Fatal Pursuit

by Martin Walker

  “We’re trying to draw a map of what we think is a very sophisticated financial network,” she said. “Sylvestre and Farid are the middlemen, taking the money at the auctions from the buyers and then distributing it to the supposed sellers. And from what we can see, Farid is the one in charge, the one making the connections. Sylvestre is just the facilitator. Some of the business is legitimate; we’re trying to identify the part that isn’t. So far we’ve found five people involved in different European countries, each of them with known terrorist connections. We’re also tracking the bank accounts, the routes and companies through which the money is moved. Once we’ve mapped the whole network, we’ll pounce.”

  “How close are you?”

  “Pretty close, but we might not have mapped the whole thing.”

  “You know Sylvestre is heading for China in a couple of weeks? That’s the deadline he’s set for the deal with Oudinot to go through.”

  “Thanks, I didn’t know that. It means we might be facing a deadline when he’ll be out of our jurisdiction.” She made a note to herself on a pad and then looked up. “Anything else.”

  “Yes. When you asked me to conduct discreet surveillance I installed a couple of cameras left over from a previous case, the one your American friend Nancy was involved in. I’ll need to change the batteries tonight, but I imagine you have much-better equipment.”

  “You know that’s illegal.” She raised an eyebrow.

  “No, it’s not. I’m a licensed hunter and known to be a wildlife enthusiast. Monitoring wildlife movements on a friend’s land with cameras is perfectly legal. And I’m not responsible if the wildlife has moved them so they unfortunately cover the entrance to a house rather than the undergrowth.”

  “You might just get away with that here in the Périgord,” she said. “What’s the recording system? I hope it’s not transmitting on Wi-Fi. If their computers are good enough, they might pick that up.”

  “No Wi-Fi. It’s on a small data card, and Sylvestre was working on what looked like a top-end Apple laptop. I don’t know what Freddy was using, or rather Farid, as you call him.”

  “How friendly are you with Oudinot, the man whose land borders Sylvestre’s house?”

  “Very friendly, and he often asks after you. We met him a couple of times at marchés nocturnes that summer when we were together.”

  “I can’t say I recall him, but I suppose I might remember him if I saw him again. Would he let us use his property for proper surveillance?”

  “He’d be delighted. He hates Sylvestre, or at least he did, but who knows, now that they’re getting close to a deal? The problem is that I don’t know how discreet Oudinot would be. But there’s a small hut on his land less than ten meters from Sylvestre’s house that would be good for surveillance except for the noise of the geese. I told you about them.”

  “Could you arrange for the geese to be withdrawn once we’re installed?”

  “Probably. We could say it’s a goodwill gesture to help the deal go through. I can do that today. What about Freddy’s trip to Agen when his phone was in Sarlat? J-J was worried that he might know his phone’s being monitored.”

  “We’re cool on that. We got him on the security camera at Agen station, meeting someone of interest to us from Toulouse. It helped that you sent us the photos with the license plates.”

  “I’m glad. Other than Oudinot, how else can I help?”

  “Get me those data cards from your cameras tonight.”

  “Do you want me to remove the cameras at the same time?” he asked.

  “Why would I want to interfere in the perfectly legal wildlife-monitoring techniques of a law-abiding citizen?” She smiled, a wicked twinkle in her eye that touched Bruno’s heart. He’d never really get over her. He rose to go.

  “Just one more thing,” she said, a little hesitantly. “Would you mind leaving Balzac here with me for the day?”

  “Of course,” he said. The dog had been her gift to him when his previous hound had been killed in another operation in which they worked together. “Balzac would like that.”

  He left, walked back to his van and then stopped at the wine cave of Hubert de Montignac, whose extraordinary collection of vintages of Château Pétrus and of Château Angélus going back fifty years and more had made it one of the great tourist attractions of St. Denis. For the locals, it was also the place to take their bidons of glass or plastic to the huge vats at the back of the shop and fill them from the tap with good Bergerac white and red for a couple of euros a liter. Bruno was looking for something between those two extremes of wine for Martine’s dinner that evening. He spent a pleasant twenty minutes gossiping with Nathalie, the saleswoman, and tasting a couple of wines he did not know, before leaving with a bottle of Anthologia, a white wine of sauvignon from Château Tour des Gendres that he could seldom afford. Then he set off to see Oudinot at his farm, wondering if he might be fortunate enough to catch Martine before she set off again to woo the local mayors and councillors into supporting her plan.

  20

  Bruno was waiting on the bench in the pleasant garden of the maison de retraite, a grandiose modern building that the département architects thought suitable as a seniors’ home, texting Isabelle that Oudinot would be delighted to allow her team to use his hut for a police operation. Bruno had been evasive about the purpose when he’d gone to Oudinot’s farm to seek permission. Oudinot had at once assumed that it was to investigate Sylvestre for tax evasion. When Bruno had shrugged his shoulders and refused to deny it, Oudinot had rubbed his hands gleefully together and pronounced himself eager to cooperate. He would withdraw his geese that very day and call on Sylvestre to shake hands on the deal and announce that the geese were gone as a gesture of goodwill. With any luck, Oudinot had added, he’d get Sylvestre’s signature on a contract and a check before the taxman took all the money away.

  “Bonjour, Bruno,” said Félix, suddenly appearing, slightly out of breath after running all the way from school, and holding out his hand to be shaken. “The science teacher showed me what you’d said about me in the paper and read it out in class. And then the headmaster called in my mom to show it to her. It made her cry, and she said I had to be sure to thank you.”

  Of course, Bruno thought, his parents wouldn’t get Sud Ouest at home. “It was no more than the truth, Félix. We’re all proud of you. And did you hear the good news that Denise will be fine?”

  “Yes, Madame Pantowsky told me she heard it on the radio.”

  That was the science teacher Bruno knew as Florence. “Well, what is this mysterious photo that made you write me that note?” he asked.

  “I know of a photo of the same car, that’s why we’re here. It belongs to my grandfather, so I thought I’d take you to see him, and he’ll show it to you and tell you the story about my great-uncle.”

  “Do you visit your grandpa often?”

  “Two or three times a week. I like him. They eat early here, so he brings out a sandwich for me from the dining room when he knows I’m coming. He’s over eighty, but he’s in pretty good shape.”

  The St. Denis retirement home was close to the town cemetery, which Bruno had considered unfortunate until he’d learned that most of the inhabitants enjoyed the convenience of being able to attend funerals without having to walk too far. Some even claimed to take comfort from being able to gaze out over their eventual resting place. The home was a curious mixture, a few rows of single-story buildings that contained one-room apartments all surrounding an aggressively modern structure that contained the offices, recreation and dining rooms and wards for those too enfeebled to continue living in the single-room dwellings where they could be surrounded by their own furniture and belongings. The gardens were a pleasant mix of ornamental flower beds and small allotments, where the residents were encouraged to grow vegetables for their family or for the communal kitchen.

  Félix’s grandfather lived in one of the studios, as the single rooms were called. He came to the door and we
lcomed his visitors, kissing his grandson on both cheeks and shaking Bruno’s hand. Bruno recognized him as one of the group of old cronies who sat around a table in the cheapest of the town’s cafés, drinking their glasses of petit blanc and watching horse racing as they grumbled that St. Denis and the whole country were not what they’d been in their day.

  “I didn’t expect you so I didn’t bring a sandwich,” the old man said, then ruffled Félix’s hair. “How’s my little nut-brown grandson?” He glanced up at Bruno. “That’s what I call him because he’s the color of a walnut, best-looking man in the family. I was very proud when I saw what you said about Félix in the paper.”

  “I brought Bruno to look at your photo album, Grandpa,” Félix said. “He’s interested in the photo you have with this car.” He showed him the printout of the Bugatti that Bruno had given him.

  “You know that album by heart,” the old man said affectionately as he moved slowly to the bedside table, sat down on the neatly made bed and gestured to the others to join him. He began leafing through to a familiar page that displayed four small, square photos in black and white, each one about twice the size of a passport photo. The images of young Resistance fighters with rifles and Sten guns and armbands that carried the letters FFI, for Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, were instantly recognizable as dating from World War II.

  He put a wavering finger on a snapshot of two men standing by a car that looked to be the very image of the Bugatti on the printout. One was wearing flying gear, the fur-lined jacket open to reveal a uniform. He was hatless, his hair smoothed back glossily. He was standing beside a young man in farming clothes whom Félix’s grandfather identified as his older brother, Henri, a member of the Resistance who had been killed later in the war. Beside this photo was another of the same young man in farming clothes carrying a Sten gun with his hand on the shoulder of a young boy who looked to be about twelve.

  “That’s me with Henri, the family hero,” the old man said. “That was in the summer of ’forty-four, just before he went off to fight. He went from the Resistance straight into the French army and was killed that winter in the fighting around Strasbourg. I never saw him again after the photo was taken. It broke my mother’s heart. She died not long after the war, and my dad followed soon after, when I was away doing military service.”

  He asked Félix to pass him the magnifying glass, and the boy darted across to snatch it from the windowsill beside the room’s sole easy chair, clearly its usual location.

  “You can see the family resemblance—me, my brother and young Félix here,” the old man said, his voice quavering and his hand trembling as he held the glass over the little photo.

  “What’s that ruin in the background?” Bruno asked.

  “Rastignac, after the Nazis burned it. It was springtime, and I remember watching it burn for days.”

  “The one that was supposed to have all those paintings that disappeared?” Bruno asked.

  “That’s it, just the other side of Thénon. They were nice people, the owners, even the English ones in the family. My dad worked for them in a way, he was a métayer, but every Christmas they’d have all of us métayer families up to the château for a party and give the children presents. Not all the landlords were like that, I can tell you.”

  The métayer system was a form of sharecropping that had been common in the region until it was finally regulated almost out of existence by President François Mitterrand’s Socialist government in 1983. The tenant farmed the land, and in return the landowner took a half share of everything that was produced—crops, livestock and wine, everything except the family’s chickens and their eggs. In the reforms after the war, the landlord’s share was reduced to a third, but it was still widely blamed for rural poverty, and the system’s existence helped explain the remarkable number of Communist Party members among the rural population.

  “How near was your farm to the château?” Bruno asked.

  “You can see from the photo, which was taken in our farmyard; it’s about a kilometer away. The land we farmed stretched out the other way, toward Labouret, all the way down to the River Cern. We had cattle, wheat and tobacco, an apple orchard and a woods full of walnuts. We spent every winter’s night around the stove, shelling them.”

  “Did you ever see the car that’s in the photo?” Bruno asked.

  “Only from a distance. The driver wanted to hide it, I don’t know why. He was supposed to be a famous racing driver, but I forget the name, maybe never knew it. My brother said he’d hidden the car in one of the old tobacco-drying barns that belonged to a friend of his. The government didn’t trust us to dry the tobacco ourselves because it was rationed, so a lot of the old barns were disused.”

  “Was this friend also a métayer for the château?” Bruno asked.

  “No, I think the barn belonged to the family of a girl he was sweet on. They’d been at school together in La Bachellerie, where I went to school.”

  “Do you remember the name of the family?”

  “No, but her name was Marie-France. She got married to somebody else after my brother was killed, and they moved away. One thing I do know is that they didn’t just hide the car; they dismantled it. My brother said he helped take the body off and the seats out, and they put it in with some other old farm equipment, broken plows and the like. I don’t know what they did with the bodywork.”

  “Did you come back home when your father died?”

  “Yes, they gave me a week’s leave from the army. I was stationed at Montauban, down near Toulouse, so it wasn’t too far to come back for the funeral. It was lucky, in a way; the rest of my unit was sent off to Indochina. A lot of Henri’s old Resistance pals turned up for the funeral, and one of them said he’d give me a job when I got out. I’d been a driver in the army, and that was what I did when I came out, drove a truck for the logistics firm in Le Buisson. That’s why I settled here.”

  “You never went back to look for the barn or the car?”

  The old man shook his head. “Nothing to go back for, not for me. After my dad died, I still had a year to go in the army, so the landlord found a new tenant. I hadn’t really thought about that car until today.” He picked up the magnifying glass to examine the photo more closely. “Fine-looking vehicle, isn’t it? I bet it would go like the wind.”

  “What about that pilot in the photo, did you ever meet him?”

  “No, but Henri told me he was English, from the RAF. Somebody in the château had connections to another Resistance group that organized escape routes across the Pyrenees into Spain. Henri said he often wondered what had happened to that fur-lined flying jacket. He’d have liked to have it for himself.”

  He moved the magnifying glass to a photo of half-a-dozen young men, all armed and wearing FFI armbands, standing around an old Citroën. “That’s my brother and there beside him is Jean-Pierre, the one who gave me the job. He’d dead now, of course.” He looked up at Bruno. “Why are you interested in all this?”

  “That car, it’s famous, and probably pretty valuable if anybody could find it. I know some people who are looking for it, and there may even be a murder involved. That’s why I’m investigating. Is there anything else you remember about it?”

  “I can’t say I do.” The old man put down the magnifying glass and stared at Bruno. “Murder? Who was it got killed?”

  “Sorry, I’d better not say anything until we get the results from an autopsy. It’s still a matter of suspicion at this stage. When the investigation is over, I’ll come back and tell you all about it. Can you tell me if anyone else has asked you any questions about this car recently, or has the topic come up in any way?”

  “No, the only one who’s ever asked me about it is Félix, when we look through the album together. It’s mainly his great-uncle Henri who interests him, but he’s always liked cars. I’m only sorry the photo is so small.”

  “If you like, I could get it blown up for you and also the one of you and Henri,” Bruno said, thin
king that Philippe Delaron could easily do it; he owed Bruno several favors.

  “I’d like that. Do I have to take them out?”

  “I’ll do it, Grandpa.” Félix took the album and gently prized the two photos out of the little triangular pouches at each corner and handed them to Bruno. He carefully put them inside his notebook, shook the old man’s hand and thanked him. At the door he asked if Félix was going back to school.

  “In a few minutes, then I’m going to the riding school again.”

  “Thanks for this, Félix. Take care.”

  Félix didn’t move but looked up shyly at Bruno. “Could you do me another favor? I’d like to give Grandpa a photo of me on a horse. Could you take one for me, please?”

  “No problem, we’ll do it next time I see you at the stables.”

  Bruno went back to his office and texted Philippe, asking him to come to Bruno’s office in the mairie. Then he called Florence at home, knowing that she’d be there with her children during lunchtime. Rollo, the headmaster, had excused her from the usual roster of supervising the school lunches because her children were still so little.

  “I’m calling to thank you for letting Félix know about the story in the paper today,” he said when she answered. “I gather his mother was very touched.”

  “It was good of you to say what you did,” she replied. “I’ve been worried about that boy, and at the way Tristan bullies him, but he usually makes sure to do it in ways and places so we can never catch him at it. And if we do catch him, there’s not much we can do beyond telling him off, so despite what happened to poor Denise I’m glad you managed to nail him. What happens to him now?”

  “It’s up to the magistrate, which in this case is probably Annette, and as you know she always tries to avoid putting anyone into a detention center. It depends on whether the procureur decides to intervene. Given the publicity and the prospect of some political pressure, I suspect that he’ll probably feel that he should. He may decide to take it out of Annette’s hands and give the case to a more experienced magistrate.”