Suitcase sitting by my right ankle, I rested my hands on the white and gold desktop. “Graham Browne. With an ‘e’ – the surname not the Christian. I have a reservation.”
“Welcome back, Mr Browne,” they chorused.
“Back?” My surprise unsettled them.
Correcting a guest was presumably découragé but the taller of the two receptionists took his career in his hands and a deep breath before saying: “En effet, Monsieur Browne. You were with us in February. Four nights. We have upgraded you to the same room.”
“Impossible. I’ve never stayed at Le Negresco.”
An awkward moment’s silence was guillotined by the shorter receptionist. “Je suis désolé. No doubt an error on our part.”
The high room looked across Promenade des Anglais to the late afternoon’s silver sea. I looked across the room. Blue, beige, black, pink. In terms of interior design, there was a lot going on. Difficult to forget.
Unpacking my suitcase, I dropped the formal invitation I’d received to Le Festival du Livre de Nice 1975 onto an ornate side table and chose the nearest of three closets to hang up my jacket. The invitation specified lounge suits to be worn for the book fair’s opening night but surely authors weren’t meant to dress like auditors?
The telephone’s clanging startled me. I picked it off its cradle and my publisher immediately added to the alarm. His usual Hooray Henry honking was gone. Brief pleasantries over, he gave a dry cough. “Graham, I’ve just arrived at the hotel. Can we catch up for a quick drink at, say, five-ish? There’s the rather delicate matter of that advance I need to discuss. You’ve missed the deadline.”
“Advance? Deadline?” My visit to Nice was becoming a string of one-word queries.
“We paid you on time, Graham, and … err … now we’d like the first three chapters of that new novel you promised.”
Rather than begin a stream of “what, what?” I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the phone in my hand. Yoram Housman’s voice squawked through the earpiece. I’d stopped listening.
It was happening again. Somewhere in the world, someone with the high-end tastes of the Shah of Persia and the spending habits of Elizabeth Taylor was impersonating me. It’d been three years since the other “Graham Browne” last hijacked my identity and swanned from the Hotel Nacional De Cuba to the Colony Room Club in London, running up bills and running out on women. Digging through the leather compendium I’d stashed in my suitcase, I found an ageing, creased Le Monde newspaper clipping mailed to me via my agent by the irate manager of Paris’s La Tour d'Argent restaurant. The headline in the entertainment pages read: “Auteur célèbre dans une bagarre au restaurant”. The accompanying story claimed I’d thrown a punch at a waiter after he’d smiled at my “date”. A flashbulb-lit black and white photograph captured a man baring a vague resemblance to me being given the bum’s rush by waitstaff while a peroxide blonde in stockinged feet beat their backs with her high heeled shoes. La Tour d'Argent’s manager had demanded payment for two damaged chairs and the unpaid tab. I’d pleaded that not only had I never visited his overpriced restaurant, I was at home on Cap d’Antibes at the time.
Other documents in the compendium included a paternity suit notice from a woman in Monte Carlo and a letter of demand from a Kentucky horse breeder.
Then, suddenly, my doppelganger had disappeared. Hopefully dead or in jail. But now …
A few minutes after 5 o’clock, I walked into Le Negresco’s bar with its walnut woodwork and, thanks to diligent Côte d'Azur tanning, its walnut-coloured guests. Housman appeared to have two drinks’ head start. I chose Ricard Pastis de Marseille, he stayed with The Macallan. He accepted a cigarette and then clinked glasses before he started banging on again about the advance and the late manuscript. Apparently, I’d phoned him four months’ earlier with my plans for a new book and a request for a “little something to tide me over”. In cash. I’d then met with Housman’s junior partner Rosemary in a Soho bar I’d chosen, signed the book deal, slipped the envelope of cash into my pocket and, finally, patted her knee and suggested dinner. As I’d recall, said Housman, she’d slapped my hand away.
No, I said. I did not recall the slap. In my 10 years with his publishing firm I’d never taken an advance in cash nor met Rosemary. I reminded Hausman of the mystery man of 1972. At the time I’d tagged him: “The Ghost Writer”.
Housman didn’t have the advantage of a Riviera tan to stop him turning pale. He lifted his whisky glass and tugged at his shirt collar. “I did think it strange. But authors are rather offbeat. Shall we call the police?”
I rattled the ice in my glass before taking another sip. “Not yet. You and I can outwit the fake Mr Browne. For example, what’s on 15 May?”
Housman, with no ice to shake around, emptied his glass. “That’s the day you’re to be French kissed by the new Mayor of Antibes.”
“He refers to it as being awarded the Keys to the City for my sterling work promoting the area in my novels. Those Keys aren’t simply symbolic. Not only can I go anywhere, I can do almost anything. Carte blanche. It’s an irresistible lure for the impostor to get involved in some way.”
Before Housman could order
another round, I outlined how his firm’s public relations department should
beat the publicity drum to preview the event in the UK and French press.
15 May. The hook had been threaded through the bait. By now, the counterfeit Mr Browne would be swimming towards me to be caught, scaled and filleted.
Sitting in an arched doorway in my relatively modest villa in Cap D’Antibes, I could see the Alpes-Maritime peaks in the distance. Smoke trailing from a Disque Bleu gave them a hazy, dreamy look. Forty-five minutes to the ceremony. Easy. It was a less than 20-minute drive to the event location on the marina below the towering Fort Carré.
Cigarette smoke still hung over the empty chair as I calmly walked out the front door. On the pebbled driveway my two-tone Citroën 2CV sat at a jaunty angle. Two flat tyres on the right-hand side. An Opinel knife’s wooden handle jutted from the rear tyre. Merde. It took me 60 seconds to reach the villa’s phone and another 30 before I realised the line had been cut.
Standing at my front gates, I looked around. My nearest neighbour was holidaying in Tahiti and, on the quiet backroad, there was zero chance of a flagging down an available taxi. Panama hat jammed in place, I headed towards a bus stop half a kilometre away. Thoughtfully, the local Council had set up regular services to shuttle the Cap’s villas’ support staff from the town’s centre to their workplaces and back again. The bus took 35 long minutes to arrive.
Clambering off at a stop just 200 metres from the podium, I started what, for me, was a sprint. For others, simply striding. A crowd of well-dressed people was moving en masse towards me. Was I going in the right direction? Merde - encore une fois. The event had finished.
Two gendarmes began officiously herding the departing throng off the wide boardwalk by the waterfront to allow a large black Peugeot with pennants flying from both sides of the bonnet to ease its way past.
Exhausted, I stood trying to catch my breath as the car drew up alongside me. In the back seat sat the Mayor and a man who looked distressingly familiar. There was a Panama hat on his lap. The window slid down. The Ghost Writer produced an apologetic smile. “We’d offer you a lift, old boy, but we’re off to paint the town red … and white and blue. À tout à l'heure.”
Before the window rose, he blew me a kiss.
# # #
Copyright 2023 GREG FLYNN
