The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  The station and the hotel were visible in the distance, but I was too far away to tell if anyone was waiting on the open platform or sitting at the café. I decided to approach along the shore, well below the road and the platform, and I was about to cross, when I had to wait for an oncoming motorbike towing a loaded sidecar. As it rounded the sweeping curve toward me, the bike hit a pothole. The whole contraption bounced, flinging its cargo onto the tarmac. I caught a rolling bicycle wheel and picked up a second when it came to rest in the gutter.

  “Ah, monsieur, merci, merci.” The motorcyclist pushed up his goggles and came forward to shake my hand. He had a lean, tanned face below curly brown hair, and he was wearing an unusual costume, a brilliant blue-and-white-striped jersey with very tight black shorts that showed off his strong rump and beautiful muscular legs. His name was Pierre, and he was the just sort of lad I find it a pleasure to help.

  He examined the wheels I’d collected, checking the rims carefully, exclaiming profanely all the time about the state of the roads and the inadequacies of his transport. Besides the spare wheels, I noticed some inner tubes and several small cardboard boxes. When he was satisfied that there had been no serious damage, he began to repack, complaining that this was not the first difficulty he’d had on his way from Nice and that these expensive parts needed to be delivered in good shape. “Perhaps some rope,” he said and looked around as if a good length of hemp might appear by magic.

  I examined the sidecar and had a better idea. “Give me a ride back into town and I’ll hold the wheels.”

  “Monsieur, you are within sight of the gare. You could ride in comfort.”

  I explained that I had a particular desire to avoid the station, that I had suffered a petit contretemps too embarrassing to relate, that the gare and the estimable SNCF were out of the question at the moment. After some discussion and a Gallic shrug from Pierre, I was wedged into the sidecar with the spare parts and the inner tubes. Pierre handed me the three extra wheels and hopped on the cycle.

  Off with a lurch and a fart of exhaust down the straight toward the gare. Half screened by bicycle wheels, I whipped by the empty station platform and my two “workmen” in the nearby café. The coast road was narrow and winding, rock on the land side, sand or a drop to more rocks on the other. Despite his earlier troubles, Pierre favored the accelerator and the sidecar found every little imperfection in the road. Any bump brought various boxes and bike parts into connection with my anatomy, while centrifugal force threatened to send me into the rocks or launch both of us into the blue Mediterranean. Without goggles, I mostly had to keep my eyes shut against the wind and flying grit, a circumstance that added to my discomfort.

  Now, I quite like excitement, and even danger isn’t off the menu, but blind speed and invisible disaster are not to my taste at all. I got brief, frightful glimpses of potential calamity in palms and pink and buff stucco walls and dangerous curbs and a stray dog and two careless pedestrians. It seemed a long while before the motorcycle dropped from a whine to a roar to a throbbing rumble. I opened my eyes as we bounced off a side street into the courtyard of a small bicycle repair shop. Pierre switched off the motor and flipped up his goggles. He had, I now noticed, eyes between brown and green with little gold flecks like a cat’s. “All right, monsieur?”

  I handed out the wheels and attempted to disengage myself from the tires, the boxes, and what turned out to be a couple of extra bike pedals, one of which had gouged my right shin. I started cleaning up with my handkerchief, but Pierre unlocked the shop and motioned me inside. He took down a first aid kit with iodine, Nan’s mainstay, several gauze pads, and reels of tape. While he patched me up, I looked at the photographs on the walls: men in Pierre’s blue-and-white-striped kit posed with racing bicycles and, sometimes, with trophies.

  This was the local club, he told me, and he was a member as well as the team’s official mechanic. The parts were for his team leader’s bike, which was getting set up for a big race, and he’d taken the motorbike to save the train fare, a decision that would have been a disaster without me. He was so distressed about my leg that he insisted on riding me down to the front in the sidecar and he was so amusing and decorative that I had him stay for dinner, where he explained bicycle racing and mentioned that the ongoing Tour de France would run through Monaco.

  “We will watch for you,” said Arnold.

  “Oh, Monsieur, I will not be in that race, not even as a domestique, but I hope to work as a mechanic on the Riviera stage.” Then, sensing our all-encompassing ignorance of this splendid event, he began explaining the extraordinary length and difficulty of the race, the climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees, and the hundreds of kilometers of stages that comprised a circuit of the entire country. “And the last stage beginning in Caen, Monsieurs, the martyred city—it will be very moving.”

  In this way, we passed a pleasant evening. After Pierre, who kept training hours, said good night, we remained drinking on the terrace instead of going to the casino or one of our usual bars.

  We left early the next morning for Monte Carlo, and it was two days later, after we were established in a pleasant waterside hotel and losing money hand over fist at the casino, that I visited a news kiosk for the London papers Nan enjoys. Almost as an afterthought, I picked up Nice-Matin, thinking to check on the progress of the famous bicycle Tour.

  Standing under the plane trees in the dappled sunshine, I opened the paper to an article headlined, “Murder in the Var.” Just Nan’s cup of tea, I thought, with the added promise of the guillotine, for my dear nan has a great passion for capital punishment. I was skimming the story when my chest contracted: the victim was known locally as “Madame Renard.” Victor’s supposed widow, the woman I’d visited, was dead, and I had perhaps precipitated this by delivering Victor’s legacy. It took me a moment to digest that idea, before my shock turned to surprise and then doubt when I checked the accompanying photo.

  Instead of the Madame Renard I’d met, who was young with short, honey-colored hair and a wide face with broad cheekbones and an impudent expression, this Madame Renard was older, Arnold’s age if she was a day. With her long nose and bony cheeks, dark hair streaked white, and the large eyes of a tragic heroine, this Madame Renard looked plausible for the widow of a gambler with enemies, but she wasn’t the one who’d collected Joubert’s package.

  I sat down on one of the benches to read the story carefully. The body of Claudine Renard had been found the previous afternoon when one of her neighbors delivered some eggs, found the kitchen door unlocked, and ventured inside. Madame Renard lay in a small stone pantry off the kitchen with her neck broken. There was no sign of a struggle, and it was as yet unclear if the victim had been killed where she was found. There was no information on the time of death, but I profoundly hoped that it was well outside of five p.m. on the afternoon I rang the bell at the Villa Mimosa, even though earlier might implicate my Madame Renard while later suggested that she had met a similar fate. All this was bad in any case.

  Worse was to come. The neighbors, who clearly had been alert behind their shutters, reported that the villa had had a number of visitors, some in cars, and at all hours. Although those late-night visitors should have been the concern, the police seemed more anxious to trace the whereabouts of a fair-haired foreigner who had asked directions to the villa on what the paper referred to as “the fateful day.” I’ll just bet they were. With that thought, I realized what I’d considered a diversion for Nan presented serious trouble for me.

  Chapter Three

  “Make a run for it,” was Nan’s advice, while Arnold, reverting to his solid-citizen mode, advised a quick cross-border visit to the nearest French police station. “You saw two men leave the villa. They may be the very ones involved.”

  Nan shook her head. Her fascination with newspaper crime accounts has given her considerable expertise. “That’s risky without knowing the time of death,” she sa
id. “And you are guilty until proven innocent here.”

  “There’s no question of that!” Arnold exclaimed, but I thought it very likely that a mysterious fair-haired foreigner, aka me, would look like a nice solution to a sensational murder. And so timely, too, right at the start of the tourist season.

  “Then,” said Arnold, the voice of conscience and reason, “there’s your Madame Renard.”

  Nan sniffed. “Likely no better than she should be, that one.”

  “She may also be in danger. You said she looked young and”—he hesitated a second—“down on her luck.”

  “Off the street in Marseille, I’d venture.”

  “Expendable,” Arnold said.

  “So is our dear boy to the flics.” That’s my nan. Her love of capital punishment is balanced by her dislike of authority. What she might have become had she been born male or wealthy staggers my imagination.

  “The difficulty is the French border,” I said. “The police will have my name soon. If Pierre reads the paper—that’s it right there. Or the hotel personnel, even. I did ask about the Villa Mimosa, about the location of the hamlet and the proper train stop.”

  “Raising another question,” said Nan. “Why weren’t you given more explicit directions if that package was so important? That Joubert is a jackass.”

  I was sure that was true, and I feared that one or both of the Madame Renards had trusted him unwisely.

  “You were set up,” said Nan. “Once you asked for directions.”

  With this sobering thought, we sat pondering our alternatives. To go to the police, to respond to that call for assistance would be a point in my favor. On the other hand, my description of the two “workmen” and of my “Madame Renard” might well lack corroboration, though the men had been at the café near the station and the neighbors must have seen them as well. It was possible my statement would be taken, my public spirit commended, my vacation resumed.

  Possible, yes, but even stronger was the chance of being detained indefinitely in la belle France, possibly in a French prison. I wasn’t going to risk that. Dieppe and the boat train were out of the question, but I could hop on the local and make for Italy. Arnold and Nan would return via the boat train, and I would get myself north to Holland or Belgium and cross the Channel there.

  Arnold thought this plan possible; Nan was enthusiastic. I went upstairs to pack, and I had my paintings stowed and my suitcase ready when there was a knock on the door. Funny how bad events send out their own vibrations. I knew before I spoke that it was not the chambermaid. I looked out at the balcony, but we were on the third floor, and even a successful run would be a confession of guilt. I closed my suitcases and called, “Entrez.”

  Two men stepped into the room. One was a local policeman in the principality’s handsome uniform. He was short and broad shouldered with a physique like a boxer and an athlete’s restless grace. He was markedly younger than his companion and dark, with thick, black hair and Italianate features. In better circumstances, I’d have given him the eye. The other visitor was a tall, shambling French police detective with a large, broken nose, full mouth, and small gray eyes, who walked as if his knees and his feet were not in direct communication. Both men were very formal and polite, showed me their identification, and asked for mine. I handed over my passport.

  “You appear to be leaving,” remarked the Frenchman, whose name was Inspector Chardin. Shades of the great genre painter. Would that prove a happy omen? Probably not, for he seemed gratified to have found me packing like a proper felon on the run.

  “Monte Carlo is wonderful,” I said with a nod toward the Monégasque, but I have not been lucky at the tables. Besides, I want to visit the police in Menton.”

  This clearly surprised him. “How so?”

  “Why the story in Nice-Matin this morning, Monsieur. The request for information. Isn’t that why you are here?” I certainly hoped I’d guessed right, because my public-spirited gesture didn’t seem to please him as much as one might have thought.

  “You were a visitor to the Villa Mimosa? Why didn’t you come forward sooner?”

  “I am on holiday. I only saw the paper this morning. And that was just by chance. I’d decided to see how the bicycle race was progressing.”

  “Very well,” said the flic from Monaco in the eager tone of an aficionado. “Vietto is leading. Surely a French victory this year, though look for Brambilla in the mountain stages. Bellissimo is Brambilla.”

  His companion gave him a sour look. “Why were you at the Villa Mimosa?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We are at your disposal, Monsieur.” He sat down on the end of the bed and took out his notepad. I started with the shooting outside the gambling club and progressed to the rich, mysterious Monsieur Joubert and the even more mysterious Victor Renard, who might or might not be dead.

  Inspector Chardin looked up sharply at this. “You were supposedly taking his last letter to his wife.”

  “Supposedly—and the letter bore that out. It was a farewell note. He had been very badly hurt, and I’m in position to know that he lost a lot of blood. His death was certainly believable, but there has been no report in the London papers. We took an interest, as you can imagine.”

  Inspector Chardin made a note of this. “So you did not know Monsieur Renard personally?”

  “I don’t believe I had ever seen him before. He was not a regular at the club.”

  “And Joubert?”

  “I just knew him as the proprietor.”

  “Yet you agreed to deliver the letter for him even if it was out of your way?”

  “There were inducements.”

  I described our bargain, and the younger man did a quick conversion from pounds to francs. “That’s a lot of money for a letter.”

  “Too much,” I agreed. “But the packet contained more than a letter.”

  “It would be nice to have a look at that notebook,” the detective remarked when I finished describing the contents of the packet.

  “Madame Renard, the Madame Renard I saw, that is, took it to the rear of the house—undoubtedly to someone else—and came back and pronounced it satisfactory.”

  “Then you left?”

  “I left immediately. I did not want to linger at the villa, which was nearly empty of furniture and unnaturally quiet. I couldn’t believe that anyone lived there, yet I had a sense that Madame Renard was not alone. For one thing, and I didn’t think of this until just now, the whole house stank of cigarette smoke. I have asthma; I notice. But not Madame. I spoke to her in the doorway, and she smelled only of cologne.”

  “But you actually saw no one except the woman calling herself Madame Renard? As far as you know the house was otherwise empty?”

  “No.” I explained my detour to the tower and the two men in their blue smocks and town shoes who came out the front gate.

  “Would you recognize them again?”

  “Hard to say. I saw them from above. There was nothing particularly distinctive about them. One was slightly balding. Both were medium height and weight. But if the neighbors saw me, I assume they saw the men as well, perhaps more than once. And the Madame Renard that I saw—surely someone would have noticed her. She must have left at some point.”

  The inspector thought for a moment, letting the silence grow in the room that I now felt was distinctly warm and stuffy. He was waiting for me to tell him more, to reveal something, to betray myself. I kept my mouth shut and thought how he would look on canvas with his rather red mouth and his long yellow teeth. His fingers were stained brownish yellow, too, and he began tapping one restlessly on his knee so that I guessed he needed a smoke. Finally, he said, “There is a problem, Monsieur. A problem for you, unfortunately.”

  I waited; this did not sound good.

  “The neighbors only report seeing you that afternoon. No one
else went in or out of the Villa Mimosa that day.”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps they stopped peeking out their windows. Perhaps they are lying.”

  “Or perhaps you are, Monsieur.”

  “I have no reason to lie, and I had every reason to wish for Madame Renard’s good health so that she could notify Joubert and erase my gambling debts.”

  “All this will have to be verified with our London colleagues.”

  I could see delays coming.

  “It would be convenient if you could return with me to France. It is possible you can identify the men you claim to have seen. That would be a very strong point in your favor.”

  Though I pointed out that this plan would hardly be convenient for me, I was unable to convince them that I should remain in the principality. I tapped on the adjoining door, confident that Nan would have been listening, and told her that I had to return to France. She stuck her head out, glared at the two policemen, and said, “Give me your cases, dear boy. I will keep them for you.”

  The inspector shook his head. “It may be a few days,” he said and motioned for me to collect my things and leave. Downstairs, a black car waited with a uniformed officer in the driver’s seat. Inspector Chardin shook hands with his Monégasque counterpart, and I managed to wave to Arnold before I was hustled into the back of the car, the driver complaining about the weight of my cases.

  “Painting supplies,” I explained.

  This interested the inspector. “You will help us with the picture file,” he said, and after a long session with him and one of his note-taking juniors, I was seated at a big table with piles of folders and books of photographs. A resource indeed, and in a happier time, I would have enjoyed pouring over the mug shots of various French, Italian, and Corsican lowlifes. Yes, really some remarkable features but too impassive for my brush. I like extreme emotions, rage, lust, ecstasy, and I like them pictorially, too.