Monsieur Pamplemousse on the Spot (2 page)

Pommes Frites had a simplistic approach to life. Black, to him, was black. White was white. The shortest distance between two points was a straight line, and restaurants were for eating in, regardless of race, colour or breed. Rules of entry which showed any form of discrimination were beyond his comprehension.

Equally, Monsieur Pamplemousse had to admit that he missed Pommes Frites' company. Not just the occasional warmth of a head resting on his shoe, or the nuzzling up of a body against his leg, but also his views on the food, often conveyed by the raising of an eyebrow or a discreet wag of his tail.

Pommes Frites had a bloodhound's sensitivity to smells
and to taste, a sensitivity sharpened by his early training with the Paris police and honed finer still during travels with his master over the length and breadth of France. Had they but known it, there were many restaurants who owed their placing in
Le
Guide
to Pommes Frites' taste-buds, and Monsieur Pamplemousse would have given a great deal to have noted down his reaction to the meal he had just eaten.

He gazed out of the window at the lights of Lausanne, twinkling on the Swiss side of the lake. Somewhere in-between a steamer slowly made its way back to Geneva. He looked at his watch. It was still barely ten o'clock. He had dined early. There would be time for a stroll before retiring to bed. Perhaps he could take Pommes Frites for an extra long walk that night to help make up for things. There were some emergency biscuits in the boot of the car. When they got back he would open the packet as a special treat.

He glanced up again as a waiter came towards him carrying a silver tray bearing not, as he might have expected, a dish containing a mound of wild raspberries, but a plate on which reposed a single light-blue envelope. He frowned, recognising the colour of the hotel stationery. Who could possibly be sending him a note?

As the waiter disappeared again he picked up a knife and slit open the envelope, aware that the party at the next table was watching him curiously. Inside there was a sheet of white telex paper and underneath a duplicate in pink. The message was short and to the point; a single word in fact. The word was
ESTRAGON
.

To say that Monsieur Pamplemousse blanched visibly as he digested it would have been to cast aspersions both on his ability to conceal his true feelings and on the subdued and subtle lighting conceived by the architect responsible for the interior design of the restaurant. Bearing in mind the sometimes astronomical size of the bills, blanching of any kind was filtered out by rays which purposely emanated from the warmer end of the spectrum.

Nevertheless, he felt a quickening of his pulse as he carefully refolded the message and slipped it between the
pages of his book to mark where he had left off. Any further reading was out of the question. Had he been Sherlock Holmes he would probably have reached for his violin in the hope of applying the panacea of music to soothe his racing thoughts. Instead, Monsieur Pamplemousse did the next best thing; he picked up a spoon and fork. More waiters were heading in his direction. It would be a pity to let the efforts of all those village girls with their bulging aprons go to waste.

The
framboises
were beyond reproach. He added a little more cream.

The word
ESTRAGON
meant only one thing. There must be an emergency of some kind.

It couldn't be anything personal. He'd telephoned Doucette just before dinner. She'd been in the middle of her favourite serial and he'd had to do battle against background music from the television. In any case, if it was something personal surely the telephone would have sufficed.

In all his time with
Le
Guide
the use of the emergency codeword had been minimal. The last occasion he could recall had been all of two years ago when Truffert from Normandy had been caught reading a copy of
L'Escargot
,
Le
Guide
's staff magazine, while reporting on a restaurant in Nice. There had been hell to pay. Anonymity was a sacred rule, never to be broken. Heads had rolled.

But then its use had been in reverse; a call to
Headquarters
from someone in the field. He couldn't recall a time when the word had gone out from Headquarters itself. He wondered if it was a general alarm. Perhaps all over France colleagues were waiting for their
café
as he was and wondering.

The first cup came and went. Declining a second, he rose and made his way towards the door. As he did so he caught the eye of the blonde girl. She blushed and looked down at her plate as if conscious that he'd singled her out for attention.

On his way out he passed two more tables whose occupants were having to make a fresh decision over the last course, just as he had done. They didn't look best pleased
either. The maître d'hôtel probably wouldn't thank him if he paused and recommended the
framboises
– even though they were probably the best he'd ever tasted. They would need all their supplies that evening. To have one dish off was bad enough. To run out of a second would be little short of disaster.

In the foyer he looked for a public telephone booth. It wouldn't do to use the telephone in his room and risk being overheard – not until he knew what it was all about. Despite the fact that it was an automatic dial-out system, he had an old-fashioned mistrust of hotel telephones.

He emptied his change on to a shelf, fed some coins into the machine and dialled his office number. It was answered on the first ring.

‘Ah, Monsieur Pamplemousse.' It was a voice he didn't recognise. Normally he didn't have much contact with the night shift. ‘
Monsieur
le
Directeur
is expecting you.
Un
moment
.'

The Director was even quicker off the mark than the switchboard girl. He must have been sitting with his hand permanently on the receiver.

‘Pamplemousse? Are you all right? What kept you?'

‘I'm afraid the
café
was a little slow in arriving,
Monsieur
.'

‘
Café
!
There was a noise like a minor explosion at the other end. ‘You stopped for
café
?'

‘
Oui,
Monsieur
le
Directeur
.' Monsieur Pamplemousse decided he must proceed with care. The tone was not friendly. ‘In view of the gravity of your message I felt it wise not to arouse suspicions by leaving my table with too great a haste.'

‘Ah!' The response was a mixture of emotions, of incredulity and suspicion giving way, albeit with a certain amount of reluctance, to grudging respect. ‘Good thinking, Pamplemousse. Good thinking.'

Monsieur Pamplemousse breathed a sigh of relief. It was often a case of thinking on one's feet with the Director. Like a boxer, you needed constantly to anticipate.

‘How was your meal?' From the tone of the other's voice it was clear he regarded the answer as a foregone
conclusion. Not for the first time Monsieur Pamplemousse found himself marvelling at the efficiency of
Le
Guide.
He wondered how the news from Les Cinq Parfaits had got through so quickly. It was almost uncanny at times. He had a mental picture of the Operations Room; the illuminated wall-map, the large table in the centre of the room with its little flags to represent the Inspectors. The girls with their long sticks moving them around. The shaded lights. The staff talking in hushed voices as the reports came in. However, tonight was no normal night.

‘It left a lot to be desired,
Monsieur.
Particularly towards the end.'

‘This is a disaster, Aristide. A disaster of the first
magnitude
.'

‘It was not good news,
Monsieur
,' Monsieur Pamplemousse replied carefully, picking his way through the minefield of the Director's mind. ‘It was not good news at all. As you can imagine, I had been looking forward to it. Perhaps,' he tried to strike a cheerful note, ‘perhaps it only goes to show that nothing in this world can ever be wholly perfect.' Encouraged by the silence at the other end, Monsieur Pamplemousse began to enlarge on this theme. The Director was in an overwrought state. He had probably been working too hard. He needed soothing. ‘One
soufflé
doesn't make a summer,
Monsieur.
There will be others.'

There was a long pause. ‘Have you been drinking, Pamplemousse?'

‘Drinking,
Monsieur
?
I had an apéritif before the meal – a Kir – followed by a glass or two of Sancerre with the
Omble,
then a modest Côte Rôtie, a glass of Beaumes-de-Venise with the sweet. I forewent a liqueur …'

‘Do you know why I sent you a telex?'

‘Because of the
Soufflé
Surprise,
Monsieur
?'

‘No, Pamplemousse.' The voice at the other end reminded him suddenly of a dog barking. ‘It was
not
because of the
Soufflé
Surprise
.' There was another pause, a longer one this time. ‘And then again, yes, you are quite right. It
was
because of the
Soufflé
Surprise
.'

Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to stay silent. Clearly
he had, albeit unwittingly, scored some kind of point. Bonus points in fact. Throwing caution to the wind he edged the door to the telephone booth open a little with his foot. The heat inside was adding to the confusion in his mind. The Director's voice when he spoke again was tinged with a new respect.

‘Your time with the Sûreté was not wasted, Aristide.'

‘
Merci,
Monsieur.
I like to think not.'

‘You have a knack of going straight to the heart of the problem. Clearing a pathway through the jungle. It is indeed fortunate that we chose to send you to Les Cinq Parfaits at this moment in time. Pamplemousse …' The Director paused and Monsieur Pamplemousse instinctively braced himself for the next words. ‘Pamplemousse, if I were to ask you for your definition of the words “liquid gold”, what would it be?'

Feeling himself on safe ground at long last, Monsieur Pamplemousse didn't hesitate. ‘It would be a Sauternes,
Monsieur
. A Château d'Yquem. Probably the '45. I am told that the '28 and the '37, although still wonderful, are now sadly past their best. In '45 there was an early harvest …'

‘Aristide.' There was a hint of pleading in the Director's voice, as if he was trying to convey some kind of message. ‘Aristide, I have to tell you that this is a very serious matter. Think again.'

Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the matter for a moment. He wondered if the Director was trying to catch him out. Perhaps he was thinking of a German Eiswein – the capital made out of what in other circumstances, other areas, would have been a disaster; wine made from juice which had been squeezed from grapes frozen on the vine. That could be called liquid gold indeed. He racked his brains as he tried to think of famous years when it had happened.

‘Am I getting warm,
Monsieur
?'

‘No, Pamplemousse.' There was an audible sigh from the other end. ‘You are not getting warm. You are cold. But your temperature at this moment is nothing compared to what it will be if this problem remains unsolved. Then you will be very cold indeed. We shall
all
be very cold.'

‘I have heard that the owner of Château d'Yquem holds the '67 in high regard …'

‘Pamplemousse! Will you please stop talking about wine. It has nothing to do with wine.' Monsieur
Pamplemousse
fell silent as the Director's voice cut across his musings. He recognised a warning note and like a
professional
gambler studying the tables he decided to watch play for a while so that he could get the feel of how the numbers were running before making his next move. A moment later the wisdom of his decision was confirmed. The Director was off on another tangent.

‘Do you remember the winter of '47, Pamplemousse?'

‘It was a very cold winter,
Monsieur.
I was only nineteen and it was my first time away from home. I was in Paris and I remember shivering in my room and wishing I was back in the Auvergne; at least they had wood to burn there. Food was scarce and there was ice on the inside of my bedroom window.'

‘There may well be ice on the inside of your bedroom window again next year, Pamplemousse, if you do not act quickly. Quickly and precisely and with the utmost discretion.

‘Listen to me and listen carefully. Walls have ears as you well know, and I do not wish to repeat what I have to say.

‘In four days' time you will see a red carpet being laid out on the steps of Les Cinq Parfaits, a red carpet which will stretch all the way from the entrance doors to the helicopter landing-pad at the side of the building. It is a red carpet which in its time has felt the tread of a reigning monarch of Grande-Bretagne and more than one President of the French Republic. Latterly its pile has been
compressed
almost beyond recovery by the weight of a man of such unbelievable wealth it is impossible to describe; a
grosse
légume
who by the blessing of Allah has the good fortune to be sitting on one of the richest deposits of oil in the world.

‘Each year he visits Les Cinq Parfaits as a guest of France to carry out what one might call a “shopping expedition” and at the same time indulge himself on all that is best and
richest and creamiest on the menu. He is particularly partial to the
Soufflé
Surprise
.'

Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to take the bull by the horns.

‘With respect,
Monsieur,
I understand perfectly all that you are saying. What you are saying is that this V.I.P. – this
grosse
légume
as you call him – being a guest of France, a guest of some importance to our future well-being, has to be cosseted and indulged and made to feel at home while he is here. That I understand, even if I do not necessarily approve. What I do not understand is how it affects my own stay at Les Cinq Parfaits.'