“That was how they conned us, don’t you see?” Bruno replied. “Pons wasn’t going to lose a damn thing by it. He already had another sawmill site lined up, and he told me and the baron about his plans to develop the sawmill site here in St. Denis for housing. With his son in the mairie granting development approval, he’d have made a fortune.”
“And on top of all that, the son was providing little Chinese girls,” said Jofflin. “And little boys to blackmail Didier with at the truffle market.” Jofflin was thumbing through a notebook, found the page he wanted and looked up. “Piguin in Siorac is on the list of the dentists we’re checking for the teeth. By the way, we found this in Boniface Pons’s Mercedes. It seems like some sort of local diary.”
“Give me some gloves,” Bruno said. The mayor handed him a pair of medical gloves from a box on a side table. Bruno slipped them on, took the bag from Jofflin and pulled out what he was sure would be Hercule’s truffle journal. There was no name on the inside cover, but the first page was dated December 1982, and it began: “Three fine brumales from the oak behind the hunters’ hide just off the Vergt road, total weight 340 grams.”
Bruno turned to the last entry, stopping when he saw one of Hercule’s tidy sketches. A lump came into his throat when there was one of Gigi, front paw and tail raised, nose high and sniffing, his eyes fixed on something off the page. There was a gentle caricature of the baron and an account of the wines the three of them had shared at dinner. Beneath that was evidence of a new technology, a GPS reference for a site deep in the woods where Hercule had found truffles. The last entry listed the sale that Bruno had made in Ste. Alvère and a final phrase, “If anyone can get to the bottom of this fraud, it will be Bruno.”
“This is it,” said Bruno. “Hercule’s journal, the one he left to me in his will.”
“What was it doing in Pons’s car?” the mayor asked.
Bruno could hardly hear him for the sound of the helicopter landing on the sports field behind the medical center. He looked out the window as the noise of the engines died, and J-J and the brigadier emerged, stooping under the slowing rotor blades.
“By being in Pons’s car, it provides the evidence we need that Pons was connected to Hercule’s murder,” Bruno said. “That’s why I have to get to Pons’s house. More evidence will be there. There’ll be a will, with his son as beneficiary. There’ll be paperwork on the truffles trade, and I’ll bet the cash he used at the truffle market came from his Chinese friends. But what I’m really looking for …” Bruno broke off as J-J and the brigadier eased past the baron and Pamela at the door and came into the room.
“What I’m really looking for,” Bruno repeated, “is evidence that Pons was directly responsible for the murder of Hercule.”
“I think I can help you there. We’ve established a motive,” said the brigadier. “But should you be up and about?”
“No, he shouldn’t,” said Fabiola. “But you try stopping him.”
“What’s the motive?” Bruno asked.
“Clear the room, J-J,” the brigadier said, and stood silent at the foot of the bed while J-J escorted Fabiola, Jofflin and the others into the hallway outside. He closed the door and leaned against it. The brigadier turned to check the room and nodded his thanks.
“It’s Hercule’s memoirs, from the safety-deposit box,” he began. “Hercule incriminates Pons not just as a torturer in the Algerian War, but as a crook. Hercule says it all happened at a detention camp called Ameziane, and it was hushed up at the time. He says Pons took bribes from their families to ease up on the torture. He claims Pons would specialize in rounding up children, and then taking money to free them after he’d had his fun with them.”
“Why did he leave it so long to make this public?” From the back of his mind, Bruno recalled the baron talking of Pons coming back from Algeria with enough money to build a new sawmill. Now he knew where the cash had come from.
“The typescript was in a sealed envelope in the safety-deposit box, addressed to his notaire and marked not to be opened until after his death. The manuscript wasn’t complete,” the brigadier said. “There were rumors among the old barbouzes that Hercule was up to something like this. He’d been asking questions of some old comrades. I guess Pons heard those rumors too.”
“Are you going to release it for publication?” Bruno asked.
“That’s not my decision, and there’s a lot of other stuff in there that we wouldn’t want to see made public. But if you subpoena parts of the manuscript for evidence in a murder trial, the memoirs would have to be made available to the court. Just remember you didn’t hear that from me.”
“But if Pons is dead, there’ll be no murder trial.”
“He’s dead?” asked the brigadier. “Are you sure?”
“No, but we think he died in the fire, in bed with a little Chinese girl,” said Bruno.
“There will be a murder trial,” said J-J. “That young Chinese thug you arrested in Bordeaux gave us a DNA match on the tissues and the cigarettes in the abandoned Mercedes that was at the murder scene.”
There was one more question Bruno had to ask before the others came back into the room. “How’s Isabelle?”
“Still not awake when we left, but the doctors say she’ll be as good as new. They have to put a titanium brace onto her thighbone. After a few months, she won’t know it’s there, but she’s in for a long convalescent leave.”
“Can the others come back in now?” Bruno asked. The brigadier nodded, and J-J opened the door and beckoned them in.
“Here,” said the brigadier, handing Bruno a new mobile phone. “It’s got your old number, and you’ve got dozens of messages already, half of them from the media.”
“The other half are from me, calling to apologize,” said Pamela. She didn’t look in the least apologetic, perhaps a little embarrassed. Mainly she looked her usual self, and Bruno felt a rush of affection.
“No need,” said Bruno, smiling at her. “Pons fooled all of us. I didn’t even know he was running a child brothel. And I agreed with a lot of what he said that night at the public meeting.”
“Have you any idea how funny you look in those filthy shorts?” she asked him.
“I don’t think he cares,” said Fabiola, and Bruno tried to work out which of the two meanings of the phrase Fabiola had meant. One of them was wrong. He still cared for Pamela. But he also knew that as soon as he could he’d be heading for Bordeaux to visit Isabelle.
“Could you fetch Gigi for me from your car, please?” he asked the mayor. His room was so crowded that a dog wouldn’t make much difference. The mayor squeezed his way out.
“Do you want to come with me to Pons’s place?” Bruno asked J-J and the brigadier.
“I can’t,” said the brigadier. “The helicopter is taking me to Marseilles, where we’ll have the truce meeting. Vien sends you his regards, and Bao Le says he’ll let you know if they learn anything about the girl. The Vinhs will be home in St. Denis tomorrow and back in the market next week.”
“I’ll gladly come with you,” said J-J. “But I don’t think there’s much hurry.”
Then came the sound of running paws and Gigi darted into the room and made a flying leap to join Bruno on his bed.
“For God’s sake,” said Fabiola, with an exasperated laugh. “This is supposed to be a hospital.”
She and Pamela sat down beside Bruno on the bed and joined him in stroking Gigi’s long velvet ears.
“I’ll be off,” said the brigadier. “My offer still stands, Bruno. I want you on my team. Think about it.”
Raising his face to escape Gigi’s tongue, Bruno looked around the room at his friends, the mayor and the baron and J-J, Pamela and Fabiola. Through the window behind them the wintry sun gilded the old stone of the mairie and glinted from the bronze eagle atop the war memorial.
“I don’t think I could leave this,” Bruno said. “Besides, I’ve got the rugby club New Year’s dance to arrange, and Stéphane expects me at the farm to help kill the
pig next month. I’ve still got to sort out the contracts for the town fireworks on le quatorze juillet, and then there are the children who are expecting me to carry on teaching them to play tennis. On top of that, I came across this recipe I want to try, called truffes cendrillon, little pies with foie gras topped with truffle and baked in cinders. I was thinking of inviting you all to a Christmas dinner at my place with Florence and her children to welcome them to St. Denis.”
“Dear Bruno,” said Pamela, lifting her hand from Bruno’s dog to cup his cheek and kiss him softly on the lips. “Don’t ever change.”
“Change?” said Bruno, returning the kiss. “I don’t think St. Denis would let me.”
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction and the characters and situations have all been invented by the author. While there is regrettably a growing amount of fraud in the truffle trade, particularly relating to China, the reputation of the famous truffle market in Ste. Alvère has not been tarnished. But my friends and neighbors in the enchanting Périgord have served as inspirations, guides and the most patient of teachers in educating a foreigner into some of the folkways of the land. They have taught me to pick and tread the grapes, to hunt and cook the elusive bécasse, to search for truffles and try to tell one variety from another. Above all, they have taught me the difference between food enriched with the real black diamond of Périgord and the wan apologies for the truffle you so often encounter in places that take their gastronomy less seriously. So my gratitude to the people of the valley of the river Vézère for the welcome they have given to me and my family and our basset hound is deepened yet further, along with my fondness for their way of life. I hope that the Bruno novels convey some of my profound affection and respect for the people of this valley, whose ancestors had the excellent taste to settle amid its gentle hills and fertile slopes some forty thousand years ago. Their descendants have never left, and I can understand why.
This novel is dedicated to a particular friend, Raymond Bounichou, a veteran of the gendarmes and of various other, perhaps less public, arms of the French state. Not only has he made me reassess the role of the barbouze in France’s complicated recent history, but his endless stories have also triggered thoughts of many future plots. So Bruno should have some mysteries to solve in the future, even as he stands guard on all the traditions and peculiarities that make France and the Périgord so beguiling. But Bruno would hardly be Bruno without the devoted ministrations of Jane and Caroline Wood and Jonathan Segal, who whipped this book into shape with their customary and attractive blend of firmness, frankness and charm. I am most grateful to them, and to my wife, Julia Watson, and our daughters, Kate and Fanny, without whom I suspect we would not have made nearly so many friends.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Walker is senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, a think tank on international economics founded by the A. T. Kearney management consultancy. He is also a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and editor in chief emeritus of United Press International, for whom he writes the weekly syndicated column on international affairs, “Walker’s World.” In 2010, he was given the Swissglobe Award for building bridges between Switzerland and the rest of the world. Mr. Walker spent twenty-five years as a prizewinning journalist with The Guardian. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and other national and foreign publications. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and the Périgord region of France. Readers can learn more about Bruno and his friends, his cooking and his region on brunochiefofpolice.com.
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