Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  I split off on the long road behind the house. It took me away from Rolland territory. I walked quickly. The Clutch brothers hadn’t got a good look at their attacker on the path. At worst, they could be holding my belt hostage. It wasn’t much of a clue, a black leather belt, size thirty-two. To Georges and Emile, I was a mystery man who had nothing to hold up his pants and a sweetheart of a right cross.

  Mike Rolland would wise up when he discovered the disk was missing from the centre drawer of his desk. First he’d probably fasten on Dan Renzi as the robber. But he was sure to change his mind after he received a report from the Clutches about the rough stuff on the sea walk. Dan was not the sort for fisticuffs. Mike would switch his suspicions to other parties. And I’d be at the top of the list. I shrugged to myself. What the heck. I reached Avenue Denis Semeria and walked to the apartment without spotting Mike or the Clutches.

  Annie met me at the door. I held up the disk. “Nice work, big guy,” she said. She looked relieved. “You weren’t gone much more than an hour.”

  “Time flies when a guy knows his business.”

  “Oh, yes?” Annie stepped back. “Then why does your best windbreaker look like something from a rummage sale?”

  I fingered the rip in the windbreaker’s shoulder. “I think it might’ve been the Hound of the Baskervilles,” I said.

  “A chien mechant?” Annie looked alarmed. “You got attacked by a chien mechant?”

  “Who?”

  “Most big houses around here keep them on the grounds. Tremendously vicious watch dogs.”

  “Damn French curs,” I said. “If they aren’t shitting on the sidewalks, they’re chewing on people’s windbreakers.”

  Annie wrinkled her nose. “You notice it’s suddenly gotten gamey in here?”

  I lifted my shoe and examined the bottom.

  “Oh, yuck.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I took the Miles Davis autobiography and a cup of coffee out to the apartment’s balcony. It was late morning, and I had the place to myself. Annie was up in the hills conducting her movie-reviewing seminar.

  I swallowed some coffee from the outsized piece of crockery in my hand. What the French drink their morning coffee from, Canadians eat their morning cereal from. I sat in the sun and felt superior. Couldn’t help myself. If Mike Rolland concluded it was I who had invaded his apple villa and filched the disk, and if he and the Clutches set out to track me down, they’d start, and end, at hotels in the neighbourhood where Canadian tourists put up. They wouldn’t think of a rented apartment, or locate my particular rented apartment. I basked in the sun and in my own splendid conceit, and I read the part of the Davis book where he described taking a fist to Cicely Tyson. Lovely trumpet player, lousy gentleman. At some point, I wasn’t sure when, Annie was touching my shoulder.

  “Huphurr,” I said. I had a sour taste in my mouth and a crick in my neck.

  “Dozed off, did we?” Annie said. She looked smart in her lightweight black suit. The skirt stopped at the middle of her thighs. There was no blouse under the jacket. There was nothing under the jacket.

  “How’d it go?” I struggled in my chair for a return to dignity.

  “The kids didn’t have many points of reference. Not in pre-1975 movies. But on sci-fi stuff, things like Altered States, Aliens, any Lucas or early Spielberg, they were really analytical. And fiendishly well-informed.”

  “Makes me feel deprived I missed it.”

  “Don’t be a grouch or I won’t tell you about the news flash I brought back.”

  “The university wants me to show the students what a smooth-talking criminal lawyer looks like?”

  “Better.”

  “Hard to top that.”

  “Just wait.” Annie went inside, and when she came back, she was carrying two glasses of white wine.

  “Lovely,” I said. I tried to get out of the slump I’d fallen back into. “Is it that time of day?”

  “Almost twelve-thirty.” Annie stood over my chair looking down at me. “Know what that noise you made when I woke you up reminded me of?”

  “Just resting my eyes.”

  “Of the name of the character Steve Martin played in The Man with Two Brains.”

  “Yeah?” I got straight in my chair. “Really? Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr. The first h isn’t silent. That’s where most people go wrong.”

  Annie settled in another of the balcony chairs. The black skirt rode further up her thighs.

  I said, “That’s a movie you should’ve talked about this morning. Opened the kids’ eyes to great and durable comedy.”

  “Crang, not everybody has seen The Man with Two Brains four times.”

  “Six. How do you think I mastered Hfuhruhurr?”

  “Okay,” Annie said. “My reward for the boon I have for you from the university is that you don’t sit there and do recapitulations of your favourite scenes from The Man with Two Brains.”

  “What you’ve got can’t be that sensational.”

  “A computer expert who’ll study your disk.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  “Optical disk?” Annie said. “That’s the term?”

  I nodded.

  Annie said, “The president at the university introduced me to some faculty members, including this one guy whom the president called their resident computer genius. So I piped up and said I had a friend with an optical disk and nowhere to look at it.”

  “And no skills to do so.”

  “I added that. And I got the impression the resident computer genius, a Professor Nestor, was thrilled at the challenge of it all. He doesn’t have the right machine at the school, but he can scare something up in Nice. Take a few days, which I said was certainly agreeable and very generous of the good professor.”

  “That long?” I said. “A lot can happen in a few days. Pamela could come batting over here. Swotty could get into the act somehow.”

  “You’re sounding ungrateful, Crang. Nestor is the expert. If he says a few days, that’s the necessary period.”

  “What’s he like, Professor Nestor?”

  “Oh, in his early thirties probably, but he looks about fourteen.”

  “Ideal. The man’s ideal.”

  Annie shook her head in exasperation. “You insist on thinking that only kids or people who are kidlike can be trusted around computers.”

  “No, I think they’re the only ones who should be permitted around computers. Maybe a universal law could be enacted, people over thirty-five have to abandon computers and return to instruments more compatible with man. The pen and pencil.”

  “With that kind of retrogressive attitude, you’re headed for big setbacks before the twenty-first century.”

  “If it becomes absolutely necessary, I’ll hire a kid to guide me.”

  Annie dipped her hand into her shoulder bag. It was hitched over the back of the chair. She pulled out the notes from her seminar. There were handwritten scribbles on the last page. She read from them.

  “David Nestor is the genius’s full name. He’s staying in an apartment in Beaulieu, an address I think is just up the walkway past the tennis courts. It’ll be convenient for him if we drop off the disk on our way to lunch.”

  “We’re on our way to lunch?”

  “Got it all planned,” Annie said. “And much, much more.”

  She went into the bedroom to change and emerged wearing a light green cotton blouse, blue denim skirt, and Reeboks with three dark green stripes. The skirt wasn’t any shorter than the skirt to the black suit. Or any longer.

  “Something occurred to me,” Annie said. She was back in the chair, the wineglass held in her lap. “Do you intend to tell Dan Renzi you recovered the disk? If so, Professor Nestor may be superfluous.”

  “Recovered the disk?”

  “How you got it last night i
s something I would rest easy not knowing.”

  “It won’t hurt Dan to wait until the professor tells me what’s on the disk.”

  “A whole few days?”

  “What Dan is worried about,” I said, “is Mike Rolland using the disk to put the screws to Jamie Haddon, and Jamie thereby discovering it was his trusted friend and devoted admirer Dan who lifted the disk in the first place.”

  “Yes, that would cast Dan in a very poor light.”

  “But if Mike hasn’t got the disk, he can’t put the screws to Jamie, and Jamie won’t discover Dan’s duplicity, and Dan has no cause to worry.”

  “But Dan doesn’t know that.”

  “Well, he’ll notice nothing terrible is happening. Besides it’ll be beneficial to his character to stew a little.”

  “I’m not sure,” Annie said. “This is being kind of rough on Dan.”

  “Two answers, sweetie,” I said. “One, it was Renzi who began this round-robin of disk snatchings. He doesn’t rate any special compassion on that ground. And, two, I think we’re of one mind, you and I, that none of that lot is conducting himself on the square, not Dan, Mike, or Jamie. Or herself either, Pamela. And, I guess this makes three, we’ll never know what’s up until the contents of the damned disk are revealed.”

  “That’s Professor Nestor’s field,” Annie said. “Right, okay, I buy it.”

  “Was it the force of my argument?” I said. “Or you just want to let your mind roam to other pastures?”

  “Some of the former, all of the latter.”

  Annie placed her wineglass carefully on the floor of the balcony. She hooked the shoulder bag over her arm. The glass had a couple of swallows of wine left in it.

  “Get your Rockabees on,” she said to me. “We’re hitting the road.”

  “You know they’re called Rockports.”

  We delivered the disk to Professor David Nestor at his apartment. He was medium tall and chubby all over, what in an adolescent is called baby fat and is expected to vanish before age sixteen. His face looked as if it needed shaving about every other Christmas. He held the optical disk like he’d been handed the Dead Sea Scrolls. I thanked him effusively for his services.

  Annie and I walked another two blocks to a restaurant near the train station called Le Catalan. It was gruff and noisy and the air was thick with the smoke of one thousand Gitanes. It won my heart, the Gallic-ness of it all. We got a table in the window. Annie ordered pizzas.

  Her arm disappeared up to the elbow into her shoulder bag. It emerged with a sheaf of articles clipped from magazines, notes she’d made from Michelin and other guides. “This file,” Annie said, “tells you everything you might ever want to be briefed on in advance before we go to Haut-de-Cagnes this afternoon. It’s one of the more accessible of the villes perchées.”

  “First principles,” I said. “What are villes perchées?” Annie expounded. The pizzas arrived. They were, as was the case with almost everything else I’d encountered on the Côte d’Azur, a different species from the product at home. Villes perchées, Annie said, were villages that medieval folks built of stone at the peak point of the highest mountains they could get at in their districts. Annie said the reason the medievals built on the heights was that it helped them spot their enemies coming from a long way off. A lesson worth adopting in my own life, if I could just think how.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I was feeling touristed out.

  “Something funny’s happening in my head,” I said to Annie. “I have to think very hard to remember what day it is.”

  “Monday, big guy.”

  “I’d already thought very hard,” I said. “Odd though, I’d decided it was Sunday.”

  “Sunday, yesterday, was when we went to Grasse, Vence, and Biot.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Grasse was the perfume factory. Vence was the Matisse chapel. And Biot was where the man with the mighty lungs blew into the long tube and produced the pretty glass that I bought to take home and drink vodka and soda out of.”

  The phone rang. Annie and I were dawdling over lunch in the sunroom at the apartment.

  “That’s probably someone calling to offer you a job as a tour guide, Crang.”

  “Bad move if they are. I’d lose track of the days.”

  I picked up the phone. “Oui?” I said. It was my best French word.

  “Crang?”

  It was an emphatic male voice.

  “C’est moi,” I said, two more I had down pat.

  “Archie Cartwright here.”

  “Holy mackerel.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “More like thunderstruck,” I said. “Poleaxed. Knock me over with a feather.”

  “We have never been introduced.”

  “This’ll do.”

  Archie Cartwright spoke with an upper-class Toronto honk. His voice was coming through without the underwater sounds of long-distance telephone.

  I said, “Please tell me you’re in Toronto, and this happens to be a fantastically clear line.”

  “We’ve just checked into the Negresco.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re on a Rotary junket.”

  “Pamela is with me.” Archie paused. “Or, under the circumstances, you could say I’m with Pamela.”

  “Which circumstances would those be?”

  “That’s the subject I wish to discuss with you.” Archie had the tone of a man who was accustomed to parcelling out instructions. “Let’s set up a meeting for this afternoon.”

  “Well, ah, yeah, that’d be dandy, you bet.”

  Why did I turn into Jimmy Stewart whenever a Cartwright caught me on the phone?

  “I’m free at this moment,” Archie said.

  “Free of Pamela?”

  “I intend to meet you alone, Crang.” Archie was just brusque enough that I almost slipped back into Jimmy Stewart. I rallied and suggested the outdoor cafe in Villefranche under the Hotel Welcome.

  “In an hour,” Archie said.

  I was there in forty-five minutes. I ordered a coffee. A tour bus unloaded a crowd of sightseers. They looked middle-aged, well-upholstered, and German. Did I need the complication of Archie Cartwright? With him, the topic could be Pamela, if Archie had somehow picked up on her affair with Jamie Haddon. His remarks on the phone made that seem likely. Or maybe it was Swotty who had despatched Archie to call on me. On the whole, I would prefer Archie as an emissary of Swotty. Marital trouble was on a par with the European Community as a subject that buffaloed me. The language from the sightseers had echoes of the bad guys in World War II movies. Ve haf vays of making you talk, Herr Englische.

  “Crang?”

  It was the voice from the telephone, piercing and nasal. Archie Cartwright was taller than six feet. Even at rest, standing beside the cafe table, he emanated vigour. He had a long, firm-looking face. There was a deep cleft in his chin. His nose was too large, but its size added to the overall impression of energy. His hair was brown and cut short. He was wearing a grey-blue tweed jacket, grey dress shirt, a red tie bearing the insignia of a club I couldn’t place, navy blue trousers, and black loafers. He asked the waitress for coffee in English. No messing about with lesser tongues.

  “Good of you to meet me on short notice,” Archie said to me.

  “I had a choice between this and one more vieille ville,” I said. “You got the nod.”

  Archie crossed his legs and did some fine tuning on the creases in his pants.

  “I think,” he said, “we would both prefer if I didn’t beat about the bush.”

  “Could you hold the bush-beating for a minute, Archie?” I said. “My phone number over here, did Swotty give it to you?”

  “Swotty?” Archie’s face showed a flash of bewilderment. The face didn’t look like it was used to an expression like bewilderment.


  “You know,” I said, “the mainstay of C&G. Old Whetherhill. Your father-in-law.”

  “Oh, I see, you were being facetious,” Archie said. “Yes, John gave me your number.”

  “John? You call him John?”

  “I like to think the two of us are intimates.”

  “Intimate enough for you to call him John? Not enough for Swotty?”

  “Only his oldest prep-school friends use that.… Look, Crang, could we get on to other matters?”

  “The dynamics of names intrigue me,” I said. “When I held down a seat at the Whetherhill Sunday table, just keeping it warm till you came along, Arch, I didn’t get as far as the John stage.”

  Archie seemed to regard that as a conversation-stopper.

  “If Swotty supplied my phone number,” I said, “is he why you’re here?”

  “John is not the reason.”

  “That leaves the alternative I was hoping it wouldn’t be.”

  The waitress brought Archie’s coffee. He said “Thank you” in English. She said he was welcome, also in English. Maybe Archie’s air of total self-assurance drove her to bilingualism.

  “I should warn you, Crang,” Archie said, “John is certain to be ringing you himself. I’m not privy to certain executive matters at C&G, that goes without saying. But John told me in so many words he has a worry connected with the commission you are carrying out for him over here.”

  “Swotty’s not a happy camper?”

  “John wanted me to put you on alert.”

  It crossed my mind to play dumb and let Archie ease into whatever subject he wanted to chat me up about. But, what the hell, I’d spent a lifetime plunging straight into matters that were usually better left alone. Why break old habits?

  “In the broad spectrum, Arch,” I said, rushing in where angels fear to tread, “the piece of inquiry I’m doing for Swotty has to do with the guy whose name I bet you’re about to bring up.”

  “Jamie Haddon.”

  “And, sorry about this, his affair with your wife.”

  Archie stayed steady as a rock. “To be clear on one point, Crang,” he said, “John is completely unaware of Pamela’s involvement with Jamie.”