Walls of a Mind

By John Brooke

In this fifth installment of the Aliette Nouvelle mysteries, Aliette is now, officially, Chief Inspector Nouvelle. After a difficult breakup with former boss and boyfriend Claude Neon, the inspector is transferred from an urban beat in Alsace to the south of France. She is given command of a small brigade at St-Brin, a sleepy town in a valley where wine is the primary industry and source of identity.

When Joel Guatto, scion of an old wine-producing family, and recently defeated political candidate, is shot dead on the beach, it appears to be a politically motivated murder. But is it? As a political candidate, Guatto had been no threat, despite his efforts to rally local wine producers incensed by the cheap Spanish wine imports that are jeopardizing their livelihood. A political amateur, Guatto managed to lose not only the vote, but also his campaign manager-turned-lover, Stephanie McLeod.

The scope of Aliette's investigation widens when it turns out that Stephanie has ties to a Europe-wide anarchist network. Aliette needs Stephanie for her murder case. But French secret service agent Margot Tessier is determined to use the young woman as a disposable pawn in her quest for a much bigger target. Aliette must get to Stephanie first.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927426302

John Brooke

John Brooke became fascinated by criminality and police work listening to the courtroom stories and observations of his father, a long-serving judge. Although he lives in Montreal, John makes frequent trips to France for both pleasure and research. He earns a living as a freelance writer and translator, and has also worked as a film and video editor as well as directed four films on modern dance. His poetry and short stories have been widely published and in 1998 his story "The Finer Points of Apples" won him the Journey Prize. Brooke's first Inspector Aliette Nouvelle mystery, The Voice of Aliette Nouvelle, was published in 1999, followed by All Pure Souls in 2001. He took a break from Aliette with the publication of his novel Last Days of Montreal in 2004, but returned with her in 2011 with Stifling Folds of Love, The Unknown Masterpiece in 2012, and Walls of a Mind in 2013, which was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Best Crime Novel Award.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Aliette floored the Peugeot’s gas pedal and flew, ragtop down, through a day that felt like heaven.

Fortunately for her, she was the only cop around. On that stretch, on that day, at that moment.

Fortunately for her, revelation comes, if only in flashes, and life can be defined…

Redefined? Inspector Aliette Nouvelle had come unwound in her previous posting. Call it the effects of love muddling pure focus. She had asked for a transfer, had begged to be sent away. They said, Fine, we can do that, Inspector. Indeed, we may have just the thing. Though we note that above and beyond being an unattached soul in need of renewal, you are a cop without a car. Yes? Well, you should know there’s no car pool servicing a three-cop detachment in a Midi town two hours from the Spanish border. They said, You want the job, it’s yours, but you will need a car.

She got the car because she wanted the job because she needed another life.

A silver-blue Peugeot cabriolet helped ease the transition from one existence to the next.

And make that Chief Inspector, please.

It was a Monday in June, hot, 34°C, a warm wind from the southwest. Not uncomfortable — a dry heat, pure, exhilarating after the often clammy summers of Alsace. Even better: It was a crime-free Monday, high noon, and she had a beach towel, sunscreen, picnic lunch and a book, a parasol stowed in the back. The road was clear, the towns deserted, everyone safely behind closed doors, seated in front of the midday meal. Leaving the River Orb, the road rose to a plateau. Aliette shifted down, speeding past a coppery vigneron bouncing in the saddle of his tractor, heading for his lunch…then siesta. She was alone with vast vineyards on either side, row upon row of maturing grapes, growing heavy, sheltered in lush green leaves, stretching to hilltops along lines of furrowed pinkish earth. And delighted to be! Her new patch was indeed an outpost in the middle of nowhere. But nowhere was a sunny valley overflowing with southern wine, where they worked from crack of dawn till stroke of noon then disappeared till three.

The corner at Départmentale 612 and Rue de Poussan marked one boundary of the chief inspector’s sprawling territory. The two usual ladies were there. The blonde was seated on a lawn chair, enjoying a sandwich. She wore the same strategically translucent flower-patterned cotton dress she’d worn since spring. Her denim-clad friend was negotiating with a trucker. Aliette had yet to stop and introduce herself but she knew they would, inevitably, be a useful source. A few clicks further on, D612 meets Autoroute A9, thick with traffic flowing west toward Toulouse or Spain, east to Marseille and Lyon. Passing under the busy highway, she could see the sea.

Five minutes later, she turned at a lane and stopped in the public parking lot. Bag slung over her shoulder, parasol in the crook of her arm, she trudged the pebbly pathway to the dunes.

Where, removing her sandals, Aliette walked onto the sand.

The wind lifted her hair, a warm south wind called the Marin.

This end of the beach was almost empty. Looking east, she could see the sparse crowd at Valras, horribly white Brits and Belgians and Germans making the most of preseason deals for a week in a beachfront condo. She went the other way, strolling through gently roiling fringes of wash flowing up, retreating back. A fishing boat chugged out from behind the breakwater that formed the entry to the port of Vendres, probably heading off for another haul of mussels, a local staple. She had yet to try them. A local man, deeply brown, had three tall fishing poles planted in the sand, the spooled-out lines invisible. He smoked and waited. There were half a dozen other solitary women. The inspector assumed they had all felt the same irresistible pull at noon, had left the workaday world and made their way to the sea. She stopped thirty steps away from the last of these pilgrims, put up her parasol, spread her towel, slipped out of her skirt and removed her shirt.

Aliette wore her one-piece on a Monday, a monochrome forest green, made for swimming, not for attracting men. Later, she would swim. Just now she unhooked the strap and rolled it down to a low point on her belly. A fair-skinned northerner, she was not foolhardy — it would take some weeks yet for her skin to become acclimatized. She carefully applied number 30 sunscreen. She pulled on the old LA Dodger baseball cap to shield her eyes from the dazzling midday sun. The cap was from her other life, purchased by mail-order from America. Dodger blue and silver blue had proven an enticing match. A dozen years later it was just a hat and her eyes were no longer young. She placed her book on the corner of her towel. A policier from Sweden. She unpacked her lunch: jambon-beurre on fresh baguette, one hard-boiled egg, a few black olives. Carrot sticks. A white peach. Lastly, unwrapping the layers of the Midi-Libre sports pages, one bottle of 1664 beer, still cool, simple newspaper a very effective insulator.

She opened her beer and sipped. She ate. Studied a page of her book. Watched a boat move across the horizon.

At a certain point, a man walked by, pant cuffs rolled up, shoes in hand, headed toward Valras. A white shirt, tie in place, suit coat buttoned, all said he’d fled the office for a moment alone at the beach. His was another local face, one she’d seen a thousand times since arriving — and was getting to like: those round Catalan eyes, sensual wide mouth, smooth sallow skin. Though his oddly protruding ears blunted the sultry effect. This man looked preoccupied. Suddenly aware of her scrutiny, he nodded a taciturn bonjour and kept moving, immersed in a desultory march. She watched him till he was lost in the sunny chimera at the distant bend in the shore. Then she rolled the top of her suit back up over her breasts, secured the strap and forced herself to rise.

When the north wind blew it cleaned the air; you could see Agde in the east, the Pyrenees and the Costa Brava rising up beyond Narbonne. The Marin covered that distance in a haze. But it made the sea so warm! …pushing waves, six-foot rollers mild as soup, 25 or 26 beautiful degrees thanks to this kindly wind. She waded out till it tickled her navel, dove forward, rolled in it, lolled, peed, surfed a wave or two and drifted languidly back in.

Aliette had always loved to watch the ocean drying in crystal drops on her browning arm. Stretched on her belly, sun on her back, she did this till she surrendered, closed her eyes and slept, secure in the knowledge that if there was anything needing her professional attention it would not happen till after three. These people knew how to live.

PART 1

We were never clear what we were going to do exactly, but we were going to do something.

— Nescio

· 1 ·

HER HILLS

Next morning Aliette Nouvelle was back in the car, headed for the city.

Division was at Montpellier, two hours away. She was one of six chief inspectors based at Beziers, a quick twenty minutes at the right time of day. There was a major reorganization going on and, strictly speaking, her office ought to have been there. At the moment of her transfer she had asked to have her operations retained at Saint-Brin, de facto centre of her new world. She did not say, I need space, time alone to rebuild my soul, but it came down to that.

Why not? Rent on the half-floor at Saint-Brin town hall was far less than equivalent space in the city. The drive in for meetings with procs and judges, Q&A’s with those in custody, forensics briefings or chats with the légiste was the same as the drive out to the scene of a crime.

With fourteen towns and forty villages in her purview, she had been busy enough since taking over in February, fulfilling her new role quietly and efficiently, learning the lay of the land. The romance of wine country did not mean people were less nasty, brutal or just plain stupid than their fellow humans anywhere else. Yes, the beat was different: apart from gypsy house-breaking rings, there were no gangs. Gangs were in the city and stayed there. So no extorting and breaking knees. No people-smuggling; illegals came in through the ports and her patch stopped well short of the sea. No white collars siphoning, laundering or otherwise defrauding. Not yet. Make no mistake: wives were bashed, children were abused and abducted, houses were robbed and vandalized, garages torched. Drugs were being dealt. There had been two rapes. A Belgian wintering in his summer retreat had been seriously beaten by a neighbour when he complained a little too loudly about the man’s yapping dogs. An armed robbery in Causses had turned into a tense stand-off and negotiation at a cabin in the woods before two sad men surrendered. And these were all serious crimes requiring her expertise. But in almost half a year on the job, not one person had been murdered.

Now someone had, and high-profile, to boot.

One does not wish for murders, but it is natural for a cop to yearn for a challenge befitting her skills. And of course, this was coupled with a need to prove herself to her new peers. Aliette was eager.

And puzzled: The victim was a Joël Guatto, thirty-three, from a prominent wine-producing family. The media were playing up the political angle. The politics of wine. Six weeks before, Guatto had run in the regional elections representing CPNT (Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Tradition), also known as the Hunting & Fishing party. He hadn’t made it past the first round, garnering less than one percent of the vote. Yesterday he had been shot dead: one well-placed bullet through the head, according to the morning reports. Joël Guatto lived on the family domaine twenty minutes from Saint-Brin, well within Aliette Nouvelle’s allotted territory. But he was gunned down on the same stretch of beach where she herself had been enjoying some sunny oblivion a few hours earlier. The beach, twenty minutes from downtown, was city jurisdiction. And scene of the crime was the bottom-line criterion where it came to the choice of lead investigator.

So why had they called her?

A brigade of three in a town of barely 10,000 serving what is essentially a farming region does not get a forensics lab and a morgue in the basement. But then, neither did the much larger city squad. Forensics had been largely centralized at Montpellier, in a beautiful new lab covering two floors at HQ. The morgue serving Beziers and environs was in the basement at Centre Hospitalier.

‘Bonjour,’ Aliette said, offering her hand to Chief Inspector Nabil Zidane, head of the Beziers PJ detachment, the city’s highest-ranking cop. And her counterpart, at least in name.

Aliette tried to read the soft North African eyes. Was he feeling usurped? Violated? It usually showed. Nabi’s greeting was low-key, friendly, neutral. His eyes told her nothing.

Zidane introduced Magistrate Sergio Regarri, from the contingent of public prosecutors and instructing judges housed at the Palais de Justice. He would be instructing the investigation. And Dr. Annelise Duflot, a police pathologist posted to Beziers. She also served as médecin légiste, medical examiner, attending at crime scenes. It was the first time the new chief inspector had made the acquaintance of Regarri and Duflot. The victim waited on a pallet, modestly dead beneath a plain blue sheet. Introductions done, Annelise Duflot pulled back the sheet.

Add ironic shock to puzzling protocol: Aliette Nouvelle found herself looking at the scrubbed and lifeless face of the same man with the loosened tie who had passed through the edges of the surf as she’d sipped her luncheon beer. In death the face was more generic than it had appeared in passing on the beach. But for the goofy ears, Judge Regarri could easily be the victim’s cousin, if not brother. But commonality is only a reference. It was him: Joël Guatto had met her eyes, said bonjour and kept on walking, a man with things on his mind. The new cop in town cautiously assessed the gathered faces. Had anyone discerned her consternation? Who knew she had been to the beach? And did it matter? Their faces were as blank as the victim’s. Strange serendipity, she decided, of no consequence here. She withheld this information.

She asked about the means of execution.

Donning plastic gloves, Dr. Duflot led them across the immaculate floor. Morgues are certainly amongst the cleanest areas in an overburdened healthcare system. The firearm, or one just like it, waited on the counter. ‘My colleagues sent this along. For context.’ The doctor, a petite, well-kept blonde in the bourgeois style, unzipped the case and lifted it out with a masculine sort of heft. Odd vignette: la petite bourgeoise commando. ‘Sako TRG42. Finnish. 338 Magnum long-range. Tactical. Not hunting… Not the only choice of course, but popular because of light weight, hence portability. No way of telling the exact distance,’ explained Duflot, referring to notes. ‘These are guaranteed to hold a target for consistent hits at 1000 metres. If your shooter’s good for it, this guarantees him a hit and a lot a room to get lost.’

She lifted the killing bullet from a dish. ‘Fires these.’

‘Quietly.’ Aliette noted the reflex suppressor included in the kit.

‘Indeed,’ confirmed Duflot. ‘Top-line suppressor like this adds value to the concept — it actually drops muzzle signature below bullet flight noise. Anyone downrange will generally look away from the shooter when they hear the ballistic crack of the shot or the thud of bullet impact in flesh. This thing effectively eliminates visual and sonic clues that could leave your guy exposed to reactive counter-fire.’

‘Not that our victim was out walking the beach with a team of body guards,’ added Regarri.

‘Still…’ All eyes turned to Aliette. Disconcerting, but to be expected — after all, this was her debut. ‘It’s not a gang thing. They go closer. At least in my experience.’ To the doctor. ‘You’re saying this was done by a real marksman. Well-paid, well-planned, long-range, one deadly round. A political assassination. Your Jackal… or Dallas?’

‘I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m describing the weapon, the strategic purposes built into it.’ Annelise Duflot smiled. There was something stony about this woman.

‘Possible, but why?’ Judge Regarri was smoothly diplomatic. ‘Monsieur Guatto lost his bid to serve the public. Just a private citizen yesterday. Lost quite decisively, I should add. Though he’s definitely part of the wine community and they are having their troubles.’

‘But the style of it,’ Aliette responded. ‘This group planting bombs — CRAV? Would DST maybe share a file?’

A fringy, agrarian-styled movement, the Hunting & Fishing party had proclaimed a mandate to defend the traditional values of rural France. The party had welcomed the small but growing group of wine producers who said new Euro open-border rules were squeezing them out of business. Cheaper grapes and bastardized blends from Spain were destroying a way of life. CRAV, the Comité régional d’action viticole, was a clandestine group of militants with no more patience for political process. They had taken to planting bombs at sites where imported plonk was stored, processed and bottled. Wine terrorism? So far, the damage had been limited to property and product. DST is Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, internal national security. Think MI5, FBI: secretive, too often dangerously immune from normal processes when it comes to rights and disclosure.

A look passed between Magistrate Regarri and Chief Inspector Zidane. Zidane responded, ‘They’ll show you what they’ve got — but only on him, and the ones who fell in behind him during his campaign. They won’t say a word about CRAV. That’s their special project.’

What was DST but special projects? Aliette persisted — politely, ‘But if it’s political.’

‘They doubt it is. I tend to agree. How could it be? Less than one percent of the vote. Not exactly a threat.’ And indeed, DST was not present that morning.

‘Even so,’ Aliette pursued her notion, needing to know more clearly where her starting point might be, ‘maybe someone felt cheated. Punishment for less than one percent?’

Sergio Regarri smiled in defence of Nabi Zidane. ‘They’d be highly unrealistic.’

Aliette liked his smile. ‘A lot of these fringe types are exactly that, no?’ A girl who’d grown up in the city and worked in the city had never really paid attention to the Hunting & Fishing message. Too far right; ‘traditional values’ is code for all manner of nasty thinking. If nature ever became her soul’s abiding cause, she’d vote Green.

The judge crinkled his nose. ‘They scream and throw wine on the floor of the Préfecture, but they’re not fringe types. They’re farmers who believe they’ve been abandoned. Big difference. No bombs. No guns beyond what you need to bring down a boar. DST would know this.’

Point taken, the chief inspector asked, ‘And who’s our deputy again?’

‘B’eh, Roland of course,’ blurted Annelise Duflot. In a proprietary kind of voice.

‘Roland?’ Sorry — she really was new around here.

‘Roland Bousquet? …UMP.’ Union pour un Mouvement Populaire. A proprietary kind of voice confirmed the pathologist’s sense of the proper natural order.

‘Ah, that Roland.’ Aliette Nouvelle had been raised to have an automatic aversion to people farther right than she, especially politicians. Handily re-elected, right-leaning national deputy for the region and regional president Roland Bousquet also happened to be the mayor of Beziers. A very powerful man, a good — or bad, depending on how you saw it — example of how French democracy has no qualms about layering power in a single seat.

‘Roland would be a logical place to start,’ noted Zidane, audibly rueful, eyes wincing as they fixed on Dr. Duflot for the briefest instant. Her kind had an automatic aversion to people like him, and he knew it. People’s stripes were starting to show. Murder victims will tend to do that — they lie there while everyone else talks too much. ‘When I posed it to Doquès, I got five minutes of bullshit, then your name.’

Chief Inspectors Nouvelle and Zidane both reported to Divisional Commissaire Gael Doquès. Aliette had met him exactly once, for a half-hour welcome briefing in January, at his office in Montpellier. Not much fellow feeling there — he’d been a cop once too, but now he was a police mandarin. Politicians on the level of Roland Bousquet were his natural allies. It was logical that le divisionnaire and le député might even be friends. And friends look out for each other.

Was a less-than-likely political killing being fobbed off on a new girl who was less than up to speed on the fine points of local power? Aliette posed a logical question to her city counterpart. ‘Forgive me, but why not you? It is your beach.’

Zidane’s warm smile turned wan, like a tired priest’s. ‘But not really my type of people.’ Whether this meant wine growers wanting to preserve ‘traditions’ or de souche French who feared a mixing of cultures, he refrained from specifying.

Whatever. She gathered Nabi Zidane was more than happy to give her the Guatto file.

Magistrate Sergio Regarri nodded at the corpse of Joël Guatto. ‘Not his beach either, Chief Inspector.’ Division had made it clear. ‘He’s from the hills. Your hills. They want you.’

‘Fine.’ She would show him she could solve a murder.

· 2 ·

POSSIBILITY

The inspector followed her instructing judge out of the city and down to the beach. He turned at the same lane and stopped where she had done the day before. They got out of their cars and walked without speaking toward the sea. At the gateway through the dunes she paused to remove her shoes. He did not. With a change of wind the temperature had dropped and the sea had darkened; there were fewer people on the beach than yesterday. A couple, both very white, both reading. One fisherman had cast a single rod by the breakwater. ‘Which one’s that?’

‘Which what?’

‘Which wind?’

‘Oh…’ A look to align the shrouded midday sun and assess the low massing cloud bank, a sniff of the salty humid air; ‘that’ll be the Grec. It’ll rain.’

Aliette dipped a toe. The waves had gone elsewhere, the water was cooling. A shame after yesterday’s gloriously tepid bath. She had an urge to tell him of her solitary picnic, the strange coincidence of their murder victim passing by. She resisted. Everyone here was new to her; a certain kind of judge could find meaning in a coincidence like that. She did not want to complicate things. ‘Here? Exactly here?’

Sergio Regarri pointed to a stake in the sand behind them…and to another about ten paces westward. Both were tipped with painted yellow-blue chevrons, same tone as the basic Police ribbon. No one had bothered to rope off the spot, let alone the beach. With all that wind, why bother? It looked pretty much like the very spot where she had been. But then, it was a beach.

She asked, ‘Do we have any idea where he was headed?’

‘We think he’d already been. They found his car by the breakwater,’ gesturing west toward Port-Vendres. ‘He was walking that way when he went down.’ Loosening his tie and collar, Regarri stared out to sea. His tie flapped, the lapels of the summer-weight cotton suit coat rippled. His dark hair was long enough to blow some. He was good looking — the more so when striking a pose on the beach. ‘Quite a few people around when it happened. Around four.’ A popular time for locals leaving the office, school or the kitchen to take the sun for a couple of hours before evening. ‘No one heard it.’

‘Any sort of wind, you wouldn’t,’ observed the inspector. ‘Plus that suppressor.’

He nodded his agreement. ‘The guy’s walking, suddenly his head bursts open. He falls. Dead. Some poor woman reading her book sees it all from about twenty steps away. Can you imagine? When she got her wits together, she’s the one who called on her cell phone.’

Aliette visualized the scene. ‘Good shooter.’

The judge said yes to that and walked back toward the dunes. A straight line.

She followed, looking over her shoulder. ‘It could have been from a boat.’

There was a single yacht pointing smoothly toward Agde, sails tight, the backs of four crew clumped in a row along the port-side deck. Regarri stopped. Looked. ‘True…I’ll call Annelise.’

‘You work with Annelise a lot?’

‘Not if I can help it. A bit too…’ He sniffed the air, searching for a word.

‘French?’

‘Voilà…or something like that.’ A brief flash of that good smile.

They trudged to the dunes. She was wishing Magistrate Sergio Regarri would remove his shoes. A detail, but it rankled. Might his enjoyable looks be wasted on a rigid mind?

‘Could’ve been here,’ said Regarri, standing for a moment, looking back toward the shore. He began following the crude path tracing the slatted windfence running up and down through the clumps of grasses and wind-hollowed nooks. She followed. He stopped. ‘Or here.’ He marched again, she followed, he stopped. ‘Or here. Anywhere along here would be perfectly feasible with a gun like that. They combed the entire length of it till dark. No shoe or boot prints.’ A futile shrug. ‘The wind. If there was a casing, he took it with him.’

‘No pervs in the dunes?’ Monitoring topless bathers. ‘No kids kissing?’ Someone who might have seen something?

‘Not when they got here. They canvassed pretty thoroughly. Zidane’s very patient when it comes to that. All the parking places. Over at the fish market in the harbour.’ Gesturing back at Vendres. ‘The beachfront places at Valras. I’ll give you all the reports. Thing is, without hearing anything, not seeing anything is pretty easy.’ He headed off again.

‘It was heavenly here yesterday.’

Sergio Regarri stopped abruptly and gazed at her — exactly like an instructing judge.

Oops. ‘The news said the place was filled. Someone saw him. Had to. Just doesn’t know it.’ Was that a smooth recovery? She had no idea.

They headed out of the dunes and across the scrubby field to their cars. Before parting, he lifted a cardboard box from the boot of his. She opened the boot of hers and he placed it there. ‘Happy reading.’

‘Sure.’ She shook his hand.

‘Nice…’ He lingered, admiring with wistful eyes as she turned the key and the ragtop roof lifted up, folded into itself, disappeared into the slot and the panel closed back down.

‘A gift from me to me after ten years chugging through the Alsace rain in broken heaps from the car pool. Didn’t even have one of my own.’ She did not mention its therapeutic value to a cop moved sideways because she could not control the vagaries of her searching heart.

‘Good for you.’ Leaning close, ostensibly to check the instrument layout around her cockpit.

She took advantage of the moment to sniff him gently. And ask, ‘You know these people?’

‘Which people?’

‘The Hunting & Fishing people.’

‘No.’ He saw her studying him. ‘I don’t understand why everyone has to create their own little political club. The debate becomes absurd, impossible, no chance of common cause.’

Was she meant to answer? She was not in the mood for political philosophy. What Sergio Regarri actually saw was Aliette Nouvelle wanting to tell him how much he looked like their victim — apart from his haircut, and deciding not to. Instead, she said, ‘They don’t run candidates where I was before. I was a city cop.’

To which he replied, ‘They will. If they were really as agrarian as they paint themselves, they’d be with the Greens. It’s the gun thing. You’ll see,’ he predicted.

‘Not a hunter, you?’

‘No.’

‘Rugby?’ The place was insane for it. She’d learned that much at least.

‘Used to. Question of the conversation level after the match.’ Wrong answer. He saw it: snobby? Tried to right the balance, pleading age. ‘And the old bones get fragile, you know?’

Aliette nodded sympathetically, made a silent promise to be gentle if she decided to jump them. At that moment, it felt like a real possibility. She fitted the baseball cap over her tresses, tucking in a stray. She did this for him. ‘I’ll get started. Let me know about the boat factor?’

Sergio Regarri assured her that he would, adding, ‘Actually, after I hung up my rugby boots, I got myself a bike. I enjoy a weekend cycle now and then.’

Alone? Was there an invitation there? This was to be explored. ‘Ciao, monsieur.’

She saw him in her rearview, waving.

· 3 ·

TRAGIC FAMILY

Saint-Brin was basic: Two bakers. Two butchers. A