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grateful that she’d decided against garlic as the flavor of the month. With a final tweak of his pocket handkerchief, he left the house and headed for the Domaine des Rochers.
    ——
    The D36 twists south from Bonnieux, becoming the D943 as it continues down through the Lubéron toward the flatter, less savage country around Lourmarin. It is a narrow corkscrew of a road, cut through rock, the perfect setting by night for the twentieth-century highwayman. Rumors of armed robberies had been circulating recently in village cafés, and the story was always the same. A car, seemingly broken down, blocks the road, with a lone figure standing beside it. The unsuspecting motorist stops to offer help. Friends of the lone figure then jump out from their hiding place in the bushes, often with guns. The helpful motorist is left with a ten-mile walk to civilization, while his car is being processed for resale in a backstreet Marseille garage.
    But on a fine spring evening, with the sun still catching the high limestone peaks, the road offered some spectacular views, and Bennett was in the best of spirits as he slowed down to go through the iron gates that marked the entrance to Poe’s property. The coarse gravel track wassmooth and well maintained, curving to follow the contours of the land, always rising. Poe had apologized over the phone for its length, which was nearly ten miles, but had said that the destination was worth the drive.
    And so it was. Bennett came around the final sweep of gravel, and stopped the car to look, astonished, at the view before him.
    It was as though the crest of the mountain had been sliced off to form an immense plateau level enough to build on. Immediately in front of Bennett’s car, a broad alley of stout old plane trees led, in two perfectly straight lines half a mile long, to a massive arch that pierced a high stone wall. Behind the wall, Bennett could see the slopes of roof tiles, a warm, faded terra-cotta in the evening sun, with the tower of a
pigeonnier at
one corner of what appeared to be a courtyard. In the distance beyond the buildings, the Grand Lubéron stretched away to the eastern horizon. To the north, the bald white cap of Mont Ventoux; to the south, the plains leading to Aix, Marseille, and the Mediterranean. Nowhere, in the entire sweep of the view, was there any sign of a power cable, a pylon, or another building. It was the most perfectly sited property Bennett had ever seen.
    He drove slowly down the alley of plane trees, wondering what the owner of such a place did if he ran out of milk or cigarettes on a rainy night, with the nearest village fifteen miles away. But then, of course, people like Poe didn’t run out. Servants made sure of that.
    With a heightening sense of anticipation, Bennettdrove through the arch and pulled in next to the dark-green Range Rover and the long black Citroën that were parked to one side of the huge courtyard. He walked toward the house, past a fountain that would have done credit to a medium-sized village with its three great stone gargoyles spouting water into a circular
bassin
, and was searching for something as modern as a bell when the high carved double doors swung open. A man in a black suit, tall for a Japanese, bowed his head.
    “Monsieur Bennett?”
    Bennett bowed back.
    “Please follow.”
    They went down a long hallway, polished flagstones softened by the subdued gleam of Iranian rugs. Bennett ran a surreptitious finger along the top of an antique oak game table. Not a speck of dust. Georgette would have approved, he thought, and then whistled softly to himself as they entered a space that was big enough to have kept her busy until she qualified for her pension.
    The low ceiling of the classic Provençal farmhouse had been removed, probably at the cost of several upstairs rooms, and the traditional small windows replaced by high, wide slabs of plate glass set into the stone walls, which had the effect of bringing the view into the