Death of a Chef

by Alexander Campion

  Gradually the bar filled up and became thick with singsong meridional patois and tobacco fug. David continued to scribble nonsense in his notebook. In the mirror he could see the men casting glances at him out of the corners of their eyes: two parts hostility to one part curiosity.

  Just as David was thinking about ordering his second apéro, an older man, who looked like he might be the elder of the village, walked up to the bar, his distance from David nicely calculated: not close enough to be an invasion of David’s territory but close enough to indicate a desire to talk. David closed his notebook and snapped on the rubber band with a loud snick.

  The man looked at him over droopy haws as mournful as a basset hound’s. “Hè bè, l’été n’est bien pas fini. Ça va cogner aujourd’hui. Well, summer sure isn’t over yet. It’s going to be hot as hell today.” The hè bè was a locution of emphasis so Provençal, it made David long for his village. Even though the conversation in the café continued loudly, David was well aware that everyone in the room had an ear cocked at them.

  “Hè bè, oui. C’est pour ça qu’on aime le pays, non? Of course. That’s why we love it here, isn’t it?” David replied, unleashing the Provençal accent he tried so hard to repress in Paris.

  “So you’re from around here, estranger?” the man asked, using the Provençal word for stranger.

  “Not at all. I’m from St. Jean de l’Esterel.”

  The man looked at him blankly.

  “It’s behind Cannes, up in the hills.”

  “A Cannois, eh?” He gave David a long searching look. David held his gaze without wavering. “You look like a Parigot, a Parisian. And the Var is a long way from the Alpes Maritimes. What good wind blew you to La Cadière?”

  The conversation at the tables had become murmurs. A stranger outside of the tourist season who didn’t look like he was selling farm machinery was almost unheard of.

  “I’m an author. I write biographies. And I’m writing one about Chef Jean-Louis Brault.” David let this sink in and stuck out his hand. “David Martineau,” he said with a politician’s smile.

  The old man looked at him levelly and did not extend his hand. The abruptness of the proposed handshake was an imposition, but, then, so was asking an estranger what his business was. If the old man refused to take the hand, he would give offense and he might come to regret that later. But if he didn’t refuse, he would lose face. He thought it over for a few beats and then grasped David’s hand in a grip like a hare trap. He looked at the barman.

  “A cent deux, Félix.”

  “A cent deux”—a hundred and two—was patois for “two glasses of Pastis Fifty-one.”

  David nodded his thanks.

  “Come drink this with us,” the old man said, using the familiar tu and indicating his table with a tilt of his head.

  At the table, the old man introduced his three companions with juts of his chin, Félix, Piquoiseau, and Le Bosco. “And they call me Césariot,” the man said.

  “So, Le Cannois,” Piquoiseau said, “you think you’re going to find out all about Jean-Louis Brault’s life down here, do you?”

  “Cannois,” Le Bosco said, “no one down here has seen the Brault boy since he left when he was . . . what? Sixteen?”

  “Fifteen,” Félix corrected.

  “I know that. My book is going to start with his childhood. It’s going to explain how Brault’s genius germinated in the smells of the wild herbs in the hills of La Cadière-d’Azur.”

  The men at the table glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes and repressed grins.

  “I want to find out all about his childhood. Was he a gifted cook even as a small boy? What did he like to eat at home? Who were his friends? Did he have a girlfriend? You know, stuff like that.”

  At the word girlfriend the four men at the table exchanged sharper glances. Césariot drew his lips into a frowning moue.

  Changing the subject, Le Bosco turned to the elder and said, “Hè bè, Césariot, I hear tell these Cannois are not completely useless when it comes to boules.”

  “Do you play?” Césariot asked David.

  “Do I breathe?” The question had been rhetorical. What man in the Midi didn’t live to toss steel balls into the dust in the cool of the evening? The mood softened a tiny notch.

  “What you want to do is go see the baron,” Césariot said. “If you can understand him, you might just learn something about his son. When you’ve done that, come back so we can see if the Cannois live up to their reputation. But don’t get your hopes up. You might wind up buying the pastaga tonight.”

  The noon Angelus rang slowly from the single bell in the church belfry. Three strokes. A pause. Three more strokes. And three more again, until the count of nine was reached. The men fell silent, counting, and then rose almost as a single person to go home and eat the meal their women had prepared for them. David sat alone in the café.

  Three hours later, after a solitary meal—a daube de canard, a stew of wild duck marinated in white wine and then simmered for hours in a bath of broth, brown Niçoise olives, and orange zest—David walked up the hard-earth road to the town’s château.

  It wasn’t much of a place. The iron gate was long gone from the crumbling stone archway. In the distance he could see the château, a small abandoned building pretentiously decorated with pseudo-Gothic crenellations, now gap-toothed, the façade ruined by blind eye sockets of frameless windows. The weed-choked land between the gate and the château was dotted with small, cheap, disintegrating prefab bungalows.

  David banged on the cracked oak door of the gatehouse. Even through the thick door the television was painfully loud. There was no answer. He shouted. Still no answer. He pounded continually on the door with the heel of his fist. After a very long wait, the door opened. The din from the TV hit him like a falling wall.

  An emaciated man in shapeless olive corduroy trousers bald at the knees blinked at him, working his jaws as if he was trying to chew gum on the sly. David knew he was fretting badly fitting false teeth.

  “Monsieur le Baron?” David asked.

  There was no reply.

  David yelled his question. “I called from the village an hour ago, remember? I’m the author writing a biography of your son.”

  The baron looked confused. “Jean-Louis? Is he all right?” A tear rolled down his cheek. He took a none-too-clean, balled-up handkerchief from his side pocket and blotted the tear. Without a word he turned and walked into the house. David followed him.

  There was a single room on the main floor. A threadbare Persian rug with a hole worn in the middle lay on a grimy floor of cracked black-and-white tiles. The few pieces of furniture all dated from the early nineteenth century but were broken and crudely repaired. On a dining table with buckled veneer and a fractured leg nailed back together sat three large faïence vases. All three had been broken, and the pieces glued by an unskilled hand. The noise from the television was far louder than a discothèque. David switched the set off. The sudden silence rang in the room.

  The baron collapsed into a dusty Louis XVI fauteuil and waved David toward a rattan settee. Most of the rattan was missing. David sat on the edge of the frame.

  “I’ve come to talk to you about your son,” David yelled.

  “There’s no need to shout, my good man. I can hear you perfectly. I’m assuming you mean poor Jean-Louis. I haven’t seen his brother, Antonin, in years and can’t imagine why an author would have any interest in him. But Jean-Louis, now there’s an exceptional son.”

  Over the next few hours the ball of handkerchief was in constant use as the baron rambled on about his son. Like a pointillist painter the baron flitted from one topic to another, from one era to another, but, in the end, the picture that emerged made up in depth what it lacked in clarity.

  The baron’s wife had died of cervical cancer when Jean-Louis was five. Shortly after her death the baron had been cheated out of his house and lands by an unscrupulous developer in a failed deal.
He had managed to hang on to the gatehouse. He had gradually sold off his father’s collection of faïence. All that was left were the three pieces on the table, which no one wanted to buy since Antonin had broken them in a fit of rage and Jean-Louis, then age six, had glued them back together, hoping his father would not notice. At this point the story paused for a full minute as the handkerchief was put to use.

  The baron had always been a keen gardener and had been able to feed his boys on his produce. Without Jean-Louis, who had been a gifted cook even as a child, it might have been monotonous. But Jean-Louis made every meal a feast. More handkerchief. The harvest of his sweet red Midi asparagus, for example, lasted over two months, and they were on the table every night. But Jean-Louis made a different dish every meal. The handkerchief came out again. There was a summer salad Jean-Louis would make from fresh asparagus, summer squash, new potatoes, and one or two pinches of duck gizzard confit, the whole sprinkled with a few drops of olive oil.

  “And this, monsieur, from the hands of an eight-year-old boy!” The handkerchief stayed in use for a full two minutes. “Even though we had no money, we had our family honor and our pride, and we were very happy. Very.”

  The baron proved as persistent as a leaky but valiant steam engine. At six, the evening Angelus rang out its stately nine strokes, reminding David of his promise to show off his prowess at boules. He rose to leave. The baron blinked in alarm. David turned on the television and rotated the dial to maximum volume. The thundering sound and flickering image mesmerized the baron so completely, David doubted his departure was noticed.

  Two tables in front of the café had been pushed together. Five men sipped pastis and watched David cross the dusty square with his fluid gait. The sun was low in the sky, and the temperature had begun to drop, drawing in the odors of grasses and wild herbs from the hills. The cymbal rasping of cicadas had quieted, leaving the square in silence.

  “Alors, Le Cannois,” Césariot threw out, “you managed to escape from Monsieur le Baron?”

  There was a peal of raucous laughter. It was obvious they had started on the apéros sometime before. In addition to Césariot, Le Bosco, and Piquoiseau, there were two men David didn’t know. Césariot introduced them: Ungolin and Le Papet.

  “Did he make you take a flat of his famous Thermidrome onions, the pride of the Midi?” Le Papet asked. There was another shout of laughter.

  “Enough of that,” Césariot said. “We’re wasting daylight. I propose Piquoiseau and Le Bosco team up with me, and Le Cannois can play with Ungolin and Le Papet.” There were grunts of assent as the men downed their drinks and moved out onto the powdery, cement-hard earth of the square.

  Ungolin presented David with a much-dented set of three boules, which must have sat under the counter of the bar for the use of estrangers since well before the Second World War.

  “They’ve never liked Le Baron here. They didn’t like his father either. The old baron pissed his fortune away on the French attempt at the Panama Canal. His son was even stupider and lost the little that was left,” Ungolin said confidentially to David.

  “Alors, Ungolin, are we here to play pétanque or to gossip like old women?” Césariot said. He flipped a ten-euro coin high in the air with his thumb, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his wrist. “Heads or tails?”

  Ungolin picked tails and won the toss. He drew a three-foot circle in the dust with a stick, stood in the middle, ankles together, and tossed the cochonnet—a small wooden ball—out into the dust.

  “You go first,” Ungolin said to David.

  David stepped into the circle, sank down on bended knees until his buttocks almost touched his heels, holding the boule loosely, arm straight down, the back of his hand facing the cochonnet. In a single fluid motion he rose, hoisting his arm forward for the throw, at the last second imparting a hint of forward spin on the boule with his thumb. The boule rose high in the air, landed an inch in front of the cochonnet, and rolled gently until it just kissed the little ball. A perfect shot.

  The five men exchanged covert glances. With a smirk, Piquoiseau muttered, “Beginner’s luck.”

  Césariot’s team retreated a few feet away to discuss their strategy.

  “But don’t get me wrong,” Ungolin said. “The Baron had a hard row to hoe with his wife gone and no money. He did his best to bring his boys up. And he had his work cut out for him. That Antonin was a bad egg from the beginning. A born voyou—a delinquent—he hot-wired cars so many times for joyrides, the gendarmes would go straight to him every time a car was missing. They’d keep him a night in the cabane and then let him go without booking him.”

  “Anou did it only because the food in the gendarmerie detention cell was better than what he got at home. At least it had some meat in it,” Le Papet said with a smoker’s gurgling laugh.

  Ungolin stepped into the circle and attempted to duplicate David’s shot. His boule landed a foot away from the cochonnet.

  “What happened to Antonin?” David asked.

  “One day he disappeared,” Ungolin said, flicking his fingers open into the sky. “No one knows why, but good riddance. Probably finally did something bad enough he knew the gendarmes wouldn’t be letting him go in the morning. Bound to be a mechanic somewhere. He knew cars. Or at least he knew how to start them without a key.”

  The group chortled.

  “Funny how the two boys were so different,” David said.

  “That they were,” Césariot said.

  “Little Jean-Louis was as shy as a goat kid, always hugging the walls when he walked through the village,” Le Bosco said.

  “That was because he didn’t have a woman to bring him up when he was little. No man can grow up normal without a woman’s tender hand to help him,” Le Papet said. The men all nodded in reverence at this truism, despite the fact that the presence of the fair sex in the café and its environs was unthinkable.

  The play continued for another two hours. The last shot was David’s. As he rocked back and forth, pivoting on his ankles, his arm swinging like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, he felt a wave of perfect contentment wash over him like the warm surf of a Provençal beach. He rose in the liquid release of a loosely coiled spring and launched the boule, sending it off with backspin from his fingertips. It landed seven inches behind the cochonnet and rolled gently backward. From where David stood, it was the same distance from the cochonnet as Césariot’s boule.

  The men bent over the cochonnet in a huddle. Ungolin produced a twig and measured the distances with the care of a surgeon performing a brain operation. David’s boule was microscopically closer, but still unquestionably the winning boule. It was a shutout: Ungolin’s team had beaten Césariot’s thirteen to nothing.

  “We’re going to make them kiss Fanny’s ass!” Ungolin shouted, giving David a warm hug. “And they’re going to buy us so much pastaga, they’ll have to take us home in wheelbarrows.” He was overjoyed. A shutout was something that almost never happened in pétanque.

  Inside the bar Ungolin, as excited as a small child on a sugar high, rushed up to a well-patinated wooden box hanging on the wall and hysterically rang a small brass bell attached to the side, yelling, “They’re going to kiss Fanny’s ass. How sweet it is. They’re going to kiss the relic!”

  To loud shouts and much laughter, the two portals of the box were opened to reveal a woman painted in a crude naïve style bending forward, lifting her skirt and frilly petticoat to expose ample and shapely buttocks of plaster bas-relief. One by one the three men from the losing team went up and ceremoniously kissed the painting to choruses of loud ribald cheering. Drinks were at the expense of the losers.

  Césariot brought David his pastis. “I guess it must be true. You Cannois do have a bit of talent at boules. I guess some of our Provençal blood must have flowed your way. Do you also have the tradition?”

  “Absolutely. In my village we have an almost identical box on the wall, but I’ve never seen it used.”

  �
�Of course you haven’t. You’re all too good at the game. Or maybe the sun is too hot out there for you to have a taste for Fanny’s ass,” Ungolin said.

  There was a soft rumble of sly laughter. David had been excluded from an inside joke. In a gesture of apology to the estranger, Césariot patted him on the back but didn’t explain the joke.

  CHAPTER 18

  The banner headline of Le Figaro read FIRMIN ROQUE—HERO OF THE FRENCH COMMUNIST PARTY—DIES TRAGICALLY. It was not surprising the headline went across all eight columns. Roque had been an icon of the Party, an institution that, even though now toothless and backward looking, had once been a vibrant force on the French political scene.

  It was the large box that took up most of page one above the fold that caught Capucine’s eye: portraits of the five key individuals in Roque’s worker-run and worker-owned company, with brief bios underneath. The face in the middle was Thierry Brissac-Vanté’s, considerably younger, his hair curlier, his smile pearlier, looking even more like an empty-headed playboy.

  The uniformed receptionist, who also served as her secretary, knocked on the door. “Commissaire, don’t forget you have your weekly review with the lieutenants in five minutes.”

  “Push it back half an hour. Something’s come up.”

  “Oui, Commissaire.”

  The reason for the big box filled with pictures was that there was no real information on Roque’s death. All that was known was that he and his wife had gone out to a local bistro for dinner. When they came home, the lights wouldn’t turn on, so Roque had gone down to the basement with a flashlight and was electrocuted as he inserted a new fuse. That was it. No commentary from the local gendarmes. Nothing other than a tearful quote from the wife, who, the reporter assured the reader, was “hysterical with grief.”

  Capucine sipped her coffee, now cold. Much had been made of Roque at Sciences Po. It had been quite a story, the archetypal liberation and revival of a dying business by its workers.