The Resistance Man

by Martin Walker

  His cheerful mood evaporated as he considered what he might do if Paul Murcoing suddenly appeared on the bridge carrying his stolen guns. He was paid to protect St. Denis. Reluctantly, because he preferred to do his job unarmed, Bruno descended the steps, walked across to the mairie, went up to his office and opened the safe. He took out his MAB nine-millimeter, stripped, cleaned and lightly oiled. He then carefully wiped the bullets before loading the magazine. It could take fifteen rounds, but like most former soldiers he left out one to loosen the spring and reduce the chances of jamming. He reassembled his weapon, checked the safety catch and strapped his holster around his waist. Feeling self-conscious at its unaccustomed weight, Bruno went back to complete his patrol and watch over the market. To his surprise, none of his friends and neighbors seemed to notice he was armed.

  An hour later, however, it was the first thing Isabelle spotted when he responded to her phone call and arrived in his van at Crimson’s house. As he climbed out to greet her, he could hear the distant sound of a helicopter. “Perfect timing, they’re on their way in,” she called from the doorway, then came down the path to greet him. “It’s good to see you with a gun again. That usually means matters are about to get interesting.”

  She opened the front of her leather jacket so he could see her shoulder holster but then went down on one knee after Bruno opened the rear of the van and little Balzac leaped out and sprinted toward her. Ears almost as long as Balzac himself flapped like giant wings as he jumped into her arms, his tongue raking her neck and cheek. She laughed and hugged him and then seemed to lose her balance and toppled onto her back, Balzac standing foursquare on her chest to nuzzle at her face. Bruno felt himself grinning even as he thought how much he would miss her.

  “Don’t just stand there, help me up,” she called from the ground, and laughing he stretched out a hand. The helicopter was much closer. She dusted herself off and watched Balzac follow his sniffing nose around the garden. Whether or not she would miss him, Bruno thought, she’d certainly miss Balzac.

  One of the men in overalls who had been with her on her first day at Crimson’s house was standing on the edge of the covered swimming pool, holding a red flare, its rising smoke giving the pilot the wind direction. The military helicopter flew past the house, turned and came back into the wind as it dropped. Bruno clamped his képi firmly to his head, noticing that the helicopter was a Fennec, one of the unarmed models used to transport senior officers. Balzac, who had darted into the shelter of Bruno’s legs when he saw the helicopter descend, now barked in defiance as its rotors stilled. The door opened, and the brigadier, dressed in a suit and tie, groped with his foot for the little step attached to the skids and jumped down. He turned to help Crimson, a rather older man in gray slacks, blazer and open-neck shirt.

  Crimson was the only man Bruno knew who seemed to have his hair cut once a week. It was always at a perfect length and never seemed to become disheveled, however strenuous the tennis or capricious the wind. At first, Bruno had thought it signified a touch of vanity, but now that he knew the man it seemed all of a piece with his self-possession and self-control.

  “Bruno,” said the brigadier, much more coldly than usual, reaching out for a curt handshake as Bruno’s arm came down from the salute. “I believe you know Monsieur Crimson.”

  “Bruno and I have been on first-name terms for years,” said Crimson, in his grammatical but strongly accented French. With careful courtesy he shook Isabelle’s hand before surprising Bruno with a kiss on both cheeks. They had been amicable acquaintances but hardly good friends. Perhaps he was trying to send a signal to the brigadier. “I gather you’ve pulled off a remarkable bit of police work.”

  “You’ll need to check the hoard, but I brought this as a token of the eventual return of your goods,” said Bruno, and handed to Crimson the wrapped parcel he had brought with him from the back of his van. He was conscious of the brigadier glowering impatiently at him. Whatever credit he’d gained from solving the burglary did not seem to have impressed the brigadier.

  “Let’s do this inside the house,” Crimson said, and looked down to where Balzac was sniffing at his perfectly tailored twill trousers. “And who’s this little fellow? You finally managed to replace dear Gigi?”

  Inside his kitchen, he unwrapped the two Cotman watercolors, which Bruno had selected as the most portable and identifiable of the loot from the barn. Crimson examined them both with deep satisfaction.

  “These were the wedding presents my wife and I gave each other over forty years ago. I can’t believe you pulled this off, Bruno. I’d been resigned to a long battle with the insurers, and then when I landed at Paris, there was Vincent waiting for me with the good news and his helicopter. I can’t believe that you got my wine back too.”

  Bruno had never known the brigadier’s first name, and from the way her eyes widened, nor had Isabelle.

  “I’ll want to see you at the gendarmerie at five this afternoon, Bruno,” the brigadier said briskly. “I don’t think we need detain you or your dog further. As soon as Monsieur Crimson has unpacked his things, we’ll take the helicopter on to the Corrèze so that he can check on the rest of his property, and then we’ll arrange to have them shipped back here.”

  Bruno replied with a crisp salute. His attempt at a dignified departure was undermined by Balzac, who was alternating his attentions between Isabelle’s black sneakers and Crimson’s English brogues. Bruno finally had to bend and scoop Balzac into his arms to take his leave, aware of Isabelle’s averted eyes and the half-baffled, half-concerned look on Crimson’s face.

  “Call me tomorrow because I owe you the best dinner in the Périgord,” Crimson called after him.

  16

  His holster still around his waist, Bruno was in his office at the mairie, dealing with accumulated paperwork, when his phone rang. He put down the leasing contract for a big screen on which the council would project open-air cinema on summer evenings and answered.

  “It’s Jacqueline Morgan, and I’m not sure whether I’m in your jurisdiction, but I thought I’d better tell you first. I’ve been burgled.”

  She was in another commune, so technically the break-in at her house was none of his business, he told himself as he drove through Les Eyzies on the way to her house. But her tale was intriguing, she had been helpful in sharing her expertise, and any friend of the mayor deserved his best efforts. He parked behind her white BMW, pulled from the glove compartment a pair of latex gloves and a couple of evidence bags and knocked at the door.

  The first thing he noticed was that Jacqueline had been to the hairdresser. The iron-gray curls he remembered had been tamed into soft waves and given subtle streaks of gold. She was wearing a well-cut dress that flattered her trim figure. On her feet were sneakers, but a pair of formal shoes with heels stood by the door, as if she’d kicked them off on entering. At their first meeting, she had looked like he imagined an American female academic would appear. Now, despite the shoes, she looked French and ten years younger. When she presented him her cheek to be kissed, he detected an attractive scent.

  Jacqueline said she had spent the morning at the market in Sarlat and had then met the mayor for lunch before he went to the hospital. Bruno didn’t think she was the kind of woman who’d dress up to go shopping in the market, so she must have wanted to look her best for lunch with the mayor. He smiled to himself at the thought.

  She’d then driven home to find no sign of forced entry. But the books and papers on her table were not quite where she had left them, and when she’d looked into the kitchen she found the back door open and one of its panes neatly removed. She had checked the rest of the house, and a few small items of jewelry were missing from her bedroom, along with some silver, her TV set and the laptop.

  She led him to the back and showed him the pane of broken glass on the kitchen floor, still mainly attached to a sheaf of greased newspaper. That was the technique that had been used at Crimson’s house. Could this be Murcoing’s work a
gain? Or perhaps somebody who wanted to make it look like Murcoing?

  He told Jacqueline to stay inside and went out to check the garden and outbuildings. They were all clear, but an army could have been hiding in the wooded slopes of the ridge that rose behind the house. Dirt roads led up through the woods, although he could see no other houses up there. About a kilometer from Jacqueline’s home he had passed a duck and goose farm, which seemed to be her nearest neighbor. A burglar would have had no fear of being seen. The ground was too dry for prints, but there were tire tracks in the grass behind the house, out of sight of the road.

  Inside, the house was strangely tidy for a burglary. Usually he’d have expected drawers pulled out and upended, mattresses shoved aside and ripped and cupboards dragged away from walls. In the bedroom a rather fine wooden box, obviously for her jewelry, had been tipped onto the bed. A charming nude sketch of a woman sitting on a bed, her shapely back to the painter, hung between the two windows. Even the least artistic thief would have thought that was worth money.

  “I haven’t touched anything since I found the house like this, except for some of the books and notes downstairs to see if anything was missing,” she said. “The most important thing is the manuscript of my father’s memoirs. I have copies, of course, but not here in France, they’re…”

  Bruno put a finger to his lips to signal for silence. He was not one to leap to conclusions, but there was a possibility that Jacqueline’s burglars had been the kind of people who would also leave the house bugged. It was going to be a very interesting conversation with the brigadier.

  “Are you insured against theft, madame?” he asked. She nodded, her eyes widening, understanding the signal of his formality. “And the value of your stolen silver and jewelry would be what in your estimate?” Bruno waved his hand upward two or three times to encourage her to set the figure high.

  “Well over ten thousand euros,” she said, “probably more. Some of them were antiques, irreplaceable family heirlooms. The silver coffeepot is eighteenth-century American, and since my father was descended from Mary Robbins, there’s a family legend that it was made by Paul Revere.”

  Bruno looked at her blankly.

  “He was a silversmith in Boston, a famous revolutionary who carried the news of the British raid that started the War of Independence. There are poems about him that children learn in school, at least we did in my day. Mary Robbins married his son.”

  Bruno nodded, thinking that would be useful for the plan that was forming in his mind. “Do you have a photo of this coffeepot?”

  Jacqueline went to a two-drawer filing cabinet disguised as a wooden chest of drawers. He told her to wait and brought another set of gloves from his car. She put them on, muttering that the files seemed to have been searched, and gave him a postcard-sized print of a handsome coffeepot with a curved spout.

  “I had to have a photo taken for the insurance once I’d listed it as a special item,” she said. “I put the value at ten thousand.”

  “And your laptop? How much would that be worth?”

  “Over a thousand. Both it and the TV were quite new.”

  “So altogether the value of what has been stolen could be as much as twenty thousand euros? Perhaps we’d better see if anything from the outbuildings is missing before I call the gendarmes.” He steered her outside and into the garden at the rear.

  “You think I’m being bugged?” she asked in a whisper.

  He shrugged. “It’s possible. What about the material on your laptop? Do you have it all backed up?”

  “Yes, on the university mainframes, both in Paris and in the States. It’s tiresome, but I won’t have lost anything. Is this some government operation, spying on me?”

  “I don’t know but we’ll do this by the book.”

  After a fruitless search of the barn and shed Bruno led the way back into the house and called the gendarmerie at St. Denis, where Sergeant Jules was on the desk. Jacqueline’s house was roughly halfway between the gendarmeries in Montignac and St. Denis, so he couldn’t be accused of deliberately calling in the gendarmes he knew. Bruno explained the burglary and the value of the items stolen and stressed the news value of Paul Revere’s coffeepot. Most important, he added, was that the same method of entry had been used in the Crimson burglary, so that pointed to Paul Murcoing. That would get Yveline excited, Bruno thought.

  He then went to his van and pulled out the cheap pay-as-you-go phone he’d bought in a previous case when Isabelle had wanted to contact him in a way that could not be traced. He used it to call Annette in Sarlat and explained not only the burglary but also his suspicion that the real target of the thieves might have been Jacqueline’s papers. Could she make sure that the report of the burglary got special attention when the procureur came back to the office on Monday? Once the procureur listed the case as a délit, a serious crime, there would be a paper trail that would make any attempt at a cover-up very difficult.

  “This sounds intriguing, so let’s talk about it over dinner tonight,” she said. “I’m with Yves at the house, and he’s been shopping in the market to make that dinner he promised you. I already called Pamela and Fabiola.”

  “Is there enough for a couple of extra guests? My friend Gilles from Paris Match is in town, and I think you’d like to meet Jacqueline.”

  “The more the merrier,” Annette replied. “My place in Sarlat, about eight? And by the way, Bernard Ardouin has brought me in to help on the Fullerton murder, so I need to call Sergeant Jules. I’ll just ask him if anything has come up, and that way the procureur’s office will be informed.”

  Bruno hung up, called Gilles to tell him about dinner and smiled to himself at the difference between the way the French judicial bureaucracy was supposed to work with its separate jurisdictions and checks and balances and the way that in practice friendships and personal connections could cut through the red tape. He took a mischievous pleasure in the way that he, a village policeman, could play the system. But this time he would have to be particularly careful. Usually he could count on discreet support from the brigadier and Isabelle. This time the politics made that problematic, and he’d hate to have either one of them as an enemy. The brigadier could squash him like a bug.

  Suddenly he looked at the cheap phone in his hand and cursed himself for being so foolish. Isabelle had the number. If she decided to track the phone records, his careful maneuvering could be uncovered. So much for his moment of self-satisfaction. He’d have to buy another disposable phone as soon as he got back to town.

  He was taking this risk not for Jacqueline, whom he barely knew, but for the mayor, to whom he owed just about everything that made his life rewarding: his home, his work, his place in St. Denis. More than that, he had a visceral dislike of the way that agents of the French state often rode roughshod over the law. If the brigadier, say, had staged Jacqueline’s burglary to protect the government from embarrassment, that would stick in Bruno’s throat. He remembered the angry words he’d exchanged with Isabelle over the growing number of scandals piling up at the door of her ministry. At least she was making arrangements to move to another job.

  “I thought you might like some coffee,” said Jacqueline, coming out of the house with a tray. “I’m just sorry that I can’t serve it in Paul Revere’s jug.”

  She took the tray to a small garden table with two spindly metal chairs, tucked into a sunny corner among the rosebushes.

  “I think you ought to know what’s going on, or at least what I think may be happening,” he said. “Somebody in the French government is worried that a scandal could be unleashed just ahead of the election. There is some suspicion that Jack Crimson is involved. I presume you know his background?”

  Jacqueline nodded. “And they think my research is somehow involved, is that what you mean? But it all happened so long ago. Anybody involved in that business with the slush funds and the Resistance money is almost certainly dead.”

  “You mentioned that you were working on some
thing else, about the French nuclear deterrent not being truly independent. If the opposition could make an issue out of that in the next week or so, it could have an impact on the election.”

  “The Americans say it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that causes the trouble, and the cover-up has been going on for years,” she said. It had started with Nixon’s summit with President Pompidou in 1970, she explained. By 1973 the French were being given assistance in developing their missiles, their multiple warheads, and even being shown how to set up underground testing sites for nuclear weapons. They also received help on missile guidance systems. She had a Pentagon document that recorded the French saying they didn’t need their missiles to be accurate enough to hit Soviet missile silos; they just wanted to be able to take out cities.

  She had a whole file of documents, she said, memos of talks between Nixon and Pompidou, and between Kissinger and the French defense minister Robert Galley. The cooperation had gone a lot further under Presidents Carter and Giscard d’Estaing. Most of the material was marked TOP SECRET, but she had managed to get some of it declassified. There was a whole lot more in the archives of the Nixon Library, she said.

  “So this material is now publicly available?”

  “Only if you know where to look. Some of it’s quite funny. There’s a memo of a discussion between Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger when they say the French have, and I quote, ‘the worst nuclear program in the world.’ Because of U.S. laws against the transfer of nuclear secrets, they set up a system called negative guidance, under which the French nuclear technicians would say they were thinking of doing it this way, and the Americans would shake their heads. They’d go through the various options until the Americans didn’t shake their heads, and that’s how they built the triggers for the French nuclear explosions. I had fun writing the chapter with all that stuff.”