him to go on duty. He took out the one item of equipment that never left his
side, his cell phone, and dialled the familiar number of the Hôtel de la Gare.
Any sign of them, Marie? he asked. They hit the market at St Alvčre yesterday
so they are in the region.
Not last night, Bruno. Just the usual guys staying from the museum project and
a Spanish truck driver, replied Marie, who ran the small hotel by the station.
But remember, after last time they were here and found nothing, I heard them
talking about renting a car in Périgueux to put you off the scent. Bloody
Gestapo!
Bruno, whose loyalty was to his local community and its mayor rather than to the
nominal laws of France, particularly when they were really laws of Brussels,
played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors from the European Union
who were charged with enforcing EU hygiene rules on the markets of France.
Hygiene was all very well, but the locals of the Commune of St Denis had been
making their cheeses and their pâté de foie gras and their rillettes de porc for
centuries before the EU was even heard of, and did not take kindly to foreign
bureaucrats telling them what they could and could not sell. Along with other
members of the Police Municipale in the region, Bruno had established a complex
early warning scheme to alert the market vendors to their visits.
The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very
seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started
their visits to the markets of Périgord in an official car with red Belgian
licence plates. On their second visit, to Brunos alarm, all the tyres had been
slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number 75
on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and
Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of
hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some
private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in
violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean
before the inspectors arrived.
Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at
local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel
keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese
and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and
truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the
nations gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of
St Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the
Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the
idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and
even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise
that they did not have the patience to make themselves.
So now the inspectors were trying a new tack, renting a car locally so that they
might more easily stage their ambush and subsequent getaway with their tyres
intact. They had succeeded in handing out four fines in St Alvčre yesterday, but
they would not succeed in St Denis, whose famous market went back more than
seven hundred years. Not if Bruno had anything to do with it.
With one final gaze into the little corner of paradise that was entrusted to
him, Bruno took a deep breath of his native air and braced himself for the day.
As he climbed back into his van, he thought, as he always did on fine summer
mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him: that the very summit of
happiness was to live like God in France.
CHAPTER 2
Bruno had never counted, but he probably kissed a hundred women and shook the
hands of at least as many men each morning on market day. First this morning was
Fat Jeanne, as the schoolboys called her. The French, who are more attuned to
the magnificent mysteries of womanhood than most, may be the only people in the
world to treasure the concept of the jolie laide, the plain or even ugly woman
who is so comfortable within her own ample skin and so cheerful in her soul that
she becomes lovely. And Fat Jeanne was a jolie laide of some fifty years and
almost perfectly spherical in shape. She was not a beauty by any stretch of the
imagination, but a cheerful woman at ease with herself. The old brown leather
satchel in which she collected the modest fees that each stall holder paid for
the privilege of selling in the market of St Denis thumped heavily against
Brunos thigh as Jeanne, squealing with pleasure to see him, turned with
surprising speed and proffered her cheeks to be kissed in ritual greeting. Then
she gave him a fresh strawberry from Madame Verniets stall, and Bruno broke
away to kiss the roguish old farmers widow on both wizened cheeks in greeting
and gratitude.
Here are the photos of the inspectors that Jo-Jo took in St Alvčre yesterday,
Bruno said to Jeanne, taking some printouts from his breast pocket. He had
driven over to his fellow municipal policeman the previous evening to collect
them. They could have been emailed to the Mairies computer, but Bruno was a
cautious man and thought it might be risky to leave an electronic trail of his
discreet intelligence operation.
If you see them, call me. And give copies to Ivan in the café and to Jeannot in
the bistro and to Yvette in the tabac to show their customers. In the meantime,
you go that way and warn the stall holders on the far side of the church. Ill
take care of the ones towards the bridge.
Every Tuesday since the year 1346, when the English had captured half the
nobility of France at the Battle of Crécy and the grand Brillamont family had to