Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (18 page)

S
he had no idea why, but Capucine assumed that Régis was a late riser like Alexandre and put off her call to him until ten in the morning. Instead of the sleepy male voice she expected, the phone was answered by a harried young woman. There were several other voices in the background, the most strident of which was that of Régis, who was giving directions. She was interrupting a shoot.

“Who is it?” Régis called out.

“Someone called Capucine. She wants to see you,” said the harried woman.

“Great. Have her come here for lunch at one, if she’s free. We’ll eat the subjects.” There was a ripple of dutiful laughter.

Capucine arrived at Régis’s street, the rue Legouvé—a block away from the now ultrachic Canal Saint-Martin—at 12:40 p.m. and drove around looking for a legal parking spot. If it had been her own car, she would have been happy enough to leave it at a bus stop, but the last thing she wanted to do was impose a mountain of parking tickets on the person who had so kindly lent the car to David. Finding a legal parking spot, something she’d never attempted even in her student days, turned out to be far more difficult than she imagined.

She went around the block twice, found nothing, went farther afield. At 1:10 p.m., she finally saw a man pulling out of a legal spot in the rue des Récollets and shoehorned the Renault into the space. She was five long streets away from Régis’s studio. Rounding a corner, she saw a teenager snatch the handbag of an elderly woman and sprint in her direction. Capucine ducked back around the corner. As the young man passed her, she stepped out, hooked his raised leg with her foot, and lifted just as he was about to put his weight on his leg. The effect was gratifying. He rose in the air and dropped flat on his face, deeply skinning an arm.

Capucine twisted his uninjured arm in a policeman’s lock and prodded him to his feet. The boy, fifteen at the most, limp and soft, sneered at Capucine, saliva leaking out of one side of his mouth.

“
Salope. Vieille conne.
Bitch. Old asshole
.
What did you have to do that for? What did I ever do to you?”

Police phrases, subduing and authoritative, formed themselves automatically. “Take it easy, son. We’re going somewhere to talk this over quietly.” The moment of an arrest was always electric for Capucine. Beneath the endorphin rush lay a seabed of moral vindication. There was no joy sweeter than that of the altruistic avenger.

Reality kicked open the door to the scene. She had nowhere to take this perp. If she turned him over to the local Police Judiciaire brigade, she would be required to produce ID. When her name was run through the computer, she would be of far more interest to the officers than a juvenile purse snatcher.

She heard the
pan-pon-pan-pon
of a distant police car. She released the boy’s arm and gave him a little push.

“Tire- toi.
Get the hell out of here.”

He reached down to grab the purse. Capucine kicked his hand away. He looked at her, his pink gums exposed in a sneer.

“Connasse. Va te faire foutre.
Bitch. Go fuck yourself.”

He skipped down the street, waving both arms, giving her the finger. The police siren got louder. Capucine wondered if someone had seen the incident and called them.

Capucine ran off in the same direction as the juvenile. Thank God she was wearing ballet flats. In less than a minute she was at the door to Régis’s building. She realized she still had the woman’s bag in her hand. She couldn’t think what to do with it. She walked a few doors down the street and looped it over a doorknob. There wasn’t the remotest chance the woman would be reunited with her bag, but what else was there to do?

Régis’s building had been built as a small factory—there was still a railroad track running down the cobbled entranceway—but had been converted to artists’ lofts. Régis’s unit was at the back of the building. The door was ajar. She wandered down a long hallway until she reached a vast studio. In the very center, a large table was surrounded by a battery of lights and silk reflectors. In the middle of the forest of equipment sat a large, black, battered video camera, only a few inches above the level of the tabletop. The camera was unattended.

Régis sat at a small table a few feet away, a laptop computer open in front of him. Three women hovered nervously. A third sat in a kitchen area in one corner of the room, sipping coffee from a demitasse. Régis tapped a button on the laptop. The lights came on with an audible pop. Capucine was impressed that he seemed to be able to run everything from his keyboard.

“All right, children. Seventh take. Here we go,” Régis said.

Three oval plates, rimmed with the words
CHAROLAIS ALLÔ,
were lined up at one end of the table. Each contained a different form of steak with a different side order.

“Giselle, we’re looking a little dry here.”

A young woman darted over to the steaks and sprayed them with something from a plastic squeegee bottle.

“Perfect,” Régis said. He touched a button on the keyboard. “I’m rolling. Action!”

Giselle took up the handle of what looked like a miniature shuffleboard paddle running through a wooden frame. Slowly, she pushed the first steak out into the middle of the table, then the second, stopping a few inches behind the first, then the third, a few inches behind the last. As the steaks were pushed out, slight traces of vapor could be seen rising.

“Cut.” Régis touched a key. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

A large, flat computer screen on the far end of the table lit up. A close-up of the steaks appeared. It looked like they were being pushed out on the table by unseen human hands. The vapor, looking like wisps of steam, was more apparent on the screen. The meat was astonishingly inviting, hot, moist, cooked to perfection, more luscious than any steak Capucine had ever eaten.

“It’s a good one,” Régis said. “Let’s do the béarnaise shot, and then we can break for lunch. Antoinette, I need new steak. This stuff is already drying out and beginning to look tough.”

Antoinette went to the kitchen area, took a raw steak out of a waist-high refrigerator, held it with a pair of pincers, lit an industrial blowtorch, and charred the steak. In less than a minute it looked like it had been cooked on an outdoor grill. She placed it on one of the Charolais Allô dishes and spooned some fries next to it. The fries tinkled as they landed on the plate, as if they were made of some brittle material. She took the plate to the studio table, plumped the steak up with her fingers and then meticulously arranged the fries in a loose pyramid. She sprayed the plate with her squeegee and gave Régis a thumbs-up.

“Here we go. Action!” Régis said.

The plate began to rotate slowly. Capucine hadn’t realized the center section of the table was a lazy Susan.

From his computer terminal, Régis muttered, “Good, good.” He looked up. “All right, Véronique, cue the béarnaise.”

A woman arrived with an antique English sauceboat. A homely woman in a pink halter, cutoff jeans, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wore no makeup. The lazy Susan stopped. The woman extended her sauceboat in the direction of the plate. The hand that held the sauceboat was a study in perfection, not only as graceful as the hand of a Botticelli Madonna but exquisitely manicured. The nails as pure and luminous as mother of pearl, the skin was ivory white and completely blemish free.

The woman tilted the sauceboat. For a long moment nothing happened. Finally, a large excremental blob of chrome-yellow sauce plopped onto the plate.

“Antoinette!” Régis yelled just as Antoinette was already rushing up to collect the sauceboat and the plate.

There was a moment of calm as Antoinette went to work in the kitchen. Régis caught sight of Capucine.

“Capucine, you’re here. How wonderful.” He did a double take. “You got adventuresome with your hair.”

Capucine could see he was searching in vain for something flattering to say about the new hairdo.

“Don’t worry. I’m going back to my usual style. Alexandre hates it.”

“Let me introduce the team. This is Giselle. She’s the prop girl. And the young one is Daphne, the intern who does all the heavy lifting. And the body and brains behind the exquisite hand is Véronique. She’s a full-time hand model and not on our payroll, but I use her all the time. I rarely have faces in my ads, but I almost always include hands.”

Antoinette returned with a fresh plate, which she placed on the lazy Susan.

“And this is Antoinette. She’s in charge of food prep. She’s a genius, by the way. I’d be lost without her.”

The scene was repeated. The dish rotated; Véronique arrived with the sauceboat of béarnaise. This time it flowed unctuously. Régis had left the monitor on. The béarnaise was creamy, flecked with dark green speckles, presumably tarragon. Capucine could see herself dipping the perfect fries into the perfect béarnaise. It would be superb. She was half tempted to twist Alexandre’s arm into giving Charolais Allô a try.

“Okay, children. Got it on the first take. Brilliant. We’re done for the morning. We’ll finish the shoot after lunch.”

The lights died. Antoinette cleared the stage.

“Where is your old devil of a husband? I’d thought you’d be bringing him.”

“He wanted to come but had to go to a restaurant he wants to review.”

“In August?” Régis raised his eyebrows in a pantomime of incredulity.

“Was that really béarnaise?” Capucine asked. It looked absolutely delicious. There was a titter of laughter from the women in the room.

“My dear, if you put a real béarnaise under those lights, it would separate in less than fifteen seconds. That’s one of Antoinette’s secret recipes. Guaranteed not to contain a single edible ingredient.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Of course not.” Régis was slightly offended. “The law is quite clear. A restaurant can’t show portions larger than what they serve, but they have every right to make their food look as appetizing as they can. I apply makeup to my actors exactly the same way feature-length movie directors make up their actors. Well, it’s true the béarnaise is a bit artificial, but think of it as the stuntman standing in for the real béarnaise.” He laughed happily.

The women left, and Antoinette led Capucine and Régis to the kitchen area.

“I’m trying out something new on you. I’ve figured out a way to make those steaks we shoot edible,” Antoinette said.

Capucine sat in front of places that had been laid at the kitchen table. Antoinette produced a platter with two tournedos that looked even more delicious than the ones that had been photographed.

“These are some of the understudies I blowtorched for this morning’s shoot. These haven’t been sprayed with glycerin, so they’re perfectly edible. You know, I freeze the steaks before I run the blowtorch over them, so they stay raw inside. They look more appetizing that way. I take the steaks out of the refrigerator and pop them in a two-hundred-degree oven for forty-five minutes. That’s all there is to it. Tell me what you think.”

Capucine cut a piece out of her steak. It looked like no steak she’d ever had before. Beneath the crisp, charred exterior left by the blowtorch, the meat was a uniform pink monochrome from top to bottom, with not the slightest variation in hue. It was so tender, Capucine was sure it would melt in her mouth if she sucked on it. Still, delicious as it was, its unnaturalness was slightly unsettling.

Antoinette put another platter on the table.

“Nothing magic about this. I can’t serve you the fries. They’ve been coated with silicone. These are some of the potatoes they sent us. I sliced them up and fried them in duck fat for half an hour with a little diced garlic and chopped parsley. Good old
pommes de terre sarladaises.
Nothing better.”

She clunked a bottle of Côtes du Rhône on the table and made for the door.

“I’m glad you dropped by,” Régis said, pouring the wine. “I’d been meaning to call you and Alexandre. I looked for the two of you on the dock in Port Grimaud, but I guess you’d already left. It really was unconscionable the way everyone disappeared the instant we docked.”

“What happened to Aude? Are you still seeing her?”

“Aude.” Régis pursed his lips and squinched his eyebrows together. “She vanished in Port Grimaud. She wouldn’t even have lunch with me. I suppose she took the first train back to Paris. I haven’t seen her since. I’ve tried calling a couple of times, but her cell phone goes right to voice mail and her landline has been disconnected. My guess is that she’s already in the States, looking for a place to live.”

He paused, thinking about Aude.

“Nice girl. Beautiful. But very spacey. You never knew what she was thinking. A lot of the time it was as if she was on another planet.” He snapped himself out of his reverie. “No point in worrying about her anymore. You can’t win them all.”

“So what are you and Alexandre doing with the rest of your summer? You’re not back at work, are you? Are the police investigating the death of that poor girl, or has it just been filed away as an accident?”

“As far as I know, there’s nothing to file away. The report from the Italian police hasn’t arrived yet.” At the words “as far as I know,” Régis looked at her quizzically but said nothing.

“What an awful night that was,” Régis said finally.

“I thought you slept through it all and only woke up when Serge started shouting on the radio.”

“Not at all. I couldn’t sleep a wink. It was Aude who was tucked into her little corner, sleeping like a princess. I was just lying there, watching Alexandre and Jacques play backgammon on the settee on the other side of the salon. They were trying to be quiet, but it was very easy to hear their conversation. Jacques loves to tease Alexandre, doesn’t he? He’s very funny when he does it.”

“And that was it? Nobody came or went?”

“No one. You were the last person to go on deck and the first person to come below two hours later, when you came to get Serge.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t nod off?”

“Positive. I’m a very light sleeper even in my own bed, much less on a sofa in a public area.”