The Shooting at Chateau Rock

by Martin Walker

  “Merde,” she said. “It’s Saturday night.”

  She picked up her own phone, checked the contacts list and called. Bruno heard a male English voice. Isabelle apologized for the timing but said it was really urgent and gave him the details.

  “That Ukrainian guy at the briefing you mentioned,” he said. “Do you think he’d help if you tried to trace Meghan’s grandmother?”

  “Trace what? That grandmother was a teenage kid working for German occupiers in a war when millions of Ukrainians were being killed, and not just the Jewish ones. Lord knows what archives remain.”

  “I was thinking,” he said. “The German family took her back with them. They must have liked her, protected her, and they were probably high ranking. Who were they? Where did they go back to? Presumably they fled to Germany in ’44 when the Red Army overran Poland. Where and when did she meet her Scottish soldier? In Berlin or somewhere else? We can get that from their marriage certificate and then British army records.”

  “I’m not sure I see the point of tracing this Ukrainian grandmother.”

  “A lot of Ukrainians who hated Stalin did more than just collaborate with the Germans. They helped run the death camps, did some of the killings, even had units that volunteered to fight for the Germans. There was even a kind of Ukrainian puppet government under the Nazis. A girl trusted enough to be hired by a German family and taken back with them to Germany would probably have been well connected, certainly seen as pro-German. And there was a Ukrainian anti-Soviet resistance for years after the war. I remember reading about one of their leaders, Bandera, I think his name was, murdered by the KGB with a cyanide gun in the 1950s. It was state-of-the-art murder technology in those days.”

  “That’s not just a long shot, that’s outer space,” she said, but looked thoughtful.

  “It was Meghan who hired Nathalie, the real-estate agent whose brother was shot in the Maidan demonstrations in Kiev. Maybe just coincidence. But why would Meghan go to a new agent rather than someone local? And how did she just happen to come across an agent of Ukrainian origin with a martyr for a brother?”

  “There’s not much we can do about this until Scotland Yard calls me back.”

  “Yes, there is.” He took out his notebook, thumbed back through the pages and found the card with the number of Nathalie’s drone permit. “Civil Aviation HQ must have a duty officer, even at this hour. Get him to check the permit, which will list Nathalie’s carte d’identité with birth date and so on. From that you can find her parents. Nathalie’s dad was a Frenchman. Who was he? Where and how did he meet her mother? What was her background? Is she a French citizen, was she naturalized? How does she feel about her son being killed? What do we know about him? And when did he return to Ukraine?”

  Isabelle sat down on the end of the bed, called the duty officer at the interior ministry, introduced herself and explained what she wanted.

  She looked up at him. “Shall I call Lannes, or do you want to do it?”

  “You have the rank,” he said. “And I don’t even know how far I’m supposed to be briefed on all this Ukraine business. The brigadier likes to keep me in the dark, even though he told me he knew I was seeing you this weekend and why. He even sent Balzac his best wishes.”

  “That’s because he still thinks I can get you to marry me and bring you back to Paris to work for him,” she said, almost casually.

  He stared at her. “You would do that?”

  She looked back at him defiantly. “Yes, but not for him. I’d do it for me. For us.”

  “We’ve been through this,” he said. “In Paris, I wouldn’t be the Bruno you know down here. No horse, no chickens, and I wouldn’t keep Balzac in some tiny Parisian apartment. And what would children do to your career?”

  “Merde, Bruno. We always end up having the same conversation. And if I came back to the Périgord and succeeded J-J—which wouldn’t happen if I started having babies—I’d be miserable and start blaming you for losing my career.”

  He looked at her and nodded and then threw up his arms and laughed. “I love you, but logically we’re doomed.”

  She laughed back at him and shook her head. “And I love you, but we have no future.”

  “But we have the present,” he said, rising to loosen the belt of her dressing gown.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning they were woken by a knocking on the door and Claire’s voice calling them to breakfast. Bruno checked his watch: seven-thirty. “Coming,” he called back. They showered and dressed hurriedly, Isabelle running her fingers through her short hair and shrugging as Bruno let Balzac out into the courtyard, remembering just in time to keep him on the leash. In the kitchen, they found Claire with hot coffee, warm bread and croissants and ice-cold orange juice.

  “You went to the village for these?” he asked. “That was very kind.”

  Claire shook her head. “A neighbor and I have a deal, he picks them up one day, me the next. After breakfast, I have to attend to all the dogs, then take the visiting ones on a walk, which you’re free to join with Balzac, and then we can put him to Diane again before you go. And thank you for that lovely wine at dinner last night. It sent me right off to sleep. I hope you both slept well.”

  “Very well,” said Isabelle. “Country air. Slept like a log.”

  After the croissants there was homemade apricot jam with baguettes, cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Bruno ate well and had a second cup of coffee while Isabelle packed. He did the same, and then they joined Claire, each taking four leashes for separate bassets, and set off on a route that took them down to the riverbank and on a gentle rise back to the kennels. It should have been a simple stroll, but the multitude of bassets had them tangled in leashes as the friendly dogs got to know Balzac, wandered away to follow intriguing scents and stopped to roll in the grass. At one point Isabelle sat down, laughing as she tried to untangle a Gordian knot of leashes while the bassets crawled over her, vying for caresses and attention.

  When they got back to the kennels and left the other bassets in their fenced-off field, Claire made more coffee and then led them to the bridal chamber, where Balzac once again needed neither guidance nor urging. Like a gentleman he began by nuzzling Diane where she lay on her side until she rose, presented her rump and lifted her tail as if this were the most natural procedure in the world. As indeed it was, thought Bruno. This time, after Balzac had finished, Diane graciously nuzzled him as if returning a compliment, and the two bassets lay amiably together until Claire said she had to go and look after the Malinois.

  “Thank you so much for your hospitality; I’ve had a marvelous time and wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” said Isabelle. “Anytime I feel Paris getting too much for me, I’d like to volunteer to come back here and help you walk the dogs. I can’t think of a better place to restore my spirits. You ought to offer weekend breaks here. You could make a fortune.”

  “You’d be welcome, both of you,” said Claire. “If all works out with Diane’s litter, as I’m sure it will, I’d like to breed Balzac again and welcome you all back.”

  Bruno hugged Claire, saying, “À bientôt.”

  They stripped the bed and left a twenty-euro note discreetly on the pillow, with a message attached saying it was to buy a treat for Carla. They loaded the car and set off back to Hautefort to walk Balzac around the formal gardens and stroll through the small town that nestled beneath the château walls.

  “The only thing I missed was waking up this morning in time for you to make love to me,” she said, nestled into his arm as they walked. “And soon I’ll be back in Paris, trying to track a Ukrainian granny and work out just what her granddaughter and her friends have in mind.”

  “I thought at one point it might be about holding Galina for ransom, but I don’t see Meghan doing that to her future daughter-in-law,” said Bruno. “Then I wond
ered if there might be a plot to assassinate Stichkin, but I doubt whether he’d come here. He’d want the wedding on his own ground, Cyprus or Monaco, or perhaps on his yacht.”

  “I don’t see the point of killing him, even if they weren’t so obviously prime suspects that they’d be caught,” Isabelle replied.

  “What role did he play in the Ukraine troubles, anyway?”

  She explained that Stichkin had been close to Yanukovich, the pro-Russian president who tried to block Ukraine from reaching an association agreement with the EU and then fled to Russia during protests that followed the Maidan violence. Stichkin and Yanukovich both came from Donetsk, and Stichkin, with support from the Kremlin, then helped finance and coordinate the Donetsk declaration of independence from Ukraine and then the clandestine Russian support. When the cease-fire came, Stichkin moved back to Cyprus along with his Ukraine assets in time to escape sanctions.

  “So why would the Ukrainians target Stichkin now?” Bruno asked. “He seems to be out of the game.”

  “I don’t know, Bruno. The Dutch say there are rumors that he was behind the secret police snipers brought in to shoot the Maidan protesters, but no more than that. And Kiev is always full of rumors. If Lannes succeeds in recruiting Stichkin, maybe we’ll find out, for what good it does us.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “Lannes is a good man, but he’s from the Cold War generation, like Putin, like Stichkin, playing the old Cold War games.” She looked up at him. “Look at Europe now, with Romanians, Bulgarians, now the Balkan countries coming in. Can you honestly say that’s been good for us, the traditional Europeans? And now people talk of bringing Ukraine in as well. We have enough trouble with the Italians and the Greeks, not to mention the Brits. You ought to hear the Eurocrats in Brussels talk grandly of the United States of Europe, the new superpower. It scares me sometimes, the sheer unreality of it. I believe in Europe, but it will take years, maybe generations.”

  “So you weren’t just being polite when you told Claire how much better you felt at the kennels.”

  “No, I meant it, but after a few months I know I’d go crazy. It’s the difference between the same, placid contentment every day forever, and me aiming at something in the future while dealing with a new crisis every week.”

  “Aiming at what? Lannes’s job?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d rather play in the European stadium than on the little French field. Why not? Somebody has to do it. And I’m ticking off box after box—police, ministerial staff, EU justice coordination, counterterrorism.”

  “And you’re good at it.”

  “And I’m good at it so I’m going back. How long before my train?”

  “Five hours, which gives us time for a sumptuous lunch.”

  “After our country breakfast I’m not that hungry.” She reached up to kiss his cheek and whispered, “I’d rather have another picnic at that place we went yesterday.”

  “I know you,” he said, hugging her. “It’s that little thrill of risk that you want, the possibility of being caught.”

  “Of course,” she said, laughing, taking Balzac’s leash and running back toward the car. “But not only that,” she called from over her shoulder.

  On the way back to the station at Brive she pulled out her phone and began replying to calls, pen and pad in hand. On the first one she spoke English. On the second and third she spoke French. On the fourth it was German.

  “We have Meghan’s grandmother,” she said. “Elisaveta Tereschuk, married in Glasgow, 1946, to Company Sergeant Major James Angus McPherson of the Scots Guards, five children, and we’re checking on all of them. He became a schoolteacher. She was secretary of the Glasgow branch of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, founded in 1946, and she wrote for their newspaper, Ukrayinska Dumka.

  “We also have Nathalie’s mother, who returned to France from Canada after her son was killed in the Maidan. She was born in Kiev in 1958, somehow got a visa to study Polish literature in Kraków and left for the West in 1980 during the Solidarity upheavals. She was given a French student visa and married a French Canadian student who had French nationality. In 1991, when Ukraine became independent, she returned to visit her family in Kiev, where she gave birth to her daughter. One year later they moved to Canada.”

  Bruno pondered all these individual epics, so many people leaving one country and moving to another to start new lives and new families while keeping their links to their roots. That’s what history is made of, he thought, all those little personal decisions driven by fear or ambition, war or hope for self-improvement, adding up to vast social changes. The historians focus on the mass when in fact so much of the underlying reality is individual men and women trying to shape their own futures, like so many seeds carried off by the winds.

  “We’re getting nowhere on Lara Saatchi,” Isabelle went on. “She hasn’t been tracked coming into any European border post. Of course, once she’s inside it’s all the Schengen Area, so she doesn’t need to show a passport.”

  “Does that include Monaco?” Bruno asked. “Even if she comes in by ship?”

  “Certainly. So either she was born inside Europe and never left or she got her passport inside the EU and never left.”

  “Widen the search to driving permits, education qualifications, health care,” he said.

  “We already did. Nothing. That happens with refugees, particularly if they’re worried about retribution against their families back in their home country. They can file their first registration under a false name, or pay a bribe to register a new name. She might even have two passports under different names. Meanwhile, we’ve asked for a search of the German military archives at Karlsruhe for Elisaveta’s German employers,” Isabelle added. “That will take a while, we’re told. And now just one more call.”

  “Bonjour, J-J, it’s Isabelle,” he heard her say. “What’s happening with this guy Constant? Is he talking?” Pause. “He is? Good.” Pause. “So he volunteered those documents and said so in his statement. Excellent.”

  Bruno heard a final exchange of pleasantries before she closed the phone and said, “Constant is singing like a bird, took J-J’s guys into his office and voluntarily let them into the computer and into the files. He claims he simply carried out Sarrail’s instructions. And he only met Stichkin once, in Monaco, at a cocktail party on the yacht.”

  “Is he being charged?” Bruno asked as he pulled into the parking area near the station.

  “Yes, but J-J says he’ll be listed as a cooperating witness.”

  She leaped out of the Land Rover, dived into the backseat to hug Balzac and tell him what a fine dog he was, grabbed her bag and turned to embrace Bruno.

  “Please don’t come to the platform,” she said, holding him. “I hate that kind of farewell. It makes me think of war movies and I start to cry. Thank you for sharing Balzac’s big moment with me and for twenty-six wonderful hours and for everything. We’ll stay in touch on this Ukraine business. À la prochaine, mon coeur.”

  He drove home, feeling happy that he’d been with her and sad that she’d left as she always did but delighted that Balzac’s breeding had gone so well and that Claire had been such an admirable and hospitable woman. He’d also been interested to see Isabelle at work and impressed by the range of her contacts and her skill at amassing and processing the vast amounts of data available to the security services. But he wondered whether all this data should be taken at face value or if there should still be a place for the human factor, for personal judgment and the knowledge of people. Bruno knew that his work as a policeman depended almost entirely on the fact that he knew most of the people of St. Denis and that the majority of them trusted him.

  At the back of his mind he felt a small, nagging doubt about the Ukrainian connections that Isabelle had tracked down. Was it sinister, or all just coincidence? He knew Meghan to be
a good woman. Bertie seemed a decent young man, even if he was hotheaded. He couldn’t see any of them as the coldhearted, fanatical killers of which terrorists were made. Nor could he see them all secretly engaged in some grand conspiracy.

  Once back home, he checked on the chickens and geese, refilled their food and water bowls, fed Balzac and spent a pleasant hour weeding his vegetables and thinking. He went to his laptop, logged on and looked up the Ukrainian association in Britain that Isabelle had mentioned. It had been started by a Canadian army officer in Britain as a support group for the thirty thousand or so Ukrainian prisoners of war, refugees and displaced persons who had ended the war in Britain for one reason or another.

  He looked at a section called Patriot Defence, a fundraising arm to buy first-aid kits and provide training courses for young Ukrainians in how to deal with combat wounds. In the circumstances, that didn’t seem like a bad idea. There was a section on the Holodomor, the great famine of the 1930s that Stalin had imposed when launching the collective farm system. Bruno had read enough history to know the website did not exaggerate.

  He could understand why people started and maintained such an organization, how it could nurture and discover links and family connections in a far-flung diaspora. Inevitably that would inspire young idealists heading back from France and Canada and Britain to take part in the Maidan demonstrations against a deeply corrupt government that wanted to keep Ukraine under Moscow’s thumb and block any advance toward a closer link with Europe. Equally, Bruno could understand how such an organization could become a vehicle for violent, even extremist, militants, and how it could become a target for the Kremlin’s own shadowy security arms. When he applied this to people he knew personally, he wasn’t sure it added up. In their search for a Ukrainian connection, was Isabelle barking up the wrong tree?

  Such thoughts did not prevent him from falling into a deep and satisfying sleep. If he dreamed, he had no memory of it when his phone startled him awake sometime before dawn. Speaking urgently over the sound of his truck’s siren, Albert, chief of the pompiers, said there’d been a bad car crash with some deaths on the back road from St. Cyprien. How soon could Bruno get to the scene?