Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  In truth, Bruno knew there were not many warnings to give. More and more of the market stalls these days were run by strangers from out of town who sold dresses, jeans, draperies, cheap sweaters, T-shirts, and secondhand clothes. Two coal-black Senegalese sold colorful dashikis, leather belts, and purses, and a couple of local potters displayed their wares. There was an organic-bread stall and several local vintners sold their Bergerac and the sweet Monbazillac dessert wine that Providence in its wisdom had kindly provided to accompany foie gras. There was a knife-sharpener and an ironmonger, Diem the Vietnamese selling his spring rolls, and Jules selling his nuts and olives while his wife tended a vast pot of steaming paella. The various stalls selling fruit and vegetables, herbs and tomato plants, were all immune so far from the men from Brussels.

  But at each stall where they sold homemade cheese and pâté, or ducks and chickens that had been slaughtered on some battered old stump in the farmyard with the family axe rather than in a tiled abattoir by people in white coats and hairnets, Bruno delivered his warning. He helped the older women to pack up, piling the fresh-plucked chickens into cavernous cloth bags to take to the nearby office of Patrick’s driving school for safekeeping. The richer farmers who could afford mobile cold cabinets were always ready to let Tante Marie and Grandmère Colette put some of their less legal cheeses alongside their own. In the market, everyone was in on the secret.

  Bruno’s cell phone rang. “The bastards are here,” said Jeanne, in what she must have thought was a whisper but wasn’t. “They parked in front of the bank and Marie-Hélène recognized them from the photo I gave to Ivan. She saw it when she stopped for her petit café. She’s sure it’s them.”

  “Did she see their car?” Bruno asked.

  “A silver Renault Laguna, quite new.” Jeanne read out the number. Interesting, thought Bruno. It was a number for the Department of the Corrèze. They would have taken the train to Brive and picked up the car there, outside the Dordogne. They must have realized that the local spy network was watching for them. Bruno walked out of the pedestrian zone and onto the main square by the old stone bridge, where the inspectors would have to come past him before they reached the market. He phoned his fellow municipal police chiefs in the other villages with markets that week and gave them the car and its number. He had protected his friends from the inspectors; now he had to protect them from themselves.

  So he telephoned old Joe, who had for forty years been the town’s chief of police before Bruno. Now Joe spent his time visiting cronies in all the local markets, selling an occasional oversized apron and work coat from a small stock that he kept in the back of his van but more often nursing a petit rouge. Joe had been a good rugby player two generations ago and was still a pillar of the local club. He wore in his lapel the little red button that labeled him a member of the Légion d’honneur, a reward for his boyhood service as a messenger in the Resistance. Bruno felt sure that Joe would know about the tire slashing, and might well have helped organize it. Joe knew every family in the district, and was related to half of them.

  “Look, Joe,” Bruno began when the old man answered with his usual gruff bark, “everything is fine with the inspectors. The market is clean and we know who they are. We don’t want any trouble this time. It could make matters worse, you understand me?”

  “You mean the car that’s parked in front of the bank? The silver Laguna?” Joe said, in a deep and rasping voice that came from decades of Gauloises and the rough wine he made himself. “Well, it’s being taken care of. Don’t you worry yourself, petit Bruno. The Gestapo can walk home today. Like last time.”

  “Joe, this is going to get people into trouble,” Bruno said forcefully, although he knew that he might as well argue with a brick wall. Joe must have been in Ivan’s café when Jeanne was showing the photos around. And he had probably heard about the car from Marie-Hélène in the bank, since she was married to his nephew.

  “This could bring real trouble for us if we’re not careful,” Bruno went on. “So don’t do anything that would force me to take action.”

  He closed his phone with a snap. Scanning the people coming across the bridge, most of whom he knew, he kept watch for the inspectors. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar car, a battered Renault Twingo the local gendarmes used when out of uniform. In theory, they were his colleagues; in fact, while some were his friends, the gendarmerie reported to the Ministry of Defense in Paris, whose interests did not always coincide with those of St. Denis. The car was being driven by the new captain he had not yet had time to get to know. He was a dour and skinny type called Duroc, from Normandy, who seemed to do everything by the book. Suddenly an alarm went off in Bruno’s mind and he called Joe again.

  “Stop everything now. They must be expecting more trouble after last time. That new gendarme chief has just gone by in plain clothes, and he may have arranged for the inspectors’ car to be staked out. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Merck,” said Joe. “We should have thought of that, but we may be too late. I told Karim to take care of it. I’ll try and call him off.”

  Bruno called the Café des Sports, run by Karim and his wife, Rashida, very pretty and heavily pregnant. Rashida told him Karim had left the café already and she didn’t think he had his cell phone with him. Putain, thought Bruno. He started walking briskly across the narrow bridge, trying to get to the parking lot in front of the bank before Karim got into trouble.

  Since he first arrived in the town a decade ago, Bruno had known Karim as a hulking and sullen teenager, ready to fight any young Frenchman who dared take him on. Bruno had seen the type before, and had slowly taught Karim that he was enough of an athlete to take out his resentments on the rugby field. With rugby lessons twice a week and a match each Saturday, and tennis in the summer, Bruno had taught the boy to stay out of trouble. He got Karim onto the school team, then onto the local rugby team and finally into a league big enough for him to make the money that enabled him to marry Rashida and buy the café. Bruno had made a speech at their wedding.

  Putain, putain, putain. If Karim got into trouble over this it could turn very nasty. The inspectors would get their boss to put pressure on the prefect, who would then put pressure on the Police Nationale, or maybe they would even get on to the Ministry of Defense and bring in the gendarmes who were supposed to deal with rural crime. A conviction for criminal damage to state property would mean an end to Karim’s license to sell tobacco, and the end of his café. Karim would not name names but Rashida would be thinking of the baby and she might crack. That would lead them to old Joe and to the rest of the rugby team, who had certainly participated in the mischief, and before you knew it the whole network of the quiet and peaceful town would face charges. Bruno couldn’t have that.

  He carefully slowed his pace as he turned the corner by the commune notice board and passed the war memorial, moving into the ranks of cars that were drawn up like so many multicolored soldiers in front of the Crédit Agricole. He looked for the gendarmes’ Twingo and then saw Duroc standing in the usual line in front of the bank’s cash machine. Two places behind him was the looming figure of Karim, chatting pleasantly to Colette from the dry-cleaning shop. Bruno closed his eyes in relief, and strode on toward the burly North African.

  “Karim,” he said, and swiftly added “Bonjour, Colette,” kissing her cheeks, before turning back to Karim, saying, “I need to talk to you about Sunday’s game. It will just take a moment.” He grabbed Karim by the elbow, made his farewell to Colette, nodded at Duroc and steered his reluctant quarry back to the bridge.

  “I think they may have the car staked out, maybe even tipped off the gendarmerie,” Bruno said. Karim broke into a delighted smile.

  “I thought of that myself, Bruno. Anyway, it’s already done.”

  “You did the tires with Duroc standing right there?”

  “Not at all,” said Karim, grinning. “I told my nephew to take care of it with the other kids. They crept up and j
ammed a potato into the exhaust pipe while I was chatting with Colette and Duroc. That car won’t make ten kilometers before the engine quits.”

  3

  As the siren that sounded noon began its soaring whine over the town, Bruno stood to attention before the Mairie. At moments such as this he often wondered if this had been the same sound that had signaled the coming of the Germans. Images of ancient newsreels would come to mind: diving Stukas, people dashing for air-raid shelters, the victorious Wehrmacht marching through the Arc de Triomphe in 1940 to stamp their jackboots on the Champs-Elysées and launch the conquest of Paris. This was the day of revenge, the eighth of May, when France celebrated her eventual victory, and although some said it was old-fashioned and unfriendly in these days of Europe, the town of St. Denis remembered the Liberation with an annual parade of its venerable veterans.

  Bruno had posted the ROUTE BARREE signs to block the side road and ensured that the floral wreaths had been delivered. He had donned his tie and polished his shoes and the peak of his cap. He had warned the old men in both cafés that the time was approaching and had brought up the flags from the cellar beneath the Mairie. The mayor himself stood waiting, the sash of office across his chest and the little red rosette of the Légion d’honneur in his lapel. The gendarmes were holding up the impatient traffic, while housewives kept asking when they could cross the road, grumbling that their bags were getting heavy and that they had to get lunch on the table.

  Jean-Pierre of the bicycle shop carried the Tricolor and his enemy Bachelot held the flag that bore the cross of Lorraine, the emblem of General de Gaulle and Free France. Marie-Louise, who as a young girl had served as a courier for one of the Resistance groups and who had been taken off to Ravensbrück concentration camp and somehow survived, had the flag of St. Denis. Montsouris, the only communist council member of the town, carried a smaller flag of the Soviet Union, acknowledging one of France’s wartime allies, and Monsieur Jackson held the flag of another ally, his native Britain. A retired schoolteacher, he had come to spend his declining years with his daughter, who had married Pascal of the local insurance office. Jackson had been an eighteen-year-old recruit in the last weeks of war in 1945 and was thus a fellow combatant, entitled to share the honor of the victory parade. Bruno was privately proud to have arranged this. One day, Bruno told himself, he would find a real American, but this time young Karim, as the star of the rugby team, carried the Stars and Stripes.

  The mayor gave the signal and the town band began to play “The Marseillaise.” Jean-Pierre raised the flag of France, Bruno and the gendarmes saluted and the small parade marched off across the bridge, their flags flapping in the breeze. Following them were three lines of the men of St. Denis who had performed their military service in peacetime but who turned out for this parade as a duty to their town as well as to their nation. Bruno noted that Karim’s entire family had come to watch him carry a flag, even the reclusive old grandfather who was almost never seen in town. At the back came a host of small boys trying to march in step. After the bridge, the parade turned left at the bank and marched through the parking area to the memorial, a bronze figure of a French poilu of the Great War. The names of the fallen sons of St. Denis took up three sides of the plinth beneath the figure, more than two hundred young men from the small village. The bronze had darkened with the years, but the great eagle of victory that was perched, wings outstretched, on the soldier’s shoulder gleamed golden with fresh polish. The mayor had seen to that. The plinth’s fourth side was more than sufficient for the dead of the Second World War and the subsequent conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria. Happily, there were no names from Bruno’s own brief experience of war in the Balkans.

  The schoolchildren of the town were lined up on each side of the memorial, the smallest ones, from the nursery school, in front sucking their thumbs and holding each other’s hands. In the next row, the slightly older ones in jeans and T-shirts were still young enough to be fascinated by this spectacle. Across from them, some of the teenagers of the junior high school slouched, affecting sneers and a touch of bafflement that the new Europe they were inheriting could yet indulge in such antiquated celebrations of national pride. But Bruno noticed that most of the teenagers stood quietly, aware that they were in the presence of all that remained of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, a list of names on a plinth that said something of their heritage and of the great mystery of war, and something of what France might one day again demand of her sons.

  Jean-Pierre and Bachelot, who might not have spoken for more than sixty years but who knew the ritual of this annual moment, marched forward and lowered their flags in salute to the bronze soldier and his eagle. Montsouris dipped his red flag and Marie-Louise lowered hers so far it touched the ground. Belatedly, unsure of their timing, Karim and Jackson followed suit. The mayor walked solemnly forward and ascended the small dais that Bruno had placed before the memorial.

  “Français et Françaises” he declaimed, addressing the small crowd. “Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, and the representatives of our brave allies. We are here to celebrate a day of victory that has also become a day of peace, the eighth of May, which marks the end of Nazism and the beginning of Europe’s reconciliation and her long, happy years of tranquillity. That peace was bought in part by the bravery of our sons of St. Denis whose names are inscribed here, by our gallant allies whose flags we honor today and by the men and women who stand before you and who never bowed their heads to the rule of the invader. Whenever France has been in mortal peril, the sons and daughters of St. Denis have stood ready to answer the call, for France, and for the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and the Rights of Man for which she stands.”

  The mayor stopped and nodded at Sylvie from the bakery. She pushed forward her small daughter, who carried the floral wreath. The little girl, in a red skirt, a blue top and long white socks, walked hesitantly toward the mayor to offer him the wreath, looking quite alarmed as he bent to kiss her on both cheeks. The mayor took the wreath and walked slowly to the memorial, leaned it against the soldier’s bronze leg, stood back and called out, “Vive la France, Vive la République.”

  And with that Jean-Pierre and Bachelot, old men feeling the strain of the heavy flags, hauled them to an upright position of salute, and the band began to play “Le Chant des Partisans,” the old Resistance anthem. Tears began to roll down the cheeks of the two men, and Marie-Louise broke down in sobs so that her flag wavered and all the children, even the teenagers, looked sobered, even touched, by this evidence of some great, unknowable trial that these old people had lived through.

  As the music faded away, the Soviet, British and American flags were marched forward and raised in salute. Then came the surprise, a theatrical coup engineered by Bruno and approved by the mayor. This was a way for the old English enemy, who had fought France for a thousand years before becoming her ally for a brief century, to take her place on the day of victory.

  Jackson’s grandson, a boy of thirteen or so, marched forward from his place in the town band, where he played the trumpet, his hand on a shiny brass bugle that was slung from a red sash around his shoulders. He reached the memorial, turned to salute the mayor and, as the silent crowd exchanged glances about this novel addition to the ceremony, raised the bugle to his lips. As Bruno heard the first two long and haunting notes of “The Last Post,” tears came to his eyes. Through them he could see Jackson’s shoulders shaking and the British flag trembling in his hands. The mayor wiped away a tear as the last pure peals of the bugle died away, and the crowd remained absolutely silent until the boy put his bugle smartly to his side. Then, they exploded into applause and, as Karim went up and shook the boy’s hand, the Stars and Stripes swirling briefly to tangle with the British and French flags, Bruno was aware of a sudden flare of camera flashes.

  Mon Dieu, thought Bruno. That “Last Post” worked so well we’ll have to make it part of the annual ceremony. He looked around at the crowd, beginning to drift away, and saw that young Phi
lippe Delaron, who usually wrote the sports report for the Sud Ouest newspaper, had his notebook out and was talking to Jackson and his grandson. Well, a small notice in the newspaper about a British ally taking part in the victory parade could do no harm now that so many English were buying homes in the commune (though it would hardly encourage them to complain less about their various property taxes and the price of water for their swimming pools).

  Suddenly Bruno noticed something odd. After every previous parade, whether it was for the eighth of May, or the eighteenth of June, when de Gaulle launched Free France, or the fourteenth of July, when France celebrated her Revolution, or the eleventh of November, when the Great War ended, Jean-Pierre and Bachelot would turn away from each other without so much as a nod and walk back separately to the Mairie to store the flags they carried. But this time they were standing still, staring fixedly at one another. Not talking, but somehow communicating. Amazing what one bugle call can do, thought Bruno. Maybe if I can get some Americans into the parade next year they might even start talking. But now it was thirty minutes after midday and, like every good Frenchman, Bruno turned his thoughts to lunch.

  He walked back across the bridge with Marie-Louise, who was still weeping as he gently took her flag from her. The mayor and Jackson and his family were close behind. Karim and his family walked ahead, and Jean-Pierre and Bachelot, with their almost identical wives in their dark, frumpy dresses and cardigans, brought up the rear. They marched in silence as the band played another song from the war that had the power to melt Bruno: “J’attendrai.” It was the song of the women of France in 1940 as they watched their men march off to a war that turned into six weeks of disaster and five years of prison camps. “Day and night, I shall wait always, for your return.” The history of France was measured out in songs of war, he thought, many sad and some heroic, but each verse heavy with its weight of loss.