Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2006

A Visit to the Gendarmerie by DeLoris Stanton Forbes

On the French side of the island of St. Martin in a fishing village called Grand Case we opened a shop catering to tourists. We named it Pierre Lapin (Peter Rabbit), and there we hired three local ladies to sew clothes of my design from fine sea-island hand-silk-screened cotton. Business prospered, slowly at first, but it picked up the second year. We enjoyed our busy island existence.

Grand Case as a village framed a two-way paved road beside the Caribbean Sea. The shore was composed of sugar sand; the natives were friendly; the tourists were plentiful. The bay was rimmed with small houses placed window to window; our shop occupied one of these. There was a grocery store, and across the street was a lady who baked French loaves every morning in an aboveground oven in her back yard. The smell of fresh bread awakened us each morning. There was a small restaurant with a Chinese chef where they “always had shrimp.” Heineken beer was the island beverage. There were two churches, one Catholic (St. Mary’s by the Sea) with a Dutch priest, and one Baptist, smaller in size but more enthusiastic.What more could one want?

A gendarmerie.

Grand Case’s gendarmerie was housed midtown in a handsome stuccoed building facing the pier. The chef gendarme was an affable, good-looking young man from la belle France named Jean Luc.

In Grand Case we were just one happy family. Even my husband and I, the only resident Americans, were included.

The houses in Grand Case were located hip to hip. Our next-door neighbor to the right was Ellie Johns, a widower whose offspring had migrated to Connecticut. Ellie let sections of his house to temporary roomers, mostly Frenchmen who had begun to populate the island they’d heretofore ignored. They came now, in various exotic species — sophisticated chefs, chic designers, artists, adventurers, gamblers, roamers, schemers — the whole motley spectrum came when jobs began to materialize in the suddenly popular tourist industry.

Living in the back of Ellie’s house were Claude DuValle and his elderly mother, Martine. Claude worked nightly as a chef in Marigot, the French capital of St. Martin. He owned a white cat named Charles (pronounced Sharle — no’s — but still Charley to me), who visited us through our wide-flung shutters when Claude was at work. Charley would slip in at night and bed down beside me, head on my pillow. I’d gotten very fond of Charley, he of the gold eyes.

I could lie prone, look back over my head out the window and count — try to count — the brilliant stars doing their sparkle act against a black velvet sky. That’s what I was doing the night I heard a woman’s cry — “Arrêt! Voleur!” Stop! Thief! Looking down, I saw a man run out from the narrow passageway between the buildings. He was running back to me, he had a thick neck and a muscular back, and he wore a mutlicolored, silky-looking shirt. He turned to his left and ran down the street. I watched him go until he vanished.

Come morning, Martha, my maid, told me that Claude’s mother was very upset about the loss of her jewelry. He also took her money, but the jewelry was heirloom. In the States I would have considered it my duty to report my eyewitness account to the authorities for whatever it was worth, so I passed by the gendarmerie and told Jean Luc. For whatever it was worth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see his face,” I told him, “but I saw him very clearly. He was an islander, but no one who looked familiar. Claude’s mother is very upset, and I don’t blame her. He took her jewelry, she’s most distressed about that. Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. My husband didn’t see him. He was asleep. I was awake, waiting for Charley.” And then, of course, I had to explain who Charley was.

I thought, well, that’s the end of that. Too bad, I’m sorry, Martine. But I was more than just sorry, the entire episode was unnerving. The thought that a voleur could creep into our peaceful village in the dead of night. No telling what he could have been up to.

Daisy, our bread lady, was certain of one thing. “You can be sure he was nobody from the island. One of those étrangers from off-island, that’s who he was!” And Jasmine, the tiny Chinese waitress from the pier restaurant, shook her pretty little head and comforted me with “We got shrimp. We always got shrimp.”

A week later, a young gendarme tapped politely on the shop door. His English wasn’t quite as smooth as that of Jean Luc’s, but he managed to communicate a message. Would Madame be so kind as to step down to the gendarmerie? Her presence was required. Of course, Madame would comply; Madame followed Maurice down the street taking the same route as the voleur in the night. And sitting inside the gendarmerie, back-to on a bench, was a familiar, garishly printed shirt on a muscular island back. Like a flashbulb inside my head, an instant picture left no doubt. “That’s the man,” I said. “That’s him.”

And that was that, I thought.

The next day, three gendarmes appeared at my shop door. Jean Luc led the small parade. The voleur was flanked by the other flics. (We say “cops,” they say “flics”). He looked into my eyes; his were bottom-of-the-well dark with murky red-toned whites. Like an animal’s eyes, I thought, like the eyes of Emile’s boar housed behind a fence at the side of the house on the other side of the pond, which the road leading out of Grand Case circled. Jean Luc had yet another message, “Madame Cummings, it is necessary that once again you identify this man, Gerard Daniel from the island of Domenica, as the perpetrator of the crime of thievery from the household of Claude DuValle and his mother Martine DuValle.”

The boar eyes were trying to see inside my head, or so it seemed. Not begging. Nor supplicating. Only probing.

“Yes, Jean Luc. I’m certain. I’m very sure. I’m certain.”

“Merci, Madame,” responded Jean Luc, and they took him away.

I heard that they got the jewelry back, that he’d given it to a woman in Philipsburg on the Dutch side.

“Did Claude DuValle express his gratitude?” my neighbor Ellie wondered. I shook my head. “Ah, the French,” Ellie said, with a shake of his white head. “I must admit they are rude. Sometimes. C’est la vie. That’s the way they are. Sometimes. It is too bad.” He turned to go inside his house. “They are moving from here, Claude and his mother. To Marigot. They think it is more safe. Marigot is not safe. It is more dangerous because there are more French there. That’s what I think. The island has turned dangerous since times are better. It is too bad. Things get better but they get worse.” And he shook his grizzled head. “Maybe it is better to let lazy dogs lie.”

Martha, my maid (every American on St. Maarten/St. Martin had a maid), was more forthright. “Maybe it’s not a good thing,” she told me. “We think bad things happen when there’s too much talk. Sometimes.”

“Is that the reason that nobody complains when somebody — name unknown — drives through Grand Case one night and shoots Gilbert’s dog? Chances are somebody does know the name of the shooter, yes? But nobody tells.”

She gave me a sidewise glance, looked quickly away. “We like to settle things among us. We think it’s better. Sometimes.”

“Maybe. Sometimes.” A clear difference of opinion. But she could have been right. Not that it had anything to do with my visit to the gendarmerie, but Charley got hit by a car and killed. I found him, a lifeless, stiff little fur shape at the entrance to the walkway between the shop and Ellie’s house. As I stood there in shock, Claude DuValle came out from his dwelling and discovered Charley’s body. He looked down at him as he stepped over Charley and proceeded on his way. “Stop,” I cried after the departing figure. He didn’t even look back. Ellie, standing on his porch, had a comment. “The French, they can be... froid. Sometimes.”

But Charley loved him. He must have known that Charley loved him. As soon as Claude came home after work Charley would leave my bed and run to him. Inside my shop, I wept for Charley. My husband buried him on the beach.

We began to get winds and rain; it was September, hurricane season until the fall. The islanders had a little rhyme about hurricanes that ended, “October, all over.” We followed their lead. One morning very early in September we heard the sound of tap-tap-tapping, and when we looked out on the street we saw Ellie and Gilbert and other villagers wielding hammers on plywood panels, covering windows. My husband said, “They know weather is coming. I’d better get busy.” Our building was constructed of poured concrete (the walls were three feet wide), so we felt pretty safe.

In our bedroom, I insisted that my window be left open. “I’ll pull my shutters closed if need be, but I’ve got to see out. If I can’t see out, I’ll get claustrophobia. I’m serious, Bill. I must see out!” Which is why I saw the two people who visited Ellie that night. A man and a woman. The wind was strong, so I couldn’t hear what they said before they went inside. As the wind was howling and the rain was coming in sideways, I finally had to close my shutters — somehow claustrophobia didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.

What turned out to be a tropical storm raged through the night. In the early hours, we heard someone calling our name, a neighbor from down the street, Maurice. “Madame Cummings, are you all right?” he called. The storm was easing.

My husband answered, “We’re okay, Maurice. Thanks.” To me he added, “I think.”

We’d lost power, so we waited until daylight to get up. The tropical storm had gone to sea by the time I pushed my shutters open and looked out on Ellie’s front room. It didn’t look like Ellie’s front room — white lacy curtains hung at the windows and all the furniture was covered with white fabric. It didn’t look like Ellie’s house, the shutters were open, plywood panels were down. A leftover breeze fluffed the white curtains. A room all dressed up for a wedding? For a funeral. Neighborhood women wearing white or purple passed in and out, through the room into the rear of the house, while neighborhood men gathered on the porch and smoked. Ellie had died in the night.

Martha told us that Ellie had died of a heart attack. And the little bridge at the end of town had been blown away. The gendarmes were directing traffic around our village, but those who came from the Marigot side of town came anyway. People gathered in the street where they talked quietly.

“It was the heart,” Martha told me when I inquired. But she didn’t look at me.

“She didn’t look at me,” I told Bill. “I think she’s hiding something. When Martha doesn’t look at me, she’s always hiding something.”

Ellie had a big funeral at St. Mary’s by the Sea, and the choir sang. It was the worst sounding choir I’d ever heard; that’s another comment I kept to myself. That and the distinct memory of the man and the woman who came to Ellie’s house in the night. The night he died. Of a heart attack.

The only time I mentioned them was to Daisy. The morning after the funeral when I went for bread I said, “Daisy, you see everything that goes on in this town. Did you see the man and woman who visited Ellie the night of the storm?”

She’d been shoveling breads from the oven onto trays, looking down at the bread, but now she looked up at me. She looked at and through me. One of the loaves fell from the tray. She bent to pick it up. When she looked up again she had a different expression. “A man and a woman? I saw no one, Madam Cummings. The wind, the rain — we took shelter in the middle room. Elwige, Ellie’s washerwoman tells me Ellie dies of a heart attack. She knows nothing more. I know nothing more. No one knows more. Not even the gendarmes.” And then the young gendarme Maurice came in for bread, and I watched while she gave him the loaf she’d picked up from the floor.

I’ve thought and thought about it, and I’ve decided I’m to blame for Ellie’s heart attack. Because somebody thinks it was he who went to the gendarmes.

I’d like to know what the French do with murderers these days. They used to use the guillotine and later, Devil’s Island, but I don’t know what they do with them anymore.

Maybe they just keep quiet. And settle it among themselves.

Copyright 2006 DeLoris Stanton Forbes