A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  By the time he reached his vehicle, his phone was ringing.

  “Why did you want to know about the incident report?” asked J-J, his voice heavy with suspicion.

  “I’m at the riding school and by coincidence there’s an English journalist here, doing a story on the new cooking school,” Bruno replied. “Her paper called her from London after hearing a rumor from the British police about a dead Englishwoman. So I gave her what you drafted for the incident report, which any minute now will be out on the radio news.”

  “Dammit, Bruno, you know what I said—”

  “That’s all she has and that’s all she’s getting from me,” Bruno interrupted, keeping his voice reasonable. “I’m not going to aggravate some writer doing a story that could hurt Pamela’s livelihood, not for the sake of an incident report that’s already being made public. You’d do the same, J-J.”

  “Look, Bruno, you’re not simply a village policeman anymore. You have command responsibilities…Oh, putain. It’s always the same with you and women. Make sure you stay well out of her way from now on.” J-J ended the call.

  As Bruno started his car, the radio came on automatically, tuned to France Bleu Périgord. The deaths were the lead item of the news report, phrased exactly as J-J had confided. But when Bruno heard the newscaster call them “the mystery deaths of Lalinde,” he wondered whether J-J had made a mistake. The very vagueness of the report stirred curiosity. An unknown man and woman in a country farmhouse, in a rural district where people tended to know quite a lot about each other’s business? How long would it take for one of the neighbors being canvassed by Juliette to look up the lane and see the police presence at McBride’s place?

  His phone rang. He sighed and pulled to the side of the road to check the screen. It was Philippe Delaron from Sud Ouest. He ignored the call and drove on. Within moments the phone rang again, this time with an English number. He assumed it would be Kathleen and he ignored that call, too.

  The following morning Bruno would be at the St. Denis weekly market, and Miranda was bringing her entire class along to have coffee and croissants and then buy the various foodstuffs they would be cooking that evening. He was supposed to give them a quick tour, introduce them all to the stallholders and explain how to pick out a good duck liver. Later in the afternoon, he’d give Pamela’s guests a demonstration of how to make pâté de foie gras, as he promised, and also how to cook duck, and he would discuss the wines that would best accompany each dish.

  It worried him a little that Pamela and Miranda were running their cooking classes on the cheap, using friends like him, Jack and the baron to cut costs. There were only two real chefs. The first was Ivan from the local bistro, who stayed open for lunch all year round but closed on weekday evenings out of season. So Ivan was free to earn some extra cash by giving two afternoon lessons. The highlight of the week was Raoul, a retired chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant, who was teaching another session. On the penultimate evening of the course, Pamela was taking all her guests to the Vieux Logis, Raoul’s old restaurant in Trémolat, where he would give them a tour of the kitchen before they ate. On the final evening, the pupils were in charge of the meal, from shopping in the market in the morning to picking the wines and preparing the food, all within the budget Pamela had set.

  Still, they would probably be eating better this evening than he would, Bruno thought, as he turned in to the driveway that led to his cottage. He parked, let Balzac out to make his customary patrol of the grounds, then refilled the water bowls in his hen coop and brought in some fresh wood for his stove. Evenings could still be cool at this time of year and he lit a fire, looking forward to a quiet couple of hours with Jean-Marie Constant’s new biography of Henri IV. He was Bruno’s favorite French king, the one who had given his name to a classic dish, poulet Henri Quatre, after he had announced his desire that every French household should have a chicken in the pot each Sunday.

  The large pot atop Bruno’s wood-burning stove provided his solitary meals, shared only with Balzac. One week, it would be a quartered chicken, to which he added some of his prepared bouillon, garlic, spices and various vegetables, topping it off with wine and fresh vegetables as needed. On Sundays, he would give what remained to Balzac, then start all over again with a knuckle of pork or a kilo of stewing beef, chopped into bite-size portions. His friend the baron, who had unexpectedly dropped by one Friday evening, had become a fan of the way the stew had thickened by the end of the week, and now the Friday suppers had become a ritual, with Jack Crimson making a third. He brought the wine, the baron brought bread, cheese and a tarte au citron from the patisserie counter at Fauquet’s café. Bruno contributed his stew, salad from his garden and the inevitable glass of pastis to begin.

  Two or three times a week, Bruno dined alone and had come to enjoy it, his book propped open on the table before him, a glass of Bergerac wine at his side and Balzac at his feet. This week’s stove-top ragout was based on a large pork hock stewed with onions, carrots, leeks and lentils and a quarter bottle of cooking wine left over from a dinner party.

  As the heat built up in the stove and the two-days-old stew began to simmer once more, Bruno checked the messages on his phone. There were two from Philippe Delaron, requesting information, another from Kathleen and one from J-J, telling him to be at police headquarters in Périgueux at seven the next morning. That was odd; case conferences usually began at eight. There was one more message, signed simply with the letter I, noting that there had been another murder in the Périgord. It was Isabelle’s way of staying in touch, letting him know that she was thinking of him even while holding down her high-powered job as liaison between the French and other European counterterrorism agencies.

  “Wish you were here to help us solve it,” he texted back and then went to his cabinet and took out a bottle of the Balvenie malt whisky she had given him on her last visit. He poured out two fingers and added half that amount of water, exactly as Jack Crimson had taught him. Bruno sat in his armchair, watching the fire through the stove door, aware of the aroma of the stew as it warmed, and thought of the evenings he and Isabelle had spent entwined before this very fire. And then, inevitably, he thought of the time she had told him, after the event, that she had decided to abort their child. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant. It was the first time he had ever himself confronted the question of abortion, when it was already too late to do anything but mourn.

  It was his memory of that grief—as much as if not more than his hopes of Paulette wearing the blue shirt of a French rugby team—that had troubled him so profoundly since Fabiola told him that Paulette was pregnant. He sipped at his scotch, wondering if Paulette would share the news and perhaps the decision with her lover, or whether she would take all the burden onto herself, as Isabelle had done.

  Ever sensitive to his master’s mood, Balzac nuzzled Bruno’s leg and stared up with his mournful basset eyes. Or perhaps he was simply hungry for his supper, like Bruno. He finished his scotch, caressed his dog, rose to stir the stewpot and then went out to the garden to look at the stars while Balzac shuffled his way discreetly into the bushes. Perhaps that was what Balzac had wanted all along. Moments of introspection, however gloomy, would always be interrupted by calls of nature.

  Bruno went back indoors, ready to eat, and saw another text from Isabelle’s number. It contained four words: “Googled Michael George Felder?”

  “I will, thanks,” he replied and brought his laptop into the living room, pushing aside his book on Henri IV and sitting down at his dining table. He put the name into the search window and a Wikipedia entry appeared in English.

  Felder had been born in 1940, son of a British army officer, went to the officer training school at Sandhurst at the age of eighteen, joined the British army and retired in 1992 with the rank of brigadier, which in the British army gave him the courtesy title of general, as director of the Intelligence Corps. He had t
hen founded a private firm, Special Security Services, which provided bodyguards as well as antiburglary and cybersecurity systems to private clients. The company had enjoyed a modest but growing success until the occupation of Iraq after the 2003 war, when it expanded dramatically, providing ex-military security staff to the U.S. and British occupation forces. As CEO, Felder had become a very wealthy man.

  He had been married twice, once in 1970 to an Englishwoman by whom he had two children. They had divorced in 1988 and he had the following year married Monika Eschinger, a West German citizen, then aged twenty. That was remarkably young to be a stepmother, particularly when she was barely older than Felder’s two teenage children. That could not have been an easy relationship, Bruno thought. And Felder was now in his seventies, so it was hardly surprising that his much younger and beautiful wife should have found a younger lover. Could that act of adultery have led to her death?

  Bruno then Googled the name of Felder’s company and found a website that listed offices in London, New York, Washington, Dubai, Baghdad, Kabul, Sydney and Johannesburg. The focus now seemed to be more on cybersecurity than on bodyguards, and more on corporate clients than on governments.

  Bruno kept looking, finding a reference to Felder in a book in English about BRIXMIS, a small group of some thirty British soldiers allowed to be based in the old East Germany throughout the Cold War under the original Four Power Agreement on the occupation of Germany after 1945. Bruno knew a little of this since the French, like the United States, were allowed a similar mission and the Soviet Union had their own such mission in West Germany. They were, in effect, legal spies, free to roam most of the territory where they were based, to observe military maneuvers and spot new types of military equipment.

  Felder had made his reputation by establishing the caliber of an unknown new cannon mounted on Soviet armored military vehicles by pushing an apple into the muzzle and later measuring the size of the hole as thirty millimeters.

  Bruno smiled at that, took his bubbling pot from atop the stove and resumed his place in the biography of the good King Henri IV, who had at least temporarily stopped the French religious wars. Although a Protestant, Henri had negotiated an entry into the Catholic stronghold of Paris by agreeing to go directly to Notre-Dame to attend a Catholic religious service, with the words “Paris is worth a mass.” A wise man, thought Bruno. It was sad that few of his successors on the French throne had shared his common sense.

  As he ended his meal, he pushed the book away, unable to concentrate. His thoughts kept returning to Isabelle, just as she kept returning to him, however briefly. The last time he’d seen her, she had come down from Paris for the opening of the new cave beneath the château of Commarque, invited herself to lunch and stayed for the night before taking the morning train back to Paris. She remained irresistible to him, despite his knowing there was no future for them, at least not the future he wanted of a life together and children. The fierce fire of her ambition meant she could never settle down.

  He shook his head to end that train of thought before taking his dirty plate to the kitchen to wash up. Then he let Balzac out for his usual patrol of the grounds and Bruno’s own nightly look at the sky. With no other house in sight, when he turned out the light in his hallway the stars shone so clearly and in such profusion that he felt awed, and a sense of calm came over him. The constellations were all so wonderfully predictable, exactly where he knew they would be. He followed the lines of the Grande Ourse, which the English called the Plough, to identify Polaris, the North Star. Then he looked for the twins of Gemini and the three stars of Orion’s belt with Grand Chien, Canis Major, beside them. Someday, Bruno told himself, he’d visit the Southern Hemisphere to see their different sky.

  With that thought, he turned in and fell asleep as soon as his head touched his pillow.

  Chapter 5

  At seven the next morning, J-J was waiting for Bruno in the corridor outside Prunier’s office at police headquarters. A uniformed officer stood beside him, a sharpshooter’s clasp on his lapel. This was the weapons instructor, whom Bruno knew slightly from his annual firearms check.

  “Case conference at eight, but you have to do this first,” J-J said, leading the way down into the basement. “Seen the paper yet?” He handed over a copy of the latest Sud Ouest. A front-page headline read MURDER IN LALINDE and carried a photo of police vehicles outside McBride’s house.

  “Just our luck,” J-J said. “One of the houses on that road up to McBride’s place belongs to a guy who covers the local sports scene for Sud Ouest. That new policewoman of yours canvassed him along with all the other neighbors. He took photos of McBride’s house and called his news desk.”

  Once in the deep basement, a level below the cells, they came to an armored door, locked with two sets of keys. The instructor let them into the small firing range, a mere thirty meters long. Bruno turned in his old weapon, was given a receipt in return for it and was then handed a new handgun with two holsters, one made of webbing as a waist belt with a small pouch for the cleaning kit, and the other of leather for when he wore the gun under his armpit.

  “It’s a lot lighter than my last weapon,” said Bruno. “What does this short barrel do to the accuracy?”

  “It’s a SIG Sauer Pro 2022 and light because it’s mostly made of polymer. I assure you it’s accurate to fifty meters,” said the instructor, stripping the weapon down, checking the breech and then squinting down the barrel before reassembling it. “Note the slide stop pin. It goes all the way through the gun and you have to remove it to strip the weapon. It’s metal because it takes the recoil and distributes it through the less resilient polymer frame.

  “It’s two hundred grams lighter, more accurate, less liable to jam and above all it doesn’t become a danger to the user after six thousand rounds,” he went on. “That’s why we got rid of the PAMAS you’ve been using. The PAMAS was based on the Beretta but our French version used inferior steel so it started blowing up in people’s hands. The SIG is a better gun. Same caliber, NATO-standard nine millimeter, and it has a flat magazine base-plate that shortens the grip by seven millimeters and makes it easier to draw even though you still have fifteen rounds in the magazine. You have no manual safety but you don’t need one because there’s an automatic lock on the firing pin.”

  “Any problems I should expect?” Bruno asked.

  “Your first shots may be a little off since the trigger is a bit slack by comparison with the PAMAS, but you’ll get used to that.”

  The instructor had set up each of the three firing lanes, one with the paper target hanging from its wires at ten meters, the second at twenty and the third at the far end of the range. He handed Bruno the gun and told him to strip it down. Bruno complied, fumbling a little at the unfamiliar decocking lever and the slide stop pin, and then placed the reassembled weapon back on the table, the empty magazine to one side.

  “Load your mag.” The instructor pushed across a box of 9-millimeter Parabellum rounds.

  Bruno loaded the rounds one by one, checking each time that the spring was smooth.

  “Load your weapon.”

  He slid the magazine home, gave the heel a gentle tap, and it clicked into place. Making sure the muzzle pointed downrange, Bruno laid the weapon back on the table and put on the pair of ear protectors the instructor handed to him.

  “When you’re ready, the full mag at ten meters.”

  Bruno’s first two rounds were outside the small circle, clipping the right edge of the cardboard square. The instructor was right about the trigger pull. Bruno adjusted, fired a single round and saw it had hit the black circle. He then fired the rest of the magazine in double taps, the way he’d been taught in the army, a short pause after each one. After the first few shots, Bruno began to change his position with a swift turn or a step to the side. That was how the army trained for handgun use in combat—it was not often in a gunfight that
one could afford to keep firing from the same spot. The instructor hauled back the shredded target, most of the black circle now disintegrated.

  “You pulled a little to your right at first,” he said. “I already tested this gun and centered the sights, so it was probably just the trigger slack. Now try the twenty-meter range. You don’t need to clean the barrel yet.” He handed Bruno a full magazine. Bruno ejected one round to test the spring and then replaced it. The instructor nodded in approval.

  His first shot was a single and in the black circle. He then emptied the mag with seven double taps, moving his position between each burst and the next. Once again the target was shredded. The instructor adjusted the last target and signaled Bruno to shoot again. At thirty meters he had three holes on the white edges of the target but most of the black circle had gone.

  “She’s a beauty,” Bruno said, ejecting the magazine and opening the cleaning kit.

  He stripped the gun and sighted down the barrel. It still looked clean, but he pulled an oiled rag through and then followed it with the phosphor-bronze brush. He used the tiny nylon brush and a little solvent to clean the carbon from the feed plate and the mouth of the magazine. With the rag he cleaned the spring guide and spring and the long grooves, lightly lubricated them and reassembled the gun.

  “Sign here,” said the instructor, handing over a form that acknowledged receipt of the weapon, two holsters, a spare magazine, a cleaning kit and a box of 144 rounds. “You are good to load and go. Remember to remove and unload the magazine when not on duty, and all live rounds are to be kept locked away. You can expect at least one surprise visit to your home in the course of the next three months to ascertain that the weapon and rounds are being kept safely. Failure to abide by these regulations will result in disciplinary action.”

  Conscious of the weight of the gun on his belt and with the box of rounds and the other holster straining the handles of the thin plastic bag the instructor had found, Bruno followed J-J back upstairs to the conference room where Commissaire Prunier had taken the head of the table.