Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (4 page)

“I thought you two were asleep,” Florence said from above.

Capucine tilted her head back again and took in the heavens. She was rewarded with a small cascade of shooting stars.

“It’s on nights like this that you can understand the appeal of single-handed sailing. It must be pure bliss to be able to plug yourself fully into the cosmos.”

“Except that you don’t. You’re always worried about something. You’re going to have to hoist yourself up the mast in the morning to find out why the masthead block is making that funny squeak. The air smells like a small sea change that you weren’t expecting. You’re going to have to get a radio link and download the latest Met report, crappy as they are. You haven’t sat on the head in two days, and that’s bound to spell trouble. Stargazing is for pleasure cruises.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because I was nuts as a kid. I’m over it. This is the first time I’ve been on a boat in years.”

“But you were famous.”

“Famous and poor. Now I’m president of a company, even if it’s a very small company, and I have a bank account with actual money in it. That’s a very nice thing to have, I’ve learned.”

Capucine sat up straight. “And you really didn’t know that Inès was sitting on the lee rail, under the jib?”

“No. I’m sorry if I scared you both. I was a million miles away, in my own world. I had just come up on deck to relieve Angélique, and I made the course adjustment reflexively. Totally without thinking. I really don’t know how it happened. I guess I’m just not used to sailing with other people.”

E
ven the grace of the next morning’s flat, dark disk of the sea under the cerulean dome of cloudless sky did not come close to dissipating Serge’s high dudgeon. They were over three hours behind his schedule. The fact that no one except Serge cared in the slightest considerably exacerbated his despondency. He spent the morning diving down the companionway to his navigation desk, popping back up like a sweaty rabbit, shaking his head in despair. At one o’clock, in the middle of a lunch of
pain bagnat—salade niçoise
soaked into hollowed-out, garlic-scrubbed
tranches
of baguette—prepared by Alexandre and Régis, Serge dived back down his rabbit hole, only to reemerge wreathed in a victorious smile. Landfall off the port bow was apparently imminent. But nothing happened for twenty long minutes, when a gray smudge deigned to appear on the horizon.

“Nathalie, Florence, prepare yourselves. We’re about to change course.”

Florence poured herself another glass of rosé and dimpled at Serge. “In twenty minutes,
mon ami,
not before. Take it easy. Have some of the pain bagnat. It’ll do you a world of good.” Nathalie, at the helm, did not even look at him.

Serge disappeared below and popped up again in fifteen minutes. “Now?”

“Not quite yet.”

Serge disappeared again.

A few minutes later, Florence drained her glass and stuck her head through the hatch.

“Now, Serge, now. Come on deck.”

“Oh-nine-oh,” Serge barked in the stentorian tone of a black-and-white war movie.

The boat veered. Florence shook the mainsheet free of its cleat and let the sail out to a forty-five-degree angle, then repeated the maneuver with the jib. The boat righted itself slightly, picked up speed, and seemed to relax once its nose was no longer held hard into the wind.

Within half an hour the white cliffs of Bonifacio were visible. Serge raced up and down the companionway, calling out course changes. The boat veered to the north, sails full out, wallowing in the swell.

Soon they could see the town hanging by its fingernails to the rock above the cliff, as if in mortal fear of being blown off into the sea.

The rhythm of Serge’s dives below increased. Eventually, Florence lost patience, made a moue of annoyance, indicated with a tamping motion of her palm that Serge was to sit still. The boat rolled its way on toward the cliffs.

“Nathalie, come a few degrees to port, please,” Florence said. Serge jolted up to adjust the sails. Florence tamped him back into his seat.

A slim breach in the cliffs appeared as if by magic. Serge jumped up. “Nathalie, start the engine and prepare to lower the sails.”

“Not yet,” Florence said.

They nosed into an endless gorge, the town high above them. Only a miracle forestalled a collapse of the eroded cliffs into the sea.

“Now,” Florence said.

Serge leapt up like a jack-in-the-box. The warning shriek of the ignition broke the calm. The sails came down with a loud rumble.

The burping diesel fed them deeper and deeper down the endless rock-faced gorge. After fifteen minutes they reached a village, smeared around the semicircle of the gorge’s cul-de-sac. Around the little harbor, the berthed boats were as tightly packed as tinned sardines. At one end, a long row of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs defaced the white façades of timeworn houses.

Inching forward with the engine almost at an idle, Serge circled the marina in search of a berth. He finally chose one in front of a bar that was already animated in the middle of the afternoon. Awkwardly, he lined up the boat stern to quai and attempted to back in at a snail’s pace. Crew members from the adjacent boats appeared on their decks to scrutinize the maneuver.

A third of the way into the slip
Diomede
shifted sideways, threatening to ram the vessel on its port side. Serge spun the wheel, accelerated the engine.
Diomede
lurched even more violently at the neighboring boat. A man on deck—in his late fifties, white-fleeced barrel chest sun-toasted nut brown—put one leg over his lifeline and fended
Diomede
off, shaking his head, spitting out disgusted “
Oh là là là
s.” Serge jerked the accelerator lever, the engine roared, and the boat fought against the man’s leg.

Gently, Florence edged Serge aside with her hip. She threw the engine into forward and eased the boat out of the slip. In an attempt to reinstate Serge’s amour propre, Florence explained, “That bar is the hottest spot in Bonifacio. Drunks will be coming out all night, yelling and barfing. Kids love to pass out—or amuse themselves—in the cockpits of boats berthed out in front. We’ll sleep much better on the other side of the cove.”

She motored over to an empty spot directly opposite, swung the wheel hard right, gunned the engine in sharp bursts. The boat, once again docile and obedient in a master’s hands, pivoted in the opposite direction. When the boat was lined up with the slip, Florence put the engine in reverse, waited for the boat to gain speed, killed the engine, walked to the bow, picked up the line attached to the mooring buoy, stopped the boat’s movement, cleated off, marched rapidly to the stern, stepped ashore with both stern lines, cleated them off, and hopped back on deck. This was all done in seconds, with no more effort than a man bending over to tie his shoes.

Serge danced a jig halfway between envy and irritation.

Jacques said to Capucine over loudly, “You see, cousine, she learned to do that playing with rubber ducks in her bathtub. I tell you, rubber toys are the key to happiness.” His donkey bray was loud enough to echo off the cliff wall.

Serge examined the boat’s mooring with great care, retied one of Florence’s perfectly cleat hitches, and then collected everyone’s passports to deposit them at the
capitainerie du port
and register their arrival.

“The great thing to do in Bonifacio is to climb the steps to the old town and explore. The village’s architecture is unspoiled, and the shopping is fabulous,” he said. “When I get through with the port captain, I’ll join you up there, and we can have an
apéro
in a quaint bar and then move on for dinner. Some of the restaurants have absolutely spectacular sea views.” Once again Serge was far more at ease in his mantle of a Club Med vacation animator than in his skipper’s cap.

Spontaneously, the crew divided itself into two groups: shoppers and sightseers who wanted to explore the old fort. Capucine went for the shops, and Alexandre for the fort.

The old town, perched high up over the cliffs, was as precious as promised, crooked little streets hardly wide enough to allow the passage of a single car, rickety little houses leaning against one another for support, sparkling with fresh coats of whitewash.

Over the years Bonifacio had entirely given itself over to tourism. Every second shop sold postcards and T-shirts. The little group of shoppers eventually found a boutique that would have been at home in Saint-Germain. Muted, sophisticated techno music throbbed from a high-powered sound system, and anorexic, androgynous salesgirls in abbreviated skirts milled among the customers, murmuring advice. Capucine discovered a pile of fabulous linen T-shirts decorated with a styled wood-block version of the Corsican flag. As she was searching the stack for a powder-blue one in her size, an ecstatic Angélique rushed up, holding a pair of peach-colored espadrilles with long beige satin ribbons.

“Know what these are?” she asked with a radiant smile.

“Lanvin espadrilles,” Capucine said. “I’d kill for a pair, but Alexandre would never forgive me. They cost over four hundred euros.”

“Not these. They’re beautifully done knockoffs, and they’re only thirty-five euros.” Giggling, Capucine and Angélique rushed off to the corner of the shop where Angélique had found the shoes.

As Capucine ducked her head into a large basket, foraging for a pair in her size in a pale blue that would match her new T-shirt, she heard a squeal of tires and a blaring horn in the street outside the shop. She was surprised to see Angélique at the door. Capucine rushed out just in time to see Florence grab Inès’s shirt and haul her off the street into the doorway. There was a flurry of commotion. A small Peugeot with Corsican plates hurtled by, its horn blaring. A swarthy man leaned out the window, clapped his right hand on the crook of his elbow, raised his left forearm in the classic insult, yelled, “
Touristi Francesi, fuora!
French tourists, go home! Leave our island to us! Leave Corsica to the Corsicans.” The car rocketed off.

Angélique was on her knees on the narrow sidewalk. She must have been jostled in the attempt to get at Inès.

“Corsican separatists,” someone said.

“That brutal Florence shoved me,” Angelique wailed. “Capucine, if you’d told me there would be violent dykes on this trip, I’d never have come.”

Capucine gently took her arm. “Are you all right?”

“No, I’m very much
not
all right! Look at my knee. It’s bleeding. And my skirt is torn. Not that any of you care. And where’s my husband when I need him? Don’t bother telling me. I know perfectly well what he’s up to, that goddamn philandering cad!”

Inès very gently slipped her arm through Angélique’s. “There’s a pharmacy just at the end of the street. Let’s go there and have them put an antiseptic on your knee. The last thing you want is an infection. These streets are probably alive with microbes. . . .” There was a silent sigh of relief as the two walked down the street, Angélique taking great pains to limp theatrically. The fact that it was Inès who had been in danger was quite forgotten.

The group continued to wander and discovered a miniscule restaurant on the ground floor of a two-window-wide house. From the street it was obvious that there was a magnificent view of the sea. Cell phones were put to use to summon the fort explorers, who trooped in, moved all the tables adjacent to the window together, and ordered apéros of fortified wine. A frisson ran through the group when they realized that they were on the overhang, well out over the sea. Drinks in hand, they amused themselves by leaning as far as they could out the window, attempting, in vain, to see the cliff face below them.

Aude, who had been dispatched down the street to let Angélique and Inès know where the group had gone, arrived with her two wards. Simultaneously, the group from the fort became boisterous, anxious to learn about Inès’s encounter with the Corsican separatists. When everyone was seated, it was noticed that Serge was at the table, too, as if he had materialized from thin air.

“I ran up all those steps, and it took forever to find you,” he said with a sheepish smile.

Ignoring him, Angélique showed off her knee, which was covered in an oversize compress, and summarily instructed the waiter to prepare her a pot of tea from the herbal tea that the pharmacist had given her. With acid cynicism, she asked the group at large, “And, of course, my husband has yet to appear?”

Resuming his Club Med mantle, Serge gushed about the view and, in a confidential whisper, said that he had it on good authority that the food at the restaurant was outstanding.

Alexandre, who had been examining the menu, cocked an eyebrow at him.

The main topic at dinner was the violence of the Corsican separatists, who were famous for blowing up villas owned by the French. Capucine noticed that the waitress was so unnerved by the conversation that she avoided the table. As the main courses were served, Alexandre whispered in Capucine’s ear, “It’s a shame Nathalie had to boat sit. She would have loved this. The ravioli in marinara sauce are going to be worthy of Chef Boyardee himself.”

Serge overheard but misunderstood. “Don’t feel sorry for her. I needed her to top up our supply of provisions”—Alexandre winced—“and the boat needed a thorough cleaning.” He paused awkwardly. “And don’t forget, she’s being paid and we’re on vacation.”

The insipid dinner was served with a particularly muscular Corsican red wine that made up in vigor and alcoholic content what it lacked in quality and subtlety. Halfway through the main courses, vacation hilarity reemerged. At one point, Capucine looked up from Alexandre to discover that Dominique had materialized at the corner of the table, in front of an enormous plate of the Bo-yardeesque ravioli, their red sauce luminescent under a pile of dusty Parmesan cheese.

The conversation veered to the next port of call. The group quickly formed a consensus that the supposedly magnificent Costa Smeralda of the northeast of Sardinia—which had been lavishly developed by the Aga Khan and was now the econiche of movie stars and paparazzi—should be bypassed in favor of a more authentic Sardinia to the south.

Serge announced he had a close friend in Tortoli who owned a fabulous villa and who would be overjoyed to feed them dinner after they had swum on his private beach. The decision to embark at the first light of dawn on a ten- to twelve-hour sail directly to Tortoli was made by acclamation. As was a second decision to descend to the port and have a long series of nightcaps at the so-called hot spot that would have kept them all awake had they been imprudent enough to berth the boat in front of it.