Hotel Pastis (26 page)

The three of them arrived at Les Halles just before six. In the predawn gloom of the Place Pie, the only indications that anyone else was up were the cars jammed into every parking space and the faint glow of light coming from the entrance to the market. It was well below zero, with a wind that chased empty cigarette packets along the gutter and sliced into exposed skin. Simon rubbed his unshaven face, and it felt like frozen sandpaper.

“How are we going to find her?”

“She said she’ll be having breakfast at Kiki’s bar.”

Darkness and silence became noise and bustle and glaring light as soon as they were inside. The aisles were
crowded, the stall holders shouting to make themselves heard as they filled orders and bellowed encouragement at indecisive shoppers. Ernest stood in astonishment as he looked at the stalls, every inch filled with vegetables, with meat, with cheeses and olives and fruit and fish, abundance piled on abundance.

“Well! I can see we’ll be spending many happy hours here. Look at the size of those aubergines—they’re enough to give a ballet dancer an inferiority complex.”

They made their way through the crowd towards the bar. Men in old work clothes stood shoulder to shoulder over small
ballons
of red wine and sausage sandwiches. In the corner, a solitary woman was making notes on the back of an envelope, a half-empty flute of champagne in front of her.

Madame Pons had passed the stage of being merely ripe and was now, in early middle age, voluminous. Below her dark red curly hair and fleshy, handsome face, chins cascaded into a white lace blouse. Her makeup was emphatic, as was her bosom, which rested on the bar like two sleeping puppies. Around her shoulders was slung a cloak of bottle green, and two surprisingly dainty feet balanced on a pair of elegant high heels.

Nicole made the introductions, and Madame Pons looked at them with lively brown eyes as she finished her champagne. Simon put a one hundred-franc note on the bar. “Permit me,” he said.

Madame Pons nodded graciously, picked up her envelope, and tapped it with a plump finger. “I have the menu for lunch,” she said. “A little
bouffe
—nothing complicated. Follow me.”

She moved regally along the stalls, prodding, sniffing, rejecting. Most of the stall holders knew her and were loud in praising their produce, offering lettuces and
cheeses for her inspection as though they were works of art. She said little, either shaking her head with disapproving clicks of her tongue or nodding before moving on, leaving Simon and Ernest to pick up her choices. After nearly two hours, they were both weighed down with plastic shopping bags, and Madame Pons was satisfied. She drove off with Nicole, and the two men followed.

“What do you think of her, Ern?”

Ernest was silent as he swerved to avoid a dog that had stopped in the middle of the road for a scratch. “If she cooks as well as she shops … Did you see the look she gave to that first man with the fish? Withering. I rather took to her, I must say. Rubens would have adored her.”

“There’s certainly a lot to adore. You saw she was dipping into the champagne?”

“Oh, I never trust a chef who doesn’t like a tipple. It shows up in the cooking, you know.”

They were out of central Avignon, and Ernest slowed down as they saw a girl in high boots and a micro-skirt bent over the bonnet of a BMW, her bottom presented to the oncoming traffic. “Do you think we ought to give her a hand?”

Simon laughed. “Ern, she’s a working girl—a hooker. She’s there every day. Nicole told me.”

The sun had come up, and the fields and orchards that had once been the private property of the Popes of Avignon glittered with frost. It was going to be a postcard day, clear and blue and bright, the kind of weather that promises good luck.

They gathered in the vaulted rooms that were to be the hotel kitchen and restaurant, now the temporary headquarters of Fonzi and his men, who were knocking
through the thick stone walls to make high arched windows. A fog of dust hung in the air, and the jackhammer was in full song.

Madame Pons gathered her cloak around her and tiptoed through the rubble towards the kitchen area. She stood in the middle of the space, turning slowly as she mentally arranged her ovens and burners and preparation tables, her refrigerators and dishwashers and pot racks. She paced out distances, gauged the height of the ceiling, studied the access to the dining room. The others watched her in silence as she moved back and forth in majestic slow motion. Eventually, she looked at them and nodded.

“It will do,” she said. “A little small, but it will do.”

With smiles of relief, they escorted Madame Pons through the dining room and up the stairs, unaware of the admiring glances she had attracted from the smallest of the masons. He waited until they were out of earshot and turned to Fonzi.

“Elle est magnifique, non?”
He shook one hand vigorously from the wrist.
“Un bon paquet.”

Fonzi grinned. “Always the big ones, Jojo, eh? You’d get lost.”

The little mason sighed. One of these days, if the affair of the bank raid worked, he’d be able to buy a suit and take a woman like that out, smother her with money. One of these days. He resumed his assault on the wall and thought about vast expanses of milky flesh.

Madame Pons slipped off her cloak and examined Nicole’s kitchen, testing the edge of a knife on her thumb, feeling the weight of a copper pot while Ernest unpacked the bags from the market. She demanded an apron and
a glass of white wine, selected Ernest as her assistant, and told Nicole and Simon to come back at noon. As they were going out of the front door, they heard the first of her instructions and a brisk “
D’accord
, dear” from Ernest.

Simon smiled. “How do you like being thrown out of your own house? She’s a tough one, isn’t she?”

“All good chefs are dictators.” Nicole looked at her watch. “It’s good, because there’s something I want to show you—a surprise for Ernest. We have time.”

“I think he’s having a surprise at the moment.”

They drove along the N-100 and then up into the hills. Nicole parked by the side of a high fence, and they walked through a pair of sagging gates. In front of them was a plot of land that stretched for three or four acres, still frosty, and, despite the sunlight, slightly macabre. It looked as though a violent and untidy giant had demolished a village and tossed the remnants over his shoulder—piles of old beams, blocks of cut stone the size of small cars, pillars, fireplaces, roof tiles, millstones, colossal ornamental tubs, an entire staircase leaning against the side of a barn, terra-cotta urns as tall as a man, everything chipped and pockmarked with age among the weeds and brambles. Nicole led Simon past a battered nymph with no nose, lying on her back, her hands crossed modestly over lichen-speckled breasts.

“What is this place?” Simon asked.

“A
casse
. Isn’t it marvellous? With these things, you can make a new house look two hundred years old.” Nicole stopped to look around. “
Merde
, I’m lost. Where is it?”

“What are we looking for?”

“Ah,
voilà
. Over there, past the beams.”

It was a statue, a large, weather-stained replica of the
Manneken Pis in Brussels, a corpulent cherub micturating pensively into a circular stone basin, blind-eyed and content, one chubby stone fist clutching a penis made from ancient copper piping.

Nicole tapped the copper. “This, I think, may be a little too evident, but Fonzi can adjust it.” She stood back and looked at Simon, her face a smiling question mark. “Well?”

Simon laughed as he walked round the statue and patted its bottom. “I love it. Ern will be thrilled. I know exactly where he’ll put the spotlight.” He put an arm round her shoulders. “You’re a clever girl. I can’t wait to see his face.”

They spent half an hour wandering through the rest of the domestic graveyard, chose some troughs and pots for the hotel terrace, and found the owner’s makeshift office in a corner of the barn. Simon watched with interest as Nicole haggled, asking the prices of several pieces she had no intention of buying, wincing as she heard them, shaking her head.

“If only one was rich,” she said to the owner. “And the old fountain? How much is that?”

“Ah, that.” His expression was soulful beneath his knitted wool cap. “My grandmother’s fountain. I grew up with it. I have a great sentiment for that fountain.”

“I understand, monsieur. Some things are beyond price.” She shrugged. “Well, that’s a pity.”

“Eight thousand francs, madame.”

“Cash?”

“Six thousand.”

They got back to the house at noon to find Ernest putting the finishing touches to the table while Madame Pons, glass in hand, supervised.

“Remember, Airnest, flowers are for the eyes, not for the nose. If they are too strong, they fight with the scent of the food.”

“You’re so right, dear. Specially freesias.” Ernest stepped back, frowned at the table, decided that it was satisfactory, and reached into the fridge for a bottle of white wine. “On the menu today,” he said, “we have a terrine of aubergine with a
coulis
of fresh peppers, roast turbot with a sauce of butter and
fines herbes
,
les fromages maison
, and hot crepes wrapped around a filling of chilled whipped cream and vodka.” He poured wine for Nicole and Simon and then a glass for himself, which he raised to Madame Pons. “Madame is a jewel.” She looked puzzled.
“Un bijou.”
She beamed.

They sat down at twelve-thirty and were still at the table, drinking a final cup of coffee, three hours later. Madame Pons had triumphed, and in an unfamiliar kitchen. Warmed by compliments and wine, she became expansive, leaning over to cuff Ernest from time to time at some of his more outrageous flatteries, quivering with laughter, the flush extending down all her chins to the apron she was still wearing. Simon knew he wanted to hire her when she refused to discuss business over food.

“Eating,” she said, “is too important to spoil with talk of work. The table is for pleasure. I might take a little Calvados, Airnest, and then I must go.” She held a hand up to her ear, thumb and little finger extended, the gesture that always accompanies the promise of a phone call in Provence. “We will talk tomorrow.”

They went down with Madame Pons to see her off. On the way back, Ernest stopped at his car to let Mrs. Gibbons out. She yawned and looked at him reproachfully.

“She doesn’t like dogs, Ern?”

“Quite the contrary, dear. She kept tossing little bits and pieces at Mrs. Gibbons while she was cooking, and it’s not good for her. Gives her wind.”

When they got back to the house, they were unanimous over the washing up. The hotel had a chef.

T
here were times during the next few weeks when Simon felt that his only function, the beginning and end of his usefulness, was to sign cheques. Everyone else had a job.

Madame Pons, always in the steepest of heels and usually with a glass in her hand, was supervising the design and equipping of the kitchen, interviewing sous-chefs, and constructing the hotel wine list. Two or three times a week, she would hold court at an old tin table in her unfinished kitchen as burly wine-growers or smart young
négociants
came in with their best bottles. These visits were always followed by an invitation to a return tasting at the property, accompanied by a light three-hour lunch. It was
l’enfer
, Madame Pons kept saying,
but how else would one discover the little treasures of the region?

Ernest was spending his life among brochures and swatches of fabric, samples of stone and wood, encyclopaedias of trees and plants, sketches and plans. He had taken to wearing a black, wide-brimmed Provençal hat; and with his bulging portfolio, covered in Venetian marbled paper and tied at each end with ribbons of moiré silk, he was beginning to resemble an artist looking for somewhere to paint his next fresco.

Nicole, when she wasn’t inspecting the fingernails and general suitability of potential waiters and chambermaids, worked with Ernest, taking him off for trips to the antique dealers of Isle-sur-Sorgue, the ateliers of metalworkers and carpenters, the garden nurseries where one could find anything from a sprig of thyme to a fifty-foot cypress. They would come back in the evening, flushed with the joys of discovery and acquisition, telling Simon how right his decision had been to avoid getting bogged down with all the details. “Cushions and sanitary fittings, dear,” Ernest had said. “Frightfully dreary.” It was odd, Simon thought, how both they and Madame Pons seemed to enjoy grumbling about what they obviously found fascinating.

Even the dog had a job. Mrs. Gibbons had appointed herself the assistant to Blanc, the architect, waiting outside the hotel every morning for him to arrive and greeting him with circular motions of her tail. For the rest of the day she would be at his heels, gradually accumulating dust and blotches of plaster as she waddled through the rubble, occasionally dragging a plank or a discarded chunk of roof beam to place at his feet. The masons called her
l’architecte
and trained her, with the help of scraps left over from their lunch, to fetch twenty-kilo
sacks of plaster, making bets on how far she could pull a sack up the flight of stone stairs. (This was done in reverse, to the sound of hideous growls.) Mrs. Gibbons was occupied, and content.

Simon, on the other hand, found himself becoming restless. It was exciting, despite the torrent of money going out each week, to see the hotel starting to take shape, to wander through the bare but elegant stone rooms and picture them finished. And yet, for the first time in years, he had nothing to do, no meetings to go to, no phone calls to make. The only time he’d called the agency, Jordan had been pleasant but brisk. Everything was going well; the old clients had settled down with the new management, and there were a couple of interesting prospects in the works. “Tickety-boo, old boy,” was how Jordan had described it, and as Simon put down the phone he had felt a twinge. He wasn’t important anymore.