Dial M for Merde (3 page)

‘Great,' I said.

‘Oh,' she said, as if she was surprised I'd accepted. ‘I can't pay you.'

‘Pay me? What on earth do you want me to do for you?'

‘Ah, sorry, I thought …' Her voice trailed off in embarrassment.

‘I'm not looking for a job,' I told her. ‘So I wouldn't expect anything in return for helping you out. Well …'

She laughed, and we were both teleported back to that hot night in Los Angeles. The pleasure was clearly mutual.

 

‘Alors?' Elodie had finished her glass of champagne while I'd been phoning, and her eyes were bright with alcohol and expectation.

‘Does Valéry love you very, very much?' I asked.

‘Yes, he's crazy for me. Why?' She looked apprehensive.

‘Well, do you reckon he'd mind if we went back to your place right now?'

‘What?' Elodie blushed, an event that probably happens less frequently than the creation of a planet hosting intelligent carbon-based life forms.

‘I'm sorry, but I just can't wait,' I told her.

‘Paul,' she whispered, ‘this passion is very un-English of you.'

‘I know. Do you think Valéry would understand if we went online straight away and used his platinum card to book me a plane ticket?'

1

T
HE WEBSITE
had obviously been translated by a French person who got the job because they once managed to understand the ingredients on an imported ketchup label. But after a couple of glasses of honey-coloured rosé, it started to make sense, and I was able to deduce two things about the town where M had invited me to join her.

One, judging by the photos, it had a church belltower shaped like a giant willy.

And two, it was where the painters Matisse and Derain invented Fauvism.

Fauve
was translated as ‘big cat', but French artists have
always taken themselves very seriously, so Matisse and co. were probably thinking more along the lines of a lion or tiger than a large tabby. The paintings on the website were impressionistic landscapes of primary-coloured blobs. The painters had clearly decided that they were doing something very wild – throwing away their black paint and capturing Collioure's colours in their most primeval form.

The site said that in the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain produced 242 paintings there. By my reckoning, that had to make Collioure one of the most frequently painted locations in all of French art, on a par with the Moulin Rouge, Monet's lily pond and Madame Renoir's thighs.

 

‘And then they slit them along the belly and harvest the eggs,' M was saying. ‘They get up to twenty-five kilos of caviar from one adult fish. Though hardly any of the poor creatures reach full adulthood these days.'

‘Yuk,' was my only comment. Unscientific, perhaps, but then a PowerPoint presentation on caviar production is not how I usually choose to spend the morning after a romantic reunion with a girl I haven't seen for three months.

The reunion itself had been very romantic. I'd strolled into the arrivals lounge at Perpignan airport to be greeted by the smiling babe that all the guys had been checking out. I guessed they were praying that she was there to meet her ageing grandma, and then in I walked, shattering a dozen Frenchmen's fantasies. A moment for any Englishman to relish.

M was every bit as hot as when I'd last seen her – her long, blonde hair was ruffled as if it had just dried out in the sea breeze, her amber tan was highlighted by a floaty white dress that she'd gathered on her hips with a leather belt,
and to cap it all, there was her brilliant smile, aimed straight at me.

We kissed, on the lips but chastely, and hugged American style – cheek to cheek and zero pelvic thrust. Suddenly both of us seemed self-conscious. This was natural enough, I reasoned, because we didn't have any kind of status. We'd spent one night together, but we hadn't been exchanging breathless promises by text and email ever since. It was all very tentative.

We chatted in the taxi about what we'd been up to since LA, and seemed to be making a conscious effort to keep our hands to ourselves. Even so, it felt as though we were sizing each other up like two dancers at a nightclub, enjoying the sensation of being so physically near to someone that we intended to get even closer to as soon as possible.

And sure enough, as soon as we got into the entrance lobby of her hotel, we both decided that the time for coyness was over, and took up right where we'd left off in California, showing the surprised receptionist just how entangled two bodies can get without actually making love.

We went up to M's room, kissing all the way, stumbling and fumbling with stairs, keys and door handles. I was glad of the tango practice I'd got in Paris. We dived straight under the duvet, and hardly an intelligible sentence was spoken till the next morning, when I woke up to find myself alone in bed.

The French windows were open, warm sunlight was shafting in from the courtyard, and the only sounds were the chatter of starlings, the soft sloshing of a pool filter and the distant hubbub of a waking town.

M was out on the terrace, wrapped in a dawn-yellow bathrobe, dividing her attention between a croissant and her small unfolded laptop.

‘Bonjour,' I called out.

‘Sorry if I abandoned you,' she said. ‘But this is a working trip for me, remember.'

I forgave her when she let her bathrobe fall to the floor and came back to bed, bringing me not only her warm, perfumed body but also a cup of coffee. The ideal woman.

Except that she'd also brought her laptop, and proceeded to show me precisely what kind of work she was doing, which mainly involved disembowelled fish.

‘It's like the rhino, really,' she said. ‘Sturgeon are born unlucky. Sadly for them, their bodies are worth a fortune to us predatorial humans.'

‘A bit like supermodels.'

‘Yes, but we prefer our supermodels alive,' she said.

‘Some of them aren't far off starvation. Unlike you, you're more than alive …' Invigorated by a dose of fresh coffee, I tried to divert her attention from her screen to her erogenous zones.

M, however, had a scientist's ability to shut out everything in the universe that didn't relate to her specialist subject. She planted a quick kiss on my forehead and then carried on with her fish show.

‘For a while, exports from the Caspian Sea were banned by the UN, but they're legal again now, which has just about condemned the beluga sturgeon to extinction. Sad when you consider it's been around, almost unchanged, since prehistoric times.'

She clicked open a photo of a baby sturgeon, only just big enough to fill the hand that was holding it. It was a scaly-backed, dinosaur-looking creature, a cross between a shark, a crocodile and a leech.

‘Cute,' I said.

‘Millions of young sturgeon are introduced into the
Caspian every year, but only about 3 per cent survive till sexual maturity, and they tend to be caught pretty well immediately after that. So you're right – they are like models. As soon as they hit adolescence it's all over.'

I looked up at the frown crinkling M's forehead and had to suppress a laugh. Not that I was indifferent to the tragic story of yet another of our planet's species biting the dust because of human shortsightedness. No, it had suddenly struck me that this was like the start of a James Bond movie, with 007 getting briefed on the ins and outs of the bullion trade or diamond smuggling. I, though, was getting the lecture on sturgeon and caviar from a nude Bond girl instead of a pipe-smoking boffin. Who says 007 gets all the action?

‘Which is why I'm down here,' M concluded. ‘Beluga caviar is such a valuable commodity that it's a prime target for counterfeiting. A clever dealer can make as much from fake Iranian caviar as from heroin. And fish eggs are totally legal until you put them in a tin with a fake label, so there's infinitely less risk. Sturgeon are farmed legally in the south of France, but we suspect that the fake caviar is coming from fish being captured in the wild and then matured in secret offshore pens. These were spotted last year.' She invited me to examine an aerial photo of faint shadows darkening the seabed.

I nodded, although it could just as well have been a fleet of nuclear submarines or a family of lobsters out for an afternoon stroll.

‘Who spotted them?' I asked, punctuating my question with a squeeze of her bare inner thigh.

‘My institute in the UK. But the photo leaked out, and the fish pen had gone by the time the French government reacted. I'm down here to pinpoint the sources of all the
counterfeit caviar that gets sold along the Riviera, and be a bit more discreet about my findings.'

‘Great,' I said. ‘Are we going to hire boats and spotter planes and go out looking for them?'

‘No, not on this trip anyway,' she said. ‘I want to have a snoop around, but officially I'm just going to try and convince the French oceanography institutes to help fund an aerial survey of the coastline. They say that it should be left up to the police. But we're afraid that if the French police get involved, there'll be another leak and it'll all be a waste of time. Or they'll just destroy all the illegal sturgeon. We want to save them, maybe even set them free from their illegal farms. If the environmental impact isn't too heavy,' she went on, apparently unaware of the impact of several male fingers that were now softly caressing the smooth, hot flesh of her stomach. ‘Because when sturgeon are left in peace, the population recovers remarkably quickly. In Florida, for example, the Gulf of Mexico sturgeon has got so common, and so big, that several boaters have been seriously injured in accidental encounters.'

M clicked on a window and started up an amateur film. A guy in a canoe was holding his paddle aloft weightlifter-style, clowning around for his friend with the camera. He slapped the water a few times, and I could hear him yelling for the gators to come and get their asses kicked. Then suddenly, the tranquil river erupted, and a giant fish soared out of the water, the scaly ribs running down its flank practically slicing the nose off the guy's canoe. As soon as the cameraman stopped lurching about, we saw the look of shock on the canoeist's face turn to horror as he realized that he was going to get dumped into the water with the prehistoric monster, plus any gators that had decided to take up his challenge. The macho man of a moment ago
had been transformed into a shrieking hysteric, frantically scrabbling to get free of the canoe and almost weeping with panic.

‘That's amazing,' I said. ‘Can we watch it again?' I leaned over to scroll back.

M's hand leapt out as fast as the sturgeon and clamped down on my wrist. ‘Please don't,' she hissed.

It was a reflex, the kind you often come up against when you're in bed with someone for the first time. We all have taboos about what other people can't touch. It's easy to go too far in the heat of the moment. But this was the first time I'd gone too far with a computer.

‘Sorry,' I said.

She relaxed her grip and smiled apologetically. ‘No,
I'm
sorry. Scientist, laptop, sensitive files, you understand.'

‘Yes,' I said, though I didn't.

‘Now,' she said, putting the laptop on the floor and rolling on top of me, ‘why don't we forget about fish and get down to some prehistoric action of our own?'

2

Our hotel, I discovered, was an elegant Spanish-style mansion, and our room looked out over a courtyard with a splashing fountain. I'd had no time to take in all the details the previous night. I'd been distracted by the rush to reach the bedroom.

We strolled through the empty garden, sniffing at plants, and I stopped to examine a plaque on the bare brick wall. I was trying to piece together a translation when M leaned forward and helped me.

‘Le sage est celui qui s'étonne de tout,' she read, fluently. ‘A wise man is amazed by everything.'

‘Like leaping sturgeon,' I said. ‘Or the fact that you speak such good French. How come?'

‘I took a course at uni,' she said. ‘And you'd be surprised how many oceanographers are French, so I get a lot of practice. Now come on, let's go and find the giant willy.'

We walked down a cobbled lane, in the cool shadow of the castle mound, and emerged beside a tiny harbour. The sun had climbed up out of the Med and was lighting a scene that Matisse might not have found unfamiliar. The beach was a curve of fine grey pebbles running between the castle and the famous phallic church tower.

‘People pretend to like Collioure because of the art,' M said, ‘but what they really enjoy is staring at an erection.'

‘It's suntanned and circumcized,' I said. ‘Perhaps it was originally built by the Moors.'

‘Or the Romans. An erect willy was a good-luck charm for them. They used to carve them over their doorways to ward off evil spirits and attract prosperity.'

We agreed that Collioure must have been a very prosperous place indeed.

The castle, which loomed up to our right, had small slitty windows and sheer stone walls, and looked like a cross between a Spanish villa and a Scottish fortress. It was built on a rocky hill, and its walls tumbled more than a hundred feet straight down into the water.

The promenade behind the beach was taken up by four café terraces. They formed a small village of bamboo armchairs and coffee tables, differentiated by the colours of the cushions and parasols – blue, red, yellow and white. There were hardly any customers, though, just a few solo
newspaper readers and a group of six or seven women in sunglasses. I noticed them because you don't often see a large female gang in France, except at a department-store sale or a nurses' protest march. These women were in their early twenties, wearing short skirts and bikini tops. Judging by their snow-white skin, they had very recently arrived from somewhere much less sunny. They were dozing peacefully in their wicker armchairs as if they'd been there all night.

Matisse would probably not have recognized the silence that reigned in Collioure this morning, I thought. A century ago, fishermen would have been unloading their catch, and women would have been yelling out prices, heckled by flocks of seagulls. Now, half a dozen old fishing boats swayed emptily by the jetty, lined up like an outdoor museum display.

‘Can't you ask the fishermen if they've seen any sturgeon pens?' I asked M.

‘Tricky,' she said. ‘Some of them might be on a backhander from the caviar guys.'

We stretched out on the beach, and I let the pebbles give my back a warm massage.

M sighed. ‘Shame I have to work,' she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out what looked like a small sandwich-maker. She unfolded it, and seemed about to toast her phone.

‘What's that?' I asked.

‘It's a solar-powered phone-charger. Haven't you ever seen one before?'