Smuggling stinky truffles, teaching toads to sing—and a gold mine in my garden!

Our builders had left an assortment of rubble and cracked flagstones, old light switches and chewed wiring, beer bottles and broken tiles beside the swimming pool as souvenirs of their work on the house. It was understood that one day Didier and Claude would come back with an empty truck, take the debris away and we could plant the alley of rose bushes we had planned. But somehow the truck was never empty, or Claude had broken a toe, or Didier was busy knocking down some distant ruin in the Basses Alpes.

In time, the souvenir rubble began to look quite pretty, an informal rockery softened by weeds and splashed with poppies. I told my wife that it had a certain unplanned charm. She wasn’t convinced. roses, she said, were generally considered more attractive than rubble and beer bottles.

I started to clear the pile. In fact, I enjoy manual labour, the rhythm of it and the satisfaction of seeing order emerge from a neglected mess. After a couple of weeks, I reached bare earth and started swinging a pickaxe.

I had loosened about three yards of hardpacked earth when I saw a gleam of dirty yellow among the weed roots. At first I thought it was a bottle cap but when I rinsed it under the hose, it shone gold in the sun. It was a Napoleon coin, a 20-franc piece, dated 1857.

Ten minutes later, I found another. Dashing to consult the financial section of Le Provencal newspaper, I discovered Napoleons were now worth 396 francs, between 25 and 30 quid.

Where there were two gold coins, surely there must be a buried hoard.

Never has a pickaxe been taken up with more enthusiasm, and it inevitably attracted my neighbour Faustin’s attention. He asked what I was doing. Planting roses, I said. ‘Ah?’ he replied. ‘They must be large roses to need such an important hole.’

Days passed. Blisters flourished. The trench grew longer and deeper. The tally of Napoleons remained at two. It didn’t make sense. No peasant would go to work in the fields with gold in his pocket. A hidden cache was there somewhere, I was sure, within feet of where I was standing.

But I was unable to find it on my own, so I enlisted the help of my disreputable neighbour Massot and his metal detector.

He arrived at dusk, wearing camouflage trousers and a junglegreen army surplus hat.

He looked like a badly paid mercenary as he unloaded his equipment — the pickaxe, a long-handled mason’s shovel and an object wrapped in old sacking.

Glancing round to see if anyone was watching, Massot removed the sacking and held up the metal detector. ‘ Voila! This is haut de gamme, top of the range. It is efficacious to a depth of three metres.’ He switched it on, and waved it over his tools. Sure enough, it detected a shovel and a pickaxe, chattering away like a set of agitated false teeth.

Massot was delighted. ‘Better start digging, eh?’ I pointed out it would be dark in half an hour, and he nodded patiently, as though I had grasped a very complex theory.

‘Exactly! We don’t want the world watching us, do we?’ My WIFE and I were heading out for dinner with friends, and when we stopped half-way down the drive and looked back, Massot’s shadow was elongated in the beam of our spotlight. The ticking of the metal detector carried clearly on the evening air, and I had misgivings about the secrecy of the enterprise.

We might as well have put up a sign at the end of the drive saying

MAN LOOKING FOR GOLD. It was just after midnight when we got home, and Massot’s van had gone. The spotlight had been switched off, but there was enough of a moon for us to see large mounds of earth scattered haphazardly, as if a giant mole had been coming up for air and spitting out mouthfuls of metal.

There were nails, fragments of a cartwheel rim, an ancient screwdriver, half a sickle, a dungeon-sized key, a brass rifle shell, bolts, bottle tops, the crumbling remains of a hoe, knife blades, the bottom of a sieve, birds’ nests of baling wire, unidentifiable blobs of pure rust. But no gold.

Massot explained later that he had located the hoard: it must be under the swimming pool, he said. If he had a pneumatic drill, he could start looking for it . . .

We said ‘ Non’, quite firmly. But I see him from time to time, standing on the path at the back of the house, looking down at the swimming pool, sucking thoughtfully at his moustache. God knows what he might do one drunken night if he ever did get his hands on a pneumatic drill. My FRIEND Frank, once described by a glossy magazine as a ‘reclusive magnate’, is a gourmet of championship standard, a man who takes dinner as seriously as other men take politics. There was more than a hint of alarm in his voice when he called from the uK to ask about truffles. ‘Are there any left?’ he demanded anxiously.

I was due to visit London, and promised to bring him whatever I could lay my hands on. ‘It is the end of the season,’ I warned. ‘you might have left it too late.’ There was a horrified silence as Frank considered the deprivation that stared him in the face — no truffle omelettes, no truffles en croute, no truffle-studded roast pork.

There was one man I had heard of, I said, a hunter who might have a few put by. He had a reputation as a character of irreproachable honesty, which is not always the case in the murky world of truffle dealing: I had heard tales of truffles loaded with buckshot and caked with mud to increase their weight.

rumour had it that inferior truffles were smuggled in from Italy and sold as native French. Without a reliable supplier, one could get into expensive trouble. But I called a number, slipped to me on a scrap of paper by a secretive chef, and a voice said, ‘I have what you want. We can have a rendezvous tomorrow evening.’

The truffle hunter told me to be waiting by a telephone box on the Carpentras road at six o’clock. What make and colour was my car? And one important point: cheques were not accepted. Cash, he said, was more agreeable. (This, as I later discovered,

is standard practice in the truffle trade. Dealers don’t believe in paperwork, don’t issue receipts, and regard with disdain the ridiculous notion of income tax.)

I arrived at the phone box just before six. The road was deserted, and I was uncomfortably conscious of the large wad of cash in my pocket. The papers had been full of reports of robberies and other unpleasantness on the back roads of the Vaucluse. what was I doing out here in the dark with a salamisized roll of 500-franc notes — a sitting and well- stuffed duck? I searched the car for a defensive weapon, but the best I could find was a shopping basket and an old copy of the Guide Michelin.

Ten slow minutes went by before I saw a set of headlights. A dented Citroen van wheezed up and stopped on the other side of the phone box. The driver and I looked at each other surreptitiously from the safety of our cars. He was alone. I got out.

I’d been expecting to meet an old peasant with black teeth and canvas boots and a villainous sideways glance, but Monsieur X was young, with cropped black hair and a neat moustache. He looked pleasant. He grinned as he shook my hand. ‘You’d never have found my house in the dark,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

I could smell truffles as soon as I went through the front door — that faintly rotten smell which can find its way through everything except glass and tin. Monsieur X packed the truffles into two linen bags and licked his thumb before counting the cash I gave him.

The scent of the truffles stayed with me in the car on the way home. The following day, my carryon luggage smelt of truffles, and when the plane landed at Heathrow a heady whiff came out of the overhead locker as I prepared to take my bag past the X-ray eyes of British Customs. other passengers looked at me curiously and edged away, as if I had terminal halitosis.

outside the airport, when I hailed a cab to take me to Frank’s house, the taxi driver was deeply suspicious. ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘what you got there? Truffles! Been dead long, have they?’ I FIRST heard about it towards the end of winter. Two men in the cafe opposite the boulangerie at Lumieres were discussing a question that had never occurred to me: could toads sing? The smaller character, his hands coated in dust, insisted a man in St Pantaleon had a multitude of toads that he was training for the 1989

bicentenaire, the 200th anniversary of the French revolution.’

‘And what will they do?’ asked the bigger man sceptically. ‘wave flags? Dance?’

‘They will sing.’ The smaller man finished his wine and pushed back his chair. ‘By July 14, I am assured that they will be able to perform the Marseillaise, in Paris.’

The two of them left, still arguing, and I tried to imagine how one could teach creatures with a limited vocal range to reproduce the strains which make every patriotic Frenchman tingle with pride at the thought of noble, severed heads dropping into baskets.

Maybe it could be done. I had only heard untrained frogs croaking around the house in the summer. A gifted toad might easily be able to span more octaves and hold the long notes. But how were toads trained, and what kind of man would devote his time to such a challenge? I was fascinated.

Enquiries led me to a small stone house set back from the road in St Pantaleon. The gravel on the drive looked as though it had been combed. Monsieur Honore Salques opened the door as I was walking up, his head thrust forward and his eyes bright behind gold-rimmed glasses. He radiated neatness.

I asked if I could perhaps visit the choir. He made little clucking noises, and wagged a finger under my nose. ‘It is clear you know nothing about toads. They do not become active until spring. But if you wish, I will show you where they are. wait there.’

He went into the house, and reappeared wearing a thick cardigan, carrying a torch and a large old key labelled, in copperplate script, ‘Studio’. I followed him through the garden until we came to a beehiveshaped building made from dry, flat stones — one of the bories that were typical of Vaucluse architecture 1,000 years ago.

Salques shone a torch inside, showing me banks of sandy soil that sloped down to an inflatable paddling pool in the middle. Hanging from the ceiling was a microphone,

but there was no sign of any of the artistes. ‘They are asleep in the sand,’ said Salques, gesturing with his torch.

‘I have the species Bufo viridis. The sound it makes resembles a canary.’ He puckered up his mouth and trilled. ‘And over here’ — the torch swept across to the opposite bank — ‘the Bufo calamita. It has a vocal sac capable of enormous expansion, and the call is deep and strong.’

Every birdlike squeak and manly croak, he explained, would be transmitted via the microphone to a tape recorder in Monsieur Salques’s study.

From there, it would be edited, mixed, levelled, synthesised and transformed through the magic of electronics until it became recognisable as the Marseillaise.

My reaction was deep disappointment. I had been hoping for live performances, massed bands of toads with their enormous vocal sacs swelling in unison, and Salques conducting from his podium as the star contralto toad delivered a poignant solo,

Trying to hide my deflation, I just asked the obvious question: why use toads? Monsieur Salques looked at me as though I was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it has never been done.’

In the days leading up to July 14, the papers filled with news of the preparations in Paris — the floats, the fireworks, Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe — but nowhere could I find any mention of the singing toads. I knew they should have done it live. ROBERT the security consultant was not quite short, not quite fat, broad across the chest and stomach, thick-necked, dark-faced, dashingly moustached. His smile was a contrast in gold fillings and nicotine-edged teeth, and his brown eyes were lively with amusement. There was an air of faintly unreliable charm about him, the charm of an engaging scamp.

Nowadays he sold alarm systems, a lucrative business in Provence where so many holiday homes were empty throughout most of the year and prey to burglars.

One enterprising team were known to take days on their raids, dismantling and removing entire kitchens.

I didn’t want to buy a burglar alarm, but I was quite content to sit in a dim, confidential cafe in the town of Cavaillon and ask Robert about what really interested me — his past as a policeman, and why he had left the force.

He settled back in a cloud of Gitanes smoke, waved his empty glass at the barman for more pastis, and started to talk.

In the beginning, he said, it had been slow. Waiting for promotion, just like everyone else, trudging through the routine work, getting bored with the desk jobs, not the kind of excitement he had hoped for.

And then came the break, one weekend in Frejus, outside Cannes on the Riviera coast, where he was taking a few days’ leave.

Every morning he went for breakfast to a cafe overlooking the sea, and every morning at the same time a man came down to the beach for windsurfing lessons. With the idle half-interest of a holidaymaker, Robert watched as the man got up on his windsurfer, fell off and got up again.

There was something familiar about the man. Robert had never met him, he was sure, but he had seen him somewhere.

There was a prominent mole on his neck, a tattoo on his left arm, the slightly hooked nose, the kind of small distinguishing features that a policeman is trained to notice and remember. AFTER two days, it came to him. He had seen the face, in black and white with a number underneath it; an identity photograph, a police mug shot.

He went to the gendarmerie, the police station, and quickly discovered the windsurfer had a long criminal record. The leader of le gang de Gardanne, he had escaped from prison the year before and was known to be dangerous. Physical characteristics included a mole on the neck and a tattoo on the left arm.

A trap was set. Twenty officers disguised in swimming trunks appeared on the beach bright and early and attempted to look inconspicuous, despite the curious similarity of their bronzage — the policeman’s suntan of brown forearms, brown vee at the neck and brown face, with everywhere else, from toes to forehead, an unweathered white.

Fortunately, the fugitive was too busy getting aboard his windsurfer to notice anything suspicious until they surrounded him in shallow water and took him away. A subsequent search of his studio apartment in Frejus produced two .357 magnum handguns and three grenades.

Robert was promoted to plain-clothes duty at Marignane airport, where his powers of observation could be exploited. But there were weeks when nothing much happened, and in the end boredom had got to him. That, and his zizi.

What’s a zizi? I wondered. He grinned, and pointed with his thumb down between his legs.

He’d stopped a girl — a good-looking girl, well- dressed, travelling alone, the classic drug ‘mule’ — as she was getting into a car with Swiss plates. He asked a few standard questions.

She became nervous, then friendly, then very friendly, and the two of them ended up spending the afternoon together in the airport hotel. Robert was seen coming out with her, and that was it. Fini.

Robert shrugged. It was wrong, it was stupid, but policemen weren’t saints. There were always the brebis galeuses, the black sheep. He looked down at his glass, the picture of a penitent man regretting past misdeeds. One slip, and a career in ruins.

I started to feel sorry for him, and said so. He reached across the table and patted my arm, and then spoiled the effect by saying that another drink would make him feel much better.

Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle is published by Penguin Books a £9.99. To order a copy for £7.99 (offer valid until February 5, 2018), visit www. mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15.