Black Diamond - Martin Walker [35]
The second plastic folder was titled “Crevettes Bigeard,” which sounded to Bruno like food. But as he read on, he saw that General Bigeard’s shrimps were corpses or survivors of torture who were loaded into helicopters, taken over the Mediterranean and dropped into the sea. After some of their bodies floated ashore, the torturers began taking the precaution of putting the feet into a large plastic bucket filled with cement before dumping them. These, with a kind of black humor that Bruno found repellent, were known as Bigeard’s shrimps. Again, Hercule had appended a list of names and units.
Bruno put the folders back in their place. No wonder the brigadier was alarmed. Hercule’s memoirs would open a lot of old wounds. He looked at the photographs, all expensively framed in silver, which took up part of the wide surface of the desk. The one the baron had recognized was still in the front row, but pride of place was held by a studio portrait of a beautiful Asian woman with a small child in her arms. Another photo of the woman showed her arm in arm with a much younger Hercule. Yet another showed her sitting in the middle of a row of young Asian girls, all wearing the tabard, the traditional French school uniform.
There were more photos of young Hercule in army camouflage, one of him in a jeep wearing the shoulder bars of a captain and looking up at a cluster of parachutes dropping from the sky. A MAS-38 machine gun was balanced across his knee. Bruno thought he recognized the event from other photos of the same scene. It was the relief of Dien Bien Phu, when the Foreign Legion paratroops were dropped in to reinforce the doomed French outpost whose defeat heralded the end of France’s empire in Indochina. In an adjacent photo, this time in Algeria from the look of the buildings, he was surrounded by young Asian troops, presumably some of their Vietnamese allies the French took with them when they withdrew after Ho Chi Minh’s victory.
By now Hercule was a major. More photos showed him with a very old de Gaulle pinning the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur to his chest. At the back was a much smaller photo of Hercule with an impressive-looking uniformed black man with a beard and a white man in commando camouflage with a face that was vaguely familiar. Half the history of modern France was spread out in the photos before him, some of it doubtless secret, and Bruno marveled at the way a man such as this had been content to sit back and help him learn about truffles.
He thought of the manpower it would take to go through Hercule’s mounds of files and papers, looking for whatever embarrassments or secrets the state wished to guard. But there was one book he expected to find and so far he had drawn a blank. It was Hercule’s truffle journal, the one Didier had been so eager to see. Bruno assumed that Hercule kept the journal with him, and it would thus be found by the police forensics team. He made a mental note to check with J-J.
The drawers of the desk all seemed to be unlocked. Using his handkerchief on the handles, he opened them and found bills and bank statements neatly filed. But in the central drawer, he saw an envelope marked “Testament” and handwritten below was a note saying that the original will was filed with a notaire in Ste. Alvère. He closed the drawer again and went back through the kitchen to the outside toilet, pushing aside the paint can he had left there. He put it back where he’d found it by the shed and went in to pee, smiling at the torn-up