The Dave Bliss Quintet (35 page)

“I'm not the villain here,” he wants to proclaim, but realizes that in a way the widows may see him as worse than the Nazis; the invaders took their menfolk — he is threatening to desecrate their souls. Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the assembly is the fact that several women in the front row are knitting.

What has Daisy told them? he wonders, although there is no hiding his guilt. The manuscript of his novel is in his hand and he's half expecting a bunch of them to rush him, smack him in the face, and pinch it, when one old crone grips the pew in front of her, hauls herself as upright as she has been in years, and launches into a tirade. “
Espè ce de salaud, je vais te casser la gueule
.”

She's not happy, he guesses from her tone, and looks to Daisy for help.

“She's gaga,” whispers Daisy, feeling that to be translation enough, and the priest warns the congregants to be careful with their words — God is listening.

Women, as spectral as their men, who have shied away from the glare of public pity for sixty years in an effort to preserve the fragile tenets of their belief, mutter behind clenched gums, hoping God will not hear. Bliss gets the message. The fierceness of the thirty-odd stares worries him, although he is relieved to see that at least a dozen look dazed, as though they've been dragged out of a home for the senile aged. If they'd ganged together as determinedly on the Nazis perhaps they would have got their men back, he is thinking, as another flies at him without ceremony.

“
Vous fourrez votre nez dans les affaires des autres
.”

“You should not put your nose into zhe affairs of others,” Daisy translates unnecessarily, as another, with a silvery topknot, shouts, “
Occupe-toi de tes oignons
.”

Bliss holds up his hand to Daisy. “I get it: I should look after my own onions.”

“
Oui
.”

The priest steps in with a sermon of tolerance as the women, all in their eighties and nineties, start to edge forward.

“
Ç a va chauffer
— it is hotting up,” warns Daisy, though Bliss doesn't need telling as he realizes that the passion may not simply be religious fervour, that there may be another dynamic. Thinking, this is worse than a bunch of civil libertarians trying to spring a freedom marcher after a riot, he wonders if they really know what they are trying to achieve. Then it dawns on him that they may have
turned their misfortune into a lucrative profession, and now, as they come close to retirement, this big clumsy Englishman —
un casseur anglais —
threatens to dispel the château's mystique and end their careers. I wonder if the widows have survived on State sympathy since the château took their husbands, he thinks, surmising some may even have benefited from the guilt of the Judases who'd arranged for some of their men to be spirited away.

“If there is anything else you need, Madame ...”
boulangers, charcutiers,
and other purveyors may fawn, discreetly delivering sacraments of bread and meat in atonement, as they and their predecessors have done for nearly sixty years.

One old woman, described by Daisy as “
une vielle toupie
,” complains, “
Ç a me donne une indigestion
.”

“I got that,” says Bliss, asking Daisy to tell her he is sorry he's upset her stomach, but perhaps it is time they move on with their lives.

“We will never
capituler
,” another shouts, with a smattering of English, confirming Bliss's suspicions that after sixty years of silence the embarrassment factor will deter any of them from publicly acknowledging the truth. This is not like exhuming the bodies; this is disinterring the past — their past — when they had manned the front lines while their men were picked off. Were they any different than the thousands of returning front line troops who'd taken their nightmares to the grave fifty years later with their widows crying, “He never talked about the war” ?

“
Les carottes sont cuites
— all is lost,” complains one woman when Bliss declines to hand over his manuscript, although he admits a certain empathy with the women. Rightly or wrongly, they'd protected the family graves for
six decades, and he wonders aloud if there is not some “
convention d' agré ment
” that will satisfy everyone.

The priest, a
conciliateur
by trade, seeks conciliation. Perhaps Bliss would agree to
couper la poire en deux
— to cut the pear in half.

“But how?”

“You could change zhe name of zhe town and zhe château in your book.”

“I could … ” Bliss gives ground willingly, and the priest speedily announces the resolution to his parishioners, thanks God, and heads to the bar L' Escale for lunch.

Leaving the church with Daisy, under the thankful smiles of thirty widows, Bliss feels a touch of guilt that he has permitted both the priest and the old women a degree of self-deception, realizing that anyone knowing the location of Î le Sainte-Marguerite and the legend of the man in the iron mask will immediately work out the château's correct location even if he calls it Kathmandu or Kingdom Come.

“I'm sorry,
Daavid
,” says Daisy. “I would have told you, but maybe you would not go.”

“It's OK,” he soothes. “Change can be scary for old people. I was only worried the priest was going to marry us.”

“
Non
,” she laughs, though did he detect disappointment? But hadn't she also lost a husband to the château in a way? Was the memory of Roland still blocking the aisle for her? Does she share the guilt of the widows — the guilt of doing nothing? And what about him? When will he come to terms with the truth and let go of past relationships? Is he scared of change as well?

By Thursday evening, with only two days to go, Bliss meanders along the promenade with the château's widows still on his back. They'll never let me live here in peace, he worries, and he can't avoid the feeling that without the novel's publication he has actually achieved nothing. Ten frenzied weeks have fizzled with as much furor as Jacques's winds. Johnson is still on the run with Natalia Grimes and the widows' mites; the potter's attacker is still free; and, though he may have released Nathaniel Johnson from his cage, the outcome was hardly satisfying.

Daisy, offering to take him somewhere special for dinner in atonement for setting him up with a hostile bunch of crones, has given him something to look forward to, and as he approaches the bar L'Escale, nearly an hour early, he watches Angeline hovering by the roadside as if she's picking her moment to cause motorized mayhem. But with the season winding down, she too is running out
of steam, and awaits a break in the traffic before slipping inoffensively across the road. Jacques is back, thinks Bliss, as he spies his fellow officer in his customary spot and prepares to challenge him — his prophecy of
le pounant
has been as wayward as his other winds. But Jacques is not alone. Alarm bells in Bliss's mind force him to pull up behind a poster-plastered pillar as he takes a closer look. The sign, “
Festival du Jazz de la Côte d'Azur — avec Dave Brubeck
,” now dog-eared, sun-faded, and more than two months out of date, rekindles warm memories of his first few weeks of summer. But the balding head of the man sitting opposite Jacques has an immediate and chilling effect.

The Shining Sands Hotel, a dismal back street
auberge
with a smoky snack bar infested with bikers and prostitutes, sits next to the railway tracks and is nowhere near a shiny grain of sand. Its only redeeming feature is the pay phone in the foyer.

“He's here,” Bliss scowls as soon as he's connected to Richards at his home number.

“What?”

“Chief Superintendent Edwards is here, in St-Juan. I've just seen him. Someone has leaked.”

Richards snorts his derision. “That's impossible. You must be imagining it. No one knows where you are.”

“Peter Marshall does.”

“He wouldn't grass on you,” says Richards, and, without the electronic eavesdropper on his line, changes his tone. “He wants to see the skids under Edwards as much as anyone else.”

“He's in Edwards's black book as well, then.”

“You know about that?”

“Everybody knows about the black book,” Bliss shouts. “Even the villains know about him and his dirty
The Dave Bliss Quintet
317 tricks. I've even heard old lags banged up in the slammer taking the piss. “So — who's Edwards got the black on now?' they'd laugh.”

“Shit,” mutters Richards, though he knows that when it comes to black book diplomacy Edwards could be prime minister. Even the commissioner has joked that Edwards is more bilious than Napoleon.

“So. How did he find me?” Bliss asks Richards. “And what does he want?”

“He won't do anything. He just wants to put the frighteners on you. He's in a corner. Just lie low. He's got to be back here by Monday.”

“So have I.”

Edwards has staked out his apartment by the time he arrives home. Daisy dropped him in it. Jacques paid her a professional visit, saying Inspector Bliss's boss was looking for him.

Luckily, Bliss's defence strategy works. Since Grimes's disfigurement and his confrontation with Johnson's wife over her deranged son, he's been bothered by the possibility that his adversary knows where he lives, if not who he is. So, taking the elevator to the third floor, he stabs the button for the fourth, leaps out, and runs softly up the single flight of stairs. Edwards, focusing his attention on the arriving elevator, doesn't see the door open behind him, and by the time he turns Bliss is flying back down the stairs.

“
Merde
,” mutters Bliss, returning to L'Escale and discovering that it is shuttered.

“
Fermé
,” proclaims the hastily scribbled note taped to the front door.

His immediate concern that the unexpected closure of his favourite bar could somehow be related to Edwards's presence has him wondering if someone's paid off the landlord, and he peers thoughtfully through the slits in the shutters — is there movement? And where is Angeline? Every night for ten weeks. Now … nothing.

“Jacques is a policeman — he is your friend,
n'est-ce pas?
” explains Daisy when he roots her out in her apartment, demanding to know how Edwards got his address.

“It's not your fault,” he says, and she beams.

“You can stay here with me,
Daavid
.”

The Japanese prints in her eyes bother him. “That is not a good idea, Daisy.”

Her face drops.

“I can't stay with you because Jacques might bring Edwards to find me,” he tells her, and she brightens. In any case, with only two days left he's already decided to cheer himself with a couple of nights in a swank hotel in Cannes. With Edwards standing guard at his front door he will also need some new clothes — thank you, John Smith. The apartment is paid for until the end of September; he'll come back and pick up his stuff later. All he needs is his passport, his plane ticket, and, most importantly, his manuscript.

“I go get for you,” says Daisy, determined to make up for her mounting indiscretions.

Two backpackers seeking leftovers share a cut-price croissant over a couple of coffees in one of the beachside cafés as Bliss waits for Daisy. “Quiet little place,” one muses, unaware of the maelstrom of humanity that passed just before them.

“Brilliant,” says Bliss, as Daisy bustles in with a handful of documents. She has even put together a grab bag of toiletries and underwear and, as he rummages through the small case, he wonders aloud how long Edwards is likely to stay. Daisy leaps up, saying, “I 'ave zhe friend at zhe airport,” and heads for the phone.

“He goes back to London Saturday afternoon,” she smiles triumphantly a few minutes later.

“You're forgiven,” he says, and offers, on John Smith's behalf, to buy her dinner in Cannes.

The sight of Johnson's yacht nudging into Cannes harbour doesn't faze him as he and Daisy pull up to the valet outside the Carlton Hotel. Until the forensic results are in and Richards has sworn out an arrest warrant, Morgan Johnson is just a greasy phantom who will constantly slip through his fingers. But even with an international warrant he knows he'll be sidelined. A couple of leather-jacketed
agents de la sûreté
from Paris, backed by a riot squad of
police nationale CRS
officers, will board the
Sea-Quester
one dawn and won't want anyone from Scotland Yard sticking his nose into their cesspit.

“John Smith is going out in style,” he whispers, as Daisy flinches at the Carlton Hotel's prices.

“
Merde
,” he mumbles, as the bellboy shows him into his room a few minutes later and he spots the Japanese prints on the walls.

“
Oh là là, les estampes japonaises
,” Daisy coos, with an entirely different picture in mind as she slides in behind him.

“Time for dinner,” says Bliss, turning her around and marching her back out.

Sunday morning dawns clearer and brighter than any day since his arrival and he is packed by nine o'clock. His three-thirty flight to London, allowing for a onehour time difference, will get him in a little after four. First thing Monday morning he'll report to the Yard and Edwards's career will be over.

Still indecisive over whether or not to seek a publisher for his novel, he plumps for a final meditative visit to the beach and sits on the end of a wooden jetty looking over the château and the fort on Île Sainte-Marguerite, knowing that his revelation will forever change the relationship between the two buildings and their victims.

The winds have turned full circle, and the dreaded katabatic nor'wester, the mistral, which Jacques forecast with foreboding nearly three months earlier, has finally arrived. Sweeping powerfully down the valley of the Rhône the glacier of chilled air bites as sharply as sorbet on a cavity and drives many summer stragglers off the shore.