The Children Return

by Martin Walker

  Raoul, one of the men who had carried the boar, clapped Bruno on the shoulder, put a wet towel in his hand and, barely giving him time to introduce Nancy to Stéphane, led the way to the third boar. Bruno helped lift the beast from the blasting heat to carry it, still dripping fat, to the carving tables. He apologized to his friends, saying he couldn’t get away sooner. He was sorry to have missed the usual ritual of building the fire, stuffing the boar with thyme and sage, sewing up the belly and then sliding the beast onto the roasting spit. Usually it was Bruno who concocted the bucket of marinade: herbs, wine and honey. They applied it with long brushes made of thick branches of rosemary tied around a pole. It always reminded Bruno of a witch’s broom.

  “I was going to save you a wee dram, but they finished off the bottle,” said Dougal, coming to give Bruno a welcoming hug. A Scotsman who now ran a local rental agency for tourists and had arranged the use of Le Pavillon, Dougal had launched St. Denis’s new tradition of baptizing the beasts with a splash of whisky just before they were placed atop the fire. The men who had built the fire and dressed the boar then finished the bottle.

  Dougal took Bruno’s arm and turned him aside. “When can we get the insurance inspectors into Le Pavillon?”

  “It’s up to the gendarmes,” Bruno said. “Trust me, it will be taken care of.”

  Julien approached, bringing two large water glasses filled with wine. Bruno took them and turned to find Nancy standing with Fabiola and being introduced to Pamela, Florence and Annette, a young magistrate based in Sarlat. He was pleased to see that Yveline, the gendarme officer, had joined them. Her unpopular predecessor, Capitaine Duroc, had seldom bothered to attend any of the civic festivities that meant so much in the life of St. Denis. Bruno went to join the women and hand Nancy her glass.

  “I’m celebrating,” said Pamela, kissing him enthusiastically. “My brace is finally off, and Fabiola says I can start riding again tomorrow. When do you get a day off to come and see the new horse I’m hoping to buy?”

  Nancy seized the cue and began an animated discussion about horses, but Bruno noted that as soon as Pamela spoke, Nancy withdrew a fraction, observing Pamela in the way cops were trained to do. Nancy was watchful more than curious, with cool detachment in her gaze. Bruno thought Isabelle might have told her about Pamela.

  Nancy and Isabelle must have been closer than he’d assumed, Bruno thought as he felt a friendly hand grip his arm to draw him to one side. Hubert de Montignac, whose local wineshop regularly made the Hachette list of the best caves in France, handed him a glass of red.

  “It’s the new one Julien and I started making last year, leaving the juice in the vat with the skins,” Hubert said. “We kept it six months in a barrel. What do you think?”

  His eyes still on the interplay between the women, Bruno sniffed; the smell of fruit was stronger than usual, but there was a deeper note in the scent, a hint of maturity. He sipped, and opened his eyes in surprise. It was markedly better than the reds Julien had made in the past.

  “That’s a good wine,” Bruno said. “It can’t just be the barrel. There’s more Merlot in this.”

  “Half and half Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, plus about five percent Cabernet Franc; it’s what we plan to make this year.”

  It had been a good harvest, Hubert went on. Having invested most of his savings in the town vineyard, Bruno was delighted to hear that St. Denis was now producing a wine of which he could be proud. Bruno led Hubert back to the women, who were still talking enthusiastically about horses, and Hubert began pouring another bottle of his new red for them to try. Bruno excused himself to make a brief tour of the crowd, shaking hands and kissing cheeks and ducking questions about the explosion at Le Pavillon. He was looking for the mayor. Finally he found him coming out of the door to the Domaine’s big kitchen, carrying a huge pot filled with roast potatoes.

  “More pots to bring, Bruno,” the mayor called, and Bruno helped him take out the rest. Then he pulled the mayor to one side.

  “Things are about to get busy,” Bruno said quietly. “The news about Sami being here will break tonight, and we’ll be flooded with media tomorrow.”

  “Not just media,” the mayor said. “We’re likely to get demonstrations, Front National, antiwar types, Islamic groups. I had a word with the prefect about bringing in extra gendarmes and putting the CRS on standby.”

  The Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité were the much-feared riot police, with helmets, shields and body armor that made them look like bodyguards for some alien species. Bruno understood the need for them but winced at the thought of their patrolling the streets of St. Denis.

  “Ah, there you are,” the mayor said when a figure slipped from the light of the kitchen. Bruno saw the silhouette of a woman in a well-cut dress, wearing flat-heeled shoes, her gray hair flowing. He recognized her as the half-French, half-American historian who had become close to the mayor after his wife died.

  “Jacqueline,” Bruno said, embracing her with real affection and catching a hint of Chanel. “I thought you’d be back teaching in Paris.”

  “I am,” she said, hugging him. “I came down for the weekend, for this. There’s a rumor going round that you have a new woman in tow, an American like me. You must introduce us.”

  “Gladly, but she’s hardly in tow, just a colleague. In fact, she’s talking horses with Pamela and Fabiola. She’s at the American embassy, a legal attaché.”

  “So I don’t need to ask what brings her here,” Jacqueline replied, frowning. “I might have known you’d be involved with this poor devil they’re calling the Engineer. I presume your friend the brigadier has stashed him here.”

  Bruno glanced at the mayor, who shrugged and then shook his head, as if to say he’d told Jacqueline nothing. Bruno knew her to be a formidable woman, as perceptive as she was curious and with a fierce intelligence. Jacqueline was even more passionate about politics than the mayor, and Bruno always felt he should have read every word in Le Monde for a week before joining them for dinner.

  “He hasn’t been stashed anywhere,” Bruno said, mildly. “His name is Sami, and this is his home, and he’s as French as I am, thanks to the mayor, who signed his naturalization papers.”

  “Hmm, you could pay for that,” Jacqueline said thoughtfully, glancing at the mayor, “unless you lead the fight to stop his extradition.” The sound of a bell rang out over the chatter, and Julien climbed onto a chair, still tolling the bell until it was quiet enough for him to say a brief word of welcome and invite all his guests to take their seats for dinner.

  Bruno found himself surrounded by women: Jacqueline, Florence, Yveline, Nancy, Pamela and Fabiola, who kept an empty chair beside her in case Gilles was able to join them. A generous slice of game pâté, with cornichons and cherry tomatoes, lay on each plate as a starter. A large dish filled with thick slices of roast boar dominated the table. It was flanked by a large bowl of salad and another of roast potatoes. Magnums of red and white wine stood beside jugs filled with a thick sauce of cèpe mushrooms.

  Bruno looked around the tables with an almost-professional eye, honed from many a rugby and tennis club dinner. The benches and tables and crockery had been borrowed from the clubs, he recognized. Hubert had probably provided the wineglasses; the clubs usually made do with water glasses and even recycled mustard and jam jars. Had Bruno been involved, he’d have tried to provide a soup as a starter, probably with the cèpes, since the woods were full of them after the rain. Still, for a first effort at a vendange for this many people Julien had organized this well, he thought, as he poured wine and the mayor began slicing a big round tourte of bread.

  The white wine he had drunk had been more than decent, with some Sémillon added to Julien’s usual sauvignon blanc grapes. The red wine being served was not up to the standard of the barrel-aged wine Hubert had poured, but it went well with the pâté and was sturdy enough for the boar.

  “Do you have this dinner every year?” Nancy asked. She had been chatting
with Annette about rally driving, Annette’s passion. Bruno had a hair-raising memory of driving with the young magistrate headlong along a wooded road, convinced she was about to crash them headfirst into a tree at every bend.

  “No, this is the first vendange since it became a town business,” he told her. “Everyone here you see is a shareholder, getting a return on our investment. Some of them took part in picking the grapes, and I’d have joined them if this other business hadn’t come up.”

  “You mean Sami,” said Yveline. “Fabiola told us all about it. And who is this guy Deutz?”

  “He’s with the medical tribunal trying to decide whether Sami is fit to stand trial,” Nancy said before Bruno could frame his answer. He’d been looking for Fabiola, but her chair was empty.

  “Why do you ask?” Nancy went on.

  “Deutz is a lot more than that,” Annette interrupted. “Fabiola froze when Yveline mentioned his name, like there’s something personal there.”

  “No doubt about it,” said Florence. “There’s something not right about this, Bruno. What do you know about him?”

  Before he could speak, Nancy said, “Deutz freaked earlier today when Fabiola showed up.”

  Pamela caught Bruno’s eye and seemed about to speak when a cheerful shout of greeting interrupted them, and Gilles appeared to slap Bruno on the shoulder, Fabiola looking happy with his arm around her. Gilles nodded amiably to Nancy and then darted around the table to kiss Florence and then Pamela.

  “I need to talk with you,” he said, coming back to Bruno and almost hauling him to his feet and then tugging him away from the courtyard. Bruno saw that Fabiola’s eyes followed Gilles fondly before she turned back to her friends. He wondered if that conversation about Deutz would continue now that Fabiola had joined them.

  “My story is running on our wire, and my tweet has gone viral,” Gilles said, holding up his phone; messages were racing past on the screen. “That’s my Twitter account, people responding and tweeting it on. They’re coming in too fast to see; I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Congratulations,” Bruno said. He knew little of Twitter and thought life was too short to spend more time than he had to looking at a phone or computer screen.

  “This is not about me, it’s the story. I’m late because I had to stop the car three times on the way here to do phone interviews for France Inter, the BBC and Agence France-Presse. We’ve got requests from Al Jazeera and CNN. Everybody wants some of this.”

  Bruno glanced back to the long tables in the courtyard where Nancy was climbing from her seat. She began walking toward them, her phone to her ear, advancing toward him in that graceful, assertive way she had, still listening to her phone but with her eyes fixed intently on his. Out of the blue he felt a jolt of sexual energy pass between them that was so powerful he was suddenly out of breath. He saw her eyes widen and her mouth open, and she stopped dead in her tracks, her shoulders back and her breasts thrusting forward. She was still staring at him, and Bruno felt certain that she felt this same intense rush of attraction.

  He felt like leaping to take her in his arms but stayed rooted to the spot. He found cautionary thoughts erupting in his mind. One of them seemed to say Pamela and another said Isabelle, a third said Nancy is an American official and a fourth said Half the town is present here and yet another said There is no future in this intense surge of passion.

  Nancy swallowed, seemed to collect herself, dropped her eyes and half turned to concentrate on her phone call. Gilles’s phone was ringing again, and then Bruno’s mobile began to vibrate. He felt drained, his mouth dry. Whatever this erotic rush had been, he felt it passing. He took a deep breath, checked the screen and saw it was Philippe Delaron. Reluctantly, he answered.

  “The mayor told me you said it was okay for me to run the story,” Philippe began. “Can you give me a quote?”

  Bruno fought to pull himself together, and duty and habit kicked in. He pondered briefly and then said, “You can quote me saying we’re all glad to see Sami home and reunited with his family, but he’s been through a terrible ordeal. He has very serious medical and psychological problems that are being addressed by some of France’s best experts. Meanwhile he’s doing his best to help French and American officials to understand the trauma he went through.”

  “Has he been charged yet? Is he spilling the beans about the Taliban?”

  “That’s all I want to say for now, Philippe. But you were at school with him, so that should let you fill a page or two. Good luck.”

  Bruno closed his phone, aware of Nancy standing close to his side, almost close enough to touch. She was listening to her phone and answering briefly in English. She looked at him curiously, her mouth still slightly open and her lips glistening. He forced himself to tear his eyes from her. He felt rather than saw her nod at him before walking out of earshot.

  Bruno closed his eyes and tried to think of anything he’d neglected to do. Suddenly he felt very hungry. He looked across at Pamela, expecting to see her still locked in conversation with the other women, but she was watching him with something like wariness in her expression. He told himself to smile and went back to his table, where his plate of roast boar and mushroom sauce awaited along with a refilled wineglass.

  Annette, Yveline, Florence, Jacqueline and Fabiola were huddled over Annette’s mobile phone, reading with apparent approval the story Gilles had filed on the Paris Match website. Annette held the phone out to Pamela, and she took it almost reluctantly, scrolling down as Bruno began to eat.

  “Have you seen this already?” Pamela asked him, briefly raising her eyes from the tiny screen. She was looking at him closely, and he felt flushed. Bruno shook his head, washed down his first mouthful with a sip of red wine and made himself smile at her.

  “No, but I trust Gilles and I want to eat while this is still warm,” he said.

  “Better eat while you have the chance,” she replied and gestured at the other tables. The sound of conversation was fading, and Bruno looked around to see knots of his friends and neighbors clustering around mobile phones. An image from some long-ago newsreel came into his mind, of people in vintage clothing huddled around old-fashioned radio sets as they listened to news of war being declared.

  Mauricette from the Hôtel St. Denis and the manager of the Royal Hotel were leaving the courtyard, phones pressed to their ears. Mauricette changed course toward him.

  “You could have told me this was coming, Bruno,” she said briskly. “We were going to take time off but France 2 TV has just booked the whole hotel. I’ve let the staff go, and now we’ll have to work all night to get the rooms ready.”

  So it begins, Bruno thought, turning back to his plate as Mauricette stalked off to her car. Music began to play from loudspeakers Julien had rigged on the table where Stéphane had carved the boars. He recognized the tune, “Mon Amant de Saint-Jean,” and the singer. It was the original version by Lucienne Delyle, recorded sometime during the war before she had been eclipsed by the rising star of Edith Piaf. Bruno would always associate Delyle with “J’attendrai,” the song of the Frenchwomen of 1940, waiting for their men to come home from the war. A memory of Delyle’s face on an old record cover suddenly came into his head, and he looked across the table at Nancy, struck by the resemblance that had eluded him.

  Fabiola and the other women had put down their mobile phones and were ignoring the music, instead talking intensely among themselves in voices too low for Bruno to hear. He caught the mayor’s eye, raised his glass, and they nodded to each other, each thinking of the intense global attention that was about to focus on St. Denis.

  His plate empty and the courtyard starting to fill with dancers, Bruno asked Pamela to dance. He had never quite mastered the swing, the dance that most French people seem to absorb effortlessly in their youth, and Pamela had never learned it. So they fell into their usual dance, not quite a fox-trot and not quite a waltz, but they circled the floor contentedly, enjoying the music and the pleasure o
f being in each other’s arms.

  “What were you all discussing so animatedly?” he asked. “Was it about Sami?”

  “No,” she said, glancing behind her to see if anyone could overhear and then speaking softly, close to his ear. “This is not for other ears. Nancy started asking Fabiola about Deutz. Then Annette and Jacqueline joined in. And you know Jacqueline, how direct she is. She asked Fabiola straight out if they’d had a relationship that ended badly.”

  “What did Fabiola say?”

  “She said she wants only to think about Gilles this evening,” Pamela replied. “So I told her this was really all about Gilles, that she’d never be able to have a proper relationship with him until she resolved this issue, so she’s thinking about it. We’re all meeting for coffee tomorrow to take this further. It won’t stop here.”

  20

  Beyond his love for St. Denis and the life he had built there, Bruno was aware of another reason that he could never leave. He suspected he would be a terrible policeman in any other setting. Colleagues like J-J, the chief detective for the département, liked to say that Bruno embodied a unique store of local knowledge, familiar as he was with every family and house in his commune. Bruno sometimes suspected that was all he had, apart from basic common sense, a lot of good advice from his mayor and a largely law-abiding and amiable population. And nothing could be more important for a policeman than knowing the territory he covered and the people he protected and served.

  Bruno stood in awe of the cops in great cities like Paris or Marseille who dealt almost invariably with strangers. For Bruno, it was the reverse. Strangers were the rarity; mostly he dealt with people he’d known for years, youngsters whom he’d watched growing up. He’d danced with their mothers at their weddings, played rugby with their fathers, helped arrange the funerals of their grandparents and taught most of them how to pass a rugby ball and to volley at tennis.

  Bruno’s instinctive reaction whenever a problem arose was to ask himself whom he knew, a relative or neighbor or colleague, who could help him get to the heart of the matter. His idea of policing was based on knowing people, their backgrounds and concerns, sometimes their secrets. And so, squashing the twinge of guilt he felt at investigating a friend, on the morning after the vendange he rang the pathology lab in Bergerac, where one of the doctors had been at medical school with Fabiola. The two doctors were friendly without being close friends, ready to do favors for each other, but Bruno knew they seldom met.