Dial M for Merde (25 page)

We were in a restaurant one street in from the Vieux Port. Sitting at our corner table, guzzling an over-pink Côtes de Provence while we waited for our entrées, both M and I must have seemed uncannily carefree.

M was chatty, telling me that she'd spent most of the afternoon cycling around the city, puffing up hills and getting hooted at. As she spoke, I was sure – well, almost – that she was watching me for signs that I might have doubts about what she'd really been up to.

I was being equally breezy, telling her all the stuff about the Bonnepoires that I hadn't dared to mention in front of
Elodie, and scrutinizing her for any hint that she might have seen me following her that afternoon.

Early on in the meal, I realized I'd made a mistake when I ordered a bouillabaisse, Marseille's trademark stew. I'd only done it so that I'd be able to tell M the story of mispronouncing the name. The thing is, a real bouillabaisse should contain three or four types of local fish, caught and served the same day. A good one costs a fortune. And mine was the main dish in a very cheap three-course menu. It was basically a lumpy, none-too-fresh fish soup. I poked at a doughy potato, and tried to raise my spirits by picturing the fresh food I was planning to serve at Elodie's wedding.

‘I wonder how Benoit's getting on with my fig pièce montée,' I said.

‘Why don't you call him and ask?' M said.

Naturally, as we were in mutual-suspicion mode, I wondered why she'd suggested this.

‘In the middle of dinner?' I said. ‘I'm way too polite.'

‘But if you're really worried about the wedding, you should call. You're obviously worried about something.' She gave me a bright smile, and rubbed the back of my hand as if this would magically cheer me up.

‘I'll call him later,' I said, thinking, Does she want me to phone now so I'll leave the table and she can send someone a text message?

Mutual suspicion had turned me completely paranoid. If this was what it was like to be a full-time adulterer, give me boring old monogamy any day.

 

We wandered back to the hotel through the kind of area that has been sanitized out of existence in Paris. Groups of guys were hanging around, engulfed in aromatic clouds of dope smoke. Women in ultra-short skirts were standing at
the entrance of every dark bar. Very friendly women, too, engaging passing men in chummy banter. One of them, a tall middle-aged lady in PVC thigh boots, was on the phone, commiserating loudly with a friend who'd been arrested, and letting all passers-by know that it was unfair to prevent a woman doing her job of hiring out parts of her body. All this just yards from the main tourist hub.

Our hotel room was small and muggy, so I went to open the window. A rush of traffic noise and café-terrace conversation burst in from below. The view was great, though, straight along the lattice of lights running down each side of the Vieux Port, and away to the floodlit castle.

‘Hey.' M was standing by the bed, her hands on her hips, scanning the furniture.

‘What?'

‘Someone's been in our room.' She looked inside the small wardrobe, and pulled at the padlock on her case.

She was probably right, I thought. One of Léanne's mob had almost certainly been in here looking for the money M had collected from the sex shop. But I couldn't say so. I had to try and imagine what someone would say if they had no idea who might want to search their room.

‘Anything missing?' I asked. Yes, that wasn't bad.

‘I don't know,' M said, and I watched her carefully, wondering whether she might look where she'd hidden the money.

She opened her bag, and seemed satisfied that the lock and the contents hadn't been interfered with. I tried to see what the combination on her padlock was, but she was too far away and I couldn't afford to be obvious.

‘You're not checking your stuff?' she asked.

Damn, I thought. That's exactly what an innocent person would do.

‘Nothing worth stealing in my bag. Not unless you're a dirty T-shirt fetishist.' Blast – had I made it obvious that I knew she'd been in a sex shop? ‘My laptop's in the safe,' I said. ‘Is that OK?'

M opened the safe, the combination of which I'd already given to Léanne. Not that the money was in there. I'd looked.

‘Hmm,' M said, not entirely satisfied.

‘You want me to call reception? Or the police?' I was especially proud of this last idea. No one who was dealing with the police would suggest calling the police, would they?

‘Police, huh,' M said. ‘I thought you read the local papers. Down here they're all crooks, in league with the Mafia.' Which, of course, was exactly what someone who was in league with the Mafia would say. Or someone who
wasn't
in league with the Mafia. Shit, it was all getting too complicated.

‘I need a drink,' I said. ‘Let's go and find a bar.'

‘You want to go out? But I got us a staying-in present.' M was kneeling by her bag, holding up a little golden sachet with a pink ribbon on top.

‘What is it?' Please, I thought, don't let it be what I think it is.

Smiling enigmatically, she tugged at the ribbon and dipped her fingers inside the bag, which rustled as she pulled out a transparent plastic box.

‘Holy shit.' I couldn't stop myself.

‘You know what it is?' She looked disappointed at my reaction.

‘I think so.'

She took it out of the box to give me a better view, and I came face to face with a smiling pink dolphin. She twisted
its tail and it started to buzz, while its little head nodded a manic hello.

‘I thought it would be fun,' she said. ‘They're not just for women, you know.' She was walking towards me, pointing the dolphin at me, and her thin jacket was already slipping off her shoulders. ‘Some men get great pleasure from one of these, you know, if a woman pushes it up—'

‘You're not sticking that fish up my backside,' I told her. ‘It'd traumatize me for life. I'd never feel safe snorkelling again.'

M was suddenly deflated. Her arms fell to her side, and she threw the dolphin on the bed, where it carried on thrashing about as if it wanted to jump off the balcony and into the harbour.

‘You don't fancy me any more, do you, Paul?'

‘Course I do. You're beautiful, you're sexy,' I told her, truthfully. I just couldn't add that I was shit-scared of who she was and who her friends were.

‘But I don't turn you on any more. I practically had to rape you in Bandol.' She looked genuinely sad. ‘Maybe we should call it a day.'

‘Call it a day?'

‘Go our separate ways.'

‘Merde,' I said, failing to act like a guy who loved his girlfriend and didn't want the relationship to end. No, I sounded exactly like a man who has been warned that if he and his girlfriend break up, they are both going to be arrested and thrown in jail.

 

I spent most of the night lying flat on my back, examining the problem from all angles. I had to find a way of staying with M. And I didn't think I was capable of going down on my knees in the morning and singing ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas'.

At about four a.m., I had one moment of frightening lucidity. I was waking from a brief nightmare in which Jean-Marie was boasting about his political connections, and stressing his point by doing unspeakable things to the President, when I had an idea that was either sheer genius or total lunacy. I needed a second opinion. Staring at the ceiling, I waited impatiently for dawn.

As soon as there was a decent amount of light and noise in the street, I snuck out of bed and went downstairs to call Léanne. I left a note for M, saying I'd gone for a coffee. I didn't want her thinking I'd taken her at her word and called it a day.

Out on the waterfront I found a fish market that seemed too authentic to be authentic. It was a single row of around twenty small stands, each one fronted with the registration number of a fishing boat. Sometimes the boat itself was moored at the quay behind the stall, with a fisherman on board mending nets or doing other trawlery stuff

The fishermen looked like gnarled peasants, their hands swollen and their faces wrinkled by years of sun and sea water. And, I guessed, booze to make the long nights go quicker.

The women selling the fish were dressed shapelessly in layers of pullovers and plastic aprons, but they looked decidedly land-bound, with hair-dos dyed blond or the colour of Côte du Rhône wine, like Paris boulangères. All of them were speaking in the strong local accent as they asked their middle-class customers if they wanted their sole and sea bream gutted.

Several of the stalls, I noticed, were selling live fish. Grey sole were flapping, and rougets – red mullet – were gaping in surprise at their human audience. It was hypocritical to be squeamish, but I did feel sorry for the little poissons de
roche – small, colourful aquarium fish, my mates from my snorkelling trips in Collioure and Bendor, who had been kidnapped in the middle of their fancy-dress party. Two stalls had little piles of them, still alive, flapping like M's pink dolphin up in the hotel room. I thought of buying them all and setting them free in the harbour, but they looked exhausted. If I returned them to the polluted harbour water they'd probably lie side-up on the surface and get pecked to death by the seagulls.

I turned away and dialled Léanne's number. She answered quickly and told me to look up at the hotel. It sounded as though she was standing in a wind tunnel.

I did as she said and, Christ, there she was on the roof, repeating the balancing act that I'd seen in Collioure.

‘Be careful,' I told her. ‘M's in the room, asleep. She'll hear you and wake up. She's already suspicious because you searched the room. You did search it, didn't you?'

‘Yes, yes,' she said. ‘Please wait, I will call you in a minute.'

‘But I need to talk to you. M wants us to split—'

‘Monsieur, Monsieur.' An old woman was tugging at my arm. She was wearing a shapeless green cardigan and a bright-red headscarf, and was trying to thrust a bag of lemons in my hand. ‘Des citrons, Monsieur?' she said, and gripped my elbow almost painfully as she pulled me towards her little citrus fruit stall.

‘Non, merci,' I said, but she wouldn't let go.

‘Stop calling Léanne,' she hissed at me. ‘Des oranges, alors?'

I looked closer and my mouth fell open so wide you could have stuck a kilo of lemons in there. It was one of the ghostly gay twins from Collioure. A cop in drag.

‘We think your girlfriend hid the money on the roof. Un
kilo de citrons?' he added for the benefit of an old man buying a headless angler fish from the next stall.

‘So Léanne is going to take it? Er, yes, a kilo, please.'

‘No, she's going to bug the package. If she finds it.' He began choosing lemons and putting them in a flimsy plastic bag.

‘But I must talk to Léanne,' I said. ‘M says that we must separate …'

‘No, no. You must stay with her and follow the money. Anything else, Monsieur?'

‘But if there is this bug in the package, I am not necessary. Non, merci, Monsieur, er, Madame. How much for the lemons?'

‘We still need you to stay with her. What if Léanne can't plant the bug, or if your girlfriend finds it? You must be there. A million euros, please.'

‘
How
much?'

He laughed. ‘You can afford it,' he said. ‘Or your girlfriend can, anyway.'

 

M came down and joined me at the fish market before I had a chance to talk to Léanne again.

‘I saw you getting beaten up by the old lady,' she said. ‘I thought you might need some help. Shall we go and get some coffee?' Behind her jokey tone, I could hear resignation. This was probably going to be our Last Breakfast.

‘Sure.' I steered her away from the lemon seller and towards the sunlit café terraces on the other side of the harbour. If my suspicions were correct, I had only a minute or two before M gave me the ‘You're dumped' speech and set out on her solo career as a money-delivery girl. But I had had an idea. The only problem was that I had no time to ask Léanne if she approved of the
scheme that I'd cooked up while lying awake in the night.

We sat down, ordered two crèmes and croissants from a gruff waiter, and I closed my eyes, turning my face to the sun to get the speech straight.

‘Paul—' M began, her voice heavy.

Merde, I thought, here goes.

‘Hey, guess who I just talked to,' I said, and like a rhetorical Frenchman I didn't give her time to reply. ‘Jean-Marie. And guess what he told me.' Yet again, I left no room for her to interrupt. ‘It's amazing. Not only is the wedding going to take place on the date Elodie and Valéry want, but there's going to be a very special surprise guest. You'll never guess who.' She couldn't have, anyway, because I carried straight on talking. ‘The President.'

‘The President?' She looked gobsmacked.

‘Yes, Jean-Marie talked to him, and because the President's, you know, a friend of the family, he had a word with the old bitch grand-mère.' Slow down, I told myself. I was gabbling, getting the lies out as fast as possible in an attempt to make them sound convincing. ‘And at first she said that the date had to change, but then the President said he was going to be down in the Camargue next weekend – on a secret visit,' I added, in case M and her chums had plotted the President's known movements. ‘And when he told her he was going to come along to the wedding in person, she had to give in, even though it means Valéry will be getting married on the day before his birthday.'

‘So the President will be there, in the Bonnepoires' chateau?' M asked, apparently testing the story for freshness.

‘Yes.'

She thought about this.

‘Wow,' she eventually said. ‘So when is it?'

‘Saturday. Four days' time.'