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

  Oystercatcher

  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 Shooting at Château Rock

  The Body in the Castle Well

  A Taste for Vengeance

  The Templars’ Last Secret

  Fatal Pursuit

  A Market Tale (ebook)

  The Patriarch

  The Children Return

  The Resistance Man

  The Devil’s Cave

  Bruno and the Carol Singers (ebook)

  The Crowded Grave

  Black Diamond

  The Dark Vineyard

  Bruno, Chief of Police

  The Caves of Périgord

  Nonfiction

  The Iraq War (editor)

  Europe in the Twenty-First Century (coauthor)

  America Reborn

  The President They Deserve

  The Cold War: A History

  Martin Walker’s Russia

  The Waking Giant: Gorbachev’s Russia

  Powers of the Press

  The National Front

  Oystercatcher

  A Bruno, Chief of Police Story of the French Countryside

  Martin Walker

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Walker & Watson

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

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

  Vintage Books eShort ISBN 9780593311400

  Cover design by Mark Abrams

  www.vintagebooks.com

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Martin Walker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Oystercatcher

  It was one of those quiet days between Christmas and New Year’s. The great bay of Arcachon stretched out endlessly, merging into what might have been the surly waves of the Bay of Biscay or merely the gray sky in the faded light of midwinter. On the huge sand dune of Pilat, nearly three kilometers long and more than a hundred meters high, a couple stood entwined, braced against the freshening wind. The woman nestled her back closer to the man, her eyes closed, relishing the comfort of his arms wrapped tightly around her body. His face was buried in the short hair at the back of her neck, and they were content together in their silence.

  Isabelle and Bruno kept in touch, but there had been long interruptions between reunions, which made them all the sweeter. There was no other person in sight, but the boats out in the bay were jolting along the vast rows of oyster beds, stopping every few moments to take aboard more of the cages that carried the oysters that would grace half the tables of France on New Year’s Eve.

  “I’m starting to freeze, but it must be even colder for the fishermen out there,” said Isabelle.

  “You’ll warm up again on the way down this dune,” said Bruno. He felt comfortable in the heavy wool of his old army overcoat and happy just to be holding her close. “Most people end up tripping and rolling all the way to the bottom. The sand is soft, though. Your only problem is that the sand gets everywhere.”

  “Is it true that the dune moves?” she asked.

  “They say it creeps back a little toward the land every year,” he replied. “There are old maps that show it used to be farther south and a few hundred meters out to sea. The tides here are strong. They rise four or five meters every day, and the wind drives the whole Atlantic Ocean against this shore.”

  “And you’ll be out there tonight.” He noticed that she made an effort to keep the concern out of her voice.

  So he would, one of thirty policemen brought in from rural areas so they would not be recognized by the locals, all called in for a police operation against the recurrent thefts of oysters. Clearing out a whole bed could net the thieves fifty thousand euros or more. The oysters took three years to grow from spawn, and after the devastation caused to the beds by the red tide plankton, supercharged by the runoffs of fertilizers, few oyster growers could survive a major theft.

  That morning, while Bruno was waiting for Isabelle to arrive from Paris, he had sat with the rest of the team in the large briefing room at Bordeaux police headquarters as Commissaire Pleven, the man in charge of what he called Operation Dominique, laid out his plan. Pleven had not explained the name, whether it was a random identifier spewed up by some computer or in honor of his wife, but the resources he had assembled were impressive.

  “This time we have at our disposal two navy patrol boats,” the commissaire said with pride as he pointed with a long stick to the blown-up map on the wall behind him. “One will be blocking the entrance to the bay, and the other will patrol the big sandbank and Île aux Oiseaux, containing some of the most valuable oyster beds. We have three helicopters equipped with infrared vision and night sights and full of heavily armed gendarmes mobiles in case of trouble. We’ve even been allotted a squadron of Republican Guards standing by with tracked armored cars, which are much more mobile on the beaches than wheeled vehicles.”

  Bruno had heard from one of the Bordeaux cops he’d worked with before that the commissaire had even persuaded the local prefect to activate an old nineteenth-century statute to recruit gardes-jurés, formally sworn informants among the local oystermen. They might be sworn, Bruno thought to himself, but he had no idea how far they could be trusted. They were still part of a tight-knit local community of seamen, no more than a couple of hundred families who had intermarried for centuries. He’d heard of some families who had worked the oysters of the bay for six or seven generations. They had their own codes and their own rules, and they knew the local waters, tides, and currents better than any French naval patrol boat did.

  Bruno knew that all these techniques had been tried before, and the culprits had not been caught. The thieves were probably local people who knew these waters, knew the routes and the back roads, and probably expected the police operation. The end of the year was the most lucrative time of year for the oystermen.

  Until this point, Bruno had barely been paying attention. His thoughts kept straying to Isabelle, who was hurtling toward him from Paris on a high-speed train for another of their snatched, occasional reunions. He’d be working each night, so their time together would be limited to lunches and languid, loving afternoons.

  Suddenly Bruno sat up, startled by the commissaire’s confident new tone. This time, he was saying, they had a secret weapon. Working with a new French high-tech company, they had developed artificial oysters that contained a transmitter that could be tracked. Each of the transmitters had a different code, so they could see at once which of the many sprawling oyster beds was being targeted. Six drones would be flying over the main beds, tracking the movements of the fake oysters. On shore there were roadblocks to stop each of the big refrigerated trucks that would be waiting to haul up to twenty tons of oysters to the hungry consumers of France.

  France was the biggest consumer per head of oysters anywhere in the world, and the biggest producer in Europe, the commissaire explained. The country produced over 160,000 tons of oysters a year, worth more than €600 million annually. Almost half of the oysters were sold in December. Police sources in Paris, Lyon, and Lille had picked up hints at restaurants of cut-rate oysters being available for those with the right connections. That was why Operation Dominique had been mounted.

  The role of Bruno and the twenty-nine other rural policemen w ho had been put under political pressure to join Operation Dominique was relatively modest. They would each patrol different sections of beach throughout the night, using night-vision glasses borrowed from the French army. They had all been equipped with portable sensors to track the radio transmitters in case the drones failed. The sensors looked like a smartphone. Bruno and the others had to report each truck that arrived on their stretch of beach, note the number of the license plate, and check the driver’s papers. The police had been equipped with mug shots of locals with previous convictions and photos of other suspects. Bruno reckoned the chance of his recognizing someone at night, probably with a scarf around his face against the cold, would be close to nil.

  “These are tough guys, people who know the oyster trade and have the contacts to sell the stuff by the truckload,” the commissaire went on. “You’re each armed, but the usual rules of engagement apply. Only fire if you have reason to believe that you or an innocent civilian could be in danger. Use your heads. Stay in touch on the radio so we know if you are stopping a truck, and we can have reinforcements with you within minutes by chopper. We have armed gendarme teams standing by.”

  Bruno had studied the relevant maps before coming down to Bordeaux the previous evening from his home in the Périgord, nearly two hundred kilometers inland. The coastline of Arcachon Bay was at least fifty kilometers long, not counting the sprawling beaches to each side of the entrance to the bay. That meant each of the thirty rural cops had to patrol close to two kilometers of ground. On the maps Bruno had counted more than a hundred roads and paths leading away from the endless beaches, and locals probably knew of more that weren’t shown. There were five sizeable towns and dozens of small villages around the bay. With the huge market of New Year’s Eve awaiting them, every one of the five hundred local oystermen would be out in the bay and bringing in his harvest.

  Bruno wondered if the commissaire was putting too much faith in his technology and in the sheer number of cops and troops available. How would Bruno have planned this operation if he’d been in charge? Rather than put the thirty cops on the beach, he thought, he would rather have used them to increase the number of roadblocks. The thieves had to get the oysters to market, and Bruno suspected that meant getting the trucks onto the autoroute system as quickly as possible. Perhaps with millions of French families on the roads, going to or coming from family reunions, the commissaire had not been allowed to clog the autoroute access points. Could there be another bottleneck somewhere the police might use, Bruno asked himself, as the commissaire paused and lowered his voice, apparently coming to the end of his briefing. The man had been word-perfect so far; he’d evidently rehearsed his presentation.

  “Seven tons stolen in Gujan-Mestras, another twenty tons in the Marennes Basin, more thefts off the Île de Ré—we are going to stop this theft, and we are going to stop it tonight,” the commissaire insisted. “And remember, we are dealing here not only with an important local economy but with the cultural identity of France. ‘To eat an oyster is to kiss the sea on the mouth,’ as one of our great poets put it.”

  He paused and then asked, “Any questions?”

  Another member of the top brass raised a hand.

  “Sir, we know that the oysters have to be sluiced in clean water for a day or two to get the sand out after they are harvested. Presumably we know where all the sluicing points are around the bay. Why not monitor them?”

  “Good question,” the commissaire replied. “We tried that last year and found that they weren’t using any of the ones around the bay. Oysters are raised all along the Atlantic coast up to Brittany and beyond, so there are hundreds of sluicing points available to them. That’s why we’re deploying these fake oysters with their transmitters. If we miss the hijackers on the bay, we’ll still be able to track them as they move out. Once we track the trucks, we can follow them all the way to the crooked wholesalers they are using and wrap up the whole operation.”

  That made sense, Bruno thought. He saw heads nodding in agreement around him as the briefing ended and the meeting broke up. He checked his watch. Isabelle would be arriving in Bordeaux a few minutes after eleven. Then they would take the local train to Arcachon, for which he’d already bought the tickets, and arrive shortly before noon. There would be time for him to take her to lunch and then to spend the afternoon together before reporting for duty. The prospect of a weekend with her in a hotel paid for by the police budget had been too tempting to ignore.

  Bruno had been surprised when Isabelle had emailed him to invite herself to join him at Arcachon. He knew she stayed in close touch with her old colleagues in the Police Nationale in the region, so he might have guessed she would know of the operation. She had proposed their getting together in a way that suggested he would be doing her a favor, rescuing her from spending more time than she could stand at a family Christmas with her father and his new wife, whom Isabelle did not like. Bruno had been delighted at the prospect.

  Bruno arrived on foot at Bordeaux Saint-Jean station as the clock struck eleven, feeling his skin tingle with anticipation at seeing Isabelle again. He had time to smooth down his hair and slip a mint into his mouth before reaching the Relay newspaper kiosk where they had arranged to meet. He scanned the crowd from Paris, looking for that familiar face, and was surprised when a slim figure, head wrapped in a woolen scarf, slid out of the throng and into his arms.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you in all that wool,” he said, and kissed her. “It’s so good to see you.”

  She returned his kiss with enthusiasm before saying she’d checked the weather forecast and knew it would be cold. Arm in arm, Bruno carrying her overnight bag, they headed for the platform where the train for Arcachon was waiting. They took their seats in an almost-empty car, facing each other and holding hands, her eyes alight as she slipped off the scarf. Then she turned serious.

  “I checked around a little bit,” she began. “You’ll have to watch Commissaire Pleven. He’s a guy with political ambitions who’d clamber over dead bodies to get ahead. That’s why he’s called in cops from all across the region. It’s not only because he can’t afford a failure. You and all the rest of them will start receiving New Year’s cards, phone calls on your birthday, invitations to meet for a drink when he’s touring the prefectures and the mairies. He’s a brilliant networker, and he’s not just after your vote. He’ll try to turn you cops into his local organizers. I hear he’s on the list for the regional government, probably planning to be deputy head before angling for a ministerial job in Paris. It’s up to you whether you back him, but don’t get in his way.”

  This was not how Bruno had expected the first talk of their brief time together to begin. They had met and fallen in love when she was a detective inspector for the Police Nationale in the Périgord. After a delicate but successful operation, she had been invited onto the staff of the Minister of the Interior in Paris, had then been wounded in an otherwise successful operation against a shipload of illegal immigrants, and was now on the staff coordinating the antiterrorism efforts of the European Union. If anyone knew about brilliant careers, it was Isabelle. Bruno, who thought of her as the love of his life but felt no temptation to move from his native Périgord, knew the personal cost to each of them of Isabelle’s ambition.

  But this was no time to think of that as they sat together in the warmth of a waterfront restaurant’s glass-fronted terrace, a plate of fresh oysters, and a glass of Mouton Cadet sauvignon blanc before each of them. Isabelle loosened an oyster from its shell, squeezed some drops of lemon on it, and slurped it into her mouth. With her eyes closed, she chewed it once, twice, and finally swallowed with a purr of deep satisfaction. Eyes open again, she nodded her appreciation and reached for her wineglass.

  “Mon Dieu, that was delicious. That hint of iodine makes these the tastiest oysters I know,” she said, and reached for another. And then she smiled roguishly at him. “Oysters always make me think of you, and here you are.”

 

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