A Twist of Orchids

by Michelle Wan

  “Listen, I don’t know who you are, but if you’ve got anything to say, spit it out direct, okay? I’m not in a mood to fool around.”

  “No need to get nasty.” The other man took a few stumbling steps back and wiped his nose on a sleeve streaked with mucus. His hands, Julian noticed, were shaking. “Maybe I can help you. Maybe I know where this Kazim hangs out.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Freddy. Everybody around here knows me as Freddy.”

  “Well, Freddy, you come up with Kazim for me and I’ll talk money. Nothing up front. Got that?”

  Freddy looked sulky. “I could do with thirty. Say, twenty.”

  “I said nothing up front. You deliver, and I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a number—”

  Julian had started to dig out pen and paper when Freddy, with a greasy smile, showed him the Kronenbourg coaster he had palmed off the Select bar.

  • 12 •

  “You gave them my cellphone number?” Mara stared at him in disbelief.

  “Oh, Freddy probably had it off those two before they even had a chance to look at it.” Julian opened a bottle of red and set it aside to breathe.

  “I’m reassured.”

  “You can trace a land line. I didn’t want that lot finding out where we live.”

  “You can do reverse search with a cellphone number, too. So now I’m going to get death threats on my portable?”

  “Er—I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

  “It had better not.”

  She moved to the stove, driving the dogs before her. They skittered away and regrouped immediately around her. She emptied some kind of powder from a foil pouch into a pot of something liquid and brought the mixture to the boil. As it thickened, it took on the appearance of a brown sauce.

  “This has to simmer”—she broke off to read the cooking instructions on the back of the pouch—“for a couple more minutes.”

  Julian looked about him and sniffed. Something was cooking, but he couldn’t tell what. Something she had shoved into the oven the minute he had walked in the door. When he had asked what was for dinner, she had acted rather mysterious.

  “So,” he went on, “to cut a long story short, I had no luck running Kazim to earth. And I don’t know what he’s up to, but it seems to me he mixes with some pretty dodgy company.”

  “Probably selling drugs. Ecstasy. That’s what all the kids are doing nowadays.”

  He supposed she was right. He took glasses down from the cupboard and carried them and the wine out to the dining room. When he gathered up cutlery to set the table, she said, “Just forks.”

  He hung about watching her, running through in his mind the kinds of things one ate only with forks. She cut the fire under the brown sauce and turned her attention to tossing a simple salad in walnut oil and vinegar. Ten minutes later, she opened the oven door and pulled out a tray of golden-brown potatoes cut into strips.

  “Ta-da! Frites the easy way,” she announced. “Frozen, pre-cut, pre-seasoned. Twenty minutes in the oven. Dead simple.”

  “Ah,” he said, very little enlightened. He wondered what else came with them. Apart from the salad and the sauce, there appeared to be nothing else.

  Now she shoveled the sizzling potatoes into two large bowls, sprinkled handfuls of what looked like wet cheese bits on top, and poured on the sauce.

  “Hmm,” he said cautiously. “Chips au gratin and gravy?”

  She shook her head. “Poutine. The ultimate in comfort food, Quebec style.”

  “Poutine?”

  “Fries and cheese curds with sauce velouté. I had a hard time finding really fresh curds. Back home we say you know the curds are fresh if they make your teeth squeak. I also found the sauce packaged. You have to let it sit a minute to give everything a chance to sort of soak in. Bring the salad, will you?”

  She carried the bowls into the dining room and they sat down. Jazz and Bismuth settled themselves strategically beside their chairs.

  “Well, this is a first,” said Julian, gazing doubtfully at the rather soggy-looking mixture before him. When he tried it, however, he found it surprisingly good, in that gut-level, satisfying way that only a high octane mix of hot starch, cholesterol, and salty seasoning can be. As she had said, comfort food.

  “What I don’t get,” he said after a few moments of appreciative eating—she was right, the curds did make his teeth squeak—“is why everyone is being so bloody secretive about Kazim. Nadia wasn’t prepared to say anything, and the English kid, Peter, I’m sure led me a wild goose chase just for a handout of ten euros. Surely someone selling Ecstasy isn’t such a big affair?”

  “Well, it is illegal.”

  “They probably thought I was a narc.” He grinned at the thought.

  Mara stopped chewing. “Don’t say that.” She looked at him anxiously and added, “You know what happened to the other one.”

  •

  Freddy tried to bum the use of a cellphone, but no one would trust him with anything that was not nailed down. Finally, he put through his call on one of France’s last remaining coin pay phones. The phone was situated at the end of the old-fashioned zinc counter in the Café de Paris. Toulouse had won, and the place was crowded and noisy with topers. He had to shout to be understood as well as plug his free ear with a finger in order to hear. The fact that he was cramping and shaking badly did not make the conversation any easier.

  “I said, he’s looking for your boy. Tall, skinny anglais. No, man, he didn’t introduce himself, but I got a phone number and a license plate. Peugeot van. White. What? Shit, man, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.” Freddy’s cramps, coming in rapid waves, were nearly doubling him over. He clutched the edge of the counter for support, fought off a rush of nausea, and realized that he was about to mess his pants. Desperately, he broke in: “Look, I got a name. It’s yours for a couple of balles. It’s urgent, man. No, for crap’s sake, I can’t wait.” A moment later he closed his eyes. “Okay. Okay. I’ll be there. But hurry.”

  •

  The Ton, surrounded by asparagus ferns and hostas, was playing toesies in the king-sized Jacuzzi with Lydia. A floating tray between them held a mini-bar and an array of health drinks. The phone rang. Lydia stood up, lowering the water level considerably. Full body streaming, she reached for the phone on a nearby wicker stand, flipped it open, punched a button, and listened.

  “It’s Serge.” Lydia passed the phone across.

  “Yeah, what?” barked the Ton.

  “I’ve just talked to Freddy. He knows who our boy is. Kid named Kazim Ismet.”

  The Ton wiped moisture from his chin. “You think he’s playing straight? The little con would say anything for a fix.”

  “He seemed sincere.”

  The Ton laughed. “Sincerely in deep shit.”

  “There’s something more,” said Serge. “Someone else is on Kazim’s tail.”

  Ton-and-a-Half frowned. “A narc?”

  “Freddy doesn’t know. Said he was a tall, skinny guy. English. Freddy got a phone number and a car plate.”

  “Okay. Find out who this anglais is, but go easy until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Right,” said Serge.

  • 13 •

  “The trouble with fighting crime,” complained Albert, “is you’ve got to do it everywhere at the same damned time.”

  Laurent sighed in agreement.

  It had grown colder and more uncomfortable for the two gendarmes as the night wore on. Albert was better insulated by his own body fat, but Laurent, long and lean, kept having to rub his arms and stamp his feet to keep from freezing up altogether. He was tempted to start the engine of the Renault just so they could run the heater for a bit, but of course that would have given the whole thing away. The essence of a good stakeout was unobtrusive surveillance. A police car parked in the shrubbery off a country lane with its motor idling and belchi
ng exhaust was hard not to notice on a still, frosty night.

  Four days ago, an elderly gentleman, resident of Le Vignal, had seen a dusty green van drive slowly through the bourg and turn down that lane, at the bottom of which were two houses, both owned by expatriates, both closed up for the winter. Neither house was visible from the village. The van had come back up the road a few minutes later. Three days later, the man had noticed the same vehicle going down the lane again. This time the van had not returned for a good forty-five minutes.

  “Now I ask you,” the man had said to the Brames duty officer to whom he had reported the event, “what could anyone be up to, apart from skulduggery, for so long down a road where nobody’s at home? Especially with all these housebreakings going on.” Owing to the van’s tinted windows, he had not got a good look at the driver.

  The result was two gendarmes sitting in the dark, freezing their butts off (according to Laurent) and wasting taxpayers’ money (according to Albert, who was convinced that the appearance of a green van in Le Vignal on two separate occasions was nothing more than coincidence).

  A bright moon rode high in the sky, shedding white light on trees and fields. Laurent’s watch read 3:03 a.m. They had been in place for four hours. Except for the fact that the car windows frosted up periodically and had to be scraped clear, the gendarmes had an unimpeded view of the dark bulk of the two unoccupied houses. So far the only movement they had seen had been a troupe of sangliers—wild boars—out for a night’s rooting.

  Albert was in the driver’s seat, slouched forward, chin on chest. Laurent had his seat pushed back as far as it would go, but there still wasn’t enough space for his long legs. They felt cramped, and his right foot was going numb. Also, he had drunk a thermos of coffee since midnight. He needed a stretch and a piss. He opened the passenger door, causing Albert to stir, and got out of the car. His breath hung ghostly in the air. He closed the door quietly behind him and walked off into the bushes.

  As he stood listening to the soft patter of his urine against a tree, Laurent wondered why it was that men pissed by preference on upright objects—walls, posts, fences, trees. Was there something deep in the male psyche that needed to leave its mark on more than Mother Earth? Maybe, like dogs claiming territory and status—he’d once seen a scrappy little dachshund nearly upend itself in an effort to outdo a bigger dog—human males had an atavistic need to make their mark vertically. He recalled boyhood competitions in which he and his pals, Albert among them, had tried to outdo each other in how high they could pee. Albert, the dachshund of the gang, had perfected a technique of leaning back so far that he shot his whiz higher than any of them.

  Back in the car, Albert, made of less philosophical stuff, was thinking only that stakeouts were boring and damned inefficient. All uninhabited houses should be wired and linked to a central station monitored by commercial security personnel. It would make the life of a gendarme a lot easier. A mild socialistic streak also inclined him to believe that people who were rich enough to buy second homes that they weren’t prepared to live in ought to pay for their which was:

  The problem was that the Dordogne was steadily filling up with Parisian and expatriate homeowners who came for brief snatches of time, leaving their properties locked and shuttered but otherwise unguarded for the rest of the year. This was especially true of the British, who seemed to be arriving in the region by the planeload. Someone had said that, having lost their claim to France in the Hundred Years War, they were now buying it back by the square meter.

  Laurent concertinaed himself into the car again, bringing a rush of frigid air with him.

  “The bastard better show,” Albert muttered through gritted teeth. “Otherwise, I know our adjudant, he’ll have us out here every night until hell freezes over. Which it’s close to doing.”

  The cold and the waiting were not the worst of it. For everyone attached to the Brames Gendarmerie, on whose patch the last two burglaries had taken place, and especially for brigade chief Jacques Compagnon, the main problem, the real indignity, was the doggerel.

  In the space of six months there had been five burglaries in different communities in the Dordogne, all targeting houses closed up for the winter. The thief had been selective; only portable antiques and objets d’art had been taken. Paintings had not been touched. Nor had easily disposed-of electronic equipment. The first three break-ins, involving gendarme units of other jurisdictions, could have been isolated events. The fourth, a house on the outskirts of Brames, could also have been an unrelated crime. However, in this case, the thief ’s sense of humor, perhaps excited by his success, had got the better of him. The burglar had left behind a piece of poetry, the translation of which was:

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  Got into a battle

  One fell and broke his arse

  The other lost his rattle

  The words had been scrawled in magic marker on a wall about a meter from the floor, leaving one to conclude that the author was either very short or had written the piece while kneeling. Adjudant Compagnon’s protuberant eyes had bulged with annoyance at this piece of crude whimsy, the meaning of which was not entirely clear. The reference to Alice in Wonderland gave rise to brief speculation that the burglar was English. However, Lewis Carroll’s fat twins were so well known in France that such a conclusion could not be sustained.

  A billet-doux found at the fifth site—it had been typed on the homeowner’s old-fashioned typewriter and left in the roller for police to discover—had removed all doubt as to the writer’s intent and had caused Compagnon’s eyes to stand out even farther from his head:

  Two little blue birds

  Sitting on a rail

  Up comes Bad Boy

  To grab them by the tail

  Obviously, “blue birds” referred to the gendarmes, who wore blue uniforms and worked in pairs. By extension, Tweedledum and Tweedledee must be taken to refer to the police as well—the Brames brigade specifically, since that robbery had also occurred on their turf—who couldn’t get it together and who went ass over rattle in their attempt to enforce law and order. Bad Boy, of course, was the thief himself, who outwitted the police, yanked their tail feathers, as it were.

  Adjudant Compagnon was outraged. He took law and order and the Gendarmerie nationale very seriously. But mostly he felt personally teased. He expressed himself strongly and publicly on the mentality of criminals who thought they could get away with taunting the police with silly verses. He was widely quoted in the media as promising that the burglar would shortly be singing a different ditty. In confidence, he told his officers and the examining magistrate assigned to the case that Bad Boy had very stupidly given himself away: they now knew they were looking for an educated male perpetrator who worked alone and fancied himself a poet.

  Although, the disloyal thought had flitted across Laurent’s mind, it might as easily have been a very subtle female heading up a gang of literate dwarves.

  Laurent did not like the prospect of continued below-zero stakeouts any more than his partner. But their boss’s pride had been piqued, and he, like Albert, knew that until the burglar was caught, all suspicious behavior on their territory would have to be investigated thoroughly.

  Laurent said, “We need more bodies. We can’t be doing this and keep our eye on Luca as well.”

  He referred to the fact that their brigade was also carrying out an informal, low-level surveillance on Rocco Luca, alias Ton-and-a-Half, under the rubric of maintaining public order. Like waiting for a housebreaker to turn up, the Luca case was very much hit and miss, and it took up personnel time with nothing to show for it so far. Apart from occasional visits from Serge Taussat, Ton-and-a-Half seemed to lead an exemplary existence. You couldn’t arrest someone on the strength of his associates, and up to now the Brames Gendarmerie had no case for launching even a preliminary investigation, or for requesting reinforcements.

  Albert grumbled, “A fat zero, if you ask me, our adjudant’s hunch. Even if Luc
a is running a pipeline through the Dordogne as big as the N21, we have nothing on him. Or that extraterrestrial sidekick of his. Everyone else, including the cops in Périgueux, thinks Yvan Bordas’s death links to Marseille. So how does Compagnon figure the Ton is back in business and using the region as a transshipment point? Personally, I think Compagnon’s dreaming of making a big bust. But he’s going down a dead-end road if you ask me.”

  Laurent, stiff with cold, shifted about. In his experience, drugs were a problem mainly in the rougher suburbs of Paris and other big cities. Here in rural Dordogne, kids went in more for grass and E, when they weren’t getting plain drunk, and you had to go all the way to Bordeaux, Toulouse, or Marseille for supplies of the heavy. However—and this was what worried him—things were changing. Now foreigners and Parisians moving into the region were bringing with them their big-city habits, and this was reflected in the stepped-up availability of heroin in modest centers like Sarlat, Bergerac, and Périgueux. You could get a balle of shit-quality brown—say, less than 5 percent purity, cut with pepper, talc, or God knew what—on the street for as little as twenty-five euros a gram. Better-quality white sold for a hundred and up.

  Heroin—it had other names: héro, rabla, came, poudre, cheval, or simply H—was also taking on a new face. Junkies still mainlined, but nowadays users tended to snort or smoke it because of the fear of dirty needles and AIDS. They often took it with pot, Ecstasy, and prescription drugs, or as a day-after soother to calm the crash landing from cocaine and amphetamines. The damned stuff, Laurent thought grimly, had become the recreational user’s adjunct drug of choice.

  However, unlike Albert, Laurent did not think their brigade chief was necessarily heading down a cul-de-sac. He said, “Supposing Compagnon’s right? You’ve got to ask, why did Luca choose to retire here?”

  “The canaille’s from Bergerac,” Albert pointed out.

  “I know. But, I mean, is he really retired? Or is he behind the new action?” Laurent beat his arms to get feeling back in them. “Don’t forget, Bordas was found in Périgueux. The word is he was killed because he got wind of a shipment coming in. So maybe Luca is routing the stuff through his buddy, Pascal Goudy, and then moving it on, and that’s what Bordas found out.”