Dial M for Merde (6 page)

‘What?' M looked almost scared of the idea.

‘They spend half their lives underwater,' I said. ‘I could hang around and—'

‘Please, Paul,' she interrupted me. ‘Let me do things my way. No improvised interrogations, OK?'

‘OK.'

‘Promise?'

‘Promise. M's the word.'

We sealed the deal with a kiss and she went trotting down the stairs.

 

Normally, I'm not the kind of guy who stops in his tracks when he sees an athletic young man with tight buns. But these were extraordinary times, and when I arrived in the village centre and saw the commando striding past in his black vest and shorts, I began to follow the muscular, nylon-clad buttocks.

I knew that I'd just promised M that I wouldn't interrogate the soldiers, but surely a little discreet trailing would do no harm? This guy was heading away from the castle, looking very purposeful. What was it that the plaque in the hotel garden had said – a wise man is astonished by everything? Well, this soldier's buttocks were clenching and unclenching with astonishing speed, showing far more military efficiency than anything else I'd seen the French army do. It was only natural to try and find out why.

He marched up a steep lane of pastel-painted houses, his black shadow flitting through a palette of Mediterranean colours. The houses were dormant in the afternoon sun, their blue and green shutters closed to the outside world.

The commando paused at a junction to pull his phone out of his shorts pocket, and I buried my face in the nearest vegetation, which turned out to be a pungent honeysuckle hanging from a terraced garden. I heard his voice from twenty yards or so up the hill, but didn't dare check to see whether he had noticed the tourist whose head was apparently trapped in a shrub.

The voice began to fade – he was on the move again, and engrossed in his conversation. I extracted my face from the honeysuckle, sneezed some kind of insect out of my nose, and followed.

Soon, the street petered out into a flight of steps that were drenched in the heady smell of a fig tree. The commando bounded up the ten or so steps and disappeared between two parked cars. I followed him, pausing at the top of the stairway to make sure he wasn't looking back.

Around the next corner, I came face to face with a sign saying ‘Défense d'entrer'. A plaque informed passers-by – spies included – that this was the home of the CNEC, 1er Choc. But apart from the sign and the barbed-wire fence, the base didn't look very military at all. The gate was a simple, unguarded barrier like you get on any car park, and beside it was an old canoe that had been filled with earth to be used as a flower bed. Maybe, I thought, they were the shock gardening troops? The stones they'd been picking up from the sea bed were for their rockery. Anyway, it all felt unbelievably French and laid-back – I was sure the guys would love to have a chat about caviar. M was wrong to rule them out of her investigation.

If only I could think of a way to get into conversation with them.

One thing was for sure, though – I wasn't going to sign
up to join the CNEC, 1er Choc. I had nothing against spending my days snorkelling, but those Lycra shorts looked like killers.

 

Unwittingly, the commando had also helped me in my own investigation, because on the way to the base he'd led me past exactly the shop I needed for Elodie's anchovies.

I headed back down towards the harbour and found it again. It was a typically French ‘produits régionaux' store. Its window display was a tangle of fishing nets that ensnared tiny pots of hand-harvested salt, a jar of honey in the shape of Collioure's belltower, a glass bull filled with red wine and, yes, small tubs of local anchovies. No caviar, I noticed, local or foreign.

The shop's tweeness was offset by its location. It was in one of the village's steep, labyrinthine alleys, on the ground floor of a mustard-yellow house. The façade was framed by a leafy vine that provided shade and refreshment to window-shoppers. I helped myself to a few purple grapes that were hanging, juicy and tempting, just within reach.

Inside, the shelves were stacked solid with boxes, bags, tins and bottles of all shapes and sizes. Ribbons and animal shapes abounded, and the whole place smelt of distilled Provence – lavender, olive oil and sunscreen.

Elderly tourists were jostling carefully between the displays, poking and smelling things, trying to work out how small their presents for the folks back home could be before looking cheap. But at four euros a toffee lollipop, people with lots of grandchildren were going to be seriously out of pocket.

I squeezed my way to a shelf where there was an almost
inexhaustibly imaginative selection of things to do with fish – squid paté, swordfish rillettes, mackerel fillets, crab flesh, monkfish livers and whole white anchovies in Banyuls vinegar. I looked at the price tag and calculated that buying Elodie's ten kilos here would probably cost more than the boat that had fished them.

I went up the counter, where the shop-owner was holding the world's smallest jar of honey – the product of a single, world-famous bee to judge by the price ticket.

‘Bonjour,' I said, adding a quick ‘excusez-moi'.

She ignored me, and I had time to admire her dexterity as she twisted wrapping paper around the honeypot and stuck a little gold label on top.

‘J'ai juste une petite question,' I said as she looked for a paper bag that wouldn't dwarf the honey.

Again she ignored me completely. I stood patiently and waited for her to grant me an audience.

I had to admit that it was fascinating to get a close-up view of a type of French woman I'd never seen in Paris. A late middle-aged Parisienne would not have plaited her hair in auburn schoolgirl pigtails, or worn a skin-tight sleeveless vest with a desert warfare camouflage pattern. The cleavage was way too uncovered, as well. A Parisienne of any age is proud of a well-proportioned chest, but she usually covers up her boobs as soon they stop looking like the creamy-smooth orbs in moisturizer adverts. I admired this woman's self-confidence. She had strawberry-red lips and eyelashes like dreadlocks, but she didn't look at all tarty, or what people insultingly call mutton dressed as lamb. She was simply a woman who didn't see why she should stop flaunting her sexiness just because she was over twenty-five. Go for it girl, I thought.

‘Oui?' she said when she had finally handed the
thimble-sized package to her customer and taken a credit card in exchange.

‘Your anchovies, are they from Collioure?' I asked.

‘Oui,' she answered, though she was more interested in watching her customer type his pin number.

‘Is it possible to visit the factory?'

Now I had her full attention.

‘The factory? No, it's closed to the public,' she said. ‘This is the only place you can buy them.'

‘Ah.' I may not be that experienced with women, especially those from the Mediterranean basin, but I can usually tell if a lady is fibbing. When she's telling me an unpleasant truth, she's either apologetic or (like the Paris bank worker who'd deprived me of my credit card) triumphant. The fibbers always sound too offhand and unemotional. I knew that this lady was lying.

‘What size jar would you like?' she asked.

‘I'll go and look,' I said, and returned to the fish product section. The anchovies had been labelled with the shop's golden logo, but by lifting up a sticker I was able to see the name of the producer. ‘Conserves Franchois,' it said, one of those puns that the French are so fond of. The English equivalent would be to call them ‘Preserved Frenchovies'.

Peeling the label further up, I saw that there was an address for the factory, too, a street that I could easily find on my town map. I rubbed the gold sticker back into place as best I could with my thumbnail, and strode out the door.

Straight into a black T-shirt.

‘Merde,' was my first thought, closely followed by, ‘The shop has a security guard, and he saw me damaging the goods.'

I changed my assessment of the situation, though, when I saw that the guy blocking my way had bare legs. No one
has a bare-legged security guard. And he had skintight Lycra shorts on. He was a commando. Correction –
the
commando. The guy I'd followed.

I went back to my original assessment of ‘merde'.

‘Toi,' he said. ‘You were following me.'

‘Moi?' I said.

‘Oui, toi. I followed you back here.'

Oh merde, I thought yet again. So much for my spying skills. The commando saw my discomfort and laughed. He had a friendly face, in a brutal kind of way. His head was shaven, and his jaw was massive, with a dimpled chin that made him look like one of the French rugby players they photograph for calendars.

‘Why were you following me?' he demanded, flexing his biceps through his T-shirt as though the wrong answer might earn me a pair of punches.

‘I am interested in the commandos,' I said. ‘My grandfather was in Normandy.' This was true, though granddad hadn't been there on D-Day, only for a day-trip with my gran to watch the tall ships in Le Havre.

‘But that doesn't explain why you were following me.' There was a cruel glint in his eye. ‘You're English, aren't you?'

‘Yes,' I said, as if this might be enough explanation.

He didn't have time to pursue his line of questioning, because three old ladies brandishing cameras came out of the shop and swarmed around him, asking if he was one of the courageous young men that they saw every day at the harbour, and begging for a photo. His attention was distracted long enough by the bobbing white heads clustered around his midriff for me to edge past him and start walking downhill.

‘Hey, you!' he shouted, but when I looked back he was
still entangled in the gaggle of old ladies, and unable to move without swatting them away. ‘I know why you were following me,' I heard him call out.

I didn't stop to check whether he'd guessed right.

 

‘I do this all day.' The woman was dressed in a white overall, with a hairnet holding her black curls in place. Her fingers were bare, and she hardly looked at them as they pulled the little anchovies to pieces, stripping away their skeletons and laying the bare fillets side by side on a sheet of gauze. ‘It helps me think,' she said.

I didn't like to imagine what ripping the skeletons out of several thousand fish a day made the woman think about, so I asked why she was putting them all to bed like that.

The anchovies had just spent a month soaking in salt, she told me, and were now getting ready to hibernate in a barrel.

I had made good my escape from the commando, and taken refuge in the anchovy warehouse, where things were going very well. When I'd mentioned to the assistant in the factory shop that I wanted to place a large order, I'd been ushered straight through to a preparation area and invited to take my time tasting the full selection of products available. It was all very appetizing. I forked up a long, white anchovy fillet in vinegar that was almost sweet. All that was missing was a glass of rosé to wash it down.

‘It must be hard,' I said, ‘your fingers, the little fish.' My French wasn't up to expressing it more eloquently.

‘No, you get used to it. It's like knitting.'

‘Ah yes.' I nodded, imagining a jumper made of anchovies. It would have been only slightly less wearable than the patterns my aunt used to inflict on me at Christmas. ‘You never do any big fish?' I asked.

‘Big fish? We do sardines sometimes, they're bigger.'

‘No, even bigger fish.'

‘There used to be tuna around here, but they've all gone.'

‘No, not tuna. Other fish.' I tried to look casual. ‘Salmon, for example …'

‘No.'

‘Sturgeon?'

‘What?' I still hadn't mastered the pronunciation of ‘esturgeon'. I made it sound too like ‘detergent'.

‘Ay-stoor-djo?' I tried again, and this time she understood.

‘No, we never do them,' she said. ‘The company only prepares anchovies and sardines. We sell other fish, but they're imported. From Brittany and places like that.' She was apologetic. I could see that she was telling the truth. ‘Why do you want sturgeon?' she asked.

‘I want to buy different fish,' I explained. ‘It's for the wedding of a friend. Ten kilos of the white anchovies, and maybe some other fish, too.'

‘Ten kilos of anchovies? I'm not sure they will like that. Why don't you get them a vase or a lamp?'

‘No, it's not a present. I'm the caterer.'

Probably for the first time in hours, she stopped pulling fish to bits. She held her hands up in the air, closed her eyes and enjoyed a long, shoulder-shaking fit of the giggles. I could only assume that her days of sitting here alone with the anchovies were so dull that the thrill of meeting a caterer had been too much for her nervous system.

‘I'm sorry,' she finally said, and her fingers got back to work. ‘But you said that you are the
traître
. You mean the
traiteur
. You see the difference?'

I managed a short laugh of my own. I'd mispronounced caterer and called myself ‘the traitor'.

Proof yet again that I definitely wasn't cut out for espionage.

6

It was just after seven in the evening.

I was walking down from the hotel to the harbourfront. At the foot of the castle walls, a group of men were drinking pastis and playing pétanque, the game invented by Frenchmen so that they don't have to help with the cooking.

Floodlights were throwing a sheet of white light over the battlements, and I thought about the girl I'd seen walking up there. I wondered if it really had been her at the restaurant. After our eyes met, she hadn't looked at me again, and I had made an effort not to stare at her. But now I half hoped to see her again.