by Michael Bond
‘You know something,’ Harvey Wentworth joined them. ‘The last time I was in Paris doing an article for Gourmet magazine I took the boat across to that island in the Bois de Boulogne – the one with the restaurant. There’s a notice by the ferry saying dogs are forbidden unless they are going there to eat! Can you imagine that happening back in the States?’
‘A few years ago,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Someone opened a restaurant in Nice for dogs only.’
‘No kidding? What happened if one of them brought an owner in?’
‘He got chained to the table like the rest of them,’ said Spencer Troon.
Everyone laughed.
‘Let’s drink to that.’ Harvey took a ladle from a silver bowl on the sideboard and filled a glass with a sepia-coloured liquid. ‘Punch à l’ Alexandre Dumas. One of his own inventions. Perfected over years of party giving.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse took the glass and held it to his nose. He hazarded a quick guess. ‘Lemon tea? Lemon tea with something much more potent added.’
‘Right in one. If you want a repeat order when you get back home – put some sugar into a large bowl and mix in some rum. Light the blue touch paper and stir until it reduces to a third. Add hot Souchong tea and some lemon juice, then top up with mystery ingredient “X” – white Batavian arrack.’
‘I wouldn’t bother writing it down,’ said Paul Robard, ‘the recipe’ll be in Harvey’s next book.’
‘So?’ Harvey looked unabashed. ‘Something new comes your way – you use it. That’s what it’s all about, right? Old “motormouth” Norm himself would have been on to it like a shot. He’s probably making notes even now.’
‘In all that heat?’ Paul Robard gave a snort.
Harman Lock drained his glass. ‘Let us not speak ill of the dear departed.’
The ice broken, everyone suddenly began talking at once, and finding some of the accents difficult to follow Monsieur Pamplemousse took the opportunity to cast his eye over the wine on a sideboard to his right. With the exception of some white burgundy and a bottle or two of Loire poking out from a pair of large ice-buckets, it was all from Bordeaux. He caught sight of a Mouton-Rothschild and a Château Léoville. In the centre of the sideboard, in a position of honour, stood a decanting machine with a bottle already in place. The original label had long since disappeared, but he couldn’t resist looking at a hand-written tag dangling from the neck.
Elliott came up behind him. ‘You approve?’
‘Lafite 1884? How could I not?’
‘I acquired it for the occasion at a wine auction in California. It is our one big extravagance for the evening. I tell myself Dumas would have approved. He was an extremely generous host.’
He was also, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse, a teetotaller. Clearly, Elliott wasn’t living up to his reputation of being meticulous on research. He let it pass, deciding instead to watch out for other mistakes. Elliott invited a challenge.
‘Where did you learn about this particular event?’
Elliott shrugged. ‘I don’t even remember. Someone must have told me. As I’m sure you know only too well, research often throws up all kinds of strange facts.’
‘I congratulate you on the Lafite. It is a great coup.’
‘I read somewhere that it was the favourite drink of Queen Victoria. The cellar book at Windsor Castle lists the 1862 vintage as being the house wine.’
‘She has gone up in my estimation,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I had always pictured her as being a little formidable.’
‘It only goes to show. Things are seldom what they seem.’ Elliott ran his eyes over the other bottles, making a last-minute check that all was well.
‘Ideally, it would have been nice if all the wines could have been of the period, but there is a limit. However, I suspect namewise they would have been much as you see here. It was the beginning of a golden age for Bordeaux. The 1855 classification had just taken place and the vines had yet to be stricken by phyloxera. Mouton-Rothschild had begun its long fight to be recognised as a first growth – it was fetching the same prices, and Léoville already belonged to an Irish family named Barton.’
‘You must have done a lot of research.’
‘It’s fun. And you learn a lot on the way.’
‘It has been said that Les Trois Mousquetaires could not have been written without all the research carried out by Auguste Maquet.’
Elliott Garner looked at him with interest. ‘You’re a scholar of Dumas?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse shook his head. ‘Only from around forty-eight hours ago. As as child I was brought up on The Count of Monte Cristo, but I have a lot of catching up to do.’
The reply was casual enough, but somehow he sensed a momentary feeling of relief in the other. It would have been hard to put into words, and in any case further conversation was cut short by the sound of a dinner gong from the other end of the room.
He looked at his watch. It was exactly eight o’clock.
As they made their way towards the table Elliott motioned the actor playing Dumas to sit at the head. ‘I feel that is where you should be. I have put your mistress, Madame de Sauvignon, on your right. Paul, you are next to her, then Harman and Auguste Maquet.’
‘I guess we’re going to have to talk to each other, Paul,’ said Harman.
‘You win some, you lose some.’ Paul Robard looked as though he would be perfectly happy if he spent the evening miming to Madame de Sauvignon. Harman was in for a thin time.
‘I shall be at the other end of the table,’ continued Elliott. ‘On my right, Monsieur Courbet. Then Harvey, Madame Joyeux, Monsieur d’Artagnan, and Spencer.’
Almost imperceptibly a bevy of waiters moved into position. Chairs were pulled back, then rearranged as the guests seated themselves.
As the waiters disappeared to begin preparations for serving the first course, the sommelier and his assistant began pouring the wine. Monsieur Pamplemousse had to admire Elliott’s attention to detail. All the same, he couldn’t resist a dig as the waiters reappeared.
‘I see the service is à la Russe. Does that mean you won your battle this morning?’
Elliott looked at him in surprise. ‘Of course.’
‘Beware of Elliott,’ said Harman. ‘Elliott treats any form of disagreement as a confrontation and he has to come out top. Right, Elliott?’
Elliott didn’t even bother to reply.
‘Potage à la Crevette, Monsieur.’ One of the waiters moved in alongside Monsieur Pamplemousse and served him from a tureen.
‘Another of Dumas’ own inventions,’ said Elliott, for the benefit of the assembly. ‘He adored shellfish – shrimps especially.
‘He made it with tomatoes, onions, white wine and the bouillon from a pot au feu. The tomatoes and onions are cooked in one pan, the shrimps with white wine in another. He always added a pinch of sugar to bring out the flavour of the tomato. I’m sure when you taste it you will agree the amalgamation is superb.’
While Elliott was talking, Monsieur Pamplemousse sipped the wine. It was a Pouilly Fumé: deliciously flinty. Its bouquet mingled perfectly with that of the soup.
He settled back and tried to make himself comfortable. Dressed in all his finery, it wasn’t easy. Already there was a large smear of butter on his right sleeve. He looked around for some bread. D’Artagnan would probably have speared some from across the table with his sword. Monsieur Pamplemousse resisted the temptation.
The soup brought back memories of his childhood: the bouillon from Sunday’s pot au feu which appeared as a base for other dishes all through the week. If the rest of the meal lived up to its early promise, then as a restaurateur Elliott would undoubtedly have been in line for a Stock Pot or two in Le Guide.
‘Boy, this is something,’ Harvey Wentworth smacked his lips.
‘Dumas was lucky to have lived by the sea during an age of abundance,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Food was there for the taking and it was going to last for ever.’
‘The field which ploughs itself,’ said Elliott. ‘And it’s cheap. Compare an acre of the Atlantic with an acre anywhere in the States. But for years people ignored the fact that it still has to be sown.’
‘It’s the same all over the world,’ agreed Harman. ‘When I was a kid in California you couldn’t walk on the beach without treading on clams. Now they fine you if you’re caught picking them up under a certain size.’
‘You know something?’ said Harvey. ‘Take crabs, right? You get on an airline and what do they serve you? Crab meat, right? Or lobster. You know where most of it comes from? The Orient. They call it “blended sea-food product” which is supposed to make it OK, right? But what you’re really eating is cod, plus starch, chemical seasoning and boiled down crab shells to give it the flavour. It’s got to be big business, but the sad thing is people will grow up thinking it’s the real thing.’
The Lamproie à la Bordelaise came and went while everyone started talking at once about the difficulties of living in such a profligate, uncaring world. Monsieur Pamplemousse decided it was probably a good thing. Prepared in the traditional way, the story of the lamprey’s journey from the Gironde to the plate was not for the gastronomically faint-hearted, even if in many people’s eyes the end justified the means.
He concentrated instead on the second wine; a Grand Cru Chablis from the Domaine de la Maladière. Palish yellow in colour, with just a hint of green, it was steely dry, and richly perfumed without being cloying. From choice, he would have preferred a red; it would have gone better with the dark sauce made from the lamprey’s own blood, but he wasn’t grumbling.
The asparagus tips which followed were served with scrambled eggs to which a chicken bouillon had been added. It was a very smooth combination. Monsieur Pamplemousse reached instinctively for the notepad he normally kept concealed in his right trouser leg. As he did so he encountered a wet nose.
The sigh of contentment which emerged from beneath the table as he took the hint and delivered a sizable portion on a piece of bread didn’t pass unnoticed. It was rewarded with a second helping.
Elliott called across. ‘Don’t tell me Monsieur d’Artagnan is flagging already. You disappoint me.’
‘On the contrary. Pommes Frites is very fond of asperge. I was interested in his views.’
‘You want my views?’ Harman Lock broke off from a conversation he’d been having with Paul Robard. ‘I reckon it’s a good thing Norm wasn’t here tonight. If drinking spa water did for him he would have died of a heart attack twice over by now.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse shrugged. ‘Perhaps. They thought the Emperor Claudius died of indigestion through eating too many mushrooms until they found that whoever tickled his throat to make him vomit had used a poisoned feather.’
Harvey Wentworth leaned forward and looked along the table. ‘What are you trying to say?’ he demanded. ‘That Norm didn’t have heart failure?’
‘No. Only that until the result of the post mortem no one knows why it stopped beating. It could have been for a variety of reasons.’
‘It’s the one certain thing that happens when we die,’ agreed Paul.
‘He didn’t need the insurance money, that’s for sure,’ broke in Spencer Troon. ‘I heard he got an advance of over a quarter of a million bucks for his next three books. A quarter of a million bucks without a word being written, would you believe?’
‘I know one person who’ll be in deep mourning at the funeral,’ said Harman. ‘His agent. I doubt if he’s gotten a single word on paper.’
‘He was probably waiting to see what we did next before he got started,’ said Paul.
‘I don’t know so much,’ said Harvey. ‘At least he came up with something original before he died. Can you imagine having “Bring me a bottle of Bâtard Montrachet and some fish” written on your tombstone?’
Monsieur Pamplemousse caught Mrs Van Dorman’s eye. She gave a slight shrug as much as to say ‘What did I tell you?’
‘Hey, fellers …’ It was Harman Lock. ‘Can’t we talk about something else tonight?’
Elliott rapped his knife against a glass, calling the table to order.
‘Harman’s right. It’s time for the ortolans. In a moment I will ask you to cover your heads in the traditional manner. Special napkins will be provided. But before that …’ he glanced along the table towards Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘perhaps our honoured guest would like to tell you something about them. In his role of d’Artagnan they can be said to inhabit his part of the country, and I understand that in real life he is something of an expert.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t sure whether it was an attempt to put him down, or whether he was being paid a compliment. He decided to give Elliott the benefit of the doubt.
‘I have to admit I have never eaten them – the nearest I have experienced is larks, but they are really at their best in winter. In the Auvergne, when I was a boy, I used to see ortolans fly over twice a year – in May and October. Once en route to Burgundy where they built their nests in the vineyards, and again on their way back south after the breeding season.’
He glanced towards Elliott. ‘I must congratulate you on your detective work. In Alexandre Dumas’ time they were a symbol of richness. Nowadays, like the fish we were talking about earlier, they have become something of a rarity. Tracking them down cannot have been easy.’
In view of the conversation round the table he was sorely tempted to point to a moral about shared guilt, but he decided that would be out of place.
As his dish was placed before him he was pleased to see that the birds had been cooked in the simplest way possible; wrapped in vine leaves and roasted in a pan rather than on a spit. There were three to a plate, resting on slices of toast. Each bird had a quarter of lemon beside it.
The sommelier offered up two bottles of wine. Monsieur Pamplemousse chose the Mouton in preference to the Léoville, then leaned back while a waiter tied a fresh napkin over his head. It was like the preparation for a sacred rite, which indeed it was in some people’s eyes.
He felt a pressure against his left leg. Patently it didn’t emanate from Pommes Frites. Pommes Frites wasn’t given to sending messages in that way; the placing of a paw on the foot or knee perhaps, but not lingeringly on the calf. He glanced along at Mrs Van Dorman, but she had already disappeared beneath her napkin. It was hard to say whether she had been trying to attract his attention about something or was looking for support. Perhaps she didn’t like the sight of small birds peering up at her. A sudden movement by Madame de Sauvignon on the other side of the table suggested that others were taking advantage of the situation.
The toast had been prepared by first cooking it in goose fat and afterwards spreading it with Roquefort cheese. It would test Alexandre Dumas’ theory about raisins to the limit.
As he placed both hands beneath the canopy his napkin had formed over the ortolans and began dissecting the birds, Monsieur Pamplemousse found himself wondering about the evening. Mrs Van Dorman was wrong about one thing. It wasn’t so much that her party bickered amongst themselves, rather that they all shared a common dislike of the late, but obviously not greatly lamented, Norm Ellis.
His first reaction on hearing of Ellis’s death had been that he must have committed suicide. But if that were the case, it was a slightly bizarre way of going about it. On the surface he had everything to live for, but success didn’t necessarily bring happiness, and as Elliott had so rightly said, things weren’t always what they seemed. All the same, in his experience potential suicides very rarely used cyanide; in fact in all his time in the force, he couldn’t remember having come across such a case.
Peeling off a piece of meat, he reached under the table, but Pommes Frites was no longer there.
Pommes Frites, in fact, had gone on a voyage of exploration. There were certain matters to attend to; things he wanted to get straight in his mind before he was very much older. Pommes Frites had an orderly, almost computer-like mind. It relied on
the breaking down of problems into a series of short questions to which the answer was either yes or no. ‘Perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ were not words which formed part of his vocabulary, and there were currently too many of both for his liking.
Unaware of the reason for Pommes Frites’ absence, Monsieur Pamplemousse consumed the offering himself, then took the opportunity to feel for his glass. Anyway, why choose Vichy of all places? Unless, of course, Ellis was going to extreme lengths to make it appear as though he had died from natural causes. Insurance perhaps? It hardly seemed likely. People committing suicide were seldom that thoughtful of the effect it would have on others, and he hardly seemed in great need.
The wine was rich and opulent, with an aroma of ripe plums and spicy oak. It was Mouton at its best.
And if Ellis hadn’t committed suicide, what then? That thought and the ones which followed on took on a slightly eerie aspect in the circumstances. Sitting with his head in a shroud made him feel vulnerable, as he always did in a shower during the moment when his eyes were closed to protect them from the soap. Perhaps Mrs Van Dorman had been feeling it too and that was why she had reached out. He decided a call to the Poison Control Centre in Paris in the morning would not come amiss; although quite what he would ask them was another matter.
Quickly polishing off the remains of the dish, Monsieur Pamplemousse uncovered his face and reached for a finger bowl. He was the first to finish. The neat pile of tiny bones on his plate looked as though they had been picked clean by a hungry buzzard and then left to whiten in the desert sun.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught an approving look from the waiter as he removed the napkin from around his neck.
