Black Diamond - Martin Walker [34]
The house smelled clean, with a touch of mustiness from old books and Gauloises mixed with wood smoke from the previous evening’s fire. The kitchen was tidy, a washed cup and plate and an ashtray on the drying rack. The desk and papers in the big living room looked undisturbed. Bruno went upstairs and found again the signs of a neat and well-organized man. One small bedroom was filled with boxes of files and papers, and Bruno left them for the brigadier’s people to examine. The iron-framed single bed in Hercule’s room had been made and covered with a brightly colored cotton spread. Old tribal rugs were spread on the floor, and Bruno assumed they were antiques. Hercule’s clothes were hung in a large wardrobe, and there was no indication of anyone else ever staying, no women’s clothing and only the most simple masculine toiletries in the bathroom. The walls were papered in a design from another era, pale red prints of eighteenth-century scenes against a gray background.
The books by Hercule’s bed were works of history. Bruno put down his shotgun and picked up the first. It was on the French war in Vietnam, Jean Ferrandi’s Les Officiers français face au Vietminh. But most covered the Algerian War. Bruno recognized Axel Nicol’s La Bataille de l’O.A.S. and Claude Paillat’s Dossier secret de l’Algérie. There were several bookmarks inside General Massu’s memoirs, La Vraie bataille d’Alger, and even more inside General Paul Aussaresses’s Services spéciaux. Bruno remembered the scandal it had provoked when published a few years earlier. Aussaresses had confessed to the routine use of torture and claimed that François Mitterrand as minister of justice had approved the practice, twenty years before he had become president of France. Bruno looked at the marked pages, all of them referring to torture.
He put the book down and returned downstairs. There was no sign of a safe, and the cellar contained only wine. Bruno could not help himself. He squatted down to examine some of the bottles and handled them reverently: Château Angélus from St. Emilion, Château l’Evangile and Château le Pin from Pomerol, Château Haut-Brion from Graves. He smiled to himself and envied Hercule’s heirs.
Back in the living room, which looked as if Hercule might return any moment, there were press clippings on the desk in what he assumed to be Chinese and Vietnamese. Another book had been left open with an old-fashioned lead-weighted leather bookmark holding the pages in place. It was in English, called SOE in France, and written by M. R. D. Foot. The publisher was Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, which made Bruno assume it was an official volume on the work of British intelligence in France in World War II. The English was almost too much for him, but Bruno made a note of the number of the page that had been held open. The text on the page seemed to be about a British officer named Starr who had become the mayor of the small commune of Castelnausous-l’Auvignon in Gascony, and whose role allowed him to provide quantities of official but false documents. Why would Hercule be interested in that?
Also on the desk was a thick file of notes and what looked like the draft of a book of Hercule’s memoirs, almost all of it about Vietnam and Algeria. On top of the file were two transparent plastic file folders. The first contained an account of a farm at a place called Ameziane, a detention center in Algeria run by a Centre de Renseignement et d’Action, one of the counterinsurgency intelligence units based in the nearby city of Constantine. Hercule’s notes said that torture had been practiced there on an “industrial scale” and added that