Capucine whooped like a schoolgirl and leaned far over the table to kiss her cousin on the forehead. The males at surrounding tables smiled admiringly.
“But, don’t think this is a done deal. Messing outside of my own ministry is poking into a can of nasty worms that often bite.”
“Jacques, thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jacques shrieked his inimitable laugh. “And to think that when you called me to have dinner on such short notice, I was sure it was all about finishing what we started that rainy afternoon in the commons—”
Jacques started as if he had been goosed. His hand darted into his jacket. Reflexively—thinking he was reaching for a gun—Capucine leaned forward, pushing her chair back, grabbing for her Sig as she searched the room for the danger. Jacques’s volcanic bray was loud enough to stop conversation at all the surrounding tables. He fished a beeper from an inside pocket, inspected it, and held it up disdainfully between thumb and index. It twitched and buzzed like a captured insect.
He stood up and hiked his eyebrows in apology. “Gotta run, luscious.”
Just as he started off, he turned back and whispered in Capucine’s ear. “I feel guilty about leaving you in the lurch. If one of the things you had on your mind was resolving that issue I was just talking about, I can recommend that little citizen at the next table.” He indicated the blonde who was following their conversation intently. “I’m sure she’d be amenable to anything you might conjure up.”
CHAPTER 21
At seven thirty the next morning, just as night was reluctantly beginning to relax its grip on the dark, Capucine jerked awake. For a brief horrible instant she thought it had happened again, like that one time—that single time—she had woken up in the strange bed of a boy she had met at a party. But this was her own bed, in her own apartment. Still, it took her several minutes to find the courage to leave the warm security of her eiderdown and face the desolate flat.
She went into the kitchen, coaxed a café au lait out of the Pasquini, and stared out the window, willing the familiar kaleidoscope of the dawn reflected on the zinc rooftops of Paris to break her mood.
Two coffees later she was fully awake but still a little disoriented. She’d boiled it down to one of two possible causes: a feeling that she’d made a fool of herself by asking—hell, begging—Jacques to fight her battles for her or having fibbed to Alexandre about why she’d had to spend the night in Paris. Maybe it was both.
At nine she picked up the phone and dialed Maulévrier. Gauvin answered. His continued insistence on addressing her as “Madame La Comtesse” irritated her more than usual. Neither Alexandre nor Oncle Aymerie was reachable—the former still in bed and the latter in conference with his gardener—but Gauvin was voluble with the day’s plans: a walk-up shoot after lunch over some fields of stubble that were believed to be rich in partridge. Astonishingly, Alexandre had agreed to participate. She felt a rush of love for her husband, who was trying so hard to be a good consort. She rang off, announcing she would be there for dinner.
She felt an urge to manifest her appreciation and love for Alexandre with some sort of material gesture. But what? She dragged her feet through the morning errands—sorting through the accumulated mail, packing more clothes to take to the country, spending the hour she never had time for in the bathroom, attending to all the petit soins so dear to the Frenchwoman—racking her brains for the perfect gift to take him, but nothing came to mind.
Eventually, she capitulated and accepted that, faute de mieux, a sweater from that exorbitantly priced English store on the boulevard Saint-Germain was the best she could do. It wasn’t ideal, but just maybe, if she could find the perfect color, it might get her message across.
As she walked down the boulevard, she passed a dusty umbrella store that was held to have been there since the time of Louis Philippe. Her emotional register blipped. A walking stick! It wouldn’t have the passive-aggressive character of the usual woman’s gift, which was no better than a thinly disguised attempt to impose her taste on her husband. No, this present was going to be something he would cherish for life.
The store lived up to its reputation, crammed with beautifully made canes and umbrellas that all looked like they had been made before the Great War, to be used promenading up and down the Champs-Elysées while it was still lined with walled town houses. Her first thought was one of those hunting sticks that open up into a flimsy little saddle, but those were really for dutiful wives to sit on daintily as they admired their husbands’ shooting prowess. Completely wrong. But here it was! A robust malacca cane with a large semicircular handle. The perfect stick for a postprandial country stroll. Just the thing to whack at weeds and raise in the air to emphasize a point. But what made this cane absolutely perfect was that the handle unscrewed to reveal the cap of a slim silver flask that, the salesman assured her, would hold a third of a bottle of wine or whatever the owner chose to fill it with. Alexandre would be overjoyed.
Her next stop was at Hédiard in the place de la Madeleine, where she purchased an absurdly expensive bottle of Francis Darroze fifteen-year-old Grand Bas-Armagnac so Alexandre could provision his cane the minute she gave it to him. As an afterthought she bought an elegant two-pound tin of breakfast tea for Oncle Aymerie and headed the Clio back to Normandy.
Dinner turned out to be a very boisterous affair. The Vienneaus and Henri Bellanger, who seemed to dog Vienneau like a bad conscience, had been invited. The men were in high spirit as the four had spent the afternoon trudging through fields with the household dogs in search of partridge and had returned with nine birds, six downed by Bellanger, two by Oncle Aymerie, none by Vienneau, and, astonishingly, one by Alexandre.
“He has a natural talent, your husband,” said Bellanger, who was now established as an indisputable paragon with a shotgun. “If you took him out regularly, he could become quite a useful shot.”
Even though he had used the same tone as if suggesting Capucine give her dog more exercise, Alexandre couldn’t have been more pleased. Her husband never ceased to amaze her.
Gauvin arrived at his usual lugubrious pace with the main dish, a grim-looking array of small parchment paper bundles securely tied with string, suggesting tiny bodies wrapped in shrouds after some massacre in a distant land. A kitchen servant, abjectly terrified, looking not a day older than thirteen, followed at Gauvin’s heels with a fragrant dish of golden girolle mushrooms.
“Partridge,” Oncle Aymerie announced proudly, looking at Alexandre. “Of course, not the ones we took this afternoon. These have been hung for exactly the right amount of time. In fact they’re from that shoot two weeks ago, when, ah . . .”
In an effort to redeem his gaffe, he summoned Gauvin sharply to bring him the serving dish. But Marie-Christine stared at him with a rigidly polite smile that did not quite mask her horror and desperation.
“This is a recipe that’s been in the family for generations,” Oncle Aymerie said with forced cheerfulness, picking up one of the partridges with two forks to show it off. “The secret is that you wrap them in fat and then tie them up in a paper package so they come out nice and moist.”
There was much awkward cutting of string with dull table knives and clumsy opening of the paper parcels with forks. For some mysterious reason, good manners dictated that the unwrapping, which would have been difficult enough with a sharp knife and nimble fingers, be done entirely with cumbersome tableware. Once open, the little bundles yielded appealingly moist golden partridges crammed with stuffing that smelled invitingly of onion.
“Aymerie,” Alexandre said, fanning the aroma of the birds to his nostrils with an open hand in that odd gesture that high-level chefs seemed to cherish, “your family recipe is a classic that comes direct from Dumas père.” He had assumed the full pompous gravitas of a celebrated food critic. “The birds are stuffed with a mixture of finely chopped fatback, shallots, parsley, and the minced heart and liver of the bird. And then they’re wrapped in very thin
ly sliced fatback and wrapped again in baking parchment. The beauty of the recipe is that it reinforces the natural bitterness of the bird rather than struggling with it. Your Odile is a treasure.”
Oncle Aymerie beamed and started to ramble on about the connection between Dumas and his family. Bellanger smirked and leaned over to make a whispered aside to Vienneau. Oncle Aymerie scowled and said, “Here! There are no low masses said at my table. What are you on about?”
“I was saying to my neighbor, monsieur,” Bellanger said with a smug smile, “that I hoped you were not claiming Dumas in your ancestry.” He chuckled as if he had scored a subtle debating point.
Oncle Aymerie was furious. “I take it, monsieur, that you are alluding to the fact that the immortal writer’s grandfather, the Marquis de la Pailleterie, chose a black slave girl from the colonies for a wife. Could that be what you are referring to, monsieur?” Oncle Aymerie was red in the face.
It was a double-barreled gaffe: not only did Oncle Aymerie’s clan have two crossings with the Pailleteries, of which they were quite proud, but Dumas’ métissage was known to every high-school student in France and was hardly the nugget of literary erudition Bellanger seemed to think it was. Indeed, President Chirac’s speech when Dumas’ ashes were transferred to the Panthéon the year before attributed at least some of Dumas’ greatness to the mélange of his blue and black blood.
The cold splash hastened the dinner’s end, which was a shame since the partridge was exceptional. As soon as decently possible, Vienneau left, followed by Bellanger with his tail between his legs and Marie-Christine trotting obediently behind.
As Capucine escorted them out to their car, she took Marie-Christine aside. “I was planning on a little shopping expedition to Honfleur tomorrow, but I haven’t been there in years and I have no idea which are the good stores anymore. What if you came with me?”
Marie-Christine jumped at the idea.
Capucine postponed giving Alexandre his surprise gift until they were alone in their room after dinner. It turned out to be a wise decision. He was genuinely delighted with the cane and insisted on opening the Armagnac with the corkscrew of his pocketknife and sloshing it into the cigar-shaped silver flask.
“This is glorious,” he said, topping up the vial with the exaggerated care of the slightly soused. “Now let’s put it to the test.” He screwed the components of the stick back together. “I stroll down the boulevard with the insouciance of a true flâneur,” he said, walking around the room with exaggerated strides, “and—hop!—I am suddenly overcome with a desperate need of sustenance.” Alexandre halted, unscrewed the stick, and took a deep draught.
“Perfect. And the Armagnac is exquisite. Your turn!”
Capucine entered into the spirit of the thing, and before long the two were marching around the room, Alexandre swinging his new cane in a parody of Charlie Chaplin, singing Maurice Chevalier tunes, pausing every now and then to refill the little flask.
Much later, Oncle Aymerie banged loudly on their door. “Oh là là. Ça suffit comme ça, les enfants! Au lit!” They giggled like schoolchildren and whispered happily to each other. Obeying Oncle Aymerie’s dictate, they found themselves under the covers in abbreviated sleeping attire and set about the dramatic representation for which they were costumed.
Alexandre froze as if he had seen another deer leaping. He sat bolt upright in bed.
“Did I hear you say you were going to Honfleur tomorrow with Marie-Christine Vienneau? I have to spend another day watching the grass grow up between my toes? And I suppose you’re going to tell me this is more police business.”
“It is, sort of. I have a feeling, an intuition really, that there’s a little more going on there than meets the eye.”
“And there’s a great deal that does meet the eye, too.” He resumed his snuggling, then propped himself up on one elbow. “I thought the cherchez-la-femme approach to crime investigation went out of style with Dumas, that great African Frenchman.” They both giggled.
Alexandre sat up again. “So where did you go to dinner with this . . . What was his name, anyway?”
“Damien Pelletier,” said Capucine. “We were in the same commissaire’s course at the police school. When we graduated, he was assigned to headquarters. He loves it.”
“And where did you two go for dinner?”
“The Green Cow. You were right. It was really awful,” she said loyally, even though in hindsight she had enjoyed the restaurant. “I had a salmon tortilla.” Alexandre groaned. “Damien had the famous poulet au Coca. The frites that came with it were unbelievable.”
“Of course they were. They fry them the way the Belgians do, in pure beef tallow. Your face is going to explode with pimples any second now, and your heart is going to slow down like a toilet stuffed with too much paper. Even McDonald’s stopped using that stuff years ago.”
Capucine hoped Alexandre’s interest in the dinner had been deflected, but he looked at her with the slyness of an interrogation’s bad cop. “Strange place for two flics to go to discuss business, the Green Cow,” he said with a flinty look.
“It’s the new police. Maigret’s day is over. It’s all leather jackets and two-day stubble now.” Capucine slid under the covers in an attempt to reinitiate their former pursuit, delighting at the speed at which Alexandre’s interest reemerged. There would be no more imaginary deer prancing through the room that night. In fact, within twenty minutes he was sound asleep, emitting just the slightest growl of a snore. Capucine nestled up against him and rubbed the slight convexity of his stomach. Men were such pushovers.
CHAPTER 22
“Is this really a police car?” Marie-Christine asked, looking around Capucine’s Clio, wide-eyed.
“It most certainly is.” Capucine clunked the pulsing blue beacon on the top of the dashboard and flicked a switch to emit the strident pan-pom, pan-pom of French police vehicles. A Peugeot a hundred yards ahead pulled over and stopped. As they passed by, they could see the driver reaching into the glove compartment for his car’s papers. Both women waved, giggling.
“And do you have a big black gun like they have in the movies?”
“Actually, today it’s a cute little one in my handbag, but when I’m on duty, I have to carry a service weapon. I keep it in a holster in the small of my back, and it’s torture when I’m sitting down. But when you need it, you’re definitely glad to have it.”
“How exciting. You have no idea how much I envy you. You’re so courageous to have done something so daring and . . . well . . . you know,” she giggled.
Capucine laughed. “My parents certainly didn’t share your point of view.”
Marie-Christine’s face was flushed with excitement like a little girl’s. “We’re having a real outing. I never get out of Saint-Nicolas. This is such fun!” She squeezed Capucine’s arm in appreciation.
They rolled through the brilliant jade-green countryside dotted with white cows, gnarled apple trees, and rustic thatched cottages with thin wisps of smoke drifting up from chimneys. Marie-Christine seemed as oblivious as Capucine was delighted. In forty-five minutes they were in Honfleur, a town that, despite the glowing hype in tourist guides, had been sucked dry by generations of day-trippers, who had left only a hollow, empty shell of quaintness. Nonetheless Marie-Christine was ecstatic and insisted on seeing even the most desiccated sites: drab, empty Saint Catherine’s Church, rebuilt in the fifteenth century by shipbuilders with salvaged ships’ timbers to celebrate the end of the Hundred Years’ War; the commercial dock with its remaining handful of fishing boats struggling to eke out a desperate living from dwindling stocks of fish; and finally the Vieux Bassin, the square inner harbor with its anorexically thin houses and shabby sailboats.
The shopping was also a disappointment. Summer was long gone. Most of the clothing stores were closed for the winter, and the handful of knickknack shops offered nothing more exciting than garish ashtrays made from seashells or bad reproductions of the more famous of Corot�
�s and Boudin’s paintings of the region.
“We’ll make up for it over lunch,” Marie-Christine giggled. With some misgivings they settled on a restaurant that, even though its authenticity seemed to be the product of an interior decorator, did have a pretty view of the Vieux Bassin.
It was almost empty. After a few minutes’ wait, during which a loud altercation could be heard in the kitchen, a waiter arrived, darting angry looks over his shoulder. He slapped two cracked plastic menus on the table and held them down with his open hand. “I’d recommend the oysters. They’re Belons and they came in fresh about an hour ago. After, I’d recommend the red snappers, which I know for a fact the chef bought at the dock this morning. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anything else unless you have a taste for antiquities.” He said this loudly enough to make it perfectly clear he wanted to be overheard in the kitchen.
All that was left for the two women to do was order the inevitable bottle of Sancerre. Despite the ominous portents, the oysters were delightfully briny and alive with the fresh tang of the sea, while the yellow-green Sancerre was lemony, tooth achingly cold, and made them shiver with delight.
Marie-Christine rapidly downed two oysters, tilting her head back and letting the pulsing little globs slide down her throat. “Bliss!” she exclaimed.
“Alexandre always tries to convince me that oysters are a potent aphrodisiac,” Capucine said. “He insists they work individually. He once claimed that he had had two dozen at lunch and that we were going to have an even better time than the first night of our honeymoon.”
Somehow, it was the completely wrong thing to say. Marie-Christine grimaced as if she had felt a sudden twinge of pain and drained her half glass of Sancerre in one go. With an angry gesture she speared an oyster with her tiny fork and swished it around violently in a ramekin of mignonette sauce the color of blood mixed with water, sloshing the liquid on the white tablecloth. She looked up with a forced smile and prattled a rapid recitative of inanities until the waiter came to remove their dishes.
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