Albert eyed him doubtfully and pulled a scarf from his pocket. “Tie this around your face. It’s fire retardant.” He pulled down his own protective mask. He plucked a flashlight from the Velcro on the chest of his jacket and led the way into the smoke. The bright yellow of his jacket seemed to disappear at once. Bruno could follow him only by the swirls Albert’s movement left in the smoke.
The flashlight was almost useless, but at least it picked out the first of the stairs. Albert leaned down to touch them and shouted, “Not too hot, but it could catch anytime. You look around the ground floor, I’ll get the ladder to that upper window.” He handed his flashlight to Bruno and retraced his steps to the door.
The first two ground-floor rooms were empty, and the third had a door so hot that Bruno did not dare open it. He went back to the stairs and began to climb slowly, controlling the threads of panic that seemed to run like electricity from the scar on his arm into his brain by counting and testing the heat of each tread.
He reached a landing where the wall was hot, but the stairs then turned away from it and seemed cooler. He climbed on, and the smoke was thinner. His flashlight picked out two doors straight ahead, neither of them warm. He opened the first, and smoke seemed to be pouring from the ceiling. He clamped his mouth shut against the smoke and the fear, but the room seemed unoccupied. He stubbed his foot against a bed, felt along its empty length and turned back to the other door.
Something was blocking it. He used his ax to lever the door open. His brain was shrieking at him to run, to leave, to save himself in flight. He knelt down to feel the blockage. It was a piece of rolled-up cloth that he was able to tug away. More smoke was coming from the ceiling, and Bruno knew he had better be fast. He couldn’t breathe in this much longer. He felt himself going dizzy, and his self-control was ebbing.
The screams had kept him going in Sarajevo, an appeal for help from men he knew whose flesh was burning that had made him plunge again and again into the flames to haul them out. But there were no screams here. They’re dead already, a part of his brain was insisting. It’s wasted effort. They’re corpses. The smoke got them. They suffocated. Get out and save yourself.
Bruno fought the fear and made himself think of water. Cool water. He was swimming, swimming in the river with Isabelle. No, it was colder than that, he told himself. It was snowing. He was in the mountains, and the snow was all around.
He groped along the wall and reached a bed, and then his hand met a very thin leg. He felt along the length of the unconscious child, picked up the limp body and staggered to the window. Holding the child against his chest with his left arm, he used his right to break the window open with his ax, almost tripping as his feet encountered another body crumpled beneath the window. He leaned out and gulped at the clean night air.
“This way,” he shouted as the ladder swerved toward him from the adjoining window. A fireman began clambering up as Bruno stuffed his ax into a pocket and held out the child in his arms. Smoke billowed thickly around him.
“There’s another child,” Bruno shouted down to Albert, standing by the controls of the ladder.
The first fireman took the child from Bruno’s arms and handed the small figure down to a second man who had clambered up below him. Bruno pulled his head and body back into the thickening smoke and held his breath as he hauled up the second child at his feet and passed it through the window.
“Get out now,” Albert was shouting, and Bruno leaned out to grab the ladder with his right hand. He hauled a leg over the windowsill and then felt his ax tumble from his pocket, and he gripped the ladder tightly as he sensed it begin to swivel away from the window, and the room seemed to explode behind him. Hugging the metal step with both arms, his legs swaying in the breeze, Bruno felt a scalding heat on the back of his legs, and a great rush of flame roared past him into the night.
“You damn fool,” Albert was saying from a great distance. “I told you to stay on the ground floor.”
There was white foam all over him, and then a familiar face was looking into his eyes. It was Fabiola, pulling open his jacket to put a stethoscope against his heart.
“The kids will be all right, Bruno,” he heard her say. “You got them out in time.”
27
Fabiola stood beside him with a glass of milk, saying it would soothe his throat and nourish him. He felt his chest burn with every breath. He was in a strange bed, lying on his back, but he could see his feet. Both his legs were suspended in the air, a light gauze dressing on them. Dr. Gelletreau was at the foot of the bed, looking up from a chart to smile at him. Fabiola raised his head and eased a straw into his mouth. Bruno drank, realizing with relief that he was at the medical center in St. Denis. If he’d been badly hurt, they’d have moved him to the big hospital in Perigueux.
“You’re a lucky man,” Gelletreau said. “Mainly second-degree burns, including some bad ones on the back of your calves. The smoke inhalation doesn’t seem too bad. A few days rest and you’ll be fine.”
“I have to be in Bordeaux at three this afternoon,” Bruno said.
“Too late,” Gelletreau said. “It’s almost three already.”
Bruno looked out the window. It was bright daylight, and he could see the sun on the stone of the mairie across the river.
“Don’t worry,” said Fabiola. “J-J knows all about it. Everything is taken care of.”
“The Chinese girls?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse and it hurt to talk.
“A boy and a girl,” Fabiola said, but her face was grim. “They’ll be okay.”
“A boy? I’m sure I saw two girls when we were there.”
“You did. We both did. One of the girls didn’t make it.”
“Did I leave her in the room?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“No, she was in the front of the house. She’d have been dead before you arrived. You saved what there was to save, but Albert says he’s never letting you near a fire again.”
“Fine with me,” Bruno said, waving away the milk and sinking back onto the bed.
“There’s something else,” Fabiola said. “Those Chinese children, when I examined them, they’d been abused, sexually abused, not once but repeatedly and over a considerable time. We’re waiting for a Chinese translator and a child psychiatrist to try and find out what happened to them.”
Bruno closed his eyes. That meant they can’t have been Minxin’s nieces. If only he’d gotten the children registered and into school he might have prevented all this. He’d been meaning to do that ever since he saw the girls at the restaurant.
“The girl who died,” Fabiola went on. “She wasn’t alone. There was a big adult male with her. They died in bed together from the smoke.”
“Do we know who he was?”
“They’re checking the teeth with local dentists. It’s the only way he’ll be identified.”
Arson and a double murder, thought Bruno. The Vietnamese were in trouble. He hoped Tran and Bao Le had not been part of it.
“You’ve got some visitors,” Gelletreau said. “I think you’re well enough to see them.”
Fabiola opened the door and the mayor came in, then stood to one side and held the door wide open. A camera flashed from the outer room. Philippe Delaron again, thought Bruno wearily; he’s making a living out of me.
“Look at these, Bruno,” said the mayor, coming to the bed and leafing through some prints. “By the way, I fed your chickens and dog and gave him a walk. In fact he’s in the back of my car.”
He thrust one of the photos close to Bruno’s face. It showed him leaning out of the window, handing one of the children to a waiting fireman while fires leaped from a lower window. There was another, with Bruno swinging on the firemen’s ladder and silhouetted against a ball of flame erupting from the room behind him.
“Tomorrow’s front page, and Philippe says he’s also sold them to Paris Match. That’s why he wanted the picture of you in the hospital, to round out the story.”
“Did you know that young Pons has been arrested?” Bruno said.
“J-J called to tell me. That means I win the election, as Pamela might say. She’s waiting outside, wants to know if you’d like to see her.”
Of course he wanted to see her. “Does she know about Pons?”
“I just told her.”
“How did she take it?”
The mayor shrugged as only a Frenchman can, a gesture that carried with it all the weight of the world’s imponderables and prime among them the glorious mystery of women.
“Have you heard anything from J-J about Isabelle? You know she was shot?”
“J-J said to tell you she’s fine.”
“What have you heard about the bodies they found at the fire?” Bruno asked.
“No identification as yet. There’s a young inspecteur from Bergerac waiting to see you who wants to talk about that, when you’re ready.”
“That’ll be Jofflin. Bring him in first, there’s things that have to be cleared up.”
Jofflin too came into the room brandishing some photos, but his were gray and fuzzy.
“The forensics people used infrared and then computer enhancement on those charred prints in Didier’s wastebasket. This is what they got. I think he was being blackmailed.”
Bruno tried with little success to control the revulsion he felt at the images of Didier with a naked young Chinese boy. It somehow made it worse that Didier had kept his socks on. Bruno looked more closely at the chaise longue on which Didier was lying.
“I think I recognize the furniture from Pons’s Auberge, the house where the children were.” He felt sick. If only he’d pressed the issue sooner about getting the kids into school, this would never have happened. He hadn’t even known there was a boy as well as the nieces.
“There’s no doubt it’s the same Chinese boy as the one here, the one you pulled out of the house,” Jofflin said.
Bruno handed the photos to the mayor. “A hell of a cop I am. Didn’t even know someone was running a pedophile brothel in my backyard. That’s another crime we’ll be charging young Pons with, and to think he might have been your successor.”
“I tried to call his father, to let him know his son was arrested and in the hospital, but I haven’t tracked him down yet,” said the mayor. “I know they were badly estranged, but still, a son is a son. The tie of blood is strong.”
Bruno nodded, feeling very tired, and wondering just what Pons might feel. He turned to Jofflin. “Do you have enough to arrest Boniface Pons for the truffle fraud?”
“More than enough,” the young inspecteur replied. “We’ve already been in touch with the tax authorities about the money laundering. He’s not at home, not in the new office he set up in St. Felix, not answering his phones. I was going to ask you where that plantation of his was, we might find him there.”
“It’s on that back road behind the cemetery,” said the mayor. “The one that leads down past the Lespinasse garage.”
“Of course,” said Bruno, suddenly making the one connection that threw everything in a different light. “I’ve been a fool. They conned us all, the two of them.”
He tried to sit up, but his legs were immobilized.
“Get my feet out of these damn straps and bring one of those doctors in here. I’ve got work to do.”
The mayor protested, but Jofflin unhooked Bruno’s ankles from the supporting straps and helped Bruno to his feet.
“Pass me those trousers on the chair,” he said, clinging to the bedpost as he sat gingerly, his burned legs stretched out before him.
Jofflin held up the trousers with a smile. They were in tatters. Another new uniform to go on his expense account, thought Bruno.
“Pass them over and hand me those scissors on the counter.” He snipped off the legs and was left with a pair of serviceable shorts. Jofflin helped him ease them over the gauze bandages, looked in the closet and held out the shirt and jacket that were hanging there. They stank of smoke and were still smeared with foam, but they would do. There were no socks, but Bruno jammed his feet into his boots and stood, swaying as the dizziness hit him, just as Fabiola reentered the room.
“You’re mad,” she said. “You’re in no condition to be up.”
The faces of Pamela and the baron peered around the door, and in the distance Bruno could hear the clattering sound of a helicopter. He tore his eyes away from Pamela’s worried face.
“Which dentist did Boniface Pons use?” he asked the mayor, who shook his head.
“Same one as me,” said the baron from the door. “Piguin in Siorac; I’ve met Pons in the waiting room there.”
“Get Piguin to look at the teeth of that corpse in the Auberge,” Bruno said to Jofflin. “I’ll bet you a fortune it’s old Pons.”
“Are you going to lie down?” Fabiola asked harshly.
“No. I’m going with the inspecteur here to Pons’s place. All the answers will be there.”
“You’re going nowhere,” Fabiola snapped. “Get back into bed.”
“It struck me when you reminded me about Pons’s plantation,” he said to the mayor, but sitting back on the bed. “That’s where some of the campers were parked overnight before heading on to Arcachon, where Pons’s son was directing the landing of a shipload of illegal immigrants. They fooled us into thinking that they were estranged, but the two of them were in league all along. They were in it together, father and son, the truffles and the Chinese market, the alliance with the Chinese, the pedophile brothel and above all the election.”
“But they were opposing each other in the election,” the mayor objected.
“No, they weren’t,” said Bruno, remembering that book on British intelligence that had been on Hercule’s desk, the passage about a British agent becoming mayor of some small village in order to issue ID cards and ration books for other agents.
“Old Pons was only running to take enough votes from you so that he’d get his son elected. And guess why? Who issues identity cards and birth and marriage certificates? You do, at the mairie. What better place to give a bunch of illegal immigrants good French identity papers than a mairie under your own control?”
“But what about that fight over closing the sawmill?” the mayor said, speaking loudly above the sound of the helicopter. It sounded as if it were almost overhead.
“That was how they conned us, don’t you see?” Bruno replied. “Pons wasn’t going to lose a damn thing by it. He already had another sawmill site lined up, and he told me and the baron about his plans to develop the sawmill site here in St. Denis for housing. With his son in the mairie granting development approval, he’d have made a fortune.”
“And on top of all that, the son was providing little Chinese girls,” said Jofflin. “And little boys to blackmail Didier with at the truffle market.” Jofflin was thumbing through a notebook, found the page he wanted and looked up. “Piguin in Siorac is on the list of the dentists we’re checking for the teeth. By the way, we found this in Boniface Pons’s Mercedes. It seems like some sort of local diary.”
“Give me some gloves,” Bruno said. The mayor handed him a pair of medical gloves from a box on a side table. Bruno slipped them on, took the bag from Jofflin and pulled out what he was sure would be Hercule’s truffle journal. There was no name on the inside cover, but the first page was dated December 1982, and it began: “Three fine brumales from the oak behind the hunters’ hide just off the Vergt road, total weight 340 grams.”
Bruno turned to the last entry, stopping when he saw one of Hercule’s tidy sketches. A lump came into his throat when there was one of Gigi, front paw and tail raised, nose high and sniffing, his eyes fixed on something off the page. There was a gentle caricature of the baron and an account of the wines the three of them had shared at dinner. Beneath that was evidence of a new technology, a GPS reference for a site deep in the woods where Hercule had found truffles. The last entry listed the sale that Bruno had made in Ste. Alvere and a final phrase, “If anyone can get to the
bottom of this fraud, it will be Bruno.”
“This is it,” said Bruno. “Hercule’s journal, the one he left to me in his will.”
“What was it doing in Pons’s car?” the mayor asked.
Bruno could hardly hear him for the sound of the helicopter landing on the sports field behind the medical center. He looked out the window as the noise of the engines died, and J-J and the brigadier emerged, stooping under the slowing rotor blades.
“By being in Pons’s car, it provides the evidence we need that Pons was connected to Hercule’s murder,” Bruno said. “That’s why I have to get to Pons’s house. More evidence will be there. There’ll be a will, with his son as beneficiary. There’ll be paperwork on the truffles trade, and I’ll bet the cash he used at the truffle market came from his Chinese friends. But what I’m really looking for…” Bruno broke off as J-J and the brigadier eased past the baron and Pamela at the door and came into the room.
“What I’m really looking for,” Bruno repeated, “is evidence that Pons was directly responsible for the murder of Hercule.”
“I think I can help you there. We’ve established a motive,” said the brigadier. “But should you be up and about?”
“No, he shouldn’t,” said Fabiola. “But you try stopping him.”
“What’s the motive?” Bruno asked.
“Clear the room, J-J,” the brigadier said, and stood silent at the foot of the bed while J-J escorted Fabiola, Jofflin and the others into the hallway outside. He closed the door and leaned against it. The brigadier turned to check the room and nodded his thanks.
“It’s Hercule’s memoirs, from the safety-deposit box,” he began. “Hercule incriminates Pons not just as a torturer in the Algerian War, but as a crook. Hercule says it all happened at a detention camp called Ameziane, and it was hushed up at the time. He says Pons took bribes from their families to ease up on the torture. He claims Pons would specialize in rounding up children, and then taking money to free them after he’d had his fun with them.”
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