Murder on the Mediterranean

by Alexander Campion

  Florence cut him off. “There are places where you can have lunch and lean out the window as far as you can and still not see where the sea meets the bottom of the cliff. I always move my chair very carefully.”

  Serge jockeyed to regain the microphone. “We’ll arrive in the middle of the morning. We’re going to have a hard sail tonight, and so I’m going to tell you how I want to assign the crew—”

  “Voilà,” Alexandre said, arriving with a platter, leaning forward against the incline. Régis’s incessant flashes lit up the room like a nightclub.

  The main course was beautifully browned squid, bloated with a stuffing of crab, the squid’s chopped tentacles, onions, green peppers, red bell peppers, and a bit of garlic; seasoned with curry and hot mustard powder; and sprinkled with lime. It was accompanied by an elegant tian of thin slices of tomatoes and eggplant, topped with little pieces of fresh goat cheese, covered with the Midi’s ubiquitous herbes de Provence and a latticework of a truly excellent olive oil Alexandre had unearthed on his shopping foray. This all was served with an unctuous, round, honey-noted Ott rosé.

  There was another moment of silence as the first bites were tasted. From her seat Capucine could see Nathalie scowling at them from her position at the helm. Even though the sun had set nearly an hour before, the dusk was still rosy bright.

  Florence followed Capucine’s gaze.

  “Serge,” Florence said. “Whose head is Nathalie going to use?”

  “I, er, hadn’t—”

  “It’s going to take more than a bathroom to scrape the filth off that girl’s feet,” Angélique said. “Someone needs to put a pressure hose to her.”

  She glanced at Aude, hoping for an agreeing comment, but Aude just looked back, her porcelain face expressionless. Angélique smirked self-righteously, as if Aude had agreed with her vigorously. Capucine noted, not for the first time, that Aude’s blank face had a Rorschach quality of reflecting the mood and opinion of the person talking to her. It must be those all-knowing, preternaturally blue eyes.

  Jacques also stared at Aude, the top half of his face deadly serious, but the bottom twisted into a wry smirk. “I wouldn’t be too quick with that pressure hose. Nothing is more erotic than a big-breasted wench seasoned with the soil of the earth. Think Tom Jones.” He shrieked his donkey bray, ear piercingly loud in the confines of the salon.

  Obviously embarrassed by the turn the conversation had taken, Régis said, “Florence, tell us about your single-handed races. I just can’t imagine anyone sailing a boat as big as this all by herself.”

  Florence smiled modestly. “Actually, most of the boats I sailed were more than twice as long as this one, and since they were three-hulled trimarans, they were a whole lot wider. Handling the boat is the easy part. You just take everything very, very slowly, very carefully, one step at a time. You win races by being lucky about the weather. The first Route du Rhum I won, I arrived a full day before the others because I took a southerly route and had a nice following wind for three days, while everyone else was stuck in a dead calm.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “No. If you’re not terrified in the middle of a storm, you’re numb from lack of sleep. It’s like being on drugs. Of course, you lose it a little. I can understand why so many of these guys who do the single-handed circumnavigation of the globe wind up nuts.”

  Florence continued on with tales of loopy single-handed sailors. Capucine lost the thread. She wondered who had really been at the helm when they took their ducking.

  With a clatter, Régis cleared the dishes and put new plates on the table, along with a selection of cheeses from the Midi, a big wedge of pale Moulis, three different goat cheeses, and a large slab of Bleu des Causses, which looked like a thick-crusted Roquefort.

  “Be sure to try that,” Alexandre said to the group. “It’s Roquefort’s milder, more elegant cousin.”

  Florence edged out of her seat and stood up effortlessly, despite the steep list of the floor. “Serge, why don’t you have a peek at our position and make sure we don’t have a course change? Shout it up to me if you want a new heading. I’m going to spell Nathalie so she can eat.”

  “Yes, good thinking. I was just about to do that.” Serge stood up, limped his way to the navigation desk, and began poking at the electronic instruments and making pencil marks on the chart.

  “Florence, we’re dead on course. Steady as she goes,” he shouted.

  Nathalie’s bare feet thumped down the companionway steps. She swept the table with a rancorous look. She went to the galley area, where Régis was washing dishes. Two of the squid had been left in the foil-covered frying pan for her. She pulled off the foil and wrinkled her nose in distaste. The group at the table watched her out of the corner of their eyes.

  “Here’s how we should divide up the watches,” Serge said.

  Nathalie picked up one of the squid with her fingers, put it to her nose, sniffed it suspiciously. She made a childish moue of distaste. Alexandre frowned at her.

  “The boat will be on autopilot, so there’s nothing to do except keep your eyes open and call me if there’s a change in wind direction. Is that clear?”

  Nathalie took a deep, resigned breath and bit off a third of one of the squid. The stuffing oozed out, sticking to her upper and lower lips as she chewed. She swallowed with a loud gulp, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and stuffed in the rest of the squid.

  “I’ll take the first watch with Alexandre and Aude. Then at midnight Florence will come up with Capucine and Jacques. At four in the morning Nathalie will take over with Angélique and Régis. How that?”

  “Perfect,” Jacques said sotto voce to Capucine. “Angélique can get to work with her power hose.”

  Nathalie appeared to approve of the squid. She grabbed the second squid in her fist and took a large bite. A blob of stuffing fell on her dimpled chin. She chewed on, swallowed with a gulp, scraped the stuffing off her chin with two fingers, then put them in her mouth and sucked loudly.

  The people at the table made a great show of avoiding the spectacle. Capucine had not the slightest doubt that Nathalie was putting it on intentionally.

  “Pure Antonioni,” Jacques said sotto voce with his Cheshire cat smile. “Only he fully understood the eroticism of the belle fauve—the beautiful savage.” He shrieked his high-pitched laugh. Capucine looked at Aude to see how she would react. She had turned her head toward Jacques, and Capucine was sure she saw a faint smile, but when she looked again, she thought she must have imagined it. Aude’s lips had remained as immobile, as if they had been cut from white Tuscan marble.

  At one in the morning Capucine leaned back in the cockpit, her feet up on the now-folded table and her head resting on the back of a settee cushion, watching the canopy of stars gyrate lazily back and forth as the boat rolled. She thought of Ulysses, who had sailed these very waters in his adventures and misadventures. She thought of how this little sea, when you got right down to it, was the placenta of the Western world’s civilizations.

  Florence was at the helm, a few feet away, her hand languidly draped over one of the twin wheels, eyes glued to the horizon, throwing an occasional glance at the compass in front of her, which cast a faint, candle-like glow on her mannish features. She had switched the autopilot off. The feel of the boat had immediately softened, the boat itself becoming responsive to the give and take of the sea. On long cruises Capucine was always amazed how, even when you were eyes-shut-tight asleep in your bunk, you could always tell who was at the helm. And you always slept far better with an experienced hand on the wheel.

  The sky was solid with stars. There were so many, it seemed almost that the lighted dots occupied more area than the dark spaces. Harking back to her childhood summers on the beach in Brittany, she found the few constellations she could recognize. There was the Big Dipper, guiding her eyes to the North Star. She searched for her father’s favorite cluster of stars, the Pleiades, which he always liked to call “a little
pâté.” Where was it? There it was. Fainter than she remembered, but very much present and accounted for.

  Finding the Pleiades had always been her summer nighttime swan song. Her father would sit with her on the beach until they found it and congratulated themselves. Then—

  “You know, cousine, you should do the wet T-shirt thing more often. You have the perfect nichons for it. It’s a look that suits you. Your juge chum, not so much. If the best you can muster is a fried egg, you should stay dry.”

  “I thought you two were asleep,” Florence said from above.

  Capucine tilted her head back again and took in the heavens. She was rewarded with a small cascade of shooting stars.

  “It’s on nights like this that you can understand the appeal of single-handed sailing. It must be pure bliss to be able to plug yourself fully into the cosmos.”

  “Except that you don’t. You’re always worried about something. You’re going to have to hoist yourself up the mast in the morning to find out why the masthead block is making that funny squeak. The air smells like a small sea change that you weren’t expecting. You’re going to have to get a radio link and download the latest Met report, crappy as they are. You haven’t sat on the head in two days, and that’s bound to spell trouble. Stargazing is for pleasure cruises.”

  “So why do you do it?”

  “Because I was nuts as a kid. I’m over it. This is the first time I’ve been on a boat in years.”

  “But you were famous.”

  “Famous and poor. Now I’m president of a company, even if it’s a very small company, and I have a bank account with actual money in it. That’s a very nice thing to have, I’ve learned.”

  Capucine sat up straight. “And you really didn’t know that Inès was sitting on the lee rail, under the jib?”

  “No. I’m sorry if I scared you both. I was a million miles away, in my own world. I had just come up on deck to relieve Angélique, and I made the course adjustment reflexively. Totally without thinking. I really don’t know how it happened. I guess I’m just not used to sailing with other people.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Even the grace of the next morning’s flat, dark disk of the sea under the cerulean dome of cloudless sky did not come close to dissipating Serge’s high dudgeon. They were over three hours behind his schedule. The fact that no one except Serge cared in the slightest considerably exacerbated his despondency. He spent the morning diving down the companionway to his navigation desk, popping back up like a sweaty rabbit, shaking his head in despair. At one o’clock, in the middle of a lunch of pain bagnat—salade niçoise soaked into hollowed-out, garlic-scrubbed tranches of baguette—prepared by Alexandre and Régis, Serge dived back down his rabbit hole, only to reemerge wreathed in a victorious smile. Landfall off the port bow was apparently imminent. But nothing happened for twenty long minutes, when a gray smudge deigned to appear on the horizon.

  “Nathalie, Florence, prepare yourselves. We’re about to change course.”

  Florence poured herself another glass of rosé and dimpled at Serge. “In twenty minutes, mon ami, not before. Take it easy. Have some of the pain bagnat. It’ll do you a world of good.” Nathalie, at the helm, did not even look at him.

  Serge disappeared below and popped up again in fifteen minutes. “Now?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  Serge disappeared again.

  A few minutes later, Florence drained her glass and stuck her head through the hatch.

  “Now, Serge, now. Come on deck.”

  “Oh-nine-oh,” Serge barked in the stentorian tone of a black-and-white war movie.

  The boat veered. Florence shook the mainsheet free of its cleat and let the sail out to a forty-five-degree angle, then repeated the maneuver with the jib. The boat righted itself slightly, picked up speed, and seemed to relax once its nose was no longer held hard into the wind.

  Within half an hour the white cliffs of Bonifacio were visible. Serge raced up and down the companionway, calling out course changes. The boat veered to the north, sails full out, wallowing in the swell.

  Soon they could see the town hanging by its fingernails to the rock above the cliff, as if in mortal fear of being blown off into the sea.

  The rhythm of Serge’s dives below increased. Eventually, Florence lost patience, made a moue of annoyance, indicated with a tamping motion of her palm that Serge was to sit still. The boat rolled its way on toward the cliffs.

  “Nathalie, come a few degrees to port, please,” Florence said. Serge jolted up to adjust the sails. Florence tamped him back into his seat.

  A slim breach in the cliffs appeared as if by magic. Serge jumped up. “Nathalie, start the engine and prepare to lower the sails.”

  “Not yet,” Florence said.

  They nosed into an endless gorge, the town high above them. Only a miracle forestalled a collapse of the eroded cliffs into the sea.

  “Now,” Florence said.

  Serge leapt up like a jack-in-the-box. The warning shriek of the ignition broke the calm. The sails came down with a loud rumble.

  The burping diesel fed them deeper and deeper down the endless rock-faced gorge. After fifteen minutes they reached a village, smeared around the semicircle of the gorge’s cul-de-sac. Around the little harbor, the berthed boats were as tightly packed as tinned sardines. At one end, a long row of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs defaced the white façades of timeworn houses.

  Inching forward with the engine almost at an idle, Serge circled the marina in search of a berth. He finally chose one in front of a bar that was already animated in the middle of the afternoon. Awkwardly, he lined up the boat stern to quai and attempted to back in at a snail’s pace. Crew members from the adjacent boats appeared on their decks to scrutinize the maneuver.

  A third of the way into the slip Diomede shifted sideways, threatening to ram the vessel on its port side. Serge spun the wheel, accelerated the engine. Diomede lurched even more violently at the neighboring boat. A man on deck—in his late fifties, white-fleeced barrel chest sun-toasted nut brown—put one leg over his lifeline and fended Diomede off, shaking his head, spitting out disgusted “Oh là là làs.” Serge jerked the accelerator lever, the engine roared, and the boat fought against the man’s leg.

  Gently, Florence edged Serge aside with her hip. She threw the engine into forward and eased the boat out of the slip. In an attempt to reinstate Serge’s amour propre, Florence explained, “That bar is the hottest spot in Bonifacio. Drunks will be coming out all night, yelling and barfing. Kids love to pass out—or amuse themselves—in the cockpits of boats berthed out in front. We’ll sleep much better on the other side of the cove.”

  She motored over to an empty spot directly opposite, swung the wheel hard right, gunned the engine in sharp bursts. The boat, once again docile and obedient in a master’s hands, pivoted in the opposite direction. When the boat was lined up with the slip, Florence put the engine in reverse, waited for the boat to gain speed, killed the engine, walked to the bow, picked up the line attached to the mooring buoy, stopped the boat’s movement, cleated off, marched rapidly to the stern, stepped ashore with both stern lines, cleated them off, and hopped back on deck. This was all done in seconds, with no more effort than a man bending over to tie his shoes.

  Serge danced a jig halfway between envy and irritation.

  Jacques said to Capucine over loudly, “You see, cousine, she learned to do that playing with rubber ducks in her bathtub. I tell you, rubber toys are the key to happiness.” His donkey bray was loud enough to echo off the cliff wall.

  Serge examined the boat’s mooring with great care, retied one of Florence’s perfectly cleat hitches, and then collected everyone’s passports to deposit them at the capitainerie du port and register their arrival.

  “The great thing to do in Bonifacio is to climb the steps to the old town and explore. The village’s architecture is unspoiled, and the shopping is fabulous,” he said. “When I get through with the port captain, I’
ll join you up there, and we can have an apéro in a quaint bar and then move on for dinner. Some of the restaurants have absolutely spectacular sea views.” Once again Serge was far more at ease in his mantle of a Club Med vacation animator than in his skipper’s cap.

  Spontaneously, the crew divided itself into two groups: shoppers and sightseers who wanted to explore the old fort. Capucine went for the shops, and Alexandre for the fort.

  The old town, perched high up over the cliffs, was as precious as promised, crooked little streets hardly wide enough to allow the passage of a single car, rickety little houses leaning against one another for support, sparkling with fresh coats of whitewash.

  Over the years Bonifacio had entirely given itself over to tourism. Every second shop sold postcards and T-shirts. The little group of shoppers eventually found a boutique that would have been at home in Saint-Germain. Muted, sophisticated techno music throbbed from a high-powered sound system, and anorexic, androgynous salesgirls in abbreviated skirts milled among the customers, murmuring advice. Capucine discovered a pile of fabulous linen T-shirts decorated with a styled wood-block version of the Corsican flag. As she was searching the stack for a powder-blue one in her size, an ecstatic Angélique rushed up, holding a pair of peach-colored espadrilles with long beige satin ribbons.

  “Know what these are?” she asked with a radiant smile.

  “Lanvin espadrilles,” Capucine said. “I’d kill for a pair, but Alexandre would never forgive me. They cost over four hundred euros.”

  “Not these. They’re beautifully done knockoffs, and they’re only thirty-five euros.” Giggling, Capucine and Angélique rushed off to the corner of the shop where Angélique had found the shoes.

  As Capucine ducked her head into a large basket, foraging for a pair in her size in a pale blue that would match her new T-shirt, she heard a squeal of tires and a blaring horn in the street outside the shop. She was surprised to see Angélique at the door. Capucine rushed out just in time to see Florence grab Inès’s shirt and haul her off the street into the doorway. There was a flurry of commotion. A small Peugeot with Corsican plates hurtled by, its horn blaring. A swarthy man leaned out the window, clapped his right hand on the crook of his elbow, raised his left forearm in the classic insult, yelled, “Touristi Francesi, fuora! French tourists, go home! Leave our island to us! Leave Corsica to the Corsicans.” The car rocketed off.