-worn Paris telephone directory favoured by many of his colleagues; particularly as the latter also lacked the addition of noisettes.

  There was a noticeable spring to Pommes Frites’ step too as they resumed their walk. The saucisson happened to be one of his favourites, although for vastly different reasons.

  The boules area was already occupied and he waited patiently while his master stopped for a moment or two to watch a game in progress. Then, as they drew near the school, he set off on a quick tour round the car park in order to make one last check-up on various trails before finally committing them to memory. If it was going to rain – and even without the benefit of a radio in his kennel there was little doubt in his own mind that they hadn’t long to wait before it did – then any lingering smells would soon be washed away.

  Pausing again at the school gates, Monsieur Pamplemousse looked up and registered for the first time an almost windowless five-storey tower block attached to one side of the building. There was a complicated array of aerials on the roof. He had no idea of their purpose, but it didn’t surprise him; they went with all the sophisticated technology he had seen the previous evening. Once again, though, it was clearly a case of no expense spared.

  He could hear music issuing from the main hall: a reprise of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’. It hadn’t occurred to him that the school would be mounting more than one performance of the musical.

  Had his mind not been firmly fixed on other things, the music mistress in particular, Monsieur Pamplemousse might well have noticed that in the short time since they had left their hotel the cumulus clouds had given way to a mountainous development of dark-based cumulonimbus.

  If the weather forecaster had been in attendance he would undoubtedly have waxed lyrical on the subject; explaining that technically the change had been brought about through a body of warm, moist air rising from the sea, leaving behind an area of low pressure. And since nature abhors a vacuum, the surrounding air rushing in to fill the space had formed a rapidly accelerating upward current.

  Back at the hotel, as a wind began to develop, the boatman lashed his craft more firmly to its moorings, waiters hastily dismantled the few sunshades they had put up, and of their own accord seagulls made for the safety of a sheltered cove.

  In the school car park Pommes Frites began chasing dried leaves as they rose into the air like hundreds of awakening butterflies, while all around him a myriad of tiny creatures made a concerted dash for safety.

  Certainly, had Monsieur Pamplemousse chanced to look even higher, beyond the array of aerials, he couldn’t have failed to notice that an anvil-shaped cloud had developed overhead. A more fanciful observer of the passing scene might have suggested it had simply been biding its time until he arrived.

  The first intimation of there being anything seriously amiss came as he was about to ring the doorbell to announce his presence. There was a blinding flash of light as an avalanche of electrons discharged itself from the cloud and headed in a laser-like beam towards the earth at a speed of 300,000 kilometres a second. For a brief moment the grey-green leaves of the ancient olive tree behind him – the very same tree where Pommes Frites had been waiting for them the previous evening – seemed almost transfixed, as though it had received a mighty blow.

  It took a lot to destroy an olive tree, and he would put his money on its gnarled branches surviving the shock, but he wouldn’t have fancied the chances of anyone sheltering beneath it.

  Bouncing straight back up again, compressing the air as it went, the flash created a sound wave, which moments later announced its presence with an ear-splitting clap of thunder.

  Hardly had Monsieur Pamplemousse recovered from the first shockwave than a second flash struck the tower block. Ignoring the array of multi-faceted omni-directional aerials, possibly through being spoilt for choice, it singled out a small and relatively inoffensive satellite dish, and in a split second left it hanging from its mast, a blackened ruin.

  Another horrendous crack of thunder, louder even than the first, left Monsieur Pamplemousse thanking his lucky stars he hadn’t been carrying an umbrella.

  Almost immediately the door was flung open and his ears were assailed by girlish screams as the entire school orchestra, the majority having abandoned their instruments, pushed him to one side as they streamed past, heading towards the surrounding woods. They were closely followed by the music mistress, still clutching her baton; then by members of the junior school and their attendants.

  Throwing caution to the wind, Monsieur Pamplemousse dashed after them. ‘Non! Non!’ He gesticulated towards the olive tree, hoping to demonstrate in as potent a way possible the danger they were in. ‘You must stay where you are … ici … here … à la belle étoile! … out in the open!’

  It seemed for a moment as though his words were falling on deaf ears, but another flash of lightning, followed by the inevitable clap of thunder, brought them all skidding to a halt.

  Suddenly uncomfortably aware they were hanging onto his every word and that the worst possible scenario would be to have the entire school population carbonised before his very eyes, he drew on a recent article that had appeared in L’Escargot.

  ‘Disperser-vous,’ he ordered, pointing towards the open play area. ‘It is necessary that you should present the least possible surface towards the sky … faites comme moi. Watch me!’

  The article had been written by one of his colleagues, Glandier, who had been born and brought up in the Savoy mountains, so he should know how to survive a thunderstorm if anyone did.

  What was it he had said? Having found a suitable spot out in the open, bend over and touch the ground with your hands. Never stand with your feet apart lest lightning, having struck one leg, travels back down to earth via the other. Monsieur Pamplemousse shivered as he recalled the description of what might happen en route should the worst happen. Glandier was never one to mince his words.

  Suddenly aware that all had gone quiet, Monsieur Pamplemousse looked up and gazed at the serried ranks of derrières spread out with almost mathematical precision in front of him. Tallest at the front, smallest at the back, their heads touching the ground, the only exception – a pastiche of the famous Hitchcock shot of a Wimbledon tennis match, when all but one of the crowd were watching the progress of the ball – was the girl he had last seen at breakfast. She was staring at him as though she could hardly believe her eyes.

  He hastily turned his attention to the others. Possibly his instructions had lost a little in translation, but from where he was positioned it looked as though the more enthusiastic of the senior pupils were intent on presenting the largest possible surface to the heavens rather than the least. Although lightning was said never to strike the same spot twice, were he the God Thor he might be tempted to make an exception in a number of cases.

  Almost as though carrying out a preliminary
reconnaissance, a gust of wind passed along the nearest row, lifting skirts which were doing little enough as it was to render more than a token service towards preserving their wearers’ decorum.

  Spotting the music mistress almost immediately in front of him, Monsieur Pamplemousse averted his gaze momentarily, then hesitated. The technician in him rose to the surface. Her derrière would make admirable foreground interest: living, breathing proof, if proof were needed, that a curve is always more interesting than the straight line. Its juxtaposition with the military precision of the rows of girls would make it doubly so.

  Would Cartier-Bresson, he asked himself, have wasted such a golden opportunity? The answer, of course, was a resounding no! The great man may have had his faults – who didn’t? – but indecision was not one of them. The precious moment of truth captured in an instant and frozen for all time had always been his particular forté.

  Faced with such a unique, not to say golden opportunity, he would have been hot-footing it to the nearest darkroom by now.

  Likewise that other great practitioner of the art, Doisneau, who always maintained that the moment someone said ‘don’t move’ the picture was ruined.

  As a potential subject for the front cover of L’Escargot it was a must: a welcome change from endless studies of lobster pots and boeuf en croute.

  Thankful for the rising wind which drowned both the sound of the shutter and the whirr of the high-speed motor-wind, Monsieur Pamplemousse got through half the remaining thirty-four exposures of his film in just under four seconds.

  Another blinding flash caused him to release the button and he seized the opportunity to take up another position before pressing it again.

  As soon as the rest of the film had been exposed and the automatic rewind had stopped he set about reloading the camera as fast as he could. Now that he had embarked on the operation he was determined to make the most of it.

  While he was concentrating on the task in hand, Pommes Frites trotted into view, stopped dead in his tracks and gave a double take. Although over the years he had grown used to his master’s peccadilloes, this was something on a scale he had never encountered before, and for a moment or two he gazed in awe at the scene laid out before him. It was, although of course he had no reason to be aware of the fact, even more spectacular than the tableau involving a group of chorus girls at the Folies, which had been the cause of Monsieur Pamplemousse’s enforced early retirement from the Paris Sûreté.

  Blithely unaware of the widely-held superstition that a dog’s tail can act as a lightning conductor, he raised his own appendage to its full height. Relying on the good offices of St Hubert, the patron saint of bloodhounds, he then tempted fate still further by wagging it furiously as he took up a position at the end of the front line. Sad to say, his moment of euphoria was destined to be shortlived.

  While the storm was breaking, millions of tiny water droplets condensed from the rising current of moist air had not been idle. Having found themselves floating aimlessly in space, they gradually coalesced into larger drops, joined up with others, then formed themselves into hailstones. At which point, obeying yet another of nature’s immutable laws – the one which states that what goes up must eventually come down – and to the accompaniment of renewed peals of thunder, the Heavens opened and they began falling from the sky with ever increasing speed.

  Monsieur Pamplemousse hastily closed the camera back, slipped the fully exposed film into his jacket pocket, and put the boudin under his hat for safe keeping. He was about to set to work again when, without warning, he was knocked flying by a sudden blow to the head.

  Momentarily convinced he had been struck by lightning, he staggered forward and while trying to recover his balance glimpsed a figure looming behind him.

  A quick backward kick with the sharp edge of his right shoe produced a satisfactory howl of pain. As his assailant spun round he managed – more by luck than judgement – to land a second kick to the Achilles tendon. Having regained the initiative, he seized the opportunity to make a grab for Pommes Frites’ saucisson and aimed a third blow towards an exposed muscle at the base of the man’s neck.

  Recovering his balance, he automatically adopted a defensive karate horse stance – feet wide apart, arms at the side, forearms outstretched and fists clenched – and gazed down at the figure sprawled on the ground in front of him while trying to get his breath back. It was quite like old times.

  The next attack came when he least expected it, although a flicker in the man’s eyes should have forewarned him. A second blow to the head, again from behind, but this time harder than the first, sent him reeling.

  Everything seemed to be happening at once, but in a kind of slow-motion montage, almost as though he were swimming out of his depth. As the water began closing about him he was dimly aware of shouts and screams, and of someone wrenching the camera from his grasp. From somewhere else a long way away, came the sound of a dog barking. Then, as his head made contact with something hard, everything began to dissolve and he lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When nature bestows one of its manifold bounties on a living creature, more often than not it exacts a price, presumably with an eye to preserving the inherent balance of things. So it was that Pommes Frites shared a trait common to most bloodhounds: his unique sense of smell was counterbalanced by a distinct lack of what an optician would call 20/20 vision. Nor, since nothing is perfect, was he equipped with a rear-view mirror and it was several moments before he realised what was going on behind his back.

  Having received an early blow on the end of his nose from one of the hailstones, he not unnaturally attributed the girlish screams rising from all around him to the fact that others were suffering a similar fate, albeit on target areas rather larger, if not more sensitive than his own. That being so, he turned his mind to other things. What, for example, was the man hovering on the far side of the play area doing? Instinct told him that he was up to no good.

  It wasn’t until, looking over his shoulder, his gaze happened to alight on a familiar pair of shoes protruding from the bottom of an untidy pile of bodies some distance away, that he gave his second double-take in as many minutes. Even then his immediate reaction was one of patient tolerance. Clearly his master was up to his tricks again.

  Several more seconds went by before it dawned on him that the legs to which the shoes were attached were the only ones among an assortment of threshing limbs which weren’t actually moving. They hadn’t, in fact, stirred since he first spotted them. It looked for all the world as though his master was about to be borne away in triumph by a swarm of giant female soldier ants.

  Several girls seemed to be fighting to take possession of an arm; some, clearly unable to get as close to the action as they would have liked, stood helplessly by, wringing their hands in desperation. Others were running round and round in circles wailing, while two of the more enterprising girls appeared to be doing their level best to divest the inert figure of his clothing – his shirt was already half off.

  Even as he watched, he saw another, this time larger than the rest, place her lips against his master’s, as though about to wish him goodbye before he set off on a long journey. If the time and energy she was putting into the act had any bearing on the matter, it was a journey from which he was unlikely to return.

  Ignoring a rapidly stifled cry from somewhere nearby, and in order to make up for lost time, Pommes Frites hastened to investigate the matter.

  On closer inspection, even though by now the hailstones were rapidly turning to rain, it struck him that his master didn’t look entirely unhappy with the turn of events. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, anyone less charitably inclined than Pommes Frites might have suggested the reverse to be true. Still clasping the saucisson in his right hand, he appeared to be perfectly content for the time being to lie exactly where he had fallen. There was, thought Pommes Frites, no accounting for tastes.

  Having detected a barely perceptible si
gn, the merest flicker of an eyelid – the Food Inspector’s equivalent of a Film Director’s classic ‘take five’ – indicating that for the time being his services weren’t required, Pommes Frites pricked up his ears. He turned his attention instead to the distant sound of trampling feet somewhere beyond the shrubbery, and without further ado he abandoned plan ‘A’ and set off in hot pursuit.

  Pommes Frites was never very happy leaving Monsieur Pamplemousse on his own.

  It wasn’t so much that he didn’t trust his master to look after himself. It was other people, and as far as he could see there were quite a lot of those around who were acting suspiciously.

  One way and another he’d had a busy time over the past two days; following trails, retracing not only his own steps, but others almost too numerous to mention. During the course of his perambulations he had collected a number of items that were now safely stored beneath an old blanket at the back of his kennel. He felt sure they would be of interest to his master when the time was ripe.

  But for now it was a case of first things first, and Pommes Frites knew where his priorities lay.

  Seeing the tail end of his friend and mentor disappear into the bushes at high speed, Monsieur Pamplemousse relaxed.

  Having woken at the very moment when the kiss of life was being applied, it had taken him several moments of close study to confirm that it really was the music mistress who was astride him and not some winged messenger sent down from on high to render first aid. As for the girl who was feeling his pulse, she was pressing so hard, if she didn’t watch out it would stop altogether.

  ‘Atkreevat …’

  He had no idea what the mistress was saying – it sounded more like double Dutch than anything he had come across before – but the phrase ‘whispering sweet nothings’ took on an entirely new meaning as a warm tongue entered his mouth, forcing it open still further.