Murder in Montparnasse
Praise for Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series
‘Phryne Fisher is gutsy and adventurous, and also well endowed with plenty of grey matter. She has it over Robicheaux and Poirot because she’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
Wester Australian
‘Fisher is a sexy, sassy and singularly modish character. Her 1920s Melbourne is racy, liberal and a city where crime occurs on its shadowy, largely unlit streets.’
Canberra Times
‘Greenwood is the class act of local crime writing.’
Weekend Australian
‘A joy to read.’
Newcastle Herald
‘Nobody does it quite as well as Greenwood. Favourite line: “never underestimate the value of inflammable underwear”.’
Sisters in Crime
‘Snappy one-liners and the ability to fight like a wildcat are appealing in a central character.’
City Weekly
‘Greenwood manages to evoke the elegance of the era in this charming tale [
Away with the Fairies
], which dwells as much on the wardrobe of the heroine as the morbid details of murder and mayhem.’
Vogue
K
ERRY
G
REENWOOD is the author of eighteen novels and the editor of two collections. Previous novels in the Phryne Fisher series are
Cocaine Blues
,
Flying too High
,
Murder on
the Ballarat Train
,
Death at Victoria Dock
,
The
Green Mill Murder
,
Blood and Circuses
,
Ruddy
Gore
,
Urn Burial
,
Raisins and Almonds
,
Death
Before Wicket
and
Away with the Fairies.
She is also the author of several books for young adults and the Delphic Women series.
When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates’ Courts for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.
MURDER IN
MONTPARNASSE
A Phryne Fisher
Mystery
Kerry Greenwood
First published in 2002
Copyright © Kerry Greenwood 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Greenwood, Kerry.
Murder in Montparnasse: a Phryne Fisher mystery.
ISBN 1 86508 806 4.
1. Murder—France—Paris—Fiction. 2. Fisher, Phryne
(Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
A823.3
Set in 11.5 pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to
Dr Ruth Campbell,
most excellent of historians—
this is all your doing, you know . . .
And in loving memory of
Cecil Murgatroyd,
parfait joculator
With thanks to the cast of usual suspects and Alice B. Toklas, who did all the cooking while Gertrude did the writing. I would also like to thank Mark Pryor (wine expert), the immensely learned Stephen D’Arcy for the bal musette and especially Kay Rowan, local history librarian for the city of Bayside, for her exemplary organisation and patience.
Paris is a moveable feast.
Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
Contents
The extremely active existence we lead does not
leave us leisure to devote the necessary care to the
upkeep of our bodies.
Auguste Escoffier,
Ma Cuisine
The sun glared off the shop windows, the wind blew fine sand which stung the eyes. It was both chilly and sunny, a thoroughly uncomfortable combination only found in the less successful ski slopes and in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda on this particular day in 1928.
The Hon. Phryne Fisher blinked, wiped her eyes, wished she had brought sun goggles and wrapped her sables more closely about her thin frame. With her fur coat, fur hat and Russian leather boots she looked like one of the smaller members of the Tsar’s guard who was about to lose his temper with a serf and resort to knouts.
She was cold, cross, half-blinded by the wind and just about to decide that she had chosen the wrong day or possibly planet for trying to understand St Kilda’s street numbering system when she simultaneously found Café Anatole and a well-dressed male body left it, mainly through the window.
Phryne stood back courteously to allow the man to complete his swallow dive. He hit the pavement with a thud and lay still. Phryne was mentally balancing (1) the duty of every human to go to another’s aid when they have been thrown through windows and (2) the danger of getting blood on her sinfully lavish and exceptionally expensive sables when the prostrate one rolled over, groaned a fair bit, then scrambled to his feet and stumbled away. This solved her problem.
And Café Anatole might easily prove more interesting than she had been led to believe. Bits of lettered glass crunched under her stacked leather heels as she opened the door and went in.
The letter had arrived the day before. Written in flawless, formal French, it had invited her to a special lunch at Café Anatole. It had been sent by Anatole Bertrand himself. Phryne had heard that his cuisine was remarkable and since the distance was not great, she had walked from her own house on the Esplanade.
A moment before she had been regretting the journey. Now, as a heavenly aroma stole over her senses, she would have walked twice as far, over a lot more than broken glass.
The scent took her straight back to Paris in 1918. Onion soup. Real French onion soup, made with cognac, with real gruyère cheese melted onto real baguette. As the slim, good-looking person in an apron tripped forward to greet her, she gave him a blissful smile which knocked him back on his heels.
‘Miss Fisher,’ she said.
‘Mam’selle does us great honour,’ said the waiter, taking her hat and coat. He saw a small woman with black hair cut in a cap, pale skin, bright green eyes and the most beautiful smile. He sagged slightly under the weight of the coat, hung it carefully behind the bar, and conducted Phryne to a table set for one at the back of the café.
‘The chef will be very sorry that such a scene greeted such a charming lady,’ he said. Phryne waved a hand.
‘Bring me a pastis,’ she said, ‘and we will say no more about it. Are other guests expected?’
‘No, mam’selle, just yourself,’ the waiter told her, beckoning to the girl behind the bar. Two men were already outside, fixing a tarpaulin over the broken window. In the kitchen, someone was roaring. Phryne recognised the voice of the bull chef in rut and nodded to the waiter that he could go. He grinned at her and fled.
The drink came in a moment and Phryne sat sipping and considering Café Anatole. It was as though some gourmet whirlwind had picked up a Parisian bistro and, tired by the journey to the Antipodes, dropped it carelessly in St Kilda, just before it ran out of land. There was the zinc counter with a saucy girl leaning on it. There was the row of stools for the passing trade. There was the mirror and in front of it an array of bottles, from Chartreuse to Armagnac. There were the little tables, each covered with a white cloth and over it white butcher’s paper. There were the wrought iron chairs. There was the group of artists drawing on the paper and arguing about Modernism. There was a group of respectable bourgeois, a little affronted by the brouhaha, settling back to their lunch; a meal, it is well known, which must be eaten with a knife and fork. Everyone in the café was speaking French. She might be back in Mont-parnasse at Au Chien Qui Fume, talking to the trousered girls from the Latin Quarter, drinking pastis and smoking Gauloises.
She sniffed. Someone
was
smoking Gauloises. And someone else was shortly about to provide her with soupe à l’oignon, or something else concocted by a master chef. Bliss. Phryne settled down to enjoy herself.
She wasn’t even beginning to be bored when the waiter brought her quenelles of pheasant in a delicate broth and poured her a glass of fragrant white wine.
‘Is the chef not dining with me?’ she asked in surprise.
‘Desolated, mam’selle,’ said the waiter. ‘An emergency in the kitchen. He will join you for coffee.’
Phryne shrugged. The quenelles, little spoon shaped rissoles poached in broth, were superb. Presently, the waiter brought her poulet royale with French beans and poured her a glass of white wine. She ate slowly. Each mouthful burst upon the taste-buds with fresh savour—tarragon, perhaps, or was it parsley?
She heard a shout of despair from the kitchen, and a cry of ‘Plus de crème!’ Sauce must have curdled, she thought. The remedy for anything short of an outbreak of cholera in a French kitchen was ‘Add more cream!’
Finally the waiter brought Phryne a tiny vanilla soufflé, a glass of cognac, a cup of coffee and M’sieur Anatole.
He was of the thin, stringy and miserable class of chef, weighing in at perhaps ten stone in a wet army greatcoat. His hair, far too glossy and black to be natural, was slicked back from a forehead wrinkled with years of concocting sauces béchamel, royale, crème and suprême. His eyes, of a pale grey, had been blasted by the heat from too many ovens and his hands had constructed far too many roux, garnitures and hors d’oeuvres.
Phryne rather preferred the fat, red-cheeked and jolly form of chef, but her excellent lunch had given her an attack of goodwill to all men, even one who resembled a shabby vulture who had just missed out on the last beakful of dead wildebeest. She held out her hand and M’sieur Anatole kissed it.
‘Thank you for my delightful lunch,’ she said. ‘The quenelles were superb. The poulet royale could have been served to royalty, and your soufflé melted in the mouth.’
Phryne believed in the specific compliment. The vulture face softened.
‘It is my pleasure,’ he said, ‘to please such a beautiful lady. Jean-Paul,’ he ordered, ‘another cognac.’
The waiter, who had clearly graduated magna cum laude from Cheeky French Waiter School, made a face which suggested that a chef who had dinners to cook ought not to be glugging down cognac at lunch, but he slapped down another glass and the bottle of cognac. He then flounced away, turning an ostentatious back.
‘He is my sister’s son,’ said M’sieur Anatole. Phryne nodded. French cafés were usually family affairs. She wondered what had brought such an obvious Parisian so far from the centre of all civilisation and culture—Paris—and decided not to ask. Besides, she had still to ascertain why she had been invited to lunch.
‘We have an acquaintance in common, mam’selle,’ said the chef. ‘M’sieur le Comte d’Aguillon.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Phryne. Count d’Aguillon was an aged, exceptionally respectable member of the Alliance Française. Phryne had met him when helping to find the Spanish Ambassador’s son’s kitten. She had beguiled an hour discussing . . . now what was it? Modern art? Matisse? Something artistic.