Fatal Pursuit

by Martin Walker

  “Tristan is one of his constituents, and Tristan’s father is the very competent manager of the supermarket, which is the biggest employer and leading taxpayer in St. Denis.” Bruno opened his arms and gave an exaggerated shrug, as if to say matters were now out of his hands.

  “You can’t have one law for the rich and another for the poor,” Annette began, and this time she looked in appeal to Yveline, who was nodding vigorously.

  “That’s shameful,” Yveline said.

  Ah, thought Bruno, it worked. They’re agreeing with each other.

  “Shameful, probably, but it’s the reality, it’s politics,” he said. “The mayor is planning to find Tristan some tightly supervised physical labor in the woods with the forestry department. But what if we three agree to insist on putting some real teeth into that? Tristan is prosecuted and found guilty, sentenced to two or three years, but then the sentence is suspended on the strict condition that the court get a satisfactory weekly report from the forester. One false move, one day playing truant, and he goes straight to jail.”

  Yveline and Annette exchanged glances. Yveline shrugged. Annette said, “If that’s the best you think we can do…”

  “I think it’s important that we come up with a joint recommendation,” he said. “Let me draft something and then leave you two to tidy it up and put it into the right terminology.” Bruno, disguising his relief, took a notepad from Yveline’s desk and began to write.

  Ten minutes later, escorting Annette to her car, he asked, “How’s George Young? Still looking for that famous Bugatti?”

  “Don’t talk to me about that damn Bugatti. I get enough of that from George. I don’t think he’s making much progress, and it’s getting him down,” she said in a tone that suggested she no longer felt swept off her feet.

  “I went to a lot of trouble to get him something I thought was bound to cheer him up,” she went on, sounding aggrieved. “I planned it as a kind of consolation present, and he barely even thanked me before setting off again on this wild-goose chase of his.”

  “It sounds like he’s a bit obsessed by it,” said Bruno sympathetically, thinking that Annette would naturally prefer Young to devote all his attentions to her. “But I think he has been interested for a long time, through the family connection he has with the English racing driver.”

  “I suppose so. I just wish he’d talk about something else once in a while.” They reached her car, and she stopped, looking appealingly at him. “Am I being unreasonable?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, an image of Martine unbuttoning his shirt the previous evening suddenly entering his mind and making him think it was sad that Young was wasting that unique and precious time that a kindly Providence reserved for new lovers. “But I suppose you could say that in a way it’s flattering that he wants to share with you something that’s so important to him.”

  “It’s not just the car, it’s also this rivalry he has about the Bugatti with Sylvestre. It gets on my nerves, and I went to such a lot of trouble to get him that damn radiator.”

  “Radiator?” he asked.

  “A real Bugatti radiator, they’re very distinctive with a kind of horseshoe shape. You remember Marcel, whose car we drove in the rally? He has one on the wall of his garage, along with ones from a Rolls-Royce and I don’t know the names of the other cars. But this one had BUGATTI written on it, and I wheedled and fluttered my eyelashes, and finally Marcel let me buy it from him.”

  “Young must have been delighted.”

  “He was, for about thirty seconds, then he asked where I’d found it, and when I told him he said he had to run.”

  “And that surprised you? You hand him a piece of solid evidence that a Bugatti has been right here in the Périgord, and you don’t expect him to go hunting to see which car it might have come from?”

  She looked down at her feet, a little abashed. “I suppose so. But he didn’t have to rush off right away, did he?”

  “No, of course not. And I suppose you never have to rush away in the mornings to be on time for work? Perhaps he sees this as his work. By the way, did Marcel say where he got the radiator?”

  “Years and years ago, he said, when he first opened the garage. He found it in some local junk shop in Sarlat that closed down years ago.”

  “So as soon as Young realizes the trail has gone cold, he’ll come back to you,” said Bruno. “And you are young and lovely and alive and loving, all the things that a Bugatti radiator is not. I suspect he’s the kind of man to appreciate that. So cheer up, Annette.”

  “Thanks, Bruno.” She rose on tiptoe to her full height and kissed him on the cheek before getting into her car and giving him a smile and a wave as she drove away.

  With Balzac at his heels, Bruno walked back to pick up his van, noting that Sylvestre’s Range Rover was still parked outside the notaire’s office. And Freddy was in Bordeaux. That meant the coast was clear. He could pick up the data cards from his cameras, put in new ones and change the batteries before taking Hector out. He headed out to the chartreuse.

  Half an hour later, leaning forward in the saddle as Hector plodded up the slope, Bruno was wondering how difficult it would be to track down all the closed junk shops in Sarlat. He’d have to find out when Marcel had first launched his garage and restrict the search to those that had been open at the time. It would mean looking through old business directories and then trying to track down members of the family who had owned the shop and see if anybody remembered where the Bugatti radiator had come from. The prospect dismayed him, until he remembered that he could ask Gilles to do it. And then he thought, as he topped the rise onto the ridge that looked down on St. Denis, he had the evening with Martine to look forward to. He looked back to see that Balzac was still following along behind, running as fast as his short legs would allow. Bruno leaned forward and loosened the reins to let Hector know it was time to run.

  For a time, at least, the ride drove all the other thoughts and concerns from his head. There was nothing but this moment, this speed, this wind in his face and this powerful, galloping creature that seemed almost to be a part of him. More than that, on horseback he felt himself to be much more a part of the physical world around him even as its trees flashed by sensed rather than seen.

  As he slowed at the end of the ridge, the thought stayed with him. This sense that he felt of being connected to nature was at its most immediate and dramatic when he was riding, but it was also something he felt with his dog and even with his geese and chickens. Humans were meant to live with animals, he concluded, to know that humankind was not alone on this planet but shared it with other species in a state of mutual interdependence. People who lived in cities might know that intellectually, but could they ever truly feel it in the way he did in the woods with his horse and his dog? He turned in the saddle to watch Balzac catch up, and then unbidden Hector set off at a walk down the familiar bridle path that led to the ridge for the long canter back to the stables.

  —

  As Bruno finished rubbing down his horse, Gilles drove into the courtyard in Fabiola’s old car, the Twingo that he’d started to use now that she had her new electric vehicle. They shook hands, and Gilles said, “The Perdigat farm is now a housing estate, a filling station and a couple of warehouses for supermarkets. It’s right by the extension to the new autoroute. There’s no trace of any old barns, and the farm and its contents were auctioned off fifty years ago. The next step is to check the old newspapers and try to find an announcement of the sale, which will give us the name of the auctioneers, and we can see if they have kept any records.”

  “There might be a shortcut,” said Bruno, and pulled out his phone to call his counterpart, the municipal policeman of Terrasson, the nearest town to La Bachellerie. Grégoire was a pillar of the département’s tennis federation, and Bruno had met him often; his father had been the St. Denis policeman before him. They exchanged greetings, and Bruno explained he was trying to find out which company had auctioned the farm of
Perdigat.

  “Probably the Melvilles from Périgueux, they’ve always done most of the auctions around here,” Grégoire replied. “But I’ll ask my father, he might even remember it. The farm’s partly built over now, of course. I’ll call you back.”

  Gilles grinned. “You and your local knowledge, Bruno. I should have thought of that.”

  “I didn’t know Grégoire’s father was still alive, or I’d have gone straight to him,” Bruno said, thinking that Grégoire was nearing sixty, close to retirement, so his father would be close to ninety. He’d certainly have been around at the time of the auction. He might even have known Félix’s grandfather. If so, perhaps he could find a way of bringing the two men together.

  “I have to go, Gilles, but there could be another clue,” he said, and recounted how Annette had found the radiator at Marcel’s garage and given it to Young.

  “I’m disappointed that Young didn’t tell me that himself,” said Gilles. “We’re supposed to be cooperating.”

  “Maybe he feels he’s getting close to the car and the money it could bring him.”

  “We went through all that, remember? I’d better give him a call, and I’ll count on you to call me back when you hear from Grégoire. Do you mind if I follow up with Marcel? His place is the big Citroën dealership, is that right?”

  Bruno stopped at the gendarmerie to give Isabelle the data cards from his cameras and got home not long after five. He fed his geese and chickens, got the fire going in the wood-burning stove and set the table for two. He was about to climb into the shower when Grégoire called him back to say his father remembered the sale. The auctioneer had indeed been Melville. The farm had been broken up into lots, and all the old farm equipment, mostly out of date, had been bought by a scrap-metal merchant and junk dealer in Sarlat named Bérégevoy.

  “I don’t think they’re still in business, Bruno,” Grégoire added.

  “Thanks anyway,” Bruno said. “You might also ask your dad if he remembers people called Boulier; they were métayers at Rastignac. One of them is in our maison de retraite, and he told me that he remembers seeing the château of Rastignac burning during the war. Your dad will certainly remember that. He’s about your dad’s age so they were probably at school together. He had a big brother, Henri, a Resistance fighter who died in the war. If your dad remembers the family, it might be nice to bring the two of them together to reminisce about old times.”

  “Good idea,” said Grégoire. “I’ll ask him. My father’s always been interested in what happened at Rastignac, spent years talking to everyone in the area to try to establish whether the paintings had been stolen or burned in the fire. I’m sure he’d love to get together with someone who could talk about it with him. Old folks like to reminisce about their young days. Maybe one day someone will do the same for the two of us. Keep well, Bruno.”

  Bruno called Gilles to tell him about the Bérégevoy scrap-metal merchants and to commiserate. If the old tobacco barn at Perdigat had indeed been the last resting place of the chassis and engine of the legendary Bugatti, it had probably long since been melted down for scrap.

  “It’s not bad news as far as I’m concerned,” Gilles replied. “Quite the opposite—it makes a good, haunting ending to my story. The most valuable car in the world, melted down and recycled, and some of its molecules are probably now speeding around in some of the family cars in France.”

  Bruno put his phone down and climbed into the shower that he’d built and tiled himself, thinking that someday he might invest in one of those grand multijet showers his friend Horst had installed. He shampooed his hair and was soaping himself down when he was suddenly aware of a shadow against the frosted glass of the sliding door. Then he heard a tap on the door and a woman’s voice said, “Bruno?”

  Was that Martine, arriving early, or was it another voice? With the shower running, he couldn’t tell. Heaven forbid it was Isabelle making an unexpected visit. He slid open the door a crack and with relief saw it was Martine, smiling cheekily at him and swiftly unbuttoning her blouse to reveal a black bra. She began unzipping her jeans.

  “I just showered at home before I came,” she said. “But I think I’m in the mood for another.” She reached behind her back to undo her bra. “I’ve brought the food, but I’m not hungry yet—at least, not for the food.”

  She climbed in to join him in the running water and put her arms around his neck. “You’re already soapy,” she said. “Why don’t you soap me?”

  22

  For Bruno, it began as just another Saturday morning, rendered more piquant by the expectation of breakfast with Isabelle. This was the second, smaller market day of the week, and a few minutes before eight most of the stalls were already erected, and the early customers were moving purposefully from one to the next. Bruno had noticed that most of them shopped in the order in which they ate: first the olives stall and the organic bread, then the fish or the duck, then the fruit and vegetables and finally Stéphane’s cheeses. Even those he knew to be apartment dwellers paused at the flower stall, the last one before the bridge, picking up seedlings of herbs for their balconies and window boxes. Bruno moved through the stalls, shaking hands and kissing cheeks, tasting a ripe fig and then a fat black olive.

  “Not hot yet, come back later,” Madame Vinh called to him from the glass-fronted stand where she kept the samosas and the lumpia, the prawn curries and rendang beef, for all of which the people of St. Denis had developed a taste. Takeout containers were stacked beside the vast cauldron of pho soup heating on the portable gas stove. It would be empty by noon. In the decade that Bruno had been the town policeman, the usual radishes and cucumbers had been joined by mangoes and papayas, heirloom tomatoes and pomelos. Sausage rolls and Cornish pasties now stood beside the quiche Lorraine. But the cheese and the charcuterie stalls were still the most thronged. The people of St. Denis were prepared to experiment and the stallholders were ready to adapt, but all of them always returned faithfully to the foie gras and smoked duck sausage, to the Brie de Meaux and Vacherin Mont d’Or, emblems of a nation that still liked to define itself by the way it ate.

  Fauquet’s café was crowded and the windows steamed up, people standing three deep at the bar and all the tables filled. This was no place for his dog. He tied Balzac’s leash to a railing and then moved through the crowd, shaking hands until he caught Fauquet’s eye and asked for coffee and croissants on the terrace. The café did not usually put the chairs and tables out into the open air until later, but Fauquet nodded and Bruno leaned across the counter to pick up a dishrag and the key that hung by the cash desk. He went outside to open the padlock to a discreet door into the storage area, pulled out two chairs and a small table. He put them at the far corner of the terrace, by the stone balustrade that overlooked the river, where he and Isabelle would be out of earshot of any other arrivals. He wiped the furniture clean with the rag, collected Balzac and took his seat. Once Isabelle arrived, the coffee and croissants had been served, and other regulars had liberated another half-dozen tables and lifted their faces to enjoy the gentle early morning sun.

  “In Paris the cafés are installing heaters on the terraces,” she said as he rose to greet her.

  “It being Paris, they will probably be denouncing the perils of global warming while they cluster beneath the artificial warmth,” he said and pointed up to the clear blue sky. “Here in the Périgord, we prefer solar power.”

  “My team has finally arrived and been issued its warrants from the prefect, so at last we can get started,” she said, sitting down to pet Balzac and tell him what a fine dog he was and how much she’d missed him.

  “I hope you had a more interesting evening than I did,” she said, looking up at Bruno. “I was staring at those images from your data cards until my brain flagged. It was always the same two Range Rovers coming and going, and so the high point was when a new vehicle turned up, until I realized it was you. The postman didn’t even get out of his car, just pushed the supermarket fl
yers and catalogs into the box. And there was one courier delivery.”

  “Any result from the Bordeaux surveillance?”

  “He had lunch with a junior professor of sociology whom we’re now checking out, French but a Muslim convert and wearing her head scarf as if it were a veil. The guy from Toulouse whom he met at the station in Agen was interesting, a trade union rep at Airbus, already on the brigadier’s watch list. They went to a kebab house to eat.”

  “These legalistic delays must be very frustrating for you,” he said.

  “They are, but that’s the price Europe pays for human rights,” she said wryly. “And since we French invented them, we’ve only got ourselves to blame. But the surveillance is only part of the operation. Mostly it’s about tracking bank accounts and money trails, which is why we need the Americans, and that’s going well.”

  “How much money are they moving through the vintage-car system?” he asked.

  “They’re being discreet, mostly cars in the very low six-figure range, nothing above two hundred thousand. But we think they’re doing three or four at every auction, so the total is already close to five million.”

  “Do you know where the money is going?”

  She shrugged. “Some of it, not all by any means. But we’re building the map of local paymasters, giving the brigadier and his counterparts in other countries the names of people to watch. It’s slow, but as the brigadier says, this is going to be a very long war.”

  “Do you want me to take your surveillance guys up to meet the farmer whose hut they’ll be using?”

  “That’s the plan. We meet at the gendarmerie at eight-thirty and you can take them. The sooner they get started the better. Do you need me to come along and show our Eurojust credentials?”

  “No, the farmer thinks it’s a tax investigation. Eurojust will simply confuse him. His feud with Sylvestre is nominally over—they signed a deal for Oudinot to sell the land. But he still enjoys the thought of Sylvestre in tax trouble.”