Monsieur Pamplemousse and the Militant Midwives (10 page)

These and other thoughts flashed through his mind at lightning speed as Pommes Frites sprang into action, only to be erased in an instant as a cry of ‘
Couchez
!’ rang out from somewhere near at hand.

All around him people froze. Such behaviour was beyond the pale. One of the rules of the game, Article 17 in fact, decreed that during a throw everyone had to remain quiet and refrain from walking about, gesticulating or doing anything that could distract the player’s attention.

Pommes Frites, his instant reaction to sudden commands honed to razor-edged perfection over the years, literally hovered in mid air for a fraction of a second, his feet going like paddles as another object flew past his head, missing it by a matter of millimetres.

Whoever had thrown the latest boule was obviously a
tireur
of some distinction, for it landed on the preceding object with the deadly accuracy of a guided missile, low down and a little to the right of centre, lifting it into the air and sending it flying upwards towards a tarmac area away from the crowd.

It was still gaining height when it exploded. Harmlessly, as it happened, but the shock silenced
everyone around them and it was a moment or two before everybody began talking at once.

Hearing the pounding of feet coming from somewhere behind him, Monsieur Pamplemousse turned and was just in time to see a figure running across the Esplanade towards a waiting car. He was pursued by a second figure, already too far away to have any chance of catching up.

The first man was barely inside the back seat of what looked like a dark-blue Renault Megane before it accelerated away, jumped the lights, and disappeared in an easterly direction towards the rue Saint Dominique. Given the distance and the angle, it was impossible to read the rear number plate.

Meanwhile, Pommes Frites, for the moment at least blissfully unaware of the narrowness of his escape from certain death, picked himself up from the spot where he had landed and looked round balefully for the person responsible.

Suddenly his expression changed. Jumping to his feet, his face lit up as he loped across the stony patch of ground to join his master.

‘You realise, of course,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, addressing the new arrival, ‘that what you have just done is in direct contravention of Article 23, which states very clearly that any participant who plays a boule other than his own should receive a warning.’

‘That may be true,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘On the other hand, in accordance with Article 4 of the
Fédératation Francaise de Pétanque,
if a boule is broken into two or more pieces, the largest piece alone will count for measurement. Unfortunately, in this particular instance that is no longer possible. As far as I can see, there are no large pieces left.

‘Perhaps,’ he continued, bending down to exchange greetings with Pommes Frites, ‘the time has come to rewrite the rule book. The possibility of someone substituting a hand grenade for a boule is clearly one the authorities haven’t thought of. In the meantime, may I suggest we make ourselves scarce.’

Having ordered a Cardinal for Monsieur Pamplemousse and a
pastis
for himself, Mr Pickering left the bar and made his way towards a far corner of the room, away from the windows. ‘By rights, Pommes Frites should be doing the honours,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, moving his precious boules set to one side as his friend joined them. ‘Or I ought to be doing it on his behalf. If you hadn’t called out when you did, he wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I’ll take a rain cheque.’ Mr Pickering pulled up a chair. ‘Anyway, if you want my opinion, it’s a good thing we made ourselves scarce when we did. It saved us having to answer a lot of tedious questions.’  

Monsieur Pamplemousse wasn’t so sure. He’d heard the sound of police sirens coming from all
directions while they were beating a hasty retreat along the rue Saint Dominique.

Admittedly, it had been in the opposite direction to the one the escaping car had taken, but once descriptions had been circulated it would be more a matter of putting off the evil moment. The police would lose no time in putting two and two together, particularly when they got to hear about the activities of a certain bloodhound, known to have already blotted his copybook once that week. It was for that very reason he’d suggested they find a quiet corner inside one of his regular haunts. Joining the crowd of sun-worshippers occupying the pavement tables outside would have been asking for trouble. At least it being the middle of the afternoon meant no one from
Le Guide’s
offices was likely to disturb them, but you never knew.

‘I had no idea you were a
pétanque
player,’ he said.

‘It is one of my lesser-known accomplishments,’ said Mr Pickering modestly. ‘I must admit to being a little rusty, but for a short while I was the South of England champion.

‘Once upon a time I had aspirations to become a trendsetter.
Pétanque
has a lot of things going for it. Apart from the fact that it can be played on any old patch of level ground, it has one thing in common with our own game of bowls: the players don’t run around in ever-decreasing circles shaking
their fists in the air when they’ve scored a point. But I was fighting a losing battle. It doesn’t attract the crowds. The world is becoming more violent by the day.

‘All the same, I never thought I would live to see a hand grenade being thrown.’

‘Things are worse in the south,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse gloomily. ‘The mayor of Montpellier has had to cancel the annual
pétanque
tournament again this year. Since the arrival on the scene of Roma gypsies, the event has become open warfare. Knife-carrying spectators threaten players just as they are about to make a throw. Security dogs are the order of the day. Riot police are regularly called in. Things have become impossible.’

‘No wonder you are so cool about what happened just now,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘It’s small beer.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse shrugged. Inwardly he was feeling far from cool; his mind was in turmoil, wondering what would happen next. ‘It is all to do with money. In Montpellier the winning team shares a cash prize of over seven thousand euros.’

‘We live in strange times,’ said Mr Pickering dryly. ‘In England that would just about buy Beckham a new suit. Anyway, we must have a quiet game together when all this is over. As far as this afternoon’s episode is concerned, I’m sure you would do the same for me should the need ever arise.’

And probably die in the attempt, thought
Monsieur Pamplemousse, under no illusions as to his prowess.

‘When …’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I had better get some practice in.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘I doubt if I could give a repeat performance in a million years.’

‘Don’t tell me it was luck …’

‘Not entirely,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘It is what is euphemistically known as “rising to the occasion”. At such times it needs more than luck. You might say a professional golfer is lucky when he drives off and gets a hole in one, but since that is precisely what he is aiming to do, it would hardly be fair.

‘I think it has more to do with the coming together of all manner of forces in a moment of intense concentration.’

They both fell silent as the
madame
arrived with their order. Having wiped the table-top clean and arranged coasters and glasses to her liking, she placed a bowl of water on the floor.

‘Comme d’habitude,
’ she said. Pommes Frites lapped at it gratefully before settling down to think matters over. He was used to things like exploding fire-crackers – they had been part and parcel of the training during his early days with the Paris
Sûreté
, but it was the first time he had ever encountered an exploding boule. It seemed to him that if whoever threw it had been aiming for his master, he wasn’t a very good shot. That he himself might have been
the intended target hadn’t yet crossed his mind.

‘I’m afraid it may have put him off picking up boules for a while,’ said Mr Pickering, intercepting the thought-waves emanating from under the table. He glanced up as Monsieur Pamplemousse took a sip from his glass. ‘Good?’

‘It is always good here,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘The
Crème de Cassis de Dijon
is from Edmond Briottet and is high in alcohol. Also, it is made with just the right ratio of chilled Beaujolais.
Madame
knows how I like it, but today it is probably the best Cardinal I have ever tasted. Why? Because it might well have been my last.’

He watched as Mr Pickering slowly and carefully added some cold water to his glass.

‘You will find the
pastis
is of the same high quality. It is from Henri Bardouin, and is full of complex flavours and the smell of wild herbs from the Lure Mountain. One glass is usually more than sufficient.’

‘That is good,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘because I also feel in need of something strong. As Shakespeare would have it, “methinks there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”.’

He concentrated his gaze on the liquid in the bottom of his glass as it clouded over, its milky whiteness momentarily assuming the classic wraith-like figure. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing I didn’t live in the days when absinthe was all the rage. At
times like this I might easily have become addicted to the hallucinogenic qualities of wormwood; the whole ritual of it, in fact. The slow adding of the water to the sugar lump resting in its metal bridge.

‘What was it Oscar Wilde said? “The first glass enabled him to see things as he wished they were; wonderful, curious things”, and the second made him see things as they are not.’

‘If I remember rightly,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘didn’t he also say of the third glass, “It makes you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world”? It drove him mad in the end, along with Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others before it was outlawed.’

‘You are right,’ sighed Mr Pickering. ‘I’ve probably had a lucky escape. I was simply trying to get a feel of what is going on. It seems to me the world is not as happy a place as it ought to be. It is in a constant state of flux. People are no longer happy with their lot.

‘What would you say is the average Frenchman’s pipe dream?’

‘In the Auvergne,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘where I was born, they used to dream of moving to Paris and opening a bar or a small restaurant. But that doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Nowadays it is the other way round.’

‘In England,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘for many people
the dream used to be a thatched cottage in the country with roses round the door and two point four children, but I doubt if that is so any more. There have been too many disappointments over the years.

‘These days they are more likely to end up in the Loire Valley, restoring some old barn, having first made sure the nearest village shop stocks Oxo cubes, Tetley teabags and Bird’s custard. English people like the idea of France, but in trying to make it more like home they end up destroying the very things they came away to find.’

‘The last time I saw you,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘I thought you were heading back to England.’

‘The last time you saw me,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘I thought so too. Before I reached Calais I had a change of mind. Or rather, my mind was changed for me.

‘Word reached me that things were beginning to move. I gather there has been a major development. A demand for a large sum of money has been made; the equivalent of some ten million English pounds. Currently the French government is awaiting instructions.’

‘Do they know where it came from?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Or, more importantly, from whom?’ He wondered if the AZF were up to their tricks again. It bore the same hallmarks;
first the threat, then the demand, followed by a series of bizarre instructions, such as having the money placed on top of a tall building so that it could be collected by a helicopter.

‘I was hoping you would tell me,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘Strictly speaking, since the threat is aimed directly at France, I only have a watching brief on behalf of my own government, but I gather you are involved in some kind of emergency “think tank”.’

‘Not so much a “tank”,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘more a small bowl.’

It would have sounded rather lame to say that, apart from Monsieur Leclercq, the only other person he had met was Mrs Beardmore, but it was early days and events had moved so quickly it was hardly surprising. He guessed the Director must be in touch with others.

‘Mostly we are concerned with the “how” rather than “who” or “why”.’

‘It may prove hard to separate them,’ reflected Mr Pickering. ‘It could be a chicken-and-egg situation. Forgive the analogy with food, but if you want to find out what makes a particular egg taste the way it does, the first thing you do is find out what the chicken has been eating.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a noncommittal shrug. It was all too easy to become paranoid about the whole thing. The mere mention of the word ‘egg’
immediately set his mind wondering whether or not they could be a possible target for a terrorist attack.

And yet … and yet … He still couldn’t rid himself of Mrs Beardmore’s notion that it might coincide with some kind of seasonal event … something that was a cause for celebration. A national holiday, perhaps … or the arrival from the Landes of the first white asparagus in May.

He launched yet another balloon in the air.

‘If it were
aspèrge
,’ he said, ‘then ideally it needs to be eaten the day it is picked, so there is always a rush for it. Being grown so far away creates a problem. Sometimes it can be over a day old …

‘
Alors!
’ He threw up his hands. ‘But it could be injected with something
en route
rather than at source …’

Mr Pickering gave sigh. ‘
Alors
, indeed! What it is to have such problems. I envy you your vast resources. If you wanted to inject asparagus at source in the UK, you would stand a better chance doing it seven thousand miles away in Peru, which is where most of it comes from.

‘For the vast majority of English people, “fresh” means it was fresh when it was picked on the other side of the world. We used to be a nation of small shopkeepers and farmers, but sadly that is no longer the case. We have slowly found ourselves at the mercy of a few giant supermarkets that call the tune.

‘France has them too, but at the same time you are very protective of your way of life. You still manage to retain your small shops and, being largely self-supporting agriculturally, you are rich in possibilities. It could be so many things.’

Mindful of the Director’s warnings, and without naming names, Monsieur Pamplemousse enlarged on his meeting with Mrs Beardmore. Stripped of all its undercurrents, which in the light of day he had to admit might sound like something out of a cheap novelette, it didn’t add up to much.

‘It was rather one-sided,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling she had been hoping to get more out of me than I was able to supply.’

‘I am not in the habit of surfing the web,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘but I take it this cookery guru is American?’

‘Very,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘CIA. Specially flown over for the occasion.’

‘Then frankly, I am not surprised. She is probably coming up for air. US security is currently in danger of sinking under the weight of information flooding in from all over the world.

‘Some of it is true, much of it is false. The problem lies in sorting out the wheat from the chaff. At the moment they have a monumental storage problem.

‘Prior to 9/11, the CIA relied on an Information Retrieval system that could only translate text written in the Roman alphabet. With over six
thousand languages in the world, that’s only skimming the surface. Until they have the new multi-lingual National Virtual Translation Centre in Washington up and running it’s likely to remain that way. When everything is in place there will be a few early retirements on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘Even then, the machine has yet to be built that can understand and evaluate the subtle nuances in the way people write. Many words defy translation. It isn’t just a matter of literal translation, it needs careful analysis too; interpreters to interpret the interpreters. And as if all that isn’t enough, there are a dozen or more different branches of security after the same information for different reasons. Sharing that information doesn’t always happen as it should.’

Mr Pickering paused for a moment to allow the size of the problem to sink in. ‘Did your contact have any idea where the warning originated?’

‘We didn’t get around to discussing that,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.

‘It is all a question of communication,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘Most of the time there is too little, but there are occasions when you can have too much. It is a matter of striking the right balance.

‘Apart from the traffic provided by their own agents using normal methods of coded communication, the CIA receives information by the truckload from outside sources, in every language
under the sun and in every shape or form you can possibly imagine – from grubby scraps of paper bearing a cryptic warning in Arabic passed on in some remote Afghanistan bazaar, to waterlogged notebooks recovered from sunken boats that defy even the most sophisticated character recognition software.