Jacquot and the Waterman (19 page)

By the time Jacquot got back home on the Moulin's hill,
Madame Foraque's door was closed, no light coming
through the panels of coloured glass.

Monday, he realised. The weekly card game over at her
brother's. Which was a relief. He didn't fancy a repeat of

her observations and opinions on the subject of Boni, even
if she wasn't far off the truth.

Up in their apartment - his apartment now - Jacquot
pulled the rubber band from his hair, stripped off his
clothes and fell onto the bed. Their bed. In a few moments
he was sleeping deeply, and alone.

Tuesday

R
esting the backs of his thighs against the cream
leather trim of the skippers chair, Pamuk eased back
on the Ferrettis throttles and the seventeen-metre cruiser
buried her bow into the inky blue Mediterranean. As he
steered her into the wind, a low chop slapped against the
hull and the sound of her twin engines dropped to a chesty
rumble. Pamuk knew this stretch of coastline like the back
of his hand, but he cross-checked their position on the
chart display and glanced at the echo sounder - it was
shallow enough to anchor if they had to.

Leaning over the wheel, he reached for a pair of
binoculars and scanned the horizon - a few distant sails
taking advantage of the blow around Calseraigne and the
lie de Riou, the ladened bulk of a container ship heading
west past Cap Croisette, and an incoming Tunis Line ferry
shivering in the heat off the water. Then he turned and
trained the glasses on the scrubby headlands of pine and
glaring white limestone that rose up not two hundred
metres off his starboard side. Satisfied, Pamuk put down
the glasses, reached for the phone cradled on the dashboard and called down to the master cabin to let Monsieur
Basquet know they'd arrived.

There were only the two of them aboard.

Pamuk had arrived at the
Vallée des Eaux
berth in the
Vieux Port at six-thirty that morning, at about the same
time that the fishermen's wives were setting out their
stalls on the Quai des Beiges. Genevieve, Monsieur
Basquet's assistant, had called the evening before to
schedule the trip. By the time Monsieur Basquet boarded
at eight-forty-five the tanks were full, the air-conditioning
set low and the engines warming at a purr over eight
hundred revs.

Pamuk had brought with him a bag of fresh croissants
and chocolate brioches from Joliane's, and some fruit
and dates from the Capucins market. Down in the
galley, the fruit had been juiced to Monsieur Basquet's
specifications, the Blue Mountain coffee had been brewing since eight-forty, and the saloon TV was tuned to
CNN. Pamuk had also stopped off at the
tabac
on the
corner of Pytheas to buy a small tin of Lajaunie's
cachou
pastilles. They were Monsieur's favourite brand, but he
was always forgetting where he'd put them, leaving them
places. Pamuk made sure he carried a fresh supply just
in case.

The
Vallée des Eaux
may have been a splinter over fifty
feet but she handled like a dream. You could berth and tie
her up single-handed if you had to, and set off the same
way. Five minutes after Monsieur Basquet disappeared
below deck they were cruising down the channel alongside
the Rive Neuve quay and drawing looks before heading
out to sea between the twin forts of St Jean and St Nicolas.
Now, twenty minutes later, they drifted gently some six
kilometres west of Cassis, the idling engines a soft rumble
somewhere aft.

'You see anyone?' asked Basquet, coming up onto the
bridge and looking around.

'Nothing, Skip,' replied Pamuk, playing the wheel,
glancing across at his employer. Heftily built, in his late
fifties, with a crop of grey hair bristling over a tanned skull,
Basquet had a short, muscly neck, a fat, shiny face and
small button ears. He'd come aboard wearing a silk two-
piece suit that caught the light and a well-buffed pair of
lace-up brogues, but had changed below deck into shorts,
a polo shirt and leather espadrilles. A gold chain and cross
hung from the roll of his neck and a diamond Rolex
sparkled on his wrist. He wore mirrored sunglasses and
carried a mug of coffee which slopped messily over the
deck when the Ferretti swung through a larger than
average chop.

Apart from the Rolex, Paul Basquet looked like any
middle-aged tourist waiting for a table at a Prado beach
club. But Pamuk knew better than to be fooled by appearances. The man beside him was certainly no tourist.
Monsieur Basquet was one of the region's most prominent
businessmen, a property developer who'd turned large
stretches of the coastline into a country-club fairway of
pantiled villas, swimming pools, golf clubs and tennis
courts. And all of it in less than a decade.

Everyone knew the story. For two hundred and fifty
years the Valadeau family that Basquet had married into
had made their money from soap and essential oils. When
his father-in-law died and Monsieur Basquet took over the
running of the company, he'd used that security to underwrite a programme of diversification that had started with
residential and commercial property development in the
centre of town, before spreading out along the coast. It
was said there wasn't a brick laid between Marseilles and
St Raphael that didn't bear the Basquet stamp. And
Pamuk believed it.

Tossing the remains of his coffee over the side, Basquet
hoisted himself onto a seat and leant an elbow over the
rail. Take her in,' he said. 'Let's have a look.'

Gunning the engines, Pamuk turned against the offshore breeze and powered in towards the coast, a craggy
wall of limestone that ran from Montredon, a little east of
Marseilles, to the outskirts of Cassis, its desolate, thirty-
mile length cut with narrow, fjord-like
calanques.
It was
the mouth of one of these, maybe fifty metres across, that
now opened up ahead of the Ferretti's prow. Passing
between the headlands that guarded its entrance, the chop
flattened and Pamuk reduced speed, letting the cruiser
chortle along between the bluffs, the sound of its engines
growling off the stony sides of the inlet.

Beside him, Basquet looked to port and starboard, the
sloping sides of the inlet rising a hundred metres above
them. Slim, twisted pines and bursts of golden mimosa
clung to its rocky skirts, their roots trailing out for a
precarious grip on the stony soil. At a little past ten in the
morning it was already hot, the sun climbing high above
the canyon rim, warming the deck beneath their feet and
the handrail that Basquet gripped.

One day soon, thought Basquet, this stretch of water
will be the most sought-after address on the coast, nothing
to compare with it between Marseilles and the Italian
border. A dozen sumptuous villas cantilevered into the
sides of the
calanque,
each with its own wrap-around
terracing and private dock, the peculiar geography of this
twisting inlet ensuring that no two villas were in sight of
one another. Complete privacy. Basquet could see the
properties now, superimposed onto the slopes and bluffs
that rose around him: the mahogany decking under low
pantiled roofs, Jacuzzis and glass walls, each estate connected by roped pathway to its private jetty and headland
terrace.