Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

by Alexander Campion

  He skipped down the street, waving both arms, giving her the finger. The police siren got louder. Capucine wondered if someone had seen the incident and called them.

  Capucine ran off in the same direction as the juvenile. Thank God she was wearing ballet flats. In less than a minute she was at the door to Régis’s building. She realized she still had the woman’s bag in her hand. She couldn’t think what to do with it. She walked a few doors down the street and looped it over a doorknob. There wasn’t the remotest chance the woman would be reunited with her bag, but what else was there to do?

  Régis’s building had been built as a small factory—there was still a railroad track running down the cobbled entranceway—but had been converted to artists’ lofts. Régis’s unit was at the back of the building. The door was ajar. She wandered down a long hallway until she reached a vast studio. In the very center, a large table was surrounded by a battery of lights and silk reflectors. In the middle of the forest of equipment sat a large, black, battered video camera, only a few inches above the level of the tabletop. The camera was unattended.

  Régis sat at a small table a few feet away, a laptop computer open in front of him. Three women hovered nervously. A third sat in a kitchen area in one corner of the room, sipping coffee from a demitasse. Régis tapped a button on the laptop. The lights came on with an audible pop. Capucine was impressed that he seemed to be able to run everything from his keyboard.

  “All right, children. Seventh take. Here we go,” Régis said.

  Three oval plates, rimmed with the words CHAROLAIS ALLÔ, were lined up at one end of the table. Each contained a different form of steak with a different side order.

  “Giselle, we’re looking a little dry here.”

  A young woman darted over to the steaks and sprayed them with something from a plastic squeegee bottle.

  “Perfect,” Régis said. He touched a button on the keyboard. “I’m rolling. Action!”

  Giselle took up the handle of what looked like a miniature shuffleboard paddle running through a wooden frame. Slowly, she pushed the first steak out into the middle of the table, then the second, stopping a few inches behind the first, then the third, a few inches behind the last. As the steaks were pushed out, slight traces of vapor could be seen rising.

  “Cut.” Régis touched a key. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  A large, flat computer screen on the far end of the table lit up. A close-up of the steaks appeared. It looked like they were being pushed out on the table by unseen human hands. The vapor, looking like wisps of steam, was more apparent on the screen. The meat was astonishingly inviting, hot, moist, cooked to perfection, more luscious than any steak Capucine had ever eaten.

  “It’s a good one,” Régis said. “Let’s do the béarnaise shot, and then we can break for lunch. Antoinette, I need new steak. This stuff is already drying out and beginning to look tough.”

  Antoinette went to the kitchen area, took a raw steak out of a waist-high refrigerator, held it with a pair of pincers, lit an industrial blowtorch, and charred the steak. In less than a minute it looked like it had been cooked on an outdoor grill. She placed it on one of the Charolais Allô dishes and spooned some fries next to it. The fries tinkled as they landed on the plate, as if they were made of some brittle material. She took the plate to the studio table, plumped the steak up with her fingers and then meticulously arranged the fries in a loose pyramid. She sprayed the plate with her squeegee and gave Régis a thumbs-up.

  “Here we go. Action!” Régis said.

  The plate began to rotate slowly. Capucine hadn’t realized the center section of the table was a lazy Susan.

  From his computer terminal, Régis muttered, “Good, good.” He looked up. “All right, Véronique, cue the béarnaise.”

  A woman arrived with an antique English sauceboat. A homely woman in a pink halter, cutoff jeans, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wore no makeup. The lazy Susan stopped. The woman extended her sauceboat in the direction of the plate. The hand that held the sauceboat was a study in perfection, not only as graceful as the hand of a Botticelli Madonna but exquisitely manicured. The nails as pure and luminous as mother of pearl, the skin was ivory white and completely blemish free.

  The woman tilted the sauceboat. For a long moment nothing happened. Finally, a large excremental blob of chrome-yellow sauce plopped onto the plate.

  “Antoinette!” Régis yelled just as Antoinette was already rushing up to collect the sauceboat and the plate.

  There was a moment of calm as Antoinette went to work in the kitchen. Régis caught sight of Capucine.

  “Capucine, you’re here. How wonderful.” He did a double take. “You got adventuresome with your hair.”

  Capucine could see he was searching in vain for something flattering to say about the new hairdo.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going back to my usual style. Alexandre hates it.”

  “Let me introduce the team. This is Giselle. She’s the prop girl. And the young one is Daphne, the intern who does all the heavy lifting. And the body and brains behind the exquisite hand is Véronique. She’s a full-time hand model and not on our payroll, but I use her all the time. I rarely have faces in my ads, but I almost always include hands.”

  Antoinette returned with a fresh plate, which she placed on the lazy Susan.

  “And this is Antoinette. She’s in charge of food prep. She’s a genius, by the way. I’d be lost without her.”

  The scene was repeated. The dish rotated; Véronique arrived with the sauceboat of béarnaise. This time it flowed unctuously. Régis had left the monitor on. The béarnaise was creamy, flecked with dark green speckles, presumably tarragon. Capucine could see herself dipping the perfect fries into the perfect béarnaise. It would be superb. She was half tempted to twist Alexandre’s arm into giving Charolais Allô a try.

  “Okay, children. Got it on the first take. Brilliant. We’re done for the morning. We’ll finish the shoot after lunch.”

  The lights died. Antoinette cleared the stage.

  “Where is your old devil of a husband? I’d thought you’d be bringing him.”

  “He wanted to come but had to go to a restaurant he wants to review.”

  “In August?” Régis raised his eyebrows in a pantomime of incredulity.

  “Was that really béarnaise?” Capucine asked. It looked absolutely delicious. There was a titter of laughter from the women in the room.

  “My dear, if you put a real béarnaise under those lights, it would separate in less than fifteen seconds. That’s one of Antoinette’s secret recipes. Guaranteed not to contain a single edible ingredient.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Of course not.” Régis was slightly offended. “The law is quite clear. A restaurant can’t show portions larger than what they serve, but they have every right to make their food look as appetizing as they can. I apply makeup to my actors exactly the same way feature-length movie directors make up their actors. Well, it’s true the béarnaise is a bit artificial, but think of it as the stuntman standing in for the real béarnaise.” He laughed happily.

  The women left, and Antoinette led Capucine and Régis to the kitchen area.

  “I’m trying out something new on you. I’ve figured out a way to make those steaks we shoot edible,” Antoinette said.

  Capucine sat in front of places that had been laid at the kitchen table. Antoinette produced a platter with two tournedos that looked even more delicious than the ones that had been photographed.

  “These are some of the understudies I blowtorched for this morning’s shoot. These haven’t been sprayed with glycerin, so they’re perfectly edible. You know, I freeze the steaks before I run the blowtorch over them, so they stay raw inside. They look more appetizing that way. I take the steaks out of the refrigerator and pop them in a two-hundred-degree oven for forty-five minutes. That’s all there is to it. Tell me what you think.”

  Capucine cut a piece out of her steak.
It looked like no steak she’d ever had before. Beneath the crisp, charred exterior left by the blowtorch, the meat was a uniform pink monochrome from top to bottom, with not the slightest variation in hue. It was so tender, Capucine was sure it would melt in her mouth if she sucked on it. Still, delicious as it was, its unnaturalness was slightly unsettling.

  Antoinette put another platter on the table.

  “Nothing magic about this. I can’t serve you the fries. They’ve been coated with silicone. These are some of the potatoes they sent us. I sliced them up and fried them in duck fat for half an hour with a little diced garlic and chopped parsley. Good old pommes de terre sarladaises. Nothing better.”

  She clunked a bottle of Côtes du Rhône on the table and made for the door.

  “I’m glad you dropped by,” Régis said, pouring the wine. “I’d been meaning to call you and Alexandre. I looked for the two of you on the dock in Port Grimaud, but I guess you’d already left. It really was unconscionable the way everyone disappeared the instant we docked.”

  “What happened to Aude? Are you still seeing her?”

  “Aude.” Régis pursed his lips and squinched his eyebrows together. “She vanished in Port Grimaud. She wouldn’t even have lunch with me. I suppose she took the first train back to Paris. I haven’t seen her since. I’ve tried calling a couple of times, but her cell phone goes right to voice mail and her landline has been disconnected. My guess is that she’s already in the States, looking for a place to live.”

  He paused, thinking about Aude.

  “Nice girl. Beautiful. But very spacey. You never knew what she was thinking. A lot of the time it was as if she was on another planet.” He snapped himself out of his reverie. “No point in worrying about her anymore. You can’t win them all.”

  “So what are you and Alexandre doing with the rest of your summer? You’re not back at work, are you? Are the police investigating the death of that poor girl, or has it just been filed away as an accident?”

  “As far as I know, there’s nothing to file away. The report from the Italian police hasn’t arrived yet.” At the words “as far as I know,” Régis looked at her quizzically but said nothing.

  “What an awful night that was,” Régis said finally.

  “I thought you slept through it all and only woke up when Serge started shouting on the radio.”

  “Not at all. I couldn’t sleep a wink. It was Aude who was tucked into her little corner, sleeping like a princess. I was just lying there, watching Alexandre and Jacques play backgammon on the settee on the other side of the salon. They were trying to be quiet, but it was very easy to hear their conversation. Jacques loves to tease Alexandre, doesn’t he? He’s very funny when he does it.”

  “And that was it? Nobody came or went?”

  “No one. You were the last person to go on deck and the first person to come below two hours later, when you came to get Serge.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t nod off?”

  “Positive. I’m a very light sleeper even in my own bed, much less on a sofa in a public area.”

  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.

  CHAPTER 32

  Capucine 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.r />
  “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.