The Dying Minutes

by Martin O'Brien

  And then, more galling still, he wondered how many other people knew about it? Did his staff know? His friends? Did they laugh behind his back? Was he the only one not in on the joke? He felt a boiling mix of anger and shame, and a sudden, aching need for revenge: to take that primped-up, smug, little Toulonnais con and teach him a real lesson, a Marseilles’ lesson he would never forget.

  At the corner of Tamberle and rue Guillot, Roquefort slackened his pace and paused by the stone bollards that closed Guillot to traffic. Catching his breath, heart pounding, he looked across the road at the front of Maison Blanche, its pavement parasols packed away and its striped awning wound in. If the mistral hadn’t started up, Roquefort knew that Jean Grandet would have taken his usual table outside, making sure he could lean back in his chair to catch some sun and work on his tan. He’d seen him do it enough times. But this afternoon, with the wind whipping along the street, he’d be inside.

  Maison Blanche was a favourite lunch spot for the higher ranks of dock worker. If you wore boots and bleus and worked the quays you brought your own packed lunch, or snuck across to Ali’s where a bowl of couscous and tub of salad gave you change from a twenty. But if you had a desk and an office, you’d come to Maison Blanche. The food was good, came in large portions, and didn’t stretch the budget too far. Roquefort usually managed a couple of times a month; Grandet, a single man, a great deal more often.

  Pushing open the door, Roquefort smelled the hot daubes and rôtis from the kitchen, but felt no answering call from his belly. Instead he cast round the room, a line of tables down each side, and a shorter line down the middle, each covered with a red gingham cloth, every seat taken. He spotted Grandet straight away, sitting in the far corner, uniform jacket hung off the back of his chair, shirtsleeves up. He was one of four at the table, none of whom Roquefort recognised. Making his way across the room, he reached the table and caught Grandet’s eye.

  ‘Join us?’ asked Grandet, casting round to see if there was a spare chair. He probably knew there wasn’t, not that it would have worried him.

  ‘A word, Jean. That’s all,’ replied Roquefort, somehow managing to keep a hold on his anger, even managing a brief, apologetic smile.

  Grandet sat back, spread his hands. He didn’t need to say anything. Sure, go ahead, we’re all friends here, was what he meant.

  Roquefort shook his head. ‘There’s a problem with one of the new arrivals, docked this morning. I’d rather we went outside, if it’s okay? Shouldn’t take a moment, but you need to know.’ He hadn’t planned the exchange; the words just came to him.

  Pulling the napkin from his collar, Grandet made his excuses, eased away from the table and followed Roquefort out of the restaurant. By the time he stepped onto Guillot, Roquefort was a dozen metres away, waiting for him by one of the bollards, the wind blustering through his hair and ballooning his shirt.

  What followed was swift and vicious, Marseilles-style.

  Grandet had just reached Roquefort and was pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket when Roquefort reached up his hands around Grandet’s head as though to embrace him, then jerked it down, smashing the man’s face into the top of the bollard that stood beside them. Grandet had no time to react, to defend himself. There was a crunching, splintering sound of bone and teeth and a whiplash of Grandet’s blood splashed across Roquefort’s shirt. Without waiting a moment, Roquefort hauled Grandet off the blood-crowned bollard by the shirt collar and waistband, and heaved the limp, stunned and wheezing body across the back of his neck. Then, getting a grip on a leg and arm, he hoisted Grandet above his head like a weight-lifter, paused for a moment, took a breath, then slammed him down onto the pavement. The head hit the kerbstone with a juicy slap, the body crumpled into the gutter and more blood spilled out on to the road.

  If that had been all, Grandet might have survived the attack. But Roquefort wasn’t finished. His blood was up, his heart pumping, muscles singing. This was his moment. This was where he settled the score. Once and for all.

  His breath short and sharp, Roquefort took a couple of steps back and then lunged forward, aiming a running kick at the side of Grandet’s head.

  The right leg swinging through an arc from the hip, toe pointed, arms spread out for balance, like a striker in the penalty box, shooting for the net.

  A working shoe. A steel cap.

  * * *

  Christine Roquefort was in the garden, pegging up washing, when her husband returned home an hour later, pulling up his car in a cloud of dust. She turned in time to see him striding across the lawn, but she was not in time to protect herself from the fist which landed fair and square in the centre of her face, breaking her nose, splitting her top lip and snapping three teeth from her upper jaw. The force of the blow sent her staggering backwards through the line of washing before she dropped to the parched grass like a sack of rice.

  Knuckles burning, panting with the effort, every ounce of energy and hatred suddenly spent, Roquefort dropped his chin to his chest as the sound of sirens approached, turned into his street.

  7

  ‘TELL ME THIS is a joke,’ said Jacquot, as he followed Salette through the wheelhouse hatch and down into the main cabin, feeling a wince of pain on every one of the five steps. There was a warm, stale smell below deck but the varnished wood and brass fittings gleamed. ‘I hardly knew the man.’

  Salette waved the objection aside. ‘Ça n’importe,’ he replied, reaching up to open the skylight. A draft of fresh salty air spun through the opening and stirred the small curtains on the three portholes either side of the cabin. ‘Philo knew your father, fished with him. You didn’t have to know him. And it’s what he wanted. For the boat to be with someone who would take care of her. Someone who would cherish her. Love her. As he did. And he appointed me, as executor, to make sure it happened.’

  ‘And he specified me? Daniel Jacquot, the cop, the son of Vincent? Something written in a will.’

  ‘Not in his will, no,’ admitted Salette, working now at the screws that latched down the portholes. ‘But he mentioned your name. Many times, always asking after you. Vinnie’s boy. The flic. And since Niko had no family, never married, kept to himself … He just gave me the papers. With instructions to hand them on. To whomever I thought should have them.’

  ‘Niko?’

  ‘His real name. Niko Emanetti. His mother was Sardinian, I think, and his father Greek.’

  ‘Emanetti doesn’t sound too Greek.’

  Salette latched the last porthole open and threw Jacquot a look. There was no need to say anything. Jacquot knew what the look meant. When a child took a mother’s name it was usually because the father was not known. Maybe the ‘Niko’ was a nod to the man who had sired him, but that was all.

  ‘Écoute. Écoute-moi,’ Salette began again. ‘Listen to me. It’s not a joke, and there’s no mystery here. It is straightforward. Niko … Philo … He just wanted Constance to go to a good home, and told me to make it happen. That’s what I’m doing.’

  Jacquot started to chuckle, started to shake his head. ‘You make me drive all the way down here to give me a boat?’

  ‘I have the papers. A notaire waiting. You just have to sign. Three copies only. C’est tout. It’s yours.’

  ‘It can’t be for nothing, J-P. There must be money involved. A boat like this? Too much for me, c’est certain.’

  ‘The berthing, servicing, a few bits and bobs. That’s it. And it’ll do you good. Get you out of the office.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘It’s me he asked to sort it. And I’m sorting it,’ replied Salette, a little testily now, as though he couldn’t understand Jacquot’s reticence. Why there should be any objection? All these questions. He pushed aside a cushion and settled himself at the table, started tapping a finger against its edge.

  Jacquot remained standing – unwilling to risk the discomfort that sitting might entail – and looked around the cabin. For the first time he took in the books, every spare cen
timetre shelved and laden with books, down in the for’ard berth, too. Books everywhere.

  ‘It’s like a library,’ he said.

  ‘That’s Philo for you. You remember him?’

  ‘Late-seventies? Brown as a nut. Not many teeth …’

  ‘None.’

  ‘A gentle, quiet man as I recall.’

  Salette nodded. ‘But tough too. Old-school tough. No whining, no excuses. So, what do you think?’

  ‘What I think is …’ Jacquot couldn’t help himself. ‘What I think is, how did he get his hands on a boat like this? Even with no wife, and no kids to support, a fisherman’s nets wouldn’t have brought in enough for something like this.’

  ‘Hard work and luck,’ replied Salette. ‘Old Philo was always lucky. Cards and women, both.’

  ‘He won the money, or some admirer bought this for him?’

  Salette spread his hands. ‘Who knows? Like I told you, he kept himself to himself. None of us ever really knew. He never said. And we didn’t ask. It was just … his. That’s all he’d say. And now … it’s yours.’

  Jacquot started to shake his head, tried to order his thoughts, was about to turn it down, get off that boat and drive home, leaving Salette with an earful for wasting his time. It was all just too … ridiculous. Impossible. He lived in Cavaillon now, not the city. And a boat? In the Vieux Port?

  But then he paused, let his eyes take it all in, felt another gentle sway and tip as a cruiser passed down the channel and out to sea. And he smelled the salt air, stronger out here at the end of the pontoon.

  ‘Be good for the boy,’ said Salette, with a sly glance.

  ‘Boy?’

  ‘Or girl. Whichever.’

  There was a moment’s silence, filled by the distant, rising wail of a siren. Mention of ‘the boy’, his son, ‘or girl’, his daughter, had caught Jacquot unawares. As Salette had meant it to.

  ‘So tell me about Constance,’ Jacquot asked, still playing for time, still undecided, but knowing that soon he’d have to make up his mind.

  Salette smiled. ‘Mahogany hull, new epoxy sheath. Teak decking. Twin Volvo diesels that’ll give you close to twenty knots. Turns in her own length, cheap to run. You want, you can take off the wheelhouse roof, too – go topless …’ Salette chuckled. ‘Sleeps six if you’re friendly. And all the gadgets.’ He nodded to the chart desk that Jacquot was leaning against. ‘Radio. Radar. Depth finder. Solid stuff.’

  Then he smacked the palms of his hands on the table, got to his feet. He had said enough. No more.

  ‘So. Are we going to that notaire or what?’

  8

  JACQUOT DID NOT return to Cavaillon that afternoon, nor the afternoon that followed. After parting company with Salette, who refused an invitation to stay for supper on board Constance – ‘the two of you need to be together,’ he’d told Jacquot. ‘Get to know each other.’ – Jacquot had gone to a quayside chandlery and bought himself a sleeping bag, and to a small corner store on Sainte-Catherine for a toothbrush, toothpaste and other basic supplies. Back on Constance, he fired up the galley stove to heat some water, found a mug, made coffee, added a dash of Calva and took the brew up on deck. The sun was low, sliding towards the battlements of Fort Saint-Jean and the wind had dropped to a flighty, gusting breeze. Finding cushions in one of the seat lockers on the aft deck, Jacquot laid one out – sun-faded blue canvas stiff with salt – made himself comfortable and tried to take it all in.

  As Salette had promised, it had taken just twenty minutes at the notaire’s office: the scrawl of his signature, the official’s secretary as witness, and the duly notarised exchange of papers confirmed with a triple stamp-stamp-stamp with ink from a pad that had almost run dry. And Constance was his. All he had to do now, Salette informed him as they left the notaire’s office, was to signal the change of ownership with the Capitainerie in the morning, deposit a quarterly berth fee, and he was done, formalities dealt with.

  Jacquot sipped his coffee and reached for his cigarettes. Twelve hours earlier, he’d been stumping around an empty house in the Lubéron, missing Claudine more than he could have imagined, and now he was here, berthed in the old port, on a boat that had come into his life without warning and was very quickly capturing his heart – as Salette had surely known it would.

  There was just something about Constance. The shape of her, the curving lines, her age and elegance, thought Jacquot. The sun-whitened teak decking, smooth and sturdy underfoot, with its finely tined caulking; the brass-framed dials on the instrument panel with their salt-speckled glass and black needle-thin arrows; the occasional gentle creak from the timber planking in the wheelhouse when she rode a swell; and below deck the pair of warm, snug cabins, wood-panelled, lit by gimballed oil lamps, with portholes for windows and blue gingham curtains the size of napkins. And being out here in the middle of Marseilles’ Vieux Port, watching a sun set through a metal fencing of swaying masts, the lights round the harbour and stars above twinkling now into strength, traffic circling the quays just a distant hum, was a simple yet invigorating delight. The blackening sea all around him, deep and dark and shifting, the warm breeze over its light-shimmering surface, the slap and snap of halyards and the hollow suck of the water beneath the pontoon. All utterly seductive.

  But maybe the attraction was not so surprising, he thought. It was in his blood, after all. His father had been a fisherman, lived in Le Panier and worked right here in the Vieux Port, and Jacquot recalled the times as a boy when Papa had brought him aboard whatever fishing boat he’d been working – the smell of the catch, of drying nets and seaweed, of oil and petrol and rusting chains. There’d been something magical about it all back then, Jacquot decided, and there was something just as magical about it now. But whether it was Constance, or where she was, or the fact that this lovely old boat now belonged to him – no matter how unlikely or impractical – he had to admit that the spell she had cast had caught him as surely as a tightly knotted net. Just a few hours afloat and he was lost.

  After finishing his café-Calva and two more cigarettes, Jacquot set about exploring his new home, his first real inspection, starting with the seat lockers on either side of the aft deck. Secured with simple brass clasps, he opened them up and sorted through their contents. In the one he’d been sitting on, there was another seat cushion, a folded rug, some smaller cushions, and a pair of rusting hurricane lamps, fuel still sloshing about in their tanks. Turning to the other seat, he lifted the lid and found a set of wet-weather gear: a yellow, waxed jacket that was far too small for him, a sou’wester, and a pair of old rubber boots, also a couple of sizes too small. Beneath them was a heavy-duty waterproof torch (batteries dead), a set of fins, mask and snorkel – useful, he supposed, if something snagged round the rudder or propellers, a fishing rod broken into sections and wrapped in a green plastic sleeve, and some hand-held wooden lines with the hooks neatly bedded into the twine. Right at the bottom, tucked away in a corner, were old cans of varnish, a glass jar filled with a collection of screws and nails and tacks, an opened packet of sandpaper, and half a dozen paint brushes held in a thick rubber band, their soft bristle tips cleaned and ready for use.

  Satisfied there was nothing else of any interest, Jacquot closed and secured the seat lids and made his way down into the cabin where, gimbal lights lit, gingham curtains drawn but portholes left open, he continued his search, as detailed and thorough as any scene-of-crime investigation. Taking it all in: the smell of her, the feel of her, judging heights, testing his weight before leaning against anything.

  The main cabin was five paces long from wheelhouse steps to the sliding door leading to the for’ard berth, and Jacquot was a big man; high enough, too, to allow him a reasonable clearance in the centre of the cabin; and a good few centimetres wider than a full stretch of his arms. These proportions might not have been overly generous on land, but here they had been cleverly organised to provide enough space for a small galley on one side of the wheelhouse companionway, a chart table
on the other, and a booth-style dining area that would comfortably seat six, which, as Salette had demonstrated, could be turned into a second double berth by dropping the table to seat level and using the cushions for a mattress. Between the outside banquette and bulkhead a worn strip of deck led forward to a Formica-skinned shower stall, a marine head, and the for’ard cabin where Jacquot had dumped his sleeping bag.

  There was also plenty of storage space, all of it ingeniously accommodated: a number of drawers, cabinets and stow-spaces containing a basic range of cooking implements, cutlery and crockery (mismatched, two of each), a school-kid’s geometry set, a see-through plastic ruler, a GPS handset on a worn rope collar, a white tin box with a red cross on it, and a fairly comprehensive collection of hammers, pliers, spanners and screwdrivers all neatly secured in metal clips. As Salette had said, a tidy, well-kept, and well-found vessel.

  And books, of course. Books everywhere. Two shelves running the length of the main cabin, both sides, squared off to keep the portholes clear, with another shelf along the top of the bulkhead and three narrower ones the other side in the for’ard berth. There could be few small boats, Jacquot reckoned, with such a large and extensive collection, paperback and cloth-covered, dog-eared and fat with use.

  Slowly, Jacquot worked his way along the shelves, tipping his head to read the spines. Everything from Rabelais’ Gargantua to Camus’ La Peste, not to mention other Nobel laureates like Sartre, Gide and Mauriac, old masters like Balzac, Dumas and Zola, as well as collections of short stories, poetry and philosophy. And text books, too, but text books of a high order, with titles in French, German, English, Italian and Spanish on subjects ranging from celestial navigation to marine engineering, their pages filled with finely detailed drawings and lengthy footnotes. It wasn’t just the languages that impressed – Jacquot’s own father had spoken Italian and Spanish as well as French, Salette was equally fluent, as were many other French trawlermen who worked in mixed-race crews – it was the wide scope of the subject matter: classic fiction from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and non-fiction works that would have demanded a certain level of academic and intellectual aptitude, clearly showing that Philo was altogether more than just a fisherman. Only in the for’ard cabin were the books any lighter. Thrillers this time, and crime fiction, from Marseilles’ very own Jean-Claude Izzo to John Grisham, from Clive Cussler to Jack Drummond.