The Rebel’s Revenge

‘Mister Hope? It’s you, right?’

‘That depends. Who the hell are you and what do you want?’

‘Dickie Thibodeaux, from the Courier. I wondered if I could have a minute of your time?’

As politely as possible, Ben explained to them that he wasn’t interested in giving interviews and had nothing to say. ‘I’m on vacation. Now please leave me alone.’

‘Come on, man, you gotta give us somethin’. This is a hot story. You’re the star of the liquor store holdup! Some kinda superhero, like the British Jack Bauer.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Who told you that?’

Dickie Thibodeaux smirked. ‘Sorry, I never reveal my sources.’

‘Tell your sources to get stuffed.’ Ben turned to glare at the photographer, who was clicking away. ‘And you, get that camera out of my face before I ram it down your bloody throat.’ Amazing how fast politeness could melt away. Reporters had that effect on people, and especially on Ben.

The pair stalked to their car, shooting resentful glances back at him. Dickie Thibodeaux was already getting on the phone, probably drumming up reinforcements.

Ben watched them go. He’d successfully repelled the first wave. But there would be more, and the scrutiny on him would intensify fast as the story gained traction. By lunchtime there might be TV crews for CNN, WNBC and Good Morning America blocking the street and swarming all over the Moutons’ front lawn. Ben was about to become the world’s most reluctant celebrity. And that could mean only one thing.

He muttered aloud, ‘I need to get out of here, right this minute.’

Chapter 7 (#ulink_c110bc4c-5a80-5838-a462-a2665b62ba37)

In fact it was a whole twenty before Ben had packed his things, checked out of the Bayou Inn and was speeding out of Villeneuve, cursing whichever wagging tongue had put him in this predicament. His plan was now to find a discreet new place to stay in a quiet location not too far away, where he was less likely to be recognised.

He had only to lie low for another thirty-six hours or less before sneaking back undetected into Villeneuve in time for the Woody McCoy gig. How hard could that be?

Then, the moment the Great Man’s final performance was over, Ben would hustle back to New Orleans. Before Sheriff Roque or the local press were any the wiser, he’d be flying home to the sanctuary of rural Normandy.

On his map the nearby small town of Chitimacha, forty-five minutes’ drive to the west, looked like a promising place to hole up. He spurred the Tahoe along a meandering two-lane that cut through the cane and sweet potato fields and flat marshlands striped with industrial waterways and oil pipelines. As he got closer to Chitimacha he started looking around for a motel, but passed only a tattered billboard for Dixie beer. Was that the only kind of beer anyone drank around here? Minutes later, he entered the town itself.

If Chitimacha could be called a town, then Villeneuve was a city by comparison. The small settlement had grown up piecemeal along the east bank of a broad, glass-smooth waterway called Bayou Sainte-Marie. Access from the western side meant crossing a wooden bridge that straddled the bayou’s narrowest point and looked as though it had been there since Civil War days.

It was only mid-morning and already the air was as hot and thick as caramel sauce. Clouds of insects drifted over the water like smoke. It made Ben think of the Amazon. The smell of the bayou hung heavy, fishy and stagnant like an aquarium left standing uncleaned. Beneath the bridge, the bank’s edge was a buzzing hive of industry, crowded with small jetties where stacks of lobster traps stood piled man-high, and moored flat-bottomed river boats bobbed gently on the almost imperceptible swell of the mud-brown water. Back from the jetties were store huts and bait and tackle shops advertising live worms and boat hire.

Traffic entering and leaving Chitimacha was thin and sporadic. Like everywhere else in the region, two out of every three vehicles were pickup trucks. Once over the wooden bridge Ben passed a couple of roadside fish shacks selling wares such as gaspergou and gar balls, and other arcane specialities of Planet Louisiana at whose nature he could only guess. He slowed the Tahoe to gaze from his window at a huge fish that hung tail-up from a hook outside one of the shacks.

Once, in the Cayman Islands, Ben had seen a man torn apart by tiger sharks. This thing was even more fearsome. Part giant pike, part alligator, its massive jaws bristling with fangs. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to eat it, but it was easy to imagine the creature taking a bite out of any unlucky fisherman who fell in the bayou.

Ben drove on into the centre of Chitimacha, which made the Villeneuve town square look like New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras. If Ben had wanted quiet, he’d certainly found it here. Seemingly, if you wanted action in Chitimacha you needed to be on the bayou itself. Here in town the sidewalks were almost completely deserted. A solitary pickup truck rumbled past, heading the way Ben had come. A few parked vehicles, many of them older than he was, sat gathering dust in the sun. There was a hardware store displaying racks of everything from chainsaw oil to crawfish boilers, and a grocery store with sun-faded ad placards in the windows saying ‘Drink Coca-Cola in bottles’ and ‘If it ain’t Jerry Lee’s, it ain’t boudin’. Next door was an empty barber’s shop, and next door to that an equally empty café with chairs and tables spilling out into the deserted street for nobody to sit at.

Possibly the liveliest spot in town was an ancient relic of a filling station that consisted of a weedy patch of blacktop, two pre-war gas pumps and an old man in oily dungarees outside on a dilapidated bench with a corncob pipe in his mouth, sunning himself in the burning heat like a reptile on a rock.

Ben pulled up by the pumps and got the old man to fill up the Tahoe, which he set about doing without uttering a word, the pipe still stuck between his teeth. It was lit, but if the old man didn’t worry about going up in flames, Ben wasn’t going to worry about it either.

‘I’ll bet this place really comes alive in the high season, doesn’t it?’ Ben said by way of initiating a conversation. The old man just looked at him and muttered a response in what sounded like a weird version of French. Ben realised he was speaking the Cajun dialect handed down from the Acadian settlers way back. The historic language had been heavily altered by isolation and the passing of the centuries, but (or so Ben had read) was still basically intelligible to a modern French speaker. Which Ben was, and so he switched from English in the hope that they could communicate.

‘Don’t suppose you have anything resembling a hotel here in Chitimacha?’

The old man plucked the pipe from his mouth with a moist sucking sound, and waved the wet end of its stem to point down the street while jabbering more of his dialect. Maybe it wasn’t that intelligible after all, at least not to anyone but a Cajun. Ben was stumped for a second or two, then understood he was being directed to a local pension, which was French for a guesthouse. Ben got the rest of the directions, paid up for the gas, said, ‘Merci, monsieur’ and drove on.

The directions led him to a street quarter of a mile away on the edge of Chitimacha, which could have been lifted straight out of Villeneuve’s most down-at-heel neighbourhoods. Signs of neglect and poverty were all too obvious in most directions he looked.

Except for one. The guesthouse stood out from the adjoining properties, spick and span and resplendent from a fresh coat of white paint that was almost blinding in the bright sunshine. The tiny green GMC hatchback outside the front gate looked new and clean and well maintained, unlike most of the beaters parked up and down the street. A flowery hand-crafted bilingual sign on the gate said, ‘Bienvenue à la pension de Lottie’ and underneath ‘Welcome to Lottie’s Guesthouse’.

Ben parked up behind the miniature GMC, which could probably have fitted in the Tahoe’s rear cargo space. He climbed out into the hot sun and opened the gate and walked up a neat little path to the door to ring the bell. A minute later he heard movement inside.

The inner door opened, then the screen door, and a large African-American lady with a smile that made the house’s dazzling pearl-white paintwork seem dull and faded greeted him with a vivacious ‘Well, hello there, sugah. I’m Lottie Landreneau, and how are you today?’

Chapter 8 (#ulink_65608f35-e60a-54af-8336-50d0a5ab54a5)

Ben knew from the start that he’d struck lucky with Lottie. The warmth of her hospitality was as endearing as her smile and from the moment he walked into her house he felt right at home. The place was filled with flowers, light and Southern charm, like her personality. ‘Where y’all from, sugah? You sound English without soundin’ English, if you know what I mean.’

‘I’ve moved around.’

‘Oh, I know all about that,’ she said mysteriously, and seemed to enjoy keeping him in suspense for now. ‘Come, let me show you your room.’

He followed her from the richly carpeted entrance hall and up a switchback staircase with a thick gleaming mahogany banister rail that she clutched as she hauled her weight up the stairs. ‘That’s me,’ she said, motioning towards a glossy white door at the end of the galleried first-floor landing.

Spaced out along the passage were two more doors, each adorned with a little brass number plaque. ‘Y’all are the only guest I got right now, so you get your pick of the rooms.’ She pointed at the door nearest to hers. ‘How ’bout this one?’

‘What’s up there?’ he asked, nodding towards a drop-down wooden staircase that led from the opposite end of the landing to an open hatch in the ceiling.

‘Rooms three and four. It’s an attic conversion. Ceilings are kinda low.’

‘I love attics.’

‘Okay, well then let me show you.’

The attic conversion was a work of genius, executed with style and taste. The drop-down wooden staircase was a fine piece of carpentry that could be retracted from above by means of a rope pulley to create a cosy, isolated sanctuary at the top of the house. As for the bedrooms themselves, room three was nice, but room four was perfect. The inverted V of the sloped ceiling was all decked out in gleaming white tongue-and-groove panelling, and the floor was sanded and varnished bare boards with a furry rug. The single bed ran along the middle, where the ceiling was at its highest point. It had a simple iron frame and a patchwork quilt, and a small table with a reading lamp. The single dormer window looked out beyond the slope of the nearest neighbour’s roof to offer a view of Chitimacha as far as the winding brown snake of the bayou in the distance. The room reminded Ben a lot of his quarters in the old farmhouse back home in France.

‘This is the one I’d like.’

‘No problem at all. It’s yours, sugah.’

Lottie led the way back down to a little salon on the ground floor, where she made a fuss of serving home-made iced tea with lemon in tall, slender glasses. Not too sweet, not too lemony, perfect and refreshing after the wilting heat. Then, wedging her not inconsiderable bulk into an armchair, she began to talk. Which was something she loved to do, as Ben now discovered. But she did it so beautifully, mesmerising him with her accent and laughter, that he could have sat listening all day.

He got the whole life story. Born and bred right here in Chitimacha, she’d moved to Villeneuve in her teens and ended up living there for twenty-plus years until a bad marriage had grown worse and she’d eventually escaped with the intention of doing something with her life. A goal that Lottie had taken extremely seriously, celebrating her fortieth birthday with the vow to waste not another single minute of whatever time God had provided for her. The last three years had been spent travelling and studying in Europe, from where she’d returned to Louisiana only a few months ago.

‘Studying how to run a guesthouse?’ Ben asked, to which she giggled and replied, ‘No, dearie, studying cookery. The guesthouse thing, that’s only temporary. What I’m gonna do, my real plan, is to set up my own restaurant, the best eatin’ house for a hundred miles around. It’s gonna put this little ol’ town back on the map and bring folks from all over.’

Lottie’s travels had taken her to London, Paris and Rome, where she’d scrubbed pots and waitressed in all the top restaurants, while using her divorce settlement money to take classes in some of the most famous cookery schools in Europe. Now armed with the requisite skills and a clutch of diplomas, she had proudly returned to her roots in order to realise her grand ambition of bringing together the finer points of classical cuisine with the best of traditional Cajun cooking. ‘Because there ain’t nothin’ like it in the world,’ she assured him.

‘Everywhere I go around here, it’s all about food, food and more food,’ Ben observed with a smile. ‘Everything from Mickey’s crawfish to fresh coon meat to Creole jambalaya to boudin to gumbo to gar balls. I’ve done nothing but eat since I got here. Does anyone in Louisiana ever think about anything else?’

She laughed. ‘We do worship our bellies, that’s a fact. Fattest state in America, and we’s only just gettin’ started.’

‘Whatever the heck gar balls are.’