The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (6 page)

“We? You mean ‘
Oui
’?”

“No, Professor Gaie. I cannot leave you by yourself in a strange hotel.”

“Why that’s mighty nice of you, Agent Gasquet. But you don’t have to trouble yourself on my account. The hotel is not unfamiliar to me. And thank you for remembering my carry-on bag.”

“
Pas de problème
. The hotel though is unfamiliar to me.” He was the one now doing the nettling.

“How did you know which hotel I booked?” She sulked inwardly, and thus opted to make small talk.

“You’re a professional American woman accustomed to certain luxuries. Americans typically overspend on accommodations; there is only one four-star hotel in Cassis, and I am part of the French police.”

She tilted her head sideways and thought about all of his possibly unintended and intended inferences.
High maintenance. Typically American.
She wouldn’t have minded the three-star Hotel Mahogany. She decided not to protest, allowing his misperception to stand. It might be to her advantage later.

They drove off, making a right onto the Routes des Calanques. They passed the crowded beach and tourists having late afternoon refreshments at the cafés and restaurants across the street, zipped up a steep hill and turned left into the car park in front of Les Roches Blanches. It was no more than a five-minute drive from the foundation.

The imposing building had a stone façade covered in leafy sprawling green vines. The hotel’s name, The White Rocks, suited the place, given the white Cassis stone peaking out from every possible vista. The surrounding grounds were made of cascading, multileveled stone terraces covered with pine trees, potted palms, and flowering gardens. At the hotel’s perimeter, fronting the Bay of Cassis, were steps that led down to beds of large white rocks where the hotel’s clients could sunbathe and then dive directly into the sea just below.

She rushed out of the car and reached for her bag in the back seat. Gasquet nabbed it just out of her reach and then moved quickly to her side of the car. He turned, putting his hand on her elbow and leaned into her ear. She got a faint whiff of something spicy, but floral.

He whispered discreetly, “You may call me Thierry. We are old friends on vacation together, Havilah. Remember that. I will see about the reservations and then check out your room. Please don’t wander off in search of an out-of-the-way bathroom or talk to strangers.”

Before she could respond, he guided her into the lobby.
He did say ‘rooms’ at least
. She exhaled.

“Don’t go too far, Havilah,” he said over his shoulder.

“Wouldn’t think of it, Thierry.”

She had decided to take a stroll by the infinity pool. She took off her shoes and sat down on one of the pool chairs. The view was spectacular. The Mediterranean, the Cassis bay and harbor, the Cap Canaille. They were all there for the taking in. The sun was streaking across the sea, leaving splashes of cerulean and brandeis blue and ultramarine. Cassis was quite warm. The weather was perfect for eating on the hotel’s terraces. Just as she took out her sunglasses, a server appeared.

“
Voulez-vous quelque chose à boire
?” he asked.

“
De l’eau pétillante, s’il vous plait
.”

“
Perrier, Badoit, ou San Pellegrino
?”

“
Un Badoit. Et une salade niçoise, si c’est possible, s’il vous plait
.”

She realized she was famished. She looked at her watch. She knew she was past the bewitching hour when French kitchens closed until dinner. It was 3:15. She hadn’t eaten since the early breakfast of a
pain chocolat
, orange juice, and a hot chocolate. Crashing from the carbs, adrenaline was the only thing sustaining her. So she gave him her best pretty please smile and a wink for the cause. That always seemed to work with French men. He’d think she was easy, which was also typical of French men.
To hell with it. I’m hungry.

She could overhear Gasquet at the reception. He had asked to see Havilah’s room. The svelte young blonde graciously and coquettishly obliged to escort him there.

* * *

As the agent had expected, the professor had reserved herself a junior suite with a private balcony with views that rivaled those by the hotel’s pool. The large bed had a white matelassé coverlet with bed skirt and pillows of the same fabric. The room’s chairs were covered in the whitest muslin. Except for the splashes of color from the silk red, gold, and green pillows, silk damask curtains, and a Persian rug that left parts of the hardwood floor exposed, the room was awash in whites, which made it seem brighter and larger. It was scented with a mix of lavender and vanilla.

The room flirted with contemporary furnishings while incorporating Orientalist touches. Such was the attention to the minutest of details for certain effects it reminded him of something out of an Alexandre Dumas novel. He then scanned the very contemporary large white-tiled bathroom. Thierry Gasquet liked nineteenth-century French literature. He realized such predilections could be perceived as incongruent with his profession. But those were the only French novels his mother brought with her that first summer when she decided to leave a position as a professor of literature at the Sorbonne to follow his father to the family villa in Essaouira. His father’s father was ill.

Gasquet was descended from a line of French-Moroccan liaisons. Beautiful, educated French women left France to follow dark, handsome, educated men from well-to-do Roman Catholic Moroccan families to the white-walled North African province on the Atlantic coast. It began with a promising French-Moroccan doctor, his great grandfather, and ended with a high financier— his father.

The family moved back and forth between these two worlds. The children were without fail born and educated in France. Much to his father’s chagrin, after Thierry completed his
baccalauréat
at a French-English bilingual school in Paris and earned an advanced degree at the requisite elite
grande école
, he traveled to London and New York for three years to further perfect his English. When he returned, he chose to become a high-level civil servant.

Thierry’s subsequent fluency in English, French, and Arabic, his prestigious education and training with the French national police, landed him in an elite division of the police. He was part of the Groupe de Sécurité de la Présidence de la République, the unit that had direct access to the Élysée Palace and protected the President of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy. And he usually accompanied the prime minister and the minister of interior on their trips to English-speaking countries. His father had arranged for him a prestigious office post as head of the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, the French equivalent of the CIA, where he would have delegated fieldwork to agents. He preferred to be in the field.

Since he had insisted on living in Paris and also refused to pursue the decidedly lucrative and discreet family professions of law and business, for the sake of the family’s standing, his father requested that he at the very least keep up an apartment in the
bon chic, bon genre
, or “bcbg” as it was commonly called, sixteenth arrondissement. His father had had after all a membership at an exclusive, but well hidden club on the very top floor of a building overlooking the Avenue des Champs-Élysées where wealthy conservatives dined, played board games, and met their mistresses. Bernal and Anne Gasquet lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy suburb of Paris. He couldn’t have his son living some bourgeois bohemian lifestyle in the ‘hot property’ sixth arrondissement. He wanted him to settle down with a wife and children in a respectable Paris neighborhood.

Thierry compromised only because he had upended his father’s other plans for his life. He purchased a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Seine at 24 Quai de Bethune on the Ile St. Louis. It was a renovated sandstone-colored building where the former French president Georges Pompidou lived from 1969-1971. Given its presidential connections, it was respectable enough for his father. From his terrace he could see Notre Dame, the Institut du Monde Arab, and the celebrated restaurant La Tour d’Argent. While he lived in the heart of Paris, the views from the apartment represented the various points of contact that had shaped his worldview. “Your room is ready,” he informed the American professor.

* * *

Havilah looked over her sunglasses at Thierry Gasquet. His tall, lean but not lanky figure cut a long shadow over the chair next to hers. An hour in the sun at the crime scene had further bronzed his skin.

“The room met with your approval I take it?”

The sun felt warm. She had eaten one of the best
salades niçoise
of her life at this little Provençal hotel built on Cassis’s white rocks. The Badoit went down smoothly. She had had her brief respite.
This is no vacation, Havilah. Kit is dead
.

She raised herself from the reclining poolside chair. Havilah hoped the room had a bathtub. She knew a workout would have helped to clear her head, but she was too wound up for it to be relaxing. A nap would have to do. She needed to be on her A-Game when she
rendezvous’ed
with Laurent. Having figured out a way to get into Kit’s apartment, she had to shake Thierry Gasquet loose. That task would now be more difficult.

“I think you will find your accommodations more than suitable, Havilah.”

New York, NY, Monday, June 21
^st

MonaLisa Caren eased out of bed at 5 a.m. Monday morning. She quickly showered and had a breakfast of oatmeal and orange juice with calcium and vitamin D. At 48 years old, she knew she was a prime candidate for osteoporosis, so she consumed calcium-laden foods with a vengeance. She thought about her good-natured, humped-back Bubbe, and popped a vitamin with an additional 450 milligrams of calcium. MonaLisa’s limpid hazel eyes stared back at her in the mirror; she immediately reached for the Orlane Hypnotherapy. She figured her skin had to be as depressed as she was after a night with Nigel Latt. He was a National Book award-winning author. She had never slept with a writer she represented. But Nigel was looking mighty fine in his tight jeans and loose-fitting white shirt when he pulled out his David Oscarson pen to sign some papers at her office. He had Mick Jagger lips, lean abs and hips, and a confident masculine swagger. All of these attributes were enhanced by the fact that she had just signed the 38-year-old Nigel to a $3.3 million-dollar book deal with a large publishing house for his next two novels. She had also mere months before served divorce papers to her third insecure and faithless husband. She had reasoned that she deserved a good lay.

She had nurtured Nigel from a pup with his first book,
The Good One
, for which he had happily received a $100,000 advance. MonaLisa had such high hopes for Nigel as a writer and a lover. And yet, he proved to be a great disappointment from the split seconds it took for him to remove his jeans and reveal a needle dick.

It was downhill from there. Oral sex felt like he was exfoliating her with his beard. After chafing her up, he proceeded to poke her with his pencil. The needle-dicked writer came off in 3 minutes. If it weren’t for the 15% commission on his book sale, MonaLisa would have kicked him in the balls with her pointiest stilettos and out of her apartment onto the rainy New York streets. Instead, she smiled as she escorted him to the door and pecked him goodbye at 3 a.m. that morning. It was rather difficult to manage. She hated bad sex for the same reason she hated drizzling afternoons after a visit to the hair salon. They were both a waste of time.

Two hours later, she was lathering up with an anti-aging moisturizer for depressed skin. After the moisturizer came the concealer and base, mascara, and a bit of color for the eyes. She put on her favorite Chanel russet moon lipstick. With her black push-up bra and silk panties, black garter and the sheerest of black stockings on, she reached in the closet for a black wrap dress and red and black peek-a-boo patent leather pumps.

She pulled her long, dark layered hair into a sleek ponytail. Despite the hellish conoodling interlude with Nigel, MonaLisa looked pretty good that morning. She was fit from a regimen of elliptical training sessions and a healthy diet. She had weekly facials and massages. The jars of Orlane and Ingrid Millet body and caviar neck creams on the makeup table of her well-appointed Upper Eastside apartment had also helped her repel the free radicals that seemed determined to push her usually luminescent skin to premature ageing.

She had left the apartment at 6:30 a.m. Like clockwork, MonaLisa reached the sidewalk of her building. Gripping a leather bag in one hand, she stepped ever so slightly off the curb to greet the New York 20 car service driver who usually took her to her midtown office.

A cab came barreling down in its place, swooping her up in the air. MonaLisa Caren’s body was tossed like Raggedy Ann. Her peek-a-boo pumps came flying off. Her leather bag emptied its contents of manuscripts, contracts, and personal effects into midair, while her dress opened like a parachute that could not provide her a softer landing. On the way down, she thought again about Nigel’s subpar sexual gymnastics. Why did her last time have to go bust? For she knew that the sorry Nigel Latt would probably be her last lover. She had seen the feral glint in the driver’s mischievous dark eyes on the way up. There was not the least bit of remorse or shock. She hit the hood of the cab and rolled under, just touching the front wheels. The driver unceremoniously drove over her like a pothole, crushing her sternum and breaking both ribs. Two of those 24 rib bones punctured a lung.

VI

Cassis, France, Les Roches Blanches, June 21st

Havilah and Thierry walked towards the lobby from the pool. He had again placed his hand on the small of her back as he guided her through the hotel’s sunlit lobby. To onlookers, the gesture would have appeared intimate. As they moved towards the small elevator, both the concierge and desk receptionist flashed Thierry huge smiles. He nodded in their general direction. Havilah looked at them both and smiled as well. She was mildly amused by the flirting. As soon as they were out of the concierge and desk receptionist’s view, she glided away from his hand.