The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  In any case I didn’t make much progress. Only one balding man struck me as being the right type for my faux workmen. “Not him, but he was like this.”

  “Keep at it,” Inspector Chardin ordered, and he had another book of photos brought in.

  Two hours later, when I had still found nothing, he produced a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil. “You say you’re a painter. Give us a sketch, then.”

  This certainly was my lucky day: free art work on top of hours spent in the interview room instead of lolling under the palm trees. But needs must, as the saying goes, and since I often start with a printed image, I asked for the photo that bore the closest resemblance. Normally, I paint and draw simultaneously and always with the brush. I’m not really too friendly with the pencil, and, even with the help of the photo, it took me several minutes to rough in the head. “I saw him from above, you understand.”

  Chardin shrugged. He breathed a melancholy resignation that I thought would have been more suited to a priest than a copper. He stood at my shoulder and watched me work. “Ah,” he said when I was finished. He took the paper and disappeared with it.

  On his return, he asked, “What about the other man?”

  I shook my head. I had only a vague image of a square face, dark hair, heavy shoulders.

  “And the girl? The one you call Madame Renard?”

  I thought for a minute, trying to decide if she would be safer known or unknown to the police.

  “They’ll kill her, you understand,” Chardin said. “When she’s no longer of use to them.”

  I saw his point, though I wasn’t entirely convinced that a Marseille street girl would be any safer in the warm embrace of the law. “Right. But I need you not to stand over me. And something to drink.”

  Chardin went to the door and presently I received a large glass of the local red wine. When the door was locked again, I took a clean sheet of paper and concentrated on the hallway of the Villa Mimosa with the bare walls and tile floor, and on Madame with her wide, cat’s face, her small ears, and full lips. I erased once, twice, three times, and the paper took on the nasty grayish sheen of overwork before a little alteration to the brows, a change to the inside corner of one eye, a little shadow under the other and voilà: There she was. Though I am not fond of realism, per se, it has its moments, and this was one of them.

  I got up from the bum-torturing wooden chair and went to the narrow barred window. Perhaps it was the contrast between the blue Mediterranean and the mildewed rooms of the station that depressed Inspector Chardin, who returned as I was studying the buff and sienna roofs of the town. He went right to the table and picked up the sheet. I heard him swear under his breath. “Are you sure?”

  I turned around. His face had contracted with anxiety, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into. “It is as good a likeness as I can manage. It’s a true impression of her.”

  He looked at the drawing again, shook his head, and disappeared into the hallway. When he returned, we rehashed everything I had told him, particularly about my Madame Renard, who had gone from being a no-account Marseille tart to a person of real interest.

  “Did you think she was frightened?” he asked at one point.

  I thought this over. “When I gave her the packet, I thought she was nervous. But when she came back to see me out, she seemed relieved. I did momentarily get the feeling she would like me to stay, but though she offered me a drink, she did not press me.”

  Chardin tapped the table with one long, restless finger. “This has been very helpful,” he said.

  I stood up like a bona fide good citizen, hoping that my passport would be returned and I would be free to go.

  Chardin shook his head. “Helpful, but your story is still without corroboration. You are the only one who claims to have seen these people. You are the only one who can identify them. We must ask you to stay in the Var until further notice.”

  When I began to protest, he added, “With such excellent information, it will surely not be too long, Monsieur.” He suggested a small and inexpensive hotel in the old part of the town, then went to the door and called for an officer to bring my cases. I was going from en vacances to semipermanent resident.

  Chapter Four

  Ah, to be en vacances—without money. The Hotel Phoenix was certainly cheap and the little café next door did a reasonable sandwich au jambon, but it did not take me more than a few days to see that I was going to have to find some means of support. Remembering the glossy young things along the plage, I suspected that I was now too old for my former occupation of discreet “gentleman’s gentleman.” With the last of the money Arnold wired me, I’d visited the casino, a bad, exciting night that emptied my pockets, and I found no business that needed my other skill, telephone operator.

  I was considering various desperate measures when I remembered the “portrait artists” along the front. My drawing of the false Madame Renard had been good enough to put the wind up the inspector. How much worse could I be than the wretched caricaturist who sat outside the casino? Remember Monet, I told myself, who earned his pocket money doing caricatures as a boy; remember the great Daumier, who satirized the great and the corrupt! I packed a kit, took my collapsible easel, and went to the front.

  Do you think there are deep roots to one’s choice of profession? I have a certain pictorial taste for pain and humiliation that anticipate the seaside portraitist’s life. One sits, one waits, one hopes. One is rejected. One gets a client. The client is uninspiring, the work goes badly, the client refuses to pay, perhaps a gendarme becomes involved.

  Within a few hours, I gained a new respect for the facile draftsman to the south of me, whose big scrawling strokes elicited wonder and whose subtle flattery disarmed the young women and their cretinous boyfriends. A lovely liar, really. Now, I lie easily in life, but not on canvas or paper. I find it hard to reduce a bulbous nose or raise a low forehead or trim protruding ears even in the interests of profit.

  After eight hours in the sun, I had done three sketches, been paid for two, and had just enough for a fish soup and a chunk of bread; the artist’s life is not always a happy one. Still, I figured things could only get better. I set up my easel the next day within sight of my competitor’s drawings, and when I wasn’t working myself, I watched his every move.

  The one great product of a neglected childhood and an irregular education is the ability to learn on the fly. Within three days, I was turning out creditable sketches and, by dint of some shading in charcoal, offering an alternative to the rapid pen work of my nearest competitor. I’d developed a patter, too; I can be amusing when I want, and I really think I might have lasted the summer if I hadn’t met the Chavanel ladies.

  Anastasie arrived first. She appeared out of the sun, as the pilots say, a tall, lean figure in a long black skirt, a black sunhat, sturdy heels, and a black-and-white polka-dot blouse, an ensemble from before the war, incongruous amid the bare, tanned limbs of the sun-drenched Riviera.

  “Bonjour, monsieur.” She tipped her head slightly, and the light caught her face, which was thin, brown, and lined like parchment. She was old and interesting, and her name was Anastasie Chavanel.

  “Bonjour, madame.” I made a bow to this courtly apparition.

  “I see that your business is thriving.” She nodded toward my metal till box.

  “As much as these ever thrive,” I said.

  “Just so.”

  With modest prosperity I had acquired two folding stools. I gestured toward the client’s seat and asked if Madame wished a drawing. “A portrait drawing would perhaps be more suitable than a caricature?”

  She remained standing. “I have something else in mind,” she said. She looked at my price list. “Thirty francs? I can offer you better than that.”

  This was music to my ears.

  “You are, I believe, a painter?”

  �
�My fame has preceded me.” I wondered exactly how that had happened, and I couldn’t help remembering that the last time an elderly lady wanted a painter, I’d spent a couple of weeks on a scaffold with extremely depressing colors.

  “In a manner of speaking. Could we go somewhere to talk? This is a confidential matter.”

  “I am at your service.” I collapsed the stools and folded up my easel, tied them together with my drawing pad and my box of pencils and charcoal, and hoisted the whole contraption on my back. I felt like Van Gogh, who did a picture of a painter burdened just so with all his equipment in the burning Provençal light.

  In recompense, I anticipated a café, where she would treat me to good coffee or a glass of wine and a dish of ice cream. Instead, we took the steep hill past the hôtel de ville and the police station. I was sweating in the afternoon heat before we reached the top where Madame’s “confidential matter” took us to a fine house in need of a great deal of money. The little garden behind the low wall and the high ironwork fence was a jungle of overgrown oleanders and mimosas, while a grove of the distinctive dark cedars of Provence shadowed the back. The windows were elegant and the door handsome, but there were loose and broken tiles on the roof, and the fine stucco work was cracked and flaking.

  Inside, the hallway and the front rooms were dimmed by shutters, and I remembered the shadowed Villa Mimosa. Madame Chavanel led the way into a large square room. I expected an old lady parlor with horsehair sofas, antimacassars, tea tables, and bric-a-brac. I found a big workbench with an assortment of carpentry tools and, in the center, still smelling faintly of paint and sawdust, a large and beautifully detailed dollhouse in the very style of Madame’s home—or of the Villa Mimosa, for that matter.

  Though I have little interest in the miniaturist’s trade, I found the small house fascinating, with what looked to be operational windows and doors and a roof of tiny tiles. “This is very impressive, Madame.”

  She inclined her head. “My sister and I do commissions for serious collectors. As you would imagine, everything has to be perfect.”

  “And so it looks.” I was a little disappointed, because I could not imagine what I might add to this curious masterwork.

  “One thing is missing.” She touched what I’d thought was an electric meter box and the right side wall swung open, revealing a formal parlor and, behind it, a dining room and a kitchen. As all seemed immaculately appointed, I looked at her curiously.

  “Paintings,” she said. “We need a small portrait here.” She pointed to the wall above the fireplace where a tiny frame awaited a stamp-sized picture. “And here, on the ceiling. There will be a fresco. In oil or gouache for our purposes.”

  “Gods and monsters?”

  “Ribbons and flowers would be better at our scale.” She showed me the painting set up: two small rectangles of canvas pinned to a table easel. A large magnifying glass was mounted on a movable stand next to a container of very small red sable brushes. “As we get older, the close work is difficult. Particularly painting. We used to have a very good helper, but—times change, Monsieur.”

  Do they ever. I have ambitions for big paintings, for my great subject, the crucifixion, for a series of screaming heads. Now I was set to do a portrait no bigger than my thumb and a faux ceiling fresco the size of my hand. Time for some artistic temperament? I considered the heat and glare of the plage with its tightfisted clientele reeking of sun oil. Madame’s house was cool, quiet, and dark; Madame was interesting, and, even if I weren’t a gambler, I was willing to bet there was something more here than two minuscule paintings. “How much for both?”

  “Could we say one hundred and fifty francs, Monsieur?”

  I said we could. Madame brought me a glass of white wine, cold and clear, accompanied by a plate of biscuits. We discussed the colors of the fresco, which seemed to be her primary concern, and I began work. The “fresco” was to be in a fat oval. A bouquet of roses and lavender in the center, a wreath of oleander, bay, and rosemary around the edges. “The herbs of Provence,” Madame said. The colors would be soft, faintly dusty.

  “Distemper or gouache would be ideal,” I said, “but not as lasting as oil.”

  “Oils as dry as you can make them, then.” She opened one shutter to give me better light and left the room. When she returned three hours later, the white hot light was sliding to gold, and I knew that the colors would begin to deceive me.

  Madame took the magnifying glass from its stand and examined the ceiling design carefully. “Very nice, Monsieur. A few days to dry and it can be pasted in place. Very good.”

  “The portrait’s roughed in, but it will need to dry before I can add the features. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

  “And a little blue,” she said. “At the neck. To pick up the colors of the chairs.”

  I took my brush and added a ribbon trim.

  “You are a discovery, Monsieur.” She gave me one hundred francs, the balance to be due when I finished the portrait, then asked, “You will stay for dinner? My sister and I so rarely have the pleasure of company.”

  The smell of good things issuing from the back of the house reminded me that I hadn’t seen a decent meal in days. I said that I would like that very much.

  “Indeed you will,” she said. “My sister is a wonderful cook.”

  That was an understatement. An hour later we sat down to a fine bouillabaisse with good bread and tomatoes and olives, served up in the stone-floored kitchen by Agathe Chavanel, who was as plump and jolly as her sister was thin and serious. She had bright, protuberant blue eyes, and the strong Chavanel features were padded out with folds of soft, fair skin like a pug dog’s. She padded around in espadrilles, wore a big white apron even at table, and seemed in every way a less formal personality than her sister.

  Both of them were very complimentary about my efforts for the dollhouse. They wanted to know how I had come to speak such excellent French and how my holiday had been. It was all very pleasant, the good food enhanced for me by the old-fashioned table, sideboard, and storage cupboards. Even the battered easy chairs by the fire reminded me of the Irish kitchens of my youth where I spent so much time with Nan. Delightful, really, but I couldn’t help noticing the glances that passed between the two old ladies. They had clearly lived together long enough to need few words, and I sensed another conversation progressing beneath my account of our adventures at the tables in Monte Carlo or of the rebuilding going on at Dieppe’s port.

  “You’ve seen the length of France,” Agathe said when the dinner plates had been cleared away, and we were eating grapes with little layered cakes covered in chocolate. She leaned forward slightly.

  “And now you are here,” said her sister. “Without your friends and without work.”

  “I’ve had the misfortune of helping the police.”

  “I knew it,” said Anastasie to her sister. “I said it had to be him, did I not?”

  Agathe nodded her head. “My sister is an excellent judge of character. How many times we have relied on her instinct!”

  “And now?” Anastasie asked her.

  “I think so,” said Agathe, before turning to me. “If you are telling the truth about the police, that is. Can you tell us why you are assisting them?”

  “The killing at the Villa Mimosa. I was apparently the last visitor.”

  They both crossed themselves, and Anastasie said, “You saw her, then.”

  “No. I saw another, much younger woman who claimed to be Madame Renard but was not.”

  “She is the one we are interested in,” said Agathe. “Please tell us everything you can remember.”

  I hesitated. If my loyalties lay anywhere, they lay with the young woman who’d been “down on her luck,” as Arnold so tactfully phrased it, and who was living by her wits as I had done at about the same age. “Could I ask why you are interested?”

  Now it was their turn to
think things over. Agathe decided. She went to a large, carved wooden bureau with a fine collection of framed photographs. I only then noticed that half a dozen of them had been turned to face the wall. “If you can describe her to us, we will explain everything.”

  I repeated the description I’d given the police: the wide face, the alert expression, the short blond hair.

  “Blond?” the old ladies asked in unison.

  “Most likely dyed,” I said.

  “But short. Her hair was short?”

  I drew a line halfway down my neck. “About to here. And she’s a few inches shorter than me. Thin. She could do with a meal like this,” I added and immediately regretted it when I saw that this idea hurt them.

  Agathe held out the photograph. “Was this her?”

  Small, slim, dark, wide face, a longish nose, which I realized that I had gotten wrong in my drawing, a nose that might one day take her features from appealing to distinguished. Her hair was long and looked almost black. Very like, but identical? This was a girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen, and I wasn’t sure, until Anastasia brought me another photo and this time there was no doubt. “Yes, that’s her. Who is she?”

  Before answering, Agathe rose and turned all the photos of the young woman so that they faced the room. “We did not want to confuse your memory,” she said. “This is our niece, Cybèle. Our late sister’s child.”

  “Our daughter, almost,” said Anastasie. “We raised her from the time she was ten.”

  “But she hasn’t been living here?”

  “She disappeared right at the end of the war,” Agathe said. “It’s been over two years.”

  “She looks to be in good health,” I said. I did not feel I should speculate on her survival skills.