The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (2 page)

Among the guests in the garden Bruno saw only a handful of people he knew. The mayor and Dr. Gelletreau from St. Denis were chatting with Hubert, who owned the town’s celebrated wine cave. As he spotted them, the men were joined by the stylish Clothilde Daunier, curator of the national museum of prehistory at Les Eyzies and a scholar with an international reputation. Beyond them, he saw his friend Jack Crimson, a supposedly retired British spymaster who had a house outside St. Denis, chatting amicably with the French foreign minister.

Beside Crimson, Bruno saw Pamela, who had been his lover for the past year, although he wondered increasingly how long their affair would continue. She’d been delighted when Crimson had asked her to accompany him to the Patriarch’s birthday but had courteously asked Bruno if he approved. Of course, he had said, stilling the twinge of jealousy that lasted until the Red Countess had called to ask him to escort her and her great-granddaughter. Pamela, looking very fine with her red-bronze hair piled high, caught his eye. Feeling obliged to stay in attendance on the countess, Bruno waved, beckoning her to join them on the terrace. Pamela raised her glass to him with a cool smile but then left him feeling deflated as she turned back to her conversation.

Then the Red Countess waved at a young woman in the crowd. She evidently knew the Patriarch’s family well. His son Victor, also a former pilot who now ran the family vineyard, and Victor’s very attractive wife, Madeleine, had each embraced her in the receiving line. Victor was around sixty, Bruno calculated, but his vivacious wife seemed very much younger. Bruno would have guessed her to be in her early thirties. So he was startled when their daughter, Chantal, approached and eagerly hugged Marie-Françoise, whom she knew from the university. Chantal must be at least twenty, he thought, so that made her mother around forty, Bruno’s own age.

As Chantal greeted the countess enthusiastically and Bruno politely, her mother suddenly appeared. She put one hand on her daughter’s shoulder and the other on Marie-Françoise and posed, briefly cocking an eyebrow at Bruno before saying to the countess, “Marie-Françoise looks so like those famous photos of you when you were her age. You must be so proud of her.”

“At my age, it’s privilege enough just to see your great-grandchild, let alone to watch her beauty grow,” the countess replied. “And Marco tells me he can hardly wait for Marc or Chantal to make him a great-grandpapa.”

“Don’t listen to her,
chérie,
” Madeleine said to her daughter, with a laugh that didn’t sound quite as carefree as she’d intended. “I’m in no hurry for you to make me a grandmother.” She gave Bruno an appraising glance. “So this is the local policeman who saved you from your awful sister.”

“He saved me, too, in the cave,” said Marie-Françoise. “I’ll never forget it, the gunfire in that enclosed place and then Bruno undressing me after I’d been pulled out from that underground lake.” She gave him a cheeky smile. “I feared the worst, Bruno, until you rubbed me down and dressed me in dry clothes from that plump policeman.”

Bruno remembered the stricken look of the girl, her face bloody and her mouth caved in from where she’d been hit with a gun butt. There was no sign of her injuries now, and her teeth looked as perfect as expensive dentistry could make them.

“You were very brave, and you look lovely now,” Bruno said. He gestured at the three blond women standing before him. “All three of you look wonderful, the three graces of the Périgord.”

“Beware of dangerous flatterers like this, you two,” said Madeleine, rolling her eyes and laughing as she hugged the two girls. “Gunplay and gallant compliments make for a heady combination.”

“Both of you must come to lunch at the vineyard and tell us all about that time in the cave. I never really heard the whole story,” said Chantal.

“Good idea, maybe when Grandpa comes. I know he’d like to hear it, too,” said Madeleine. “And you must come, too, Hortense,” she said to the countess. “You know how Grandpa loves to see you. I’ll call to confirm the date.”

“I’d be delighted, and you can rely on me to bring the countess,” said Bruno. “You can always reach me at the St. Denis
mairie.
”

Bruno felt Madeleine’s eyes stay on him as her daughter asked the countess if she might take Marie-Françoise away to join some of the other younger guests in the garden. He watched as the three women left. From the rear, they looked identical, slim hipped, long legged and elegant, each moving with the same, assured grace.

“There are some other members of Marco’s family you should meet,” said the Red Countess. “But they’re all well brought up, even the foreign ones. They’ll see us stuck here in the balcony, and they’ll come to greet me. Madeleine was very well brought up, so she’ll see to it, despite the way she’s using this party to advance her political career.”

“There’s a very pleasant woman whom you ought to meet, Raquelle, the daughter from Marco’s Israeli wife,” she went on when Bruno inquired about the non-French family members. “Marco had just divorced her when we met. Raquelle has lived here in the Périgord for forty years. She’s always been a favorite of mine, one of the artists who did the reconstruction of the Lascaux Cave. Then there’s Yevgeny, his son by a Russian woman in wartime. I first met Yevgeny in Moscow when he was a little boy—and here he is.”

A big-boned bear of a man in his sixties with gray hair tumbling to his shoulders had suddenly appeared before the wheelchair and knelt to take the Red Countess into his arms. He kissed her soundly and sat back on his heels to admire her.

“They told me you were bedridden,” he said, in strongly accented French.

“Much exaggerated and it was all the fault of my dreadful sister and her crooked grandson César,” she said. “You can thank the young man standing behind me for rescuing me.” She gestured at Bruno, and Yevgeny shook his hand.

“You were what, seven or eight when I first laid eyes on you?” she asked Yevgeny.

“Eight, and I’d never seen anything in Moscow like you, all dressed in Dior and with your long cigarette holder; you were like something from films,” Yevgeny said, smiling. “And then you took me to your film premiere and gave me French chocolates. You know I’ve been in love with you ever since.”

“From what I hear, Yevgeny, you say that to a lot of women. Is it true you’re living here now?”

“Yes, I have a house near Siorac with glorious light and a big barn that serves as my gallery. You have to come and see my latest paintings.” He turned to Bruno and said, “I did a whole series of portraits of the countess, all called
Parizhanka,
the ‘Woman from Paris.’ The first ones were from my boyhood memory, but then she started coming to Moscow again, and I could paint her from life.”

“It’s all a long time ago,” the countess said. Bruno was doing the math in his head. If Yevgeny had been eight when Stalin died, he’d have been born in 1944 or 1945 and therefore conceived as a war baby. Marco had divorced his Israeli wife by the time he met the countess in 1953, so Yevgeny’s half sister, Raquelle, would be just a few years younger. And then there was Marco’s third child, Victor, the one who ran the vineyard. Three children by different mothers, and all three gathered here for their father’s birthday and all living nearby.

It said a lot for the old man that he remained that close to his children and even more that they wanted to be near him. Or maybe the attraction lay in the eventual inheritance, Bruno thought, looking around at the château with its well-kept grounds. The Patriarch was usually described as a wealthy businessman, and he must have made money from his directorships. The family vineyard in the hills above Lalinde was respected, mostly producing Bergerac reds and whites with a small and separate vineyard in Monbazillac, but it was hardly a gold mine. Bruno knew the old saying that the way to make a small fortune in wine was to start with a large one.

“I understand why one might have preferred to leave Russia in the former times of the Soviet Union,” Bruno said, “but has not life improved in Russia these days?”

“In some ways it’s better, like cars and money and foreign travel,” Yevgeny replied. “Many other things stay the same, like the weather. But for an artist or a writer, the big difference is that we have lost our great patron, the state. In Soviet times, a member of the writers’ or artists’ union was guaranteed a stipend, commissions, a studio, even a dacha in the country. It was a strange system but agreeable enough if one was part of it and didn’t bother much about politics. These days, we are thrown back on our own resources, or rather on the dubious tastes of our rich oligarchs and their flighty mistresses.”

“And naturally they prefer to buy what’s fashionable rather than your best work,” said the countess.

“I thought your father was very much in favor with the current government,” Bruno said.

As they had waited in the receiving line there had been time to study the array of photos that lined the hallway—the Patriarch meeting various dignitaries. He was posed with six presidents of France, two American presidents, with Stalin and Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and Deng Xiao Ping. Alongside these were photos of him with popes, German chancellors, British prime ministers, assorted generals, astronauts, film stars and opera singers. The Red Countess had preened at a photo of her younger self with the Patriarch at a Cannes Film Festival in the fifties. A young Brigitte Bardot was in the photo, too, but the Patriarch had eyes only for the Red Countess.

“Putin is a very old-fashioned kind of Russian who remembers the war and its heroes, even though he wasn’t even born at the time,” Yevgeny said. “Still, my father’s fame and his medals have their limits. He was invited to the Kremlin, yet he couldn’t get me a Soviet exit visa. He had great
blat,
but only in certain fields.”

“
Blat
?” Bruno asked, baffled by the word.

“It means influence or pull, the ability to command favors. You French have the word
piston,
which means much the same thing.”

As he spoke, there was the sound of a glass breaking, and a small altercation seemed to be taking place just below their place on the balcony, with raised voices and suddenly a swirl of people. An older man who looked drunk was pulling Chantal by the arm, and she was resisting and telling him to let go, helped by Marie-Françoise. Victor, the Patriarch’s younger son, suddenly appeared through the crowd, Dr. Gelletreau at his side. The St. Denis parish priest, Father Sentout, seemed to come from nowhere with a good-looking young man who bore more than a passing resemblance to the Patriarch.

Before Bruno could push his way to the steps to join the rescue party, they managed between them to separate the drunken man from Chantal. They were joined by a new figure, a large, burly man dressed in a tweed jacket and flat cap and wearing boots and gaiters that gave him the look of an old-fashioned gamekeeper. He put his arms around the drunk, lifted him bodily and then carried him away. The other men followed, except for the young man, who remained with Chantal. She sank gratefully into his arms but seemed none the worse for the incident.

The buzz of conversation had silenced for a moment as people turned and craned their necks to see the cause of the flurry. But the string quartet continued to saw away at their instruments, and the babble of voices quickly renewed.

“Who were those men?” Bruno asked the countess, noting with approval the brisk efficiency with which the disturbance had been managed.

“I don’t know the big one; he looked like some kind of servant,” she replied. “The handsome youth is Marc, Victor’s son, Marco’s grandson. He’s here to learn the family business before going to business school in America. Marco thinks his grandson will make a fine match for Marie-Françoise. I agree so we’re arranging for them to see a fair amount of one another. It would be a very good marriage for both families.”

Bruno was surprised, assuming that the days of arranged marriages were long over. But when it came to countesses and châteaux, perhaps the old ways continued as they always had. The Patriarch’s money and the countess’s estates and titles would make quite a combination.

“Were you ever tempted to marry the Patriarch yourself?” he asked her.

She looked up at him, amused. “There are men you marry, for the family’s sake, and men you take to bed, for your own. I’m not sure it makes sense to confuse the two.”

“And who was the drunk pulling at Chantal?” he asked.

“Gilbert, an old friend of the family,” she said. Gilbert had befriended Victor when they were cadets together at the French Air Force Academy at Salon-de-Provence, and they went on to serve in the same squadron as fighter pilots. When Victor left to join Air France, Gilbert remained in uniform and became an air attaché at the French embassy in Moscow, where there had been some kind of scandal. The countess didn’t know the details. Charming but always a heavy drinker, Gilbert was now a barely functioning alcoholic, with a trail of affairs and failed marriages behind him. Thanks to Victor, he lived in a small house on the family estate and had the nominal job of cataloging the Patriarch’s archives.

Bruno left to get a plate of canapés from the buffet for the Red Countess, whose wheelchair had a neat folding table attached from which she could eat. When he returned, balancing two glasses of champagne and two plates, she was in conversation with an elegantly dressed white-haired woman in her sixties, who had one bold lock of coal-black hair running back from her forehead.

“Meet Raquelle, the Patriarch’s daughter,” the countess said. “I’ve told her all about you and she can have my glass of champagne. I’ll go on to the white wine.”

Bruno shook hands and told Raquelle he admired the copy of the Lascaux Cave she had worked on and asked about her new venture.

“It’s at Le Thot, the prehistory park with the antique animals,” Raquelle replied, in a deep, attractive voice. “We’re upgrading it now with virtual reality and animatronics, lifelike mammoths and aurochs that we designed on computers. It’s fun learning new skills at my age. Some of the family are coming to lunch next week to see our progress so far. Would you like to come along?” She handed him a business card with the image of some wild-looking men in furs brandishing spears and stones as they surrounded a trapped mammoth. Her phone number and e-mail address were on the reverse side.