A Rather Charming Invitation (41 page)

A waiter quickly appeared, handing us menus of a normal amount of offerings, which were nevertheless printed on the most enormous-sized menu folder that I have ever seen. He said he would return shortly to tell us the specials of the day.

“Psst,” Jeremy said from behind his leather wine list, “I didn’t see any framed photo of this original car, did you?”

“Nope,” I replied.

“Did you bring Venetia’s photograph?” he asked.

“Yes,” I whispered, ducking behind my gigantic menu, surreptitiously comparing her photo to the patterns on the walls all around us.

We were definitely in the right place. Just as Venetia had said, two of the walls were covered with pretty mirrors made of pale blue glass, decorated with opaque figures of barefoot dancers in Isadora Duncan-style tunics, holding bunches of purple grapes beneath bowers of flowers. This motif was echoed on the other two walls, which were covered with wallpaper friezes of similar dancing figures in white and blue. The marquetry was indeed Art Deco. Atop each wall was a continuous strip of painted woodwork, just beneath the moulding, running all around the Bridal Car. I squinted, trying to make out their design . . .

“Cocktail?” asked the waiter, reappearing. “We are featuring a lovely rosé champagne today by the glass. May I suggest that for your pleasure?”

“Sounds good,” Jeremy agreed hurriedly, and the waiter smiled and went away. I guess he thought that Jeremy was smitten with my charms and eager to be alone with me, like the other diners who were intent on their own private conversations, murmuring quietly. I tried peering into the mirrors to see if the wall patterns were reflected there.

Within a few minutes, I whispered, “Jeremy! Is that a cartouche over the doorway?”

“Do you think I have eyes in the back of my head?” Jeremy inquired, since he was facing one of the walls without mirrors.

“And the flowers,” I continued in a low voice. “They
could
be the purple moonwort.”

“Are you sure?” Jeremy asked. Then he glanced up and said, “Here comes that waiter. Better take a look at the menu and pick something to eat.”

“How can you think of food at a time like this?” I demanded.

He scanned his menu and said appreciatively, “All in the line of duty. Wow, this is excellent
gastronomie
. Might as well enjoy ourselves.”

So, when the waiter returned with our cocktails, we ordered the day’s special. He suggested a particularly fine red Sancerre wine to accompany it. All the while that Jeremy was handling the ordering, I kept surreptitiously trying to figure out the wall patterns.

I thought we were playing it very cool, acting like everybody else around us, but the waiter evidently noticed my eager gaze, because after he took our order, he smiled at me and said proudly, “Perhaps you’ve heard of the decor of this carriage? They say it was made for a bride. It was painted by Cocteau, in the 1930s, so the artwork has been carefully preserved just as it was.”

“Lovely,” I breathed, not allowing myself to catch Jeremy’s eye until the waiter had departed.

“Just like Venetia to fail to mention that her little artist friend was Cocteau!” Jeremy said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out something and handed it to me, under the table. It was my camera.

Startled, I took it. “Go ahead, shoot the cartouche,” he said.

“Are you mad? We’ll look like a couple of awful tourists and they’ll throw us out,” I hissed.

“You want to crack this case or not?” Jeremy asked. “Just do it fast. I’ll go stand under the doorway, and you pretend you adore me and want a photo, and you can shoot the cartouche.”

“I do adore you,” I said distractedly, “but . . .”

Jeremy got up, went to the door, turned round and smiled sheepishly at me. A few other diners looked up momentarily, then chose to ignore such gauche creatures as us. I snapped away, but my lens couldn’t pull that darned cartouche into a close-up. So, I had to get up from the table, and move closer.

The waiter returned, sized up the situation and, as if hoping to put an end to it, said, “Shall I take a picture of you together?” I had no choice but to hand him my camera, and go pose foolishly alongside Jeremy, while the waiter wasted the last precious bit of my camera’s battery power on us two dopes.

“Swell,” I muttered when I returned to the table. “I guess we’re insulting the chef.”

“Quiet,” Jeremy said. “I memorized it. Give me something to write on.”

I quickly tore a sheet from my notepad and handed it to him. Meanwhile, I sketched the other designs I’d seen all around the room, which I now identified as swans, putti and moonwort. So, when the waiter arrived with our food, there we were, like two kids, earnestly doing art class.

Well,
you
try to surreptitiously copy a whole four walls of pattern, whilst dining on an incredible meal. Somehow, we managed to get one wall after the
amuse bouche
of lightly breaded and baked oysters with a lemon and caper sauce; then we copied the second wall while devouring a fish course of turbot baked with fennel and black olives, served with just-plucked-from-the-garden skinny French string beans; and we got the third wall while feasting on delicate roasted hen, with potato croquette and a garden salad of greens topped by tiny pink, blue, purple and yellow edible flowers; and the fourth wall while nibbling on a dessert of fresh fig tarte with lavender honey and caramel ice cream. It was the kind of meal which, as my father says, “One remembers forever, into one’s dotage, when you have no teeth left, and you’re nodding by the fireplace in your robe and slippers.”

By the time the check arrived, I was fully sated, and I had all those images and Latin lettering swirling in my head. I only hoped our notes would make sense when we got home. We rose, thanked our gracious hosts, and marched down the front walk, past its railroad ties and fragrant garden.

“Wow,” I said as we climbed into the car. “If that’s how they ate on the
train bleu
, why on earth did they ever invent airplanes?”

“A meal like this should be followed by a nice nap in the garden,” Jeremy observed sleepily. He checked his mobile to see if the coast was clear. The message from Monsieur Felix was the same.
OK!

W
hen we returned to the villa, we printed out the new photos and notes, and added them to the other ones on the dining-table jigsaw-puzzle of clues.

“You were right about the old top border,” Jeremy said, impressed. “There’s the cartouche, the swans, the cupids, and the moonwort. Look. It matches up perfectly with the cut-off bits in the main body of the tapestry. Here’s the Latin from the new cartouche.”

He consulted his notes:

“Let’s see if I can get that into English,” Jeremy muttered, scribbling.

When he was done, however, he still looked puzzled. “You’re not going to like it, because it’s just more of that obedient wife stuff.”

He showed me his translation:

“That’s not so bad. It sounds like those Bible passages, about a woman leaving her family and her childhood village behind, to follow the man she marries,” I observed. “But, that can’t be all there is to it. Does it mean something more when you put it together with the bottom one?”

We looked at the two of them, one under the other:

“Well, it would seem that the top cartouche of the tapestry is advice to the bride, and the bottom is advice to the groom,” Jeremy noted. “Makes sense, but it doesn’t shout ‘buried treasure’.”

Hugely frustrated now, I exclaimed, “Somehow, in spite of all our pictures and notes, there
must
still be something in the actual tapestry that we’re missing in these photos, something we need in order to solve it. Oh, Jeremy, we’ve just got to get the tapestry back!”

The telephone rang. It was Honorine, with one of her wedding-plan updates. She was happy to report that the decor for our wedding train carriages, and the donations to Women4Water, were, she said, “pouring in”. Even Margery and Amelia were quite pleased.

“Great,” I said. “Anything else?”

Honorine scanned her list. “Jeremy’s clothes are ready. Rupert will pick them up. I must hang up now, because your mother is scheduled to call me from America, so we can go over all the RSVPs.”

We rang off, but a few minutes later a telephone shrilled again. I thought it was Honorine calling me back about the guest list. Then I saw that it was Jeremy’s mobile ringing. He picked it up.

It was Drake’s P.R. man. Jeremy held the phone between the two of us so that I could hear. At first, it sounded like the usual business B.S., in which he smoothly explained that Parker Drake had been
incredibly
busy with his breakneck schedule, but he’s been
really
wanting to meet you and your lovely fiancée. I listened, barely breathing, as the guy invited the two of us to a “small party” on Drake’s yacht in Monte Carlo this weekend.

“And Mr. Drake would
personally
like to invite you to join his regular card game,” the P.R. man said silkily, as if he were offering Jeremy a private audience with the Pope.

I must say that Jeremy handled it beautifully, acting like a guy who was eager for a new client, and was properly impressed at the right moments. Then the call ended.

“Now what?” I asked.

Jeremy grinned. “Looks like Drake bought our little performance in the jewelry shop! He must think we’ve got the only remaining Lunaire coins in existence. You know, for the first time, I really do believe that he stole that tapestry.”

“But he’s not just going to just hand it over,” I objected.

“No, which is why we have to keep up the bluff,” Jeremy said. “Until we can figure out for sure what his game is.”

T
he principality of Monaco seems like an improbable little country that somehow managed to survive in the shadows of two powerhouses, Italy and France. You would never guess that, once upon a time, Monaco’s ruling dynasty was a formidable big noise along the Riviera coast, bossing around the nearby towns and collecting taxes on their prized lemon and olive harvests. The Grimaldi dynasty’s stronghold here began in the 1200s, when a family member who belonged to a political party from Genoa—and was known as Francesco the Spiteful—disguised himself as a monk, and, in the dead of night, simply knocked on the door of a fortress in Monaco. Having gained entrance, he started knifing the guards; then let in his lurking team of warriors, who stormed the place and took over—and Monaco has belonged to the Grimaldi dynasty ever since.

However, by the 1800s they fell short of funds, until Monaco’s ruler at the time, one Prince Carlo III, decided to build a casino on a rocky promontory. In no time at all, it became a popular winter resort. They named it after the rock it stood on, and the prince who built it—Monte Carlo.

Today, Monte Carlo is still a magnet for gamblers, but summer is the big season, and it kicks off with the Grand Prix. Top race car drivers go zipping around its streets, roaring past its hotels, shops, and the pricey apartments, which the world’s richest-of-the-rich claim as their primary residence, in a land that doesn’t charge income tax. About fifty banks do a bustling business sheltering hot-shot money, and security is so high that it’s said the whole town can be “locked down” at a moment’s notice.

But Monsieur Felix had an investigator’s particular take on the place. “It is totally bugged,” he proclaimed. “Yes, everywhere you go, there is ze camera on the streets. And in ze restaurants, hidden in the floral arrangements, you find ze microphone.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not; he seemed serious, especially when he added, “Do not say or do anything in public in Monte Carlo that you would not want the whole world to see and hear.”

Monsieur Felix apologetically informed us that he had a previous commitment, which required him to go to Paris on the night of Drake’s card party. But he assured us that he would be “on call”, and if we needed immediate help, he could alert the police and “other associates” on the Côte d’Azur. I felt a little uneasy at his absence, but Jeremy assured me it would be okay.

Meanwhile, Rollo stopped by the villa to teach Jeremy how to spot a marked deck of cards. As we were leaving for the party, something compelled me to say, “Rollo, could you stay on call tonight?” I’m not sure whether I said this because I wanted him to keep out of trouble, or if I simply felt that we could use all hands on deck.

“Be happy to, my dear,” Rollo said agreeably.

Jeremy and I set off in his modern green Dragonetta, which our friend Denby, who restores and services “collectible” autos, had driven down here from London for us, so we’d have it available for the wedding. We took the
Moyenne Corniche
road, that runs along the middle level of the cliffs above the Mediterranean. Soon Monte Carlo appeared below, like a great enchanted rock sticking up out of the sea. As we wound our way down the curving road, I tried not to think of Princess Grace meeting her untimely end on these hairpin turns. Round and round we went, circling down in the seashellshaped spiral that took us finally to the harbor. There, at one side stood the famed Casino and the Hotel de Paris; and on the other side, a majestic castle, the official residence of the Prince of Monaco.

We had reached the “Port of Hercules”, filled with yachts of all shapes and sizes, its quay dotted with trees and flower boxes. Old pastel-colored buildings with balustrades and balconies overlooked the boats. Behind the harbor were stacks of pricey apartment houses and, rising beyond them, the verdant green hills of Monaco, high and sheltering. We parked the car, and headed for Drake’s party.