The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (mobi reader android txt) 📕

different market in the region, offering popular French cabaret classics mixed in with bal musette dance music and romantic ballads. Bruno enjoyed it hugely, making a point of dancing with each of the women in their group, and with several more, friends whom he came across while strolling past the food stalls.

After his first stroll, trying to decide which of the foods on offer he would choose this evening, Bruno went to the rear of the church. Balzac followed him and at once joined some children playing on the grass. Bruno waved at two of them whom he recognized from his tennis classes. He then used his burner phone to call Isabelle on her private number.

‘Thanks for the Paris Match piece,’ she said. ‘And give my thanks to Gilles. There’s nothing much that’s new in it but he certainly makes it all sound sensational. Maybe he should try a new career as a spy novelist. It’s Jacqueline’s piece I’m more worried about.’

‘It’s all policy-based, Franco–American relations,’ Bruno replied. ‘But it all hinges on Gilles’s point that the Stasi were recruiting among the student left in Germany in ’68 and they’d almost certainly have tried the same in France. It seemed a bit odd to me since any of that generation would be in their seventies by now and long since retired. Other than some cerebral stuff about the new Cold War and national versus European interests, that seems to be it. I shouldn’t imagine that it will cause you any real problems.’

‘That’s not what they’re saying in the Elysée Palace,’ she said. ‘Anyone recruited back in the sixties could have recruited promising candidates from the next generation they were meant to be training and supervising. There are already people warning that this could lead to a witch-hunt, sniffing out suspected spies and sleeper agents among the énarques,’ she added, referring to graduates from the elite ENA, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, who filled the higher ranks of the state bureaucracy and the boards of directors of France’s top corporations.

‘But all these people are routinely vetted by our own security people, just in case,’ Bruno replied.

‘Yes, but the point Gilles missed about Rainer Rupp was that the guy was an idealist. He wasn’t a passionate supporter of East Germany, far from it. He just thought that the Cold War arms race could be made less dangerous if each side knew what the other was doing and thinking. He convinced himself that he was in the right place to do that. He even claimed that he helped prevent World War Three by reassuring the Warsaw Pact that NATO was not planning a surprise attack back in ’83, when Ronald Reagan was talking about the Evil Empire and Star Wars and scaring the pants off the Kremlin.’

‘These are very different times,’ Bruno said.

‘Up to a point, Bruno, but the current American administration is not exactly reassuring. It’s no secret that most European capitals worry that we’re all skating on thin ice, whether we look at trade, security policy, arms control, relations with Russia, the Middle East . . . I could go on. Some of the advisers around our President are almost panicking about it.’

‘This is all way above my head,’ Bruno said.

‘Yes, but you can understand why the Rosenholz dossier has suddenly become a hot topic here in Paris. I have to go but thanks, and kisses to you and Balzac.’

Bruno stood for a moment looking out over the valley, the sounds of some old dance music drifting to him from the far side of the church, accompanied by the scents of different foods from the night market stalls. The contrast between the innocent pleasures of this peaceful village and the mood and politics in Paris that Isabelle had described disturbed him deeply. It suggested a huge and dismaying gap in perceptions and concerns between the Parisian elite and the people who voted them into office and entrusted them with power.

As a very minor cog in the vast machinery of French administration, the scale of this gap scared him. Nor was Bruno comfortable at having shared his friends’ articles and views with Isabelle. He told himself that he’d passed on Gilles’s piece only with his tacit permission, for Gilles was familiar with this game of complicity between media and officialdom. And while he had shared nothing of what Jacqueline had written, he’d passed on her views, not that they were secret. Everything would soon be available to anyone who bought Le Monde or Paris Match.

That did not stop Bruno from feeling he’d participated in something underhand. It was not so much guilt as feeling rather shamefaced at making use of people he considered his friends. These were people who had reason to trust him, to assume that they could converse with him in confidence. And he could not fool himself by claiming to have acted from patriotism nor from some sense of duty to the French state. Not at all. He had acted simply to render a small service to Isabelle, a woman he would rather not disappoint.

Putain, it was a lot more than that. He still loved her, still thrilled like a schoolboy at the sound of her voice, still dreamed of somehow squaring the impossible circle of contrasting ambitions that kept them apart. Even in those blissful moments when they shared the same bed, they had different dreams. Perhaps he should force himself to end it, to refuse to run at her bidding. It would hurt, he knew, but pain eases with time. He’d be bruised but free to look elsewhere and perhaps to give his heart fully and honestly to another.

He breathed out a long sigh. As he’d told Isabelle, this was all far above his head. Also he was hungry. He went back to buy another bottle of wine from the woman from the Domaine de la Voie Blanche, who made the wine the Baron had offered for his blind tasting. And that, Bruno recalled, as he tried to decide