A Twist of Orchids Read online

  “Like me,” said Osman proudly. “But younger. Is nineteen.”

  “Not like you,” Betul cut in bluntly. “Kazim is skinny, not fat like Osman, and without walrus mustache.”

  “What walrus?” Osman objected.

  “A photo would help.”

  Betul got up and left the room. She returned minutes later with a school photo, taken when Kazim was perhaps fifteen. A round face with dark curly hair, his mother’s long nose and large eyes.

  “Nothing more recent?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, what kind of motorbike does he have?”

  “Honda,” said the father. “Big shiny red.”

  “A Bol d’Or,” said the mother, ever more practical. “New. He just bought it this year.”

  “And what was he wearing when he left?”

  “Ha!” Osman slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “White robe—what we call önluk—long to ground, yellow vest, red shoes, red hat.” The man’s natural buoyancy came bubbling up as he tried to make a joke. “You cannot mistake. When he left, Kazim is dress like Turkish salepar!”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Betul scolded. “Monsieur Wood, when Kazim came for his moto, he took some clothes and his leather jacket. He left the salepar outfit. I put it away where my husband would not see it. I knew it would only upset him.”

  Osman’s face fell. “You see?” he said miserably to Julian. “You see what I say? Our son is try take off his Turkish skin. But—” The father sat up straight, his head lifted with pride, and he said with conviction, “He cannot. Once you are Turk, you cannot change what is inside.”

  • 7 •

  The Brieuxs’ commercial empire in Grissac occupied the ground floor of a large house built of honey-colored Périgord limestone. A small, thriving conglomerate, it consisted of a general store, a dépot de pain, a tabac, and a marchand de journaux—that is, it supplied not only groceries, mousetraps, and dish detergent, but daily deliveries of fresh bread, cigarettes, and newspapers as well. It also served as the informal hub of activity and gossip for the surrounding villages and farming population. Most important, it was the site of the Chez Nous Bistro, which offered some of the best cooking in the region. Julian knew the owners, Paul and Mado Brieux, from his bachelor days when he had lived full-time at his cottage, a twenty-minute walk away.

  On that Friday night, the bistro was full as usual. Julian, Mara, and another friend, Loulou La Pouge, a retired policeman, sat at their customary table at the front. Bismuth slept at Julian’s feet, Jazz near the bar. Friday was their weekly dinner get-together. Loulou did not know it, but Fridays were also becoming the occasion of Julian and Mara’s weekly fight: Madame Audebert cleaned on Fridays.

  The fight had begun earlier over a little thing. Or, from Julian’s viewpoint, not little at all. He had left his English newspapers scattered about. She (la Audebert) had thrown them out. When he had asked her about them, she had retorted that they were old papers. She could read the dates, that much she could do. And she was right, except that they were last Sunday’s editions of The Independent and The Observer. Although he spoke and read French like a native, these papers were Julian’s weekly treat to himself. He liked to stretch the enjoyment of them—the sports, politics, news of home—over the whole week and, well, yes, over the whole house as well. He had retrieved the crumpled pages from the garbage only to find that they were soggy with coffee grounds and vegetable peelings.

  Understandably irritated, Julian had pointed out that the newspapers were now unreadable. To which the cleaning woman had declared, “Pah! C’est la montagne qui accouche d’une souris,” equating his complaint to a mountain giving birth to a mouse, her way of saying “a tempest in a teapot.” At that point, he had lost his temper and told her in future not to touch anything that was his. She had snapped back, in that case she might as well not come at all, since his things were everywhere, and slammed out of the house. Mara, instead of taking his side, had asked him quite testily if he couldn’t pick up a bit, as she did, before the woman’s weekly visit. He, aggrieved, had replied: “I thought picking up was the whole point of having a femme de ménage.”

  Then he had made the mistake of adding that he was surprised that Mara, who was afraid of nothing, could be so easily intimidated by a cleaning woman.

  That was the spark that had ignited a gunpowder mood that lasted all the way to the bistro and now into dinner.

  “I ordered the escargots,” Mara snapped at Bernard, the weekend waiter, when he mistakenly put a plate of snails sizzling in garlic butter before Julian. She made it sound like an accusation.

  “Um, yes,” said Julian, with a slight shrug of apology to the young man. Bernard, when he was not waiting tables, served as Julian’s heavy labor during the gardening season. “The—er—crayfish in tomato sauce is mine.”

  “Eat. Be happy,” urged Loulou, digging into his platter of aubergine fritters. Fat and cheerful, he looked more like an elderly cherub than an ex-flic.

  Conversation was strained during the main course. Loulou tried to keep his end up, but eventually fell to mopping up Mado’s rich cream and morel sauce with bits of bread. Over dessert, Julian tried to jolly Mara out of her sulk by referring to their lovers’ quarrel in a lighthearted way. It was, after all, he told Loulou, a case of the mountain and the mouse.

  Loulou chuckled as he cracked open the crust of his crème brûlée with the back of a spoon. “Eh bien, which of you is the mouse?”

  Mara glared. Julian was reduced to picking his teeth.

  Later, they lingered over coffee, staying on as they always did until Paul and Mado could join them. By then, they and the dogs had the restaurant to themselves.

  When Paul came out from the kitchen, he, too, looked out of sorts. He shook hands perfunctorily with Julian and Loulou, poked his head at Mara’s face in a simulation of the double-sided kiss, hooked a chair over with his foot, and dropped his large frame into it. Bismuth, who had been lying under the chair, shot away. Jazz looked up from his spot by the bar.

  “Bigre!” uttered Paul. “Some people are never satisfied. There was a crétin actually had the nerve to tell me our menu needs variety. ‘Variety?’ I said. ‘I’ll give you variety. How would you like a face full of pudding?’”

  “You didn’t,” marveled Loulou, highly entertained.

  “I did.”

  The bead curtain separating the bistro from the other parts of the Brieuxs’ enterprise parted noisily. Mado, statuesque and beautiful, came through. She had just been up to check on their young son, Eddie, asleep in the couple’s apartment upstairs. Wearily, she embraced everyone around the table, pulled up another chair and sat down next to her husband.

  “C’est trop,” she sighed. It’s too much.

  “Are you all right?” Mara asked, peering at her anxiously.

  In fact, Mado looked exhausted. She had miscarried a month ago. Although the couple pointedly refused to talk about it, the loss of the baby had knocked the spirit out of the normally vibrant redhead. Out of Paul, too.

  The addition of the Brieuxs did not improve the company. Julian unwittingly started an unpleasant exchange of words by mentioning that he had run into Loulou’s grandnephew, Laurent. The conversation began calmly enough.

  “Someone broke into the Turkish store in Brames on Sunday night,” he said. “Laurent and Albert were there investigating.”

  “Are you talking about Lokum?” asked Mado. She knew the Ismets slightly, since they were also in the food business. Her golden eyes widened, accentuating the shadows lurking beneath them. “Robbery?”

  “No, the money wasn’t touched. It was a trash job, and they made a right mess. The Ismets think it was an anti-Muslim statement. Osman and his son were involved in a dust-up at the market in Beaumont last Tuesday. Name-calling ending in bodily contact. Osman thinks it was the same group of voyous. And to make matters worse, the son, Kazim, has left home. I’m supposed to get him back. You know about people who go missi
ng, Loulou. This ought to be right up your street.”

  It was. Loulou had spent part of his career in Missing Persons with the Police nationale in Périgueux. In fact, it was with respect to Mara’s missing sister Bedie that Julian and Mara had come to know him. Loulou’s eyes lit up, and he embarked on what threatened to be a lengthy lecture. He told them that in cases where a person vanished willingly, the key was to understand the background, the psychology behind the subject’s wish to vanish. “However,” he went on, warming to his subject, “in the case of someone who disappears involuntarily—ah ça!—that is another matter. There you have to look at misadventure, kidnap, murder, human trafficking, and all too often”—he hunched forward—“a body.”

  “I doubt it’s anything like that,” Julian cut in, stemming the flow. “His parents think he’s trying to shake his Muslim roots. Apparently he’s fed up with being hassled for being Turkish.”

  “Les arabes,” Paul muttered. Whether he was referring specifically to Turks or to France’s six million Muslims jumbled together regardless of national origin was unclear. Then he added, leaving no doubt as to the even broader inclusiveness of his meaning, “Too many damned immigrants in France. They come here, live off the system, drag everything down.”

  “That justifies a trashing?” Mara bristled. She did not know the Ismets, but she had been combat-ready all evening, and this was as good a cause as any for opening fire.

  “I didn’t say that,” objected Paul, shifting about, making his chair groan.

  Mara bore down. “You as good as did. It’s a fact that people of color aren’t treated well in France. They’re stuffed into ghettos. They’re poorly educated and can’t get work.”

  “Bigre!” Paul stuck his jaw out. “They won’t work. That’s the whole problem.”

  “You’re both generalizing—” Loulou began, but Paul, resentful, cut him off.

  “Easy enough for her to talk. Canada’s a big country. All that ice and snow. Canada wouldn’t survive without immigrants. Needs them, just to stay warm. Well, they can have ours, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Oh, come on, Paul.” Julian weighed in. “You can’t say the Ismets are a drag on the system. They struggle bloody hard to make a living, and they turn out a good product. You should taste some of Betul’s pastries.” This earned from Mara an almost friendly glance. She did have a personal acquaintance with Betul’s baklava.

  Paul snorted skeptically. “Peuh! Heavy. Doughy. Not like ours.”

  “Have you tried them?” Mara challenged. “Don’t be so chauvinistic.”

  “Chauvinistic how? No one makes better pastries than the French. It’s a recognized fact.”

  Julian said, “Forget pastries. You’d change your tune if you saw what those crapauds did to their store. You wouldn’t like it if it happened to you.”

  “Let them try!” The big man swiveled around fiercely, as if warning off all comers.

  “What happened to the Ismets is an isolated incident,” Mado said, trying to soothe matters. “We don’t have those kinds of problems in the Dordogne.”

  Loulou shook his bald head. “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s coming. In fact, it’s here. Bigotry knows no home. And what about those break-and-enters in the last few months?” He referred to a string of unsolved house burglaries. The last two had been accompanied by signature poems teasing the police.

  Paul said ungraciously, “That’s my point. Foreigners come to the Dordogne, buy property, push up the prices, and then live here only a few months of the year. You have all these houses sitting around empty most of the time, asking to be robbed.”

  “Julian and I are foreigners,” Mara snapped.

  Paul scowled. “Not you. You live here. You’re like us. I mean those others.”

  “Oh, you mean like Prudence?” Prudence Chang was a mutual friend, a retired Chinese-American advertising executive who maintained a summer residence not far from Mara. She usually spent all or part of her summers there but, like the O’Connors, came and went as she pleased. She was also a very good customer of Paul and Mado. Every fall she hosted a gala eight-course lunch, catered by the Brieuxs, for her large circle of friends. The ticket accounted for a decent percentage of the Chez Nous annual take, to say nothing of the free publicity.

  “Not her, either.” Paul’s face grew very red.

  “Well, who then?”

  He glowered and shoved away from the table. For a moment it looked as if he would stalk out, but instead he stomped to the bar where he appeared to struggle with his better nature. Eventually he returned with a flask of plum brandy and fresh glasses.

  “There’s also an increase in drugs on the street,” Loulou went on, watching Paul pour out the ruby-colored liqueur. “In the last year there’s been a spike in the supply of heroin in the region. I tell you this in confidence. Ton-and-a-Half may be back in business. If he was ever out of it.”

  “Ton who?” asked Mado.

  “Rocco Luca.”

  “Wop,” said Paul.

  “French. Local boy. He was born down the road in Bergerac.”

  Mado asked, “If his name’s Rocco Luca, why do they call him Ton-and-a-Half?”

  The ex-cop took a sip of plum brandy, rolled it around in his mouth, and swallowed. “Good, this. Some say it’s because he packed a big punch. Used to be a heavyweight boxer. But he really got the name because back in the seventies he was caught trying to land a ton and a half of marijuana along the Côte d’Azur. He did time and passes nowadays for a legitimate man of business leading the blameless life in a big house north of Brames.”

  “Brames? That’s Laurent’s turf,” Julian observed.

  Loulou nodded. “And his boss is very well aware of it, let me tell you. Compagnon’s had his eye on Luca ever since he moved back to the Dordogne five years ago. He thinks Luca’s behind the new action in the region. He thinks drugs are Luca’s source of money and business is how he launders it.”

  “Is he right?” Mara leaned forward with interest. She and Julian personally knew Laurent’s brigade commander, Adjudant Jacques Compagnon, a big, prickly man with a reputation for working his gendarmes hard.

  Loulou lifted his shoulders. “Who knows? It’s not really Luca’s style—petty stuff—but Compagnon has a theory that it’s leakage from bigger shipments that are being moved on. But if it is Luca, how is he bringing it in? Is he reverting to his old MO and landing it on the coast? Trouble is, the drug squad boys don’t take Luca seriously anymore. He’s pushing seventy, and they think he’s past it. They’re after new blood like Reynaud in Marseille and Félix Bidart in Bordeaux, who they figure are handling big transshipments to New York. However, Luca has ties with Pascal Goudy in Toulouse, a type with known drug connections. Those two go back a long way. He also employs someone named Serge Taussat as a kind of general factotum, and that one’s as nasty as he looks. Judge a man by the company he keeps, they say. Except the Ton also has some pretty powerful political pals who owe him favors, which makes him untouchable. So far, only Compagnon is keeping Luca in his peripheral vision, and he’s going on nothing more than a hunch.”

  “Drugs!” Paul seized the point and slammed a hand as big as a ham on the table, making the glassware jump. “That’s another thing. Who brings the stuff in? Foreigners. Albanians and Kurds. Turks.”

  “And the Dutch,” added Loulou. “Sure, most of the heroin that starts out as poppies in Afghanistan is processed in Turkey—”

  “They ship it here in boats, trucks, planes, trains, even in dogs’ stomachs, parbleu!” Paul rumbled on.

  “But the fact of the matter is that a lot of it winds up in Holland first, and from there it comes into France.”

  “Whatever. They’re killing our kids with their poison. Look at them. High on something most of the time, shooting stuff into their veins or swallowing Ecstasy. And we’re left to clean up the problem. I tell you, it wasn’t like this in my day. Everything’s going down the drain.” Paul had recently turned forty-one.
Whatever excesses had defined his youth in la France profonde—the depths of the country—things like soft, hard, and designer drugs had completely passed him by.

  “We don’t have a drug problem here,” said Mado.

  “Just wait for it!” roared her husband.

  Julian shook his head. He had never seen his friend in such a mood. Maybe it was more than Mara’s goading, foreigners, and drugs. Maybe it was change itself that was bothering Paul. It bothered him, too. You felt it in the air, saw its imprint on the land, heard it in the way people talked. The old ways, the old ties and courtesies were breaking down. Young people were restless, discontent. Every year there was more traffic on the roads. Fields that had once grown wheat and oats and maize were sprouting houses. Ugly red smudges of raw bricks (waiting to be faced with limestone; that’s what everything was nowadays, facing, not the real, solid stuff) were replacing the blaze of poppies on the hillsides. Mara had criticized Julian for always going on about the vulnerability of the stretch of woodland and meadow that abutted her own property. But only last fall he had seen a team of surveyors there. “Just waiting for someone to snap it up,” he had predicted grimly. And now a resident drug baron.

  “Since the cops know where this Ton-and-a-Half lives,” said Mado, “why don’t they just pull him in?”

  Loulou brought his shoulders to his ears. “On what charge? He’s smart, is old Luca, and, like I said, well connected. Compagnon will want to be very sure of his ground before he makes a move.”

  “That type they found in Périgueux have anything to do with this?” asked Julian. They had all read about the sensational gangland-style murder. Chlorinated water had been found in the dead man’s lungs, and there were particles of some kind of commercial soil and peat moss mixture embedded in his nostrils. It was as if he had been drowned in a swimming pool and then dragged through a flower bed before being dumped, like an offering, at the foot of Vesunna’s temple.

  “Ah,” said Loulou. “Yvan.” He drained his glass, pausing for dramatic impact.