Peter May - Blowback

“Are you asking us or telling us?” Dominique was getting impatient, and Enzo could see that Fred was starting to shut down. Whatever he knew, he didn’t want to say, especially not in front of Dominique.

“Well, thanks very much,” Enzo said, and he felt Dominique turn toward him in surprise. “That’s been very helpful.” He turned to Dominique. “Why don’t you head on up to the Cafe Central and get a couple of coffees on the table for us. I’m just going to have a little flutter here myself.” And he reached into his satchel for his wallet.

The skin around Dominique’s eyes darkened, and he saw the anger in them. He was getting rid of her, and she knew it. But whatever thoughts went through her mind she kept them to herself. “Okay,” was all she said. She nodded to Fred and left.

Enzo waited until the door had closed behind her before sliding a hundred euro note across the bar. “Whatever you tell me, Fred, is between us.” He raised his eyebrows. “Okay?”

Fred looked at the note, Enzo’s fingertips still on it, pinning it to the counter, then glanced up to search the Scotsman’s eyes for some kind of illumination. None was forthcoming, but his hesitation did not last long. He lowered his voice. “Not here. Not now.”

“Where then, and when?”

“Tonight. About seven, after I get away from here. I’ll meet you outside the gates of the old Chateau Puymule on the road to Saint-Pierre. You know it?”

Enzo nodded. He had passed it several times on the road, sitting off to the right on the way up to Chez Fraysse. An impressive, historic building open every day to the public during the tourist season. But shut now. Fred’s eyes turned down toward the note on the counter, and Enzo lifted his fingers.

One blink and it was gone.

He saw her through the glass, sitting alone, her hands on the table in front of her, fingers intertwined. The cafe was empty, and she cut a lonely figure sitting there under the harsh fluorescent light. She looked up as the door opened, and her face darkened. There were no coffees on the table.

He sat down opposite her, and for a moment she refused to meet his eyes. Then, when she did, he saw that all the warmth had left hers. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Her voice was low and controlled.

He felt the stab of her anger, and his own face colored. “He wasn’t going to say anything with you there.”

“Then you should have gone back later. I have to live here, Enzo. And you completely undermined me in front of him. Stripped me of all my power and authority. Turned me into some silly woman who can be brushed aside.”

Enzo drew a deep breath. “I’m sure he didn’t see it like that.”

“I’m sure he did.”

Enzo reached out to take her hand. “I’m sorry.”

She withdrew it quickly. “Don’t make it worse. I’m not some silly woman, and you can’t just appease me with a squeeze of the hand and a patronising apology.”

Enzo withdrew his own hands and pushed them into his pocket. “Ok. Then let me put it another way. I’m here to investigate a murder, Dominique. I have a few days at the most. They’re closing the hotel next week and everyone will be gone. I’m not going to pussyfoot around fragile sensibilities and risk losing any of the little time I have.” They glared at each other for a moment. Then Enzo sighed. “I’m genuinely sorry if I stepped on your toes. I didn’t mean to, and it won’t happen again.”

Her voice remained steady. “No, it won’t.” The tension between them almost crackled in the air, like electricity. Before suddenly she seemed to relent, and it dissipated. “What did he tell you?”

“Nothing. Yet.”

She searched his face. “I’ve been straight with you, Enzo. Shared everything I have.”

“And I’ll be straight with you, too. He didn’t want to talk in there. I’m meeting him tonight. And whatever he shares with me, I’ll share with you.”

“You told him that?”

“No, I told him that whatever he told me was between him and me.” He grinned. “But I gave him a hundred euros, so I figured that bought me the right to lie a little.”

A reluctant smile pushed its way on to Dominique’s lips and a little of the warmth returned to her eyes.

Enzo said, “Listen, what are you doing for lunch?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably open a tin of soup or something. I’ll get some bread at the boulangerie on the way back to the apartment.”

“No one to cook for you?”

A sadness dulled her smile. “Or to cook for.”

Enzo shook his head. “That seems incredible to me. An attractive woman like you.”

She caught his glance at her ring hand. “Oh, I used to be married. He was a fonctionnaire at the mairie. We had a little apartment away from the gendarmerie. Both employees of the state, but our hours never quite matched up. In the end he found someone else to share his time off with.” She shook her head and made herself smile. “And the kind of hours I work, I’m not going to find someone else in a hurry.”

Enzo gazed at her thoughtfully for some moments.

She said. “Don’t pity me. I don’t feel sorry for myself.”

Enzo shook his head. “I wasn’t feeling sorry for you. I was just thinking what a waste it was.” He hesitated. “Maybe I can offer you something better for lunch than a tin of soup and a baguette.”

She laughed. “Don’t tell me you cook, too.”

“I do actually. But that’s not what I meant. I’m having lunch at Chez Fraysse today. Why don’t you join me, since it’s your day off?”

Her mouth fell open just a little, before she became aware of it and snapped it shut.

“After all, you did tell me you’d never eaten there. And maybe at last you can say you’ve met a man who would be happy to spend that kind of money on you.”

She stared at him for some moments, almost in disbelief, before her face broke into a grin. “Oh, my God! What am I going to wear?”

The staff ate in a long recreational shed out back, behind the kitchen. Canteen style tables and chairs were laid out in two rows to feed the twenty kitchen staff and other employees of the hotel. The toilets and locker rooms stood at one end.

Morning service for the staff was at eleven, and lasted no longer than thirty minutes, so that the kitchen was geared up and ready for lunch service in the restaurant by midday. Most of the chefs had been in preparing for the day’s services since eight, and were more than ready to eat.

As Enzo wandered in, the shed was filling up. Big pots of steaming food were being placed along the two lines of tables: Andouillette sausage, bowls of pasta, salad, potatoes, several huge containers of hot brown lentils in a thick onion gravy. Bottles of water and cheap vin de pays stood at intervals along the tables. But no one was drinking the rough, red wine. Cutlery was grabbed from piles at the ends of the tables, but Enzo noticed that most of the cooking staff had their own Laguiole or Thiers knives that they unfolded from pockets and used for eating.

He noticed, too, the men he had seen putting in snow poles along the road the day he arrived. The big man with the dark haunted expression who had caught his eye then, caught it again now. He was unshaven, his hair long and greasy, hanging over his collar. Enzo nodded and smiled. But the man gazed back at him from behind unfathomable dark eyes, and made no acknowledgement whatsoever. He wore thick, workmen’s overalls and a fluorescent yellow vest. The treads of his green Wellington boots were caked with mud. His eyes dipped back to his food which he shovelled unceremoniously into his mouth with big, dirty hands.

Enzo squeezed past and scanned the faces of all those taking seats along the length of the two rows of tables. He saw Sophie, assiduously avoiding his eye. She was sitting amongst a group of young kitchen staff, obviously stagiaires, who were laughing and joking as they passed the food along and snatched chunks of rough cut bread from one of the many baskets.