Dial M for Merde (16 page)

‘Yes.'

‘Doing what?'

‘We do not know, exactly, but she was there, and when she quitted the boat, she started her mission.'

‘And her mission is to hire a hitman?'

‘Hitman?'

I mimed a sniper taking out a distant target.

‘Yes,' she said.

‘But why should M work for them? You said she has a reason to hate the President.'

‘A President of any country has many enemies,' she said evasively. ‘Anyway, I am more concerned by practicalities. We know who she sees when she goes to her meetings, but these are not the leaders. They are the – how do you say? – midwives?'

‘Middle men.'

‘Yes. We need for you to become an
espion
– how do you say?'

‘Spy?'

‘Yes, a spy. We know who the middle men are. You must try to find out who is their chef.' I guessed that she didn't mean their cook.

‘How am I supposed to do that?'

‘You must listen, ask some questions, try to discover when is her next meeting. Not too many questions, though. She must not – what do you say? – doubt?'

I was the one with doubts. If I'd still been working in London, I would have been sure that it was all a wind-up, a huge piss-take organized by some twisted bastard in the office. But the French don't go in for practical jokes like that. And Léanne's ID was no joke at all. Neither was her determination to use me. I wondered how far she would
have gone to get information if she'd thought I was part of the plot. That backless dress hadn't just been for decoration.

I looked across the water, where a solo swimmer was doing a lazy crawl towards the open sea. It would be great, I thought, to dive in and follow him, and not stop swimming till all this nonsense had gone away.

‘Wait here a moment,' Léanne said. She stood up and made a phone call, and a few seconds later, the leather-jacketed cop came bounding down the steps on to the beach. ‘Keep an eye on him,' Léanne ordered. The guy nodded and came to stand over me as though I might suddenly leap into the sea and splash to freedom.

It was tempting. I saw that the lone swimmer had reached the edge of the bay. He was now having a rest, floating on his back and gazing up into the cloudless sky. I could imagine the sense of blissful achievement he would be feeling – the pure, tingling pleasure of being alive. A piercing envy shot through me, from my throbbing head to my impatiently twiddling toes. No, it wasn't envy exactly, it was an urgent need to share that all-over tingle, to prove to myself that I was, for the moment at least, still in control of my nerve endings.

Léanne had walked away along the beach and was speaking on the phone. The urgency and seriousness of her movements reminded me of M. Maybe they were involved in the same story after all.

‘So you're going to play Mata Hari, uh?' Leather Jacket was grinning at me.

‘Mata Hari?' I thought she was an oriental dancer.

‘You don't know her? Famous spy. She fucked German generals and they gave her secrets. So you fuck your demi-Anglaise, and if you're good enough, maybe she'll tell us something useful.'

The cop spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure I understood his French.

I turned away, trying my best to ignore him.

‘We call it
l'espionage horizontal
,' Leather Jacket went on. ‘It is a noble French tradition. Mata Hari was not the only one. France has used lots of whores in this way.' He started to laugh, but broke off when Léanne began walking back towards us.

‘What have you said to M?' she asked me. ‘What reason have you given to quit the island?'

I told her about Saint Tropez and Elodie's wedding.

‘This is good,' Léanne said. ‘Yes. You leave her alone for a day or two. Maybe she will make some interesting calls. Maybe she will return to Marseille. We know that she has some problem there. You occupy yourself with this marriage, then you can begin the espionage.'

‘Horizontal,' Leather Jacket added.

‘Who will you see in Saint Tropez?' Léanne asked.

‘Valéry,' I told her, ‘the other guy who was arrested in Collioure.'

‘Ha, ce petit con,' Leather Jacket spat. ‘Him and his rich druggie friends. We'll get them.'

Léanne nodded. ‘There are many arrestations in Saint Tropez,' she said. ‘Lots of raids on the chic cafés. If your Valéry tries to buy cocaine, maybe he will get a bad surprise.'

‘Valéry, cocaine? No way.' I tried my best to forget the drugs he'd offered me in the police car. ‘He's a clean-living boy. Really close to his family, especially his dear old grandmother, and he still lives at his parents' home …'

As I stumbled on with my protestations of Valéry's cocaine-white innocence, it struck me how very far I was from anything you could call home. Here I was, defending
the French fiancé of my French ex-boss's daughter, while being press-ganged into saving the life of France's President from a bunch of local killers.

I couldn't have been more embroiled in this foreign country's affairs if I'd been chained up in the deepest dungeon in the Bastille, with nothing to read except the rules of pétanque.

1

T
HE FIRST PERSON
I ever met who'd actually been to Saint Tropez was Elodie's dad, Jean-Marie. I'd recently arrived to work for him in Paris, and we were returning to the office after lunch. We were waiting to cross a posh street near the Champs-Elysées when we saw what looked like a hairy iguana scuttling towards us.

On closer inspection, it turned out to be a woman, though there was probably not much of her original DNA left. She was aged somewhere between sixty and six hundred, and had had so many facial operations that her nose was the size of a peanut and her lips could have been used as a sofa. Someone had glued several kilos of blond seaweed to the top of her head, and her body had been wedged into a leather catsuit made for a twelve-year-old, so that her industrially renovated breasts overflowed at the neckline like a pair of half-melted Camemberts. She was on the highest stilettos I'd ever
seen, and looked in grave danger of breaking both ankles.

But she only had ten or so yards to walk, from the middle of the road, where she had abandoned her silver Smart Car, to the terrace of a restaurant that was so expensive it had as many parking valets as waiters.

The iguana lady was greeted with a syrupy smile by a hostess and shown to a table where a similarly reptilian woman was waiting for her. They did a mwa-mwa kiss, and then twitched their lips, which was probably as close as they got to smiling these days.

I'd never seen such creatures before, and asked Jean-Marie who, or what, they were.

He told me that they were a rare sub-species of French woman, and that I'd only see them if I hung about in chic areas like this one, because they spent most of their life cycle outside Paris.

‘Where?' I asked.

‘When they are not in Hungary for cheap surgery? In Saint Tropez,' he said. ‘They all want to look like Brigitte Bardot in 1964. That whole town wants to pretend that it is 1964. Except for the people who fix the prices – they think it's 2064.'

Saint Tropez was, he went on,
the
place to go if you liked to watch rich old men pouring champagne over young girls' bikinis and see women pumped so full of silicone that they floated upright in the water. He hated it.

This was yet another subject on which he and Elodie didn't see eye-to-eye.

‘Saint Trop's great,' she once told me. ‘Best cocaine in France.'

 

Valéry's family's chateau wasn't actually in Saint Tropez – it was twenty kilometres southwest. It was a perfect Provençal
mansion – a long, tall, chalky-white building, at least three floors high, with a gently sloping ochre-tiled roof. The windows along the top storey had rounded frames, and those on the floor below were stately rectangles with brick balconies. I couldn't see any lower because of the garden, which was even more stunning than the house itself. It was a luxuriant mass of vegetation – immaculate lawns, a jungle of flowers, the emerald finger of a cypress, a silver swathe of olive trees.

The driveway leading to this oasis was a double alley of date palms slicing through a field of grape vines. The branches of the palm trees burst upwards in vivid green fountains. The vines were turning a mellow yellow in the bright autumn sun.

And this paradise was set right on the shore, so that you could probably lie in bed and gaze past the palm trees to the glittering Mediterranean. Valéry's dad could call up his yacht crew in Saint Tropez and stay in his silk pyjamas until the boat appeared in the bay.

I pulled up outside the chateau grounds, between two massive green metal gates, and looked back along the coast road. Léanne had said that the cops would keep in touch, and I wondered if that included following me. One car passed, then another, and neither driver so much as glanced in my direction. There was no helicopter overhead, no glint of sunlight on binoculars in the woods. Maybe they were keeping their distance, I thought, trusting me not to fly away to a country where the Queen could protect me. Though reason told me that that wasn't the French style. Léanne and her men would be around here somewhere. They'd turn up soon enough.

The Peugeot I'd hired in Bandol crunched loudly along the driveway, between the trunks of palm trees that were
chocolate brown and almost hairy, like elephant's legs. I was afraid one of them would deem the little car unworthy, and boot it into the sea.

It was around one thirty p.m., and I was starving. The purple grapes hanging on the vines looked so plump that I was tempted to stop for a picnic, but I'd just called Elodie to say I was at the gate, and she and Valéry were standing at the top of the drive waiting for me.

Elodie was gesturing at me to turn right, and I wondered why she would want me to slam into a date palm until I saw a small opening in the tree line. Steering carefully between two elephant legs, I turned on to a more modern, paved drive that led to the side of the house.

Elodie and Valéry reappeared, waving at me to carry on round to the back, into a well-hidden car park full of family-sized Renaults, with a red Mercedes sports car standing out from the crowd.

I parked with my bonnet snug against a huge bank of lavender, which was perfuming the air so forcefully that I felt a sudden urge to start sewing pot-pourri bags.

We said our hellos, and I noticed that Elodie had aged about ten years since I'd seen her in Paris the previous week. Not that she'd gone grey or wrinkly. It was her clothes. She was dressed as if she'd been invited to a frumps and geeks theme party. Her navy-blue skirt came down below the knee, and her blouse was cut to hide any sign that she might possess breasts. She was a nun on day release from the convent.

Valéry was looking pretty much how I'd seen him in Collioure – a big smile on his face, a pair of expensive sunglasses lodged in his floppy blond hair. Though he seemed to have
lost
ten years. His clothes were boyish, making him look like a kid on the verge of taking his baccalauréat. He was fidgeting with embarrassment.

‘Uh, Paul, next time can you come on the new alley, not the old one?' He pointed towards the modern, tarmacked driveway. ‘The old one with the palm trees, only my grandmother uses that.'

Oh dear. I wasn't even in the house and I'd already committed a gaffe.

‘Sorry, Valéry. The big gate was open.'

‘Yes, Bonne Maman arrived this morning. The gate is always open when she arrives. Anyway, you are just in time. Everyone is together in the salon for coffee.' With the rules of the house re-established, Valéry brightened up again.

‘Coffee? Maybe I should have got a sandwich on the way …'

‘Ah, yes, lunch is very early here,' Elodie said.

‘It's Moo-Moo's fault,' Valéry explained.

‘Moo-Moo?'

‘My mother.'

‘Her real name's Marie-Angélique,' Elodie informed me.

‘Yes, here we eat at midday exactly,' Valéry said. ‘She says we must respect God's timetable.'

‘And He always has breakfast at eight and lunch at midday.' Elodie raised her eyes towards heaven in a plea for more flexible mealtimes.

‘Oh, It is Bonne Maman who likes the early meals, really,' Valéry said. ‘Moo-Moo is the pope who applies the laws, Bonne Maman is God. The rest of us are simply Adam and Eve.'

‘I see.' The metaphor might be a bit scary, but I had to concede that the house looked like the Garden of Eden. The hellish goings-on in Bandol seemed an eternity away.

‘You can meet Babou and Mimi, too, before they go to play golf,' Valéry said.

I turned to Elodie for help.

‘His uncles, Charles-Henri and Dominic,' she explained.

Moo-Moo, Babou and Mimi. It sounded like a family of Teletubbies.

‘Now, Paul, before you meet them, there is just one problem.' Valéry was looking pained again. ‘Your clo-zez.'

‘My clothes?'

‘Yes.' Elodie took over. ‘We must show the family that you are a good traiteur who will serve them champagne and grande cuisine. I do not want to be cruel, but today you look like the pizza boy.'

‘Yes, well.' I couldn't explain that I'd practically been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night by the cops. ‘Maybe I should get changed first, then?'

‘I had to, so why shouldn't you?' Elodie led the way towards the house, lifting her skirt to show me where she would have preferred the hemline to be. She'd obviously had to frump down to please Moo-Moo.

‘Ah.' A woman was standing in the doorway. She wore a pale-blue blouse with a rounded collar and a long pleated royal-blue skirt like Elodie's. Her dark hair was in a neck-length bob, topped off by a chunky felt headband. She was glowering at Elodie's exposed knees.

‘Moo-Moo, voici Monsieur West,' Valéry announced. ‘Il arrive de Londres.' I guessed he was exaggerating the length of my trip to excuse the crumpled state of my clothes. ‘He's just going to change.'

Moo-Moo tore her eyes away from Elodie's knees, which had hastily been covered up again, and eyed me as if I was the snake arriving in her Eden.

‘Hmm, well he must hurry if he wants coffee. No more after two o'clock, remember.'

‘Oui, Moo-Moo.' Valéry spoke like a six-year-old.

The woman disappeared, and the three of us entered the
house in chastised silence, passing below a large, wrought-iron cross that was set in the wall, presumably to ward off vampires and bad caterers.

‘No coffee after two o'clock?' I whispered.

‘No stimulants,' Elodie replied, just as quietly. ‘I think she is frightened that they will turn us into sex maniacs.'

We went up a winding staircase with peeling walls. It seemed to go on for hours. Eventually, we reached a narrow corridor with tiny round windows. The old servants' quarters, I guessed. I was being put in my place.

‘This is now the children's floor,' Valéry said, and ducked into one of ten or so doorways.

I followed, and found myself in a musty room so small that Amnesty International would have started a poster campaign if a prisoner had been forced to sleep there. The ceiling was so low and sloping that Valéry actually had to reach down to open the skylight in the roof. It reminded me of the homes for midgets that I'd been shown when I first arrived in Paris and the estate agents thought it would be fun to take the piss out of a non-French-speaking immigrant. Except that those garrets weren't half-full of teddy bears and ancient kids' books.

‘Sorry, it's the only free bed,' Valéry said. ‘If it is too small, I will get you a room at the chambre d'hôte by the beach.'

‘But politically, it is best to stay in the house,' Elodie added. ‘N'est-ce pas, Valéry? Paul must be here to defend the marriage.'

‘Yes, it would be good if you can stay.' Valéry bent down and swept a dozen or so teddies off the narrow bed so that it would, at a pinch, have been possible for a double-jointed yogi to lie down on it. He saw me staring at the mound of
fake fur on the floor. ‘There is one bear for every child in the family,' he said.

Wow, I thought, they say rodents breed, but they're nowhere near as prolific as the French upper classes.

‘OK, I must go,' Valéry announced.

‘Go?' Elodie was horrified.

‘Yes, to Saint Trop. You know.' He clenched his facial features as if to communicate a telepathic secret.

‘Now?' Elodie asked.

‘Yes, it is arranged.' He kissed her on the forehead, shot a hearty grin at me and sped off down the corridor. Elodie stared after him.

‘Urgent business?' I asked. ‘Wedding stuff?'

She grunted. ‘Huh! Stuff, yes, but not wedding stuff.'

A worry popped into my head. ‘Elodie?' I tried to think how to put it diplomatically. ‘He's not going out to buy coke, is he?' Balls to diplomacy. This was too important.

‘Yes. I don't know why he can't wait until tonight.'

I remembered what Léanne had told me about dealers getting busted, and – even worse – the look of mean determination on the face of the leather-jacketed cop when he'd talked about Valéry.

‘He's got to be very careful. The police are cracking down,' I began, before realizing that I couldn't explain how I knew so much about the Saint Tropez drugs trade. ‘I overheard some people talking in Bandol,' I added. ‘They said a big dealer in the white stuff had been caught red-handed and he was singing like a canary.'

‘Uh?' Elodie's English was good, but the mix of colours was too much for her.

‘Apparently the police in Saint Tropez are arresting lots of dealers and their customers,' I translated. ‘Valéry ought to be careful.'

Elodie waved my concern out the window. ‘Oh no, these aren't the sort of guys who get arrested in bars. To stop Valéry's dealer, the police would be obliged to annoy some very important people. He is – how do you say? – safe as a house?' She looked dubiously down at my shapeless bag. ‘You must change quickly, Paul. We must take coffee with the family. Moo-Moo has told them you are here and she has probably said you are dressed like a tramp. You must show them different. You can show them different, can't you?'

‘Well, I didn't bring my Paul Smith suit on holiday, but I do have a shirt that's been worn only ten or so times,' I told her.

‘Well change, then.'

‘OK.' I waited politely for her to leave the room while I disrobed.

‘Come on, Paul, we have a lot to discuss and not much time. I have seen all of your body, with and without underwear, so don't try to play the timid schoolboy with me. Allez!'

It felt strange being ordered to undress by a nun, but I obeyed and began to hunt around for some decent clothes. I unravelled a pair of barely creased cargo pants and a white linen shirt that was designed to look artistically wrinkled. Elodie nodded her satisfaction.

‘Now tell me about M,' she said as I stripped off. ‘How is it going?'

‘Ah.' I pretended to be preoccupied by a stubborn shirt button as a slideshow of photos ran through my head – M in the bathtub, M on the phone, Léanne in a backless dress and lecturing me on the beach. How much of the truth could I tell Elodie? None, was the simple answer. Telling her any secret was like starting a blog called ‘Please broadcast all my secrets.'