Dial M for Merde (4 page)

I had to confess I hadn't.

‘I never charge up my phone or iPod with anything else. You should get one. Every little helps when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint.'

‘I do my bit,' I said. ‘I've been using the Vélibs in Paris. And I've cut down on fizzy drinks.'

M turned to stare at me. ‘Are you serious?' she asked. There was a sudden edge to her voice.

‘Yes,' I assured her. ‘When I was in California, there was this guy campaigning against the billions of carbon-dioxide bubbles released when we pop open a can of soda or a bottle of fizzy water.'

M shook her head in disbelief. ‘Loonies. There's infinitely more damage done by Californians importing French mineral water so they'll have chic kidneys. I only drink tap water these days.'

Wow, I thought, she must be the only woman ever to say that last sentence on French soil – she is one serious environmentalist.

M plugged her phone into the charger. ‘I'm waiting for an important call,' she said. ‘I might have to go and meet someone.'

‘No problem,' I said. ‘I think I'll see if there are any giant sturgeon out there. Coming?' I nodded towards the glinting sea.

‘No, thanks. I dipped my little toe in yesterday. Freezing. You're on your own.'

I grabbed my snorkel and strode manfully in up to my knees, at which point I was paralysed by a massive electric shock zinging up from my toes to my testicles. But when a guy's being watched by a beautiful girl, he doesn't let a little groin agony put him off, and I waded out over the slippery pebbles until my lower body was totally numb. A quick rinse of my mask, a puff through the snorkel and I dived forward into a different world.

Whole schools of edible-sized fish were parading back and forward just a few feet from the beach. They were
practically tame. They swam towards me to stare goggle-eyed at the new giant in town, and only darted out of reach if I actually tried to touch them. Occasionally they plunged down as a group and started chomping at something on the seabed. I could hear their jaws snapping open and shut.

I thought I recognized one or two of the larger species from past dinners – mullet and sea bream – but there were others that I'd never seen before. Fat silver-green torpedoes with gold stripes running along their backs, and flatter, bream-shaped fish with a black spot at the base of their tails. And then down amongst the rocks, in about ten feet of water, I saw a flash of crimson that stood out against the background of silver, green and blue. I dived, and the crimson turned to vivid white – it was the tentacle of an octopus turning over to reveal the suckers. Before I ran out of breath, I just had time to peer into a staring eye, and watch the octopus's soft flesh rippling as it pulled small stones on top of itself to improve its cover.

I was as crimson as the octopus when I got out of the sea and hobbled over the stones to grab my beach towel. Only when I'd rubbed off every drop of water did I start to fade to my usual colour.

‘No sturgeon that I could see,' I said. I stretched out in the sun beside M, and described the fish I'd seen. ‘What are they?' I asked.

She shrugged.

‘You don't know?'

‘No.'

‘But you're an oceanographer.'

‘What are you trying to say, Paul?' Her large, dark sunglasses stared challengingly at me.

‘Nothing, I'm just doing what the sign said at the hotel
– being amazed by everything. I assumed you'd know.'

‘Look, I'm a marine ecologist, not a fish catalogue. I know a lot about endangered species, but I doubt that the ones you saw are endangered, otherwise they wouldn't be swimming merrily about near a fishing harbour. Fish may be stupid but they're not idiots.'

Despite the joke, the hard edge had come back into her voice, just like when I'd tried to use her laptop. There were so many touchy subjects with her. It struck me how little we knew about each other, no matter how intimate we'd become physically.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I'm not trying to say you don't know your job. I expect you get that a lot, being a female scientist. I know how you feel – I'm an Englishman working in the French food business.'

This softened her mood, and she was just about to lick some droplets of seawater from my chin when her phone buzzed.

‘Excuse me.' She jumped to her feet and walked away along the empty beach to take the call. She was holding the phone in one hand and the charger in the other, pointing it up at the sun as if she was listening to someone out in space. A bizarre sight.

Less bizarre, though, than the group of about twenty identically dressed men who had come into view, trooping silently along the jetty. They were wearing short-sleeved vests and wetsuit bottoms, and each man was carrying a belt of lead weights and long, pear-shaped flippers. Every piece of their kit was black. The local undertakers' diving club, perhaps?

When they got to the end of the jetty, they helped each other on with their wetsuit tops, and then swam out into the bay in pairs. I watched them gather around a buoy and
begin diving down one by one. Each of them came back up clutching a rock, which he held aloft as proof that he'd reached the seabed. It was evidently some kind of exercise.

As soon as they'd all completed their dives, they set out towards the shore, where M was still pacing up and down, alternately talking and listening earnestly. She must have been on the phone for a full half-hour, I thought. The sun had risen high in the sky and warmed away all the aftereffects of my chilly swim, and the café terraces had filled with mid-morning coffee drinkers.

M appeared beside me and apologized for taking so long.

‘I've got to go to Banyuls,' she said. ‘There's a marine research institute there. They've been looking into unusual offshore activity.'

‘Exactly what I've been watching.' I nodded towards the divers.

‘Soldiers,' she said. ‘There's a commando training centre in the castle. They go out on night dives and climb cliffs and stuff.'

‘Surely they'd notice if there were any sturgeon in the neighbourhood,' I said. ‘Why don't you ask them?'

‘I couldn't. A foreign scientist trying to get secrets out of the French military? They'd never let me in the country again.'

‘Maybe I could talk to them,' I suggested. ‘I want to help with your investigation.'

M laughed. ‘So you're going to wander over and casually inquire whether any of their canoes have been savaged by prehistoric fish?'

‘I may be a man, but I am capable of some subtlety, you know.'

‘Oh, I know.' She gave me a lascivious grin that a commando would have been proud of.

I was just about to suggest that she might enjoy a little more subtlety back at the hotel before she left for Banyuls when there was a barrage of whistling and whooping from the café terrace. The snoozing women had woken up and were giving the commandos a hard time as they wandered past in their diving gear.

Judging by the shouts of ‘Wahay', ‘Get 'em off' and ‘Is that a snorkel in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?' I guessed that the women were English. After raping and pillaging their way through Dublin, Prague and Cracow, it seemed that hen parties were coming south in search of prey.

Poor French soldiers, I thought. Nothing in their training could possibly prepare them for an English hen party.

 

I found the commando training centre with no difficulty at all. It was completely open to the public.

It was little more than an alcove at the base of the castle wall, a damp platform the size of a tennis court containing a rack of canoes and various bits of diving equipment. There was a ladder down to sea level, where three inflatable dinghies were moored, their massive outboards on open display for anyone to steal or sabotage. Of the commandos themselves, there was no sign at all, unless they were camouflaged as lumps of seaweed.

The only security measure I could see was a metal gate painted with the unit's name: ‘CNEC, 1er Choc'. I presumed that the second part of the name meant something like ‘First Shock Battalion' and was in no way related to the common French abbreviation for chocolate. Though the whole scene did smack of chocolate soldiers. Surely these guys couldn't be serious commandos?

‘The soldiers, do they often swim?' I asked a French guy who was filming the inflatables. A fellow spy, perhaps.

‘Oh yes, every morning,' he said. ‘Beautiful motors, no? Wah!' Not a spy, then, but an outboard fetishist.

Resolving to try my luck with the commandos the following morning, I strolled around the foot of the castle wall. M had left for Banyuls, so I was on my own for lunch, and I'd spotted an open-air restaurant that was catching the midday sun.

The meal would have delighted the strictest ecologist. The anchovies had been marinated a kilometre or so away, the waiter told me. The rosé was Appellation Contrôlée Collioure, so I could probably have spotted the vineyards just by turning round and looking inland. And my main course – whole grilled sea bream – looked so like the fish I'd swum with that morning that I felt a pang of guilt. Apart from the rice and the coffee, the item on the table that had travelled furthest might well have been the glass of tap water, which had probably been piped down from the Pyrenees. Practically everything else – braised courgettes and tomatoes included – could have been produced within a few miles of the restaurant. Vive la France, I thought. I hoped the other G8 members would remember things like that when they were handing out their carbon dioxide credits.

I was bathing in a rosé-tinted haze of self-satisfaction when I noticed that the people around me were gasping and swearing at something.

‘Merde!'

‘Putain!'

I followed their gaze and joined in myself.

‘Holy shit!'

On top of the castle wall, a dizzying hundred-foot drop
to the concrete path below, a woman was walking along the battlements.

‘On va la ramasser à la petite cuillère, celle-là,' the waiter said, meaning that if she fell, they'd need a spoon to scrape up her remains.

Like everyone else, I held my breath as the woman swivelled and walked back towards us again. She was filming with a small handheld camera, and seemed to be talking to someone inside the castle. She was going to trip and fall, I knew it. She would scream and then splat sickeningly on the ground, no doubt ending up a lot like my sea bream after I'd finished forking it open. I wanted to shut my eyes, but like everyone else I was riveted.

She had black hair hanging loose down to her shoulders, what looked like a trim figure, and an air of complete self-confidence. She had to be a model, I decided, and had been ordered to risk her life to make an ad for shampoo or digital cameras. She was pacing back and forward, not even looking where she was treading, and calmly filming the beach.

I stared up at her and mouthed a silent message at her camera lens. ‘Get down,' I told her. ‘Descendez, s'il vous plaît.'

Suddenly she lowered the camera from her eye and stared down towards me, as if she'd understood. I was too startled to react, but several other people started gesturing at her, urging her to get down.

At last she jumped back into the castle, out of view, and my fellow lunchers gave a sigh of relief and started an animated discussion about why the castle wardens didn't stop visitors climbing up and risking their lives. But then, as I'd seen, security didn't seem to be the castle's biggest priority.

3

Back at the hotel, I looked up some of my new underwater friends on the internet. The fish with the black spot near its tail was an ‘oblade'. In English, a saddled sea bream. The yellow-striped one was a ‘sarpa sarpa', and its flesh apparently had hallucinogenic properties. The Romans used to consume it as a recreational drug. And there was a case of one man eating the fish at a restaurant and suffering thirty-six hours of LSD-like visions. Perhaps that was what I'd had at lunch, I thought. I'd hallucinated the girl on the wall.

I surfed around for news stories on the Med, hoping to find something about sturgeon. It was vital, I'd decided, to gather some useful info for M's investigation. It might relax her a little.

She was totally at ease in bed, but as soon as the sex was over, she seemed to become tense and overreact to innocent remarks. It had to be stress-related. If I could help her get ahead with her work, it would reduce her stress levels and make things easier between us. At the moment, we were vacillating between extreme closeness in bed and cold distance out of it. It was all a bit disorienting.

There were plenty of weird things going on beyond Collioure's harbour wall, I discovered. Sardines with herpes, a great white shark attacking a small cargo ship, a cow found floating thirty kilometres off Marseille, and a new species of toxic seaweed that was killing off sea urchins. Not that I could see much wrong with zapping a few of those spiny bastards.

The Med was in turmoil, it seemed. The perfect place to hide some sturgeon. And they had to be very well hidden, because there were no French news stories about
them on the internet. Either they'd been keeping themselves to themselves, or France's caviar pirates were much better than its commandos at keeping their activities secret.

 

‘Paul, you haven't forgotten me, have you?'

Elodie woke me up from the depths of a siesta. She was phoning to remind me that I was meant to be overseeing the catering arrangements for her wedding.

‘No, of course I haven't forgotten you,' I told her, as soon as I'd remembered where and who I was. ‘I'm going to sketch out some menu ideas. If I email them to you, maybe your brother and your dad can look after the actual ordering?'

‘No. You know Papa – he will buy illegal meat from Belgium or China. And Benoit will get the numbers wrong and order one bottle of wine and five hundred roast pigs.'