“She seems to have succeeded — now they’ve got VCRs going. All of this will be on television, I suppose.”
“All over the world. She—”
“Please!” cried Valérie Valescu, vainly rapping her fork against her water glass. “Please, let me—”
The chorus of boos grew louder.
The still-sensual lips of the middle-aged ex-sex kitten grew tight. With a surprisingly athletic gesture she threw the glass precisely into the middle of the fireplace, where it smashed noisily. “Will you just let me finish?” she pleaded into the sudden silence. “Behind this restaurant, there are pens where the owner keeps his poor tortured geese. I beg of you: Go look at them, ask yourselves if—”
Once again her voice was drowned out, and now the inn’s owner, Michel-Pierre LaRochelle, could be seen stalking ominously across the dining room.
“Then eat your dirty foie gras,” screamed V. V. above the clamor, “eat your filthy liver from tortured birds!” From somewhere she produced a white plastic bag. A moment later she was throwing gleaming brown objects in all directions. One of them landed squarely against the crisp white tunic of the restaurant’s owner, and it was then that Tama identified what she was throwing.
“Chicken livers,” he bellowed gleefully, “she’s throwing raw chicken livers! Look at that, she got old Dr. Vonnegut right in the face!”
Another glob of liver landed on the creamy white breasts of a redhead in startling décolleté. The horrified woman began to scream hysterically. Two more handfuls were fired at random and then Michel-Pierre LaRochelle’s hairy hands fastened around V. V.’s neck.
“Let me go!” she cried, grinding chicken liver into his face. “Murderer! Torturer! Sadist!”
Equally enraged, the half-blinded restaurateur pummeled the screeching actress with a flurry of blows as he dragged her to the front door and manhandled her into the night. Cursing furiously, he turned back to look for Valérie Valescu’s companions, but they had made a prudent withdrawal. A ragged volley of cheers went up from the stunned diners as Michel-Pierre LaRochelle vanished behind the swinging doors of his kitchen.
“Well!” exclaimed Colonel Yashimoto admiringly. “This has been an evening worth seeing! Thank you for bringing me, Sandy, it was even worth the foie gras ice cream!”
“Bah!” muttered Alexandre Tama darkly. “Children, all of them. There’s something about this island that turns everyone into children.”
“I guess our sex goddess is gone, but what are you going to do about our gracious host? That looked pretty much like common assault to me, what he was doing to V. V.”
The Commissaire de Police snorted angrily. “It’s up here in the mountains, completely out of my jurisdiction. And why should I? I love foie gras. Let her go raise a fuss about baby seals or iguanas — those I don’t eat!”
Tama spent a restless night in the sole room the inn had ready for guests.
Perhaps because he was in a strange bed that, though large, still wasn’t quite large enough.
Or perhaps because Mad Dog Yashimoto in the adjoining bed occasionally broke into light snores before once again falling silent.
At some point during the night he came awake in the darkness with a sudden start and a violently throbbing head. Maybe he really shouldn’t have had that last glass of champagne. Water, he badly needed several liters of water. Fumbling for the lamp beside his bed, he located it only to discover that the light wouldn’t come on. He fell back with a groan. Obviously, way up here in the mountains, the Mother Goose inn had to generate its own electricity. And, as in most little places like this, the generator was equally obviously turned off at night to economize on fuel.
Tama muttered to himself, found his bedside glass of water in the darkness, and eventually drifted back to an uneasy sleep.
Sometime later the thunderous rain suddenly stopped and in the absolute silence that ensued he could hear the frantic honking of geese. No foie gras without geese, he thought disjointedly, and no geese without honking. And no honking without Valérie Valescu. And no V. V. without... Rolling over, he fell into a troubled sleep in which he was pursued by giant geese waving bright red livers held before them in dainty white human hands.
He was awakened again by having his shoulder violently shaken. “Come quickly, Monsieur le Commissaire! My husband is hurt, I think he may be dead!”
Groggy, Tama looked up to see the once-lovely features of Mar-tine LaRochelle only inches from his. Now, however, her eyes were wild and her face was mostly hidden by bright red blood. A scalp wound, he thought automatically, they’re always messy, just as several drops fell against his bare skin. “Are you all right?” he muttered, staring at her disheveled hair, muddy blue bathrobe, and bloody hands.
“Yes, yes, it’s my husband who’s hurt! Hurry!”
Groaning loudly, Tama pushed himself upright. “Pass me that bathrobe and then go in the bathroom and wrap a towel around your head to stop the bleeding — there’s not room enough for all of us in this one little room.”
In the pale gray light of a misty dawn, Tama and an equally groggy Colonel Yashimoto followed the half-stumbling demi-Chinoise through the soggy grass. Ahead of them loomed two surprisingly large buildings that, Tama supposed, housed the geese. In the distance he heard a muted honking and saw thirty or forty long-necked white birds disappearing over the crest of a small rise.
“She let them out,” murmured Martine LaRochelle in an uninflected monotone as they rounded the corner of the buildings. “She let them out.”
“Who—” began the Commissaire de Police but was stopped short by the sight of last evening’s host lying in a morass of thick mud. The restaurateur wore nothing but a yellow and white pareo cloth knotted tightly around his ample stomach and a single muddy green slipper — the other one was half buried in the mud a few yards away. Just behind him was the chain-link fence that enclosed an equally muddy yard on the side of one of the buildings. A gate in the middle of the fence stood open.
“Michel!” Throwing herself to her knees in the viscous mud, Martine LaRochelle cradled her husband’s head against her thighs. “Michel!” His pale blue eyes stared up at her unblinkingly. Even from here, Tama could see that Tahiti’s only producteur de foie gras was dead.
“Looks like he’s been bludgeoned,” murmured Colonel Yashimoto into Tama’s ear. “Look at those dents in his skull.”
“Yes, and there’s the wrecking bar that did it, lying in the mud over there.”
“No chance of fingerprints with that mess.”
“Fingerprints? In Tahiti?” Tama puffed out his great cheeks. “You’ve been watching too much television.” He moved forward with his customary sure-footed delicacy that constantly astonished Colonel Yashimoto and gently drew the newly widowed Martine LaRochelle to her feet. “Come along, Madame. I fear there’s nothing we can do for your husband. And we ought to have your head attended to — we can’t have you bleeding to death.”
With an anguished wail, Martine LaRochelle buried her head against Tama’s massive shoulder, then let herself be led around the far corner of the barn and back towards the inn. A listless sun was just beginning to appear above the edge of the mountains surrounding the inn’s narrow valley.