The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe (30 page)

“Is that breadfruit?”

Trousseau turned in the seat. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your breadfruit smells absolutely terrible.”

“The plastic bag’s torn.”

“You intend to eat something that smells like that, Monsieur Trousseau?”

The
greffier
was offended. “I can’t smell anything.” He coughed loudly and leaned forward, placing his hands carefully on either side of the steering wheel. “She mentioned Dugain? You were whispering between yourselves like adolescent girls.”

Anne Marie opened the window. “It’s worse than the Vaton woman’s
eau de cologne
.”

They had come to the edge of Sainte-Anne, and the Peugeot hissed smoothly along the
boulevard maritime
. It was not yet five o’clock and
there were bright sails skimming over the turquoise waters of the Atlantic. Along the sidewalk, the itinerant vans had parked and were preparing their evening trade of drinks, pizzas and crêpes.

“So you can drop the whole affair?”

“Affair, Monsieur Trousseau?”

“You’re going to drop the Dugain thing?”

“We still haven’t found the murderer of Agnès Loisel.”

“Your friend the
procureur
’s happy to blame the dead Dominican.”

“One, Arnaud’s no more my friend than you are.”

“Very flattering, I’m sure.”

“And two, he hasn’t said anything to me. Until he does, I’m still in charge of the dossier.”

“You’re going to let Dugain drop?”

The breadfruit in the boot must have been in an advanced state of putrefaction. Anne Marie raised her wrist to her nostrils, seeking a hint of van Cleef and Arpels. “Why for heaven’s sake does everybody want me off the Dugain dossier?”

“For your own good,
madame le juge
.”

“I’m old enough to know how to look after myself.”

They had come to the end of the village and the road narrowed as Trousseau took the slow incline that led to the turning for Ffrench.

“And I don’t understand, Monsieur Trousseau, why you felt it necessary to be so aggressive toward the Director of the Tourist Office. I don’t suppose it occurred to you that as my brother-in-law, he merited a minimum of courtesy.”

“They go off to France, these West Indians, they get some little
diplôme
and then when they come back to the islands, they wear double-breasted suits and they think they can lord it over us.”

“Eric André’s my brother-in-law.”

“Ex-brother-in-law,
madame le juge
.”

“Brother-in-law or ex-brother-in-law—that’s got nothing to do with you.” Anne Marie was suddenly very angry. “Lucette Salondy’s my ex-sister-in-law. That doesn’t stop me being worried for her.”

“Eric André’s a phony. A crook and a phony.”

“You mustn’t say those things about my brother-in-law.”

“What do you want,
madame le juge
?” Brusquely Trousseau brought the car to a halt beneath a billboard advertising a nearby
discothèque
, now in an advanced state of abandon. Creole cows gazed calmly.
“What on earth do you want?” He pulled angrily on the handbrake and turned to face her. “Just answer that.”

“I think my family deserves respect.”

“You want a sycophant? You want somebody to tell you just what you want to hear? Or do you want a friend? Can’t you see that André was behind the death of Dugain?”

“Eric murdered Dugain?” Anne Marie laughed in disbelief.

“As for the breadfruit,
madame le juge
, it’s not for human consumption. It’s for my pigs at Trois-Rivières. And don’t say I haven’t already invited you to come and eat pig tails and breadfruit at my place.”

It was a small beach next to the Méridien hotel. Trousseau parked the Peugeot on the edge of the unsurfaced white road, between the open Méharis and Japanese four-wheel drives.

The trade breezes were blowing noisily through the palm trees that seemed to lean into the wind. After the lush green of the countryside, the coral beach was almost blinding in its whiteness, even at this late hour of the afternoon. The sun was fast moving toward the Soufrière and the West. In another half hour, the wind would drop and the sailboards would be brought onto the beach, taken down, packed up and set back on the awaiting motor vehicles.

There was no sign of Fabrice, nor of his distinctive fun-board, with its yellow and mauve sail.

“You should’ve told me a long time ago, Monsieur Trousseau.”

“I thought you knew.” He ran a finger along his moustache. “After all, he’s your brother-in-law.”

“I scarcely ever see my ex-brother-in-law. I hadn’t seen him in ages when he phoned me last Wednesday night.” Anne Marie shrugged. “I assumed it was over the Pointe des Châteaux murder.” Instinctively, she looked eastwards toward the Pointe des Châteaux. At a distance of over ten kilometers, the concrete calvary was clear against the limpid afternoon horizon.

“Instead he spoke to you about Dugain?”

“He’s intending to go into politics.”

Trousseau laughed. “I don’t think he’s got much chance.”

Beneath the palm trees there was a small white shack, clean and freshly painted. Plastic tables and chairs were set out on the powdery sand. Anne Marie made her way toward a free table in the shade. The customers were beach types, European men and women for the most part, with matching blond hair and tanned backs. Their beautiful young skin would soon be losing its elasticity from over-exposure to the sun. Even with Fabrice’s mixed parentage, Anne Marie insisted he wear a T-shirt while windsurfing. She knew the treachery of the sun and was reminded of it every time she looked in the mirror.

“André’s not a doctor. He doesn’t belong to the old class of West Indians who went to France to finish their studies or flew there in the days of the Lockheed Constellation. Not a doctor, not a pharmacist, not that category of people the population likes to respect—people who understand that in return for a personal vote, there’s a personal favor to be repaid. Your ex-brother-in-law’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing. If he hadn’t gotten a job at the Office of Tourism he’d have been a teacher in some godforsaken junior high on the Côte-sous-le-Vent or in one of the islands, Désirade or Marie-Galante. He belongs to that class of second-raters.”

“Like me, Monsieur Trousseau?”

“
Madame le juge
, you have many failings, but you’re not second rate. You have professional probity—perhaps too much.”

“Not sure whether I should take that as a compliment.”

“You still have your illusions—perhaps that’s all you’ve got left.” Again Trousseau ran his finger along the line of his moustache. Then he straightened his tie. “You’re part of that generation of white do-gooders.”

“Thank you.”

“You came out to the Caribbean with the best of intentions. The post-1968 generation in tie-dyed T-shirts and clogs, you ran around in bell-bottom jeans and Renault 4Ls and you paid the air-duty to read
Le Monde
every day. And you married into the local population, just to prove that you were free of prejudice.”

“I met my husband in Paris.”

(Jean Michel used to have an old Panhard coupé, and in the afternoons, the car could be seen cruising up and down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, along the rue de l’Odéon and as far as the rue
Monsieur-le-Prince and the Luxembourg gardens. The roof was always down, despite the chill spring weather of Paris, and the back seat was packed tight with grinning friends from Martinique and Guadeloupe, with bright teeth and short hair and American Army raincoats. Invariably sitting beside Jean Michel was a blonde girl, with skin of alabaster and a scarf round her head like the actress Pascale Petit.)

“It comes to the same thing. Don’t think I don’t respect you,
madame
. Quite the opposite. There are times when I think you choose not to see the opportunism of my compatriots—after all these years. The opportunism of people like Eric André. You insist on seeing the best in him.”

“Blame the tie-dyed T-shirt and clogs.”

“What’s worse, he’ll probably get away with the Ilet Noir project. Use influence he has as director of the Tourist Office and he’ll make a lot of money. While my island”—Trousseau tapped the table—“yet again, this poor Guadeloupe’ll be pillaged and made poorer. Just so that Eric André can wear his Lacoste shirts and run around in a Mercedes.”

“Why was Eric responsible for Dugain’s death?”

“Dugain was a bastard—but I don’t think he sought money.”

“He committed suicide because he’d been embezzling.”

“No one believes that,
madame le juge
.”

“What do you believe?”

“Dugain was concerned about the environment.”

“Like Desterres?”

“Desterres is like your brother-in-law.” A derisory snort. “A shark—only he’s better educated and there’s been money in Desterres’s family for years. A vulture—but less of a vulture than Eric André.” Trousseau started to laugh. “Having lighter skin, Desterres’s got less of a complex about himself.”

A girl in a swimsuit took their order: mineral water for Trousseau, iced tea for Anne Marie. Trousseau glanced admiringly at the girl’s long white thighs. When she was out of earshot, Anne Marie said, “You, too, are a bit of a shark.”

“My pigs at Trois-Rivières—that’s all I’m interested in.”

Anne Marie sighed. “Lavigne’s probably right—we’re animals.”

“Sharks?”

“Mice—we’re like mice in a maze, Monsieur Lafitte. And the cheese we’re all looking for—we’re all frantically sniffing out—is sex.”

“Speak for yourself,
madame le juge
.”

“Power, money, influence—all substitutes for our libido.”

There was still no sign of Fabrice on the horizon. Anne Marie was not particularly worried, but she never liked it when he went beyond the protection of the barrier reef, eight hundred meters out into the sea. A calm sea could suddenly turn into swelling breakers.

“Putting your analogies aside, if I may for a moment …” Trousseau waited until the girl had brought the drinks. “There must have been some sort of blackmail being used on him.”

Anne Marie leaned forward and poured tea into the glass. “On him?”

“On Dugain. Didn’t you read about it? A couple of years ago—it was in the papers.”

“Probably when I was in France for the in-service training course. A month in Châtelrault.”

“The
préfet
set up a council of wise men to deliberate over the whole Ilet Noir affair. At the time, they said it was an American consortium, Texaco or Esso. In fact it was Elf Aquitaine that wanted to install a refinery off the coast of Port Louis, bringing the crude oil up from Venezuela. It would’ve meant a lot of jobs and it would have meant housing petroleum engineers coming out from France. Well-paid professionals from the mainland. The mayor of Port-Louis was for it—and so of course was the Office of Tourism.”

“But Dugain wasn’t?”

“Precisely,
madame le juge
.”

“And Desterres?”

The
greffier
said, “I can’t remember but I do remember Dugain going on television and doing a series of programs about the possible danger of oil spills. His special interest’d always been the mangrove—which never endeared him to the building lobby, anyway. Especially when you remember half of Pointe-à-Pitre is built on mangrove. Even the sugar fields in Grande-Terre were originally mangrove—they were drained by the English when they controlled this island.”

“Then what happened?”

“In return for Quebec and Canada, the English handed this island back to the French at the end of the Seven Years’ War. A bit of a shame, really, because we could’ve been English and you’d be drinking tea.”

“I am drinking tea. What happened over the Ilet Noir dossier?”

“Demonstrations—you’re sure you weren’t here,
madame le juge
? To keep things calm, the
préfet
called for an enquiry but the review body still hasn’t submitted its report. Dugain was on the television, he was on the radio, he was in the papers—and then suddenly silence as if his power had been switched off. Strange.”

“Why?”

“Why did he suddenly shut up?” Trousseau looked at her. “I’m only a
greffier
of course.”

“Even so, you have an opinion.”

“I know about sharks—and I know about the money to be made from setting up a new industry in a place like this, where forty percent of the population is unemployed. Government handouts—that’s what we live on. A lot of money to be made out of Ilet Noir. And Dugain was treading on a lot of people’s toes.”

“They silenced him?”

“The blackmail worked.”

“If blackmail worked, then there was no need to kill him,” Anne Marie said.

“
Madame le juge
, they
suicided
him.”

“Suicided?” Anne Marie said and gave a start as she felt a coldness on her shoulder, as cold as death itself.

Fabrice, hair wet and the torn T-shirt clinging to his chest, bent over and kissed his mother. “For once you’re not too late.” He stroked her hair. “I’m starving.”

“Maman, please help me iron my dress for church.”

“Can’t you see I’m watching television, Lélé?”

The local news was taken up by the siege in the rue Schoelcher. The cameramen had reached the scene late because they had been covering a basketball match at the hall
bicentenaire
. Shots of the ambulances and police vans outside the Collège Carnot. Anne Marie recognized herself as she was being helped into one of the red ambulances. She saw that she had put on weight, particularly around the buttocks. Too much sitting and not enough exercise was turning her into one of Trousseau’s steatopygous women.

Following the siege and the dawn raid on Boissard—more pictures of
gendarmes
in bulletproof jackets—the journalists had interviewed the
préfet
in his office in Basse-Terre. Ill at ease under the television lights, speaking in a marked Provençal accent, he assured the viewers the enquiries would follow their course until the murder of the Pointe des Châteaux was properly resolved.