Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  “I’ve had three cancellations today, all from good and regular customers, and I’m expecting more. It even made the English papers. Look at this,” he said, and tossed a stack of newspapers onto the table. Everybody had already seen them. Bruno’s picture was on the front page of Sud Ouest, his arms outstretched as he had tried to shelter Pamela and Christine and the other women, just before he had been knocked down. The headline read ST. DENIS—THE FRONT LINE. The photo should have been of Isabelle, he thought.

  “All credit to you, Bruno, you did a great job, but this is very bad for business,” Dougal said. There were murmurs of agreement around the council table.

  “How long is this going to go on?” demanded Jérôme, who ran a small theme park of French history where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake twice a day and Marie Antoinette was guillotined every hour, with medieval jousting in between. “It is up to the police to end this quickly, arrest somebody and get it over with. Interviewing suspects with no real result is going to spark more trouble from the Right and more counterdemonstrations from the Left and more bad publicity on TV. It will ruin our season.”

  “Listen,” said the mayor. “There’s been a hideous racist murder and passions have been aroused on both Left and Right. We’ve been assigned extra gendarmes to keep order and we have over forty people charged with riot and assault, so they’re unlikely to bother us again. This is an isolated event. It may well hurt our business this year, but the effects won’t last. We just have to grit our teeth and wait this process out.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll still be in business next year,” said Franc Duhamel, who ran one of the biggest campgrounds. He said this every year, but this time he might be proved right. “I borrowed a lot of money to finance that big expansion and the new swimming pool, and if I have a bad season I’m in real trouble. If it hadn’t been for all those Dutch guys who came down for the motocross rally, I’d have been in trouble already.”

  “I’ve talked to the regional managers of the banks,” said the mayor. “They understand that this is a temporary problem, and they won’t be closing anybody down—not if they want to get any business from this commune again. And not unless they want to make an enemy of the Minister of the Interior. You all saw the report of his speech last night, about the whole of France standing firmly with the brave citizens of St. Denis.”

  The politician had been trying to put the best possible face on what had for him been a humiliation, shouted down from speaking and pelted with fruit and eggs. To be seen on TV presiding helplessly over a riot was not a good image for a Minister of the Interior, so naturally he had tried to spin it differently in his scheduled speech in Bordeaux. Bruno doubted very much that he would lift a finger to help any troubled businessman falling behind on his bank loans. He would never be able to hear of St. Denis again without an instinctive shiver of distaste. But such assurances were what the businessmen needed to hear from their mayor.

  “We need some temporary tax relief for this year to help us get through this bad patch,” said Philippe, the manager of the Hôtel St. Denis, who usually acted as spokesman for the town’s business community. “We know taxes have to be paid, but we want the council to agree to give us some time, so that rather than pay in June, we can pay in October when the season is over. If we go down, the whole town goes down, so we see this as a sort of investment by the town in its own future.”

  “That’s a useful idea,” said the mayor. “I’ll put it to the council.”

  “The other thing on our minds is that new head of the gendarmes,” said Duhamel. “He was useless, totally useless. If it hadn’t been for Bruno taking charge it could have been a lot worse. We’d like you to ask for Captain Duroc to be transferred. Nobody in town has any respect for him after yesterday.”

  “I’m not sure that’s fair,” said Bruno. He had felt less angry at Duroc when he arrived at the bank parking lot after the riot and saw the three buses blocked by a dozen of the gendarmes’ motorbikes, a burly cop standing guard at each door, and the captain taking the names and addresses of the forty-odd men detained inside. Two blue gendarmerie vans were parked beside the buses.

  “His immediate reaction was to ensure that the mayor and distinguished guests were secure,” Bruno went on. “Although he is obviously new in the town and a bit short of experience, I’m not sure we have anything to reproach him with.”

  “Bruno could be right,” the mayor chimed in. “I’d rather we used the sympathy we now have in official circles to get some financial help than squander whatever influence we have in a fight with the defense ministry to get the captain removed.”

  “That could have gone a lot more disagreeably,” said the mayor when he and Bruno were left alone. “Are you sure you should be at work? You looked pretty bad on TV last night with that blood running down your face.”

  “I used to get worse on the rugby field every week. Did you see how Inspector Perrault rescued me, by the way?”

  “Yes,” the mayor said. “The Minister of the Interior was most impressed with her martial skills. I suspect the inspector will find herself promoted back to a staff job in his Paris office with that karate black belt of hers, or whatever it is she has. An elegant and very dangerous woman—they love that sort of thing in Paris. I’ll make you a bet that Inspector Perrault will soon be in a position to help us if needed.”

  “I’m not sure she’d take such a job if it were offered. She’s an independent sort of woman.”

  “You’re certainly in a better position to know than I am.” The mayor knew more than he let on, Bruno always assumed. “What’s going on with those goons who were arrested? I assume that’s being handled by the Police Nationale in Périgueux?”

  “It should be. I’ll find out.”

  Bruno had barely got back to his own office and opened his mail when the mayor burst in, muttering, “Merde. That fool woman … one of the phone calls Mireille sat on while we were chatting was from the Café des Sports. I told her to interrupt me for anything urgent. Captain Duroc has apparently arrested Karim for assault. Can you find out what’s going on?”

  “Assault? It was self-defense.” Bruno conjured up the image of Karim picking up the garbage can and hurling it at the knot of Front National men. He winced. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but if that crucial moment of the brawl had been caught by the TV cameras, Karim could be in trouble.

  “Do you remember seeing Karim throw the garbage can?” he asked the mayor.

  “Yes, it helped turned the tide. But I suppose it could be seen as assault with a weapon. Still, I think the minister and the generals and I could testify that Karim did the right thing.”

  “Yes, but there’s another witness—the TV cameras. Front National has access to clever lawyers and they would relish filing a complaint against an Arab. Even if the police decide not to press charges upon their urging, the victims could do so.”

  “Putain!” The mayor slammed a fist into the palm of his other hand. He paced back and forth before Bruno’s desk. “How do we fix this?”

  “I’ll see what I can do with the police in Périgueux,” said Bruno. “But if there’s a magistrate being assigned to bring charges against the Front National, he’d also be the one to decide about charges against Karim, and that’s way above my head. If that’s the case, you’ll probably have to see what influence you can bring to bear. It should be a local magistrate, so you might be able to get the prefect to have a quiet word with somebody. A lot will depend on the statements taken by the police, so depositions by you and the minister and the generals would be very useful.”

  The mayor took a pad and pen from Bruno’s desk and began to scribble some notes.

  “The first thing is to find out exactly on what grounds the gendarmes arrested Karim, and whether charges have been filed by the Front,” Bruno said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Is it possible that the FN is charging Karim so they’ll have some leverage? If we drop the charges against them, they’ll drop the char
ges against Karim? They can hardly like the idea of forty of their militants getting charged with riotous assembly, especially not after members of their security squad were charged with drug trafficking.”

  “Maybe. I just don’t know. I’ll go and see what I can find out at the gendarmerie,” Bruno said, grabbing his cap and heading for the stairs.

  “And I’d better go and see if there’s anything we can do for Rashida at the café, and we’d better call Momu. He may not know about this yet,” said the mayor.

  “If Karim’s convicted of violent assault he’s likely to lose his tobacco license, and that means the end of his café and probably bankruptcy,” Bruno said. “If those bastards insist on a deal where we have to drop all charges against them, we may not have a lot of choice but to agree.”

  18

  Bruno always savored a long stroll along the Rue de Paris, the main shopping street of St. Denis. Built in the days when a street had to be wide enough for a horse and cart to turn in, not a single building was less than two centuries old, and only the church stood more than three stories tall. Despite the modern shop fronts on the ground floor, women still leaned from the balconies of the apartments above as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers always had, summoning their kids from playing in the alleys, calling to one another across the street and hanging their washing out to dry on the wrought-iron railings. There was something slow and timeless in the ways of his town and in the familiarity of the street and its people that he found calming, despite the bustle of errands and commerce and the constant metallic ballet of cars trying to squeeze themselves into the narrowest of parking places.

  But today, the Rue de Paris slowed him down even more because everybody wanted to talk about the riot. He had to shake the hands of all the old men filling out their horseracing bets at the Café de la Renaissance, though he refused their offers of a petit blanc. The women standing in line at the butcher’s shop all wanted to kiss him and tell him they were proud of him. More women wanted to do the same at the pâtisserie, and Monique insisted on giving him one of his favorite tartes au citron as a token of her renewed esteem. He walked on, shaking hands at the barber’s shop and again at Fabien’s Rendezvous des Chasseurs, where Bruno bought his shotgun cartridges.

  Fabien wanted his opinion on a new lure he was inventing to tempt the fish in that fiendish corner of the river where only the most perfectly cast fly could evade the trees and boulders. Jean-Pierre was tinkering with a bike in front of his shop and raised an oily hand in salute. Not to be outdone, Bachelot the shoemaker darted from his shop, nails still gripped between his lips and carrying a small hammer, to shake Bruno’s hand warmly. Didier came out from the Maison de la Presse to make sure Bruno had seen the newspapers and to assure him that at least three small boys had bought scrap-books to record the sudden fame of their local policeman, and he was joined by the ladies in the flower shop and Colette from the dry cleaner. By the time Bruno had reached the open ground in front of the gendarmerie and greeted the two rugby forwards who were making a success of their Bar des Amateurs, refusing their offer of a beer, he felt restored by the familiar rhythm of the town and its people.

  Francine was at the desk in the gendarmerie, and she had been stationed in St. Denis long enough to understand Karim’s importance to the town as its star rugby player, which had to be the reason for Bruno’s visit. After he kissed her cheeks in greeting, she jerked a thumb toward the closed door of Duroc’s office and rolled her eyes to signal her own view of Karim’s arrest. She beckoned him closer and spoke very quietly.

  “He’s in there with Karim and a magistrate from Périgueux who just turned up this morning with a couple of videotapes,” she whispered. “He’s the one behind this arrest, Bruno. Duroc is just obeying orders.”

  “Did you recognize the guy from Périgueux?”

  She shook her head. “He’s new to me, but a very fancy dresser. And he came in a car with a driver, parked over there by the vet’s office. He made the driver carry in the video machine.”

  “Merck,” said Bruno. It must be Tavernier, already armed with the TV film of Karim’s part in the brawl. He thanked Francine and strolled out to the trees that shaded the old house containing the office for Dougal’s Delightful Dordogne. There he pulled out his cell phone and called the mayor to warn him that Tavernier was now the problem.

  “I’m with Rashida at the café and she’s in hysterics,” the mayor said. Bruno could hear Rashida in the background. “I called Momu’s house to get Karim’s mother over here,” he went on, “but then she called Momu at school and he’s heading for the gendarmerie. You’d better make sure he does nothing foolish, Bruno, and I’ll have to tackle Tavernier. The moment you have Momu calmed down, get hold of Tavernier and say that I want to see him urgently, as an old friend of his father.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Bruno asked.

  “Not yet, but I’ll think of something. Is there a lawyer in there with Karim?”

  “I don’t think so. Can you call Brosseil? He’s on the board of the rugby club.”

  “Brosseil is just a notary,” the mayor said. “Karim will need a real lawyer.”

  “We can get a real lawyer later. We just want Brosseil to go in there, tell Karim to say absolutely nothing, and insist that anything he has said so far be struck from the record since he was denied legal representation.”

  “You know that’s not French law, Bruno.”

  “Yes, but it is European law, and Tavernier won’t want to run afoul of that. Brosseil has to keep on saying so. That will buy us time and keep Karim quiet. And do you have the deposition yet from the minister or those two generals on what they saw in the square?”

  “From the generals, yes. They faxed it. Nothing yet from the minister,” said the mayor.

  “Tavernier won’t know that. If he thought that his prosecution of Karim called into question the deposition of a minister, not to mention two senior figures in the defense ministry, he might have second thoughts.”

  “Good thinking, Bruno. We’ll try it. But first you had better stop Momu.”

  Bruno poked his head in around the door and told Francine to block Momu at all costs and to call him as soon as Momu appeared. Then he stationed himself at the end of the Rue de Paris, one of the two routes that Momu could be taking, just in time to see Momu pedaling furiously toward him.

  “Hold it, Momu,” he said with his hand up. “Let me and the mayor take care of this.”

  “Out of my way, Bruno,” he shouted angrily, steering around him and thrusting out a powerful arm to push him away. Bruno hung on to his arm and the bike began to topple. Momu was stuck, his feet on the ground, his bike between his legs and his arm still in Bruno’s firm grip.

  “Get off, Bruno,” he yelled. “The rugby boys are on their way, along with half the school. We can’t have them rounding people up like this. It’s a damn rafle and we’ve had enough.”

  “Rafle” was the term the Algerians had used for the mass roundups staged by the French police during the Algerian war, and before that to refer to Gestapo raids against French civilians.

  “It’s not a rafle, Momu,” Bruno said, trying to match his intensity.

  “The Nazis kill my father and leave him like a piece of butchered meat and now you take my son into your dungeons. Out of my way, Bruno! I’ve had it with French justice.”

  “It’s not a rafle, Momu,” Bruno repeated, trying to catch the man’s eyes with his own. He let go of Momu’s arm and gripped his handlebars instead. “It’s Karim answering some questions and the mayor and I are on your side. The town’s on your side. We have a lawyer coming and we’re going to do this right. If you go charging in there you’ll make things worse for Karim and do yourself no good. Believe me, Momu.”

  “Believe you?” Momu scoffed. Then he braced himself and seemed to calm but his face turned cold. “I might believe you, Bruno, but I’ve had it with that uniform you wear and this damned system it stands for. It was French police who killed hun
dreds of us in those rafles back during the war. Police like you rounded up Algerians and bound them hand and foot and threw them in the River Seine. Never again, Bruno. Never again. Now get out of my way.”

  A crowd was gathering, led by Gilbert and René from the Bar des Amateurs.

  “Have you heard?” Momu shouted. “The gendarmes arrested Karim. He’s in there. I have to get to him.”

  “What’s this, Bruno?” asked Gilbert. “Is this right?”

  “Calm down, everybody,” Bruno said. “It’s true. The gendarmes came and picked him up and there’s a magistrate now questioning him about the brawl in the square with those Front National guys. The mayor and I are trying to get things fixed. We have a lawyer coming and we’re standing by Karim, just as we expect you all to do. We can’t have people charging into the gendarmerie—it will just make things worse.”

  “What’s Karim supposed to have done?” René wanted to know.