Murder on the Ile Sordou (7 page)

About the Manager

T
he village of Néoules was in the middle of Provence, a region that some enterprising local mayors had coined La Provence Verte to try to entice tourists. It was south of the A8—a highway that stretched from the Riviera all the way to, as the signs proclaimed, Barcelona. There were few reasons to go to Néoules, unless you knew someone there: no sea or mountains; the roads were windy; and there were no cultural sites or Michelin-starred restaurants. The economy was thinly spread: chickpeas were the local specialty crop; there was a sprinkling of winemakers making good to mediocre wines; a bottled-water company was one of the bigger employers with a staff of fifty-five; an enterprising Dutch woman made soaps and cosmetics out of donkey's milk; and the rest of the inhabitants appeared to be either retired or unemployed. And it had never been green—
verte
—to Nicola; for her it would always be orange, the color of rust.

Rusting farm equipment was her parents' idea of garden decorating. They had been unemployed as long as Nicola could remember; when she was very young her father had worked part-time fixing motors, but he grew so unreliable that farmers began taking their work to a mechanic in neighboring Rocbaron. But M. Darcette loved the motors, and instead of taking broken, useless motors to the dump, he arranged them around their half-finished terrace, as if they were art objects. Her mother found a broken cherub fountain behind an abandoned hotel in Garéoult and had made her husband put it in the middle of the terrace, surrounded by the rusty engines. He had given up trying to rig water up to it—they couldn't afford a pump—so every now and then, when Mme Darcette was feeling energetic, she filled the basin with old dishwater.

Nicola and her older sister Aude went through the first half of their childhood thinking the Darcettes' way of life was normal. They didn't think it odd that their parents went almost everywhere, even into the village, wearing their slippers—with cigarettes hanging from their mouths—as the other villagers weren't much better dressed. But Nicola knew that at least some of the other men in the village met at the
bar des sports
and laughed a bit. Not her father; he and Mme Darcette kept to themselves, nourished by a constant supply of bulk wine they got from the
cave cooperative
. Mme Darcette had inherited two acres of vineyard outside of Néoules, and she rented the grapes out to a local farmer, who took them, along with his own harvest, every September to the co-op. The farmer offered to pay them in cash or wine; the Darcettes chose wine.

The Darcettes had, surprisingly, enough money to live on. The girls needed next to nothing; school was free, and the state paid for their books and most of their clothes. Mme Darcette made endless pasta (with no sauce) and cucumber salads (with white vinegar and salt). As soon as Aude was ten, she began doing the cooking, sometimes adding ketchup, which she stole from the school cafeteria, into the pasta. The girls ate better at school than at home and soon learned to take extra servings when they were offered by the canteen ladies and gladly finished the tossed-aside food on their friends' plates.

Nicola realized that her family was abnormal when she was ten, and Aude was in her first year of high school, being bused to Brignoles. A Parisian family moved to Néoules; the father commuted to his job as a lawyer in Toulon, and the mother stayed at home with the three children and restored their two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. M. and Mme Masurel bought the house on a whim; they loved Provence and had long wanted to get out of their cramped eight-hundred-square-foot apartment in Paris. They moved in the summer, when Néoules was looking its best, and enrolled their three young children in the village school. Claire Masurel, their oldest, and Nicola Darcette became fast friends; Claire, being a secure, loved child, didn't know that the other students left the Darcettes alone. Nicola was bright, and athletic, and, thanks to an energetic first-year gym teacher, the girls were encouraged to play soccer and run track together.

Nicola would always remember her first visit, after school, to the Masurels' house. She had seen other old houses, but never one like this. The garden certainly didn't look like hers, nor did it look like “rich peoples'” gardens, as her references were the manicured gardens of Americans, as seen on 1970s reruns poorly dubbed into French. Mme Masurel had left the olive trees in front of the house, and the Masurels had planted the cypress trees that lined the driveway. A wrought iron table and four chairs sat under an umbrella pine. Ivy grew up the sides of the stone walls, but even Nicola could see that it was neat, and clipped.

But it was the smell inside the house that Nicola remembered most acutely, more than the furnishings, for at that age she didn't really know what was beautiful, or tasteful; she just knew that it all looked good, and comfortable. The house smelled like cooking—Mme Masurel liked to bake—mixed with Mme Masurel's perfume. It took Nicola years to find that smell again, and she found it when robbing a department store in Nice. It was Yves Saint Laurent's Rive Gauche.

Nicola experienced many firsts
chez les Masurel
. Her first lasagna, her first bubble bath, and her first games and puzzles. She had never seen an activity book before, and Mme Masurel began buying them for her, slipping the books into her backpack. Nicola and Claire would walk through Néoules together, hand in hand. They'd make up stories about the people and choose their favorite houses. Nicola would have pink roses growing up beside her front door; Claire, jasmine. They began, along with some of the other, brighter, students, to put on elaborate spectacles for the end-of-the-year party. M. Masurel filmed them; the Darcettes never came. Both girls were voracious readers, lying on Claire's frilly bedspread, locking the door on Claire's two younger siblings, whom they referred to as Pest No. 1 and Pest No. 2.

It all came crashing down on Nicola a week in May when she turned thirteen. Claire came into school one spring day looking gloomy and had a hard time meeting Nicola's stare. At recess they sat together with their backs against the chain-link fence and Claire gave her the news: they were selling their house and moving back to Paris. Living in Néoules was too hard on Claire's mother: she hadn't met any friends; the villagers shied away from her. And M. Masurel had been offered a much better job in Paris; he'd be a partner in a law firm, which meant that they would be able to buy a big apartment in a fancy neighborhood. A German couple had seen their farmhouse from the road and had offered them a lot of money for it.

Nicola was stunned. The rest of the day she couldn't concentrate. She couldn't believe that she would lose Claire, and that there would be strangers living, and only on vacations, in the Masurels' beautiful house. The Masurels moved that August, and Nicola knew that she would never see Claire again. There was no way that she could ever invite Claire to her house. She now knew that her family was awful. Aude, at nineteen, had escaped; she was already married, with a toddler, but Nicola hated her husband. Aude was going to have another baby at Christmas.

Nicola saw her future: either end up like Aude or get out of Néoules. But it would be five years before she would even graduate from high school. She found solace, as one would expect, in new friends. They met every day after school in the bus shelter (it had a bench, a roof to protect it from the sun, and three walls to protect it from the wind). Boys would pull up to the shelter on their mopeds, resting their feet on the shelter's low front wall, while the girls sat side by side on the bench, facing the boys. By the time she was fifteen Nicola had become one of the ringleaders; she was brighter than the rest of them and had more reasons than the others to stay away from her house as much as possible. Teachers at the school, remembering her enthusiasm for reading and theatre, tried to get Nicola to participate in the annual concerts and plays, as she had done with Claire, but she refused. Her new friends would have seen this as childish, and she desperately needed her new friends, thick as they were.

Before moving, Mme Masurel and her husband had discussed the possibility of inviting Nicola for vacations to Paris. But they had both seen, from afar, Nicola's house, and her parents, and didn't know how they would ever arrange such a voyage with the Darcettes. M. Masurel was torn: he saw that his wife had grown very attached to the sprightly young Nicola—whom they lovingly called Niki—and he worried that she would be too sad if she saw Niki again, knowing what they were sending her back to in Néoules. He even asked a colleague, who specialized in family law, about the possibility of adopting Niki. But, as he had half-presumed, that would be impossible unless there were claims of abuse or life-threatening neglect. So once they were installed in their fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartment in the seventh
arrondissement
, he purposely threw away his condoms, and Mme Masurel became happily pregnant for the fourth time.

Lunch Poems

A
ntoine Verlaque could barely remember the last time he had had such a pleasant “lie in,” as his English grandmother would call it. His father, industrious and hardworking, had not permitted the boys—Antoine and Sébastien—to just do
nothing
or especially to sleep in. His mother—emotionally absent—had no opinion whatsoever. M. Verlaque saw idleness as laziness, but Emmeline and Charles, the grandparents, gave the boys time to do nothing. “It's a luxury,” Emmeline would tell them. “You have the time. Let your wonderful minds wander.” Emmeline had one rule for this time, though: they had to be outside. It was one of the reasons that Verlaque so enjoyed a cigar: it was a quiet one or two hours of tasting, thinking, looking, and it was often outside. It was time to ponder over a current case, but more often than not he thought of words (his own, or those of poets) or faces (Marine's, Emmeline's). It was never wasted time.

Each room had a Nespresso machine, and Marine made them each a coffee and they sipped, and read, in bed. As was usual with Marine she soon had a half dozen books, and various sheets of paper, surrounding her, and a pen poised behind her right ear. Verlaque peered over his reading glasses at her, setting down the hotel's complimentary copy of the
International Herald Tribune
.

“How are Jean-Paul and Simone?” he asked. It had been over a year since Marine had embarked upon the ambitious project to write about the love life of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Verlaque was encouraging her to take a year's sabbatical, but that proved more difficult than either of them thought in her state-funded university in Aix.

“Wonderfully complicated,” she replied. “And yet so simple too, at least in terms of their own relationship, and work habits.”

“They didn't work in bed,” he said, smiling.

Marine laughed. “Lots went on in their beds, but not work. They wrote diligently every morning, stopped for lunch, then worked until eight p.m. or so. Every day. In many ways they were a perfect couple.”

“Except they didn't have children,” Verlaque said, finishing his coffee. Marine stared at Verlaque, but before she could reply, he asked, “Where did they go for lunch? Café de Flore?”

“Of course,” Marine said. “You know, I've never been there.”

“You're kidding!” Verlaque said, taking off his glasses.

“No. I've always been turned off by the six-euro espresso.”

“My father still goes there regularly.”

“Why don't we go with him?” Marine suggested. “The next time we're both in Paris.” The truth was, she had only been to Paris once with Antoine, and that was for an art opening of Sylvie's photographs. They had stayed one night in a mediocre modern hotel near the Louvre and caught the morning train back to Aix. Antoine had not introduced Marine to his parents, nor had he walked her by his old haunts, which she knew were close to the Seine. It was forbidden territory.

“I think,” he answered slowly, “that that's a very good idea.” He put his glasses back on and opened the newspaper, signaling that the conversation was finished.

•   •   •

By late morning Marine and Sylvie were sitting by the pool, and Verlaque, having swum several laps, left them to their gossiping and walked up to the hotel to get changed.

“Antoine's being nice to me these days,” Sylvie said to Marine, while she applied SPF-0 suntan oil to her already tanned legs.

“There's something . . .” Marine began, “changed about him. This morning he actually agreed to my suggestion that we meet with his father in Paris.”

“That's front-page news,” Sylvie said.

“And another thing,” Marine said, putting down Sartre's
Being and Nothingness
. “He's been speaking about children . . .”

Sylvie began humming the wedding march.

“Stop it,” Marine said. “It's all been very indirect, boys versus girls, that sort of thing. I think he's terrified of having a son.”

“I get that,” Sylvie said. “When I see the boys at Charlotte's school, I think of them as extraterrestrials. Did Antoine really talk of children?”

“Yes, but like I said, only when it has to do with other people,” Marine said. She thought for a moment and then added, “But that day we arrived here, Antoine did say how much happier he'd be with a daughter. Because of Brice, Alain Denis's son, storming out of the hotel.”

“Stepson,” Sylvie said.

Marine looked at her friend, puzzled.

“I read it in
Paris Match
,” Sylvie said. “Oh, look. Here he comes now.”

The teenager strode onto the terrace, a book and towel under his arm. Marine thought that in his swimsuit he looked even thinner, and more fragile. He threw his affairs on a chaise longue not far from Sylvie and muttered, “I hate him,” and then dove into the pool.

“Wow,” Sylvie said. “That was pretty frank.”

“It might not have been about Alain Denis,” Marine whispered. “What's he reading?” she asked, craning to see the book.

Sylvie, who was closer, got part way off of her lounger to see the book's cover. “
Death in Venice
,” she said, sitting back down. “Must be on next year's reading list.”

“I'm not so sure,” Marine replied. She had been a great reader at that age, as had Antoine. She knew that Sylvie's reading consisted mostly of photography journals and fashion magazines. But she didn't fault Sylvie for that: how dull life would be if one's friends did exactly the same thing as you.

They watched in silence as the boy swam lengths. They smiled as he did a few somersaults and then floated on his back, looking up at the cloudless sky, framed by the dark-green needles of the umbrella pine trees that circled the south side of the pool. Marine found it curious that, even though there were available chairs on the opposite side of the terrace, Brice had chosen one near them. Perhaps he had thrown his towel on the closest chair and was going to leave as soon as he got out of the pool. She was about to ask Sylvie something about Charlotte—her beloved goddaughter—when the boy got out of the water, shook himself off like a dog, and sat down.

“Fun book?” Sylvie asked, pointing to the Thomas Mann novel.

“I wouldn't say fun,” Brice answered, not showing his surprise that this woman, who must be more than twenty years older than himself, would refer to Thomas Mann as “fun.” “Disturbing. And dense, but highly readable too.”

“Oh. Well, if it's too treacherous,” Sylvie went on, as if she hadn't heard his answer, “there's a great film version with Dirk Bogarde in the lead.”

“I've seen it,” Brice said. “Now,
Bogarde
was an actor.”

Marine and Sylvie exchanged quick looks. As if Brice too regretted his comment, he quietly added, “Thanks for the recommendation though.” He slipped on his earplugs, and like Antoine with his newspaper, Marine saw that their short discussion was over.

But Marine kept the image of Brice, floating on his back, in her head. What was he thinking when floating, looking at the sky? What
do
we think of when we're teenagers? Food? The opposite—or same, given your preferences—sex? Music? She thought of herself at sixteen, seventeen: a studious and polite girl. But it had also been the summer when she had been so conscious of a new silence that enveloped her parents—a doctor and a theologian in Aix—and Marine, an only child, had been unable to speak to anyone about it.

•   •   •

Antoine Verlaque walked into the Jacky Bar to the sounds of Billie Holiday. He was hungry and felt good after his long swim. He saw Eric Monnier sitting at his usual table, under the large framed photograph of the Cuban tobacco farmer. Monnier, seeing the judge, held a finger in the air. “Ze Lady,” he said in heavily accented English. Intrigued, for Verlaque had always preferred the scratchy and sad voice of Billie Holiday over the too-perfect one of Ella Fitzgerald, he saluted and walked over to the teacher.

“‘Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do,'” Verlaque said, sitting down.

“Written by Bessie Smith, I believe,” Monnier said.

Determined to outdo the teacher, Verlaque added, “Yes, and the lyrics a smack in the face to all the journalists who were so obsessed with Billie's private life.”

But Monnier had one up on the judge. “Look at this book of poetry,” he said. “I swear to God, when the song came on, I was reading this exact poem: ‘The Day Lady Died.'” He passed the slim volume—
Lunch Poems
—to Verlaque, who turned around and asked Serge Canzano for a whiskey.

Verlaque turned back and looked at the cover. “Frank O'Hara?”

“One of my colleagues at the high school—an English teacher—recommended him,” Monnier said. “Never a professional poet, this O'Hara. Worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the fifties and sixties.”

“A curator?”

“Not even,” Monnier said. “He took the tickets. Front desk. At lunch he'd walk around New York and then come back and hit the typewriter. Hence the title of this collection. Or that's what the jacket says about him, anyway. Lunch was his favorite meal.”

“Much better than breakfast,” Verlaque said.

“I hate breakfast,” Monnier admitted. “Always thought it something to get quickly over with.”

Verlaque laughed. “No alcohol.”

“Exactly. Lunch: I've gotten through the dismal morning and am feeling like working. Really working. I treat myself to a nice restaurant lunch and am surrounded by chatting people—workers, students, tourists. The food is salty, not sweet like at breakfast, and I can have a glass of wine to get the creative juices flowing and that perfectly complements my meal. And it's still bright out, and the world looks happy.”

Verlaque picked up the book, feeling Monnier's loneliness. He said, trying to be light, “Not much boozing goes on anymore at my work lunches.” Dinner was Verlaque's favorite meal, but he kept that to himself: the evening meal he shared with Marine. He began reading the poem, set on a Friday in July in 1959, as Canzano quietly slipped a Lagavulin in front of him. He finished reading and took a slow concentrated sip of the single malt.

“What did you think of the poem?” Monnier asked.

“I'm speechless,” Verlaque said. “It's beautiful,” he went on, “and I've never heard of this O'Hara.”

Monnier nodded, smugly smiling. “Could you help me translate a few lines?” he asked, leaning forward and taking the book. “Especially at the end.”

“Sure.”

“John door?” Monnier asked, pointing to the sentence.

“Ah. The door to the toilets,” Verlaque said. “It sounds like the 5 SPOT he writes of is a New York bar.”

“Whispered?”

“
Chuchoter
,” Verlaque answered.

“There's almost no punctuation,” Monnier said. “I'll have to loosen my poems up a bit. Breathing?”

“
Respirer
.”

Verlaque had another sip and asked Monnier for the book. He read aloud:

“. . . and a NEW YORK POST with

her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”

“It gives me goose bumps,” Monnier said. “Very wise that he doesn't end the sentence with a period.”

“Yes,” Verlaque said. “Like there's still so much to say about her.”

“Or he really did stop breathing . . .”

Their reflections were cut short by Alain and Emmanuelle Denis, who entered the bar, loudly arguing. Eric Monnier folded his arms across his chest and quietly barked.

“He's
your
son,” Alain Denis said, flopping down in a vintage rattan chair. He motioned to Serge Canzano with his pointer finger twirling in the air, and a few seconds later the cork gently popped out of a bottle of expensive champagne.

“That's right,” Emmanuelle Denis replied, still standing. “Brice—he has a name—is
my
son, and I'll decide where he'll go to school.”

“It seems like you're making a decision, all right,” Denis said. “Between the kid and me.” He turned around and yelled to Canzano, “Having trouble finding a glass, or what?”

“Alain, you're such an ass,” Mme Denis said.

“A famous ass,” Alain Denis replied, grabbing his glass of champagne from Canzano. “You seemed to like that fact when we first met.”

Monnier coughed, barely disguising another bark, and Verlaque tried to hide his laughing face in the glass of whiskey.