Toujours Provence(40)

But there were weeks when nothing much happened, and in the end boredom had got to him. That, and his zizi. He grinned, and pointed with his thumb down between his legs.

He’d stopped a girl—a good-looking girl, well dressed, travelling alone, the classic drug “mule”—as she was getting into a car with Swiss plates. He asked her the standard question, how long the car had been in France. She became nervous, then friendly, then very friendly, and the two of them spent the afternoon together in the airport hotel. Robert had been seen coming out with her, and that was it. Fini. Funnily enough, it had been the same week that a warden in the Beaumettes jail had been caught passing Scotch in doctored yogurt pots to one of the prisoners. Fini for him too.

Robert shrugged. It was wrong, it was stupid, but policemen weren’t saints. There were always the brebis galeuses, the black sheep. He looked down at his glass, the picture of a penitent man regretting past misdeeds. One slip, and a career in ruins. I started to feel sorry for him, and said so. He reached across the table and patted my arm, and then spoiled the effect by saying that another drink would make him feel much better. He laughed, and I wondered how much of what he’d told me was the truth.


In a moment of pastis-scented bonhomie, Robert had said that he would come up to the house one day to advise us on our security arrangements. There would be no obligation, and if we should decide to make ourselves impregnable, he would install the most technically advanced booby traps at a prix d’ami.

I thanked him and forgot about it. Favors offered in bars should never be taken too seriously, particularly in Provence, where the most sober of promises is likely to take months to materialize. In any case, having seen how carefully members of the public ignore the shriek of car alarm systems in the streets, I was not convinced that electronic devices were much of a deterrent. I had more faith in a barking dog.

To my surprise, Robert came as he said he would, in a silver BMW abristle with antennae, dressed in perilously tight trousers and a black shirt, humming with a musky and aggressive after-shave. The splendor of his appearance was explained by his companion, whom he introduced as his friend Isabelle. They were going to have lunch in Gordes, and Robert thought it was a chance to combine business with pleasure. He managed to make it sound infinitely suggestive.

Isabelle was no more than twenty. A blonde fringe brushed the rims of gigantic sunglasses. A minimal part of her body was coated with hot-pink spandex, an iridescent tube that ended well above mid-thigh. The courtly Robert insisted that she lead the way up the steps to the house, and he clearly relished every step. He was a man who could give lessons in leering.

While Isabelle busied herself with the contents of her makeup bag, I took Robert around the house, and he gave me a predictably disturbing assessment of the opportunities that our home provided for any larcenous idiot with a screwdriver. Windows and doors and shutters were all inspected and dismissed as being next to useless. And the dogs? Aucun problème. They could be taken care of with a few scraps of drugged meat, and then the house would be at the mercy of the thieves. Robert’s overwhelming after-shave gusted over me as he pinned me against the wall. You have no idea what these animals do.

His voice became low and confidential. He wouldn’t want Madame my wife to overhear what he was about to tell me, since it was rather indelicate.

Burglars, he said, are often superstitious. In many cases—he had seen it more times than he liked to think about—they feel it necessary before leaving a ransacked house to defecate, usually on the floor, preferably on fitted carpet. In this way, they think that any bad luck will remain in the house instead of with them. Merde partout, he said, and made the word sound as if he’d just stepped in it. C’est désagréable, non? It certainly was. Désagréable was a mild way of putting it.

But, said Robert, life was sometimes just. An entire group of cambrioleurs had once been apprehended because of this very superstition. The house had been picked clean, the swag loaded into a truck, and all that remained was to perform the parting gesture, for good luck’s sake. The head of the gang, however, experienced considerable difficulty in making his contribution. Try as he might, nothing happened. He was très, très constipé. And he was still there, crouched and cursing, when the police arrived.

It was a heartening story, although I realized that according to the national average we had only a one in five chance of being visited by a constipated burglar. We couldn’t count on it.

Robert took me outside and began to propose his plans for turning the house into a fortress. At the bottom of the drive there should be electronically operated steel gates. In front of the house, a pressure-activated lighting system; anything heavier than a chicken coming up the drive would be caught in the glare of a battery of floodlights. This was often enough to make burglars give up and run for it. But to be totally protected, to be able to sleep like an innocent child, one should also have the last word in repellents—la maison hurlante, the howling house.