“But nothing more about the Neuvic train?”
“That’s what Murcoing was really interested in, but my brother only found snippets in the SOE archives. But he told Murcoing that more files were scheduled to be declassified, and he’d hired a researcher to keep an eye out for them. One of the last e-mails said he’d gathered lots of new photocopies that he was bringing with him.”
“We didn’t find those at your brother’s house,” Bruno said, thinking that this could gel with Crimson’s idea for new documents to lure Murcoing out of hiding.
“Murcoing must have taken them,” Brian replied. “He’s obsessed with this Neuvic business. He compiled a list of names of Maquis types from the Groupe Valmy and other networks, people he claimed were suspects, or ones that he or his grandfather believed had gotten away with some of the loot. Lord knows there was enough money at stake. He gives their addresses, the names and addresses of their heirs, the family businesses and farms that suddenly had money to expand with after the war. Two or three of his e-mails end up with the phrase ‘They will pay for this!’ But he doesn’t say whether he wants to denounce them or blackmail them or what.”
“Could you collect those names for me and e-mail them to me at my office?” Bruno asked. “I’d like to check them against our list of burglaries. What was your brother’s reaction to this kind of thing?”
“It didn’t seem to surprise him. But that was Francis, he was always an enthusiast. Even as a little boy he’d take up some hobby like stamps or aircraft recognition and hurl himself into it for weeks at a time, just like he did with Grandpa Freddy’s wartime career and this venture with Murcoing. I went with my mother to see his specialist when he was in one of those expensive treatment centers where they try to wean people off drugs, and he told us that Francis had an addictive personality.”
“What about their personal relationship? Did Murcoing know about Francis’s affair with Yves or his liaisons with other men?”
“Francis was e-mailing all sorts of different men in ways that made their sexual relationship pretty clear, but he was at pains to keep them all separate,” Brian replied. “With Murcoing, I think there was much more passion on Murcoing’s side. It reminded me a bit of that line from La Rochefoucauld, that in love there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. Murcoing was very much the one doing the kissing.”
“I’m wondering if that could have been a motive for the murder,” Bruno said. “Murcoing could have felt betrayed if or when he found that Francis was about to have a romantic liaison with another man.”
“I’ve asked myself the same question. The relationship with Murcoing had lasted for a long time, according to the e-mails. That was unusual for Francis. I used to wonder if Francis ever really loved anybody, except maybe his nephews and nieces, my children. It’s hard to tell, and even harder to match the charming little brother I knew with what he became later. He could be a monster when he was on drugs.”
Brian called up the final exchange of e-mails and turned the laptop so Bruno could read them.
The last e-mail from Francis had been sent on Monday, and he’d arranged to meet Murcoing at his Corrèze farm “after the weekend,” presumably meaning this weekend. Francis said that he was bringing a full load of furniture from England to be unloaded and would then return across the Channel with French furniture from the barn. Bruno worked out the timing. Today was Sunday. The e-mail had been sent the previous Monday, and on Tuesday Francis had taken the Chunnel train and called at Dougal’s to pay for the extra days’ lease and to pick up the keys.
“So my brother would not have been expecting Murcoing when he suddenly showed up at the gîte. There could have been an angry scene,” Brian said. “But I don’t understand how Murcoing knew that Francis planned to arrive early for a romantic interlude with this other man.”
“His sister works for the rental agency,” Bruno said. “She knew which gîtes were going to be occupied and when. And the name of the tenant is also listed for the relevant week, so the cleaners and gardeners know who’ll be there. She’d certainly have recognized your brother’s name, since this affair with Murcoing had been going on for over a year, you say.”
“Maybe even longer. Look at this.” He scrolled back to the beginning of the chain of e-mails between the two men, the first one dated in September, more than eighteen months earlier, and sent by Murcoing when Francis had returned to England after their affair had begun, or perhaps resumed. He pointed to a line in the rambling and passionate message.
“I have often thought of you even before that magical reunion when I saw you at the fair in Monpazier,” Bruno read, and wondered just how long it had been between the reunion and their previous meeting.
That triggered a memory, something he had noted at the time and planned to follow up on but that had slipped his mind. It was to do with Valentoux and the night he had told Bruno about his daughter. Valentoux had been asking around the gay community in the region for information about Paul Murcoing and had been told he was known as a mercenary.
The conversation began to play back in Bruno’s head. They had been standing on the steps of his home because Yves had wanted a cigarette. Yves recalled that Francis Fullerton had recounted some story of being in this region and meeting a boy a decade or so ago. And then an image suddenly appeared in Bruno’s mind of the studio portrait of a sultry-looking Murcoing that had been on Francis Fullerton’s bedside table in Corrèze and of Yves mentioning a poem that Francis had written about a boy named Paul.
Mon Dieu, he thought to himself, it’s the missing boy from Bergerac who gave the medical clinic a false name on that case I could never resolve, the one that kept me awake at night. It will be in one of my first notebooks.
He began to rise clumsily, jolting the table and startling Brian, who reached out to steady his drink. Bruno was thinking of the pile of cardboard boxes in his barn where he stored his old papers.
“Sorry, I just remembered something,” he said.
“Is it to do with the case?”
“Maybe, but it’s probably not that important, it’s just that there may be a connection with something that happened a long time ago.”
“Can you tell me about it? Does it involve Francis?”
“I think it might, it happened about ten years ago. A group of English gays rented a gîte and invited some French boys back to their pool. But the fathers turned up as well and beat the hell out of the Englishmen. I tried to sort it out, but the English guys left the area. The French boys were sent away on sudden vacations, and everybody clammed up. There was one boy I could never track down, who may have been young Murcoing.”
“Ten years ago, that’s just before Francis went to prison. And I recall that he did go on holiday not long before he was arrested. I don’t remember him being beaten up.”
“Did your brother drive a Range Rover?”
“No,” Brian answered. “But his partner did, Sam Berenson, the one who died and left him the antiques business.”
The names of the Englishmen had been on the rental agreement and on the car registration forms. Bruno was sure he’d have copied them down in his notebook.
“Did you find any poems on your brother’s laptop?” he asked.
“Yes, he wrote a lot, poems, short stories. He even wrote a few songs when he was in New York, made a couple of CDs, which I still have. I don’t know for sure, but all his writings are probably in his computer. Why?”
“Yves Valentoux told me the other day that he remembered Francis reciting a poem he’d written about a French boy. That may have been where all this started. I’m going to have to look in my old notebooks.”
“That’s a shame, because I was just about to invite you to dinner, if you’re free, that is,” said Brian. “I’ve had enough of going through these e-mails and the mess of my brother’s life.”
“You’re very kind, but I have some horses to take care of and a friend who’s in the hospital. I may have to leave at any moment
.”
22
It was Bruno’s day off, and after he’d phoned the hospital and Fabiola hoping in vain for some news of Pamela, he decided to plunge into activity rather than sit around worrying. He’d started by hunting through the cardboard boxes containing his old notebooks. Each box was sealed with Scotch tape and identified by the years the notebook had been filled. Inside, wrapped in the plastic bags the dry cleaner used to protect Bruno’s uniforms, the notebooks were in rough chronological order. He found the relevant one, resisted the temptation to read it through and relive old events and cases and checked on the names of the Englishmen he’d written down from their car insurance forms. One of them was Francis Fullerton and another was Samuel Berenson.
The only French name he found was Édouard Marty, the boy who’d disappeared to England before enrolling at the university. While his notebook didn’t say so, Bruno was sure he remembered that it had been the University of Bordeaux. And Marty had planned to study architecture. His parents had been old when he was born, and Bruno knew the father had died and the mother had moved away to be near her sisters. He called the faculty of architecture at the university, asked to speak to the director’s office, identified himself and explained that he was trying to trace a former student, Édouard Marty.
“He’s still here,” she said. “What are you after him for, speeding again in that new Jaguar of his?”
Nothing like that, he replied with a laugh, just a routine inquiry about a possible witness. But how could Édouard still be at the university?
“He’s not teaching today, he’s only part-time,” he was told. Bruno was given the name and number of a company named Arch-Inter where Marty could be found when he was not teaching a course on the history of interior design as an associate professor. Bruno searched for the company on his computer and found an elegant website, with the words “Arch-Inter” forking out to say “Inter-national” and “Inter-iors.” To his great surprise, it boasted offices in Bordeaux, Cannes, London and Los Angeles.
The company offered services in architecture, interior design and furnishings in different traditions, from English country house and minimalist modern to French ancien régime or Empire. There were photographs of very grand-looking rooms furnished in various styles, each of them captioned in Russian and in English. It seemed to be a one-stop service for wealthy Russians, who would buy a house or apartment and have it filled by Arch-Inter in whichever style the client chose. How long, Bruno wondered, before they added Shanghai to their list of offices?
Bruno clicked on the section titled “About Us” and saw that Francis Fullerton was listed as the London representative. Bruno sat back, reflecting on the chain of circumstance that connected the beating up of some foreign gays a decade ago with this international company today. And what better outlet could there be for Fullerton’s haul of French and English antiques? This was clearly a much bigger and more lucrative operation than Bruno had assumed, and perhaps one that could present some alternative explanations for Fullerton’s murder.
He phoned Bernard Ardouin, who called up the website on his own computer as they spoke. Ardouin asked whether Bruno recognized any of the items in the photographs as stolen. No, he replied, but the art squad of the Police Nationale might be able to, and the place to start would be to compare the website pictures with the photographs on Fullerton’s computer. Bruno explained the original connection between Fullerton and Édouard and asked whether Ardouin had any objections to Bruno’s driving to Bordeaux to interview the architect.
“I’d rather you didn’t do that yet,” said Ardouin. “We don’t want to alert him before we’re sure stolen goods are involved. And as you say, this looks like a matter for the art squad rather than you, but all credit to you for opening up this lead. I’d better brief J-J and get him to print out those photographs on Fullerton’s laptop.”
“Still no sign of Murcoing?” Bruno asked.
“Nothing from J-J or the Bergerac police, and he hasn’t used his bank card. He’ll have to show his face at some point; it’s just a matter of time. I’ve asked J-J to have some plainclothes types mixing discreetly with the crowd at the funeral tomorrow.”
As he ended the call, Bruno wasn’t so sure that finding Murcoing would be quite that simple. He shrugged. It was time to resume his training session with Balzac, who was by now so accustomed to being hugged and caressed by every human he met that Bruno had some difficulty in getting him to associate achievement with reward.
The special dog biscuits he prepared each month helped. Bruno mixed together a liter of milk, a bag of brown flour, an egg and a handful of brown sugar. He cut a slice of fat from the ham that hung from the beam in his kitchen, fried it and then poured the rendering into the mix along with a shredded clove of garlic. He then added tiny morsels of the ham. If he had any gravy left from one of his own meals, or any other useful leftovers, they went into the mix. If it was still too moist, he added bread crumbs. Baked for thirty minutes in a hot oven, the biscuits had proved irresistible to his previous dog, Gigi, and now to Balzac. Lured by the scent, Balzac would come when called and had learned to approach Bruno from the left with one whistle tone and from the right with another.
It was when he’d ended the training session with a grooming session and was cleaning Balzac’s ears that he’d been reminded by the identifying tattoo inside the ear of one avenue he had not tried.
Bruno went into his study, pulled out the phone book, turned to “Tatouages” in the pages jaunes and found two tattooing parlors in Bergerac. He checked his watch, donned his uniform and headed into town, where he’d be in time to catch Pascal at the post office taking his midmorning break. He dropped off Balzac in Hector’s stable, and armed with Paul Murcoing’s photograph and the sketch Pascal drew from memory of the tattoo on the arm of the driver of the white van, he drove to Bergerac. Stopping to buy diesel fuel, he made the obligatory courtesy call to Inspector Jofflin to say he’d be coming onto Jofflin’s turf and might have a lead on Murcoing. To Bruno’s relief, he was passed to voice mail and left a message without having to explain his hunch.
At the first parlor, a place in a run-down part of town that seemed to specialize in gothic images, he drew a blank. The second place was just outside the old town, not far from the river, in a street where flower shops alternated with organic food stores, hairdressers and vegetarian restaurants. Ahead of him two women, one with a severe crew cut, were strolling hand in hand. The shopwindow of the tattoo parlor was dominated by a dramatic collage composed of posters advertising local concerts. Inside, a shaved-headed man in black leather pants and a matching vest, his arms and chest covered in ornate and colorful designs, glanced at Pascal’s sketch and said proudly, “That’s my Maori warrior.”
“Your what?” Bruno asked.
“Maori warrior, from New Zealand. I saw it on one of their players in a rugby match on TV. Different designs say different things about how many fights you’ve been in, how many of the enemy you killed. I adapted it and made my own design.”
“Did you do one for this guy?” Bruno showed him Paul’s photo.
“Paul, yes, I did that one, and another that only his best friends would see. But I haven’t seen him for a few days. He’s usually in Marcel’s at night.”
“Is that a bar?”
“Bar, bistro, little theater in the back, its real name is Proust, but we all call it Marcel’s. It won’t be open now, though. Weekend nights run late, so they don’t open Mondays until the evening. Is he in trouble again?”
“No, he’s a witness in a case. What was he in trouble for?”
“I don’t know, it’s just something you say. But I make sure he pays me cash in advance,” the man said. “You know what I mean?”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“You might find him at Marcel’s. He’s got one of the rooms upstairs, but I don’t know if he lives there or just uses it for pickups. Like I said, I haven’t seen him for a bit. And if you find him, don’t tell
him it was me who told you.”
Bruno found the place easily enough, between a dog-grooming salon and an antiques shop with a single Buddha head in gray stone dominating its window. Proust was painted black, and the windows were filled with movie posters of Jane Russell and Lana Turner flanking a blown-up photo of a beautiful woman’s eyes. Bruno thought they might have belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. Below the eyes was a photo of Marcel Proust in profile. The door to the bar was closed, but it opened when he tried the handle. Inside, chairs were piled atop tables, the floor was wet, and a black woman who was mopping it looked up guardedly at his police uniform.
“I’m looking for Paul Murcoing,” he said, showing the photo.
She shrugged and slopped water on the floor. “Boss not here,” she said, not looking at him.
He walked across and put the photo in front of her face. “Do you know this man?”
She closed her eyes. “You talk to boss.”
Bruno sighed. She was almost certainly an illegal immigrant. He disliked doing what he was about to do, but he didn’t want to waste time.
“Your papers, please, madame.”
“Papers at home.” Now she had stopped mopping and was standing still, head down.
“You have a choice, madame. You either show me Murcoing’s room right now, or we go to the police station and check your papers.”
She shrugged again, this time with an air of defeat, pulled a large ring of keys from the pocket of her apron and led the way up two flights of narrow stairs to an unpainted wooden door. She unlocked it and let Bruno step into a room that was clearly unoccupied. There was a plain double bed, with a mattress and a pillow but no bedding, a small table with a water jug and basin, a hard-backed chair and a handsome armoire that had seen better days. It was empty.
The Resistance Man Page 19