The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (23 page)

Armed with an authorization from the
procureur de la République
in Périgueux to launch an investigation into Gilbert’s death, J-J was heading to the vineyard to make a full search of his cottage and the vineyard computer he’d used. Prunier was on the phone to France Télécom to arrange a full review of Gilbert’s cell-phone records. Bruno was perched uncomfortably in the backseat of his Land Rover, Balzac nestled in the footwell below him, as the brigadier drove to Crimson’s house.

Of course, Colonel Clamartin might have been on the British payroll, the brigadier said in response to Bruno’s suggestion. But the payments seemed too generous for them. What was strange was that the payments into the second trust fund had never stopped, although Gilbert had been retired and presumably out of the intelligence business for two decades. Pensions were usually paid to defectors who had to be resettled outside their homeland and had no other income.

“I can’t think what he might have been doing down here in the Périgord that was worth that sort of money,” the brigadier said. “As far as we know he had no access to anything secret, not even commercial technology, since he’d stopped flying. If he was working for the Russians when he was supposed to be working for us, we’ll have to backtrack over a lot of stuff and take a very hard look at some of the agents he recruited.”

“He spent a fair amount of time with Yevgeny, the Patriarch’s Russian son who’s an artist,” Bruno suggested. “They spent evenings drinking together, reminiscing about Moscow. Yevgeny also inherits something in the will.”

The brigadier nodded. “We’ll take a look at him. The Russians have a history of using artists as bankers for operational funds. Who can say if a painting is worth five hundred euros or fifty thousand? Payments can be made in cash, and then the artist can pass the money on to local agents. But we need to know what would justify paying Clamartin.

“Are you comfortable back there?” He turned to glance back at Bruno, his legs stretched out along the rear seat, his back jammed into the corner made by the seat and door. Bruno grunted that he was okay, and the brigadier spoke again. “In the car on the way here J-J was wondering if there might be any connection between all this business and the attack on you. What do you think?”

“I think it’s personal,” Bruno replied. “I pulled the guy in for another matter entirely, scared him into thinking he might be going inside and losing his job.” Bruno explained the coincidence that Fabrice was working for the Patriarch and Victor as their gamekeeper.

“There are too many coincidences in this affair. I don’t like it.” The brigadier turned in to Crimson’s drive, parked and helped Bruno out.

Crimson opened his front door, eyebrows raised in surprise. “My dear Vincent, what brings you down here? And Bruno, why on earth are you using a walking stick?”

After brief explanations and the usual pat for Balzac, Crimson led them to the terrace at the back of the house, explained that his daughter and Pamela were at the riding school after signing the contract to buy the place, offered drinks and brought a stool for Bruno’s leg. The brigadier chose mineral water, and Bruno thought it best to follow suit. Balzac trotted off to explore Crimson’s garden.

“So you think Gilbert’s death was unnatural,” Crimson began, using the intimate
tu
form.

The brigadier held up a hand. “That’s just one part of the problem,” he said. “We came across a secret trust fund in Liechtenstein. He’s been getting three thousand dollars a month since he left Moscow, and we don’t know who was paying him or why. Was it you?”

“Not as far as I know, and I probably would have known.”

“The Americans?”

“Unlikely. He’d been out of the game for over twenty years. What would he have to offer?”

“That’s what we can’t understand,” said the brigadier. “Unless he was being paid for his silence.”

Silence about what? Bruno asked himself as he watched the interplay between the two intelligence men. Not for the first time, Bruno wondered how they had come to know each other and be on first-name terms. Their relationship seemed too close to be based on the usual formal liaison meetings that took place between officials.

“Is Bruno cleared for this?” Crimson asked.

“If it wasn’t for Bruno, I wouldn’t be here,” the brigadier replied. “Besides, as you know, it never happened.”

“It came damn close.”

The brigadier turned to Bruno. “Jack and I met in the course of an operation that was planned but never took place. It was overtaken by events. And it was probably just as well that it didn’t happen. It was also an operation that involved Gilbert.”

It had begun in Moscow in July 1991, when Gilbert had sent a warning to Paris that he had information that a military coup was being prepared by hard-liners to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev and reverse his reforms. At almost the same time, Jack Crimson had sent a similar warning to London.

“Enough people in London and Paris believed our warnings,” said Crimson. “Mitterrand spoke with our prime minister, John Major, and said we should start making contingency plans on possible Western responses in case there was a coup. I was flown back to London and put on an Anglo-French team, which is where I met Vincent here. You call him brigadier, but he was just a captain then.”

Gorbachev had arranged private talks with Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Kazakh leader Nazarbayev on July 29 to discuss sacking the hard-liners: the KGB chief Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Yazov, Interior Minister Pugo, Vice President Yanayev and Soviet premier Pavlov. Convinced that the army under Marshal Akhromeyev would remain loyal, Gorbachev decided to wait until after his return from vacation, when he planned to sign into law the new union treaty for a much more decentralized Soviet Union. Gorbachev, however, did not know that Kryuchkov had him under close observation, knew of the plan to dismiss the hard-liners and arranged to strike first.

On August 17, Kryuchkov convened a meeting at a KGB guesthouse outside Moscow, read aloud the terms of the new union treaty and declared it meant the end of the Soviet Union. Then Kryuchkov played them a clandestine recording of Gorbachev discussing with Yeltsin the sacking of the hard-liners; at this, the hard-liners agreed to move. Either Gorbachev must declare a state of emergency and give the hard-liners full power to restore order, or he must go. Those at the meeting agreed to send a delegation to the Crimea the next day to give Gorbachev the ultimatum. Gorbachev refused, and the coup was launched.

Communications to his Crimean dacha were cut off, his KGB guard reinforced. Kryuchkov recalled all KGB personnel from leave and doubled their pay. Three hundred thousand arrest forms were prepared for Moscow and a quarter of a million sets of handcuffs ordered. The Lefortovo Prison was emptied, ready for new prisoners. Yanayev signed the decree for the state of emergency, and it was announced at seven in the morning of August 19.

Even before the coup plotters held their televised press conference that evening, Gilbert had been in the Russian White House, the seat of the Russian Federation parliament that was Yeltsin’s power base. He had heard Yeltsin’s statement of defiance and his call for a general strike against the coup. Above all, he had seen Major Evdokimov, chief of staff of a tank battalion from the Tamanskaya Guards, declare his loyalty to the Russian parliament. On the first day Gilbert had reported back to Paris that the coup was by no means secure; short of massive bloodshed, it was likely to fail. That evening, the Patriarch flew to Moscow.

“Gilbert was there at midday when Yeltsin climbed onto that tank, denounced the coup and called on the military to stand by the constitution and refuse any orders from Yanayev and his emergency committee,” said Crimson. “In London, we watched it on TV. None of us could believe that the plotters hadn’t already picked up Yeltsin and dumped him into some distant dungeon. And by now he was protected by tanks and thousands of protesters and TV cameras.”

In Paris and London, with equivocal support from the United States, one of the contingency plans being considered had proposed a possible commando raid on Foros to rescue Gorbachev and bring him to the West. The joint team of British SAS troops and French commandos was to launch from NATO’s Incirlik base in Turkey on helicopters and ride through the Black Sea on a French-owned oil tanker until within range of Foros.

“That was where I came in, as a young captain in the First Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment,” said the brigadier. “I was brought in to help plan the mission and to take part in it, if it went ahead. And Jack Crimson was one of the British planners.”

“By the time we got started, on August twentieth, the coup was crumbling,” said Crimson. “It collapsed that night when the KGB’s Alfa and Vympel special forces teams said they could only break into the Russian White House and arrest Yeltsin with massive bloodshed. The plotters lost their nerve, the troops began pulling out of Moscow, and Gorbachev’s communications were restored. He ordered the arrest of the coup plotters and came back to Moscow.”

“That was it,” said the brigadier. “Gilbert came back to Paris to a hero’s welcome, at least from the defense ministry, before being sent back again to take advantage of his connections with Yeltsin and the new regime.”

“How long did Gilbert last in Moscow after that?” Bruno asked after a long silence, in which the other two men, their eyes locked, seemed to be staring into a shared but distant past.

“Just over a year,” the brigadier replied. “The diplomats hated him for being right, and some of our intelligence chiefs who’d questioned his warnings began complaining that he’d gone native.”

“Lesson one in the politics of bureaucracy: never be right about something too soon,” said Crimson, with a bitter laugh. “Lesson two: it never matters to be in the wrong, so long as everybody else is.”

The brigadier shrugged, and said, “He was drunk most of the time. We called him home, put him in front of a medical board and had him forced out. He never forgave us, and I don’t blame him.”

“The same thing might have happened to me if I hadn’t been called back just before the coup,” said Crimson. He rose, saying, “Christ, I need a drink,” and went into the kitchen. He came back with a bottle of Bowmore, three glasses and a small bottle of Evian.

“Nothing ever seemed quite as important after that, nor as simple,” he said, pouring out the scotch with a heavy hand. “Sometimes I miss the Cold War.”

The three men drank in silence. Bruno looked across Crimson’s garden to the ridges of green trees turning to gold.

“So what did Gilbert know or what did he do that was worth paying for, over all these years?” he asked, and turned to Crimson. “You said something about a Russian woman who was close to Yeltsin, a woman who became a banker. You called her Ludmilla.”

“Ludmilla Gracheva, one of Gilbert’s many women.” Crimson took another drink and shook his head. “She’s rich enough, so I suppose she could have been paying him, or maybe he was an early investor in her bank and the money came from his dividends.”

“You said you’d told Gilbert you’d lost touch with her,” Bruno went on. “That doesn’t sound like you, Jack. I’ve always seen you as the kind of man who keeps up with useful contacts. They’re your bread and butter.”

“She’s on the board of one of their small private banks but pretty much retired from politics. She’s too tarred with the Yeltsin brush for the current regime. She and her husband keep an apartment in London, so I see her from time to time. She has a son at an English boarding school.”

“So why were you asking Gilbert about her when you knew already where she was and what she was doing?” Bruno went on.

“Trying to get a sense of what he was up to. Gilbert was too good a man to vegetate down here. I couldn’t believe he was doing nothing, so I wanted to probe a little.”

“Do you know her well enough to ask her if she was paying him?” the brigadier asked. “You’ve got the perfect excuse to get in touch—sad news of the death of an old friend.”

“I suppose so. But it might be easier to trace the money if we start with her bank.”

At that moment the brigadier’s phone rang. He listened, spoke a few words of acknowledgment and said, “Thank you.”

“That was Prunier,” he said. “He’s got Gilbert’s full phone records. No calls to or from Moscow, and the only calls to Britain were to his tailor in Savile Row.”

“Could be a useful cover,” muttered Crimson.

Almost immediately the phone rang again, and once more the brigadier listened, acknowledged and thanked his caller and said, “I can leave it to you to report to the
procureur.
” Then he hung up.

“That was J-J with the first forensics report,” he said, passing his hand over his eyes. “They found chloral hydrate mixed with orange juice on those shoes where Crimson spilled his drink. Knockout drops; I believe the Americans call it a Mickey Finn. Similar traces on the cap of the flask he was carrying. The DNA analysis will take a bit longer.”

“So Gilbert was murdered,” said Bruno. “And we don’t know why he was killed nor why he was paid when he was alive.”

“Welcome to the dark world of intelligence,” said Crimson. “Even if we find out why and how, we may not be able to do a damn thing about it except put it in the files and hope it turns out to be useful someday.”

“That may be your world,” said Bruno. “It’s not mine. This is a time for simple police work. You told me that Gilbert was given that glass of spiked orange juice by one of the waiters in an air-force uniform. We have to call them all in, organize a lineup and grill the one you recognize until we find out where he got that orange juice and who told him to give it to Gilbert.”

The brigadier pulled out his phone again. “I’ll get Prunier onto it.”

Usually on this day Bruno would have been up at dawn with his colleagues from the hunting club, building the fire in the great pit beside their cabin in the woods. Other members with trucks and trailers brought in the rows of tables and benches, borrowed from the rugby club, to fill the barn where Julien Marty would store his hay once this annual feast of the hunt club was over. The kitchens of both tennis and rugby clubs had been raided, as they were every year, to provide the glasses, plates and cutlery for the two hundred people who were invited to the autumn feast.

It had begun long ago, before the time of the club’s oldest members, as a way to provide a treat for the wives and children of the hunters. Some said it dated back to pagan days when the Gauls had celebrated the equinox each spring and fall. The gathering and feast had now become a civic event, a fixture on the St. Denis calendar and the kind of occasion that helped turn the town into a community. More than that, the day of preparations and the evening supper were also ways of connecting the townsfolk to the traditions of their region, back to a time before there were supermarkets and frozen food, a time when the people had depended on what they could hunt and what they could grow.

Bruno was sad to have missed the day’s rituals, gathering at the cabin for coffee before starting to build the fire, and then bringing out the wild boar to impale them on the long spits, stuff their stomach cavities with herbs and then sew them shut with wire. Bruno usually brought branches of bay leaves, armfuls of rosemary, sage and wild garlic. The baron was always the one to light the fire. Others would bring the pots of honey and liters of wine, the salt and pepper and other spices that would be mixed in buckets to make the marinade. Long twigs of rosemary bound around a wooden pole to make a kind of broom could be dipped into the buckets and then used to paint the wild boar as they turned on their spits above the fire.

Once the fire was begun and the wild boar sewn and placed on their spits, there was a new ritual that had been started by Dougal, the Scottish businessman who ran a local rental agency for holiday homes. Before each feast, he brought along a bottle of whisky, and each beast was solemnly baptized with a dram of the scotch before all of those present, then they finished off the bottle.

The fire blazed in its pit all morning, huge logs two and three meters long, needing four men to lift them. They burned furiously until the early afternoon, when the ashes were judged to be sufficiently hot and deep for the roasting. Then the long spits bearing the boar were hoisted onto supports and fitted with the rubber belts that would rotate them once they were attached to the gears of the old Peugeot car engine that had belonged to someone’s grandfather. It was a makeshift system, but it had worked well enough for years.

There were twenty members in the hunting club, a number established over the years as the right proportion for the area of hills and woodland over which they had hunting rights. Each member was allowed to invite up to ten guests, and each one was expected to bring sufficient tins of pâté, vegetables, apple pie and wine to provide for them. They never ran short, but then they all knew one another and had been doing this for years, and their nearby cabin was by now a sophisticated if rather-rustic kitchen.

They had an old cast-iron stove, a refrigerator and freezer, a sink with running water, an old butcher’s counter from a shop that had gone out of business and a formidable array of kitchen knives. This was where the hunters cooked for themselves on hunting days—hearty soups and stews, rabbits and hares, roasted ducks and pigeons and grilled venison. It was where they made their pâtés and cooked their raspberries and black currants to make jam in the autumn, at which Sergeant Jules was the club expert. And today, Bruno knew, Xavier from the bakery would be bringing huge pots of pastry to be rolled out into squares, baked in the big oven and then covered with a compote of that year’s apples topped with apple slices and sprinkled with sugar before being slid back into the oven.

The members of the club were as proud of their cooking skills as they were of their hunting. And just as they trusted their fellow members with loaded weapons, they trusted them in other matters as well. In the event of illness, unemployment or family crisis, the club members rallied around without needing to be asked. Their politics varied, of course, from very conservative to staunch Communist, but politics were kept in their place; their friendship and mutual loyalty were far more important. Still, Bruno reckoned he could usually make an accurate guess at the outcome of elections, local or national, from what he heard from his friends around the table at the cabin.

And that, Bruno thought as his Land Rover climbed the road from St. Cirq that led to the cabin, was why it was so unusual that Fabrice had been asked to leave his old hunting club before joining the one at Lalinde. Bruno recalled the long deliberations on the merits of various candidates that took place in the cabin whenever old age or illness meant there was a vacancy to be filled. Fabrice must have made himself very unpopular, and Madeleine and Victor must have exerted considerable pressure to get him accepted into their club. Perhaps all clubs were not so long established and tight knit as his own, Bruno considered, and because she and her husband owned the land on which their club shot, they could probably get their way easily enough.

Bruno had long since invited his guests: Pamela, of course, Fabiola and Gilles, Crimson and his daughter, Florence from the
collège
and Yveline from the gendarmerie. So bringing along the brigadier as a last-minute addition would still not exceed his quota. He’d been planning also to invite Hubert from the wine shop and Julien from the Domaine, two of his partners on the board of the town vineyard, but the baron had invited them already, along with Philippe Delaron, the reporter, and Dr. Gelletreau.

Attracted by the appetizing smell of roasting boar, Bruno and the brigadier followed Balzac as he trotted ahead to greet the other hunting dogs he’d come to know over the previous months. The dogs were sitting in a loose line, close enough to the fire to enjoy the scent but far enough back to avoid the heat, tongues hanging out and eyes fixed on the roasting boar.

The baron and Sergeant Jules were brushing marinade onto the rotating beasts and giving the brooms to Dougal to plunge back into the buckets of marinade. The three men wore heavy leather gauntlets and aprons against the heat and headbands to catch their sweat. As Bruno and the brigadier came closer, the heat was intense. Small flames darted up from the ashes beneath as the fat from the boars dripped down.

“They’re almost done,” said the baron. “Another twenty minutes and we’ll be taking them off to rest before we start to carve them.”

It was like a scene from another era. The fire pit and the roasting boars and the leathers of the three men would have looked just like this centuries ago, in forest clearings like this one, surrounded by the same trees and following the age-old rituals of the hunt and the feast. Reluctantly, but knowing his injured leg would make it dangerous for him to take his usual place among the men donning the heavy gloves to lift the spits from their supports, Bruno turned toward the hunters’ cabin. It was an unduly modest name, Bruno thought, for a building that was larger than his own house. But any place where the hunters gathered to dress their meat and cook and eat together was always known as
la cabine.

Bruno’s surprise came when he limped into the cabin, walking stick in one hand and a bag full of freshly picked lettuces in the other. The brigadier was at his heels, carrying one bag with a dozen tins of Bruno’s homemade pâté and another full of potatoes for baking.

“Ah, Bruno,” the Patriarch called in greeting. He was standing beside the mayor, who was pouring him a drink, obviously the mayor’s guest. “Gérard here was just telling me how you’d been in the wars, so I’m very pleased you could make it. How’s the leg?”

“I can hobble around, thank you,” said Bruno, putting down the lettuces to shake hands. “And I believe you both know Général de Brigade Lannes, one of my guests, who was kind enough to drive me here.”

“That means you can drink your fill this evening,” said the mayor. “Although I’d be surprised if Sergeant Jules lets the gendarmes mount any Breathalyzer patrols tonight And didn’t you say you were also inviting Yveline from the gendarmerie?”

Bruno’s friend Stéphane, the local cheese maker, waved a greeting from the sink where he was opening bottle after bottle of wine from the Domaine. Since every member of the hunt club was a shareholder in the town vineyard, they never served anything else. Behind Stéphane were stacked six cases of red and six of white, which the club knew from memory was the usual amount that was drunk at these feasts. There were more cases in the cupboard in case of need.

“So what brings the éminence grise of the interior ministry down here to the Périgord?” the Patriarch asked the brigadier in a jovial tone. He finished the wine in his glass and held it out to be refilled. “What dark plots and dangers to the République are you unearthing?”

“Just visiting my friend Bruno,” the brigadier replied and turned to Bruno. “Anything I can do to help?”

“We have two hundred potatoes to wrap in tinfoil before we put them in the ashes,” said Bruno. “And then there are the lettuces to wash and drain. But first you have to try our local wine.”

Stéphane poured Bruno and the brigadier a glass of the Domaine’s dry white wine, and they set to work, ripping off squares of aluminum foil from big rolls and wrapping the fat potatoes, one by one. The mayor and the Patriarch joined them, piling the wrapped potatoes into big metal tubs that had been rescued from the town’s communal laundry when it had closed a generation ago. Bruno began opening the cans of pâté he’d brought, slicing each one into six portions and putting them onto a small plate with a handful of cornichons.

“Is your visit connected to that remarkably senior policeman who called at the vineyard today to search Gilbert’s house?” the Patriarch asked.

“If it were, I couldn’t tell you,” said the brigadier. “But I assume it was police business. Did he say what he was looking for?”

“No idea, I wasn’t there,” the Patriarch replied equably and helped himself to more wine. That was his third glass, Bruno noticed. “But my son said the visitor had shown some document signed by the
procureur,
and naturally they let him go ahead. Lord knows if there was anything to find, the place was cleared out a week ago. And now my new gamekeeper is under arrest in some hospital. So would either of you two be able to tell me what’s going on?”

“Your gamekeeper assaulted a police officer with a deadly weapon, namely an ax,” Bruno said, lifting his gaze from the worktable to observe the Patriarch’s reaction. “The person he assaulted last night was me. That’s what happened to my leg.”

“
Mon Dieu,
I had no idea.” The Patriarch looked aghast. “My dear Bruno, I’m terribly sorry to hear this, but what on earth was behind it?”

Bruno briefly explained the attack on Rollo’s garden and Fabrice’s arrest. As he finished they heard the sound of voices and thuds as the boar were heaved onto the big carving tables outside. Stéphane and the brigadier took the potatoes out to the fire pit where Dougal was raking some of the ashes onto a wide step that had been dug into the side of the pit. This was where the potatoes would be roasted. Meanwhile Sergeant Jules and the baron were sliding the boar off their spits before starting to carve them.

Other guests were gathering around the trestle tables that formed the bar, and Stéphane took out two cases of wine to serve them. Cases of beer were already piled into tubs that had been filled with ice, and the bar tables carried bowls of olives, snacks and peanuts. Bruno limped behind the bar and helped Stéphane serve drinks; it was one of the few jobs he could do. But it seemed that everyone he served wanted to know about his leg. Word of the attack had spread fast. At least Bruno’s own guests had been briefed by Fabiola that his wound was not serious. Still, they all came up to give him a hug and ask how he was or if he needed a chair, and Pamela seemed as affectionate as ever.

Inside the barn, Bruno had reserved one of the trestle tables for his guests, and the mayor had the adjoining table. The Patriarch took the head, with Florence and Fabiola to each side, then Bruno and the brigadier sitting opposite each other, flanked by Pamela and Yveline. At the mayor’s table sat Crimson and the mayor, Crimson’s daughter and Jacqueline Morgan, the half-French, half-American historian who was the mayor’s friend, Gilles and some more of the mayor’s guests. There were four separate rows of tables in the huge barn, five tables in each row, one table for each member of the hunt club. The benches alongside the tables began to fill as Stéphane and the baron steered people from the bar. It took some time as old friends shook hands, kissed cheeks, exchanged greetings and looked for their host’s table.

A large plate of pâté and cornichons, a fat
pain,
a half kilo of butter, a bowl of cherry tomatoes and a bottle each of red and white wine and jugs of water stood on every table. The baron tapped his spoon against his glass for silence, welcomed the assembled guests and called on Father Sentout who said a very short grace. Conversation then resumed and grew into a steady, jovial roar as wine was poured, plates and bowls were passed, cutlery clattered, and the feast began.

“This is the life, the real France,” declared the Patriarch, holding out his empty glass to be refilled. “You won’t find this in Paris,” he said, addressing the brigadier. “Reminds me of those last months of the war, pushing through Poland and Prussia, setting up the field kitchens in huge barns like this, building big fires and roasting any pigs or cattle we could find. It made a welcome change from Russian rations.”

“Wouldn’t the fires attract German aircraft?” Florence asked.

The Patriarch shook his head. “They didn’t have many planes left, and even less aviation fuel. We didn’t see any fighters, so we were switched to tactical duties, supporting the advancing troops, shooting up enemy supply columns and artillery. And when the weather was too bad for flying, we went off with our Russian friends, looking for loot.”