The Prisoner of the Riviera

by Janice Law

  THE PRISONER

  OF THE RIVIERA

  A Francis Bacon Mystery

  JANICE LAW

  To Jamie and Shanna

  Francis Bacon was a major twentieth-century British painter. He really did live with his old nanny and his ultra-respectable lover, and he traveled to France with them both after the Second World War.

  But his adventures in this novel are imaginary, and the various members of the French Resistance and the Milice, the gangsters, cops, and denizens of the Riviera café society are all pure fiction.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter One

  The war was over; Herr Hitler was dead; Hirohito was mortal. We had flags and bunting, and I got marvelously drunk and committed a public indecency in Hyde Park—my little contribution to Britannia’s celebration. Really, the least I could do, and pretty much the most, too, because for all our relief, peace left a lot to be desired. We’d thought that once the blackouts and raids stopped, and the V2 rockets and the casualty reports disappeared, we’d go back to normal life, prewar normal, that is. Turned out postwar normal was what we’d gotten, with dust and disruption, rebuilding and demolition, even slower transport and the rationing of everything under the sun.

  It always seemed to be wet, too, and cloudy when it wasn’t. Rain bucketing down, streets awash, everything gray if not black. Coal smoke in the air and the familiar tang of powdered brick and stone, topped up with attar of wood ash. Amazing how long smells linger; light fades, solids rot or erode, but the smell of destruction is a continuing reminder of disasters large and small, even when the empty lots, the pits, and the piled rubble of shattered landmarks—and the bones of those beneath—are out of sight.

  Maybe that’s why I’d been depressed, though I’d sold a couple of paintings and had money in my pocket. When I opened the door of the Europa, my haven, my drinking club, my favorite place in all London, I felt disgusted. My friends were there and I didn’t want to meet them. Fellow painters were at the bar, and I was bored before they opened their mouths.

  You might blame the décor, and I admit that the Europa is far from elegance or even cleanliness. But shabby, I like. Seedy bars, louche clientele, artists off their game, and boys on the game—that’s my kind of place. Normally.

  But that day, I felt bored and irritable. Even when Maribelle leaned over the counter and called, “So where’s my painting, then, cunty?” I could hardly manage a smile.

  “Oh, she’s out of sorts, is she?” At the Europa, as you might have guessed, I’m always in the feminine mode.

  “I need Champagne, Maribelle.”

  “Don’t we all! Frenchies are keeping anything worth drinking to themselves at the moment.”

  I sat down at the bar and pulled a small paper parcel from under my leather coat.

  “For me?”

  “With infinite gratitude,” I said. That was not, by the way, a rhetorical flourish or a figure of speech. Maribelle had literally saved this bacon at least once during the war and lent metaphorical assistance on many bad nights.

  “Let’s see the masterwork.” This from a red-faced, ginger-haired Scot, another painter, another habitué of the Europa. We’re both obsessed with Picasso; we like to chew over the problems of painting postcubism and, in his case, of being a successor to the famous Glasgow Boys.

  A rustle of paper. “Well,” said Maribelle, and she favored me with a specimen of her inventive profanity. She’s a linguistic genius with a tongue that can make the language blush.

  “Aye,” said the painter. “It’s an original for sure. But have you no made her nose a little too short?”

  Laughter at this, for the nose takes off from the vicinity of one distorted cheekbone and heads for the jawline. But Maribelle smiled; she has a taste for serious painting. By which I mean painting that does more than coat a canvas with pretty colors and surface details. “I always said you’d immortalize me. Do me in my retirement, it will.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s me to the life.” She held it up. I confess that I was pleased with it, even seeing it out in the world, which is always a big test of a painting, especially one seen in the insalubrious light and worse air of the Europa. A little rectangle of darkest blue-purple with big fat, fleshy sweeps of white, pink, green, and brown paint laid across it to make a map of her features, the flesh dissolved by energy and taking flight of her bones. “You’re on the house, today,” she said, and she poured me a glass of bubbly. Woefully adulterated, of course, but the bubbles were reminiscent.

  I lifted the glass, toasted Maribelle, took a sip, and said, “I need to go to France. I hear that they have bread without sawdust, unrationed eggs, real cakes, recognizable meat. I’m sick of ration cards and I want to get reacquainted with cuisine.”

  “What’s stopping you?” she asked, for she knew about my recent sale.

  “Nan,” I said, but even as I spoke I had an irresistible image of the boat train and of Nan sitting beside me with a hamper for lunch. Arnold would have to come, too, because deep in the Blitz he’d promised me Monte Carlo postwar. Now the war was over and we’d done celebrating and were sick of austerity. With his money and what I’d made off the paintings, I could close the studio, pack away the pictures, and make a run for sun, food, and gambling. “You are an ever-present source of inspiration, Maribelle,” I said and headed for the door.

  A week later it was settled that we were to be off: a traveling party of yours truly, painter and bon vivant; Nan, my old nanny, mostly blind now but game for anything that will please me without “sending us to the poor house,” as she puts it; and Arnold, friend and lover, an older businessman and alderman, leaving his family to squire me and Nan around la belle France. That’s how it is with Arnold. He’s ultrarespectable but with a taste for escape and a yen for his shadow side, which is where I come in. He was eager for the trip right away. “A solemn promise,” he admitted, referring to Monte Carlo.

  “That should perhaps be an unsolemn promise.”

  “Dear boy, you are right. We cannot be solemn in France.” He asked if my passport was up to date and set about acquiring the tickets.

  Nan, on the other hand, was initially reluctant. “Full of foreigners,” she said, which was, from one point of view, indubitable.

  “And the loos will be filthy,” she added.

  “The loos will be filthy, I grant you that. But the food, Nan, the food will be divine.”

  “You’d think folk who can manage a soufflé could manage to clean WCs.”

  “And you’d think people with clean WCs would have fine soufflés.”

  Nan made a face. She taught me to be logical but doesn’t always like it when I am.

  “If you’re set against it, you could maybe stay with Bella,” I said. Bella is her great friend, a fellow nanny whom she always describes as “perfect.” That may be so, but although they have tea together at least once a week, her last stay with Bella was not a success. To be honest, Nan, who was the absolute ideal for me, is nonetheless very far from being the con
ventional item. Both she and Bella can ignore that over tea but not in mutual residence.

  “Well,” she said as if it was a huge concession, which it probably was, “I do want you to have a good time. We’ll make the best of it, dear boy.”

  “Of course, we will.” And I gave her a hug.

  So you can see we were in the right frame of mind. Travel should be for pleasure. And for that I was ready, believe me, after the Blitz, when I was an ARP warden and Arnold was a fire watcher. You don’t want to know all we saw. Then, when the demolition and blast dust grew lethal and the asthma that had kept me out of khaki threatened to kill me forthwith, we had a dreadful exile in darkest East Anglia. Nothing but fens and fields and silence, with miles between the appalling pubs, with dogs and horses set to ambush my lungs at every turning. I hate the country and its echoes of my childhood. Give me pavement, give me traffic, give me pretty boys on the make, give me French cooking. The sooner the better.

  But first there was a delay, which, seemingly innocent at the time, was to change the whole complexion of our journey. Arnold’s aldermen duties intervened and then he had some business affairs to sort. We were kept waiting in suspense—something I hate. With or without Arnold, I amused myself with roulette and managed to run up a substantial tab at the gambling club. I was thinking that I’d be working off my markers with some hideous drudgery next, when something quite unexpected happened.

  I say unexpected, because we were still in the postwar phase, where we thought that life, which, looked at closely, has always been of the nasty and brutal sort, would now revert to something better. We must have imagined that the monstrosities of total war would have a cleansing effect. As if! You can see why I have a low opinion of human intelligence, my own included. But that was the mood of the time, and if nothing else, I’m an honest chronicler.

  So here’s the surprise that occurred as Arnold and I were leaving a very select gambling club in the early hours of the morning. Drizzle, of course, streets wet and reflecting the streetlights—how we’d missed them during the war—otherwise not a glimmer beyond the portico of the club. Another gambler left at the same time; I had an impression of height and thick wavy black hair and a sense of his posture, for he was hunched in a dark blue overcoat as if to hide from his losses. I knew the feeling. I love to gamble; I even find a certain exhilaration in losing, but that’s at the table, mesmerized by the wheel, deep in the arcane language of le rouge et le noir. When you push off back to ordinary life, your losses come to roost on your shoulders, and the world that was so bright and exciting an hour ago turns to dust. I was certain that’s the point the man in the blue overcoat had reached.

  He turned up his collar against the rain, and just as he stepped from the handsome marble stairs to the sidewalk, I saw a figure, a mere blur, emerge from the adjoining alley. I put my hand on Arnold’s arm, a purely automatic warning, then there was a sort of pop, once, twice, and the man in the blue overcoat staggered and lurched before falling backward. Arnold leaped after the assailant, who ran across the road and jumped into a waiting car.

  My old ARP training kicked in. The man was bleeding heavily from a chest wound. I knelt down beside him, ripped his shirt, and used part of it and my handkerchief to stanch the wound. “Get an ambulance!” I shouted. “Get some towels!”

  Arnold ran back up the steps into the club, calling for help. A waiter hurried with clean towels and a blanket, and we rigged the best bandage we could and wrapped the injured man up to stave off shock. His eyes were half closed and his face seemed drained of blood. He was certainly losing a lot. My hands and shirtfront were covered as well as my trousers, and still a wide red pool was spreading on the cement: shades of the Blitz and of blackout calamities. I am well acquainted with calamity, which, pictorially, is one of my favorite subjects.

  “Hang on,” I said. “Help is coming. Hang on.” That’s what we ARP wardens always told victims, as if life were a trapeze act that required a death grip on the bar.

  His eyes opened then, cold black orbs. His glance was malevolent—but perhaps he was just in pain. He seemed unable to speak, and I warned him not to try, though when the manager, fat, pale, awesomely self-important, came out, he bent over the wounded man—no kneeling in the mess for him—and demanded to know what he’d seen and who’d shot him and was there a car and so on until I told him to shut up. He didn’t like that, but there wasn’t much he could do because now came a Klaxon and ambulance men arrived in the usual whirlwind of questions and commands with a stretcher, bandages, and vital fluids.

  I was so bloody from my exertions that there was a moment of confusion when one of the ambulance men took my arm and asked me where I was hit. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. “Look after him. He’s hemorrhaging badly.”

  They gave me a blanket just the same, and Arnold got me back into the club WC where I dirtied half a dozen towels before I got all the blood washed off, my leather jacket wiped, myself dried. I put on the jacket again minus my ruined shirt, and Arnold draped a blanket over my shoulders as if I were a survivor of some liquid disaster. Which, in a sense, I was going to be.

  Naturally, there were questions and more delays in our holiday. A respectable citizen shot in front of a semirespectable club was an offense to good order and a little indication of how much the war years had changed London. The police took this personally, and they wanted to know what we’d seen—very little in truth—and alternately implored and impugned our memories. The nice coordination of the shots and the car implied a professional job, but the escape of two witnesses raised certain questions in their mind: Had we known the victim? Spoken to him in the club? How had we come to leave at precisely the same time? And so on. We weren’t able to give them much satisfaction, though they gave us a great deal of irritation, so much so that, when something curious happened, I did not toddle off to the nearest phone box and call in a report.

  That was two days before we were to leave. Boat train tickets resided in Arnold’s pocket; Nan had her valise packed; my clothes and a painting kit were in two big suitcases. I was in my studio, a splendid space with a crystal chandelier and wonderful light that had once belonged to Millais, yes, Sir John of hyperrealism and drowning Ophelia. Not to my taste, but he knew a thing or two about painting, and he’d left me a good atmosphere, conducive to work. No matter what I do the night before, I am up by six and into the studio by seven a.m. That particular day I was working on a study of a side of meat that I’d seen in the butcher shop. I like painting meat, the yellow-white fat, the wonderful shades of red from pink to purple, the textures of flesh, flayed and otherwise. That’s what I do well, though I was having the usual struggle with grounding the shape when I heard Nan at the door.

  “He’s painting at the moment,” she said. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  Oh, ho, I thought, because she had her nanny voice on, very high, refined, and carrying. It’s warned me of bill collectors and coppers and time-wasting associates, and I was set to slide through to my bedroom and out the window, when I heard his name. It was Monsieur Joubert, the proprietor of the gambling club.

  “It’s all right, Nan,” I called. Sooner or later I would have to pay my club debts, and maybe I could interest him in a painting, perhaps a portrait. Dodgy characters often have a taste for art.

  “Well, Francis,” he said, “so here’s how you spend your off-hours.” And laughed at his own joke. Detestable habit. He wandered around the studio, looking at my work quite uninvited, and stared at a row of small portraits and self-portraits propped up on a shelf. “Unusual, Francis. Unusual.” He turned his little porcine eyes on me and nodded.

  I disliked the man. At the same time, I could see his swept-back hair, his stubby nose, and flaccid cheeks on canvas. The club owner was a mysterious gent with a provenance like a forged picture. There was an ambiguous accent lurking in his background. He claimed to be French, but I suspected he was Italian or Swiss. He’d
showed up near the end of the war, opened the club with considerable fanfare, and attracted an eclectic clientele of toffs, thugs, and bohemians.

  “What can I do for you?” I needed to get on with the painting, because I saw now that, while my dark background was not going to work, a certain steely gray-pink was a distinct possibility.

  “It’s what I can do for you,” he said, dredging an oily charm from some nether region. “We are all so grateful for your efforts for poor Victor the other night.”

  “How is he doing?”

  “He’s dead.” He crossed himself. “But not your fault. No, no, your efforts aroused nothing but admiration. It wasn’t blood loss; he took pneumonia.”

  “It’s a murder case, then.” I wondered that nothing had been in the papers. But perhaps there had been. I would have to ask Nan, who remembers every scrap of crime news.

  “Of course. Tragic,” he said, and I feared for a moment that he would wipe a tear, but some remnant of taste restrained him. “Victor leaves a widow,” he said and sighed.

  “Orphans, too?”

  He gave me a sour look. “No, thank the Lord, just the widow. Poor woman.” He shook his head and took another turn about the studio. “She will be grateful as well,” he added after an examination of one of my screaming heads. “Very grateful, which has made me think of a way to thank you.”

  I waited.

  “You have run up a considerable tab at the club,” he said after a minute. “Well, young men naturally like to gamble. But, sad to say, you do not appear to have a large source of income. These surprising paintings—yes, truly surprising—are perhaps not reliable collateral. How sad, the life of the artist, no?”

  There was something in that.

  “Yet your kindness to Victor! Under fire, at the risk of your own life, surely this is worth something.”

  “One might think so.” If he had an offer, I wanted to hear it.

  “Victor left a letter for his wife. Yes, yes, thanks to you, he was able to dictate a last note. She will be so grateful to have such a remembrance, don’t you think?”