by Gerald Jay
The PMU booth was painted a bright, hopeful green. The middle-aged woman inside wore a jockey hat in an identical shade of green. She handled all the bets and, for the lucky few, the instant payoffs afterward. Métronome was number 7.
Ali sensed a good omen. Didn’t Al Borak race through the seven heavens of the Koran? Feeling like a winner, he upped his bet to two hundred and put down the third of his five-hundred-franc notes. The good news was he still had two left. Back at the table, Ali waved his ticket at the old girl in appreciation. Lifting the glass of cognac her friend had just brought her, she toasted their success.
From the start it was a tight race. The ten horses jockeying for position, the speedster Bernadette taking the early lead. Ali, along with almost everyone else in the café, had his eyes nailed to the screens. At the halfway pole, Bernadette was still out front but pressed by a trio of horses coming up out of the pack. Spotting number 7 among them, Ali silently urged on the big black mount. By the three-quarter mark, Bernadette, fading fast, had run out of steam, and Métronome, with Chez Nous and Séducteur hot on his heels, had vaulted into the lead. The track announcer’s voice throbbed with excitement as number 2, a pale gray with legs flying, suddenly came up on the outside, and side by side the quadriga thundered down the stretch. As their mounts reached for the finish line, the riders beat away on them like tom-toms and Ali, battling the other jocks, pounded the table.
Eldorado was first, Métronome second, and Chez Nous third.
“Eldorado,” Rabo groaned. He wondered aloud if the winning horse was owned by Johnny Hallyday and named after his big hit. Offering Ali his condolences, Rabo told him he had something to cheer him up outside in his car.
Ali, muttering as he tore his ticket in two, was about to leave when he noticed Popeye coming back from the payout counter with a fistful of francs. He stared, incredulous, as she split the money with her girlfriend.
“You told me Métronome,” he fumed at the old bitch, a scowl like a dueling scar marking his face.
“Sure. Didn’t you bet him to place?”
“Putain!” Snatching up her racing form, he was shredding it into bits and pieces when Popeye, cursing the bicot, launched herself at his head. Ali, neatly sidestepping her flailing fists, knocked her to the floor. The woman behind the counter came running out with a club in her hand. Rabo grabbed his friend and pulled him away. It was time to go. He’d no wish to wait for the flics to show up.
11
L’ERMITAGE, TAZIAC
The morning sun turned the lawn, still damp from the night’s rain, into a molten lake that stretched from the cool green shadows of the bushes below the high terrace wall all the way down the hill. It was going to be a steamy summer day. Up above on the terrace, the four friends sat outside, leisurely finishing breakfast, chatting and enjoying their buttery brioches and coffee. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking. Then they heard the car coming up the hill. Although Ali hadn’t yet arrived for work—unpredictable, as usual—it didn’t sound like his old VW.
Next door, Reiner heard the laboring engine too. He didn’t need binoculars to see the police markings on the car’s hood and trunk, the blue light on its roof. He supposed it had something to do with the accident. Eager to find out what the cops knew, he made his way over to the neighboring property under cover of the trees. It was dangerous, of course, but a calculated risk never troubled Reiner. Darting across the open dirt road, he slipped soundlessly into the shadows between the terrace wall and the bushes, and, placing himself directly beneath where they were sitting, he waited, still as a lizard.
Mazarelle had had no trouble finding the L’Ermitage turnoff. As he approached the house, he marveled at how many attractive châteaux were tucked discreetly away in the hills outside Taziac, houses that even the locals knew little about. One like this, he estimated, probably cost more to rent for a month than he could make renting out his little place in town for a year. Should he decide to go back to Paris, which he’d been thinking a lot about lately, he’d probably do better to sell it outright, take whatever he could get, and forget the past. Close the book on all those months of pain and remember just the good times. Taziac had nothing more to offer him now.
Judy Reece invited the inspector to join them out on the terrace for coffee and introduced him to their friends. Though she had told them about him, she recounted the amusing way they’d first met Inspector Mazarelle behind the counter in the boulangerie. Schuyler thought the sad-eyed, burly man with the hairy horseshoe under his nose looked exactly the way a French detective should. So did Schuyler’s Canadian wife. Given the inspector’s large, open face, Ann Marie believed that the serious downward curve of his mustache gave him the gravitas his police role demanded.
Judy, who found Mazarelle attractive and in need of care, felt that he could be a poet. A big one, to be sure, with a limp. Perhaps like Jacob, he too had wrestled with some terrible power and walked away from their fearful encounter forever changed. To Ben, he seemed heavy, country slow, and terminally incompetent. But Ben had to reconsider when the inspector announced that he’d come to return his missing Visa.
“That’s fabulous! You mean you’ve cracked the case already?”
“Doucement, Monsieur Reece. Not so fast. We have the card but not the thief.” He asked Ben to drop by his office as soon as possible for fingerprinting. But Mazarelle had to admit he wasn’t too hopeful about identifying the thief from fingerprints. Most of the latent ones they found on the plastic card were either smudged, distorted, or fragmentary. Also complicating his life, though he spared him this, was that lately there had been so many court challenges by defense lawyers of false-positive identifications, it was getting harder to convict with fingerprints alone. What he did say was that he had something he wanted to show them.
The three photos were thirteen-by-eighteen-centimeter blowups of pictures taken by the bank’s surveillance camera. Unfortunately all three were dark and grainy, the images not very sharp and lacking in contrast. Mazarelle apologized for their poor quality. The videotape hadn’t been changed in a long time. Nevertheless, he hoped that the face of the man using Monsieur Reece’s Visa at the ATM might be one they recognized. Despite his doubts, the inspector cleared a space on the table and laid the pictures down like three aces.
Ben nodded his head. “It’s him! It’s Ali. I told you he stole it.” Though he’d no idea who the woman with him was, Ben had no doubt about Ali. Mazarelle turned to Ben’s wife. Judy bent over the photos, studying them closely. “I suppose it’s possible …” she allowed, but she was far from certain. As for Schuyler and Ann Marie, they didn’t think it was Ali any more now than when Ben had first voiced his suspicions.
Judy asked the inspector if he’d ever seen Ali. He shook his head. It wasn’t true, but if he said yes, he’d have to answer her next question. Mickey had pointed Ali out to him at the Café Valon, and Mazarelle thought that perhaps the reason he didn’t recognize him now was because the pictures were so lousy.
“It’s him! It’s him,” Ben insisted, angrily tapping the photos with his index finger. The same nasty confrontational glare he’d seen in Matisse’s Seated Riffian in the Barnes Collection. A fierce, haughty, selfish North African rebel restrained by no laws. And as Ben knew, Ali also had a rotten temper. “That’s the handyman, all right,” he shouted.
Mazarelle urged him not to excite himself. Thanked them all for their help. Gathering up the photographs, he cautioned them to say nothing to Ali about his visit. He hoped that aside from this little unpleasantness, they were all enjoying their vacation in Taziac.
“Yes and no,” Schuyler hedged. He recounted his friend’s recent hair-raising automobile accident so vividly that he might have been in the car. A miracle that Ben wasn’t killed.
Mazarelle turned to Monsieur Reece, expecting to get more of the story. But Ben simply shrugged and dismissed the incident as a crazy accident. He hadn’t wanted to mention it at all, especially after filing a complaint about the lo
ss of his money and credit card. Ben had no wish to appear a complete fool.
Schuyler described how the brakes on the rented Mercedes had failed and the air bags hadn’t inflated. The car rental agency in Bordeaux was so glad not to be slapped with a serious lawsuit that it had provided a brand-new Mercedes free of charge.
Out of curiosity, Mazarelle asked Reece, “Were you the one who rented the Mercedes, monsieur?”
“No, I did,” Sky said, grinning at his friend. “They might have been less generous had I told them who was actually driving when the car went out of control.”
Reiner, his shirt soaked from pressing against the cold damp wall, had heard enough. Dashing back across the road, he disappeared into the empty house. It had been worth the risk. A new plan had taken shape in his mind as magically as if it had been there all along, boxed and gift wrapped, waiting for the right occasion. It was daring and would need a little time, which he disliked. And it lacked the anonymous casualness of chance. But it was breathtakingly neat and came ready to use with all the parts inside.
On the twenty-fourth of June, Ali didn’t arrive at L’Ermitage until late in the afternoon. He untied the wooden planks from the top of his white VW and carried them into the barn. For a man his size, he was unusually strong. Schuyler was inside, bent over the handyman’s large metal toolbox and rummaging through it. Ali dropped the planks on the floor, sending up a cloud of dust, and asked what the hell he was looking for. Schuyler needed a Phillips-head screwdriver for the kitchen cabinet hinges. Ali knew just where it was, which was amazing given the clutter of tools, rolls of tape, drill bits, blades, and assorted boxes of nails, washers, and screws. Much to the vacationing executive’s amusement, Ali insisted that when he had finished with it he put it back exactly where he had found it.
After several weeks of sightseeing, Sky had had enough. Lately, he’d been helping Ali renovate the barn. He loved sanding down the new doors, windows, and cabinets, the smell of sawdust. And perhaps most pleasurable of all for him was losing all sense of time. It was a quality common to many of the things he enjoyed most, like flying, sailing, cross-country skiing, and, of course, making deals. Especially big ones. Like the billion-dollar deal that had delayed his departure.
As for the handyman, Ali didn’t mind free volunteer labor as long as Phillips didn’t get in the way and minded his own business. This one seemed to know what he was doing. Ali had completed putting down the new floor and Schuyler was going over it with a rented electric sander when Ann Marie came up behind him.
“It’s really coming along,” she said approvingly. Schuyler smiled and was about to give her a kiss when he noticed that she was already dressed for dinner.
“What time is it?”
“A little after eight. Our reservation at Chez Doucette is for nine. Aren’t you coming, dear?”
He didn’t feel like quitting just yet, and he wasn’t particularly starved. “If I get hungry, I’ll find something later in the refrigerator.”
“You okay?” she asked, more concerned than annoyed. Her husband loved to eat and definitely liked Chez Doucette, the best restaurant in town, and its owner.
“I’m fine.”
Even though Ali was busy at the other end of the room, Ann Marie could tell that his ears were tuned to every word they said. It gave her a very uncomfortable feeling. She wondered how much English he really knew. “You sure, Sky?”
“Tell Ben and Judy I’m sorry.”
“Suit yourself.”
It was a quarter to ten when Ali, complaining that he’d done enough work for one day, abruptly packed up and left.
“À demain,” called Schuyler.
Tired and hungry himself, after a while Schuyler too thought he’d knock off. That day they had put in the new windows and the hardwood floor was ready to be stained. As his wife said, the place was shaping up. The funny thing was that, despite the pleasure he took in the work, he’d never have thought of doing anything so relaxing at home. For one thing, he’d no time for it. And for another—wiping the sawdust off his scraped, dirty hands—that’s what money was for, and they had plenty of that.
Schuyler flipped off the lights. He was about to close the barn door and go see what was in the refrigerator when he heard footsteps. At first he thought it was Ali returning. But Ali’s VW was gone—as was Ben’s Peugeot—and the only car parked under the ash-gray outdoor lights was his new Mercedes. He peered into the darkness, trying to make out who it was.
From the shadows emerged someone Schuyler had never seen before. Tall, long-haired, he moved like a hunter—stealthily, on the balls of his feet—as he approached the lit kitchen window of the house. Schuyler didn’t like his looks at all. Nor the gun he was toting or the furtive way he peeked through the panes, scanning the room. This guy was trouble.
Motionless and dumbstruck, Schuyler watched as the intruder glided over to the door and went into the house as if he’d been there before. With his gun and large rubber boots, he could be the poacher Schuyler had seen the other night. Perhaps the same uninvited guest who had ripped off his friend’s money and credit card and was coming back for more.
Schuyler was certain that it wasn’t Ali who had stolen Ben’s Visa. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the comforting bulge of his wallet. Though Ann Marie had probably left some expensive earrings and bracelets in their room, everything was insured. He wasn’t worried about that. He longed wistfully for his car keys or his cell phone, which were nestled among his silk handkerchiefs in the top drawer of the bureau. Some official tough guy like Inspector Mazarelle would be awfully good to see about now. Schuyler wondered what the creep was doing in there. Why was he taking so long? Could he have already left by way of the back door or the terrace?
When the intruder finally came out, he looked across at the barn. Schuyler’s heart sank. Even before the guy started toward the barn door, Schuyler had begun feeling his way into the darkness of an interior whose layout was by now familiar to him. Although there was no other way out of the barn, he knew of a perfect hiding place. It was in the rear storage area where they kept old boxes, barrels, cartons, and trunks. And as Ali one day had shown him, it also contained a secret room that once, long ago, had been a granary. Laughing, Ali had suggested that maybe during the war when the Vichy cops came looking for Jews, the owner hid them in there. It was even less funny to Schuyler now than when he first heard it.
Outlined in the doorway, the stranger stood for a moment framed by the ghostly light behind him, his face lost in the shadows as he entered the barn. Either he couldn’t find the light switch or had no desire to turn it on. As fast as Schuyler could go, he groped his way to the back of the barn where the air was damp and musty. Moving quickly, as much with his hands as his feet, he felt along the wall until he came to a pile of suitcases stacked atop a huge wicker basket and, grabbing the handle with both hands, pulled the basket slowly toward him so as not to knock over the loose tower of luggage. Nothing fell as the large basket, which was bolted to the wall, inched forward, pulling with it a section of the wall behind. The wood scraping on the stone floor squealed like the steel wheels of an elevated train rounding a curve.
Shit, he thought, that’s all I needed. Without a moment’s pause, Schuyler hurled himself into the utter blackness and pulled the wall closed behind him with a second high-pitched, agonizing sound. It wasn’t until he’d shoved the thick wooden bar into place on the back of the door that he felt momentarily safe.
Then came the stealthy approaching footsteps. Followed by the noise of barrels being shoved lightly aside as if some powerful stalking animal were hunting for its frozen prey. Who was this guy, Schuyler asked himself, and why me? What the hell did he have against me? What was he doing now? There wasn’t a sound. Straining to catch the slightest hint of movement, Schuyler, barely breathing, pressed his ear against the back of the door.
From the other side of the wall, a low voice called softly, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” There was a s
udden hammering on the wall, furious blows as if someone was trying to punch a hole through it to get at him.
Was the man crazy? The thought was as frightening as the surreal situation in which Schuyler found himself. How do you charm a madman? His chest pounding, he reached into his back pocket searching for a weapon, something with which to defend himself, and impaled his palm on a steel point. Though bleeding, he was so cheered to find Ali’s screwdriver that he hardly felt the wound. It wasn’t an ice pick, but it was better than nothing.
He longed to hear Ben’s car with the three of them returning from dinner. They had been gone a long time. Instead what he heard was the banging of the suitcases being violently tossed aside, one after the other, and the wicker basket on the floor squeaking and rattling as the lid was opened and tugged at savagely. Then dead silence. It was as if his pursuer had momentarily lost the scent. Schuyler gripped the handle of the screwdriver so hard that the pain in his hand was excruciating, but he barely noticed as he waited for the door to move.
12
CHAMBOUVARD FARM, TAZIAC
Georgette Chambouvard awoke with a headache after a bad night of dreams. She’d been tossing and turning for hours, and in the morning when her father came to wake her, she dimly remembered snapping at him and hearing the door slam, the house shake. Her dinner had not gone down well. She’d told her mother when she went up to bed that she thought it might be the mussels. And today was Friday. She knew she had to get up early to go to work.
She squinted dubiously at the day. Behind her on the wall, the great Bernard Hinault, with a smile big as his heart, rolled jubilantly across the finish line, both hands raised high above his head. It was the 1980 World Championship in Sallanches. “Le Blaireau,” known by cycling fans the world over as the badger for never letting go of his prey, had won again. The other poster showed the irresistible Jean-Paul Belmondo in bed with a lit cigarette in his mouth, a gold chain around his neck, and Jean Seberg in his arms.
