A week passed, nearly two, and then one evening the phone rang.
A voice said, “I have what you want. We can have a rendezvous tomorrow evening.”
He told me to be waiting by a telephone cabine on the Carpentras road at 6:00. What make and color was my car? And one important point: checks were not accepted. Cash, he said, was more agreeable. (This, as I later discovered, is standard practice in the truffle trade. Dealers don’t believe in paperwork, don’t issue receipts, and regard with disdain the ridiculous notion of income tax.)
I arrived at the phone box just before 6:00. The road was deserted, and I was uncomfortably conscious of the large wad of cash in my pocket. The papers had been full of reports of robberies and other unpleasantness on the back roads of the Vaucluse. Gangs of voyous, according to the crime reporter of Le Provençal, were out and about, and prudent citizens should stay at home.
What was I doing out here in the dark with a salami-sized roll of 500-franc notes, a sitting and well-stuffed duck? I searched the car for a defensive weapon, but the best I could find was a shopping basket and an old copy of the Guide Michelin.
Ten slow minutes went by before I saw a set of headlights. A dented Citroën van wheezed up and stopped on the other side of the phone box. The driver and I looked at each other surreptitiously from the safety of our cars. He was alone. I got out.
I’d been expecting to meet an old peasant with black teeth, canvas boots, and a villainous sideways glance, but Monsieur X was young, with cropped black hair and a neat moustache. He looked pleasant. He even grinned as he shook my hand.
“You’d never have found my house in the dark,” he said. “Follow me.”
We drove off, leaving the main road for a twisting stony track that led deeper and deeper into the hills, Monsieur X driving as if he were on the autoroute with me bouncing and clattering behind. Eventually he turned through a narrow gateway and parked in front of an unlit house surrounded by clumps of scrub oak. As I opened the car door, a large Alsatian appeared from the shadows and inspected my leg thoughtfully. I hoped he’d been fed.
I could smell truffles as soon as I went through the front door—that ripe, faintly rotten smell that can find its way through everything except glass and tin. Even eggs, when stored in a box with a truffle, will taste of truffles.
And there they were on the kitchen table, piled in an old basket, black, knobbly, ugly, delicious, and expensive.
“Voilà.” Monsieur X held the basket up to my nose. “I’ve brushed off the mud. Don’t wash them until just before you eat them.”
He went to a cupboard and took out an ancient pair of scales, which he hung from a hook in the beam above the table. One by one, testing the truffles with a squeeze of his fingers to make sure they were still firm, he placed them on the blackened weighing dish, talking as he weighed them about his new experiment. He had bought a miniature Vietnamese pig, which he hoped to train into a truffle-finder extraordinaire. Pigs had a keener sense of smell than dogs, he said, but since the normal pig was the size of a small tractor he was not a convenient travelling companion on trips to the truffle grounds below Mont Ventoux.
The needles on the scales hovered and then settled on two kilos, and Monsieur X packed the truffles into two linen bags. He licked his thumb and counted the cash I gave him.
“C’est bieng.” He brought out a bottle of marc and two glasses, and we drank to the success of his pig-training scheme. Next season, he said, I must come with him one day to see the pig in action. It would be a major advance in detection technique—le super-cochon. As I was leaving, he gave me a handful of tiny truffles and his omelet recipe, and wished me bon voyage to London.
The scent of the truffles stayed with me in the car on the way home. The following day, my carry-on luggage smelt of truffles, and when the plane landed at Heathrow a heady whiff came out of the overhead locker as I prepared to take my bag past the X-ray eyes of British Customs. Other passengers looked at me curiously and edged away, as if I had terminal halitosis.
It was the time of Edwina Currie’s salmonella alert, and I had visions of being cornered by a pack of sniffer dogs and thrown into quarantine for importing exotic substances that might endanger the nation’s health. I walked tentatively through Customs. Not a nostril twitched. The taxi driver, however, was deeply suspicious.
“Blimey,” he said, “what you got there?”
“Truffles.”
“Oh, right. Truffles. Been dead long, have they?”
He closed the partition between us, and I was spared the usual cab driver’s monologue. When he dropped me at Frank’s house, he made a point of getting out and opening the back windows.