Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  “Hilda? She’s the housekeeper?”

  “And totally trustworthy.”

  “The hotel’s name,” I repeated. “What are you planning? Ring Jamie and give him a rocket?”

  “Uh, uh.” Pamela’s voice dropped close to bass-baritone territory. “I’m going to handle Mr. Haddon face to face. And his’ll be the face covered in shit.”

  “Fly over? You?”

  “How else do you think I can get at his face?”

  Damn, the Riviera was going to be overcrowded by one too many Canadians.

  “Is that advisable?” I said. “Won’t Archie get his antennae up?”

  “That isn’t your worry. I’ll think of ways to keep Archie out of harm’s way.”

  “Yeah, well, practice makes perfect.”

  Pamela must have been putting so much energy into fuming over Jamie that she let my little jab bounce right off.

  “I know what’s bothering you,” she said. “Me in the vicinity. You’re afraid I’ll spoil the fun for you and Annie.”

  “You read my mind.”

  “But don’t you see, the minute you phone me, you can toddle off to the beach or wherever you please. To the movies. You won’t have to bother any longer with me or Jamie. Your obligation will be over.”

  “Except to Swotty.”

  “Oh, just tell Daddy Jamie was in culture shock when he wrote the postcard. Daddy’s so anxious to be understanding and forgiving he’ll believe anything about Jamie.”

  “Swotty might not be so understanding and forgiving when he hears Jamie is on board a sixty-foot yacht he’s the proud new owner of. Especially, as you yourself may be rethinking at this very instant, if the cash that bought the boat isn’t Jamie’s and it is Swotty’s.”

  “Crang, please.”

  “Not Swotty’s own, but possibly C&G’s.”

  “Will you lighten up a minute.”

  “Or a C&G client’s.”

  Pamela paused for a beat of silence.

  “Two things, Crang,” she started up again. “Number one, are you familiar with the term ‘alleged’?”

  “Very popular in circles I work in.”

  “For heaven’s sake, the only indication we have on Jamie and the alleged money comes from a complete stranger named Rolland with whom you spent, maximum, a total of forty-five minutes.”

  “Granted.”

  “Number two, who was it that raised the issue of Jamie and money in the first place? Who said to you, how is Jamie financing his leave of absence in Europe? Who?”

  “You did. You, Pamela.”

  “Now I’m saying to you, me, Pamela, I’m saying I withdraw the money issue from your list of assignments.”

  She had a point. Tenuous, but a point. Pamela could be likened to a client who was taking back a case, dispensing with my services. Still, I felt myself resisting her orders. I owned a small personal stake in events. It was my house that big, scary Curtis, undoubtedly hired by Mike Rolland, broke into to swipe the disk I had swiped from Jamie Haddon’s apartment. In my mind, the pair of swipes didn’t cancel out one another. The personal element was one reason for not abandoning a search for the source of Jamie’s money. Another reason to resist Pamela was that I’d made my commitment to Swotty Whetherhill first. I didn’t like the thought of short-changing him.

  “Supposing,” I said, “we put off all final decisions until I suss out the situation in Monaco?”

  “Is this a compromise?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “I loathe compromises.”

  “How can you be sure?” I said. “As far as I know, you’ve never entered into one.”

  Pamela laughed. It wasn’t a hearty guffaw, just a small indication that something risible had crossed her horizon.

  She said, “You can be a bastard, Crang.”

  “Better than having a Mr. Nice Guy tend to your interests.”

  “We shall see.”

  Pamela absorbed more scotch, and checked the watch on her wrist. It was about the size of a thumbnail.

  “I have to be going,” she said. “Archie’s playing tennis at the club. I’m meeting him there when he’s finished.”

  She started to slide out of the booth. I managed a half rise. Pamela stopped her slide.

  “Are you and your Annie doing anything special tonight?” she asked.

  “Well, thanks, but I don’t think it’s such a hot idea us double-dating with you and Archie.”

  “Don’t be gauche. I meant if you’d care to keep the table, I’ll speak to Pip. My treat.”

  “Annie’s occupied, real marathon session, seeing movies, writing reviews.”

  “You stay,” Pamela said. “They do wonders with veal here.”

  “Veal? I accept.”

  “That’s settled.” Pamela stood up. “And bon voyage for Monday, Crang.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  If I turned my head to the left, the Mediterranean came into view. It gleamed azure in the afternoon sun. Straight ahead, across the harbour, the houses of Villefranche spilled from the top of the steep cliff to the water’s edge. The cliff looked smooth and weathered. The houses were pink and yellow and ochre. On the distant right, I could make out the peaks and crests of the Alps. The tallest had wreaths of snow.

  “I believe I’ve died and gone to the south of France,” I said to Annie.

  “Half right, big guy.”

  Annie and I were drinking glasses of vin rosé. Annie’s French friend who had rented the apartment to us had left the bottle in the refrigerator. Welcome to the Côte d’Azur. The apartment occupied the top floor of a three-storey white stucco house on a hill over a narrow, twisting street called Avenue Denis Semeria. All streets in the south of France seemed to be narrow and twisting. Some were named after guys better known than Denis Semeria. In the taxi over from Nice Airport, I had noticed boulevards for a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, and a de Gaulle. Maybe Denis Semeria had been a resistance fighter or a soccer player. It was mid-afternoon on Tuesday. I was standing on the balcony of the Mediterranean villa, sipping the dry vin rosé, absorbing the Riviera view, and feeling one hell of a worldly fellow.

  “When can we get the sightseeing underway?” Annie asked me.

  “I’m way ahead of you, sweetie. Sightseeing is what I’ve been up to out here the last fifteen minutes.”

  “This long-range stuff is okay,” Annie said, “but tame. Your veteran tourist gets down to it and slogs.”

  Annie listed the wonders within walking distance of the apartment. Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild. La Chapelle de Saint-Pierre. Villa Kerylos. She gave the names of the places their correct pronunciation. Annie speaks French like Isabelle Adjani. She speaks Italian like Claudia Cardinale. She has some Portuguese, but I don’t know any movie stars from Portugal. Annie picked up the languages and her intimacy with Europe’s countries in the three years she drifted around the continent in her mid-twenties. She says she travelled alone most of the time. I never asked about the rest of the time.

  Annie said our apartment was in Pont Saint-Jean. Very convenient location, she said. It was at the conjunction of three towns. Saint- Jean-Cap-Ferrat was further south on Avenue Denis Semeria, on a peninsula sticking into the Mediterranean. Beaulieu was behind us and around the corner. It had the nearest train station, Annie said, and an open-air market that sold fish unknown to Canadian cuisine. The third town, Villefranche, lay shining at our feet.

  We finished the wine. We unpacked. I shaved. Annie sat in the bathtub for three minutes. At five-thirty, we went down to Avenue Denis Semeria. We found a back road that took us past palm trees and large flashy residences and deep driveways with expensive cars parked in them. The road petered out at a descending cement staircase. The staircase ended at a walkway around the harbour to Villefranche.

  “Watch your step,” Annie said to me.

&nb
sp; “You’re talking about this obstacle course of dog shit?” I asked as I stepped over a mutt’s recent deposit.

  “Dogs are allowed pretty much freedom of place,” Annie said.

  “Nobody heard of poop and scoop?”

  Annie shook her head. “Strictly a North American concept.”

  “Know what I think?” I said. “A guy could run for mayor on a platform of no more doggie doodoo. Just from the evidence I see around me, the guy would win in a landslide.”

  “Uh, uh,” Annie said. “The French love their dogs more than their grandmothers. Your politician would go zero at the polls.”

  I zigged and zagged past a lumpy mass.

  “Whoever sells door mats,” I said, “must clean up, you’ll excuse the play on words.”

  The harbour was in the shape of a new moon. Villefranche, as we circled closer to it, looked postcard pretty. Beige and cream buildings sitting tight to the water, open-air cafes, gaily-coloured tablecloths, people being leisurely over drinks in funny-shaped glasses. A sign read La Vieille Ville. An arrow on the sign pointed up a ramp of stairs. We followed the arrow. We were in a maze of cramped alleys and tiny vaulted passages. Annie said the old town’s staunch greystone buildings dated from the Middle Ages. A kid in a space helmet ripped past us on a dirt bike. I told Annie I was having trouble with the collision of centuries. Dirt bikes in medieval alleys. Above us, jeans hung out to dry from the windows of apartments that had been built for guys who had carried longbows into battle.

  Annie conducted us back to a gorgeously-proportioned little building on the waterfront. Another dislocation in time. The building was the Chapel of St. Peter, lovingly erected in the fourteenth century. Its decorating scheme was more recent, by Jean Cocteau in 1957. Inside the chapel, Cocteau’s paintings flowed around the walls and ceiling in an airy swirl of gypsies and angels, musicians, a Virgin and Child, and fisher folk of both sexes.

  “Not profound,” Annie said, “but a beaut of a tourist attraction.”

  We settled at a cafe in the square. It was under a hotel that was five storeys high and painted orange. The hotel had a name that put Holiday and Ramada to shame. It was called the Hotel Welcome. Annie spent a long time in discussion with the waiter. After a while, he brought six dozen fresh mussels drenched in some kind of divine-smelling juice. There was a green salad and white wine. The wine came in a jug that, back home, shoppes on Avenue Road would label an antique and price at seventy-five dollars. We started on the mussels.

  “A schedule,” I said to Annie.

  “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “Roquebrune should be our first stop. It’s got the most sensationally picturesque citadel

  “By schedule, I had reference to business.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Duty,” I said, “then pleasure.”

  “Well, the film festival doesn’t open until next week, and my seminar at the university, which” — Annie turned sideways in her chair and waved an arm in the general direction of the hills — “is somewhere above us, is on for Thursday morning.”

  “What’s a Canadian university doing in the land of bliss?”

  “Prospering, I gather.”

  “Turning out students with suntans and majors in hedonism.”

  “Your jealousy’s showing, buster,” Annie said. “The place is perfectly legitimate, L’Université Canadienne en France. It’s administered out of Toronto, Canadian subjects and teachers, lectures in English, all like that. The students that come over, they get the same credits for a degree they’d get at a school back home minus the snow and ice.”

  “Plus the benefit of beautiful and intelligent guest lecturers.”

  Annie smiled. “Somebody heard me on the radio, a woman who used to teach here. She recommended to the university I do the seminar. The honorarium’s three hundred francs.”

  “Don’t bother translating. I might be shocked.”

  “I’ll buy you a dinner.”

  I speared a mussel. “My quest for young Haddon isn’t as cut-and-dried as your tasks,” I reminded her.

  “How easy it is for his name to slip my mind.”

  “Fair’s fair. My Jamie Haddon for your film festival.”

  “Yes,” Annie said, “but in movie reviewing, a person doesn’t run into dissembling, stealing, and skulduggery.… Well, not on the same scale as you seem to have turned up in the Haddon thingamabob.”

  “My accumulation to date may not merit the term skulduggery. What have I got? A May-December affair in which May can’t keep his mouth shut. A computer disk that’s slippery to get a grip on. And some suspicious spending habits.” I stopped chewing. “Actually that’s not a bad list.”

  “You left out the burglar.”

  “Large Curtis. Yeah, I may be trying to suppress the memory.”

  “If this Mike Rolland is calling in that sort of person and if the burglar was as big as you say, it could mean that your simple little investigation for the Whetherhill family might be more physical than you can handle.”

  “Curtis was as big as I say.”

  “I rest my case,” Annie said. “Look, suppose Mike Rolland pops up over here, as I’ve no doubt he will, he could arrange to cuff you around again, and I didn’t come all the way to the Riviera to sit with you in a doctor’s office.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “As far as Mike goes, guile and wit ought to carry the day. Mine, I’m talking about, my guile and wit.”

  “Oh, brother.”

  Annie concentrated on her food and wine for a minute.

  “Deep down,” she said, “what do you suppose Pamela thinks is the source of Jamie Haddon’s eight hundred thousand dollars? Deep down in Pamela, I mean.”

  “I don’t think she wants to know. I think she wants to put herself between me and Swotty.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Yeah. If I report to Swotty that Jamie is rolling in francs … are francs the currency of Monaco?”

  Annie nodded.

  “… then whatever’s going on, if anything, could come undone, not excluding Pamela’s dalliance with Jamie. Pamela couldn’t bear to have Swotty find out. It would rock him to the foundations.”

  Annie had a knack of using an empty mussel shell as an implement to scoop a fresh mussel from another shell and convey it to her mouth. I admired the technique, but didn’t copy it. I might cause damage to myself. Maybe a lip impaled on a mussel shell.

  “Let’s visit Monaco tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”

  “Get it out of the way,” Annie agreed. “Right. We’ll go over by train. They’re fantastic along the coast, just like the subway at home, except the stops are more exotic.”

  “Jamie may be the fly in the ointment. Finding him, that is, if he doesn’t care to be found.”

  “What’s Plan A?”

  “No Plan A.”

  “Ah, then we go directly to Plan B.”

  “Yeah, the one where I poke and prod and nudge until someone comes from under.”

  The mussels were gone, and jet lag was beginning to set in. Annie and I walked back to the apartment along the quay just as the sun, showing plenty of vermilion dazzle, dropped behind Villefranche’s hills.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  From the Monaco train station, the streets sloped at a precipitous angle in the direction of the sea. Annie and I tottered down them for four or five blocks until we arrived at a broad, level section of boulevards and sidewalks. The buildings of Monaco were behind us, running back up the hill and into the lower levels of the Alps. There were rows of low-rise villas, the pink and pale brown stucco and stone buildings I’d seen all along the coast. But shoehorned into every free space, on every block, high-rise apartments and condos, graceless and disruptive, poked fifteen and twenty storeys into the air.

  “My God,” I said to Annie, “the developers aro
und here could teach the Japanese a few things about stacking people on top of one another.”

  “These last twenty years,” Annie said, “speculation in Monaco land has gone kind of bananas.”

  From where we were standing down by the harbour, approximately at the centre of everything, the city was enclosed by two high rocky promontories. On top of both, there were clusters of pastel buildings. From a distance, they looked like sets left over from a 1930s MGM musical.

  Annie pointed to the promontory on the west. “Up there,” she said, “that’s the real Monaco, the original. The old town is there, and those walls you can see, light coloured, with all the crenellation, they’re part of Prince Rainier’s palace.”

  “I thought it might be the Nelson Eddy Retirement Villa.”

  Annie said, “Where you and I are standing is called La Condamine. More humble, you notice, commercial. And up there” — Annie was pointing to the eastern promontory — “that’s your renowned Monte Carlo. The Casino, L’Hôtel de Paris, untold wealth.”

  We dodged the traffic to cross the street and get closer to the water. The harbour was small and orderly. The jutting promontories formed a natural protection from the Mediterranean. There were wide docks with berths for boats to tie up. Annie and I walked around the harbour, gawking at the boats. For a long time, neither of us spoke.

  “I may barf,” I said.

  “Kind of rich for the stomach.”

  As a word, “boats” was grossly inadequate to describe what Annie and I were looking at, though “gross” was probably on the mark. These boats, replete with several levels of decks and gangways and saloons and aft quarters and fore quarters and quarters amidships and passages in between, were castles that happened to sit on water instead of land. They were painted a white that glared in the sun, and they were equipped with every electronic gizmo except maybe rocket launchers.

  We followed the walkway around the harbour and out to a man-made seawall. The boats moored at the inner wall, closest to land, were smaller than the others. Smaller in relative terms: they were larger than a house, my house anyway, but not as large as a mansion.