The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started their visits to the markets of Périgord in an official car with red Belgian licence plates. On their second visit, to Bruno’s alarm, all the tyres had been slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number “75” on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean before the inspectors arrived.
Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the nation’s gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of St. Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise that they did not have the patience to make themselves.
So now the inspectors were trying a new tack, renting a car locally so that they might more easily stage their ambush and subsequent getaway with their tyres intact. They had succeeded in handing out four fines in St. Alvère yesterday, but they would not succeed in St. Denis, whose famous market went back more than seven hundred years. Not if Bruno had anything to do with it.
With one final gaze into the little corner of paradise that was entrusted to him, Bruno took a deep breath of his native air and braced himself for the day. As he climbed back into his van, he thought, as he always did on fine summer mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him: that the very summit of happiness was “to live like God in France.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Walker is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including six previous novels featuring Captain Bruno Courrèges. He is also senior director of the Global Business Policy Council in Washington, D.C., as well as editor emeritus at the global news agency United Press International. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C., and spends his summers in the southwest of France.
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Bruno and le Père Noël
Copyright © 2013 by Martin Walker.
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This EPUB edition: 2013
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