“Bonjour, Bruno,” she said, kissing him on both cheeks and holding out her hand to Simon. “Monsieur,” she said.
“Congratulations on your success in the rally, mademoiselle,” Simon said. “I saw the report in the paper today. But your photo did not do you justice.”
“Whereas mine showed me scared to death,” said Bruno, smiling. “I think we’re almost done here, Annette. Simon here, the store manager, has decided not to proceed with charges against the boy. But I thought you and I should at least visit his home and see if there is any evidence there of other thefts. I can explain the details as we drive.”
He led the way back to Simon’s office, introduced Annette, thanked Bertrand and Roberte and said he’d drop Roberte back at the mairie now that the magistrate was present. No need, she said, she’d take the opportunity to do some shopping. Félix was staring wide eyed at Annette, as if awed to be in her presence. He must know about her success in the rally, Bruno thought. He took Bertrand aside and said the store manager would explain the agreement he’d reached with Bruno. Bertrand nodded his okay. Bruno turned back to inform Félix and his father that he and the magistrate were going to search Félix’s room at home. He showed everyone out into the corridor, picking up the set of headphones from Simon’s desk and slipping them into his pocket as he said to Simon, “Since you’re paying for them…”
Bruno took Félix’s father in his police van, and Annette followed with Félix. Bruno used the drive to explain that he’d persuaded the store to drop charges on account of Félix’s age but on the condition that there was no other evidence of shoplifting.
“He’s a handful, that kid,” said his father, lighting a cigarette as they drove. He had lit one earlier as soon as they were out of the supermarket. Bruno plucked it from his hand and threw it out of the partly open window. “Not in a police van,” he said. The man shrugged, coughed and opened the window fully to spit. “His mother can handle him, but he never listens to me.”
“Maybe that’s because you don’t have a job and you’re never at home, always in the café,” said Bruno.
“There aren’t any damn jobs, not for someone my age, not anymore.”
“Your wife finds work to do, and so does Félix. Lots of old people would pay a few euros to get their wood chopped, their gardens taken care of.”
“Is this about me or about my son?”
“Both. If your son is getting into trouble, and we both know it’s not the first time, it’s your job to take an interest. You could steer him back onto the straight and narrow, set him a good example. What was your job when you worked?”
“Storeman at the sawmill, until they closed it. I had that job for nearly thirty years, ever since I came out of military service.”
“Which unit were you in?”
“Infantry, One Hundred Tenth Regiment, based in Germany at Baden-Baden.”
Bruno had been based there for a few months after finishing basic training, before he went on the course for the combat engineers. There had been over fifty thousand French troops stationed there at the time, including the headquarters of two army corps before the army finally withdrew from German soil in 1999.
“Not a bad posting,” said Bruno. “Did they give you conscripts the extra money for being outside of France?”
“Not much, but yes, a few of those deutsche marks. I remember a bar we used to go to, Chez Hannes, it was called, run by a big German guy who’d been in the Foreign Legion, always ready to tell a few war stories. He’d been in Indochina and Algeria.”
“I’ve been there,” Bruno said, remembering. “If I remember rightly, Hannes was as bald as a badger, but he had one of those big handlebar mustaches, and he’d sing ‘Le Boudin’ when he got drunk.”
“That’s right, the old legionnaires’ marching song. Putain, I can see the old bastard now with all those tattoos on his arms.” He laughed, his eyes lively as he remembered. “Hard as nails, Hannes was. You should have seen him throwing people out when there was a fight. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the wrong end of one of his punches.”
They drew up outside Félix’s home, an old public-housing block of four stories and no elevator.
“Did you ever tell Félix about those days, what it was like when you were young and in the army? He’d probably be interested.”
The old man looked sideways at Bruno, then nodded grudgingly before climbing out of the car and lighting another cigarette. Bruno sighed as Annette parked behind him. He’d talk to the manager of the old folks’ home, see if there were any odd jobs that could be found for an old soldier.
Félix had a small room to himself. It contained a single bed, a small chest of drawers, an old card table and a chair. The floor was covered in old linoleum, holes in it patched with duct tape. Two hooks on the back of the door provided the only place to hang clothes. There were no photos of pop groups or pinups on the walls, only an array of photos of sports cars and horses taken from magazines. There was no laptop, no radio, and Bruno knew Félix was one of the few collège students with no mobile phone. The room smelled stale with an overlay of dirty socks. Bruno checked the drawers and found T-shirts and threadbare underwear, another pair of jeans. One drawer contained about a dozen apples. There were some cores in the wastepaper basket. On the card table was a pile of schoolbooks and beside them two old issues of Cheval Magazine, lacking their covers. Bruno looked up; they had been stuck to the wall with sticky tape.
“Obviously he likes horses and cars,” said Annette, looking around. She closed the door behind her. “Are you going to tell me what happened here? I’m called to a shoplifting case with a juvenile, and suddenly it’s all dropped when I know that manager is supposed to demand legal action.”
Bruno explained and brought out the headphones. “Do you think I should give them back to him?”
“No, I think you should get the bully to return Félix’s own phones. In the circumstances, you’re pushing your legal rights in searching this boy’s room. If the father hadn’t allowed you inside, I think I’d have stopped you. And I don’t see any evidence of other shoplifting here, except maybe those apples.”
“You’re right. But this kid is going to get into more trouble unless somebody sets him straight, and pretty soon. The next time he gets into trouble, he’ll face juvenile detention,” Bruno said. Annette made a face, evidently disapproving of the tougher new laws Sarkozy had brought in.
“I’ve never been able to get through to the boy, not through rugby or tennis or anything else, and I don’t think his dad has much of a relationship with him,” Bruno went on. “Félix is a loner, scrawny, not big for his age, with no friends that I know of, a bit of a victim.”
“If he’d been arrested, we could have gotten him assigned to community service,” Annette said. “That might have helped, gotten him started on something that might lead to a job and a bit of self-respect. But now that the case has been dropped, there’s no cause to arrest him.”
Bruno nodded thoughtfully. “I’m wondering if these pictures of horses tell us something. Maybe we could steer him into work that way.”
“You mean Pamela’s riding school? It’s worth a try.” She looked around the drab room, sadly. “Mon Dieu, how the other half lives.”
9
Fernand and Odette Oudinot lived in a cottage that had in the old days belonged to one of the farmworkers employed by the owners of the chartreuse. With a lot of hard work they had transformed it into a welcoming and attractive home. They had turned the attic into a large bedroom with its own bathroom, and downstairs they had knocked down walls to make two large rooms, a huge kitchen and a separate dining room, where Bruno had often been a guest. They had also created a large archway into the connecting barn, where in the past tobacco plants had been dried. The lower part of the barn was now a vast living room, twelve meters long and five meters wide. Its large and double-glazed windows gave spectacular views down the slope where Fernand kept a small herd of cows. Fernand had done most of the co
nversion work himself. Upstairs were three guest rooms, each with its own bathroom.
At the other side of the large vegetable garden and far enough removed to be almost out of earshot was another barn, where the geese, ducks and chickens were kept at night. Beyond them stood a pigeonnier, a tall tower that still housed pigeons for the family pot, a large pond and then two hectares of land where the birds roamed free. Then came the orchards and the walnut plantation, and just over the brow of the slope was the chartreuse that belonged to Sylvestre.
The whole place was a tribute to the ability of the farmers of the Périgord to adapt. It was hard to make a living from ducks and geese alone, so Fernand’s dairy cows brought in a little extra money, and the calves he raised were known to produce the best veal in the district. And in the summer, the three guest rooms were rented out by the week for farm vacations. The guests ate with Fernand and Odette, roamed the farm and enjoyed the countryside. Odette cared for her bees and cooked endlessly, making jams and her splendid pies and tarts to sell in the market along with her honey. From her vegetable garden came strawberries and zucchini, tomatoes and eggplants, peppers and every other vegetable Bruno could think of. What wasn’t eaten by the paying guests was pickled, preserved and put into jars to be sold in the market in winter. And with all of this, Odette still found time to cultivate the daffodils that made the hillside dance in spring and the roses that she’d trained to wind prettily around the doors and windows of her cottage. It made a splendid palette of colors in summer with the sunflowers that flanked the guests’ barn and a lower meadow filled with wildflowers where her bees and hosts of butterflies dallied and feasted.
Fernand and Odette had made their home and their farm into one of the better-known places in the Périgord. Hardly a tourist brochure was printed without a photo of their ducks and geese in the shadow of the pigeonnier or their garden with the rose-covered cottage behind. It was every city dweller’s fantasy of the French countryside and the rural heritage that most French people still held dear and to which every French politician paid homage. The mayor’s own campaign brochures featured him smiling as he picked tomatoes in Odette’s garden or sat on the terrace helping Fernand shell walnuts. This was the image of La Belle France and a promise that some core of that grand tradition was still to be seen and enjoyed.
“Bonjour, Bruno,” Odette said, wiping her hands on an apron and advancing to kiss him on both cheeks. A plump and motherly woman, Odette had rosy cheeks as round as two little apples. She smelled of flour and jam and good cooking. Behind her on the giant stove were four large copper pots, each bubbling with black currants, and on the kitchen table an army of empty jam jars waited to be filled. “Tu as mangé?”
Bruno grinned at the traditional farm welcome, the eternal question “Have you eaten?” It was an invitation as much as a welcome, and Bruno loved to eat in this friendly home, staring down at the grazing cows and the ducks and geese waddling among them.
“I’m on duty today, so I can’t stay, Odette, much as I’d like to,” he said. “Is Fernand around?”
She directed him to the workshop, a lean-to attached to the barn for the ducks and geese. Fernand was using a small circular saw to cut logs for the winter and stacking them neatly under the eaves of the barn. When he saw Bruno, he pushed his protective goggles up onto his bald head, shook hands and said with his bright blue eyes glinting, “Time for a p’tit apéro? I keep a bottle here that Odette’s not supposed to know about. You can tell me about the race you were in. I saw it in the paper.”
“Not this time, Fernand. It’s business, although very unofficial. The mayor got a call from a mayor in Alsace about this trouble with your cousins over the chartreuse. He’s tied up today with the regional council meeting or he’d have come himself, but he asked me if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“It’s a family thing,” Fernand said. “I can’t say I’m happy about the way it’s built up, but I don’t want to see the big old family house turned into some fancy place for rich tourists.”
“You have a few tourists here yourself.”
“Yes, but what we do is tourism on the farm; ecotourism, they call it these days. The kids get to play with the ducks and chickens, see the cows and calves, pick vegetables for their lunch—it’s educational. The Alsace part of the family wants to do something very different, make a fortune by selling off these luxury apartments. It’s crazy; this is the countryside, not the heart of Paris. Besides, there’s some bad blood built up between us over the years.”
“How do you mean? I thought you and your aunt, Sylvestre’s grandmother, agreed to divide it, she got the chartreuse and you got the land.”
“Yes, but we had a verbal agreement that we’d try to keep it all together in the family, not start selling it off. The Alsace family used to come down here every year, and we’d light the fires, air the beds, take care of the garden, get a meal ready to welcome them.”
“What went wrong?”
“It was money, of course. When our parents died—they died within three weeks of each other—there was this land and there was a fair bit of money saved up. I was underage, but I wanted to stay with the farm, so my aunt agreed to let Jeannot, our neighbor, take me on as an apprentice, and he and I farmed this land together. The idea was that I’d take over the farm when I came of age. That was fine, just what I wanted, but then she came to me and asked if she could use the money to invest in some business project that she and her husband had back in Alsace. She promised to pay me back, with interest, and got a notaire to make it all legal.”
“And did she pay you back?”
“Oh yes, in cash and right on time, but she paid me only three percent interest a year at a time when inflation was roaring away. And she used our money, my money, to help her new family buy back the aerodrome, which eventually made them millionaires. I’d just married Odette, and I had a fight with my aunt at the wedding when I said I wanted to be paid what the money was worth before the inflation, as well as the interest. That was when it started. She said a deal is a deal, and there was nothing in the contract about inflation. Anyway, it went on from there, me and Odette struggling to build this farm up and make ends meet, while she and her family up in Alsace were buying fast cars and fancy clothes. And she took all the family furniture, although half of it was mine.”
“What would it take to settle this?”
“They’ve got all the money in the world. It wouldn’t hurt them to let me have the chartreuse, as compensation for all the money I lost through inflation, and the interest I lost along with it. I sat down one night and worked it all out, using the government’s own inflation figures. Last time I looked, it was close to half a million euros they owe me. And I’m not asking for anything that’s not mine by right. So if they think they can make some more money from this place, they’ll have me and my rights to reckon with. And it’s not just me; it’s our Martine. All this will be hers when Odette and I are gone, and I’d like her to have the chartreuse.”
Bruno nodded. Martine was a late child, probably now in her thirties, who’d gone to the lycée in Périgueux and then to university in Bordeaux and got some high-powered job in Paris.
“Is she still in Paris?” Bruno asked, thinking she might be prepared to reach some sensible settlement with Sylvestre.
“She’s based in England now, got her own business helping French companies get established in London. She’s doing very well, employs three or four people,” Fernand said proudly. “She was always good with languages.”
“Didn’t she get married, must be ten years ago or more, just about the time I got here and took this job?”
“She married a colleague from Paris, but it didn’t last. I never took to him. She’s divorced now, no kids, more’s the pity. Odette can’t wait to be a grandmother. And I’m not getting any younger. I’d love to have a grandson take this place over one day.”
“Do you see much of her?”
“She’s here now, just came for the week
on one of those discount flights from London that come into Bergerac. Only cost her fifty euros, there and back. She’s off seeing friends in Périgueux, but she’ll be back for dinner. Come and join us. You’ll like her.”
Bruno had to decline, citing a previous engagement. He left his car outside the cottage, and Fernand led the way through the walnut plantation.
“I saw the parade of old cars the other day, but I was sorry we missed your race. We were having lunch with friends in Rouffignac. But I saw that white Jaguar again as we were driving there. It raced right past me.”
“The E-type?” Bruno asked. “Are you sure?” That was Young’s car. Why was he driving around when he was supposed to have been laid low by a migraine? Maybe he wasn’t as attached to Annette as she seemed to think.
“Oh yes, and it was the same driver, the fair-haired young man.”
They walked on over the brow of the hill. Strolling through the geese to the wire fence Fernand had erected just a few meters from the rear of the chartreuse, Bruno saw the building had two wings enclosing a large courtyard with a handsome old tree in its center. About thirty meters beyond the archway that led into the courtyard was a separate gatehouse. The main house was about fifty meters in length, with mansard windows in the roof.
“Sylvestre turned each wing into a separate house, and he plans to keep the gatehouse for himself,” said Fernand, over the noise of the geese. “I’ve fenced off his land from mine, so you’ll have to walk around from here and get to his house by the dirt path that leads off from the road.” He opened a small gate in his fence to let Bruno out of the enclosure for the geese and back into the walnut plantation.
“Any message for him?” Bruno asked.
“Tell him to restore to me what his family owes, and I’ll remove the geese and sell him an easement for an access road. I’ll even put up with him living in the gatehouse.”
Bruno continued alone on a pleasant stroll through the trees and out to the single-lane road of tarmac. The potholes in the road suggested heavy use by trucks coming with building materials for Sylvestre’s conversion. The path that led off to the chartreuse was muddy and narrow, marked by ruts that had been filled in with gravel. Trees and bushes on each side had been battered by the truck traffic. Nobody interested in a luxury home would want to arrive this way. And the closer Bruno approached, the louder the cackling of the geese.
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