A Twist of Orchids (7 page)

“That justifies a trashing?” Mara bristled. She did not know the Ismets, but she had been combat-ready all evening, and this was as good a cause as any for opening fire.

“I didn’t say that,” objected Paul, shifting about, making his chair groan.

Mara bore down. “You as good as did. It’s a fact that people of color aren’t treated well in France. They’re stuffed into ghettos. They’re poorly educated and can’t get work.”

“
Bigre!
” Paul stuck his jaw out. “They
won’t
work. That’s the whole problem.”

“You’re both generalizing—” Loulou began, but Paul, resentful, cut him off.

“Easy enough for her to talk. Canada’s a big country. All that ice and snow. Canada wouldn’t survive without immigrants. Needs them, just to stay warm. Well, they can have ours, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, come on, Paul.” Julian weighed in. “You can’t say the Ismets are a drag on the system. They struggle bloody hard to
make a living, and they turn out a good product. You should taste some of Betul’s pastries.” This earned from Mara an almost friendly glance. She did have a personal acquaintance with Betul’s baklava.

Paul snorted skeptically. “
Peuh!
Heavy. Doughy. Not like ours.”

“Have you tried them?” Mara challenged. “Don’t be so chauvinistic.”

“Chauvinistic how? No one makes better pastries than the French. It’s a recognized fact.”

Julian said, “Forget pastries. You’d change your tune if you saw what those
crapauds
did to their store. You wouldn’t like it if it happened to you.”

“Let them try!” The big man swiveled around fiercely, as if warning off all comers.

“What happened to the Ismets is an isolated incident,” Mado said, trying to soothe matters. “We don’t have those kinds of problems in the Dordogne.”

Loulou shook his bald head. “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s coming. In fact, it’s here. Bigotry knows no home. And what about those break-and-enters in the last few months?” He referred to a string of unsolved house burglaries. The last two had been accompanied by signature poems teasing the police.

Paul said ungraciously, “That’s my point. Foreigners come to the Dordogne, buy property, push up the prices, and then live here only a few months of the year. You have all these houses sitting around empty most of the time, asking to be robbed.”

“Julian and I are foreigners,” Mara snapped.

Paul scowled. “Not you. You live here. You’re like us. I mean those others.”

“Oh, you mean like Prudence?” Prudence Chang was a mutual friend, a retired Chinese-American advertising executive who
maintained a summer residence not far from Mara. She usually spent all or part of her summers there but, like the O’Connors, came and went as she pleased. She was also a very good customer of Paul and Mado. Every fall she hosted a gala eight-course lunch, catered by the Brieuxs, for her large circle of friends. The ticket accounted for a decent percentage of the Chez Nous annual take, to say nothing of the free publicity.

“Not her, either.” Paul’s face grew very red.

“Well, who then?”

He glowered and shoved away from the table. For a moment it looked as if he would stalk out, but instead he stomped to the bar where he appeared to struggle with his better nature. Eventually he returned with a flask of plum brandy and fresh glasses.

“There’s also an increase in drugs on the street,” Loulou went on, watching Paul pour out the ruby-colored liqueur. “In the last year there’s been a spike in the supply of heroin in the region. I tell you this in confidence. Ton-and-a-Half may be back in business. If he was ever out of it.”

“Ton who?” asked Mado.

“Rocco Luca.”

“Wop,” said Paul.

“French. Local boy. He was born down the road in Bergerac.”

Mado asked, “If his name’s Rocco Luca, why do they call him Ton-and-a-Half?”

The ex-cop took a sip of plum brandy, rolled it around in his mouth, and swallowed. “Good, this. Some say it’s because he packed a big punch. Used to be a heavyweight boxer. But he really got the name because back in the seventies he was caught trying to land a ton and a half of marijuana along the Côte d’Azur. He did time and passes nowadays for a legitimate man of business leading the blameless life in a big house north of Brames.”

“Brames? That’s Laurent’s turf,” Julian observed.

Loulou nodded. “And his boss is very well aware of it, let me tell you. Compagnon’s had his eye on Luca ever since he moved back to the Dordogne five years ago. He thinks Luca’s behind the new action in the region. He thinks drugs are Luca’s source of money and business is how he launders it.”

“Is he right?” Mara leaned forward with interest. She and Julian personally knew Laurent’s brigade commander, Adjudant Jacques Compagnon, a big, prickly man with a reputation for working his gendarmes hard.

Loulou lifted his shoulders. “Who knows? It’s not really Luca’s style—petty stuff—but Compagnon has a theory that it’s leakage from bigger shipments that are being moved on. But if it
is
Luca, how is he bringing it in? Is he reverting to his old MO and landing it on the coast? Trouble is, the drug squad boys don’t take Luca seriously anymore. He’s pushing seventy, and they think he’s past it. They’re after new blood like Reynaud in Marseille and Félix Bidart in Bordeaux, who they figure are handling big transshipments to New York. However, Luca has ties with Pascal Goudy in Toulouse, a
type
with known drug connections. Those two go back a long way. He also employs someone named Serge Taussat as a kind of general factotum, and that one’s as nasty as he looks. Judge a man by the company he keeps, they say. Except the Ton also has some pretty powerful political pals who owe him favors, which makes him untouchable. So far, only Compagnon is keeping Luca in his peripheral vision, and he’s going on nothing more than a hunch.”

“Drugs!” Paul seized the point and slammed a hand as big as a ham on the table, making the glassware jump. “That’s another thing. Who brings the stuff in? Foreigners. Albanians and Kurds. Turks.”

“And the Dutch,” added Loulou. “Sure, most of the heroin
that starts out as poppies in Afghanistan is processed in Turkey—”

“They ship it here in boats, trucks, planes, trains, even in dogs’ stomachs,
parbleu!
” Paul rumbled on.

“But the fact of the matter is that a lot of it winds up in Holland first, and from there it comes into France.”

“Whatever. They’re killing our kids with their poison. Look at them. High on something most of the time, shooting stuff into their veins or swallowing Ecstasy. And we’re left to clean up the problem. I tell you, it wasn’t like this in my day. Everything’s going down the drain.” Paul had recently turned forty-one. Whatever excesses had defined his youth in
la France profonde
—the depths of the country—things like soft, hard, and designer drugs had completely passed him by.

“We don’t have a drug problem here,” said Mado.

“Just wait for it!” roared her husband.

Julian shook his head. He had never seen his friend in such a mood. Maybe it was more than Mara’s goading, foreigners, and drugs. Maybe it was change itself that was bothering Paul. It bothered him, too. You felt it in the air, saw its imprint on the land, heard it in the way people talked. The old ways, the old ties and courtesies were breaking down. Young people were restless, discontent. Every year there was more traffic on the roads. Fields that had once grown wheat and oats and maize were sprouting houses. Ugly red smudges of raw bricks (waiting to be faced with limestone; that’s what everything was nowadays, facing, not the real, solid stuff) were replacing the blaze of poppies on the hillsides. Mara had criticized Julian for always going on about the vulnerability of the stretch of woodland and meadow that abutted her own property. But only last fall he had seen a team of surveyors there. “Just waiting for someone to snap it up,” he had predicted grimly. And now a resident drug baron.

“Since the cops know where this Ton-and-a-Half lives,” said Mado, “why don’t they just pull him in?”

Loulou brought his shoulders to his ears. “On what charge? He’s smart, is old Luca, and, like I said, well connected. Compagnon will want to be very sure of his ground before he makes a move.”

“That
type
they found in Périgueux have anything to do with this?” asked Julian. They had all read about the sensational gangland-style murder. Chlorinated water had been found in the dead man’s lungs, and there were particles of some kind of commercial soil and peat moss mixture embedded in his nostrils. It was as if he had been drowned in a swimming pool and then dragged through a flower bed before being dumped, like an offering, at the foot of Vesunna’s temple.

“Ah,” said Loulou. “Yvan.” He drained his glass, pausing for dramatic impact.

“Yvan—they’ve identified him, then?” Mara’s dark eyes widened.

“Yes.” Loulou put the glass down, leaned in, and looked at them each in turn. “But as far as the public is concerned, no.
Alors, mes amis
, this doesn’t go any farther.”

“Well?” demanded Paul impatiently.

“His name was Yvan Bordas, and he was one of
ours.
”

Mado, Julian, and Mara sat up in surprise.

Paul scratched his chest. “What, you mean
un mouchard?
”

Loulou leaned back, satisfied with his effect. “Not an informer. An undercover narc.”

“A narc?” Mado shook her tawny head. “They said he was an addict. He had an arm full of needle marks.”

“Nevertheless, he was one of the best we had. He’d been working Marseille for the last three years. Before he died he told his contact he had a lead on a big drug shipment being planned.
So how did he wind up dead 600 kilometers away in Périgueux, eh? There’s nothing to link Bordas to Luca, but it makes you wonder if Jacques Compagnon’s little idea doesn’t have something to it after all.”

“
Merde
,” said Paul, deeply impressed.

It is the small hours of the morning. A broken moon rides on the backs of clouds that stream across a turbulent sky. Wind batters the house and rattles the shutters. The old man moans and struggles in his bed. He is having a nightmare. The noises, incorporated into his dream, take the form of something that has just broken down the exterior wall and is now pushing through the hole it has made, its dark mass bulging menacingly into the room. He tries to roll away from it, but his body is rigid, heavy, inert.

“No!” Joseph Gaillard tries feebly to fight it off. “Amélie!”

With a rush of relief, he opens his eyes to discover his wife there, bending over him as she often does. Then he sees in the moonlight that in place of her face is a tangle of colorless hair trailing like dead vines over a large, black hole.

His own scream of terror wakes him. In his head, the scream is shattering. In reality, it comes out as a thin, protracted wail.

Joseph often has vivid, frightening dreams. Things reach out to grab him, monsters chase him. He is trapped in rising flood waters, stands helpless in the path of thundering avalanches. Like his hallucinations, the dreams are a side effect of his disease and his medication. When she was alive, Amélie would wake up, too, whenever he screamed. She would turn on the light and sit forward to check the clock with the big digital display to see if it was time for his pills. He took them every four hours, day and night. If it was, she would shake him fully awake and make him take them. Then she would push the reset button to activate the alarm
to the time of his next dosage. Every evening before bed, she set out his medication and put a plastic tumbler of water on his bedside table. The tumbler had a lid that was equipped with a drinking spout, like a toddler’s cup.

Usually, when she was awakened by him, Amélie would also help him go to the toilet, since he needed to urinate frequently but was usually quite unsteady, getting out of bed like that in the middle of the night. The trip down the hall to the WC was slow, with Joseph shuffling along, taking little steps, and Amélie beside him, gripping his arm. After the equally slow trip back, his wife would settle him down again and tell him rather crossly to go back sleep and not bother her again until morning.

Tonight, he is alone. Henceforth will always be alone, will have to do everything for himself, for as long as he is able. The prospect is daunting and engulfs him like a dark, cold lake. He lies on his back, listening to the gusting of the wind. It drives before it a squall of rain that spatters against the windows, batters the old hornbeam that stands by the corner of the house. The branches creak and groan. They had planted that tree, he and Amélie, fifty-one years ago, on the birth of Christine, their only child. As if in sympathy with his solitude, the house complains around him. A moan of self-pity, a desolate bubble of sound, squeezes from his chest.

His medication. He turns his head, straining to make out the hour. The numbers on the digital clock swim before his eyes: 2:49. Almost time for his 3 a.m. dose. With difficulty, he pulls himself to a sitting position, using a special railing that has been built onto the side of the bed, reaches stiffly for the electrical cord dangling from the wall lamp, and follows it upward until he finds the switch. The lamp sheds a pale circle of light. As usual, the water tumbler and the dispenser that he uses to help him keep track of his medication are on the bedside table. It gives him a
sense of minor achievement to know that he has remembered to put them there.

But getting the pills out of the container is not easy. His hands shake badly, and he spills several before he is able to pick out three: two yellow, one white. He makes a messy job of getting them down. He has trouble swallowing. Water leaks from the corners of his mouth, trails down his chin. Parkinson’s affects every muscle in his body, including those of his mouth and throat.

Tap -tap.
Something is striking the north bedroom window. At first he thinks it is an ivy branch hitting the panes.
Tap-tap-tap.
He listens more carefully. The sound is rhythmical, like ghostly fingers—the fingers of the storm—beating out a code that ought to have some meaning. For a moment he almost thinks, almost lets himself have the fantastic hope, that it is Amélie, blowing about outside, signaling to come in. Is that what the tapping is trying to tell him? He nearly calls out to her.