‘And what can you tell me of this Gaston Lemontin?’
‘He’s the deputy manager of our branch in this town.’
The Mayor picked up the petition fastidiously between finger and thumb and dropped it into his waste-paper basket. ‘Are you telling me he is still the deputy manager of your branch in my town?’
‘If you will excuse me a moment, Monsieur le Maire, please allow me to address this matter immediately, and then to wait upon you later today, at your convenience.’
The Mayor nodded, and Valentin scurried out. Bruno leaned back in his chair and blew out a long breath, shaking his head at the same time.
‘Is that admiration or condemnation?’ the Mayor asked, with a twinkle in his eye and not a trace of the anger he had displayed to the banker.
‘A bit of both; I’m not sure yet of the proportions. That will wait until I learn Lemontin’s fate.’
‘This is France; they can’t sack him or demote him. I imagine he’ll be transferred to another branch. And I also expect us to get extremely favourable terms for our next loan, and as a taxpayer you should be grateful for that.’
Bruno nodded. ‘There is one other thing that troubles me, the thought that Lemontin might have been on to something. He told me there were some real questions about this Paris investment bank we’re getting involved with.’
‘The bank will presumably do its own due diligence. That’s why we pay their fees,’ the Mayor said.
‘The economy of Europe is currently littered with the wreckage of banks and finance houses that we presumed to have done due diligence on American mortgages, Greek debt and Irish banks,’ Bruno replied.
The Mayor nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘Might you make a discreet inquiry into just what has got Lemontin so concerned?’
‘I’m no financial expert,’ Bruno replied.
‘Go ahead with my blessing,’ said the Mayor. ‘I always suspected that any financial transaction that cannot be completely understood by an honest man is probably best avoided.’
Isabelle’s text message had said simply ‘12.50’, which gave Bruno a little time. He stopped at Ivan’s Café de la Renaissance to check the plat du jour. Soupe aux haricots and Wiener Schnitzel, he was told, which meant that the buxom German tourist Ivan had brought back from his winter holiday in Morocco was still installed in his bed and his kitchen. The development of Ivan’s menu was a reliable guide to his love affairs. She might depart next week, but the Schnitzel would remain for ever a part of Ivan’s repertoire, at least until a Greek came to introduce him to the possibilities of moussaka or a Spaniard to lure him into deep bowls of paella. Bruno approved of the German girl. He’d never had veal quite like the Schnitzel she’d brought to St Denis. It was hammered out so thin that it almost hung over the edges of the plate and covered with a delicate coating of bread crumbs. It was served with a whole lemon cut into quarters, and a bowl of potato salad and another of coleslaw on the side. Bruno was thinking how a glass of Bergerac Sec would go perfectly with the veal when Ivan beckoned him inside, tamping down a new serving of coffee into the filter basket.
‘Try this,’ Ivan said. ‘It’s Griselda’s latest idea. She said she had it in Italy, called an affogato, so I’m going to try it here.’
He took an espresso cup, spooned in a small helping of vanilla ice cream and put the cup beneath the coffee machine.
‘What do you think?’ Ivan asked, as Bruno tried to decide whether he should eat it with a spoon or try to drink it first. He compromised with a small sip of what seemed to him like a particularly good coffee ice cream.
‘Be a good dessert for the plat du jour,’ said Bruno.
Ivan shook his head. ‘I want them to buy a coffee as well as the menu. This will be something different, mid-morning maybe.’
Bruno asked him to hold two places for about one o’clock and then headed to Karim’s Café des Sports, also licensed to sell tobacco and close enough to the collège to stock a vast selection of confectionery. Beyond the sweets were racks of magazines and newspapers, and beyond the tobacco stretched the big coffee machine and the bar. Rashida was serving glasses of Ricard for the pre-lunch crowd, her baby asleep in a shawllike pouch that kept him tucked against her breast. Her husband Karim, star of the town’s rugby team, loomed over the till.
‘Un p’tit apéro, Bruno?’ he asked. Bruno shook his head and handed him the plastic bag containing the bubblegum wrapper he’d found in the cave. He asked if Karim recognized it.
‘It’s this one,’ Karim said, reaching over the counter to pick out a small pack in garish colours. ‘It has cards inside, all the footballers who’ve played for France, and the kids collect them. I must sell fifty a week, maybe more. It’s a new line, running just this year.’
So it can’t have been litter from last year’s tourists, Bruno thought. Whoever had thrown away the wrapper had kept the card, which Bruno assumed meant it could have been a collector. That would suggest that the tableau in the cave had been the work of kids.
‘Would you know the main collectors?’ he asked.
It was a mixture, Karim explained, of the older kids in collège and the younger ones in primary school, all the football fans, and quite a few girls. He broke off to sell a copy of Télé-Journal and some lottery cards to Ahmed from the fire station.
‘What about this cigarette end?’ Bruno asked, handing over another plastic bag. ‘It smells funny.’
Karim looked at the dark brown filter and sniffed at the bag, and grinned.
‘It’s a kretek, from Indonesia. I’m the only one round here who sells them. I keep them for my cousin Hassan, who won’t smoke anything else. It’s flavoured with cloves, supposed to have been invented by an asthmatic. It took me ages to find an importer.’
He pulled a pack from the rows of cigarettes behind him and handed it to Bruno. The pack was dark brown, and marked Djarum Black. Bruno sniffed at it, and picked up the faint scent of cloves.
‘Anybody else buy them?’
‘Hardly anybody, these days. When I began stocking them, a lot of people bought a pack to try after they smelt Hassan smoking them. Smells like apple pie. But once the novelty wore off, it was just Hassan. I can’t think when I last sold a pack to anyone else.’
Hassan lived in the nearby village of St Chamassy, where he worked for Electricité de France as a travelling maintenance man. His route would take him past the Café des Sports on most days.
‘I’m trying to remember how old his kids are,’ Bruno said.
‘Just the little girls and the one boy at the collège here, Abdul,’ Karim said, a touch of alarm in his voice. ‘Is there a problem, Bruno?’
He shook his head. ‘Just routine inquiries. I presume the boy is a football fan.’
‘Mad about it, plays on the school team. Are you sure this isn’t trouble?’
Karim was obviously worried, and something in his tone made Rashida turn to look at her husband.
‘He could have been involved in some larking about, nothing that will need more than a good talking-to if it does turn out to involve him,’ Bruno replied. ‘Don’t worry about it, and don’t say a word to Hassan.’
Bruno took his plastic evidence bags and headed for the collège. It was almost noon, when classes ended for lunch. By the time he parked, the courtyard was thronged with adolescents jostling to get to the dining hall. Bruno turned left to a row of two-storey buildings in faded white stucco. These were the subsidized apartments for the teachers, one of which housed Florence and her twins. Rollo had excused her from the rota of supervising the school lunches so she could pick up her children from the maternelle and feed them before dropping them back at the crèche.
A flustered Florence answered the door holding a wooden spoon. She leaned forward so he could kiss her cheeks in greeting.
‘Bruno, I’m afraid you’ve come when it’s feeding time at the zoo,’ she joked.
‘I know, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t urgent.’
With
a glance at the mirror, hanging on a hook that Bruno had affixed when she was moving in, Florence invited him in to the kitchen. The twins broke off from squabbling over the flavours of their yogurts and shouted a welcome to Bruno.
‘Bonjour, Dora, bonjour Daniel,’ he said, bending to kiss each of them on their upturned brows.
‘They’ve almost finished,’ Florence said. ‘Would you like something? A coffee, perhaps a sandwich? I was about to make myself a quick tartine.’
‘I’m fine, thanks. I’ll be lunching later but go ahead and eat. It’s just that I need your help about one of the kids, the El Ghoumari boy from St Chamassy. Do you know him?’
‘Nice youngster, he’s in my junior science class. What’s your interest?’ Her tone was guarded and her face neutral. It reminded him of her closed and formal way when they’d first met. He’d been investigating fraud at the Ste Alvère truffle market where she was working. He had no doubt that despite their friendship her first loyalty would be to her pupils.
‘It’s not official, otherwise I’d have gone to Rollo,’ he said. ‘I think the boy might have been larking about. I just want to know who his best friends are so I can clear something up. It’s nothing serious, at least not for the boy.’
Florence looked at him dubiously.
‘You’ll have to tell me more than that,’ she said. The children, aware of a sudden tension, kept their big eyes switching from Bruno to their mother as they spooned in their yogurts.
Bruno explained about the cave, and his suspicion that it had been kids playing at re-enacting what they had read in the papers, probably spurred on by a grown-up with an interest in keeping the Satanist story going.
‘It’s not something that can get them into trouble, it’s just that I need to know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘So if the best friend turns out to be Jean-Paul whose dad runs the cave, I’d like to go and talk to the father. If I go through Rollo, it starts to get official.’
‘Your uniform makes it official, Bruno.’
‘I don’t like things being official, not when kids are involved,’ he said. ‘You know that.’
She turned from piling plates and yogurt pots to look him in the eye.
‘Will you let me be there when you talk to them?’ she asked. He nodded, and watched her as she considered what to do.
‘Jean-Paul is a friend of his. And so is Luc Delaron, Philippe’s nephew,’ she said, standing to take a butter dish and a fat sausage from the refrigerator. The bread board was already on the table with most of a baguette. She sat and began to slice the sausage. ‘The three of them are pretty much inseparable, and sometimes there’s a fourth with Mathieu, the boy you pulled out of that manure pool last year. Do you want me to see if I can find them now? Or once I’ve eaten?’
Bruno checked his watch. He had to get to the station to meet Isabelle’s train.
‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘But I’m expected somewhere so I’ll have to talk to them later, maybe when school ends today.’
‘I still want to be there when you talk to them,’ she said. ‘They’re all in my last class today, so why not come by the science lab at four o’clock and I’ll keep them there. And now I’ve got to get these kids to the crèche.’
She stood up, took a cloth from the kitchen sink, cleaned the faces and hands of her children, and then wiped the table.
‘If this turns out badly for the boys, I’ll be very disappointed in you,’ she warned.
11
The only other person waiting on the station platform was Fat Jeanne from the market. A jolly and almost spherical woman, she had cheerfully embraced the nickname given her by the stallholders whose fees she collected. She was, she informed Bruno, heading to Agen to visit her sister for a few days. That meant that everyone in town would learn that he’d been meeting that police inspector from Paris that he’d been in love with. But they might not hear it for a day or two unless, Bruno reminded himself, Jeanne thought it an item of gossip so delicious that she’d pull out her mobile phone the moment the train got under way.
‘Meeting someone?’ Jeanne asked after they had touched cheeks. He could see her brain churning, wondering who might be coming to see him on a train from Périgueux, or Limoges or perhaps even Paris. ‘Something official, is it? To do with this Satan business?’
‘A police colleague from Paris. You’ll remember her,’ he said.
The train whistle blew from around the bend and at the end of the platform the automatic barrier dropped to close the road. ‘Ah, that one,’ she said, knowingly. She was probably thinking that these days he was supposed to be attached to the Mad Englishwoman whom everybody liked.
Bruno wondered what it would be like to live in Paris or some big city where he could go out anonymously to meet someone without word spreading to all his friends and neighbours within moments. The train slowed to a halt, and even though it stopped for less than a minute Jeanne delayed her boarding, eager for a sight of the policewoman from Paris and the confirmation of her suspicion that Bruno was reviving an old affair.
‘Ça va, Bruno?’ Isabelle asked with a smile as she stepped down from the train, and he felt his heart leap happily in his chest. The line of her jaw and cheekbones still had a sharp look; she had yet to replace the weight she had lost from her already slim body after being shot. She was dressed as always in black, an open raincoat that fell almost to her ankles and black slacks with a wide red leather belt whose colour matched her lipstick. Her hair was cut even closer than usual to her enchantingly shaped head. Another millimetre and Bruno would have called it a crewcut. She had a small overnight case in one hand, a laptop bag over one shoulder, a cane in the other hand, and by her feet was another square case in plastic.
Carefully avoiding any darting glance at the cane, which he’d hoped would no longer be needed, Bruno took the square case and her bag, and kissed her soundly on both cheeks. His hands encumbered with her luggage, he hugged her as best he could with his upper arms. The square case shifted and squirmed in his grip, as if it had a life of its own.
‘Careful, Bruno, it’s alive,’ she said. Jeanne looked baffled as she pulled herself onto the train and the doors began to close. As the train started to move Isabelle fell into his arms, hugging him tightly. But it was more the embrace of a fond relative than an impatient lover, Bruno thought.
‘What’s alive?’ he asked. He heard a tiny mewing as the case he was holding seemed to quiver of its own accord.
‘It’s the man who’s been sharing my bedroom,’ she said, leaning back to look at him but still holding his hand. ‘It’s your present from me and the Brigadier, and I want you to call him Balzac.’
Bruno went down on one knee and turned the case to see the small metal grille, and behind it the pink tongue and eager eyes of a puppy. Its feet were far too big for its small body and its ears were so long they trailed in the layers of newspapers that lined the travelling cage. One half of his heart lifted at the sight of a baby basset hound. The other half regretted that Isabelle had not understood his wish to choose his new dog himself. He opened the grille and the puppy bounded out and clambered up one thigh to perch on his other knee and then start squirming his way up Bruno’s arm to lick his face.
‘It looks like he’s chosen you,’ Isabelle said.
‘Balzac,’ Bruno said, holding the puppy in both hands and bringing it close to his face to study it with a hunter’s eye.
The snow-white legs, pedalling merrily, were short and sturdy, the hips almost as broad as the shoulders. The puppy’s chest and belly were the perfect pink of new flesh, the brown fur on its sides becoming black from the white collar along the spine to the rump. Balzac’s tail had the characteristic white tip, so in the woods Bruno would be able to see it above undergrowth. The pads of Balzac’s paws were still pink and soft, and his tiny teeth were like needles as Bruno looked inside his mouth. A white stripe from his scalp ran down between eyes that already carried the wisdom of generations of bassets. With the rational part of
his mind, Bruno knew this was a hound of classic breeding, and all the rest of him was falling in love.
‘I was worried at picking one out for you, rather than letting you choose,’ Isabelle was saying, an unusual tone of nervousness in her voice. ‘But the Brigadier insisted on this breed. He called the head of the hunting pack at Cheverny and asked where to find the best bassets in France and got him to pick this one out.’
She explained that Balzac came from the original kennels of the legendary French breeder Léon Verrier, and his grandmother had been crossed with the Stonewall Jackson line from America.
‘You know that the Marquis de Lafayette took bassets to George Washington as a gift when we helped free the Americans from the British?’ Bruno interrupted.
She shook her head. ‘My briefing didn’t go that far.’
She paused and put her hand on his shoulder, where Balzac quickly began to lick it. ‘Now, pay attention, Bruno, because I learned this little speech off by heart just for you.’
She coughed to clear her throat and Bruno stood, his puppy nestling against his chest and licking the underside of his chin, as Isabelle closed her eyes and began to recite.
‘We know that no dog could ever replace Gigi, but this comes with the personal thanks of the Minister of the Interior and his staff. We were going to pay for your new dog with Ministry funds, but when the kennel heard how Gigi was killed, they wanted you to have it as a gift. By special arrangement, Gigi’s name has been inscribed on the roll of honour at the headquarters of the 132nd Bataillon Canine, at Suippes in the Département of the Marne.’
She stopped, opened her eyes, and smiled at him brilliantly. ‘Oh yes, and they’ll be in touch with you in a couple of years because they want to breed from him.’
Bruno’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Is this a joke?’
Isabelle shook her head. ‘We in France deploy and train more military dogs than any other country on earth. I found out a lot about this when the Brigadier took me down to Suippes, seven hundred dogs in the biggest military kennel in Europe.’
The Devil's Cave Page 10