Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (19 page)

Later, as Capucine left, Régis said, “I’m thinking of throwing a big dinner party next week. You know, a party for
Aoutiens
—those of us who are stuck in Paris for the month of August—particularly my three girls and their husbands and boyfriends, but also my clients who want their ads up on the screen the second everyone gets back from vacation. I’d love it if you and Alexandre could come, and maybe Jacques, too. Are you going to be around next week?”

“Next week? What a shame. Alexandre and I are planning on spending the last week of our vacation in a tiny village near Bandol. We have a friend who has a mas there. It’s really too bad. Your dinner party sounds like great fun.”

As she was walking to her car, Capucine saw a woman on the opposite sidewalk whom she had met at a cocktail party several months before. The woman looked at her, her lips parted for a greeting. She hesitated, then decided she might not know Capucine, after all. The shock was as if Capucine had been hurled into the Canal Saint-Martin. The new hairdo was nowhere near as effective as she had thought. Capucine felt her blouse sticking to her back from sweat. Hugging the wall, she darted to the safety of the car.

C
apucine was upset enough to yank Alexandre away from his lunch before he had had a chance to tuck into his dessert and coffee.

“We have to leave right away. Immediately. I seriously underestimated the risk of coming to Paris. Too many people know us here. This is folly. Come on. Hurry up. Settle the check. We’re going back to La Cadière right now.”

Alexandre well knew when not to oppose his wife. In less than half an hour they had packed their bags, checked out of the hotel, and were on the E60 autoroute heading south.

Capucine kept to the middle lane, scrupulously keeping the car’s speed at exactly eighty-two miles an hour, two miles an hour over the speed limit, neither too fast nor too slow to attract the gendarmes.

By seven in the evening, the sun had sunk low on the horizon. “We’re coming up to Beaune,” Alexandre said. “I know the perfect little
bistrot
there. We can just hop in and have a little bite
sur le pouce
—“on our thumbs”—and be back on the road in no time at all.”

“
Pas question.
But if you’re desperately hungry, we can stop at one of those places on the autoroute.”

Alexandre was left speechless as a cow dealt a blow to the head with a sledgehammer. Numb, he allowed himself to be led up the steps of a bridge restaurant spanning the autoroute. He remained mute as they were shown to a table by an impassive teenager with bad skin and handed folio-sized menus laminated in thick plastic, lurid with overbright, polychrome photographs. Capucine was delighted. The menu was even more magic realist than Régis’s work.

She was less delighted when the food came. Alexandre’s overdone entrecôte was shoe-sole thin and filmed over with a slick of garlicky
beurre composé.
Her fried eggs were mu-cousy, tasteless, evocative of the postage stamp–size confinement of the hen cage, and the geometrically round circle of ham was so fluorescent, it seemed impossible it could once have been the functioning component of a living creature.

They left the restaurant without a word.

Just before eleven they reached the D559 departmental road, which would lead them to La Cadière and then to the mas. Capucine relaxed, slowed down, rolled the window open. The car filled with the humid, tropical air of the Midi and the smell of wild thyme. In fifteen minutes they were at the mas.

At the sound of the car, David emerged onto the terrace, his finger in a slim book. He wore white linen slacks, a long-sleeved broadcloth white shirt open to the middle of his chest, and white espadrilles. When Capucine emerged from the car, he smiled.

“The hurly-burly of the big city was too much for you, eh? I know the feeling.”

Capucine sank into his arms and let herself be enveloped in his hug.

“Are you hungry? Magali made a marvelous pissaladière this evening. Most of it is still left. And there’s a half bottle of Ott rosé in the fridge. Why don’t you just sit out here and let me get it for you?”

In less than a minute, David was back, balancing a tray laden with plates, cutlery, and the dish of pissaladière in one hand and holding a long-necked bottle and three glasses in the other. The pissaladière was an onion tart topped with a crisscrossed latticework of anchovies and olives. Legend had it that it originated in the area around the Italian border in the days of the Roman Empire. The original pissaladière was apparently made with garum, the fermented fish intestines so prized by the Romans. The anchovies were supposed to evoke that taste. Like all of Magali’s cooking, this dish was excellent, silky with umami. Capucine rejoiced in Alexandre’s pleasure.

“Where did you eat on your way down?” David asked.

“Don’t ask,” Capucine warned with a coquettish smile. Things were beginning to fall back into focus.

“One of those bridge restaurants they have over the autoroute,” Alexandre said.

“Wow. Even in my flic days I wouldn’t eat in one of those places,” David said.

“Oddly enough, the frites were quite good. I have to write a piece about that. You can knock yourself out at home making frites, but they are never anywhere near as tasty as the ones made by pimply teenagers with two weeks’ experience in a fast-food dive. Asian food is just the same—”

Neither Capucine nor David listened to him.

“How did you make out in Bonifacio?” Capucine asked.

“I think I got all there was to get. But this isn’t the time to talk about it. You both look punched out. Let’s go to bed. We’ll deal with it all tomorrow, after breakfast.”

By morning the healing of the mas was nearly complete. Capucine slipped on a silk kimono and, barefoot, padded to the kitchen door, where she heard David chattering with Magali in Provençal. The rhythm seemed so otherworldly, her real problems retreated to the threshold of the imaginary.

Capucine waited for a lull in the conversation and walked in. David had the local press open on the table in front of him, and Magali had gutted several small fish, apparently for lunch.

David smiled up at Capucine and tapped the open newspaper with his knuckle.

“If you believe this, I’m the new powerhouse of the Var. I’m beginning to think my candidature for the Assemblée might not be so unrealistic, after all.”

Capucine put her hand on his shoulder and scanned the article.

“For years I’ve known you had gifts as a politician. I think you can make a real contribution to the country. And I’m sure you will. But I still want to know what you found out in Bonifacio.”

David laughed and folded his newspaper. Magali shuffled over and served Capucine café au lait and buttered toast made in the oven.

David waited until Capucine had downed half of her coffee before beginning his report.

“Despite all the tourism, Bonifacio is not too different from my village here. It’s run by a hard core who look down their nose at everyone else. I drank a few pastagas with some of the key players, the port captain, the owner of a club called the B’ Fifty-Two, the man who runs the mini supermarket at the end of the marina, people like that. After a drink or two, they were all very expansive.

“For openers, your Nathalie was no saint. She was well known in the ports. Last summer she had been half of a skipper-cook combo on a crewed charter boat, a very froufrou fifty-foot catamaran. It was a sweet job. The kind of setup where you get a four-figure tip for two weeks’ work, in addition to your salary from the charter company. But one afternoon your girl decided to have a go with the charter customer while his wife was out shopping. The wife got wind of it and got so pissed off, she grabbed her husband by the ear and took off in a taxi. There were no tips that trip. Even worse for her, the skipper, with whom she was sharing a cabin, didn’t take kindly to her tryst and threw her off the boat. She hung around the clubs for a while but got warned off one by one. Her look was just too scruffy, and she liked to get sozzled and go in for heavy making out at the bar and then ask for ‘little loans’ from her marks.

“That was the last anyone saw of her until she turned up again on your boat. The port captain noticed that she almost never went on shore. His guess was that was because she had too many enemies on the lookout for her.”

“Serge,” David continued, “is also known down there. He bought the port captain drinks a couple of times. The port captain said he was a very nervous sailor, very unsure of himself. Probably shouldn’t have been skippering a boat the size of yours.”

“He might be a weak sailor, but he’s not dumb one,” Capucine said. “He made a point of bringing along a crew member who had been a champion racer.”

“Yeah, I heard about her, too. Seems there was this bizarro love-hate relationship between her and Serge. Much as he needed it, he couldn’t stand when she interfered. His hot button was that she would tie the boat too close to the dock for his taste. She didn’t want women to have to take a huge step off the stern to go ashore. And Serge was worried that the stern would bang against the dock if the wind picked up. They were always bickering about it on the dock, the stock joke.

“When you guys went up the steps to the old town, Serge invited the port captain for a pastaga. The port captain tried to get out of it, but Serge was insistent. Serge was after him to check their mooring. The port captain couldn’t get over it. ‘The guy had so little control, he needed the port captain’s sign-off for the most trivial stuff,’ he said.”

“Did the port captain go look at the boat?”

“Of course not. But he said Serge did. After they finished their drinks, he made a big show of checking not only the stern lines but the bow line, as well. The mooring thing seemed to be a very big issue with Serge.

“That’s pretty much it. The port captain said that as he was shutting down the capitainerie, he saw one of your crew, Dominique Berthier, rush down the quai in the direction of the boat, patting his pockets as if he’d forgotten something.”

“Did they see him again?”

“No. Because they went to a bar that was on a side street just off the quai that didn’t have a good view of the marina. The only other thing he saw was the boat girl struggling with a supermarket cart from the mini-market at the port.”

“When was this?”

“About twenty minutes into their second drink.”

Capucine looked out the window of the kitchen and into the hills for a few beats.

“When the port captain went back to his office, was the cart still there?”

“No, he said it wasn’t. It was the sort of thing he’d notice. He’s an old lady about the neatness of the marina. But you can’t conclude it was your boat girl who took it back. I checked with the mini-market. It seems that a good number of their customers just leave the carts on the dock, so they have a boy who, in addition to helping out in the back of the store, goes up and down the dock every couple of hours, bringing in carts.”

That evening, around six thirty, at the magic moment when the cicadas’ sawing quieted and the colors of the hills began to deepen, David, Capucine, and Alexandre sat on the terrace, sipping
perroquets
—apéros made with pastis and mint syrup. A black Mercedes with darkly tinted windows rolled up the road at speed and stopped abruptly in a shower of pebbles.

Capucine felt her stomach twist more tightly than one of Serge’s over-convoluted sailor’s knots. She half rose, on the way to disappearing into the house.

The door of the car opened.

“What’s for dinner? I’m starved,” Jacques said.

Capucine collapsed back in her chair with a thud.

“What’s this?” Jacques asked as he arrived on the terrace. “I’m used to being greeted with rose-petal confetti and clanging cymbals, and all I see are dropped jaws dribbling drool. Have I come at an inopportune moment? There’s not enough dinner to go around? You were planning a quiet threesome?”

“Jacques, how did you find this place?” Capucine asked. “I never told you where we were.”

“Little cousin, it may surprise you, but there are actually things I know that you’ve never told me. Granted, only a few, but there are still some.”

“No, seriously. How did you find out where I was?”

“Maybe it was the all-seeing eye of the DGSE’s drones in the sky, or maybe I just know how the mind of my little cousin works better than she knows it herself, and have a computer that can look up names and addresses and a GPS in my car that will take me anywhere. Choose whichever solution pleases you best.”

Capucine scowled at him. Alexandre beamed.

“We’re having a bouillabaisse,” Alexandre said. “David has the most extraordinary cook. You’ve come to the right place for dinner.”

“And to stay for a while, I hope,” David said with his vote-winner’s smile.

“Who could resist the invitation of a future president of the republic?” Jacques said through his Cheshire cat grin.

A glass was produced for Jacques. By the time it was a third empty, the intimate circle had re-formed. Jacques teased Alexandre, finished Capucine’s sentences, and poked fun at David’s political aspirations. The strain of the circumstances retreated into the hills with the fading light of the day.

The meal over, David and Alexandre cleared the table and could be heard chatting and washing dishes in the kitchen. Jacques and Capucine strolled through the grounds of the mas.

“Lovely place,” Jacques said. “Good to see that David finally got over his thing for his boss, Isabelle—isn’t that her name?—and struck out on his own. He has far too much talent for the Police Judiciaire.”

“His thing for his boss! Are you kidding? She’s definitely . . . And I think he may be, too.”

“Little cousin. The things you don’t understand. So tell me, are you planning on spending the rest of your life here and becoming David’s campaign manager? Mind you, you could do worse.”

Capucine laughed. “
Quelle idée.
No, I’ll be back at work in a week or two at the most. My greatest concern right now is finding enough
pièces à conviction
for a court case against the murderer.”

“Whom you’ve identified, naturally.”

“Of course. It wasn’t all that difficult.” She paused for a few seconds. “Jacques, it might help if you could tell me exactly what you saw the night of the murder.”

“Nothing. I’m sure Alexandre has already told you. He and I were on the little settee in the salon, playing backgammon. The poor guy was so besotted, he couldn’t bear to think of himself snoring away while his dear wife was braving the elements on deck.”

“He doesn’t snore,” Capucine lied defensively.

“And when you came down,” Jacques continued, as if she had not spoken, “I saw what you saw. You banged on Serge’s cabin door, and he emerged, yawning and stretching, wearing his foulie pants and sea boots, the intrepid sailor, ready for the call of duty on deck.”

“At the time, I thought his foul-weather pants were dry. Did you get that impression, too?”

“They looked dry enough to me. Do you suspect him of having had wet dreams?” Jacques’s piercing bray shattered the calm of the night. “I hope you’re really sure you have the killer tagged. There are some nuances to the case that may have escaped you.”