The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  He checked his watch. Usually he would simmer the meat for as much as two hours to get it really tender, but this was Oudinot’s veal, the best in the valley, from milk-fed calves raised with their mothers. The meat would be deliciously tender anyway, and his guests would be arriving within the next fifteen minutes. He cleaned up the kitchen, tidied the books and papers in his living room and brushed away the ashes from the tiles below his stove. Then he filled his electric kettle with water, set it to boil so it would be ready for the rice and took a pot of heavy cream from the fridge.

  Finally from the freezer he took the vacuum bag with the last of the basil he’d picked last autumn. And when he saw Balzac’s ears twitch and the dog move to the door, Bruno knew his guests were about to arrive. Balzac always heard the sound of an engine coming up the road a good half minute before his master. He opened the door so that Balzac could bound out and give the arrivals his usual noisy welcome. Before he followed Balzac, Bruno added another glass of white wine to the fish soup, tasted it and smiled to himself. It was good.

  Sergeant Jules in uniform was driving his own car, with Yveline and Amélie in the rear and Annette in the front seat. Bruno shook Jules’s hand, welcomed Annette and Yveline and helped Amélie extract herself from Balzac’s obvious affections. This time she was wearing a bright yellow dress with a generous headdress of some coarse cloth in blue and yellow stripes. Yveline wore black slacks, a cream silk blouse and fitted tweed jacket. Annette was in jeans, a white cotton sweater and a knee-length cardigan in black cashmere. They were three striking women, each in her different way.

  “Will you stay for a p’tit apéro?” Bruno asked Jules.

  “Better not,” Jules replied, with a glance at Yveline, his commandante. “I’m on duty this evening. But give me a call at the station when you’re ready and I’ll come back to pick them up.”

  “It made sense for us all to come together and go back together,” said Yveline. “Annette is staying at my place tonight rather than drive back to Sarlat.” She handed Bruno a bottle of chilled Monthuys champagne. Annette waved a paper-wrapped bottle at him, saying it was his favorite Château de Tiregand, and Amélie handed him a small glass jar of what looked like a greenish sauce.

  “Epice, my mother’s recipe,” she said. “Ivan let me borrow his kitchen to make it. I gave him a jar, and this one’s for you.”

  Once inside, the guests settled in his sitting room with glasses of champagne. Bruno excused himself and went into the kitchen to check on the food. He added some lemon juice to the fish and wondered how to serve some of Amélie’s gift. She’d certainly be hoping that he’d find a way for them all to try it. He opened a can of his own venison pâté. It should go well with Amélie’s épice.

  “I thought we should try your épice right away,” he said, returning to his guests.

  “Not too much, it’s pretty spicy until you’re used to it,” warned Amélie, casting Bruno a grateful look. He gave her a grin in return, one cook to another, as she spoke again. “This is the heart of Creole cooking.”

  It was hot, but not unpleasantly so, spicy rather than burning, and it went well with the venison. Bruno could imagine it working with chicken, but he recalled Amélie saying that rice and beans were a staple in Haiti, a dish of the poor, and the épice would add flavor to an otherwise bland but filling meal. Yveline fanned her mouth and asked for a glass of water, pleading that she wasn’t accustomed to such fiery food. Annette, by contrast, added even more épice to her next slice, saying she had come to enjoy hot peppers when she’d worked for Médecins Sans Frontières in Madagascar.

  “Do you know anybody who works for them in Palestine?” Bruno asked suddenly, with a quick glance at Amélie. “A friend you know well enough to call and ask about that dead woman at the château? Amélie managed to identify her, an Israeli woman who lives with a Palestinian boyfriend.”

  “Yes, I have a good friend who’s a psychologist at a clinic in Hebron,” Annette replied. “She works mainly with traumatized children. And I know another in East Jerusalem. Why?”

  “Could you call them tomorrow and ask if they know anything about Leah Ben-Ari, or maybe Leah Wolinsky, and her guy, name of al-Husayni.”

  “Saïd al-Husayni, a historian at the university,” Amélie interrupted.

  Annette pulled out her mobile and began typing a text message. “Why wait till tomorrow? It’s late there now, but I should get a reply tomorrow.”

  Bruno poured out the rest of the champagne, invited them to move to the table and went back to the kitchen to check the seasoning and toss some chopped parsley onto the fish soup. He opened the white wine and took it to the table, then brought in the tureen.

  “If anyone wants to try adding some of Amélie’s épice to the soup, that might be interesting,” he said, handing around the bread and then pouring the wine.

  “I’ll wait and try it when I’m close to the end,” said Annette. “This is really good, Bruno, rich and hearty.”

  “It’s great,” said Amélie, stirring a spoonful of her sauce into her bowl. “But since we’re here to talk about policing, Yveline, what does a village cop like Bruno mean to you?”

  “A lot more than I’d expected when I came here. A good local policeman is like a living archive of a community, a real resource of local history and knowledge. I’d be a fool to ignore it, which is why Bruno is now invited to my weekly planning meetings. In my future postings I’ll do the same—but I might not find another village cop who can cook like this.”

  “It’s the same for me as a magistrate,” said Annette. She explained that when the procureur assigned her to a case to see whether a prosecution was warranted, she’d learned always to talk first to the municipal policeman in order to understand the background. In juvenile cases the local cop could describe the parents before she went to see them, give her a sense of the local context and degree of family support she might expect.

  “I didn’t start out like that,” Annette added. “In fact I was very suspicious of Bruno as a hunter and rugby player. I thought of him as an old-fashioned male chauvinist, a rather sinister figure in a local Green-hating mafia that would block and frustrate me at every turn.”

  “It was hard for us locals to work out why they’d send a vegetarian feminist to be a magistrate in the Périgord,” said Bruno, smiling. “That was before we learned you were a fearsome rally driver. Now I’m going to try this with the épice.” He stirred in some of the green sauce with the last spoonfuls of soup in his bowl and tasted the result.

  “Not bad,” he said. “But I prefer it without, since I don’t think this would work with chabrol.”

  “What’s that?” asked Amélie.

  “An old local tradition. Just watch,” he said. He served the remainder of the soup, then he ate the last pieces of fish until only liquid remained in his bowl and then added perhaps half a glass of red wine and stirred it together. Then he put down the spoon, picked up the bowl with both hands, brought it to his lips and drank. He smacked his lips as he put it down and watched with satisfaction as Annette and Yveline followed suit.

  Hesitantly, and with a doubtful glance at Bruno, Amélie did the same. “Interesting,” she said, putting down the bowl. “It’s good, might be better if the wine was heated. What’s the story about this chabrol?”

  “There are different explanations,” said Bruno. “The one I like says it comes from the English soldiers who were here in the Hundred Years’ War. There wasn’t much meat around in winter when they were on garrison duty in the castles, so their staple food was pickled herring, brought from the coast in barrels. The English term for a young herring is ‘shad,’ and their word for soup is ‘broth.’ Say them together a few times, and you’ll see how the French could turn ‘shad broth’ into chabrol. And given the quality of the local wine the English could afford, it probably improved the wine as well as the herring.”

  He gathered up the bowls and went to the kitchen, stacking them in the sink and turning on the hot wat
er. Then he tasted the veal and nodded; it was time to make the blanquette. He drained the sauce from the meat over a measuring cup and put the meat aside, removing the bouquet garni and the carrot and celery. He poured the sauce into a separate large saucepan and left it over a low flame. He put the rice into a separate saucepan with a tablespoon of duck fat, stirring until all the grains were coated and then added boiling water from his kettle, covered it and left the rice to cook.

  Then he began to make his roux, using the saucepan in which the veal had cooked. He put three thick slices of butter into the pan and brought over his glass jar of ordinary flour. When the butter had melted, foamed and subsided, he reduced the heat a little and began sprinkling flour into it, stirring steadily with a whisk. Slowly, making sure the flour was fully absorbed, he added four tablespoons and then began to pour in the juice from the veal, continuing to whisk to ensure it was fully blended. He turned up the heat and brought it to a simmer, still stirring until it began to thicken. Then he added the veal, the shallots, the mushrooms and the pot of cream, stirring steadily until it returned to the boil. He turned down the heat to a simmer, checked the rice, adding half a cup more water, piled the dirty dishes into the sink and opened the bottle of red wine.

  Quickly, he peeled the fat pears he had bought, put them into a saucepan and poured in red wine until they were just covered. He added two cloves, some cinnamon and some grated nutmeg. Finally, he poured in half a glass of his own vin de noix and left it simmering.

  “Five minutes,” he said, returning to the table with the red wine and a bottle of mineral water. He shared out the last of the white wine and began to follow the conversation. It was clear that they had been talking about J-J’s pedophilia investigation.

  “But it’s almost always the case that you only have the testimony of the victims to go on,” Amélie was insisting. “The children hardly ever complain to other adults at the time, so there’s no chance of physical evidence or DNA. That thirty years have passed since the kids were molested is typical. And when you get three kids saying the same thing about the same abusers, that to me is corroboration.”

  “But that’s part of the problem,” said Yveline. “When you get into detail, the kids are not saying the same thing.”

  “The real problem is this psychologist and her use of so-called recovered memories,” said Annette. Both in Britain and in the United States, she noted, the medical authorities had treated such memories with great skepticism and warned against their being used as evidence without strong corroboration.

  “There are several cases where these memories are now thought to have been suggested to the patient by the psychologist involved, often through the use of hypnosis. In this case that J-J is dealing with, hypnosis was used on all three,” Annette went on. “As a magistrate, this is a case I would not want to take to court. The evidence is just too flimsy.”

  Bruno excused himself to bring in the blanquette de veau and the rice and was not surprised to find them still arguing about the case when he returned.

  “You can’t seriously argue that the reputations of these adults are as important as the lives of the kids that were destroyed,” Amélie was saying fiercely. “What about their rights?”

  “Mon Dieu, this is rich. I’m going to gain at least a kilo from this meal,” Yveline interjected. Bruno threw her a grateful glance for changing the subject.

  “This is a Pécharmant from one of my favorite vineyards,” said Bruno, pouring out the red. “But it’s light enough to go well with the veal. Still, if anyone would prefer to stay with white wine, I have some in the fridge.”

  “Let me pay you a compliment, Bruno,” said Amélie. “I would not want to add any épice to this dish. It’s perfect just as it is. But I suspect Yveline is right about the extra kilos we’ll be putting on.”

  He offered second helpings of the veal, and despite her joke about gaining weight, Yveline was the first to proffer her plate. The others followed.

  “There may be one more treat in store for us all this evening,” Bruno said, bringing in the dessert, adding a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a splash of cognac to his poached pears. “We have a star among us, a singer who has recorded albums, and the moment I heard her I knew she was extraordinary.” He turned to smile at Amélie. “I’m hoping that you’ll grace our dinner table with a song. I promise not to join in.”

  Annette clapped her hands, and Yveline said, “Now that we know you’re a singer we have to hear you—anything you like.”

  Amélie beamed at them and remained seated. “Well, now that I’ve gotten back into the habit since I’ve been driving around with Bruno, maybe you’d like a little Cole Porter, a favorite of mine that I learned by heart.”

  Tapping her finger gently on the table to keep time, she launched into “Just One of Those Things,” a song of a love affair that flared suddenly and magnificently but then died away as quickly, that then merged into “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”

  It was a song that hit Bruno like a fist, a lament of lovers parting that he had listened to again and again after Isabelle had left him. He felt tears prick his eyes. It was a song she had loved, and she had written down the English words for him. He could never play it without wondering if Isabelle was alone in Paris, playing the same song and feeling the same regrets. Finally, sick of the melancholy it brought, he had put away the disc she had left him.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning Bruno drove with Balzac to the stables to exercise his horse and then joined Amélie at Fauquet’s café, where she was enjoying her morning croissant. She raised her eyebrows at his dress, a tracksuit and tennis shoes rather than a uniform, before thanking him for dinner. He accepted her offer of coffee, and Balzac sat expectantly at her feet until she slipped him a corner of croissant and then a crust of baguette.

  “Off duty today?” she asked.

  “Depends what you mean by ‘duty.’ Teaching the kids to play tennis is not part of my job, but I think it’s good for them, and I know it’s good for my work.”

  “How come?”

  “They grow up knowing me as something other than a policeman. It helps once they’re old enough to get into mischief that could turn into something worse.”

  She pulled out her phone and began tapping in a note to herself. “Sounds like you’re a social worker as much as a cop. Anything else? Soccer or basketball?”

  “Rugby in the autumn and winter, tennis in spring and summer for boys and girls alike. Do you play any sports?”

  She shook her head, which today was wrapped in a billowing yellow headdress. She was wearing jeans with a yellow polo shirt, her leather jacket draped around her shoulders.

  “I liked to play soccer, but my brothers always wanted me to be in goal, so I took up swimming. But you don’t have a gym anywhere nearer than Bergerac.”

  “There’s a yoga and Pilates club that meets at the collège. Yveline’s a member, so if you’re interested you could ask her. I’ve done some work today already. Annette forwarded me the e-mail she got from her friend in Hebron. Leah Wolinsky did some volunteer work for charities, but she was a historian and an archaeologist, so not many useful skills. Mainly she was known as a critic of Israel’s behavior on the West Bank, got arrested a couple of times at demonstrations. Her boyfriend is apolitical but from a prominent family, landowners and politicians. I forwarded the e-mail to J-J.”

  He checked his watch. “The kids will be there by nine, so we’d better go.”

  The town tennis club boasted three open courts and one covered, all flanked by a modern clubhouse with a bar, changing rooms and a well-appointed kitchen, since it was a tradition that no communal activity could take place in St. Denis without there being food and wine involved. The main room was filled with long tables which could seat forty for lunches and dinners during the annual club tournament. The kitchen was in use most days, when regular quartets of doubles players would end their session by cooking their own lunch. This morning a group of seven-year-olds
were getting changed, and several mothers sat on the courtside benches waiting to watch them play.

  Bruno had learned from experience that in each class three or four children shone as natural tennis players, another dozen would show decent hand-eye coordination, and the remainder would need a lot of practice. He put one of the natural players in each of the three open courts with a basket of balls, and the others lined up in turn to hit balls back and forth until one went into the net and another player took his or her place. Eight of the better youngsters then went off to the covered court to play under the critical gaze of Montsouris, a train conductor who had taken advantage of the generous pension plan for his profession to retire at the age of fifty.

  The only Communist on the town council, Montsouris spent his time hunting, fishing and helping the various sports clubs, an endless round of activity that kept him from spending too much time with his relentlessly radical wife, who found his politics far too tame for her own convictions. He was also in charge of the tennis club barbecue in summer. Bruno liked him and led Amélie across to the covered court where he introduced her to Montsouris and left them, no doubt to talk about politics.

  “Ça va, Bruno?” one of the mothers called from a bench as he passed. “Who’s the new girlfriend?”

  He stopped to greet Giselle and her younger sister, Amandine, who had both been in his tennis classes only a few years earlier, and explained that Amélie was a colleague from Paris. Giselle was married to a local builder, had one child in the tennis class, two more in nursery school and another grinning toothlessly at Bruno from the carriage beside the bench. Amandine’s official job was to spend four nights a week as a carer for old people in their homes, for which she earned the minimum wage, but she also worked unofficially as a housecleaner, which allowed her to own a small car.