“Algerian War, mostly. The house is stuffed with them-and photos. Come, I’ll show you.”
He led her into the main room and showed her the ranks of framed photographs, the trail of lost empires from Dien Bien Phu to Bab el-Oued and of lost leaders from de Gaulle to Giscard and one photo of Hercule lighting the flame at the Arc de Triomphe.
“Who’s the woman?” she asked. “And the child?”
“No idea. And who’s the African?” He pointed to the small photo. She leaned in closely to see, putting her hand on his shoulder as if simply keeping her balance.
“The guy in camouflage is Rolf Steiner, German, ex-Foreign Legion. He became a mercenary,” she said. “So I guess the African must be Ojukwu, the man who ran Biafra when it tried to break away in the sixties. Steiner fought for them as a mercenary.”
“What was Hercule doing there?”
“Looking after French interests, as always,” she said, stepping back, leaving a space between them. “I recall hearing something about Total Oil hoping for a deal with Biafra, breaking Shell’s monopoly in Nigeria. This other photo here is Jacques Foccart, who ran our African policy for the past thirty years. It didn’t matter who got elected president, Foccart always stayed in power.”
“And that’s the kind of work you’re in these days?” he asked, thinking, The kind of work that you were pressing me to do so I could come and live with you in Paris.
“I’m still on the personal staff of the minister of the interior, in a section run by the brigadier.” She was all business now.
“Does that make you a barbouze like Hercule?”
“Do people really use that old slang these days?” She laughed. “No, I’m still part of the Police Nationale. Mostly, I do liaison, which means keeping an eye on what other police and security forces are doing so that our minister avoids the embarrassment of being surprised. You’d be amazed how much politicians hate to be surprised.”
“So what’s happening in Bordeaux?”
“Can’t tell you,” she said, and then grinned. His heart warmed to see it, the first genuine expression her face had worn since their meeting. They’d been dancing around each other, too aware of the history between them to lower their guard. That grin was the first sign that it was the same Isabelle he’d fallen in love with. “It’s all straightforward stuff. Liaison with customs and the military and Europol, and our neighbors across the Channel,” she went on.
“The British?”
She nodded. “I just did six weeks in London, seconded to their counterterrorism unit, and they sent one of theirs to Paris. We work closely together on radical Muslims, but this latest operation is about illegal immigration, which is why the navies are involved, ours and theirs. It’s all run by organized crime.”
“The brigadier thought Hercule’s death was more important than that?”
“Well, perhaps more urgent. And it’s not his death that matters, it’s his files. He ran a big section of the old SDECE so it’s routine to check over his papers. And then his being murdered makes it a real problem. No surprises, remember?”
“What’s your role in all of that?”
“I just babysit the house until the archives team gets down from Paris, which should be later today. They were taking a high-speed train to Bordeaux. But if you found anything interesting while poking around…”
“I know he was reading about the Algerian War and about British intelligence in World War II. He was writing something that looked like memoirs. It’s that folder on the desk, but it’s a long way from being done. And I found a copy of his will in that central drawer, but I didn’t open it.”
“Show me,” she said, pulling a pair of surgical gloves from her shoulder bag. She opened the drawer and took out the envelope. It was unsealed, so she removed a thick wad of papers, unfolded them and sat down on an easy chair to read.
“I presume I can go, now that you’re here to look after the premises.”
“What?” She looked up. “Just hold on a second, Bruno. There’s something interesting here about you. He says you and the baron are the only real friends he’s made since his retirement. He’s left the baron his wine cellar. Some journal that he kept on truffles goes to you, along with his old Land Rover.”
“What did you say? His journal? And his Land Rover?” He sat down. He felt overwhelmed with a mixture of surprise and affection for Hercule. He had never been bequeathed anything before. The pleasure faded as he thought of Hercule, so animated when last they met.
“He’s also left you some books. A lot of books, it sounds like. He must have been really attached to you.” She looked up and smiled widely at him. “You’re thinking of the Land Rover, I can tell.” She laughed. “Oh Bruno, I do like you.”
He felt himself blushing, but also profoundly moved. He’d respected the old man deeply, but he’d never suspected that Hercule thought of him as anything more than a casual hunting companion and as an amateur truffle cultivator. To bequeath his journal, a master’s guide to the truffles of the region and of the secret sites where they might be found, was a mark of real affection. But had there been no family?
“Who is his main heir?” he asked. “Is that Asian woman mentioned?”
“I’m still reading. I can’t see anything about the woman in the photo, but there is a reference to his late wife. There’s nothing specific about the young girl in the photo. The main beneficiary is a scholarship trust fund he seems to have established more than twenty years ago, for the education of Vietnamese who fought for France. There’s more that goes to the Daughters of St. Paul, an order of teaching nuns. And there’s a codicil. The house and contents, less the books, go to a woman called Gioan Linh Nguyen-Vendrot, if she can be found. I assume that may be the daughter, but it doesn’t say so. If she is not traced by his executors in a reasonable time, the house goes to the commune of Ste. Alvere. The latest available information on her whereabouts is with his notaire in the town here. He is named as an executor of the will, along with you and the baron.”
She put down the will. “And that, my dear Bruno, means that I had better arrest you. And your friend the baron when he turns up. You two found the body. You are the heirs. Obviously you had the motive and the opportunity, and presumably you had the means. How was he killed?”
“That’s not funny, Isabelle. He was tortured, left hanging by his wrists.”
“Mon Dieu!” She shuddered. “Do we have a time of death yet?”
“No, but the baron and I were there a bit before nine, and the blood was still wet. He can’t have been dead long, and we saw nobody on the trail up to the hide where we found him. There are other ways out from there, but you’d have to know those woods pretty well.”
“Not in these days of GPS. But they’d still need to rinse the blood off themselves, most likely. Was there water nearby?”
“Yes, a stream. I’ll make sure the forensics guys check that. But Hercule was a hunter and a trained soldier. And he was armed. It wouldn’t have been easy to sneak up on him or take him by surprise. He knew those woods like the back of his hand.”
“One of the things they’ll be looking for in the archives is anything that could point to a motive for his murder. It’s a bit complicated because of the way he left the service,” she said. “I don’t know the details, but he was one of the victims of Mitterrand’s big cleanup in eighty-two, when he closed down SDECE and started the new foreign intelligence department. It was all political. Mitterrand thought the old guard was a bunch of right-wing anti-Communists, and his coalition government depended on Communist support. So he closed the old bureau down and put the new organization under the Ministry of Defense.”
“And Hercule was one of the sacrificial lambs.”
“Exactly. And when they fired him Hercule was running the Action Division, that’s the clandestine service. So you can imagine, one of the top priorities of the new organization was to keep an eye on the disgruntled veterans of the old one, just in case they used their files to m
ake trouble.”
“But he never did.”
“Not Hercule, no. But some others caused Mitterrand a lot of problems, leaks of files to Le Canard Enchaine and Figaro. And remember back in eighty-two Mitterrand was running a very left-wing government, nationalizing the banks and big companies, and there was a run on the franc. Closing down la Piscine was seen as part of that, a big move to the left. The Americans were very worried.”
“La Piscine,” he said, almost to himself. “I haven’t heard that for a while.” It was the old slang term among insiders for French intelligence, named because its headquarters on boulevard Mortier in Paris adjoined the big Tourelles swimming pool. “So how closely would Hercule have been watched?”
“Very closely, but that’s long over,” Isabelle replied. “I checked before I came, and there’s no surveillance here, no microphones and not even a phone tap. Hercule was listed as ‘inactive’ until the brigadier got your phone call this morning.”
And now it all starts up again, thought Bruno. Hercule’s old outfit was taken over by the defense ministry, and Isabelle works for the minister of the interior. There would be turf wars over this.
“So when do we expect the defense ministry guys to turn up?” he asked.
“We don’t,” she said firmly. “At least not officially. This is an internal French matter, so it’s our affair, not theirs. I’ll call you on your mobile as soon as the archives team turns up,” she continued, a touch of hesitation in her voice. She looked at him almost shyly. “Perhaps we can have a drink before I get a train back to Bordeaux?”
“I’d like that, but what happened to the helicopter?” He was smiling at her, despite himself, despite having been through all this before. He knew that theirs had been an affair without a future, but the grip of the past was very strong.
“The chopper just dropped me off. Getting here was urgent, not getting back.”
9
So big and boisterous that he always seemed to fill every room he entered, J-J threw open his arms to embrace Bruno and then lumbered around the office of the mayor of Ste. Alvere to deliver bone-crushing handshakes to the others present. His dominance thus established, Commissaire Jean-Jacques Jalipeau, chief detective of the Police Nationale for the Departement of the Dordogne, looked around for a comfortable place from which to give his briefing. He perched his ample buttocks on a windowsill and waved the mayor imperiously back to his own chair at the head of the council table.
“What we know so far is mainly from forensics. There were at least three people involved in yesterday morning’s attack on Hercule Vendrot,” J-J began, not bothering to look at the manila file that seemed to Bruno as small as a bus ticket in his large paw. “A fourth person may have stayed in the stolen Mercedes four-by-four whose tire marks we found about six hundred feet down the dirt track. They seem to have been waiting since daybreak, as if knowing that their victim would arrive. Then they killed him in a most brutal way that would have left at least one of them covered in blood.”
“Do we know how they took him by surprise?” Bruno asked. “Hercule was armed, and he had his dog.”
“The dog was dying,” J-J replied. “Poisoned meat had been left at the entrance to the hide. The poor creature would have been in no shape to give much warning. Maybe they had guns pointed at the victim, we don’t know. Forensics says that Vendrot was handcuffed inside the hide and then taken outside to be murdered. They think that time of death was between seven and nine, which is not very helpful. The knife used on the victim was about eight inches long, an unusual length, and single edged with a sharp point. We haven’t found it.
“The stolen Mercedes was found early this morning in the parking lot at Toulouse Airport.” J-J paused. “That might tell you how much effort we’re putting into this. It had been cleaned and vacuumed and was empty. Garbage cans at the airport and at rest spots on the obvious autoroutes are being searched.”
J-J looked up from his file, and then he scanned the room, making eye contact in turn with Bruno and each of the other men present.
“Hercule Vendrot was a prominent man, and an honored son of France,” he said. “The minister of the interior has personally instructed me to give this case top priority, and all other agencies of the state have been ordered to provide full cooperation. This includes the DGSE, whose predecessor agency our victim used to serve. We have a representative here today.” J-J nodded at an anonymous-looking middle-aged man in a dark suit and tired gray shirt sitting at the foot of the table. He nodded in acknowledgment.
“Do you have any hypothesis so far?” asked the mayor.
“That’s about all we do have,” J-J replied. “It might have been revenge for something from his past, or something more recent, possibly connected with the truffle market here in Ste. Alvere. That’s why you gentlemen are here, because we need your local knowledge of Hercule and his concerns, his enemies… anything that might be useful.”
Bruno had one new fact to contribute, but he would inform J-J in private rather than share it with this bunch of local gossips. Still, he knew it was a good tactic for J-J to bring in the members of the town council and brief them. Feeding their self-importance would ensure their support, and their local knowledge might be useful. But the copies of Hercule’s will and the note he had left with his notaire seemed more important. Bruno had been to see him already that morning. The notaire was a member of Hercule’s hunting club and knew Bruno well. He’d confirmed that a formal notice of death had been filed, so Bruno had no difficulty in obtaining Hercule’s papers. He’d also provided a copy of the letter being sent that day to the legal attache of the Vietnamese embassy in Paris, asking for assistance in tracing one Gioan Linh Nguyen-Vendrot, a possible heir. Such letters, the notaire had said, were quite routine.
The terse sentence in Hercule’s will on the possible heir was written in the dry tones of an official report, and yet Bruno could almost feel the personal sadness that had gone into its drafting. When reading it in the notaire ’s office, Bruno had wondered aloud at the self-control that had kept Hercule from ever mentioning his loss. The notaire had been able to fill in some of the gaps.
When Hercule had left Vietnam with the French forces in 1954, he’d brought with him a new Vietnamese wife. Still attached to military intelligence, he was based briefly at the NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau and was then posted to Algeria soon after learning that his wife was pregnant. She stayed in Paris with Vietnamese relatives and died in child-birth. Hercule had remained in Algeria, and the daughter had remained in Paris. He had seen her only on his occasional leaves, and she barely knew her father. For security reasons, even these brief contacts ceased when the generals launched their coup attempt in 1961 and the war with the OAS had begun. Hercule had been one of their targets. To visit his daughter would have put her at risk.
Now, looking around the council table in the mairie of Ste. Alvere, listening to the predictable questions from the mayor and the council members, Bruno found it daunting to comprehend a France that had been so close to civil war. Bruno recalled Hercule when last they met saying he would have shot the baron if he had joined the OAS. Bruno had assumed he was joking, or at least exaggerating for effect. Now he knew better. Had some fearsome echo of those OAS years cost Hercule his life?
Suddenly aware that J-J and the rest of the gathering were looking at him and evidently awaiting an answer, Bruno hauled his attention back to the meeting. J-J had been talking about full cooperation, and Bruno had spent years learning the army rule that one could seldom go far wrong repeating an officer’s words back to him and adding “sir.”
“Full cooperation, Monsieur le Commissaire,” he said, which seemed to suffice. J-J’s penetrating gaze lingered on him a moment, but moved on.
The mayor began to explain ponderously that Hercule’s death could have had nothing to do with Ste. Alvere, since the truffle market was thoroughly monitored. Bruno tuned out again and looked gloomily at the DGSE man in the gray shirt who had arrived
so late from Paris yesterday that after meeting with him there had been no time for a drink or even much of a conversation with Isabelle as he had raced her back to the station at Le Buisson to catch the evening train to Bordeaux. A little less speed, a bit more braking on the corners and just slightly more caution before passing other cars and she’d have missed her last train and been stuck for the evening. The thought had crossed his mind with a brief flutter of temptation. It was not that he wanted to restart their affair but that he still felt baffled and frustrated at the way it had ended. It felt unfinished and untidy; there were still matters between them to be resolved.
But there was other unfinished business that nagged at him. Once he had dropped Isabelle at the station, he had driven to Vinh’s house on the outskirts of St. Denis. It was one of the small modern homes, built from prefabricated kits for a hundred thousand euros and the cost of a small tract of land. They had been spreading around the region since the foreigners and the Parisians had pushed the price of the traditional Perigord houses out of reach. Bruno understood the need for them, but disliked them all the same with their shallow roofs of rounded red tiles, as if they were in Provence or Italy rather than the Perigord. But he remembered Vinh’s pride at his single-story home with two small bedrooms all on a flat platform of cement, and the feast he and his wife had given to celebrate his new status as a man of property.
The house had been closed and silent when Bruno arrived, the window shutters closed and no sign of Vinh’s small truck that he used to get to the local markets. As he tried to peer through the shutter gaps and poked around the tiny rear garden for any sign of life, Bruno remembered his mild surprise at finding Hercule among the guests that evening of Vinh’s feast. Hercule, the only Frenchman there who was not in some way attached to the St. Denis market, had made a brief speech, reminiscing fondly of his own days in Vietnam and his admiration for the nems and pho that Vinh’s wife made. Probably Vinh had taken his wife away for a few days to get over the shock of the attack. But he was not answering his mobile phone, and Bruno had no other Vietnamese contacts in the area, which meant he was stuck, although he very much wanted to know why Vinh had been attacked by a Chinese illegal immigrant with an expensive lawyer.
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