The Shooting at Chateau Rock

by Martin Walker

  It was Tuesday, market day in the morning and the town’s usual summer night market in the evening, with the pizza kiosks, salad stalls, beer tents and barbecues that were already doing a roaring trade. Hubert’s wine cave was staying open until midnight, and the town vineyard had organized a shuttle service to ferry extra cases from the chai. Bruno had arranged for forty portable toilets, extra bins for garbage, a first-aid tent and another for lost children. The town rugby teams—the first and second men’s teams, the juniors and the women’s team—were acting as stewards and had all been issued armbands that read BÉNÉVOLE, volunteer. The gendarmes of St. Denis, along with extra colleagues from Sarlat and St. Cyprien, were managing the traffic and the parking that was filling the fields around the town.

  To keep the crowds amused until the main event, at 7:00 p.m. the town band started to play its entire repertoire. This was followed by the town choir. Then the town’s own rock group, Panama, played the golden oldies that most of the crowd knew by heart. With the town’s choirmaster on keyboards, Jean-Louis from the garage on drums and Robert the retired architect singing and playing guitar, their mix of Brassens and Jacques Brel, Beatles, Beach Boys and Francis Cabrel was well known to all the locals—and none the worse for that.

  It was, Bruno thought, the first moment that he could relax after the two weeks he had spent organizing it all. He had been pleased to have been invited to Galina’s wedding but simply unable to take off the time at the height of the tourist season and with Rod’s concert as his priority. He comforted himself with the thought that Monaco and a luxury yacht were not what Pamela would call his tasse de thé. Nor did Bruno wish to renew his acquaintance with Igor Stichkin, particularly since General Lannes would also be there, cementing the new back-channel relationship with the Kremlin that had been his objective all along.

  Rod, Meghan and Kirsty had returned from the wedding on Sunday. Determined not to miss Rod’s concert, Jamie and Galina had flown in a few hours ago, with that soft and dreamy look that suggested they had hardly stopped making love since the wedding. Jamie had told Bruno proudly that Galina had insisted that they postpone their honeymoon cruise around Italy on the yacht that had been named after her.

  The sale of Château Rock to Galina had been completed before the wedding with a bank draft from Cyprus. The extra cash in the briefcase that Bruno had found in the crashed Maserati had been given to Galina to fulfill what Stichkin insisted had been its original purpose: to pay for the restoration of the cottage on the château grounds where Rod planned to live and whatever new decor and furniture Galina wanted for the château. Bruno and J-J privately thought that the cash had been put into the car to lull any suspicions Sarrail might have of Stichkin’s plans for him.

  Only one arrest had been made, of Constant, the insurance agent, at the behest of Goirau. Along with the papers that had been in the suitcase, their phones had provided abundant evidence that Constant and Sarrail had planned Lara’s seduction of Driant, along with sufficient Viagra and cocaine to almost guarantee a heart attack. Constant admitted they were counting on the money from the sale of Driant’s farm to cover the losses on the retirement home. He confessed that he and Sarrail had been terrified of Stichkin’s anger if the project failed. Bruno suspected that Constant’s cooperation in unraveling the tangled skeins of Stichkin’s European investments might yet keep him out of prison.

  Galina had been instructed by her father not to bring charges against Bertie, who had been diagnosed by a carefully chosen and suitably expensive psychologist as mentally unstable and under intense stress. General Lannes had arranged for him to be sent quietly back to Canada.

  Kozak, if that had ever been his real name, had disappeared. But Isabelle’s facial recognition programmer had identified him giving orders at political demonstrations and skirmishes in Kiev, Crimea and across Ukraine in previous years. Bruno and J-J were convinced he had killed Sarrail on Stichkin’s orders, to save Stichkin from the embarrassment and public scrutiny that Bruno’s investigations had already threatened to bring, with the prospect of worse to come. Stichkin’s usefulness to Putin depended on his discretion, his ability to remain in the background. Sarrail’s embarrassment over Driant and the retirement home were putting that at risk.

  Bruno could not understand why the other Sasha and his girlfriend had also been considered expendable, until J-J suggested they had been sent along, like the money in the briefcase, as a kind of reassurance, in case Sarrail suspected that he’d outlived his usefulness. Isabelle had reminded Bruno of the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. She had been killed by a bomb placed beneath her car in October 2017, after exposing the scandal of the widespread sale of Maltese passports to Russians and the bribes and corruption involved. Maltese Sasha had long been a suspect, so perhaps Stichkin feared the police were getting uncomfortably close.

  Once General Lannes had become involved, the police had attributed the crash of the Maserati to the unfortunate action of wild boars. Bruno was not surprised. A curtain of official discretion fell over what was now officially deemed a tragic accident. At least the préfecture had announced sensible new controls on the placing of log piles too close to roadsides.

  The Driant heirs were delighted with the generous financial settlement offered to them by the insurance company, so Bruno felt at least a small fraction of justice had been done. The thought of those two dead young Syrian women, struggling as best they could to make their way in a Europe that was growing tired of its own compassion, still troubled him. He had mentioned this to Gaston and Claudette when they invited him to a splendid dinner at La Tupina in Bordeaux, to thank him for his efforts in securing their inheritance. A few days later, Claudette had e-mailed him a copy of the receipt from Médecins Sans Frontières for her and her brother’s joint donation of ten thousand euros.

  In the performers’ tent behind the stage truck, Rod was tuning his guitar when Bruno arrived, once Panama had finished their set. To their delight, Rod had asked the three of them to be his backup group, and they had been rehearsing all week using Rod’s own tapes.

  “Ça va, Bruno?” asked Amélie, rising from the chair at the dressing table where she’d been checking on her hair and makeup. She looked terrific in the spangled white dress she had worn at her Josephine Baker concert and her hair fluffed out into a giant Afro. She gave him an air-kiss on each cheek. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be doing this.”

  “Rod loved that vocal you did over his tape,” Bruno said. “All your own work, nothing to do with me.”

  “This whole concert has everything to do with you, Bruno,” said Rod. He put his guitar across his knees and began rolling a cigarette.

  “It’s really just a rehearsal,” said Bruno. The official premiere of Rod’s new album was to take place in London the following week. “Your comeback tour of rock festivals is going to be great, but we’re honored to have the grand rehearsal. Which reminds me, the mayor wants to say a brief word of welcome as you go onstage.”

  Rod shrugged. “Okay, I guess. But it’s time to get on with the music.” He bumped fists with Robert and Jean-Louis and the choirmaster as they headed up the steps onto the stage and told them to break a leg. “Merde,” they replied in the customary way. The mayor put his head around the tent flap, and asked, “Are we all ready?”

  “You bet,” said Rod. “Break a leg yourself.”

  The mayor headed up the steps, holding a roll of parchment from which dangled a red ribbon and seal, tapped the microphone, welcomed everyone to St. Denis and told them he had a brief announcement.

  “By the authority vested in me by the people and council of St. Denis, I hereby proclaim that Rod Macrae is now an honorary citizen of this commune where he and his family have lived for more than twenty years and where he has continued to write and make and perform the music that has made him an international star.”

  The crowd erupted in cheers
and applause as Rod emerged onstage through the curtain, accepted the roll of parchment and the mayor’s kiss on each cheek, thanked him and said into the microphone, “Well, I guess this is where I belong, these days.”

  The cheers and applause doubled in volume.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Rod went on when he could be heard again. “We’re going to play some of my old numbers and a few of my new ones, and it’s great to be working with these guys from Panama and this brilliant young vocalist, Amélie.”

  As Rod picked out the familiar chords of the global hit he had made nearly thirty years earlier, Bruno left the tent and climbed up the steps beside the medical center to get a view of the crowd. The parkland was full, and so was the bridge and the quay on the far side of the river. There were dozens of boats and canoes on the river, which was so slow at the height of summer that they stayed in place with an occasional paddle stroke. He had no idea how many people had gathered, certainly more than five thousand, perhaps the biggest assembly St. Denis had ever known.

  A short buzz came from the phone at his belt, an incoming text message. He pulled it out and saw that it came from Claire, the breeder.

  “Good news, Bruno! On the stethoscope today I heard the heartbeats of Carla’s nine new puppies. Estimated birth date a month from today. Congratulations to you and to Papa Balzac.”

  Acknowledgments

  There were three triggers for the ideas that came together for the plot of this book. The first was the assassination by car bomb of the brave Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, in October 2017. She had for some time been working on the various scandals surrounding the sale of Maltese passports, and thus in effect of European citizenship, to Russians and others. Since such a passport required proof of a Maltese residence, some cheap public-housing tenements were being rented out at hugely inflated sums to the profit of local figures. Rumor has it that the Russian mafia was involved in her murder. The second trigger was the outrageous use of a nerve toxin in a quiet British town by two Russian intelligence agents seeking to kill a Russian defector, Sergei Skripal.

  The third trigger was much more pleasant. It was hearing of a number of rock stars heading for Miles Copeland’s Château de Marouatte. It reminded me of some very happy years in the 1970s when I became friendly with Miles’s father, a CIA man who had become legendary for his close relationship with Egypt’s president Nasser. Our gossipy lunches in the rooftop restaurant of the London Hilton were always interesting. But at around the same time the then editor of The Guardian indulged my wish to write about rock music, on the condition that I did so on my own time. I was fortunate to attend the premiere of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at the London Planetarium, David Bowie’s first incarnation as Ziggy Stardust, the launch of Quadrophenia by the Who; to go on an American tour with Procol Harum and Steeleye Span; and to attend the ball at Blenheim Palace for Mick and Bianca Jagger. Those fleeting brushes with rock stardom came flooding back as I began to plan this tale of Château Rock.

  The book also owes a great deal to the many classical music concerts in the Périgord, which these days are rather more my speed. It may owe even more to the riverside concerts that enliven our summers and to the local bands and musicians like my friends in the group Panama. Robert the singing architect, Jean-Louis the garagist on drums and Stéphane on keyboards have given me great pleasure over the years, so I’m delighted to commemorate them here.

  Rod Macrae, his family and Château Rock are inventions, and so is Balzac’s breeding kennel, the Château Marmont retirement home and the Stichkin family. But there are such Russian oligarchs, and many of them have acquired rights of residence and influential roles in Europe, along with some protection for their wealth. One understands their motives; Vladimir Putin is an uncomfortable leader and a dangerous fellow. His forces have invaded two neighbors, Ukraine and Georgia, occupied Crimea, launched a dramatic cyber-attack on Estonia, deployed nerve agents in Britain, shot down a civilian airliner and sent troops, ships and warplanes to sustain its odious Syrian ally. It is not entirely Putin’s fault that international tensions have increased so sharply, but one understands why Western intelligence agencies have been scrambling to rebuild their Kremlin-watching capabilities. Just to be sure my imagination wasn’t running away with me, I ran the outlines of this plot past some old contacts in the field who had better remain nameless.

  As always, some of the key characters were originally, many novels ago, inspired by some real people in the Périgord before being filtered through my imagination. But these fictional people quickly took on for me lives of their own as they confronted new plots in new books. And time passes. Some of the original figures have died; others have retired or changed their jobs. Businesses have closed or been sold. New winemakers and restaurants have emerged. Children are growing up. St. Denis is sufficiently real in my head that I understand the place and that its people have to evolve.

  I am hugely grateful to my friends and neighbors and the welcoming people of the Périgord for providing such a perfect place and inspiration to write. Thanks in particular to Raymond and Francette for looking after the garden and the basset hound when I’m traveling. I owe a great debt to my wife, Julia Watson, a professional food writer who keeps a close watch on Bruno’s cooking and who is coauthor of the Bruno cookbooks. When not covering Grand Prix races, our daughter Kate maintains the brunochiefofpolice.com website. When not working on her poetry and plays, our other daughter, Fanny, keeps track of all the characters, meals, skills and relationships, a task that becomes more complex with each new book and short story.

  Bruno would not have become an international success without my agent and friend, Caroline Wood, nor without Jane, Jonathan and Anna, my wonderful editors at Quercus in London, Knopf in New York and Diogenes in Zurich. Alongside them stand small but devoted armies—the copy editors, proofreaders, designers, publicists, marketers, production editors and sales teams. And we’d all be in trouble without the booksellers, book reviewers, librarians, bloggers and book clubs, who bring the books to the most crucial people of all—readers like you.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Martin Walker served as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe and was also the editor of United Press International. He was also a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center and senior director of the Global Policy Business Council, both in Washington, D.C. He now shares his time between the United States, Britain, and the Périgord region of France, where he writes, chairs the jury of the Prix Ragueneau cookery prize, and is proud to be a Grand Consul of the wines of Bergerac. He enjoys writing a monthly column on wine for the local English-language paper, The Bugle, and with winemaking friends produces an agreeable and unpretentious red wine, Cuvée Bruno.

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