“Then we’ll make the pork the usual way, in red wine with the dried cepes?” she asked when the shallots were done, the potatoes parboiled and dried and set to saute in the duck fat. Bruno grunted confirmation as he bent to the delicate task of slicing the raw foie to just the right thickness. She warmed the shallots on low heat, added the dried mushrooms and a glass of wine and joined Carlos to watch Bruno’s next step.
“No fat for the foie?” Carlos asked as Bruno put a jar of honey alongside a heavy black iron pan that had been heating for some time.
“It contains all the fat it needs,” Isabelle said.
Bruno laid slices of the foie in the pan, so hot that the surface of the foie was seared to keep in the juices, but its own fat seeped out steadily into the iron pan. Carlos looked up as he noticed Bruno humming to himself.
“That’s how he times his cooking,” said Isabelle. “It takes Bruno forty-five seconds to sing the ‘Marseillaise,’ and thirty seconds if he stops before ‘Aux armes, citoyens.’ Steaks get the full version, but the foie needs only thirty seconds a side.”
Bruno turned the slices of foie and began humming again, using a spatula to keep moving the liver around the pan. As the first tendrils of smoke began to rise, he stopped singing to himself, removed the pan and poured out the excess fat into a waiting jar. He slid the foie onto a hot serving dish and then took a bottle of balsamic vinegar and poured in a couple of spoonfuls. The spatula scraped back and forth with the heating vinegar to cleanse the bottom of the pan, and then he added three large spoonfuls of honey and swirled it into the thickening sauce.
“So simple,” said Carlos. “Yet it smells so good.”
Bruno took the toasted bread from the grill, quickly scraped a clove of garlic over each slice and put them on the warmed plates. Onto the toasts he draped slices of cooked foie and then drizzled the honey-vinegar sauce over every portion. Isabelle took the plates to the table as Bruno put the enchaud into the red wine and shallot sauce and left them on a very low heat alongside the potatoes. Finally he took an opened bottle of Monbazillac from the refrigerator and four fresh glasses and joined his guests around the big table that took up one side of his living room.
“A glass of this with the foie,” he said, pouring out the rich, golden wine of the Bergerac. “And bon appetit.”
“I always thought of foie gras as a pate, something you ate cold,” said Carlos. “This is amazing, not just smooth but silky.”
“ Putain, but this is good, Bruno,” said J-J. “I never heard of it being done this way with the honey and vinegar, but the fat balances the sweetness. You’ve got the foie crisp on the outside, and this toast with the juices…”
“I used to saute the foie with a tiny knob of butter,” Bruno said. “But then someone with a stall at the night market in Audrix made it this way and I liked it so much I watched him and learned how to do it.”
Bruno briefly left the table to turn the enchauds and the potatoes and came back to sip at his Monbazillac when he saw Isabelle raise her glass to him across the table. She was sitting in the wheelback chair she had always used when they were together. She had bought it for him as a gift, soon after they had become lovers, at an antiques market where they had spent a happy summer afternoon. Seeing her there, he might fleetingly imagine that nothing had changed. From the corner of his eye Bruno noted Carlos observing the interplay and history between them.
She looked down to where Gigi had been waiting patiently at her side until she fed him the final morsel of her toast, rich with the juices of the foie and its sauce. J-J used his bread to wipe his plate clean, and the others followed his example as Bruno brought in the enchauds. Carlos’s Rioja, a Torre Muga, was sampled and pronounced excellent, and Bruno watched with pleasure at the scene around the table. Entertaining his friends in this house that he had built, with food that he had grown in his garden and cooked at his own stove, gave him a deep satisfaction. J-J was an old friend, Carlos seemed to be a promising new one, and Isabelle-well, Isabelle was special in the way that only an old lover can be.
“Excellent sauce, Isabelle,” said Carlos. “And delicious pork.”
“Knowing Bruno, this pork fillet will have come from a pig he killed with Stephane a couple of months ago,” she said. “And his freezer will be filled with rillettes and ribs, sausages and intestines. Nothing ever goes to waste from a good farm pig.”
“Let’s not go into that, or we’d have to arrest him,” said J-J. “You know those idiots in Brussels have made it illegal for our farmers to kill their own pigs.”
“If we carried out that regulation, we’d have to arrest half of Spain,” said Carlos. “Our police aren’t fools, most of them know when to turn a blind eye. In the end it comes down to judgment.”
“Unfortunately, good judgment is in much shorter supply than new laws,” J-J said. “Let’s hope this summit meeting doesn’t produce any new ones because I can’t keep track of all the laws on the books already.”
“Tell me if I’m wrong, but this summit sounds to me like a political meeting about cosmetics,” said Carlos, pouring out the second bottle as Isabelle passed the cheeseboard. “We’ve already got all the cooperation we need with France, both police and intelligence.”
“And yet the bastards still seem to keep a step or two ahead of us,” said Isabelle. “The one thing that can make a difference out of this summit will be to agree to joint staffing of the ecouteurs. We haven’t got enough Basque speakers monitoring the phones.”
“But that’s not on the agenda,” said Carlos, looking thoughtful.
“Not explicitly,” Isabelle agreed. “But it’s what my minister wants. Read between the lines of the draft agreement and it’s there.”
“Talking of cooperation, we might need some from you,” J-J said to Carlos. “I got the forensic report on that skeleton, Bruno. They say that from the shoes and the Swatch it’s twenty to twenty-five years old, one shot to the back of the head with a nine-millimeter Beretta. They found the bullet in the dirt beneath the body so he was shot in place. The dentistry is poor, but they think it’s Spanish, Portuguese or possibly Moroccan. We’re sending it out on the Interpol wire, but perhaps you can cut some corners.”
“E-mail me the report and I’ll try,” Carlos replied. “Anything else?”
“Yes, the report claims he was tortured,” J-J went on. “The finger bones were crushed and splintered with what they think was a pair of pliers. That makes it look like gangland, maybe drugs.”
Carlos winced and took a deep breath. “Poor devil, whoever he was.” He pointedly looked at his watch, and J-J picked up on the cue.
“Early start tomorrow, so no time for coffee,” he said, rising, and looked at Carlos and Isabelle. “I’ll drive you both back to the hotel and let Bruno do his washing up.”
Isabelle looked at Bruno and raised her eyebrows slightly, before leaning down to stroke that spot she knew behind Gigi’s ears. He told himself that he detected a touch of regret in her gesture, but he might have been flattering himself.
She looked up from the dog, noting quickly that J-J and Carlos were chatting together, and said quietly to Bruno, “Thank you for the books. We must talk about them sometime.”
When she had been convalescing, Bruno had spent some time considering what books to send her in the hospital. He knew she had a taste for American detective stories, but knew too little about them to make a thoughtful choice. But in the brief time they had been together he had seen her reading a couple of his own history books and so he sent her the three volumes of Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de memoire. He’d devoured them, fascinated, after reading an essay in a popular history magazine about Nora’s analysis of some of the iconic French sites like Verdun and Versailles and the difference between reality and the memory and myth attached to them. Two months later, he had received a short note of thanks from her and a book of Jacques Prevert’s poems. Her gift had been doubly thoughtful. She knew that one of Bruno’s favorite films was Les Enfants du Paradis, and Prevert had been the scriptwriter. The note said the book had been her first purchase after leaving the hospital.
“And my thanks for the poems,” he said, although he’d already sent her a note. They were at the door, Carlos and J-J standing back to let Isabelle go ahead. He remembered the first time she had come to his house. When looking at his books she had gone unerringly to the volume of Baudelaire’s poems that had been a gift from a woman he’d known and loved in the war in Bosnia. Now Isabelle’s gift stood beside it on the shelf.
“Gigi has to go out and patrol the grounds first, and we’ll meet again tomorrow,” he said as he turned on the porch light and saw them out. Gigi looked mournfully after Isabelle and then up at his master.
“She’s still our friend, Gigi,” he said. He grabbed his coat and led the dog into the shadows around the
