French Fried

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Jason frowned. Doubtless he thought a guide would be expensive, but what did he expect me to do? Sit in my room at the hotel watching the leaves blowing on the slender branches outside. For excitement I could eat hotdogs at the Perrache Station and visit newspaper kiosks.

  “I would be happy to show Madam Blue around Lyon.” Sylvie flashed me a merry smile. “We could go to see the murals first. You will find them so exciting.”

  I thanked her, while pondering the fact that Sylvie had a British accent, but spoke what sounded like excellent French. Her husband warned me that I would have to put up with her endless picture taking.

  “Indeed, our Sylvie is worse than a Japanese tourist,” said Madam Laurent.

  “And you must ride in a car with no top,” her husband continued. “An ancient Austin Healy.”

  “Still, the weather is fine, Raymond, so why would one need a top? Anyway, I am having a new one made. Perhaps it will be ready tomorrow.”

  I agreed to ride in the topless car and then discovered that Jason would have to bring me to the university with him tomorrow to meet Sylvie, which meant getting up very early after so little sleep this afternoon. However, that trip would give me the chance to question the secretary about the pâté. And a local guide with a car was not to be passed up, unless, of course, rain was predicted.

  Following Sylvie’s offer, Gabrielle Doigne decided that she would be the best person to show me the major churches of Lyon, although Sylvie was welcome to drive, and finally Madam Laurent offered to devote a morning on the third day to showing me the traboules, passages cut through private property so that pedestrians could cross from one street to another. They dated from the days when residences crowded together, sharing walls, for long distances. Even in the company of the chairman’s acerbic wife, I longed to see the traboules; they had courtyards, towers, and ornate winding staircases inside.

  “I will drive that day, too,” said Sylvie. “The traboules are—”

  “Garçon,” commanded Laurent, evidently tired of the plans to entertain me. He burst into a stream of irritated French, and the waiter promptly removed the one chair that had sat empty beside Catherine.

  “Robert didn’t tell you that he would be absent from the dinner?” Madam Laurent demanded. “That is unlike him.”

  “He has been absent all day. But wait.” The chairman turned to Jason. “Did he not meet you at the airport, Professor Blue?”

  “Levasseur?” Jason asked, and his question gave me a start. “I haven’t seen him. We received a message saying the Guillots had to leave town. In fact, I left Carolyn at Perrache because I hoped to talk with Robert today.”

  “Very strange,” muttered the chairman. “Levasseur was to meet you at the airport and drive you to your hotel.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “This professor’s name is Robert Levasseur? Is he, by any chance, French Canadian?”

  Jason said he was sure he had mentioned Robert to me after the Canadian meeting. “Well, if you did, I was much too upset to remember after being rescued from the lifeboat,” I retorted. What a terrible story I had to tell these people about a member of their department. “I’m afraid I know what happened to your professor. When I entered my hotel room, I found him seemingly asleep across our beds, having eaten half the pâté delivered to us as a welcome gift. I took him for a thief and had the police summoned.”

  “A thief !” exclaimed Madam Laurent.

  “Well, he did eat our pâté,” I replied defensively, “and I didn’t know who he was. He was lying there on his stomach making funny noises, and then the horrid hotel woman said he was dead.”

  “Dead?” they exclaimed in a ragged chorus.

  “If you didn’t know who he was, why was he in bed in your hotel room?” demanded Victoire, as if I had arrived for an assignation, only to find his body.

  “I really couldn’t say,” I replied. “I’d never seen the man before, or even heard his name until today. You’d have to ask a very unpleasant woman at the hotel desk. She’s the one who let him into our room. Maybe he was a friend of hers.” Madam Laurent looked exceedingly angry.

  “As I was saying, when the medical examiner arrived, he agreed with Yvette that he was dead, so Professor Levasseur was taken away in a body bag.”

  “My God, not another corpse!” muttered my husband.

  “Actually, he wasn’t dead,” I protested, “and if he had been, it wasn’t my fault. After I had lunch with the inspector and the doctor, Doctor Petit went off to perform the autopsy. At that time it was discovered that your friend wasn’t dead after all.”

  “Then where is Levasseur?” demanded the chairman.

  “In some hospital. They sewed up the autopsy cut and sent him off, according to Inspector Roux, who called me with that information tonight. That’s what I was trying to tell you, Jason, when I arrived.”

  All the members of our group then burst into agitated conversation in French while the waiter served a dessert that the chairman had ordered for the whole table, something to do with the Red Cross—a red tart, a red fruit, some white strips, and something that looked like a chile relleno with sugar sprinkled on it. I approached the dish with great caution, while Jason stared at me accusingly, as if I had personally endangered his friend.

  10

  “Who, in Lyon, Would Want to Kill Us?”

  Jason

  We were both so tired that we dozed until the cab driver woke us up at Perrache and then the hotel. Much to my surprise, the Charlemagne was nicely decorated. We were given a large key at the desk, after which we squeezed into an incredibly small elevator. When I mentioned that the hotel seemed better than expected, Carolyn admitted that it was, except for the bathroom, where the shower sprayed water everywhere, especially on the floor because there was no curb between the shower stall and the bathroom floor. She also assured me that we were not in the room where Robert had fallen ill.

  Feeling conscience stricken that I had left her to face such a trying situation, I apologized. Then, while I had a shower in the dripping bathroom, Carolyn returned a phone call. When I waded out, wrapped in a damp towel, she told me that Robert was now dead.

  More bad news. “It’s hard to believe that a medical examiner could make a mistake like that,” I said, accepting the pajamas Carolyn had retrieved from my suitcase, which the cab driver had, for a tip, retrieved from the locker at Perrache.

  “Doctor Petit thinks it’s significant that your friend appeared dead when he wasn’t. He’s having the lab follow up on an idea he has about what might have been in the pâté, and of course, he’ll have toxicology done on the stomach contents.”

  “Poor Robert. He was an excellent scientist and very personable. Why do they think the pâté killed him?” I asked, as we climbed into twin beds and turned off the lights. “It could be something else entirely, something that sent him into a coma.”

  “A stroke? He looked too young for that,” said Carolyn, “and Jason, I wish you’d take the pâté theory seriously; that pâté was meant for us. If I’d eaten it, you’d have found me dead when you got home.”

  A terrible thought. What kind of food poisoning would one find in pâté? Something the goose had eaten that ended up in its liver? Or perhaps something put into the pâté, part of a recipe? “Did it have mushrooms in it?” I asked.

  Carolyn thought there might have been truffles because it had looked so delicious, and she had been furious that the man, whom she hadn’t known was a friend, had eaten our gift.

  “If the black specks were toadstools mistaken for mushrooms—”

  “Why would the department send us a welcome present made at a place that can’t distinguish mushrooms from toadstools?” she asked.

  “We don’t even know who sent the gift. Maybe Robert brought it.”

  Carolyn said he hadn’t according to Yvette, and would I at least consider being careful, in case there was someone who wanted to kill us?

  “Who, in Lyon, would want to kill us?” I asked her. Car
olyn muttered something about Albertine and her wretched dog, and I had to laugh, which did not go over well. Acting on a better idea, I gave my wife a good-night kiss, and we both drifted into exhausted sleep.

  All that trouble to synthesize the compound secretly in my lab, and I killed a perfectly innocuous colleague with whom I had no quarrel. Poor fellow, a victim of his own gluttony and my incompetence in the art of vengeance. I wonder how he planned to explain why he had eaten the pâté from their gift platter. Fortunately, I had devised another plan and hoped to fare better the next day with my mission. “Tomorrow,” I whispered to my ghostly companion.

  Jason

  Having been awake for two full days, excluding uncomfortable airplane naps, I was tempted to stay in bed an extra hour and skip my morning run, or perhaps wake Carolyn and devote the time to her. She looked so pretty, curled up in the bed next to mine with her blond hair tangled on the pillow. Still, once one starts skipping daily exercise, middle-aged spread sets in. As long as my knees held out, I hoped to keep running. There’s nothing like a cool dawn and a brisk workout to start the day.

  Accordingly, I slipped out of bed and searched my suitcase for running clothes. In short order I was on Charlemagne Cour. As I ran, I thought about Robert. What could have happened to him in our room?

  I had turned to my left outside the hotel to run along the sidewalk until I had used up half the allotted period. Then I crossed the street and ran back toward the hotel, enjoying the sound of trees rustling in the light breeze and the friendly greetings of shopkeepers, who were sweeping off sidewalks in front of their stores and arranging merchandise on racks. A very friendly city—Lyon. I don’t remember being greeted on the streets of Paris.

  During the return trip I picked up a companion, who came out of a side street and joined me with tail wagging enthusiastically. I’m not sure what kind of dog he was, but his coat, blotched in brown and white, reminded me of the huge cows we’d seen grazing in the pastures of Normandy. He looked well cared for, no doubt someone’s pet, and gave me a friendly bark from time to time as he tipped his head up to inspect me.

  We both had picked up the pace, so I decided to run as far as Perrache, then back to the hotel. As we started down the last block, a car, motor revving loudly, suddenly pulled out of the road that circled the station and accelerated toward me. Without thinking, I dove into a recessed doorway. That proved to be exactly the right thing to do, for the car jumped the curb. I slammed up hard against a door and crumpled to the cement. The dog, too, tried to evade the racing car and landed on top of me, but the poor beast had been clipped, and whimpered against my shoulder, its hind leg bleeding on my trousers. While the car swerved to avoid the building and accelerated away, I managed to sit up and lean against the wall, my heart beating violently.

  Had the person driving that car meant to hit me? Or had he lost control and hit the gas rather than the brake? Since he hadn’t had the decency to stop, I’d never know. I staggered up and discovered that I wasn’t badly hurt. Then, with the injured dog in my arms, I limped cautiously across the street and entered the hotel, where a cheerful lady with dark brown hair and a tipped nose met me at the desk.

  “Jason Blue,” I said. “Room four-twelve. I was almost run down by a car, and the dog was hit, so I brought him in. Perhaps you could suggest what can be done for him.”

  “He’s not yours? Oh, poor dear,” said Simone, as her nametag read. She rounded the glowing counter and took the dog from me. “He’s bleeding. Where shall I put him? Not on a sofa. The manager would object.” The dog laid his head on her breast and whimpered. “Monsieur, you must go to the dining room and take a tablecloth from one of the tables. We can fold it on a chair and put this poor creature there.”

  I followed her directions to the dining room, talked a doubtful busboy into giving me a tablecloth, and returned to help care for the dog.

  “He has a tag,” said Simone. “His name is Henri. I shall call his owner. And the police—because of the car. Did you see it? Or the driver? It is not allowed for cars to run into pedestrians and dogs.”

  Simone called Henri’s owner. I called Carolyn to explain the situation, and she insisted that Simone contact Inspector Theodore Roux, who should know that another attempt had been made on us. At that point, with my bones aching, I didn’t feel like objecting. As ridiculous as it seemed, perhaps there was someone out there who meant to cause us harm.

  11

  The Dog, the Vet, and the Inspector

  Carolyn

  The first day someone tried to poison us. The next someone, probably the same person, tried to run Jason down, yet we were in a strange city, where one of the three people who knew us was now dead. That left the Guillots, reported to be visiting Albertine’s mother at a Paris hospital. I tried to imagine Albertine sneaking back here, putting poison in the pâté and speeding down Charlemagne Cour to run over Jason, whom she had no reason to dislike. She might resent me because of her dog’s behavior in Sorrento, but not Jason.

  These thoughts got me as far as the miniature elevator, into which I pushed my way, although there were two people inside—Germans, who said, I think, unpleasant things about me in German, a peculiar language. As if someone made it up as a joke.

  “Jason, you’re hurt,” I cried, as I got out and spotted my husband. When, close to tears, I threw my arms around him, he told me to be careful of his knee, which had been bruised in his attempt to avoid the car.

  “Carolyn, this is Simone, who’s been looking after Henri.”

  Simone had come out from behind the counter to shake my hand. How glad I was that Yvette had the day off. Imagine my husband having to deal her when he arrived, hurt and in pain.

  “We are so sorry for your husband’s injury,” said Simone. “Such a good-of-heart man. Even hurt himself, he brings in Henri, who is injured more. I have called this inspector and the owner of Henri. Both will soon come. And yesterday. Mon Dieu. In your time of bad fortune, you must deal with Yvette. Please excuse her. She likes not the English.”

  “I’m American,” I corrected, unwilling to forgive Yvette.

  “Speakers of English, I should say. Yvette is engaged to our assistant manager, and he runs away with an English woman guesting in our hotel. How humiliate is Yvette to be replaced by an English woman! Please know that I shall do everything to make you a happy stay.”

  “Thank you, Simone. You’re very kind.”

  “Henri!” A wizened man wearing a beret and waving a cane burst through the round glass doors. His voice set off a cascade of yipping from behind the counter. Then a brown-and-white dog came limping out, trailing a bloody tablecloth.

  While dog and owner reunited with human murmurs of dismay and canine whimpers, while Simone beamed at them and comforted the owner in French, another person joined the group, a large, fat man wearing a shredded brown sweater. He took the dog, carried it to a sofa, and proceeded to examine it. “The manager, he will be furious if Henri bleeds on the sofa,” Simone whispered to us. “Monsieur Blue, you look pale. Please sit. I will bring the rest for your leg.” She bustled off to take care of Jason while I put my arm around his waist.

  “I can walk,” he grumbled.

  “Oh, that is very fine to hear.” It was Simone, carrying a footstool. “Breakfast is serving. If you can walk so far, you can have some while the inspector is coming.”

  “I’ve already been there to get the tablecloth,” said Jason, and we headed for the breakfast room. Simone propped his leg on the footstool at a table while I went to the buffet and gathered croissants, raisin rolls, coffee, ham, cheese, and kiwis. Ah, those kiwis. They were the best I’ve ever had. So sweet, just the slightest bit tart. Of course, we had to peel off the hairy skins and put up with the black seeds, which lodge in the teeth, but still, kiwis go so well with cheese.

  As upset as I was, I enjoyed the breakfast and congratulated Jason on his genius at choosing reasonably priced hotels. Then I asked if he was in pain and needed Advil, which I carry
in my purse. I do like to be prepared for the exigencies of travel. Jason declined and even took his leg off the footstool. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she got the footstool before I could say I didn’t need one.”

  “Yes, she’s much nicer than Yvette, who sent the foie gras to our room and then your friend Robert. He’d still be alive if she hadn’t. On the other hand, we might be dead.” Jason frowned at me, but I just had to say, “I hope, after your terrible experience, that you don’t still attribute these things to happenstance.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” said Jason, “but I could use another cup of coffee.”

  “Don’t move, darling. I’ll get it for you.” I jumped up to do so, which is why I wasn’t at the table to make introductions when Inspector Roux arrived to take Jason’s statement. But before the statement, he helped himself to a roll and coffee at the buffet—reminding me of the police in Sorrento, who had always been more interested in the hotel buffet than in corpses found upstairs. I recommended the kiwis and cheese, so he took some of those, too, and we went back to join Jason.

  “Professor,” said the inspector, putting slices of cheese and kiwi on his raisin roll and taking a bite, “what enemies do you have in Lyon?”

  “None,” said Jason. “My only friend, except a couple who left town, died last night. I don’t know anyone else but academics I met yesterday.”

  “Very puzzling. Madam, have you enemies?”

  “I only know the two who left town,” I replied, “plus the people who took us to dinner last night.” I was unwilling to implicate Albertine until I’d done some investigating. First, I’d call Albertine’s Lyon number to see if she answered.

  “Hmmm,” said the inspector, sipping his coffee and taking another bite of roll. “Then please tell me with much detail, Professor, what happened this morning. Did you recognize the car?”