A Chateau Under Siege, page 8
“Would you like a fresh cherry tomato, just plucked from my garden this morning?” he asked. He picked out two, popping one into his mouth and offering her the other.
“No, thank you,” she said coldly as she stood beside the passenger door of his car, clearly waiting for him to open it for her. He ate the second tomato, closed the rear of the SUV and went to open her door. Bruno extended an arm to help her clamber in, which was evidently not easy with her tight skirt and high heels.
“How long will this trip take?” she asked.
“To Domme, usually about forty minutes,” he replied. “But with the tourist traffic today, maybe an hour.”
“Don’t you have a police siren on this van?” she asked. “That would get us through the traffic.”
“Of course, but I only use it in emergencies,” he replied, ignoring the irritated glance she threw his way.
By the time Bruno was in the driver’s seat, her attention was fixed on her mobile phone, and they drove off in silence. From Bergerac he took the back road through Ste. Alvère and Meyrals, where there would be less traffic, but just after the hilltop village of Audrix he saw a line of pony riders led by Miranda approaching the road. He stopped, put on the flashing lights and fetched a big radish from the back of his car and went to stop the other cars while the riders crossed the road. As Miranda approached, Bruno gave her pony his radish. She blew him a kiss and waved in thanks. He blew one back and returned to his car, where Suzanne looked pointedly at her watch and said, “I need to reach Domme in time for lunch with a colleague.”
“And we need to look after our tourist trade and our small businesses,” he replied. “Their taxes pay my wages, and yours too, madame.”
Well, Bruno thought, at least a conversation has begun, and he asked where she was having lunch. A restaurant in Domme, she replied.
“Probably the Esplanade,” he said. “It’s very good and it’s got one of the finest views in France. I’ll drop you there and they’ll take care of your suitcase. And I’ll try to get Nadia to call you.”
In response, she flashed him a brief smile, which seemed like progress.
“I know you’re with La Piscine,” he said.
“I have an office there,” she replied, “but I also have a desk in the Elysée, since much of my work involves liaison with the presidential staff. You may have heard we’re moving soon to a larger new place in Vincennes, better protected against cyber-threats.”
“I heard about it on France Culture,” Bruno said.
“There are no secrets in France these days,” she said drily. “Anyway, I know of your connection to General Lannes; he’s an old family friend.”
“I know he’s your daughter’s godfather.”
“He’s the one who helped recruit my husband into the service when he was making his fortune in Silicon Valley.”
Bruno managed to keep a reasonably civil conversation going until they reached the crossing over the crowded main road. Then he crossed the bridge at Castelnaud before heading for Domme. With the sweep of the river dominated by the great medieval fortresses of Beynac and Castelnaud, Suzanne condescended to admire the view.
“Haven’t you been here before?” Bruno asked.
“Only on office business and we came in by helicopter,” she replied. “My contact with Brice naturally ended with our divorce.” She turned in her seat to examine him, and asked, “Are you directly involved in the police investigation into this attack?”
He nodded. “Yes, and I was there when it happened, but without a direct view. I went down to the scene with a doctor, where we found the knife between his ribs. Commissaire Jalipeau is still examining hundreds of videos of the pageant, trying to establish whether this was an accident or something more sinister.”
Bruno explained Kerquelin’s decision to ignore the script and pile into the melee on the steps, throwing off the careful planning of the mock fight.
He drove up the hill to Domme, turned through the imposing stone towers that flanked the ancient gate and told her about the Knights Templar who had been imprisoned there. He avoided the main street that was filled with food and souvenir shops and thronged with visitors. He parked in front of the church, left his police lights flashing and took her to the main viewpoint on the point of the cliff that overlooked the Dordogne Valley with the picturesque arches of the bridge. Brightly colored kayaks were passing beneath the arches. It was too late in the day for the hot-air balloons that took passengers along the valley in the early mornings, swooping down almost to the river before the gas burners were lit, sending them soaring high again.
“One of the great views of France,” he said. “The two great fortresses that glowered at each other across the river in the Hundred Years’ War—Beynac, which was held by the French, over there; Castelnaud, held by the English, to your left. The gardens of Marqueyssac are over to the right.”
“Wasn’t Beynac the château used in that Luc Bresson film of Joan of Arc?” she asked. “With Malkovich playing the King and Dustin Hoffman as the Conscience? I remember seeing that with Brice, it must have beeen twenty years ago.”
“Did you do much traveling together when you were stationed abroad, America and Britain, Germany?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said curtly. “All to do with our work.”
“What about Taiwan?” he asked, thinking of the guidebook in Kerquelin’s bedroom.
The question evidently startled her. “What on earth makes you ask that?” She suddenly sounded aggressive, almost fierce.
“A guidebook in his house,” he replied. “It looked well used.”
She shook her head dismissively and headed for the restaurant. Bruno followed with her suitcase. An older man with carefully coiffed gray hair and a trimmed white beard rose with the help of a stick from his seat at a table on the terrace and called out, “Suzanne.”
She waved airily at the man and handed Bruno a card with her name and numbers. “Make sure you call me as soon as you hear from Nadia and make sure that she calls me. You can leave my suitcase at the front desk.”
“Dominic, j’arrive,” she called out to the waiting man, leaving Bruno to his task, and to wonder whatever had happened to make Parisians assume they could ignore the usual French courtesies. And what had irritated her about Taiwan?
Chapter 7
Bruno climbed into his SUV and headed back to St. Denis, thinking about the folder that contained Kerquelin’s will, the list of names of lawyers and investment trusts in different countries and various American states. All that Bruno knew of South Dakota was that it had a mountain into which the heads of various presidents had been carved and that it was home to many American Indian tribes, for whom he had enjoyed a boyhood fascination. Delaware was familiar only in a song that Pamela sometimes sang: “What did Delaware, boys? She wore a brand New Jersey.” Suzanne had said something about her ex-husband making a fortune in Silicon Valley before General Lannes had persuaded him to return home to serve France. Perhaps Kerquelin’s wealth somehow suggested a motive for his stabbing.
Bruno remembered a lunch in Périgueux with J-J and an intriguing and ferociously intelligent friend of his, Aristide Goirau, head of the fisc—the financial police—in Bordeaux. The topic had been the French and European operations of a Russian oligarch, and the political and security complications in the case had inspired General Lannes to assume control. During the lunch Bruno had asked for Goirau’s card and had scanned it into his phone. Now he put the phone into its cradle on the dashboard, inserted his earbuds and called Goirau.
“Bruno, good to hear from you. I fondly remember that lunch with J-J, when we talked about that intriguing affair that ended up far beyond our humble station,” Goirau said, in a sharp, clipped voice Bruno recalled. “What can I do for you?”
“Why are South Dakota and Delaware significant in finance?” Bruno asked, and explained his findings at Kerquelin’s house, without mentioning Kerquelin’s name.
“Delaware is known to be remarkably friendly to corporations and doesn’t require companies to list their owners when formed,” Goirau replied. “Almost two-thirds of the Fortune 500 corporations have their legal home there. Altogether there are more than a million corporations in a state with about nine hundred thousand residents. The taxes are low, the supervision lenient, and taxable profits earned elsewhere can be transformed into nontaxable earnings through what is known as the Delaware loophole.”
“And South Dakota?” Bruno asked.
“That is capable of providing rich people with even more miraculous benefits,” Goirau said. “South Dakota invites you to set up a perpetual trust for your heirs which will be tax-free, completely secret and protected from outside lawsuits including divorce and alimony actions. At last count it had close to half a trillion dollars in assets based there.”
South Dakota had traditionally been a poor and underpopulated prairie state, Goirau explained. But in 1981 it had a remarkable governor, an ex-marine named Janklow who became famous for taking his own rifle along to a hostage crisis. When an American financial crisis sent inflation soaring, Janklow saw an opportunity. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s had given the United States an anti-usury law that limited the interest rates banks could charge. As inflation went into double figures, the usury limit meant that the new credit card companies were losing money fast. Governor Janklow persuaded Citibank to move its entire credit card operation to South Dakota, welcoming the company with a new state law that allowed them to charge an interest rate at which they could remain profitable.
“Janklow then began looking for more opportunities, and he found one in these perpetual trusts,” Goirau went on. He explained that along with Switzerland, South Dakota was now the world’s leading location for money that people wished to be both safe and discreet. After the Swiss banking scandals of 2009 and 2010, most countries wanted to clamp down on money laundering and tax evasion. They agreed upon the Common Reporting Standard, which required countries to exchange information on the assets of each other’s citizens kept in each other’s banks. Overnight, places like the Bahamas, Jersey and Liechtenstein lost much of their appeal as places to avoid tax. But the United States never signed on to the CRS, Goirau explained.
“The Americans require other countries to send data on foreign nationals to the USA, but do not return the compliment. As a result, the United States is becoming the tax-avoidance capital of the world and a lot of that money is going to South Dakota. I remember one of the few cases that became public,” Goirau added. “When China imposed new tax rules on its citizens, the billionaire Sun Hongbin quietly transferred almost five billion dollars’ worth of shares in his Chinese property company to a South Dakota trust. And think about what the perpetuity trusts really mean.”
“You mean they go on forever?” Bruno suggested.
“Exactly. Now assume that you put a million dollars into such a trust, invest it and it gets an annual return of six percent,” Goirau went on. “Remember this is tax-free. So after two hundred years, it will have grown to one hundred thirty-six billion dollars. After three hundred years it will be more than fifty trillion dollars—twice the size of the current U.S. economy. We will have dynasties that make the Medicis of Renaissance Italy and the Rothschilds look like financial pygmies.”
“And this is legal?” Bruno asked in wonderment.
“Alas, yes. The United States has apparently decided that dirty money is better than no money at all. I have no objection to people using their savings and their brains to invest and become rich, so long as they pay the proper taxes to the community that is the ultimate source of their wealth. There are few things that tempt me to become a revolutionary, Bruno, but you’ve touched on one of them.”
“I’m very pleased to hear it, Aristide,” Bruno replied. “Count me in.”
“I may be leaping to a conclusion, Bruno, but I suspect your investigation is linked to the news about the tragedy at Sarlat,” Goirau said. “Kerquelin would be one of the few Frenchmen in a position to benefit from such trusts.”
“Is he really that rich?” Bruno asked.
“Hard to say, but since he helped write the source code and the basic algorithms for Google, and he was paid in shares rather than the cash the new company did not yet have, we assume he must now be a very rich Frenchman.”
“And this Dakota trust cannot be taxed, right?”
“Right. When Kerquelin agreed to the patriotic appeal that he come home and apply his skills to French security, he struck a deal for himself and his heirs. Whatever assets he held outside France would not be subject to French tax. We tax only his salary and various earnings from his other, wholly legal investments, and they on their own make him a wealthy man by French standards. But whatever he owned when he was persuaded to return to France, he has kept, and it grows tax-free out on the South Dakota prairie. And his heirs will enjoy that money as well—forever and ever. Of course when the deal was signed, Google was barely known in France, and the explosion in value of its shares was far in the future. I suspect even Kerquelin had no idea just how rich he would become.”
“Thank you for this, Aristide. You’ve been a great help.”
“Just one public servant helping another. By the way, J-J said that if I ever have the opportunity to dine at your own table, I should seize it.”
“It would be a pleasure,” said Bruno. “Let me know when you’re coming this way and I’ll arrange a dinner. And you can stay overnight, if you like.”
“Thanks so much. Keep me posted on the Kerquelin affair and those wealthy heirs of his. A young man and a daughter, I believe?”
“Two daughters, half sisters,” Bruno replied, “and a son who seems more interested in sailing.”
“In that case he might need the money. I once heard that sport described as standing in your clothes under an ice-cold shower while ripping up hundred-dollar bills.”
When Goirau ended the call, Bruno wondered whether Nadia had any idea just how rich she was going to be. In some ways, he thought, such wealth was a problematic inheritance to leave to one’s children. It was a temptation to idleness and extravagance, and it would take a strong character not to start thinking of the rest of the human race as not only poor but as somehow less deserving. He remembered some wealthy American woman being quoted as saying that “only the little people pay taxes.” It would be sad if that attitude afflicted Nadia, though she seemed to be a young woman of character.
He was approaching Meyrals when his phone vibrated. Nadia was phoning from Les Eyzies to say that her half sister, Claire, was on the way from Bordeaux and should arrive in the Périgord that afternoon. He suggested meeting her at the café in front of the museum in ten minutes. He found her nursing a coffee and still wearing Fabiola’s tracksuit.
“I spent the last hour or so driving your mother from Bergerac to Domme,” he said, after ordering an espresso. “She says she needs to talk to you, in case you may have to arrange a funeral.”
“I refuse to believe he won’t survive. And in any event, neither Claire nor I would want my mother involved,” Nadia said firmly. “She was divorced from my father. She has no say in the matter.”
“Have you heard from your brother?” he asked.
“He didn’t respond to my email, so I suppose he’s at sea,” she replied. “I’ll try to track down a number for his sailing club. They might know. I’m not sure he’d want to come here, anyway. He only socializes with his crew members. He’s on the autism spectrum.” She paused, took a sip of her coffee, looked at him almost defiantly and said, “I suppose we’re a pretty screwed-up family.”
“Not by local standards,” Bruno replied, smiling. “Around here most people stayed in their little villages over the centuries, intermarried and interbred. If it hadn’t been for all the marauding soldiers, wandering pilgrims and naughty priests mixing up the gene pool, we might all be gaga. Anyway, you and your brother’s genes are pretty well mixed, French, Breton and some Moroccan through your mother. You have her eyes, that striking blue. Does your brother look like you?”
“No, not much. But then I don’t look like Claire, my half sister, as you will see when you meet her. She’s lovely, those sultry Latin looks.”
“I look forward to it,” he said, politely. “I think you and your sister should talk to a lawyer and to General Lannes about your father’s will. You are all trustees of your father’s estate, according to a document that I saw in his files when I had to secure the place.”
“I know,” she said. “My father told me about that. There’s another trustee, an old college friend of his in California whom we called Uncle Angus, my other godfather. He’s on his way here now, coming with Claire.”
“Angus McDermott,” Bruno said. “Yes, I remember seeing his name. Did you tell him your father’s in the hospital?”
“Yes. Uncle Angus was coming anyway. It was my father’s turn to host our annual reunion, and he wanted everyone to see the reenactment, so he rented a château for the week.” Nadia’s eyes filled with tears as she spoke.
“Will you have to cancel?”
“No, everyone is still coming, to support us and Papa. They’ll get here tomorrow when the rental starts.”
“Which château is it?” asked Bruno.
“It’s Château de Rouffillac, overlooking the river near Carlux, wonderfully restored.”
Bruno knew the place, a twelfth-century fortress that dominated the cliff that rose from the north bank of the Dordogne River, almost due south of Sarlat. It had been heavily restored in the nineteenth century and more recently bought by a wealthy couple from Silicon Valley, an Englishman and his American wife. No expense had been spared, he’d heard, to re-create a medieval château with modern plumbing in several luxurious suites. There was even a nearby landing pad for helicopters.
