Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  The crowd thinned as the people went off to lunch, most of the parents and children heading home, though others made for Jeannot’s bistro beyond the Mairie, or the pizzeria back over the bridge. Bruno would normally have gone with some friends to Ivan’s café. Bruno loved telling visitors about how Ivan fell in love with a Belgian girl staying at a local campsite and, for three glorious and passionate months until she packed up and went back to Charleroi, the plat du jour was moules-frites. Then there was no plat du jour for weeks, until Bruno had taken the grieving Ivan out and got him heroically drunk.

  Today was a special day, and the mayor had organized a déjeuner d’honneur for those who had played a part in the parade. Now they climbed the ancient stairs, bowed in the middle by centuries of feet, to the top floor of the Mairie, which held the council chamber and, on occasions such as this, doubled as the banquet room. The town’s treasure was a long and ancient table that served council and banquet alike, and was said to have been made for the grand hall of the château of the Brillamont family itself in those happier days before their seigneur kept getting captured by the English. Twenty places were laid for lunch.

  Bruno scanned the room and saw the mayor with his wife, and Jean-Pierre and Bachelot with their wives at opposite ends of the room. For the first time, Karim and Rashida had been invited, and stood chatting with Montsouris and his tall and skeletally thin wife, who was even more Left-wing than her husband. Jackson and Sylvie the baker and her son were talking to Rollo, the headmaster of the local school, who sometimes played tennis with Bruno. With them was the music teacher, who was the conductor of the town band and also the master of the church choir. Bruno had expected to see the new captain of the local gendarmes, but there was no sign of the man. The sleekly plump Father Sentout, priest of the ancient church of St. Denis, who was aching to become a monsignor, emerged puffing from the new elevator. His usual benign smile looked considerably forced as he made way for the only other passenger, the Baron, a retired industrialist of some sixty years who was the main local landowner. Bruno nodded at the Baron, who was both a fervent atheist and Bruno’s regular tennis partner.

  Fat Jeanne from the market appeared with a tray of Champagne glasses, swiftly followed by young Claire, the mayor’s secretary, who carried an enormous tray of amuse-bouches that she had made herself. Claire, who had a tendresse for Bruno, had talked to him of little else for weeks, leaving the mayor’s letters untyped as she thumbed through Madame Figaro and Marie Claire to seek ideas and recipes. The result was celery filled with cream cheese, olives stuffed with anchovies and slices of toast covered with chopped tomatoes. Less than inspiring, thought Bruno.

  Suddenly Claire was in front of him, gazing fixedly into Bruno’s eyes.

  “They are Italian delicacies called bruschetta,” she said. Claire was pretty enough, if overtalkative, but Bruno had a firm rule about never playing on his own doorstep. He knew, however, that his reticence on that score did not stop Claire and her mother, not to mention a few other mothers in St. Denis, from referring to him as the town’s most eligible bachelor. Any sign of interest Bruno showed in any eligible young woman became a subject for gossip among the women and amusement among the married men. They teased him about it, but in fact they approved of the discretion he brought to his private life and the polite skills with which he frustrated the town’s mothers and maintained his bachelorhood.

  “Delicious,” said Bruno, limiting himself to an olive. “Well done, Claire. All that planning really paid off.” As she lingered, he suggested that the mayor’s wife looked hungry. Once Claire moved on he scooped a glass of Champagne from Fat Jeanne and noticed that Montsouris and his wife were approaching him.

  “Well, Bruno,” boomed Montsouris, whose loud voice was more suited to bellowing fiery speeches to a crowd of striking workers, “you have made the people’s victory into a celebration of the British crown. Is that what you meant to do?”

  “Bonjour, Yves,” said Bruno, starting to grin. “Don’t give me that people’s victory crap. You and all the other communists would be speaking German if it weren’t for the British and American armies.”

  “The British would be speaking German if it weren’t for Stalin and the Red Army,” snapped Montsouris’s wife in her high-pitched voice.

  “Yes, and if they’d had their way, we’d all be speaking Russian today and you’d be the mayor.”

  “Commissar, if you please,” replied Montsouris, grinning in return. Bruno knew that Montsouris was only a communist because he was a cheminot, a railway worker, and the Confédération Générale du Travail, the communist labor union, had those jobs sewn up for its members. Montsouris ostentatiously read L’Humanité, the party paper, and campaigned before each election for the communists, but most of his political views were decidedly conservative. Sometimes Bruno wondered whom Montsouris really voted for once he was away from his noisily radical wife and safe in the privacy of the voting booth. But Montsouris knew his role and in public played it to the hilt.

  “Messieurs dames, à table, s’il vous plaît” called the mayor, “before the soup gets warm.”

  Jackson gave a hearty English laugh, but stopped when he realized that nobody else was amused. Sylvie took his arm and guided him to his place. Bruno found himself sitting beside the priest, and bowed his head as Father Sentout delivered a brief grace. Bruno often found himself next to the priest on such occasions. As he turned his attention to the chilled vichyssoise, he wondered if Sentout would ask his usual question. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “Why does the mayor never want me to say a small prayer at these public events like Victory Day?”

  “It is a republican celebration, Father,” Bruno explained, for perhaps the fourteenth time. “You know the law of 1905, separation of church and state.”

  “But most of those brave boys were good Catholics and they fell doing God’s work.”

  “I take your point, Father,” Bruno said kindly. “But you do get to bless the meal. Most mayors would not even allow that.”

  “Yes, and the mayor’s feast is a welcome treat after the purgatory that my housekeeper inflicts upon me. But she is a pious soul and does her best.”

  Bruno now watched with satisfaction as Fat Jeanne whipped away his soup plate and replaced it with a healthy slice of foie gras and some of her own onion marmalade. To accompany it, Claire served him a small glass of golden Monbazillac that he knew came from the vineyard of the mayor’s cousin. Toasts were proposed, the boy bugler was singled out for praise and the Champagne and Monbazillac began their wondrous alchemy of making a staid occasion convivial. After the dry white Bergerac that came with the trout and a well-chosen 2001 Pécharmant with the lamb, it became a thoroughly jolly luncheon.

  “Is that Arab fellow a Muslim, do you know?” asked Father Sentout, with a deceptively casual air, waving his wineglass in Karim’s direction.

  “I never asked him,” said Bruno, sensing that the priest might be hoping for a convert. “If he is, he’s not very religious. He doesn’t pray to Mecca and he’ll cross himself before a big game, so he’s probably a Christian. Besides, he was born here. He’s as French as you or I.”

  “He never comes to confession, though—just like you, Bruno. We only ever see you in church for baptisms, weddings and funerals.”

  “And choir practice, and Christmas and Easter,” Bruno protested.

  “What do you know of Karim’s family?”

  “Karim’s religion I don’t know about, and I don’t think he really has one, but his father is most definitely an atheist and a rationalist. It comes from teaching mathematics.”

  “Do you know the rest of the family?”

  “I know Karim’s wife, and his cousins, and some of the nephews who play with the minimes, and his niece Fatima, who has a chance to win the junior tennis championship. They’re all good people. I met the grandfather at Karim’s wedding, which was held here in the Mairie without any priest or mullah in sight. That was before the old man
moved down here.”

  “By chance I met the old man, too, and he seemed interested in the church, so I just wondered …” the priest broke off, as if looking for the right words. “He was sitting in the church, you see, while it was empty, and I think he was praying. So naturally, I was curious to know if he was a Muslim or not.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “No. He scurried away as soon as I approached him. It was very odd.”

  Bruno could only shrug. And then the mayor started tapping his glass with a knife and rose to make the usual short speech. As he listened dutifully Bruno began to long for his after-lunch coffee, and then perhaps a little nap on the old couch in his office, to restore himself for a tiresome afternoon of paperwork.

  4

  Bruno always made it his business to establish good relations with each new head of the local gendarmes who arrived for his three-year tour. The gendarmerie, a station of six men and two women on the outskirts of town, was in an undistinguished modern building of red brick and brown stucco that jarred with the comforting old stone of the buildings that flanked it. There was a small yard for parking between it and the modest block of apartments where the gendarmes and their families lived. Unlike the classic military barracks that the gendarmes occupied in the big towns, the station of St. Denis had a decidedly civilian air, with washing hung out to dry on the balconies and children playing in the yard. Since the station supervised several communes in a large rural district in the largest department of France, it was run by a captain, in this case Duroc. And now, two days after the parade, a very angry Duroc, dressed in full uniform, was leaning aggressively across Bruno’s untidy desk and glowering at him.

  “The prefect himself has telephoned me about this. And then I got orders from the ministry in Paris,” he snapped. “Orders to stop this damned hooliganism. Stop it, arrest the criminals and make an example of them. The prefect does not want embarrassing complaints from Brussels that we Frenchmen are behaving like a bunch of Europe-hating Englishmen. He wants no more destruction of the property of government inspectors who are simply doing their job and enforcing the law on public hygiene. Since I am reliably told that nothing takes place in this town without its chief of police hearing about it, I demand your cooperation.”

  He said “chief of police” with a sneer. Duroc was a most unappetizing man, tall and thin to the point of gauntness, with a very prominent Adam’s apple that poked out above his collar like some ominous growth. But, thought Bruno, one had better make allowances. Duroc was newly promoted, and understandably nervous after being telephoned by the prefect himself, a post established by the Emperor Napoleon to be the official representative of Paris and the French state in each of the one hundred departments of France. And since Duroc would be here in St. Denis for another three years at least, there was no sense in getting off on the wrong foot. In the best interests of St. Denis, and himself, Bruno knew he had better be diplomatic. He needed Duroc to accede to his requests that the traffic gendarmes stay at home with their Breathalyzers on the night of the rugby club dance or the hunting club dinner. If the local sportsmen couldn’t have a few extra glasses of wine on a special night without getting stopped by the cops, he would never hear the end of it.

  “I quite understand, Capitaine,” Bruno said. “You’re quite right and your orders are entirely proper. Nobody needs this hooliganism. We’ve got to work together on this. You’ll have my full cooperation.”

  He beamed across his desk at the red-faced Duroc, who was not, alas, buying what Bruno was trying to sell.

  “So, who is it?” Duroc demanded. “I want to bring them in for questioning. Give me the names—you must know who’s responsible.”

  “No, I don’t. I might make some guesses, but that’s what they’d be. And guesses are not evidence.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Duroc snapped. “Just give me the names and leave it to the professionals.”

  “Evidence will not be easy to come by, not in a small town like this where most of the people think these European laws are ridiculous,” Bruno said, ignoring Duroc’s attempt to pull rank and shrugging off the implied insults. Bruno had been down this road before. In time Duroc would discover how much he needed Bruno’s local knowledge. “The people around here tend to be very loyal to one another, at least in the face of outsiders,” he continued. “They won’t talk to you—at least, not if you go around hauling them in for tough questioning.”

  Duroc began to interrupt, but Bruno rose, raised his hand to demand silence and strolled across to the window.

  “Look out there, Capitaine, and let us think this through like reasonable men. Look at that scene: the river, those cliffs tumbling down to the willows where fishermen sit for hours. Look at the old stone bridge built by Napoleon himself, and the square with the tables under the old church tower. It’s a scene made for the TV cameras. They come and film here quite often, you know. From Paris. Foreign TV as well, sometimes. It’s the image of France that we like to show off, the France we’re proud of, and I’d hate to be the man who got blamed for spoiling it. If we do as you suggest, if we go at it heavy-handed and round up kids on suspicion, we’ll have the whole town up in arms.”

  “What do you mean, kids?” said Duroc, his brows knitted. “It’s the market types doing this stuff, grown-ups.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bruno said slowly. “My experience in this commune tells me a few kids are doing this. And if you start hauling in kids, you know what the outcome will be. Angry parents, protest marches, demonstrations outside the gendarmerie. The teachers will probably go on strike in sympathy and the mayor will have to take their side and back the parents. The press will descend, looking to embarrass the government, and the TV cameras will film newsworthy scenes of the heartland of France in revolt, scenes of brutal police bullying children and oppressing good French citizens who are trying to protect their way of life against those heartless bureaucrats in Brussels. You know what the media are like. And then all of a sudden the prefect would forget that he ever gave you any orders and your boss in Paris would be unavailable and your career would be over.”

  He turned back to Duroc, who was now subdued, and said, “And you want to risk all that just to arrest a couple of kids that you can’t even take to court because they’d be too young?”

  “Kids, you say?”

  “Kids,” repeated Bruno. He hoped this wouldn’t take too much longer. He had to do those amendments to the contract for the public fireworks for the Fourteenth of July, and he was due at the tennis club at six p.m.

  “I know the kids in this town very well,” he went on. “I teach them rugby and tennis and watch them grow up to play on the town teams. I’m pretty sure it’s kids behind this, probably egged on by their parents, but still just kids. There’ll be no arrests out of this, no examples of French justice to parade before Brussels. Just a very angry town and a lot of embarrassment for you.”

  He walked across to the cupboard and took out two glasses and a very old-looking bottle, its glass imperfectly shaped.

  “May I offer you a glass of my vin de noix, Capitaine? One of the many pleasures of this little corner of France. I make it myself. I hope you’ll share a small aperitif in the name of our cooperation.” He poured two healthy servings and handed one to Duroc. “Now,” he went on, “I have a small idea that might help us avoid any unpleasantness.”

  The captain looked dubious, but he was listening. He took the glass without displaying the slightest warmth.

  “Unless, of course, you want me to bring in the mayor, and you can make your case to him,” Bruno said. “And I suppose he could order me to bring in these children, but what with the parents being voters, and the elections on the horizon …” He shrugged for effect.

  “You said you had an idea.” Duroc sniffed at his glass and took a small but evidently pleasing sip.

  “Well, if I’m right and it’s just some kids playing pranks, I could talk to them myself and have a quiet word with th
e parents and we can probably nip this thing in the bud. You can report back that it was a couple of kids and the matter has been dealt with. No fuss, no press, no TV. No nasty questions to your boss back in Paris.”

  The captain took another thoughtful sip of his drink.

  “Good stuff, this. You make it yourself, you say?” He sipped again. “I must introduce you to some of the Calvados I brought down with me from Normandy.” He paused. “Maybe you’re right. No point stirring everything up if it’s just some kids, just so long as no more tires get slashed. Still, I’d better report something back to the prefect tomorrow.”

  Bruno smiled politely and raised his glass.

  “We cops have got to stick together, eh?” Duroc said. He was now smiling and he leaned forward to clink his glass against Bruno’s. At that moment Bruno’s portable phone, lying on his desk, rang its familiar warbling version of “The Marseillaise.” With a sigh, he gave an apologetic shrug to Duroc and picked it up.

  It was Karim, breathing heavily, his voice shrill.

  “Bruno, come quick,” he said. “It’s Grandpa, he’s dead. I think—I think he’s been murdered.” Bruno heard a sob.

  “What do you mean? What’s happened? Where are you?”

  “At his place. I came up to fetch him for dinner. There’s blood everywhere.”

  “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He closed his phone and turned to Duroc. “Well, we can forget about childish pranks for now. It looks like we have a real crime on our hands. Possibly a murder. We’ll take my car. One minute, while I ring the firemen.”

  “Firemen?” asked Duroc. “Why do we need them?”

  “Around here they’re the emergency service. It might be too late for an ambulance but that’s the way it’s always done and we had better do this by the book. And you’ll want to tell your office. If this really is a murder, we’ll need the Police