Isabelle leafed through Teddy’s papers and found his university transcripts, letters of recommendation from his professor and teachers, certificates from other archaeology digs where he’d worked—all the stuff he’d need if the museum wanted to check his credentials.
“All as you’d expect, but what’s this?” she said, looking up. “This isn’t his handwriting, at least it’s not like the handwriting on these other papers.”
She held up what seemed like a crudely drawn map, which looked much older than the rest of the papers in the envelope. She took it to the desk by the window, pushed aside the huge vase of flowers and beckoned Bruno to come over.
“Get rid of those damn flowers,” she said. He smiled to himself as he took the vase to the corner of the room and then joined her, bending over the map. It was a photocopy of an older document, but something on one of the corners had been covered when the photocopy was made, and the paper was much whiter there.
The map showed a river, joined by a stream, and then some lines that could have signified contours and a small track leading from a road. The main feature was a cross, with some thin lines drawn as if to measure its distance from the road, the stream and the start of the contoured slope. Each line had some scrawled numbers beside it and arrows led off the page to other locations, identified only by initials.
“If those letters on the edge are SD, they could stand for ‘St. Denis,’ ” said Isabelle.
“That would make these letters look like LE, which could be Les Eyzies, so this is the river,” said Bruno, drawing on his mental map of the district. Suddenly the location jumped into place.
“It’s the archaeological dig,” he said. “And those scrawls beside the lines are distances in meters. The track runs a hundred and twenty meters from the river, and then this cross here is fifteen meters from the stream, eight meters from the start of the contours. I’ll need to go back and pace out the distances, but I think this is a map that shows where the unidentified corpse was buried.”
“So this is how Teddy knew exactly where to dig,” said Isabelle. “And the map must have been drawn by somebody who knew where the body was buried, probably by somebody who took part in the killing. So how did Teddy get hold of it?”
“What’s this blank patch?” Bruno asked. “Why would they want to cover something when they made the copy?”
“That’s simple,” she said, and reached into her briefcase to pull out a file with a sheaf of documents inside. “All bureaucracies work the same way,” she went on, pointing to the stamp of the French Ministry of the Interior at the top right-hand corner of her own papers, with spaces for a date and different departmental codes to be written in.
“This is a document that has been filed in some kind of registry, possibly official or state controlled. Then somebody took it out of the files and photocopied it while concealing the registry mark that could identify it, and maybe identify whoever had taken it out.”
She turned the paper over and looked at a small scrawl of numbers on the back, in a different handwriting.
“Could be a phone number,” she said. Bruno reached for his mobile but she shook her head. “Your number might be known. This one’s anonymous,” she said, picking up a phone from the folding table. She punched in the number and waited.
“It’s an answering machine in Spanish,” she said. “Asked me to leave a message.” She picked up another phone, gave her name and ID code and asked for a subscriber check on the number. Bruno was studying the map.
“There’s no writing on it apart from those initials for St. Denis and Les Eyzies. It could come from anywhere,” Bruno said. “French or Spanish or even Russian.”
“Russians would use their own alphabet,” said Isabelle. “If we assume that Todor was killed by the GAL, then this map could come from the GAL files, or at least from some Spanish file, maybe Ministry of the Interior or police intelligence.”
“Do we bring Carlos into this?”
“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d better fax this to the brigadier and check with him.” She looked at her watch. “He’s going to be here later today and may be on the way. We’ll just keep this to ourselves until he gets here. He can decide how much of this we want to share.”
“I’ll copy those coordinates and go out to the site and check them,” Bruno said. He paused. “Does this mean that you don’t altogether trust Carlos?”
“I don’t altogether trust anyone, Bruno. Except maybe the brigadier and, on a good day, you—unless the interests of St. Denis are concerned.” She smiled as she said it, a smile that grew wider as she saw his eyes dart across to the corner where he had put Carlos’s flowers.
“Now I see why you want to know if I trust Carlos,” she said, teasing him. “Bruno, I do believe you’re getting jealous. And now you’re blushing. That’s not something I’ve seen before.”
He shook his head, half laughing, half embarrassed, not sure what to say, confused further by the presence in the room of the enormous bed. He was tempted to scoop her up in his arms and carry her to it, close the big damask curtains and forget about the world. “You know I still care for you,” he said.
“And I for you,” she said, suddenly switching her mood in a way that had always disconcerted Bruno. “So why are you walking around me on eggshells as if you daren’t approach? Is it because of Pamela?”
“Partly, not entirely. In fact, Pamela had to go home. Her mother had a stroke. I’m waiting for news. Maybe it’s that you’re wounded,” he said. Of course he walked on eggshells around her; he no longer knew the rules of engagement, couldn’t read the signals. Were they ex-lovers and still friends? Or colleagues thrown together by duty who had to forget that they had once shared a bed? Or should Bruno act on the question that sometimes kept him awake at night, the suspicion that Isabelle was the love of his life? He thrust the thought aside; the last time a woman had consumed him so deeply, she had been dead within the year in the snowbound hills around Sarajevo.
Isabelle was eyeing him coolly, waiting for him to say something else. He floundered for words. “You shouldn’t be back on duty, not yet, not while you still need that cane.”
“I’m not,” she snapped. “I’m deskbound, light duties only. And I’m not destroyed by this, Bruno. I’m making a full recovery, even if I do have a titanium brace in my thigh. Merde, I thought you of all people would be able to understand this. You’ve been shot too. It didn’t stop you from being a man, and a bullet hole in my leg doesn’t stop me from being a woman, so why don’t you treat me like one?”
“I’d like nothing better than to touch you, Isabelle. You know that.” He took her hand, pushing back the guilty memory of doing the same with Pamela just a few hours earlier. “But every time we get together we break apart when you head back to Paris, and I have to brace myself to soldier on through it all over again.”
“Doomed lovers,” she said with a wry smile, moving her hand from his lips to stroke his cheek. “I guess it’s never going to work, but we keep hoping that it will.”
A phone buzzed on her desk, and she pulled her hand away. “And we’re supposed to be working,” she said. “Dammit, Bruno, go and check that map and I’ll see you at the evening meeting.”
He was going out the door when she called, “Wait.” He turned back. She muttered something into the phone and held the line open. “It’s the German police. They checked the fingerprints. Jan is Horst’s brother, the one from the Red Army Faktion gang who was supposed to be dead.”
Bruno went to the stack of papers on the desk, looking for the sheets he’d been working on earlier. He pulled out his crude diagram with the boxes and the dotted line from Horst to Jan and the Basques. He showed it to Isabelle.
“This means that Galder, the young guy with bad French whom Jan described as a cousin of his wife, is probably connected. Does Carlos have any mug shots of suspected ETA militants I could look at?”
“We have our own as well as theirs, passed on to us under t
he intelligence-sharing agreement,” she said. He tried to come up with a mental image of the youth: medium height, slimly built, with dark hair and a prominent jaw; a straight nose and hands with long fingers that looked too delicate for a blacksmith’s work. Not much to go on, but Bruno would know him again if he saw him.
“They’re in the file room downstairs, a big red folder on the shelf above the photocopier,” Isabelle said.
“Do you want me to bring Jan in?” he asked, reluctant to believe that Horst could be his brother’s accomplice.
“He’s ex-Baader-Meinhof, he’ll probably be armed. I’ll arrange a firearms team. Take a look at the mug shots and then go and check the map coordinates, and I’ll have the team ready to go within an hour. And I’ll arrange to use the gendarmerie when you bring him back. The Germans are faxing through an extradition order on a Euro-warrant.”
23
The archaeology dig had been deserted, all the students still going through the explosives checks at Bergerac, but the coordinates on the hand-drawn map were precise. When Bruno paced out the numbers on the sketch he found himself standing at the ever-lengthening trench where he had first met Teddy and first seen the corpse. As he led the way to Jan’s smithy, a firearms team from Isabelle’s security force in its unmarked van following behind, he wondered at the coincidence that had led a Spanish murder squad to pick the same burial place as prehistoric people had chosen for their dead thirty thousand years before.
Generation after generation, so many bodies must lie scattered in the soil of France, so many battlefields where the bones must lie thickly together. In Normandy and Dunkerque from the last war, at Verdun and the Somme from the Great War, at Gravelotte and Sedan from the Prussian war, the wars and bodies stretched back through the centuries to Spaniards, Englishmen, Normans, Arabs, Huns, Gauls and Romans. France is built on a heap of bones, he thought; we are the sum of all the dead that went before us. And here we are again, a troop of armed men with their weapons ready, heading across the placid Périgord countryside to enforce the will of the French state. He bit his lip to bring himself back to alertness, remembering how in the army he’d often been this way before going into action. He supposed it was some kind of defense mechanism, his subconscious trying to distract him from fear.
Bruno stopped at the turnoff to Jan’s smithy and parked his car. He climbed into the back of the second vehicle and struggled into the flak vest handed to him as the van jerked and bounced over the ruts in the lane. The vest’s design did not seem to have improved since his days in Bosnia. It still left the throat and sides exposed, and he doubted if it would stop anything more than a nine millimeter. He’d seen men killed with an AK-47 round that had penetrated their vests. Bruno looked at the squad with him. They had the extra armor of ceramic plates slipped into their vests, front and rear. He raised his eyebrows at the sergeant of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité whose troops made up the firearms team. The sergeant shook his head and shrugged; no plates for Bruno.
They had discussed the approach, and Bruno had said there was no obvious reason for Jan to be alert and armed. He wanted to drive up beside the smithy, to go in himself while the armed team deployed quietly, and make the arrest. The sergeant had objected, wanting his men in place while Bruno used the bullhorn to call Jan to give himself up. Bruno had won that argument, but as he clambered out of the truck, feeling clumsy from the flak vest beneath his jacket, he was wishing that he’d listened to the sergeant.
The place was quiet. There was no sound of hammer on iron nor of Jan’s salty curses, and none of the usual smell of burning coke. The smithy was empty, the tools all neatly tidied away and the fire cold. There was no car in the other barn, and the door to the main house was locked and the windows shuttered. Bruno signaled to the truck and men in black with weapons pointed deployed around the rest of the property. As the sergeant approached, Bruno gestured to the locked door. The sergeant turned back to the van and returned with a heavy ram. He took one side, Bruno the other, and they smashed it into the lock while another trooper stood cover behind them, his weapon aimed into the doorway. The door toppled open, but no sound or sign came from within.
The sergeant went in first, flicking the button on the flashlight taped beneath the barrel of his rifle to illuminate the room. Bruno followed, and once the sergeant came down from upstairs and pronounced the premises clear, Bruno flicked on the switch inside the doorway, and the room blazed with light. He felt relieved. He’d begun to expect that they’d find Jan’s dead body in the abandoned house.
“I’ll search the house,” Bruno told the sergeant. “I’d be grateful if your team could search everywhere else. Hold any papers that you find for me, and let me know of any signs that other people have stayed here. There’s an office with a computer in the barn by the smithy. Leave that to me.”
Bruno took off his jacket, wriggled out of the flak jacket and handed it to the sergeant. “I’d have thought they’d have improved these things since my day,” he said.
“You ought to see the new German ones,” the sergeant said. “My brother’s in the paratroopers in Afghanistan. He brought one back, light and terrific. He said it would stop anything short of an RPG.” He paused. “What unit were you in?”
“Combat engineers, then attached to paratroopers,” said Bruno.
The sergeant raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. “You can count on us, then,” he said.
“Check in the smithy for any false walls or trapdoors or anything like a basement,” Bruno said. “Get two of your men to take a good look in that lean-to where he stores his coke. Shift some of it if you have to.”
The sergeant nodded and Bruno went into the house, but there was no study, no box of family files and documents. Jan must have kept everything in the office in the smithy. There was a bookshelf of well-thumbed paperbacks, some in Danish and some in German, and a row of political books in French, presumably Juanita’s.
The drawers in the main bedroom contained only clothing, and standing on the chest there were a lot of photos of Juanita. They seemed the only items in the house to have been dusted, which reminded Bruno that he’d always liked Jan. There were two other bedrooms, each with two single beds made up with creased and grubby sheets. Another four people had been staying here. In the spare bathroom he found soiled towels and the discarded wrapping in Spanish of a disposable razor. In the bottom of the bath was a small, empty plastic bottle of shampoo, marked with the name of a hotel in Bayonne. That might be useful.
Still looking for documents, Bruno checked the usual places, the attics and the freezer, the water tank of the bathroom and beneath the plastic bags of the garbage bags. There was nothing. The smithy office contained paperwork from the business and all the household bills, each loosely stuffed into separate file boxes marked for water, gas, electricity and taxes. Bruno pulled the drawers out of the filing cabinets. Wrapped in plastic and taped to the underside of the lower drawer were three passports. A West German one and an East German one were a decade out-of-date, both bearing the photo of a much-younger and much-slimmer Jan and identifying him as Dieter Vogelstern. That settled any lingering question of whether Jan was Horst’s brother. There was also a valid Cuban passport, with a more recent photo, in the name of Jan Pedersen, the same name as on the Danish passport he had used to obtain his French residency. Tucked inside it Bruno counted eighty one-hundred-dollar bills.
He went outside and called Isabelle, asking if she could get a forensics team to Jan’s place. There might be fingerprints or DNA traces that could help identify Jan’s guests, and maybe even a credit card number from the stay at the Bayonne hotel. He gave her the various passport numbers, marveling at the vast international bureaucratic machine that he could summon into action for such an investigation.
“The fact that Jan left the cash and the Cuban passport suggests that either he thinks he’s coming back, or he left involuntarily,” he said.
“Or he doesn’t suspect we know about him,” said Is
abelle.
“Jan’s no fool. He must have known his real identity was likely to emerge once I started asking about Horst’s father and brother and said we’d be contacting the German police.”
“So if we assume that Jan’s guests were the Basque unit, does that mean that the two brothers are in this voluntarily? You know them both, what’s your assessment?”
“My views aren’t worth much. I never suspected that Jan wasn’t the Danish blacksmith he pretended to be,” said Bruno. “For what it’s worth, and I know him a lot better, I can’t see Horst involved.”
Bruno hung up when he heard the sergeant calling from a small, half-ruined barn some distance to the rear of the smithy. Part of the low roof had collapsed and the rest was bowed, a sure sign that the laths had rotted; the windows were covered with stout wooden shutters. Bruno hoped this would not be Jan’s tomb, but the sergeant was pointing at the door itself and the sturdy modern bolt, still bright with newness.
“It stinks of piss inside and there’s a filthy bed,” the sergeant said. “Someone was probably held prisoner here.”
Bruno looked in, and paused, taking the sergeant’s flashlight. He shone it upward to see how much headroom there might be. There was one place where he could stand upright. Moving the light around he saw a bucket, evidently the only sanitation available, and an army surplus camp bed of canvas and thin metal bars. A filthy blanket lay atop it, and there was an empty plastic bottle beneath. Bruno switched off the flashlight and closed the door, trying to assess how much light the room’s occupant might have had. He just knew Horst had been there. There were some cracks in the door and one or two in the apex of the roof, but the sense of darkness was very strong. He must have spent a wretched couple of days in this place, Bruno thought, aware that his own brother was his jailer.
The Crowded Grave Page 20
