Chapter Eight: On the Usefulness of Historical Anecdote, Part II
Camille wished she could be as sure of Richard now, as she had been thirty hours ago.
She pushed aside the handkerchief to glance at her watch for the thousandth time and huffed angrily that it had not advanced by more than three minutes since she had last looked. When she had come in to the station this morning, she had been unable to keep silent about where the Inspector was, and Fidel at least had hung on every detail. He had gone to Guadeloupe for the ring! What kind would it be? Would it be expensive? Beautiful, wild and splashy, or traditional? Elegant?
Dwayne shook his head doubtfully. "The mon wears a suit in the Caribbean, and he's buying an engagement ring?" he muttered, loud enough to be heard. "It'll be hideous!"
"Nooo, Dwayne!" Fidel implored him, but Camille's fevered imagination ran with it. If the ring was horrible, what would she do? Smile and say she loved it, and then get Catherine to persuade her contacts to knock it into some semblance of pretty? Or perhaps Gennaro would trade it for something better. Camille and her maman had haunted his Port Royal shop for weeks, and finally picked out the perfect wedding bands three days ago!
"Nothing fancy!" she assured her colleagues. "Just plain gold. Richard –" and she had to stop and smile down into her cup as Dwayne rolled his eyes at Fidel. "The Inspector and I, we don't need fancy things. We would be happy with only each other!"
But as the hours slipped away and no Richard appeared, Camille's doubts and fears began to get the better of her. Why had she let him go? Her foolishness had given him the perfect escape – by now he must be on an Air France flight direct to London!
Dwayne was nodding gravely. "I know people to take care of that," he said. "One shot, and – no, no, sarge, I was joking! Only joking!"
Finally, Fidel got her settled at the evidence table with coffee and sat with her, leaving Dwayne to answer the phones. "He'll be here, Camille," Fidel soothed, ladling sugar into her mug. "He came back from London, that time, remember? He'll come back now. Don't worry. He's just delayed with, with – hey! I'll bet he missed the mail flight and he's coming on the ferry!"
Camille gulped the syrup in her cup and nodded, scarcely noticing the taste, then glanced at Dwayne for confirmation. Dwayne faked a grin and shrugged.
In the hot mid-afternoon, dripping from a languid Caribbean shower, Chaz's taxi finally pulled up in the market below. Fidel left his sergeant at the coffeemaker and slipped out to glance over the railing. There was his chief at last, pulling himself out of the taxi, scooping a handful of change out of his pocket, glaring at what Chaz left in his palm, and turning toward the station steps.
"He's here!" Fidel hissed, and Dwayne got his feet off his desk. Camille tipped the coffee she had just cupped down the drain and lunged at the mirror, swiping at her hair. Did she look stunning? She needed to look stunning!
It was a good two minutes before the sound of oxford-shod feet could be heard on the station veranda and DI Richard Poole lurched into view, his ever-present briefcase dangling from one hand and the other arm supporting a box about a foot square. They heard his voice raised in a few colorful words and phrases before they actually saw him.
". . . thank you! Last time I depend on a French mail pilot to actually carry mail! I said no, thank you!" This to someone who was hallooing from the market below. "Two and a half bloody hours in this heat with this lot on that fetid, festering tub they call a ferry, with every goat within a forty-foot radius trying to eat down to the – hal-lo!"
He glared around at his team and dumped the box on Camille's desk, its paper covering tattered and sweat-stained under the ceiling fans, much like his suit. He dropped the briefcase at his own desk and proceeded to peel off his jacket. "It's probably all melted together by now, in one pustulating heap of goat and cow and alcohol, if I know my mum. Not one word to her, by the way," he warned, as he turned to sling the jacket over the back of his chair. "She'd only send more, and they've probably already spent two hundred quid on this lot, including shipping!"
Poole pulled at his shirt cuffs as he paced back into the center of the station, to glare around at them all once more, oblivious to the bewildered looks he was getting. "Well," he blustered, still fussing with his cuffs, "it's not my fault. The mail plane wouldn't carry it; put them over weight, they said, when it's only four kilos. Then some genius at Customs discovered it was cheese, and you wouldn't believe the row that started then! Apparently it's fine to bring cheese on to Guadeloupe, but taking it off? No, in large red capital letters! Lacking export documentation, they said. I had to wait four blistering hours in their office until it came through. But I got it here. Humph!"
Then he noticed Fidel and Dwayne exchange blank stares, and his intended bride wilt as if she was finally feeling the tropical heat, and took their silence as the cue to re-knot his tie. "All right, yes, I suppose mum did get rather carried away, but I think you'll find this is definitely more sanitary than what she'd have you do with mutton. Now, then."
He fished the little handmade book out of his back trouser pocket, glanced inside and packed it away again. "Ahem. So, er, just so you know, my mum's family is Welsh, and Wales is a small country – a principality, actually – eighty percent of which is small farms, most of them dedicated to various specialties. Not much in the way of material wealth otherwise, with all its gold and such gone into England or the – well," noticing he was losing his audience. "So, when a man finds himself obliged to court a woman, he has to show he can provide for her, which he does – or he used to, back in the day – by giving her cheese; as much of it and in as many varieties as he can. Hence," and he gestured grandly to the small, sweaty box, "cheese."
Fidel very nearly did a face palm, right there in the station. Camille stared, empty-eyed, at the box, then at her superior officer. Dwayne stretched his neck just enough from his corner to peer at the blotched block on the sarge's desk. "Did he say 'alcohol'?" he wondered aloud.
"About nine pounds," Poole finished. "Of cheese. Not all of it, um, 'infused'." With a glance at Dwayne. "Don't worry," he went on, now addressing Camille, "you don't have to eat it all. It's mostly for giving away at the reception or shower or whatever.
"Although," he blundered on after another pause, "she could have sent up to thirty pounds, if you'd wanted . . .?"
Camille spoke at last. "Cheese."
Poole bobbed his head, an imbecilic look of satisfaction on his face, which slowly began to dissolve as Camille took one pace toward him, then another.
"Was this the errand you had on Guadeloupe?" she asked, her treacly French accent becoming more viscous with every step. Dwayne looked sharply to Fidel, and both of them rose slowly, signaling with their eyes, as long-time partners do: Fidel was to shield the chief, Dwayne to restrain the sergeant, as best he could. Poole just melted into bafflement.
"This? Your maman's peasant wish for our happiness, a, a stupid weight of cheese? For this you made of me a nervous wreckage and a mock of my hope and dreams?"
"Steady!" said Poole. He hadn't backed off an inch.
"Where is the ring?! Do you not know, you precious idiot, that maman and I have spent weeks choosing the wedding rings at Gennaro's!"
"Ah." Poole whistled, shortly. "Expensive. Yes, well; I hope they'll match this."
From one of the front pockets of his trousers he brought out a pristine folded handkerchief and carefully unwrapped it in the palm of his hand. In the center lay a slender band with a round three-carat white diamond, blooming like a flower from the embrace of delicate supporting vines of rose-gold, lined with melee diamonds.
"I saw that," said Poole, quietly, "and I said, 'That's for Camille'."
END OF PART TWO
NOTE: Sorry this section has taken so long, but some of that cheese needed to age.
Please stay tuned for Part Three, whenever I can get it up.