Murder on the Ile Sordou (6 page)

“Impressive!” Verlaque said. “Small food menu, and big wine menu, just the way it should be.”

Marie-Thérèse nodded, but looked baffled. “I'll be right back!” she said.

“Take your time,” Marine said, smiling. “My friend will be a while looking at your wine list.”

“We'll need a red and a white,” Sylvie said. “Marine ordered the fish.”

“Oh, I like red with fish—”

“Yes, definitely two bottles,” Verlaque cut in, putting his reading glasses on to read the menu. He read the list, whistling softly as he turned the pages. “White from Cassis?”

“No,” both women said in unison.

“Too close to home?” Verlaque asked. “Okay then, a Nuragus di Cagliari from Sardinia. And a red from . . . Sicily?”

“Perfect,” Sylvie said, having no idea what a Nuragus was. But if Antoine liked it, it would be good. She looked around the room. “Alain Denis and his wife are here without the teenager.”

“Poor boy,” Marine said. “Does he have to eat alone, in his room?”

“It would appear so,” Sylvie said. “They were arguing about him this afternoon.”

“That must be the new couple, who arrived here on the later boat,” Marine said as she saw Sylvie looking across the room at an elegantly dressed couple in their late thirties or early forties who sat in silence.

“Parisians,” Sylvie said. “Obviously.”

Verlaque ignored the women as he continued to read the wine menu, which for him was as interesting as a novel. He turned to the last page to see what kind of Armagnacs and whiskies they offered.

“I hope this place isn't going to feel like a retreat,” Sylvie said. “With half of the guests not getting along, and the rest of us watching each other.”

“You're the one who's watching,” Verlaque said, looking at Sylvie over his reading glasses.

“I can't help it,” Sylvie said. “And there's that man, eating by himself.”

“He's a French literature teacher, from Aix,” Marine said. “I'd say he looks happy enough. Perhaps another night we'll ask him to join us.”

“See what I mean?” Sylvie said. “This
does
feel like some camp. Next you'll suggest that we each change seats every dinner, so we all get to know each other.”

Marine laughed. “That would be fun . . .”

“Clément!” Verlaque called out.

Marine and Sylvie stared at each other.

“Clément Viale!” he continued. Verlaque got up and set his napkin on the table. “Clément Viale is over there. We went to law school together.” Verlaque excused himself and began to walk across the dining room.

Viale saw his old friend and cried, “Dough Boy!”

Verlaque and Viale embraced, and Viale led Verlaque over to his table, where he was introduced to Clément's wife of twelve years, and mother of his three children, Delphine. Marine saw Verlaque turn and point to her, and she was about to get up when Verlaque came back.

“We're meeting them after dinner, for a drink in the bar,” Verlaque said, sitting down.

“Dough Boy?” Sylvie asked, winking at Marine.

“I was thinner then, believe it or not,” Verlaque said. “But the name came from my family's flour business.”

“
Bien sûr
,” Sylvie replied. “Here comes the waitress,” she said. “No laughing this time!”

Verlaque ordered the wines, and Marie-Thérèse took the wine list from him, almost dropped it, and left.

“How's dessert?” Verlaque said to the Hobbses, leaning back in his chair.

“Wonderful!” Bill Hobbs yelled.

“The cookies have lavender in them,” Shirley Hobbs added. She held one up.

“Excellent!” Verlaque said, turning back to Marine and Sylvie.

“They're very enthusiastic,” Marine said.

“Yes, not at all affected,” Verlaque agreed. “My poor friend Clément isn't having as much fun as our Americans.” He glanced around the room. “Nor is the movie star-slash-dog-food-salesman.”

“See, you're just as curious as us,” Sylvie said.

“As
you
,” Verlaque replied. “Marine could care less.”

Marine sighed. She hated when Antoine put her on a pedestal, or when he assumed what she was thinking. The maddening thing was, he was usually right.

Marie-Thérèse came back, holding a bottle of white wine in her hand. She bit her lip and tried to remember her lesson with Émile and Serge; she could have killed Serge right now. She had looked for him at his post in the bar, as he usually opened the wines, but he was nowhere to be seen. She had rushed into the kitchen and Émile had calmed her down, and told her to open the wine herself. They had practiced it numerous times. “Pour a little, then taste,” Émile repeated twice.

She tilted the bottle gently toward
him
—Chubby Man, she'd already named him in her head—and showed him the label. Both Émile and Serge had warned her that it could be the woman who chose the wine, but Marie-Thérèse knew that in this case it was definitely the man deciding. He looked at the label, and nodded, smiling up at her, and she took the bottle by its neck and cut off the lead wrapper. She slipped the piece of foil in her apron and then slowly twisted the screw into the cork, pleased that it was going in straight, and easily. Pulling up on the corkscrew, the cork came slowly out, letting off a tiny “pop” sound, and Marie-Thérèse almost cried tears of relief.

She poised the bottle over the monsieur's wineglass, from a set of glasses that Marie-Thérèse had been warned were handblown in Austria and were the world's best. Serge had joked that they were also so fragile they could break if you looked at them the wrong way. She knew he hated them, and she did too. Shaking, she began to pour a little white wine into Chubby Man's glass, and just then she looked up and saw her boss, M. Le Bon, come into the dining room. She was sure that Émile was watching her too, through those little round windows that looked like mirrors. And then her head went all fuzzy. Her face was hot, and red, as she strained to remember the next step. And then she had it; Émile's kind voice in her head, saying, “We pour a small bit in the glass, and then we taste.” Marie-Thérèse silently repeated the phrase as she finished pouring. And, before Antoine Verlaque had time to reach out for his glass, Marie-Thérèse had grabbed it and lifted it to her mouth and tasted the Cagliari. “It's good!” she said, putting his empty glass down with a confident thump.

Stranger Than Fiction

M
axime Le Bon froze in his tracks. Émile Villey, taking advantage of a small pause between cooking lamb chops and sea bream, had indeed been looking out the
hublot
onto the dining room. He held his head in his hands and went back to the stove. Taking a juice glass off of a shelf, he poured it half full with a good cognac he used for cooking and downed it in one sip.

Antoine Verlaque was, for one of the first times in his life, speechless. He looked up at the waitress and saw, in her big brown eyes, his own at twenty-two. She looked terrified. Hadn't he been just as nervous and bewildered by adult life as she was now? The Verlaque family wealth and prestige only partly softened all the apprehension he felt at that age.

And then he laughed and put his hands together and began to clap. Marine and Sylvie quickly followed suit, Sylvie adding some fist pumps, and Eric Monnier, who had witnessed the whole thing (as he couldn't take his eyes off of Marine Bonnet), clapped and yelled, “Bravo!” Bill Hobbs began to film the scene with his new iPhone and couldn't wait to show it to Ian Bertwhistle.

Maxime Le Bon looked around the room and saw his diners happy, and laughing. Even Clément and Delphine Viale seemed to be having a good time.

Marie-Thérèse had at once realized what she had done wrong. She had practiced sipping wine with Serge and knew what a good wine should smell, and taste, like. And she knew that it was Chubby Man who was meant to have tested the wine, not her. But now he was clapping, as was Maxime Le Bon.

Serge Canzano, having heard the commotion, came running into the dining room, and Le Bon motioned for him to take another wineglass to Verlaque's table. Canzano set down an empty Riedel glass, and Marie-Thérèse slowly poured some wine into it. She smiled at Verlaque, who swirled the wine around and then sniffed at it, and tasted it. “You're right,” he said. “It is good. Very good indeed.” He didn't want to teach her that you only need sniff the wine, to see if it was corked, and then say, “It's fine.” She'd learn that, probably first thing tomorrow morning.

“Bravo!” Monnier yelled once again.

Marie-Thérèse then poured wine into Marine's glass, who said, “Thank you,” and into Sylvie's, who said, “Chin-chin!” and took a big gulp.

“I'll be back . . .
momentarily
 . . . with your first course,” Marie-Thérèse said. She felt, all of a sudden, a surge of power and confidence. She had a feeling that the job would be easy from now on, and she would grow to like it more and more with each passing day. She turned around and walked through the dining room, beaming. It was the first time in her life that, although she had made a mistake, she had made people laugh, and be happy. It made her joyous. She walked by the famous actor's table (she had never seen any of his films, but thought he was funny in the dog-food commercials), and Alain Denis raised one eyebrow at her and frowned in a way that she knew was not kind. Émile Villey, back at his lookout post, also saw the actor's callous stare and rushed to be at the kitchen door when Marie-Thérèse walked in.

•   •   •

“That was quite a scene back there,” Clément Viale said, swirling his whiskey in a cut-crystal tumbler.

“She'll be able to tell her grandchildren the story,” Marine said.

Viale smiled. “At any rate, that was nice of you to applaud her, Dough Boy. A younger Verlaque would not have taken that so well, if I'm remembering correctly.”

Verlaque rubbed his stomach, not seeming to care about his nickname. He crossed his legs and sipped a bit of the eighteen-year-old Lagavulin. “Stranger than fiction,” he said. “If you were to put that scene in a novel, no one would believe it. It made my day.”

“What was
Clément
like at that age?” Delphine Viale asked, leaning forward and resting her chin on her incredibly thin and bejeweled hands.

Verlaque laughed, sensing the tension between the couple. “Like the waitress,” he said. The group looked on, perplexed. “Full of bewilderment for what lies ahead in life, and naïve too,” he continued. “Not yet aware of all the crap.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Clément replied, straightening his back. “I think I knew quite well what I was doing back then.”

“Really?” Verlaque asked. “You were one hundred percent sure that law school was for you? And that you'd enjoy being a lawyer?”

“I think so . . .”

“And you were sure you'd marry, and have children? And you were confident in the fact that the earth was a safe place to be; that there'd never be anything like global warming, or tidal waves, or maniacs driving airplanes into the World Trade Center?” Verlaque began to remember the things that had frustrated him about Viale all those years ago: his smugness, the smugness that came from their elite backgrounds and schools.

“Nobody could have known those things,” Viale suggested.

“But I think that's what Antoine means about naivety in the young,” Marine said. “We don't know yet, and don't even want to know, that evil exists. We all saw it in that young waitress this evening.”

“At that age I was just into getting drunk and laid,” Sylvie Grassi said. Verlaque laughed and the Viales looked on, Clément with a strained grin and Delphine with a look of disgust.

“Fancy Alain Denis being one of the guests this week,” Delphine Viale said in an awkward attempt to change the conversation.

“He was the only person not laughing this evening at dinner,” Marine said.

“Really?” Verlaque asked.

Marine nodded. “I think it's because that waitress stole the show.”

“You're right,” Sylvie said. “An aging actor, once having worked with the most famous Italian and French directors of his day, now selling eyeglasses and dog food. He shows up to a small exclusive resort and expects people to be fawning over him, and then at dinner no one gives him the time of day and the gaff of a young waitress steals our hearts.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Clément said, turning to his wife. “Delphine asked for his autograph this afternoon, didn't you
chérie?
”

“It was for Mother,” Mme Viale replied, pursing her lips and glaring at her husband.

“Oh, my mother loved him too,” Marine said, smiling, in an attempt to lighten the strained atmosphere between the Viales.

“Poor guy; we should stop speaking of Denis in the past tense,” Sylvie said, finishing her whiskey. “Well, I'm off to bed; the boatman has promised to take me . . . um . . . rowing . . . tomorrow.” Verlaque and Clément Viale laughed, and Delphine glared at her husband. Sylvie stood up and pulled down her dress, which had risen up while she had been sitting.

“I'll come too,” Marine said. “It's been a long day.”

“Well, I'm not going to be the only woman here, listening to Antoine and Clément relive their glory days,” Delphine Viale said. She got up, taking with her a small Fendi clutch bag that Sylvie had been eyeing with interest.

“Sleep tight, ladies,” Viale said, saluting them with his right hand.

The men watched the women leave the bar and the minute they were out of the room Clément called over to Serge Canzano, ordering two more whiskies. Viale then sighed, leaning back in the armchair and closing his eyes for a few seconds.

“Going through a bad patch?” Verlaque asked.

“Only for about the last ten years,” Viale said. “No, six years. Things started going downhill after the birth of our third child.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You've never married, have you?” Viale asked.

“No.”

Serge Canzano set two more whiskies down on the table and cleared away the empty glasses. When Canzano was out of earshot, Viale went on. “I'm having financial problems too. That's the one thing I never thought I'd have. So I guess you were right before; when I was a student I didn't think unhappiness, or failure, was possible. Cheers,” he said, holding up his glass.

Verlaque lifted his glass and had a small sip; he didn't feel like drinking anymore but wanted to keep Viale company.

“Do you have a course of action?” Verlaque asked. “I mean, is there any way to straighten out your financial problems?

Viale made a sweeping gesture around the room.

“Here?”

“I'm an investor in Sordou,” Viale said. “It's the last of my family money. The rest I lost; who was to know that Alcatel-Lucent would take a dive in the stock market?”

Verlaque said, “It's a good idea, Clément. This is a beautiful place, from what I've seen so far. You'll make back your investment.” Verlaque took another sip of whiskey; he knew all too well how risky the hotel and restaurant business was. And this one was set on a remote island. “It must be a coup having Alain Denis here. Has someone called
Paris Match
and arranged for some paparazzi to come?”

“Niki Darcette is supposed to be working on that, and Denis himself promised to call some journalist contacts, but so far, nothing. He's a prick, actually.” Viale finished his whiskey with one final big gulp and set his glass down.

Verlaque smiled; anyone who at sixtysomething tried to look as he did at twentysomething was sure to be a prick. “Speak of the devil,” Verlaque whispered. Viale turned around to see not Alain Denis but Emmanuelle, his wife, enter the room, wearing what looked like a long white silk housecoat but was actually a dress, split up the front to her midthigh.

“I'm glad to see there are still some men awake in this hotel,” she said to no one in particular as she walked to the bar and ordered a glass of champagne.

Verlaque couldn't take his eyes off of her; not because she was beautiful, but because she was so odd looking. Emmanuelle Denis was of average height and had long blond hair piled in an elaborate bun on top of her head. She was outrageously thin but had very large breasts, a look that always seemed imbalanced to him. She was tanned, and well groomed, right down to the French manicured toenails. He smiled to himself, having overheard Marine trying to paint her own toenails, every second word a “
merde!
”

Mme Denis had obviously paid a lot of money, and taken much effort, to look the way she did, and yet she looked like a half human. He glanced across at Clément, who was also staring at her, but with a look, it seemed to Antoine, of admiration.

Emmanuelle Denis was used to receiving the attention of men and slunk off her bar stool, expertly maneuvering between the bar's small tables in her evening gown and high heels, and carrying a full glass of champagne. “Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Verlaque said, rising. “But I was just headed off to bed.”

Clément Viale also got up and pulled out an armchair, the same one Delphine Viale had been sitting in, and motioned for Emmanuelle to sit down. “I'll have another whiskey, please,” he called over to Canzano. Serge Canzano grabbed the Lagavulin and gave the Parisian a double hit; maybe it would knock him out and Serge could close the bar at least before 2 a.m.

“What a shame,” Mme Denis said to Verlaque. “Are you sure you can't stay?” She liked his look and guessed that he was a powerful man. A surgeon, or politician . . .

“Quite sure,” Verlaque said. “Good night, madame. Good night, Clément. See you tomorrow.”

Verlaque walked through the quiet, marble-floored hallways, up a flight of stairs to their room. He quietly opened the door and walked through the room, looking at the sleeping figure of Marine, lit up by the moon. She lay still, on her back, with her hands clasped on her chest. She rarely moved in her sleep, unlike his thrashing. Was Clément right in suggesting that Verlaque, as a young man, had been short-tempered? Verlaque knew that over the years he had softened; 30 percent due to aging, and 70 percent due to the calming effects of the woman sleeping in the bed opposite him now.

He opened the doors to the terrace and stepped out; the wind had stopped and he could see the hotel's garden, lit up by well-placed spotlights, and beyond that, the still black sea. What had he wanted when he was in his early twenties? Probably a bit of Sylvie's getting laid; he had also wanted, and received, love and affection from his grandparents; he wanted to get good marks; and had loved running fast, alone with the ball, during his rugby games. He must have had fantasies of being a famous courtroom lawyer, but these memories were fuzzier. He breathed in the night air, which smelled of pine trees and the sea.

Did he dream of marriage, and children? No, probably not. Half of French marriages ended in divorce; the Viales were a perfect advertisement for staying single. But there were successful marriages too. His commissioner, Bruno Paulik, was happily married to a winemaker, and at this moment they were watching their first crop of grapes ripen in the July sun; their funny, chatty little daughter, Léa, most likely dancing and singing among the vines. If he had children, he wanted girls. What in the world would he do with a boy?