He tugged off his shoes and with one hand on the hem of his coat he slid himself over the edge toward the boy.
“Mathieu, can you touch my foot?” he called. He turned, trying to see the boy, but he was out of his vision.
“It’s too far,” came the piping voice. “I’m sinking.”
Bruno edged down farther, trying to get a grip with his stockinged feet on the side of the pit but slipping on the plastic.
“Lie down full length, Juliette,” he called. “I need more length from the coat. Tell the children to hold on to you.”
“I’m here, Bruno,” came Alphonse’s voice. “I’ll hold the coat with Juliette.”
Bruno let himself slide down to the limit of the coat’s length and felt a small hand clutch at his ankle.
“I’ve got you, Bruno,” called Mathieu.
“Hold on with both hands, Mathieu,” Bruno told him. “Just hold tight, and we’ll have you out in a moment.” He looked up to the faces of Alphonse and Juliette peering over the rim. “Can you start to pull me up?”
“You’re too heavy,” said Alphonse. “We can hardly hold you as it is. But there are more people coming.”
Bruno began lifting his right leg and Mathieu with it, feeling the strain in his knee and thigh. Gingerly, he took one hand from his coat and lowered it until he could feel the boy’s hand on his ankle and then felt the sleeve of the boy’s jacket. Despite the fumes, he took a deep breath, gripped and hauled the dripping boy up with a great heave until the two little arms were around his neck, the stinking slime smearing on his chin and collar.
“Climb up me, Mathieu, until you can stand on my shoulders, and they’ll lift you out.”
He felt Mathieu’s shoes digging into his hip and his waist and then into his ribs as the boy clambered up Bruno’s body. A dirty hand slid into his mouth, trying to get some leverage, and Bruno set his jaw firm to help the boy. Bruno felt his greatcoat collar start to tear, and he slid down a few inches. His feet and lower legs were now in the slime, and he was surprised by its warmth. Then a knee was on his shoulder, the hand left his mouth and was in his hair, and the weight suddenly lifted as Mathieu was scooped out of the pit by eager hands.
“We’ve got him,” called a woman’s voice. Pamela’s voice.
“Hold on, Bruno,” called Alphonse. “Bill has a rope.”
The collar of his greatcoat tore some more, and Bruno slid down up to his waist into the slime that was releasing an even worse stench as he broke more and more of the surface crust. But a rope was dangling beside his face, and he took hold of it.
“Take the strain on that rope,” he shouted. “I’m about to put my weight on it.”
“There’s three of us on it,” Bill called.
They hauled him out, black and reeking up to his waist, manure smeared all across his face, neck and hair. Mathieu was being bundled off toward the restaurant by Juliette. Bruno looked down to see his greatcoat floating on the black pool. Someone patted him on the back, despite the manure. He looked around and saw Pamela. As he smiled at her, a camera flashed twice in a row. Philippe Delaron was taking pictures for Sud Ouest. He had come to take photos of the schoolchildren at the Green Fair, but now he had a real news story, to be accompanied by another unflattering picture of the chief of police of St. Denis. Bruno grimaced and gestured into the pit.
“I’ll need a hook to get my coat out. There are things in the pockets that I want to save,” he said to Bill. “Then I’ll need to go into your house for a shower, and I would be grateful for some spare clothes.”
“Well done, Bruno,” said Bill. “But not the house. There’s no hot water there today. We’ll use the bathroom in the restaurant. There’s a shower, and I’ll bring some spare clothes and put yours in the wash.”
“Oh Bruno,” said Pamela. “You’re a sight. But consider yourself kissed.”
Looking down at himself, Bruno could not help but laugh. Half of it was relief that Mathieu was safe, but he had to admit she was right. He was a sight, and a stink. And he was cold. Then he started to become angry. To invite children onto the property and not take some elementary safety precautions infuriated him.
“You and I will be having a serious talk about safety procedures when you invite children onto your property,” he said to Bill. “This very nearly ended in tragedy. I’ll need to see your license for this large pool of manure and a statement of approval for its construction from the water authorities.”
“It was just an accident, Bruno,” Pamela said. “All’s well that ends well.”
“Yes, we were lucky this time,” Bruno said, wondering why she was letting Pons off so lightly. “Now we have to make sure that all legal precautions are taken so we don’t have to be lucky in the future.”
He turned to Bill. “And we also have to talk about getting your chef’s nieces into school. But first perhaps you could show me your shower.”
16
As Bruno had expected, the archives of the mairie of Ste. Alvère were stuffed into a dark and chilly basement room next door to the wine cellar. It took him and the mayor’s secretary twenty dust-filled minutes to locate the cardboard box that contained the records from the truffle market. She showed him to a vacant underground conference room lit by a single fluorescent light, brought him a weak coffee and left him to it.
He started on the logbook of weekly sales, looking for the two consignments that had triggered the complaints as a way to familiarize himself with the recording system. It was as Didier had explained. The date, weight, price and batch number were each recorded in the logbook, and they matched the identifying numbers on the labels that had been cited in the complaints. But something was odd. The batch numbers seemed out of sequence with the other sales recorded that day.
Bruno checked again, and indeed each of the suspect items seemed to have been packed and sealed at the end of the day, even after the items listed as having been sold in the special auction. And neither one carried the extra tick in the column marked “Chemist,” which meant they had not been tested by Florence.
He began to look through the other sales lists and found that there were always some batches out of sequence at the end of the day. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. But he could find no logbook of the sales in what Didier had called the special auctions of unsold stocks at the end of each market day. Bruno pulled everything out of the cardboard box and checked each file and item thoroughly. There was no such logbook, so he began going through the various file folders.
Mainly they contained bills for electricity and water, all of which seemed in order. Then there was a maintenance log for the monthly service of the photocopier and another for the vacuum-pack machine, with each visit signed for by the service technician. There was no payment sum listed, but Bruno found a note on the bottom of each bill that matched an annual service payment from the bank account. There was also a handwritten note on each service statement, evidently put there by the technician, that gave a number followed by the words “digital counter.”
Bruno punched the telephone number on the servicing invoice into his mobile phone and went up to the ground floor to make the call to the technician. Yes, there was a digital counter on the packing machine that tallied how many times it had been used, and the technician always listed the number on his monthly visit. Bruno went back to the basement and checked the monthly totals. They went from zero in the spring and early summer to a maximum of more than five thousand in January. He looked at the figures for November, a relatively quiet month. The digital counter said the machine had been used 420 times that month. Bruno went back to the shipments log and found only 304 items that had been vacuum packed and shipped. That seemed like a sizable discrepancy, so he began to look at other months.
He took a notepad from his briefcase and began making monthly lists. It was tedious, repetitive work, but he felt it was worth it. In December, he found the machine had been used 1,974 times, but there were only 1,214 shipments listed as packed. In January,
the machine was used 3,447 times, but the logbook showed only 2,689 items packed and shipped. He went back to the previous year, and this time the figures for the digital counter and the logbook matched almost precisely, with a discrepancy of only a dozen or so, which could be explained by a faulty seal or a package damaged and having to be resealed. But the discrepancy for the latest year was extraordinary. The packages must have been opened and then resealed, which would have triggered the counter a second time. That would have been the opportunity for cheap Chinese truffles to have been inserted instead of the genuine Périgord variety.
Bruno sat back, content. He had his evidence for the mayor that some kind of fraud was taking place at the market. But he also had a mystery in the absence of the separate logbooks for the auction sales. According to the account books, they contributed more than a hundred thousand euros a year to the market, about a fifth of its profit. That was serious money, and there should certainly be a logbook.
He closed up the cardboard box, sealed it with tape and scrawled his own signature across the seal to ensure it was not reopened. He took the box up to the mayor’s secretary and asked her to lock it away. Then he walked across to the rear door of the truffle market, knocked and pushed the door open. Alain, the packer with a red nose from the glasses of petit blanc he sipped all day in the café across the street, jumped back in surprise.
“What the hell—oh, it’s you. Not done yet?”
“No, I’m not. But you are, Alain,” Bruno said. Alain was alone in the room. Bruno walked across to the inside door, and the next room and the market hall were both empty.
“Just you and me, Alain, and a nice quiet room for a chat. You’re in big trouble. I’ve been checking the books, and I want you to tell me why you’ve been reopening and then resealing about one package in four. Suppose you start by telling me who’s been giving you the cheap Chinese stuff to stick in the packages.”
“What? I don’t know about any Chinese stuff.”
“You’re lying. Let’s go to the gendarmerie and get your fingerprints taken. Then we can match them to the packages with the Chinese truffles. Or maybe you’d like me to call in the mayor first and tell him about the scam you’ve been running.”
“What scam?” Alain blustered.
Bruno turned to the vacuum-pack machine, studied the controls and pressed the catch that opened the service door. He pointed to the digital counter inside.
“Ever notice this, Alain? See how it counts every time the machine gets used? When I compared this count with the number of packages that you signed for as packed and shipped, I get some very different numbers. Want to explain to me why that should be? Or do you want to do your explaining down at the gendarmerie?”
Alain looked blankly at the digital counter, and then up at Bruno.
“Putain,” he said.
“What did Didier pay you? A hundred euros a month extra?”
Alain shrugged. “I’m saying nothing.”
“So you go down instead of him.”
“You won’t get him. He’s related to the mayor.”
“Have you got any idea how much he was skimming off this? If you got a hundred a month he was getting a thousand a week. The mayor couldn’t hush that up even if he wanted to.”
“A thousand a week?” Alain raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding me.”
“I can show you the books. One of you is going down for this, him or you. Which would you prefer?”
“I just did what I was told.”
“I know that. He was the boss. If Didier said open the packages up and seal them again, that’s what you did.”
Alain nodded.
“What happened to the logbooks for the auction? What did he do with them?”
Alain looked blank. Bruno let it go. Some things Didier would have done for himself.
“Alain, you have a choice to make right now. Either you sit down with me and make a statement and sign it, or I take you straight to the gendarmerie and charge you with theft and have you kept in jail under garde à vue. And then we go to your house and search everything with your wife and kids out on the pavement crying and all the neighbors watching in the street. And when you come out of prison, you never work again. It’s your choice.”
“If I make a statement, I’ll lose the job anyway and still go to jail.”
“Maybe. It’s a risk. But you’ll have me on your side. And you can say in the statement that you are speaking out of your own free will because you thought there was something funny going on. You did what you were told by Didier, but you became suspicious when you heard about the complaints.”
“I would have spoken out, but who was I going to talk to—the mayor?” Alain said. “I’d have been fired on the spot.”
“You make that statement with me as witness, and they can’t fire you. The mayor would be voted out overnight by the council if he tried, relative or no relative.”
“I’m no good at statements, don’t know what to say.”
“I’ll help you, Alain. We’ll do it question and answer, and then when we’re done you can read it over before you sign anything. How’s that sound?”
Bruno pulled up two chairs to the low table beside the vacuum machine and placed them side by side. He took a notepad from his briefcase, turned to a fresh page and wrote “Statement of Alain Bruneval” and the date at the top and said: “Tell me when you started resealing the packages.”
Alain paused and looked at him with a half smile. “I saw you play rugby the other day. You’re not as fast as you used to be.”
“I remember when you used to play yourself,” Bruno said, putting down the pen.
“I could have given you a run for your money.”
“You still could, Alain. Maybe you should come out and start training again, get fit for next year.”
Alain nodded contentedly, as if some scrap of pride had been satisfied, and Bruno started to write as he began to speak. “We’d always had a few resealings to do, when a package broke or we had the wrong label on it, but about a year ago, November last year, Didier began bringing package after package to be sealed again.…”
Twenty minutes later, Bruno had a signed statement that would stand up in court and send Didier to jail.
17
The mayor was chortling with delight as he looked at that day’s edition of Sud Ouest, and not only because of the photo of a manure-drenched Bruno that graced the front page under the headline HERO COP OF ST. DENIS SAVES CHILD.
Inside, they had given it two pages. “Policeman Dives into Manure to Rescue Drowning Boy” topped one page. “Mayoral Candidate Apologizes for Dangerous Day Out” topped the other, with photos of Bill looking abashed, little Mathieu looking cheerful and Juliette the teacher looking angry, with a quote from her saying, “Bill the Green has lost my vote.” At the bottom of the page was a story about Bill’s use of manure to power his fuel cells, titled “Green Power’s Pool of Death.”
The mayor was quoted condemning Bill for “the height of irresponsibility” in bringing schoolchildren to a place without security precautions and promising an investigation that could lead to the suspension of the restaurant license for L’Auberge des Verts. Prodded by the mayor, the water department was threatening to close the restaurant as a health hazard.
“This is going to cost him a lot of votes,” the mayor said to Bruno, not bothering to conceal his delight at Bill’s embarrassment. “Mathieu comes from a big family, and every farmer in the valley knows his mother. And every pet owner.”
Mathieu’s mother was the receptionist for St. Denis’s one veterinarian, a jolly woman and renowned local gossip who chattered away happily to everyone in the waiting room, even when she had nothing to say. Now she had a story that she could recount endlessly to all comers. Mathieu’s father, who ran the meat counter at the local supermarket, was equally well known and doubtless every customer would ask after his son’s health. Bruno could understand why the mayor was so happy.
“That was not
exactly at the top of my mind at the time,” Bruno said.
“I wouldn’t think so,” said the mayor. “But we’ll have to increase your salary at this rate.”
“Does this mean I get a new van?” he asked. Bruno decided to take advantage of the mayor’s good mood.
“Certainly you’ll get a new van. I don’t see how you can do without it,” said the mayor. “I’ve already put it on the agenda for the next council meeting. Plus we got the special insurance bonus since the old vehicle was destroyed in the line of duty. So we’ll only have to pay an extra two thousand euros for the new van, police markings and blue light included.”
“That’s good news, thank you. And you saw the bill I put in for the new uniform?” Even two washings had been unable to save Bruno’s shirt and trousers.
“Yes, yes, I already signed the approval for two full replacement uniforms, winter and summer. We’ll make young Pons pay for them. And did you see this in the paper? Little Mathieu saying, ‘Once I saw Bruno, I knew I would be safe.’ ”
“It looks as if Philippe Delaron is setting himself up to be your press agent,” said Bruno, embarrassed. “He’s certainly milked the story for everything it’s worth, even a sidebar on how this damages Pons’s election prospects.”
“Philippe owes me a lot of favors,” said the mayor. “I just had to encourage him to see what ramifications there were to this story. And it was a quiet news day.”
“Not that quiet. Did you see the story on the next page about the fire at the Chinese restaurant in Bergerac? That’s the third in a week.”
“We don’t have any Chinese restaurants in St. Denis. We don’t even have any Chinese,” said the mayor, waving his hand dismissively.
“We do now. The chef at Bill’s restaurant is Chinese, and his nieces. That reminds me, I need to check about getting them into school,” Bruno said. “But that’s not the point. We have our Vietnamese being attacked by unknown Chinese, and now we have Chinese places of business being burned out across the region. This is what happened in Paris and Marseilles. It’s a kind of gang war for control of territory.”
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