The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (16 page)

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Bruno said. “At the Patriarch’s party, were you with Chantal when that drunk tried to pull her away?”

“Yes, but he wasn’t being aggressive,” Marie-Françoise replied. “He excused himself to me and said he really needed to talk to her. They obviously knew each other, and at first I didn’t even realize he was drunk. I thought he had some sort of speech impediment. It was only later that Chantal told me it was her godfather and he was an alcoholic.”

Marc and Chantal emerged from the pool house, dived in and began swimming fast. Bruno thought they might have been racing until Chantal suddenly swerved and with a cry of triumph clambered atop Marc’s shoulders to push his head underwater. Marie-Françoise laughed at their antics as she served the coffee, probably wishing she could join her friends in the pool as soon as her guests had left. But Bruno wanted some answers.

“Did you hear what her godfather wanted to talk to Chantal about?” Bruno went on, sipping at his coffee and aware of Fabiola watching him curiously.

“I don’t remember exactly, just something about the family that he thought she needed to know,” Marie-Françoise said. “Apparently he’d lived with them for years and was like an honorary family member. Anyway, Chantal and I were talking about something private, and she didn’t want to be interrupted so she pulled herself away, and he sort of stumbled and dropped his glass and grabbed her to keep his balance. That’s when I knew he was drunk, and then Marc and Victor came to take him away.”

“Do you remember what he was drinking?”

“Yes, it was odd. He had a tall glass that looked to be filled with orange juice. I remember because it slopped when he stumbled, and the liquid went over my feet before he dropped the glass. I tried to wipe the juice off, but it ruined one of my shoes. I had to spend the rest of the party with this sticky stuff sloshing around my toes.”

“Do you still have that shoe?” Bruno asked.

“It’s in my room. I was going to chuck it, but I thought maybe I’d take it to a special cleaner in Bordeaux, see if they could fix it.”

“Let me take care of it,” said Bruno, thinking that J-J’s forensics team might be able to tell just what Gilbert had been drinking. “I know an expert.”

In the pool, Marc was now ducking Chantal, who squirmed out of his grip and swam away, as fast and supple as an eel. Marie-Françoise grinned as she watched and then turned to Fabiola. “Granny keeps trying to pair me off with Marc. She’s not very subtle.”

“Don’t you like him?” Fabiola replied.

“He’s great as a friend, as Chantal’s brother, but we’re really not interested in each other. Anyway, those two are so close there wouldn’t be much room for anyone else.”

Although it would hold a hundred and fifty or more, the Salle de l’Orangerie was already filling fast when Bruno and the mayor arrived through the chanting Green demonstrators who lined the paths of approach through Bergerac’s Parc Jean Jaurès. Some space had been taken at the back of the hall for a small dais where a TV reporter was holding a white card before the lens so his cameraman could get the right color balance. There was a buzz of conversation, and the large room was full of local politicians scanning each new arrival to see who might be important or useful.

Bruno spotted the Patriarch standing with Marc and Chantal in the front row and chatting with three men, two of them deputies to the National Assembly, and the third was Peyrefitte, the lawyer from Périgueux who had lost his wife. The Patriarch waved him over, and Bruno quickly shook hands all around as he was introduced. Peyrefitte evidently knew of Bruno from the press reports and murmured a word of appreciation for his efforts. Bruno asked after Peyrefitte’s children. One was fine, the other still in intensive care, he was told. The mayor of St. Denis came to join them, shaking hands right and left with political colleagues from around the region as he approached.

The thought had never previously struck Bruno, but he suddenly realized that politicians are not just members of a common profession but of a tribe, with common customs and concerns, a shared vocabulary and a fondness for one another’s company. He never normally saw his own mayor as a politician, since Gérard Mangin always reckoned that running St. Denis was more about getting the garbage collected on time than partisan struggles between parties. But here the mayor seemed to be in his element, knowing almost everybody and greeting friends from all across the political spectrum. He was sharing a joke and then squeezing someone’s arm here and murmuring something into an ear there, nodding and scribbling a note on a business card as someone whispered to him, an arm on the mayor’s shoulder. Finally he and Bruno returned to the third row, where Fauquet had installed himself earlier and guarded two places for them.

“The Greens have made a big mistake,” said Fauquet gleefully. “They’re demonstrating outside, but we’ve got most of the places inside, so we can cheer her and whistle at their guy.”

“Don’t you have to be inside to vote?” the mayor asked.

Fauquet nodded. “But they’re also doing a phone-in vote; you text one number for the Greens, another for Madeleine. That will take a while, so we’ll be able to claim the first vote and try to be sure that’s the one that gets reported. And we’ve got people lined up all over the
département.
”

As well as running the St. Denis café, Fauquet was a veteran of small-town politics and knew all the tricks of local elections. When drinking one evening at a rugby club dinner, he’d begun confiding to Bruno his three rules to win council races. The first was to recruit candidates from the largest families in the commune, since they’d usually all vote for a relative even if a family feud meant they hadn’t spoken for years. The second was to work hard to win over the members of the town’s tennis, rugby and hunting clubs, which explained the generous subsidies the
mairie
usually provided to the town’s sports. The third was always to recruit a doctor, a pharmacist or a schoolteacher to be the candidate, since they came in contact with hundreds of potential electors, and people always preferred to vote for someone they knew.

“They all know me, too,” Bruno had said.

“But people never vote for a policeman unless they’re scared stiff,” Fauquet replied.

Bruno then objected that the mayor kept getting reelected though he did not come from a large family nor had he been a member of one of the chosen professions. “The mayor’s different,” Fauquet had grumbled and turned away.

The contrast was striking when the two debaters came onstage to shake hands. The Green politician, a former teacher named Georges Luchan, was tall, very thin and wore jeans and a blazer with an open-necked striped shirt. His thinning gray hair was gathered in a ponytail, and Bruno couldn’t tell whether the man was trying to grow a beard or was aiming for the stubble that had become fashionable among younger men. He sported a large Green campaign button in his lapel. Madeleine had dressed conservatively in a plain dress of dark blue with a light blue silk scarf at her throat. Her fair hair was piled into a neat bun, and she wore minimal makeup, seeking to appear businesslike and even severe. But her classical features and graceful posture ensured that her looks still captivated most of the men in the room, Bruno included. Even as he braced himself to pay attention to a serious discussion, he could not prevent the image of the painting he had seen in Yevgeny’s bedroom from leaping into his mind.

Each speaker had a podium, and the moderator, the mayor of Bergerac, sat at a small table in the center. The debate had originally been his idea, to test local opinion on the issue of using fracking technology to exploit the natural gas reserves deep underground in much of southwestern France. The Socialist government with its Green allies was against it, and the conservatives were divided, but more and more mayors of all political parties were becoming interested in what this could mean for local jobs and prosperity. The huge publicity for the death of Peyrefitte’s wife and the fate of Imogène’s deer had widened the focus of the debate, and it quickly became clear that Madeleine was going to make this her main theme.

The rules for the debate gave each speaker fifteen minutes for opening remarks, then twenty minutes to respond to questions from the floor, and a closing statement of five minutes. The event was timed to last exactly one hour, for the convenience of the local radio stations that would be broadcasting it live. The mayor had tossed a coin to see which of the speakers would go first, and the Green won. He gave a competent opening speech on the threat of climate change, the dangers of fracking and the need to build wind and solar farms to replace fossil fuels. Although Bruno was sympathetic to the themes, the speaker was lackluster; it sounded as though he’d given the same speech many times before. He then offered a brief word of condolence to Peyrefitte for the loss of his wife before concluding.

“While I oppose the slaughter of those helpless deer at St. Denis, I agree we must take precautions against their becoming a danger to road users. We want no more such sad and terrible accidents. What this tragedy teaches us is the need for constant discussion and debate among all citizens over how best we can balance the needs of the environment and the economy, wildlife and people, to ensure such tragedies never happen again and that our children can inherit a safe and sustainable planet.”

Madeleine rose as Luchan sat to polite but restrained applause. She thanked the mayor for moderating, thanked the Green speaker for his remarks and began by saying, “I’m glad the Green Party exists, and I’ve even thought very seriously about voting for them in the past. But I wonder if they are not headed for extinction, doomed by the evolution that has made every other political party aware of the need to protect our environment. The Greens have scored a huge political victory. They have fulfilled their historic role and won this big argument.

“But they are becoming an irrelevant and querulous sect, opposed to everything but wind and solar farms with no thought of what we do when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. They are against nuclear power, against exploring for natural gas, against coal and oil, against foie gras and even against the use of genetic science in food when it can prevent famines and ensure that children in even the poorest countries can get the right vitamins in their diet. Many of them don’t even want us to eat meat.”

Madeleine gave a thoughtful and balanced assessment of the benefits and problems of fracking, the cost to France of importing natural gas and the danger of depending on importing energy from Russia. Greens should support fracking, she added, since power stations fueled by natural gas produce fewer than half the emissions of those fueled by coal.

Of course, she went on with a smile, not all the Greens are against everything. Monsieur Luchan here is no extremist but a sensible man. She gave her opponent a friendly nod. She was persuaded he had no qualms about hunting animals or shooting deer. From a folder on the podium before her, she pulled out a newspaper clipping and held it up.

“I have here,” she said, “the report from
Sud Ouest
of the anniversary dinner of the town of Nontron in the north of our
département,
at which Monsieur Luchan gave the formal speech. Quite rightly, too; it is in his constituency. And what a fine dinner it was. I have here the menu. It started with a fine vegetarian dish, a cream of mushroom soup. It was followed by
foie gras de Périgord
and then by
médaillons de chevreuil,
kindly provided by the hunting club of Nontron.”

She turned to Luchan. “I congratulate you, sir, on your taste.
Médaillons de chevreuil
is one of my own favorite dishes. There is nothing quite like a fine roast of venison. But, monsieur, if you are prepared to eat and enjoy the flesh of deer that have been shot by hunters, how on earth can you oppose using the same method to control their numbers when they become a danger to themselves as well as to humans?

“So I close with three questions for my colleague in this debate. The first question is this: should we seek to maintain an ecological balance between wildlife and the local environment that can sustain the deer without suffering or starvation? If so, and I’m sure a sensible man like Monsieur Luchan would agree, my second question is this: which method do we use—culling or contraception?”

She paused for the scattered chuckles that spread into general laughter. She held up a hand to quiet the audience, and Bruno realized she now had the hall in the palm of her hand. Everyone seemed to be smiling, looking up at her expectantly.

“I leave it to your imaginations to ponder how we persuade each doe in our woods to take her contraceptive pill every day,” she said, and the room rocked once more with laughter. She held up her hand again, and then paused with the timing of a natural actress before gazing around the audience with a soft smile.

“Or perhaps our Green friends think we can persuade each stag to take steps to fulfill his own responsibility for family planning? They might even volunteer to help with the fitting.”

She paused again, and this time it took a moment for the mental image she had evoked to take hold, and then the room erupted in guffaws and cheers. Beside Bruno, Fauquet and the mayor were wiping tears of laughter from their eyes, and so was the moderator onstage. Even her opponent, Luchan, had a sickly sort of smile on his face.

When the hall finally stilled again, Madeleine said, “My third and final question for Monsieur Luchan, to whom I offer a belated bon appétit for those
médaillons de chevreuil,
is this: which come first, deer or people?”

She stepped back from the podium and inclined her head to Luchan and the moderator, and the room broke into a storm of applause. Peyrefitte was the first to rise to his feet, clapping his hands together above his head, and he was followed by the Patriarch and then by Fauquet and most of the hall. Bruno considered for a moment and then rose as well, thinking Madeleine deserved a standing ovation for the most effective and amusing political speech he’d heard in years.

The remainder of the evening was an anticlimax. Luchan stumbled through his questions and closing remarks and then hurried from the stage, leaving the field of battle to the victor. Madeleine remained onstage and nodded her head sweetly as her gaze swept the audience, her glance seeming briefly to meet the eyes of every man in the room. And not a man there was immune to her charms, and even the few women in the crowd were smiling broadly at the triumph of a member of their own sex in such a traditionally masculine preserve.

“You have just seen the selection of the next deputy to the National Assembly,” the mayor said to Bruno, “and probably a future minister.”

“That was really something, and I pity that poor Green at the next meeting of his executive committee,” said Fauquet. “She crushed him, chewed him up and spat him out.”

“But she did it all with the utmost respect and courtesy,” the mayor said. “And yet maybe she was a little too ruthless. That business with the menu was pretty close to the line. There’s an unwritten rule that we don’t mix politics with people’s families or personal matters. And heaven knows a politician can’t choose what the menu is going to be at an official dinner. Still, she did it beautifully, and I’m very glad I don’t have to run against her.”

Fauquet burst into renewed laughter. “I’m just thinking of that silly bastard Luchan. From now on at every lunch or dinner he goes to, the poor sap is going to have to ask for the vegetarian option or the fruit plate. He’ll never be able to eat a decent meal in public again.”

Bruno was thinking that Madeleine was a most remarkable and somewhat terrifying woman. She was equipped with every possible advantage for a political career. She had beauty, brains, acting skills and a mesmerizing style in public speaking that included a natural sense of humor and a way of winning audiences onto her side. She was a wife and mother, but she was also a businesswoman, helping to run the family vineyard. There can be few professions dearer to the heart of a French voter than someone who combines a family farm with producing a decent bottle of wine. And she also had the inestimable advantage of being the daughter-in-law of one of the best-known and most respected figures in France.

More than that, Bruno mused, she had a subtle but deeply effective charm, a discreet but possibly unconscious way of seducing every man in the audience. Bruno was not sure whether this was deliberate on her part or simply an inevitable result of her beauty. Having never come across anyone quite like her before, he was prepared to give Madeleine the benefit of the doubt. She was the kind of woman whose every look seemed to carry some flirtatious signal, and yet she was no flirt. There was nothing overt about her manner, and the other women did not seem to resent her; they had applauded and cheered as sincerely as the men. So perhaps it was simply her looks and posture and her personal style, the proud way she carried her head, that had this effect. He found himself thinking in Hollywood clichés, but it was more than just sex appeal, more even than star quality. It was something, he told himself with a flutter of patriotic pride, uniquely French but universally beguiling.