Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

arms to get everyone chanting and a rhythm going.
    Bruno tugged at Alphonse’s sleeve. “Calm them down,” he said with some urgency. Alphonse nodded and stopped chanting, but a momentum had built among the crowd and they were moving forward, their faces red and their voices climbing in pitch. Bruno tugged at Alphonse once more and he began to speak again, but somehow the bullhorn had been turned off and he was drowned out. Bruno kept his eyes on the young men in hoods who were now pushing others forward. He clambered up the steps alongside Alphonse and waved across their heads to the baron, and the rugby team began to move in.
    From the middle of the crowd something black was hurled into the air. Then another one. Bruno whirled to see. It seemed to have a tail and to be heading off to one side, way over the heads of the gendarmes and toward the long row of greenhouses that flanked the research station. Were they trying to break the glass? He pushed Alphonse down the steps, grabbed the bullhorn, turned it on and shouted for calm. Three, four, five more projectiles were in the air when the first one landed with a great splash of red paint across the glass panes. Another bag seemed to open in midair, scattering splashes of paint over the gendarmes and the research staff inside the gates.
    Bruno located the paint throwers—now he knew what had been in that shoulder bag—and handed the bullhorn to the mayor. He turned to Jules and the gendarmes, shouting, “Get them!” and pushed his way through the crowd. He reached the one he had jostled, who was taking his arm back for another throw. Bruno grabbed the arm and pulled the man backward so he fell, the paint in the bag splashing over the marchers behind him. Bruno grabbed the shoulder bag, pulled out a bag of paintand upended its contents over the face of the man he’d felled. He turned and threw a second bag at another of the young paint-throwers, half of it catching a gendarme who was trying to collar the man.
    Jules had one hooded youth in a bear hug and another was ducking away from two gendarmes. The rugby players had moved in to grab some of the others. Red paint was splashing everywhere. The chanting had stopped, and most of the marchers were scuttling away from the mess of paint. One young tough ran at Bruno, his sign held out ahead of him like a lance, and Bruno stepped quickly to one side, pulling on the stick so the youth lurched forward and Bruno pushed him sprawling to the ground.
    Suddenly it seemed to be over. The mayor was standing on the steps, speaking calmly into the bullhorn about his lawsuit and waving the legal papers he had brought. Nobody was listening, so he asked the crowd to disperse. Max, his arm protectively around her, was escorting Jacqueline back toward town. Dominique was helping a middle-aged man who was holding his head and sitting on the ground. All of the paint-throwers were pinioned by either a gendarme or a rugby player.
    Bruno almost lost his footing on the lake of fresh paint that seemed to cover the ground, and camera flashes went off. Of course the marchers had tipped off the media. Bruno began steering the captives through the gates, where the remaining gendarmes could handcuff them.
    A braying siren sounded, and with a squeal of brakes a large dark blue bus with darkened glass windows came to a halt on the road. When the door opened, Bruno saw the brigadier, standing by the driver and clutching a handrail to keep his balance. Two by two, the squadron of thirty black-clad figures wearing helmets and leg guards and carrying shields and clubsjumped out and formed a disciplined line. The Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité were France’s feared riot police, tough and trained and ruthless.
    The crowd retreated hastily back toward town and their parked buses. Abandoned paint bombs lay leaking on the road behind them. Alphonse’s two well-groomed friends, their hair and clothing splashed with red paint, stood staring at the immobile ranks of riot police and at the brigadier, who now descended the steps from the coach and eyed the scene, nodding affably at Bruno.
    “You seem to have handled this without our reinforcements, but I thought it best to be on hand if needed,” he said, eyeing the lake of red paint. “Let’s hope nobody tries to claim that the riot police left a sea of blood on the road.”
    “We had the research station security cameras running the whole time,” said Bruno. “They’d look silly if they