Dial M for Merde (24 page)

Yes, I thought, an ego so puffed up that it could fly him across the Atlantic.

‘You know that the President and I have certain things in common?' he asked.

‘Yes?' The ego, plus the belief that the world would be a better place if everyone spoke French and drove Renaults.

‘Yes. For the first thing, we live in the same part of Paris. Before he was President, he was our major.' He meant mayor. ‘And you know that I represent his political party here?'

‘Right.'

‘Yes, but not extreme right.'

‘No, I meant right, as in OK.'

‘Uh?'

‘Go on, Jean-Marie, what were you saying?'

‘I don't know, you have interrupted me.' I'd forgotten that you don't cut in when a Frenchman is asking rhetorical questions.

‘You have things in common with the President …'

‘Ah yes.' He was happy again. ‘For the second thing, we are both very interested in, you know, immobile, uh, how do you say?'

‘I have no idea,' I said, wondering if this boasting was going to last much longer.

‘
L'immobilier
. Houses, apartments.'

‘Property,' I said. ‘Real estate.'

‘Yes. We are both part of a deal in our district that is, shall I say, not one hundred per cent
conventional
.' He chuckled. He liked that word. ‘We are, if you want,
associés
, how do you say?'

‘Partners in crime?'

‘Crime? Who mentioned crime? The President cannot commit a crime. He is immune. It is illegal to accuse a president of crime. And anyway, do you think I could be implicated in something illegal?'

Which was a bit like asking whether pigeons ever poo on statues.

‘Oh no, of course not,' I said. ‘Sorry I mentioned it. Please go on.' Both of the girls were staring at me, wondering what the hell we were talking about. I had no idea myself.

‘OK, OK.' Jean-Marie slowly unruffled his feathers. ‘This means that I can maybe have some influence on the President. You understand?' This wasn't a rhetorical question.

‘I'm beginning to. Go on.'

‘You know he is a friend of these aristocratic imbeciles the Bonnepoires? One of them gives him – how do you say? –
des pipes
. Before the press conferences.'

‘Blowjobs?' Now M and Elodie were even more curious about what was going on. ‘You mean Ludivine, the spokeslady?'

‘Yes. And you can criticize French presidents if you want, but they are always grateful to the women who give them …'

‘Blowjobs,' I prompted.

‘Yes. Blowjobs.' He memorized it, as if it might come in useful one day in his political career.

‘And this, in combination with our, uh, immobile deal together, can be very useful. Now, I am going to see the President at a soirée tonight. I think that if I talk to him, maybe he can influence the family to keep the marriage on the correct date, the day before Valéry's birthday. Voilà.' I could almost hear him applauding himself.

‘That's great, Jean-Marie, but why tell me? Why didn't you tell Elodie?'

‘Huh, we are still officially fâchés. Angry. You can tell her. To me, she would shout and say that I am doing this only so we can get the old vache's money.'

‘Well, aren't you?'

He was still chuckling as he rang off.

4

M suggested that I drop her off at the Vieux Port, where she'd reserved a room for us, then take Elodie on to the railway station.

For the first time that morning, I disobeyed a female order, and as soon as M had disappeared into the hotel, I started a rapid-fire apology to Elodie.

Really, really sorry, I said, but would she be pissed off if I left her to get a taxi and doubled back?

‘Why?' She was surprised more than annoyed.

‘It's M.' I'd rehearsed my explanation in my head. ‘She's been coming to Marseille a lot, and every time she comes here, she shakes me off and goes to meet someone. I'm sure it's another man.'

‘Oh.' Elodie put a consoling hand on my arm. She had clearly noticed the tensions between M and myself. ‘You think she's going to meet him now?'

‘Yes.'

‘OK, just drop me on the corner of the main street. I'll get a taxi.'

Léanne's trick had worked yet again. In France, you only had to hint at relationship problems and you could act as erratically as you wanted.

‘Call me and tell me how it goes,' Elodie said as we unloaded her case. ‘And remember – it might not be a man. It could be a woman.' She poked my ribs to show that she was joking. Or half-joking.

I left the car in a side street, ignoring the parking meters. Then I nipped back to the Vieux Port and found a doorway from where I could see the entrance to our hotel.

The hotel itself was four storeys of balconies pointing straight along the harbour. I didn't know which was our room, but M had said it was high up, to give us a good view and reduce the noise from the bustling nightlife below. She must have checked in by now, I calculated. She was probably in the room, unpacking her essentials, changing into more urban clothes.

If you had to hang around on a street corner, it was a pretty pleasant spot to do so. The early-afternoon sun was shining straight at me, and a large pleasure cruiser was just arriving at the nearby jetty, idling up to the harbourside with its cargo of smiling boat-trippers.

I wondered why they call it the ‘old port' – on the whole, it looked pretty recent. Half of the water space was taken up by rank upon rank of new yachts. There were thousands of them crammed into the rectangular basin. One side of the harbour was lined with angular modern apartment buildings, and between the wide café terraces and the waterside was a busy road, constantly growling with traffic.

The distant entrance to the port was obviously older, though – an ancient castle with sheer walls and a stubby tower that was a sunburnt version of Collioure's historic willy.

M stepped into the street, and I shrank back into my doorway. She was wearing sunglasses, and had changed into jeans. She looked right and left, as if checking for
observers, then walked briskly towards the nearest junction.

Next minute, I was swearing in fluent French. ‘Oh merdy putainy crotty shit.' Well, fluent Franglais, anyway.

She was getting a bloody bike. Marseille had Vélibs, like Paris, and she was going to pedal off on one.

What's more, she obviously had a subscription, because she swiped a card at one of the bike stands, wiggled the saddle and the handlebars to make sure everything was in working order, and pushed out into the traffic.

I had no time to fiddle about with a credit card and do likewise. Keeping up a steady stream of bilingual swearing, I jogged after her. Luckily, the bikes were the same heavy model as in Paris, so she was having a bit of trouble getting up speed. I reached the street corner only a few yards behind her, and had a little laugh at what I saw next – a hill, leading to an even steeper hill, topped in the distance by a giant golden statue of the Virgin Mary, waving down at me from a veritable mountaintop.

There was no way M was going to speed up there.

Sure enough, she began to wind through a grid of dark, right-angled streets. It reminded me of when I'd had to risk my life to keep up with Elodie in Paris. This time, on foot, I was much safer, but I couldn't say the same for M. Cars were parked on both sides, and the streets were dangerously narrow. She was having to concentrate hard on keeping ahead of the impatient drivers behind her, and there was no way she could look back and see me behind her, dodging past dawdling pedestrians.

She rode by the Roman-temple Palais de Justice, and didn't even glance at two bizarre statues of golden cherubs apparently trying to stop themselves falling into a rubbish-strewn fountain. The road was flatter here, and she began to get up speed. I did my best to
keep pace, but lost sight of her just before a roundabout.

The central reservation was a grassy mound with a statue of a frock-coated politician receiving something from Marianne, France's female equivalent of Uncle Sam. Either she was handing him a parchment or trying to stab him with a baguette. I trotted around the mound, gazing along each exit to try and spot M's pedalling backside, and drew a blank. A very sexy blank, though.

On the corner of one exit was something I'd never seen in France before – a women's sex shop. I'd seen the men's versions all over Paris, of course – glitzy windows with posters of pouting women, offers of cheap relief in a ‘cabine', a curtain of plastic streamers protecting passers-by from the sordid goings-on inside.

This place was completely different. It was a wide, double-fronted shop window, with an uninterrupted view of the interior, and the overriding colours were clean pink and purple rather than the dingy black and red of the guys' dives.

On one side of the entrance was a hanging garden of undies, with the emphasis on transparency and strategically placed holes. On the other was a row of little bottles of flavoured lubricants, and a display of things to tickle, massage and penetrate women's intimate parts. Some of the vibrators had animal heads and faces, including a smily pink dolphin and a grinning blue mouse. Who, I wondered, would want to get shagged by a vibrating rodent?

‘You want to go inside, Monsieur?' A tall girl in a tight black T-shirt and low-cut jeans was standing in the doorway, smoking. One of the shop assistants, I guessed. ‘Because normally, it's interdit for unaccompanied men,' she added apologetically.

‘Ah, merci, non, je—' I stopped in mid-stutter. The thing
was, I'd seen M inside the shop. She was standing near the back of the store, between the corsets and the furry handcuffs, as if she was waiting for someone to bring out the split-crotch cycling shorts she'd ordered.

So this was her meeting point – a women's sex shop. What could it mean?

The shop assistant was taking the last puffs of her cigarette, keeping one eye on me, so I waved an innocent goodbye and walked away. She would assume I'd been scared off by the display of electronic penises with animal faces.

In a way she was dead right.

 

‘Why have you followed her, Pol? Merde!' Léanne was doing her best not to sound furious, but making a pretty bad job of it. ‘
We
follow her. You don't do that. I have told you this was an important meeting.'

The call had come almost as soon as I walked away from the shop. The buzzing in my pocket almost got me killed, because I stopped in the middle of a street to answer, and a car swung round the corner and screeched to a halt. The four young guys in the car yelled and gestured insults at me. I got out of their way.

‘But you told me to watch her in Marseille,' I said to Léanne, ‘so that's what I'm doing. I need to know what's happening. I'm the one that has to be with her all day. And night.'

There was a long silence, but I could hear how frustrated Léanne was. She wanted me to be the puppet and I kept pulling strings.

‘It's the money,' she said at last. ‘We think she has come for the money to pay the
man
.' I presumed she meant the hitman.

‘Hey, toi, t'es cong?' The driver of the car was keeping
pace with me as I walked, and insulting me in the strong local accent. But I didn't have time to retort. What Léanne had said was much more urgent.

‘She's picking up cash?' I asked. ‘I would have thought they'd do it by bank transfer. Much cleaner.'

‘Huh, no, some people do not like the – what do you call it? – the electronic bank. They prefer to feel the paper in their fingers. She will pick up the money, and she will hide it. So please go to your hotel now and give me the number of your room safe.'

‘Hey toi, l'Anglais, là? Tu m'écoutes ou quoi?' Now the driver was asking me whether I was listening to him. Which I wasn't, because Léanne was letting me in on some secrets at last.

‘You know, we have a big problem in France,' she was saying. ‘Our frontiers are very open, and the euro is the best money for paying crime. The five hundred, it is the biggest value note in the world. A million euros is only as big as two tablets of chocolate or a small computer. It is very easy to hide. This is also, we think, why M takes the bike. She does not want to walk in the street with so much money. She prefers to pedal fast to the hotel. The streets can be dangerous.'

As I was just finding out. The car had pulled up in front of me, and the driver, quite a large guy, was getting out, presumably to ask more insistently whether I had been paying attention to him. He had a very silly haircut – short at the front and sides, with a kind of black chicken crest on top of his skull – but he still looked pretty tough.

‘Er, Madame la commissaire, there is a car, number nine two seven …' I read out the whole registration, speaking in loud, clear French. ‘I think that the driver is going to attack me. Is one of your men in this street?'

The guy laughed, but I'd sown a seed of doubt in his mind. He called me a ‘cong' again, shook his crest and got in his car. As he pulled away, the back wheels screeched on the tarmac to show me that he wasn't a wuss.

‘What was that?' Léanne asked, and I gave her a brief account. ‘I told you the streets can be dangerous here,' she said.

‘You haven't been to an English city recently,' I told her. ‘I'd have been dead by now.'

 

I've never been one for cheating on girlfriends. Well, not deliberately anyway. There has been the odd infidelity incident when I was literally blind drunk, or under the impression that I'd been dumped. But a long-term double-dealer? No. It's too complicated.

Now, though, I was rapidly learning what it felt like to be cheater and cheatee, because M and I both had plenty to hide.

‘Am I acting natural enough?' I kept asking myself. ‘Or is my naturalness unnaturally natural?' And I was thinking, ‘I don't think she knows I know. But I do know she
thinks
she knows what I know, and she doesn't. Know, that is. I think.'