Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

groaned and took a sip of coffee.
    “And you fought me,” Bruno said. “You certainly don’t want to be doing that.” Bondino closed his eyes and hunchedforward. Bruno took Gigi inside and fed him, finished his coffee and went back outside. Bondino was holding a silver flask over his cup, letting the last drops fall out.
    “Hair of the dog,” Bondino said in English. Bruno nodded. It was a phrase he remembered from the British troops he had known in Bosnia.
    “Great dog,” he said, smiling at Gigi. It was the first genuine smile Bruno had seen on the face of this man he had instinctively disliked.
    “I’ll drop you at your hotel,” Bruno said. “But first you clean that.” He handed Bondino a hose and a rag and pointed to the streaks of last night’s vomit on the side of Pamela’s car.
    Once the two men were in Pamela’s car, Bruno realized that Bondino still stank like a brewery. Bruno opened all the windows, and they drove into town in complete silence. He stopped at the wrought-iron gates that guarded the entrance to the Manoir and turned to Bondino.
    “No more fighting, understand? Next time, I’ll arrest you. And stop drinking so much.” Bondino got out, said
“Merci”
and closed the door. Bruno drove on through the town—it was still too early for many people to be stirring—parked in front of the
mairie
and went into Fauquet’s, where the air smelled of warm bread and coffee, and the espresso machine busily bubbled steam into a large jug of milk. He looked briefly at that morning’s
Sud Ouest
, checking the front page, the sports scores and the local news, and greeted Fauquet and his wife and their Hélène, who had just left school and used to be in his tennis class. He shook hands with the knot of men from the Public Works Department in their bright yellow coveralls and nodded affably to Mr. Simpson, the retired Englishman who had taken enthusiastically to the local custom of having a small glass of red wine with his breakfast. Protocol satisfied, hebought his croissants and a baguette, went back to Pamela’s car and drove out on the long road past the supermarket toward Saint-Cyprien.
    Pamela was already in her courtyard watering her geraniums, wearing her riding jodhpurs and a white shirt, when Bruno parked. He took off his peaked cap and strolled toward her. Arms outstretched and smiling, he held out the bag of croissants and fresh eggs in one hand and the baguette in the other, and took such good care to kiss only her cheeks that he almost pecked at her ear.
    “This is very kind of you, Bruno,” she said, leading the way into her kitchen, where two places were set at a small table, with a bowl of fresh-picked berries at each place, bowls of yogurt and cereal and a large jug of orange juice. He put the croissants and bread on the table, and then watched Pamela make tiny rearrangements to the settings to make herself look busy. These are the signals a woman sends when she does not want to suggest that she is available, Bruno thought. He wondered if she regretted the half kiss they had shared. He took his seat, deciding not to make some foolish joke about breakfasting with a woman with whom he had not spent the night.
    “You’re going to be surprised when I tell you what happened after I left you,” he said, and described the scene with Jacqueline. When Bruno had finished Pamela said, “She seemed fine when she left for work not long before you arrived.”
    “She
was
fine. Bondino was too drunk to be anything more than a nuisance. Maybe she’d flirted with him once too often. I’ll ask at the bar. I hope they didn’t serve someone as drunk as he was. But he had a flask with him; maybe he was drinking from that.
    “The good news,” Bruno concluded as he dug his spooninto the bowl of berries, “is that your battery’s fixed and your car started right away.” He paused. “There’s something else,” he said. “Do you remember the conversation last night over dinner about the value of the land and the houses? I need to understand the economics of this. Say you buy an old house with a barn and a few hectares for a hundred thousand, and you spend another forty thousand to fix it up, install water and electricity. What can you make out of that, as a
gîte?”
    “Add another ten thousand to furnish it and twenty thousand for a swimming pool. That’s a necessity. Say you have three bedrooms in the house and put two more in the barn. Five bedrooms at around sixty euros