The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel by Martin Walker

could be one of the most charming people you’d ever hope to meet, and he was certainly on form at the party. He died that evening, you say? Do you know about the funeral arrangements?”
    “Not yet, but once I hear I’ll let you know. Did you notice a small disturbance at the party, a sudden drop in the conversation and a flurry of people?”
    “Can’t say I did, I was having too good a time, at least until those damn planes came over. I thought there were rules about how low they are allowed to fly. What was the disturbance about?”
    “Gilbert was apparently bothering a young woman, Victor’s daughter, trying to pull her away, and then Victor and some others intervened and escorted him off. I saw it, and he was stumbling drunk by then. But it can’t have been long before that when I saw him with you and Pamela and the foreign minister. It didn’t seem long enough to get so drunk.”
    “I see what you mean,” said Crimson as he tried to work out the chronology. He and Gilbert had chatted with the foreign minister for a few minutes before the Russian ambassador joined them, and he’d stayed for a few minutes more. “I lost track of Gilbert after we were joined by our mutual chum, the brigadier.”
    Bruno would not have put it like that. The brigadier was a senior official in French intelligence, attached to the staff of the minister of the interior but with a remit that seemed to run across the range of France’s police and security forces. He sometimes roped in Bruno for problems, political or diplomatic, that emerged in the Périgord. A thought struck Bruno: the brigadier also drank Bowmore; perhaps Crimson had introduced him to it.
    “Did the brigadier know Gilbert?” Even as he asked the question, Bruno had a sinking feeling. Whenever the brigadier became involved, it spelled trouble, usually in the form of a letter from the minister to the mayor, asking for Bruno to be seconded to the brigadier’s staff for a temporary assignment. Since he was still officially on the reserve list of the French army, Bruno could always be conscripted if he tried to refuse the request.
    “Of course. You don’t get to be military attaché in Moscow without getting to know people in the intelligence community.” That was where he had gotten to know Gilbert, Crimson explained.
    He’d been attached to the British embassy during that extraordinary time when Gorbachev was in the Kremlin. Gilbert had been very well informed with lots of good contacts in the Soviet air force, so Crimson had made a point of getting to know him. It was also through Gilbert that Crimson had met the Patriarch. Gilbert had introduced them at one of his celebrated parties in his apartment in the old Arbat, the most desirable district. It had been a great deal grander than the usual place the Soviets assigned to one of Gilbert’s rank; Crimson assumed that the Patriarch’s influence had helped.
    “Of course the Patriarch was like a god to the Soviet military, fighting alongside them all the way to Berlin,” Crimson went on. Marshal Akhromeyev had been the Patriarch’s bosom friend; he was the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces and the last serving Soviet soldier to have taken his tank into the heart of Berlin in 1945. So the Patriarch had smoothed Gilbert’s way in Moscow, introducing him to the marshal as a fellow fighter pilot and a close friend of his son. The British had sent a Royal Air Force squadron to fight on the eastern front around Murmansk, Crimson added, and a bomber group to attack the German warships that were trying to attack the Arctic convoys. But the British never reaped anything like the subsequent political harvest that the French managed with the Normandie-Niemen fliers and the Patriarch.
    “Moscow was an extraordinary place back then,” Crimson went on. “Gorbachev dismantling the old Soviet system, his glasnost bringing amazing revelations in the press every day, people speaking out on TV and in public meetings