Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Alexander Campion

  Reflexively Inès bridled. She gathered her legs under her chair to rise and stalk out. But as her toes took her weight, she had second thoughts. This vastly exceeded anything she had ever imagined. She had had no idea Lévêque operated at this level. This could easily prove to be the watershed of her career. Despite her self-control, her cheeks flushed in excitement.

  A large, well-larded, toad-like man appeared at the table and extended his stubby-fingered hand to Lévêque. Inès had seen his picture often in the papers, Charles Bufo, cabinet chief for the minister of the Interior. Lévêque invited him to sit. Champagne was brought. Was he part of the package?

  No. The half-spoken proposition was snatched from the table like a bad egg. Tone and substance became banal. In a cocktail party voice Lévêque went on about a new committee Bufo had just been placed in charge of to centralize the intelligence and police departments. He had just finished merging the DST—the internal espionage agency—and the RG, the agency in charge of the investigation of individuals on French territory. Next were the Police Judiciaire and the juges d’instruction. But all this was at such a high level that any change would be imperceptible at Inès’s level.

  Lévêque smiled at Bufo. “You really need to consult with Madame Maistre. She will have some very valuable insights into the definition of the juge d’instruction’s role.”

  “Oh, I will, most definitely.” The tone was clearly one of dismissal.

  “Oh là là,” she said, looking at her watch. “I’m already fifteen minutes late for a meeting.” She rose. Her hand was shaken.

  “I’d like to finish our chat. Very soon,” Lévêque said, rising. There was a strong sense that too much had been said.

  Inès wound her way through the tables. She almost ran into an elderly waiter lurching under an enormous tray. She stopped and moved aside to let him pass. Her heart went out to him. He smiled at her.

  Behind her she heard Lévêque scold Bufo. “You really need to learn to become more closemouthed. You made a complete balls-up of the situation in the Tyrrhenian Sea. And if I weren’t here to stop you, you’d do it all over again. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to learn how to clean up your own messes.”

  CHAPTER 19

  At two o’clock in the morning Capucine woke with a start, convinced she was still on the boat and something was wrong. It took the odor of wild thyme carried by a warm breeze to bring home the fact that she was at the mas. The sense of worry volatilized but returned with redoubled force. Then it hit her.

  She might not be on the boat, but she was confined to the mas and she had a crime to solve, and fast. She burrowed into Alexandre’s stomach, but sleep would not come. As the black of the night began to pale, she got out of bed, snipped the price tags off a new pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went down the hall to the kitchen.

  A crone of a woman with two teeth missing was fussing in the kitchen.

  “Magali?”

  “Oui, M’dame Capucine. M’sieu David told me you’d be up with the sun, so I’ve got your coffee all ready.”

  The promised coffee was poured into a white porcelain bowl, then placed in front of her, along with a jug of warm milk and a tin of sugar cubes. While Capucine sipped, Magali boiled eggs, toasted bread in the oven, and cut thick slices from a whole ham kept on the counter, under a linen towel. David walked in, leaned over to kiss Capucine on the cheek, this time without hesitation. Capucine squeezed his hand. David turned to Magali and chattered away in a language that sounded almost like French but of which she could understand only one word in ten.

  “You speak Provençal?” Capucine asked.

  “Of course I do. Don’t forget I grew up in a small village in the hills just behind Cannes.” He laughed. “We were forbidden to speak Provençal at school. There was a big sign in the courtyard that said, ‘Be Clean. Speak French!’ But we all spoke Provençal to each other when the teachers weren’t around.”

  Magali put the eggs, toast, and ham on the table.

  “Here almost all my older villagers still speak Provençal at home. The irony of the situation is that now that the language is tolerated, even encouraged, it’s dying out. Our école primaire actually has a class in it. But they teach it as a foreign language.”

  Magali said something incomprehensible. David laughed and patted her arm paternalistically.

  “So, Capucine, what are your plans for the day?”

  “I’m going to try to get to work on the case. I’m going to start with the telephone.”

  “Good. I’ve moved a desk into a room in the corner of the mas and left you all five of those confiscated telephones, along with the chargers. I also put a box of office supplies in there, pads, Bics, stuff like that. There’s also my spare laptop.” He put down his bowl of coffee and gave her a severe look. “Jacques warned me to not let you use it to send e-mail. He said it would be easily traceable back to here. He said the plan would be to have you type up your e-mail messages on word-processed documents and then to copy them onto a new e-mail account from an Internet café. I put a flash-drive stick next to the computer and can take it into Bandol this afternoon if you want.”

  “I know the technique. It’s too cumbersome for me. I’ll just use your cell phones.” She broke the top of one of the soft-boiled eggs with the back of her spoon. “And what are you going to be doing today?”

  “What I do every day. Go down to the village, sign papers in my office, walk around, sit in the café, hear endless requests, keep the village heading roughly west.”

  “Holding court?”

  “That’s the very last term I’d use, but it amounts to that. You can come look. Last night I convinced Alexandre to spend the morning with me and then have lunch at the village café. It would be wonderful if you could walk down the hill and join us. I just sent Magali to your room to make as much noise as possible cleaning up. That should get Alexandre out of the rack.”

  In a few minutes Alexandre appeared at the breakfast table, visibly put out at having been turned out of bed before his accustomed hour of ten o’clock. In less than thirty minutes Alexandre and David went off, rattling down the hill in the ancient Peugeot. Capucine explored the mas, looking for her new office. Inside, the house was far larger than it looked from the outside. The rooms seemed endless. Only a few of them had been furnished. It was like wandering through an empty hotel that was in the process of being decorated.

  She finally found the office in the farthest corner of the building. It was empty except for a large, ancient, heavily distressed oak kitchen table, which must have been scrounged from the detritus of one of the mas’s numerous outbuildings. Many of Capucine’s Paris friends would kill to have it in their Sixteenth Arrondissement kitchens. The phones had been dumped unceremoniously in a cardboard box, all of them fully charged and fully functional.

  She started with Inès.

  “Capucine, ma chérie. How are you? What a harrowing experience you’re having. Are you comfortable where you are, at least?”

  “Oh yes, very. We’re staying at a sumptuous mas in the Midi that belongs to a good friend of mine. I feel quite secure here.”

  “Perfect. But don’t get too comfortable. I need you to get to work. Tottinguer has become even more of a priority. Why don’t you start by mapping out a plan of attack?”

  “But what about the Nathalie case? Don’t forget, I’m the prime suspect.”

  “Oh, that. The Italian box of evidence doesn’t seem to have arrived yet. And when it does, it will still take forever for the police to inform the magistrates and for the magistrates to get going with a case. We have plenty of time on that one.”

  “The last time we spoke, you led me to believe my arrest was imminent.”

  “That was then. This is now. Let’s focus on Tottinguer.”

  There was a long, leaden silence on the line.

  “Capucine, listen to me. You’re overreacting. The Nathalie thing will go away. I don’t even know if the magistrates will decide it’s a Fr
ench case. We have bigger fish to catch. Map out your plan and call me back this afternoon.”

  Capucine squeezed the OFF button on the phone and tossed it into the box. She extracted another cell phone and called Isabelle Lemercier, David’s former partner at the Police Judiciare. The call lasted so long, the phone beeped to warn that the battery was about to die. The timing was perfect. Isabelle’s assignment was fully mapped out. She would be very busy for the next few days.

  Eleven thirty. Time to find her way down the hill to lunch.

  Capucine changed out of her shorts into a skirt and blouse, which she knew would be more acceptable in the village, and walked down the hill. The scrub grass was hard and dry, the few trees were gnarled and scrawny, and the sawing of the cicadas was almost deafening. It was a world apart from Paris. Capucine wondered how David had lasted so long in the City of Light before returning to his homeland.

  La Cadière was built around a dusty earth square with a fountain in the middle. Even though the green-painted, wrought-iron fountain tilted far more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa and hadn’t spouted water for well over half a century, it was a source of pride for the villagers. When Capucine arrived, six men played boules—or pétanque, as Capucine knew they called it locally—in the dust with all the solemnity and concentration the game required. At the far end of the square was a café with a half dozen deserted green metal tables baking in the sun. Capucine ducked under the awning and walked inside. The ageless ceramic-tiled floor, flyblown mirrors, and zinc bar could easily have been a set for a 1930s Pagnol movie. Alexandre and David sat at a table with an old man. Each had a thick, V-shaped glass of pastis in front of him.

  Alexandre motioned for Capucine to come to the table. It was clear from the discreetness of his gesture that they were at a delicate moment in the discussion. The instant she sat, a man, clearly the proprietor of the café, arrived and, without a word, pointed at one of the glasses to inquire if she wanted a pastis. In a whisper, Capucine asked for a Lillet Blanc.

  In a Midi accent so thick it could have been eaten with a spoon, every third word in Provençal, the man told his story. His livelihood was his olive grove. It was known to one and all he produced the finest olive oil in the region. David himself used it with great joy, as did the café, as did the villagers of discernment. And just imagine! His next-door neighbor, that dried-out, withered twig of a man, had done research in the village cadastre and had discovered that a tiny corner of the grove was on his land. The neighbor had stretched a rope, cordoning off the part he thought was his, and had told him he would shoot if the line was breached.

  How was he going to get to his most precious olive trees to harvest the olives? Could Monsieur le Maire send the gendarmes to allow him access?

  David explained that no, Monsieur le Maire could not, because he had verified the cadastre himself and had been out to examine the property, and it was true that that tiny section of the grove was, as claimed, on the neighbor’s land.

  But, the man explained, it made no difference who owned the land. They were his trees, not the neighbor’s. He had cared for them and nurtured them ever since he had been a boy. They existed because his sweat had dripped into their roots. The man was close to tears.

  The noon Angelus sounded. Everyone in the café looked up and finished their apéro quickly. Capucine suspected that lateness at family lunches was not tolerable.

  The man looked at David with pleading eyes. What was he going to do?

  “Leave it to me,” David told him with a soothing look. Capucine had seen him use it to great effect with battered wives when he was still with the police. The man was to come back to the café on Friday for some pastaga, and he would see that everything had been restored to order. The man, only partially mollified, shuffled out on legs bowed with age.

  Before the old man was out the door, the owner of the café appeared with a serving bowl, three dishes, and a large carafe of rosé. He clunked them on the table and disappeared through a door behind the bar.

  Alexandre poured wine for the three of them and tasted. “The cépage is Mourvèdre, of course,” he said, identifying the varietal most common to the area, “but that’s as far as I go.”

  “It’s from a tiny vineyard in the Plan du Castellet. Inexpensive, but a village staple,” David said. He ladled out the stew. “And this is a daube made from beef cheeks marinated in red Bandol. The owner’s wife made it for lunch. Like everyone else in the village, Casimir goes home to eat with his family. But he got in the habit of feeding me at noon when I was staying upstairs”—David pointed with his thumb—“when you sent me down here two years ago. Over the years the habit became permanent, and I eat lunch here every day, even though the café is closed.”

  “What are you going to do about that poor man?” Alexandre asked. “His case seemed impossible.”

  “Pas du tout. That’s one of the easy ones. It’s already settled.”

  “But if the land really is the neighbor’s?”

  “You have to understand the brain of the Provençal paysan. It has only four things in it. Pétanque, pastis, probity, and patrimoine—land. This whole story has an underlying narrative, what my editor would call a subtext. What the neighbor really wants is to buy a plot of land in the hills behind his mas. He wants it so his goats can graze there. But it’s owned by an old man in his late eighties who has no use for it but won’t sell it to him. It has to do with a quarrel so ancient, no one remembers what it’s about. The game the neighbor is playing is aimed at getting me to intervene with the old man. If he can buy his hillside plot, he’ll be happy enough to sell the tiny hunk of olive grove—which contains only three trees, by the way—to his neighbor. I saw all this coming two weeks ago and have already spoken to the old man.”

  David laughed and took a bite of his daube. “Of course, I’m going to make damn sure that the neighbor pays a stiff price for the plot on the hill and sells back the three trees for next to nothing.”

  “Are all politics in La Cadière like this?” Capucine asked.

  “Most of it. The mayor acts as a kind of buffer. But he also has to implement his vision for the village.”

  “And yours is?” Alexandre asked.

  “Quite simple. We remain in the sweetness of the era of Pagnol, but everyone will have an iPhone and cable Internet.”

  “Implementing an oxymoron seems like quite a challenge,” Capucine said.

  “Not as challenging as a Police Judiciaire case. I have to admit I miss those.” He paused for a few seconds, tracing an imaginary pattern on the surface of the table. “And, of course, as I told you last night, I miss my partners, Isabelle and Momo.”

  “I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with Isabelle. I set her to work on the case.”

  “You know, Capucine, I wasn’t kidding when I suggested you use me as a brigadier. I have plenty of free time right now, and I really do miss police work.”

  “Careful what you wish for. I might just take you up on that,” Capucine said.

  CHAPTER 20

  After lunch, Capucine and Alexandre left David, who went off to a meeting of his conseil municipal—his town council. They walked up the narrow lanes through the hills to the mas. The heat was intense, shimmering up from the baked earth and radiating down from the sky. The only sound was the raucous sawing of the cicadas. The hills seemed deserted. Alexandre pointed at large rusty patches in the scrub.

  “Know what that is?”

  Capucine shook her head. Alexandre led her out on the grass, holding her hand. Close up, the rusty patches were made up of squat little plants with tiny purple flowers. Alexandre reached down, yanked out a handful, crushed it in his fist, opened his hand under Capucine’s nose.

  “Serpolet—sweet wild thyme—the backbone of one of France’s most imaginative inventions, herbes de Provence.”

  “Invention?”

  “Of course. It’s like the fiction of the Gaulois resisting the Romans from their tiny fishing villages. The real paysa
ns down here have a very delicate hand with their wild herbs. They pride themselves on dosing them one by one for each dish. They’re hardly going to let a big bag of premixed stuff sit in the back of their cupboards so long, it turns into sawdust.”

  Alexandre was as enraptured by wild herbs as he was by the mushrooms of the damp autumn forests of the Île-de-France. He foraged and presented Capucine with the spiky stems and bulbous violet and purple flowers of wild rosemary, white-flowered savory, yellow-flowered fennel, and a big bunch of lavender, which Capucine wadded, sniffed, and stuffed in the pocket of her frock.

  They reached the crest of a hill that overlooked the mas. The hills seemed to roll on eternally. There was not another house in sight. They sat down and held hands like little children, fingers intertwined.

  “Are you feeling a little better about things now that we’re home?” Alexandre asked.

  “We’re not home. We’re abusing the generosity of one of my former flics while I sit flopping on the ground with my wings clipped.”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “Oh, am I? Well, let me tell you, then. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess David has more than a fair chance of getting elected to the Assemblée Nationale. He has the potential for an important career in politics.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “But what I think you’ve forgotten is that every mayor in France is also a representative of the state and, technically, an officer of the Police Judiciaire, in addition to head of the local police force, if there is one. That means that if a warrant for my arrest is issued, David would be obliged to arrest me. If he continues to hide me, he could easily be removed from office and sanctioned. That would be the end of his political career.”

  “Should we move to a hotel?” Alexandre asked.

  “I’ve thought about it. Not just yet. But maybe soon. Just as soon as I figure out a way to break out of house arrest.”