The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  Bruno disliked the way he sounded in official reports, the way the bureaucratic phrases came to his lips as they had in his days in the army. The words felt lifeless as he spoke them, just as they had sounded when he listened to the reports from the others around the table.

  “Keep us informed of any developments in those two cases you mentioned,” Isabelle said. “But let’s make sure we check everything, particularly those foreign students. If you could let me have a list of names and passport numbers I can make the usual inquiries. Any of them Spanish?”

  “No,” said Carlos. “It was the first thing I checked.”

  “I’ll e-mail you the list,” Bruno said.

  “I have a liaison meeting with the prefect in Périgueux tomorrow, so we won’t bother with the morning meeting. If there is no other business we’ll convene again at six tomorrow evening, messieurs,” Isabelle said. She closed the file in front of her and put away her pen. She did not rise, but sat back in her seat and closed her eyes as the men shuffled to their feet and began to file out to their cars, talking in low voices. Bruno delayed rising, hoping to exchange a private word with Isabelle, but the large figure of J-J loomed into view, his expression unusually grim.

  “Why have you got me taking over this minor case of accidental discharge of a firearm?” J-J asked. Carlos had perched on the edge of the long table beside Isabelle and had said something to make her smile. Bruno felt a surge of something that he hoped wasn’t jealousy; perhaps it was just pleasure at seeing her face come alive.

  “Because my mayor and your subprefect are members of the same hunting club as the guy who fired the shot,” Bruno told him. “And because it’s in your interest to keep Capitaine Duroc from blundering into the scene, which would ruin the first case of that new magistrate you warned me about.”

  J-J pursed his lips as Bruno briefly explained the informal agreement that he had brokered between Kajte and the farmers. J-J would be sympathetic to anything that could reduce his paperwork.

  “Any chance of persuading the Dutch girl to head back to Holland on the next train? That would make it a lot easier.”

  “We can try it,” said Bruno. “But if she’s set on a career as an archaeologist, this is the place to be.”

  J-J’s phone trilled, and after a quick glance at the screen he answered, mouthing the word “Duroc” at Bruno. There was a pause as he listened, keeping his eyes fixed on Bruno.

  “You’ve heard of the new security alert in the region, Capitaine, because of this high-level international meeting coming up?” J-J said. “That’s why all firearms and other potentially suspicious events are being handled by me during this period. I was just discussing these special measures with the general at today’s security meeting.” J-J gave Bruno a broad wink, and continued: “Would you like me to put him on the line so you can explain why you want an exception in this case? No? Very well, and I’ll be sure to let you know whatever action I decide to take.”

  “I hope that’s not my general whose name you’re taking in vain, J-J,” Isabelle said. She had suddenly appeared at J-J’s side, walking more easily than Bruno had expected and with the cane held loosely by her side rather than used as support. She leaned forward to kiss her old boss, but J-J threw his arms around her, saying the Périgueux detectives had not been the same since she left. Bruno too was kissed lightly on the cheeks, but the hand that was not carrying the cane discreetly squeezed his own.

  “So many damn generals around me these days I’m bound to upset someone,” J-J said.

  “Carlos has just been telling me about his introduction to your own methods of policing here in St. Denis,” Isabelle said, grinning at Bruno. “It seems to involve rugby and hunting, foie gras and a pretty girl, archaeology and gunplay—have I left anything out?”

  “Guilty on all counts,” Bruno replied, laughing and raising his hands in the air in surrender. “But you left out the mayor and my dog.”

  “And how’s Gigi?” she asked eagerly. “I hope you’ll bring him along to tomorrow’s meeting. He’ll be more fun than the generals.”

  “Why are we standing here talking about dogs when there’s a perfectly good bar at the hotel across the road?” J-J asked, leading the way to the door. “These committee meetings are thirsty work.”

  Maurice’s call came to Bruno just as the first glasses of Ricard were emptying and thoughts turning to dinner. Maurice and Sophie had returned home to feed the ducks, and had found a curt note from Capitaine Duroc ordering them to appear the following morning at the gendarmerie. Bruno assured them that he’d be there and suggested they call Pouillon and ask him to attend. Just before hanging up, leaving Bruno no time to protest, Maurice added that he’d left a cooler with some fresh foie in the secondhand refrigerator Bruno had installed in his barn. With that, the question of dinner was solved, and Bruno led the way by the back road skirting Les Eyzies and through the woods to his home.

  “I love this road. It feels almost magical, like something in a fairy story,” said Isabelle as he turned off by the disused quarry along the single track where the flanking trees leaned inward so that their branches met and intertwined above the road, making a dark and mysterious tunnel. At each bend, the eyes of watching animals gleamed in Bruno’s headlamps.

  Bruno’s heart had given a little leap when she led the way from the hotel and installed herself in the passenger seat of his car, leaving Carlos and J-J to follow in a separate car.

  “Happy birthday for tomorrow,” she said, kissing his cheek before sitting back to fasten her seat belt. “Don’t be surprised that I remembered. You Pisces, me Leo.”

  He smiled, recalling the way they had celebrated her birthday with a champagne breakfast in his bed in what he recalled as the happiest summer of his life. He had teased her then about the way she checked her own horoscope each day in a newspaper, and she liked to read his aloud over their morning coffee. It was one of the little rituals of their affair that he missed.

  “Your leg seems to be healing well,” he said. “Do you still need the cane to walk?”

  “Not really, but it’s useful,” she said, twisting the silver handle and lifting so that Bruno could see the gleam of steel beneath. “It’s an old sword cane, a gift from the brigadier. It could come in useful, walking home at night in Paris.”

  “So he does feel guilty about sending you into that fire-fight,” Bruno said. “And so he damn well should. There was no need for you to be there.”

  “I volunteered,” she said crisply. “And as you can see, I’m making a complete recovery. But enough of that. Tell me about yourself. Are you happy? Is your Englishwoman looking after you? I always found it hard to read your face.”

  “I’ve become a horseman, thanks to her. She taught me to ride, and I love it. Perhaps we appreciate skills more when we learn them when we’re older. I had to work at riding, and it gives me enormous pleasure.” He looked across at her, leaning back into the corner of the car seat, studying him with fond amusement. “Do you ride?”

  “No, but then I’m not in the rural police,” she said. He could hear the gentle teasing in her voice. “I like the thought of you patrolling the far reaches of St. Denis on horseback, like an old-fashioned garde-champêtre, or perhaps like a sheriff in a Western. Bruno, the fastest gun in the Périgord.”

  He laughed. Two could play at this game. “And now you’re the queen of the committees, a rising star among officials, with generals and prefects deferring to your leadership,” he said. “A woman with a future.”

  “A woman with a career,” she said quietly as he turned up the lane that led to his home. “I’m good at it and I’m proud of it. And I’m not going to let this leg slow me down.”

  Bruno nodded, giving what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Inwardly he sighed. This was the irony that governed them and that had doomed their affair. Everything that made him love her, Isabelle’s courage and her drive and self-confidence, was locked inextricably into her job and her determination to excel. And that m
eant living in Paris and working at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior on place Beauvau. If she gave that up and returned to live with Bruno, she’d probably succeed J-J as chief detective for the département. But diminished by the curtailing of her own ambition, she’d no longer be the Isabelle he loved. And if he accepted her offer to move to Paris, giving up his hunting and his garden and all his friends and roots in St. Denis, he knew he’d no longer be the Bruno that she loved. He wasn’t made to live in a city. He’d be unhappy and resentful in a way that would slowly but certainly undermine whatever happiness they found together. He had pondered it and thought it through to the same bleak conclusion on dozens of solitary evenings and walks in the woods with Gigi. But it didn’t stop him thinking of might-have-beens.

  As he rounded the last bend she lowered the car window and poked her head out, shouting “Gigi, it’s me,” and opening the door before Bruno had fully stopped to welcome the galloping basset hound, his short legs pounding and his long ears flapping as he leaped into Isabelle’s lap and licked passionately at her neck.

  Bruno left them to their reunion, musing how much easier such encounters seemed to be for dogs than for humans, and took the packet of foie from the barn. He let himself in the back door and opened the front one for his guests. Isabelle laid the table and J-J made more drinks from the supply Bruno kept in his kitchen. Carlos, who had brought two bottles of Rioja from a case in the back of his Range Rover, leaned against the window frame to watch.

  Bruno put a kettle on to boil and from his larder took a large glass jar filled with an enchaud de porc he had made earlier in the winter, a fillet of pork cooked and preserved in duck fat and garlic. Usually he served it cold, but the night was chilly so he spooned the duck fat into a frying pan to melt on low heat, sliced the fillet and put it into the oven to warm, along with four plates. He peeled and sliced some potatoes, threw in some salt and added them to the boiling water. Then he cut thick slices from the fat round loaf of pain de campagne and put them under the grill. Without being told, Isabelle took the cheese from the refrigerator, half of a Tomme d’Audrix that Stéphane made and some cabécous of goat cheese from Alphonse. She put them on a wooden board and took it into the dining room.

  “Making your special foie?” she asked on the way out. When he nodded she said, “I’ll come back to watch. Anything I can do?”

  “Peel and slice those shallots,” he said, and for a moment it was as though she had never left, each of them falling into the familiar kitchen rhythms, neither getting in the other’s way.

  “Then we’ll make the pork the usual way, in red wine with the dried cèpes?” she asked when the shallots were done, the potatoes parboiled and dried and set to sauté in the duck fat. Bruno grunted confirmation as he bent to the delicate task of slicing the raw foie to just the right thickness. She warmed the shallots on low heat, added the dried mushrooms and a glass of wine and joined Carlos to watch Bruno’s next step.

  “No fat for the foie?” Carlos asked as Bruno put a jar of honey alongside a heavy black iron pan that had been heating for some time.

  “It contains all the fat it needs,” Isabelle said.

  Bruno laid slices of the foie in the pan, so hot that the surface of the foie was seared to keep in the juices, but its own fat seeped out steadily into the iron pan. Carlos looked up as he noticed Bruno humming to himself.

  “That’s how he times his cooking,” said Isabelle. “It takes Bruno forty-five seconds to sing the ‘Marseillaise,’ and thirty seconds if he stops before ‘Aux armes, citoyens.’ Steaks get the full version, but the foie needs only thirty seconds a side.”

  Bruno turned the slices of foie and began humming again, using a spatula to keep moving the liver around the pan. As the first tendrils of smoke began to rise, he stopped singing to himself, removed the pan and poured out the excess fat into a waiting jar. He slid the foie onto a hot serving dish and then took a bottle of balsamic vinegar and poured in a couple of spoonfuls. The spatula scraped back and forth with the heating vinegar to cleanse the bottom of the pan, and then he added three large spoonfuls of honey and swirled it into the thickening sauce.

  “So simple,” said Carlos. “Yet it smells so good.”

  Bruno took the toasted bread from the grill, quickly scraped a clove of garlic over each slice and put them on the warmed plates. Onto the toasts he draped slices of cooked foie and then drizzled the honey-vinegar sauce over every portion. Isabelle took the plates to the table as Bruno put the enchaud into the red wine and shallot sauce and left them on a very low heat alongside the potatoes. Finally he took an opened bottle of Monbazillac from the refrigerator and four fresh glasses and joined his guests around the big table that took up one side of his living room.

  “A glass of this with the foie,” he said, pouring out the rich, golden wine of the Bergerac. “And bon appétit.”

  “I always thought of foie gras as a pâté, something you ate cold,” said Carlos. “This is amazing, not just smooth but silky.”

  “Putain, but this is good, Bruno,” said J-J. “I never heard of it being done this way with the honey and vinegar, but the fat balances the sweetness. You’ve got the foie crisp on the outside, and this toast with the juices …”

  “I used to sauté the foie with a tiny knob of butter,” Bruno said. “But then someone with a stall at the night market in Audrix made it this way and I liked it so much I watched him and learned how to do it.”

  Bruno briefly left the table to turn the enchauds and the potatoes and came back to sip at his Monbazillac when he saw Isabelle raise her glass to him across the table. She was sitting in the wheelback chair she had always used when they were together. She had bought it for him as a gift, soon after they had become lovers, at an antiques market where they had spent a happy summer afternoon. Seeing her there, he might fleetingly imagine that nothing had changed. From the corner of his eye Bruno noted Carlos observing the interplay and history between them.

  She looked down to where Gigi had been waiting patiently at her side until she fed him the final morsel of her toast, rich with the juices of the foie and its sauce. J-J used his bread to wipe his plate clean, and the others followed his example as Bruno brought in the enchauds. Carlos’s Rioja, a Torre Muga, was sampled and pronounced excellent, and Bruno watched with pleasure at the scene around the table. Entertaining his friends in this house that he had built, with food that he had grown in his garden and cooked at his own stove, gave him a deep satisfaction. J-J was an old friend, Carlos seemed to be a promising new one, and Isabelle—well, Isabelle was special in the way that only an old lover can be.

  “Excellent sauce, Isabelle,” said Carlos. “And delicious pork.”

  “Knowing Bruno, this pork fillet will have come from a pig he killed with Stéphane a couple of months ago,” she said. “And his freezer will be filled with rillettes and ribs, sausages and intestines. Nothing ever goes to waste from a good farm pig.”

  “Let’s not go into that, or we’d have to arrest him,” said J-J. “You know those idiots in Brussels have made it illegal for our farmers to kill their own pigs.”

  “If we carried out that regulation, we’d have to arrest half of Spain,” said Carlos. “Our police aren’t fools, most of them know when to turn a blind eye. In the end it comes down to judgment.”

  “Unfortunately, good judgment is in much shorter supply than new laws,” J-J said. “Let’s hope this summit meeting doesn’t produce any new ones because I can’t keep track of all the laws on the books already.”

  “Tell me if I’m wrong, but this summit sounds to me like a political meeting about cosmetics,” said Carlos, pouring out the second bottle as Isabelle passed the cheeseboard. “We’ve already got all the cooperation we need with France, both police and intelligence.”

  “And yet the bastards still seem to keep a step or two ahead of us,” said Isabelle. “The one thing that can make a difference out of this summit will be to agree to joint staffing of the écouteurs. We ha
ven’t got enough Basque speakers monitoring the phones.”

  “But that’s not on the agenda,” said Carlos, looking thoughtful.

  “Not explicitly,” Isabelle agreed. “But it’s what my minister wants. Read between the lines of the draft agreement and it’s there.”

  “Talking of cooperation, we might need some from you,” J-J said to Carlos. “I got the forensic report on that skeleton, Bruno. They say that from the shoes and the Swatch it’s twenty to twenty-five years old, one shot to the back of the head with a nine-millimeter Beretta. They found the bullet in the dirt beneath the body so he was shot in place. The dentistry is poor, but they think it’s Spanish, Portuguese or possibly Moroccan. We’re sending it out on the Interpol wire, but perhaps you can cut some corners.”

  “E-mail me the report and I’ll try,” Carlos replied. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, the report claims he was tortured,” J-J went on. “The finger bones were crushed and splintered with what they think was a pair of pliers. That makes it look like gangland, maybe drugs.”

  Carlos winced and took a deep breath. “Poor devil, whoever he was.” He pointedly looked at his watch, and J-J picked up on the cue.

  “Early start tomorrow, so no time for coffee,” he said, rising, and looked at Carlos and Isabelle. “I’ll drive you both back to the hotel and let Bruno do his washing up.”

  Isabelle looked at Bruno and raised her eyebrows slightly, before leaning down to stroke that spot she knew behind Gigi’s ears. He told himself that he detected a touch of regret in her gesture, but he might have been flattering himself.

  She looked up from the dog, noting quickly that J-J and Carlos were chatting together, and said quietly to Bruno, “Thank you for the books. We must talk about them sometime.”