Monsieur Pamplemousse and the Militant Midwives (12 page)

He felt for his diary. Run with it, as Mrs Beardmore might say.

‘May I further suggest,
Monsieur
, since secrecy is the order of the day, Véronique telephones this number. It will connect her to Taxis Canine. They run an ambulance service for
chiens
. It will enable you to leave this building accompanied by Pommes Frites without arousing anyone’s suspicions.’

‘Pamplemousse …’ Monsieur Leclercq rose from his seat and advanced round the desk, hand outstretched. ‘Pamplemousse, there are times when I don’t know what I would do without you.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse glanced down at Pommes Frites, still struggling to take it all in. And there are times, he thought, when I wish certain dogs didn’t look quite so lugubrious. It makes me wonder if I am doing the right thing.

‘Do stop fretting, Aristide,’ said Doucette, later that evening. ‘You’ve been like a cat on hot bricks ever since you got home. That’s the second Krispy Kreme you’ve had. You’ll be making the door handles stickier than ever if you go on like that.’

‘I know the Director,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse gloomily. ‘And I also know Pommes Frites.’

In truth, he couldn’t remember how long ago it was since they had been apart for any length of time, and although he knew in his heart it was for the best, it still didn’t seem right.

‘I wouldn’t call Monsieur Leclercq streetwise by any stretch of the imagination. As for Pommes Frites, even now he is probably acting like a small boy staying with his grandparents for the first time – hardly able to believe his good fortune that they can be so gullible. I fear the worst.’

The words were hardly out of his mouth when the phone rang.

‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘Pamplemousse …’ The Director sounded in a state of scarcely suppressed excitement. ‘I have only been in this hotel for half an hour and I think I have struck gold …’

‘
Monsieur
?’

‘Have you ever come across a device for translating dog barks?’

Monsieur Pamplemousse was forced to confess he hadn’t.

‘It is one of the hotel’s extramural activities,’ said the Director. ‘One of the conversational aids Véronique referred to in her notes. I have a DVD in my hand at this very moment …

‘According to the wording on the outside of the box, it was invented by a Japanese professor who has
made a lengthy study of over eighty different breeds, including bloodhounds. Apparently his invention first of all breaks the barks down to the breed of dog, then into their frequency components. The result is analysed and transformed into digital voiceprints, which are then converted into words on a small screen.

‘He has also written a book on the subject. It is called
Boku-Inu no Subete wo Oshieru Wan,
which means “I, Dog, Will Tell You Everything About Myself. Woof!”.’

‘I didn’t know you were fluent in Japanese,
Monsieur
.’

‘I am not,’ said the Monsieur Leclercq testily. ‘It is all in the instructions.

‘Well, Pamplemousse,’ he said, after a short pause. ‘What have you to say?’

‘Does Pommes Frites know about it yet?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse. It was the only thing he could think of on the spur of the moment.

‘I have yet to apprise him,’ said the Director. ‘However, it is my fervent hope that he will greet the news with rather more enthusiasm than that shown by his master.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse winced as the slamming down of the hotel’s phone broke through the quiet of their living room like a pistol shot.

‘Would you care for a pick-me-up, Aristide?’ asked Doucette, breaking the silence which followed.

Monsieur Pamplemousse had not one, but several large ‘pick-me-ups’ before he retired for the night. Consequently it took him rather longer than usual to regain consciousness when the phone rang for the second time.

Screwing up his eyes, it was a moment or two before he deciphered the figures 01.49 on the digital bedside clock, and several more before he finally made sense of what was being said. It was a man’s voice, and it kept repeating the word
Estragon
.

He wondered if he had been re-living in his dreams the original message that had triggered off his involvement in the first place.

‘Pamplemousse! Are you there? Answer me!’ The voice at the other end changed its tune.

Monsieur Pamplemousse sat bolt upright in bed and came awake immediately.

‘Monsieur Leclercq!’ he felt a tremor of alarm. ‘Not … it isn’t to do with Pommes Frites, is it?’

‘No,’ said Monsieur Leclercq.

‘Thank goodness for that!’ Monsieur Pamplemousse relaxed. ‘So he is alive and well?’

‘Alive,’ said the Director, ‘but not exactly well. I am afraid he has blotted his copybook.’

‘Blotted his copybook,
Monsieur
?’

‘Not so much his copybook,’ said the Director, ‘as the pavement immediately outside the hotel.’

‘The pavement outside the hotel?’

‘Pamplemousse, I do wish you wouldn’t keep on repeating everything I say. It is, if I may so, an unhappy failing of yours. I have pointed it out to you many times in the past.’

‘Whatever Pommes Frites has or has not done to the pavement,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, as patiently as he could, ‘it hardly seems to merit shouting “
Estragon
!” at me down the telephone at nearly two in the morning. Surely it can wait until tomorrow?’

‘Unfortunately, Pamplemousse,’ said Monsieur Leclercq, ‘the answer is no! Matters have escalated since we last spoke. One thing led to another, and not to mince words, I have been placed under arrest.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse settled back down into the bed. ‘Perhaps,
Monsieur
,’ he said, ‘you should try telling me exactly what happened, starting at the beginning.’

There was a long pause while the Director marshalled his thoughts.

‘We dined well,’ he said at long last. ‘Rather too well as things turned out. I fear it may be partly my fault. Despite the fact that they are out of season, I ordered three dozen oysters, perhaps somewhat misguidedly in view of the hot weather.

‘We followed that with
foie gras
– Pommes Frites had rather more than his share of each. In fact, he consumed both courses with such obvious relish I
thought that with the aid of the Bow-Lingual his findings might provide interesting material for
Le Guide.
I had in mind a separate section at the end with canine comments.

‘Unfortunately, the first two courses proved to be an unhappy combination. Either that or there was too much liqueur in the Grand Marnier soufflé that followed the cheese … we shall probably never know. Suffice to say that somewhere along the line something disagreed with him.

‘There is a notice in the hotel lobby warning guests not to go walking in the Bois de Boulogne after dark, so after we had finished dinner we went straight up to our room.

‘In any case I was anxious to strike while the iron was hot and begin testing the Bow-Lingual. Unhappily, as is so often the case with even the simplest piece of electronic equipment these days, the instructions turned out to be rather more difficult to follow than the picture on the outside of the box would have you believe, and I’m afraid it all took longer than I bargained for. Being without any watchmaker’s tools, it was over a quarter of an hour before the batteries were installed. The screws were ridiculously small. They kept falling onto the carpet and getting lost in the pile.

‘It wasn’t helped by the fact that Pommes Frites began nudging me with his paw. When I finally got the machine working it was hard to know what he
was trying to tell me. Most of the noises he was making appeared to be untranslatable, showing up on the screen merely as a series of asterisks, interspersed from time to time by the single word “walkies”; an American term which I must confess I was unfamiliar with at the time.

‘By then he was jumping up and down and taking the Lord’s name in vain. There was a cryptic message to that effect that Jesus was in tears.’

‘Jesus wept?’ hazarded Monsieur Pamplemousse.

The Director could be very trying at times, but Pommes Frites was normally of a very amiable disposition, and it was most unlike him.

‘I can’t think where he can have picked that up.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Monsieur Leclercq, ‘since it was gone one o’clock in the morning I thought it could wait.

‘However, Pommes Frites clearly had other ideas, so when he started attacking the bedroom door I put two and two together and rushed him downstairs.

‘Then we had to wait while the night porter took his time over finding the key to the main door. We just made the pavement in time. In short, he wanted to go to the bathroom!’

Monsieur Pamplemousse sighed inwardly. The Director was certainly living the part. It was as well to humour him.

‘Pommes Frites never does “going to the
bathroom” on the pavement,’ he said. ‘“Walkies” was a very circumspect way of putting across the fact that what he really wanted was to relieve himself of
les besoins solides
. It was a loose translation.’

‘That was certainly the case,’ said Monsieur Leclercq. ‘By then there was nothing
solides
about them.
Besoins liquides
would have been more to the point.’

‘At least he hadn’t taken the Lord’s name entirely in vain,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘He must have been very upset.’

‘
He
was upset!’ barked the Director. ‘What about me? You haven’t heard the worst.

‘It so happened that a police wagon was going past at the time. They were returning from a nightly patrol of the Bois de Boulogne.’

‘And they stopped?’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I find that hard to understand.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’ demanded Monsieur Leclercq. ‘Clearly I had a problem on my hands.’

‘I say that,
Monsieur
,’ replied Monsieur Pamplemousse patiently, ‘because statistically, twenty thousand or so
chiens
leave ten tonnes of
caca
behind them every day of the year. It is, you might say, an unwanted gift to the city of Paris.

‘A brigade of sixty
moto-crottes
patrols the streets, but they have their work cut out trying to keep pace with it. That being so, a law was brought
in imposing a fine on anyone found allowing their dog to defecate on the pavement.’

‘And how many transgressors have been charged so far?’ demanded the Director.

‘The last time I heard it was four,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.

‘
Four
?’ repeated Monsieur Leclercq. ‘In how many years? That is disgraceful.’

‘If,
Monsieur
, to coin a phrase, your own charge sticks, it will now be five.’

‘It is still disgraceful,’ boomed the Director. ‘I have no wish to be a statistic, Pamplemousse. Besides, what is a dog to do when it has to obey the call of nature? There should be special
vespasiennes
for them on every street corner.’

‘I hardly think that would go down well with the public at large,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse dubiously. ‘Think of the queues.

‘The problem is the city doesn’t have its own police force to enforce the law and the Police Nationale don’t consider it a high priority. To put it another way, it is beneath their dignity. That is why I find it hard to understand why they stopped.’

‘One of them wished to urinate,’ said the Director. ‘I think it must have been brought on by seeing Pommes Frites. Then, following an altercation when I protested at his unseemly behaviour, they arrested me on suspicion.’

‘On suspicion of what,
Monsieur
?’

‘Not being who I said I was.’

‘Which was?’

‘Hirem K. Rosemburg. It was the name I used when I checked in. I’m not sure why, but it came to me on the spur of the moment. It has the merit of being easy to remember. For some reason they were unhappy and demanded to see my passport, so I intimated I had lost it.

‘They then asked me what the letter
K
stood for and I fear my mind went blank.’

‘With respect,
Monsieur
,’ broke in Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘it seems to me the police have a very good case.’

‘You sound just like my lawyer,’ said the Director plaintively.

‘You have spoken to him?’

‘He is on his way over here even now,’ said the Director.

‘To the hotel?’

‘No, Pamplemousse, to a police station somewhere near the hotel, which is where I was taken after they arrested me. Is it any wonder that I used the word “
Estragon
”?’

‘Oh, la, la!’ exclaimed Monsieur Pamplemousse.

‘Oh, la, la!?’ repeated the Director nervously. ‘What do you mean, Pamplemousse? Oh, la, la?’

‘That is Inspector Malfilatre’s territory. He will throw the book at you when he gets to hear. He once
broke a collar bone when he slipped up on a pile of
caca
outside his house. He has had it in for dogs ever since.’

‘It is coming to something, Pamplemousse,’ boomed the Director, ‘if a dog who, to all intents and purposes, is favouring this country with a visit from the United States, cannot have its motions without the person accompanying him being arrested. It was only circumstantial evidence anyway. I just happened to be holding the other end of Pommes Frites’ lead while he was at it. If only it would rain. A good downpour would wash away the evidence.

‘In vain did I intimate to the officer who arrested me that I am a close friend of the American President.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse sucked in his breath. ‘Whatever you do,
Monsieur
, don’t mention that to Malfilatre. It was an American dog that was the cause of his downfall. I understand it caused a good deal of merriment at the time because it was a breed called a Shih-tzû.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said the Director, ‘first thing tomorrow morning I shall issue a complaint at the highest possible level.

‘On the journey to the police station we had to share a van with some highly unpleasant creatures, most of whom appeared to be Brazilians saving up to go to Buenos Aires for some kind of operation.
Quite why they should be arrested for that I don’t know.’