5,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Monsieur Pamplemousse Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
When one of five restaurant-owning brothers vanishes into thin air, Monsieur Pamplemousse's detective skills are called into play. A delicious blend of gastronomic delight, teasing mystery, and pure comedy.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 276
Ähnliche
Monsieur Pamplemousse on the Spot
Michael Bond
CONTENTS
1
‘OPERATION SOUFFLÉ’
‘Pardon, Monsieur.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse jumped as a figure in evening dress suddenly materialised at his right elbow. Hastily sliding a large paperback edition of the collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle beneath the folds of a snow-white tablecloth draped over his lap, he pulled himself together and in a split second made the mental leap from the austerity of number 221B Baker Street, London, Angleterre, to the unquestionably less than harsh reality of his opulent surroundings in the dining-room of Les Cinq Parfaits, Haute Savoie, France.
Inclining his head to acknowledge but not necessarily welcome the waiter’s presence, he diverted his attention with some reluctance from the adventures of Sherlock Holmes to focus on a single cream-coloured card listing the various delights of the menugastronomique. He was all too aware as he scanned the menu that his every movement was being followed by a third pair of eyes on the other side of a large picture-window to his right and he shifted his chair in an anti-clockwise direction to avoid their unblinking gaze.
Almost immediately, following a barely perceptible signal from the maître d’hôtel, a bevy of under-waiters descended on his table, rearranged the cutlery symmetrically in front of him, rotated the plate so that the Parfait motif was in line, adjusted the vase of flowers slightly, and then drew a dark-green velvet curtain a few inches to its left, blotting out as they did so part of Lac Léman, the misty foothills of the mountains beyond, and an unseemly intruder in the foreground.
Almost as quickly as it had arrived the entourage again melted discreetly into the background, but not before a large, wet, freshly vaselined nose reappeared on the other side of the window and pressed itself firmly against a fresh area of glass.
Monsieur Pamplemousse gave a sigh. Pommes Frites was being more than a little difficult that evening. He shuddered to think what the outside of the window would be like when it caught the rays of the morning sun.
‘Pardon, Monsieur.’ The maître d’hôtel leaned across. ‘May I point out a slight change in the menu? The SouffléSurprise is off.’
‘The SouffléSurprise is off?’ Monsieur Pamplemousse repeated the words slowly, as if he could hardly believe his ears. ‘But that is not possible.’
To say that he had ploughed his way through six or seven previous courses with but one end in view, that of tasting the creation for which, above all, Les Cinq Parfaits was famous, would have been a gross misstatement of the facts; an unforgivable calumny. Every course had been sheer perfection; not just a plateau, but one of a series of individual peaks, each a thing of beauty in its own right, offering both satisfaction and a tantalising foretaste of other delights to come. If he stopped right where he was he could hardly complain. It had been a memorable meal. All the same, to take the mountaineering analogy still further, there was only one Everest. To have travelled so far and yet not to have scaled the highest point of all, that which was embodied in the SouffléSurprise, would be a great disappointment.
He was tempted to ask why, if it was off, was he being shown the menu where the two words Soufflé and Surprise were printed very clearly between fromage and café. It was rubbing salt into the wound.
He glanced around the crowded restaurant. ‘There will be many sorrowful faces in Les Cinq Parfaits tonight.’
‘Oui,Monsieur.’ The waiter clearly shared his unhappiness.
‘What have you instead?’
Looking, if possible, even more ill at ease, the waiter waved towards a large trolley heading in their direction.
‘We have our collection of home-made sorbets. Monsieur may have a panaché – a selection if he so wishes.’
‘But I have already eaten a sorbet,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse testily. ‘I had one between the Omble and the Quenellesdeveau.’
And very nice it had been too – a GranitéauvindeSaintEmilion, made with something rather better than a vinordinaire if he was any judge, a GrandCruClassé to which orange and lemon had been added, the whole garnished with a fresh, white peach inlaid with mint leaves. A palate-cleanser of the very first order. He had awarded it full marks on the pad concealed beneath a fold in his right trouser leg.
‘Fruitsdesaison? We have wild framboises … gathered on the mountainside just before nightfall by girls from the village. They are still warm from their aprons …’
‘Fruitsdesaison?’ Without raising his voice Monsieur Pamplemousse managed to imbue the words with exactly the right amount of scorn.
‘A crèmecaramel,Monsieur?’ There was the barest hint of desperation in the waiter’s voice. ‘Made with eggs from our own chickens, fed from the day they were born on nothing but …’
‘A crèmecaramel?’ Aware that he was beginning to sound like an ageing actor milking every line which came his way, Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to try another tack. ‘Have you nothing which includes the word pâtisserie?’
Even as he posed the question he knew what the answer would be. It explained the absence of many of the customary tit-bits earlier in the meal. An absence which he had noted with a certain amount of relief at the time, fearing the outcome of any battle involving mind over matter.
The waiter leaned over his table in order to remove an imaginary bread crumb. ‘I regret, Monsieur, the pâtisserie is not of a standard this evening that we in Les Cinq Parfaits would feel able to serve to our customers.’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘As for the SouffléSurprise … pouf!’ A low whistling sound somehow reminiscent of a hot-air balloon collapsing ignominiously escaped his lips. He looked for a moment as if he were about to say something else and then decided against it, aware that he might already have spoken out of turn and betrayed a position of trust.
Monsieur Pamplemousse decided not to press the man any further. Ordering the framboises he sat back in order to consider the matter. Clearly all was not well in the kitchens of Les Cinq Parfaits, and if all was not well then it put him in something of a quandary.
His presence there was only semi-official, a kind of treat on the part of his employers, the publishers of LeGuide. It had been arranged by a grateful Director following the success of a mission on his behalf in the Loire valley. Nevertheless, implicit in the visit was an appraisal of the restaurant, an extra opinion concerning a matter which had been exercising the minds of his superiors for some considerable time. Work was never far away when food was on the table.
Just as LeGuide was by general consent the doyen of the French gastronomic guides, so Les Cinq Parfaits was considered the greatest of all French restaurants, which in most people’s eyes meant the best in all the world.
Set like a jewel in the hills east of Evian and overlooking the lake, its walls were lined with photographs of the high and mighty, the rich and famous, who in their time had made the pilgrimage to its ever open doors. Presidents came and went, royalty rose and fell, but Les Cinq Parfaits seemed set to remain where it was for ever.
In an area devoted to those whose waistlines were sadly in need of reduction, or were beyond redemption, where consequently cuisine was, generally speaking, basse rather than haute, Les Cinq Parfaits had proved the exception to the rule and had thrived.
For many years possessor of three stars in Michelin, maximum toques in Gault Millau, and one of less than a dozen restaurants in France to enjoy the supreme accolade of three Stock Pots in LeGuide, it was an open secret that it was only a matter of time before one of the three rival guides broke ranks and awarded Les Cinq Parfaits an extra distinction of some kind.
Therein lay the rub. Such a break with tradition, were it to backfire, would lay whoever was responsible open to all manner of criticism. On the other hand, to delay, to be second, would be to risk the accusation of being a follower rather than a leader. It was a knotty problem and no mistake.
If three Stock Pots represented perfection, then a fourth would need to stand for something even more absolute. On the showing that evening, one of the cinq Parfaits, either Monsieur Albert, the father, or one of his four sons, Alain, Edouard, Gilbert or Jean-Claude, was failing to live up to the family name.
Monsieur Pamplemousse glanced around the room. Like all restaurants of its class, staff seemed to outnumber the diners. His notes and reference cards upstairs would give him the exact answer, but he judged the capacity to be about sixty couverts. All the tables were full, many of them would have been booked weeks if not months ahead; the clientèle was international. Waiters switched from speaking French to German to English and back again with practised ease.
The ceremony of the lifting of the silver salvers was in full swing. No dish arrived in the dining-room uncovered. No matter how many guests were seated round a table, for the waiter to ask who had ordered what was regarded as a cardinal sin, and the lifting of all the covers in unison was a theatrical gesture which never failed to draw the gastronomical equivalent of a round of applause.
At the next table a waiter who had just finished translating the entire menu into perfect German was now performing the same feat in English for another family. From the snatches of conversation he’d overheard when they arrived he gathered the daughter was at a local finishing school. Clearly her parents were not getting value for money.
Beyond them, at a smaller table, a young girl was sitting alone. From her blonde hair and the colour of her skin, and the fact that she seemed to be on nodding terms with the family at the next table, he guessed she must be English too. Probably at the same finishing school as their daughter. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.
He wondered what she was doing there. She seemed oddly out of place and ill at ease, rather as if she was waiting for someone who she knew was going to let her down. Irrationally he found himself wanting to go across and ask if he could help in any way, but he resisted for fear his action might be misinterpreted, as it certainly would be by the other diners, if not by the girl herself. People always thought the worst. Once or twice she looked up quickly and caught him watching her, then just as quickly she looked down again, colouring in a becoming manner.
Holmes would have known all about her by now. He would have built up a complete picture in his mind, picking up some detail to do with the way she wore her belt or the cut and style of her dress.
‘Borrowed for the evening, my dear Watson. And in a hurry too. You can tell by the way it doesn’t quite match her nail-varnish.’
With difficulty he disengaged himself from the scene in order to return to his book. Reading it was really a labour of love; a holiday task he had set himself – a chance to improve his English while at the same time meeting up again with one of his favourite characters.
The stories were as unlike his own experiences in the Paris Sûreté as it was possible to imagine, and yet there was a certain fascination about them that he found irresistible. The particular story he was reading – TheHoundoftheBaskervilles – was a case in point. He had barely reached the second page when Holmes, from a brief examination of a man’s walking-stick, had deduced that the owner was a country doctor who had trained at a large London hospital, left when he was little more than a senior student, was still under thirty years of age, amiable, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.
Rereading the passage reminded Monsieur Pamplemousse of Pommes Frites. He looked round, but the face was no longer pressed against the window. It didn’t need the intellectual powers of a Sherlock Holmes to tell him that his own particular Watson had gone off in a huff, and even though Pommes Frites’ exclusion from the meal had not been of his choosing he felt a sudden pricking of his conscience.
The discovery when they arrived at Les Cinq Parfaits that dogs were interdits had been a bitter disappointment. The ban had been imposed after a visiting captain of industry had been set upon one evening by a Dobermann Pinscher belonging to a disgruntled shareholder. It was understandable up to a point, but it was like forbidding visitors to the Eiffel Tower because someone had once been caught trying to place a bomb underneath it; hard to accept and impossible to explain to a creature whose powers of reasoning didn’t follow such convoluted paths.
Not that the four-legged visitors to Les Cinq Parfaits did badly for themselves. The kennel area behind the main building was a model of its kind, the service was impeccable, with staffing levels scarcely less than in the restaurant itself. The straw was changed twice daily and there was a choice of food which was served from china plates bearing the hotel crest. Had there been paw-operated bell-pushes Monsieur Pamplemousse wouldn’t have been surprised. At fifty francs a day, full pension, servicecompris, it was incredibly good value.
All the same, it wasn’t like sharing a table, and in the event Pommes Frites had taken the whole thing rather badly, just as Monsieur Pamplemousse had feared.
Pommes Frites had a simplistic approach to life. Black, to him, was black. White was white. The shortest distance between two points was a straight line, and restaurants were for eating in, regardless of race, colour or breed. Rules of entry which showed any form of discrimination were beyond his comprehension.
Equally, Monsieur Pamplemousse had to admit that he missed Pommes Frites’ company. Not just the occasional warmth of a head resting on his shoe, or the nuzzling up of a body against his leg, but also his views on the food, often conveyed by the raising of an eyebrow or a discreet wag of his tail.
Pommes Frites had a bloodhound’s sensitivity to smells and to taste, a sensitivity sharpened by his early training with the Paris police and honed finer still during travels with his master over the length and breadth of France. Had they but known it, there were many restaurants who owed their placing in LeGuide to Pommes Frites’ taste-buds, and Monsieur Pamplemousse would have given a great deal to have noted down his reaction to the meal he had just eaten.
He gazed out of the window at the lights of Lausanne, twinkling on the Swiss side of the lake. Somewhere in-between a steamer slowly made its way back to Geneva. He looked at his watch. It was still barely ten o’clock. He had dined early. There would be time for a stroll before retiring to bed. Perhaps he could take Pommes Frites for an extra long walk that night to help make up for things. There were some emergency biscuits in the boot of the car. When they got back he would open the packet as a special treat.
He glanced up again as a waiter came towards him carrying a silver tray bearing not, as he might have expected, a dish containing a mound of wild raspberries, but a plate on which reposed a single light-blue envelope. He frowned, recognising the colour of the hotel stationery. Who could possibly be sending him a note?
As the waiter disappeared again he picked up a knife and slit open the envelope, aware that the party at the next table was watching him curiously. Inside there was a sheet of white telex paper and underneath a duplicate in pink. The message was short and to the point; a single word in fact. The word was ESTRAGON.
To say that Monsieur Pamplemousse blanched visibly as he digested it would have been to cast aspersions both on his ability to conceal his true feelings and on the subdued and subtle lighting conceived by the architect responsible for the interior design of the restaurant. Bearing in mind the sometimes astronomical size of the bills, blanching of any kind was filtered out by rays which purposely emanated from the warmer end of the spectrum.
Nevertheless, he felt a quickening of his pulse as he carefully refolded the message and slipped it between the pages of his book to mark where he had left off. Any further reading was out of the question. Had he been Sherlock Holmes he would probably have reached for his violin in the hope of applying the panacea of music to soothe his racing thoughts. Instead, Monsieur Pamplemousse did the next best thing; he picked up a spoon and fork. More waiters were heading in his direction. It would be a pity to let the efforts of all those village girls with their bulging aprons go to waste.
The framboises were beyond reproach. He added a little more cream.
The word ESTRAGON meant only one thing. There must be an emergency of some kind.
It couldn’t be anything personal. He’d telephoned Doucette just before dinner. She’d been in the middle of her favourite serial and he’d had to do battle against background music from the television. In any case, if it was something personal surely the telephone would have sufficed.
In all his time with LeGuide the use of the emergency codeword had been minimal. The last occasion he could recall had been all of two years ago when Truffert from Normandy had been caught reading a copy of L’Escargot, LeGuide’s staff magazine, while reporting on a restaurant in Nice. There had been hell to pay. Anonymity was a sacred rule, never to be broken. Heads had rolled.
But then its use had been in reverse; a call to Headquarters from someone in the field. He couldn’t recall a time when the word had gone out from Headquarters itself. He wondered if it was a general alarm. Perhaps all over France colleagues were waiting for their café as he was and wondering.
The first cup came and went. Declining a second, he rose and made his way towards the door. As he did so he caught the eye of the blonde girl. She blushed and looked down at her plate as if conscious that he’d singled her out for attention.
On his way out he passed two more tables whose occupants were having to make a fresh decision over the last course, just as he had done. They didn’t look best pleased either. The maître d’hôtel probably wouldn’t thank him if he paused and recommended the framboises – even though they were probably the best he’d ever tasted. They would need all their supplies that evening. To have one dish off was bad enough. To run out of a second would be little short of disaster.
In the foyer he looked for a public telephone booth. It wouldn’t do to use the telephone in his room and risk being overheard – not until he knew what it was all about. Despite the fact that it was an automatic dial-out system, he had an old-fashioned mistrust of hotel telephones.
He emptied his change on to a shelf, fed some coins into the machine and dialled his office number. It was answered on the first ring.
‘Ah, Monsieur Pamplemousse.’ It was a voice he didn’t recognise. Normally he didn’t have much contact with the night shift. ‘MonsieurleDirecteur is expecting you. Unmoment.’
The Director was even quicker off the mark than the switchboard girl. He must have been sitting with his hand permanently on the receiver.
‘Pamplemousse? Are you all right? What kept you?’
‘I’m afraid the café was a little slow in arriving, Monsieur.’
‘Café! There was a noise like a minor explosion at the other end. ‘You stopped for café?’
‘Oui,MonsieurleDirecteur.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse decided he must proceed with care. The tone was not friendly. ‘In view of the gravity of your message I felt it wise not to arouse suspicions by leaving my table with too great a haste.’
‘Ah!’ The response was a mixture of emotions, of incredulity and suspicion giving way, albeit with a certain amount of reluctance, to grudging respect. ‘Good thinking, Pamplemousse. Good thinking.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse breathed a sigh of relief. It was often a case of thinking on one’s feet with the Director. Like a boxer, you needed constantly to anticipate.
‘How was your meal?’ From the tone of the other’s voice it was clear he regarded the answer as a foregone conclusion. Not for the first time Monsieur Pamplemousse found himself marvelling at the efficiency of LeGuide. He wondered how the news from Les Cinq Parfaits had got through so quickly. It was almost uncanny at times. He had a mental picture of the Operations Room; the illuminated wall-map, the large table in the centre of the room with its little flags to represent the Inspectors. The girls with their long sticks moving them around. The shaded lights. The staff talking in hushed voices as the reports came in. However, tonight was no normal night.
‘It left a lot to be desired, Monsieur. Particularly towards the end.’
‘This is a disaster, Aristide. A disaster of the first magnitude.’
‘It was not good news, Monsieur,’ Monsieur Pamplemousse replied carefully, picking his way through the minefield of the Director’s mind. ‘It was not good news at all. As you can imagine, I had been looking forward to it. Perhaps,’ he tried to strike a cheerful note, ‘perhaps it only goes to show that nothing in this world can ever be wholly perfect.’ Encouraged by the silence at the other end, Monsieur Pamplemousse began to enlarge on this theme. The Director was in an overwrought state. He had probably been working too hard. He needed soothing. ‘One soufflé doesn’t make a summer, Monsieur. There will be others.’
There was a long pause. ‘Have you been drinking, Pamplemousse?’
‘Drinking, Monsieur? I had an apéritif before the meal – a Kir – followed by a glass or two of Sancerre with the Omble, then a modest Côte Rôtie, a glass of Beaumes-de-Venise with the sweet. I forewent a liqueur …’
‘Do you know why I sent you a telex?’
‘Because of the SouffléSurprise,Monsieur?’
‘No, Pamplemousse.’ The voice at the other end reminded him suddenly of a dog barking. ‘It was not because of the SouffléSurprise.’ There was another pause, a longer one this time. ‘And then again, yes, you are quite right. It was because of the SouffléSurprise.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to stay silent. Clearly he had, albeit unwittingly, scored some kind of point. Bonus points in fact. Throwing caution to the wind he edged the door to the telephone booth open a little with his foot. The heat inside was adding to the confusion in his mind. The Director’s voice when he spoke again was tinged with a new respect.
‘Your time with the Sûreté was not wasted, Aristide.’
‘Merci,Monsieur. I like to think not.’
‘You have a knack of going straight to the heart of the problem. Clearing a pathway through the jungle. It is indeed fortunate that we chose to send you to Les Cinq Parfaits at this moment in time. Pamplemousse …’ The Director paused and Monsieur Pamplemousse instinctively braced himself for the next words. ‘Pamplemousse, if I were to ask you for your definition of the words “liquid gold”, what would it be?’
Feeling himself on safe ground at long last, Monsieur Pamplemousse didn’t hesitate. ‘It would be a Sauternes, Monsieur. A Château d’Yquem. Probably the ’45. I am told that the ’28 and the ’37, although still wonderful, are now sadly past their best. In ’45 there was an early harvest …’
‘Aristide.’ There was a hint of pleading in the Director’s voice, as if he was trying to convey some kind of message. ‘Aristide, I have to tell you that this is a very serious matter. Think again.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse considered the matter for a moment. He wondered if the Director was trying to catch him out. Perhaps he was thinking of a German Eiswein – the capital made out of what in other circumstances, other areas, would have been a disaster; wine made from juice which had been squeezed from grapes frozen on the vine. That could be called liquid gold indeed. He racked his brains as he tried to think of famous years when it had happened.
‘Am I getting warm, Monsieur?’
‘No, Pamplemousse.’ There was an audible sigh from the other end. ‘You are not getting warm. You are cold. But your temperature at this moment is nothing compared to what it will be if this problem remains unsolved. Then you will be very cold indeed. We shall all be very cold.’
‘I have heard that the owner of Château d’Yquem holds the ’67 in high regard …’
‘Pamplemousse! Will you please stop talking about wine. It has nothing to do with wine.’ Monsieur Pamplemousse fell silent as the Director’s voice cut across his musings. He recognised a warning note and like a professional gambler studying the tables he decided to watch play for a while so that he could get the feel of how the numbers were running before making his next move. A moment later the wisdom of his decision was confirmed. The Director was off on another tangent.
‘Do you remember the winter of ’47, Pamplemousse?’
‘It was a very cold winter, Monsieur. I was only nineteen and it was my first time away from home. I was in Paris and I remember shivering in my room and wishing I was back in the Auvergne; at least they had wood to burn there. Food was scarce and there was ice on the inside of my bedroom window.’
‘There may well be ice on the inside of your bedroom window again next year, Pamplemousse, if you do not act quickly. Quickly and precisely and with the utmost discretion.
‘Listen to me and listen carefully. Walls have ears as you well know, and I do not wish to repeat what I have to say.
‘In four days’ time you will see a red carpet being laid out on the steps of Les Cinq Parfaits, a red carpet which will stretch all the way from the entrance doors to the helicopter landing-pad at the side of the building. It is a red carpet which in its time has felt the tread of a reigning monarch of Grande-Bretagne and more than one President of the French Republic. Latterly its pile has been compressed almost beyond recovery by the weight of a man of such unbelievable wealth it is impossible to describe; a grosselégume who by the blessing of Allah has the good fortune to be sitting on one of the richest deposits of oil in the world.
‘Each year he visits Les Cinq Parfaits as a guest of France to carry out what one might call a “shopping expedition” and at the same time indulge himself on all that is best and richest and creamiest on the menu. He is particularly partial to the SouffléSurprise.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse decided to take the bull by the horns.
‘With respect, Monsieur, I understand perfectly all that you are saying. What you are saying is that this V.I.P. – this grosselégume as you call him – being a guest of France, a guest of some importance to our future well-being, has to be cosseted and indulged and made to feel at home while he is here. That I understand, even if I do not necessarily approve. What I do not understand is how it affects my own stay at Les Cinq Parfaits.’
‘Because, Aristide, you are not at this moment staying at Les Cinq Parfaits. You may think you are, but you are not. To all intents and purposes you are staying at Les Quatre Parfaits. They are a Parfait short. One of the brothers – Jean-Claude – the one who is responsible for the soufflé in question, has vanished. Vanished without warning and without trace.’
‘That is bad news, Monsieur, I agree … but surely it is a matter for the local police …’
‘No, Pamplemousse, it is not a matter for the local police. The local police must be kept out of it at all costs. There are wheels, Pamplemousse, and within those wheels there are other wheels, and within those wheels there are yet more wheels. They must all be kept oiled. Without the continuing goodwill of this grosselégume – and I must tell you that the speed with which he has acquired his untold wealth has not so far been matched by any show of finer feelings towards his fellow man, rather the reverse – oil will be in very short supply. It may well be diverted towards colder climes than ours.’
‘But surely, Monsieur, if this … this person has to go without his SouffléSurprise it is not the end of the world? Surely some other member of the staff could make one? One of the other brothers? Or if not, someone could be brought in. Girardet, perhaps? He is nearby.’
‘Aristide, would you have asked Titian to paint a Monet, or Picasso a Renoir? We are dealing with the creation of a genius.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse fell silent. The Director was right, of course. They were dealing with the product of an artist at the very pinnacle of his profession. Such things were beyond duplication.
‘Pamplemousse!’ The Director’s voice broke into his thoughts again. ‘When I say it is a serious matter, I mean it is a very serious matter. Who knows where it will end up? Each of the brothers is a specialist in his own right. Today there is no SouffléSurprise. Tomorrow it could be the Omble. The day after, the Risdeveauauxsalsifis. It is a matter that is exercising the minds of certain people at the highest levels of government. In particular of a “certain person” whose name I am not at liberty to divulge for reasons of security …’
‘A certain person,’ ventured Monsieur Pamplemousse, determined not to be outdone, ‘not a million miles away.’
‘No, Pamplemousse.’ The Director appeared to be having trouble with his breathing again. ‘A “certain person” who happens to be not two feet away from me at this very moment. Furthermore, he wishes to speak to you.’
Despite himself, Monsieur Pamplemousse stiffened as a second voice came over the phone, clear and incisive; a voice he recognised. A voice which until that moment he had only heard over the radio or on television.
‘Oui,Monsieur.’ His own voice, by comparison, sounded far away.
‘Oui,Monsieur. I understand, Monsieur.
‘It is a very great honour, Monsieur.
‘Without question, Monsieur.’
‘Now do you understand the gravity of the situation, Pamplemousse?’ It was the Director again, revitalised, and showing scarcely less authority than the previous speaker. Now the voice was that of a man with a mission. The voice, Monsieur Pamplemousse couldn’t help but reflect, of a man who sensed the whiff of a possible decoration somewhere close at hand. An Order of Merit, perhaps, or membership of the Légion d’Honneur?
‘From now on you will only communicate directly with this office. The telephone will be manned day and night. The codename of your mission will be “Operation Soufflé”. I have already spoken to Monsieur Albert Parfait. He has been instructed to render every assistance. If you require anything else, name it and it shall be yours. Otherwise, I suggest we keep conversation to a minimum.’
‘Oui,Monsieur.’
‘And Aristide …’ The Director’s voice softened for a moment. ‘If … no, not if – when our mission has been brought to a successful conclusion, you may order a bottle of Château d’Yquem … the ’45. I will see matters right with Madame Grante in Accounts. Your P39s will not be delayed. Au revoir, et bonne chance.’
‘Aurevoir, Monsieur.’
Monsieur Pamplemousse replaced the receiver and then stood for a few seconds lost in thought. So much for a quiet week at Les Cinq Parfaits. It was a good thing Doucette hadn’t come with him as had at first been suggested. She would not have been pleased.
Gathering up the rest of his change, he pushed open the door, glancing around as he did so. He felt as though he had been inside the booth for hours and yet it could only have been a matter of minutes. Inside the restaurant itself the scene was as he had left it, the soft lights, waiters gliding to and fro, a steady hum of conversation. If only they knew what currents were developing around them.
As he crossed the entrance hall the commissionaire looked at him enquiringly and then stepped to one side. The glass doors slid quietly open for him as he drew near.
Outside the air was cool. It had a crisp feel to it; a hint of autumn. Floodlights concealed in a low wall gave a translucent glow to a bed of late-flowering roses. Nearby a fountain changed from red to green. The swimming pool beyond was deserted. Of Pommes Frites there was still no sign.
