Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  “Now, I hear you have made a breakthrough in the case,” Tavernier said. “New evidence from Bordeaux, they tell me. Explain.”

  Bruno laid out the photocopies of the pay books from Vichy and from the French Army Then he added the fax photo of Hussein Boudiaf with Massili Barakine and Villanova, and the Force Mobile action report that cited Boudiaf’s role in the raids around St. Denis.

  “Our murder victim was a hired killer for the Vichy Mi-lice, who changed his name and his identity to hide out in the French Army” Bruno said. “That is why his executioner carved the swastika onto his chest.”

  Tavernier looked at J-J, then at Isabelle and finally at Bruno. He had a half smile on his face as if he were expecting someone to tell him it was all a joke.

  “Obviously the higher-ups are going to have to consider some of the wider national implications of this,” Isabelle said coolly. “As far as I know, the fact that North Africans were specially deployed by the Vichy regime to inflict brutal retaliations on the French population during the Occupation has not become widely known. It’s now likely to become very well known indeed.”

  Tavernier looked at the papers Bruno had put out before him.

  “Notice the thumbprints on the pay books,” said Isabelle. “They match. And when the forensics team searched the home of the deceased, they naturally took all the victim’s fingerprints. Here they are.” She shoved another sheaf of papers across to Tavernier. “It’s the same man.”

  “Do you have any recommendation for me, any proposal on how you plan to proceed?” Tavernier asked.

  “We have a list of the known Resistance families in the region, including those who were targets of the Force Mobile,” said Isabelle. “Any of them would have a motive to murder their old tormentor. The obvious next step would be to question them all, about forty families, altogether. That is just in the commune of St. Denis. We may have to spread our net wider.”

  “Why on earth did the old fool ever come back to St. Denis and run the risk of being recognized?” Tavernier asked, almost to himself.

  “It was the only family he had,” Bruno said. “He was about to become a great-grandfather. He was old and tired and lonely. He took a chance.”

  “And you think he was murdered by someone who recognized him from the old days?”

  “Yes,” said Bruno. “I do. I think he was executed by someone who felt he had a right to vengeance. And of course, that’s how I would make the case if I were his lawyer.”

  “I see,” said Tavernier. “Let me review all of this overnight.” He looked up at them, a determined smile on his face. “You three have obviously had a very long day. I congratulate you on first-class detective work. Now why don’t you take some time off while I consult with Paris and we decide how best to proceed. So, no questioning of the old Resistance heroes for the moment. I’ll call when I have a decision.”

  He stood up, gathered the papers and was about to leave the room.

  “Just one thing before you go, Monsieur Tavernier,” said Bruno. “Would you be good enough to sign the release order for Richard Gelletreau, the teenage boy? He’s obviously no longer a suspect.”

  “We have nothing on him for the drug charges,” said J-J.

  “Bruno is right. The girl has given us all the testimony we need to nail the Dutchmen. It’s a good result.”

  “Right,” said Tavernier, “a good result.” Bruno looked across to see Isabelle smiling at him. Tavernier took some notepaper and his seal of office from his elegant black leather attaché case. He scrawled the release order with a flourish, and then stamped it with the seal. “Take him home, Bruno.”

  Bruno awoke with Isabelle still sleeping beside him, her hair tousled from the night and one arm flung out above the covers and resting on his chest. Gently, he crept out and tiptoed to the kitchen to make coffee, to feed Gigi and his chickens. June 18 would be a busy day for him. He knew that if he turned on the radio, some announcer on France-Inter would play de Gaulle’s full speech. He also knew that there was no copy of the original broadcast of 1940, and de Gaulle had recorded it all over again after the Liberation: “Français et Françaises, la France a perdu une bataille. Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!”

  While the water boiled, he walked out to his garden, Gigi by his side. As he turned he saw Isabelle in the doorway, looking particularly fetching in the blue uniform shirt he had worn the previous day.

  “Police Municipale—it suits you.” When he was standing just in front of her he said, “I’m going to miss you.” It was the first time he had raised the subject.

  She stretched out her arm and put her hand on his. “Not until September,” she said quietly. “I have to be here for the drug case, and with all the bureaucracy of the Dutch liaison I’ll probably be here until the middle of July. Then I have my vacation and my reassignment leave. That’s the rest of August. You’ll probably be tired of me by then.”

  He shook his head, suspecting that whatever he said would be wrong, and leaned across and kissed her instead. She smiled, took his hand and led him back into the kitchen.

  “I saw you’d put the photograph of you and the blond girl away,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that for me, not if she was important to you. Particularly not if she was important.”

  “Her name was Katarina and she was important.” He looked directly into Isabelle’s eyes as he spoke. “But that was a long time ago, a different Bruno, and it was in the middle of a war. The rules all seemed to be different then.”

  “What happened to her?” she asked. “You don’t need to answer. It’s just curiosity.”

  “She died. The night that I was wounded, she was in a Bosnian village beside our base that got attacked and burned out. The Serbian paramilitaries did it to set a trap for us. When we went to help with the fire they hit us with mortars and snipers. She was among the dead. My captain went looking for her after the battle and told me when I got out of the hospital. He knew that she meant a lot to me.”

  “At least you knew some happiness with her.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We knew some happiness.”

  Isabelle rose and came around to his side of the kitchen table. She opened the shirt she was wearing and put his head against her breast and stroked her hands through his hair.

  “I know some happiness now, with you,” she murmured, and bent to kiss him.

  • • •

  When Bruno reached the Mairie later that morning, he immediately reported to the mayor.

  “The case is suspended until Tavernier gets his orders from Paris,” Bruno told him. “My guess is they’re not going to pursue it.”

  “Good,” said the mayor. “I’ve wrestled with this. Murder is murder, after all. But what good would it do to put two Resistance members on trial for killing a Nazi collaborator?”

  “Have you spoken to them?”

  “I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m not proud of that.”

  “I’m tempted to tell them I know what they did,” Bruno said. “Maybe then they would take the decision out of our hands.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Bruno, having lived through all of it. They are old men, and Father Sentout would tell you that they will soon face a far more certain justice than our own.”

  “Two unhappy old men,” said Bruno. “They fought on the same side and lived and worked opposite one another for sixty years and refused to exchange a single word because of an old political feud, and they all but poisoned their marriages by constantly suspecting their wives of deceiving them. Think of it that way and the good Lord has already given them a lifetime of punishment.”

  “Perhaps. But there’s something else: What do we do about Momu and his family?”

  “I saw them yesterday when I got back, and told Momu and Karim that we had new evidence that convinced us that Richard and the girl could not possibly have been responsible for Hamid’s murder. I had to explain why Richard had been freed to come home. They asked what the police would do now and I
said that in the absence of any other evidence, the police would have to start work on the theory that the swastika was a distraction carved onto the corpse to mislead us. So one of the next lines of inquiry would have to be Islamic extremists who saw the old man as a traitor.”

  “It must have been hard for you to tell such a blatant lie.”

  “It would have been worse to tell them the truth about Hamid.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Momu kept silent at first. Karim said the old man had a good long life and died proud of his family and knowing that he had a great-grandson on the way. He seemed fatalistic about it. Then Momu said that having taught the boy he’d never been able to believe that Richard was involved in the murder. He was glad Richard was free and he supposed that now we’d never find the killer and he’d just have to live with that failure of justice. He was used to that in France, he said, which made me feel even lower. He seemed to realize that I was feeling terrible about it and it was as if he then set out to comfort me. He said he’d been thinking a lot about the rafle of 1961 that he told me about, and how much things had changed since then. He was touched by the way so many neighbors came out to be sure that Karim was released by the gendarmes, he said. When I left, he came after me and said that as a mathematician he always knew that there were some problems beyond human solution, but none beyond human kindness.”

  “I was in Paris at the time of the rafle,” said the mayor. “But do you know who was then the prefect of police in Paris, the man responsible? It was the same man who had been prefect of police of Bordeaux under the Vichy regime in the war; a man who rounded up hundreds of Jews and had Force Mobile troops under his orders. Then the same man went on to be prefect of police in Algeria during that dirty war. Maurice Papon. I met him once, when I was working for Chirac. The perfect public servant, who always followed orders and administered them with great efficiency whatever they were. Every regime finds such men useful. It’s our dark history, Bruno, Vichy to Algeria, and now it all comes home to St. Denis again, just as it did in 1944.”

  The mayor’s voice was calm and measured, but tears formed in his eyes as he spoke.

  “This isn’t right, Bruno. We both know that.”

  “I don’t know what’s right, but I know I can live with it, at least for now. And I want it to be over,” said Bruno.

  “Should we go back to Momu, do you think? Tell him the truth in private and in confidence?”

  “I’m content to let it lie. They’ll accept it in time, get on with their lives. Think what they will go through if all this becomes public. As it is, Momu goes on teaching the children how to count, Rashida will still make the best coffee in town and Karim continues to win our rugby games.”

  “And the younger generation uses Resistance tricks with potatoes to immobilize the cars of our town’s enemies.” The mayor smiled. “They are our people now, three generations of them. One of the things that troubled me most was that Momu and the whole family would feel they had to leave St. Denis if all this became public.”

  “They don’t even know that the old man was not who he claimed to be,” said Bruno. “Maybe it’s better that it stays that way.”

  The mayor donned his sash of office and Bruno polished the brim of his cap as they walked down the stairs together to the square, where the town band had already begun to gather for the parade and Captain Duroc had his gendarmes lined up to escort the march to the war memorial. Bruno called Xavier, the deputy mayor, and the two of them posted the route barrée signs by the bridge and brought up the flags from the basement of the Mairie. Montsouris and his wife took the red flag, and Marie-Louise took the flag of St. Denis. Bruno smiled and hugged her extra hard. The Force Mobile, he remembered, had destroyed her family’s farm after she was sent to Ravensbrück. There was no sign of Bachelot and Jean-Pierre.

  A crowd was beginning to gather, and he went across to the outside tables of Fauquet’s café, where Pamela was sharing a table with Dougal, wineglasses in front of them. “We’re celebrating Waterloo day,” said Pamela. He kissed her in greeting and shook Dougal warmly by the hand. Bruno’s eyes were searching everywhere. Then he turned and saw Isabelle striding jauntily toward him. They were meeting in public, so he contented himself with a fond smile and a barely perceptible shrug as he kissed her formally on both cheeks. She squeezed his arm and let her hand linger to show she understood. With a burst of cheery greetings, Monsieur Jackson and his family arrived, his grandson with his bugle brightly polished. Pamela introduced them to Isabelle, who dutifully admired Jackson’s British flag.

  It was less than five minutes to twelve when Momu arrived with Karim and his family. Bruno kissed Rashida, who looked ready to give birth there and then, and hugged Karim as he handed him the flag with the stars and stripes, and the mayor came across to greet them. Bruno checked his watch. Bachelot and Jean-Pierre in years past would have been there by now. The siren was about to sound, and the mayor looked at him anxiously.

  And then Jean-Pierre and Bachelot emerged, walking slowly, almost painfully, up opposite sides of the pavement from the Rue de Paris into the square. They made their separate ways to the Mairie to collect their flags. The two men were very old, Bruno thought, but neither one would stoop to use the assistance of a walking cane while the other walked unaided. What power of rage and vengeance had it required, he marveled, to endow these enfeebled ancients with the strength to kill with all the passion and fury of youth?

  He stared at them curiously as he handed them the flags, the Tricolor for Jean-Pierre and the cross of Lorraine for Bachelot the Gaullist. The two men looked at him suspiciously. He looked back, his eyes shifting between them. They know, or do they? The two men of the Resistance shared the briefest of glances.

  “After all that you’ve been through together, and I include the secret you have shared for the past month, do you not think in the little time remaining to you that you two old Resistance fighters might exchange a word?” he asked them quietly.

  The old men stood in grim silence, each one with his hand on a flag, each with a small Tricolor in his lapel, each with his memory of a day in May more than sixty years ago when the Force Mobile had come to St. Denis, and a day in May more recently when the story had come full circle and another life had been taken.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Bachelot.

  “What did you do with the old man’s medal—the one he earned fighting for France? Not for what he did in the Force Mobile,” Bruno asked.

  Bachelot turned and looked at his old enemy, Jean-Pierre. A look passed between them that Bruno remembered from the schoolroom, two small boys stoutly refusing to admit that there was any connection between the broken window and the slingshots in their hands; a look composed of defiance and deceit that masqueraded as innocence. So much contained within a single glance, Bruno thought, so much in the initial look they had exchanged when they first saw the old Arab at the victory parade. That had been the first direct look between the two veterans in decades, a communication that had led to an understanding and then to a resolve and then to a killing. Bruno wondered where they had agreed to meet, how that initial conversation had gone, how the agreement had been reached to murder. Doubtless they would have called it an execution, a righteous act, a moment of justice too long denied.

  “If you’ve got something to say, Bruno, then say it,” said Jean-Pierre. “Our consciences are clear.” Bachelot nodded grimly.

  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” Bruno said.

  This time they did not need to look at one another. They stared back at Bruno, their backs straight, their heads high, their pride visible.

  “Vive la France,” said the two old men in unison, and marched off with their flags to lead the parade as the town band struck up “The Marseillaise.”

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank Gabrielle Merchez and Michael Mills for luring him to the Périgord, and Rene Millot for making the place so comfortable, and Julia
and Kate and Fanny Walker and our dogs Bothwell and Benson for filling it with life. This is a work of fiction, and all the characters are invented, but I am indebted to the incomparable Pierrot for inspiration and for his cooking, to the Baron for his wisdom and his wines, to Raymond for his stories and his bottomless bottle of Armagnac, and to Hannes and Tine for their friendship, tennis and memorable meals. The tennis club taught me how to roast wild boar, everybody taught me how to make vin de noix and those who taught me how to ensure that nothing of a pig was wasted had better remain nameless in view of the European Union regulations. The inhabitants of the valley of the river Vézère in the Périgord call it a tiny corner of paradise, and I am honored to share it. Jane and Caroline Wood and Jonathan Segal between them whipped the book into shape, and I am deeply grateful.

  Read an excerpt from

  The Devil’s Cave

  By Martin Walker

  Available from Knopf

  July 2013

  1

  Bruno Courrèges seldom felt happier about the community he served as chief of police than when standing at the rear of the ancient stone church of St. Denis, listening to rehearsals of the town choir. Unlike the formal ceremonies at Mass when the singers dressed in neat white surplices, the choir practiced in their normal dress, usually gathering immediately after work. But Father Sentout’s daring decision that the choir should reach beyond its usual repertoire to attempt Bach’s St. Matthew Passion had required some additional rehearsals early in the morning. Farmers stood alongside schoolteachers and accountants, waitresses and shopkeepers. These were people Bruno knew, wearing clothes he recognized, and usually singing hymns that were familiar, perhaps the only memory of his church orphanage that still gave him pleasure.

  On this Saturday morning two weeks before Easter, the twenty-four choristers were mostly in casual clothes, and the front pews of the church were filled with coats and shopping baskets they would take to the town’s market, about to get under way in the street outside. As he entered the twelfth-century church, Bruno heard the first notes that led into the chorus of “Behold Him as a Lamb.” The noises of the street seemed to ebb away behind him as Florence’s pure soprano voice filled the nave. He knew there should be two choirs and two orchestras, but St. Denis made do with its trusty organ and the enthusiasm of its singers plus, of course, the determination of Father Sentout, whose love of choral music was matched only by his devotion to the pleasures of the table and the fortunes of the local rugby team. It made him, Bruno thought, an entirely suitable pastor for this small town in the gastronomic and sporting heartland of France.