Barbara Cleverly - Folly Du Jour

A black clarinettist doubling on tenor saxophone was playing the audience as cleverly as his instruments this evening and there was a jazz pianist of almost equal skill. A banjo player and a guitarist added a punchy stringed rhythm. Not an accordion within a mile, Joe thought happily. Generously, the instrumentalists were allowing each other to shine, turn and turn about, beating out a supporting and inspired accompaniment while one of the others starred. To everyone’s delight, the pianist suddenly grabbed the spotlight, soaring into flight with a section from George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Joe almost forgot why he was there.

Damn George! If it hadn’t been for his officious nosiness, Joe could have been here, plying Heather Watkins with pink champagne, relaxing after a boring day at the Interpol conference, just a couple of tourists. She’d have been laughing at the new cap he’d bought and flattened on to his head, wearing it indoors like half the men in the room. Instead, he was crouching awkwardly, sitting slightly sideways on his bar stool to disguise the bulge of the Browning on his hip and hoping that no friendly American would fling an arm around him, encountering the handcuffs looped through his belt at the small of his back.

He glanced around at the crowd. Not many single men but enough to lend him cover. The one or two who appeared to be by themselves had probably chosen their solitary state, he reckoned. He saw two men line up at the bar, released from the company of their wives whom they had cheerfully waved off on to the dance floor in the arms of a couple of dark-haired, sinuous male dancers. What had Bonnefoye called them? Tangoing, tea-dance gigolos. Everyone seemed pleased with the arrangement, not least the husbands. On the whole, a typical Left Bank crowd, self-aware, pleasure-seeking, rather louche. But then, this wasn’t Basingstoke.

He enjoyed the clarinettist’s version of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and decided that when he spiralled to a climax, it would be time to move on.

He ducked into the gentlemen’s room and checked that, as Bonnefoye had said, it was no more than it appeared and waited for a moment by the door he held open a finger’s breadth. No one followed him. A second later he was walking up the carpeted stairs towards the three doors he’d been promised at the top on the landing. And there they were. The middle one, he remembered, was the one behind which the doorkeeper lurked.

The building itself was a stout-hearted stone and rather lovely example of Third Empire architecture seen from the exterior. But it had been drastically remodelled inside. The original heavy wooden features had been stripped away and replaced with lighter modern carpentry and fresh bright paint. Entirely in character with the new owner, Joe suspected.

He fished in his pocket for his ticket to the underworld, thinking it might not be wise to be observed digging about as for a concealed weapon at the moment when the doorkeeper turned up. And the mirrors? Just in case, he offered his face to the fanlight, grinned disarmingly, and waited for Bonnefoye’s promised monster.

A moment later the door opened and he was peremptorily asked his business by a very large man wearing the evening outfit of a maître d’hôtel. Bonnefoye, for once, had not exaggerated. The attempt to pass off this bull terrier as a manservant could have been comical had he not seemed so completely at ease in his role. He was not unwelcom-ing, he merely wanted to know, like any good butler, who had fetched up, uninvited, on the doorstep.

Joe held out the book he’d bought that morning.

‘This is for madame. Tell her, would you, that Mr Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. .’ He repeated the name. ‘. . is here and would like to speak to her.’

It’s very difficult to avoid taking a book that someone is pressing on you with utter confidence. The man took it, looked at Joe uneasily, asked him to wait, and retreated, closing the door behind him.

A minute later, the door was opened again. He saw a slim blonde woman, giggling with delight and holding out her arms in greeting.

‘Mr Dodgson, indeed!’ She kissed him on each cheek. Twice.

‘We can all make use of a pseudonym at times,’ he said, smiling affably and returning her kisses. ‘Good to see you again, Alice.’

The giant appeared behind her, a lowering presence. She turned to him and spoke in French. ‘Flavius, my guest will hand you his revolver. House rules,’ she confided. ‘I see you still carry one on your right hip, Mr Dodgson.’

Joe traded steely gazes with Flavius as he handed over his Browning. The man’s head was the size of a watermelon and covered, not in skin, but in hide. Cracked and seamed hide, stretched over a substructure of bone which had shifted slightly at some time in his forty years. Wiry grey-black hair sprouted thickly about his skull but had been discouraged from rampant growth by a scything haircut. It was parted into two sections along the side of his head by an old shrapnel wound. Or a bayonet cut. His hands resembled nothing so much as bunches of overripe bananas. Joe wondered what pistol had a large enough guard to accommodate his trigger finger.

‘Thank you, that will be all, Flavius,’ said Alice daintily. ‘I’ll call you if we need to replenish the champagne.’

‘Or adjust the doilies,’ said Joe.

‘May I just call you, as ever — Joe?’ she said, switching back to English when her guard dog had stalked off on surprisingly light feet. She held up the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , with a peacock’s feather poking out from the pages as he remembered it on her shelf in Simla. The hat maker in the rue Mouffetard had been puzzled and amused by his request that morning and had refused payment for such a small piece of nonsense but it seemed to have worked. Alice was still laughing. ‘Do you know, I never did get further than the page marker! I got quite bogged down in the middle of a mad tea party.’

‘The reason most of us leave India,’ Joe suggested.

‘Yes indeed! But, as you know, it wasn’t boredom that drove me away! I was having a happy time. It was Nemesis in the shape of a granite-jawed, flinty-eyed police commander who chose to delve too deeply into my business affairs.’

Joe decided to bite back a dozen objections to her light summary of a catalogue of murder, theft and fraud. ‘Not sure I recognize him . Shall we just say something came up and you had to leave India in a hurry?’

‘ You came up, you toad! And here you are again, doing what toads do! Now the question is — shall I step on you and squash you or invite you inside and give you a kiss?’

‘I think it’s frogs that are the usual recipients of oscula-tory salutations,’ he said cheerfully.

Alice groaned. ‘Still arsing about, Sandilands? Can’t say I’ve missed it! But come in anyway.’

He followed her trim figure along the corridor. Dark red cocktail dress, short and showing a good deal of her excellent legs. Her shining fair hair, which had been the colour of a golden guinea he remembered, was now paler, with the honey and lemon glow of a vin de paille . It was brushed back from her forehead and secured by a black velvet band studded with a large ruby over her left ear. Had her eyes always had that depth of brilliant blue? Of course, but in the strait-laced society of Simla, she had not dared to risk the fringe of mascara-darkened lashes. She still had the power to overawe him. He found himself looking shiftily to left or right of her or down at her feet as he had ever done and was angry with his reaction.

‘Joe, will you come this way?’ She turned and, stretching out her right hand, invited him to enter a salon. Distantly, sounds of the jazz band rose through the heavily carpeted floor and he realized they must be directly over the jazz café. She closed the door and they were alone together.