The Vintage Caper

television had failed. He stared at the moon hanging above the Vieux Port. Almost full. He checked his watch. Almost three a.m. He wondered where he’d be this time tomorrow. He wondered if it would work, if he’d thought of everything. And he wondered if the others would go along with it.
    Dawn found him still on the terrace; cold and stiff, but not at all tired. In fact, he felt as though his sleepless night had given him a shot of adrenaline, and he was impatient to get on with the day. He called room service to order breakfast, and stood under a scalding shower until his skin started to redden through its California tan.
    He did his best to dawdle over coffee and the Herald Tribune , but it was still too early to call Sophie and Philippe. He decided to take a walk, and on leaving the hotel instinctively turned right, in the direction of the Palais du Pharo.
    The great iron gates hadn’t yet been opened for the day, and he stood looking through the black bars toward the immense green carpet of lawn that led up to the house. Vial wouldn’t be in his cellar much before ten, and the domestic staff who worked for Reboul would be taking advantage of his absence in Corsica to have an extra half hour in bed. It was surprisingly quiet for a spot so close to the center of the city. Behind him, he could hear the murmur of traffic as Marseille hurried about its early-morning business, and the mournful hoot of a ship’s siren coming from the direction of the docks beyond the Vieux Port. The sound prompted him to set off down the hill to the Quai des Belges, to see the catch of the day being set out for the fish market.
    The fishing boats normally get in between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m., but the ladies of the market are there before them, their stands empty and waiting and freshly scrubbed. A traditional feature of the market—almost a tourist attraction in itself—is the often ripe vocabulary of these ladies, delivered with relish by voices powerful enough to compete with a force-eight mistral. Sam regretted that his level of French wasn’t quite high enough, or perhaps low enough, and most of the unprintable nuances escaped him. He thought he’d like to come back with Philippe as his interpreter.
    The boats had started to tie up to the quay, and the badinage of the ladies increased in volume, accompanied by the soft slap of fish being arranged on the stands, eyes still bright and scales gleaming. In ones and twos, the first customers started to arrive. In the time-honored manner of the French when shopping for anything edible, they looked deeply suspicious as they went from one stand to the next—peering into the eyes of a rascasse , sniffing the gills of a galinette , weighing the attractions of a grilled daurade against the delights of a bouillabaisse .
    Sam’s first and only encounter with this legendary dish—an experience that still made him shudder—had been in New Orleans, when he had been persuaded to try something called bouillabaisse Créole . It had been sufficiently nasty to make him ask the waiter about the ingredients. These turned out to include flour, oysters, margarine, and chicken broth. It was an odd mixture for a fish stew. He promised himself a genuine bouillabaisse one day. It was another reason to return to Marseille, a city he found himself liking more and more.
    Without realizing, he had drifted close enough to one of the stands to arouse the sales instinct of the proprietor, a vast, weather-beaten woman wearing a faded baseball cap and heavy-duty rubber gloves. “Eh, monsieur!” she bellowed at him. “Comme il est beau, ce loup!” She picked up a large and splendid sea bass and thrust it toward him, a smile splitting her brick-red face. Sam made the mistake of nodding and smiling back. Before he could stop her, she had picked up a knife and gutted the loup with lethal speed and precision before starting to wrap it. Not a woman to argue with, Sam thought. He bought the fish.
    As he started off back to the hotel, the clammy package tucked under his arm, he made a mental note to write down the recipe the woman had passed on to him. So simple, she had said, even a man like him could do it. Make two deep cuts in your fish, one on each side, and stick two or three short pieces of fennel in each cut. Paint the fish with olive oil. Grill on each side for six or seven minutes. Using a fireproof serving dish, place the fish on a bed of dried fennel stalks. Warm a soup ladle filled with Armagnac,