There was something else in the pocket. He hooked a finger over the pocket’s edge, peered in and saw an object wrapped in newspaper, but the smell had already informed him. He pulled out two perfect examples of melanosporum, the famous black diamonds, weighing perhaps a pound between them. They could not have been fresher, so they must have been picked that morning, Hercule’s last act before starting to prepare a fire for a casse-croûte with his friends. Hercule wouldn’t want them to go to the ambulance men. He pulled out the truffles, showed them to the baron and put them in his pocket.
“Stay here, keep the dogs away from the blood and I’ll go to phone,” Bruno told the baron. “Keep your eyes open and I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll whistle when I come up the trail so you’ll know it’s me.”
The baron tossed him the keys to the jeep, backed into the hide and settled down on one knee, his back against the stove.
“This is not just a murder,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“This is a killing that triggers phone calls to government ministers. Hercule was a barbouze, one of the top ones. He’ll have files and secrets that could shake la République.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t need to, until now.” The baron gestured with his head toward the hanging corpse. “Somebody’s out for revenge.”
“From his Algerian days?” Bruno asked. “Or is it something else?”
The baron shrugged.
Had Hercule been Deuxième Bureau, military intelligence or the SDECE foreign intelligence and counterespionage service or what? Bruno’s head spun a little at the thought of all the vague and shadowy organizations that had been charged over the past few decades with guarding France’s security by fighting her secret wars. “I know somebody in Renseignements Généraux, but that’s about it.”
“He’ll do. Call him and just say Hercule was an old barbouze. Indochina and Algeria and the OAS. He’ll know what to do.”
Bruno left, avoiding the footpath, in case forensics could find something useful on the trail, and kept a keen watch for any other signs of life. Before he reached the clearing where the jeep and Land Rover were parked, he slowed down, skirting around to approach the cars from another direction. Hercule’s vehicle was locked and showed no signs of tampering. Bruno’s phone still gave no signal. Before starting the jeep he looked carefully for any signs of different tire tracks in the clearing and on the track leading back to the road. He saw two possible tracks. He marked each one with a large stone and crossed branches, and then drove down the track toward Paunat, eyes darting to his phone for the first sign of a signal.
As soon as the first bar appeared, he began to call J-J, but then paused. This was one report he had better make by the book. He began by calling 15 for the SAMU emergency ambulance service and told them he’d wait by the junction with the Paunat road. Then he called a number in Paris that he had been given previously, in the course of a different inquiry, gave his name and asked for the brigadier. Apparently his name was still on the approved list at Renseignements Généraux because the brigadier was on the line within seconds.
“How’s life in the Périgord, Bruno?”
“Dangerous for some,” Bruno replied. “I’ve just found a body left hanging in the woods, murdered, probably tortured. He’s been killed within the last hour or two, and he’s one of yours. An old barbouze from Indochina, Algeria and the OAS, is how I was advised to put it by one of his military friends.”
“What was his name?”
“Hercule Vendrot. He had a Croix de Guerre and was a member of the Légion d’Honneur.”
“Putain, Bruno. Hercule’s a legend in this business. You said he’d been tortured?”
“I think so. It reminded me of some of the things I saw in Bosnia.”
“Putain. Someone thinks he was an informer. What had he been up to? How did you know him?”
“He’s been retired for as long as I’ve known him. He spent his time hunting for truffles. He was worried about some dirty goings-on at the truffle market in Ste. Alvère, where he lived. He and I go hunting together, and we were supposed to meet today in the woods.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
“Yes, I followed procedure and called the SAMU, told them it was a suspicious death. They’ll automatically inform the gendarmes and the Police Nationale when they send the ambulance. Next I’ll call our mutual friend J-J. Meantime, I’m waiting at a road junction to direct the SAMU guys into the woods. They’ll never find it otherwise.”
“I need a favor, Bruno. As soon as you’ve directed them to the body, would you go to Hercule’s house and make sure nobody else gets in until one of my people shows up? They’ll have identification.”
“I can’t keep the gendarmes out.”
“I’ll take care of them. You’ve got your hunting gun. Just get to Hercule’s house as soon as you can and keep it secure. Whatever happens, I’ll back you. Even if you have to use the gun. Does anybody else know of this?”
“Yes, my chum the baron. We were all going hunting together. He was the one who told me to call you and say Hercule was a barbouze. I left him at the scene.”
“Fine. You call J-J while I sort things out with the gendarmes and get somebody to the house in Ste. Alvère. I’ve got people in Bordeaux; with a chopper from the military airfield, expect them anytime after a couple of hours. But nobody else gets into that house.”
“I need to do this by the book,” Bruno said. “Once I get the SAMU guys to the body and they pronounce him dead, the rule is that any available law officer has to secure the scene until relieved by a senior officer or by the scene-of-crime unit. So we’d better get a gendarme out here fast. I’ll call one of the motorcycle teams from Sarlat to stand by until the SOCO guys turn up.”
“I’ll fax your mayor with a request for you to be seconded to us as a matter of national security. You’ll be covered.”
Bruno made his calls and waited, wondering what kind of barbouze Hercule had been. The word meant simply someone with a false beard, but had come to mean somebody operating undercover or in the murkier areas of security and intelligence. In the Algerian War the barbouzes had been outright killers, some of them taken straight from prison and offered a pardon if they joined the underground war to kill members of the OAS, the secret army fighting de Gaulle in a quixotic bid to maintain the French empire. Deals had been done with the Union Corse, the mafia of Corsica, to turn a blind eye to some of their organized crime work in return for help against the OAS. They had kidnapped, tortured and assassinated each other and had become almost indistinguishable, except that one group had the backing of the French state and the other did not.
Somehow, despite the gruesome manner of his killing, Hercule did not strike Bruno as that kind of barbouze. You learn a lot about a man from the way that he hunts, Bruno thought, and Hercule was subtle. He did not go charging into the woods, gun blazing. He considered his quarry, tried to think the way it did and to anticipate its moves. He seldom fired more than a single shot in a whole day of hunting, but it was always a shot that found its mark. Bruno pondered Hercule’s knowledge of foreign languages, the books in his home. However basic his education may have been, Hercule was thoughtful, learned and well read, something of an inspiration to Bruno, who was learning that he need not be limited by the inadequacies of his own schooling but that he could read for himself, learn by himself, think for himself.
Hercule had been no thug, no gangster lying in wait to kill renegade French officers in Madrid nightclubs or to kidnap pied-noir nationalists in Rome brothels. The brigadier had called him “a legend in this business,” which meant a strategist, a planner. Who would want him dead? Bruno thought as he heard the siren and saw the red SAMU van coming over the far hilltop. The method of the murder itself had to be the message. It was a killing designed to demonstrate the ruthlessness of the killers and to intimidate by its very brutality.
But anyone who sought to intimidate, th
ought Bruno, needs to be known. There is no point in anonymous terror. One has to be frightened of someone or something. And once that someone emerged, Bruno would have his target, both for justice and for vengeance.
8
Bruno parked the baron’s jeep on the slope behind the ruined castle and looked up the lane to Hercule’s house. It seemed normal, as if waiting for its owner’s return. He rang the medical center in St. Denis to ask if Vinh or his wife had turned up for treatment, but there had been no sign of them. Bruno rang Vinh’s home number and his mobile, cursing himself for not doing it earlier, but got no reply from either. This was ominous; he’d have to visit Vinh’s home as soon as he was relieved here at Hercule’s place. But there was no telling how long that would be. He called the gendarmerie, and Sergeant Jules answered the phone.
Bruno explained his anxiety about Vinh and asked Jules to send someone to check on the house. Then he told Jules what had happened to Hercule.
“Hercule from Ste. Alvère? Who’d want to murder the old boy?”
“It’s complicated and I’ll explain later, but can you check on Vinh?”
Jules said he’d put Françoise onto it. Then he told Bruno that Poincevin had returned to confirm that the Chinese student was an illegal immigrant who would plead guilty to all charges, pay the costs of all damages and accept deportation back to China. The Chinese prisoner had not uttered a single word while detained and had now been transferred to the custody of the magistrate in Périgueux for trial.
“But he’s the only link we’ve got to all this. We’ve got to get him properly questioned,” Bruno said.
“I know. And Capitaine Duroc”—Jules weighted the rank with a heavy irony—“says this fits the pattern of events on his checklist for organized crime. It must be reported to the Police Nationale. So we had your old pal J-J on the line.”
“J-J’s now tied up in the murder investigation. I’ll call him later. Look, I’ve got to go and check out Hercule’s house, but don’t forget Vinh.”
Bruno next called Nicco, his counterpart in Ste. Alvère, as a courtesy to explain his presence on Nicco’s turf, but if he wanted to share the guard duty at Hercule’s place he was welcome. Nicco was a member of Hercule’s hunting club and knew him well.
“Murdered? Our Hercule? Christ, I’d better tell the mayor.”
“You’d better tell the rest of the hunting club to stay away for a while. The murder took place at the hide. They’re both dead, Hercule and his dog.”
“The best truffle hound in the valley? Putain, what sick kind of devil would want to do something like that?”
They hung up. Bruno tucked his opened shotgun under his arm and walked up the lane past Hercule’s house. A man with a gun was commonplace in rural France in the hunting season. He continued through an old archway and an alley that led to the back of the house. The place looked undisturbed. Just in case, he took an empty paint can left by the garden shed and placed it against the rear door. If anybody left the house in a hurry he’d hear it. He went around to the front and used Hercule’s keys to let himself in.
The house smelled clean, with a touch of mustiness from old books and Gauloises mixed with wood smoke from the previous evening’s fire. The kitchen was tidy, a washed cup and plate and an ashtray on the drying rack. The desk and papers in the big living room looked undisturbed. Bruno went upstairs and found again the signs of a neat and well-organized man. One small bedroom was filled with boxes of files and papers, and Bruno left them for the brigadier’s people to examine. The iron-framed single bed in Hercule’s room had been made and covered with a brightly colored cotton spread. Old tribal rugs were spread on the floor, and Bruno assumed they were antiques. Hercule’s clothes were hung in a large wardrobe, and there was no indication of anyone else ever staying, no women’s clothing and only the most simple masculine toiletries in the bathroom. The walls were papered in a design from another era, pale red prints of eighteenth-century scenes against a gray background.
The books by Hercule’s bed were works of history. Bruno put down his shotgun and picked up the first. It was on the French war in Vietnam, Jean Ferrandi’s Les Officiers français face au Vietminh. But most covered the Algerian War. Bruno recognized Axel Nicol’s La Bataille de l’O.A.S. and Claude Paillat’s Dossier secret de l’Algérie. There were several bookmarks inside General Massu’s memoirs, La Vraie bataille d’Alger, and even more inside General Paul Aussaresses’s Services spéciaux. Bruno remembered the scandal it had provoked when published a few years earlier. Aussaresses had confessed to the routine use of torture and claimed that François Mitterrand as minister of justice had approved the practice, twenty years before he had become president of France. Bruno looked at the marked pages, all of them referring to torture.
He put the book down and returned downstairs. There was no sign of a safe, and the cellar contained only wine. Bruno could not help himself. He squatted down to examine some of the bottles and handled them reverently: Château Angélus from St. Emilion, Château l’Evangile and Château le Pin from Pomerol, Château Haut-Brion from Graves. He smiled to himself and envied Hercule’s heirs.
Back in the living room, which looked as if Hercule might return any moment, there were press clippings on the desk in what he assumed to be Chinese and Vietnamese. Another book had been left open with an old-fashioned lead-weighted leather bookmark holding the pages in place. It was in English, called SOE in France, and written by M. R. D. Foot. The publisher was Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, which made Bruno assume it was an official volume on the work of British intelligence in France in World War II. The English was almost too much for him, but Bruno made a note of the number of the page that had been held open. The text on the page seemed to be about a British officer named Starr who had become the mayor of the small commune of Castelnausous-l’Auvignon in Gascony, and whose role allowed him to provide quantities of official but false documents. Why would Hercule be interested in that?
Also on the desk was a thick file of notes and what looked like the draft of a book of Hercule’s memoirs, almost all of it about Vietnam and Algeria. On top of the file were two transparent plastic file folders. The first contained an account of a farm at a place called Ameziane, a detention center in Algeria run by a Centre de Renseignement et d’Action, one of the counterinsurgency intelligence units based in the nearby city of Constantine. Hercule’s notes said that torture had been practiced there on an “industrial scale” and added that more than eleven thousand Algerians had been detained at the farm, all of them tortured with a hellish blend of electric shocks, beatings, starvation, mock drowning, cigarette burns and rape. There was a page, headed with the word “Ameziane,” with a list of French names and military units beneath. Some of the names were just initials. A final sheet was the photocopy of a news clipping from Vérité Libre with a passage marked that said some inmates had been able to bribe their way out. Against this Hercule had written another list of names, military ranks and initials.
The second plastic folder was titled “Crevettes Bigeard,” which sounded to Bruno like food. But as he read on, he saw that General Bigeard’s shrimps were corpses or survivors of torture who were loaded into helicopters, taken over the Mediterranean and dropped into the sea. After some of their bodies floated ashore, the torturers began taking the precaution of putting the feet into a large plastic bucket filled with cement before dumping them. These, with a kind of black humor that Bruno found repellent, were known as Bigeard’s shrimps. Again, Hercule had appended a list of names and units.
Bruno put the folders back in their place. No wonder the brigadier was alarmed. Hercule’s memoirs would open a lot of old wounds. He looked at the photographs, all expensively framed in silver, which took up part of the wide surface of the desk. The one the baron had recognized was still in the front row, but pride of place was held by a studio portrait of a beautiful Asian woman with a small child in her arms. Another photo of the woman showed her arm in arm with a much younger Hercule. Yet anot
her showed her sitting in the middle of a row of young Asian girls, all wearing the tabard, the traditional French school uniform.
There were more photos of young Hercule in army camouflage, one of him in a jeep wearing the shoulder bars of a captain and looking up at a cluster of parachutes dropping from the sky. A MAS-38 machine gun was balanced across his knee. Bruno thought he recognized the event from other photos of the same scene. It was the relief of Dien Bien Phu, when the Foreign Legion paratroops were dropped in to reinforce the doomed French outpost whose defeat heralded the end of France’s empire in Indochina. In an adjacent photo, this time in Algeria from the look of the buildings, he was surrounded by young Asian troops, presumably some of their Vietnamese allies the French took with them when they withdrew after Ho Chi Minh’s victory.
By now Hercule was a major. More photos showed him with a very old de Gaulle pinning the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur to his chest. At the back was a much smaller photo of Hercule with an impressive-looking uniformed black man with a beard and a white man in commando camouflage with a face that was vaguely familiar. Half the history of modern France was spread out in the photos before him, some of it doubtless secret, and Bruno marveled at the way a man such as this had been content to sit back and help him learn about truffles.
He thought of the manpower it would take to go through Hercule’s mounds of files and papers, looking for whatever embarrassments or secrets the state wished to guard. But there was one book he expected to find and so far he had drawn a blank. It was Hercule’s truffle journal, the one Didier had been so eager to see. Bruno assumed that Hercule kept the journal with him, and it would thus be found by the police forensics team. He made a mental note to check with J-J.
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