The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (25 page)

So much for the hero of my youth, thought Bruno, looking inside the envelope for more evidence. There was none. There was only the hearsay report of a dead man. He replaced it in the envelope, suddenly aware of Chantal, her arm around her brother’s neck, chatting cheerfully to the brigadier about her wine studies. She was a golden girl, the very image of youth and beauty, and now worth two million. All that and she could certainly whip me at tennis, Bruno reflected.

She would be about the age Oksana had been in that wartime summer when she’d become pregnant. And the dashing young fighter pilot of 1944 would have been about the age Marc was today. Would wars be any different, Bruno wondered, if they were not fought by people so young?

They dropped Chantal and her brother at the station in Périgueux, and the brigadier then called Prunier and J-J to arrange a meeting at the Commissariat de Police on rue du 4 Septembre. He closed his phone and said, “I’d better take a look at that document you were reading; I presume it’s some form of testament from Clamartin.” He made no comment on Bruno’s decision to read it, simply held out his hand to receive it, and they stayed in the station parking lot while the brigadier read it, once quickly, the second time more carefully.

“At least we have an explanation for Gilbert’s money. This suggests he was being paid for his silence,” the brigadier said when he’d finished. “What do you make of it, Bruno?”

“The first question is whether it’s true,” Bruno said. “If it is, I imagine the Patriarch would have been disgraced if it had been leaked that he was an informer for the NKVD—I assume that was the wartime version of the KGB.”

“Yes, pretty much the same thing. NKVD stands for the ‘People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs,’ and the KGB is the Committee for State Security. They changed the names after the war ended. But go on, what would the fallout have been if this had become known?”

“I don’t know how the Patriarch would have lived it down if the French press reported that he’d had a man sent to the Gulag over a woman. And then there’s the implication that after Gilbert told him about the young man’s visit, the Patriarch tipped off the KGB, and they arranged his death. That would make the Patriarch an accessory to murder.”

“So your conclusion is that the KGB has had a hold over the Patriarch for all these years?”

“Yes, but is it that simple?” Bruno asked. “If it’s true, others must have known, starting with Oksana, Yevgeny’s mother. Did she ever tell her son about it? And then there is Dmitri’s mother, presumably the one who sent Gilbert the newspaper clipping and accused the Patriarch of murder.”

The brigadier shrugged and pocketed Gilbert’s letter. When Bruno asked what he intended to do with it, the brigadier threw him a curt glance. “What would you do, Bruno?”

“No idea, but I’m not in your shoes,” Bruno replied. “You’re the one who has to make a decision, and I can’t say I envy you. He’s an old man. Whatever damage he did is long since past, and the Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. If he was a spy, I suppose we need to know the details. But he’s such a patriot I find it hard to think he’d ever do anything against French interests, or at least his view of French interests.”

“I’m not sure it was ever so crude as his being a spy,” the brigadier replied. “I suspect it was far more subtle than that, and probably more important. It seems that he was an agent of influence, a sympathetic voice with access to French presidents as well as the Kremlin, a trusted go-between. But not a word of this to Prunier or J-J.”

They drove the short distance to the
commissariat
and were shown to Prunier’s spacious office, photos of Prunier in various police units on one wall, and in different rugby teams on another. J-J was with him, coffee and mineral water on the conference table. Alongside the drinks lay a laptop and several files, one of them open at printouts from a telephone log. Bruno took a seat at the head of the table so he could stretch out his leg. He rested his cane against the arm of his chair.

“The DNA results came through,” said J-J, his tie loose and his shirt and trousers rumpled as usual. He was looking pleased with himself, and like Prunier he’d risen to shake hands with the new arrivals. “Gilbert was Chantal’s biological father, so she’s not the Patriarch’s granddaughter.”

“And she’s just inherited two million from her late father,” said the brigadier. He pulled his own, specially secured laptop from his bag, put it on top of Prunier’s desk, plugged it in and, with a cursory
“Vous permettez?”
to Prunier, he sat down to log on. Prunier casually nodded his permission for the brigadier to take over his desk. With approval, Bruno noted that Prunier didn’t seem the kind of man to make a fuss over precedence or protocol. He’d known some senior cops who were different.

“Two million euros? She’s a lucky girl,” said J-J, and turned to Bruno. “That guy you put in the hospital, Fabrice, we have a trace that links him to the attack on Rollo’s garden. The
procureur
will file a formal
délit
against him and probably assign Bernard Ardouin as the
juge d’instruction,
since Bernard’s also dealing with the assault on you. He wants to see you when you’re free.”

“Which
juge
has the
procureur
assigned to Gilbert’s death?” Bruno asked. The quality of investigating magistrates varied, and policemen kept a close watch on their performance, their style of work and their political leanings. Some were good investigators who got results but were seen as bullies by the detectives who had to work with them. Others, usually those with political ambitions, were seen as partisan for certain causes or too anxious to win newspaper headlines. Inevitably, the best cops wanted to work with the best magistrates, the ones who got results and who were assigned the most interesting cases. Less-popular magistrates got the worst cops, or the laziest ones. Bernard Ardouin was a good one; Bruno had worked with him before.

“The
procureur
’s going to deal with that himself,” said Prunier, giving Bruno a sympathetic glance. On the one hand, it meant top-level attention with all available resources deployed and no concerns about budgets; on the other, since the
procureur
had so much else to do, it meant he could give the case only occasional attention.

“Don’t worry, Bruno, he asked me to keep an eye on the investigation, and I’ve assigned J-J,” Prunier went on. “We had detectives at the Mont-de-Marsan and Mérignac air bases today showing a photo of Gilbert to the waiters. One remembers serving him orange juice but said he’d brought it because Gilbert had asked for it. The waiter got the juice from the barman, so we spoke to him, and he said several people were drinking it, and he poured out half-a-dozen glasses from a jug.”

“But nobody else collapsed, only Gilbert,” said Bruno, mystified by this development.

“Right, so if it wasn’t in the orange juice, the drug must have been secretly slipped into the drink somehow. So we assigned Inspector Jofflin in Bergerac to start trawling among the guests at the Patriarch’s party to see which of them had been taking photos on their mobile phones. It turns out most of them were. We’ve gone through hundreds, and here are some of the clearest.”

He pressed a button on the laptop, and dozens of thumb-sized photos appeared on the screen. He zeroed in on one, clicked twice and stared at a selfie of Pamela and Crimson, grinning with their arms around each other. Gilbert’s face was visible behind them, talking to someone out of camera. To their left, standing back so as not to intrude on their photo, was a partial image of a young woman. All that was visible was the outline of her breasts in a yellow dress, a bronzed forearm and some locks of long blond hair. In her hands was a small bowl containing silver tongs and what looked like ice cubes.

“Ice cubes,” said Bruno, almost to himself. He’d never thought of that. Chantal had been wearing yellow, Bruno recalled, but so had other women at the party. Prunier clicked on the next picture, another of Pamela’s selfies, but one in which Crimson had his eyes closed and his hand holding a drink was a blur. But this photo showed a much-clearer image of Gilbert behind him, smiling at someone on the other side of Pamela and Crimson. He looked sober, impeccably dressed and was carrying a glass of orange juice.

“It looks like he’s smiling at the woman in the yellow dress, the one with the ice cubes,” said Prunier. “These photos were taken one after the other, just instants apart. There’s a date and timing feature for the photos on some of these phones.”

“Here she is again,” said Prunier, flicking through to another folder of photos and clicking on one. “No ice cubes this time. But it’s the same dress, the same hair.”

This photo had been taken from a different phone, a snatched shot of the Patriarch with one hand on the stone balustrade as he descended the steps from the terrace. He was smiling at a woman in a yellow dress whose back was to the camera. Prunier flicked to another photo that showed the same woman, bowl in one hand and tongs in another, her face obscured by her hair, and talking to Madeleine.

The next photo was another selfie of two people Bruno did not recognize, but behind and above them was a scene on the terrace. He could see the countess’s wheelchair, Bruno himself standing behind it and smiling at the two young girls. Marie-Françoise was in light blue and Chantal was in the now-familiar yellow dress.

“It’s Chantal, the girl with the ice cubes,” said Bruno. “The girl in the DNA report, Gilbert’s daughter, I mean Colonel Clamartin.”

“So if she was the one who dropped them in his drink, she murdered her own father,” said J-J.

“Only if the ice cubes contained the drug and only if she knew what was in them. And I don’t think she knows even now that Gilbert was her father. The
notaire
said nothing about it,” said Bruno. “Still, congratulations, you’ve done well. I wouldn’t have thought of trawling through people’s phones for photos. But do you have any photos of her actually putting the ice cubes in Gilbert’s drink?”

“Not yet, but we’re still collecting the damn things, and we’ve got the Paris police trying to collect more photos from guests who came down from the city,” said Prunier. “I think we’ve already got more than enough to call her in for questioning. Any idea where she is now, Bruno?”

“We just put her on a train for Bordeaux with her brother. We spent the day with them, hearing Clamartin’s will from the
notaire.
”

J-J reached for the phone with a speed surprising for one of his bulk. “Do you know what time the train leaves? We could stop it or have it met at the next station, probably Neuvic.”

“Let’s not go overboard,” said Prunier. “There’s no indication that she’s going to flee, and I want to see whatever extra photos we can get. We haven’t even begun to work out where she got the knockout drops. And perhaps you two could share with me what you got from the session with the
notaire,
apart from the girl’s two million?”

The brigadier threw Bruno a stern glance of warning, but Bruno ignored it. He had no intention of breaking the brigadier’s order to say nothing about Gilbert’s letter.

“On the knockout drops, Chantal is doing the wine course at Bordeaux university that involves some serious chemistry. It would also give her access to a sophisticated laboratory,” Bruno said. “I don’t know how easy these drops are to obtain or to make, nor if they can be frozen into ice cubes or if that degrades their effect. We need to get an expert opinion on that. And while I imagine you can slip someone a precise dose in a drink, how much of that precise dose can be delivered by a slowly melting ice cube?”

“Right, that makes sense,” said Prunier, and he turned to J-J. “Get someone in Bordeaux to have a quick talk with Chantal’s chemistry professor, and ask forensics whether there’s anything in the ice-cube theory.” He turned back to Bruno. “Go on, you were going to tell us about the will.”

“There were two interesting items,” Bruno said. “The widow of his old air mechanic gets a sealed envelope that might be cash. Of course, it might be documents, and they might contain a safe-deposit key. I just don’t know. And Yevgeny, the Patriarch’s Russian son, was bequeathed a nude portrait he painted of a much-younger Madeleine, Chantal’s mother. It hangs in Yevgeny’s bedroom, but it seems it was owned by Gilbert.”

Given Chantal’s age, Bruno explained, she would almost certainly have been conceived in Moscow, when Gilbert was at the embassy and Madeleine was doing her summer internship at the commercial office. With a start, the brigadier rose from Prunier’s desk and went to the bookcase, filled with legal tomes and reference works. He pulled out
Qui Est Qui?
—the French equivalent of
Who’s Who
—and looked up the listing for Marco Desaix. Grandchildren, he read out, Marc born in Paris, 1986, son of Victor and first wife, Marie-Dominique. Chantal, born May 18, 1991, in Périgueux, daughter of Victor and second wife, Madeleine.

“What’s the date of Victor’s second marriage?” Bruno asked, thinking Chantal had been conceived in August of 1990.

“December 15, 1990, in Paris,” the brigadier read out. “She’d have known she was pregnant by Gilbert when she married Victor. I wonder if Victor knew?”

“Victor obviously accepted Chantal as his child, but if he learned that she was Gilbert’s daughter, who knows how he might react? He’s a proud man,” said Bruno.

“Cuckolded by his best friend,” said J-J, shaking his head. “If Victor found out, that gives him a motive to kill Clamartin.”

“If he found out and demanded a divorce, that could have an impact on Madeleine’s political plans. It would make for quite a scandal, and she’d probably lose the Patriarch’s backing,” said Prunier. “That gives her a motive to silence Gilbert. And then the daughter who’s just inherited all the money has a pretty strong financial motive to bump him off, if she knew of the bequest. Half the bloody family has a motive.”

You don’t know the half of it, thought Bruno. He was tempted to tell them that the Patriarch may have had the biggest motive of all. But he held his tongue, and instead he said, “There’s not the slightest sign Chantal knew about the money before his death. I saw her reaction when the
notaire
read the will; she was stunned by it.”

“But it’s worth noting that she didn’t say anything about it to her brother when they were in the car,” the brigadier said from Prunier’s desk. He’d been huddled over his laptop, and Bruno hadn’t known he was paying that much attention to their conversation. Now he looked up and asked Prunier, “Do you have an old-fashioned photocopying machine? I need one that just photographs what it sees, rather than the modern ones that take an electronic image that somebody else might call up later.”

“I’ve got one in my office,” said J-J, and the brigadier picked up his laptop and followed J-J out.