“Where are you from?” asks Bliss, as he drags the man from the brink and guides him to a chair on the promenade.
“New Jersey,” replies the stranger. “Say, thanks bud — that Ferrari nearly got me. It’s like a racetrack out there.”
“Traffic lights are only advisory here,” Bliss explains. “Mainly decoration, in fact.”
“Let me get you a drink,” says the Yank, summoning Angeline. “You take dollars?” he asks her.
“Sure,” she counters. “When you take euros.”
A couple of street musicians set up in front of the preassembled audience. “Pinky and Perky,” Bliss christened them the first night they showed up — two animated little pot-bellied creatures with a piano accordion and a set of pan pipes whom he quite enjoyed, until he realized they played the same four tunes every evening, always culminating in “Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera.”
But it isn’t just Pinky and Perky — every pianist in every bar, and every busker on the beach and quayside constantly belt out “Guantanamera.” It is as if they wait for him as he strolls along the boulevards. He can hear them warming up, timing his arrival. “Guantanamera, gua-ji-ra Guantanamera.”
Jacques, the fisherman, isn’t at the bar — too embarrassed to admit his weather forecast was off track again, perhaps — or is he out hooking a bigger fish? But the potter is at his wheel. At least a dozen delicately thrown pots are paraded past Bliss by beaming young women and girls, and another half-dozen carried by men, their feelings clearly signalled on their faces: “Merde! This one’s going straight down the toilet.”
“So what was your name before?” Marcia startles him, sliding into an adjacent chair.
“What d’ye mean?”
“Look, one of us is going to have to lay our cards on the table, starting with your name. I mean — Dave Burbeck?”
“It could be,” he says, giving nothing away, offering her a drink.
“A cocktail, if you’re paying,” she says, then refuses to be drawn until Angeline has taken the order and is waltzing her way through the wall of death towards the bar.
“How did you know it was me?” he asks.
“You’ve been wandering around like a lost Japanese tourist for the past two weeks.”
“You’ve been spying on me!” he exclaims.
“I had to be sure,” she starts, but Pinky and Perky, sensing the possibility of a burgeoning romance, appear out of nowhere and jump in with “Autumn Leaves.”
“It’s July, for gawd’s sake,” mutters Bliss, hoping to deter them, but they switch to “Strangers in the Night.” He tosses them ten euros, which they mistake as a sign of approbation and delve into “Guantanamera” with gusto. Bliss puts his head in his hands, complaining, “Oh God, Perky’s singing,” then pleads through his fingers, “Please don’t sing.”
Marcia buries herself in her handbag as heads turn in their direction, and Bliss, worrying she may bolt again, angrily waves the musicians away.
“Please be careful. And make sure you’re not followed,” Marcia says, sliding a fiercely twisted scrap of paper into his palm, then she slips smoothly into the crowd.
“Bloody woman,” Bliss mouths after her, and Pinky and Perky, finally getting the message, seek their next victim as the waitress returns with a giant goblet sprouting vegetables.
“Oh! Your friend, she has gone,” Angeline says, her disappointment evident. “She is very pretty.”
“She didn’t like the orchestra,” he says, giving the departing performers a poisonous stare. Then he stops momentarily as he gives Marcia’s appearance some thought: shortish — petite, even — with all her lumps and bumps developed in the right places. However, the tautness of concern in her face has left a cloud. He assumes her to be about forty, but is totally confused by the compression of ages, having decided that virtually all women between fifteen and fifty somehow manage to look twenty-five in this never-never land. “Yes,” he agrees, “I suppose she is fairly pretty.”
Pinky and Perky strike up “Guantanamera” at the next table, and Bliss pointedly puts on his headphones as he debates whether or not to run after Marcia. Dave Brubeck’s quartet, playing “Por Que No?(Why Not?)”, reminds him that he is still clutching the paper twist. “Watch the potter,” says the message, and he realizes that was why she was scrabbling in her handbag — scribbling a note. But what does it mean?
“Are you Engleesh?” asks a woman with more than a mouthful of teeth and a nose-in-the-air sneer that says, “I detect smelly armpits and skid-marked underpants.”
“Yes,” he starts, removing his headphones, then switches to French, thinking: I’m supposed to be blending in. “Oui. Je suis Anglais.”
Apparently undeterred by his admission she invites herself into Marcia’s seat. “Cigarette?” she queries, but it’s an offer, not a request, and, as she delves into her Louis Vuitton bag for a packet of Gauloises, he wonders if she is somehow connected to the case. Quickly pulling his thoughts together he realizes that after two weeks of inactivity, concerned he is chasing his tail, he is suspicious of everyone.
“Excuse me,” he says, guessing her game and rising to leave. Her face falls. “Please, have this on me,” he says, offering her Marcia’s cocktail in consolation, and she beams.
“Zhanks, Engleesh,” she sings out. “Maybe next time.”
I doubt it, he thinks, heading off along the promenade, though he concedes that without the cigarette she’d be reasonably attractive, despite the teeth — although upsetting her during a bout of soixante-neuf could be a painful mistake.
Bliss, trying to work out the meaning of Marcia’s note, hurries along the promenade, upstream against a tide of outstretched hands balancing little pots, and finds a semicircle of admirers around the maker. The women remain transfixed as Bliss pushes his way deeper into the crowd — seeking what? He has no idea. “Watch the potter,” the note says, and he watches as the strong hands, caked with creamy clay, cup around the brownish red mound as it rises under the pressure of his fingers. The electric wheel, spinning fast, shoots off droplets of water as the potter teases the rising lump, and Bliss turns his attention to the women in the crowd as they are drawn closer.
What’s going on here? he wonders, studying the fascinated faces of the women, as the mound of clay rises like a swelling phallus in the potter’s soft, moist hands, his penetrating blue eyes holding the gaze of each woman in turn — just for a second — just long enough to send a message.
Bliss is looking around the mesmerized crowd of women, wondering how many of them will be rinsing out their underpants when they get back to their hotels, when, almost magically, a perfectly proportioned candle holder complete with crenulated drip tray seems to form itself from the ductile material. Seemingly without taking his eyes off the crowd, the potter lifts the work onto a cardboard disk and stands — teasingly.
“Me, me, me,” call the younger girls who’ve elbowed their way to the front — but he is seeking a bigger catch, and locks eyes with a dark-haired teenager hanging
