A Provençal Mystery (19 page)

I took her off the hook: "But I really wasn’t so good. An errant flute-player in coffee houses. A bum, my father called me, and he was right." But I was smiling at the recollection of my past life, and regretted it not at all. "I had my heart broken more than once but still. . . . great times. The only thing wrong with them was hair. Mine had a mind of its own. It didn't fit the image I was trying to create."

"Mine lay flat and dank,” said Rachel. She smoothed her already smooth hair. “Maybe your hair was telling you something."

"Oh, sure!" I laughed. “Yes, indeed. Even if my hair didn’t change, I’ve had to. I’m getting older, and my bones can’t stand sleeping on floors. My old friends have become respectable householders with children and no extra space. I studied history, got hooked. Then grad school."

“Listen,” said Rachel. “Why don’t you and Roger join us for the game of petanque?”

Chapter 17

Rachel and I sat on either end of a green-painted wrought iron bench in a little park on the edge of the Rhone, waiting for Fitzroy and Roger to arrive. Ducks were swimming in the water of a nearby pool. After barking at the ducks, Foxy settled down under the bench, staring out at the world. The mistral had stopped; the day was bright and still. Rachel tilted her face into the sun, her arms laid out against the back of the bench, and her pose alone told me that something was different.

I said, "You’re happy, Rachel."

"I am." She glanced at me and smiled.

"Is it Fitzroy?"

“Martin.”

“OK. Martin. Is it?”

"We've just visited a couple of museums, had a couple of impromptu picnics. Nothing unusual."

"Remember his reputation," I warned. Then: "Listen to me! I sound like my mother."

"I don’t judge people by their pasts,” Rachel said in the voice I suspected she used with her students. “Especially pasts that gossip creates."

I backed off. "All right. Watch his behavior, then. He has a little streak of meanness."

"I know that. I know what’s wrong with him, I think, but I don't care. He’s brainy and attractive. But it’s more than that. He
knows
me." Her voice had gone soft.

"That could be an illusion," I said. I’d experienced feelings of intimacy like that. Oh, yes. But so often they turned out to be untrustworthy. What was this cat-like knowledge that some men seemed to have about women?

"Now you really do sound like your mother. Or maybe it’s your grandmother."

"My grandmother used to say no one chases a streetcar after it’s caught.”

"This streetcar isn’t caught yet." Rachel shifted on the bench into an even more languid posture.

"See?" I said sharply.

"Stuff it!" replied Rachel amiably. "I want to learn to play better pétanque. You’ve let yourself be caught more than once, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt you "

“It's true,” I said, remembering with some fondness the men that I had loved and lost—or left. Harry, the guitar-player, who had the smile and attention span of a five-year-old, but when that attention was focused on me, we created a crazy and joyful world. Artie, the marathon runner, with whom I could not keep up. The pilot I met in a bar, scarred in body but not in mind, who turned out to be too sweet for me. Jean-Jacques, a Parisian who taught me French and how to make a cheese souffle, then boarded a train to Prague, never to be seen again. And. . . “Better to be caught than not.”

Rachel said, “You’re starting to sound like Madeleine. Little sayings. Proverbs. With her, it works. Not so much with you.”

“Since you brought it up, remember how at restaurant she used the phrase ‘ride on a horse behind a man’?”

Rachel thought about it for a minute then said without much interest, “No, not really.”

“As a sign that a woman could be doing something outside the bounds of propriety?” I sounded eager, and eagerness did not suit the serenity of the place. Not that I was about to give in to the serenity. “A strange example, don’t you think? Have you ever heard it before? Have you run across anything like it?”

“I wouldn’t. My field is too modern. . . . How sensual, to ride behind a man on a horse.”

She’s in lovers’ country, I thought. No point in discussing anything else but romance.

I looked up to see Fitzroy loping toward us, leaning forward like an English don in an academic gown though he wore his usual outfit. When he arrived, he put down his pétanque ball case and sat on the bench next to Rachel, as close to her as he could get. She leaned slightly toward him, like a plant to the sun. "Ready? Where’s Roger?" said Fitzroy.

"
I see him coming from the other direction," I replied. Roger walked up quickly. He had a broad smile on his face. After greetings all around, we headed off to the playing field. Along the way, Foxy found enticing aromas of other dogs, who had visited spots we passed by.

A few old men were using the far court, which was shaded by plane trees just coming into leaf. Bark was peeling in strips from their trunks.

"Those trees look naked to me," I said.

"Half naked," replied Roger. "Peeling. It’s natural to them. Like your California sunbathers."

"Peeling sunbathers in California are usually from somewhere else," I replied briskly, grinning at him.

We found an empty court in the sun, and Fitzroy, who was at his best when lecturing, explained the game to me: "Someone tosses the jack—this tiny ball—to a spot about ten meters away. The first player from the other team throws a pétanque ball, trying to get it as close as possible to the jack. Then a player from the other team tries to throw his ball even closer."

"What if he hits the first person’s ball?" I asked.

"Allowed. Then the first team again, and the second team. And so on, until the balls are all out on the field. That’s one round. The winning team is the one who gets closest to the jack with any ball. That team receives a point for every one of their balls that is within a circle defined by a circumference point determined by the closest ball the losing team has to the jack."

"Come again?” I said.

He explained it a second time, unusually patient, “After all the balls have been thrown, we find the ball from the losing team that is closest to the jack. We use that point to draw a circle. Then we count all the winning team’s balls that are inside the circle. That number is the score.”

“The winning team can get up to three points. And the losing team always gets zero,” Rachel put in. “If each team has only three balls, that is."

"It looks easy," I said.

"Deceptively,” Fitzroy replied. “As a matter of fact, people spend years learning to play the game well, though anyone can play right away."

“A fine explanation,” said Roger.

“You could follow it? Even in English?” asked Fitzroy.

“Fooff!” replied Roger, warding off any more implied criticism with a wave of his hand.

"Let’s do it," said Rachel.

We broke into teams: Roger and I against Fitzroy and Rachel. Fitzroy and Rachel won the first round.

Roger turned out to be a shrewd player. In the second round, it showed. Fitzroy’s first ball came within three inches of the jack, mine only about a foot from it, then Rachel’s came to rest just slightly closer than mine.

Roger measured the distances with his eye, then he leaned down and with one long throw sent his ball in a curving path. After knocking Rachel’s ball sideways several inches, the ball cozied up to the jack, leaving our team the winner with one point.

I jumped up into the air, fist raised in victory. Fitzroy looked at me in disgust. I didn’t care. The game continued, we three Americans outclassed by Roger, who looked sideways with a big grin every time he succeeded in completing a clever maneuver.

In an hour, we agreed to one more round. Again Roger was the last to throw. The other team’s balls were within a few centimeters of the jack, mine an armslength away. Roger walked out onto the field and leaned down to look closely at the balls.

"Is that allowed?" asked Fitzroy between his teeth.

"It is," said Rachel.

“Are you sure?” he asked. His tone was cold.

“Absolutely,” Rachel replied.

I suddenly imagined Fitzroy picking up a heavy metal ball and hurling it at Roger’s head; then I elaborated on a variation of the fantasy, burying Fitzroy in the ground to his neck and I myself hurling the ball at the handsome face. I do have antogonistic feelings towards him, I thought.

Roger returned to the line, leaned forward, ball held in the backward curl of his hand, thought a moment, and then hurled the ball towards the jack. It careened into Rachel’s ball and knocked it away from the jack a couple of meters, then, lurching off course from the impact, banged into Fitzroy’s ball, sending it even further. The game was over.

In anger, Fitzroy slammed his right fist into the open palm of his left hand. Rachel put her hand protectively on his arm. He shook it away and walked with quick, tense steps to the edge of the playing field, where he stood with his back to the rest of the group. He seemed to hum with fury—every line of his body spoke of it. I was afraid, especially for Rachel. Could this man become angry enough to kill?
Had
he become angry enough to kill?

"Where did you learn to play?" Rachel asked Roger.

"Madame, I am a Frenchman from Provence. I learned from my father, who learned from his father," Roger said.

Fitzroy didn’t move.

“It’s only a game, after all,” I said, ashamed of my fellow American. Rachel, Roger, and I chatted uneasily, waiting for him to get over his snit. He hated to lose, that was clear. I had the feeling that he rarely put himself in a position where he could lose. And what did he do, day to day, with that buried anger?

Finally he came back to the group. “I must challenge you to a game of squash sometime,” he said to Roger.

“Of course. I play that, too, Professor Fitzroy. Also basketball. And tennis.”

“Quite the athlete, aren’t you?”

“Enough to please myself,” replied Roger, smiling quietly to himself.

“Oh, hell,” Fitzroy said, and started to walk ahead. Rachel half-ran to catch up with him.

That evening, feeling restless, I took Foxy out for an extra walk and decided to stop and have a drink at the Café Minette. When I arrived, I glanced in the window and saw Fitzroy and Rachel. They were sitting side by side, crowded together on one edge of a table. Their bodies were touching, their heads close, their right arms rising in unconscious unison as they drank coffee. Lovers.

Not right, I thought, remembering Fitzroy’s reputation and envisioning the practice that had gone into his posture, Rachel is so naive. I hesitated, then entered the café and walked to the table and stood over them, waiting for an invitation to sit down. It finally came, with some reluctance, from Rachel. Fitzroy looked at me coolly.

"Bored?" Fitzroy asked.

"A bit."

Sitting across from them, I could feel the heat of their sexual attraction, a steamy invisibility that wafted across the table and enveloped me, like second-hand cigarette smoke. I miss this, I thought regretfully. "What are you two up to?"

"A quiet evening after the pétanque and Martin’s ignominious defeat," said Rachel.

Fitzroy’s smiled, with a hint of resentment. "Ignominious, indeed," he repeated.

"After all, Roger has had a lifetime of learning the game. You should challenge him to tennis, Martin," Rachel said.

"Not today—or tomorrow," said Fitzroy. I imagined that their thighs were touching under the table.

"I guess I am at loose ends,” I said, feeling superfluous, but I didn't leave. I decided to use the awkward occasion to extract information. “What do you suppose Jack was doing this weekend? He’s so mysterious about it,” I said.

“Maybe he has a girlfriend,” said Fitzroy.

“You’d think that, Martin,” said Rachel.

“But he’s married,” I put in.

“Tell me,
does
he have a girlfriend, Martin?” I asked, knowing I was being too insistent.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then why did you bring it up? You must know something. Look. Someone’s dead. Every clue counts. If he has a girlfriend, that could provide him with an alibi. She could testify about his whereabouts.”

“He’s been staying at my place while he looks for one of his own,” said Fitzroy, who lived in an apartment on a short lease. “Sometimes he gets letters in French handwriting that looks female. He acts embarrassed about them when I give them to him. That’s all.”

“Maybe it's Madeleine who writes to him,” I said and saw his face fill with alarm. What was it with Fitzroy and Madeleine, and why was he acting so anxious about it? And could it be that Jack's animosity toward Agatha had something to do with Madeleine?

I thought if Martin had been less engrossed with Rachel, he might have acted more nervous about my interrogation. But he
was
engrossed with Rachel. Not his type, I thought, she’s not his type at all. He seemed to be the kind of man who usually pursued dramatic women, striking women with very red lipstick—even fingernails—dangerous and without intellectual substance. What was going on here?