Monsieur Pamplemousse on Vacation (4 page)

She peered over his shoulder at the screen. ‘Write … write … write … If that’s the best it can do I hate to think what it will make of last night’s meal – a lot of gobbledegook I shouldn’t wonder. It isn’t even in French.’

‘Patience, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘One out of three isn’t bad for a start.’

‘You need the man who was at the next table,’ mused Ducette. ‘His English was almost as good as his French. It could have been that he is from the Loire, of course …’

Monsieur Pamplemousse pretended he hadn’t heard. He was rapidly taking a dislike to the other guest, whoever he was.

‘Anyway, I thought you said it was a matter of saving space.’ Doucette gazed at the tangle of wires spread out across the table. ‘If you ask me it’s worse than ever.’

‘Even at this very moment, Couscous,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, enunciating his words carefully for the benefit of the laptop, whilst at the same time turning the screen away from his wife in case it made heavy weather of the endearment, ‘scientists all over the world are doubtless working
on the problem. By this time next year they will have come up with the answers. All the optional extras will be part and parcel of the whole. You mark my words. We are on the threshold of a paperless society. Best of all, this laptop slips into my trouser leg pocket and takes up no more room than the notepad.’

‘Things may be getting smaller,’ said Doucette, ‘but your fingers certainly aren’t. Anyway, by this time next year they will probably have invented something that makes it all redundant. As for a paperless society, I shall believe it when I see it. A small packet of paper used to last you months. Now you buy it 500 sheets at a time. People no longer write letters, but they use more paper than ever, what with their faxes and their emails.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse sighed. Some people were left entirely unmoved by the manifold wonders of science. ‘How about a walk before breakfast?’ he suggested.

‘I thought you would never ask …’ Doucette’s voice took on a dream-like quality and faded away as she padded off in the direction of the bathroom.

Left on his own, Monsieur Pamplemousse reached out to shut the lid of his computer only to discover … horror of horrors … it had seized up! No matter how hard he wrestled with it, it simply refused to budge.

‘Sacrebleu! Nom d’un nom!’
He could hardly believe it.

‘Merde!’
Banging on the table out of sheer frustration
he woke with a start to find his fist covered in grease and the sound of a baby crying.

A squashed packet lay in front of him, a sodden mess of gold foil and butter. The bawling child and its owners – an English couple by the look of it, lobster red – were sitting at a nearby table. They stared at him uneasily, the mother making cooing noises as she tried to soothe her offspring. As soon as they saw Monsieur Pamplemousse glaring at them they looked the other way as though nothing had happened.

Wiping the stains from his Cupillard Rième wristwatch he saw it registered a few minutes short of 9.30. He must have been asleep for over half an hour.

Recovering himself as best he could, Monsieur Pamplemousse blew some
croissant
crumbs from the laptop’s keyboard and pressed the power switch.

While the machine was booting itself up, spewing out facts and figures at a speed too fast to read, he caught sight of the Russian he’d mentally christened Nikita. He was seated at a table at the far end of the small terrace in deep discussion with another man who had his back to the café. The second man had close-cropped grey hair. Expensively dressed in a mid-blue silk suit, each time he made a gesture with his right hand there was a sparkle from a gold bracelet.

Acting on an impulse, Monsieur Pamplemousse set up the mini-camera facility, rotating the pod until both men filled the frame.

Choosing his moment, he gave a friendly wave. It
wasn’t reciprocated, but the Russian said something to the second man, who glanced round briefly.

Monsieur Pamplemousse captured the moment and stored it for reference in the computer’s memory. It was a very satisfactory experiment in covert information gathering. With no tell-tale click of a shutter, he could see all sorts of possible uses for it. He was also impressed at the speed at which the automatic exposure had corrected itself in order to compensate for the second man’s swarthy appearance, somewhere midway between the blue of the suit and his white shirt.

Getting down to work at long last, he began typing out a preliminary heading for his report on how the new equipment was functioning.

Despite Doucette’s earlier comments, his fingers ran smoothly over the keyboard.

Except … for a moment or two he sat nonplussed, staring at the words on the screen:
Qnylyse Fonctionelle Eauip;ent Nouvelle q Qristide Pq,ple,ousse;;;

Slowly the truth dawned on him. Monsieur Leclercq had been sold a pup – or rather two pups. Not only was the voice-activated programme for the dictating machine an English version, but so, too, was the laptop’s keyboard! Hence the Anglo-Saxon QWERT arrangement of the alphabet.

It was not a good beginning. Ill omens were rife. He was glad Doucette wasn’t with him.

Closing down the programme in disgust, he waited for the screen to go dark, then closed the lid. No
doubt there would be ways of changing the language electronically. Doubtless he could choose to work in Afghanistan if the Director so wished, but that wasn’t the point. It would still mean the tops of the keys would have to be swapped around in order to avoid confusion and he had better things to do with his time.

The sooner he collected the picture for Monsieur Leclercq, the sooner he would be able to relax and enjoy his holiday.

Glancing up, he saw the two men were no longer there. Presumably had they had slipped away while he wasn’t looking.

Bidding the English couple a polite good morning in gobbledegook, he went on his way. It could have been Greek for all the reaction he got, although the woman did give him a sickly smile.

Back at the hotel he found two police cars parked outside, along with a British-registered Rover and a top of the range black Mercedes-Benz S-Class with all-round tinted glass and an 06 Alpes Maritimes registration.

One of the uniformed policemen eyed him curiously, as though trying to place him. His time in the Paris
Sûreté
still followed him around. The affair at the Folies that had led to his early retirement seemed to be indelibly etched on people’s memories. Short of growing a beard he would have to grin and bear being recognised wherever he went for a long time to come. There were times when he might just as well have had his face on a
WANTED
poster and have done with it.

Pommes Frites was nowhere to be seen. For some reason best known to himself he had been acting very independently since their arrival. Monsieur Pamplemousse put it down to the holiday spirit. No doubt he would turn up when it suited him, and with the driver of the hotel courtesy coach into Antibes looking as though he was about to leave, he made a snap decision and climbed aboard.

A little way along the road, just past the first bend, he noticed a huge silver American Airstream caravan trailer parked in a lay-by cut in the side of the hill. There was no sign of a towing vehicle and it had an air of semi-permanence about it.

In Antibes he was just in time to catch the 10.22
Transports Express Régionaux
double-decker train to Nice. Choosing the top deck, he found himself in a carriage surrounded by American Mormons. Smartly-dressed and freshly scrubbed, wearing their metal name badges with obvious pride, they all looked too young to be called ‘Elders’. The world was growing more cosmopolitan by the day. The last time he had taken a train on that line, admittedly some years ago, it had been full of genuinely elderly local ladies on their way to market.

Gare Nice St Augustin
came and went and with it the once thriving Victorine film studios. It was hard to visualise it having been the setting for
Les Enfants du Paradis,
the first film he and Doucette had ever seen together. Given the almost constant roar of jet aircraft taking off from the airport on the other side
of the railway track it wouldn’t be easy to make its equivalent nowadays.

Afterwards they had ended up eating couscous at a small North African restaurant near Place Clichy, and the name had remained a term of endearment ever since.

Five minutes later they arrived at the
Gare Nice-Ville
.

Picking up a street map from the Tourist Office on his way out, and seeing a long queue outside the ticket-kiosk on the far side of the square, he took another chance and jumped on a local Sunbus which was about to depart.

Handing the driver 3f 50 in exchange for a plastic card marked
1 voyage solo,
he validated it in the machine and sat back to take in his surroundings as they headed down the wide main street towards the sea.

So far, so good. Already he felt in a better mood. With luck he would be back at the hotel in time for lunch on the beach.

At the bottom of the avenue Jean Medicin they entered the vast Place Masséna with its
Italian-style
arcaded buildings, their façades stuccoed in red ochre, the pavements crowded with shoppers and window-gazing tourists. Taking a left, the bus headed inland again alongside the landscaped area acting as a roof to the Paillon river. Now relegated to being a mere underground stream, it had for centuries been the dividing line between the old city of Nice and the new.

It still had its moments of fame, of course. In 1976 it had been the setting for one of the great bank robberies of all time.
Un ‘Coup’ Monumental
Nice-Matin had called it. In total the haul had been the equivalent of over $1400,000,000.

Monsieur Jacques Genet, the
directeur
at the time, must still suffer nightmares thinking about it.

A little away along the boulevard Jean Jaures he saw what he was looking for: the restaurant L’Univers – Christian Plumail. It was time to get off.

Bernard still waxed lyrical about an
entrée
he had there on the last inspection two years ago. An unlikely, but apparently wholly delicious
grande assiette
of tomatoes: stuffed, dried, roasted and plainly sliced, topped by a deliciously fresh tomato sorbet.

Bernard’s confession at the annual staff get-together that he hadn’t realised until then how many things one could do with a tomato had given rise to much ribald comment.

Entering the old town, Monsieur Pamplemousse began working his way through the maze of narrow, winding streets and tiny squares, making for the harbour area, where most of the antique shops were located.

The tall seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Genoese seaside Baroque buildings lining the alleyways on either side, their wrought iron balconies festooned with flowers and washing hanging out to dry, stood as a permanent reminder that they had once belonged to Italy.

He felt like
a flâneur
of old, taking his morning stroll. From being poor and run down, there was now an embarrassment of riches. At ground level, nouveau art galleries and designer-dress shops were sandwiched between old-fashioned
bricolages
and bars,
charcuteries
and
fromageries
; food shops of all descriptions, whose owners were probably steadfastly refusing to sell out. It was very different to the first time he’d visited Nice, long before he had ever dreamt that one day he might become a food inspector. In those days it had been almost a no-go area after dark.

It was hard to say who would win in the end, but there was hardly room for both.

Emerging into blinding sunshine he found himself outside the church of St-Martin-St-Augustin. Set into a wall directly opposite was a massive plaque dedicated to the memory of Catherine Ségurane, a local washerwoman who in 1543 achieved fame by mounting the ramparts and lowering her culottes in the face of a horde of invading Turks under the command of the infamous Admiral Barbarossa. Gazing up at her formidable
derrière
as she stooped to pick up her paddle, they had run for their lives. He didn’t blame them.

Making his way down to the street which also bore her name, he stopped once again and took out a piece of paper the Director had given him in order to double-check it against his map. Although he hadn’t registered it at the time, there was no name and no phone number, just the minimal address scribbled on
a piece of lined paper torn from a notepad. He didn’t even recognise the handwriting. It certainly wasn’t the Director’s.

A line of schoolchildren snaking their way past nudged each other. One, braver than the rest, placed a sticky finger over the autoroute to Cannes as he went past.

‘Vous êtes ici, Monsieur,’
he called, and they hurried on their way laughing happily.

Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered what would have happened to the boy had he tried it on with Madame Ségurene. Probably another bottom would have been bared that morning, and it wouldn’t have been hers.

He found the address he was looking for, sandwiched between a garage and a builder’s yard at the end of an alleyway not far from the antique market in the ‘Village Ségurene’. But this time his luck ran out. A roll-top shutter was in place over the front. The lock securing it looked new. On the other hand, if the other establishments in the immediate neighbourhood were anything to go by, most of them, including the garage, must do their business later in the day.

He tried banging on the shutter but there was no reply. While he was debating what to do next, a black Mercedes drew up at the end of the alleyway and a man got out. Dressed in plain clothes, he nevertheless reeked
Police Judiciaire
. There was something vaguely familiar about him, and his feigned surprise at seeing
Monsieur Pamplemousse wouldn’t have won him any prizes at the Comédie-Française.

Greetings exchanged, a gentle probe began. ‘What brings you to this part of the world? Don’t tell me you are in the antiques business now.’

Monsieur Pamplemousse was non-committal. ‘I am looking into a certain matter for someone.’