The Children Return

by Martin Walker

  “I saw her there recently, but we really got to know each other in Paris,” she replied. “Isabelle said she’d told you about our group of women in this business who meet informally for dinner together every month. And I visited her in the hospital when she was wounded. That’s when she told me about you.”

  Bruno was confused. Isabelle had been talking of a band of women in the security service. Was Nancy Sutton a lawyer or a spook? Or perhaps both? And what exactly had Isabelle told Nancy about her former lover deep in the French countryside?

  “And what brings you to the Périgord?” he asked.

  “You know perfectly well what brings me,” she replied, keeping her eyes on the road but somehow signaling to Bruno that she did not want to speak openly with Yacov Kaufman in the rear seat. “That engineering matter.” She turned in her seat to address the lawyer. “I know from our conversation on the plane that you’re here about a bequest. But why is a policeman meeting you?”

  “The bequest relates to someone in our commune, so Maître Kaufman has an appointment at the mairie,” Bruno said smoothly. “The mayor asked me to meet him as a courtesy. This is the mayor’s car. He’d have come himself, but he has a meeting of the regional council.”

  “I gather the mayor is quite well connected in Paris,” Nancy said. “Didn’t he once work for Chirac?”

  She was well informed, Bruno thought, or she had done some efficient research. Maybe Isabelle had told her; it was the sort of detail that Isabelle had always made a point of knowing. “Yes, when Chirac was mayor of Paris, before he was elected president,” he said, slowing the car and steering it between imposing iron gates into a gravel courtyard. He stopped at the base of the steps that led into a large stone building flanked by tall pillars. “The mayor’s political background has certainly helped us in St. Denis. And here you are, Mademoiselle Sutton, at the office of the procureur.”

  He was about to climb out of his seat to open her door, but Kaufman had slipped out from the backseat and beaten him to it.

  “Thank you, Bruno,” she said, leaning across the seat to peck him on the cheek. “I’ll hope to see you for a longer chat in St. Denis later today.” She swiveled her legs with practiced grace to leave the car, shook Kaufman’s hand as she thanked him and strode up the steps as if leading a delegation.

  “An interesting woman,” said Kaufman, taking her seat in the front of the car. “A lawyer, a temporary diplomat, and career FBI.”

  “How do you know that?” Bruno asked, steering back into the tree-lined avenue, the Cours de Turenne.

  “We do a lot of work for the Israeli embassy,” Kaufman replied. “They speak of her with respect. What’s this engineering business that brings her here? It doesn’t sound like her usual work.”

  “That’s all I know,” said Bruno, thinking he had said quite enough. “Business related, I imagine. What’s her usual work?”

  “I told you, she’s FBI, high-level liaison on law enforcement and security issues with the French government: interior ministry, justice and DST.”

  The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire was more counterespionage than law enforcement, Bruno reflected. No wonder she knew Isabelle and the brigadier.

  “Not your field of the law, then?” he asked Kaufman, his tone light.

  “Not really. I hear you have some good news for me on the Halévy matter.”

  “That’s what the mayor wants to discuss with you. We’ve found the house in St. Denis where the two children first stayed, and the farm where they spent most of their time.”

  “Maya will be very pleased. I think the prospect of seeing those places again might tempt her over here.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Israel. She went with David after the war, but he came back to Paris for his medical studies and remained in France to make his career. She stayed in Tel Aviv and built up her business.”

  Once she left the university, Kaufman explained, Maya Halévy had taken a job in the Ministry of Education, researching the textbooks that the infant state of Israel wanted to have translated into Hebrew for use in schools. As a native French speaker, she had looked first at French books, but the ministry had decided to use American ones. Believing this was a mistake, she resigned, married an army officer and went into business for herself, translating and publishing French textbooks on mathematics, and then German books on the sciences and electronics, for the Israeli military. She then went into partnership with an English publisher of scientific journals, launched her own electronic versions, and by the time her husband had retired as a general she had become wealthy enough to invest in the first Israeli start-up companies. Now widowed, she had become one of the country’s leading venture capitalists, still active in business despite her age.

  “She’s also my grandmother,” Kaufman concluded. “So I also want to see these places in St. Denis. My mother would never have been born without them.”

  “That means David must have been your great-uncle,” Bruno said as he turned off from the old Route Nationale for the road that led to St. Denis. “And I gather he never married.”

  “No, but he was very kind to me and my mother when she came here from Israel. My father was French, and they met when both were working on a kibbutz. They fell in love, got married, and she came back with him to France, and I grew up here. So David became my honorary grandfather.”

  “What kind of law do you specialize in?” Bruno asked.

  “Patents. I’m handling the bequest because it’s a family matter.”

  “It’s a strange bequest. I never heard of anything like it. I didn’t even know you could do something like that under French inheritance law.”

  “You can’t, but the money in question is not David’s, at least not under French law. His own property has to go to the family, but the bequest money would come from a family trust. Since David used his savings to back my grandmother when she was starting out, she always gave him a lot of say in what the trust does. It’s complicated, but one of the trust’s purposes is education, and another is Franco-Israeli friendship, so that’s why the bequest was set up the way it was. It was my grandmother’s idea as much as David’s. She always believed it was no good to just give money; you had to prompt people to do something on their own in return.”

  “That’s why you’ve challenged us in St. Denis to come up with a plan?”

  “Exactly; it means you get to feel ownership of the whole project.”

  “One thing still baffles me about all this,” Bruno said. “Why did nothing about the Halévy children and St. Denis emerge until now? You’d have thought people would have been proud of it after the war, but nobody seems to have heard of these children being sheltered. And why did David and Maya never refer to it before, never come to visit the town or make inquiries about the family that looked after them?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaufman replied. “I’ve asked myself the same question, and I asked my grandmother, but she just changed the subject. Until David died, I’d never heard of St. Denis and never knew how he and my grandmother survived the war. They just said that thanks to the Boy Scouts, they were able to hide in the countryside. One thing David always insisted was that all the children in the family had to join the Éclaireurs.”

  “Are you still involved with them?”

  “Yes, I’m a scoutmaster.” There was a note of pride in Kaufman’s voice.

  “You mean you wear khaki shorts and take kids on camping trips?” Bruno asked, grinning.

  “It did me a lot of good when I was a boy, and I still enjoy it. We did a week walking in the Ardennes this summer, and last year it was the Alps. Next year we’re going to Israel and do some hiking with Israeli Scouts, which I did when I was thirteen. It stood me in good stead when I did my military service.”

  “You mean in Israel?” Military service had been phased out in France by the time Kaufman would have been old enough.

  “Yes, it’s a family tradition. David and my grandmother would neve
r have spoken to me again if I’d ducked it. I was in the navy on patrol boats, but they taught me sailing and navigation, a bit of scuba diving. Frankly, I kind of enjoyed it.”

  “Are you still in the reserves?”

  “Two weeks a year for another eight years, and they can call me back anytime in an emergency.”

  Bruno pulled up in front of the mairie and checked his watch. They had made good time, in spite of the detour to drop off Nancy. Kaufman had twenty minutes before his appointment with the mayor. Bruno offered him a coffee in Fauquet’s café, but he declined, saying he’d seen his hotel down the street. It was the Hôtel St. Denis, a comfortable but considerably more modest place than where Nancy was staying. Kaufman said he’d walk there, check in, unpack and be back at the mairie on time. Bruno knew that Kaufman intended to stay overnight; it suggested his inquiries would be thorough.

  Bruno nodded, gave him his small suitcase and then darted into his office to start a computer search for information on Maya Halévy and her venture capital business. With Google he found an article on Israeli entrepreneurs that had appeared in Les Échos, another in Capital on Israeli start-up companies and one in L’Expansion on Israeli companies that were listed on the American NASDAQ exchange. He jotted down the market capitalizations for the companies listed in her name, added up the total sum and whistled. Her U.S.-listed companies alone were valued at close to $50 million, but he could find nothing on Google.fr about the family trust. There was no time to try to fight his way through the English version of the search engine, but he was able to brief the mayor and return his car keys before Kaufman trotted up the old stone steps for his appointment.

  The mayor did the talking, first over coffee in his office and then in the attic room where the children had briefly stayed. He pointed to the two lines that had marked the children’s height. Kaufman took endless photos on his mobile phone. Bruno had his Land Rover ready for the trip out to the ruined farmhouse, but first the mayor had arranged lunch at Ivan’s bistro. He’d invited Florence to join them to talk about her computer club and the way the schoolchildren of St. Denis would become an integral part of any Halévy project.

  At the mayor’s suggestion, they all chose Ivan’s menu of the day. A tureen of vegetable soup appeared, plus a half liter of his house red and another of house white. As always in the dying days of summer, the soup mainly consisted of tomatoes, based on a stock from duck bones. Whether or not Ivan had been told that Kaufman might not eat pork, the next course was a fish terrine, avoiding the usual charcuterie. By the time they reached the blanquette de lapin, Kaufman was finishing his second glass of wine and talking enthusiastically with Florence about the benefits of getting the children to help repair the computers she salvaged from the local garbage center. Bruno and the mayor exchanged satisfied glances; it was going well.

  “Let me tell you something that impresses me here,” said Kaufman, sitting back as Ivan removed his empty plate and replaced it with dessert, peaches marinated overnight in white wine with a little fresh thyme.

  “The food,” said Florence, laughing. Kaufman grinned back, evidently taken with her.

  “Not just that. I’d been expecting a slick PowerPoint presentation from some local marketing firm, architect’s sketches, a budget with grandiose forecasts about future sponsorship income. I thought I’d be meeting a hastily convened committee with a bank manager and a local rabbi.”

  “Maybe I should have thought of that,” said the mayor, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

  “I don’t think so,” Kaufman replied. “I think I’m getting a better sense of St. Denis from meeting its mayor, the village policeman and a teacher than I would from some high-powered committee whipped together by professional fund-raisers. And given what you’ve found out already about David and Maya, you’re doing fine on your own.”

  After coffee Kaufman looked stunned as Ivan gave the mayor some change from a fifty-euro note for the four lunches, Florence went back to the collège, and the three men set out in Bruno’s Land Rover for the Desbordes farm. It was a slightly cool day, with some high cirrus clouds and occasional flurries of wind that suggested rain to come in the night. Bruno looked across to the west but saw no sign of a storm. When they arrived, he gave Kaufman a pair of rubber boots and went on ahead with a machete to clear the worst of the undergrowth on the track to the farm.

  Kaufman said nothing as he explored the dilapidated building and the barn. He tried the rusted pump, poked around what had been the outhouse and took out his phone to take more photos. The three men climbed to the top of the slope above the farm and looked at the land stretching down to the stream at the bottom of the valley.

  “David once said something about swimming here,” he said. “Could we go down and take a look?”

  At a spot where two brooks tumbling from each hillside fell into the larger stream, the banks had been eroded to form a welcoming pool. Fringed on the far side by reeds, the near bank was dominated by a large flat-topped boulder that felt warm to the hand. It sloped down to the pool. Bruno broke off a weedy sapling, and from the boulder’s edge he poked it down to test the depth of the water.

  “Over a meter,” he reported. “This is probably the swimming place David remembered.” He turned and saw Kaufman sitting on the rock, taking off his rubber boots and trousers, obviously intent on taking a dip.

  “I’ve got a towel in my sports bag, in the back of the Rover,” Bruno said.

  “I’m too old for this lark. I’ll get the towel,” said the mayor, and began trudging back up the slope.

  Like two schoolboys just released from school, Kaufman and Bruno stripped to the buff and slid whooping into the water, striking out for the far side to get over the shock of the water’s initial chill. After a moment, it felt cool and refreshing, with a silken smoothness on the skin that only river water gives.

  “If ever I become famous enough to have an entry in Who’s Who in France I’ll list as my main recreation swimming in rivers,” said Kaufman as his head emerged from the water. “There’s nothing like it.”

  Dragonflies were humming along the edge of the reeds, and butterflies fluttered over the long grass on the hill that led up to the farm. A kingfisher darted between the trees downstream in a fleeting blaze of color. As Bruno felt for the riverbed with his feet, he was conscious of something exploring his toes with the gentlest of nibbles. There would be crayfish here; the water was pure, and there was no sign that humans had come to this spot in years.

  “Next time I come, I’ll bring a bottle of wine and a girl,” said Kaufman. He began to breaststroke slowly down toward the trees where the stream narrowed again.

  Bruno headed upriver to where the stream fell over a boulder in a shallow waterfall, barely half a meter in height, but enough for him to duck beneath its flow and feel the water showering onto his head and shoulders. There was no bottom beneath his feet, and he dived down to encounter another boulder, eroded over the years by the tumbling water to a smooth flatness. Bruno turned onto his back and let the current drift him downstream. He closed his eyes and told himself this was a perfect pool. If this didn’t make Kaufman receptive to St. Denis’s proposal for the bequest, nothing would.

  He heard the sound of voices and rolled over to see the mayor sitting at the pool’s edge, his shoes off and his trousers rolled up and feet dabbling in the water. Kaufman was beside him, still naked, and using Bruno’s towel on his thick dark hair.

  “You really think we could restore this house and the barn for less than a hundred thousand?” Kaufman asked.

  “The barn roof is sound, and all the walls are in good shape,” the mayor replied. “You’d need a new roof on the house, doors and windows, a big septic tank. We’d need to clean out that well and test the water flow and depth. The biggest unknown is going to be the cost of running electricity out here, but you wouldn’t need to pay those brigands at Électricité de France. We’ve got our own works department, our own heavy equipment. We could do it for cost, or m
aybe you could rig a solar power system. Then it’s just a matter of installing bunk beds in the barn and a basic kitchen, and there you are, Camp David. Or maybe Camp Maya for the Girl Guides.”

  “Camp David,” Kaufman repeated, rolling the words, evidently enjoying the sound of it. “And I presume all the land we can see from here is part of the farm. We could pitch twenty, thirty tents on that flat land down toward the stream.”

  Bruno was uncomfortably aware that Kaufman and his family trust would not need St. Denis if all they wanted to do was to turn this old farm into a camp and hostel for Boy Scouts. They could buy and restore the place themselves and let the Éclaireurs Israélites run the place in David’s memory. It would be a pleasant tribute to him, but it wouldn’t do anything for St. Denis. He held his tongue; the mayor knew what he was doing. Kaufman tossed him the towel as Bruno climbed out of the water.

  “It seems a pity to leave this place,” Kaufman said as they headed up the slope toward the Land Rover.

  “You could come back tomorrow,” Bruno said, hoping to get a sense of Kaufman’s plans for the following day.

  Kaufman nodded amiably but said nothing until they climbed into the car. “And now perhaps you’ll let me buy you two a drink before I settle down with my laptop and catch up with the work I should have been doing in Paris.”

  14

  Bruno couldn’t help but be impressed by the speed with which the French state had organized almost overnight a secure location for the medical tribunal, Sami and his family and the security guards. As he reported in to the château, moving vans, newly emptied, were pulling away, and one armed sentry at the gatehouse watched him while another checked his ID against a list. In the courtyard, a sergeant from the catering corps was ticking off cases of plates, glasses and cutlery. Bruno was steered to another sergeant, who checked his ID again, ticked his name on a list and told him he’d been assigned a bed in one of the side buildings that had been designated as the dormitory for the guards. He’d find a locker at the foot of his bed, with a key in the lock, and he’d be responsible if it was lost.