“No, I’m not,” said Bruno. “You got to the chartreuse around midnight, and you sat beside the pool with Sylvestre, under those outdoor heaters. You were drinking Drambuie, him a lot more than you. And he was smoking joints. He was celebrating because he’d beaten you. He knew where the Bugatti was, and he’d just signed a contract with the owner of this amusement park to buy the place along with all its contents.
“He had one of his Bugatti books there on the table with him and, knowing Sylvestre, he probably started to gloat about how smart and rich he was and to mock you for having failed. You sat there, taking his taunts, getting angrier and angrier, trying to hold it in. When he went to the pool something inside of you snapped. You pushed him, jumped in after him and held his head underwater until he drowned.”
“You have no evidence for this outlandish story,” Young said.
“Yes, we do. And now we’ll take you to the gendarmerie to test your DNA, and I’m pretty sure we’ll match it to the traces on the Drambuie glass.”
“Not so,” Young shouted, triumphantly, shaking his head.
“You were about to admit everything by saying that you cleaned it before you left. I know. And I doubt whether we’ll find any traces of you on the joints. That was Sylvestre’s little vice, not yours. You don’t even smoke. But you forgot one important thing.”
“What do you mean? I admit nothing.”
“You forgot the towel on which you dried your hair when you came out of the pool after killing him. That’s what will convict you. Too bad, while you’re in prison the Bugatti will be restored and looking magnificent.”
Epilogue
For dinner with the Oudinots, Bruno had thought of taking a bottle of champagne to celebrate the finding of the Bugatti and the closing of the two murder cases. But since the family had been shaken up by events, he decided against it and instead took a bottle of Château de Tiregand from his cellar. It went perfectly with the veal escalopes that Odette had prepared with morilles mushrooms that she and her daughter had picked in the woods that day. The first course had been oeufs mimosa from goose eggs, for which Martine had made the mayonnaise. And when Bruno had arrived, she had insisted on champagne anyway to toast the end of the family feud.
“You didn’t garden today, did you?” Odette had asked by way of greeting. He confessed to digging in some ashes, which she said might bend the lunar rules but probably wouldn’t break them.
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” he had replied when Fernand had asked if there was any news yet about Sylvestre’s will. He told them about the mortgaged properties in Alsace and the state’s determination to seize what was left as criminal proceeds. “Hard to say what’s going to happen to the chartreuse, but you’ll keep your deposit money.”
Young was in a police cell in Périgueux, and the British consul in Bordeaux was arranging a lawyer. Annette had arrived at Fabiola’s house in tears. Gilles was writing up his story for the Paris Match website, with a longer story with photos for the next printed issue. Delaron was preparing his version for tomorrow’s Sud Ouest. The chassis was now stored securely in the gendarmerie car park, along with the missing transmission, which had been found beneath an old plow.
“So what happens to the Bugatti now?” Martine asked.
“That’s up to the mayor and the council,” Bruno said. Possession might be nine-tenths of the law, but the commune could not afford a long legal battle with the Bugatti heirs and other potential claimants, he explained. And St. Denis certainly could not afford to pay for the restoration, which was certain to cost millions. Full restoration would mean re-creating the special bodywork, which of course could not be welded because the special alloy Bugatti used contained magnesium. It might not even be legal to re-create it because of the fire risk.
“The mayor is thinking of making a deal with the state, donating the car in return for a very handsome finder’s fee and then putting it on display at the national auto museum as one of the greatest cars ever made, and made in France,” Bruno said.
There would be a lot of people hoping for a share in that finder’s fee, he thought: Étienne, Félix, Jérôme, Gilles and perhaps even Madame Hugon.
“But I don’t know whether that idea will last,” Bruno went on. “Not after the voters open their copies of Sud Ouest tomorrow and learn that it’s worth forty million.”
“Mon Dieu,” said Fernand. “I had no idea any car could be so valuable. Why, for that amount of money we could scrap all the taxes in St. Denis for years and years to come.”
Bruno exchanged a glance with Martine and said, “See what I mean about the reaction of the voters?”
He let his eyes linger on her. She was wearing a simple dress of dark blue, her arms bare, and a thin gold chain around her throat that carried a St. Christopher medal. He smiled to himself at the memory of how closely he’d been able to examine it and wondered whether he’d ever be fortunate enough to get so close again. Something of his thoughts must have been clear in his eyes, since she gave him a brilliant smile.
“Sadly, I’ve got to fly back to London tomorrow for at least a few weeks to find more sponsors for the electric-car rally,” she said. “But then I’ll be back to find out what happens to the chartreuse and Sylvestre’s estate.”
“So it’s au revoir rather than farewell,” Bruno said, raising his glass. Ah well, he thought, life would go on. He’d be dining with his friends at Pamela’s house the following evening, the now-ritual Monday dinner, and hoping that Fabiola had forgiven him for getting her to ask Annette that crucial question about sleeping with Young.
“If the chartreuse somehow comes back to us, I told Dad I’d like to take over the small lodge house since I’ll be back here a lot organizing the rally, and it would be good to have a permanent place here of my own.” She raised an eyebrow at him as if expecting some reaction.
“In that case, you had better set two conditions,” said Bruno. “Your dad will have to let you fix the driveway—”
“And he’ll keep the geese back on this side of the hill,” Odette interrupted. “You can leave that to me.”
Acknowledgments
This tale began with my elder daughter, Kate, a motor-sports journalist who specializes in Formula 1 races and their history. Knowing my interest in the French Resistance during World War II, she asked if I knew the story of William Grover-Williams and Robert Benoist. They were two legendary drivers of the prewar years and close friends. During World War II they together ran a Resistance network in occupied France, arranging arms drops from Britain and carrying out a number of sabotage operations, principally against the Citroën factories. They were betrayed, arrested and killed, Benoist in Buchenwald and Grover-Williams in Sachsenhausen. My daughter then told me of the lost Bugatti, a Type 57 Atlantic, one of four ever built and the only one whose fate remains unknown. She then showed me a photograph of Yvonne Grover-Williams standing beside it in 1937, and another photo of Ralph Lauren’s Atlantic. These images of this sensationally elegant automobile took my breath away and, at that moment, this novel came into my head and refused to leave.
I have taken a few liberties with the facts as they are known, suggesting that Grover-Williams was in France in 1941. He was parachuted in the following year. The incident of the downed RAF pilot is invented, but the PAT escape network was real and steered some six hundred airmen and other escapees over the mountains into Spain. Save for the presence of the Bugatti, the burning of Château de Rastignac in March 1944 is as described here. It has happily been rebuilt, to display once again its uncanny resemblance to the White House in Washington. Other than the sad fact that the fate of the lost Bugatti remains unknown (like the fate of the paintings stored at Rastignac), everything else is as faithful to the history of that glorious car as I could make it. I was greatly helped by a genial New York–based Bugatti enthusiast and historian, Walter Jamieson, who was extremely generous with his time and his library, and I am very grateful to him.
The amusement park is my in
vention, but Jérôme’s plan to replace Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette with a nineteenth-century French village owes a lot to the charmingly re-created village of Le Bournat in Le Bugue, on the banks of the Vézère River. It has an old schoolroom and parish church, a windmill and bakery, functioning workshops for the blacksmith and the knife maker and much more. On Wednesday evenings in summer it offers feasts, with vast joints of ham suspended and roasted over cinders, which are strongly recommended. Of the marchés nocturnes, I cannot speak too highly. They have added a wonderful new dimension to the attractions of the Périgord as a great tourist destination. Our family has been attending them since they began in the village of Audrix on Saturdays, which was when my wife first wrote about the culinary charms of these evening events in Gourmet magazine. Beaumont-du-Périgord has another excellent night market on Mondays, and now the big towns are offering their own.
All the Bruno books are indebted to my friends and neighbors in the Périgord and the lovely landscape they nurture. It has fertile soil, wonderful food, excellent wines, a temperate climate and more history packed into its borders than anywhere else on earth. It is a very special place, filled with enchantments. As Henry Miller wrote in The Colossus of Maroussi:
I believe that this great peaceful region of France will always be a sacred spot for man and that when the cities have killed off the poets this will be the refuge and the cradle of the poets to come. I repeat, it was most important for me to have seen the Dordogne: it gives me hope for the future of the race, for the future of the earth itself. France may one day exist no more, but the Dordogne will live on just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.
My profound thanks go to my family, who were the first to read this book, with special gratitude to Kate for giving me the idea and to our basset hound, Benson, on whom I practice dialogue during our walks. I am also very grateful to Jane and Caroline Wood in Britain, to Jonathan Segal in New York, and Anna von Planta in Zurich for their matchless editing skills.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Walker served as foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe and was the editor of United Press International. He is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center and directed the Global Policy Council, both in Washington, D.C. He now lives mainly in the Périgord region of France, where he writes, chairs the jury of the Prix Ragueneau cooking prize and is a chevalier of the Confrérie du Pâté de Périgueux. This is his ninth novel featuring Bruno, chief of police.
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