Blowback (23 page)
The restaurant, Au Gourmand, was in the aptly named Rue Molière just off the Avenue de l’Opéra, next door to an antique shop and opposite a realtor. In keeping with the shifting tastes of the French palate, it shared the street with a Japanese restaurant and a pizzeria.
Jean-Louis Graulet was waiting for him at a table by the window in this pocket-sized eatery that still catered for the theater going public of Paris. He rose to shake the Scotsman’s hand and waved him into the seat opposite.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I’ve read a great deal about you.”
“All of it good, I hope.”
Graulet smiled. “Almost none of it, actually. It seems that the French police and the political establishment are not very fond of you.”
“Only because they don’t like me showing up their mistakes. Much in the same way, I suppose, that a chef might resent you taking over his kitchen and humiliating him by preparing a better meal.”
This time the food critic laughed out loud. “God forbid! I love to eat, monsieur. I hate to cook.”
He was smaller than Enzo had been expecting. A thin, mean-faced man who did not look at all like someone who enjoyed his food. He had lively amber eyes, and for all that his facial features were not arranged in a particularly attractive way, he had a disarming smile. Enzo had come prepared not to like him, and found himself unexpectedly engaged.
He looked around at the pale yellow walls of the restaurant, the maroon chairs with their gold piping and monogrammed
Gs,
the books and bookshelves painted on the wall by the kitchen door. “Why did you pick this place to meet?”
“I’ve heard good things about it and want to review it in my blog. It used to be called the Barrière Poquelin, and was owned by Claude Verger. Cleverly named, don’t you think? Barrière Molière might have been the obvious choice. But Molière was born Jean Baptiste Poquelin. That showed some originality. As did the food. It’s where Bernard Loiseau cut his teeth and made his name before getting sucked into that dreadful place down at Saulieu.”
Enzo couldn’t resist a wry smile. “You’re not here in disguise, then?”
He laughed. “No, monsieur, I am not. If I had been, how would you have recognised me?”
“I take it the owners already have.”
“Oh, you can put money on it. But they’ll be far too discreet to say so.” He paused. “A glass of champagne?”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
Graulet caught the attention of a hovering waiter who was instantly at their table. He ordered two glasses of Veuve Clicquot and slipped on a pair of half-moon reading glasses as he lifted the menu. “I think I’ll have the
Ouef de poule
,” he said. “I’m interested to know what they mean by a contemporary version of Eggs Florentine.” He ran his eye down to the main courses. “Ah, and in your honour, I think I am bound to try the
Selle d’agneau d’Ecosse.
I expect you have sampled a fair amount of Scottish lamb in your time.”
“I have.” Enzo looked at the menu. The lamb was marinated in hibiscus, and then cooked in a sauté pan. But Enzo had to smile. The menu described it as being
cuite au sautoir
. A nice pun, since a
sautoir
was both a sauté pan and a St. Andrew’s Cross, the flag of Scotland. It was presented with gnocchi, preserved kumquats, and a reduction of the cooking juices. “Never had it served like this though.” He ran his eye down the other choices and decided on seasonal vegetables in an open ravioli as a starter, and
civet de sanglier
, a stew of wild boar, for his main course.
“Bravo,” Graulet said. “A perfect choice for a man who lives in the Lot. What wine would you like with it?” He passed Enzo the
carte des vins
.
“What about the Cahors? The Château Lagrazette.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to pick anything else. It will go wonderfully well with the
sanglier
and the lamb.” He removed his reading glasses and looked candidly at Enzo. “So what do you want to know about Marc Fraysse?”
“I want to know why you printed a rumor about him losing a star when it was patently untrue.”
Graulet canted his head to one side. “Was it?”
“It was. And I got that from the horse’s mouth.”
“The horse, no doubt, being that manufacturer of pneumatic tires which likes to think of itself as being the ultimate arbiter of good taste.”
Enzo tipped his head in acknowledgement.
“Hmmm. Well, monsieur, I think I can tell you without risk of contradiction that the rumor began with Fraysse himself.”
Enzo frowned. “How’s that possible?”
“Because the man was paranoid. You have no doubt heard the story of our little contretemps that cemented our mutual dislike?”
“Yes.”
Graulet sipped his champagne thoughtfully. “I have to tell you that although I didn’t like his food, there is no doubt that he was an extremely talented chef. But his cuisine owed far too much to the traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He introduced his own slant on it, I grant you. But he failed to bring it into the twenty-first century, unlike some of his contemporaries. The excellent Michel Bras, for example, who is unique in the way he has used natural regional ingredients to transform traditional dishes. Not to mention his presentation, which is pure art. Bras is
a
typical of the Michelin-starred chef, while Fraysse was just another hack as far as I’m concerned. Another typical anointee of the monks of Michelin.”
“You didn’t much like him, then.”
For the first time, Graulet seemed annoyed. “It’s not a question of whether
I
liked
him
or not. He disliked
me
. Because he saw in my assessment of him his own worst fears. He knew I was right, and deep down inside he was terrified that one day he would be found out.”
They were interrupted by the waiter who came to take their order. When he had gone again, Enzo said, “So how did he start the rumor about himself?”
“By being afraid it was true. He lived in fear of losing a star, of the financial pain and personal humiliation that would bring. If you celebrate your success in public, you must expect that your failures will also be seen in the limelight. That winter he began phoning round all his friends in the business looking for reassurance. And in doing so sowed the seeds of doubt in the minds of others. The world of French cuisine is very small and claustrophobic, monsieur. And in the heat of the kitchen, a single microbic rumor can multiply to become raging food poisoning.” He smiled. “Of course, when I heard it, I took great pleasure in printing it. A small modicum of revenge.”
“Even though you knew it wasn’t true.”
“I knew no such thing.”
For the first time since he had sat down with the man, Enzo began to experience the dislike he had expected from the beginning. And as their starters were delivered to the table, he said, “I thought it was the job of the journalist to report facts, not speculation.”
But Graulet was unruffled. “Monsieur, in this business there is no such thing as
facts
. Only opinions. And although I am appalled by his murder, my opinion was, and remains, that Marc Fraysse did not merit one star, never mind three.”
Saint-Pierre, Puy de Dôme, France 2010
Enzo left Paris early on the Monday morning for the four-hour drive south, and reached Saint-Pierre shortly after ten. It was Toussaint, All Saints Day, a public holiday, and everywhere was deserted except for the cemeteries, where the living tended to the needs of the dead, scrubbing down tombs and gravestones and piling them high with flowers.
It was only when he pulled into the almost empty car park at the
auberge
that he remembered the hotel would be shut. The final meal of the season would have been served the night before, the last of the hotel guests departing just after
petit déjeuner
that morning. The few remaining cars, he guessed, probably belonged to staff. He knew that many of them, including the chefs, were being kept on for several days to clean and shut down the kitchen and the guest rooms for the winter.
He felt a chill in his bones as he waded through the leaves toward the front of the hotel. With the coming of November, the rain had stopped, but the mercury had tumbled, and bruised and brooding skies of pewter presaged the possibility of early snow. He did not relish the prospect.
As he rounded the corner of the building, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Sophie standing unhappily on the steps outside the main entrance, her suitcase at her feet.
He frowned his consternation. “Where are you going? I thought you didn’t finish till the end of the week.”
She could hardly meet his eye. “That was the plan. Until that little shit, Philippe, went and told Guy that I was your daughter.”
Enzo sighed. With her cover blown it was likely his access to Guy and Elisabeth, and anyone or anything else, would be cut off. “Why did he do that?”
“We had a row.”
“I thought I told you to keep away from him.”
“I tried. But he seemed to think that knowing about you gave him some kind of leverage over me. I made it plain to him it didn’t.”
“So what happened?”
“Guy sacked me.”
“Damn, Sophie!”
“I’m sorry, papa, but it’s not my fault!” He saw a quiver in her lower lip. “Bertrand can’t come and get me till the end of the week, and I’ve nowhere to stay.”
He raised his eyes to the heavens. There was a good chance that all his work of the last week had been wasted. “We’ll get a hotel room somewhere. I guess they’ll want me out of mine, too.”
“There aren’t any hotel rooms, papa. All the hotels up here close down at this time of year, and the ski stations won’t be open for another month yet. The nearest hotels are in Clermont Ferrand.”
Enzo thought about it for a moment, then took out his cellphone.
“Who are you calling?”
“A friend.”
***
Dominique arrived outside her apartment at almost the same moment as Enzo and Sophie. She drew her blue gendarmerie van into the kerbside and stepped out, still in uniform, to meet them. Both she and Enzo were restrained in their urge to be intimate in their greeting, and shook hands formally.
“This is my daughter,” he said. “Sophie.”
Dominique smiled and shook her hand warmly. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Sophie flicked a curious look toward her father. “Have you?”
“I would never have guessed you were father and daughter. You don’t look at all like him.”
“She gets her good looks from her mother.”
Sophie pulled a face. “Actually, if my hair wasn’t dyed, you’d see that I do look quite like him. Same dark hair, same white stripe.”
“Ah, so you inherited the Waardenburg.”
Sophie cocked her eyebrow and threw her father another glance. “He
has
been telling you a lot.”
Enzo shuffled uncomfortably. Dominique unlocked the front door and led them upstairs to her apartment on the third floor.
“I’m afraid I’m going to be short of somewhere to stay, too,” Enzo said as Dominique opened the door to let them in. Tasha began barking immediately, bounding around the hallway with excitement, paws up on Enzo, almost knocking him over. He greeted her like a long lost friend, ruffling her neck and ears and dodging her tongue.
“I’ve only got one spare room, I’m afraid,” Dominique said and she and Enzo exchanged looks.
He said quickly, “Maybe I could share with Sophie, then.”
“Well, it
is
a double bed, and I suppose you two aren’t exactly strangers.”
Sophie pulled a face.
“Go on through to the sitting room, and I’ll look out some clean sheets.”
Tasha followed Enzo and Sophie into the front room. The log fire that had warmed Enzo and Dominique on their first night together was long dead. He looked from the window at the conurbation in the valley below, almost lost in the flatness of the cold, grey light. Sophie tugged on his arm and brought her face close to his.
“Papa!” she said in a stage whisper. “You’re sleeping with her!”
He wasn’t quite sure what to say, but denial didn’t seem like an option. Her eyes were wide with disbelief.
“You are
impossible
, papa!”
“I’m human, Sophie.”
She glared at him for a moment, but couldn’t stop a half smile from sneaking around her lips. “Well, it’s crazy for you to share with me, then.” She paused. “And I don’t want some big hairy man in my bed, anyway. Even if he is my father.”
Dominique appeared in the doorway. “The room’s through here, Sophie.” And Sophie dragged her suitcase off after her, throwing the merest backward glance at Enzo. He sighed. His life, it seemed, was one long succession of women giving him grief.
Dominique reappeared after a few moments. She lowered her voice. “I suppose she’s guessed, then?”
He nodded.
She smiled, half in regret. “Women have an instinct for these things.”
“Yes. I know.”
Dominique pushed the door closed and turned back to him, keeping her voice low. “I got word back this morning from the phone company. About the owner of that cellphone number. I was just about to head off to make an arrest when you called.”
Enzo felt all his focus return suddenly to the murder of Marc Fraysse. “Whose was it?”
“Anne Crozes.”
Anne and Georges Crozes lived in a converted stone farmhouse on the back road south out of Saint-Pierre, in a fold of the valley with hills rising all around it, dark evergreen and bleak winter brown. It was an impressive building, beautifully pointed, its roof recently remade with traditional
lauzes
tiles. It spoke of money and the share that the Crozes had enjoyed in the success of Chez Fraysse. There was only one vehicle sitting outside the house when they arrived. A black BMW. There was no sign of Anne’s Scenic.
“Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Enzo said.
Dominique pulled her van in behind the BMW. “We’ll see. She’s not at the hotel, I know that. Her contract for the season finished yesterday.”
They stepped out into the chill air and heard the valley echo to the cawing of distant crows, the only sound to break the silence. Blue smoke rose straight up from the chimney and hung in strands like mist above the house. Away down in the valley, Enzo saw a hawk drop from the sky like a stone and knew that some unsuspecting creature was about to die.
Georges Crozes opened the door before they got to it. Enzo barely recognised him out of his chef’s whites. He seemed less imposing somehow. A god in the kitchen, but an ordinary mortal in the real world. He wore torn old jeans that hung loose from narrow hips, and a grey sweatshirt that seemed to drown him. He looked older, too, glancing from Dominique to Enzo, and glaring at the Scotsman. “What do you want?”
“Is Anne at home?” Dominique said.
“What do you want her for?”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
“What’s it got to do with him?” He flicked his head toward Enzo.
“He’s helping with our inquiries.”
He turned penetrating green eyes on Enzo. “Not get enough information from your little spy, then?”
So everyone knew about it. Enzo chose to ignore the barb. “Where is she, Georges?”
“I haven’t the first idea. She doesn’t tell me anything these days.” And he thrust out his jaw as if challenging them to question his veracity.
Dominique said, “Okay, well tell her, when you see her, that I need to speak to her as a matter of urgency. And if she does not come to me, I will come back for her with a warrant.”
Crozes’ face darkened. “What’s she done?”
“Just tell her, Georges.”
He watched them all the way back to the van before closing the door. Enzo wondered what was going through his mind on the other side of it.
“What do you think?” Dominique said when they got back in the vehicle.
“I think he was very hostile.”
She nodded. “Attack being the best form of defence. What do you reckon he knows?”
“A lot more than he’s ever going to tell us.”
***
Enzo’s battered and bruised 2CV toiled its way back up the hill from Thiers. The mechanic at the garage had given it a clean bill of health, but still it didn’t feel quite right, especially after driving the rental car in which he had made the return trip to Paris, a sleek, fast Peugeot. Perhaps it was time, he thought, to get himself a new car. Or, as Sophie would say, a real car.
He turned off the main highway on to the private road that wound up through the trees to the
auberge
. He had left things in his room and knew that in going to get them he would probably also have to face the music with Guy and Elisabeth. A prospect he did not relish.
Up ahead he saw a car pulled into the parking area at the foot of the track leading up to the
buron
, and as he got nearer he realized that it was Anne Crozes’ Renault Scenic. He drew in behind it and got out of his car, to stand listening in the silence. But all he heard was the ticking of his engine as it began to cool quickly in the cold, and the plaintive calls of the ubiquitous crows echoing around the woods. He checked the driver’s door of the Scenic, but it was locked, and he peered up into the green gloom of the forest. Nothing moved.
He locked his own car and started off up the track. Ten breathless minutes later, he emerged from the darkness on to the open hillside and followed the path to the point where it doubled back, leading up to the plateau. Despite the cold, he was perspiring by the time he got to the top, and breathing hard. A solitary figure stood on the rise above the
buron,
gazing out across the valley to the east. He recognised the tall, thin, figure of Anne Crozes, but she had her back to him, and hadn’t heard him coming. So he stood for a moment, watching her, and catching his breath, before climbing the last few meters.
She turned, startled, at the sound of his approach. What light there was from a sullen sky reflected dully on the tears that wet her cheeks. When she realized who it was, momentary fear turned to resignation and she hurriedly used the flats of her palms to wipe her cheeks dry. He stopped a little short of her, and they stood staring at each other in the unaccustomed still and silence of the plateau. The cold wrapped itself around them like icy fingers.
“You know the police are looking for you?” he said.
She nodded. “Georges called me on my cell.” She searched his face. “I guess that means you know, then.” It wasn’t a question.
“We know that you arranged by text to meet him here on the day he died. Which puts you in the frame for his murder, Anne, especially since he had ended your affair just a matter of days before.”
The tears came again. Silently. “I met him that afternoon, yes.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have. I loved him. I still do. And I always will.”
“Why did he break it off with you?”
She bit her lower lip, pained still by some distant, haunting memory. “He said we had no future.”
“Did he say why?”
“Not in so many words, no. He’d been behaving so strangely in those last weeks. He’d always been so much fun, but it was like it had all just been some kind of front he’d put on for me. Then the mask slipped, and he was this morose, unhappy creature. I hardly recognised him.”
“Why did you want to meet him that day?”
“I thought if I could talk to him. Just sit him down and talk to him. Maybe he would open up, maybe he would tell me what was wrong, what it was that troubled him so much. And that if he did, I could win him back.”
“And did he? Open up to you, I mean.”
She shook her head disconsolately. “He was like a closed book. I couldn’t read him, I couldn’t get near him.” She looked at Enzo with a sad plea for understanding in her eyes. “He seemed manic that afternoon. I’d never seen him behave so strangely. He’d been depressed before, but this time it verged almost on madness. A bizarre kind of elation. Like there was no way out but he didn’t care any more. I knew he had gambling debts. I had no idea how much. But occasionally he would let things slip, and I would get a glimpse of a man I hardly knew. A man driven by something beyond his control. I think, in a way, that’s really why he broke up with me. He didn’t want me to see that man, and I don’t think he could hide him any longer.” She drew a long, trembling breath. “I had been so sure he believed he was going to lose the
auberge
. But he just stood there with a fire burning in his eyes, as if he had somehow risen above it, and it no longer mattered.”
“Had he told you he feared to lose the hotel?”
“Not in so many words. It was just bits and pieces of things he said. Like disparate parts of a jigsaw. I was desperately trying to put them together.”
“And do you think you got an accurate picture?”
“I think I got the picture of a man at the end of his rope. And the speculation about Michelin taking away his third star just seemed to tip him over the edge.”
Enzo looked at her intently, a sense of everything he had learned about the dead man coming together in Anne Crozes’ words. In the picture she was painting of a lost soul in search of redemption. “Do you think he was suicidal?”
“I had feared it, yes. He’d been so low. And he stood there that day in the entrance to the
buron
, tears streaming down his face like a baby, though to this day I’m not sure why.” Her own tears returned. “But to me, he really was just a child. A little boy lost.”
Perhaps, Enzo thought, the child she’d never had with Georges. Maybe Marc had aroused the mother in her as much as the lover.
“It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he’d killed himself, monsieur. But murder!” He saw the anguish in her eyes as she caught and held him in her gaze. “Who would want to kill him? Why would anyone want to do that?”
And in that moment, Enzo thought that perhaps he knew exactly why.
