Dial M for Merde (28 page)

‘There's no visit,' he shouted.

‘No, we're not tourists,' I answered.

‘It's private property.' He rolled his Rs and pronounced every bit of every syllable. His was the strongest southern accent I'd heard so far.

‘Yes,' I agreed, ‘we know.'

‘There's no visit,' he repeated, as if I was deaf. He walked right up to me, and came to breathe horsily in my face. Or my chest, anyway. He was a little barrel of a man, about sixty years old, red-faced and red-eyed. The only thing preventing him from coming any closer was his stomach, which stuck out above a thick belt and held him at bay. I saw now that his bulging black shirt was in fact white, with a crowded motif of tiny black bulls. He was eyeing me as though I was an Apache walking into his saloon.

‘We have come for the wedding,' I said.

‘What wedding? There's no wedding.'

‘Hasn't Madame Bonnepoire called you?'

‘Madame Bonnepoire?' He looked doubly suspicious now. I was not just an intrusive tourist. I knew things about the family.

‘Yes, Bonne Maman,' I said, and he blanched. Like Moo-Moo, he clearly thought the use of the nickname was blasphemous. ‘Valéry will marry here on Saturday,' I added quickly. ‘I am the traitor, er, caterer. I would like to look and see where we can have the barbecue, the place for the tables, everything.'

The cowboy shook his head.

‘It is new news,' I said. ‘Ask Bonne – er, Madame Bonnepoire.'

He puffed like a bull about to charge. ‘Madame tells me everything. If she has not told me there is a wedding, there's no wedding.'

Time for a diplomatic change of tack, I thought.

‘You must be the guardian of the chateau,' I said. ‘So I
understand your, er …' I didn't know how to say caution, but it didn't matter, because he was puffing even louder.

‘I'm not a guardian. I'm a guardian,' he said, somewhat confusingly.

‘Ah.'

‘You understand?'

‘Yes. Er, no.'

‘I'm a guardian.'

‘Right.'

‘You understand?'

‘No, not yet.'

‘You don't understand anything, do you?' He called me
tu,
as if I was one of the lizards peeking out at us from behind the plant pots.

M stepped up to save the day.

‘He's not a
gardee-an
, a concierge,' she explained. ‘He's a
gardee-on
, a Camargue cowboy.'

So it was an accent thing.

‘Biyeng, biyeng,' he congratulated M. ‘You understand now?' he asked me, his mouth still only a few inches below my chin.

‘Yes, I understand,' I said. ‘Now can we look at the chateau, please?'

‘Non, foutez le kang,' he said, the local way of telling us to get lost.

It was my own fault. I should have asked Bonne Maman to call the guy and set him straight.

‘Well, can you recommend a good hotel?' I asked him.

‘What do you take me for, the tourist office? A travel agency? The chamber of commerce?' He herded us to the car, savouring every word of his parting speech. He was still listing possible sources of hotel information as we drove
back towards the road. I just wished he could have recited the phone numbers as well.

 

We headed towards Saintes Maries de la Mer, the nearest coastal town.

‘That's where the commando told me he'd seen a sturgeon,' I reminded M.

‘Yeah.' She didn't seem especially excited.

‘Will you be going out to have a scout around?'

‘Maybe,' she said. Her mind was clearly on bigger fish.

Only a few clicks down the road, we found a hotel. It was a typical Camargue place, a huddle of low white buildings on an oasis of solid ground in the marshes. The driveway was a ribbon of tarmac between two lakes, and flamingos were wandering around on either side of the track, squeaking and grunting like a gang of impatient parking attendants. They strutted along on their stiff, gaudy-pink legs, their long necks hoovering up food from the inch-deep water. As we passed, one of them flapped its wings, showing a sudden flash of black and blood-red.

Behind the main hacienda-style building, there was a horse-training enclosure, and a faint whiff of dung was blowing across the car park. I was afraid that we were in for another cowboy-style welcome, but the guy at reception was incredibly pleasant, and said he had a perfect little room looking out across the nature reserve.

‘The flamingos will be your alarm clock,' he said.

‘We won't need one.' M laughed, and I was reminded that in the past, she had been my wake-up call, climbing on board for one of her dawn quickies.

Our simple, whitewashed room was in one of the outbuildings. Its windows faced out across an unbroken expanse of grassy banks and sea-blue lake.

‘You can walk for miles out there,' the hotel owner said. ‘Right up to the main road or down to the sea. When I was a boy we used to go out and hide in the marshes, and no one would ever find us.'

‘It's perfect.' M was gazing thoughtfully at the horizon.

Too damn perfect, I thought. I was making the business of assassination all too easy. Not only had I given her the President on a plate, I'd done it in the middle of a perfect getaway zone. He was going to be a sitting flamingo.

3

Since arriving at the Camargue ranch hotel, M and I had made love twice.

The previous evening, it had been a kind of consolation shag, like the last time before you break up, an intense flash of closeness and emotion before you start trying your best to be indifferent. I got the feeling that we were both doing it to relieve our stresses, too, plunging ourselves into physical sensation to forget the mental complications.

That, in any case, was how I interpreted M's noisy, Tour-de-France-style wake-up quickie this morning. My body was an exercise bike, and she pedalled herself – and me – to exhaustion. We didn't use her new dolphin, I must stress. It stayed in her toilet bag. I fished it out while I was brushing my teeth, and couldn't resist giving its tail a twist so that it started its manic headbanging.

‘Hey!' M called out from the bed.

‘Sorry, sorry.' It was like when I'd touched her laptop that time. She really hated people meddling with her things. I switched it off and put it back in the bag. As I did so, I saw a small brown bottle in there. It looked as though
she'd bought some flavoured oil from the sex shop, to go with the vibrator. I was tempted to open the bottle and sniff. If it was a tropical flavour, I thought I might annoy M by asking her whether she shouldn't have bought something with a smaller carbon footprint.

She barged into the bathroom, a bundle of (literally) naked anger.

‘Paul, please!' She reached out, grabbed the little brown bottle and her toilet bag and took them into the bedroom.

Not a good time to make a joke about eco-friendly sex oil, I decided.

 

The wedding arrangements suddenly gathered momentum, and I started to feel like a novice water-skier. I was constantly on the brink of disaster, but if I slowed down I would sink.

I had a long, absurd conversation with a furniture-hire company. They couldn't understand why I needed to see close-up photos of their table-legs before I would agree to the hire. In the end I had to play things the French way and tell the woman I had ‘une cliente chiante' – a customer who was as annoying as shit. This she understood, and sent me photos of some perfect, snooty-legged tables. Now all I had to do was hope they arrived in time.

I had a much shorter, but equally absurd, conversation with Jean-Marie, who was livid about the sudden doubling of the guest list. He wanted me to call Bonne Maman and ask how many kids there would be, so he could reduce the amount of food accordingly. Sure, I told him, and I'll ask if any of the nuns in the family have taken a vow of starvation.

Back at the tea room, Benoit was infuriatingly calm. He
talked me through the latest attempt at my fig pièce montée. I could almost feel the caramel hardening in real time as he spoke. Well, did it bloody work or didn't it, I wanted to scream, but he just kept on saying, Wait, wait, before describing the next step in the process.

At last, after ten tooth-grindingly slow minutes, he ended the suspense. It had worked. The tiny kitchen at the tea room was home to a metre-high mound of caramelized figs that was too big and wide to get up the winding stairs to street level. He would have to dig a tunnel to get it out.

Before he could go and buy a pneumatic drill, I told him not to worry. He should just get himself and Gilles the cook down here, and pick up some figs on the way. They could make a new pièce montée at the chateau.

Valéry resurfaced, like a dolphin coming up for air before diving back down into a drug-infused sea. He seemed to have been thrown into a total panic by the idea that his wedding was actually going ahead, and that he might, for the first time in his and probably anyone's life, be about to win a battle against his tyrannical granny.

He phoned me from his car. He was driving to Marseille to pick Elodie up from the station. But I was afraid he'd never get there. He had plugged his iPod into the car radio and wanted to play snatches of music for me. He seemed to think that as well as getting married, he'd also have time to DJ at his reception.

Between each burst of disco, chanson française and horrific vintage French rock 'n' roll – and the accompanying hoots of the drivers around him as he took his eyes off the road – I tried to tell him to forget it and book a professional, but he just whooped and told me to ‘check out this', and put on another song. In the end, I lost my temper. I yelled at him to hire a DJ and tell the guy to cue up at least
one waltz to start the evening, because Elodie had been practising.

‘One what? Wulss?' he chirruped.

‘A waltz. Une valse!' I shouted.

There was a screech of brakes, a frantic hooting, and he rang off.

I didn't have time to call back and see if he'd survived. I'd find out when – if – he turned up at the chateau with Elodie.

Apart from the spat about the toilet bag, things with M were relatively peaceful. In a matter of days, we'd gone from box-fresh love to adulterous suspicion to reconciliation, and now we were like middle-aged, long-term marrieds who hardly bothered talk to each other.

During one of my marathon phone sessions, she announced that she was going for a walk. It was only when I noticed the breeze that I saw she'd gone out the window, straight into the marshes. She was striding purposefully along a track towards the main road and the chateau, her small laptop backpack swinging from one shoulder.

I went to the wardrobe and looked down at her soft kit bag. The padlock was on it, but that didn't stop me having a feel. Without pulling the bag out of its nesting place, I probed and prodded like a pianist looking for the right chord. And yes, I could feel the hard outline of her laptop in there amongst the clothes. I remembered what Léanne had said about the money taking up so little room. M was probably carrying it with her now. To hide it or deliver it?

I called Léanne and told her about this new development. She said that M was being watched from the road, and begged me not to go arousing suspicion by following her.

‘We still do not see any sign of the man she will meet,' she said. ‘He is not here yet. You must not fry her.'

‘Fry her?'

‘
Effrayer
.'

‘Frighten. No, I don't intend to frighten her away.' Though I wished I could.

Léanne told me that Bonne Maman had arrived, and that I should go and visit the chateau. Her men were having to keep a low profile, and she wanted me to make a list of all the entrances to the main house and the outbuildings.

‘Bon courage,' she told me. It's what French people say before someone does something unpleasant like go to the dentist or host a birthday party for fifty kids with attention-deficit disorder. What I was doing felt like a mix of the two.

 

‘Chateau? Chateau? It is not a chateau, Monsieur, it is a gentilhommière.'

I'd made the mistake of trying to compliment Bonne Maman on the beauty and size of her house, and been put in my place yet again. I'd never realized there were so many nuances of French chateau-ness. It was as bad as their business with vous and tu, and when to say the ‘de' before Bonnepoire. Nothing in France was ever simple.

‘It is the home of a gentleman,' Bonne Maman went on. ‘In this case, my dear, late husband.' She held out a pale hand towards the portrait hanging in the hall. It was a painting of a white-haired guy in a dark suit. He was sitting on a velvet armchair with a brown speckled dog at his feet, both of them looking very pleased with life. In fact, Valéry's granddad looked like quite a mischievous old bloke, and probably gave the servant girls the runaround. He was even
giving the eye to the painting on the opposite wall, an ornately framed picture of the Virgin Mary, who bore a suspicious resemblance to Bonne Maman herself.

She was showing M and myself around the house, giving us a rundown of where she wanted various things to happen.

I had intended to drive over alone, but on my way I'd come across M walking by the roadside. I'd waved hello, not planning to stop, but she'd flagged me down and climbed into the passenger seat. She was obviously keen to have a snoop around inside the chateau, and I'd dished up the opportunity on a plate. Not a good move.

The salon, Bonne Maman said, was where she would receive the President. No one else was to be allowed in here.

This news appeared to interest M a lot, and she went over to the window as if to inspect the thickness of the glass. I could imagine it shattering into the President's eyes as a bullet crashed through. I'd have to tell Léanne not to let him admire the view.

‘Can we see the kitchens?' I asked.

‘Of course.' Bonne Maman led us into the corridor again, and past a gigantic carved staircase. Lodged beneath it was a wire-fronted, wardrobe-like gun cabinet, stocked with half a dozen rusting old shotguns. No danger to the President there, I thought. Pull the trigger on one of those and you'd probably lose your face.