The Dave Bliss Quintet (33 page)

It's nearly midnight by the time he's tamped down the earth and re-turfed the mound under the lemon tree.
Stuffing the workman's trowel back in his tool bag, with the thought that the previous owner might have gagged at the uses to which his faithful servant has been put, he takes the elevator back to his apartment and phones Daisy as he pours himself another drink.

“I wasn't asleep,” she assures him, though the background silence and drowsy huskiness in her voice suggest otherwise. “Would you like to come around and
voir mes estampes japonaises
?” she asks when he says he needs to see her.

“So that's what you call etchings, is it?” he laughs, having guessed one or other of them would bring the topic up eventually. “I'm sure your Japanese prints are lovely, Daisy, but I think L' Offshore Club would be more sensible.”

“You no like me,” she purrs.

“I like you very much,” he starts, and is beginning to wonder why he's spent two months staving off a relationship. But he knows why, knows he's avoiding the inevitability of death by distance. Absence makes the heart grow crazy, he says to himself, in memory of recent scars, and can only repeat, “It wouldn't be sensible. I have to go home soon.”

“OK, I come,” Daisy concedes, and he puts down the phone, still wondering what's holding him back.

An attractive lone woman in a tight skirt sits quietly smoking on the quayside outside L' Offshore Club. Her eyes trail him hopefully as he passes, and she blows a message in a ring of smoke. He reads the message, answers “No thanks” with a subtle head shake, and saunters into the bar to wait for Daisy.

A sixty-year-old bopper with an eighteen-year-old's hairstyle, supercharged on Mé doc or Merlot, dances with
himself, hoping his Hawaiian shirt and glitter-framed Elton John glasses will attract attention. “Guantanamera, gua-ji-ra Guantanamera,” he sings, grabbing a microphone and joining in with the animated keyboard player, and Bliss feels like strangling them both.

The captain of the charter yacht drunkenly waves him over, laughing. “Smith old son — come an' ' ave a tot.”

Pretending not to hear, Bliss finds a quiet corner and watches a couple in their seventies swing into action as the music changes to that of their childhood. “In the mood,” chants the keyboard player, but their bodies give out after a few turns. “Guantanamera” — again! Now everyone dances. The charter yacht captain grabs an unsuspecting sixty-year-old woman and grinds himself into her as he throws her around the floor. Three of her friends, all in their sixties, golden oldies with naturally white hair and unnaturally white teeth, twist and jive to the music of their youth, and an aged great-grandmother chats unconcernedly on her cell-phone as she shuffles around the small dance floor.

One man in his nineties is eking out his last days, and his shoes, by dancing at quarter speed. Then a flouncy forty-year-old takes his hands and his limbs are juiced with adrenalin. “It'll kill him,” worries one of the woman's friends. “At least he'll go out happy,” says another.

Finding something bizarre about a bunch of white-haired French grannies twisting and jiving to the hits of the sixties, Bliss is wondering if headbangers and rappers will still be pounding to their music when they're retired, as Daisy arrives, head down, worrying, “I've haven't told Jacques about Roland yet.”

Bliss lets her off with a
bof
. “It doesn't matter,” he says, “I think you're probably right. It wouldn't make
any difference. But what about your mother? Have you told her about the château?”

“I try,” she says, perking up, though her reply suggests failure. “
Maman
says I must not tell
Grandmaman.
She says zhat I must believe.”

“This is ridiculous,” he starts, annoyed that so many otherwise sensible people could be caught up in the theological claptrap of blind faith — chanting in unison, “It must be true; zhere is no evidence against it.”

“It doesn't matter,” he says, winding himself back down. “I'm going to get my book published anyway.”

“What book?” she enquires, assuming his scribbling had been purely for aesthetic purposes.

“This one,” he declares, revealing his nearly completed manuscript, “‘ The Truth Behind the Mask.' But I still have to go back to the château again.”

Her face falls. “Oh
non
.”

“
Mais oui
,” he says, then relates the heartrending story of the lovesick
amoureux
and his desperate plan to impress the object of his desire with his gift of the château and his masochistic immolation in the
castel
.

“Zhat is so romantic,” she says with a catch in her voice, finding herself caught up in the tale. “But why you go back?”

“Because I have to find out who he was.”

“Roger,” she cries delightedly. “His name must be Roger. Zhat is why it is called Le Château Roger.”

“That's what I suspect. But Roger who?” he questions, before explaining that whoever splashed out a fortune to build the love eyrie would want to make sure his paramour was in no doubt as to his identity. “Did you notice the coat of arms in each of the rooms, over the fireplaces?” he asks.

Daisy's blank face suggests she's in the dark, so he sketches an example.

“Ah,
les armoiries
,” she exclaims in comprehension, though doesn't recall seeing any of the stuccoes.

“I didn't take much notice, either,” he admits, recalling that they both had other things on their minds at the time, although he does picture rampant lions and other heraldic beasts. “But now I think the arms are probably the family crests, and I want to take photographs and make drawings. I know a historian who should be able to identify them.”

“I come,” says Daisy, suddenly energized by the prospect of being a party to the unearthing of history.

Thank God there's an hour's time difference, Bliss thinks, as he wakes just before ten the following morning to put Richards in the picture.

“He's gone again, Guv,” he says, stretching in the stark sunlight on the balcony while checking the empty berth where the
Sea-Quester
was the night before.

“I don't know what to suggest,” says Richards lamely, and Bliss imagines him and the rest of the senior brass moribund, sitting around with their metaphorical fingers up their bums, scared of pointing blame in case someone pulls out a finger to point back.

“Somebody's going to have to explain this to the Home Secretary and the Charities Commissioner,” bleats Richards, well aware of the political discomfiture of admitting that more than thirty thousand policemen had apparently been asleep on the job when Gordon Grimes had robbed the graves of their fallen. “And I wouldn't mind betting questions will be asked in the House.”

“Oops,” says Bliss, smiling to himself.

“Technically Johnson hasn't broken any U.K. laws,” Richards continues. “Apparently people flung their piggy banks at him ' cos he looked like a safe bet, and he's frittered it away without giving them any returns.”

“He should have been a stockbroker,” muses Bliss, getting a grunt of agreement from Richards, then continues half-heartedly, “The French could probably nick him for cruelty to animals.”

“That won't do the widows a lot of good,” gripes Richards.

“What about doing him for obtaining money by deception for the importation and sale of counterfeit Roman pottery?” queries Bliss, as if he's known the answer all along. “Presumably Grimes doled out the widows' funds on the assumption the investments were being used lawfully.”

“Counterfeit pottery?”

“That's the treasure,” he explains, then relates the story he's pieced together from Marcia and her husband.

“OK,” says Richards, brightening, “but how can we prove it?”

I want a medal for this, thinks Bliss, gloating as he says, “I actually have some of the evidence in my hand right now.”

Daisy, relieved of her thirty-year burden, is waiting for him in her office with bouncy anticipation, and it dawns on him that prior to their previous visit she may have attributed Roland's murder to the ghostly freedom fighters still inhabiting the Hades under the château.

“Courier first,” he says, and he drops off a package addressed to Richards before they take the hill to the hole in the fence.

The custom's declaration stating “pottery” takes the eye of the FedEx clerk, a man well used to shipping priceless ceramics from the world's pottery capital. “
Fragile?
” he queries.

“
Non
,” laughs Bliss, but doesn't have the words to explain he is shipping a box of old earthenware chips. The value also confounds him, especially as some of the pieces nearly cost him his life.

The tangled undergrowth surrounding the old building no longer provides cover for snarling
chiens mé chants
, although the risk of running into a patrolling security guard still exists.

“It looks so innocent, doesn't it?” Bliss sneers contemptuously as he photographs the château's sorry face, its windows shuttered in shame, pillars bowing under the weight of the oppressive canopies. “You have a lot to answer for,” he adds, his thoughts turning to the man in the iron mask, the pre-war Jewish family, the
ré sistance
fighters, Roland, and Greg Grimes. And the fallen stone statues, burying their faces into the scrub of neglected lawns, take on greater significance as he scouts around for evidence. Then Daisy's anguished cry sends him running.

A line of mounds, bordered by sun-blanched beach pebbles, fills a clearing in the woods, and he bends over her as she kneels by one marked with her grandfather's name. “Someone must come here,” he tells her, noting the graves are weed-free.

“
Grandmè re
,” she whispers, barely able to admit it to herself.

“What do you mean?” he starts, but she holds up a miniature picture frame with a photo of a white-haired woman. “
Bon anniversaire, mon cher Georges
,” her grandmother had written across the print.

“She knows,” Daisy breathes, holding back the tears.

From the condition of the frame Bliss guesses she's known for a while, and he now has a fairly good idea why she'd scuttled off to her room when the subject came up. “She just wanted to protect you and your mother,” he suggests, comforting her with a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Sitting on the promenade as he waits for Daisy to return from her mothers', Bliss describes the château's heraldry in his manuscript with a feeling of relief that the revelations in his novel will not be as devastating as he'd worried. Although he can't help lamenting the fact that Daisy's mother was betrayed by her own mother — the High Priestess of her religion — and misled into carrying a cross for someone who would never be resurrected.

The days, though shorter, have an intensity about them. The hazy, lazy days were swept away with the scorching sirocco wind, leaving stark blue skies and searing sunlight that signal urgency to tardy beach-comers. But the beach has changed. Only the dregs remain. Society's leftovers — the fat and frumpy; single mothers with scruffy kids taking advantage of the bargain prices; single guys trolling the shoreline in one last desperate attempt to find some flotsam worth taking a run at.

Do you have to audition for peak season here, or is it only the beautiful who can afford the best holidays? Bliss muses, as he watches a woman with flabby cheeks bulging out of her swimsuit like a couple of saddlebags.

The beach café and
matelas
purveyors have packed up. Most of the holidaymakers have gone, but the weather has stayed. The tired summer blossoms have finally faded in the heat and shrivelled to fruit —
les fruits de la vendange
— grapevines weighed with bulging black and green bunches drooping from balconies and arbours. Oranges and lemons sharpen themselves up, as purple figs drop like hand grenades onto the pavement and turn to sticky puree underfoot. Cascades of golden palm fruit overhang sun-flushed pomegranates, and even tropical trespassers like bananas and coconuts ripen in the Mediterranean sun.

The old, the lame, and the locals have reclaimed the promenade, and a withered fisherman moans about the overbearing heat as he passes. “
Il fait trop chaud
,” he complains, and Bliss nods in agreement. September may be approaching but the scorching sun-filled days continue — crisping the leaves of summer and bringing a glow to the fruits. But the young women are losing their lustre, and the waiters and store workers are tired and cranky. Ten weeks of fourteen-hour shifts, with headlights full on, have burnt them out. Now, with the end of the unremitting tornado of tourists in sight, many of them are coasting.

Dave Brubeck may still be playing “Summer Song” in his headphones, but Bliss realizes that summer is virtually at an end for him as well. As August slides rapidly downhill, his book is almost finished and the enigmas of the château and the boy in the cage are resolved.
L' homme au masque de fer
will soon be unmasked and an international warrant will be issued for Johnson.

A short phone call gets him a booking to London, and he happily gives John Smith's credit card details.

“But you said your name was Bliss?” queries the pleasant-voiced travel agent.

“A friend's paying,” he replies with a smile.

Now, with the flight confirmation number in his pocket, he has just over a week to pack and clear up a couple of loose ends. First, dinner with Daisy at La Scala — today is August 24th, Liberation Day.

Daisy has bounced back to her usual self by the time they arrive for the Libération dinner on the terrace of La Scala. Armed with the evidence from her grandfather's grave she confronted her grandmother, and was relieved to discover her revelation was greeted with no more alarm than if she'd announced St. Nicholas wasn't at the North Pole, either.