Oncle Aymerie fired an angry look at his son, but it passed unnoticed.
“When you get right down to it,” Jacques continued, “le Petit Suisse is Normandy’s most glorious cheese, even if it’s made for children and you can only buy it in supermarkets.”
Oncle Aymerie glared as if firing a cannonade.
Alexandre, who had been very well trained by his parents, jumped into the breach. “Pheasant is a great luxury for Parisians,” he said, sincerely admiring the platter of plump birds laid out on a bed of rich sauce. “Shooting is one of the great benefits of country living. What a blessing to have one’s bag filled with every known species,” he said with a clubman’s comfortable chuckle.
Stunned that his anodyne comment was greeted with glacial silence, he queried Capucine with a brow-wrinkled glance, but she answered back in tacit husband-wife telegraphy that she had no clue either.
“I’m guessing that it’s a standard technique for food critics to establish a baseline by putting their foot in their mouths before eating,” Jacques said with his piercing falsetto laugh. “It must be one of these tricks of the métier, you know, like film directors looking at things through that odd little rectangle they make with their fingers,” he said, illustrating the gesture.
Vienneau attempted to come to the rescue. “There was a tragic accident last weekend and—” He stopped, completely at a loss for words.
“Yes,” Oncle Aymerie said. “On the first drive. Chap called Philippe Gerlier. Poor man died. Actually, he worked for Vienneau. Important job, apparently. These things happen, of course, but it was still a catastrophe.” He made a brusque gesture at Gauvin to fill his wineglass. A sense of embarrassment settled over the table like a damp fog. Oncle Aymerie downed the wine in a single go. Alexandre winced. With some difficulty he had just identified it as a 1966 Clos des Jacobins.
“Good Lord,” he said. It was not clear to Capucine if the comment was directed at the desecration of a noble wine or the tragic death.
“It was a partridge drive,” Oncle Aymerie said. “The guns were stationed at the top of a hill in a semicircle and the birds started up the incline a bit low but they quickly gained altitude. Somehow—it’s really not clear to me exactly what happened—this man Gerlier was hit in the chest. I suppose someone must have fired very carelessly from one of the ends of the line. He died instantly.”
Gauvin, at the ready, anticipated Oncle Aymerie’s authoritarian finger wave and filled his glass unprompted. It was drained instantly.
“Of course, one can only blame oneself,” Oncle Aymerie said.
“Capucine,” Marie-Christine asked as if she were addressing an expert, “aren’t hunting accidents very common ?”
Capucine beamed inwardly at having her vocation so openly acknowledged, nodded sagely, and tactfully refrained from adding that the police believed a good number of hunting accidents were actually intentional. After all, it took some doing to kill someone with a shotgun without forethought.
“You see, Monsieur le Comte! Capucine has just confirmed that these accidents happen all the time. There’s no need to blame yourself,” Marie-Christine said.
To Alexandre’s visible horror, Oncle Aymerie downed yet another glass of wine, looking particularly morose. Capucine wondered if his gloom was due to the accident or the fact that her status as a police officer was now taken as a given.
“Gerlier was my general manager and a great friend,” Vienneau said. “It’s a huge loss, not only personal but also professional. He was brilliant at looking after the day-to-day management of the élevage.”
There was another awkward silence.
“That must put quite a burden on you,” Alexandre said. “You have quite a responsibility. No Paris establishment that aspires to haute cuisine would serve anything other than Charolais Vienneau. You’ve established the benchmark. Is it due to your proprietary breed?”
The prospect of a boring exegesis on the raising of steers burst the oppressive lid of tension, and the table fractured into individual conversations. No one other than Alexandre listened to Vienneau’s answer.
“Oh, it’s nothing as sophisticated at that,” Vienneau said with a disarming smile. “I simply apply know-how that’s been in the family for generations. And, of course, there’s a lot of perspiration involved,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.
“You can say what you will,” said Bellanger, “but the élevage could be far better developed by a global concern with access to substantial capital. As Alexandre says, if he will permit me to call him by his first name, this is a world-class brand and you’re wasting its franchise with so little flow-through. You have to think of your business potential, your patrimony, your family.”
Vienneau’s face hardened. “Mon cher Bellanger,” he said almost rudely, “when we met in Paris, I made it quite clear to you that I would never sell my élevage. You told me you wanted to have a look at the ranch to use it as a comparison for some deal or other you were cooking up, and I was happy to have you down here for that and to invite you for a little shooting. But don’t even try to tempt me to sell out, because that will never happen. Have I made that perfectly clear?”
With more diplomatic skill than Capucine would have ever thought she possessed, Marie-Christine calmed the crisis. She smiled a slightly bored, wifely smile at her husband. “Darling, why don’t you invite Alexandre—and Capucine, too, of course—to visit the élevage? If they could come on Monday, the day after tomorrow’s shoot, I could be there, too, and we could make a party of it. Wouldn’t that be fun?” As an afterthought she added, “Monsieur Bellanger would come along as well, naturally. We wouldn’t want to leave him out, now would we?”
They stayed at the table happily for two more hours. In the end, the only one who didn’t enjoy himself was Oncle Aymerie, who played with his food and excused himself the moment the guests moved to the salon for coffee and liqueurs.
CHAPTER 4
Capucine hung on for dear life. The back of the ancient Renault Estafette van had been stripped to a bare minimum decades before; all that was left were homemade wooden benches screwed in to either side of the back and three handrails welded into the roof. In the front seat, Emilien, Oncle Aymerie’s gamekeeper, a thick Gauloises Caporal glued to the corner of his mouth, drove erratically over the bumpy dirt road with the firm conviction that the pedals functioned only when fully depressed.
“So, mon oncle,” Capucine shouted over the rattling din, “tell me about today’s shoot.”
“He can’t hear you, mam’selle,” Emilien said, turning around stiffly to address her, his face made cheerfully rosy by a latticework of bright red capillaries, the product of an abiding love of Calvados. “We’re doing the Sinner’s Wood, you know, the big wood in the southeast. We haven’t been there since opening day. Bound to be full of birds. Your shoulder’s going to be aching tonight,” he said, laughing the gurgling chuckle of an inveterate smoker of tabac brun.
When the van shuddered to a stop, Oncle Aymerie jumped down, clipboard under his arm, with the energy of a Montgomery about to deploy his troops at the battle of El Alamein, and took sight of his terrain. He stared bleakly at Alexandre in his enormous plus fours, contemplated Capucine in her trim khaki corduroy hunting suit and loden cape draped over her shoulders, and consulted his clipboard. “I’m posting you and Alexandre together. That way he can keep you company and you can let him take the occasional shot if he gets bored,” he said with command briskness and strode briskly off.
Alexandre sighed audibly with relief.
Within half an hour, Capucine and Alexandre were at their station on the line, which ran down the length of a hundred-foot-wide swath cut into the wood. Alexandre was precariously perched on a shooting stick, one of those diabolical English devices that start out looking like canes but whose handles unfold into skimpy leather seats. A small pile of distressed shooting luggage—cartridge case, gun covers, ill-defined leather bags—staked their territorial claim. A hundred feet
to their left the Vienneaus formed a similar tableau, Marie-Christine sitting primly on her shooting stick while Vienneau jangled tensely. A hundred feet to their left Henri Bellanger stared lustfully at the forest with the intensity of a pig expecting a feed of potato peels. He was weighed down by an exceptionally heavy-looking skeet gun with superimposed barrels.
“I wonder if he got that cannon at a pawnshop,” Alexandre said under his breath. “You know, there’s something really not quite right about that citizen. Seems more like a used car salesman than an investment banker.”
“Do you think he’s even half the shot he would have us believe?” Capucine asked absently, fingering the shotgun shells in the leather bag that hung from her shoulder.
The sound of the beaters’ gentle tapping on the trees became audible. The idea was to dose the noise level carefully to encourage the birds to run away from the beaters but not to panic them into flying off in all directions prematurely. That way when they reached the edge of the wood, they would have no alternative but to fly up over the line of guns. Capucine lifted her gun to port position across her chest.
There was a metallic whir like a small electrical appliance. A pheasant lifted almost straight up from the wood, rising steeply over Bellanger’s position. As mechanically as an automaton, he raised his heavy gun, fired once, and lowered it instantly. The action was so rapid it looked like a circus trick. The bird retracted into a small ball and fell like a stone, hitting the ground with a slight bounce.
“Does that answer your question?” Alexandre asked.
The wood erupted with pheasants. Capucine fired incessantly until the barrel of her gun became too hot to touch and her shoulder began to throb. She cursed herself. She had spent so much time holding her breath, pointing, and squeezing on the pistol range that she had lost the bird shooters’ golf-stroke rhythm. All at once, it was over. The beaters emerged from the wood, smiling, most with motley mongrels held by frayed bits of old rope. They walked straight through the line of guns and began the search for fallen birds in the wood behind.
Capucine seemed crestfallen. “I think I only got two. Three at the most. But, bon sang, it felt good.”
The next two drives were repetitions of the first. Bellanger became a whispered cause célèbre. He showed no enthusiasm, nor even any real interest for shooting, yet every time his gun went up, a bird fell out of the sky. He made no friends that morning.
Alexandre’s level of boredom grew exponentially. As Capucine’s rhythm returned, she became an increasingly effective shot, totally absorbed, and relegated Alexandre to the role of a fixture propped up on his stick, a character she well knew he was not likely to play for long.
Just when Capucine thought Alexandre might be on the verge of something rash, the ancient Estafette puttered up with lunch. Folding tables were laid end to end and decked out with plates of charcuterie and cheese, bottles of red wine, carafes of ubiquitous Calvados. Beaters and guns congregated at opposite ends of the long counter, leaving an empty no-man’s-land in the middle. As narrow-necked bottles of Touraine circulated, the jubilation of both groups escalated measurably to the background theme music of the pack of dogs running back and forth under the table with happy abandon, wrestling joyously while foraging for table scraps.
Alexandre smiled beatifically at a monstrously thick sandwich spilling over with cooked country ham and Livarot cheese pungent with the odor of the barnyard. “When all is said and done,” he said, “haute cuisine is nothing more than an imitation of moments like this.”
Faithful to the habits of her childhood, Capucine gravitated to the beater end of the table. Even though she recognized none, she was recognized by all and greeted warmly with a ma p’tite ’demoiselle Capucine, as if she were still a child. An old man braced an enormous loaf of pain de campagne against his chest and cut slices with his pocketknife. More powerful than even Proust’s tasteless madeleines, the sight of the knife brought back the paysans of her childhood, who would announce the start of the family meal by clacking their knives open and placing them by their bowls and who would order the return to work by snapping them shut. She felt an irresistible tug to return to her childhood and walk a drive with the beaters.
Abandoning Alexandre to join the Vienneaus, Capucine climbed into the Estafette, hoping that Alexandre’s flirting with Marie-Christine would not overly put Vienneau off his rhythm. Above the rattling of the van the beaters gossiped excitedly in an all but impenetrable country patois, apparently oblivious to Capucine’s presence. The gist seemed to be that death was very much the subject of the day. It would appear that the House of Maulévrier was jinxed and a long string of fatalities was just beginning.
A venerable old man with a long white beard and a poncho made from a sheet of oilskin with a hole cut for the head and held to his waist with a piece of old rope caressed his dog, a highly mongrelized little black-and-white spaniel. “You lads don’ know nuthin’. Don’t got nuthin’ to do with Monsieur le Comte. It’s the élevage what’s jinxed. Things just ain’t right there. Everyone knows that. Those steers are cattle of the devil himself. An’ the punishment’s just a-comin’ on now. An’ it’s going to get worse, much worse.”
The van jerked to a stop and the beaters clattered out, followed by Capucine. The head beater organized them in a line and said to Capucine, “ ’Demoiselle Capucine, you stay next to me, right here in the middle. That way you’ll be there to shoot any birds that go off the wrong way.” In a minute they heard the distant triple note of Oncle Aymerie’s horn and set off, dogs whining and straining but held fast on their rope leashes, sticks tapping, quiet imprecations of “Allez là-dedans. Allez.”
Twenty uneventful minutes later, still several hundred feet from the line of guns, they heard the popping of shots as the first birds took off. The beaters changed their rhythm, speeding up, yelling loudly, and flailing energetically with their sticks, seeking to create an even greater irritant for the birds than the din of the guns.
The beater next to Capucine—the oracular old man with the tarpaulin poncho—clutched his face and let out a cry. Blood flowed freely through his fingers and down his chest. She held him by the arm as the other beaters went on. His spaniel yanked on his rope once or twice but then realized his master’s distress and sat down in front of him, looking worried and keening almost inaudibly. Capucine pulled the man’s fingers away from his face and mopped up as much blood as she could with her handkerchief. In a few minutes the blood flow dwindled but his face began to swell alarmingly. The man muttered over and over, “I told them, but they didn’t listen. I told them . . .”
The policewoman in Capucine took over. She led the beater out into the clearing, entrusted the dog to one of his pals, commandeered Vienneau’s top-of-the-line Peugeot 607, and designated Alexandre as driver. At the car she cajoled her ward—intimidated by the luxury of the leather seats—into the back and instructed Alexandre to drive to town.
The pharmacie was the only option as there was no doctor in the village. The pharmacist, Monsieur Homais, a grimly serious-looking man in his early sixties, examined the beater’s wounds with theatrical concentration.
“If this keeps up, I’m going to ask Monsieur le Comte for a season contract.”
Capucine smiled at the joke but couldn’t help remembering Oncle Aymerie’s dismay at yet another bloody accident on the heels of a fatality.
“You treated Philippe Gerlier?” Capucine asked.
“Madame, even I cannot treat the deceased. He was indeed brought to me, but I could do no more than pronounce his condition.” He produced an oversized magnifying glass and continued his examination, holding the tip of the man’s chin with two fingers to rotate his face left and right as was needed.
“These cases are usually a waste of my time. The shot is invariably in the epidermis, where it will work its way out. Even if a pellet made its way under the skin, that would only be dangerous if it found its way into an artery, and there’s nothing I could do about that.” He laughe
d virtuously, daubing a vile-looking yellow antiseptic on the wounds. “Anyhow, Monsieur Henri here only has eleven pellets in his epidermis. They’ll hurt like blazes for a week or two and then start to pop out when he shaves. It’s not the first time it’s happened to you, eh, Henri?” he said, addressing the beater in the familiar tu.
Capucine was always horrified at the callousness of country life. Two of the pellets were less than an inch from the man’s eyes. She wondered if Homais would have been so cheerful if he had been blinded.
Even Henri agreed that he was too woozy to return to the shoot and reluctantly accepted to be driven home to be entrusted to his wife.
“I wonder,” Alexandre mused, “if that pharmacist worries about the risk of practicing medicine without a license. Particularly in front of a flic. One reads that that sort of thing is the nemesis of his breed.”
“What an odd thing for you to be thinking about,” Capucine said.
“You know, of course,” said Alexandre, “that it was none other than the good Monsieur Bellanger who did the damage.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“We were posted next to him. As I was knocking birds out of the sky right and left, I noticed that a pheasant had walked out of the wood. Poor thing seemed to think that hoofing it was the safest course of action. But when he reached the clearing and saw all the hullabaloo, he changed his mind and took to wing. Bellanger, apparently, is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and fired when the bird was barely at head height. I heard the beater’s shout just after Bellanger’s shot went off. Vienneau explained to me that in sporting circles shooting birds that are not really flying is not the done thing at all, but in Bellanger’s defense the bird actually had both feet off the ground.”
CHAPTER 5
The next day, well aware that she had exhausted Alexandre’s patience with Nimrod’s pursuits, Capucine asked Odile to prepare a picnic basket, put it in the back of the Clio, and drove Alexandre to the forest for a day of mushrooming. Capucine had never quite believed it, but according to him, Alexandre was a rabid mycologist, apparently happiest when rooting for rare mushrooms in dense cover. Many was the time she had seen him in paroxysms of delight over some fungal treasure he had uncovered in a Paris market, but she had yet to observe him à l’œuvre in the great outdoors. She had consulted Emilien, the gamekeeper, about the most promising spots in the forest. Clearly a mushroomer himself, he had hemmed and hawed and defended his secrets, but eventually his feudal spirit won out and he admitted he might reveal one or two of his pet locations if Capucine swore her eternal silence.
Crime Fraiche Page 3
