A Market Tale Read online

  Praise for Martin Walker’s Bruno Series

  “The small towns where Martin Walker sets his enchanting country mysteries embody the sublime physical beauty and intractable political problems of the Dordogne region of France.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

  “In an era when most Americans are ignorant of France in its true richness, generosity of spirit, and quality of life, Mr. Walker and his Bruno offer an enchanting introduction into this very real world. The American reading public should flock to join them.”

  —Martin Sieff, The Washington Times

  “Captivating….Sure to appeal to readers with a palate for mysteries with social nuance and understated charm.”

  —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

  “Lyrical….Walker evokes his French community’s celebrations of wine, food, love, and friendship with obvious affection but without sentimentality. His villagers are no more immune from modern times than the rest of us—they just drink better wine.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY MARTIN WALKER

  Bruno and the Carol Singers (eShort)

  The Resistance Man

  The Devil’s Cave

  The Crowded Grave

  Black Diamond

  The Dark Vineyard

  Bruno, Chief of Police

  America Reborn

  Martin Walker

  A Market Tale

  Martin Walker served as foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Europe and was the editor of United Press International. He is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center and directed the Global Business Policy Council, both in Washington, D.C. He now lives mainly in the Périgord region of France, where he writes, chairs the jury of the Prix Ragueneau culinary prize, and is a chevalier of the Confrérie du Pâté de Périgueux.

  www.brunochiefofpolice.com

  A VINTAGE EBOOK ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Walker and Watson, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Vintage eBook ISBN 9781101873977

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Joan Wong

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Martin Walker

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Market Tale

  Like so many events in the small Périgord town of St. Denis, deep in the gastronomic heartland of France, this story begins in the market that takes place each week in the square between the seventeenth-century mairie and the old stone bridge that crosses the River Vézère. On a Tuesday morning in early summer, Kati, a young woman with short, fair hair and a little redness on her bare arms from her first exposure to the sun that year, was staring entranced at a stall displaying a wider selection of strawberries than she had ever known. Her eyes darted eagerly from the deep crimson of the Mara des Bois to the plump red of the Gariguettes, from the almost-orange Charlottes to the purple Rosa Linda that looked so moist she imagined the juice seeping through their skins.

  “Try one of each,” the stallholder called out cheerfully. He placed oranges in a careful pyramid. Kati noticed his lively dark eyes and tumble of curly hair before she realized that he was limping as he walked toward her. “See which one you prefer,” he said.

  With the deliberation of a woman used to watching her pennies, Kati tried the cheapest first, the Gariguette, which would have tasted as she expected a strawberry to taste, except this was her first of the year. And since it had been picked just after dawn that morning, it was as fresh a piece of fruit as she had ever eaten. Without thinking, she closed her eyes, feeling the flavor intensify until she felt she was eating the very essence of summer.

  “Try this one,” the stallholder said, offering her a small berry impaled on a cocktail stick. “It’s my favorite, Mara des Bois.”

  It was like tasting perfume: a sweetness that was intense without being sickly, and with a sparkling zest that seemed both full of energy and deeply comforting. She thought to herself, This is why I came to France.

  “Mmm,” she said, looking at the stallholder’s friendly face beaming at her. “That has to be the best one.”

  “Eat them today,” he advised, offering her a small plastic box that was filled to the brim.

  “That is too many. Do you have a smaller box?” she asked, in the careful French she had learned at school.

  “Not usually,” he said, shaking half of the panier into a paper bag and adding one strawberry of each of the other varieties. “Where are you from?”

  “Switzerland,” she said. “How much is that, please?”

  “Call it a euro. You here on holiday? What’s your name?”

  “Yes, holiday. My name is Kati.”

  Kati came from Schaffhausen, a town in northern Switzerland famous for its watches and for the Rheinfall, the majestic waterfall of the River Rhine. She had earlier that year celebrated her twenty-eighth birthday with the suitable young man she was expected to marry. Over a glass of champagne in what he called “our” restaurant, he had presented Kati with a small box that contained a ring. At that moment several thoughts that had long lain almost dormant suddenly thrust themselves simultaneously upon her.

  The first was that she did not enjoy her job as a junior official in the prosecutor’s office. The second was that she was bored by the young man, whose name was Dieter, and who not only worked in the same office but spoke of little but work, except for sports. The next thought came with a growing sense of dismay, that there should be more to her life than this. She yearned for drama and excitement. She owed herself some adventure, something unpredictable, Kati said to herself, something that was truly her own. She rose from the restaurant table, apologized to Dieter while explaining that she would not marry him, and walked briskly home to her studio apartment. With a sense of liberation that was as thrilling as it was alarming, Kati had then begun to pack her suitcase.

  And now, as she strolled on through the market of St. Denis, buying a small round disk of goat’s cheese and trying to choose among the array of pâtés at the charcuterie stall, a friendly looking policeman with a large baguette under his arm smiled at her and touched his cap. At each stall, Kati noticed, he stopped to shake hands with the men and kiss the cheeks of the women. He would sample a slice of saucisson here and a sliver of melon there as he headed for the small table between a cheese stall and the one where she had bought her strawberries. Already, three of the stools at the table were occupied: one by the man who had been selling wicker baskets and was now uncorking a bottle of wine; another by a man she had seen selling olives who was busy opening an unlabeled can of pâté. Perhaps, she thought with pleasure, it had been homemade. On the third stool sat an elderly man with long white hair, his chin resting on his hands, which in turn were perched atop his walking stick.

  “Bonjour à tous,” said the policeman, laying the large baguette, still warm from the oven, upon the table. He was greeted by a chorus of “Bonjour, Bruno.” Hands were shaken, places taken, bread torn into chunks and cheese and pâté spread upon them. Wine was poured, glasses clinked together to jolly cries of Santé!, and the ritual of the casse-croûte was under way.

  As she paused before the giant rotisserie in which
quail, pigeons and chickens were turning on spits as their juices dripped down onto the potatoes roasting in the tray below, Kati wondered why these men were embarking at nine in the morning upon the very meal she would be having for her lunch some three hours later. Even as she formed the thought in her mind, she realized that these were men who rose before dawn to gather and load their offerings, drive to the market with them and prepare their stalls for the rush of locals who would start arriving at eight. At nine the men could then sit down to enjoy their breakfast before the tourists arrived sometime after ten and the second rush of locals followed to buy food for their own lunches. Lingering nearby, Kati eavesdropped discreetly on their cheerful chatter around the table, where two more stallholders had now joined them, one the curly-haired man who had sold her the strawberries.

  It seemed to her that all these men met this way regularly. The man with the limp who had introduced her to Mara des Bois was called Marcel, she learned, and the man with the cheese stall was Stéphane. She did not catch the olive seller’s name. The basket seller was Raoul; he also staffed an adjoining stall that sold Bergerac wines, as she learned when he was summoned from the table to offer a free tasting to a customer. When Raoul returned they were joined by Jean-Paul from the rotisserie, who brought a freshly roasted chicken and a vast dish of roast potatoes. And the policeman, she knew, was called Bruno.

  When she noticed that Marcel was watching her as she hovered nearby, Kati turned away to examine a stall of colorful bolts of African cloth, leather belts and T-shirts manned by a tall, dark man in flowing robes and a skullcap. He grinned at her, muttered something she did not catch, pointed to the table with the other men as if to say she could find him there if she wanted to make a purchase and headed across to fetch a plate of shrimps from the fishmonger before joining the others.

  From his place at the table, Bruno, whose formal title was chief of police of St. Denis, had noticed the exchange of glances between Marcel and the stranger and asked him quietly, “Who’s the new girl?”

  “A Swiss tourist called Kati,” Marcel replied, pouring a glass for Bruno and another for himself. “She likes my strawberries.”

  Bruno had not previously seen his Marcel taking notice of another woman since he had lost his wife. So with his policeman’s eye he studied Kati as she browsed at the honey stall with its beeswax candles. He saw a healthy-looking woman wearing no makeup, in a sleeveless white dress and red sandals. The dress was belted with a red scarf, revealing a waist that looked almost too trim for her sturdy figure. Bruno guessed she would play a powerful game of tennis. A canvas shopping bag was slung over her shoulder, and she strolled across to the terrace outside Fauquet’s café and sat, taking the strawberries from her bag. Suddenly, as if aware she was being watched, she glanced across to see Bruno and Marcel looking at her. She gave a hesitant smile and turned away to order a coffee from the waitress.

  On an impulse, and with a daring that Bruno applauded, Marcel excused himself to his friends of the casse-croûte and limped across to the terrace to join her. She welcomed him with a shy smile. A second coffee was ordered, the strawberries were shared, and then a pain au chocolat, and still Marcel and Kati lingered. Alerted by Bruno, Jeanne, the woman who collected the market fees, happily replaced Marcel at his stall, although most of the locals simply placed the money for their fruits and vegetables in the small basket he used for change.

  So it had begun. And it continued over dinner that evening at Ivan’s bistro, where the plat du jour was gigot périgourdin, a leg of roast young lamb that had been studded with slivers of garlic and sprigs of thyme and basted in duck fat before being served with haricots blancs. Unlike the setting in Schaffhausen, this was a restaurant that Kati had no wish to leave. The glass of chilled Bergerac Sec that Ivan offered her as an aperitif delighted her more than the champagne of that earlier evening. Marcel was charmed to hear, in Kati’s pleasantly accented French, that she had come to St. Denis because of a postcard a school friend had sent her years earlier showing the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, and she had always promised herself to visit them one day. Kati was even more pleased by the Pécharmant wine that was served with the lamb, and Kati and Marcel both took it as an omen that Ivan’s dessert that evening was Mara des Bois strawberries.

  The one moment that could have been difficult came when Marcel asked if he could walk her back to the hotel, and Kati suddenly thought of his lame leg. But Marcel had been thinking of this all evening and had decided on bold measures. He rose, raised his left foot to rest it on an adjoining chair and lifted his trouser leg to show her his prosthetic limb. He rapped on it firmly with his knuckles.

  “I walked every day to get used to this,” he said with a touch of pride. “At first, just a couple of meters, but after a week a hundred meters, and after a month I tried for my first kilometer. And now I walk ten kilometers every weekend and can still totter up and down the rugby field as a linesman.”

  The hotel, the most modest in St. Denis, was a short stroll from the bistro. It being very early in the season, Kati had booked a week at a special low rate, she told Marcel, and had resolved to hire a bicycle to visit the caves. Lascaux might be a little far for cycling, unless you are in training for the Tour de France, Marcel said, then smiled. He added that he had no market on Thursday, his day off, and would be delighted to drive her to Lascaux. He had not seen the caves since he was a schoolboy and had always promised himself to go again.

  Bruno later heard from Mauricette, the wife of the hotel owner, that Kati and Marcel had parted on the hotel steps with a polite exchange of kisses on both cheeks. Then the girl had stood awhile in the darkness of the lobby, looking after Marcel as he limped away, whistling. And Bruno, being a romantic soul, wondered to himself what tune had come into Marcel’s head, and what thoughts and fantasies the two people had entertained as they parted.

  Marcel’s thought, Bruno learned the next day, had been very practical. Kati had told Marcel that she was trying to find work locally so she could spend the summer in the Périgord while thinking what career she might follow next, now that she had resigned from her tedious job in Schaffhausen. Marcel called the mairie to ask if Bruno knew of anything. And naturally he did, since little happened in St. Denis and the broader commune around it—love affairs, business ventures, family scandals, political plots—without Bruno learning of it. So on the morning of the trip to Lascaux, while Marcel waited in his car outside, Kati went into the offices of Delightful Dordogne, a rental agency for dozens of local gîtes and holiday villas, hoping to get a job, perhaps as a cleaning woman.

  Dougal, the Scottish owner, was delighted to learn that Kati spoke German and English as well as serviceable French and Italian. She explained that her mother was from Yorkshire, and the sound Swiss education system had equipped her with the additional language skills. Dougal hired her on the spot as a troubleshooter to take care of any concerns or problems his foreign clients might have. The job came with a room in one of the houses Dougal maintained for his staff and with a battered but serviceable Citroën deux-chevaux that was older than she was.

  Bruno learned later from Marcel that in the sudden darkness in the cave of Lascaux, when the guide had turned off the entrance lights, Kati had clutched at his hand. And their hands had stayed entwined as the different lights came on to illuminate the paintings, eighteen thousand years old, that covered the white chalk walls and ceilings around them. And when Kati had looked up to marvel at the horses and bulls and deer that seemed to dance together, she had leaned against him and rested her head against his.

  Bruno took great pleasure in the romances of his friends, in part because he was of a generous disposition and enjoyed seeing people he knew fall in love, and also because their affairs always seemed so much simpler than his own rather complicated romantic life. He felt a special happiness at this great good fortune that had fallen upon his friend Marcel, who had been dealt such a hard blow by fate. Bruno had still been playing rugby for the town team wh
en Marcel had returned to St. Denis, equipped with a new diploma as a physical education teacher. Marcel had joined the rugby team and taught the sport so well that the collège team he trained won the cup as champions of the département. He also taught tennis and basketball, introduced St. Denis to yoga and took the older classes on skiing trips to the Pyrenees in winter and to the Basque coast in summer for the surfing. He was the fittest young man in St. Denis, and, once he married his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne, and they settled in one of the subsidized apartments the collège made available for its teachers, he was probably the happiest.

  The idyll had lasted for three years, until the night of the annual dinner for the département tennis clubs. Yvonne had been driving, since she seldom drank, and somehow on the steep, twisting road from Montignac the car had gone over the cliff. And Marcel had lost his wife, his leg and his profession.

  With great determination, he had learned to walk again and took over his uncle’s fruit and vegetable stall in the market, supplied mainly from his own small farm, his stock swollen by the vast extended family of cousins in the surrounding communes. But that was not quite enough for Marcel, who had resolved to have the finest stall not only in St. Denis but in the whole of the Périgord. He selected only the best items and displayed them with style. In summer, he was at different markets six days a week, and five days in winter. On his day off he visited restaurants in the region, offering his produce but also asking the owners what they liked but could not easily obtain. Armed with this knowledge, Marcel set off for Rungis, the giant wholesale food market near Orly Airport outside Paris, to see what was available and, more important, what exotic fruits and vegetables he might buy that other stalls would not have.

  By chance, on his first visit, Marcel saw on a notice board a list of matches to be played by the Rungis rugby team. He telephoned the number of the club secretary, arranged to meet him and learned that one of the players had been with him at the physical education college where Marcel had earned his diploma. They had even played on the same team. Marcel was immediately invited to lunch that day with his old teammate, who heard the story of Marcel’s limp, the loss of his wife, his struggle to walk again and to build a new life as a stallholder in the markets.