French Fried (10 page)

“Maybe you put out a pheromone that dogs like,” said Sylvie, looking puzzled.

“You mean I
smell
like a dog?”

“Well, he’s friendly, but he doesn’t usually take immediately to strange women. And that pleading look he’s giving you. As if he expects you to . . . You fed him the sausage, didn’t you?” she asked accusingly.

Caught in the act.
“I’m sorry, Sylvie. I hope it didn’t make him sick.”

“Of course it didn’t.” Sylvie burst out laughing. “No wonder he loves you. He probably thinks you’ll be a source of sausage forever, but why would you give him your—”

“I just couldn’t face eating brains,” I admitted shamefacedly.

“No one puts brains in Cervales de Lyon anymore. Once they did, but now—you should have said something.” Then she turned to the chairman’s wife, still sitting in the front seat. “Victoire, it seems that Carolyn has bewitched my dog with sausage. Either we’ll have to take your car, or you’ll have to sit in back with the cameras. For some reason, Winston Churchill throws up if we put him in back, and we can’t let him vomit on our guest.”

Looking quite grim, Victoire swung her long legs out and managed to squeeze herself crossways into the back. Then the dog and I settled down, and off we went to visit the traboules, while he looked up at me soulfully, waiting for more sausage. When it didn’t materialize, he went to sleep.

We only had to stop for repairs twice. A spoke needed replacement on one wheel, and then the car stalled at a busy traffic light. We gained quite an audience of young men to watch both repairs. Victoire stayed inside each time trying to restore order to her hair. Knowing what to expect, I had simply taken the scarf that tied my hair back and tied it under my chin.

When we arrived at our destination, Old Lyon, and set out on foot, I became nervous again and watched every black car on the street as if Albertine might be behind the wheel, unless, of course, the chairman, who knew where we were going, had followed us. But his wife would surely recognize him and the family car. No, he wouldn’t take that chance. Would he? Maybe Laurent wanted to run
her
down, too, because of her affair with Robert, whom he had managed to poison with the fugu toxin.

“You know what I’d like to have for lunch,” I said impulsively. “Japanese food.” If there was a local source of fugu, I needed to find it. “Do you have Japanese restaurants?”

“Madam Blue,” said Victoire in a long-suffering voice, “one does not come to Lyon, a city known for its French cuisine, and ask to eat at a Japanese establishment.”

“I don’t think there is one,” added Sylvie.

“And if there were, I certainly would not want to patronize it,” said Victoire.

Another dead end
, I thought. I’d have to search the Lyon telephone book. It had occurred to me that Madam Laurent could be lying about her appointments yesterday. What if she had rented a black car and used it to attack my husband, and before that had poisoned the pâté and sent it to our room. Having poisoned her own lover by mistake, she would be furious with both of us, as well as unwilling to admit knowing a source of tetrodotoxin. But that didn’t explain why she’d send the poisoned pâté in the first place. Her lover was still alive, not dying on my bed, before the poison was added to the pâté and sent to us.

Victoire gave us
the shortest possible history of Lyon: It had been a Roman city, Lugdunum; then a Christian city, ruled by the church in the Middle Ages; and after that a city of trade, finance, and manufacture in the Renaissance when Old Lyon came into its own. “The Renaissance Association has been restoring the buildings and preserving them since 1947,” said Victoire. “Many have been turned into public housing, and some were privately purchased and restored with the help of the city. Catherine has a place here, although why she would want to live among lower-class neighbors is a puzzle.”

“Because she’s descended from Florentine bankers, who came here when they couldn’t compete with the Medicis in Florence,” said Sylvie, while her dog made forays of friendship toward passing canines.

“Yes, of course,” said Victoire. “Much of the architecture is Italianate. Shall we enter a traboule?”

Actually, I hoped to see more than one and wondered if the tour would be as short as the history lesson. I could have provided that much history myself. We ducked into a narrow archway and began. The traboules were delightful, a world unto themselves, sometimes narrow and dark before we’d burst into a courtyard with balconies soaring above our heads and pots of flowers draping over the metalwork, reminding me of the falling flowerpot in Paris that almost hit me and did hit a fellow tourist, although he deserved it.

There were gorgeous circular stairways curving up from floor to floor with twisted marble sides that reminded me of Gaudi buildings in Barcelona or wrought-iron railings on stairs and balconies reminiscent of those in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In some courtyards we’d see arches holding up ornate windowed tiers rising toward the light. And a lovely rose tower with large windows climbing around and upward to the top floor. Some traboules had long inner flights of stone stairs that lead past residences on either side to a street at a higher level. In one place I saw a rugged well, over which a shell-carved ceiling supported the upper reaches of the building. These interior walkways were shabby or lovely or eerie, but all fascinating, and Victoire walked at a fast clip and told us nothing about any of them.

Sniffing into every ancient corner, Winston Churchill tugged so often on his leash that I often had to call out so I wouldn’t be left behind. Sylvie, of course, was taking pictures of everything from door knockers—Winnie tended to bark at the ones with lions’ heads—to stairs, to the three of us, although Victoire was reluctant to be photographed for the same reason I had been yesterday: windblown hair. I began to resent the fact that Sylvie got to take all the pictures, while I, encumbered with her rambunctious dog, got to take none. I’d have to buy a book or postcards if I wanted remembrances of the traboules.

I also wondered how Sylvie, who had ignored the advice on wearing low-heeled shoes, managed to keep up. The pavement and cobblestones were rough, and Sylvie was wearing very high heels. Victoire remarked in an undertone that Sylvie would develop those “unsightly lumps” on her feet before she turned forty. I, on the other hand, was more worried about dangers in the present. I thought it a wonder that Sylvie didn’t break her ankle, but she didn’t even watch her footing, whereas I had to watch my step, the dog, and the scenery as I was dragged along.

Eventually we emerged in front of a church that I’d love to have visited, but Victoire assured me, rather sarcastically, that Gabrielle could be counted on to show me every church of note in the city. Perhaps Victoire was one of the nonreligious French. I’ve heard there are many. And after all, the French Revolution had been antichurch and destroyed all sorts of wonderful things.

“Now if you two wish to look for a Japanese restaurant, I’ll just take a cab home,” said Victoire.

Remembering that I needed to track down sources of puffer fish, I said that jet lag was catching up with me, because of which I wouldn’t mind returning to the hotel.

“What, no one wants to have lunch?” cried Sylvie. Winston Churchill looked disappointed, too. No doubt he’d expected another under-the-table feast with me as caterer.

 

So I still have the same suspects,
I thought as I took the elevator to my room,
the Guillots and the Laurents.
I kicked off my shoes and located the Lyon phone book, but then I felt hungry and glanced at my watch—after one. I called room service for a salad, reminding myself that last night’s dinner must have been high cal. Surely a chicken so tasty was full of fat and cholesterol.

Then I began to scan the business listings. I had no problem finding the restaurant section, but telling Japanese restaurants from non-Japanese was difficult because the restaurant names were in French. I was trying the Internet for French translations of Japanese foods, like fugu, when my salad arrived.

After lunch, I connected with what I took to be two Chinese restaurants, three Vietnamese restaurants, and one Korean establishment. At the Vietnamese restaurants they spoke French and Vietnamese. At the Korean restaurant the owner spoke English and gave me a lecture on Japanese depredations in Korea. I gathered that some now-deceased relative of his had been kidnapped as a sex slave. At any rate, he served no Japanese dishes and thought people who ate fugu were—I didn’t actually catch what such people were, but it sounded bad.

He offered me a reservation, but I didn’t want that; I wanted to find out where our enemy had bought the fugu, and the Korean proprietor couldn’t name any wholesaler that carried such a dangerous item. I think at one of the Chinese restaurants I got a lecture on the rape of Nanking by the evil Japanese Empire, and the man to whom I was speaking claimed never to have heard of fugu and warned me that Japanese food was bad for the digestion.

Then finally I had a stroke of inspiration. I would call the Japanese consulate. There had to be one here in Lyon, which was a large, business-oriented city. For that number, I called the desk, got the helpful Simone, and mentioned that we were looking for a Japanese restaurant.

“There are none,” she replied, astonished. “Even the Japanese tourists and businessmen eat Lyonnais food here in Lyon.”

“But what if a Japanese businessman yearns for the food of his native country? He would call his consulate for help, wouldn’t he?”

Reluctantly Simone got me that number, and I called, waiting twenty minutes for an English speaker to come on the line. “My husband and I want to eat Japanese food,” I explained. He knew of clubs for Japanese nationals in Lyon, but we could not join one because they were private.

Why didn’t that surprise me? I remember reading that, when the Olympics were held in Japan, many restaurants closed so they wouldn’t have to deal with Westerners. “Then perhaps you can tell me where we can buy fugu, that delicious fish that only the Japanese can prepare.”

He agreed that only Japanese could prepare fugu, and I could not. Therefore, I shouldn’t even think of buying it. “But my husband and I—” He interrupted me to say that fugu was not available in Lyon and hung up.

So how had the pâté poisoner got hold of fugu? The only answer was that Dr. Petit had failed to identify what had killed Robert. I called Inspector Roux to pass on the news, and he admitted sadly he was making little headway in finding out how or why the professor had died, but he assured me that the case was still open and he would contact me if he had news. I, in turn, gave him the name of the hotel in Avignon where we would be staying.

Not my most promising afternoon of investigation. I snuggled down on the bed to think about the attempts on our lives and fell asleep until my husband called to tell me that he had made it safely through the day, and that we were going to dinner with Catherine de Firenze and several faculty members I had not yet met, people who would pick me up at the hotel instead of expecting me to make my way by cab to another restaurant.

“Do any of these people seem to dislike you?” I asked Jason.

“Actually, I’m finding the Southern French very pleasant,” Jason replied.

“Yes, yes,” I agreed, “but does it seem that any of those we’re eating dinner with tonight might be harboring a grudge. For instance, have you had any arguments about toxins?”

“Carolyn, scientists don’t kill each other over matters scientific,” said Jason in the long-suffering tone I really hate to hear, especially from my husband.

I took the
elevator to fetch Carolyn while Bertrand and Nicole Fournier rushed off to study the hotel menu. They were both short, thin people, although they had talked of nothing but food since we stopped to pick up Nicole. I have to admit that I was glad they were coming along. The others attending the dinner were Catherine de Firenze and her Norman graduate student, Martin le Blanc, a very tall, muscular young man with a head of bushy red hair. With two such towering dinner companions, I found it something of a relief to recruit a couple shorter than I.

Of course, Carolyn would be delighted to meet the Fourniers, Bertrand with his encyclopedic knowledge of French wines, and Nicole, a gourmet cook who had, according to Bertrand, studied in Paris just so that she could give dinner parties that were the envy of Lyon. Too bad they hadn’t invited us to their house. I shuddered to think what tonight’s culinary adventure would cost me. Both Fourniers had competed to tell me what to order from the menu, all dishes that sounded expensive.

“You must not eat in the restaurant of this hotel, Madam Blue,” cried Nicole, as soon as Carolyn and I stepped off the elevator. “I have looked at their menu, and it is—how would you say?—mundane.”

“With a wine list that has only several entries I could recommend,” added Bertrand. “We are the Fourniers, lovers of fine food and wine, as you are, Madam Blue.” They both embraced my wife and, holding her face in their small hands, kissed her on both cheeks; Carolyn took this greeting with aplomb, although she raised an eyebrow in my direction when she was released.

“We know that Americans like to use baptismal names, so do not stand on ceremony. Call us Bertrand and Nicole,” Bertrand insisted.

“I assume you cook,” said Nicole. “We must exchange recipes. I would have been happy to cook for you, but Bertrand says it is too close to the conference for elaborate dinners. Still, you will love the restaurant. The handling of sauces there is an art in itself. So beautiful, so colorful, so innovative.”

Bertrand went into raptures over the sauces as he helped us into the car, an ancient Peugeot with seats covered in white hair from some animal that did not accompany us, thank God. Nicole insisted on sitting in the backseat with Carolyn so that she could hear about Carolyn’s newspaper column, but Carolyn gave that subject short shrift, saying only that she wrote about food, food history, and restaurants. She then asked Nicole the color of her car. Of course I realized that Carolyn was still searching for the black car that assaulted me. It wasn’t this one, which, whatever color it had once been, was now mottled, but never black.