Toujours Provence (16 page)

A trap was set, which Robert described with some difficulty through his laughter. Twenty officers, disguised in swimming trunks, appeared on the beach bright and early and attempted to look inconspicuous despite the curious similarity of their
bronzage
—the policeman’s suntan of brown forearms, brown
vee at the neck, and brown face, with everywhere else, from toes to forehead, an unweathered white.

Fortunately, the fugitive was too busy getting aboard his windsurfer to notice anything suspicious about twenty pale men loitering with intent until they surrounded him in shallow water and took him away. A subsequent search of his studio apartment in Fréjus produced two .357 Magnum handguns and three grenades. Robert was credited with the collar, and seconded to plainclothes duty at Marignane airport, where his powers of observation could be fully exploited.

I stopped him there for a moment, because I had always been puzzled by the apparent lack of official surveillance at Marseille. Arriving passengers can leave their hand luggage with friends while they go to the baggage claim area, and if all they have is hand luggage they don’t need to pass through customs at all. Given Marseille’s reputation, this seemed strangely casual.

Robert tilted his head and laid a stubby finger along the side of his nose. It is not quite as
décontracté
as it appears, he said. Police and
douaniers
, sometimes dressed as business executives, sometimes in jeans and T-shirts, are always there, mingling with the passengers, strolling through the parking areas, watching and listening. He himself had caught one or two petty smugglers—nothing big, just amateurs who thought that once they were in the car park they’d be safe, that they could slap each other on the back and talk about it. Crazy.

But there were weeks when nothing much happened, and in the end boredom had got to him. That, and his
zizi
. He grinned, and pointed with his thumb down between his legs.

He’d stopped a girl—a good-looking girl, well dressed, travelling alone, the classic drug “mule”—as she was getting into a car with Swiss plates. He asked her the standard question,
how long the car had been in France. She became nervous, then friendly, then very friendly, and the two of them spent the afternoon together in the airport hotel. Robert had been seen coming out with her, and that was it.
Fini
. Funnily enough, it had been the same week that a warden in the Beaumettes jail had been caught passing Scotch in doctored yogurt pots to one of the prisoners.
Fini
for him too.

Robert shrugged. It was wrong, it was stupid, but policemen weren’t saints. There were always the
brebis galeuses
, the black sheep. He looked down at his glass, the picture of a penitent man regretting past misdeeds. One slip, and a career in ruins. I started to feel sorry for him, and said so. He reached across the table and patted my arm, and then spoiled the effect by saying that another drink would make him feel much better. He laughed, and I wondered how much of what he’d told me was the truth.

In a moment of
pastis-scented bonhomie
, Robert had said that he would come up to the house one day to advise us on our security arrangements. There would be no obligation, and if we should decide to make ourselves impregnable, he would install the most technically advanced booby traps at a
prix d’ami
.

I thanked him and forgot about it. Favors offered in bars should never be taken too seriously, particularly in Provence, where the most sober of promises is likely to take months to materialize. In any case, having seen how carefully members of the public ignore the shriek of car alarm systems in the streets, I was not convinced that electronic devices were much of a deterrent. I had more faith in a barking dog.

To my surprise, Robert came as he said he would, in a
silver BMW abristle with antennae, dressed in perilously tight trousers and a black shirt, humming with a musky and aggressive after-shave. The splendor of his appearance was explained by his companion, whom he introduced as his friend Isabelle. They were going to have lunch in Gordes, and Robert thought it was a chance to combine business with pleasure. He managed to make it sound infinitely suggestive.

Isabelle was no more than twenty. A blonde fringe brushed the rims of gigantic sunglasses. A minimal part of her body was coated with hot-pink spandex, an iridescent tube that ended well above mid-thigh. The courtly Robert insisted that she lead the way up the steps to the house, and he clearly relished every step. He was a man who could give lessons in leering.

While Isabelle busied herself with the contents of her makeup bag, I took Robert around the house, and he gave me a predictably disturbing assessment of the opportunities that our home provided for any larcenous idiot with a screwdriver. Windows and doors and shutters were all inspected and dismissed as being next to useless. And the dogs?
Aucun problème
. They could be taken care of with a few scraps of drugged meat, and then the house would be at the mercy of the thieves. Robert’s overwhelming after-shave gusted over me as he pinned me against the wall.
You have no idea what these animals do
.

His voice became low and confidential. He wouldn’t want Madame my wife to overhear what he was about to tell me, since it was rather indelicate.

Burglars, he said, are often superstitious. In many cases—he had seen it more times than he liked to think about—they feel it necessary before leaving a ransacked house to defecate, usually on the floor, preferably on fitted carpet. In
this way, they think that any bad luck will remain in the house instead of with them.
Merde partout
, he said, and made the word sound as if he’d just stepped in it.
C’est désagréable, non?
It certainly was.
Désagréable
was a mild way of putting it.

But, said Robert, life was sometimes just. An entire group of
cambrioleurs
had once been apprehended because of this very superstition. The house had been picked clean, the swag loaded into a truck, and all that remained was to perform the parting gesture, for good luck’s sake. The head of the gang, however, experienced considerable difficulty in making his contribution. Try as he might, nothing happened. He was
très, très constipé
. And he was still there, crouched and cursing, when the police arrived.

It was a heartening story, although I realized that according to the national average we had only a one in five chance of being visited by a constipated burglar. We couldn’t count on it.

Robert took me outside and began to propose his plans for turning the house into a fortress. At the bottom of the drive there should be electronically operated steel gates. In front of the house, a pressure-activated lighting system; anything heavier than a chicken coming up the drive would be caught in the glare of a battery of floodlights. This was often enough to make burglars give up and run for it. But to be totally protected, to be able to sleep like an innocent child, one should also have the last word in repellents—
la maison hurlante
, the howling house.

Robert paused to gauge my reaction to this hideous novelty, and smiled across at Isabelle, who was peering over her sunglasses at her nails. They were a perfect hot-pink match for her dress.

“Ça va, chou-chou?”

She twitched a honey-colored shoulder at him, and it was with a visible effort that he turned his thoughts back to howling houses.

Alors
, it was all done with electronic beams, which protected every door, every window, every orifice larger than a chink. And so if a determined and light-footed burglar managed to scale the steel gates and tiptoe through the floodlights, the merest touch of his finger on window or door would set the house screaming. One could also,
bien sûr
, enhance the effect by installing an amplifier on the roof so that the screams could be heard for several kilometers.

But that wasn’t the end of it. At the same time, a partner of Robert’s near Gordes, whose house was linked to the system, would drive over instantly with his loaded
pistolet
and his large Alsatian. Secure behind this multilayered protection, I would be perfectly
tranquille
.

It sounded anything but
tranquille
. I immediately thought of Faustin in his tractor, pounding on the steel gates at six in the morning to get to the vines; of the floodlights going on all through the night as foxes or
sangliers
or the cat next door crossed the drive; of setting off the howling mechanism by accident, and having to apologize fast to an irritated man with a gun before his dog ripped me to pieces. Life in Fort Knox would be a permanent, dangerous hell. Even as a barricade against the August invasion, it simply wouldn’t be worth the nervous wear and tear.

Luckily, Robert was distracted from pressing for a sale. Isabelle, now satisfied with the state of her nails, the positioning of her sunglasses, and the overall adhesion of her tubelet, was ready to go. She cooed across the courtyard at him.
“Bobo, j’at faim.”

“Oui, oui, chérie. Deux secondes.”
He turned to me and tried to revert to business, but his howling mechanism had been activated and our domestic security was not the pressing priority of the moment.

I asked him where he was going to have lunch.

“La Bastide,”
he said. “Do you know it? It used to be the
gendarmerie
. Once a
flic
, always
a flic
, eh?”

I said I’d heard that it was also a hotel, and he winked. He was a very expressive winker. This was a wink of the purest lubricity.

“I know,” he said.

We heard about Régis from some friends. They had invited him to dinner at their house, and during the morning he had called to ask what he would be given to eat. Even in France, that shows a greater interest than normal in the menu, and his hostess was curious. Why was he asking? There were cold stuffed
moules
, there was pork with truffle gravy, there were cheeses, there were homemade sorbets. Were any of these a problem? Had he developed allergies? Become a vegetarian? Gone, God forbid, on a diet?

Certainly not, said Régis. It all sounded delicious. But there was
un petit inconvénient
, and it was this: He was suffering from a sharp attack of piles, and found it impossible to sit through an entire dinner. A single course was all that he could manage without discomfort, and he wanted to pick the course that tempted him most. He was sure that his hostess would sympathize with his predicament.

As it was Régis, she did. Régis, so she told us later, was a man whose life was dedicated to the table—knowledgeably, almost obsessively concerned with eating and drinking. But
not as a glutton. No, Regis was a gourmet who happened to have a huge and extremely well-informed appetite. Also, she said, he was amusing about his passion, and he had some views that we might find interesting about the English attitude toward food. Perhaps we would like to meet him once he had recovered from his
crise postérieure
.

And, one evening a few weeks later, we did.

He arrived in haste, nursing a cold bottle of Krug champagne, not quite cold enough, and spent the first five minutes fussing with an ice bucket to bring the bottle to the correct drinking temperature, which he said had to be between 37 and 45 degrees. While he rotated the bottle gently in the bucket, he told us of a dinner party he had been to the previous week that had been a gastronomic disaster. His only enjoyable moment, he said, had come at the end, when one of the female guests was saying good-bye to her hostess.

“What an unusual evening,” she had said. “Everything was cold except the champagne.”

Régis quivered with laughter and eased the cork out so carefully that there was nothing but a quiet, effervescent sigh to mark the opening.

He was a large man, dark and fleshy, with the deep blue eyes that are sometimes found, rather surprisingly, in swarthy Provençal faces. Unlike the rest of us in our conventional clothes, he was dressed in a tracksuit—pale grey, trimmed in red, with
Le Coq Sportif
embroidered on the chest. His shoes were equally athletic—complicated creations with multicolored layers of rubber sole, more suitable for a marathon than an evening under the dinner table. He saw me looking at them.

“I must be comfortable when I eat,” he said, “and nothing is more comfortable than the clothing of athletes. Also” … 
he pulled his waistband in and out … “one can make a place for the second helping.
Très important.
” He grinned, and raised his glass. “To England and the English, as long as they keep their cooking to themselves.”

Most of the French people we had met were more or less disdainful of
la cuisine Anglaise
without knowing very much about it. But Régis was different. He had made a study of the English and their eating habits, and during dinner he told us exactly where we went wrong.