The Crowded Grave

bury him at home, just behind the chicken coop where he used to go into the woods. It’s a good place,” he said. The rage he had felt at Gigi’s death had become something sadder and forlorn, a hollowness in his chest.
    “I’ll get you a new hound,” she said.
    “You’d better talk to the mayor about a puppy from his next litter. That’s where Gigi came from.” He paused, still holding her close, remembering Gigi clambering onto their bed and squirming to try to make a place for himself between them. “Where’s Jan, the blacksmith?”
    “Dying, but he’s told us where to find his brother. And he told us about the dynamite theft and the bomb at the foie gras factory. That was apparently Carlos’s idea, to distract us, like the bomb in his car. He set it himself, and sent one of our own people to start his car and get blown up.”
    She let him go and sat again on the balustrade, wincing as she straightened her bad leg. She leaned her cane against the stone and Bruno had a sudden recall of another stone balustrade on another day when Carlos had eaten his foie gras on the day they had met. Bruno asked where they would find Horst.
    “In an empty house they were using in St. Chamassy where Jan had installed a wrought-iron circular staircase. He knewthe owners were still in Holland. He told us that the kid is armed who’s watching him, Galder, so we’re bringing in the hostage specialists.”
    “Whatever he did with Baader-Meinhof all those years ago, Jan saved us both,” said Bruno. “And with luck he’ll help us save his brother too.”
    “I have orders to keep you here and not tell you where Horst is,” she said. “And if you try to go and find him anyway, I’ll stab you with my swordstick.”
    “Okay,” he said, thinking that the first thing he should do was rub down Hector and find him the finest bucket of oats in St. Denis. Then they could go home and bury Gigi together.
    “And the brigadier says thanks. I think he’s planning to get you a six-gun and a Stetson.”
    “What about my sheriff’s star?” he said, trying to match her banter. What he really needed was a glass of water.
    “I’ll take care of that,” she said, and then looked away. “Just as soon as I get back to Paris tonight.”
    “Tonight?” It came as a thud in his stomach. They had shared just one night together. It didn’t seem fair. “So soon?”
    “The minister wants me and the brigadier to return on the helicopter with him. Then I have to go to Madrid to debrief the Spaniards. They’ll need to work out just how Carlos managed to get away with it for so long. Then it’s back to the hospital for the plastic surgery.”
    “You shouldn’t be back on that kind of duty yet,” he said. “You aren’t fully recovered.”
    “I’ll have some leave when I get out of the hospital. I want to be there to give you the new dog.” She turned to look at him, some life in her eyes at last. “Maybe you can take some time off from St. Denis.”
    He smiled at her, thinking how little she knew of life in the country. It was springtime. There was his vegetable garden tobe planted, ducks and geese to be fed and horses to care for. But no Gigi. And then the tourist season would start again. There’d be no leave for Bruno until the autumn. A hunting season with no dog, an empty house without Gigi.
    “Can we slip away for lunch?”
    She shook her head. “Right now I have to draft a joint statement with the Spaniards on how Carlos Gambara died bravely while helping to frustrate a Basque ETA terrorist plot. But I’ll get Gigi’s name in there as a hero if it’s the last thing I do.”

Acknowledgments
    Sometimes I get twinges of guilt when I think of the fictional murders and mayhem my tales of Bruno bring to the tranquil valleys of France’s Vézère and Dordogne rivers, where life is sweet and crime is rare. It must be stressed that like all the Bruno novels, this is a work of invention. The town of St. Denis does not exist. A few of the characters may have originally been inspired by some of my friends and neighbors in the Périgord, but the people in my books and the plots are all dreamed up in my head.
    The archaeological details in
The Crowded Grave
are as correct as I can make them, in view of our still limited knowledge of the transition from the Neanderthal to the Cro-Magnon type of human beings some thirty thousand years ago. And while the genetic evidence seems clear that there was some interbreeding, I have