Blowback

by Peter May

  Enzo scrambled to his knees and straddled the man, grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him over, just as the moon emerged once more from a fractured sky. He was shocked to see the face of the young chef whom he’d seen glaring at him in the staff canteen that morning. There was blood streaming from a gash in his forehead.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Enzo shouted.

  To his surprise the young man shouted back. “Just stay away from her!”

  Enzo grabbed his lapels. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re just some dirty old man who can’t keep his filthy hands to himself!”

  “What?” Enzo glared at him, filled with anger and incomprehension.

  “She’s my girl, okay?”

  “Who?”

  “Sophie!”

  There was a moment’s hiatus before rage tore through Enzo like a storm, and he lifted the young man’s shoulders by the lapels and then slammed them down again. Hard. “You stupid little shit! Philippe, that’s your name, isn’t it? She told me about you.” He sucked air into his lungs. “I don’t know what Sophie is to you, and I don’t care. But she’s my daughter!”

  Philippe’s face froze in an expression of incredulity. Confusion filled flickering, troubled eyes as he tried to process the information.

  “It was you spying on us in the hall outside my room the other night, wasn’t it?”

  “I… I… I didn’t know. I didn’t realize…”

  “No, of course you didn’t. And you didn’t stop to think, or ask.” Enzo let go his lapels and got stiffly to his feet, brushing mud and moss stains from his trousers and his sleeves. He ran a hand over the side of his face and felt a swelling on his cheekbone. Philippe pulled himself on to one elbow and looked up at the figure of Enzo looming over him. Enzo stabbed a finger at him. “You stay away from my daughter, you hear? And keep your mouth shut about me and Sophie, sonny. Or I might just tell her real boyfriend that some scrawny chef’s been sniffing around her like a dog in heat. Bertrand’s a body-builder, jealous as hell, and got a temper to go with it. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes if he comes looking for you.”

  The young man got to his feet with difficulty, holding his ribs where Enzo’s knuckles had made contact, bruising them, maybe even cracking one. He turned and limped off into the darkness. Enzo stood breathing hard, and was filled with a momentary sense of elation. He had done not badly for an old guy. The young chef was certainly less than half his age, but Enzo had still seen him off.

  If the thought briefly puffed him up, then sudden floodlights illuminating the château and a gruff voice shouting at him from across the moat deflated him just as fast.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  He turned to see a large man in workman’s overalls and shirt sleeves rolled up over muscled forearms striding toward him. He was caught in the full glare of the floodlamps on Enzo’s side of the moat, casting a giant shadow behind him on the castle wall.

  “I’m sorry,” Enzo said. “Are you the owner?”

  “I’m the caretaker. Who are you?” He stopped and glared at the intruder, a definite sense of threat in all of his body language.

  Enzo’s confident facade faltered a little. “I just saw that the gate was unlocked, and wondered if the château was still open for viewing.”

  “Are you blind? There’s a notice on the gate. We’ve been shut for a month. Now clear off before I call the gendarmes and have you arrested for trespass!”

  Enzo raised a hand in peace. “Okay, okay, I’m going. Keep your shirt on.” He had no illusions about being able to see this man off if it turned physical. And he headed down the path, through the trees, feeling bruised and stiff, and thinking how ridiculous it was for a man of his age still to be getting into fights.

  He pulled the gate closed behind him and saw a car sitting at the foot of the path, next to his own, engine idling, headlights cutting across the road and absorbed into the darkness beyond. As he reached the passenger side, he peered in to see Fred sitting impatiently behind the wheel. He opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. Fred cast him a wary look. “You’re late.”

  “Actually, I was early. I got distracted.”

  “You alone?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I saw some guy running down the track and then heading up the road on a motorbike.”

  “Nothing to do with me.” Enzo felt himself blush as he lied. But he wasn’t about to even try to explain.

  Fred’s eyes narrowed a little as they wandered over Enzo’s face, and then down over his dirt-stained jacket and pants. “You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

  “I fell,” Enzo said too hurriedly, and it was clear that Fred didn’t believe him. “Anyway, we’re not here to talk about my adventures in the dark. You were going to tell me about Marc Fraysse’s gambling habit.”

  Forced to refocus on the purpose of their meeting, Fred retreated again into a self-protective shell. “How do I know you won’t go repeating this?”

  “You don’t. But if the choice is between an official audit and an off-the-record chat with me, I know which I’d choose.” Enzo breathed deeply and smelled the alcohol on Fred’s breath, along with the unpleasant perfume of stale cigarette smoke. “Come on, Fred! What are you hiding?”

  “We had an unofficial arrangement, Marc and me.” He flicked a nervous glance at Enzo, then held the steering wheel in front of him with both hands and stared off through the windscreen into darkness. “There were the bets he laid off officially, through the PMU. And then there was the money I put on for him unofficially through… well, let’s just say through people I knew.”

  “Illegal gambling.”

  He saw Fred’s knuckles whiten on the wheel. “Just a little freelance betting.”

  “Of which you took a percentage?”

  “I’m not a charity.”

  “What sort of money are we talking about?”

  Fred hesitated. “A lot.”

  “What’s a lot?”

  Fred shrugged. “I don’t know exactly.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Over the piece… maybe two or three hundred thousand.”

  Enzo was stunned. “You mean that’s what he bet?”

  “No, that’s what he lost. He bet a lot more. Sometimes he won.”

  “Jesus.” Suddenly Enzo saw Marc Fraysse in a whole new light. And he recalled his brother’s words of just a few hours before. Marc’s predilection for gambling on games of boules during their days in Clermont Ferrand. Used to gamble half his wages on his ability to drop those balls right on the jack, Guy had told him.

  “It was an obsession, monsieur,” Fred said. “I mean, at first I saw it as a way of making a bit of extra cash. But it got out of hand, know what I mean. And I couldn’t get out of it. He just didn’t want to stop.”

  Enzo reached into an inside pocket and produced the printouts he had taken from Marc Fraysse’s email folder. He had brought them with him on a hunch, more than an instinct, if not quite an educated guess. He handed them across the car. Fred dropped them into his lap, rolled down the window, and lit a cigarette, before reaching up to switch on the courtesy light. Enzo saw the nicotine stains on his fingers as he pulled smoke into his mouth.

  Fred lifted the sheets into the light. “What’s this?”

  “You tell me.”

  He peered at them myopically for a moment before his eyes widened and he turned to look at Enzo. “Jesus Christ! I didn’t know he was into this, too.”

  “Tell me.”

  Fred stabbed a finger at the email address. “Jean Ransou. Bookmaker to the stars.”

  Enzo frowned. “Legal or not?”

  “Oh, definitely not. Gambling turns over nearly thirty billion a year in this country, monsieur, and the government takes twenty-five percent. So that gives you an idea of the margins for making money on the black. If you’re a movie star, or a pop singer, or a celebrity chef… even a big wh
eel in the underworld… and you want to bet big money without sharing your winnings, or paying taxes, then you go to Jean Ransou.”

  “Who takes his own cut, of course.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “And the authorities don’t know about him?”

  Fred laughed. “Oh, you can bet they do. They’ve just never caught him. Or maybe they don’t want to. I mean, who knows how many politicians and judges and high-ranking cops use his services? I don’t know how he does it. Money gets laundered through the system somehow. He’s got plenty of legit operations. Whether they make money, or it’s just a cover, I wouldn’t know. But he’s the man.”

  “Was it you who introduced Fraysse to Ransou?”

  Fred’s laugh was derisive this time. “Hell no! A guy like me wouldn’t get within spitting distance of a guy like Ransou.”

  Enzo waved a hand at the emails. “So what does all this mean?”

  “Just dates, and races, and horses, and the amounts he wanted to bet. Take this line, for example…” He pointed to the top sheet, first line: PV: 18/12: 3e: 14: 150; 7e: 4: 130; 9e: 5,9,10: 200. “PV is the hippodrome at Paris Vincennes. 18/12 is the date. Third race, horse number fourteen. One hundred and fifty euros. And so on.”

  “So the initial letters always indicate the racecourse?”

  “Sure. Paris Vincennes, Deauville, Longchamp, Paris d’Auteuil, Marseilles Borely. There’s a lot of racecourses in France.”

  Enzo did some quick calculations based on the emails he had looked at. “So Fraysse was putting upwards of a thousand euros a day on these horses.”

  Fred nodded. “Looks like it. And that’s in addition to what he was putting on with me, above and below the table.”

  Enzo exhaled through pursed lips. “He was a seriously addicted gambler, then.”

  “He was.”

  And on the basis of the figures Fred had already quoted him, Enzo realized that Fraysse’s losses must have been enormous.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Evening service was in full flow in the dining rooms when Enzo got back to the auberge. There was no one at reception, but as the sommelier emerged from the cave with a bottle of Beaune he gave him a very odd look. Enzo caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the window, and realized just what a state he was in. His ponytail was a shambles, with stray strands of hair hanging down over his shoulders. His jacket and trousers were covered in dried mud, and stained green in patches by moss. No wonder Fred had looked at him so strangely. He hurried up the stairs before anyone else would see him.

  In his room he changed back into his shirt and cargos, washed his hands and face, and sorted his hair. He examined his face in the mirror. There was quite a swelling on his right cheek that was already beginning to show signs of bruising. He cursed Philippe. And Sophie for encouraging him. She was, no doubt, flattered by the attention.

  He went through to the living room and picked up the phone, dialling Elisabeth’s room, and waiting while it rang, and rang, unanswered. Finally he hung up and slipped out into the hallway. The door to Marc’s old study was just three doors along. He hurried past the others and hesitated in front of the study, listening for a moment in the stillness of the house. He could only distantly hear the chatter of guests downstairs, and the chorus of voices delivering and acknowledging orders in the kitchen. Half-fearing that he would find the door now locked, he tried the handle. But to his surprise and relief it turned and opened. He stepped quickly inside and closed it behind him. The room was in darkness, and he knew he would have no option but to turn on the light.

  It had been embarrassing to be caught here yesterday. If he were found again today, it would be more than that. It was likely that he would be asked to leave. Elisabeth had made it clear she expected him to ask for anything he wanted to see. But he didn’t want to alert anyone to this new focus of his interest.

  Almost holding his breath, he flicked the light switch down and bathed the dead man’s study in cold yellow light. He moved silently across the room to roll back the lid of the desk and open up the laptop. The start-up chorus reverberated around the room, and the operating system seemed to take forever to load. At last the desktop appeared on the screen, and he opened the mailer and quickly navigated his way to the archive folders. He stared at the screen with incomprehension, before scrolling up and down the row of folders. But there was no doubt. The Cheval folder was gone. Erased. All evidence of Marc Fraysse’s gambling relationship with Jean Ransou lost forever, along with any record of exactly how much he had placed in bets. All that remained were the two printouts he still had in his pocket.

  He had always known that it would be possible for any computer-savvy person to retrace his steps through Marc Fraysse’s laptop to see exactly what he had looked at the day before. Erasing those files would have been a simple matter.

  And it seemed to Enzo that the only possible person who could have done that was Elisabeth Fraysse.

  ***

  Back in his room he stripped off, leaving a trail of clothes behind him as he headed for the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot water cascaded over his face and shoulders, down his back and over his belly, warming his thighs. He stood for several minutes feeling the healing heat of the water relax muscles tight with tension and stiff from unaccustomed exertion.

  He rubbed himself with a big, soft bath towel, and dried his hair vigorously before slipping into the soft silk of his black embroidered dressing gown and padding back into the living room. There he poured himself a large single malt from the fridge, diluted it with a little water, and sank into the seductive softness of the settee.

  He lifted his laptop on to his knees and checked his email, then opened the moi.dssr file and scrolled through it until he found the passage he was looking for. He had sped-read through it previously, but wanted to go back now and read it more carefully, to be certain that the impression he had come away with from that first scanning had been accurate. If so, then there was a puzzling inconsistency between what he’d been told and what he had read.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Saint-Pierre, France, February 1998

  It had been a long, miserable winter. Like so many winters up here on the plateau, there had been snow, which kept people away. Certainly from Paris, and further afield. There were always a few regulars from Clermont, but local and passing business was never going to be enough. The dining room (I closed the west conservatory during the winter months) had remained stubbornly empty on some days, and on others only two or three tables were occupied. It was soul-destroying. I had two Michelin stars, and on some days fewer than two customers.

  Elisabeth, as always, tried to persuade me that we should close for the winter. We would save on staff and heating, she said. And people wouldn’t forget about us. As soon as the spring came they would return, like the geese. But I always told her: how can we expect Michelin to give us a third star if we are only part-timers? I was convinced we had to stay open, regardless, if that third star was ever to come our way.

  I had watched all through the winter months for the Michelin inspector. Every lone customer, man or woman, who came and sat in a quiet corner was a potential spy for the Guide. And yet I was never sure why I was so obsessed with the notion. Would I have treated him, or her, any differently? No. And, of course, I knew there was no point in trying to open a discussion on the subject. That would only have worked against me.

  I just wanted to know. That Michelin had been, and seen, and eaten, and that there was at least the chance that my rating would be reconsidered before the publication of the next Guide. I had spent a lifetime in the kitchen working for that. The first two stars had come quickly, it seemed. The third was infuriatingly slow to arrive, and I was beginning to fear that it never would. The low cloud, bruised and dark, that hung over us that February, spitting sleet in our faces from the teeth of a bitter north wind, reflected my mood in more ways than one.

  It was a miserable day late in the month when the call came. I can remember, w
e’d had three bookings for lunch and five for dinner, not enough to cover the cost of even one chef. The rain was driving in across the Massif from the north-west. It was Georges who answered the phone in the office and came running through the hotel to find me. There was a Monsieur Bernard Naegellen on the phone to speak to me, he said. And, of course, both of us knew that Monsieur Naegellen was the Director of Michelin’s Red Guides. I almost broke my neck to get to the kitchen, and then had to stand with my hand over the mouthpiece for almost a minute while I tried to control my breathing. When I spoke, finally, you would never have guessed how my heart was racing beneath my chef’s white blouse. “Bonjour Monsieur Naegellen. Comment allez-vous?”

  But he didn’t beat about the bush. There were no niceties to be observed in the matter of Michelin stars. “Monsieur Fraysse,” he said. “As you know the 1998 edition of the Guide Michelin will be published next month. I am just calling to let you know that you will have a rating of three stars in the new Guide.”

  I suppose it must have given great pleasure to successive directors of the Guide to deliver such news, and I have no doubt they were on the receiving end of many different reactions. I was so tense, I think that all I said was, “Oh? That’s good.” I could hardly have understated more the emotions that were bubbling up inside me.

  He told me that, of course, this was not yet public knowledge, and that I was to keep it to myself until publication. But he must have known, even as he spoke, that there was not a cat in hell’s chance of that happening.

  When I came off the phone, I realized that the entire kitchen staff was crowded into my office. Someone had told Elisabeth about the call, and she was there, too, pink-faced and wide-eyed. Everyone, it seems, was holding his breath. But it took me a moment to find my voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Welcome to Chez Fraysse. Saint-Pierre’s first and only three-star restaurant.”