A Rather Curious Engagement Read online

  "C’est normal,” Jean-Paul said, “these things are bound to happen when you start really using a house that has been asleep so long.” He gave us his estimate and explained that the work ought to be done right away, so that the water didn’t soak the wood and require détermitage (termite control).

  “Okay, okay,” Jeremy said hastily. Since he had the plumber here, he asked the guy to take a look at the bathrooms and toilets upstairs, which he suspected required work. Jean-Paul made his assessment; one of the toilets needed replacement, and there were a few pipes that looked suspicious.

  “Know what I think?” Jeremy told me as Jean-Paul set to work. “We might as well have the renovations done all at once, right now. The plasterer, the electrician, the carpenter, everybody. Remember those loose floor boards on the upstairs landing? You nearly killed yourself on those the first time we came here.”

  “Pardon me,” I reminded, “but where are we going to live?”

  "On the good ship Penelope’s Dream,” Jeremy said enthusiastically.

  “Could we really do that?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Why not?” Jeremy said. “Once the upgrades are done. You said we should cruise around the Med, stopping at all the places we’ve always wanted to visit. We can always do an overnight in an hotel.”

  “That sounds great!” I cried. “Saint Tropez, Monte Carlo, Portofino, Amalfi . . .”

  “I’ll make the phone calls for some of the repairs now, while I might still catch these guys. Then, let’s go down to the harbor and plot our course on the maps,” Jeremy said. “We’re supposed to meet Claude at noon anyway.”

  “Okay, but don’t forget, we’ve got lunch tomorrow with Erik and Tim in Nice at the Negresco,” I reminded.

  “The Negresco! Why’d they pick that?”

  “Erik’s got all kinds of meetings lined up there. But you have to come, they’re dying to chat with you because they didn’t get to really talk to you at the party,” I added.

  “These are the guys you worked with on those movies, right?” Jeremy said warily. “Erik’s the set designer and what does Tim do?”

  “Practically everything else on the set—he’s the prop-master, but he coordinates stuff with the wardrobe people, and with me, so that it’s all historically accurate.”

  “They want to find out if I’m worthy of you. Okay, I can do it,” Jeremy said cheerfully. Then he asked curiously, “Do you miss the work?”

  “It hasn’t been that long,” I said. “I’m not a workaholic, like you. But you’re improving, now that you’ve won your yacht and have taken your first class at ‘The Riviera’s Training School for Bon Vivants.’ ”

  “Very funny,” Jeremy said. “Finish your breakfast and let’s go.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Looking back on it now, I feel kind of sorry for us. I mean, we started out happily tooling along the moyenne corniche road from Antibes to Nice, the wind in our hair, the sun at our backs, the sea sparkling to our right, the sky overhead a soft, encouraging blue. On such a morning you want to sing with joy, and we actually did, tootling along, singing every song we could think of that had boats or the sea in them. It started with the radio, when we found an English-language station that was playing By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea . . .

  And then we swung around the curve of the harbor, parked the car and headed for our boat’s little parking slot . . .

  ... and stopped dead in our tracks. I turned around in confusion, mentally retracing my steps. For a moment I completely lost my bearings. “Hey, that’s weird,” I said. “We must have passed . . .”

  “No, we didn’t,” Jeremy said tensely. We stood there, rooted to the spot. Where Penelope’s Dream was supposed to be berthed. The parking space in the harbor. For our boat. Which was not there. Gone. Vanished. Zippo.

  At first we just couldn’t believe it. Surely there was some mistake. Were we standing at the wrong end of the pier or something? Totally flummoxed, I stared at the yawning slot of blue sea that was gently rocking to and fro. A terrifyingly empty slot. Nothing there except for an occasional swan paddling contentedly through it, and some seagulls overhead, circling and swooping and keening sadly. But as far as classic yachts were concerned, well, there was none. Just Jeremy, me and the empty patch of sea.

  Plish, splish.

  We were silent, for what seemed like a very, very long time.

  “But . . . but . . .” I spluttered, still unable to believe it. “Whah— where—what happened to it?”

  Jeremy swallowed hard, then said the dreaded word. “Stolen.”

  “Maybe Claude took it out for a test run,” I said. “Sure, that’s it.”

  “No,” Jeremy said positively. “He said it had to be refueled and the engine would need a tuning that will take all day. Claude is out picking up equipment to update the boat with all those safety features which . . .” The irony of all this dawned on him, “. . . help prevent theft. This—is—a disaster.”

  “Maybe the harbormaster had it moved,” I suggested.

  Jeremy considered this and said, as if he hoped but remained unconvinced, “Let’s look around.” We got back in the car, and he rapidly drove around the harbor. I could tell how upset he was by the way he took the turns more rapidly, cutting it closer than usual. He stopped abruptly at the harbormaster’s booth, went inside, then rapidly returned.

  “We’d better go alert the police,” Jeremy said in a dry, cracked voice.

  At the far end of the harbor, two uniformed marine gendarmes were sitting in their office, which was just beyond the yacht clubhouse. Their headquarters was a fairly large room with two desks and computers, and lots of file cabinets. A middle-aged policeman with a small moustache and a barrel of a chest, and grey hair at the temples, was on the telephone when we came in. A younger one, who was very tall, thin and alert, looked up at us immediately. He had a sweet boyish quality of wanting to help you stop being unhappy. So his smile of welcome faded as he saw the stricken looks on our faces.

  Jeremy grimly told them what had happened, and the older man, who hung up the phone, listened intently, asking the usual preliminary questions such as who else had access to the boat—friends, family, crew, perhaps—and might have taken it out for a morning spin, etcetera, etcetera. We explained that the yacht was still being worked on, and the man began nodding before Jeremy finished explaining.

  “Mais oui,” he said with a heavy sigh, “I am afraid we have seen it before. ‘Le boat-jacking,’ ” he said, in that way that the French will use English words which do not have a French equivalent, usually reserved for things that are too dumb or awful to be French.

  “Does this happen a lot?” I asked, aghast. The older man shrugged. I turned to the younger one, and tried again, in French, first asking the young one’s name.

  “Moi? Je m’appelle Thierry,” he said. And he explained, very sympathetically, that as yachts were becoming bigger, more ostentatious and more expensively equipped with priceless items, the Côte d’Azur, which had long been a playground for the rich, was a prime target for professional thieves seeking such enormously tempting floating treasure chests.

  “Unfortunately, it’s not too hard to do,” Thierry remarked. “Some yachts are easier to steal than a car—or even a parked motorbike! Because the owners are often absent, so a thief could watch, and plan, and calculate when to strike. All he has to do is break the lock on the cabin door, and voilà! It’s done.”

  This was too much for Jeremy. He had been silently stewing, and now he was totally incensed. “Well, if it’s such a bloody common occurrence, why can’t you put a stop to it?” he exclaimed. “Doesn’t anybody watch these harbors, for Christ’s sake?”

  The older man, who had quickly reported the theft into a radio, turned around slowly in his chair. “It is usually the custom for the owner to keep a man aboard his boat overnight to watch out for this sort of thing, now that the season has begun,” he said.

  “My captain is on his way over and y
ou can ask him,” Jeremy said testily.

  The older cop turned to Thierry and said something rapidly in French, and they had a brief conference sotto voce, during which I heard the older guy mutter that he surely didn’t need le rosbif to tell him how to do his job, and would Thierry please get him out of his office while they tried to locate our boat.

  Once a Frenchman makes reference to an Englishman’s fondness for roast beef, well, the diplomatic thing to do is to hustle said Englishman out of the office. Thierry saw Jeremy’s thunderous expression, turned to me and said apologetically, “We will try to find it, I assure you. When your captain arrives we will question him about everything, all the crew members, everyone. We know these men very well, so we do not really suspect them, but perhaps they have heard something that may be useful.”

  “Is there anything else that we can do with you, together, to help?” I asked quickly. “Right away, before it’s too late?”

  Thierry looked at me sympathetically, then turned to the older man and spoke quickly again in French as if asking permission for something. The older man grunted.

  “Come. I take you out in the patrol boat,” Thierry said brightly. “We will check the coves and see if we can find anything.” It was a good thing that Jeremy was out the door before I heard the older man mutter, “Impossible.”

  Despite his misery, Jeremy was temporarily impressed with Thierry’s patrol boat, equipped with an actual machine gun. It was a white boat with a blue and a red stripe on the side, like the French flag. It must have had a very powerful engine because we roared out of the harbor in no time at all. Sailboats floated by us, and fishing boats which had cast their nets; many of their owners waved at Thierry, who waved back. Thierry called out to some of the fishermen, and slowed down to pull alongside them and lean over and ask them if they’d seen anything, regarding a boat classique. Each time, they shook their heads, then looked at Jeremy and me.

  Thierry acted personally sorry for the whole matter, just out of common human sympathy. He kept assuring us, over his shoulder, that they would do all that they could to find it. Jeremy was mute as a stone the whole time, so Thierry found himself talking to me instead, his brown eyes warm and expressive.

  “It’s difficult, you know,” he said, expertly steering the patrol boat, with strong, tanned forearms. “With stolen yachts, there is no formal international roster listing those that are missing, the way that there is with stolen art. Some of the newer boats have the tracking systems on board, but many, like yours, do not.”

  I held my breath at this, and heard Jeremy growl unintelligibly.

  “Don’t you have video cameras watching all the piers?” I asked.

  Thierry coughed delicately, having to explain to me what was already obvious to Jeremy. “In some, but not all places. You see,” he drawled with a touch of irony, “at night, people like to be happy on their boats. They do not like so much to be watched in their comings and goings, and to have all the world know about how they spend their leisure time.”

  Although Thierry was speaking perfect English, Jeremy now translated what he meant.

  “It means they don’t want their wives to know about the girls they bring on board when the wives are back home,” Jeremy said gloomily. “Plus other questionable pastimes, like drug-dealing, art-smuggling, trading in stolen stuff from unauthorized archaeological digs, exchanging political favors, and top-secret business deals. They don’t want a record of those goings-on. They’d rather take their chances, and use their own private security.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling suddenly very unworldly. “Huh.”

  “We once stopped a boat that was full of exotic pets,” Thierry agreed. “Giant turtles. Big, big snakes. Endangered birds.”

  I started thinking about all those awful stories about under-aged girls kidnapped into prostitution, and desperate boat people from poor African countries packed onto flimsy boats that capsized and left them trying to swim to shore in an ill-fated attempt to get past immigration officials. There was, after all, a shady side to the sunny Riviera.

  Thierry very matter-of-factly told me about all the priceless treasures that people kept on their yachts, such as expensive wine collections. This made me cringe, thinking of all the wine that Jeremy had just last night put aboard the boat. I glanced apprehensively at Jeremy’s profile, which remained stony as he stared out to sea, pretending he hadn’t heard.

  Thierry continued, unperturbed at Jeremy’s silence. He explained that another reason the Riviera was a prime target for rings of professional yacht thieves was because they knew that all they had to do was to take a boat a scant twelve miles out to sea, and then it was in international waters, beyond the jurisdiction of the local police.

  “So they take the boats to Tunisia or Malta,” he explained, “and they register them with a fake offshore company, because they have repainted and disguised them. Then they might take a boat to, say, the Black Sea, and sell it to a buyer who isn’t too fussy to know the details.”

  “Or who commissioned the theft in the first place,” Jeremy said dryly.

  “It’s possible, it’s possible,” Thierry said.

  The mention of the Black Sea made me prick up my ears, and I must have glanced at Jeremy, because Thierry looked up alertly and said, “Do you have any enemies? Is there anyone you think might want to steal your boat?”

  We both hesitated. Then Jeremy told him about the Russian guy with his entourage of glamour girls and tough guys, and the lady with the beehive hairdo at the auction who was bidding so vigorously against us, and even the poor guy whose smaller bids were refused by the auctioneer. Thierry asked about what they’d all said and done. When I explained that the Russian guy had offered to buy the boat, Thierry asked me to tell him, word for word, exactly what the man had said to me. So I told him. When I got to the part where the guy suggested that I dump Jeremy and sail away with him around the world, Thierry grinned.

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy said. “I thought you were kidding about that. Did he actually say that to you?”

  “I told you that,” I said.

  “No, you didn’t,” Jeremy said. “Not in those words. I’d have remembered, if you’d told me those exact words.”

  “I certainly did tell you!” I said, feeling cranky myself. After all, we’d been awakened at an ungodly hour by that burst pipe. And our plans of living on our yacht for a couple of weeks had just been torpedoed. Plus, I was touchy because I had the feeling that Jeremy was looking for somebody to blame for this rotten mishap, and there I was, the gal who told him to go ahead, live a little, chase after his dream boat.

  Our bickering didn’t seem to disturb Thierry, who appeared to take a philosophical attitude toward lovers. He just grinned, and kept his speedboat chugging around in the inky Mediterranean Sea, until a police helicopter came flying overhead. Thierry waved to its pilot. It transpired that the grumpy older gendarme had actually swung into action and sent the chopper out to look for our yacht. The pilot would pick up where we left off, so it was time for us to head back to shore.

  I thanked Thierry and we returned to his office, where Jeremy filled out some paperwork. Then Claude, our captain, showed up, looking utterly aghast, and the whole thing started all over again. It was horrible. Jeremy tried gamely to be calm and English and civilized about the whole thing, but I could tell that it was just tearing him up inside, and by now, his face was ashen.

  “They can’t have gone far!” Claude exclaimed, genuinely distressed. “There simply wasn’t enough fuel.” But we all knew that a boat could be towed by a determined, professional thief. Claude told Thierry that one of the deck-hands was supposed to have stayed aboard overnight to avert exactly this sort of catastrophe. Claude had called the man’s mobile, and found out that the guy had indeed strayed away last night because he’d met a woman from the bar at the harbor, and gone to her place for a little supper, and . . .

  Jeremy looked like he wanted to choke somebody. I have to admit, I almost dread
ed going back to the villa with him. We drove home in utter silence, except for one stupid remark he made in response to me, when I’d said, “Well, at least we’ve got Thierry on our side. I know he’ll try.”

  To which Jeremy responded, “Well, he’s on your side, for certain. You two were jolly mates today, I must say.” He was only half-joking.

  “Don’t be daft,” I chided. “I was only playing good cop to your bad cop.” I craned my neck and peered at him, and ordinarily, he would have smiled. The worst part was, he tried to smile. And failed, miserably.

  When we got home, the villa was a fine mess, with the plumber and his men hammering and banging about. Even if our nerves weren’t already shot, this would have done us in. “It’s probably better if we stay out of their way, go outside for a swim,” I suggested quickly. “They’ll be gone by suppertime. The bedroom looks okay. Just don’t get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom without your shoes on. I saw pipes and screws all over the floor.”

  “Fine, whatever,” Jeremy said listlessly.

  Outside by the pool, it seemed to me that the birds were chirping mournfully for us, and the squirrels were clicking their teeth, tsk tsk tsk. Jeremy must have heard it, too, because later, as he wrapped himself in a towel and sank onto a lawn chair, he muttered, “That’s what I get for putting my heart and soul into a fool’s dream. Never again,” he vowed. “Serves me right.”

  “Aw, come on,” I said, “don’t go all Puritanical on me now. Where’s that hedonist I know and adore?”

  “Sunk, off the coast of Nice,” he said morosely.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It wasn’t any better the next morning. Not at all. We were up early, to have breakfast before the carpenter arrived and the plumber returned, and as I staggered into the kitchen to make coffee, Jeremy was already on the telephone, and kept taking calls all through breakfast. While I was clearing up the kitchen, he came in and announced with spookily cheerful gallows humor, “Well, just when you think it can’t get worse . . .”