Murder on the Ile Sordou

by M. L. Longworth

  Before moving, Mme Masurel and her husband had discussed the possibility of inviting Nicola for vacations to Paris. But they had both seen, from afar, Nicola’s house, and her parents, and didn’t know how they would ever arrange such a voyage with the Darcettes. M. Masurel was torn: he saw that his wife had grown very attached to the sprightly young Nicola—whom they lovingly called Niki—and he worried that she would be too sad if she saw Niki again, knowing what they were sending her back to in Néoules. He even asked a colleague, who specialized in family law, about the possibility of adopting Niki. But, as he had half-presumed, that would be impossible unless there were claims of abuse or life-threatening neglect. So once they were installed in their fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment in the seventh arrondissement, he purposely threw away his condoms, and Mme Masurel became happily pregnant for the fourth time.

  Chapter Seven

  Lunch Poems

  Antoine Verlaque could barely remember the last time he had had such a pleasant “lie in,” as his English grandmother would call it. His father, industrious and hardworking, had not permitted the boys—Antoine and Sébastien—to just do nothing or especially to sleep in. His mother—emotionally absent—had no opinion whatsoever. M. Verlaque saw idleness as laziness, but Emmeline and Charles, the grandparents, gave the boys time to do nothing. “It’s a luxury,” Emmeline would tell them. “You have the time. Let your wonderful minds wander.” Emmeline had one rule for this time, though: they had to be outside. It was one of the reasons that Verlaque so enjoyed a cigar: it was a quiet one or two hours of tasting, thinking, looking, and it was often outside. It was time to ponder over a current case, but more often than not he thought of words (his own, or those of poets) or faces (Marine’s, Emmeline’s). It was never wasted time.

  Each room had a Nespresso machine, and Marine made them each a coffee and they sipped, and read, in bed. As was usual with Marine she soon had a half dozen books, and various sheets of paper, surrounding her, and a pen poised behind her right ear. Verlaque peered over his reading glasses at her, setting down the hotel’s complimentary copy of the International Herald Tribune.

  “How are Jean-Paul and Simone?” he asked. It had been over a year since Marine had embarked upon the ambitious project to write about the love life of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Verlaque was encouraging her to take a year’s sabbatical, but that proved more difficult than either of them thought in her state-funded university in Aix.

  “Wonderfully complicated,” she replied. “And yet so simple too, at least in terms of their own relationship, and work habits.”

  “They didn’t work in bed,” he said, smiling.

  Marine laughed. “Lots went on in their beds, but not work. They wrote diligently every morning, stopped for lunch, then worked until eight p.m. or so. Every day. In many ways they were a perfect couple.”

  “Except they didn’t have children,” Verlaque said, finishing his coffee. Marine stared at Verlaque, but before she could reply, he asked, “Where did they go for lunch? Café de Flore?”

  “Of course,” Marine said. “You know, I’ve never been there.”

  “You’re kidding!” Verlaque said, taking off his glasses.

  “No. I’ve always been turned off by the six-euro espresso.”

  “My father still goes there regularly.”

  “Why don’t we go with him?” Marine suggested. “The next time we’re both in Paris.” The truth was, she had only been to Paris once with Antoine, and that was for an art opening of Sylvie’s photographs. They had stayed one night in a mediocre modern hotel near the Louvre and caught the morning train back to Aix. Antoine had not introduced Marine to his parents, nor had he walked her by his old haunts, which she knew were close to the Seine. It was forbidden territory.

  “I think,” he answered slowly, “that that’s a very good idea.” He put his glasses back on and opened the newspaper, signaling that the conversation was finished.

  • • •

  By late morning Marine and Sylvie were sitting by the pool, and Verlaque, having swum several laps, left them to their gossiping and walked up to the hotel to get changed.

  “Antoine’s being nice to me these days,” Sylvie said to Marine, while she applied SPF-0 suntan oil to her already tanned legs.

  “There’s something . . .” Marine began, “changed about him. This morning he actually agreed to my suggestion that we meet with his father in Paris.”

  “That’s front-page news,” Sylvie said.

  “And another thing,” Marine said, putting down Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. “He’s been speaking about children . . .”

  Sylvie began humming the wedding march.

  “Stop it,” Marine said. “It’s all been very indirect, boys versus girls, that sort of thing. I think he’s terrified of having a son.”

  “I get that,” Sylvie said. “When I see the boys at Charlotte’s school, I think of them as extraterrestrials. Did Antoine really talk of children?”

  “Yes, but like I said, only when it has to do with other people,” Marine said. She thought for a moment and then added, “But that day we arrived here, Antoine did say how much happier he’d be with a daughter. Because of Brice, Alain Denis’s son, storming out of the hotel.”

  “Stepson,” Sylvie said.

  Marine looked at her friend, puzzled.

  “I read it in Paris Match,” Sylvie said. “Oh, look. Here he comes now.”

  The teenager strode onto the terrace, a book and towel under his arm. Marine thought that in his swimsuit he looked even thinner, and more fragile. He threw his affairs on a chaise longue not far from Sylvie and muttered, “I hate him,” and then dove into the pool.

  “Wow,” Sylvie said. “That was pretty frank.”

  “It might not have been about Alain Denis,” Marine whispered. “What’s he reading?” she asked, craning to see the book.

  Sylvie, who was closer, got part way off of her lounger to see the book’s cover. “Death in Venice,” she said, sitting back down. “Must be on next year’s reading list.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Marine replied. She had been a great reader at that age, as had Antoine. She knew that Sylvie’s reading consisted mostly of photography journals and fashion magazines. But she didn’t fault Sylvie for that: how dull life would be if one’s friends did exactly the same thing as you.

  They watched in silence as the boy swam lengths. They smiled as he did a few somersaults and then floated on his back, looking up at the cloudless sky, framed by the dark-green needles of the umbrella pine trees that circled the south side of the pool. Marine found it curious that, even though there were available chairs on the opposite side of the terrace, Brice had chosen one near them. Perhaps he had thrown his towel on the closest chair and was going to leave as soon as he got out of the pool. She was about to ask Sylvie something about Charlotte—her beloved goddaughter—when the boy got out of the water, shook himself off like a dog, and sat down.

  “Fun book?” Sylvie asked, pointing to the Thomas Mann novel.

  “I wouldn’t say fun,” Brice answered, not showing his surprise that this woman, who must be more than twenty years older than himself, would refer to Thomas Mann as “fun.” “Disturbing. And dense, but highly readable too.”

  “Oh. Well, if it’s too treacherous,” Sylvie went on, as if she hadn’t heard his answer, “there’s a great film version with Dirk Bogarde in the lead.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Brice said. “Now, Bogarde was an actor.”

  Marine and Sylvie exchanged quick looks. As if Brice too regretted his comment, he quietly added, “Thanks for the recommendation though.” He slipped on his earplugs, and like Antoine with his newspaper, Marine saw that their short discussion was over.

  But Marine kept the image of Brice, floating on his back, in her head. What was he thinking when floating, looking at
the sky? What do we think of when we’re teenagers? Food? The opposite—or same, given your preferences—sex? Music? She thought of herself at sixteen, seventeen: a studious and polite girl. But it had also been the summer when she had been so conscious of a new silence that enveloped her parents—a doctor and a theologian in Aix—and Marine, an only child, had been unable to speak to anyone about it.

  • • •

  Antoine Verlaque walked into the Jacky Bar to the sounds of Billie Holiday. He was hungry and felt good after his long swim. He saw Eric Monnier sitting at his usual table, under the large framed photograph of the Cuban tobacco farmer. Monnier, seeing the judge, held a finger in the air. “Ze Lady,” he said in heavily accented English. Intrigued, for Verlaque had always preferred the scratchy and sad voice of Billie Holiday over the too-perfect one of Ella Fitzgerald, he saluted and walked over to the teacher.

  “‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,’” Verlaque said, sitting down.

  “Written by Bessie Smith, I believe,” Monnier said.

  Determined to outdo the teacher, Verlaque added, “Yes, and the lyrics a smack in the face to all the journalists who were so obsessed with Billie’s private life.”

  But Monnier had one up on the judge. “Look at this book of poetry,” he said. “I swear to God, when the song came on, I was reading this exact poem: ‘The Day Lady Died.’” He passed the slim volume—Lunch Poems—to Verlaque, who turned around and asked Serge Canzano for a whiskey.

  Verlaque turned back and looked at the cover. “Frank O’Hara?”

  “One of my colleagues at the high school—an English teacher—recommended him,” Monnier said. “Never a professional poet, this O’Hara. Worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fifties and sixties.”

  “A curator?”

  “Not even,” Monnier said. “He took the tickets. Front desk. At lunch he’d walk around New York and then come back and hit the typewriter. Hence the title of this collection. Or that’s what the jacket says about him, anyway. Lunch was his favorite meal.”

  “Much better than breakfast,” Verlaque said.

  “I hate breakfast,” Monnier admitted. “Always thought it something to get quickly over with.”

  Verlaque laughed. “No alcohol.”

  “Exactly. Lunch: I’ve gotten through the dismal morning and am feeling like working. Really working. I treat myself to a nice restaurant lunch and am surrounded by chatting people—workers, students, tourists. The food is salty, not sweet like at breakfast, and I can have a glass of wine to get the creative juices flowing and that perfectly complements my meal. And it’s still bright out, and the world looks happy.”

  Verlaque picked up the book, feeling Monnier’s loneliness. He said, trying to be light, “Not much boozing goes on anymore at my work lunches.” Dinner was Verlaque’s favorite meal, but he kept that to himself: the evening meal he shared with Marine. He began reading the poem, set on a Friday in July in 1959, as Canzano quietly slipped a Lagavulin in front of him. He finished reading and took a slow concentrated sip of the single malt.

  “What did you think of the poem?” Monnier asked.

  “I’m speechless,” Verlaque said. “It’s beautiful,” he went on, “and I’ve never heard of this O’Hara.”

  Monnier nodded, smugly smiling. “Could you help me translate a few lines?” he asked, leaning forward and taking the book. “Especially at the end.”

  “Sure.”

  “John door?” Monnier asked, pointing to the sentence.

  “Ah. The door to the toilets,” Verlaque said. “It sounds like the 5 SPOT he writes of is a New York bar.”

  “Whispered?”

  “Chuchoter,” Verlaque answered.

  “There’s almost no punctuation,” Monnier said. “I’ll have to loosen my poems up a bit. Breathing?”

  “Respirer.”

  Verlaque had another sip and asked Monnier for the book. He read aloud:

  “. . . and a NEW YORK POST with

  her face on it

  and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

  leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

  while she whispered a song along the keyboard

  to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”

  “It gives me goose bumps,” Monnier said. “Very wise that he doesn’t end the sentence with a period.”

  “Yes,” Verlaque said. “Like there’s still so much to say about her.”

  “Or he really did stop breathing . . .”

  Their reflections were cut short by Alain and Emmanuelle Denis, who entered the bar, loudly arguing. Eric Monnier folded his arms across his chest and quietly barked.

  “He’s your son,” Alain Denis said, flopping down in a vintage rattan chair. He motioned to Serge Canzano with his pointer finger twirling in the air, and a few seconds later the cork gently popped out of a bottle of expensive champagne.

  “That’s right,” Emmanuelle Denis replied, still standing. “Brice—he has a name—is my son, and I’ll decide where he’ll go to school.”

  “It seems like you’re making a decision, all right,” Denis said. “Between the kid and me.” He turned around and yelled to Canzano, “Having trouble finding a glass, or what?”

  “Alain, you’re such an ass,” Mme Denis said.

  “A famous ass,” Alain Denis replied, grabbing his glass of champagne from Canzano. “You seemed to like that fact when we first met.”

  Monnier coughed, barely disguising another bark, and Verlaque tried to hide his laughing face in the glass of whiskey.

  Chapter Eight

  Little Squid, Shirley

  Cat-Cat Le Bon could see the Mediterranean from her office window. She turned away from the view and opened the third drawer in her desk, pulling out a stack of black-and-white photos of Locanda Sordou from the 1960s. Someone had taken color slides too—luckily—and using those, along with vintage magazine articles from Life and Paris Match, she and Max were able to design the new hotel. Bright greens and pale blues, with touches of pink and orange, had been the original color scheme, and they stayed faithful to that. Those happy colors would be a perfect match for the white stone and marble floors and the cream-colored walls. The Le Bons had gone over budget, of course. The architect, when he saw Cat-Cat’s file of clippings, fabric swatches, and tile samples, warned her that she would. But Cat-Cat hardly listened, because here, at Sordou, it belonged to them. They had saved and worked hard—always for other people—in order to someday run their own hotel. Their goal had been to own a hotel by the time they were fifty; Max was fifty-one and Cat-Cat had just turned fifty in March.

  The next drawer down was full of design ideas that she had been collecting for over ten years. She had recorded furnishing and room arrangements that worked, and those that didn’t, in every restaurant and hotel she had ever worked in, and put them in the envelope. The envelope had grown to two binders. She and Max had sourced the best linen drapes in Tuscany; colorful cement tiles in Morocco—a fraction of the cost than those bought in Parisian tile stores—and they prided themselves on purchasing crafts from living French designers: tall, fragile porcelain vases; small marble end tables; thrown-glass goblets made by a designer in Brittany. Even the light fixtures were handmade, in forged metal by an artisan in the Luberon, with silk shades made by an obsessed seamstress in Montmartre.

  Cat-Cat knew that guests would like to see the photographs of the hotel in the sixties, and especially try to identify the many stars, singers, presidents, and millionaires who came in those days. She wasn’t sure herself why she didn’t get the photographs framed and hung as Niki had suggested; but she knew, down deeply, that she was superstitious: she hid the photos away in a drawer because she was afraid they would bring them bad luck, as if the photographs could taunt the Le Bons, saying, “Look at what a tremendously successful hotel I was back
then. See if you can do as well.”

  As if the photos could speak, she turned them over and slipped them back into their envelope and looked at the computer. The bank manager in Marseille who worked on their loan had worried about them having a luxury hotel on such a remote island. The screen flickered, reminding Cat-Cat of his concern. “It was different in the 1960s,” he had said. “Guests didn’t need Internet, or cell phones, and neither did the hotel. One phone line was enough.” He took a sip of coffee and then added the words that she and Max had dreaded, “And even then, the hotel didn’t last.”

  But Max had an old friend from Bordeaux who convinced the Le Bons, and the bank manager, that they could get by with an old-style modem to run the hotel’s computer. And Cat-Cat did research on successful hotels around the world that didn’t have cell phone reception or Internet for their clients and were doing quite well. “It’s the twenty-first century,” Max had argued at the bank. “Wealthy people want to get away from their families and businesses and the press.” Cat-Cat looked at the screen and tried to block out the bank manager’s high-pitched voice, still protesting down to the last minute, but finally giving in and signing their loan papers.

  “Coucou, Mme Le Bon,” Marie-Thérèse said, sliding into the office with a tray balanced on her hip. “I brought you an afternoon tea.”

  “How lovely,” Cat-Cat said, turning toward the girl. “Thank you.” She sighed.

  Marie-Thérèse saw the computer lit up on the reservations page. She bit her lip and then said, “Don’t worry, madame.”

  Cat-Cat tried to smile. “I wish I could.”

  “Today is Sunday . . .”

  “And?”

  “We’ll fill up. Couples will have spoken over the weekend about trips they want to take,” Marie-Thérèse explained. “And so tonight, or tomorrow, when they get into the office, they’ll book here. At Sordou. You’ll see.”

  “Have you always been such an optimist?”