Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

Bruno saw Jacqueline arrive with Max. He waved a greeting to them and turned back to give his youngsters a few last minutes of his attention. Then he shook hands with each of his boys as they trotted off the field to make way for the older players.
    “That’s how he taught me to play,” Max was explaining to Jacqueline as a winded Bruno approached, his chest still heaving. He paused to catch his breath before he greeted them, and then asked Max to help him move aside one of the painters’ ladders that partially blocked the way to the locker rooms.
    Max was already changed into the royal blue shirt and white shorts of Saint-Denis, and Jacqueline was in jeans and a sleeveless white blouse that showed her tanned shoulders to advantage. The other girls in the stands, who had all gone to school with Max, were looking at Jacqueline with curiosity as she slipped her arm around his slim waist. Whatever tension there had been between them the previous day at the
vendange
was now evidently resolved.
    “You look very well, Jacqueline,” Bruno said. “Treading the grapes agrees with you.”
    “You look good, too, Bruno. I see how you keep so fit,” she said, smiling.
    “How are you spending this lovely Sunday?” he asked. “It’s not a day to waste on watching a training session.”
    “Max is taking me up the river to his favorite swimmingspot after practice. Then we’ll have a picnic lunch before we head off to pick Max’s grapes,” she said, keeping her arm around Max’s waist.
Cresseil’s grapes, in fact
, thought Bruno, but the young man looked at Jacqueline with devotion in his shining eyes.
    The other players came trotting onto the field, a rough chorus of
“Oh-la-la
”s and
“Allez, Max
”es at the sight of Jacqueline. With a final caress of her cheek, Max followed them, and Bruno nodded amiably at Jacqueline, remembering how closely she had danced with Bondino the previous evening before leaving with him. A very sociable young woman, this Canadian. Indiscriminately sociable, Bruno thought, recalling her instinctive flirting with him. And she was not nearly as attached to Max as he was to her. Some half-remembered quotation came to his mind as he walked to the shower, that in affairs of the heart there is always one who kisses and one who is kissed.
    As he toweled himself dry, Bruno was startled to hear a woman’s brisk footsteps coming into the locker room. Women weren’t allowed in here. It was Isabelle, whom he had left with her laptop at the gendarmerie. She was carrying his boots and his uniform, and she told him to get dressed fast.
    “We’re heading for the research station. It’s been attacked,” she said, bundling his sports clothes into a plastic bag she plucked from a pocket. “That’s all I know.”
    “Again? I’m supposed to be at a meeting at the
mairie,”
he said, wondering what the security cameras might show this time.
    “I called the mayor. The meeting’s canceled. He’s joining us at the scene.” She bustled him out of the small stadium and into her car, its blue light flashing as she raced into town. “Oneof the staff went in to monitor the automatic watering systems and found the place trashed. He called his boss, who called the gendarmerie. Paris is going to be furious about this. I called J-J to let him know, and he’s on the way from Périgueux with a forensics team. I also called the brigadier and left a message. I’ll have to call the ministry as soon as we have enough to give them some kind of report.”
    Bruno hadn’t known what to expect, another fire or a break-in, and at first all seemed normal as they drove into the research station. Then they saw the mayor and Petitbon and a couple of the technicians standing in front of the greenhouses, their panes of glass now thoroughly drenched and covered in a thick layer of white paint.
    The front of the greenhouse was still spattered with red paint from the demonstration, but the roof and sides were now an expanse of gleaming white. Petitbon had a bottle of turpentine in one hand and a rag in the other, and he was rubbing hard at one of the panes, but he was only smearing the paint. The main door to the greenhouse was open, and Bruno could see from the darkness inside that the light had been thoroughly blocked.
    “How long will your plants survive without light?” he asked Petitbon.
    “A week or more, but that’s not the point. We have to monitor their progress on a daily basis or our records make no