The Patriarch, page 22
But why? Was he a dalliance for an evening’s amusement? Was he a potential ally to be bound to her with sweet, erotic chains? Hardly; he had little to offer her in politics. Or was she winning his allegiance as a way to deflect his probing questions about Fabrice and his skepticism over Gilbert’s death? Might she know that he was in touch with Chantal over Gilbert’s will? He had no idea of how close she was to Chantal, who might already have phoned Madeleine to tell her everything before he arrived at her apartment.
Not for the first time, he cursed at the way his profession had made him so cynical about people and their motives. His job required him to probe and ask questions, to seek to understand not only what had happened but why. He’d rather have spent the drive in languorous reflections on the evening’s delights, remembering the shape and feel of her in his arms, the gleam of her eyes in the darkness and how she had so slowly slipped his shirt from her shoulders after they’d eaten.
But for Bruno there was no escaping the nagging questions. Each memory of her triggered a demand for an explanation and sparked even more curiosity about this extraordinary family of the Patriarch into whose affairs he’d suddenly been plunged. And at the heart of everything was the Patriarch himself, his boyhood hero suddenly taking an interest in Bruno, bringing him under his wing and offering his patronage. Again Bruno wanted to understand why. He had little enough to offer beyond, perhaps, relief from the possible embarrassments that an overinquisitive country policeman might bring. Already, because of the notaire, he was trapped into a kind of deception of the family, keeping the secret of Gilbert’s will and of Chantal’s inheritance.
And what connection did Jack Crimson have to all this? And Yevgeny? So much of this affair seemed to hinge on those historic days in Moscow when the Cold War died and Gorbachev was toppled and the Patriarch’s old friend Akhromeyev committed suicide once his coup had failed.
Bruno turned up the lane that led toward his cottage, enjoying Balzac’s familiar presence as he checked on the chicken coop and went to the edge of the woods for a farewell look at the stars. Balzac headed off for his own patrol of the grounds, and Bruno watched him suddenly stop, poised and alert, one front paw raised and his tail erect. The dog had caught some scent, probably one of the foxes. Good, thought Bruno, he’s already too well trained to growl too soon. Bruno gazed up beyond the shadowy woods to the familiar constellation that led to the polestar. He knew that when he undressed, he’d be able to smell a memory of Madeleine on his shirt and know that her scent was lingering on his body and that she had a grip on his senses. Sad, he thought, to spend an evening making love with a woman but then not to sleep with her and wake to her presence in the morning.
Suddenly he heard Balzac growl, and he was aware of something different nearby, knowing these woods and the night sounds so well that he’d been jarred into alertness. He wasn’t aware of movement and his ears detected no sound, but then he caught it again, just the ghost of a scent, something sour and not natural. Just as he recognized it as stale tobacco, he heard the swish of movement on grass behind him and the sound of a harsh intake of breath.
Adrenaline surging through him, Bruno dropped to the ground and rolled away. He used the momentum of the roll to rise into a crouch and saw a dark and burly shape recovering from a powerful swing with some weapon that had missed its target. The figure was still off balance when Bruno stepped forward and slammed his foot hard into the side of a leg. In the darkness his aim was off, hitting a thigh rather than the knee, bruising his attacker but not crippling him. The weapon was being backhanded toward him now but without much force behind it as his assailant tried to recover his balance. The attacker staggered and then something was flying through the air and the attacker grunted and staggered again as Balzac leaped at his leg.
Bruno ducked beneath the blow, and as the momentum took the man around, Bruno rose to slam a clenched fist into the side of his neck where it joined the shoulder. It should have put the man down, but again he must have been off target because his attacker simply grunted and heaved his weapon clumsily up and back. Balzac leaped again, catching his arm so there was not much force behind the blow, but by chance it connected with Bruno’s hip at the very point where a bullet had struck him in Sarajevo. Bruno screamed in pain, lost all restraint, and using his full weight behind each fist he hammered once, twice, three times into the soft flesh of his attacker’s kidneys.
The man sank to his knees. With open hands, Bruno clapped the palm of each hand simultaneously against the man’s ears, forcing a concussion that should also burst the eardrums. The man fell, heavily, facedown, landing so hard his head bounced against the ground, and the weapon he’d been holding fell from his hands. It was a smooth and heavy piece of wood, perhaps an ax handle. Bruno picked it up, surprised by the weight, and felt along the handle until he touched the metal head of the ax itself.
The bastard had wanted to kill him!
The man was sprawled, his legs apart. Breathing hard and using the ax to brace his weakened leg, Bruno fought down the pain in his hip and called off Balzac who was worrying at his attacker’s ear. Slowly and deliberately and taking his time to aim, he tried to kick the man between his legs until his attacker screeched in pain. He couldn’t do it; even with the help of the ax handle, Bruno’s leg wouldn’t support him. Instead Bruno dropped with his knees, his full weight behind them, onto his attacker’s back just below the ribs, aiming to batter the kidneys again. He felt for the head and found fabric, wool, and it had holes—a balaclava to hide the man’s features. Bruno ripped it down and twisted so the wool was stretched tight around the man’s neck, throttling the life out of him. He could feel only stubble on the man’s head, and at that moment he realized that his assailant was Fabrice.
A kind of sanity returning as Balzac growled menacingly from his grip on the man’s arm, Bruno slackened his hold on Fabrice’s throat and rose, limping with the help of the ax, and staggered to his cottage and groped for the hook behind the door where Balzac’s leash hung. He took it back to the immobile Fabrice and used it to lash his hands together and then returned indoors to turn on the light and call the gendarmerie. Yveline answered, and he reported the assault and said she’d better also bring an ambulance. He had intended it for Fabrice, but when he put his hand on the blazing pain in his hip it came away bloody.
He couldn’t rest now. He took a leather belt from his bedroom cupboard and went back outside, turning on the porch light, and tied Fabrice’s ankles together. Balzac stood guard by Fabrice’s head. Bruno found a plastic bag in his kitchen and used it to cover the head of the ax, smeared with his own blood. No clever defense lawyer would dare claim Bruno had used unreasonable force against an attacker who had slashed him with an ax. He pulled down his trousers and used his phone to take a photo of his bloodied hip, then took another of Fabrice and of the makeshift restraints he’d used to immobilize him.
Yveline and Sergeant Jules from the gendarmes were the first to arrive, followed immediately by the pompiers with their floodlights blazing. Ahmed was driving, and Albert was first down from the cab with the first-aid kit. He headed straight for Bruno, who was leaning against his doorframe, his trousers still down around his thighs and the blood on his hip black in the harsh lights.
“I’m okay,” Bruno grunted. Now that the shock was setting in, he could speak only in brief phrases, his breath too short for anything longer. “Check out Fabrice. I had to hurt him. Eardrums. Kidneys. To stop him. Attacked me with an ax. My blood on the ax.”
The last thing Bruno heard as he crumpled to the ground was the double click of Yveline’s handcuffs going around Fabrice’s wrists.
—
Later, Bruno was slowly aware of a different kind of light, the smell of antiseptic, the sound of running water. He could see white walls, and there was an intravenous drip in his arm.
“You have the luck of the devil, Bruno,” said Fabiola, from somewhere out of his field of vision. “Six stitches and a massive bruise. The X-ray shows no damage to your pelvis. He must have gotten you with the blunt end of the ax.”
She loomed into sight, looking down at him severely. “Your attacker is being taken to Périgueux. We can’t deal with kidney damage here. And what on earth did you do to his eardrums?”
He tried to speak, but only a croak emerged. Fabiola lifted his head and put a plastic straw in his mouth. He sucked on it and tasted something hot, sweet and bitter at the same time. It was comforting.
“Hot lemon juice mixed with honey,” she said. “Don’t talk, go back to sleep, you’ll be fine.”
When he woke, only a dim light was on, and Bruno was alone. On the cupboard beside the bed was a plastic cup with a straw. He sucked on it and tasted the same mixture. It was cold, sticky, but still good. Only a dull ache came from his hip, so he’d been given some kind of painkiller. He fumbled for a light switch, blinked against the subsequent fluorescent glare and then rolled down the bedclothes and lifted the smock to see the damage. There was surgical gauze held in place by three broad bandages just below the hip bone. A bright purple bruise spread from the middle of his thigh up to his ribs. He looked at the bag feeding the drip in his arm: saline solution. He tried moving his leg. It was stiff, but it worked. The knee bent, the foot swiveled, and he could wiggle his toes.
Leaning against the chair beside the bed was a pair of crutches, which he assumed had been left for him. He levered himself to try and sit upright, felt dizzy and was aware of the stitches pulling. His eyes felt heavy, so he let his head fall back onto the pillow, turned out the light and slept again.
Aware that he was dreaming, he felt he was in a gallery looking at canvases of Madeleine, now naked in Yevgeny’s portrait, now speaking in the Bergerac debate, now gazing across the river from her balcony in Bordeaux, now walking away from him at the Patriarch’s party with Chantal and Marie-Françoise at her side. He knew Madeleine was always on display, invariably and deliberately elegant. He had an insight that in his dream he felt was so important that he must engrave it on his memory: that she never moved as other people move but adopted one studied pose after another, as though expecting each moment and each expression to be immortalized by some artist fortunate enough to be granted the privilege. Satisfied with this, he sank into a deeper doze.
He woke to the smell of coffee and hot croissants and the sound of Fabiola unzipping her leather jacket, evidently having come directly from the café. She helped him to sit up and put a tray on his lap. It held orange juice and two croissants. She poured coffee from a cafetière, a cup for each of them, and took a bite from a pain au chocolat.
“I’m supposed to call Yveline at the gendarmerie as soon as you wake up. She wants to get your statement. I imagine from the way you’re wolfing your croissants that you’re ready for that?”
“Sure, just hungry,” he said. He jiggled his leg and wiggled his toes. The hip was sore, but not hurting.
“I want you to get up and start walking to keep your muscles moving,” Fabiola said. “Use the crutches today if you have to, but you should be all right with a cane. Your cut wasn’t very deep. Yveline wants me to order you to take a week off, but I know you won’t, and you’re perfectly capable of light duties, office work and so on.”
Whenever a policeman had been in a fight, the unwritten rule was that injuries were to be maximized, that hospital stays were to be extended, and time off had to be taken, all in the interest of gaining public sympathy. It was a rule Bruno had never bothered to observe, partly because it was foolish but also because nobody would believe it; most of the people of St. Denis had seen him limping off the rugby field on successive Sundays and still turning up for work as usual the next day.
“I can feel you had me on a painkiller. What was it?”
“Ibuprofen. It’s all you need. Do you want me to help you into the shower? You’ll find a plastic chair in it so you can sit down. Try not to get the spray directly onto the dressing.” She handed him a towel. “I’ll tell Yveline you’re ready to give your statement. Do you remember clearly what happened?”
“Clearly enough. I got home late, checked on the chickens. Then Balzac growled and I was aware of someone creeping up to attack me, a big man. I fought back and then realized he had a weapon that could kill me if I didn’t stop him.”
“That’ll do. I already gave her my statement, which says your wounds and his correspond entirely with your account. Your blood on the ax should prove everything.”
Bruno gritted his teeth and resolved not to use the plastic chair. If Fabiola thought he could manage with a cane and should start walking, that was good enough for him. He ached whenever he moved, and it was awkward trying to wash himself while keeping his dressing dry, but he managed, after a fashion. The hardest part was drying his back.
Fabiola was waiting for him with clean clothes as he limped out and said, “I’ve told Pamela you won’t be riding for a few days. She’s gone off to Bergerac with Jack Crimson to see the notaire about buying the riding school. I wanted to ask if you’d mind keeping Hector in the stables so Victoria won’t get lonely. When Gilles can ride well enough to have a horse of his own, we can think again.”
“Thank you, I’d like that,” he said. Bruno had already checked the trails, and there was a hunters’ trail that covered most of the distance to the riding school and would provide a good gallop through the forest. He imagined that would become a regular morning ride.
“Pamela told me it was over between the two of you,” Fabiola said, her head bent and her face hidden as she tied his shoelaces. “You don’t seem too distressed over it.”
Bruno thought for a moment before replying. “She made it sound like she was doing me a favor, setting me free to find a woman with whom I can settle down and raise a family.”
“Funny that you never seem to be attracted to such a woman, even though the Périgord is full of farmers’ daughters just yearning to take over a homestead like yours and raise babies,” she said. “You seem to like living dangerously.”
He nodded, knowing there was no malice in her words. “I’m so pleased that things have worked out for you and Gilles. He’s a good man, and a lucky one.”
“He wants to get married,” she said, and before he could offer congratulations, she added, “I said we’d wait and see whether we decide to have children. That will be time enough to go to the mairie. One thing I’ve learned from seeing the abused women in those shelters: it’s not the first few happy months that tell you whether you can share your life with a man.”
Bruno nodded. He saw the sense in that.
“There are adjustments,” she said. “I’m already having to get used to the way Gilles likes to write at night and sleep late in the morning, and I like to be up and about soon after daybreak. And I’ve been spoiled by your and Pamela’s cooking. He can barely boil an egg.”
“There’s a project for me, teaching Gilles to cook,” Bruno said, smiling. And then came a gentle knock on the door. Yveline entered with a form to take his statement. Hard on her heels trotted Balzac, who put his head onto Bruno’s knee before investigating the crutches Fabiola had left. Yveline must have thought to bring him and had even remembered to bring Balzac’s leash, rescued from Fabrice after handcuffing him.
28
Bruno was limping through the market with a borrowed walking stick that Balzac kept darting in to bite, assuming this was some interesting new game his master had devised. Bruno was trying to dissuade Balzac while fending off questions about his leg from shoppers and stallholders when his phone vibrated with the special tone. The green light showed it was someone on the brigadier’s secure network.
“Something important has come up so I’m on my way down to St. Denis, but it’s delicate so I don’t want to meet at the gendarmerie,” came the familiar brisk voice. “I’ll see you at your house sometime around noon, and J-J and Prunier will be with me.”
The brigadier ended the call, leaving Bruno baffled. The presence of J-J and Prunier meant something that involved the Police Nationale. And Bruno would only be involved if it was something or someone connected with the region around St. Denis. He shrugged; no point in guessing when he’d find out soon enough. But like any true Périgordin his next thought was that if they were meeting at his place at noon that meant lunch. Since J-J was coming the meal had better be hearty, but because of his leg it would have to be simple. For a working lunch his guests would be satisfied with bread, cheese, salad and cold cuts.
It was warm enough to eat in the open air, and he had lettuce and the last of the cherry tomatoes in his garden. There were cans of his homemade pâté and foie gras lined up on shelves in his barn, and his chickens provided plenty of eggs. He stopped at Stéphane’s stall to buy some cheese, a nutty aged Cantal and some creamy cabécous of goat cheese. Gabrielle at the fish stall had some trout that looked tempting. Mon Dieu, these were his friends, and they deserved better than cold meats. It would be little effort to barbecue the fish, and knowing hers were always fresh he bought eight. Gabrielle took one look at his limp and gutted and cleaned them herself.
Richard at the vegetable stall had a display of large mushrooms; Bruno bought four, along with some lemons to go with the trout. At Fauquet’s he asked for a liter of his homemade vanilla ice cream to be put into an insulated bag and a large and still-warm pain. A simple baguette would not be nearly enough for J-J’s appetite. Fauquet’s wife tried without success to worm out of him the cause of his limp as she drove Bruno home. Until the inquiry into Fabrice’s injuries were complete, Bruno knew better than to say anything at all.
In his kitchen, with Balzac looking up at him expectantly, he located a can of pâté de Périgueux, a gift from a friend, the pork neatly surrounding the foie gras and interleaved with slices of black truffle. He checked that he had a bottle of Pierre Desmartis’s good Monbazillac and another of his Bergerac Sec in the fridge. Balzac followed him into the vegetable garden where Bruno selected his best lettuce and some tomatoes. He prepared knives and forks, plates and glasses on a tray and left it in the kitchen. His friends could carry it out. He then headed for his barn to collect a large bundle of the dried vine twigs he always used to start his barbecue. He could carry the bundle in one hand. He returned to fill a small bucket with the applewood charcoal he preferred for cooking fish.
