The Dave Bliss Quintet (5 page)

But what if he's not at home? Bliss sets himself puzzling as he puts down the phone, wanders across the road to the seawall, removes his shirt, and painfully plucks a few grey hairs from his chest as he ponders, What if he is here in the South of France? What does that prove?

He could be working on his defence.

He could be, but surely his best defence would be the mysterious disappearance of the prime witness — a certain detective inspector of close acquaintance.

He wouldn't risk that.

Not personally, maybe, but I bet he'd like to. Not only did you uncover an inconvenient murder that he'd swept under the rug for his own benefit, you also screwed up his restaurant business and broke his wrist.

That's all in the past, he tries telling himself, but knows that Edwards has a long memory.

The morning drags with frustrating slowness, and Bliss spends much of the time tugging at a recalcitrant hair as he lounges in the warmth of the mid-morning sun, cogitating on the Edwards problem while listening to Brubeck playing “Black and Blue” on the radio of the beach café behind him.

Given a choice, Bliss might simply kick back and golf away the rest of his life, but he fears that “out of sight” will certainly leave him “out of mind,” and the disciplinary board will let Edwards off the hook. Even with his evidence, Edwards is still capable of squirming his way out of the dung heap he's piled up for himself. Not that he needs to. He has enough names, dates, and places in his little black book to finger most of his colleagues into throwing him lifelines.

That is Edwards's MO, and has been from the day he joined up. Every indiscretion by a fellow officer, every game of golf or glass of beer on company time, every insurrection, however slight, has been meticulously recorded as a hedge. And, like Napoleon, he has never forgotten or forgiven a single transgression.

Turning anxiety into action, Bliss heads along the beach with his journal in hand and a picture of
Edwards in his mind. It is nearing Sunday lunchtime, and memories of Saturday night still haunt some of the faces on the beach. After an hour of diligently searching every prone figure for either Edwards, Johnson, or Marcia, he gives up when he realizes he is starting to have naughty thoughts about near-naked fifteen-year-old schoolgirls. This should be illegal, he thinks, constantly shocked by his inability to judge the age of sun worshippers from more than a few yards, and, plonking himself under a striped umbrella of a beach café, he writes:

The chaud-froid of life stuns with the sharpness of a blisteringly hot sun reflecting off a glacier. The very young and extremely old stand apart, but there is no place for middle age. The middle-aged either pretend to be young or are forced to be old. Nothing in the middle. Seventy-year-olds party the night away. At home they'd be in bed by ten, wrapped in a flannelette nightie, complaining of bunions and biliousness.

Mothers, even grannies, dress with more daring than their offspring. “Mum,” the kids complain. “You're not going to the beach in that. I can see your thingies.”

“Why not? I can see yours.”

“Yeah, but I'm only sixteen. You're old enough to know better.”

“Who's the parent in this relationship?”

This place is all about sex, he realizes, and is not disillusioned when a lone woman under the next umbrella peels a purple fig with impossibly long fingernails and exposes the swollen pink interior.

“Witch,” he mutters, as she runs her tongue sensuously around the bulbous fruit before taking it, whole, into her mouth.

Back on the beach, a gaudily overdressed Senegalese salesman wearing a coolie hat wilts under the weight of watches, bracelets, and necklaces and is mobbed by a bunch of faithful come to worship at the shrine of glittering possessions.

Twenty watches, stamped Rolex or Cartier according to the whim of the man whose hat he has borrowed, clinch his forearms — ten on each arm, like slave-master's irons — and a hundred other tacky trinkets with expensive names weigh him to the sand. Women and children swamp him as he sinks, and he spreads his wares as best he can. A young girl buys a shell necklace. The string snaps as she puts it on, showering shells onto the sand where other children scrabble for them.
Look, Mum. I've found a shell on the beach.

Bliss arrives earlier than usual at L'Escale and sees Angeline dodge a speeding motor scooter only to be nailed by a rollerblader as she jumps the curb to the sidewalk. The two English couples, still clutching plastic raincoats, have played musical chairs again, the women having realized that staring out over gently bobbing boats in the serene harbour all evening loses its appeal faster than a shocking pink woolly hat with a spinning plastic rotor blade. Now they can watch the passing hordes and toxic traffic while their partners crick their necks.

Bliss returns their nods of greeting. “Beautiful day again. Did you enjoy the beach?”

“Not on Sunday, old boy,” says Hugh, adding in a reverent whisper, “It doesn't seem right, somehow.”

“The churches here are so beautiful, aren't they?” responds Bliss, having had plenty of time to study the stack of tourist magazines left in the apartment by previous tenants. “Do you attend regularly?”

“No,” Hugh says vaguely, “not particularly — but it just doesn't seem right to go to the beach. Not on a Sunday.”

“Not on Sunday,” echoes Mavis, though John and Jennifer keep out of the discussion, heads in the menu with an unspoken air of insurrection.

“Tomorrow then,” suggests Bliss, but Hugh is ahead of him.

“Monday — washday — always do our washing on Mondays, don't we Mavis?”

“Even on holiday?” exclaims Bliss.

“Especially on holiday,” says Hugh.

“Got to keep a sense of proportion, keep a routine,” chimes in Mavis forcefully. “You could lose your sanity if you don't keep to some sort of routine.”

John and Jennifer look ready to take the risk when Hugh appears to offer a compromise. “We'll probably go Tuesday, if the weather holds.”

“It's held perfectly for the past two weeks,” Bliss explains.

“Exactly. That's what I'm afraid of,” scoffs Hugh, searching the cloudless sky. “Must be about time for it to break. I think I'll wait to see what the BBC forecasts tomorrow evening. No sense in getting our hopes up.”

“Wouldn't it be easier just to look out the window in the morning?”

“I think I'd rather rely on the professionals, if you don't mind, old boy,” says Hugh huffily.

The squeal of a train's hooter announces the arrival, or departure, of another crowd of tourists, and Hugh laughs, “Mavis says the train whistles here sound like strangled ducks.”

Bliss smiles at the image of the driver in his cab throttling a duck into a microphone, then John breaks into his comical thoughts. “Personally, I think it sounds more like an elephant,” he says, but Hugh slaps him down.

“Don't be silly, old boy. You couldn't get an elephant in one of those.”

As Bliss sits apprehensively on the promenade, checking every face for Edwards or Marcia, an American tourist, foolishly assuming that red traffic lights at a pedestrian crossing will bring traffic to a standstill, is clipped by a flashy Italian bird-puller as he steps onto the crossing.

“Where are you from?” asks Bliss, as he drags the man from the brink and guides him to a chair on the promenade.

“New Jersey,” replies the stranger. “Say, thanks bud — that Ferrari nearly got me. It's like a racetrack out there.”

“Traffic lights are only advisory here,” Bliss explains. “Mainly decoration, in fact.”

“Let me get you a drink,” says the Yank, summoning Angeline. “You take dollars?” he asks her.

“Sure,” she counters. “When you take euros.”

A couple of street musicians set up in front of the preassembled audience. “Pinky and Perky,” Bliss christened them the first night they showed up — two animated little pot-bellied creatures with a piano accordion
and a set of pan pipes whom he quite enjoyed, until he realized they played the same four tunes every evening, always culminating in “Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera.”

But it isn't just Pinky and Perky — every pianist in every bar, and every busker on the beach and quayside constantly belt out “Guantanamera.” It is as if they wait for him as he strolls along the boulevards. He can hear them warming up, timing his arrival. “Guantanamera, gua-ji-ra Guantanamera.”

Jacques, the fisherman, isn't at the bar — too embarrassed to admit his weather forecast was off track again, perhaps — or is he out hooking a bigger fish? But the potter is at his wheel. At least a dozen delicately thrown pots are paraded past Bliss by beaming young women and girls, and another half-dozen carried by men, their feelings clearly signalled on their faces: “
Merde!
This one's going straight down the toilet.”

“So what was your name before?” Marcia startles him, sliding into an adjacent chair.

“What d'ye mean?”

“Look, one of us is going to have to lay our cards on the table, starting with your name. I mean — Dave Burbeck?”

“It could be,” he says, giving nothing away, offering her a drink.

“A cocktail, if you're paying,” she says, then refuses to be drawn until Angeline has taken the order and is waltzing her way through the wall of death towards the bar.

“How did you know it was me?” he asks.

“You've been wandering around like a lost Japanese tourist for the past two weeks.”

“You've been spying on me!” he exclaims.

“I had to be sure,” she starts, but Pinky and Perky, sensing the possibility of a burgeoning romance, appear out of nowhere and jump in with “Autumn Leaves.”

“It's July, for gawd's sake,” mutters Bliss, hoping to deter them, but they switch to “Strangers in the Night.” He tosses them ten euros, which they mistake as a sign of approbation and delve into “Guantanamera” with gusto. Bliss puts his head in his hands, complaining, “Oh God, Perky's singing,” then pleads through his fingers, “Please don't sing.”

Marcia buries herself in her handbag as heads turn in their direction, and Bliss, worrying she may bolt again, angrily waves the musicians away.

“Please be careful. And make sure you're not followed,” Marcia says, sliding a fiercely twisted scrap of paper into his palm, then she slips smoothly into the crowd.

“Bloody woman,” Bliss mouths after her, and Pinky and Perky, finally getting the message, seek their next victim as the waitress returns with a giant goblet sprouting vegetables.

“Oh! Your friend, she has gone,” Angeline says, her disappointment evident. “She is very pretty.”

“She didn't like the orchestra,” he says, giving the departing performers a poisonous stare. Then he stops momentarily as he gives Marcia's appearance some thought: shortish — petite, even — with all her lumps and bumps developed in the right places. However, the tautness of concern in her face has left a cloud. He assumes her to be about forty, but is totally confused by the compression of ages, having decided that virtually all women between fifteen and
fifty somehow manage to look twenty-five in this never-never land. “Yes,” he agrees, “I suppose she is fairly pretty.”

Pinky and Perky strike up “Guantanamera” at the next table, and Bliss pointedly puts on his headphones as he debates whether or not to run after Marcia. Dave Brubeck's quartet, playing “
Por Que No?
(Why Not?)”, reminds him that he is still clutching the paper twist. “Watch the potter,” says the message, and he realizes that was why she was scrabbling in her handbag — scribbling a note. But what does it mean?

“Are you Engleesh?” asks a woman with more than a mouthful of teeth and a nose-in-the-air sneer that says, “I detect smelly armpits and skid-marked underpants.”

“Yes,” he starts, removing his headphones, then switches to French, thinking: I'm supposed to be blending in. “
Oui. Je suis Anglais.
”

Apparently undeterred by his admission she invites herself into Marcia's seat. “
Cigarette?
” she queries, but it's an offer, not a request, and, as she delves into her Louis Vuitton bag for a packet of Gauloises, he wonders if she is somehow connected to the case. Quickly pulling his thoughts together he realizes that after two weeks of inactivity, concerned he is chasing his tail, he is suspicious of everyone.

“Excuse me,” he says, guessing her game and rising to leave. Her face falls. “Please, have this on me,” he says, offering her Marcia's cocktail in consolation, and she beams.

“Zhanks, Engleesh,” she sings out. “Maybe next time.”

I doubt it, he thinks, heading off along the promenade, though he concedes that without the cigarette
she'd be reasonably attractive, despite the teeth — although upsetting her during a bout of
soixante-neuf
could be a painful mistake.

Bliss, trying to work out the meaning of Marcia's note, hurries along the promenade, upstream against a tide of outstretched hands balancing little pots, and finds a semicircle of admirers around the maker. The women remain transfixed as Bliss pushes his way deeper into the crowd — seeking what? He has no idea. “Watch the potter,” the note says, and he watches as the strong hands, caked with creamy clay, cup around the brownish red mound as it rises under the pressure of his fingers. The electric wheel, spinning fast, shoots off droplets of water as the potter teases the rising lump, and Bliss turns his attention to the women in the crowd as they are drawn closer.

What's going on here? he wonders, studying the fascinated faces of the women, as the mound of clay rises like a swelling phallus in the potter's soft, moist hands, his penetrating blue eyes holding the gaze of each woman in turn — just for a second — just long enough to send a message.