Dial M for Merde (26 page)

‘Saturday,' she repeated, and I could almost see the plans gelling in her head.

‘So it's going to be a mad rush to buy all the ingredients for the reception and get the staff down here. You will help me, won't you?'

‘Er, yes, of course I will.'

There was to be no more talk about breaking up, it seemed. My crack-brained plan had worked.

And even though I said so myself, it was a minor stroke of genius. All Léanne's people had to do was set up a fake wedding, and the hitman would go along thinking he was going to whack the surprise guest. But hey presto, the only surprise guests he'd find would be a few bus loads of plain-clothes police.

Alternatively, if the wedding did go ahead on the Saturday as Elodie wanted – which still seemed a pretty slim hope – the cops just had to stake out the family chateau and nab the hitman when he arrived.

The shimmering beauty of it was that, whatever happened, the killer was going to try and whack a president who wasn't even going to be there. I'd baited the perfect trap. Léanne was going to be deliriously happy with me. No more threats of prison now. They might even let me off income tax for life.

‘Hey, I must call Benoit about the pièce montée,' I said. ‘Got to get things moving.'

‘Yes, good idea,' M said. ‘Excuse me, I must go for a pee.' She left the table. Off to call her paymasters, I assumed, setting up the job for next Saturday. Excellent.

‘Bonjour, Pol,' Benoit answered, sounding his usual sleepy self.

I asked him how the fig experiments were going, playing my part to the full.

‘Oh, not bad,' he said. ‘But now I am with Papa. He was waiting until you woke up to call you. He has news for you.'

‘Paul?' Jean-Marie came on the line, and I could hear a huge grin in his voice. ‘Great news. Great news. Great, great …'

‘News?' I ventured.

‘Yes. I was at the city hall last night for a dinner.' Ah yes. The soirée he'd told me about. ‘Very, very chic, everyone was there. The major of Paris, the Minister of Justice – she is very sexy, you know – and Johnny Hallyday …'

‘So what's the news? Are you all going to make a record?'

He laughed good-naturedly. It had to be very good news indeed if he didn't mind me poking fun at his pomposity.

‘The President was there, too, of course, with his friend Ludivine, you know, the one who gives him the blow …? Merde.'

‘Blowjobs, Jean-Marie. A blow merde would be something very different, and I doubt if a Bonnepoire would do it.'

He laughed again. ‘I had a word with the two of them,' he said, ‘and the President said – the President said …' He was so self-satisfied that his tongue had got entangled while hugging itself.

‘Yes?'

‘That he guarantees that the wedding will be next Saturday. He will persuade the family. Young Valéry will be rich, after all.'

I didn't reply.

‘Excellent news, no?' Jean-Marie sounded disappointed at my lack of response.

‘Yes, excellent,' I agreed. I was thinking how this would make the police job more difficult.

‘But that is not the only thing. The best is yet to come.' He paused dramatically.

‘Yes?' I prompted.

‘Well, later on in the soirée, he came back to me. He said that he had consulted with his staff, and … and …'

‘And?'

‘He will do the ceremony himself.'

‘The President? No, he can't!'

‘He can. As an elected official, it is one of his powers. Isn't that excellent? My daughter Elodie married by the President. The honour. And the photos. Think how much
Paris-Match
will pay for the exclusive photos. Isn't this
merveilleux
?'

I was too shocked to say anything, especially because he was right. The photos were going to be worth a fortune. The President arriving incognito at the society wedding. The President marrying the beautiful young couple. The President's head exploding all over Elodie's posh Parisian wedding dress.

I could see the captions already – I now pronounce you man and splat. Till death him do part. The head of state's brain as confetti. Photo opportunity organized by Paul West.

Bloody
merveilleux
.

1

I
DID A WEB SEARCH
for French presidential deaths. There were some spectacular stories. Best of them all had to be the demise at the Elysée palace of Félix Faure in 1899, supposedly while getting a blowjob from his mistress.

Marguerite Steinheil arrived at the palace and was ushered up to the President's apartments. Some time later, she rang for assistance, and servants found fifty-eight-year-old Monsieur Faure unconscious on his bed, his hands – so it was alleged – still clinging to Madame Steinheil's hair. The affair caused a massive scandal, and also one of France's most famous puns. It took me quite a while to work it out, but to understand it, all you need to know is that the word
connaissance
can mean consciousness or acquaintance:

When the priest arrived to give Faure the last rites, he asked one of the servants whether the President was conscious – ‘Le Président a-t-il toujours sa connaissance?'

The servant misunderstood. ‘No,' he replied, ‘we sneaked her out the back door.'

Faure died a few hours later, apparently of a brain haemorrhage.

Not all the country's leaders died such pleasurable deaths. There was, I discovered, a long tradition of presidential assassinations.

Marie-François Sadi Carnot, a man despite his name, became President in 1887, and was reaching what one website called ‘the zenith of his popularity' and being hotly tipped for re-election when he was stabbed by a twenty-one-year-old anarchist called Santo Geronimo Caerio. The killer was tried and guillotined within two months.

Paul Doumer met a similar fate. In 1932, he was invited to the opening of a book fair to promote the works of First World War veterans. A noble cause, but it was here that Doumer was shot by a ‘mentally unstable Russian émigré' called Gorguloff, who was also swiftly tried and guillotined.

Jacques Chirac was luckier. During the 2002 Bastille Day parade in Paris, he was riding down the Champs-Elysées in an open-top car when a right-wing fanatic pulled a hunting rifle out of a guitar case. He managed to fire off a single round before a Canadian tourist grabbed the gun and saved the President, an event which has to be one of Canada's few contributions to world politics.

And now, somewhere out there, a much more professional hand was getting ready to take a potshot at the current President, and it was up to me to be the Canadian.

 

‘Please forget what I said last night,' M told me. ‘When a girl says things like “We ought to call it a day,” she doesn't
always mean it, you know. Sometimes it's just a test. You're meant to say, “No, don't leave me, ne me quitte pas,” then the girl feels loved and everything's OK.'

She leant across the café table and stroked my cheek. Her eyes were moist with sincerity. She was like the desperate housewife whose boring hubbie has just won the lottery. Life was about to have its compensations.

A reconciliation was all very well, but right now I needed a long, undisturbed phone conversation with Léanne. She had to stop the President coming to the wedding. Too bad for Elodie, who would just have to be married by a bog-standard mayor like any other French girl.

Trouble was, suddenly M didn't have any more meetings to rush off to. She said that she was totally free to hang out with me in Marseille or leave for the Camargue.

‘No meetings for the next four days?' I asked. ‘Are all the sturgeon experts stopping work for Iranian New Year or something?'

It sounded aggressive, and I could see that M was tempted to bite back, but she controlled her instincts and said that no, she'd finished her discussions for the moment. Which seemed to suggest that she must have met her hitman already. I guessed that her next appointment would be to hand over the dosh to him when the job was done. I really needed to get this information to Léanne.

‘I can help you out with your work, like you helped me,' M said.

I did my best to look grateful. In desperation, I took a risk and walked her back past the fish market, where I managed to fire off a meaningful gesture at the lemon seller.

Call me, I mimed, my thumb and little finger held up to my cheek. But the cross-dressing cop had been replaced by
a real old lady, who, to judge by her lascivious wink, thought I was a wrinkle groupie.

Léanne's roof-clambering operation was over, it seemed, and the cops had melted away into the shadows again. I knew that they'd be watching, though, so I hung back slightly behind M, and started to mouth a message, in French and English – ‘Call me … appelle-moi … call me' – sweeping my head from right to left so that the distress signal would be picked up anywhere around the Vieux Port.

‘What are you doing? You look like one of those poor fish.' M was staring at me.

‘Er, yeah, I must have been gaping in sympathy. I've got to order a couple of hundred sea bream for the wedding. It's a heavy weight to have on your conscience.'

‘Why don't you just buy a whale and give them steaks?' M said. ‘Then you'd only have one lot of blood on your hands.'

She laughed. I didn't.

 

We packed and left our room. I was with M the whole time, and she showed no sign of wanting to climb up on the roof, or even go out on to the balcony. The money, I guessed, had to be in her luggage somewhere.

While we were checking out, I opened up my laptop and emailed Benoit. The pièce montée was now the least of his problems, I told him. He had to get moving with his share of the organization – hiring waiting and cooking staff, ordering some of the food, renting crockery and cutlery, maybe a marquee too. It was all incredibly last-minute. I said he'd have to motivate reluctant suppliers by telling them that the President was going to be there. I just wished I could tell him to take out insurance against bullet-ridden tables and blood-stained tablecloths.

I also sent Benoit my ideas for the menu, the carbon-neutral banquet that I'd been refining ever since I tasted my first Collioure anchovy. I cut and pasted it into the email window.

It was either blind optimism or blind stupidity that made me push on as though a wedding reception would actually happen, but it was also therapeutic. Re-reading the list lifted me almost physically out of the merde I'd got myself into. My head was temporarily emptied of stress and filled with the sights, sounds and smells of the banquet. The crackling fire, the glistening green oil, the prickle of thyme and rosemary sprigs, the pungent stickiness of fresh caramel.

‘You know a champagne supplier?' M had settled the bill and was reading over my shoulder.

‘Yes, a little guy near Reims,' I said. ‘Makes organic champagne. I've got his phone number.'

As we walked to the car, I told her the story. I'd been having a picnic with my old girlfriend Alexa (I told M diplomatically that it was with ‘a few friends') at the Cité Universitaire on the southern edge of Paris. It's one of the few places in Paris where you can really hurl a frisbee and not be afraid that it'll land in the middle of a traffic jam or on a grumpy park-keeper's head. After an acrobatic game of catch, we opened the bottle of champagne that Alexa had brought – a brand I'd never heard of, made in a small, family vineyard. I noticed that the farmer's name was at the bottom of the label, and there was even a mobile phone number. I decided to call him and congratulate him on his excellent bubbly.

‘Allô, oui?' A man answered, against an echoey background of wind and open space. He sounded surprisingly un-chic.

I asked him if he was the guy on the label, and he said yes, warily, as if he was afraid of a practical joke, especially from someone with a shaky foreign accent like mine.

‘I just called to say that your champagne is excellent,' I told him.

‘Uh?' He sounded as though he couldn't quite believe it was that simple.

‘I am having a picnic in Paris, with your champagne, and it is excellent.'

‘Oh, merci beaucoup,' he said, brightening up.

‘Yes, I just wanted to say this.'

‘Merci,' he said again. ‘Is it chilled enough? At a picnic, I mean.'

‘Oh yes, we have carried in it a, you know, cold bag,' I told him. ‘It is cool and excellent. Or it was, we have almost finished.'

‘I am happy,' he said, and he sounded it.

‘Moi aussi,' I said. There was nothing else to say, really, so I thanked him again and we said goodbye.

‘Oh.' M was looking choked up. I thought it was because we'd arrived at the car to find a parking ticket stuffed under the wiper. But no. ‘That was really cute,' she told me. ‘I bet he went home and told his wife, guess what just happened. Someone called me up just to say he liked our wine.' She seemed to be on the verge of tears. ‘Don't you think it'd be great to have a simple life like that?'

Well, I thought, it does sound much cooler than sneaking round the back streets of Marseille picking up blood money.

‘Yes, and I think they'll be even happier with their lifestyle when I call them up to order three hundred bottles,' I said, ripping the parking ticket in two. I didn't need to bother with it. The policeman had effectively given himself a fine, because his colleagues were the new hirers of the vehicle.

‘Hadn't you better keep that?' M asked. ‘The hire people will want it.'

‘Oh, shit, yeah,' I said, remembering that I was supposed to be a normal car-hiring tourist.

No such luck. As I folded the two halves of the ticket together, I saw that there was a note scribbled inside, signed ‘L'.

 

The only way to read Léanne's note, I realized, was to risk my life.

We headed northwest out of Marseille and I pulled into the first motorway layby we came to and ventured into the concrete toilet block.

Bracing my nostrils, I tried to avoid eye contact with the seatless metal receptacle at the back of my cubicle, but even
as I blurred my vision, I saw that the toilet had been used more for long-distance target practice than precision bombing. The unmentionable impacts of failed operations were splashed around the floor, back wall and the metal itself.

I focussed on the note, praying that my oxygen supply would last long enough for me to read it.

‘It's OK,' Léanne had written on the inside sheet of the ticket. ‘We have noted presence of l'invité d'honneur. Call me when it is safe. I can't call you if you are not alone. Do not take risks.'

I crumpled the note and threw it into the toilet bowl. There was no point flushing it away, I thought. Only a suicidal rat would dare go diving for it. I unlocked the door and got out, my lungs at bursting point.

M probably wondered why I had to bend over and get my breath back after a brief visit to the loo, but we weren't quite intimate enough for her to ask for news of my digestive system.

‘That's better,' I said, getting back in the car, and she looked as though she believed me. I saw out of the corner of my eye that her phone was sticking slightly out of the top of her bag. I hadn't been the only one dealing with my messages.

I asked her to drive – I wanted to put in a call to Valéry and get the address of a good hotel near Bonne Maman's chateau in the Camargue. I needed a base camp from which to marshal operations.

Valéry answered after the fourth or fifth ring. He was over the moon. By which I mean not just happy, but actually flying out in space, his brain having been launched skywards by some chemical or other. So much for his resolution to keep off the powdery stuff.

‘It is super, Paul, super,' he sang. I could hear a strange creaking noise – the wings, perhaps, of his makeshift spacecraft. ‘The good date, with all my family, and le Président himself. Super.' He sighed and seemed to forget for a moment that he was meant to be speaking to someone.

‘Yes, Valéry, it's fantastic. Now I need to ask you something.'

‘Elodie is so happy. I am so happy. Are you happy?' The creaking got louder. Perhaps he was altering course to go round to the dark side of the moon.

‘Yes, I am bloody happy, Valéry. Now—'

There was a thud. ‘Oh merde.'

‘What is it, Valéry?'

‘I am just falling from the hammock,' he said, as if he was still in mid-air. ‘Ay, mon bras. I have not dropped the phone, but I have hurt my arm. Ay.'

‘Valéry! Valéry!' This was not my voice. It was a woman calling out to him. Or rather getting up the momentum for a good bollocking.

I heard Valéry say ‘Oh là' and then he rang off. I was none the wiser about a hotel, but at least I now knew the name of one guy I couldn't rely on for help.

M had just joined a convoy of trucks heading north towards Avignon and the Rhône valley when Valéry's number showed up on my phone.

‘Have you managed get back in the hammock?' I asked him.

‘Monsieur West?' It wasn't Valéry, unless he'd turned into a plummy-voiced woman.

‘Oui,' I answered.

‘Un instant,' she said, and the phone rustled loudly in my ear.

‘Monsieur West?' It was another woman. They seemed to be queuing up to check my identity.

‘Oui?'

‘Oh là là, are you on an aeroplane?'

‘No, in a car.'

‘You are not driving, I hope?'

‘No,' I said, ‘I am a passenger.'