Blowback

by Peter May

  She side-stepped the big frame of the Scotsman and hurried off through the plane trees toward the hotel. Enzo turned to watch her go. She seemed a slight, almost frail figure as she rounded the corner of the east extension and disappeared from view.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Marc Fraysse’s kitchen garden was vast, spread over an acre of south-facing hillside below the auberge, and protected by a high stone wall. It was built on terraces linked by stone steps covered in lichens and mosses. Parts of it were shaded by fruit trees: apple, pear, cherry, and plum. Extensive rock gardens provided haven for many of the herbs and wild flowers that the chef had used to flavour his dishes. And a huge greenhouse ran along the top end of the potager where it would catch most sunlight for germinating seeds and cultivating bedding plants that would be transferred to the great outdoors in the late spring.

  Now, however, large parts of it were being dug over in preparation for winter, with clear polythene sheeting stretched over ribbing to protect the winter vegetables. Along the far wall, huge orange pumpkins sat among fleshy green leaves in soft earth.

  As Guy opened the gate to let them in, Enzo saw the dark-haired man with the haunted face who had been putting in snow poles on the road, and who had cast such dead eyes in his direction in the staff canteen that morning. He wore a cloth cap now, and was wielding a long-pronged fork to turn over rich earth near the bottom of the garden.

  “Of course, the garden alone can’t supply all our needs,” Guy was saying. “We buy fresh vegetables at the market in Clermont three days a week, and we get a lot of produce from the local farmers.” He chuckled. “They generally turn up at the kitchen door with stuff they’ve just dug out of the ground. Marc always sent the sous-chef to check out the quality and haggle for a price. But we paid them well. Marc believed in supporting the locals. Most of our employees were born within ten kilometres of the auberge.”

  He started off down the steps and Enzo followed him.

  “But almost all of our herbs and wild flowers come from the garden. Marc laid out these terraces himself, you know. A labour of love. That was in the early days. But when success came, he no longer had the time, and so he asked Lucqui to look after it full time for him.”

  The man turning over the earth looked up as they approached.

  “Enzo meet Lucqui. Lucqui meet Enzo.”

  Lucqui glowered at Enzo from beneath abundant eyebrows and thrust out a big hand to crush Enzo’s and leave it cold and muddy. Enzo tried not to wince, and nodded solemnly. Lucqui’s eyes never left his.

  Guy said, “There’s not enough in the garden to keep Lucqui occupied all year round, so he does other odd jobs around the estate, and also acts as gamekeeper and water bailiff.”

  “Ah,” Enzo said. “Looks after the flora in the summer and the fauna in the winter.”

  Guy smiled, Lucqui didn’t. Guy said, “There’s some good fishing in the river, and we have deer and wild boar in the woods. We also have poachers. A problem which has kept Lucqui out of his bed for quite a few nights recently.” He looked at the gardener. “Still no luck, I take it?”

  Lucqui shook his head.

  Guy turned to survey the fallow potager at its end of season. “Marc and Lucqui spent a lot of time together here in the old days. God knows what it was they talked about all those hours in the garden. I always figured Lucqui knew Marc better than me.” He turned a grin on Lucqui. “That right, Lucqui?”

  Lucqui pushed out his jaw in an unspoken acknowledgement.

  Guy slapped Enzo’s shoulder. “Anyway, we should head up the hill before the light starts to go.” And Lucqui returned to forking the earth as Guy and Enzo climbed mossy steps back up to the gate.

  “Talkative sort,” Enzo said.

  Guy glanced at him. “What?”

  “Lucqui. He never spoke a single word.”

  Guy laughed. “That’s just Lucqui. Loquacious Lucqui I used to call him. But Marc always said there was nothing he didn’t know about what makes things grow. A real man of the soil. He never seemed to be short of words in conversation with my brother, but he’s pretty much kept his own counsel these past seven years.”

  Enzo glanced back down over the terraces, and saw that Lucqui had dismissed them from his mind already, focused instead on the dark volcanic soil that he turned over and broke up with his fork.

  ***

  By the time they reached the top of the hill the wind was strong enough to almost knock them over, whistling through clumps of already dead mountain grass. They had taken a path north from the auberge across the treeless, west-facing slope, and now it felt like they were scraping the sky. It really did seem like the top of the world up here.

  Far off, Enzo could see the peaks of mountains pushing up out of the Auvergne, reaching much higher than where they stood now, but dwarfed somehow by the distance. The landscape formed an irregular mosaic of green and brown, land divided and sub-divided by generations of fractured French inheritance. Looking south toward the lower plateau, they could just see the old ruined buron where Marc’s body had been discovered.

  Enzo’s ponytail whipped and blew about his neck and face, and Guy had to hold his béret to stop it blowing away. He said, “You know, in the whole history of mankind, only a handful of people will have stood on this spot, and seen what we see now. That gives me a sense of being very privileged. A privilege that goes beyond money or position.”

  Enzo gazed around the panorama of the world laid out at their feet and knew what he meant. He turned suddenly to the surviving Fraysse brother and said, “What did you and Marc fall out about?” It was an interrogation technique he had learned long ago. Always open with a question to which you knew the answer.

  But it was a question out of left field, and it clearly took the big man by surprise. “How did you find out about that? There’s not many people know.”

  Enzo just shrugged. “It’s my job. The way I understand it, you barely spoke for nearly twenty years.”

  Much of Guy’s joviality left his face. “Yes.” He was lost for a moment in his own thoughts. “It was a woman, of course.”

  “Elisabeth?”

  He nodded and half-smiled. A touch of sadness in it. “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “We met her at the same time. While we were still working as apprentices for the brothers Blanc. And I guess we both fell for her that very first day. But it was Marc who asked her out first. God knows where he found the courage, because he was a shy boy in those days. I was the one who knew how to chat up the girls. But he beat me to it, and I could have kicked his skinny ass.” He pushed his hands deep in his pockets and bent his head into the wind to set them walking south along the ridge. Enzo followed, straining to catch his words above the whine of the wind.

  “They went out a few times, and then she seemed to lose interest. At least, that’s how I saw it. It wasn’t a regular copain, copine thing. I knew she had knocked him back on a couple of dates, so I asked her out. And she said yes. I didn’t see any point in telling Marc. I mean, he never discussed her with me anyway. I started seeing her quite regularly. She told me she wasn’t seeing Marc anymore, but I think they still went out from time to time.”

  He took a deep breath and stopped, turning to face Enzo, and the wind caught his béret and whipped it away on its edge. Guy flailed at it with a futile hand in an attempt to catch it. But it was gone, and what was left of his hair stood almost straight up, waving in the current of air like a sea anemone. “Damn!” Then he grinned unexpectedly. “Probably Marc’s ghost getting his own back.”

  And whatever animosity there had been between them at one time, Enzo could see that Guy still had genuine fondness in the memory of his brother. “So what happened?”

  “He was out one night, playing pétanque at the boulodrome. He loved that, you know. And he was good at it. Used to gamble half his wages on his ability to drop those balls right on the jack.” He shook a smiling head at the memory. “Anyway, I knew he wouldn’t
be back for some hours and persuaded Elisabeth to come to the Lion d’Or. I figured I could smuggle her in through the back door. And the only way I was going to have sex with her was by providing some privacy and a bed.” He ran a hand back across his head in a vain attempt to tame his hair. “Anyway, Marc had a bad night at the boules, and he came home early. Found us in bed.” He pulled in his mouth, lips pressed together in regret. “And that was it.”

  “That was what?”

  “The end of our relationship. Me and Marc, I mean. He went crazy. Wouldn’t talk to me, refused to share a room with me. Managed to make all the other apprentices see me as some kind of traitor. Did everything he could to make an idiot of me in the kitchen. So I quit. Fuck it! I was never cut out for it anyway. And I fell straight into the first course that would take me.” He laughed. “Accountancy! I’d never have seen that coming in a million years. But you know what? Turned out I was good at it. A head for figures I never knew I had.”

  “And Elisabeth?”

  “Oh, I kept seeing her. And when she finished her training we got a little apartment together. She was earning, I had a summer job. We had a little money, and it was bliss. At first. Eating for next to nothing in all those cheap little bistros, walking together in the park, making love whenever we felt like it. Sleeping all day when she was on the night-shift. I thought I had discovered heaven on earth.”

  “But?”

  His smile was tinged with sadness. “Yes. There’s always a but, isn’t there? In this case, the but was that it didn’t last. By the time I was going into my second year in college, it was over. Whatever the magic was, we’d used it all up. Spent it. Gone. Just like Elisabeth. And all I was left with was a brother who thought I’d betrayed him. A brother who wouldn’t talk to me for… yes, you’re right… nearly twenty years.”

  They started walking again, the ridge dipping ahead of them, carrying them down toward the southern treeline and the old ruined buron.

  “I went to Paris when I finished my studies and learned a few years later that he and Elisabeth had got together again. Of course I was never invited to the wedding. The only contact we had was when our folks were killed in a car accident and we had to settle the issue of inheritance.

  “Marc wanted to continue to run the auberge as a hotel and try to make his name with the restaurant. I didn’t see why not. So the lawyers put together a deal whereby he paid me rental on my half of the property, and I let him get on with it. I tried to speak to him at that time, but he still wouldn’t have it. And so my lawyer spoke to his lawyer, and his accountant spoke to me.” He sighed. “Sad, really.”

  “What brought about the change?”

  “Marc did. Quite out of the blue. I’d been following his progress at a distance. The early critiques of the restaurant. The first Michelin star. The second. He was becoming a star himself. You know, it’s funny Enzo, there was a time when chefs were servants employed by the wealthy, or hired by restauranteurs or hoteliers. Now the top chefs are celebrities in their own right and the people who once employed them bow and scrape at their feet.” He laughed. “I love the irony in that.”

  They clambered over some rocks, then, and across a wet stretch of bogland that sucked at their feet.

  “Anyway, I got a call from him one day. I couldn’t believe it when I heard his voice on the phone. I could hear other voices in the background, like there was some kind of party going on, and he might have had too much to drink. He’d just heard that day that he was getting his third star. It still wasn’t public knowledge. It made me think of the day the Blanc brothers got theirs, and even the apprentices got to drink champagne. He said he needed more than a silent partner now. He needed someone who would know how to run a three-star business. And if I was prepared to put the past behind us, then so was he.”

  Enzo searched his face as they came to a halt by the tumbledown buron. “And how did you feel about that?”

  “I was rotting in Paris, Enzo. Gazing into a grey future. I jumped at the chance. And, you know, it made sense. In this business you don’t employ outsiders. They’ll steal from you. Marc needed someone. I was family. So we buried the hatchet and built the multi-million-euro Fraysse empire together. A brand that has survived everything.” He cast solemn blue eyes in the direction of the buron. “Even if Marc didn’t.”

  “And you and Elisabeth?”

  Guy threw him a quick look. “What about us?”

  “Well, wasn’t it a little bit difficult, given your history?”

  Guy just shook his head sadly. “What we had, way back, was special, I think. Intense. But the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, Enzo. We were burnt out so long before I came back to Saint-Pierre that we were like strangers, really. And in many ways still are. We might run the business together, but our private lives, such as they are, never cross.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A fourteenth century monument historique, Château de Puymule sat up on a rocky mound above a tiny collection of mediaeval houses in a bend on the road about two kilometres below Saint-Pierre. The turreted roofs at each corner of this tall, square stone edifice gave it a Disneyesque appearance that was not quite real. Trees and rock gardens climbed the slopes all around it behind high iron railings. A path wound up from the gate to an arched entrance beneath a square tower with a steeply pointed roof.

  When Enzo pulled up on the road below, the light was failing. It was not yet dark enough to trigger the floodlights that would illuminate it against a black sky once night had fallen, but it was the kind of twilight that robbed the world of clarity and created uncertainty in the shadows.

  There were no lights in any of the houses, and only the distant sound of a barking dog and the smell of woodsmoke in the air gave any indication that there was life nearby.

  Enzo checked his watch. He had overestimated how long it would take him to get here, so he was a little early for his meeting with Fred. He walked up a rough, cobbled track to the gate and saw that the padlock which would normally secure it was open, its chain dangling from one of the spikes. The right-hand gate itself stood slightly ajar.

  Enzo was surprised. A plaque on the gate announced daily visits between 2:30pm and 5:30pm from May till September. The château was closed to the public from October till April. He strained to see through the gloom toward the dark shadow of the castle and wondered if, perhaps, anyone still lived there. Many historic monuments were privately owned and only open to the public to raise funds for restoration.

  The wind whistled through autumn trees around the building, detaching the last stubborn leaves and rattling branches. Enzo pulled his jacket more tightly around him and stamped his feet. It was damned cold. On an impulse, rather than stand around waiting, he pushed the gate open and started up the curve of the path toward the main entrance, drawn by curiosity and impatience.

  Lichen-covered stone walls bounded what had once been a moat, lined now with grass and shrubs and saplings of mountain ash. Enzo crossed the stone bridge that spanned it to the tall wooden doors that arched beneath the tower. A heavy, black-painted iron ring hung from the right-hand door. Enzo lifted it with both hands and tried to move it. To his amazement, it turned clockwise, lifting some ancient, heavy latch on the other side, and releasing the door to swing inwards. He heard the sound of it echoing away into darkness. There had to be someone here.

  “Hello?” Only the echo of his own voice replied before it was smothered by the night.

  He moved forward cautiously over centuries-old flagstone, feeling the cold rising from them through his feet. Somewhere ahead was the faintest glimmer of light. Enough, at least, to allow him to distinguish his way forward through the shadows. He was in a vast entrance hall, with stone steps spiralling away to his right. Ahead, another tall, arched door stood ajar, and he could see an orange-yellow light flickering beyond it.

  “Hello,” he called out again. Still no response. He pushed the door wide enough to reveal a long banqueting room awash with the light of
dancing flames in an enormous open fireplace, its chimney rising up to the rafters, clad in decorated oak panelling.

  A long table was set with, perhaps, twenty places, as if for a mediaeval banquet. Damp air was warmed by the flames and felt clammy on his skin. There was nobody here. But the scrape of a shoe on stone flags somewhere out in the entrance hall stilled his heart. He was going to feel more than a little foolish, and certainly embarrassed, if he had walked into someone’s private home.

  He moved back out into the hall and felt the soft, damp darkness slip over him like a glove. A movement caught the peripheral vision of his right eye and made him turn in time to see a fist coming at him out of the dark. White knuckles, the glint of a ring. Instinctively he pulled back, ducking away, and was struck only a glancing blow. Still, it hurt like hell, filling his head with light, and dropping him to one knee. He heard, and felt, more than saw, his attacker coming at him again. And he pushed off, with his standing leg, dipping his head low and leading with his shoulder, a technique he had learned on the rugby fields of Hutchie Grammar. He made contact with soft flesh and hard bone. Rank garlic breath exploded in his face. A loud grunt filled his ears. With his weight for leverage, Enzo pushed the attacker back against the wall, and heard the crack of a skull against stone, almost like a bullet shot.

  This time the man cried out in pain. Enzo had a handful of jacket in his right hand, and lashed out with his left fist. He felt it strike the hard, unyielding, protective shield of the man’s rib cage. Bone against bone, and pain went spiking up his arm. The man tore himself free of Enzo’s grasp and Enzo heard the rasp of his leather soles on the stone as he staggered away toward the main door. Enzo went after him, damned if he was going to let him get away. Out on to the old drawbridge, awash now with sudden moonlight. He saw his attacker just ahead of him. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a short fleece jacket and jeans. Now the moon was gone, the man reduced to the merest shadow. But Enzo could see the fugitive had hurt himself and was not moving freely. He almost hurled himself across the bridge, gasping to draw breath into protesting lungs, and lunged at the man’s back. A classic rugby tackle. They both went down, Enzo on top, and the air was expelled from the man beneath him like air from a bellows.