Murder on the Ile Sordou

by M. L. Longworth

  “Yes, I think so,” Marie-Thérèse replied, shrugging. “I’ve never really thought about it before.”

  “I used to be too.”

  “You still are. This hotel will work, I’m sure of it.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you love it so much.”

  Cat-Cat’s eyes filled with tears.

  Marie-Thérèse went on, “And because you love it, and work so hard, it will work. Voilà!”

  • • •

  “Another dinner alone,” Eric Monnier wrote in his Moleskine. He crossed it out and wrote “Dining Alone,” and began a poem. As he always did when writing a poem, he wrote down key words in the margin: words that filled his head, words that described what he was looking at or feeling. He began with colors, and at Sordou they were always the same: “white,” “blue,” “green.” He then tried to remember what other clients or guests had said to him that day, as he enjoyed putting other people’s words in his poems. But it was only their second day on the island, and he had stuck to himself. Surely someone had said something to him? Oh yes, the bartender. Monnier chuckled and wrote down “The usual?” The waitress must have spoken to him at lunch; and he had passed the hotel’s owner, Mme Le Bon, standing on the terrace looking out to sea. He had commented on the fine weather. “Cooler than in Aix,” he had said. And what had she replied? He couldn’t remember, so wrote down an image instead: “the worried owner and the cheerful waitress.”

  Monnier took a sip of white wine and looked around the room. He wrote down what the waitress said at the Amercian’s table, “Petits supions au Vin Blanc.”

  “Pardon?” the wife had asked.

  “Little squid, Shirley,” her husband answered.

  “Very good translation,” the cigar smoker named Antoine said, leaning over his table to congratulate the American gentleman, who shrugged and laughed, amazed that he knew the translation. Eric liked the words better in English, and quickly wrote them down before he forgot them. “Little squid, Shirley.” He went back up to the top of the page and put a line through “Dining Alone” and replaced it with “Little squid, Shirley.” He sat back, smiling, and pushed his book aside when the waitress came with his first course.

  “Good evening,” she said, carefully setting down a bowl. “Chef Émile’s amuse-bouche . . .”

  “Petits supions,” he said.

  “Exactly!”

  “Thank you,” Monnier said, tucking the napkin up under his chin. “And to follow?”

  “Puttanesca,” Marie-Thérèse answered, smiling.

  “Ah, the whore’s pasta!” Monnier said, breaking some bread to have with his squid.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Go ask Chef Émile what ‘puttanesca’ means,” he said, pointing with his bread toward the kitchen.

  Marie-Thérèse turned away and quickly walked to the kitchen door.

  The squid were tiny and had been fried quickly in garlic followed by a white wine reduction. They were fresh, and delicious, and Monnier realized that he had eaten them too quickly, for when he looked around he saw the other diners still eating. He pulled out his book and realized that it would be difficult to find words to rhyme with Shirley. Someone laughed and he looked up; it was Marine, Antoine’s girlfriend, and he wrote down her name.

  He noticed that Alain Denis wasn’t dining, nor was his family. They were probably eating in their room, or suite, more likely. The poor boy, Monnier mumbled to himself. Should be out swimming with his buddies, not stuck in a small hotel with his unhappy parents. The Parisians were at the table next to him, talking of their own children; one was at camp and the two smaller ones were with their grandparents, he gathered. Monnier imagined that’s what married couples do: speak of their children. He tried to block out their conversation; he didn’t like eavesdropping, especially if it wasn’t interesting. But then the wife said Sordou more than once, and investment, and her husband whispered for her to be quiet.

  Monnier became restless when the Viales began to talk once again of their children, and, self-conscious of having eaten his squid too quickly, got up and walked to the Jacky Bar to grab the wine menu. He’d need a nice strong red to go with the puttanesca; Serge—they too were on a first-name basis—would have a good recommendation.

  “What would a whore from Naples drink with her tomato-based pasta?” Monnier asked as he leaned on the bar.

  Serge laughed, and Monnier smiled. “A southern-Italian red,” Serge replied. “But let’s go farther afield than Sicily.”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “You’ll need a fresh fruity red to match the tomatoes and red peppers and anchovies.”

  “I can handle that.”

  “Calabria,” Serge said. “Chef Émile and I have picked out a special wine to go with the pasta—”

  “Oh, I love Calabria,” a female voice sounded. Monnier swung around and saw Marine standing beside him.

  “I’ve come for the wine menu,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Serge said. “There should have been one out there.”

  “It’s no problem,” Marine continued. “Have you been to Calabria?” she asked Monnier.

  Trying to be nonchalant, as he always did in the presence of beautiful, kind women, he leaned an elbow on the bar and shrugged. “I’m sad to report that no, I’ve never been south of Rome.”

  “I’m Marine,” she said, extending her hand. “Antoine told me you had a nice talk today about poetry.”

  “Eric Monnier,” he replied.

  “I’m pleased to meet you.” She turned to the bartender and said, “So you’re recommending a wine from Calabria? We were hoping you’d have one.”

  “We’re a small island with a big wine cellar,” Serge said. Happy to share his knowledge, he showed them one of the bottles. “The ancient Greeks—the Oenotrians—made wine in Calabria as early as the seventh century B.C.”

  “Oenotrians?” Marine asked. “As in oenology?”

  “Well done,” Monnier said. “It means people from the land of vines.”

  Serge tried to smile, having lost his place center stage. He continued, “Their Greco di Bianco might be the oldest wine in the world. But we’ve selected a red for the pasta, made from three different Calabrian varieties and aged in chestnut barrels.”

  “Not oak?” Marine asked. “How interesting.”

  “It’s fresh and young and fruity,” Serge continued, “with notes of tobacco and black licorice.”

  “Tobacco sounds good,” Monnier said.

  “So does licorice,” Marine followed. She looked at the poet, as Antoine called him, and asked, “Would you like to eat with us, M. Monnier?”

  Monnier hesitated. “Thank you, but no,” he said. “Too much work,” he continued, patting the fountain pen in his pocket. “But perhaps another evening.”

  “That would be very nice,” Marine answered.

  Chapter Nine

  About the Boatman

  Hugo Sammut had not begun walking until he was almost two years old, but when he did, he had, as his mother bragged, “Run for it, and hasn’t stopped since.” He was a naturally gifted athlete, coordinated, and wasn’t nearsighted like his siblings. He was good at both soccer and rugby but he excelled at sailing and alpine skiing, two sports dear to the French middle and upper classes. His parents, now retired, had been high school teachers and had spent their numerous school vacations with their three children either skiing (in winter, in the cheaper Alpine ski resorts like Saint-Martin de Belleville, or Les Houches) or boating, in summer, at Mme Sammut’s parents’ vacation apartment in Arcachon on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux.

  As the third child, and an unexpected one, he had been pampered. His older sister and brother had been good at sports, but better at academics, and were now a family doctor and accountant, respectively. Hugo’s love was the outdoors, and spo
rts, but a grave dyslexia—which even in the mid-1980s still wasn’t diagnosed as a treatable learning disability in France—had made studies for him unbearable.

  Difficulties with reading and writing, and attention deficit disorder, finally diagnosed along with dyslexia when he was fifteen, meant that Sammut was put in remedial studies, and he graduated at nineteen with a 10/20 on the technical baccalaureate, on his second attempt. His classmates went into trades: plumbing, masonry, and electricity for the boys and hairdressing for the girls. But his athletic skills and cheery disposition—cheerier now that he was finally finished with school—gave him employment as a skiing instructor in the winter and as a boating teacher in the summer. His good looks helped too: his olive skin and dark curly hair often meant that he was mistaken for an Italian or Spaniard; odd, when both his parents, and his brother and sister, were blond.

  M. and Mme Sammut were thrilled that their son found employment, even if it was seasonal. In between jobs Hugo would be in Nancy, helping to garden or do fix-it jobs around their large suburban house. Hugo was easy to be with and loved his mother’s cooking, and was an ideal uncle to his nieces and nephews, who, with their parents, all lived in Nancy. But Hugo had a temper, brought on, his mother now knew, by his ADD. When he had been young, she and her husband and Hugo’s siblings had learned how to treat his rare—but powerful and frightening—outbursts by making sure that he couldn’t hurt himself or anyone else and leave him to his screaming. When he first came home, elated, with the news that he had found employment as a ski instructor, Mme Sammut’s first worry was his temper. But Hugo seemed to control his anger while on the slopes; it was if the constant exercise and fresh air wiped away his tantrums.

  After his fifth year as an instructor in Les Houches he abruptly switched ski stations; he told his parents that the pay was better in Chamonix. Had they read the local Savoie newspapers they would have learned that their son’s dismissal was due to a fight with another ski instructor who wasn’t calling the emergency services fast enough for Sammut’s liking. Sammut had been skiing on his afternoon off when he came across an injured skier whose red ski vest he saw through the bushes. The skier had been skiing off-slope and had suffered a heart attack, and was alone. Sammut called for help, his colleague on the other end not paying close enough attention to Sammut at first, until he realized the extent of the emergency. An emergency crew arrived nine minutes later, by snowmobile, but the skier had been dead for five minutes. Sammut watched the crew lift the lifeless middle-aged man on the stretcher, and he skied down, following them. He found his colleague in the bar, entertaining fellow ski instructors with stories, and Sammut walked over and punched him in the face, knocking him out.

  At thirty-four years of age Sammut considered himself young and was in no hurry to settle down with a wife and children, maybe not ever. He would have continued his winters in the Alps and summers in Arcachon had it not been for the successive announcements from his two siblings that they were moving, with their families, to the south of France. His sister had been offered a job in Nice’s biggest hospital, and his brother, the same week, had been hired as the financial director of a helicopter company based in Marseille. M. and Mme Sammut, seeing their children and grandchildren disappear for the sun and blue skies of Provence, sold their house—it was too big for them now—and bought a two-bedroom apartment in the seaside village of Cassis. Hugo, after seeing the Sordou job advertised in a boating magazine, soon followed.

  Sammut wasn’t convinced, as his family seemed to be, that the south of France was worth all of the talk. He loved the crashing waves of the Atlantic, and the tides, and the miles of sandy and underpopulated beaches. He had easily made friends in Arcachon: with fellow sailing instructors—who had nicknamed Sammut “Hugo-of-the-Dunes” for his talent in seducing vacationing women in nearby Pyla’s great 110-meter-high hills of sand—and he had made good friends with local commerçants and an oyster farmer across the bay in Cap Ferret. But he knew that he would miss his family too much, and so he traded all that for the rocky, crowded beaches of the Mediterranean. He would still have the winter skiing, at least.

  And so it surprised no one more than Hugo-of-the-Dunes himself when he fell in love with rocky Sordou. He knew that Jacques Cousteau, his childhood hero, had explored these waters, but Sammut had had no idea just how close Cousteau had been. For five years, beginning in 1952, Cousteau and his team on the Calypso explored the underwater around the Île Grand Congloué, finally discovering a Greek shipwreck from the third century B.C. forty meters under. Over seven thousand pieces of tableware alone were brought up to the ship’s decks and taken to two museums in Marseille, along with thousands of wine and oil amphorae. Sammut had little interest in these and had never been to the museums to look at them. It was more the heroics of the exploration that he loved: that Cousteau and his wife Simone had put their life savings into the Calypso, along with help from rich Americans and the Guinness family; that Cousteau and engineer Émile Gagnan had built the first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus in 1943, out of a sheer love of being underwater; and that Cousteau, as a young man, was meant to be a pilot, but a car accident ended his aviation career and he became fascinated by the sea when swimming, wearing only goggles, near Toulon. “What if Cousteau had become a pilot?” the young Hugo used to ask his parents. “Well then, he would have become fascinated by birds, and clouds,” his mother replied.

  Hugo was in the water whenever he got the chance; he kept his goggles draped over his bedpost, and he swam close to the rocks—without flippers or a mask—just as the young Cousteau had done in nearby Toulon. From there, under the water, he could observe the aquatic life—the variety and busyness of the fish and shellfish made their little skeleton crew at the Locanda Sordou seem ridiculous.

  The battered Cousteau poster that had been taped above his bed in Nancy was long gone, but Sammut knew the quotation on it by heart: “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” And Hugo Sammut felt free, indeed, on water, and flying over snow. Never a great lover of people, except his own immediate family, and a detester of cities, he knew from the first time he saw it that he could be happy on Sordou.

  Chapter Ten

  The Rising Sea

  Marine Bonnet and Antoine Verlaque stepped out onto the dining room’s terrace, its small red marble tables set with fine white china for breakfast. The only sound was made by Hugo Sammut; wearing neatly pressed shorts and a tightly fitting polo shirt, Sammut was clipping the fragrant hedge that separated the terrace from the gardens that gently slopped down the hill.

  “This view is just as spectacular as the view from our room,” Marine said, slipping her hand around Verlaque’s waist.

  Verlaque nodded and looked out over the island’s small, protected bay toward the limestone cliffs in the west that fell abruptly into the sea. “I’m glad we came,” he finally said, kissing her.

  “Lovebirds!” Sylvie called from under an enormous white sun hat.

  “Hey,” Marine said, walking over to Sylvie’s table and giving her the bise. “How’s the coffee?”

  “Divine,” Sylvie said, lowering her oversize vintage sunglasses for special effect. “It’s illy, not French, thank God.”

  “Great news,” Verlaque said, sitting down and pouring two glasses of orange juice for himself and Marine from a cut-glass pitcher.

  “French coffee is good, you two,” Marine said. She always felt that she had to defend their country, as Verlaque was a quarter English, and proud to be, and Sylvie was just a reactionary.

  Marie-Thérèse had seen Pretty Woman—the name she gave Marine the moment she first saw her—and Chubby Man walk onto the terrace, and she came out to greet them.

  “How are you this morning?” Verlaque bellowed.

  “F-fine,” she answered, adjusting her white apron. “Chef Émile ha
s baked scones this morning. Would you like some?”

  “Scones?” Verlaque asked. “Fantastic. And two cappuccinos, please.”

  “Yes, that sounds great,” Marine added.

  “I’ll have another scone, pretty please,” Sylvie said. “And another cappuccino.”

  Marie-Thérèse nodded and almost ran off.

  “It’s charming how she refers to the chef as Chef Émile,” Marine said. “They’re almost the same age, I would guess.” She looked out over the blue-green, almost transparent water. “Incredible to think that there are underwater caves all around these islands,” she said. “With prehistoric paintings and carvings.”

  “Weren’t those a hoax?” Sylvie asked.

  “Oh no,” Marine answered. “They’ve been dated as the real thing.”

  “But how did those little prehistoric dudes get into those underwater caves, with their paints and all?” Sylvie asked.

  “First they went to the art store and bought the paints, then to the hardware store for the flashlights,” Verlaque said.

  “By land,” Marine answered, smiling. “The sea was farther away then. Those caves, tens of thousands of years ago, were at the water’s edge. Today you have to swim in to get to them, with scuba gear.”

  Sylvie sighed and looked out at the sea. “The sea keeps rising, doesn’t it?

  “Yes. With global warming the glaciers are melting,” Marine said.

  Sylvie moaned. “What a depressing thought.”

  “Time to buy a beach house in Skagen,” Verlaque said, looking over his Le Monde at the women.

  “I’m in,” Sylvie said. “I love the Danish. That is in Denmark, right?”

  “On the northern tip,” Verlaque said, sitting up as Marie-Thérèse came back with their breakfast.

  Marine continued to look out at the cliffs and the sea. It was indeed depressing to think that one day it would be too hot to sit out in the south of France, even at 9 a.m.