The Children Return

by Martin Walker

  “How very sad for them both,” said Bruno, trying to damp down the mental image her words evoked. “Did she say why?”

  “She just said that she had to work out something from her past. I asked if she meant she was still in love with someone else, but she shrugged in that way of hers and changed the subject. I got the impression there was a bad love affair hanging over her, perhaps a married man who refused to leave his family.”

  That could be it, thought Bruno. But Fabiola almost never talked about her private life, nor about her past.

  “It could be something else,” he said, thinking aloud. “You know how much time Fabiola spends at that shelter for abused women in Bergerac. Maybe she was badly treated or beaten up herself.”

  Pamela shrugged. “Who knows? When I first got to know her, I even wondered if she was gay. I asked if she had tried seeing somebody for counseling, and she said she’d tried talking with her gynecology professor, whom she admired, but it hadn’t done much good.”

  Bruno shook his head, concerned for his friend but without enough knowledge to do anything constructive. Bruno knew his own nature; if there was a problem, he’d always try to resolve it. He always assumed there was a solution to any problem, Fabiola had once told him, but as a doctor she knew that some cases were hopeless. Perhaps she’d been talking about herself? He was determined to help, but he had to start by finding out what had gone wrong. Whatever the ordeal, people could usually recover. He knew that from his time in the Bosnian War.

  “You’re miles away,” Pamela said, breaking into his thoughts. “What are you thinking?”

  “Sorry.” He reached out to put his hand on hers. “I was wondering how we might persuade Fabiola to try again to find someone who might help her.”

  “No, you weren’t,” she said gently. “You had that soft look on your face that you get when you’re remembering something.”

  He smiled at her, thinking how well this woman knew him. “You’re right. I was recalling some women we knew in Bosnia who had been forced into being sex slaves for Serb troops. But some of them were so resilient, determined to recover. Knowing Fabiola, whatever happened to her, I’d have thought she’d be the same.”

  Pamela shook her head. “The problem is that we don’t really know what happened to her. At least she’s started to talk to me about it. And she’s not running away from Gilles. Fabiola still wants to make that relationship work, and I think we should do whatever we can to help. After all, Gilles is your friend. You brought him down here and introduced them. So in a way you’re responsible. And we both love Fabiola, so we have to help her.”

  “I agree,” Bruno said. “If she lets us.”

  12

  Since it was one of Bruno’s varied duties to manage the traffic problems of St. Denis, challenges represented by the Rue de la Libération was one of the few aspects of his job that caused him misery. Sometimes he thought it should never have been built. It led from the roundabout in the central square along a narrow street that finally opened out into the main road to Les Eyzies. It was listed as a two-lane road, but there was barely enough room for a truck and a car to pass. Its sidewalks were too cramped for safety, barely wide enough for one person, let alone two. On one side were tall, narrow houses built in the nineteenth century and shoehorned into the narrow space between the road and a steep hill that blocked any light from the rear windows. On the other side of the street, slightly newer buildings were squeezed into the equally narrow space between the road and the twelve-meter vertical drop down to the quayside and the river.

  The result was a town planner’s nightmare. There was no way to widen the narrow road without demolishing the houses on one side or the other. St. Denis could not afford to demolish the houses, which would mean paying compensation to the owners and dispossessing the people who lived there. And yet the Rue de la Libération, once a healthy commercial thoroughfare with shops and restaurants at street level, was slowly dying as pedestrians shunned the narrow pavements and busy traffic. Shopfronts were empty or boarded up. The dry cleaner had gone, and so had the real estate agent, once he realized there was too little room for the few passersby to study the photos of houses for sale in his windows.

  It was into one of these vacant shopfronts that Bruno and the mayor now entered after taking their early coffee and croissants at Fauquet’s café. The two men began to climb the narrow stairs that led to small rental apartments on the upper floors. Cheaply modernized a generation ago, the apartments contained one small bedroom, a living room with a kitchen in one corner and a tiny bathroom with shower. They were now used for unemployed families or single parents whose rents were subsidized.

  Bruno led the way to the empty attic on the top floor and forced open the reluctant door. The bulb did not work when he flicked the switch, and the skylight was too small and grimy to allow much light in. He turned on his flashlight and directed the beam around the dirty floor. There were two broken chairs and a rusted potbelly stove. A dusty wooden box held ancient crockery, most of it cracked.

  “I’m pretty sure this must be the place,” said the mayor, breathing heavily after the steep stairs. Tax records had shown that Madame Poldereau, the widowed mother of Sylvie Desbordes, lived here until her death in 1944. The mayor had tracked down a wedding certificate for the Desbordeses, with Madame Poldereau listed as witness and mother of the bride.

  “We don’t know why she didn’t move to the farm with her daughter; there’ll be a story behind that. Maybe she didn’t get on with her son-in-law,” the mayor said.

  “Halévy’s partner told me the children had stayed in a small town for a while before moving to the farm,” Bruno said. “And he specified St. Denis.”

  “She was one of the few Protestants in town, so if you’re right about the Protestant connection this is where they probably stayed. But I don’t know how we could prove it.”

  “What might they have done for water?” Bruno asked.

  “None of these apartments had water,” the mayor explained. “There was a faucet in that tiny yard at the back and a communal latrine. At night they would use chamber pots.”

  Bruno went out to the hallway, unscrewed the lightbulb on the landing and used it to replace the broken one in the attic. The extra light revealed little more. He pushed open the door that led to the second room, but it seemed empty except for dust and mouse droppings. On the walls were remnants of old wallpaper, a floral pattern of faded roses against a gray background. Some strips of it hung down like ribbons. Maybe a good forensics crew could pick up some fingerprints, Bruno thought, but he had none of Halévy’s prints for comparison.

  He directed the flashlight around the room at waist height and below, wondering if there might be some childish scrawls. By the door frame he stopped and bent down to peer more closely. Lifting one of the hanging strips of wallpaper he brought the light closer, and a childhood memory came back of his cousins’ house in Bergerac, where a small mob of kids were being lined up against the door frame while a grown-up stood there with a ruler and pencil.

  “Did you find something?” the mayor asked, coming across the room to join him.

  “I’m not sure.” Bruno pointed to the short parallel lines drawn on the wallpaper. One was about twenty centimeters higher than the other. “Remember when you were a kid and you measured your height against the wall?”

  Under the glare of Bruno’s flashlight, some faded letters could almost be made out. Beside the higher line the wallpaper had been torn, but something remained that might have been the letter D, and beside the lower was written MAR and perhaps the letter I.

  “Could be ‘Marie,’ ” said the mayor, squinting through his spectacles. “But wasn’t the little girl’s name Maya?”

  “The lawyer told me she used the name Marie,” said Bruno. “I think this must be the place.”

  He tried to visualize the scene: two Parisian children and an old woman, a stranger who probably spoke patois rather than the classic French the children could un
derstand. All three of them cooped up here together for however long it took to arrange their move to the Desbordes farm. The children must have been frightened, hardly understanding what was happening to them or who this stranger might be. In Paris, they would have known kitchens and bathrooms and would have been tucked into bed each night by a loving mother. Bruno shook his head at the thought of the Halévy children, who must have felt like fragile leaves tossed here and there by the great storm of war. The old grandmother, trying to divert them while keeping them hidden away indoors, had thought of measuring them and comparing their heights.

  “We have the place, both places,” Bruno said. “What we need now is a plan to turn them into something the Halévy executors will support.”

  “This attic reminds me a bit of the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam,” the mayor said. “Obviously we can preserve these rooms, bring in some furniture from the period, try to make it look as it was when the children were here.”

  “That makes sense. But I’m not sure we’ll persuade many tourists to climb those narrow stairs just to see some attic rooms. Could we turn the whole house into a museum, maybe about St. Denis during the war, something to explain who the children were and why they were in hiding?”

  “If we can get funding from the bequest to do that, we could probably raise some more money elsewhere. The Ministry of Education would be the place to start,” said the mayor. “We could mount an exhibition on the Resistance here in the Périgord.”

  “Why not think of something more ambitious that could take in the other houses in this row?”

  “You mean a real town museum, the history of St. Denis as well as the war, and the children?” asked the mayor, a note of excitement in his voice as he pondered the potential of such a project.

  “If we plan this carefully, we might be able to use this idea to solve the problem of this street,” Bruno said. “I’ve always thought we’d have to demolish these houses one day and widen the road, but there’s another solution. What if we removed the ground-floor shops—they’re all empty anyway—and put in stone pillars to support the upper floors? Then we could use the ground floor for a much wider sidewalk, a kind of covered pedestrian mall.”

  “There are six houses in this row. That would be a big museum.” The mayor was looking worried. “Can we justify that?”

  “Let’s get an architect to give us some ideas and then run them past the local businessmen and see what they think. A museum like that would need a café and a gift shop. Maybe they could think of other commercial possibilities. At least it gives us a real project to propose to the Halévy trustees.”

  “We could call it the Halévy Museum,” said the mayor. “They’d like that.”

  “We’d need to emphasize that we want to use it as an educational center. When I was researching the Halévy history, I certainly learned about things I’d never known before,” said Bruno. He explained that there could be one room on the history of the Jewish Scouts and their work in protecting children and another exhibit on their role in the Resistance with the fighting unit they formed. There could be another room on the role of the Protestant pastors, he suggested, and there would still be space for a museum of St. Denis. There could even be a small movie room where educational videos could be shown.

  The mayor nodded, but then he frowned. “But what do we do with the people who live here now? We’ve got nearly twenty families in these houses. We’d need to find alternative accommodation, and there’s no money for that.”

  “You’re right, but let’s lay out all the potential problems to the trustees and ask for their thoughts on how we tackle the various challenges,” said Bruno. “I get the impression that the trustees want to do something serious and impressive, so we need to propose something that can capture their imagination. And it would do a lot of good for St. Denis.”

  “But where do we rehouse those families?” the mayor persisted.

  “You’ve been complaining for years about the waste of that old cooperage off the Rue Gambetta,” Bruno said. It was a fine stone building, with a big courtyard and a long workshop where the barrels had been assembled. It had stood empty since long before Bruno’s arrival. Properly converted, he suggested, it could house twenty families, and in much better conditions than these cramped apartments.

  “Get an architect to come up with some sketches, and we can call the property Résidences Halévy, after Halévy,” Bruno said. “It’s a historic building, so there’ll be restoration grants we can apply for. Let’s think big. We can always scale it down later if we have to.”

  “Every time you suggest something, Bruno, it raises the cost even higher. You know how tough things are with the budget these days.”

  Bruno knew there were times when it was best to give the mayor the last word, and this was one of them. Then at the landing, the mayor stopped and turned to face him.

  “A lot of this is going to depend on the amount of money available under Halévy’s will,” he said. “We couldn’t hope to do this from our own resources. So you’re going to have to make sure we make a very persuasive presentation to those trustees.”

  Bruno was hardly discouraged. He was wondering whether some glossily professional drawings by an architect might be too predictable. The key to this whole project was the children in the attic and building a fitting memorial to them and the people who sheltered them. That was why he would focus on the educational aspect of the museum, and why he was determined to involve the young people of St. Denis.

  Thanks to Florence, the town’s collège students could come up with some plans for the museum and maybe also for the farm. Why not make Florence and the students responsible for the presentation rather than leave it totally in the hands of the mayor and some local architect more accustomed to designing house restorations and supermarkets?

  As he headed for the airport to pick up the lawyer from Paris, Bruno knew the mayor’s wily political brain would be at work, balancing votes and budgets. The mayor would see the advantage of using the schoolchildren of today’s St. Denis to pay homage to the children of the war years. And doubtless he was also thinking about his own legacy as mayor. From the Palace of Versailles to President Mitterrand’s giant Grande Arche aligned with the Champs-Élysées in Paris, French kings and presidents had sought to build great monuments that would carry their names down the centuries. A project like this, properly handled, could do the same for the mayor of St. Denis.

  13

  Two people descended from the small turboprop aircraft that landed at Périgueux airport from Paris. Bruno had expected the first, a slim young man wearing an elegant dark suit, white shirt and sober tie. He carried one of the bulky briefcases that lawyers used. The second, an attractive young woman in a classically cut suit in burgundy with glossy dark hair spilling artfully from the loose bun atop her head, surprised him. She strode confidently forward to embrace him, announcing in almost perfect Parisian French, “Bruno, I’ve heard so much about you from Isabelle. She said to give you her love.”

  Bruno had little choice but to kiss her cheeks in return and welcome her to the Périgord. He then turned to shake the lawyer’s hand and introduce Maître Kaufman to the woman. She was perhaps in her midthirties. Her face seemed slightly familiar, although he was sure he’d never met her. Perhaps she’d been in one of the photos Isabelle had shown him on her phone of her life in Paris.

  “Yacov and I met on the plane,” she said, waving vaguely at the lawyer. “I’m Nancy Sutton, from the American embassy. I think the brigadier may have told you to expect me.”

  That was how she knew Isabelle, Bruno realized, trying to gather his wits. He presumed she would have some kind of security liaison role at the embassy. Women in that world would be rare enough to know one another. He wondered just how much Isabelle had told her.

  “As a legal attaché, Mademoiselle Sutton is well known in judicial circles in Paris,” Kaufman said. “I understand she has an appointment in Périgueux with the procureur de la République.
”

  The procureur was the chief legal officer for the département. That suggested to Bruno that she was probably intending to file, or at least discuss, an extradition warrant for Sami. If Sutton was an embassy lawyer, then she probably knew Isabelle through her new job with Eurojust. It had meant an important promotion for Isabelle, while neatly extracting her from the staff of the disgraced minister of the interior. Untouched by the scandal that had erupted around the minister, the high-flying career that was Isabelle’s top priority had been preserved.

  “There was supposed to be a cab waiting to take me to the office of the procureur,” Nancy said as one of the airport staff unloaded one small and one large suitcase from the hold of the plane. Kaufman took the smaller case.

  “Since there’s no taxi here, perhaps we can give you a lift, mademoiselle,” said Bruno, taking the larger case and leading the way to the mayor’s car. He’d parked as close as he could get to the runway, his blue flashing light perched on the car’s roof. The mayor had said that neither Bruno’s police van nor his elderly Land Rover would be suitable to collect the Parisian lawyer.

  “Call me Nancy,” she said, and took the front passenger seat, although Kaufman was already holding one of the rear doors open for her. Bruno grunted at the weight of her suitcase as he loaded it into the back of the mayor’s Renault.

  “Perhaps you could take my suitcase on to my hotel in St. Denis,” she called. Bruno and Kaufman exchanged glances; this was a woman who knew how to get her own way. “I’m booked into Le Manoir.”

  “So you know Isabelle from The Hague?” Bruno said, making conversation as he drove into town. He could not identify her scent, but it was pleasant, slightly stimulating and discreet in the way that Frenchwomen prefer, knowing that a hint of fragrance was far more enticing than the crude impact of an overpowering perfume.