The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Read online

  There was no carpet on the hardwood floor, which creaked and reverberated with every step I took. I tore my mind away from the dusky peach wall-to-wall in my condo and inspected the bathroom, which might have been redone as recently as the twenties. The tile was severe white, the footed tub big enough to hold three people, if that was your pleasure. A halfhearted shower had been rigged up with a thin pipe and flat round head, and a stiff blue shower curtain hung on rusting rings from a wire surrounding the tub. There was a toilet, a bidet, a medicine cabinet containing a few rusty razor blades, and a sink which had separate faucets for hot and cold, something I’ve always hated. With some trepidation I tried flushing the toilet, but it rushed into vigorous action. I filed this under Thank God for Small Favors.

  The bedroom alcove contained a sagging bed with a gray mattress and a huge, gnarled-looking armoire. Gazing at the armoire I realized, with a sinking heart, that there were no closets whatsoever.

  While I made this preliminary inspection, Twinkie had been howling in her carrier. The time had come to let her inspect her new home. When I released her, she ran directly under the bed. She didn’t emerge, except for furtive nighttime trips to the litter box and food dish, for two solid weeks.

  Imagine it: Twinkie huddled under the bed, fifteen pounds of miserable tortoiseshell. Me on my knees peering at her, pleading, “Come on, Twinks. Come on, sweet girl. Come out, sweet baby.” All to no avail. It was just as ghastly as it sounds.

  While dealing with Twinkie’s maladjustment, not to mention mine, I had to do my all-important first column for Loretta. Nothing had ever seemed more impossible. In the first place, my French didn’t prove to be as fluent as I’d thought. Yes, I could go to the awning-shaded greengrocer’s stand down the street and, with some prompting from the bustling proprietress, come away with half a dozen juice oranges or a couple of onions. I could go to a cafe and order a coffee. I could buy an umbrella (a necessary purchase) or inquire where the bus stop was. That was a far cry from being able to interview somebody and actually understand what the person was saying.

  I didn’t know who to interview, anyway. I was paralyzed by culture shock and sensory overload. I started having nightmares, thrashing around on my saggy bed, Twinkie a mute witness beneath. At three o’clock one morning I stared up through the darkness at my lofty ceiling and decided this venture wasn’t going to work out. I would make reservations tomorrow and crawl back to Luna Beach. Maybe Daddy would give me a job at the Current.

  At this low and desperate point, fate gave a sign that my immediate future did not lie in Luna Beach. While contemplating making my return reservations, I came across a piece of paper on which was written the name and phone number of Kitty de Villiers-Marigny, the friend of my friend Dobie at the Bay City Sun.

  I almost didn’t call her. Her name sounded too French and too fancy. Anyway, I wasn’t staying, so what was the point? But I remembered promising Dobie, and our tearful hug. I’d ruined my cat’s life and my own, but at least I could keep that promise.

  I picked up the phone. I wasn’t looking forward to this, since I’d found that phone conversations in French caused me to perspire unduly. I clenched my jaw and dialed, trying to put together the phrases that would explain who I was and why I was calling.

  She answered with a French-sounding “ ‘Allo?” but I hadn’t gotten out more than three words when she said, “We can speak English.” Her voice was unmistakably American. I told her who I was. She vaguely remembered Dobie, and she suggested we meet late that afternoon at her office and go for a drink. I thought she sounded distracted, but I figured I sounded distracted myself.

  All that day, I was on the verge of calling the airlines. I put on my heaviest sweater and stood on my balcony in the chilly wind. People walked down the street below me. French people. Some of them went into the bakery down the way and came out carrying long loaves of bread in their bare hands, without even cellophane around it. Dogs on leashes pranced along, using the sidewalk as a bathroom at will, and later a man in a motorized cart swept it up with a mechanical brush. Little children ran by, yelling at each other in perfect French. Was there a column in any of this? Could I write my first column for Good Look about doggy doo?

  I dragged myself to the Montparnasse Metro station to go to my drinks engagement with Kitty de Villiers-Marigny. It looked like rain. Maybe I could do a column about how damn much it rained in Paris. I found the address she had given me, a nondescript office building on the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, near the Opera. She had said third floor, end of the hall. The third floor, I noticed on a directory board in the unimposing lobby, was occupied by the Worldwide Wire Service.

  The third floor hallway was lit by fluorescent glare and could have been located anywhere from Tallahassee to Timbuktu. The door to the room at the end was ajar. As I approached, I heard gasping, gurgling sounds. My steps slowed. I had done enough gasping and gurgling myself lately to know acute distress when I heard it. I tiptoed up and peeked in to see a tiny office which was all but filled by two scarred desks. A woman sat at one of the desks, sobbing, head cradled in her arms. Her hair was carrot red, a wildly curly pre-Raphaelite cascade. She was wearing a shapeless, oatmeal-colored sweatsuit outfit that looked chic and expensive even at this disadvantageous angle. Her shoulders were heaving.

  The question was whether to slip away, walk around the block, and return for a fresh start, or barge in and see what I could do. I was debating the point when a masculine voice behind me said, “I was afraid of this.”

  I jumped a mile. The speaker was a gray-haired, craggy man in his fifties who, I couldn’t help noticing even under the circumstances, wasn’t bad looking although his clothes were atrocious. His socks were drooping over his Hush Puppies, his pants were unpressed, his shirt bagged over his belt, his loosened tie was twenty years old at least. He smelled distinctly of cigarettes. Obviously, a newsman.

  At his voice, the woman looked up, revealing the kind of cheekbones we all long for (wet, at the moment, with tears), green eyes, a generous mouth, and a furious pink facial flush. The man said, “He isn’t worth it, Kitty,” as he walked past me into the room. I hovered in the doorway, partly out of timidity and partly because there was no room inside for anybody else.

  “Don’t insult me, Jack,” she said in choked tone of outrage. “Do you really think I’d cry like this over Marc-Antoine?”

  “Well, you told me this morning the two of you had split. What else am I supposed to think?”

  “Think what wonders it’s going to do for my waistline! Who needs a pastry chef hanging around?”

  “Why aren’t you laughing, then?”

  Her face crumpled and she buried it in her hands. “Felicia told me this afternoon she’s going back to Barcelona.”

  The man had worked his way around the desks to the room’s one window. He perched on the sill, fished a cigarette out of his pocket, and lit it. “Is that all? You’ve known for months that was probably going to happen. You’ll get somebody else to share the office.”

  “It isn’t just that.” Her voice was muffled by her hands.

  “What else?”

  “Teddy spiked my piece about the perfume guy.”

  Jack tapped ashes into his pants cuff. “The old fellow who mixes the scent especially for each customer? Cute old Monsieur Whatsisname, with his workroom on the Rue St. Sulpice?”

  “Yes! Monsieur Dupont will be so disappointed. He was really happy about the story, all excited. I could kill Teddy. He said it was too lightweight.”

  You can believe that my hand was sneaking into my purse toward my notebook while I repeated, over and over to myself, “Monsieur Dupont. Rue St. Sulpice.” If the old boy could talk slowly enough for me to understand him, he might get his story yet.

  “It probably was too lightweight for Teddy,” the man was saying.

  She looked up and said, furiously, “Whose side are you on, Jack?” Her gaze swung toward me. “And why don’t you introduce me to your friend?”


  They both looked at me. I froze, my hand in my purse, feeling as if I’d been caught picking a pocket.

  Jack, of course, said, “My friend?” and then I had to step in and explain that I was in fact her friend, if anybody’s.

  That was the beginning. With Kitty’s help, I wrote up Monsieur Dupont, the charming perfume-maker, for my first Good Look column, and it passed muster with Loretta. After Felicia went back to Barcelona, I moved in to share the tiny office with Kitty. Twinkie came out from under the bed. I bought a fringed tablecloth and a couple of red geraniums. My French improved. And just when I was starting to get comfortable, I witnessed a murder.

  A Taxi Ride

  I was never one of those reporters who pant to be first at the scene of a dreadful occurrence. My kind of journalistic tragedy was two women showing up at a party wearing identical dresses. I hated writing obituaries and wouldn’t have dreamed of taking the police beat even if an editor had dreamed of offering it to me. Cold-blooded murder, in other words, was not in my repertoire.

  It was October. I’d been in Paris almost four months and had scrambled for four columns. Since I was still shaky in the language and in my knowledge of the city, I hadn’t yet come up with anything too original, but I had learned long ago that writing the same stories over and over is an honored tradition in journalism. I’d done the ice cream at Berthillon and gained three pounds in a week. To compensate, I’d done Parisian swimming pools. I’d done street markets, tramping up and down the Rue Mouffetard with a shopping bag too heavy to carry. Fired with misguided enthusiasm, I bought sea urchins at a fish stall. We’d had sea urchins aplenty in Luna Beach. Why had we never thought of eating them? After I made the attempt, the answer was obvious.

  Loretta continued to like my columns, but she also continued to be parsimonious. On the other hand, now that “Paris Patter” looked like a going concern, I began to get on the invitation lists for press bashes. Often, in lieu of dinner, I could nibble flaky pastries or stuffed mushrooms at parties to celebrate a new sportswear line or a restaurant opening. Still, I was always short of cash. If I were going to get my hair cut at a decent salon and feed Twinkie the fanciest French cat food money could buy, my scope had to expand beyond “Paris Patter.”

  It was in the worthy cause of financial improvement, then, that I found myself, that bright October morning, sharing a taxi with a British art conservator named Clive Overton. The worst problem I had in the world was the suspicion that he was going to stick me with the fare. The second worst problem, which promised to be more serious in the long run, was that Overton, a man in his forties who had the general demeanor of a mackerel, was showing no inclination to talk to me.

  “He’ll probably be one of those really charming British guys with a dry wit and lots of anecdotes,” Kitty had said, urging me to take over the assignment. It had originally been offered to her by an American popular science magazine, but she was too busy to do it.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know anything about restoring damaged art works, and this man is a master in the field.”

  “So, he’ll tell you about what he does. That’s the story.”

  I balked. “I just don’t feel right about it.”

  “O.K.” Kitty dropped Overton’s bio on her desk and started to dial her phone. While she waited for whomever she was calling to answer, she mentioned the figure the magazine was willing to pay for the Overton profile.

  So here I was in the taxi with Overton who, if indeed he was a charming British guy with a dry wit and lots of anecdotes, was keeping the fact under wraps. When I’d picked him up at his hotel, the Relais Christine, he’d said hello. That was it so far.

  We were barreling along the Seine at a speed any non-Parisian would consider excessive. It was a lovely day, by far the prettiest since I’d been in Paris. The river gleamed deep green. Sea gulls wheeled. A barge pushed upstream, a line of laundry flapping from its deck. The sun had started to creep over the stones of the quay. Maybe Overton had simply turned away from me to enjoy the scene in peace. I stared at the back of his neatly barbered blond head and the rolls of pudge above his collar. His hands, I noticed, were clasped together so tightly the ends of his fingers were white.

  Maybe the idea of publicity freaked him out. But if so, why had he consented to the story? Why had he asked me to come with him to the museum and watch him in action?

  Overton cleared his throat noisily. I leaned toward him eagerly, hoping he was about to speak, but after a couple of final hawks he turned back to the window. At last, unable to stand it any longer, I fished out my notebook, uncapped my pen, and said, “Why don’t I ask a few preliminary questions. Can you tell me something about the Musée Bellefroide?”

  He looked around at me, bulging blue eyes as shocked as if I’d asked him whether he wore boxer shorts or jockeys. After due consideration he said, “Lovely place.”

  “I haven’t been there, myself,” I said. “I haven’t lived in Paris very long. I moved over here with my cat a few months ago. I came from Florida, in the southern part of the United States. But anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the museum.” When I’m nervous, I tend to run on a bit.

  Although I hadn’t seen the museum, I had done my homework about it, which meant I’d asked both Kitty and Jack Arlen. Jack, the man I’d met the same day I met Kitty, turned out to be the Paris bureau chief for the Worldwide Wire Service. “I think the Bellefroides were bankers. The museum is the former family mansion,” Kitty had told me. “It’s gorgeous. Walls decorated with carved wood, magnificent eighteenth-century furniture, a marble staircase, display cabinets filled with porcelain— all that.”

  “It’s kind of a mixed bag, though,” said Jack. “Some of the paintings have been deattributed, or whatever you call it. You know— ‘School of Rembrandt’ instead of Rembrandt. And each of the Bellefroides had his own particular interest, so there’ll be a case of Japanese netsukes next to a case of enameled snuffboxes, and then a case of… of…”

  “Dog figurines,” said Kitty.

  “Yeah. They’ve got masterpieces and junk side by side, and under the terms of the will, or the trust, or whatever, it all has to be kept together, just as it was when the old man died.”

  All of this Overton had compressed into “lovely place.” I sucked on the end of my pen, and Overton looked out the window.

  The taxi was stuck in traffic. Horns blared. The driver’s dog, a brown mongrel which until now had been dozing in the front seat, unfolded himself and gave us a pink-tongued, doggy smile. No wonder he was smiling. He didn’t have to interview Clive Overton. I tried again. “What will you be doing at the Bellefroide?”

  “Altarpiece. Water damage.”

  I wrote “Altarpiece. Water damage” in my notebook.

  Our taxi driver, a woman with short, bleached-blond hair under a checked newsboy’s cap, hit the horn. She rolled down her window, stuck her head out, and drew a deep breath. Before she had time to let loose with whatever she’d been planning to shriek, we began to move.

  I said, desperately, “What altarpiece? What water damage?”

  “Leak.” (That had to be “water damage.”) He continued, “Flemish. Early fifteenth century. Madonna and Child. Wood. Porous.”

  I wrote it all down, but with a sensation of futility. If Overton didn’t become more articulate, there wouldn’t be a story. Maybe he’d unbend once we got to the museum. By now, we were gliding down the quiet, tree-lined streets of the sixteenth arrondissement, the most posh and proper district in Paris. We pulled up in front of a square, solid-looking house of gray stone, chestnut-shaded and discreetly sumptuous behind a hedge. While Overton (to my relief) paid the taxi driver, the massive dark green front door opened and a small, sharp-faced man wearing rimless round glasses emerged.

  The day’s third problem presented itself. The small man, who had a headful of dark curls and was wearing a nubby brown wool suit too heavy for the weather, shot a disapproving look at me and immediately began speaking to Overton
with excited Gallic volubility. He was obviously protesting about something, but it took me a while to figure out that he was protesting about me.

  Once I got the drift, I started picking up a few words. I gathered that Overton hadn’t let the little man know I was coming along, and it was too early for official visiting hours, and the whole thing was seriously against regulations. (Going against regulations, I had already discovered during my brief time in France, was not something a person could expect to do without suffering for it.) The Frenchman’s glasses flashed, he gestured, he said— and I understood him distinctly— “You take too much upon yourself, Monsieur!”

  Overton, at least a head taller and a lot bulkier, seemed totally unmoved. “Madame —” he glanced at me for help.

  “Maxwell.”

  “Madame Maxwell is here at my invitation.” His French was exquisite.

  “Yes, but you see—” and the little man was off again, citing the intricacies of museum opening hours and unexpected visitors from the press.

  Overton waited stolidly for him to finish, then repeated, “Madame Maxwell is here at my invitation.”

  I was amazed that Overton felt obliged to champion me, instead of bundling me into another taxi and sending me on my way. I stood by, peering past the Frenchman’s shoulder to the dim interior of the museum, where a guard in a navy blue uniform hovered.

  Overton won. The Frenchman gave way with a shrug that involved his entire upper torso. Overton turned to me and said, “Georgia Lee Maxwell, let me present Bernard Mallet, director of the Musée Bellefroide.”

  Trying not to look triumphant, I shook Mallet’s hand and we followed him inside. Overton had paid for the cab. I hadn’t been turned away at the museum door. The day had started to go right.