Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera Read online

  But then Eugène Blocque rose to his feet and announced, ‘I too must follow Twinks to the Riviera,’ before leaving.

  Not to be outdone, Gaston Tacquelle, using exactly the same words, followed him out.

  Dimpsy turned up the wattage of her best smile and focused it on the two American writers.

  ‘Holy cow,’ said Chuck Waggen, rising to his feet. ‘I gotta go. Follow Twinks. To the Riviera.’

  Of course Scott Frea couldn’t allow his rival unimpeded access to the girl in the South of France, so he leapt up and announced his intentions of following Twinks to the Riviera.

  The smile froze on Dimpsy’s face. The waiter who came forward to collect the absinthe glasses tried to cheer her. ‘It is for such moments of accidie that one should turn to Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, for its evaluation of the internalized virtues in a—’

  ‘Stuff a pillow in it!’ said Dimpsy Wickett-Coote, as she stormed out of Les Deux Mangetouts.

  Corky Froggett insisted that he was fine to drive. ‘If we’d been slowed down by little things like concussion or fatal wounds we wouldn’t have given Jerry the pasting we did in the last dust-up,’ he assured his master.

  But Blotto thought it would still be safer if he took the wheel. Besides, he rather relished the prospect of opening up the Lagonda’s throttle on the empty roads of France. The further they left Paris behind, the warmer the weather became and after a couple of hours’ driving they put the roof down. Their leather helmets and goggles protected them from the worst of the cold, and the air that rushed past them was bracing.

  The roads were slow and frequently rural, so they broke their journey at a small hotel. Blotto didn’t think much of the menu gastronomique that was offered. Why did the French always have to spoil perfectly good ingredients by smothering them with sauces? And carefully picking out every last clove of garlic still didn’t remove the taste of the stuff from his food. However, they all slept well and, though Blotto couldn’t understand the hotel’s inability to rustle up something as simple as bacon and eggs, they set off the next morning in good spirits.

  Blotto had been to the South of France before, with some Old Etonian chums a few years after they left the school, but he hadn’t seen much except for the inside of casinos and the bottom of champagne bottles. Still, even though every mile he drove took him further away from his beloved Tawcester Towers, the prospect of the Riviera was more appealing than that of Paris. At least, so far as he knew, there weren’t any art galleries on the Riviera.

  18

  A Friend in the Right Place

  One of the many advantages of being a member of the English aristocracy is that wherever you go in Europe you’re bound to have some kind of relative there. The time-honoured custom of treating marriage as a form of trade (though of course never marrying anyone from trade) had led to much inbreeding among noble families. And though individual aristocrats might suffer from the excesses of revolution, war or communism, people like Blotto and Twinks could almost always count on finding some distantly connected scion of the family tree wherever their travels took them. They had distant cousins everywhere.

  The relevant relative on the Riviera was the Honourable Giles Strappe-Cash. He wasn’t from a part of the Lyminster dynasty that one would particularly brag about. In fact there were rumours that among his ancestors was one of the many bastard children of Rupert the Libertine. And that that ancestor’s mother had been a particularly juicy washerwoman.

  Nor was Giles one of the wealthy members of the Lyminster family. Born from a line of younger sons, his ancestors’ prospects had been further reduced over the years by the usual depredations of maintaining country houses, investing in demonstrably stupid business schemes, having expensive mistresses and losing money at cards. As a result, Giles Strappe-Cash was born in debt, and throughout his life had continued to make that debt larger. Expelled from Eton for dubious practices behind the cricket pavilion, he became an enduring source of embarrassment and scandal to the Lyminster family. So much so that he was eventually packed off to the South of France with a small allowance, completely inadequate to the kind of lifestyle he regarded as his birthright.

  Having been turned out of decreasingly grand hotels all along the Riviera for non-payment of bills, the Honourable Giles Strappe-Cash had ended up by the time of Blotto and Twinks’s arrival in cheap lodgings in the dingy fishing village of Saint-Tropez. There he continued to enjoy his dubious practices, all the while bouncing cheques with the abandon of a small child with a rubber ball.

  Twinks had contacted him from Paris and he’d agreed to meet them in a small establishment called the Café Floure in Saint-Tropez. When they arrived there, Corky Froggett – now fully recovered from his concussion – went off in the Lagonda to check their luggage into the recently opened Hôtel Majestic in Cannes.

  It was actually mild enough to sit outside the café, and that was where they found their distant cousin. Giles was wearing a battered straw hat and a stained white suit. From his lower lip, above where most people would have a chin (he was from the unchinned side of the Lyminster family) depended a foul-smelling Gauloise cigarette. In front of him on the zinc table was a glass and a half-full bottle of brandy. His manner – and his breath – suggested that he had already ingested the other half.

  The Café Floure did not have quite the stature and ambience of Les Deux Mangetouts in Paris. The waiter who took their orders gave only the briefest of disquisitions on Hegelian Dialectic before going off to fetch their coffee.

  ‘Hello,’ said Giles Strappe-Cash when Blotto and Twinks had introduced themselves. ‘Can you lend me a fiver?’

  ‘Tickey-tockey,’ said Blotto, handing across a crisp white note.

  The speed with which it was pocketed made the movement almost indiscernible to the human eye. ‘Actually, could you make it two?’ asked Giles.

  ‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto, handing across another.

  ‘And while you’re at it, three would—’

  Twinks interrupted before her brother could hand over the third note. ‘Giles, we’re here because we’re on the track of two paintings that were stolen from Tawcester Towers.’

  ‘Oh well, you’ve called in at the wrong shop, I’m afraid. I’ve never stolen any paintings.’ The idea seemed to intrigue him. ‘Though, actually, it’s something I might have a go at. I pongle off to lots of stately piles and I’m sure the owners wouldn’t notice the odd missing portrait of—’

  ‘No, no, Giles. I wasn’t suggesting that you yourself were the filth-fingered filcher. But I thought, with your contacts here on the Riviera, you might be able to point our canoes in the right direction.’

  ‘Oh, I read your semaphore. You want to pay me as an agent to introduce you to some of the right people?’

  ‘We weren’t actually thinking of paying you.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Though I suppose we could,’ said Blotto.

  Giles Strappe-Cash leapt on this moment of weakness. ‘Elegant idea. So you may as well give me that third fiver to get my brain-juices going.’

  ‘Beezer notion,’ said Blotto, handing the note across.

  It was pocketed as imperceptibly as its predecessors. ‘Right, Twinks, the fact that you’ve come all the way down here must mean that you have an idea who’s behind the theft of the paintings.’

  ‘Yes, we believe the boddo’s a criminal mastermind called La Puce.’

  Giles nodded in recognition and took a long swallow of brandy. ‘There are a lot of people down here looking for La Puce.’

  ‘Including, presumably, the local gendarmerie?’

  Their distant cousin shook his head. ‘They don’t seem too aerated about catching him. General view on the Riviera is that La Puce has paid off the police chief. Among other people.’

  ‘And no one knows where to find him?’

  ‘If they do, they’re not sharing the information. Another general view on the Riviera is La Puce has got a front.’

&nb
sp; ‘Surely everyone’s got a front,’ said Blotto. ‘And a back.’

  ‘No, I mean that he’s got a respectable front. He’s a recognized member of Riviera society with a criminal alter ego.’

  ‘Ah.’ Blotto looked blank. He’d never been much good at Latin.

  ‘If that’s the case, Giles,’ said Twinks, ‘any ideas where we should start looking?’

  ‘Well, you need to make contact with a boddo who knows everyone down here.’

  ‘And is that person you?’

  ‘Sadly no. I used to know quite a lot of Riviera people, but …’ he cleared his throat and took another swig of brandy, ‘a lot of them don’t talk to me any more.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Blotto, unaware of the message in Twinks’s face firmly saying that he shouldn’t.

  ‘Oh, anti-British prejudice, I think,’ replied Giles Strappe-Cash airily. ‘And a few misunderstandings about … I don’t know. People round here do have some rather old-fashioned views about the payment of bills.’

  ‘So who can you recommend down here who does know everyone?’ asked Twinks with some urgency.

  ‘Ah, well, there’s only one person who fits that pigeonhole. Westmoreland Hubely.’

  ‘The writer?’

  ‘You’re bong on the nose there, Twinks. Yes, expatriate Englishman, hugely successful, loaded down with spondulicks. Lives in a huge pile called the Villa Marzipan over Monaco way. Now Westmoreland Hubely really does know everybody.’

  ‘And can you organize an introduction to him for us?’

  ‘Of course I can, Twinks.’

  ‘Larksissimo!’

  ‘Hoopee-doopee!’

  ‘Oh, by the way, Blotto,’ asked Giles Strappe-Cash, ‘you couldn’t see your way to lending me a fiver, could you?’

  ‘Tickey-tockey.’ And another note was handed across.

  19

  The Villa Marzipan

  Westmoreland Hubely had the face of an elderly turtle that had just found something it didn’t like on the seabed. He welcomed his aristocratic guests to the Villa Marzipan for lunch the next day. Giles Strappe-Cash, who had effected the introduction by telephone, had not been invited. The writer explained, ‘I’m afraid he is persona non grata here,’ making Blotto once again wish he’d paid more attention in Latin lessons.

  Blotto had spent the previous evening in a casino with Giles, losing large amounts of money, both from his own bad luck and from the subs he kept giving his distant cousin. Twinks had spent the time interrogating fellow guests at the Hôtel Majestic about the identity of La Puce. She had had no success, though inevitably all of the young men she questioned had fallen in love with her. If you were Twinks, that was just an occupational hazard.

  The Villa Marzipan dominated a splendid location looking out over the Mediterranean. Even in early December no one needed topcoats. Westmoreland Hubely’s hospitality was legendary. He always had a large number of houseguests from whom he shut himself off in the mornings while he did his writing. But that day most of his visitors had gone out to the casinos of Cannes and the only other guest was a very beautiful dark-haired American girl. She wore a black dress with white trimmings and her eyes were rimmed with kohl make-up. Their host introduced her as ‘Mimsy La Pim, the film star’.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ she squeaked in the voice of a five-year-old. In spite of her looks, she didn’t seem one of those actresses likely to make the transition from silent movies to talkies.

  ‘Are you really “Honourables”?’ she asked. ‘I mean, aristocrats?’

  ‘We are the son and daughter of a duke,’ replied Twinks.

  ‘Gee, I never thought I’d meet a real aristocrat. We don’t have aristocrats in America. Or a Royal Family. We have a lot of cattle, though. And hot dogs.’

  ‘And what are you doing in France?’ asked Twinks. ‘Are you making a film?’

  ‘Gee, no. We don’t make films here. We make films in Hollywood. No, I’m here to explore my family history.’ She fluttered her long dark eyelashes. ‘“La Pim” is a French word. “La” means “the” in French, and “Pim” means … well, “Pim”, I guess.’

  ‘And what is a “Pim”?’ asked Blotto.

  Mimsy shrugged her elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t got that far in my French lessons yet.’

  Twinks had noticed a strange quality in her brother’s voice when he spoke to Mimsy, and she looked across to see if anything was wrong with him. On his face she saw an expression that she had never seen before. His fine jaw hung open. His glazed eyes gazed. He had the bemused look of one of those dead pharaohs whose brain had just been hooked out through his nose prior to mummification. Was it possible that her brother, the Honourable Devereux Lyminster, had finally met a woman who had stirred his torpid libido? Had Blotto succumbed to what in the country where they now were would be described as a coup de foudre?

  Whatever was happening, it didn’t seem to be totally one-sided either. Mimsy La Pim also wore the expression of one who had unwittingly undergone the removal of vital organs. Her plumply cushioned lips hung open, her kohl-circled eyes stared in amazement and her breathing seemed to have accelerated. Had she been in a scene from one of her silent movies, all that would have been required was a tastefully bordered caption bearing the words: ‘It was love at first sight.’

  Twinks wasn’t so impressed by what was happening with Mimsy. She had frequently witnessed young women licking their lips and positively drooling at the sight of her brother. But she’d never seen him show more than a polite passing interest in the adorer. Though, given the personality and priorities of his mother, Blotto recognized that he would be forced to succumb to matrimony at some point, he was in no hurry to name the unhappy day. And when that awful doom was finally unavoidable, it had never occurred to him that the second party in the contract might be anyone who hadn’t been chosen for him by the Dowager Duchess. The idea that he should meet and fall in love with a person of the female gender who hadn’t been rigorously selected by his mother had never entered his head.

  That was, until the moment he first set eyes on Mimsy La Pim … or perhaps it should be said: the real Mimsy La Pim. Because Blotto had seen her image many times at the cinematograph. He had a secret addiction to the kind of slushy melodramas in which she featured. He became more moved than he would care to admit by tales of thwarted love, unsympathetic parents, infants swapped in their cradles and moustache-twirling villains tying innocent young girls to railway lines. And he particularly liked flicks that featured Mimsy La Pim. There was something about the mute appeal in her large eyes that brought out the chivalry in him. He wished he could ride up gallantly on his hunter Mephistopheles to release her from the railway line. And bathe in the benison of her gratitude.

  But Blotto did know the difference between the movies and real life. Back in England he had recognized that Mimsy La Pim was likely to remain a fantasy love object in his life. He never expected to see her in the flesh. But now that unlikely event had occurred, the groundwork had been done and he was already prepared to feel a lot for her.

  He had to admit that she did stir strange feelings within him, wobbly sensations in his stomach, sensations that he couldn’t just put down to all those fumacious sauces the French insisted on covering perfectly good food with.

  This highly significant coincidence of attraction all took place very quickly, so that there was hardly a second’s pause before Westmoreland Hubely added his comment to the discussion of Mimsy’s origins. ‘I think it’s highly unlikely that you will find any family here in France, Miss La Pim.’

  ‘Gee, why’s that, Mr Hubely?’

  ‘Because “Mimsy La Pim” is not your real name, is it?’

  Bewilderment wrinkled her perfect brow. ‘That’s what I’m called.’

  ‘Yes, you’re called that, but only because a Hollywood publicist decided that “Pookie Klunch” was not an ideal name for a star of the silver screen.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not Pookie K
lunch any more. Nobody calls me that.’

  ‘Not even your parents?’ asked Twinks.

  ‘No,’ the film star replied. ‘The same publicist who changed my name to Mimsy La Pim also decided that my real parents weren’t suitable for a star of the silver screen, what with them working in hog-wrangling and all that. So in all the press handouts it says that I come from an aristocratic French family. And it’s that family that I’m hoping to meet up with here in France.’

  ‘But,’ said Westmoreland Hubely, who was getting near to exasperation, ‘you must realize that you have no chance of meeting people who don’t exist.’

  ‘We don’t know they don’t exist,’ said Mimsy. ‘And I’ve always felt much more like a Mimsy La Pim than a Pookie Klunch.’

  ‘So how would you explain that you were brought up on a farm in Idaho rather than in a French chateau?’

  ‘I was taken from my cot and changed at birth for the daughter of those hog-farmers.’

  ‘But that kind of thing never happens!’ protested Westmoreland Hubely.

  ‘It does too. It’s happened in the last three movies I’ve made. So it must be true.’

  The writer being too flabbergasted for speech, Blotto took the opportunity to add chivalrous support to his new love. ‘Mimsy’s right. You only have to look at her to see that she has innate breeding.’

  The film star looked across and smiled gratitude at him. The pair gazed soupily into each other’s eyes and in that moment Twinks suddenly understood the secret of the attraction between the two. Her brother had finally met a woman who had exactly the same intellectual capacity as he had. Just as deep calleth unto deep, so vacancy calleth unto vacancy.

  Anyway, Twinks wasn’t on the Riviera to worry about her brother’s love life. Their trip had a more important purpose. So turning the sparkling azure beam of her eyes on to Westmoreland Hubely’s hooded ones, she asked, ‘Do you know anything about the criminal mastermind called La Puce?’