Murder on the Ile Sordou

by M. L. Longworth

  “Elegant?” Verlaque asked.

  “Preppy,” Sylvie replied. “But it suits you.”

  Verlaque pressed his lips together, knowing that “preppy” for a contemporary photographer—who this evening wore a short gold-lamé dress and high-heeled strappy sandals—was an insult, but he had promised Marine he would try to get along with her best friend. He looked over at Marine, who was smiling, and she winked at him.

  “What did you two do all afternoon?” Sylvie asked, walking around their large room and inspecting it.

  “We had sex twice, then a nap,” Marine said flatly.

  Verlaque laughed.

  Sylvie took a step back and looked at her friend, wide-eyed. “Are you under some kind of Sordou spell?”

  “Perhaps,” replied Marine.

  “Well, I had a nap too,” Sylvie replied, still looking sideways at Marine. “And then went for a swim in the pool where both the young godlike chef and rugged boatman were ogling me, and then saw a huge fight between Alain Denis and Botox wifey, whose name, I found out, is Emmanuelle.”

  Verlaque yawned. “Who’s hungry?”

  • • •

  The dining room’s décor was more subdued than the Jacky Bar’s, but every bit as interesting, and also Capri-inspired. Cat-Cat Le Bon and Émile Villey had spent weeks poring over the Internet and design magazines, choosing what they agreed were the most comfortable chairs, elegant linens, and tasteful table settings. The chandeliers were made from colored Murano glass; everything else was a shade of ivory or cream, save for the bunches of pale-pink peonies on the sideboards.

  Niki Darcette, who had changed into a short black evening dress, was there to greet the guests, and she escorted the trio to a round table set for three, which did have a view of the sea, as did most of the other tables, given there were only ten people eating that evening. “I’m sorry that it’s too cold to eat outside on your first night here,” Darcette said. “We weren’t expecting the wind to pick up like it did.”

  “That’s Provence for you,” Sylvie answered. Despite living and working in Aix-en-Provence for over twenty years, she still hated the Provençal wind.

  The dining room was big but didn’t feel too cold, partly thanks to the low carved ceiling and the expansive windows. The architect had renovated a second, smaller dining room, which was now closed off by sliding wooden doors but could be opened to join the main room when the hotel reached—the Le Bons hoped by next summer—its maximum capacity.

  Verlaque, Marine, and Sylvie politely nodded at the other diners, who nodded back. Eric Monnier was just tucking his napkin into the top of his shirt and Verlaque shook his hand and wished him well. As they passed the Hobbses’ table Verlaque said bon appétit to the couple, who were already halfway though their main dishes.

  “Merci,” Shirley Hobbs said, visibly thrilled to be able to understand the man’s greeting.

  “Darn fine lamb chops,” Bill Hobbs said, pointing to the meat with his fork, his hand gently shaking.

  Verlaque stopped and said, in English, “Is that so? I’ll order them, then.”

  “Oh my God,” Sylvie whispered to Marine as they sat down. “Next we’ll be playing musical chairs with the other guests.”

  Marine smiled. “Antoine loves to talk about food, and especially use his English.”

  “What’s the sauce surrounding the polenta?” Verlaque asked Hobbs.

  “It’s just the meat juice, pure and simple,” Bill Hobbs answered.

  Verlaque rubbed his stomach. “Sounds perfect. Enjoy the rest of your meal.”

  “Thank you,” the Hobbses said in unison.

  As he walked away Verlaque heard Shirley Hobbs whisper, “The French are so nice, not at all like Susan and Ian Bertwhistle said.”

  Verlaque smiled, glad to have proven the Bertwhistles wrong. And what did he have to be snooty, or sour, about? Why not be nice, and kind, to strangers, even if it had horrified Sylvie Grassi? He liked his job as the examining magistrate in sleepy and affluent Aix-en-Provence; he was very in love with Marine Bonnet, who was the most intelligent, cultured, and warmhearted law professor he was sure to ever meet; he enjoyed, and respected—apart from Prosecutor Yves Roussel—his colleagues at the Palais de Justice; and he was, as the heir to a flour fortune, financially more than well-off. What was missing? he asked himself as he sat down, still smiling.

  “Why don’t you go and chat with the rest of the diners?” Sylvie asked.

  “I would,” Verlaque answered, shaking open the pale-blue linen napkin and setting it on his lap. “But I’m too hungry—”

  Verlaque’s sentence was cut short by what sounded like a gunshot, quickly followed by two more. Sylvie held her hand to her chest and said, “What in the world?”

  “Hunters?” Marine asked. “It’s off season . . .”

  Maxime Le Bon rushed into the dining room, motioning to the diners with his palms pushing the air. “Please, do not be alarmed,” he said.

  “Those were gunshots,” Bill Hobbs said.

  “Dear guests,” Max Le Bon continued. “As I said, please do not be alarmed. As you saw from the boat as you arrived at Sordou, the island is home to one of France’s tallest lighthouses . . .”

  The guests nodded, perplexed.

  “And in that lighthouse lives our very own eccentric islander—every island needs one, ha-ha—Prosper Buffa.”

  Verlaque leaned over and quickly translated for the Hobbses.

  “M. Buffa, having never lived on the mainland, hunts and fishes for his food,” Le Bon went on. “That was Prosper now, obviously hunting rabbits. I’m dreadfully sorry, and I’ll ask him to stay on his side of the island from now on, and to restrict his hunting to the early morning.”

  “That’s so dangerous,” Bill Hobbs said, looking at his fellow diners for approval.

  “Mais oui, certainement! Très dangereux!” the Parisian woman called out.

  “Oh, Bill,” Shirley Hobbs said. “Don’t be such a square. We’re in France, and people still hunt here.” She smiled kindly at Verlaque and Marine and Sylvie. Sylvie waved.

  “Zank you for ze understanding,” Max Le Bon said in heavily accented English. “Bon appétit!”

  “Good, here comes the waitress,” Verlaque said.

  “Bonsoir,” Marie-Thérèse Guichard said, still nervous on her first official day as waitress. She had practiced over the whole month of June on the rest of the staff, but hadn’t taken it seriously as she had grown to know, and feel comfortable with, her coworkers. At twenty-two she was the youngest person on staff and had heard about the job through her uncle, who had overseen the masonry work during the renovations. “There’s a simple menu this evening,” she began. “In fact, a simple menu all this week.”

  Verlaque and Sylvie laughed, and Marine kicked both of them under the table.

  Marie-Thérèse coughed and went on. “Um, tonight’s specials are . . . cold zucchini soup served with crème-fraîche from the Alps . . . I mean the cream, not the zucchini . . . and stacked, roasted vegetables layered with the chef’s own phyllo dough.” She looked seriously from Marine to Sylvie and went on, too shy to look at the chubby man, whom she could see was sitting forward staring intently at her, his elbows on the table and his chin resting on his fists. “Um, for entrées . . . freshly caught sea bream . . . Isnard caught it . . . he’s our fisherman . . . he’s really nice . . .”

  Verlaque laughed and Sylvie and Marine held their napkins up to their mouths, Marine’s eyes filling with tears.

  “. . . braised, um, in olive oil with cherry tomatoes, black olives, and artichokes, or wood-fired lamb chops served with polenta.” Marie-Thérèse sighed and shifted her weight, daring to glance at the male diner, who was know sitting back, his thick arms crossed, still smiling.

  “I’ll have the soup,” Marine said.

  “So will I,” Sy
lvie added.

  “Stacked vegetables for me,” Verlaque said.

  Marie-Thérèse nodded. “Okay. And to follow?”

  “The sea bream,” Marine said.

  “Lamb chops,” Sylvie said.

  “Another lamb here,” Verlaque said, raising his hand.

  “Thank you,” Marie-Thérèse said, turning quickly on her heel to go. “Oh, here’s the wine menu!” she added, handing Verlaque a thick white book.

  “Impressive!” Verlaque said. “Small food menu, and big wine menu, just the way it should be.”

  Marie-Thérèse nodded, but looked baffled. “I’ll be right back!” she said.

  “Take your time,” Marine said, smiling. “My friend will be a while looking at your wine list.”

  “We’ll need a red and a white,” Sylvie said. “Marine ordered the fish.”

  “Oh, I like red with fish—”

  “Yes, definitely two bottles,” Verlaque cut in, putting his reading glasses on to read the menu. He read the list, whistling softly as he turned the pages. “White from Cassis?”

  “No,” both women said in unison.

  “Too close to home?” Verlaque asked. “Okay then, a Nuragus di Cagliari from Sardinia. And a red from . . . Sicily?”

  “Perfect,” Sylvie said, having no idea what a Nuragus was. But if Antoine liked it, it would be good. She looked around the room. “Alain Denis and his wife are here without the teenager.”

  “Poor boy,” Marine said. “Does he have to eat alone, in his room?”

  “It would appear so,” Sylvie said. “They were arguing about him this afternoon.”

  “That must be the new couple, who arrived here on the later boat,” Marine said as she saw Sylvie looking across the room at an elegantly dressed couple in their late thirties or early forties who sat in silence.

  “Parisians,” Sylvie said. “Obviously.”

  Verlaque ignored the women as he continued to read the wine menu, which for him was as interesting as a novel. He turned to the last page to see what kind of Armagnacs and whiskies they offered.

  “I hope this place isn’t going to feel like a retreat,” Sylvie said. “With half of the guests not getting along, and the rest of us watching each other.”

  “You’re the one who’s watching,” Verlaque said, looking at Sylvie over his reading glasses.

  “I can’t help it,” Sylvie said. “And there’s that man, eating by himself.”

  “He’s a French literature teacher, from Aix,” Marine said. “I’d say he looks happy enough. Perhaps another night we’ll ask him to join us.”

  “See what I mean?” Sylvie said. “This does feel like some camp. Next you’ll suggest that we each change seats every dinner, so we all get to know each other.”

  Marine laughed. “That would be fun . . .”

  “Clément!” Verlaque called out.

  Marine and Sylvie stared at each other.

  “Clément Viale!” he continued. Verlaque got up and set his napkin on the table. “Clément Viale is over there. We went to law school together.” Verlaque excused himself and began to walk across the dining room.

  Viale saw his old friend and cried, “Dough Boy!”

  Verlaque and Viale embraced, and Viale led Verlaque over to his table, where he was introduced to Clément’s wife of twelve years, and mother of his three children, Delphine. Marine saw Verlaque turn and point to her, and she was about to get up when Verlaque came back.

  “We’re meeting them after dinner, for a drink in the bar,” Verlaque said, sitting down.

  “Dough Boy?” Sylvie asked, winking at Marine.

  “I was thinner then, believe it or not,” Verlaque said. “But the name came from my family’s flour business.”

  “Bien sûr,” Sylvie replied. “Here comes the waitress,” she said. “No laughing this time!”

  Verlaque ordered the wines, and Marie-Thérèse took the wine list from him, almost dropped it, and left.

  “How’s dessert?” Verlaque said to the Hobbses, leaning back in his chair.

  “Wonderful!” Bill Hobbs yelled.

  “The cookies have lavender in them,” Shirley Hobbs added. She held one up.

  “Excellent!” Verlaque said, turning back to Marine and Sylvie.

  “They’re very enthusiastic,” Marine said.

  “Yes, not at all affected,” Verlaque agreed. “My poor friend Clément isn’t having as much fun as our Americans.” He glanced around the room. “Nor is the movie star-slash-dog-food-salesman.”

  “See, you’re just as curious as us,” Sylvie said.

  “As you,” Verlaque replied. “Marine could care less.”

  Marine sighed. She hated when Antoine put her on a pedestal, or when he assumed what she was thinking. The maddening thing was, he was usually right.

  Marie-Thérèse came back, holding a bottle of white wine in her hand. She bit her lip and tried to remember her lesson with Émile and Serge; she could have killed Serge right now. She had looked for him at his post in the bar, as he usually opened the wines, but he was nowhere to be seen. She had rushed into the kitchen and Émile had calmed her down, and told her to open the wine herself. They had practiced it numerous times. “Pour a little, then taste,” Émile repeated twice.

  She tilted the bottle gently toward him—Chubby Man, she’d already named him in her head—and showed him the label. Both Émile and Serge had warned her that it could be the woman who chose the wine, but Marie-Thérèse knew that in this case it was definitely the man deciding. He looked at the label, and nodded, smiling up at her, and she took the bottle by its neck and cut off the lead wrapper. She slipped the piece of foil in her apron and then slowly twisted the screw into the cork, pleased that it was going in straight, and easily. Pulling up on the corkscrew, the cork came slowly out, letting off a tiny “pop” sound, and Marie-Thérèse almost cried tears of relief.

  She poised the bottle over the monsieur’s wineglass, from a set of glasses that Marie-Thérèse had been warned were handblown in Austria and were the world’s best. Serge had joked that they were also so fragile they could break if you looked at them the wrong way. She knew he hated them, and she did too. Shaking, she began to pour a little white wine into Chubby Man’s glass, and just then she looked up and saw her boss, M. Le Bon, come into the dining room. She was sure that Émile was watching her too, through those little round windows that looked like mirrors. And then her head went all fuzzy. Her face was hot, and red, as she strained to remember the next step. And then she had it; Émile’s kind voice in her head, saying, “We pour a small bit in the glass, and then we taste.” Marie-Thérèse silently repeated the phrase as she finished pouring. And, before Antoine Verlaque had time to reach out for his glass, Marie-Thérèse had grabbed it and lifted it to her mouth and tasted the Cagliari. “It’s good!” she said, putting his empty glass down with a confident thump.

  Chapter Five

  Stranger Than Fiction

  Maxime Le Bon froze in his tracks. Émile Villey, taking advantage of a small pause between cooking lamb chops and sea bream, had indeed been looking out the hublot onto the dining room. He held his head in his hands and went back to the stove. Taking a juice glass off of a shelf, he poured it half full with a good cognac he used for cooking and downed it in one sip.

  Antoine Verlaque was, for one of the first times in his life, speechless. He looked up at the waitress and saw, in her big brown eyes, his own at twenty-two. She looked terrified. Hadn’t he been just as nervous and bewildered by adult life as she was now? The Verlaque family wealth and prestige only partly softened all the apprehension he felt at that age.

  And then he laughed and put his hands together and began to clap. Marine and Sylvie quickly followed suit, Sylvie adding some fist pumps, and Eric Monnier, who had witnessed the whole thing (as he couldn’t take his eyes off of Mari
ne Bonnet), clapped and yelled, “Bravo!” Bill Hobbs began to film the scene with his new iPhone and couldn’t wait to show it to Ian Bertwhistle.

  Maxime Le Bon looked around the room and saw his diners happy, and laughing. Even Clément and Delphine Viale seemed to be having a good time.

  Marie-Thérèse had at once realized what she had done wrong. She had practiced sipping wine with Serge and knew what a good wine should smell, and taste, like. And she knew that it was Chubby Man who was meant to have tested the wine, not her. But now he was clapping, as was Maxime Le Bon.

  Serge Canzano, having heard the commotion, came running into the dining room, and Le Bon motioned for him to take another wineglass to Verlaque’s table. Canzano set down an empty Riedel glass, and Marie-Thérèse slowly poured some wine into it. She smiled at Verlaque, who swirled the wine around and then sniffed at it, and tasted it. “You’re right,” he said. “It is good. Very good indeed.” He didn’t want to teach her that you only need sniff the wine, to see if it was corked, and then say, “It’s fine.” She’d learn that, probably first thing tomorrow morning.

  “Bravo!” Monnier yelled once again.

  Marie-Thérèse then poured wine into Marine’s glass, who said, “Thank you,” and into Sylvie’s, who said, “Chin-chin!” and took a big gulp.

  “I’ll be back . . . momentarily . . . with your first course,” Marie-Thérèse said. She felt, all of a sudden, a surge of power and confidence. She had a feeling that the job would be easy from now on, and she would grow to like it more and more with each passing day. She turned around and walked through the dining room, beaming. It was the first time in her life that, although she had made a mistake, she had made people laugh, and be happy. It made her joyous. She walked by the famous actor’s table (she had never seen any of his films, but thought he was funny in the dog-food commercials), and Alain Denis raised one eyebrow at her and frowned in a way that she knew was not kind. Émile Villey, back at his lookout post, also saw the actor’s callous stare and rushed to be at the kitchen door when Marie-Thérèse walked in.