A Chateau Under Siege, page 4
“Leave the car there, please, blocking the driveway,” Bruno said. “And don’t let anyone in. I mean anyone. Are you armed?”
Gaston stared at him, uncertain how to react. “Sure, but the gun’s locked in the safe in the back of the car. Regulations.”
“Please get it out, check the magazine and keep it ready,” said Bruno. “Just in case.”
Gaston looked at him coolly and said, “I know you’re a friend of J-J, but we’re only supposed to unlock that safe when in imminent danger or under orders from a superior officer.”
Bruno pulled out his phone, opened the minister’s letter of authorization that Lannes had sent him, showed it to Gaston and asked, “Will this do? Or do you want me to call J-J while he’s in the middle of a murder investigation?”
Gaston climbed out, opened the hatchback and opened the safe. He pulled out a standard SIG Sauer handgun and inserted a magazine.
“Thank you,” said Bruno. “I think it might be better if you waited outside the car. And, again, nobody gets in without my approval.”
He returned to the back of the house, pausing to look at an impressive potager, filled with lettuces, tomato plants and eggplants. Maybe forty meters away was a small single-story house in Périgord style with its own potager and patio. No lights were showing. Maybe a place for a housekeeper or gardener, he thought.
Bruno went into the main house, relocking the door behind him. He went downstairs and began to search. The kitchen had been fully modernized with a Smeg stove and fridge, and there was a handsome old dresser against one wall. In a cupboard full of cleaning gear he found a pack of rubber gloves, and not having any evidence gloves in his pockets he pulled on a pair. The larders were almost empty and the door to the wine cellar was locked. The dining room featured a table that could seat a dozen people and another, even finer dresser, a serious antique. The sitting room had oriental rugs on the original wooden floor. The furniture consisted of two chaise longues and four Louis Seize armchairs. There was a pile of glossy art books on a low table, a handsome fireplace that seemed unused and several generic landscapes on the walls. Above the fireplace was a charming eighteenth-century oil painting of a pretty young woman on a garden swing being pushed by an admiring beau who wore knee breeches and a tricorn hat.
In the hall was a row of portraits of men in uniform from each of the world wars, another from the Franco-Prussian War and two more from Napoleonic times. There was one general, three colonels, one major and a very young lieutenant, with a caption painted in black script along the bottom of the frame to say that the lieutenant had been born in 1892 and died in 1914. The mustachioed man in the last of the portraits was on horseback and wearing a cloak that marked him as an officer in one of the Spahi light-cavalry regiments the French raised in North Africa. Kerquelin either came from a prosperous and successful old military family or wanted to suggest such an auspicious ancestry to his visitors.
The study contained a fine old desk, wide enough for two to work at it, a chair at each side. It held a large-screen computer and a small, government-issue laptop which looked identical to the highly secured one that he’d seen his former lover Isabelle use on her occasional visits to the Périgord. It came with her job, running the security coordinating committee for France and her European partners, with an office in Brussels and another in Paris.
One of the photos on the desk, all of them in silver frames, was of Nadia, and another of a young man who could have been her brother. A third photo showed a tall, middle-aged man, his arm around each of the two young people. That must be Kerquelin. There was a fourth, of another attractive young woman in a sailboat, her dark hair blowing in the wind, her shoulders tanned. On it was scrawled a line with a felt-tip pen, “Cher Papa, bisous, Claire.” Did Kerquelin have another daughter?
On the walls were old, glass-fronted bookcases, rather than plebeian shelves. They held matched leather-bound sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Montaigne and Proust. A similar bookcase on the opposite wall held leather-bound editions of Shakespeare, Gibbon, Dickens and Conan Doyle. He opened the bookcase and leafed through two of the books. They were in English. Another shelf held editions of Goethe, Schiller and Thomas Mann, all in German. Volumes of Clausewitz on war and Bismarck’s memoirs looked well used.
There were two new-looking books in French, one by Thomas Kerquelin, The Future of French Energy Policy. The flap copy said the author had studied engineering at the Polytechnique and had just retired as one of the directors of Electricité de France. The photo of the elderly author bore a strong resemblance to the photo of Kerquelin. Perhaps it was Brice Kerquelin’s father.
The other book was also by a Kerquelin, but this one showed an older woman named Clarisse, and from the biographical note beneath her photo she had taught feminist history at the University of Vincennes. She was the author of a book that Bruno had heard of but not read, Pourquoi la France est Femme (Why France Is a Woman), a study of the symbols of France through the ages, apparently by Kerquelin’s mother.
Bruno scanned the flap copy. Why did Germany have a fatherland, the United States Uncle Sam and Britain John Bull, while France had La Patrie? Why was the symbol of La République always a young woman named Marianne? Why did no other country name its symbol of patriotic courage for a young woman, while France had Joan of Arc? Interesting questions, thought Bruno, which made him ponder once again something that had often struck him on his visits to the decorated caves of his region: Why was it that almost all modern sexual graffiti portrayed the penis, while those of France’s prehistoric caves repeatedly featured the female pubic triangle?
The biographical note said that the author was the wife of Thomas Kerquelin and the mother of Brice, who was described as “a leading French internet pioneer in Silicon Valley.” Well, well, Bruno thought, Brice had done more in his life than state security and intelligence. Bruno wondered if the parents were still alive and whether Lannes might be able to inform them before the news of their son’s fate became public.
An antique cabinet had been converted to hold files, mostly personal ones: insurance, banking, household bills and the like. One was marked “Divorce,” and contained some wedding photographs of a much younger Kerquelin and a very pretty young woman, photos of her pregnant, and with small children, vacation snapshots of the family on beaches and ski slopes. The divorce had taken place three years earlier, when the two children were grown. There was a copy of a property agreement in which Kerquelin kept the house in Domme and his wife kept the apartment on the rue Truffaut in the newly fashionable Batignolles district of Paris, just west of Montmartre and the Sacré Coeur. They also shared the use of a vacation home near Dinan in Brittany.
That sounded amicable enough, thought Bruno, until he saw a copy of the divorce court’s ruling that Kerquelin’s wife had been responsible for the breakup of the marriage by “a serious and renewed violation of the duties and obligations of marriage, making the maintenance of a shared life intolerable.” The uncommon ruling stemmed from the husband’s claim that the wife had for almost a year been refusing his sexual advances. He knew that a similar divorce case had recently been upheld by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court of appeal. Women’s groups had been outraged by the decision, which was based on two articles in the Code Civil, first enacted by Napoléon in 1804, which stated that spouses must “pledge mutual help, respect, fidelity and a communal life.” Kerquelin’s wife’s counterclaim that her husband had been guilty of repeated infidelities had been rejected by the court for lack of evidence. That must have caused quite a stir among their colleagues at La Piscine, Bruno thought.
The next file he looked at was labeled “Testament,” his will. It contained one folder that named as Kerquelin’s trustees his mother, his daughter Nadia, the mysterious Claire, General Lannes and an Angus McDermott with an address in San Francisco. Neither his son nor his ex-wife were mentioned. Two lawyers were listed, one in Paris and another in New York. Four investment accounts were cited: one in Pierre, South Dakota, another in Wilmington, Delaware, both in the United States, a third in Luxembourg and a fourth in Taipei, which Bruno knew to be the main city in Taiwan. This seemed very complicated for an employee of the French state, even in the intelligence services. On an impulse, Bruno pulled out his phone and took photos of these documents.
Bruno then found several family photo albums on the lower shelf, one of them marked “Claire.” He opened it to see a photograph of a much younger Kerquelin, probably in his twenties and standing beside an attractive young woman with lustrous black hair and dark eyes who was several months pregnant. His right hand was on her swollen belly, his left around her shoulders hugging the woman to him. They both looked very happy. Then there were photos of a newborn baby girl, more of the same woman breastfeeding the baby and then more photos of the baby growing, becoming a toddler, starting to crawl and to walk. There was a photo of mother and child on an outing in an American sports car, the mother offering a hot dog to the little girl in the parking lot of some fast-food joint in what looked to be California or maybe Hawaii.
There were more framed photos on the lowest shelf, mostly of Kerquelin’s time in California. One portrayed him and some other young men holding a banner marked Stanford. Others showed him with some young faces Bruno recognized, including Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and another of Kerquelin opening a large bottle of champagne with some other young men beneath a banner reading google is born—September 4, 1998. There were more official photos of him in France, shaking hands with Jacques Chirac at the Elysée, and with presidents Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron.
Above this cabinet hung a shield bearing a double-headed black eagle with red beaks and claws, beneath it the name Du GUESCLIN, with a birthplace of Motte-Broons, Bretagne. On top of the cabinet was a bust of a plump-faced man with short, curly hair. An engraved plate below said it was a copy of the head above Bertrand du Guesclin’s tomb in the royal Basilica of St. Denis outside Paris, a likeness commissioned by King Charles V. Bruno pursed his lips; Kerquelin evidently took his supposed link to the fourteenth-century French hero very seriously indeed. The connection might even be genuine.
The upstairs had been modernized. Each of the four bedrooms now had its own bathroom. The master bedroom was for Kerquelin, and bore no sign of a woman’s presence. The wastepaper basket beside the small desk was empty, and the main drawer contained only pens and virgin notepads. One lower drawer held maps and tourist brochures about the Périgord. Another held assorted plugs to convert to British, Swiss and American electrical grids. The drawer of the bedside table held massage oil, condoms, packs of tissues, a book of expert sudoku games, half completed, and a well-thumbed guidebook to Taiwan.
What looked to be the daughter’s room was pleasantly messy, with a lovely, springlike scent that lingered. There was a crammed bookcase and several opened books on a desk, another on the bed and more on the floor with bookmarks between the pages. The one on the bed was an illustrated work on the frescoes in Périgord churches. What clearly was the son’s bedroom looked unused since school days, full of sporting trophies, framed photos of soccer and swimming teams, framed paintings of sailboats. The spare bedroom looked anonymous, as bland as a hotel room. In the attic he found a small gym, a game room with a big TV screen on the wall, a bar, comfortable modern sofas—and a locked door that Bruno could not open.
Bruno went back down to the study and looked more closely at the big desk. The drawers were unlocked and revealed the usual office tools: a stapler, pens, engraved notepaper, envelopes. There were several box files, one of personal letters, another of Christmas cards and another titled “Investments.” It contained only names, phone numbers and email addresses of banks, accountants and investment advisers in Paris, Geneva, New York and London. There was no indication of how much money Kerquelin controlled.
On a lower shelf were more box files, the first titled “Sarlat,” which seemed to concern the mock battle. The second was identified as “Sealed Knot” and the third “PA Volunteers.” This turned out to be a regiment of Civil War enthusiasts in Pennsylvania of whom Kerquelin had been a member. There were photos of him dressed in a dark blue Federal uniform and carrying a musket, others with him beside a wheeled cannon. The Sealed Knot file referred to an English group that reenacted the battles of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army in Parliament’s wars against King Charles in the 1640s. Again, it contained photos of Kerquelin, with a pike, another with a matchlock musket and on horseback wearing a breastplate and a lobster helmet, so named for the long lobsterlike tail that covered the back of the neck.
A serious enthusiast in three different countries, Bruno thought to himself, wondering why Kerquelin had chosen this form of playacting rather than following the family tradition of a military career. The man was in his fifties, so born sometime in the late 1960s. Perhaps he had been at university when the Berlin Wall came down. That was a time when the military may have had less appeal than a career in intelligence. Another box file was marked “GCHQ,” and when he opened it Bruno found mementos and photos of Kerquelin’s time at Cheltenham in England, where he had spent 2005 at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, which was their equivalent of the kind of work that Kerquelin and his colleagues were involved in at Domme. Another box file was marked “NSA” and carried souvenirs of the year he had spent at Fort Meade, Maryland, with the much larger American version, the National Security Agency. Presumably they were also the years that he took part in the military reenactments.
There was yet another file, marked “BND,” which testified to the year he had spent at Pullach, near Munich, with the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Federal Intelligence Service, before it moved its headquarters to Berlin in 2017. There did not seem to have been any German reenactment group that had appealed to him. From the evidence of the bookshelves, however, it would seem that Kerquelin was fluent in German as well as English. The man seemed to have been some kind of roving ambassador for this arm of French intelligence, and his fate would probably start alarm bells ringing in Berlin, London and Washington, or at least provoke some questions. Of course, that was why General Lannes had wanted Bruno to get to Kerquelin’s house first, so that the routine checks would be made by his own team rather than by Kerquelin’s colleagues in the DGSE.
Suddenly the blare of a car horn broke into his thoughts, sounding very close. Leaving the front door locked, he went out through the back and peeked out to see a big black Renault trying to enter the property, its path blocked by Gaston’s vehicle. There was a man at the wheel, two more in the back and a woman who emerged from the front passenger seat, marching angrily to Gaston’s car as the horn continued to blare. She gave a curt wave of her hand, and the horn went silent.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded of Gaston, who was standing beside a tree in the garden, his gun held discreetly by his thigh.
“Police Nationale, and on the orders of the minister of the interior no one is to enter,” Gaston said.
“We’re DGSE, like the owner of this house, and the interior ministry does not have authority over us,” she said, and made another gesture at the black Renault. The two men emerged from the back of the car and came up to stand beside her. If they were armed, their weapons had not been drawn. Bruno ducked back behind the side of the house, pulled out his phone and called General Lannes. The duty officer told him to stay on the line. When he was put through to Lannes, Bruno explained the situation. The general told him to keep the line open and check the documents of the newcomers.
“Bonjour, messieurs-dame,” Bruno said, emerging from cover, the phone to his ear. “I’m Bruno Courrèges, chief of police for the Vézère Valley, and I’m acting under the orders of General Lannes for the minister of the interior. I’m sorry, but nobody is allowed in here until his team arrives. May I see your identification, please?”
The woman was in her thirties, perhaps a little older, with well-cut black hair, a clear, slightly tanned complexion and no makeup. Sturdily built and looking in excellent condition, she was wearing a dark blue trouser suit, flat shoes and a plain white blouse. When she pulled from her jacket pocket a DGSE identity card with its red, white and blue stripes, Bruno saw that her nails had been recently manicured.
“Commissaire Marie-Dominique Pantin,” he read aloud from her card, the phone still to his ear.
“I’m head of security at Domme, and we are here to secure the home of our colleague, Directeur-Adjoint Kerquelin,” she said.
“Let me speak to her,” came Lannes’s voice in Bruno’s ear. He handed her the phone, saying, “General Lannes, Madame Pantin.”
“Mademoiselle,” she corrected him, putting the phone to her ear.
He could hear only her side of the conversation, which was mainly monosyllabic, except for one Bien entendu and a final D’accord, mon général, before she handed Bruno back his phone.
“Your orders are unchanged, Bruno,” said the general. “You stay there and allow nobody in until Jules Rossigny gets there from Bordeaux with his team. You know him, I believe. Commissaire Pantin and her team will await their arrival, and she’s contacting La Piscine for further orders. I’ve already spoken with them, so you won’t have any trouble. She will accompany Rossigny as he makes his inventory, and I presume she’ll make her own. Please call me when Rossigny arrives.”
Bruno tapped his phone off and apologized to Commissaire Pantin. She nodded and said, “You’re friends with Isabelle Perrault, aren’t you?”
