The Chocolate War 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

  Martin Walker

  The Chocolate War

  Martin Walker is a senior fellow of the Global Business Policy Council, a private think tank based in Washington, D.C. He is also editor in chief emeritus and international affairs columnist at United Press International. His previous novels in the Bruno series are Bruno, Chief of Police; The Dark Vineyard; Black Diamond; The Crowded Grave; The Devil”s Cave; The Resistance Man; The Children Return; The Patriarch; Fatal Pursuit; and The Templars’ Last Secret, all international bestsellers. He lives in Washington, D.C., and the Dordogne.

  www.brunochiefofpolice.com

  ALSO BY MARTIN WALKER

  Fiction

  The Templars’ Last Secret

  Fatal Pursuit

  A Market Tale (eShort)

  The Patriarch

  The Children Return

  The Resistance Man

  The Devil’s Cave

  Bruno and the Carol Singers (eShort)

  The Devil’s Cave

  The Crowded Grave

  Black Diamond

  The Dark Vineyard

  Bruno, Chief of Police

  The Caves of Périgord

  Nonfiction

  The Iraq War

  Europe in the Twenty-first Century (coauthor)

  America Reborn

  The President They Deserve

  The Cold War: A History

  Martin Walker’s Russia

  The Waking Giants: Gorbachev and Perestroika

  Powers of the Press

  The National Front

  The Chocolate War

  A Bruno, Chief of Police Story

  Martin Walker

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House, LLC

  New York

  A VINTAGE EBOOK ORIGINAL, MAY 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Martin Walker

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

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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

  The Cataloging-in-Publication data for The Chocolate War is available from the Library of Congress.

  Vintage eShort ISBN 9780525564539

  Ebook ISBN 9780525564539

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Martin Walker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Chocolate War

  The prosperity of the small French town of St. Denis in the Périgord had rested for seven centuries upon its weekly market, the oldest and largest in the region. Its continued success and security were therefore a priority for the local policeman, Bruno Courrèges. He was usually to be seen patrolling the town’s two main squares and the long street that joined them shortly after seven each Tuesday morning when the market stalls were being set out.

  Bruno always enjoyed watching as the stalls were loaded with cheeses, sausages, fruits, vegetables, ducks, geese, fish, oysters, mushrooms, chickens, and so much more. The items on display measured the changes in French and tourist tastes. Only a single stall continued to offer the traditional aprons and housecoats that once clad almost all the farmers’ wives. Several offered comic T-shirts, miniskirts, and the kind of metal-studded high-heeled shoes that once were associated with unusual sexual tastes. Organic soaps, exotic spices, and obscurely named teas that Bruno had never heard of were increasingly on display, along with hand-carved wooden toys, used books, and garish covers for mobile phones.

  Bruno knew most of the stallholders well and his patrol was punctuated by handshakes with dozens of the men and the bise of greeting on the cheeks of women of all ages. And they all usually bent down to stroke Bruno’s basset hound, Balzac, or offer the dog some tiny treat from their stalls. Sometimes in summer, when the usual ranks of regulars were swollen by new merchants, Bruno had to settle arguments over whose stall should go where, or challenges to the accuracy of Fat Jeanne’s tape measure.

  Fat Jeanne, a jolly woman of almost spherical shape with a booming laugh, who even referred to herself by the nickname by which everyone knew her, was la mère du marché, the town employee who collected five euros for each meter of frontage for every stall and placed the money in an ancient leather bag she carried. A single centimeter or two extra was acceptable; anything over that was not, and Jeanne would then demand payment for an additional meter. Bruno recalled with a smile one salesman offering discount tools using one of his own saws to carve off a sliver of wood no wider than his finger to save a bit of money. Among Bruno’s various duties was to escort Jeanne to the bank just before it closed at noon and deposit the cash in the town’s account. On the busy days of the tourist season she usually banked well over a thousand euros. In the depths of winter, it fell to two or three hundred.

  Because of the cash, Bruno kept a watchful eye on Jeanne and on strangers, and on this morning in November he spotted an unfamiliar African youngster in his teens loading a hand trolley from a van he recognized. Bruno stopped, greeted the youth, shook hands, and asked, “Where’s Léopold?”

  “He’s already at the stall,” came the reply. “I’m his nephew, Cali, down from Paris to learn the market trade.”

  “What are you selling?” Bruno asked. The square metal tins and boxes of small plastic cups being unloaded were things he hadn’t seen before. Léopold usually sold cheap T-shirts, sunglasses, leather belts, and bolts of African cloth.

  “African coffees and chocolate,” Cali replied with a friendly smile. “It’s my idea to try something new. Uncle Léo sells almost nothing this time of year.”

  Bruno nodded. Léopold usually stayed in St. Denis until the last market before Christmas and then flew back to Senegal for two or three months, visiting family and buying new stock for the next season. Bruno wished the young man luck and walked on to complete his circuit before seeking out Léopold’s stall, where an electric kettle was steaming behind the counter, plugged into one of the sockets that St. Denis provided—for an extra fee.

  Léopold was an old friend, a regular at the market for years
before Bruno’s arrival, who had once helped Bruno make an arrest during a brief period of trouble between Chinese vendors and the proprietors of the traditional Vietnamese food stalls they were trying to replace. The big Senegalese in his flowing robes opened his arms to hug Bruno and the two men brushed cheeks. Bruno saw that Cali’s tins of coffee, three cafetières, plastic cups, and sachets of sugar now took up a third of Léopold’s two-meter-wide stall. The labels on the various tins indicated that the coffee inside came from all over Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Ghana. Leaning against each of the tins were blocks of dark chocolate from each country. A hand-lettered sign said the coffee was one euro a cup, which was cheaper than the one euro thirty cents most cafés now charged.

  “None of your coffee comes from Senegal,” said Bruno.

  “People have just started growing it there and I hope we’ll have some next month,” said Léopold. “Try a cup of one of the other brands.”

  Bruno chose coffee from the Ivory Coast, since he had been stationed there for several months while in the French army. He still remembered the taste of the coarse local blend, the robusta version that he and most French people had grown up drinking before the finer Arabica coffee began to take over the market.

  “On the house,” said Cali.

  Bruno grinned and shook his head, laying down a single euro coin on one of the tins. “You know you have to give Jeanne an extra two euros if you’re using the electricity,” he said. “And what do you do for water?”

  Cali pointed to a large plastic bidon holding twenty liters that was stashed behind the stall. “And I’ll rinse out the cafetières at the public fountain. We have it all planned out.”

  The coffee was very good, strong and rich, just as he remembered. He closed his eyes and recalled the bustle of the street markets in Abidjan, the feel of the African heat, the pungent smells and tastes. With that, he then recalled another drink that had been popular there.

  “Do you do that mélange they used to sell in Abidjan?” he asked. “You know, that mix of coffee with crumbled chocolate.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Cali, looking at the blocks of dark chocolate he was also selling. He pulled out one of the blocks, unwrapped it, and used one of the penknives Léopold sold to begin shaving very thin slices into a bowl. He poured on some boiling water from the kettle, stirred it to help the chocolate melt and then added some coffee. He poured the result into two cups, took one for himself and handed the other to Bruno. “Next week, I’ll have some properly crumbled chocolate or maybe I’ll try raw cocoa.”

  “It’s not quite right yet, but I’m sure it will get there,” said Bruno, after taking a sip. “Maybe it needs a bit of honey and a pinch or two of cinnamon.”

  Then he looked at the price list and his eyes widened. The chocolate blocks were two euros each, which was what he’d expect to pay for chocolate much less exotic than this. But the Kenyan and Tanzanian coffees were twelve and fourteen euros a kilo. Bruno usually paid four euros at the local supermarket for coffee. Even the Ivory Coast brand was six euros.

  “I don’t think you’ll sell much at those prices,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” said Cali. “People like something special from time to time. What if you’re inviting that special someone to have coffee at your place? Or if you’re holding a big dinner party? And we can sell the green coffee beans more cheaply so people can roast their own.”

  “Good luck,” said Bruno, and continued his patrol, noting on his next round that several people were gathered in front of Léopold’s stall and that Cali was already tying up one large plastic garbage bag that was full of used cups. He pursed his lips. At one euro a cup, the stallholders were coming to Cali rather than heading for Fauquet’s café. And Bruno recalled Fauquet saying that he did close to half his weekly business on market day. He glanced across the square and saw Fauquet standing on the steps of his café, arms akimbo, scowling at Léopold’s stall.

  Bruno’s approach to his job was that preventing trouble was far preferable to dealing with its aftermath, so he strolled across to Fauquet’s place, sat down at one of the outside tables and asked for a croissant and a coffee. Fauquet brought them out himself and then stood by Bruno’s table, glaring at his new competition.

  “It’s not right,” he said. “I have taxes to pay, social charges for my staff, which damn near doubles the cost of my payroll. I’ll go broke if this goes on. Aren’t you going to do something about it?”

  “What did you have in mind?” Bruno asked as he took a first bite of his croissant, still warm from the oven, and gave Balzac his usual treat of the other pointed end.

  “Tell them to stop undercutting me.”

  “It’s new, people want to try it out,” said Bruno, after washing down his croissant with a sip of coffee. “They aren’t really competitors. They don’t sell croissants, let alone ones as good as yours. They don’t make cakes or special chocolates like you do. They don’t bake bread or make ice cream and they don’t do your full breakfasts of fruit juice and tartines and homemade jams. You can’t sit down and chat with friends at their stall or arrange to meet, as your customers can here. They don’t do teas and they don’t have a bar or alcohol license. And when it comes to the local gossip, half of what I need to know in this town I learn from you.”

  “It’s the coffee that brings them in on market day,” Fauquet said. “I usually sell forty or fifty cups to the stallholders even on a bad day, a couple of hundred in high season. Guess how many I’ve sold today.”

  “Twenty?” Bruno ventured. He glanced into the café where just two elderly women were sitting and chatting. Usually on market day the place was full.

  “Six.”

  “Still, it’s a great croissant,” Bruno said after a silence.

  Fauquet ignored his remark. “Bruno, you have to help local taxpayers against unfair competition. Otherwise I’ll have to see the mayor.”

  “What’s unfair about it?”

  “I bet Léopold’s not paying that young man with him the minimum wage, or paying his social insurance,” Fauquet said grimly. “I haven’t seen him face a health inspection. He doesn’t have to give receipts or have all his income registered for the taxman.”

  “It’s Léopold’s nephew, and you know the rules are different for family members. I bet you don’t pay your wife the minimum wage.”

  “Whose side are you on, Bruno?” Fauquet slammed his first down on the table so that the remnant of Bruno’s croissant bounced on its plate and coffee slopped over into the saucer. Without a word of apology he stomped back into his almost-empty café. Bruno sighed, put down two euros fifty, and climbed the spiral stone steps of the mairie to lay the problem before the wisest man he knew.

  But the mayor was just as baffled as Bruno, and he faced the added complication that Fauquet was an influential member of the town council who had—so far—always voted with the mayor.

  “What do you think Fauquet will do now?” the mayor asked.

  “I think he’ll make a complaint to the health inspectors which will probably go nowhere,” Bruno replied. “But he’ll probably make another to the tax authorities and that could be more serious, and not just for Léopold.”

  The mayor nodded. “If word gets around that the tax inspectors are looking at the market in St. Denis, we’re likely to see a lot of stallholders suddenly disappear, and that would be a disaster for the town. Merde, Bruno. You’re in charge of the market, you’ll have to think of something.”

  “Is there anything in the original market charter that forbids the sale of hot drinks?” Bruno asked, referring to the royal decree signed by King Philip the Tall in 1319. “I can’t read the original Latin.”

  The mayor shook his head. “It forbids nothing. When I was a boy there used to be regular sales of livestock—pigs, sheep, cattle. And we let people sell wine
and offer free tastings. How good a trade is Léopold doing?”

  “Enough to fill a plastic bag….” A light went on in Bruno’s head. “That’s it. They use disposable plastic cups. They had one bag filled by nine o’clock. There’ll be two or three by now.”

  “We don’t charge any other stallholders for disposing of their garbage,” the mayor objected.

  “Yes, but given the sensitivity about the environment, this week’s council meeting can pass a resolution banning the use of disposable plastic cups,” said Bruno.

  “Brilliant,” said the mayor. “But we’d better include paper ones, too. Even if it doesn’t work, it should keep Fauquet quiet.”

  “It won’t stop them for long. What do we do when Léopold buys a job lot of fifty pottery cups?” Bruno asked. He shook his head. This didn’t feel right. They should be praising Cali’s initiative rather than plotting ways to frustrate him. And Léopold was a good man, always generous to local charities and raising two fine sons who were natural athletes, assets to Bruno’s junior tennis and rugby teams.

  “He’ll have to wash the cups after each use,” said the mayor. “We can ban the use of detergent at the town fountain.”

  “We can’t ban soap—the fountain used to be the public laundry.”

  “We’ll tackle that problem when it arises. Meantime you go and tell Léopold no more plastic cups.”

  Bruno did as he was told, feeling shame-faced as he apologized to Léopold and Cali while passing on the mayor’s instructions. The two Africans seemed worried at first but then Cali turned to Léopold and said, “Remember cousin Wollo? The one who works at the porcelain factory in Limoges.”

  Cali pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number, offered a greeting, and then explained his request. He listened briefly and then his face lit up in an enormous smile as he told his uncle and Bruno, “He can let us have sixty rejects for free.”