The priest paused, as if weighing his words in a way that made Bruno wonder whether there was some secret of the confessional that was being kept back.
“Not directly, but he’d rail against the fat cats and the rich and complained of being cheated. It was just ramblings. I was never clear whether he thought his daughters had cheated him out of the money from the farm or if it was something else.”
“Is there something you can’t tell me?”
Father Sentout shrugged. “Nothing directly linked to the money. I presume it’s from the Neuvic train. You know about that, right? The great train robbery by the Resistance?”
Bruno shook his head. He’d heard of it but not the details. These days, the priest explained, the story was more legend than anything else. A vast sum of money, said to be hundreds of millions, had been stolen from a train taking reserves from the Banque de France to the German naval garrison in Bordeaux. Despite various official inquiries, large amounts had never been accounted for, and local tradition had it that several Resistance leaders had bought grand homes, started businesses and financed political careers after the war with the loot.
“If that was his share, he didn’t get much,” Father Sentout concluded, nodding at the banknotes on the bed. After the war there had been so many devaluations. Then in 1960 came de Gaulle’s currency reform; a new franc was launched, each worth a hundred of the old ones. “That thousand-franc banknote is probably worth less than a euro, if it’s worth anything at all.”
Bruno bent down to pry the note from the cold fingers. As he put it inside the box with the photographs, he heard footsteps in the corridor, and Fabiola bustled into the small room, her medical bag in tow. She was wearing a long white coat of freshly pressed cotton, and her dark hair was piled loosely atop her head. An intriguing scent came with her, a curious blend of antiseptic and perfume, overwhelming the stale air of the room. She kissed Bruno on both cheeks and shook hands with Father Sentout, pulling out her stethoscope to examine the body.
“He obviously didn’t take his medicine. Sometimes I wonder why we bother,” she said, sorting through the small array of plastic jars from the pharmacy that stood by the bed. “He’s dead, and there’s nothing suspicious. I’ll leave the certificate at the front desk of the clinic so you can pick it up. Meanwhile we’d better get him to the funeral home.”
She stopped at the door and faced Bruno. “Is this going to stop you from getting to the airport? I’ll be free by five so I can do it.”
“It should be okay. If there’s a problem, I’ll call you,” he replied. Pamela, the Englishwoman Bruno had been seeing since the previous autumn, was to land at the local airport of Bergerac just before six that evening, and he was to meet her and drive her back to St. Denis. Pamela, who kept horses along with the gîtes she rented out to tourists, had been pleased to find in Fabiola a year-round tenant for one of the gîtes, and the two women had become friends.
Bruno began making calls as soon as Fabiola and the priest left. He started with the veterans’ department at the Ministry of Defense to confirm a Resistance ceremony and then called the funeral parlor. Next he rang Florence, the science teacher at the local collège who was now running the town choir, to ask if she could arrange for the “Chant des Partisans,” the anthem of the Resistance, to be sung at the funeral. He rang the Centre Jean Moulin in Bordeaux, the Resistance museum and archive, for its help in preparing a summary of Murcoing’s war record. The last call was to the social security office, to stop the dead man’s pension payments. As he waited to be put through to the right department, he looked around the apartment.
In the sitting room an old TV squatted on a chest of drawers. In the top drawer, he found a large envelope marked Banque and others that contained various utility bills and a copy of the bill of sale for Murcoing’s farm in the hills above Limeuil. It had been sold three years earlier, when prices were already tumbling, for eighty-five thousand euros. The buyer had a name that sounded Dutch, and the notaire was local. Bruno remembered the place, a ramshackle farmhouse with a roof that needed fixing and an old tobacco barn where goats were kept. The farm had been too small to be viable, even if the land had been good. Murcoing’s last bank statement said he had six thousand euros in a Livret, a tax-free account set up by the state to encourage saving, and just over eight hundred in his checking account. He’d been getting a pension of four hundred euros a month. There was no phone and no address book. A dusty shotgun hung on the wall, and a fishing rod, its handle worn with years of use, stood in the corner. The house key hung on a hook beside the door. Bruno thought old Murcoing did not have much to show for a life of hard work and patriotism.
He wrote out a receipt for the gun, the box and its contents and left it in the top drawer. Beside the TV set he saw a well-used wallet. Inside were a carte d’identité and the carte vitale that gave access to the health service, but no credit cards and no cash. Joséphine would have seen to that. There were three small photos, one a portrait of a handsome young man and two more with the same young man with an arm around the shoulders of the elderly Murcoing at what looked like a family gathering. That must be Paul, the favorite grandson, who was supposed to arrive. Bruno left a note for him on the table, along with his business card and mobile number, asking Paul to get in touch about the funeral and saying he’d taken the gun, the box and banknotes to his office in the mairie for safekeeping.
As the hearse was arriving, Bruno’s mobile phone rang, and a sultry voice said, “I have something for you.” The mayor’s secretary was incapable of saying even bonjour without some hint of coquetry. “It’s a message from some foreigner’s cleaning woman on the road out to Rouffignac. She thinks there’s been a burglary.”
2
Bruno sighed as he set out for the site of the burglary. It was the third that month, all at isolated houses owned by foreigners who usually only came to France in the summer. The first two families, one Dutch and one English, had been down for the Easter holidays and found their homes almost surgically robbed. Rugs, paintings, silver and antique furniture had all disappeared. The usual burglars’ loot of TV sets and stereos had been ignored, and the thieves had evidently been professionals. No fingerprints were found and few signs of a break-in. Casual inspection might not have revealed that a burglary had taken place. Each of the houses had an alarm system, but one that used the telephone to alert a central switchboard, since the houses were too deep in the country for an alarm to be heard. The telephone wires had been cut.
To Bruno’s irritation, the gendarmes had made a cursory inspection, shrugged their shoulders and left him to write a report for the insurance claim. He understood their thinking. Individual burglaries were almost never solved. The gendarmes preferred to wait until they had a clear lead to one of the region’s fences and offer him a deal: a light sentence in return for testifying against the burglars. Then they could report dozens or even hundreds of burglaries to have been solved. This made their success rate look good on annual reports, which was what Paris wanted, and it led to bonuses and promotions. But it usually meant that few of the stolen items were returned to their owners. Bruno thought there should be a better way, and he’d suggested to the local insurance brokers that they ask their clients to provide photos of their more valuable items to improve the chances of tracking them down. Few of the householders bothered to do so.
But Bruno knew this house and was sure such photos would be on file. It was a small gentilhommière, the real estate agents’ term for a building that was smaller than a manor house but bigger than the usual farmhouses of the region. Dating from the eighteenth century, it had an ornate entrance with stone pillars supporting a porch, two sets of French windows on each side of the entrance and five mansard windows on the upper story. Stone urns for flowers, still empty at this time of year, flanked the French windows, and each of the mansards had been topped with a stone pineapple, the sign of the handiwork of Carlos, one of the best of the local builders. The house had been impeccably resto
red, using old tiles on the new roof, and the old stucco had been chipped away from the façade to reveal the honey-colored stone beneath. The driveway was lined with fruit trees, and rosebushes flanked the vegetable garden. At the rear, Bruno recalled, was a swimming pool and a stone terrace with a fine view across the ridges that sloped down to the River Vézère.
Bruno had been invited here twice for enjoyable garden parties and another time for dinner. He had met the British owner, Jack Crimson, at the tennis club where the retired civil servant played gentle games of mixed doubles. He spoke decent French. He always signed up to take part in the annual tennis tournament, contributed to the prizes and made a generous donation each year to the children’s tennis team. An affable man with thick gray hair, he was always well dressed. A little plump, but with the build of a man who’d been an athlete in his youth, he served excellent wines and had introduced Bruno to a deceptively potent English drink they called Pimm’s. Crimson arrived each summer in a stately old Jaguar. When Bruno had seen that the house was filled with rare books, paintings and antiques, he had persuaded Crimson to take photos of them all for registration at the insurance office.
“Ça va, Bruno? I heard your van coming up the drive,” said Gaëlle, the cleaning woman, greeting him from the front door. “They got in through the back and took all the good furniture, the rugs and paintings. They left the books. And they cut the phone line so I had to call the mairie on my mobile.”
“Were all the shutters closed when you arrived?” he asked.
Gaëlle, a kindly and competent widow in her fifties, nodded. “I opened them myself to air the rooms. I always do. It’s what Monsieur Crimson wants.”
She led him around the side of the house to the rear door, where the wooden shutter on a French window had been forced open. One of the small windowpanes had been broken by a professional; some glue had been smeared on the glass, a folded newspaper attached and then punched to make little noise and a clear break. The same technique had been used at the earlier burglaries. Inside, darker patches on the walls showed where paintings had hung.
“This was the dining room,” Gaëlle said. “You can’t tell, now that the furniture’s gone. He had some lovely old paintings of food, game birds and old-fashioned pots full of vegetables. They don’t seem to have taken anything from upstairs.”
“I hope you haven’t been using that,” he said, pointing at the feather duster she was holding. “They might have left fingerprints.”
“I know, I watch those crime shows on TV. I just like to carry it.”
“Have you called Monsieur Crimson?”
“I phoned his number in England right after I called the mairie. I heard some recorded English and then a beep, so I left a message. He’ll call me back when he gets it.”
Bruno took a note of Crimson’s number and established that Gaëlle, who came twice a week to clean, had last been at the house four days earlier. He went from room to room with his notebook, relying on Gaëlle’s memory for the missing items. The desk and filing cabinets seemed untouched in the room Crimson used as a study and library, but Gaëlle said an antique rug had been taken. At the side of the stairs was another door, a broken clasp and padlock lying on the floor.
“That’s his wine cellar,” she said, using the handle of her duster to turn on the light switch as she led him down the stairs. Bruno noted with approval the cellar’s gravel floor and the care that had gone into the labeling of the stacks. It made it easier to see what had been stolen: vintage Pomerols and Sauternes and a case of 2005 Grand Millésime of Château de Tiregand, the prince of the Pécharmant wines.
“They knew what they were stealing,” Bruno said, thinking that these were no common burglars. Cases of Cru Bourgeois reds and white Burgundies and even of champagne had been left in their racks.
As he returned to the staircase, Bruno noticed a small door beneath the stairs. He tried the handle, and it was open, leading to a dark cellar room that smelled of fuel oil. In the ceiling to one side he saw a chink of daylight.
“This used to house the oil tank,” she said. “It hasn’t been used for years. He’s got gas now for the central heating.”
Back upstairs, she led him to the side of the terrace, where she pointed to two metal plates held together by a sturdy padlock and said that was where the oil tank was refilled. Then she showed him some tire marks on a patch of lawn.
“I think they brought their truck around here to the back so they could load up easily,” she said. “It rained all night the day before yesterday, so maybe that was when they came.”
“You should be doing my job,” he said. “It must be those TV shows you watch.” Bruno followed the line of the telephone wire to the place where it had been cut. He called the security number at France Télécom to see if anyone could establish a time when the line had gone down. It had been shortly before 1:00 p.m. two days earlier.
“It’s a shame,” Gaëlle said, following in his footsteps. “Monsieur Crimson is such a nice man, always polite and generous, and he keeps the place very neat. You wouldn’t know there wasn’t a woman in the house.” She looked a little wistful. “She died the year after they bought this place, his wife. He keeps a portrait of her in the bedroom. Luckily it’s still there.”
Bruno nodded but said nothing. The burglars must have known that Crimson would be away and that his house was very much worth robbing. They had come equipped with a truck large enough to take a dining room table, chairs and cases of wine as well as the paintings and a valuable old clock that Gaëlle said stood on the mantelpiece in the living room. That suggested inside knowledge, and that in turn meant, however unlikely it seemed, that Gaëlle had to be a suspect.
“Where did you have lunch the day before yesterday, Gaëlle?” he asked, as casually as he could. Gaëlle eyed him steadily and replied, “With my cousin Roberte from the mairie, helping her bake stuff for her kid’s birthday party. Don’t worry, I know you have to ask.”
He tried Crimson’s number in England, but like Gaëlle he heard only the automated voice and the beep that invited him to leave a message. He did so, briefly and slowly, giving his office and cell-phone numbers and adding that he’d come back with a new padlock and clasp for the forced shutters and would try to secure the house. When Gaëlle pedaled away down the drive, Bruno debated with himself whether he should go the extra step. Remembering the fine dinner he’d enjoyed at Crimson’s table, he decided that he should, and he rang Isabelle’s number at the interior ministry in Paris. Again, he was invited to leave a message, and he gave Crimson’s name and London number, asking if Isabelle could inform her Scotland Yard contacts to see if they could track him down.
How would the thieves get rid of such a mixture of stuff? Bruno wondered. Furniture, rugs and paintings could be sold at any brocante or at the antiques fairs that were held in town after town throughout the French summer. There must be thousands of them, everything sold for cash and no records of the sellers. Unless Crimson’s possessions ended up with a very well-established dealer, the chances of tracking them down, even with the photos, were slim. The wine might be traceable, unless the thieves had very discerning palates and wanted it for themselves.
That triggered an idea, and as he reentered St. Denis, Bruno checked the time and turned off into the driveway to the collège, parking in front of the row of modest apartments where the teachers lived. Subsidized and almost-free housing was one of the ways the French state sought to lure well-qualified teachers to live and work in the countryside. For his friend Florence, a divorced mother of two toddlers with a science diploma who had found it tough to make ends meet, the teaching job had been a godsend.
Her arrival had been even better for St. Denis. Not only the mainstay of the town choir, Florence had also taken over the administration of the school sports teams. The dispirited and somewhat dowdy young newcomer Bruno had originally met had blossomed into a cheerful, self-confident woman with a widening circle of friends. She had earned the respect of her pupil
s and turned science into the most popular subject. She had persuaded the local recycling center to let her have all the discarded laptops and desktops so that she could repair them and launch a computer club at the school. Sud Ouest had run a story about the way all the club computers, when not in use, had been offered to the SETI Institute, to help process the reams of data from its radio telescopes that were scanning outer space for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Florence was giving her children lunch when Bruno arrived. They waved their spoons and chanted “Bonjour, Bruno” when she showed him into the small kitchen.
“Have you eaten?” she asked. “I made Pamela’s fish pie, and there’s more than enough.”
Bruno kissed the children and accepted gratefully.
“I know you like this part,” said Florence, scraping off some of the crisp cheese gratin that covered the pie and transferring it to Bruno’s plate. She poured two glasses of Bergerac Sec from the bottle in the refrigerator and handed one to Bruno. “I’m happy you gave me an excuse to have a glass of wine at lunchtime, but what brings you here?”
“Your computer club,” he replied. “There’s been a burglary, and a lot of good wine was stolen, and I was thinking that the thieves might try to sell it on priceminister.com or one of those other websites like eBay. Could your club come up with a program that would monitor those sites for these wines?” He handed over a copy of the list he had made of the gaps in Crimson’s cellar.
Florence sipped her wine and scanned the list. “It should be possible. You have the vineyard, the year, even some of the shippers. Your burglary victim must keep good records.”
“He’s an Englishman, a retired civil servant. He has his cellar all cataloged like a filing system, along with what he paid for the wine. They took over ten thousand euros’ worth. I can also get photos of the furniture, rugs and paintings that were stolen.”
The Resistance Man Page 2