Fatal Pursuit

by Martin Walker

  “Too soon to tell, but I liked him from the little I saw,” Bruno replied. “He seemed good-natured and friendly, and he danced well. Apart from his passion for cars, that’s about all I can say. But if Annette likes him, that’s good enough for me.”

  “I think it’s more than just liking him,” Fabiola said. “Did you see how she looked at him? I hope it works out for her. But it won’t be easy, her staying here in the Périgord while he’s in London most of the time. I’m sure they can have thrilling reunions at rallies and car auctions, but you don’t get to know a man that way.”

  Bruno looked at her with amused affection. “Gilles was in Paris and you were down here, but it worked out for you two.”

  “Gilles was ready to leave Paris and join me here. I don’t think that’s the case for Annette and George, and I don’t want to see her hurt. Do you think he’s ready to make some kind of commitment? Annette will need that.”

  “He drove all the way down here from London to be with her, so he’s obviously more than just interested.”

  “That’s not what I mean by ‘commitment,’ Bruno. You know what I’m talking about. She seems so much more interested than he is, and that imbalance is not reassuring. And he’s not just good-looking, he’s seriously handsome, the sort of man who’s had lots of girls. Don’t you think so?”

  Among the many things that baffled Bruno about women was the time and effort they spent analyzing the love affairs of their friends. They seemed to make it all so complicated. Bruno liked to recall a scene from his favorite movie, Les Enfants du Paradis, when the actress Arletty turns to the tongue-tied young man who is besotted with her, lets her gown fall and says, “L’amour, c’est si simple.” Bruno knew it was never quite so easy. There was an old Périgord proverb about love being like food: it changed with the time it spent cooking. But he could never see how it helped for others to pick endlessly over the passions and yearnings of their friends.

  “It’s early days for them,” he said. “They met at the Angoulême rally this summer and again at the car show in Paris, so this is only their third meeting. He isn’t even staying at her place.”

  “They haven’t been to bed together yet,” Fabiola replied. “She’s nervous about that. Annette’s not very experienced, and she thinks he is.”

  “That’s for them to work out,” said Bruno, and looked at her steadily. “Are you ready to ride on?”

  “You aren’t over your affair with Pamela,” she said, ignoring his question.

  “Nor is she, so that makes two of us,” he replied, irritated and aware of a childish urge to have the last word. He certainly didn’t want to pick over the bones of their parting to talk to Fabiola about his feelings. He touched his heels to Hector’s flanks, and his horse sprang forward. Bruno could almost feel Hector’s pleasure at being unleashed, bounding almost at once into a canter with Balzac lumbering along behind. Bruno pressed his horse to go faster, galloping to leave Fabiola’s probing remarks in his wake and feel nothing but the wind in his face.

  Forty minutes later, after stripping off his shirt to wash in the stable sink because there was no time to shower, Bruno walked into Fauquet’s café. The clock on the mairie tower was striking nine, and the market stalls with the foods from Alsace were already busy. Some in the crowd were eating portions of flammküchen, thin slices of pastry covered with onions, bacon and melted cheese. Bruno’s mouth began to water as his nostrils caught the aroma. Bruno was also tempted by another stall that was offering bowls of sausage chunks with choucroute and plastic glasses of Riesling. But he could see Thomas and Ingrid were already installed at a window table in the café. Before them were cups of coffee, the local newspaper and a basket of croissants and pains au chocolat. Ingrid was glancing through the weekly magazine of Sud Ouest, and Thomas handed Bruno the paper. It was already opened to a photograph of Sylvestre’s Bugatti on the quayside, surrounded by a throng of people.

  “The mayor will be pleased with all the publicity,” said Thomas. He tore off a piece of his croissant to give to Balzac.

  “I wonder if we’d have done so well if Sylvestre hadn’t come with that old Bugatti,” Bruno said, swallowing a mouthful of croissant and regretting that he hadn’t bought some hot flammküchen for them all. But his friends probably got enough of that at home, he told himself as he caught sight of Annette half running through the market to the café.

  “Bruno, you’ve got to help,” she said, bursting in. “George has got a terrible migraine, so he can’t navigate for me, and I can’t be in the rally without a codriver. I asked Yveline, but she’s on safety duty with the rest of the gendarmes. Please, please, please, will you take George’s place? I won’t be able to enter the national rally unless I do well here today, and there’s nobody else I can ask.”

  “I’m not nearly good enough to be a codriver,” he said, half choking in surprise and with the effort of swallowing a half-chewed croissant. He drank from his glass of water. “I’m not qualified, Annette. What about Sylvestre?”

  “I tried him, and he’s competing with that Indian friend of his. And you don’t have to drive, just navigate for me.”

  “Navigate?” he asked. “The rally track is clearly marked. You can’t get lost.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You navigate by telling me in advance of every bend and obstacle coming up.” From her shoulder bag she took out what looked like two rolls of paper towels on wooden handles and brandished them at him. “I’ve got your track roll here. You just have to read it out so I know what’s coming.”

  “But I’ve never done this,” said Bruno. “And the last time I drove with you I got carsick.”

  “You’ll be too busy concentrating on the scroll,” she said. “Please, Bruno, this really means a lot to me.”

  He looked at the scroll, realizing that by turning the first wooden handle he could see line-by-line a detailed description of the road ahead. After the start of the rally, he read, there was an eighty-meter straightaway on tarmac, followed by a ninety-degree left turn onto gravel, then a forty-meter straightaway that led into a sixty-degree left turn into a dip with a bad camber…

  He recognized the descriptions, having driven the track twice and walked parts of it when checking the hay bales that would protect the spectators.

  “Did you make this roll with George Young?” he asked.

  “I spent days on it before he arrived, driving the route with a tape recorder and then transcribing the tape onto my laptop and finding a printer that could make a continuous roll. All you have to do is read it out.”

  “I couldn’t hear myself think when you drove me around that motor-cross track,” he said. “You won’t hear me.”

  “I’ve got microphones and headphones in the helmets. And I know the track almost by heart. But if I don’t have a codriver, I’ll be disqualified.”

  “I never thought of you as a man to turn down a damsel in distress,” said Ingrid, grinning at him.

  “Why turn down the opportunity for a new experience? You know you’ll regret it if you say no,” said Thomas, grinning as his wife had.

  “And she’ll never forgive you,” said Ingrid.

  “Right, I’ll never forgive you,” said Annette, laughing as Bruno looked from one face to another and rolled his eyes. She knew he’d have to say yes.

  “Do I have time to finish my breakfast?” he asked.

  “Five minutes. The rally starts at two, but they’ll close the track at noon. Until then we can do test runs. We’ll do one slowly so you get used to it, a second one at medium speed and then a third all out. By then you should have learned to handle the roll and judge when I need to hear your instructions.”

  “So simple,” said Ingrid. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Only the roll can go wrong,” said Annette. “If you lose control of the paper, it unravels and piles up all over the car and blocks my vision. I had that happen once, and it’s not good. That’s why you have to get some practice. I’ll wait.”

/>   She folded her arms and stood at the end of the table, her jaw set and her eyes fixed on him but smiling at him expectantly. He was reminded of the first time he’d seen her, in the square outside the café in her first week in her new job, showing off out of sheer nervousness by driving too fast. Annette had gotten a parking ticket from him and a speeding ticket from Sergeant Jules. And she was only spared a charge of failing to stop for a pedestrian crossing when Florence realized it was her first job as magistrate and refused to press charges. And now she was a good friend who had learned to temper her own radical views and passion for the environment with a healthy respect for the customs and peculiarities of the Périgord. Bruno had come to respect her professionalism. And in an avuncular kind of way, which was a new sensation for him, Bruno was fond of her.

  “This isn’t your car,” he said in the parking lot, looking at the unfamiliar white Citroën DS3 festooned with advertising stickers for motor oils and car accessories and a big garage in Sarlat. Annette opened the door to reveal internal roll bars forming a protective cage. “Where’s your blue Peugeot?”

  “This is my race car,” she replied. “It’s a turbo, borrowed from the Citroën garage in Brive. The owner’s son, Fabrice, usually drives it, but he broke his leg waterskiing, so for once I’m being sponsored, which makes it my big chance to get into the national championship. That’s why I need you. I can’t give up this opportunity.”

  “What happened to Fabrice’s navigator?”

  “That would be me. That’s why I’m being given his place.”

  Bruno took the helmet from the passenger’s seat and eased himself into the car, feeling the high sides of the special rally seat enclose him. Annette climbed in her side and showed him how the double seat belts worked, straps over each shoulder and two more for the belt, meeting at a circular lock on his belly, like the one he recalled from parachute training in the army. He put on the helmet, and Annette leaned over again to adjust his microphone and plug the trailing wire into a socket between the seats. She did the same for her own audio feed and began a countdown test. He heard her perfectly and then did his own countdown, and she interrupted to say it was good.

  “Now try unrolling this while we’re parked,” she said, putting the first roll into a bracket attached to the glove compartment. Between his feet was a second bracket, and she bent down to insert the main roll.

  “Just turn the handles on the top roll to feed the paper and read out the instructions to me as they come,” she said. “Keep your feet braced, and whatever you do, don’t let your legs tear the paper or we’re sunk. Try it.”

  It was easy enough, sitting in the parking lot, but she kept him practicing for twenty minutes before rewinding the roll, clicking in her own seat belts and then setting off for the start of the course on the road to Les Eyzies. Once on the dirt track, she kept her speed down, and Bruno had little difficulty controlling the paper roll. He even had time to glance up briefly at the route ahead, checking the instructions. The special seats and the double belts kept him securely in place, even when she began to pick up speed. The strain was on his neck, to stop his head from swinging from side to side as she accelerated out of the sharp bends.

  “Okay,” Annette said. “This time, don’t touch the paper, just watch the road and get familiar with the track. I’ll go fairly fast but nowhere near full speed.”

  She got onto the gravel track and shot away, moving slickly through second gear and into third before braking hard for the corner and then skidding as she stepped on the accelerator. Bruno felt stunned by the contrast between his own sense of the sedate pace he would take to drive this route and Annette’s suicidal speed. Corners came up far too fast, and bends were whipped through so hard he felt the safety belts cutting into his flesh as they held him in place. Trees loomed before him, and he closed his eyes, sure that a crash was coming. Then somehow they were skidding sideways but still on the track, and he felt the panic rising again, certain that they were about to hit a pile of hay bales, and his neck was aching with the strain of keeping his head from jerking from side to side. He was meant to be learning the route, but his senses were too overwhelmed by fear and tension for anything to sink in.

  Bruno gritted his teeth; he would have to get used to this. As the road climbed up into the woods around St. Cirq, he felt his reactions start to adjust to the much-higher speeds and to Annette’s mastery of the car. He began to anticipate the corners and brace himself for the car’s leap into the air when it crossed even the smallest ridge. He kept telling himself that Annette was completely in control when the rear of the car skidded sharply to one side. It was simply the way that she cornered.

  “Let’s do that one more time, without using the roll,” he said, when she pulled up at the finish. He heard the breathlessness in his own voice. “I’m just starting to get the hang of this.”

  Without a word, Annette clicked a stopwatch on the dashboard and set off again at speed, but this time he felt ready, his senses catching up with the sheer pace at which the inputs were coming and his body anticipating the lurches as the g-forces tried to hurl him from side to side. Somehow his brain had learned that slamming into a tree was not inevitable and that Annette would hit the accelerator just as she went into the bend rather than wait until she was coming out of it. And he knew he was recognizing bends and corners, the short straightaways and the dips where the car bottomed out. The sense of panic was still there, but diminished. He felt he was back in control of himself.

  “Okay,” he said when Annette stopped again. “I think I’m ready to try it with the roll.”

  The next trip was worse. Bruno had almost no time to glance up at the route, and his eyes lost focus as the car bounced over bumps in the road and again when it seemed to take to the air as they went over even modest hillcrests. At one point when Annette braked very hard to go into a sharp right-hand bend, the g-force sent the paper ballooning out between his legs. Then Bruno briefly lost his place on the roll and realized he had to keep his thumb on the paper to mark each line as he read it. Somehow he got through to the end of the ride, and as Annette braked he closed his eyes and waited for his breathing to return to normal. His hands were trembling, and he felt exhausted from the intensity of the concentration.

  “Not bad for a beginner, Bruno. That was under seventeen minutes,” she said. “Now we’ll do it again, only faster. If I’m going to win this thing, we’ll have to do it in fifteen.”

  5

  Two laps into the next training session, Annette distracted him by saying, “Someone very good is on our tail, and I think I know who it is. Hang on tight.”

  Bruno hadn’t thought it was possible to go any faster, but Annette raised her pace. Still, he was starting to anticipate each place on the paper roll by the way she shifted gears and braked and by the direction of the g-force upon him at each bend. He learned to start reading out the next instruction as she accelerated out of each bend and to brace his legs to stop the paper from ballooning when the car briefly took flight as she topped each hill.

  “He’s very good,” he heard Annette say as Bruno’s tailbone made him wince when she slammed through a dip in the road. “He’ll be the one to beat.”

  Bruno saw her eyes flick to the rearview mirror and was amazed that she could spare time or attention for anything but the road ahead. He felt he had never gone so fast in his life and had never heard anything louder than the roar of the engine as she pushed the tachometer into the red zone. But he kept up his commentary on the road ahead and felt he was beginning to know the route well enough to take the occasional brief glance at the road.

  “That was our fastest yet,” said Annette, slowing and braking to turn into the assembly area. “I think we’ll be fine. How do you feel?”

  “I feel very grateful we have air bags,” he replied. “As long as they’re working, I’ll be okay.”

  She turned to him in surprise as the car drew to a halt. “They aren’t working. We have to dismantle all the air bags f
or serious rally cars. Some of the jolts we take when we land after a hillcrest would trigger them.”

  Now she tells me, thought Bruno, trying to keep his face from revealing his dismay.

  Half-a-dozen rally cars were already gathered, most of them with their hoods up, drivers leaning over their engines. Small knots of spectators were strolling around the cars, and Philippe Delaron, the local Sud Ouest correspondent, was taking photos, posing excited small boys against the cars.

  “What about that car behind us?” Bruno asked.

  “There won’t be a car behind us in the rally. We race against the clock, not against one another. That would be too dangerous. Here they are now.”

  A white Volkswagen pulled up sharply beside them, two figures inside, unidentifiable in their crash helmets. The driver pulled off his helmet, and Sylvestre’s face emerged.

  “I didn’t know you went in for this sport,” Sylvestre said to Bruno while waving at Annette. He called across to her, “I bet you’ll be the fastest woman on the circuit. But where’s George?”

  “He’s sick,” she replied calmly. “Bruno stepped into the breach. He’s my secret weapon. Go too fast, and he’ll give you a speeding ticket.”

  As Sylvestre smiled and drove off, Bruno’s mobile rang. He had to release his seat belts to get to it and saw it was Fabiola.

  “I’m at the funeral parlor, looking at the late Monsieur Hugon,” she said. “I can’t see much out of the ordinary. He’s been dead at least thirty-six hours, maybe more. And the undertaker washed him down and cleaned him when he arrived, so there’s no body waste to examine. There’s some interesting irritation around the nose and mouth and in his throat. It could be no more than a cold, and he was certainly a prime candidate for a heart attack.”