The Case of the Purloined Piggy
Pierre Périgord stood a meter outside the wooden egress, peering into the remnants of what was once his barn. The first threads of dawn illuminated his angular cheek bones, his twirled moustache pockmarked with silvery hairs, the grimace traversing his face. He treaded into the edifice, the soft earth yielding beneath his laced ankle-high shoes. Monsieur Périgord tiptoed around a caldera of blood.
Huit. He had just hallucinated. He must have. Blood lay in the mud. His hand shot up to the chain of coppery beads dangling near his protruding nose. As he yanked it in one full sweeping motion down and to the right, a sickly glow bathed the barn. A pair of irises glared up into the faulty bulb. Of all times that this could happen…great. Despite the poor illumination, Monsieur Périgord’s worst suspicions were confirmed: Something had severely wounded, perhaps murdered, his beloved truffle hog, Huit.
Périgord’s keen eyes scanned the grounds. For what seemed the better part of an hour he grasped at thin air for an alternate explanation. In the midst of pacing frenetically across the length and breath of the barn, he noticed it. One paw print, no, dozens of them, radiated out from where he stood to an…aperture! Off and to the side. Upon observing this phenomenon more intently, miniscule lines on the wood revealed themselves to him. He bent down. At first,
He remained on the balls of his feet. Monsieur Périgord, unnerved, craned his neck to the right. Comprehending from experience or sense of touch or something other than peripheral vision that his wife’s hand was cupping his shoulder, he brought his up to greet hers.
“
“Gah! Pardon me! Who are you and…?” and then Monsieur Périgord gave a muffled cry of astonishment. His wife Marie was there, standing behind him. He was holding her hand.
“Hey there, baby!” she enunciated in a tough guy voice that was dead-on. She folded her slender arms, nodded her head, tapped her foot, and raised a single blonde eyebrow at him several times. Marie kept a straight face. A recognizable high pitch giggle-squeal erupted from behind Marie’s left knee, and soon after his granddaughter Fifi Fantôme peered at him from around the back of her grandmother’s hip. She stepped into full view, covering her fey mouth with a tiny hand.
Marie took one peak at her granddaughter and cracked up into peals of laughter;
“Yes, Marie,” he responded absently, shaking his head. He jumped up from his squatting position and spun around, careful not to destroy any of the evidence. She couldn’t help but show amusement at her husband’s confused gestures through her goofy grin. She knew that Huit’s disappearance weighed on him and was the source of his unusual behavior, so at the same time,
“
“Grandpapa?” Fifi imitated.
“I’m fine, I’m fine!” he dismissed their worries with mild annoyance and a wave of the arms. “I’m onto something here…I knew that you were behind me, dear…I am already finding out some things about the crime…”
“Crime?” Marie interjected, “
“No.”
“Ooooo! I want to play detective!” interjected Fifi.
“Please…”
“I said no. I can’t even use that thing as a plain typewriter for Chissake! How the fuck am I supposed to make posters with it?!?”
“Don’t you use that language in front of our granddaughter!” his wife yelled back. A jet plane passed overhead, progressing at perhaps seven hundred kilometers per hour. The couple stood sullenly, hands in pockets, shuffling about, but not too far a field from their respective territories, pupils interred in the dust, as the hills shook with the raw power of the sonic excrement. Wide-eyed, Fifi Fantôme backed away from her grandparents and took shelter against a wall. Eventually the noise subsided as would a tremor of nausea.
“And I said I’d help you,” Marie finished.
Onward, “There was something else, too…I don’t know. I just don’t know, Marie. But then I felt your touch and knew it was you. I just have this feeling that…that if I keep on going I can find Huit and bring her home,” he ended in a hoarse whisper. Monsieur Périgord, goggle-eyed and teary-eyed and deadened from exertion, searched Marie’s face for comfort, approval, whatever. Her tongue left her bereft as he.
So back into the barn he went, unmolested by the wife or the gossamer little she-ghost, permitted to leave behind his inarticulate baggage. Marie and Fifi whispered to one another and glanced his way, but they did not follow. With a fresh survey of the ransacked pigpen, he realized that more than one hole had been dug into the barn’s foundations. There were several. More importantly, though, he found that only a single set of tracks existed. Wolves hunt in packs. This must have been a stray dog. Weird. We’ve never had that issue until now. He resolved to follow the tracks outside the barn in order to discover where the canine had entered and exited.
From his new vantage point, he discerned that the stray had come in one hole and exited another. To account for the grand total of five breaches into Huit’s residence would require something more extraordinary than a ravenous canine wanderer.
The tracks approaching the set of breaches matched the disordered smattering of paw prints in the interior. Only through painstaking observation in the pigpen had the baker discerned the flow between them and come to conclude that they belonged to a single animal. Here, however, the tracks’ progression was plain as day.
The tracks leading away from the barn were bizarre. Tracts of ground molded to the consistency of finely grained sandpaper lined the path of the dog’s flight from the pig-pen. Moreover, parts of the paw prints were sliced off where the smoothed out ground began. Most, but not all, of the paw prints were well formed. On a few only the heel showed up, rounder than the others. Missing toes. Strange.
The trail away (which he decided to follow for the most part as it would seem this would be of primary interest in locating the perpetrator) soon progressed into the backwoods. Button-sized holes were punched into some of the autumn leaves surrounding the increasingly indiscernible exodus from the barn. Those are some hungry caterpillars. He noted that some of those holes continued into the ground beneath. Correction. Those are some big caterpillars! Caterpillars? He heard a frenetic rustling and then one crunch amidst the leaves and looked circumspect. Nothing. Just a critter. A white oak tree stood before his path. This very oak was the site of Huit’s first truffling expedition,
“Her line has been used for pork as long as my family’s been raising livestock. Which is,” the farmer stared intently at his callused hand, and one by one his fingers sprang up from his balled fist, “five generations now.” His round, pleasant face brightened with each syllable as it shook up and down. Even his beard had this strange aura.
“I see. May I take her off your hands?” inquired Pierre Périgord, all business. He scratched at his stubble, blew a tuft of charcoal hair sans grays out of his eyes, and glanced sideward into the wooden pen. He spotted the runt almost immediately. She sported smoky splotches like storm clouds all across her back and her belly.
“I suppose. Those are the words I’ve been waiting to hear. She wouldn’t make a good meal, and I’ve got enough money as it is,” replied the homely farmer.
“That’s awfully generous. And you advertised this, too!”
The farmer went on slowly; he seemed to crave the act of explanation. “Well, she’s just another mouth to feed, has been for six months now.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Naw. We just call her the runt or sometimes Runty, but we don’t use that name around her.”
Monsieur Périgord slid through the pigpen gate and immediately closed it behind him. Dozens of curious hogs surrounded him, probing his hairy legs with their giant, snotty snouts. He could not budge in the midst of this orgy of tickling. Yet within ten seconds the porcine swarm broke apart. Runty the runt, his runt, had awakened and bowled into the crowd. Only his pig remained when the dust (well, mud) cleared, staring into
“Huuuiiiiiiit!” she oinked affirmatively.
“Ok, then,” responded Pierre Périgord, fastening the collar round her neck. “Just one last thing, though. What’s your name?”
“Huuuiiiiiiit!”
“You sure you don’t want me to call you Runty?”
“Huuuiiiiiiit!”
“Fine. Huit it is then,” he grumbled half-heartedly.
The farmer called out, “She likes you quite a bit. What are you going to use her for again?”
“I never told you. Huit will be my truffle hog.”
The farmer’s expression changed;
Huit hopped up onto the passenger seat and fell asleep on the raggedy bath towel
About a kilometer away from
After five minutes of searching, Huit stumbled upon a medium-sized, unglamorous tree that immediately caught her attention. She scoured the soil with glee, digging all around the roots. At length, she extricated a reddish-brown spheroid fungus roughly the size of a tennis ball and nudged it towards
Then he envisioned – how could he have forgotten? – the way the hooves imprinted themselves on the cool, primeval humus of the forest, that fateful day thirteen years ago. Those tracks that he had thought misshapen paws were Huit’s hoof prints! Someone had tried to cover all of her tracks and failed. She was here last night! He scrambled back to the house to let Marie in on his discovery.
“Whatever broke into the barn has not shredded Huit! I had feared the worst,”
“Oh,” she sighed, winded but nonetheless overjoyed, “that is such excellent news,
“But who knows what they’ll do to her now that she’s captured? What motivation could they possibly...” With that, he zoomed away into the garage, leaving his wife outside on the front porch. She followed him as far as the garage but then remembered that she’d left her oatmeal unattended on the stove and ran back towards the house.
Monsieur Périgord rummaged through the safe behind the boxes and boxes of musty clothes stores in his abnormally gigantic garage. An old set of correspondences between himself and Marie in their younger days. A picture of his mother and father in twain. Knickknacks from his childhood including his first toy football and a plastic hockey puck and part of a make-pretend kitchenette set. His mother had given him that for his seventh birthday, a few years before she left Father. Before she left me. Before she dropped off the face of the Earth.
His father in late Autumn fifty years ago decided to take a stroll around the back alleys of
That November would be his last fantastic adventure, though. He suffered acute head trauma when a unicyclist crashed into him. Not just any unicyclist, mind you. This unicyclist was the Guiness World Record holder for longest distance traveled on unicycle! Explains why the fool could balance that damnable bike at all with ten shots of whisky in him.
Father remained an anterograde amnesiac for the rest of his days. Within the first couple of weeks, Mother became privy to throwing scream-filled tantrums at Father and shaking him vigorously to no avail. The nurses often had to restrain her physically in his presence. She didn’t want to have a thing to do with him. Or his flesh and blood. Within the month, her brother-in-law (not for long) and his wife graciously took custody of
He last saw his mother the day of his wedding. He had sent her an invitation; his adoptive mom gave him the address on the back of an expired supermarket coupon. “Do what you want with it,” she said, “I wouldn’t blame you if you threw it out right now.” His aunt left before he got the chance to ask her where she’d dug up his mother’s address. He invited her for some reason, and she came. They did not speak. There couldn’t. Locking eyes daunted them. They knew any words they might say were leaden weights. No use thinking about her anymore.
He rifled through the rest of the safe. As he suspected, someone had pilfered the original copy of his secret recipe for spiced truffle bread from the safe. It was nowhere in evidence. Foul play had occurred.
But who? He’d spoken to his best friend Jefrey Costelle not two weeks ago about the dish’s evolution, how it started as an attempt to recreate a favorite delicacy of his early childhood that died off with his great-grandfather. At some point his simple bid for recreation morphed into a Holy Grail quest to perfect the essence of its taste. Jefrey? Maybe. His friend merely indulged him though, come to think of it. Jefrey knew well that
Who? Could his trusty assistant Susanne Souffle have perpetrated this monstrous theft? She took immense pride in her abilities and had progressed up the culinary ladder at his bakery rather quickly, sometimes through intimidation. She, however, had never once asked him about the recipe. Susanne Souffle understood that it resided in his purview alone.
Then, he knew. One month and a half ago, Céline Dijon, a renowned and much feared food critic and dabbler in the culinary arts, had accosted him in his bakery under the pretense of posing a few friendly questions. She had attempted to cajole flavorings and oven temperatures out of him whilst she ate a piece of his truffle bread and showered compliments upon him. But wait! How did she know about the safe? Though she failed to obtain a single valuable tidbit of information out of him, “Moutarde” (Céline’s nickname) published an article about the “interview” (more like interrogation) not a week later. Her obsessive write-up would have been considered loony had it not been published in a trendsetting gastronomy newsletter. The safe, though! How could she have done it? Mademoiselle Dijon even mentioned Huit as being the name of his truffle hog responsible for his much adored delicacy.
Céline Dijon. He pictured her in his mind. Pouty lips, white horn-rimmed glasses, and flowing chestnut curls adorned her face like regal jewels. Her suit matched her eyes: Both shone a supernatural midnight blue. What else? All of those details were so unnerving. He couldn’t possibly have paid attention to anything else. As she was leaving my bakery, though…something…voilà! Céline wore stilettos everywhere. That explained the circular imprints in the leaves, which
He emerged triumphantly from the cramped quarters to find his granddaughter awaiting him anxiously.
“Grandpapa! Where are you going?”
“I’m don’t know, my dear,” he half-fibbed, “Granpapa’s busy right now.”
“But, Grandpapa, I want to go with you. I want to play detective!” Her sandy curls bobbed like buoys as she pounced hither and thither. Her arms were an impossible blur of angles and action.
“Not…not today, Fifi, my sweet,” he whispered. “Another day, my gossamer little she-ghost.”
Fifi Fantôme then looked upon her grandfather as if for the first time and understood that something was quite wrong, but she did not press him. Instead, she watched him jog to the car and then tottered off towards the house and Grandmama. Some things even a four year old will not do.
He slid into his car. He forgot the name of the complex that vile woman worked in, the
As
He arrived at the office building wherein the acclaimed food critic and haute cuisine dilettante resided as the queen in all but name. The shadowy miasma of switched off fluorescent tubes and twilight encompassed all. He located the directory in the front lobby. C. Dijon 1414.
“I know that it’s you, Céline ‘Moutarde’
Clip clop clip. Mlle Dijon’s three inch heels clicked solemnly as she walked out of the gloom. She possessed supreme control over those glistening, crimson WMDs. Former boyfriends and playthings that bored Céline Dijon or became too needy had jettisoned her apartment without a single utterance. Or so went the gossip in
“Well, I suppose I could return something else,” she mused, coolly defusing his rant. A piece of paper yellowed and tattered with use suddenly winked into existence between the middle and index fingers of her left hand, which curled up as if anticipating the right moment to release a shuriken into the center of Pierre’s forehead; she pressed the paper into his right palm. He unfolded Céline’s disingenuous plea for détente.
9 October, 1953
The Bread of My Childhood, Attempt Seventy-Three (Success!)
A chestnut sized portion of Pecan truffle truffle, garlic, and allspice (fresh, not powdered!) Do NOT whip. 25 minutes: baked, chewy, flaky. 35 minutes: crispy, crunchy, golden brown.
“You’d have already copied this down, if you don’t have shit for brains,” Monsieur Périgord said, face lowered. The paper wobbled between his fists clenched and blooming with blood. “And you don’t have shit for brains, do you, Mlle Dijon?”
A pursed mouth and a feigned hand to shoulder gesture came ever so naturally to her. Pierre Périgord shuddered as would a shivering vagabond in the wintertime. She began to taunt him some more, “Aww…it doesn’t make you feel all better? Poor...”
“Stop it,” he growled, a rabid pup pinned to a brick wall.
“Poor Monsieur Périgord!” Rambling on, triumphant, she warned him and informed him, “Keep it for posterity’s sake. For that’s all you’ll…”
“I’ll prosecute!”
“…have soon.
“Please,” the femme fatale warbled, “you don’t have enough evidence to convince the police.” She paused, waggled her thumbs with amusement, and then traced a lacquered nail along the side of her lip, “Your bakery,
Her whole face twitched as she staggered backward, a marionette newly-abandoned by its puppet master.
Pierre Périgord spun around to find an elderly woman in a lilac cardigan and dark gray slacks holding a pistol aimed at a pile of release forms and reprocessed paperwork a few feet to his left. Her expression immediately softened. His did not.
“Mother.”
She stated simply, “My son. It has been years.”
“You just killed her,” he stammered.
“Yes, I did. And I am a criminal. But to see you one last time was my true crime,” his mother quipped.
“Why, Mother?”
“Every mother – even this old crone – must see her children.”
“And yet once you left father you wanted nothing to do with me!” Pierre Périgord shook his head furiously to cope with the shock of what had just transpired as well as his mother’s utter lack of reason. “Why did you kill Céline, Mother?”
“First, let me just say…I’m sorry. I should never have treated you the way I did all of those years.”
She proceeded with the deliberation of someone trying to pry out a strand of floss stuck between two nether molars. “I came up with the plan to steal Huit and the secret recipe. I wanted to get to know her as you have, as a superb work animal and an equally splendid friend. I wanted to taste the pride of your existence after laboring over it myself. I want to know you, Pierre, and you have denied me that in polite conversation. I called you, but you would not pick up. I sent letters, but you would not open them. So I needed to take that knowledge by force.”
She was correct. Starting around a decade ago, his mother had periodically tried contacting him. Any unmarked letters or those labeled with his mother’s name on the envelope
“I employed Céline because she was willing to do the dirty work. She’d been fascinated by that recipe for years. Unfortunately, that was the same reason I had to get rid of her just now. She had no intention of handing Huit or the recipe over to me.”
“The blood in the barn was fake?”
“I never received exact plans for the burgling other than the date, but I wouldn’t doubt it. Céline wouldn’t harm her most delicious prize.”
The breathing in his chest slowed.
“Simple. Fifi told me where it was when I asked her about you and your darling Huit. Her parents allow me to see her, you know. They are not so cruel or stubborn as you are, my dear. You were careless enough to show it to her. She loves us both with all her heart,
“And how did you know to come here?” Pierre Périgord asked with grim finality.
“A mother’s intuition,” she replied as she jabbed at her right temple with a lone index finger. She turned her head downward at the soiled carpet where the corpse of Céline Dijon lay. “I knew she wasn’t half as clever or cautious as she thought she was. She left behind for you a trail of breadcrumbs that led to your inevitable discovery of her involvement in the burglary, though I don’t deny that your keen mind eased the way.
“And now, my son,” intoned the mother, “I leave you with a choice: Let me leave the building or I will shoot you.”
“Oh! What an amazing effort to repair our relationship,”
“I never said I was interested in doing that. I understand that I am dead to you. So I’m not sure that it matters anymore whether or not you are dead to
He heard the bullet puree the air to liquefied mincemeat…and crash into a desk lamp a few meters to his left. His mother crumpled under a shattered wine bottle. Merlot, good year, he heard himself think absurdly. Still holding its hilt, her face drenched in sweat, his dearest Marie stood behind his mother’s unconscious body. Fifi Fantôme, pale as a specter, clung to Marie’s leg for dear life. He ran and embraced them. “So that was the stuttering I heard, the light I saw, the muffled cry! You followed me here,” he told them softly. Little did he know that the wife-granddaughter duo had been shadowing his movements all day, making sure he was ok.
He tied up his mother and called the police. It took hours to explain, and vomiting up the whole affair to the pigs about the pig made him want to vomit. Each time he asked for permission to take Mlle Dijon’s keys and prove that she’d kidnapped his pig he was rebuffed. Even the eyewitness accounts of his wife and granddaughter failed to persuade the officers. Luckily, they still took his mother into custody and out of sight before she came to. At dusk the authorities removed a set of keys from the body of Céline Dijon and permitted Pierre, Marie, and little Fifi to enter the dead food critic’s place of residence with supervision.
So they arrived at the house. It was clear autumn night, crisp and starry. Beyond description.
Huit bowled
