handwriting.
“Could be a phone number,” she said. Bruno reached for his mobile but she shook her head. “Your number might be known. This one’s anonymous,” she said, picking up a phone from the folding table. She punched in the number and waited.
“It’s an answering machine in Spanish,” she said. “Asked me to leave a message.” She picked up another phone, gave her name and ID code and asked for a subscriber check on the number. Bruno was studying the map.
“There’s no writing on it apart from those initials for St. Denis and Les Eyzies. It could come from anywhere,” Bruno said. “French or Spanish or even Russian.”
“Russians would use their own alphabet,” said Isabelle. “If we assume that Todor was killed by the GAL, then this map could come from the GAL files, or at least from some Spanish file, maybe Ministry of the Interior or police intelligence.”
“Do we bring Carlos into this?”
“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d better fax this to the brigadier and check with him.” She looked at her watch. “He’s going to be here later today and may be on the way. We’ll just keep this to ourselves until he gets here. He can decide how much of this we want to share.”
“I’ll copy those coordinates and go out to the site and check them,” Bruno said. He paused. “Does this mean that you don’t altogether trust Carlos?”
“I don’t altogether trust anyone, Bruno. Except maybe the brigadier and, on a good day, you-unless the interests of St. Denis are concerned.” She smiled as she said it, a smile that grew wider as she saw his eyes dart across to the corner where he had put Carlos’s flowers.
“Now I see why you want to know if I trust Carlos,” she said, teasing him. “Bruno, I do believe you’re getting jealous. And now you’re blushing. That’s not something I’ve seen before.”
He shook his head, half laughing, half embarrassed, not sure what to say, confused further by the presence in the room of the enormous bed. He was tempted to scoop her up in his arms and carry her to it, close the big damask curtains and forget about the world. “You know I still care for you,” he said.
“And I for you,” she said, suddenly switching her mood in a way that had always disconcerted Bruno. “So why are you walking around me on eggshells as if you daren’t approach? Is it because of Pamela?”
“Partly, not entirely. In fact, Pamela had to go home. Her mother had a stroke. I’m waiting for news. Maybe it’s that you’re wounded,” he said. Of course he walked on eggshells around her; he no longer knew the rules of engagement, couldn’t read the signals. Were they ex-lovers and still friends? Or colleagues thrown together by duty who had to forget that they had once shared a bed? Or should Bruno act on the question that sometimes kept him awake at night, the suspicion that Isabelle was the love of his life? He thrust the thought aside; the last time a woman had consumed him so deeply, she had been dead within the year in the snowbound hills around Sarajevo.
Isabelle was eyeing him coolly, waiting for him to say something else. He floundered for words. “You shouldn’t be back on duty, not yet, not while you still need that cane.”
“I’m not,” she snapped. “I’m deskbound, light duties only. And I’m not destroyed by this, Bruno. I’m making a full recovery, even if I do have a titanium brace in my thigh. Merde, I thought you of all people would be able to understand this. You’ve been shot too. It didn’t stop you from being a man, and a bullet hole in my leg doesn’t stop me from being a woman, so why don’t you treat me like one?”
“I’d like nothing better than to touch you, Isabelle. You know that.” He took her hand, pushing back the guilty memory of doing the same with Pamela just a few hours earlier. “But every time we get together we break apart when you head back to Paris, and I have to brace myself to soldier on through it all over again.”
“Doomed lovers,” she said with a wry smile, moving her hand from his lips to stroke his cheek. “I guess it’s never going to work, but we keep hoping that it will.”
A phone buzzed on her desk, and she pulled her hand away. “And we’re supposed to be working,” she said. “Dammit, Bruno, go and check that map and I’ll see you at the evening meeting.”
He was going out the door when she called, “Wait.” He turned back. She muttered something into the phone and held the line open. “It’s the German police. They checked the fingerprints. Jan is Horst’s brother, the one from the Red Army Faktion gang who was supposed to be dead.”
Bruno went to the stack of papers on the desk, looking for the sheets he’d been working on earlier. He pulled out his crude diagram with the boxes and the dotted line from Horst to Jan and the Basques. He showed it to Isabelle.
“This means that Galder, the young guy with bad French whom Jan described as a cousin of his wife, is probably connected. Does Carlos have any mug shots of suspected ETA militants I could look at?”
“We have our own as well as theirs, passed on to us under the intelligence-sharing agreement,” she said. He tried to come up with a mental image of the youth: medium height, slimly built, with dark hair and a prominent jaw; a straight nose and hands with long fingers that looked too delicate for a blacksmith’s work. Not much to go on, but Bruno would know him again if he saw him.
“They’re in the file room downstairs, a big red folder on the shelf above the photocopier,” Isabelle said.
“Do you want me to bring Jan in?” he asked, reluctant to believe that Horst could be his brother’s accomplice.
“He’s ex-Baader-Meinhof, he’ll probably be armed. I’ll arrange a firearms team. Take a look at the mug shots and then go and check the map coordinates, and I’ll have the team ready to go within an hour. And I’ll arrange to use the gendarmerie when you bring him back. The Germans are faxing through an extradition order on a Euro- warrant.”
23
The archaeology dig had been deserted, all the students still going through the explosives checks at Bergerac, but the coordinates on the hand-drawn map were precise. When Bruno paced out the numbers on the sketch he found himself standing at the ever-lengthening trench where he had first met Teddy and first seen the corpse. As he led the way to Jan’s smithy, a firearms team from Isabelle’s security force in its unmarked van following behind, he wondered at the coincidence that had led a Spanish murder squad to pick the same burial place as prehistoric people had chosen for their dead thirty thousand years before.
Generation after generation, so many bodies must lie scattered in the soil of France, so many battlefields where the bones must lie thickly together. In Normandy and Dunkerque from the last war, at Verdun and the Somme from the Great War, at Gravelotte and Sedan from the Prussian war, the wars and bodies stretched back through the centuries to Spaniards, Englishmen, Normans, Arabs, Huns, Gauls and Romans. France is built on a heap of bones, he thought; we are the sum of all the dead that went before us. And here we are again, a troop of armed men with their weapons ready, heading across the placid Perigord countryside to enforce the will of the French state. He bit his lip to bring himself back to alertness, remembering how in the army he’d often been this way before going into action. He supposed it was some kind of defense mechanism, his subconscious trying to distract him from fear.
Bruno stopped at the turnoff to Jan’s smithy and parked his car. He climbed into the back of the second vehicle and struggled into the flak vest handed to him as the van jerked and bounced over the ruts in the lane. The vest’s design did not seem to have improved since his days in Bosnia. It still left the throat and sides exposed, and he doubted if it would stop anything more than a nine millimeter. He’d seen men killed with an AK-47 round that had penetrated their vests. Bruno looked at the squad with him. They had the extra armor of ceramic plates slipped into their vests, front and rear. He raised his eyebrows at the sergeant of the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite whose troops made up the firearms team. The sergeant shook his head and shrugged; no plates for Bruno.
They had discussed the approach, and Bruno had said there was no obvious reason for Jan to be alert and armed. He wanted to drive up beside the smithy, to go in himself while the armed team deployed quietly, and make the arrest. The sergeant had objected, wanting his men in place while Bruno used the bullhorn to call Jan to give himself up. Bruno had won that argument, but as he clambered out of the truck, feeling clumsy from the flak vest beneath his jacket, he was wishing that he’d listened to the sergeant.
