The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (27 page)

“I thought Fabrice wasn’t able to hear anything,” Bruno said.

“Apparently the lawyer knew about that. He carried a big notepad to write things on to show Fabrice. The docs reckon it will be a couple of weeks before he gets his hearing back. What did you do to him?”

“Clapped my hands hard over both his ears at the same time. Something they taught us in the army, unarmed combat.”

“I wouldn’t say that at the inquiry, if I were you. You know how lawyers like to talk about unreasonable force, even when their clients were using an ax.”

“I think I can guess who hired the lawyer,” said Bruno.

“In this kind of case, Bruno, we have to do better than guesses.”

The housekeeper showed Bruno and Prunier into a large room that she called the library, whose French windows opened onto the terrace where Bruno had stood with the countess at the Patriarch’s birthday party. Books lined the walls, an old-fashioned desk faced the windows, and at the far end of the room the Patriarch and the brigadier were sitting amicably in two leather armchairs. Two glasses, a water jug and a bottle of red liquid with a label in Russian stood on the small table between them.

The Patriarch waved the new arrivals to draw up two chairs and fetch glasses from the small bar in the corner of the room. Above the bottles were two framed photographs of warplanes that Bruno recalled from ones he’d seen as a boy. A single-engine fighter was a Yak-9, the Soviet-built aircraft the Patriarch had flown. At one point it had been the fastest gasoline-driven plane in the world. The other was a Dassault Mystère, the French jet in which he’d broken the sound barrier. The Patriarch began pouring drinks for the newcomers.

“Pertsovka,”
he said. “Vodka spiced with red peppers, gives it a bite, and since we have a Russian theme this evening, it’s appropriate.”

Bruno took a sip. It was hot and fiery, sharp on the throat, but then he felt a warm glow spread down his chest. There was a quiet knock on the door, and the housekeeper came in with a tray of salami, smoked fish and black bread. It reminded him of the evening at Yevgeny’s place.

“Help yourselves to zakuski,” said the Patriarch, using a chunk of bread to pick up a slice of fish. “It’s an old Russian habit: never drink without eating something.”

“General Desaix tells me that neither Colonel Clamartin nor anyone else ever tried to blackmail him over these allegations,” said the brigadier. “He flatly denies that there is any truth in them.”

“The one and only time I heard of this was when Gilbert told me about it in Gorky Park,” the Patriarch said. “Whoever dreamed it up did their homework. As far as I can recall the dates and place-names were right, and so are the names of the two NKVD men. But all that stuff is available to anybody who read my memoirs. The Russian edition sold a lot of copies.”

“When Gilbert came here seeking a place to live, did he make any kind of oblique reference to allegations made by this young man?” asked Prunier.

The Patriarch shook his head. “Gilbert didn’t live here; he lived at the vineyard as a guest of my son, his best friend. So he never came to me looking for a place to stay. I had nothing to do with it, although I also saw him as a friend—and a damn good pilot. And he never referred to the allegations in any way, other than the one time he told me about them in Moscow.”

“Do you have any idea what might have been behind them, assuming the story is untrue?” the brigadier asked.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” said the Patriarch. “The obvious possibility is that poor Ivan Tomasovitch invented the story to explain to his son why he’d been sent to the Gulag. It sounds a lot better to say he was betrayed by a nasty foreigner than admit that he was criticizing his country’s leader in the middle of a war or whatever it was he’d been doing.”

“Did you know this young man was killed in a hit-and-run accident shortly after his visit to our embassy to make the allegations against you?” asked the brigadier.

“
Mon Dieu,
no. Is that true?” The Patriarch seemed genuinely surprised.

“We’re checking,” the brigadier replied. “But Gilbert was sent a news clipping about it with the word ‘murderer’ scrawled across it. That’s why he thought there might have been some truth to it all, and why Gilbert decided to make sure we knew about it after his own death.”

“So you think I might have been a spy for all these years, blackmailed by the KGB,” the Patriarch said thoughtfully. He leaned forward to pick up some more black bread and then took a long sip of his drink. “It’s plausible, I suppose, except for one thing. They had a far better hold on me than that, if they wanted to use it—my son, Yevgeny. They never gave him an exit visa. You might call him a kind of hostage to my good behavior.”

“And was your behavior good?”

“It would depend on whom you asked. I let my membership in the party lapse after 1956 when they crushed the Hungarian uprising. They knew that. But I never made it public, never openly criticized them. I always treated them with respect, as former comrades-in-arms. And I never spied on them or for them.”

“But you did have long and regular conversations with senior Kremlin officials,” the brigadier said. “You dealt with all of them—Stalin, Bulganin, Molotov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, even Gorbachev.”

“I’m not sure I accept your use of the phrase ‘dealt with.’ I certainly met them all, was formally received by them, sometimes had private dinners with them, even spent weekends out at the dachas at Usovo and went hunting with Brezhnev at Zavidovo. I gave them my interpretations of French and Western policy, just as I gave our own presidents my interpretations of the thinking in the Kremlin. And yes, we discussed French politics and foreign policy, but I knew nothing that was not in the newspapers.”

“Not quite,” the brigadier responded. “We know that you undertook certain missions for de Gaulle, acting as an informal back channel with the Kremlin.”

“I wrote reports on each of those missions, and they’ll all be in the files at the Élysée, if de Gaulle chose to keep them. And whether you are aware of it or not, I did the same for Pompidou, for Giscard d’Estaing and for Mitterrand, at their request. Sometimes I handed over personal letters, sometimes gave a verbal briefing. In each case, it was something the president did not want to go through the usual channels.” The Patriarch sniffed, waved an airy hand and said, “The quai d’Orsay leaks like a sieve.”

Bruno could not hold back a smile, and he heard Prunier chuckle beside him. France’s elegant diplomats had long been identified by the address of the foreign office on the Left Bank of the River Seine.

“Could you expand on that?” the brigadier asked.

“I could, but I won’t. I was asked to keep those conversations confidential, and I did. Both sides were confident that they could trust me. You could ask Giscard if you like; he’s still alive.” The Patriarch set his glass down firmly, looked each of them in the eye and went on.

“I don’t think you fully understand just how isolated these men were in the Kremlin, how much they feared they were being told only what their advisers wanted them to hear. I was a foreigner but spoke almost perfect Russian, and they all knew I’d fought for them, alongside them, in their own warplanes. They knew I’d shed some blood in their battles. I’d even loved a Russian woman, fathered a Russian son. I’d met Khrushchev and Brezhnev during the war when we were all in uniform. We could use soldiers’ slang together, swear like troopers, talk of old times, old battles, men we’d known.”

Bruno felt himself nodding in agreement. He knew the strength of that kind of bond and the depth of trust it could bring. He saw the brigadier’s eyes meet his and realized that he also understood.

“And so when we sat naked together on the
banya
out at Zavidovo, beating each other with birch branches until we got so hot we’d go out and roll in the snow, I knew I could believe what they told me. I could take it to my own president and be absolutely sure it was the truth.”

The Patriarch sat back, evidently moved by his memories or perhaps by his own rhetoric, and his head sank onto his chest. After a moment, he sat up, poured himself another shot of vodka, drained it and slammed the glass onto the table before glaring at the others.

“If they’d thought for a moment that I was being controlled by the KGB, that I was bought and paid for, I’d have been no use to those poor, lonely old men in the Kremlin. No use at all. They could never have trusted a word I said.

“That’s what went wrong with Gilbert. It wasn’t the KGB. It was your people, fellow Frenchmen playing intelligence games, who just wanted to use him. That’s why he was such a mess when he got back from Moscow.” The Patriarch looked accusingly at the brigadier. “Your predecessors worked him too hard. He wasn’t built for that kind of life, and you didn’t even train him for it.”

“He told you of that?” the brigadier asked, with an intake of breath. Bruno heard Prunier gasp beside him.
Putain,
Bruno thought, I don’t think I should be listening to this.

“That your people told him to accept the KGB’s advances so you could feed them false information? Of course he told me, the poor bastard. He had to pretend to be a double agent while being ours all along. Have you any idea of the strain he was under? No wonder he was drinking like a fish. Gilbert was at the end of his rope, and then you pulled him out of Moscow and dumped him, with a big label around his neck saying
SECURITY RISK
so the Russians would never be quite sure if the stuff he gave them was real or not.”

“He ignored orders, he tried to set policy all on his own,” the brigadier said, in a voice that suggested he didn’t entirely believe his own words but felt obliged to speak them.

“The orders were stupid. Gilbert was proved right about Yeltsin,” the Patriarch replied. “I was there in Moscow, don’t forget, seeing my old friend Akhromeyev, something else that Mitterrand asked me to do.”

He picked up the bottle, but it was empty. “That’s enough for tonight,” he said, almost to himself. Then he looked squarely at the brigadier, and said, “Well, you’d better make up your mind, Général de Brigade Lannes. Either arrest me or show yourself and your two witnesses out. I’m ninety years old, and I’ve had enough. I’m going to bed.”

And with that, he picked up a final morsel of black bread and headed for the door. Bruno used his cane to rise to his feet in respect as the old man stomped by. Prunier followed suit, and then the brigadier also stood. At the door, the Patriarch paused.

“I’ve had an interesting request from
Paris Match
to give them an interview on my missions to the Kremlin. I don’t suppose it would do any harm, and I might remind some people of what I know and whom I served. I’m very tempted to accept.”

As the door closed behind him, the brigadier shook his head in irritation, looked at his watch and then at Bruno. “Where can we get something to eat around here at this time?”

“At my place,” said Bruno. “I can offer homemade pâté,
enchaud de porc
that I made into a confit earlier this year, salad and cheese. It will only take ten, fifteen minutes.”

Within the half hour, the two men plus Prunier’s driver were standing at the high counter in Bruno’s kitchen and sipping single-malt scotch poured from the bottle of Bowmore the brigadier had brought earlier. Bruno handed the brigadier a tin of pâté and a can opener and took cheese from the fridge. The driver was sent out to pick a couple of lettuces from the garden, and Prunier was opening a bottle of the local Domaine red. Bruno took from his freezer a plastic bag that contained a quarter of a tourte, the big, round loaf of bread almost as big as the wheel of a small car. He’d sliced it before freezing for impromptu meals such as this and began feeding the slices into his toaster.

Bruno opened the tall glass jar in which he’d preserved the confit and scooped out the thick yellow fat that sealed out the air. From his vegetable basket he took a kilo of potatoes, scrubbed them hard under the tap, sliced them and tossed them into salted boiling water while Prunier and the brigadier set the table in the dining room. The driver washed and drained the lettuces he’d brought in, and Bruno tossed them with hazelnut oil and balsamic vinegar. He took cornichons from a jar in the fridge, and all four of them headed for the table to eat his pâté and toast.

Then Bruno went back to the kitchen, sliced the pork, put a spoonful of fat into a large skillet and added some garlic. He put more fat into his large frying pan, added more garlic, three chopped shallots and a splash of white wine. The potatoes were almost done. Bruno rolled them in a towel to dry and then began to sauté them gently in the frying pan. He put the slices of pork into the skillet and asked the driver to return to the garden for some parsley. From his freezer he took one of the gray summer truffles, wrapped in tinfoil, that he’d been storing. Once he stirred the potatoes and added some chopped parsley, he turned the pork slices. Already cooked, they only needed to be warmed.

Prunier took the skillet of
enchaud,
and the brigadier emptied the fried potatoes into a serving bowl Bruno had warmed with hot water. And once they were back at the table, Bruno grated the truffle into the
pommes de terre sarladaises.
It should be the real black winter truffles, the famed
diamants noirs
of the Périgord, he explained, but it was too early for them.

He served three healthy slices of pork to each man, told them to help themselves to potatoes, filled his glass with red wine and wished them bon appétit. All four men began to eat with appetite and evident pleasure, interspersed with thanks to Bruno, who had assumed that the presence of Prunier’s driver meant they could not talk over the meeting with the Patriarch in any detail. So when the main course had been finished, the salad and cheese eaten and the second bottle of wine opened, he was surprised when Prunier asked the brigadier, “Where do we go from here?”

“We check out everything that can be checked, like the Novosibirsk newspaper in the summer of 1989 for that report of the hit-and-run,” the brigadier began. Then they would look for any published records of Ivan Tomasovitch’s trial and sentence and subsequent release, review their own files on the Patriarch, draft a report for the minister of the interior and leave it up to him.

“He may or may not decide to invite Marco for a friendly chat, but I’ll be very surprised if anything is done,” the brigadier said. “It’s all too vague, he’s too old, too well connected, and there’s not a scrap of real evidence. With Colonel Clamartin, it’s different. The money in the trust fund makes it different. We’ll have to look back over everything he did, but it all took place twenty years ago, and we can’t question the dead.”

“And too thorough a review would get the Patriarch repeating his criticisms of the way your predecessors handled Clamartin,” said Prunier. “That could be embarrassing.”