The Prisoner of the Riviera Read online

  The thugs of my acquaintance in London were not always very bright either, but the whole affair was peculiar. “Why wouldn’t Joubert put the package in the mail if he wanted it sent? Why didn’t he trust the post?”

  Anastasie frowned. “Perhaps the post was watched. Perhaps one of the postal workers was corrupt.”

  Agathe shook her head. “I think that he wanted her dead. And, Monsieur Francis, he planned for you to be blamed.”

  Anastasie agreed. “When you delayed the delivery, Serge grew impatient. Or Madame Renard stopped cooperating.”

  “But who was she?”

  “That’s what we’d like you to find out.”

  “Oh, no. I found Cybèle, whom you could have found quite nicely on your own. Give me the notebook, and I’ll see that Joubert gets it back.”

  They shook their heads. “Have him come here,” Anastasie said. “Tell him you know where it is; tell him you can arrange an exchange.”

  “A mutually beneficial exchange,” Agathe added. Her smile gave me pause.

  “In the meantime,” Anastasie began, “you might undertake a little exploration.”

  I refused absolutely, although I did agree to contact Joubert, or rather, to wire Arnold and have him open negotiations with Joubert, who was to appear in person in three days’ time to retrieve his package.

  Chapter Ten

  The household went into high gear immediately. The aunts retired to their darkroom. Hidden under a big hat and one of the aunts’ long skirts, Cybèle was dispatched for a series of phone calls at the nearest public booth, and yours truly was left to mourn the loss of various cafés and bistros. I sat in the garden, studied the cypresses, and thought about Van Gogh, whose brush turned them to pillars of black fire.

  Early the next morning, we received the return wire: Joubert would come at the end of the week. He gave us his arrival time and expected me to meet him at the station. In the meantime, the aunts urged the utmost caution, as to venture out casually might endanger everyone. After my experiences in the nighttime town, I was inclined to agree, though I find caution disagreeable and abstinence untenable. Indeed, it was strictly boredom that led me to so complicate my life.

  Anastasie had taken a break from whatever she and Agathe were doing with the notebook and my passport to be. When she saw me sulking on the terrace, she came out and asked if I would like to see the finished dollhouse. I followed her into the front room where the sawdust smell had vanished and the paint had dried to the faintest odor of turpentine and oil.

  The house was complete. The ancestor portrait hung over the mantel in its gold frame, and the “fresco” was mounted on the ceiling. Diminutive tubs of flowers and two small conifers flanked the front steps, and miniature sling chairs sat on the back terrace. “It is delightful, Madame,” I said honestly. “Charming.”

  “Your contribution was invaluable,” she said.

  “And you’ve added figures.” To be honest, I had looked first for my workmanship and had only just noticed that a family of sorts had been added. There was a man, nicely dressed to the nines, lying in the front foyer. “He’s tumbled over,” I said and reached to pick him up.

  “No, no, Monsieur Francis. He is quite dead. And see here.” She pointed to a blonde woman, also dressed in evening clothes, standing on the stair landing. On closer inspection, I saw a tiny revolver.

  “Very dramatic. Do you stage murders in all your houses?”

  “This was a special order. Rather a provocation, I suspect.”

  “Does it represent a real house?”

  She nodded.

  “And the murder?”

  “That, too. No one you would know,” she added, which made me think the house was somehow germane to our present situation, but she said no more. “It’s to be delivered today. Would you like to go along? The house really needs two or three people to lift it safely.”

  “How are you getting it there?”

  “One of Cybèle’s old friends rents a van for us on these occasions. Pierre is such a nice boy. He runs the bicycle repair shop. Perhaps you’ve seen it.”

  My prospects brightened instantly. “I could give him a hand,” I said.

  He arrived within the hour in a dark green paneled van. Anastasie introduced me as Marcel Lepage, and Pierre, obviously a man of parts, accepted this with a straight face and shook my hand. I gave him a wink when Anastasie was not looking. We opened the front gate, sacrificing a few flowers and a strip of lawn to pull the van up to the front of the house, then muscled the dollhouse, swaddled in moving quilts and supported on its heavy plywood base, out to the van. It barely fit, and we both had scraped knuckles before our cargo was safely stowed. Anastasie gave Pierre a set of rapid-fire directions and cautions, then we headed east. Once under way, I promised Pierre a fine lunch.

  “Were you questioned again by the police?” he asked.

  I do love a man with a sense of humor. “No, I’ve branched out. And you’ve obviously remembered Cybèle.”

  “Old habits,” he said by way of explanation. “During the war, nobody knew anybody. It gets to be a habit.”

  “I suspect the old ladies have kept quite a few wartime habits.”

  He shrugged.

  Wrong ploy. “They wanted me to find Cybèle and now they want me to find where the late Madame Renard hid something valuable.”

  “They want to find where she lived, you mean?”

  “Maybe. But maybe she left—whatever—at the Villa Mimosa.”

  He thought this over. “We might check. On the way back.”

  “You know who has the keys?”

  “It is to be rented. Of course, the tenant would have to be someone foreign who does not know its history.”

  I liked the idea, but I was not sure that I looked prosperous enough.

  “Everyone knows the English are eccentric,” he said. “And an English painter—”

  I agreed we would give it a try. For the rest of the trip, we discussed the bike race. In between details of the mountain stages and time trials, I snuck in a few questions about the buyer of the dollhouse, but all I got from Pierre was that the man was rich and eccentric, which made him sound like a good candidate for the Villa Mimosa.

  Finally, I asked, “Did you know about the dolls?”

  I saw his surprise.

  “No, you couldn’t have, as the house was already wrapped up. They’ve staged a murder.”

  Pierre took his eyes off the road and met mine. “A murder?”

  “Yes, a little man in evening dress—beautifully done, I might add—and a woman in a red gown. He’s lying in the foyer and she’s halfway down the main staircase holding a revolver.”

  “Really!” said Pierre. His expression was unreadable.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just a coincidence. During the war a local man was murdered in his front hall. I remember people talking about it.” He gave me his beautiful smile before turning all his attention to the road winding through a neighborhood of fine villas with lush gardens and sea views. He slowed the van at a white gravel drive lined with palms, oleanders, and cypresses. At the end was a large pink villa with fine stone trim and a graveled parking area. Pierre went round to the tradesman’s entrance, while I opened the back of the van.

  A moment later, a pale, self-important domestic with black patent hair and shadowed eyes emerged. I guessed he was the butler, for despite the heat, he’d topped his shirt and tie and dark pants with a long striped apron as if he’d been hard at work cleaning old family silver or dusting off the wine cellar. He inspected the cargo, still shrouded in its packing, then directed us up the front steps and into the main foyer, where the miniature villa was to reside on top of a large and beautifully carved bureau.

  Pierre cut the strings holding the packing blankets in place, and we gradually unwrapped the Chava
nels’ handiwork. I heard him take in his breath as the façade of the little building was revealed. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Amazing detail,” he said.

  We had just lifted it into place when a door opened farther down the hall. The old man limping toward us had long white hair and thick white eyebrows above sharp black eyes. His high forehead was white, his cheeks eroded, his chin wobbly, and his head thrust forward by the curvature of his spine. The hands gripping his stout black cane seemed too big for the remnants age had left of his body, but he was dressed with care in an ancient summer suit, and all his accessories were elegant except for a pair of ugly black orthopedic shoes. Although Pierre greeted him and I nodded, he did not acknowledge us in any way until he had studied the house for several minutes, and I had opened the side panels for him. He paid particular attention to the figures and made a slight adjustment to the dead man who had shifted in transit from his pool of blood.

  “Merveilleuse. The ladies have not lost their skill. You may tell them that I am perfectly satisfied.”

  I assured him that his compliments would be conveyed.

  “Are you, Monsieur, perhaps the painter they mentioned?”

  “I assisted on the petite fresco and the portrait.”

  He took out a magnifying glass and peered at both. “A reasonable approximation,” was his verdict. “You are to be congratulated, as well. And you”—he turned to Pierre—“what do you think?”

  Pierre hesitated a moment. “It will be a unique decoration, Monsieur.”

  “It will be an accusation,” he said and through sheer force of will straightened out of his habitual half crouch. “That bitch fooled the police. She cowed my younger relatives with threats of libel and slander. But not me. Everyone who comes will understand my opinion without my saying a word. I will ruin her.” He gave a short, barking laugh.

  He struck me as ingenious and unpleasant in roughly equal amounts. I allowed that it was an elegant solution.

  “Do you agree?” he asked, turning to Pierre, who shrugged. I thought that my friend looked uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know you, do I?” the old man asked.

  “I think not, Monsieur. Unless you’ve ever had need of a bicycle.”

  “You are some sort of mechanic?”

  “I run the bicycle shop in town. It was my father’s.”

  The old man’s expression changed instantly. “Mechanics are the bane of this earth,” he cried furiously. “Get out of my house!” He raised his cane, and I think he would have struck Pierre, if my friend had not sidestepped nimbly and backed down the hall. The old man limped after him, screaming and cursing so loudly that he attracted the butler, who came running in a state of high anxiety. “What is wrong, sir?”

  “He just discovered that Pierre is a bike mechanic.”

  “Monsieur Lambert cannot endure mechanics,” the butler said.

  “He must think vans drive themselves.”

  “Monsieur Lambert has nothing to do with vans,” the butler exclaimed as if I had suggested bottom pinching on the plage, which might, indeed, have been his game. “He’ll be in such a state!”

  He ran to the door where his boss was clinging to the door casement and preparing to descend the steps. “Come, come, sir, you must not upset yourself.” The butler took his arm. “Let us help you inside. The noonday heat is very bad, the doctor says.” He looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Come help me with him.”

  I couldn’t say I was keen, given his blanket condemnation of a useful part of the populace, but I gestured for Pierre to move the van away. Then the butler took one arm, I took the other, and we more or less dragged the old fellow down the hall to a large, dark bedroom. He was swearing and muttering at every step, but I had the feeling that he was not as upset as his faithful butler seemed to think, and indeed, when offered a sedative, the old rascal called loudly for a cognac.

  I settled him in a chair and the butler returned with a bottle and a snifter glass on a tray.

  “Thank you. He will be all right now,” said the butler when we were back in the front hall. As if sensing some explanation was required, he added, “Monsieur Lambert has bad, bad memories. Though he commissioned the house, he must surely find it distressing.”

  “Because of the dolls?”

  “Of course,” the butler said with surprise, “but you are a stranger here. During the war, Georges, his only grandson, was shot while he waited for his wife, Yvette, to finish dressing for a dinner engagement. Monsieur Lambert believes she shot Georges,” the butler added loyally. “And probably she did. We all thought so at the time, though she claimed that she heard someone talking to her husband in the hall.”

  “But she was not believed?”

  “She was not credible. The Lamberts are one of the oldest families in the Var, and she was the sister of a mechanic who’d gotten rich in the black market.”

  I guessed that she had been unacceptable long before Georges met his end. “What happened?”

  “Georges’s death broke his grandfather’s heart. Naturally, he pressed for a swift prosecution, but the police never found the weapon and were content to blame the shooting on those assassins in the Resistance.” Though he drew himself up belligerently, ready for the fray, I was in no mood to argue French politics and let this pass. “And then Madame Lambert was Paul Desmarais’s younger sister. Old families and respectable people were set aside in favor of the nouveau riche. She was completely cleared.”

  Desmarais kept turning up like a bad penny. “What happened to Yvette Lambert?”

  “She still lives in the house. They say,” the butler lowered his voice, “that she puts flowers once a month on Georges’s tomb. What do you think of that?”

  When I told him that was exactly what an intelligent woman would do whether she was innocent or guilty, he nodded his head sagely. “They are a treacherous family,” he said. “Mechanics, all of them.”

  Then, as if he’d slipped on a jacket, he resumed his butler’s mien, put his nose in the air, and escorted me down the corridor. I stopped for a last look at the Chavanels’ miniature villa, pretty and sinister, a combination I rather like and one difficult to achieve. It was a masterpiece of sorts, and I hoped Old Lambert would take good care of it.

  I found Pierre parked just at the entrance. He was looking a trifle shamefaced, as well he might. Charming as my new acquaintances were, they all favored edited versions of events. “How’s the old guy?” he asked.

  “Upset. His murdered grandson’s wife and possible killer was Paul Desmarais’s sister, so mechanics are anathema. He’s proscribed your whole tribe.”

  “He would. Men like him are used to getting their own way, but he couldn’t touch Desmarais. At one point he even suggested the Milice, not the Resistance, might be to blame, but he was smart enough not to say that too loudly.”

  Pierre appeared suddenly to have remembered quite a bit about the case. “But if Desmarais was so important in the Milice, would he have agreed to such a thing?”

  “Paul was close to Yvette but word was that he never cared for her husband. There was some thought …” Pierre began and then fell silent. “The war presented opportunities,” he said a moment later. “People did things they would never have done in peacetime.”

  I’d had an inkling of that even in London.

  If Pierre was giving me the complete story, either Paul or his sister could have killed her husband, and, either way, Old Lambert might have a reason for hating mechanics. Not my worry. But if Desmarais and his sister were close, surely he would have entrusted anything of value to her, perhaps before he left the country. The business with “Madame Renard” surely meant that he was either dead or incapacitated, allowing Old Lambert to attack his daughter-in-law with impunity and Joubert to embark on some dubious scheme of his own. I thought that Yvette Lambert would be the right person to ask about
a number of things, but first there was the lunch I’d promised Pierre and our return visit to the Villa Mimosa.

  Chapter Eleven

  I waited until we had made our way through a fine sole with cream sauce and a couple of pichets of the local white. Then I asked the question that had been in the back of my mind since we left the Lamberts’ villa. “Old Lambert thought he recognized you, didn’t he?”

  Pierre shrugged, and for a moment I thought he would resume the fiction that he knew little about anything except bicycles and bike races. “He recognized my father. It still happens occasionally. We look very much alike. And a man that age would have known my father when he was young.”

  “He and Old Lambert were not friendly, I take it.”

  “My father was maybe the first mechanic to give him trouble.”

  A world of possibilities, but instead of elaborating Pierre immersed himself in the dessert menu and began plumping for the lemon gâteau with ice cream on the side. By the time we had finished with little cups of espresso, a good deal of the afternoon had slipped away in the service of gastronomy, and I had reached the pleasant point where the ideal balance of alcohol and food elevates the mind beyond earthly cares.

  “Do you want to see the villa?” Pierre asked.

  I could think of any number of more amusing activities, but our encounter with the old man had clearly unsettled Pierre, and he looked set to be conscientious. “I can get the key from Jean-Paul at the sales office,” he said and winked. What could I do but agree?

  We drove in minutes up the dusty road that I had climbed so slowly in the Riviera heat, past the white houses with their bare yards and red roofs, past the little side street by the church where I had watched two men in workmen’s smocks leave the villa. Pierre pulled the van to the side of the building, screened by the wall from the selectively nosy neighbors.

  “As you see, Monsieur,” he said in a fine estate agent voice, “this is an excellent property with adequate accommodation for all your needs. And the view, excellent.”