Текст книги "Bruno, Chief Of Police"

Автор книги: Martin Walker

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‘See if you can get anything more on our mystery man from his own family. He

must have told them something about his childhood and growing up,’ said

J-J

.

‘Otherwise, we’re stuck.’

CHAPTER

16

The Mayor was quietly furious. Less than an hour remained before the event began

and two of his most reliable standard bearers had decided they would boycott it.

This was bad enough, but it was the first time in living memory they had turned

him down, which made it even worse. To reject a mayoral request in St Denis was

unheard of, and to decline his invitation when a Minister of the Republic and

two generals were to grace the town’s proceedings was close to revolution.

‘You’ll have to carry the flag of France, Bruno,’ the Mayor said testily. ‘Old

Bachelot and Jean-Pierre refuse to take part in your little ceremony. They made

it quite clear that they don’t approve of Muslims, Algerians or immigrants in

general and do not intend to honour them.’

Bruno noted the ‘your’. If his idea of making the anti-racism march into a

patriotic commemoration of a French war veteran went wrong, it would be his

fault.

‘What will Montsouris be carrying?’ Bruno asked. ‘We can’t have the red flag

since there is no sign that Hamid had any politics at all, least of all

Communist.’

‘I think he’s planning an Algerian flag,’ said the Mayor, sounding rather tired

of it all. ‘You know we have the Interior Minister coming with a couple of

generals? I’ve already had to do two interviews this morning, including a long

one with France-Inter, and there’s a woman from Le Monde who wants to see me

this afternoon. The only one staying in town is a chap from Libération, who

probably can’t afford to join the rest of them at the Vieux Logis. Funny how

these media types always seem to sniff out the best hotels to stay at. All this

attention, of the worst possible kind. I don’t like it all, Bruno. And now you

say the Juge-magistrat seems convinced that young Richard is going to be

formally charged with murder?’

‘Tavernier is his name, very modern, very go-ahead, very determined,’ said

Bruno. ‘And very well connected.’

‘Yes, I think I knew his father from the Polytechnique.’ Bruno was not much

surprised. The Mayor seemed to know everybody who mattered in Paris. ‘And his

mother wrote one of those dreadful books about the New Woman when feminism was

all the fashion. I’ll be interested to see how the boy turned out. Now you’d

better go and make sure that everything is organised for midday. We don’t want

chaos in front of all these media types. Quiet and dignified, that’s the style.’

Outside in the town square, two TV cameras were taking shots of the Mairie and

the bridge, and a knot of what Bruno assumed were reporters had taken over two

outdoor tables at Fauquet’s café, all interviewing each other. At the bar inside

were some burly men drinking beer, probably Montsouris’s friends from the trade

union. Bruno waved away a reporter who thrust a tape recorder towards him as he

climbed into his van, and drove off to the college where the march was to begin,

noting some coaches parked in the lot in front of the bank. Montsouris must have

organised a bigger turnout than expected.

Rollo had half the school lined up in the courtyard already, some of them

leaning on homemade placards that said ‘No to Racism’ and ‘France Belongs to All

of Us’. Rollo wore a small button in his lapel that read Touche Pas ŕ Mon Pote,

Hands Off My Buddy, a slogan that Bruno vaguely recalled from some other

anti-racist movement of twenty years ago. Some of his tennis pupils called out

‘Bonjour, Bruno’ and he waved at them as they stood in line, chatting and

looking reasonably well-behaved and soberly dressed for a bunch of teenagers. Or

perhaps they were intimidated by the presence of the entire St Denis rugby

squad, both the first and the A team, about thirty big lads in uniform

tracksuits who were there for Karim’s sake, and as a guarantee against trouble.

Bruno looked around, but there was no sign of Montsouris, the man who had come

up with this idea of the solidarity march. He would probably be in the bar with

his friends from the union, but Montsouris’s dragon of a wife was there in the

schoolyard with Momu, and Ahmed from the Public Works, carrying a large Algerian

flag. Just about all the immigrant families in town had turned out, and to

Bruno’s surprise, several of the women were wearing head scarves, something he

had not seen before. He supposed it was a symbol of solidarity for the march. He

hoped it was no more than that.

‘We’ll leave here at eleven forty, and that’ll get us to the Mairie in time for

midday,’ said Rollo. ‘It’s all arranged. Ten or fifteen minutes for a couple of

speeches and then we march to the war memorial with the town band, which gives

us time to give the children lunch before classes start again this afternoon.’

‘There may be more speeches than we expected. The Minister of the Interior is

turning up, and with all these TV cameras he’ll certainly want to say a few

words,’ said Bruno. ‘And you’ll have to carry the tricolore. Bachelot and

Jean-Pierre have decided to boycott the event since they have apparently

developed rather strong feelings about immigrants.’

‘The bastards,’ snapped Madame Montsouris, who had somewhere found a rather

small flag that Bruno assumed was the national emblem of Algeria. ‘And that

bastard Minister of the Interior. He’s as bad as the Front National. What right

does he have to be here? Who invited him?’

‘I think it was arranged with the Mayor,’ Bruno told her calmly, ‘but the

programme does not change. We want an orderly commemoration of an old war hero,

along with a show of solidarity with our neighbours against racism and violence.

Quiet and dignified, the Mayor says.’

‘We want a stronger statement than that.’ Madame Montsouris spoke again, loudly

now so that the other teachers and schoolchildren could hear her. ‘We have to

stop this racist violence now, once and for all, and make it clear that there’s

no place for fascist murderers round here.’

‘Save it for the speeches,’ Bruno said. He turned to Momu. ‘Where’s Karim? He

ought to be here by now.’

‘On his way,’ said Momu. ‘He’s borrowing a Croix de Guerre from old Colonel

Duclos so he can carry the medal on a cushion at the war memorial. He’ll be here

in a moment.’

‘Don’t worry, Bruno,’ said Rollo. ‘We’re all here and everything’s under

control. We’ll start as soon as Karim arrives.’

And no sooner had he said it than Karim’s little Citroën turned into the parking

lot in front of the college and he came out in his rugby club tracksuit, holding

a velvet cushion in one hand and brandishing the small bronze medal in the

other. Rollo formed them up, Momu and Karim and the family at the front with

half a dozen of the rugby team, and then the school students in columns of

three, each class led by a teacher and all flanked by the rest of the rugby

team. Rollo shepherded a schoolboy with a small drum on a sash around his neck

into the column beside him, and the lad started to beat out the cadence of a

march with single taps of his drumstick.

Bruno stood back to let them get started and then went out to the main road to

stop traffic. They made, he thought, a brave and dignified parade, until

Montsouris’s wife produced a bullhorn from her bag and began chanting ‘No to

racism, no to fascism.’ Fine sentiments, but not quite the tone that had been

planned. He was about to intervene when he saw Momu step back to have a word

with her. She stopped her chanting and put the bullhorn away.

Two TV cameras were filming them as they marched along the Rue de la République,

past the supermarket and the Farmers’ Co-op, past the big branch of the Crédit

Agricole and over the bridge, lined on both sides with townspeople, to the town

square and the Mairie. There, the Mayor and some other dignitaries stood waiting

on the low platform that was normally used for the music festival. With

irritation, Bruno noticed that the town’s small force of gendarmes was lined up

with Captain Duroc in front of the podium. He had asked Duroc to post his men in

twos at different spots around the square as a precaution. As the church bells

began to ring out noon, the siren on top of the Mairie sounded, and the entire

parade squeezed into the remaining space. There was already quite a crowd, the

bar was empty, and a third TV camera had joined the media group. The siren faded

away and the Mayor stepped forward.

‘Citizens of St Denis, Monsieur le Ministre, mes Généraux, friends and

neighbours,’ the Mayor began, his practised politician’s voice carrying easily

over the square. ‘We are here to show our sympathy with the family of our local

teacher Mohammed al-Bakr at the tragic death of his father Hamid. We are here to

give salute to Hamid as a fellow citizen, as a neighbour, and as a war hero who

fought for our dear native land. We all know the heavy circumstances of his

death, and the forces of order are working tirelessly to bring justice to his

family, just as we in our community are here to show our revulsion against all

forms of racism and hatred of others for their origin or their religion. And now

I have the honour to present Monsieur the Minister of the Interior, who has

joined us today to bring the condolences and support of our government.’

‘Send the Muslim bastards back where they came from,’ came a shout from

somewhere at the back, and everybody turned to look as the Minister stood

uncertainly at the microphone. Bruno began to move through the crowd, looking

for whichever idiot had called out.

‘Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!’ The chant began and with a

sinking heart Bruno saw three flags of the Front National lift themselves from

the crowd and began to wave. Putain! Those coaches he’d seen were not

Montsouris’s union friends at all. He felt a flurry at both sides of him and two

knots of rugby men with Karim at their head began pushing their way through

towards the flags.

Then came a howl from a bullhorn and another amplified chant began of ‘Arabs go

home! Arabs go home!’ Montsouris’s wife joined in with her own bullhorn calling

‘No to Racism!’ and the first volley of rotten fruit, eggs and vegetables began

sailing through the air towards the stage. This has been well organised, thought

Bruno grimly. He had seen three coaches in the car park, say thirty or forty men

in each, so there were probably as many as a hundred of them here – and only

thirty lads from the rugby club and a handful of Montsouris’s union toughs to

stop them. This could be very nasty, and all on national television. One of the

Front National flags went down as the rugby men reached it, and groups of men

began punching each other as women started to scream and run away.

Bruno stopped. There was not much a lone policeman could do here. He began

pushing his way back towards the stage. His priority now was to get the

schoolchildren clear. He’d leave the gendarmes to look after the dignitaries. A

sudden charge by some burly men, Montsouris among them, nearly knocked him down,

and as he scrambled for balance, a cabbage hit the back of his head and knocked

his cap off. Quickly he bent to grab it, otherwise the school children might not

know who he was. Shaking his head to clear it, he found Rollo already trying to

steer the children into the shelter of the covered market. A handful of the

older boys slipped aside and joined in the charge against the groups of Front

National supporters.

Amplified howls of ‘Send them back! Send them back!’ fought bullhorn slogans of

‘No to racism! No to fascism!’ as the dignitaries put their hands over their

heads against the volleys of tomatoes, and scampered into the Mairie past a

protective gauntlet of otherwise useless gendarmes. Captain Duroc went into the

Mairie with the Mayor, the Minister and the two generals, the gold braid of

whose dress uniforms looked the worse for the barrage of old fruit and

eggshells.

They managed to get the schoolchildren into the market. Shouting to making

himself heard over the din of shouting protestors, Bruno told Rollo and Momu to

get the youngest children into the café and tell old Fauquet to make sure the

door was locked and the shutters down; then to call the pompiers and tell them

to get their engines into the square now, with their sirens going and their

water hoses ready to send out some high pressure jets to clear the area.

Bruno took in the scene around him. In the confused melee in front of the hotel,

flags and placards were being turned into clubs and lances. Another smaller

fight was under way beside the steps that led to the old town, and a group of St

Denis women, Pamela and Christine among them, were trying to get away up the

steps as some skinheads grabbed at them. The crowd was thinning and Bruno pushed

his way through, seizing the first of the thugs by the collar, kicking his feet

from under him and shoving him into the legs of two of his cronies. That made

enough space for himself to reach the foot of the steps and get between the

thugs and the women.

‘Get away, get out of here!’ he shouted at the women as the thugs closed in,

trying to grab him. He felt the old training come back, his body moving

automatically into a fighting stance, his eyes scanning the scene for threats

and targets. He dropped his arms, ducked and rammed his head into the stomach of

his nearest assailant, seized the leg of another and pulled him off balance, and

then thumped his fist into the throat of the next, who sank to his knees,

choking.

That stopped the first rush, and suddenly time began to move slowly and the

instincts that had been drilled into him took over. A fierce joy began to grip

him, the adrenalin of combat, the self-confidence of a man trained for battle.

Now was the time to attack, when they had lost their momentum. Bracing himself

on the steps, he jumped at one youth who was brandishing a length of wood, with

a Front National poster attached, as thought it were a spear. He slammed the

heel of one hand into the base of the youth’s nose, then pirouetted to ram a

vicious elbow into the solar plexus of another. He used the turn to kick yet

another on the side of his knee and he was back at the base of the steps, three

men down before him.

One of the women stepped up beside Bruno and deliberately kicked the choking

skinhead in the testicles. Surprised, he registered that it was Pamela, who was

drawing back her foot to do it again. He stretched out his arms to hold her back

and keep the thugs away from the rest of the women when he felt a thudding blow

on the side of his face. Then he was punched hard in the kidneys and kicked in

the knee and someone else was hauling on his ankle. He knew that the first rule

of brawling was to stay on your feet, but he was dazed and he felt himself start

to go down. He forced himself to turn, to brace his arm against the stone wall,

but someone was holding tight onto his leg and two more were coming at him. He

flailed at the first one and stamped hard on the man holding his leg, hauling

hard on his hair, and the grip on his ankle slackened. But there were too many

And then something extraordinary happened: a whirlwind appeared. It was a slim,

slight whirlwind, but one that knew martial arts and leaped into the air,

kicking out one lethal foot aimed straight at the belly of the man in front of

Bruno. The whirlwind dropped, pirouetted and launched a second high kick into

the throat of another thug, and then landed and delivered two hard, short

punches to the nose of the man holding Bruno’s ankle. Suddenly free to move, he

turned to where the first blow to his head had come from and saw a middle-aged

stranger backing away from the whirlwind with his hands in the air. Bruno

grabbed an arm and twirled the man, seizing the back of his jacket and hauling

it upwards to imprison his arms, then tripped him and planted his boot hard on

the back of his prisoner’s neck. Suddenly a great calm seemed to settle over

him, even as the bullhorns continued to roar out their warring battle cries. The

women were disappearing up the steps and, in front of him, the whirlwind had

stopped fighting. At which point he saw with profound admiration that it was

Inspector Isabelle.

‘Thank you,’ he said. She smiled and nodded and darted off to the brawl still

under way in front of the hotel. Bruno released his foot from his prisoner. The

man groaned, shook his head and began to crawl away. Bruno ignored him.

He almost followed Isabelle, but stopped himself. He climbed the steps to get a

clearer view, and saw what he had to do next. He trotted back to the small squad

of gendarmes dithering outside the Mairie. As he heard the sound of windows

being smashed he shouted, ‘Follow me – and start blowing your whistles,’

although he was not entirely sure where he would lead them.

The Front National bullhorn seemed to be near the tossing flags, just in front

of the hotel, and that was where he headed. Four or five men were down on the

cobbles, and a few dozen were still milling around, but the rugby men knew what

they were doing. They had organised themselves into pairs, and fought back to

back. Karim had picked up a heavy metal litter bin, which he raised over his

head and threw with force into the knot of men guarding the Front National

flags. The ‘Send them back!’ bullhorn seemed to hiccup in pain and stopped

transmitting. Then Bruno led the gendarmes into the resulting confusion and

started handcuffing the ones on the ground. All of a sudden, it appeared to be

over. Men were still running, but running away.

Bruno shouted to the burliest of the gendarmes, a decent man he had known for

years. ‘Jean-Luc! There are three coaches in the bank car park. Go and

immobilise them – that’s what these bastards came in and that’s how they’ll try

to get out. Take a couple of your mates with you and handcuff the drivers if you

have to – or get some cars to form a blockade to keep the coaches in.’

Then the fire trucks arrived, two of them taking up most of the square, and the

pompiers climbed out and began to help. The first casualty they found was Ahmed,

their fellow volunteer fireman. He was unconscious, his face bloodied from a

smashed nose, and one of his front teeth was kicked in. A smaller red command

truck then screeched to a halt beside Bruno, its siren wailing, and Morisot, the

professional fireman who ran the local station, asked Bruno what his men could

do.

‘Start with first aid for those who need it, then round up anyone you don’t

recognise and lock them in your truck,’ Bruno instructed. ‘We’ll sort it all out

later at the Gendarmerie.’

Then he bent to check on young Roussel, a fast winger on the rugby team but too

slim and small for this kind of punch-up. He was dazed and winded and would have

a magnificent black eye, but was okay. Beside him, Lespinasse the prop forward,

short and squat and tough as they come, was on his knees and retching. ‘Bastards

kicked me in the balls,’ he grunted. Suddenly a TV camera and a microphone were

in Bruno’s face, and a concerned voice asked him what was happening.

Before he could think, and probably from sheer relief that none of his people

had been seriously hurt, Bruno said angrily, ‘We were attacked in our home town

by a bunch of outside extremists. That’s what happened.’

He took a breath and calmed himself, half-remembering some tedious lecture on

media relations at the Police Academy, which taught that the most important

thing was to get your side of the story out first because that would define the

subsequent coverage.

‘We were holding a quiet and peaceful parade and a meeting at the war memorial

to commemorate a dead war hero and these swines began chanting racist taunts and

throwing missiles and beating people up,’ he said. ‘It was mainly schoolchildren

gathered here in our town square, but these extremists didn’t seem to care. They

had organised this attack. They hired coaches to get here and brought their

banners and bullhorns and they came with one intention – to wreck our town and

our parade. But they didn’t reckon with the people of St Denis.’

‘What about casualties?’ came the next question, another camera this time.

‘We are still counting.’

‘What about your own injuries?’ he was asked. ‘That blood all over your face?’

He put his hand to his face and it did indeed come away bloody. ‘Mon Dieu,’ he

exclaimed. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

The cameras turned away as an ambulance blared its way into the square. In front

of the smashed plate glass window of the Hôtel St Denis, Doctor Gelletreau was

kneeling beside one of the prone bodies.

‘A couple of broken legs, a cracked collar bone and a few broken noses. Nothing

much worse than a good rugby match,’ Gelletreau said.

Bruno looked around his town square. He saw fire engines and ambulances, broken

windows, cobbles littered with smashed fruit, eggs and vegetables – and

frightened young faces peering from behind the stone pillars of the market. He

glanced up to the windows of the Mairie and spotted some shadowed faces peering

out from the banqueting chamber. So much for today’s lunch, he thought, and

began organising the transfer of those arrested over to the Gendarmerie. Bloody

Duroc, thought Bruno; this is his job.

CHAPTER

17

Dougal, Bruno’s Scottish chum from the tennis club, never usually interfered in

the official business of St Denis, even though the Mayor had twice asked him to

join his list of candidates for election to the local council. After selling his

own small construction company in Glasgow and taking early retirement in St

Denis, Dougal had become bored and started a company called Delightful Dordogne

that specialised in renting out houses and gîtes to tourists in the high season.

A lot of the foreign residents had signed up with him, taking their own holidays

away elsewhere in July and August and showing a handsome profit from the tenants

to whom Dougal rented their homes. With the handymen, cleaners, gardeners and

swimming pool maintenance staff that he hired to service the holiday homes,

Dougal had become a significant local employer. Bruno thought it made sense,

with so many foreigners moving into the district, to have one of them on the

council to represent their views. Dougal had always declined, pleading that he

was too busy and his French too flawed, but the day after the disturbances he

was in the council chamber with the rest of the delegation of local businessmen.

Speaking an angry but serviceable French, he explained how bad the TV news

reports of the previous evening had been.

‘I’ve had three cancellations today, all from good and regular customers, and

I’m expecting more. It even made the English papers. Look at this,’ he said, and

tossed a stack of newspapers onto the table. Everybody had already seen the

headlines, and photos of the riot in the town square, but Bruno winced as Dougal

brandished the copy of SudOuest with Bruno’s picture on the front page. He had

been photographed standing with his arms outstretched to protect two cowering

women from a group of attackers, and the headline read ‘St Denis – the front

line’. It was the moment when he had tried to shelter Pamela and Christine and

the other women, just before he had been struck down. The photo should have been

of Isabelle, he thought. She had been the real heroine.

‘All credit to you, Bruno, you did a great job, but this is very bad for

business,’ Dougal said. And the rest of them chimed in. Everybody was worried

about the coming season: the hotel, the restaurants, the camp sites, the

amusement park manager.

‘How long is this going to go on?’ demanded Jerome, who ran the small theme park

of French history where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake twice a day and

Marie Antoinette was guillotined every hour, with medieval jousting in between.

‘It is up to the police to end this quickly, arrest somebody and get it over

with. This business of interviewing suspects with no real result is going to

spark more trouble from the right and more counter-demonstrations from the left

and more bad publicity on TV. It will just ruin our season.’

‘We all know that and we all agree. But what do you propose we do about it?’ the

Mayor asked. ‘We can’t ban all demonstrations, that’s against the law, and as a

town council we have no authority to intervene with the judicial authorities.

There’s been a hideous racist murder and passions have been aroused on both left

and right. We’ve been assigned extra gendarmes to keep order and we have over

forty people charged with riot and assault, so they’re unlikely to bother us

again. This is an isolated event. It may well hurt our business this year, but

the effects won’t last. We just have to grit our teeth and wait this process

out.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll still be in business next year,’ said gloomy Franc Duhamel

from the camp site. He said this every year, but this time he might be proved

right. ‘I borrowed a lot of money from the bank to finance that big expansion

and the new swimming pool, and if I have a bad season I’m in real trouble. If it

hadn’t been for that group booking by the Dutch lads who came down for the

Motor-Cross Rally, I’d have been in trouble already.’ Bruno nodded, recalling

the traffic chaos the event had caused the weekend before Hamid’s murder, with

hundreds of motorbikes and supporters filling the town and surrounding roads.

‘I’ve talked to the regional managers of the banks,’ said the Mayor. ‘They

understand that this is a temporary problem, and they won’t be closing anybody

down – not if they want to get any business from this Commune again. And not

unless they want to make an enemy of the Minister of the Interior. You all saw

the report of his speech last night, about the whole of France standing firmly

with the brave citizens of St Denis and our stout policeman.’

Bruno felt himself squirm. The politician had just been trying to put the best

possible face on what had for him been a humiliation, shouted down from speaking

and pelted with fruit and eggs. To be seen on TV presiding helplessly over a

riot was not a good image for a Minister of the Interior, so naturally he had

tried to spin it differently in his scheduled speech in Bordeaux. Bruno doubted

very much that he would lift a finger to help any troubled businessman falling

behind on his bank loans. He would never be able to hear of St Denis again

without an instinctive shiver of distaste. But such assurances were what the

businessmen needed to hear from their Mayor, and Bruno told himself he should be

sufficiently astute to understand that by now.

‘What we want is a breathing space,’ said Philippe, the manager of the Hôtel St

Denis, who usually acted as spokesman for the town’s business community. ‘We

need some temporary tax relief for this year to help us get through this bad

patch. We know taxes have to be paid, but we want the council to agree to give

us some time, so that rather than pay in June, we agree to pay in October when

the season is over and we can show you our books. If we go down, the whole town

goes down, so we see this as a sort of investment by the town in its own

future.’

‘That’s a useful idea,’ said the Mayor. ‘I’ll put it to the council, but we’ll

probably need to be sure such a delay would be legal.’

‘The other thing on our minds is that new head of the gendarmes,’ said Duhamel.

‘He was useless, totally useless. If it hadn’t been for Bruno taking charge it

could have been a lot worse. We’d like you to ask for Capitaine Duroc to be

transferred. Nobody in town has any respect for him after yesterday.’

‘I’m not sure that’s fair,’ said Bruno. He had felt a great deal better about

Duroc when he arrived at the bank car park after the riot and saw the three

coaches blocked by a dozen gendarme motorbikes, a burly cop standing guard at

each door, and the lanky Captain taking the names and addresses of the forty-odd

men detained inside. Two blue Gendarmerie vans were parked beside the coaches.

The reinforcements had finally arrived, and the policemen were doing their job.

‘His immediate reaction was to ensure that the Mayor and distinguished guests

were secure,’ Bruno went on. ‘Then he called for reinforcements and took

personal charge of the arrests of the rioters who invaded our town. I found him

in the car park, where he had forty of them under lock and key in their own

coaches. And his men behaved well. Although he is obviously new in the town and

a bit short of experience, I’m not sure we have anything to reproach him with.’

‘Bruno could be right,’ the Mayor chimed in. ‘I’d rather we used the sympathy we

now have in official circles to get some financial help through this rough patch

than squander whatever influence we have in a fight with the Defence Ministry to

get the Capitaine removed. And after those two generals got egg and tomato all

over their uniforms, I’m not sure St Denis is very popular with the Defence

Ministry this week.’

That was clever, Bruno thought. The local businessmen had perked up at the

prospect of financial aid, and then the joke about the generals had got them all

smiling. Every time he watched the Mayor in action, he felt he learned

something.

‘Thank you for coming to share your concerns, my friends,’ the Mayor continued,

rising from his seat at the head of the table. ‘The council will do what we can

to help. And while we’re here, I am sure you’ll want to join me in expressing

thanks to our new local hero, our own Chef de Police, for his outstanding

service yesterday. That statement he made about our town being invaded and

defending ourselves was admirable. The Minister of the Interior was particularly

warm in his praise – probably because you took the potentially damaging

attention away from him.’

Bruno almost blushed as they all grunted approval and some of them reached

across to shake his hand. He still expected the Mayor to dress him down in

private for that too-too clever idea about taking over Montsouris’s protest

march. But for the moment, his little speech to the TV cameras and the press