A Twist of Orchids

by Michelle Wan

  “People like us, trying to get home.”

  His eye caught the glow of Mara’s cellphone.

  “If you’re calling out for pizza, I don’t think they’ll deliver.”

  “Very funny. I can’t get a signal. I’m trying to get Joseph. I’m worried about him.”

  “Joseph? For pity’s sake, Mara, you ought to be worried about us.”

  She put the phone away. Then she cried out, “Oh no! It’s Friday night. We completely forgot about Loulou.”

  “Christ,” Julian muttered. “I doubt he bothered.”

  Above the din of the rain, they heard a tearing, crashing sound. A discharge of lightning gave them the awesome vision of a tree in the process of sliding from the steep hillside on their left down into the crater. It seemed to make its descent in slow motion, like a gargantuan grande dame going into a seismic faint. It came to rest on the road not far in front of them, bringing with it a huge amount of debris.

  “Hell’s bells,” said Julian, shaken.

  Mara was clutching the edge of her seat, too overawed to speak.

  Another flash of lightning gave them a brief glimpse of their position. They were awash in an inland sea. The tree, a massive pine, would have crushed them if Julian had not moved the van just moments before. The lightning was followed by a bone-cracking crash of thunder.

  A hair-raising wail coming out of the darkness behind them made both of them nearly scream with fright.

  “What the hell was that?” Julian choked out.

  “I think,” said Mara once she had recovered herself, “it was your dog.”

  • 31 •

  They spent a cold, uncomfortable night in the back of the van with two bags of potting soil as pillows and each other and the dogs for warmth. Mara thought she must have slept, because she was suddenly aware of pale light and an eerie stillness. She sat up and crawled over Julian’s legs to look out the back window.

  The roadbed was visible, but it was covered in detritus, and the ditches ran high with water. The field on one side of them was flooded. The trees at its margin had the appearance of floating on a lake. On the high embankment on the other side of them, more pines had been toppled. They lay criss-crossed and seemed to cling to the hillside by sheer inertia. Fortunately, none had slid down on them, and none blocked their rear. It was ten past seven. Mara got out her cellphone. This time she got a signal. She tried calling Joseph’s land line, and when there was no answer, his cellphone. It was not switched on.

  Julian stirred.

  “I’m sure he’s all right,” he said once he was awake enough to realize what she was doing. “At any rate, he’s a bloody sight better off than we are. God, what a night.”

  He sat up, worked his way to the back door of the van, and pushed it open. The dogs jumped out, and so did he. It took him a moment to get his bearings. They were no more than three kilometers from home.

  Nevertheless, it took them more than an hour to reach Ecoute-la-Pluie. They could have walked there in less time. By then, the sun was shining brilliantly and road workers with noisy, heavy equipment were everywhere, sawing downed trees, feeding the sections into chippers, or shifting them from the roads. France Telecom and electricity repair crews would soon follow. If it had been later in the year and warmer, mushroom gatherers would have been out in force as well. Morels loved nothing so much as a good rain.

  The castine road leading through the hamlet had been nearly washed away. They bumped down it, avoiding as much as possible the deep channels that had been gouged out by the escaping water. They pulled up in front of Joseph’s house. The first thing they saw was that a large branch of the Gaillards’ hornbeam had come down. Fortunately, it had fallen away from the house.

  They let themselves in the back door with Mara’s key.

  “Joseph?” Mara called. She noticed with a sharp stab of alarm that his dinner sat untouched in the covered dishes on the counter. The table was missing, giving the kitchen an empty look.

  “Joseph?”

  The house was silent.

  They went down the hallway to the bedroom. The door was closed. It resisted when Julian pushed it. As worried as Mara now, he backed off and ran at it. The door gave suddenly as whatever had been jamming it on the other side gave way. He was propelled into the room by his own momentum and immediately struck forcefully on the back of the head. Hard, heavy objects rained down on him. He gave a yell of shock and pain and stumbled forward onto the missing kitchen table, which shot away, leaving him sprawling on the floor.

  Joseph was sitting upright in his bed, arms jerking with excitement, taking in the spectacle with glee.

  “Et tak!” he crowed hoarsely, his normally rigid face split by a rictus grin of triumph. “Got you!”

  •

  He had rigged up an ingenious system using a hook that he had somehow managed to screw into an exposed beam just over the doorway and a feedsack filled with logs that he had hung by a rope from the hook. He had attached one end of another piece of rope to the bottom of the bag and the other end to a leg of the table. When Julian had pushed the table forward, the bag had tipped, spilling its load of logs on him.

  Julian sat on the floor nursing a cut lip from his collision with the table’s edge and a very sore head from the falling logs. It did not help matters that Mara was laughing hysterically.

  “That’s it,” he said, rising with as much dignity as he could muster. “I’ve had it. I’ve been threatened by a gangster, I’ve come close to being crushed by a tree, I’ve spent an absolutely filthy night in a storm, and now I’ve just been sandbagged by a hallucinating maniac. If someone is terrorizing this man, Mara, I’d say they’re welcome to him. He’s perfectly capable of looking after himself. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going home, and by home I mean my own house in Grissac, to have a shower, some breakfast, and a little bit of peace and quiet, in that order.”

  • 32 •

  It took Julian another hour to drive the few kilometers to Grissac over flooded roads. He stopped off at Chez Nous and persuaded Paul to power down his saw—he was clearing fallen branches from the front of the bistro—long enough to sell him some groceries. When he reached his cottage, the first things he did were to switch on the water heater and throw open the doors and windows—the air outside was warm, but inside the house was cold and damp, with a moldy smell of old stone. Then he checked for storm damage (more fallen branches, one or two smashed tiles). He had a shower and a shave. The water was only lukewarm, but he emerged feeling better. He was home.

  He was now in his kitchen making a three-egg-and-bacon fry-up. Unlike Mara’s kitchen, his was not color-coordinated. His refrigerator gurgled, and his stove was an old, hybrid cooker. Two of its burners ran off butane, for when the electricity kicked out; a third ran on electricity, for when he ran out of butane. A fourth did not work at all. He turned the eggs and threw in some bread slices to fry in the bacon fat.

  As he sat down to eat his breakfast—on a sturdy chair that took his weight—he thought about the fight he and Mara had had in the van.

  “It wasn’t nice,” he said to his dog, who moaned and laid a mournful head in his lap. “I’d say a few home truths were exchanged, wouldn’t you? That remark about orchids was really below the belt.” Bismuth followed the rise and fall of the fork between the plate and Julian’s mouth with rapt attention. The mutt had already had his breakfast, but Julian gave in anyway and slid a remaining egg into Bismuth’s feed dish.

  He poured himself a refill of well-sweetened tea and went to stand in the open doorway giving onto his back garden, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine on his face. The light covered everything—trees, leaves, grass—in a mantle of distilled gold.

  The phone rang. He suspected it was Mara, and for some reason, perhaps because the sun was also dancing in his head, he let it go on ringing until his answering machine cut in.

  “Julian”—her disembodied voice rang through the cottage—“look, I’m sorry I laughed. Nerves, I expect.
And Joseph apologizes, too. He said the booby trap was for the monster. Are you all right? …”

  “I am now,” he told Bismuth, who joined him in the sun. Julian poured himself a third mug of tea and sat down on his back stoop, awash with a sense of utter contentment.

  But the moment did not last. Gradually, an awkward realization began to thump, like a bumblebee, against the window of his mind: now that he was home, he did not want to leave. Merde, it wasn’t just death threats, falling objects, the Furniture Polish Gestapo, or even the lack of a decent chair to fit his body that had made him seek refuge in Grissac. It was—and this was the awkward and disturbing part—Mara herself.

  Why this should be was a bit complicated to work out. He cared deeply for her, wanted, curiously enough, her pushy presence in his life. Unbidden, a scent of sandalwood rose in his nostrils. But her constant talk about moving forward was making him uneasy.

  “What’s wrong with staying as we are?” he asked Bismuth, and since the dog was on his back, belly in the air, with his eyes closed, he addressed the fig tree by his door. “I hope to God she isn’t expecting marriage.”

  It was something they didn’t discuss, as if they had a tacit understanding that marriage was a thing neither of them favored. But holy Christ, was she starting to get ideas? The thought put him in a cold funk and almost made him spill his tea.

  “You don’t repeat a bad experience,” he told the grass. “And it’s damned hard to make yourself over after more than a quarter-century of living on your own, give or take a few short-lived affairs.”

  But it was more than that, he knew. It was a question of privacy.

  “I suppose”—he addressed his feet now—“I’m what you’d call a deeply private person. I have my secrets—who doesn’t?—and I’d like to keep them that way.”

  He gazed off into the middle distance. “But she always wants to talk. About us. Our relationship. It makes her nervous when I don’t open up. Bloody hell, it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? She’s a ferret. They nose things out.” Proximity forced disclosure. He pictured those clever paws of hers at work, picking apart the padlocks of his entangled heart.

  “No,” he concluded unhappily. “Staying as we are isn’t an option anymore. We’ve reached a point where I’m either going to have to back out or throw open the bloody door and let her in.” He found himself thinking wistfully of a time, not that long ago, when he and Mara had merely dated.

  Sadly he tickled Bismuth’s belly. “Maybe I should just stick to what I do best. Landscaping and, now that spring is finally here, beating the bushes for Cypripedium incognitum.”

  But he did remember a little later to phone the gendarmerie in Brames to tell the duty officer that Osman had been beaten up, that Betul thought drugs were involved, that Ismet’s life had been threatened, as had his own, and that Adjudant Compagnon ought to do something about it.

  •

  The storm had one benefit. The night had passed without another housebreaking. In any case, Jacques Compagnon’s mind was not on the rhyming burglar. He stood before his gendarmes in the cramped meeting room, hands behind his back, rocking slowly back and forth, toe to heel, which meant that he had something important to say. His eyes glinted with suppressed excitement.

  “The situation is coming to a head. At last we have a case. We’ve been informed by Monsieur Wood”—he shook his head irritably, as if chasing off a pesky fly; the Englishman was too much in the picture for his liking—“that Osman Ismet was roughed up yesterday by two unidentified thugs. Ismet claims it was another racist attack and refused to report the incident. However, his wife told Monsieur Wood that the perpetrators threatened her husband’s life and that of Monsieur Wood as well. She thinks the attack has something to do with drugs. I’m betting Luca was behind it.”

  “And Serge Taussat, sir?” asked Albert.

  “No. Ton-and-a-Half wouldn’t have used Serge for this job. Not yet, anyway. This was just a warning. Goons’ work. Punching someone in the head and leaving him to walk away isn’t Taussat’s trademark.”

  Compagnon did his three strides across the front of the room and swung about to face his team.

  “All this tells us what we should have realized from the beginning: Osman Ismet is a player in Luca’s network. The Ismets import foodstuffs from Turkey all the time. Lokum is a natural cover for bringing in drugs.” He gave a bitter laugh. “You have to hand it to the old fox. He kept us focusing on Toulouse while the hot spot was right under our very noses.”

  Albert dug Laurent in the ribs. “Like Narbonne Plage. What did I tell you?”

  Compagnon went on, “So now the break-in at the store and the death of the son take on a different perspective. As I’ve always suspected, Kazim was working for Luca and failed to deliver. But the Lokum trashing wasn’t a warning as I originally thought. It was Luca looking for a shipment. Kazim’s death was the warning. To Osman Ismet. Do as you’re told or else.”

  Laurent shifted in his chair. His body was too long and gangly for most furniture. He sat with his knees poking up, but physical discomfort was not his problem at the moment. He spoke out unhappily: “Mon adjudant, when we went to the store after the trashing, I had the impression the parents really didn’t know what was going on. I think only the son was in on it.”

  Compagnon shook his head. “Maybe Kazim was the point man here. But if he was involved, there’s a good chance the parents were as well. At least the father. And we have to go with the odds. The question is, what’s happened to precipitate the roughing up?” Compagnon scanned the row of intent faces before him.

  Lucie Sauret spoke up. “Maybe Ismet has turned uncooperative, sir. If Luca had Kazim eliminated, Ismet will want revenge. Say he refuses to let his shop be used any longer as a front. But Luca needs Lokum to remain intact. So he sends in his heavies.”

  Compagnon nodded his approval. “Right. Next question: why now?”

  Lucie again: “Because Ton-and-a-Half is expecting another delivery of goods?”

  “Et voilà!” beamed the brigade commander, rising up on the balls of his feet. He set off striding in the other direction. “I don’t have to tell you this is just the development we’ve been waiting for. We’re in business. I’ve got authorization to tap Ismet’s and Luca’s phones. Customs and the drug squad are also being put in the loop. We don’t know when or where the delivery will arrive, or by what means. It could be a clandestine coastal drop or smuggled in by truck, train, or air. Hopefully the phone taps will give us a heads-up. My guess is that Luca will somehow involve Lokum, so anything coming in for the shop at any port of entry will be screened by sniffer dogs. If drugs are detected, the shipment will be allowed to go through. Then it will be a matter of tracking what happens to it from there. Unfortunately, from that point, the action will be out of our hands. Luca’s men will undoubtedly receive the delivery, and it will be up to the drug squad to catch them at it. Our job will be to keep Luca himself and the Ismets and their shop under surveillance and act on anything suspicious.”

  The adjudant’s chest rose and fell heavily. He would have liked nothing more than to be in on a major drug bust that would nail Rocco Luca, but as usual, he and his officers were assigned the backup jobs.

  Laurent spoke up: “You say we’ll have Ismet under surveillance, sir, but what about Monsieur Wood? His life’s been threatened, too. Shouldn’t we—er—be offering some kind of protection?”

  Compagnon shook his head. “Done, Laurent, but he declined. Just as well, since I don’t have any gendarmes to spare. However, he’s agreed to steer clear of the shop and to keep a low profile. As long as he stays down, I doubt Luca will jeopardize his operation to silence Julian Wood. Now, before I go any further, are there any questions?”

  A couple of hands shot up.

  “Let’s just hope Ton-and-a-Half sees it that way,” Laurent muttered to Albert.

  • 33 •

  Tuesday morning found Julian, rucksack slung over his shoulder, walking down a w
oodland path. He had spent the last couple of days cleaning up the detritus of the storm on his own and several clients’ properties. Today was the first free time he’d had. The earth was still soggy underfoot, but the rain, followed by plentiful sunshine, had unleashed a riot of greenery. Grasses and wild-flowers grew lush in meadows and roadsides. Vines put out sturdy tendrils. Bismuth ran happy circles around him, now appearing ahead of him, now thundering up from behind.

  There were only so many ways of finding a flower, he reflected. First, you had to look at the right time of year. Mara’s sister Bedie had photographed Cypripedium incognitum in early May. It was now the twenty-sixth of April, a little soon for his orchid, perhaps, but the past few weeks of warmth and plentiful rain had brought things on rapidly.

  Second, you had to look in the right places. He had two leads. One was the grounds of the Château of Les Colombes, where Bedie had taken her photograph. He had already searched the area thoroughly with no results, but would search it again this spring, just in case he had missed something on the last pass or in case his orchid chose to bloom sporadically. The other was here on Aurillac Ridge, a wooded spine rising above the Sigoulane Valley. The orchid embroidery that he had mentioned in his book had come from nearby Aurillac Manor. Very few people knew this, and Julian had sworn to secrecy those who did. He prayed that Géraud had not yet got wind of Aurillac Ridge.

  The problem was that both locations represented extensive stretches of woodland, forest, and meadow. One could, if one had unlimited time and willing bodies, superimpose a grid over these areas and send out an army of people to scour each square of the grid. At the moment, Julian had only himself and sometimes Mara, if she were in the mood and not busy tearing down walls.

  Third, if you didn’t know specific places to search, you could focus on likely growing environments. Some orchids required wetlands. Others liked fields, or open woods, or rough, elevated scree. Julian had no information on the kind of habitat Cypripedium incognitum preferred, but he guessed cool, partial shade and higher ground. That was why he was concentrating on this north-facing section of Aurillac Ridge.