Children of War (15 page)

‘This reminds me a bit of the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam,’ the Mayor replied. ‘Obviously we can preserve these rooms, bring in some furniture from the period, try to make it look as it was when the children were here.’

‘That makes sense,’ Bruno agreed. ‘But I’m not sure we’ll persuade many tourists to climb those narrow stairs just to see some attic rooms. Could we turn the whole house into a museum, maybe about St Denis during the war, something to explain who the children were and why they were in hiding?’

‘If we can get funding from the bequest to do that, we could probably raise some more money elsewhere. The Ministry of Education would be the place to start,’ said the Mayor. ‘We could mount an exhibition on the Resistance here in the Périgord.’

‘Why not think of something more ambitious that could take in the other houses in this row?’

‘You mean a real town museum, the history of St Denis as well as the wartime and the children?’ said the Mayor, a note of excitement in his voice as he pondered the potential of such a project.

‘If we plan this carefully, we might be able to use this idea to solve the problem of this street,’ Bruno said. ‘I’ve always thought we’d have to demolish these houses one day and widen the road, but there’s another solution. What if we removed the ground-floor shops – they’re all empty anyway – and put in
stone pillars to support the upper floors? Then we could use the ground floor for a much wider pavement, a kind of covered pedestrian precinct.’

‘There are six houses in this row. That would be a big museum.’ The Mayor was looking worried. ‘Can we justify that?’

‘Let’s get an architect to draw up some ideas and then run it past the local businessmen and see what they think. A museum like that would need a café and a gift shop. Maybe they could think of other commercial possibilities. At least it gives us a real project to propose to the Halévy trustees.’

‘We could call it the Halévy Museum,’ said the Mayor. ‘They’d like that.’

‘We’d need to emphasize that we want to use it as an educational centre. When I was researching the Halévy history I certainly learned about things I’d never known before,’ said Bruno. He explained that there could be one room on the history of the Jewish Scouts and their work in protecting children and another exhibit on their role in the Resistance with the fighting unit they formed. There could be another room on the role of the Protestant pastors, he suggested, and there would still be space for the town’s own museum of St Denis. There could even be a small cinema to show educational videos.

The Mayor nodded, but then he frowned. ‘But what do we do with the social housing people? We’ve got nearly twenty families in these houses. We’d need to find alternative accommodation and there’s no money for that.’

‘You’re right, but let’s lay out the problem to the trustees and say here is our idea for a really ambitious project but we’d
like their thoughts on how we tackle the various challenges it throws up,’ said Bruno. ‘I get the impression that the trustees want to do something serious and impressive, so we need to propose something that can catch their imagination. And it would do a lot of good for St Denis.’

‘But where do we rehouse those families?’ the Mayor persisted.

‘You’ve been complaining for years about the waste of that old cooperage off the Rue Gambetta,’ Bruno said. It was a fine stone building, with a big courtyard and that long workshop where they assembled the barrels. It had stood empty for years, since long before Bruno’s arrival. Properly converted, he suggested, it could house twenty families, and in much better conditions than these cramped apartments.

‘Get an architect to come up with some sketches and we can call it
Résidences Halévy
. It’s a historic building so there’ll be restoration grants we can apply for. Let’s think big. We can always scale it down later if we have to.’

‘Every time you suggest something, Bruno, it raises the costs even higher. You know how tough things are with the budgets these days.’

Bruno knew there were times when it was best to give the Mayor the last word, and this was one of them. Then at the landing, the Mayor stopped and turned to face him.

‘A lot of this is going to depend on the amount of money available under Halévy’s will,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t hope to do this from our own resources. So you’re going to have to make sure we make a very persuasive presentation to those trustees.’

Bruno was not despondent. He’d been thinking about the presentation and wondering whether some glossily professional
drawings by an architect might be too predictable. The key to this whole project was the children in the attic and building a fitting memorial to them and the people who sheltered them. That was why he would focus on the educational aspect of the museum, and why he was determined to involve the young people of St Denis.

Thanks to Florence, the town’s
collège
students knew computers, and they could come up with some plans for the museum and maybe also for the farm. Why not get Florence and the students to make part of the presentation, rather than leave it in the hands of the Mayor and some local architect more accustomed to designing house restorations and supermarkets?

As he headed for the airport to collect the lawyer from Paris, Bruno knew his Mayor’s wily political brain would be at work, balancing votes and budgets. The Mayor would see the advantage of using the schoolchildren of today’s St Denis to pay homage to the children of the war years. And doubtless he was also thinking about his own legacy as Mayor. From the Palace of Versailles to President Mitterrand’s giant new Arc at the end of the Champs Elysées in Paris, French kings and presidents had sought to build great monuments that would carry their names down the centuries. A project like this, properly handled, could do the same for the Mayor of St Denis.

Two people descended from the small turboprop aircraft that landed at Périgueux airport from Paris. Bruno had expected the first, a slim young man wearing an elegant dark suit, white shirt and sober tie. He carried one of the bulky briefcases that lawyers used. The second, an attractive young woman in a classically cut suit in burgundy with glossy dark hair spilling artfully from the loose bun atop her head, surprised him. She strode confidently forward to embrace him, announcing in almost perfect Parisian French, ‘Bruno, I’ve heard so much about you from Isabelle. She said to give you her love.’

Bruno had little choice but to kiss her cheeks in return and welcome her to the Périgord. He then turned to shake the lawyer’s hand and introduce Maître Kaufman to the woman. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties. Her face seemed slightly familiar, although he was sure he’d never met her. Perhaps she’d been in one of the photos Isabelle had shown him on her phone of her life in Paris.

‘Yacov and I met on the plane,’ she said, waving vaguely at the lawyer. ‘I’m Nancy Sutton, from the American Embassy. I think the Brigadier may have told you to expect me.’

That was how she knew Isabelle, Bruno realized, trying to gather his wits. He presumed she would have some kind of
security liaison role at the Embassy. Women in that world would be rare enough to know one another. He wondered just how much Isabelle had told the American.

‘As one of the legal attachés, Mademoiselle Sutton is well known in judicial circles in Paris,’ Kaufman said. ‘I understand she has an appointment in Périgueux with the
Procureur de la République
.’

The
Procureur
was the chief legal officer for the
Département
. That suggested to Bruno that she was probably intending to file, or at least to discuss an extradition warrant for Sami. If the American was an Embassy lawyer, then she probably knew Isabelle through her new job with Eurojust. It had meant an important promotion for Isabelle, while neatly extracting her from the staff of the disgraced Minister of the Interior. Untouched by the scandal that had erupted around the Minister, the high-flying career which was Isabelle’s top priority had been preserved. There had been a time when Bruno had hoped he would be Isabelle’s priority, but now he knew better.

‘There was supposed to be a cab waiting for me,’ Nancy said, as one of the airport staff unloaded one small and one large suitcase from the hold of the plane. Kaufman took the smaller case.

‘Since there’s no taxi here, perhaps we can give you a lift, Mademoiselle,’ said Bruno, taking the larger case and leading the way to the Mayor’s car. He’d parked as close as he could get to the runway, his blue flashing light perched on the car’s roof. The Mayor had said that neither Bruno’s police van nor his elderly Land Rover would be suitable to collect the Parisian lawyer.

‘Call me Nancy,’ she said, and took the front passenger seat,
although Kaufman was already holding one of the rear doors open for her. Bruno grunted at the weight of her suitcase as he loaded it into the back of the Mayor’s Citroën.

‘Perhaps you could take my case on to my hotel in St Denis,’ she called. Bruno and Kaufman exchanged glances; this was a woman who knew how to get her own way. ‘I’m booked into Le Manoir and I’m picking up a rental car in Périgueux.’

‘So you know Isabelle from The Hague?’ Bruno said, making conversation as he drove into town. He could not identify her scent, but it was pleasant, slightly stimulating and discreet in the way that Frenchwomen prefer, knowing that a hint of fragrance was far more enticing than the crude impact of an overpowering perfume.

‘I saw her there recently, but we really got to know each other in Paris,’ she replied. ‘Isabelle said she’d told you about our group of women in this business who meet informally for dinner together every month. And I visited her in hospital when she was wounded. That’s when she told me about you.’

Bruno was confused. Isabelle had been talking of a band of women in the security service. Was Nancy Sutton a lawyer or a spook? Or perhaps both? And what exactly had Isabelle told Nancy about her former lover deep in the French countryside?

‘And what brings you to our Périgord?’ he asked.

‘You know perfectly well what brings me,’ she replied, keeping her eyes on the road but somehow signalling to Bruno that she did not want to speak openly with Yacov Kaufman in the rear seat. ‘That engineering matter.’ She turned in her seat to address the lawyer. ‘I know from our conversation on the plane that you’re here about a bequest. But why is a policeman meeting you?’

‘The bequest relates to someone in our commune, so Maître Kaufman has an appointment at the
Mairie
,’ Bruno said smoothly. ‘The Mayor asked me to meet him as a courtesy. This is the Mayor’s own car. He’d have come himself but he has a meeting of the regional council.’

‘I gather your Mayor is quite well connected in Paris,’ Nancy said. ‘Didn’t he once work for Chirac?’

She was well informed, Bruno thought, or she had done some efficient research. Maybe Isabelle had told her; it was the sort of detail that Isabelle had always made a point of knowing. ‘Yes, when Chirac was Mayor of Paris, before he was elected President,’ he said, slowing the car and steering it between imposing iron gates into a gravel courtyard. He stopped at the base of the steps that led into a large stone building flanked by tall pillars, ‘Our Mayor’s political background has certainly helped us in St Denis. And here you are, Mademoiselle Sutton, at the office of the
Procureur
.’

He was about to climb out of his seat to open her door, but Kaufman had slipped out from the back seat and beaten him to it.

‘Thank you, Bruno,’ she said, leaning across the seat to peck him on the cheek. ‘I’ll hope to see you for a longer chat in St Denis later today.’ She swivelled her legs with practised grace to leave the car, shook Kaufman’s hand as she thanked him, and strode up the steps as if leading a delegation.

‘An interesting woman,’ said Kaufman, taking her seat in the front of the car. ‘A lawyer, a temporary diplomat, and career FBI.’

‘How do you know that?’ Bruno asked, steering back into the tree-lined avenue, the Cours de Turenne.

‘We do a lot of work for the Israeli Embassy,’ Kaufman replied. ‘They speak of her with respect. What’s this engineering business that brings her here? It doesn’t sound like her usual work.’

‘That’s all I know,’ said Bruno, thinking he had said quite enough. ‘Business-related, I imagine. What’s her usual work?’

‘I told you, she’s FBI, high-level liaison on law enforcement and security issues with the French government, Interior Ministry, Justice and DST.’

The
Direction de Surveillance du Territoire
was more counterespionage than law enforcement, Bruno reflected. No wonder she knew Isabelle and the Brigadier.

‘Not your field of the law, then?’ he asked Kaufman, his tone light.

‘Not really. I hear you have some good news for me on the Halévy matter.’

‘That’s what the Mayor wants to discuss with you. We’ve found the house in St Denis where the two children first stayed, and the farm where they spent most of their time.’

‘Yes, Maya will be pleased. I think the prospect of seeing those places again might tempt her over here.’

‘And she lives in Israel?’

‘She moved there with David after the war, but he came back to Paris for his medical studies and remained here to make his career. She stayed in Tel Aviv and built up her business.’

Once she left university, Kaufman explained, Maya Halévy had taken a job in the Ministry of Education, researching the textbooks that the infant state of Israel wanted to have translated into Hebrew for use in schools. As a native French-speaker, she had looked first at French books, but the Ministry had
decided to use American ones. Believing this was a mistake, she resigned, married an army officer and went into business for herself, translating and publishing French textbooks on mathematics, and then German books on the sciences and electronics for the Israeli military. She then went into partnership with an English publisher of scientific journals, launched her own electronic versions, and by the time her husband had retired as a General she had become wealthy enough to invest in the first Israeli start-up companies. Now widowed, she had become one of the country’s leading venture capitalists, still active in business despite her age.