Children of War (25 page)

‘More pots to bring, Bruno,’ the Mayor called, and Bruno helped him take out the rest and then pulled him to one side.

‘Things are about to get busy,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘The news about Sami being here will break tonight and we’ll be flooded with media tomorrow.’

‘Not just media,’ the Mayor said. ‘We’re likely to get political demos,
Front National
, anti-war types, Islamic groups. I had a word with the Prefect about bringing in extra Gendarmes and putting the CRS on standby.’

The
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
were the much-feared riot police, with helmets, shields and body armour that made them look like bodyguards for some alien species. Bruno understood the need for them but winced at the thought of their patrolling the streets of St Denis.

‘Ah, there you are,’ the Mayor said when a figure slipped from the light of the kitchen. As she paused to blink into the darkness where the two men stood, Bruno saw the silhouette of a woman in a well-cut dress, wearing flat-heeled shoes, her
grey hair flowing. He recognized the half-French, half-American historian who had become close to the Mayor after his wife died.

‘Jacqueline,’ Bruno said, embracing her with real affection and catching a hint of Chanel. ‘I thought you’d be back teaching in Paris.’

‘I am,’ she said, hugging him. ‘I came down for the weekend, for this. There’s a rumour going round that you have a new woman in tow, an American like me. You must introduce us.’

‘Gladly, but she’s hardly in tow, just a colleague. In fact, she’s talking horses with Pamela and Fabiola. She’s at the Embassy, a legal attaché.’

‘So I don’t need to ask what brings her here,’ Jacqueline replied, frowning. ‘I might have known you’d be involved with this poor devil they’re calling the Engineer. I presume your old friend the Brigadier has stashed him here.’

Bruno glanced at the Mayor, who shrugged and then shook his head, as if to say he’d told Jacqueline nothing. Bruno knew her to be a formidable woman, as perceptive as she was curious and with a fierce intelligence. Jacqueline was even more passionate about politics than his Mayor, and Bruno always felt he should have read every word in
Le Monde
for a week before joining them for dinner.

‘He hasn’t been stashed anywhere,’ Bruno said, mildly. ‘His name is Sami and this is his home and he’s as French as I am, thanks to the Mayor, who signed his naturalization papers.’

‘Hmm, you could pay for that,’ Jacqueline said thoughtfully, glancing at the Mayor, ‘unless you lead the fight to stop his extradition.’ The sound of a handbell rang out over the chatter and Julien climbed onto a chair, still tolling his bell until it
was quiet enough for him to say a brief word of welcome and invite them all to take their seats for dinner.

Bruno found himself surrounded by women – Jacqueline and Florence, Yveline and Nancy, Pamela and Fabiola, who kept an empty chair beside her in case Gilles was able to join them. A generous slice of game pâté, with cornichons and cherry tomatoes, lay on each plate as a starter. A large dish, filled with thick slices of roast boar, dominated the table. It was flanked by a large bowl of salad and another of roast potatoes. Magnums of red and white wine stood beside jugs filled with a thick sauce of
cèpe
mushrooms.

Bruno looked around the tables and pondered the menu with an almost professional eye, honed from many a rugby and tennis club dinner. The benches and tables and crockery had been borrowed from the clubs, he recognized. Hubert had probably provided the wine glasses; the clubs usually made do with water glasses and even recycled mustard and jam jars. Had Bruno been involved, he’d have tried to provide a soup as a starter, probably with the
cèpes
, since the woods would be full of them after the rain. Still, for a first effort at a
vendange
for this many people Julien had organized this well, he thought, as he poured wine and the Mayor began slicing a big round
tourte
of bread.

And the white wine he had drunk had been more than decent, with some Semillon added to Julien’s usual Sauvignon Blanc grapes. The red wine being served was not up to the standard of the barrel-aged wine Hubert had poured, but it went well with the pâté and was sturdy enough for the boar.

‘Do you have this dinner every year?’ Nancy asked. She had been chatting with Annette about rally-driving, Annette’s
passion. Bruno had a hair-raising memory of driving with the young magistrate headlong along a wooded track, convinced she was about to crash them head-first into a tree at every bend.

‘No, this is the first
vendange
since it became a town business,’ he told her. ‘Everyone here you see is a shareholder, getting a return on our investment. Some of them took part in picking the grapes, and I’d have joined them if this other business hadn’t come up.’

‘You mean Sami,’ said Yveline. ‘Fabiola told us all about it. And who is this guy Deutz?’

‘He’s with the medical tribunal trying to decide whether Sami is fit to stand trial,’ Nancy said, before Bruno could frame his answer. He’d been looking for Fabiola but her chair was empty. She must have slipped away.

‘Why do you ask?’ Nancy went on.

‘He’s a lot more than that,’ Annette interrupted. ‘Fabiola froze when Yveline mentioned his name, like there’s something personal there.’

‘No doubt about it,’ said Florence. ‘There’s something not right about this, Bruno. What do you know about him?’

Before he could speak Nancy said, ‘Deutz freaked earlier today when Fabiola showed up.’

Pamela caught Bruno’s eye and seemed about to speak when a cheerful shout of greeting interrupted them and Gilles appeared to slap Bruno on the shoulder, Fabiola looking happy with his arm around her. That was where she’d gone, Bruno realized. Gilles must have texted her that he was arriving. Gilles nodded amiably to Nancy and then darted around the table to kiss Florence and then Pamela.

‘I need a word,’ he said, coming back to Bruno and almost hauling him to his feet and then tugging him away from the courtyard. Bruno saw that Fabiola’s eyes followed Gilles fondly before she turned back to her friends. He wondered if that conversation would continue now that Fabiola had joined them.

‘My story is running on our wire and my tweet has gone viral,’ Gilles said and held up his phone. Messages were racing past on the screen. ‘That’s my Twitter account, people responding and tweeting it on. They’re coming in too fast to see, I’ve never seen anything like this.’

‘Do I congratulate you?’ Bruno asked. He knew little of Twitter and thought life was too short to spend more time than he had to looking at a phone or computer screen.

‘This is not about me, it’s the story. I’m late because I had to stop the car three times on the way here, doing phone interviews for France-Inter, the BBC and Agence France-Presse. We’ve got requests from al-Jazeera and CNN. Everybody wants some of this.’

Bruno glanced back to the long tables in the courtyard where Nancy was climbing from her seat. She began walking toward them, her phone to her ear.

‘Not just you,’ Bruno replied to Gilles, but then something happened that rocked him.

Nancy was advancing toward him in that graceful, assertive way she had, still listening to her phone but with her eyes fixed intently on his. Out of the blue he felt a jolt of sexual energy pass between them that was so powerful he felt suddenly out of breath. He saw her eyes widen and her mouth open and she stopped dead in her tracks, her shoulders back and her
breasts thrusting forward. She was still staring at him and Bruno was suddenly certain that she felt this same intense rush of attraction.

He felt like leaping to take her in his arms, but something kept him rooted to the spot. He found cautionary thoughts erupting in his mind. One of them seemed to say Pamela and another said Isabelle, a third said Nancy was an American official and a fourth said half the town was present here and yet another said there was no future in this intense surge of passion.

Nancy swallowed, seemed to collect herself, dropped her eyes and half turned to concentrate on her phone call. Gilles’s phone was ringing again and then Bruno’s mobile began to vibrate. He felt drained, his mouth dry. Whatever this erotic rush had been he felt it passing. He took a deep breath, checked the screen and saw it was Philippe Delaron. Reluctantly, he answered.

‘The Mayor told me you said it was OK for me to run the story,’ Philippe began. ‘We were right behind
Paris Match
, but can you give me a quote?’

Bruno fought to pull himself together and duty and habit kicked in. He pondered briefly and then said, ‘You can quote me saying we’re all glad to see Sami home and reunited with his family, but he’s been through a terrible ordeal. He has very serious medical and psychological problems that are being addressed by some of France’s best experts. Meanwhile he’s doing his best to help French and American officials to understand the trauma he went through.’

‘Has he been charged yet? Is he spilling the beans about the Taliban?’

‘That’s all I want to say for now, Philippe. But you were at school with him, so that should let you fill a page or two. Good luck.’

Bruno closed his phone, aware of Nancy standing close to his side, almost close enough to touch. She was listening to her phone and answering briefly in English. She looked at him curiously, her mouth still slightly open and her lips glistening. He forced himself to tear his eyes from her. He felt rather than saw her nod at him before walking away out of earshot.

Bruno closed his eyes and tried to think of what actions he’d neglected, what duties remained for him to do. He felt suddenly very hungry. He looked across at Pamela, expecting to see her still locked in conversation with the other women, but she was watching him, something like wariness in her eyes. He told himself to smile and went back to his table, where his plate of roast boar and mushroom sauce awaited along with a refilled wine glass.

Annette, Yveline, Florence, Jacqueline and Fabiola were huddled over Annette’s mobile phone, reading with apparent approval the story Gilles had filed on the
Paris Match
website. Annette held the phone out to Pamela and she took it, almost reluctantly, and scrolled it down as Bruno began to eat.

‘Have you seen this already?’ Pamela asked him, briefly raising her eyes from the tiny screen. She was looking at him closely and he felt flushed. Bruno shook his head, washed down his first mouthful with a sip of red wine and made himself smile at her.

‘No, but I trust Gilles and I want to eat while this is still warm,’ he said.

‘Better eat while you have the chance,’ she replied and
gestured at the other tables. The sound of conversation was fading and Bruno looked around to see knots of his friends and neighbours clustering around mobile phones. An image from some long-ago newsreel came into his mind, of people in vintage clothing huddled around old-fashioned radio sets as they listened to news of war being declared.

Mauricette from the Hôtel St Denis and the manager of the Royal Hotel were leaving the courtyard, phones pressed to their ears. Mauricette changed course toward him.

‘You could have told me this was coming, Bruno,’ she said briskly. ‘We were going to take time off but
France Deux
TV has just booked the whole hotel. I’ve let the staff go and now we’ll have to work all night to get the rooms ready.’

So it begins, Bruno thought, turning back to his plate as Mauricette stalked off to her car. Music began to play from loudspeakers Julien had rigged on the table where Stéphane had carved the boars. He recognized the tune, ‘Mon Amant de Saint-Jean’, and the singer. It was the original version by Lucienne Delyle, recorded sometime during the war before she had been eclipsed by the rising star of Edith Piaf. Bruno would always associate Delyle with ‘J’attendrai’, the song of the Frenchwomen of 1940, waiting through the long years of war for their men to come home from the PoW camps. A memory of Delyle’s face on an old record cover suddenly came into his head and he looked across the table at Nancy, struck by the resemblance that had eluded him.

Fabiola had put her phone away and the women were ignoring the music and talking with quiet animation among themselves. Bruno caught the Mayor’s eye, raised his glass
and they nodded to one another, each thinking of the intense global attention that was about to focus on St Denis.

His plate empty and the courtyard starting to fill with dancers, he joined the women to ask Pamela to dance. Bruno had never quite mastered the swing, the dance that most French people seem to absorb effortlessly in their youth, and Pamela had never learned it. So they fell into their usual dance, not quite a foxtrot and not quite a waltz, but they circled the floor contentedly, enjoying the music and the pleasure of being in each other’s arms.

‘What were you all discussing so animatedly?’ he asked. ‘Was it about Sami?’

‘No,’ she said, glancing behind her to see if anyone could overhear and then speaking softly, close to his ear. ‘This is not for other ears. Nancy started asking Fabiola about Deutz. Then Annette and Jacqueline joined in. And you know Jacqueline, how direct she is. She asked Fabiola straight out if they’d had a relationship that ended badly.’

‘What did Fabiola say?’

‘She said she wants only to think about Gilles this evening,’ Pamela replied. ‘But I don’t think this is going to stop there.’

Beyond his love for the town and the life he had built in St Denis, there was another reason why Bruno knew he could never leave. He suspected he would be a terrible policeman in any other setting. Colleagues like J-J, the chief detective for the
Département
, liked to say that Bruno embodied a unique store of local knowledge, familiar with every family and house in his commune. Bruno sometimes suspected that was all he had, apart from basic common sense, a lot of good advice from his Mayor and a largely law-abiding and amiable population. And nothing could be more important for a policeman than knowing the territory he covered and the people he protected and served.

Bruno stood in awe of the cops in great cities like Paris or Marseille, who dealt almost invariably with strangers. For Bruno, it was the reverse. Strangers were the rarity; mostly he dealt with people he’d known for years, youngsters whom he’d watched growing up. He’d danced with their mothers at their weddings, played rugby with their fathers, helped arrange the funerals of their grandparents and taught most of them how to pass a rugby ball and to volley at tennis.