can and check their DNA.”
“How many have you been able to test so far?” Bruno asked.
“Just over three hundred.”
“Perhaps the child would have had some of its grandfather’s genes,” Bruno offered. “It might stand out.”
“Can you imagine how many Vietnamese orphans of that period had American fathers? Tens of thousands of them look Western.”
Bruno slumped into a chair, thoroughly frustrated. “Is there anything we can do?”
“We just have to keep trying. We’re even advertising. You can put notices in the Vietnamese newspapers now, and they have whole sections of people searching for family members who got separated. There are information brokers, private investigators,” said Bao Le.
He looked at his watch and then at Bruno. “You said something about catching a train. I have a car and a driver outside. We’ll get you to the station.”
23
Nicco, Bruno’s counterpart in Ste. Alvere, was waiting at Le Buisson station and looking grumpy.
“You lost your phone?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
Bruno dropped his hand to the familiar pouch at his waist to find it empty and then remembered the brigadier taking it from him. He had spent the journey dozing, half waking as the little train stopped at St. Emilion and Ste. Foy la Grande and chugged on its way through the vineyards of Castillon and Pomerol. Wine lovers would take this train as an act of pilgrimage. For Bruno, the endless rows of vines were comforting images of the homeland he loved, more felt than seen as he tried to catch up on his sleep.
“Sorry,” he said. “My phone’s being replaced by some fancy model that can’t be wiretapped. We’ve had some trouble that way.”
“Florence from the truffle market has been trying to reach you. Good news, she says. Something about a logbook.”
“How well do you know Didier, Nicco?”
“The market manager? Well enough. Can’t say I like him much. Is he the one behind this fraud business?”
“The logbook’ll tell us. It’s been missing.”
“So it’s an inside job, no great surprise. But how big is it? I just heard about a couple of complaints. It didn’t sound like much.”
“I won’t know until I’ve gone through all the books, but it looks pretty serious.”
“You mean there could be criminal charges?”
“That’ll be up to your mayor.” Bruno wanted to change the subject. “When did Florence call?”
“She called me a couple of times, said she couldn’t reach you. She also said she’d see you at the children’s party today, unless you want to see her sooner. I could take you to her place once we’ve picked up your car.”
“Thanks-but I’ve no idea where she lives.”
“She’s got a little place above a hairdresser’s, just a couple of rooms. Must be cramped with the kids, but she said she’d be moving to St. Denis.”
“That’s right. She’s got a new job there, teaching science at the college.”
Back in his Land Rover, Bruno followed Nicco to the small hairdresser’s shop that served the public housing project on the outskirts of town. Nicco pointed, waved and drove off, and Bruno pressed the cheap plastic button that flanked the narrow door to the upstairs apartment. He heard the sound of a distant buzzer and then steps coming down a staircase.
“Bruno!” Florence said with surprise as she opened the door, at once putting one hand to her hair, another smoothing her apron. Animated, her face had softened and become more… Bruno searched for the word. He could never call her pretty. It made her more attractive, and much less remote. “I hadn’t expected…”
“Nicco picked me up at the station and told me you’d called, about the logbook. But if this is a bad time…”
“I was just getting the children ready for a walk.” She gestured vaguely at the folding double stroller that almost blocked the narrow stairs.
“Then I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Let me get the stroller ready, and you bring the kids down.” He reached in and took the folded stroller from the hall, and with a hurried smile she nodded and went back up the stairs.
Bruno smiled to himself as he looked at his watch. Perhaps two minutes to dress the kids, another two minutes to bring them down, and the rest would be spent changing her clothes and fixing her face. Some women would keep him waiting half an hour. He suspected that Florence would be down more quickly than that. She made it, changed and hair brushed, and with the kids in overcoats and gloves and little woolen hats, in less than five minutes.
“Dora and Daniel,” said Florence. “ ‘Dora’ is short for ‘Dorothee.’ ”
Bruno knelt down to the height of the children and solemnly greeted each of them before lifting them into their seats and fastening the little seatbelts. The children were clean and cheerful and glowing with health.
“I found the logbook,” she said as he rose. “I know how Didier’s mind works. He’s careful. He likes to have proper excuses when things go wrong. I didn’t think he’d destroy the logbook or even hide it somewhere that had no reasonable explanation.”
“As if it had been accidentally misfiled?”
“Exactly,” she said. Somehow, Bruno had automatically taken the helm of the stroller as they walked, Florence striding briskly as she explained her thinking. Rather than search Didier’s office, she’d gone down to the basement storeroom, telling the secretary who gave her the key that she needed to check some of last year’s figures. She’d found the logbook in the third box she looked in, tucked beside a pile of taxe d’habitation returns. She pointed to a red leather accounts book with a black spine peeking from the bag attached to the stroller.
“I guess you’ll need to compare it with the main set of accounts,” she added. “I saw you had sealed that box so I couldn’t examine it. But I checked it against my own records, and two things struck me. The first was that the prices paid at these end-of-day auctions were consistently much lower than prices at the market itself.”
“That suggests a ring,” said Bruno. Florence looked blank. “It means an agreement among the bidders in order to keep the prices low. It can only work over time if the auctioneer, which means Didier, is prepared to go along and sell at the lower price rather than withhold his stock. What’s the second thing?”
“The main buyer almost every time was someone called Pons, and he seemed to be paying less than his official winning bids. And he always paid cash.”
“Was there an initial? There’s a Boniface Pons and a Guillaume.”
Florence shook her head. Bruno cast his mind back to a conversation with Hercule. The old man had said Didier once worked for Boniface Pons, running a truffle plantation before Pons gave up and sold the trees as timber. So Pons would know something of the truffle trade. It was possible that Pons’s name was being used without his knowledge, but either way Bruno reckoned that Florence had come across something far more serious than some cheap Chinese truffles stuffed into a vacuum pack.
“It seems you’ve done my work for me,” he said, turning his head to smile at her. She looked at him directly, her gray-blue eyes suddenly seeming less cold than he remembered.
“Watch out!” she grabbed his arm, as he was about to run the stroller into a lamppost.
“Sorry, I’m not used to this,” he said.
“I do it myself, once I start thinking and I’m suddenly miles away.” She looked down at the children. “They usually warn me when I’m about to run into something.”
“I’m going to have to check this logbook against accounts at the mairie,” Bruno said. “But I expect I’ll see you at the children’s party. There’ll be lots to eat and drink there, so you needn’t bother feeding them beforehand.”
She looked down. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to come. The other mother who usually gives me a lift has gone shopping in Perigueux. I don’t have a car.”
“Mine is parked at your place. I’ll come back from the mairie and pick y
ou up and take you all to St. Denis,” he said, thinking what kind of life it must be, stuck in a small country town with no car, little money and the supermarket at the other end of town.
“And I can bring you back, if you don’t mind waiting while I change out of Father Christmas clothes.” He looked down at the children, now squabbling amicably over a picture book. “I’d hate the kids to lose their illusions too early.”
“If it’s not too much trouble…”
“Not at all.” Bruno checked his watch. “I’ll be back at your place at about four-fifteen because the party starts at five and I’ll need some time to change into my Christmas gear.”
“You can find your way back?”
“I think I can manage that.” He said good-bye to the children and went off down the rue Republique toward the mairie, the logbook tucked inside his jacket.
With Florence’s advice to guide him, Bruno began to list the difference in prices paid at the morning market and the much lower prices at the later auction. Florence was right. One name kept recurring in the lists of buyers in the final auctions. Pons seemed to be buying every time there was an auction, although it wasn’t clear from the logbook whether it was father or son. Leafing back to the previous year, it was still Pons, still buying at every opportunity. It must have been Boniface, since Bill had not yet arrived in the district. Bruno began to list Pons’s purchases, whistling in surprise as he totaled the amounts that the man was buying. There were several days when Pons was spending more on truffles than Bruno’s monthly salary.
He turned back to the spidery writing in the logbooks. Not only was Pons the biggest single buyer, but as Florence had noted he was consistently paying less per gram than others were paying for their batches of truffles, no matter what he bid at the auction. And they in turn were paying about two-thirds of what the customers in Paris and elsewhere were being charged when they bought direct from the market. This was like giving them a license to print money, a guaranteed profit. Was it possible that Pons was getting a discount because of the volume of his purchases?
Bruno checked his figures again. Not only was Pons getting a consistent discount, but because he was invariably listed as paying in cash, that presumably meant Pons would have attended each auction. Bruno found that very hard to believe. But could he prove it? Then he remembered. He opened his own pocket diary and turned back to January, when he and Pons and the baron and others from the St. Denis rugby club had gone to Marseilles for three days to support the town’s team in a tournament there. Pons had been hundreds of miles away with Bruno when he was listed in the market logbook as present and buying truffles cheaply with cash.
So if Pons was not present, then someone-presumably Didier-had been buying on his behalf. And Pons and Didier had worked together before at Pons’s truffle plantation. And what was Pons doing with all the truffles he bought? By Bruno’s calculation, he had spent half a million euros the previous year buying hundreds of kilos. He had to be selling them somewhere. And all that cash, tens of thousands of euros a week, had to come from somewhere. This stank of money laundering, and Bruno began to feel that this inquiry was getting far too big and complex for him. He’d have to call in J-J and the specialist accountants from the fraud squad. The national tax authorities would want to get involved.
As he gathered his notes and logbooks and climbed up the stairs to the photocopying machine, another thought struck Bruno. If the investigation into Pons was launched within the next three months before the election, that would be the end of Pons’s campaign to become mayor. Those votes would drift back to their usual recipient, Gerard Mangin, the veteran mayor who had given Bruno his job and been something of a father figure to him since Bruno’s arrival in St. Denis. Copying page after page of the two logbooks, Bruno pondered the political consequences. The election would be a straight fight between young Bill Pons and his Red-Green coalition and the mayor. There would be no Oedipal battle between father and son to bring the TV cameras to excite the politics of St. Denis out of their usual placid ways.
His copies of the logbooks tucked safely into his briefcase, Bruno headed for the mayor’s office in Ste. Alvere. He greeted the secretary and politely refused her offer of coffee. He paused at the mayor’s door, knowing as he looked down at his notes and logbooks that he was probably holding the political future of St. Denis in his hands. He collected himself, looked once more at his notes and at Alain’s statement as he worked out how to explain the double fraud. He’d start with the tampered vacuum packs and the evidence from the digital counter, and then he’d explain about the auction ring and Pons’s manipulations. It was an odd way, Bruno reflected, to spend the time before he had to become Father Christmas. He knocked, opened the door and went in to greet the energetic and doubtless ambitious young politician, no older than himself, who ran the affairs of Ste. Alvere.
After the usual handshakes and preliminaries, Bruno launched in. “Monsieur le Maire,” he began. “I’ve come up with some troubling information. You’re being doubly cheated. The truffles from your market are being tampered with after the vacuum packs are sealed. This is the source of the complaints you’ve received. Didier, your market manager, is responsible.”
The mayor stood up, his fists clenched. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater over black jeans and looked fit. Bruno recalled seeing him play rugby for his town only a few years before, and he’d been pretty good. The cigarettes didn’t seem to have slowed him down. “Didier?” the mayor asked. “You sure about this?”
“Here is a copy of a sworn statement from one of the market staff explaining how the sealed packages were reopened.” Bruno handed Alain’s document across the wide desk. “Alain gave this statement to me voluntarily. I don’t think we should try charging him. We’re better off having him as a cooperative witness.”
“Didier, what a damn fool,” said the mayor, scanning Alain’s statement. He took a Disque Bleu from the pack on his desk. Bruno thought of the DEFENSE DE FUMER signs all over every mairie in France. But a mayor could make his own rules.
Bruno went on to explain how the town was being cheated out of tens of thousands of euros each month. “The prices paid at the auctions held at the end of the day are much lower than they should be. And it’s getting worse. More and more of the truffles, particularly the high-grade ones, are being sold at these special auctions where the town makes very little profit. By my calculation, if these items were sold at the proper price, the town would be at least half a million euros better off.”
“Putain,” said the mayor, blowing out a stream of smoke. “This could cost me the election. Who else knows of this?”
Bruno decided to ignore the question. When politicians asked who else knew about an embarrassment, it usually meant they were tempted to hush things up. “There is also strong evidence that this final auction is being used to launder cash. The records say that it comes from Boniface Pons, although I can prove that on some occasions he wasn’t present when the cash was supposedly paid. As you know, Pons started a truffle plantation that was managed by Didier.”
The mayor nodded slowly. Bruno noticed that his healthy pallor had taken on a grayish tinge.
“Since Pons always paid cash this was probably lost on your accountants and may not have come to your attention. I have to recommend that you bring in the Police Nationale at this point. At any rate, I have to report my findings.”
“Half a million euros,” said the mayor, slumping down into his chair.
24
To Bruno’s surprise, all three mayoral candidates awaited him around the Christmas tree in the dining room of the retirement home, the largest indoor hall in St. Denis. Mathilde, the magnificently bosomed former nurse who ran the home, was engaging all three in stilted conversation while elderly ladies scurried back and forth with plates of sandwiches and cakes from the kitchens. They had clearly been baking all week, vying to outdo one another with their sacristains and madeleines, tartes aux noix and galettes for the children. There
were bowls of raw baby carrots and tangerine segments, apples in bowls for bobbing and long rows of plastic glasses filled with orange juice and milk. Everything to fill with delight the soul of a healthy five-year-old, thought Bruno, and healthy forty-year-olds as well, even when clad in red velvet and a false white beard.
“Ah, our Father Christmas has arrived,” said Mathilde. “You look splendid, Bruno. It is you under all that?”
“Ho, ho, ho, it is indeed, Mathilde,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her thickly powdered cheeks and shaking hands with the three men. Pons senior, evidently still smarting from having Bruno’s wine poured down the front of his trousers, gave him a cold nod.
“I’m very glad we were able to combine all the parties this way and leave politics out of it,” said Bill with a brittle and unconvincing brightness. His features were drawn and strained. He stood to the left of the mayor and his father to the right. Neither one looked at the other or seemed ready to acknowledge his presence in any way. “After all, it’s for the children.”
“And after that incident with the manure pond, you wouldn’t have been allowed to hold it at your place anyway,” said the mayor drily.
“You certainly took care of that,” said Bill, sourly. He began to speak again, but the mayor interrupted and spoke over him.
“And, Bruno, we have to thank Boniface here for a most generous donation of a thousand euros to buy presents for the children. We just about cleaned out the toy department at the supermarket, and Mathilde’s dear ladies here have been wrapping them all day while you were in Bordeaux. How did that go, by the way?”
“I’ll give you a full report tomorrow,” Bruno said, adjusting the hook that attached the white beard to his ears. Mention of Bordeaux reminded him with a jolt of Isabelle and the ambush at Arcachon later that night. He felt a flash of memory of his own days in the military, the rush of adrenaline before an operation, coming to terms with the fear, mouth dry and unable to eat. And then he remembered the sniper’s bullet that caught him in the hip and had spun him bleeding into the snow. He hoped she stayed well behind the Fusiliers Marins, as she’d said she would.
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