A Birthday Lunch

by Martin Walker

  Praise for Martin Walker’s

  Bruno Series

  “The small towns where Martin Walker sets his enchanting country mysteries embody the sublime physical beauty and intractable political problems of the Dordogne region of France.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

  “In an era when most Americans are ignorant of France in its true richness, generosity of spirit, and quality of life, Mr. Walker and his Bruno offer an enchanting introduction into this very real world. The American reading public should flock to join them.”

  —Martin Sieff, The Washington Times

  “Captivating….Sure to appeal to readers with a palate for mysteries with social nuance and understated charm.”

  —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

  “Lyrical….Walker evokes his French community’s celebrations of wine, food, love, and friendship with obvious affection but without sentimentality. His villagers are no more immune from modern times than the rest of us—they just drink better wine.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Martin Walker

  A Birthday Lunch

  Martin Walker is a senior fellow of the Global Business Policy Council, a private think tank based in Washington, D.C. He is also editor in chief emeritus and international affairs columnist at United Press International. His previous novels in the Bruno series are Bruno, Chief of Police; The Dark Vineyard; Black Diamond; The Crowded Grave; The Devil’s Cave; The Resistance Man; The Children Return; The Patriarch; Fatal Pursuit; and The Templars’ Last Secret, all international bestsellers. He lives in Washington, D.C., and the Dordogne.

  ALSO BY MARTIN WALKER

  Fiction

  A Taste for Vengeance

  The Templars’ Last Secret

  Fatal Pursuit

  A Market Tale (ebook)

  The Patriarch

  The Children Return

  The Resistance Man

  The Devil’s Cave

  Bruno and the Carol Singers (ebook)

  The Crowded Grave

  Black Diamond

  The Dark Vineyard

  Bruno, Chief of Police

  The Caves of Périgord

  Nonfiction

  The Iraq War (editor)

  Europe in the Twenty-first Century (coauthor)

  America Reborn

  The President They Deserve

  The Cold War: A History

  Martin Walker’s Russia

  The Waking Giant: Gorbachev’s Russia

  Powers of the Press

  The National Front

  A Birthday Lunch

  Martin Walker

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 2019 by Walker & Watson, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Vintage Books eShort ISBN 9781984897640

  Series cover design by Mark Abrams

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Martin Walker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Birthday Lunch

  A Birthday Lunch

  Bruno awoke when his cockerel saluted the first glow of a sun that was about to rise, and at once he remembered falling asleep to the sound of heavy rain. He rose, pulled back the curtain, and saw the puddles in the yard, drips still falling from the barn roof, but at last the sky was clear and the downpour had ended. He smiled to himself, thinking that his friends would be able to take their lunch outdoors today. But his usual morning run through the woods would be sodden underfoot, and he decided to take the route along the ridge. It would be well drained, and he suddenly felt excited by the prospect of the way the land looked after the storm, as if all the earth and the air had both been washed clean and he could see forever.

  Twenty minutes later and nearly two kilometers from his home, with his dog, Balzac, trotting tirelessly beside him and not another soul to be seen, he felt privileged, as if this place he knew so well where the ridge widened into a plateau had somehow been re-created overnight just for him. The air had never been clearer, the river never such a perfect silver, and the thin grass of the plateau had become a lush green overnight. Even the hardy shrubs looked almost festive, and he enjoyed the freshness in his mouth and throat. It seemed to be pure oxygen he was breathing.

  Bruno almost laughed aloud with the pleasure of it when suddenly he stumbled, his ankle turning a little, and he slowed and then stopped, looking back at the stone on which he’d almost lost his footing. One side of it was smooth enough to shine in the almost horizontal rays of the early morning sun. Bending down to look, Bruno thought of his friend Horst, the German archaeologist, telling him of the prehistoric flint tools he sometimes found emerging from the upland soils after rain. He kneeled to examine it more closely, pushing away Balzac, who had come back to see what interested his master.

  The top of the stone was gray and rounded, but what caught his eye was the smoothness below. He put out a finger to feel it. It could almost have been glass or polished metal. He gripped the rounded top and began trying to rock it loose from the earth. It resisted at first but then gave a little. He persevered until at last, with a slight sucking sound, it came free.

  The stone was not quite as long as his outstretched hand but almost as wide. The roundness fitted comfortably into his hand, and he wet his finger to wipe free some of the soil that clung to the smooth face that had caught the sun. The other side of the stone was rough, but the smooth face narrowed slowly into something a bit too blunt to be called a point. Only toward this blunt point did the side of the stone sharpen into edges. One edge seemed to have lost a chip, and maybe that was why it had been discarded. But the other was still sharp enough to shave the hairs from his forearm. He weighed it in his hand and reckoned it was close to half a kilo. He mimed using it as a hammer, but it felt more like a weapon than a tool. He’d have to ask Horst, but Bruno knew enough of prehistoric tools from his visits to the local museum where Horst worked to think it might have been a hand ax.

  The term Mousterian came into his head, the flint tools of the Neanderthals who had lived and hunted in this region forty thousand years earlier and probably for a hundred thousand years before that. Such items were not rare in the Périgord, where the Vézère Valley contained more prehistoric sites and painted caves than anywhere else on earth. Horst had once called it the Champs-Élysées of our ancestors, a unique concentration of early humans, Neanderthal and their Cro-Magnon successors alike. So stone tools such as this were not hard to find. Souvenir shops sold such items, hand axes, blades, and scrapers, for a few euros. And there were professional flint walkers, people who made a modest living from tramping the land after rains with trowels and looking for likely finds. But Bruno thought the one in his hand was an unusually fine example.

  He looked into the hole in the earth that the flint had left, wonderin
g if the broken bit from the edge might still be there. It looked empty, but a little water had begun to gather at the bottom of the hole. He put a hand in and felt gingerly around, but there was nothing more. He stood up and made a few more passes with his hand ax, thinking it could do a lot of damage, certainly able to stun a horse or an ox, to kill a deer or even a man. He wondered what deeds this ax had done in the hands of other men and women tens of thousands of years ago in this same landscape, this same ridge above the same river. Bruno felt himself almost shiver at the thought as he turned and began to run back, the ax in his hand. It was not especially heavy, but carrying it made him feel a little unbalanced, as though he ought to have another weapon in his other hand, perhaps a spear.

  Once at home, he rinsed it clean in the sink and set it out to dry in the sun before putting it with some other small finds: some fossils, an arrowhead, and a flint scraper that he’d found over the years and kept on the bookcase in his living room. He fed his chickens and showered, and with Balzac beside him on the front seat of his elderly Land Rover, Bruno headed for Pamela’s riding school to join the morning ritual of exercising the horses.

  “What are you getting Florence for her birthday?” Pamela asked as they rubbed down the horses after the ride. “Or are you just giving her the birthday lunch?”

  “I found a decent wine carafe at the last vide-grenier,” Bruno replied. He seldom missed one of these regular local rummage sales. The term meant “empty attic,” and over the years he’d found them a useful source of tableware, linen sheets, and wineglasses. “I’ve wrapped it up so Florence and the kids can have the pleasure of opening it. How about you?”

  “I got her a couple of DVDs of Jane Austen films. You know she started reading the novels to improve her English, and now she’s hooked.”

  “I’m glad you can join us,” he said. “I was worried that you would have to run things here.”

  “Miranda can take care of the riding school and the gîtes for a day, and I wouldn’t miss Florence’s birthday lunch. What are you cooking?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he said, and kissed her au revoir before putting on his uniform jacket and képi and driving back into St. Denis to park behind the medical center, where he stood by the big plastic recycling boxes and waited for people to bring their old newspapers.

  “Good for wrapping presents,” he explained as he thanked them for the papers and stored them in his Land Rover before performing his customary patrol of the Saturday morning market. It was too early in the day for tourists, so he greeted the usual stallholders before treating himself to a coffee and croissant at Fauquet’s, skimming the headlines in Sud Ouest, and giving Balzac his expected treat of a mouthful of croissant. He strolled out to his favorite fishmonger and scanned the stall.

  “Bonjour, Gervaise. Could you fillet me eight of those red mullets but leave the tails on?” Bruno asked, knowing that his fish were always fresh. “If I’m back to pick them up in thirty minutes, will that be all right?”

  “No problem. These were trucked up from Marseilles overnight,” Gervaise replied. “How do you plan to serve them?”

  “I thought I’d simply grill them and serve them with zucchini and a tapenade.”

  “Sounds good. You might want to add a sprig of thyme when you grill them. See you in thirty minutes.”

  Bruno stopped at Marcel’s stall for a bag of lemons and two hundred grams of fat black olives. At Stéphane’s cheese stall he bought a pot of double cream and another of crème fraîche, some aged Comté cheese, and half a dozen crottins of goat cheese. Then he paused at the stall of Vietnamese food where he saw Gilles waiting while Madame Vinh heated his nem in her deep fryer.

  “You want one, Bruno?” she called. “You can share the sauce.”

  “You know I can’t resist them. Bonjour, Gilles. I don’t think one nem will spoil our lunch.”

  Gilles embraced him and bent to caress Balzac as Madame Vinh poured some of her secret sauce into a small plastic cup, wrapped the two nems in a paper napkin, picked out a two-euro coin from the change Gilles offered, and waved away the other money.

  “Special price for regulars,” she said.

  “How’s your son?” Bruno asked. “Still enjoying university?”

  “Big arguments. We want him to be an accountant, but he wants to study wine making.”

  “I thought he wanted to be an archaeologist,” Bruno said.

  “That was last year. Now it’s wine.” She shook her head, muttering “Kids these days…” before turning to serve another customer.

  He and Gilles took turns dipping their hot nems into the sauce. Between bites, Bruno asked, “How’s Fabiola?”

  “She’s great, but it’s strange being in bed with a woman who has to wrap herself round with pillows to get to sleep.”

  “She’s what, seven months now?” Bruno asked.

  “Seven months next week. I can feel the baby kicking.”

  “Is she at home?”

  “No, she’s taking Florence to that new hammam at Les Glycines as a birthday present, so they’ll both be sparkling clean and relaxed when they turn up for lunch.”

  Gilles grinned, took his final bite, and tossed the paper towel into the bin beside the stall. “Speaking of lunch, shouldn’t you be cooking?”

  Bruno stopped at the moulin for a fat, round tourte of bread, and once back home, he took a pot of chicken stock he’d made earlier from his fridge. Then he changed into jeans and gardening boots, donned some rubber gloves, and took a large bucket and a pair of shears to the patch of young nettles that grew around the chicken coop. He snipped off all the young shoots and the youngest leaves and tossed the rest to his chickens, taking a dozen newly laid eggs in return. Then he picked the two best-looking lettuces and ten of his zucchini and dug up a carrot and some new potatoes. He collected half a dozen sprigs of basil, snipped off some chives, and went back to the kitchen and tuned his radio to France Musique. He liked cooking to music.

  He peeled and chopped a large onion and the carrot, washed the nettles, the zucchini, the basil leaves, and the lettuce, and put a liter of stock into a saucepan. He squeezed the juice from four lemons and used a fine cheese grater to scrape some zest from the skin and then broke four eggs plus four more yolks into a bowl, saving the four separated egg whites.

  He beat the yolks and eggs together with a hundred fifty grams of sugar until they were creamy. Then he added the lemon juice and zest and a half teaspoon of salt and began to stir until the mixture was smooth. He put it onto a medium heat, stirring steadily and enjoying the fresh tang of the lemon that rose as he worked. When it began to thicken into the consistency of a loose pudding, he pushed this through a large strainer into a bowl. This was the curd, and he put it to one side before the next step.

  He whisked the egg whites until stiff peaks started to form and then stirred in a hundred grams of sugar. He then began gently to fold the curd into the stiffened egg whites. Once they were mixed, he whisked a hundred fifty grams of the double cream with a teaspoon of vanilla extract and folded all this into the lemon mousse. He spooned it into eight serving glasses and put them in the fridge to cool.

  Time for the tapenade. He took an anchovy from the jar he kept in the fridge, washed it under the tap, and removed the bones. He took the pits from the black olives before tossing olives and anchovy into his blender with a tablespoon of capers, blitzed them, and began gradually adding olive oil until he had a smooth but slightly lumpy paste. This went into the fridge.

  Now for the soup. He scooped a large spoonful of duck fat into a large saucepan and onto a low heat to melt. When it was ready, he put in the chopped onion to soften, stirring from time to time, breaking off to take a large potato from his pantry. He peeled it and cut it into small cubes. Once the onions were ready, he added the stock, the cubes of potato, and the chopped carrot and nettles, added salt and pepper, and br
ought it all to a simmer. The fifteen minutes the nettle soup would need gave him time to prepare and take a tray with the cutlery, soup bowls, plates, and glasses to the outdoor table. He brushed the table clean and wiped it before placing the large sheet he used as a tablecloth. Then he dusted down and washed the carafe he was giving to Florence and left it upside down to dry.

  The soup was ready. He took from the cupboard the handheld blender that the mayor had given him for Christmas and pureed the soup. It looked a little thick, but he could always add some water later. The carafe was dry, so he wrapped it first in tissue paper left over from Christmas and then in layer after layer of newspaper until it was swollen to twice its usual size. He recalled from the last Christmas party how much the children had delighted in endless layers of wrapping paper. Then he put it into a cardboard box, sealed it with adhesive tape, and took from his box of recycled Christmas wrappings a large square of red paper that looked not quite large enough. No matter. He took a second square of yellow paper and taped them together to wrap the box.

  Then Bruno paused. What of the children? He should have thought of getting something for them, and there was no time now to go back to town. He pondered a moment while Balzac sat at his feet and looked meaningfully at Bruno’s bookcase. Bruno nodded. He should have thought of that. From the bookcase he took an arrowhead for Daniel and a flint scraper for Dora and wrapped them both, shiny gold paper for Dora and shiny silver for Daniel. Thinking again, he went back to his bookcase, picked up the hand ax he’d found that morning, and wrapped it first in tinfoil and then in white tissue paper.

  He set the outdoor table and erected the large parasol while Balzac, realizing that all these preparations heralded the visit of friends, went to the head of the lane to watch for their arrival. Bruno checked that he had sufficient white wine in the fridge and apple juice for the children. He prepared the cheese board and covered it with a cloth, cut the tourte of bread in half and carved off eight thick slices. He put six coffee cups onto a tray with a bowl of sugar lumps and then washed up the dirty dishes to have a clean kitchen for the final steps. When he heard Balzac’s bay of warning, Bruno put the soup tureen into hot water to keep warm, turned off the radio, and went out to welcome his guests.