by Michael Bond
Monsieur Pamplemousse shrugged. Inwardly he was feeling far from cool; his mind was in turmoil, wondering what would happen next. ‘It is all to do with money. In Montpellier the winning team shares a cash prize of over seven thousand euros.’
‘We live in strange times,’ said Mr Pickering dryly. ‘In England that would just about buy Beckham a new suit. Anyway, we must have a quiet game together when all this is over. As far as this afternoon’s episode is concerned, I’m sure you would do the same for me should the need ever arise.’
And probably die in the attempt, thought Monsieur Pamplemousse, under no illusions as to his prowess.
‘When …’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I had better get some practice in.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘I doubt if I could give a repeat performance in a million years.’
‘Don’t tell me it was luck …’
‘Not entirely,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘It is what is euphemistically known as “rising to the occasion”. At such times it needs more than luck. You might say a professional golfer is lucky when he drives off and gets a hole in one, but since that is precisely what he is aiming to do, it would hardly be fair.
‘I think it has more to do with the coming together of all manner of forces in a moment of intense concentration.’
They both fell silent as the madame arrived with their order. Having wiped the table-top clean and arranged coasters and glasses to her liking, she placed a bowl of water on the floor.
‘Comme d’habitude,’ she said. Pommes Frites lapped at it gratefully before settling down to think matters over. He was used to things like exploding fire-crackers – they had been part and parcel of the training during his early days with the Paris Sûreté, but it was the first time he had ever encountered an exploding boule. It seemed to him that if whoever threw it had been aiming for his master, he wasn’t a very good shot. That he himself might have been the intended target hadn’t yet crossed his mind.
‘I’m afraid it may have put him off picking up boules for a while,’ said Mr Pickering, intercepting the thought-waves emanating from under the table. He glanced up as Monsieur Pamplemousse took a sip from his glass. ‘Good?’
‘It is always good here,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘The Crème de Cassis de Dijon is from Edmond Briottet and is high in alcohol. Also, it is made with just the right ratio of chilled Beaujolais. Madame knows how I like it, but today it is probably the best Cardinal I have ever tasted. Why? Because it might well have been my last.’
He watched as Mr Pickering slowly and carefully added some cold water to his glass.
‘You will find the pastis is of the same high quality. It is from Henri Bardouin, and is full of complex flavours and the smell of wild herbs from the Lure Mountain. One glass is usually more than sufficient.’
‘That is good,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘because I also feel in need of something strong. As Shakespeare would have it, “methinks there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”.’
He concentrated his gaze on the liquid in the bottom of his glass as it clouded over, its milky whiteness momentarily assuming the classic wraith-like figure. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t live in the days when absinthe was all the rage. At times like this I might easily have become addicted to the hallucinogenic qualities of wormwood; the whole ritual of it, in fact. The slow adding of the water to the sugar lump resting in its metal bridge.
‘What was it Oscar Wilde said? “The first glass enabled him to see things as he wished they were; wonderful, curious things”, and the second made him see things as they are not.’
‘If I remember rightly,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘didn’t he also say of the third glass, “It makes you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world”? It drove him mad in the end, along with Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others before it was outlawed.’
‘You are right,’ sighed Mr Pickering. ‘I’ve probably had a lucky escape. I was simply trying to get a feel of what is going on. It seems to me the world is not as happy a place as it ought to be. It is in a constant state of flux. People are no longer happy with their lot.
‘What would you say is the average Frenchman’s pipe dream?’
‘In the Auvergne,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘where I was born, they used to dream of moving to Paris and opening a bar or a small restaurant. But that doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Nowadays it is the other way round.’
‘In England,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘for many people the dream used to be a thatched cottage in the country with roses round the door and two point four children, but I doubt if that is so any more. There have been too many disappointments over the years.
‘These days they are more likely to end up in the Loire Valley, restoring some old barn, having first made sure the nearest village shop stocks Oxo cubes, Tetley teabags and Bird’s custard. English people like the idea of France, but in trying to make it more like home they end up destroying the very things they came away to find.’
‘The last time I saw you,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘I thought you were heading back to England.’
‘The last time you saw me,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘I thought so too. Before I reached Calais I had a change of mind. Or rather, my mind was changed for me.
‘Word reached me that things were beginning to move. I gather there has been a major development. A demand for a large sum of money has been made; the equivalent of some ten million English pounds. Currently the French government is awaiting instructions.’
‘Do they know where it came from?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Or, more importantly, from whom?’ He wondered if the AZF were up to their tricks again. It bore the same hallmarks; first the threat, then the demand, followed by a series of bizarre instructions, such as having the money placed on top of a tall building so that it could be collected by a helicopter.
‘I was hoping you would tell me,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘Strictly speaking, since the threat is aimed directly at France, I only have a watching brief on behalf of my own government, but I gather you are involved in some kind of emergency “think tank”.’
‘Not so much a “tank”,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘more a small bowl.’
It would have sounded rather lame to say that, apart from Monsieur Leclercq, the only other person he had met was Mrs Beardmore, but it was early days and events had moved so quickly it was hardly surprising. He guessed the Director must be in touch with others.
‘Mostly we are concerned with the “how” rather than “who” or “why”.’
‘It may prove hard to separate them,’ reflected Mr Pickering. ‘It could be a chicken-and-egg situation. Forgive the analogy with food, but if you want to find out what makes a particular egg taste the way it does, the first thing you do is find out what the chicken has been eating.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a noncommittal shrug. It was all too easy to become paranoid about the whole thing. The mere mention of the word ‘egg’ immediately set his mind wondering whether or not they could be a possible target for a terrorist attack.
And yet … and yet … He still couldn’t rid himself of Mrs Beardmore’s notion that it might coincide with some kind of seasonal event … something that was a cause for celebration. A national holiday, perhaps … or the arrival from the Landes of the first white asparagus in May.
He launched yet another balloon in the air.
‘If it were aspèrge,’ he said, ‘then ideally it needs to be eaten the day it is picked, so there is always a rush for it. Being grown so far away creates a problem. Sometimes it can be over a day old …
‘Alors!’ He threw up his hands. ‘But it could be injected with something en route rather than at source …’
Mr Pickering gave sigh. ‘Alors, indeed! What it is to have such problems. I envy you your vast resources. If you wanted to inject asparagus at source in the UK, you would stand a better chance doing it seven thousand miles away in
Peru, which is where most of it comes from.
‘For the vast majority of English people, “fresh” means it was fresh when it was picked on the other side of the world. We used to be a nation of small shopkeepers and farmers, but sadly that is no longer the case. We have slowly found ourselves at the mercy of a few giant supermarkets that call the tune.
‘France has them too, but at the same time you are very protective of your way of life. You still manage to retain your small shops and, being largely self-supporting agriculturally, you are rich in possibilities. It could be so many things.’
Mindful of the Director’s warnings, and without naming names, Monsieur Pamplemousse enlarged on his meeting with Mrs Beardmore. Stripped of all its undercurrents, which in the light of day he had to admit might sound like something out of a cheap novelette, it didn’t add up to much.
‘It was rather one-sided,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling she had been hoping to get more out of me than I was able to supply.’
‘I am not in the habit of surfing the web,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘but I take it this cookery guru is American?’
‘Very,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘CIA. Specially flown over for the occasion.’
‘Then frankly, I am not surprised. She is probably coming up for air. US security is currently in danger of sinking under the weight of information flooding in from all over the world.
‘Some of it is true, much of it is false. The problem lies in sorting out the wheat from the chaff. At the moment they have a monumental storage problem.
‘Prior to 9/11, the CIA relied on an Information Retrieval system that could only translate text written in the Roman alphabet. With over six thousand languages in the world, that’s only skimming the surface. Until they have the new multi-lingual National Virtual Translation Centre in Washington up and running it’s likely to remain that way. When everything is in place there will be a few early retirements on both sides of the Atlantic.
‘Even then, the machine has yet to be built that can understand and evaluate the subtle nuances in the way people write. Many words defy translation. It isn’t just a matter of literal translation, it needs careful analysis too; interpreters to interpret the interpreters. And as if all that isn’t enough, there are a dozen or more different branches of security after the same information for different reasons. Sharing that information doesn’t always happen as it should.’
Mr Pickering paused for a moment to allow the size of the problem to sink in. ‘Did your contact have any idea where the warning originated?’
‘We didn’t get around to discussing that,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘It is all a question of communication,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘Most of the time there is too little, but there are occasions when you can have too much. It is a matter of striking the right balance.
‘Apart from the traffic provided by their own agents using normal methods of coded communication, the CIA receives information by the truckload from outside sources, in every language under the sun and in every shape or form you can possibly imagine – from grubby scraps of paper bearing a cryptic warning in Arabic passed on in some remote Afghanistan bazaar, to waterlogged notebooks recovered from sunken boats that defy even the most sophisticated character recognition software.
‘Not that we’re entirely immune on our side of the Atlantic,’ he continued. ‘It was largely one such scrap of information that led me to attend Gaston’s funeral.’
‘I had wondered,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘I am so sorry,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘If I had known about your own involvement in the current problem I would have come clean at the time, particularly as it was through you – something you had said to Gaston some time or another – that made him get in touch with me in the first place.
‘A few weeks before he died he contacted me saying he needed some information to do with the British end of a trail he was following up. I wasn’t able to help, as it happened. But the encounter stayed in my mind.’
‘On the subject of unexpected sources …’ began Monsieur Pamplemousse. It was an abrupt change of subject, but it had been brought about by something Mr Pickering had said earlier. His mention of Bird’s custard reminded him of Elsie. He had no idea what she did to it, but whatever it was, when used as an accompaniment to her Spotted Dick, it raised the dish to new heights.
‘Someone called Ron has been talking to the French government. It may have nothing to do with what Gaston was after, but on the other hand …’
‘Say that again,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘The name rings a bell.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse took the opportunity to bring him up to date on his lunchtime meeting.
‘Interesting.’ Mr Pickering added more water to his glass. ‘Do I detect a common thread; the coming together of a number of disparate strands? You think this Ron is a reliable source?’
‘For what it is worth,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘my government clearly thinks so, and I must say that over the years I have come to the conclusion there are few better. He enjoys certain advantages denied to the rest of us. And I would say woe betide anyone who tried to lead him up the garden path.’
‘But he didn’t have any ideas on what form the attack would take?’
‘If he did, Elsie wasn’t free to talk about them.’
‘In that case we shall probably never know,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘With great respect, your Intelligence people are past masters in the art of wheeling and dealing.
‘Something is afoot. When I tried to sound them out they shut up like a clam. They were very nice about it, of course. Nice, but remarkably unforthcoming. One of them even went so far as to paraphrase a weather forecast I had read that very morning in Le Parisien: “Monsieur Celsius, having been lying dormant for a while, is showing signs of restiveness. Don’t worry if some large cumulus clouds pass over your head. They will be disarmed and are simply in transit prior to being vaporised.”
‘Snooty bugger. I was left not knowing whether to carry an umbrella when I went out, or go shopping for a bullet-proof vest.’
‘He was probably a product of one of the elite Grandes Écoles,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Humility is not one of their required subjects.
‘The American did come up with one suggestion,’ he added, feeling he ought to redress the balance of information in some way. ‘She wondered about the possibility of whoever is behind the current threat injecting truffles with poison. She pointed out that doing that would concentrate any attack on what she called “the movers and shakers” of our society.’
‘Even more interesting,’ said Mr Pickering thoughtfully. ‘That doesn’t sound like Al-Qaeda thinking. On the whole they tend to go for spectacular targets; almost at random you might say, yet clearly thought out, which is both good and bad. It is hard to predict where they will strike next; harder still to combat fanatics who are prepared to commit suicide in support of their cause.
‘Poisoned truffles? It might well work in France, where they are greatly prized. Lots of countries wouldn’t recognise a truffle if they saw one, and if they did they would probably leave it on the side of their plate.’
‘If it were the case,’ broke in Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘we haven’t all that long to go. It is currently exercising the mind of my Director to the exclusion of all else. Mostly, I fear, for selfish reasons.’
‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ mused Mr Pickering. ‘They are hardly plentiful at the best of times, and this year, after all the heat, they will be practically worth their weight in gold. That being the case, they will be even more closely guarded than usual by those who make a living sniffing them out. Secrecy is the name of the game. The sheer ergonomics of injecting as many as possible of them with poison at the same time is hard to picture, so the fall-out might not be as great as one would think.
‘A banquet for a visiting head of state, perhaps? The American President, for example. That would have undreamed of repercussions all over the world.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse fell silent. Such a catastrophic event didn’t bear thinking about.
‘You have a faraway look in your eyes, Aristide.’
‘By a strange coincidence, where we are now is only a stone’s throw from the rue Surcouf where Doucette and I were eating out on the night of the storm.’
‘You think things are going the full circle?’
‘I have a feeling they are heading that way,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘They have to end somewhere. It’s a kind of closing in.’
‘Strange the attack on Pommes Frites should happen so near your office,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘It’s almost as though someone is second-guessing your movements. There’s no possibility of a leak anywhere?’ Monsieur Pamplemousse shook his head.
‘Monsieur Leclercq’s secretary is the only other person in the know, and I would stake my life on her discretion.’
Mr Pickering slowly drained his glass while he considered the matter.
‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I passed a building site – a shop which had been gutted and was in the process of being transformed by two workmen into an establishment selling mobile phones, or so the notice outside proclaimed.
‘They had constructed an arrangement of paint tins and planks to form a table, which they had then covered with a spotlessly clean white cloth. On top of that they had laid two place settings; china plates and the appropriate cutlery and glasses for the wine. They were about to partake of what to me seemed like a passing good selection of various meats and bowls of salad ingredients. The wine was a Brouilly from Duboeuf. I wish now I’d had a camera with me.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse.
‘Because,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘I don’t think it would have happened anywhere else in the world. It was as French in its way as Cartier-Bresson’s picture of the family having a picnic on the banks of the Seine, or the one he took of people strolling in the grounds at Glyndebourne, which had England written all over it.’
‘C’est normal,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘He was a past master at that kind of thing. The exact moment that says it all. Besides, food is an important part of French life.’
