The Crowded Grave

memory of doing the same with Pamela just a few hours earlier. “But every time we get together we break apart when you head back to Paris, and I have to brace myself to soldier on through it all over again.”
    “Doomed lovers,” she said with a wry smile, moving her hand from his lips to stroke his cheek. “I guess it’s never going to work, but we keep hoping that it will.”
    A phone buzzed on her desk, and she pulled her hand away. “And we’re supposed to be working,” she said. “Dammit, Bruno, go and check that map and I’ll see you at the evening meeting.”
    He was going out the door when she called, “Wait.” He turned back. She muttered something into the phone and held the line open. “It’s the German police. They checked the fingerprints. Jan is Horst’s brother, the one from the Red Army Faktion gang who was supposed to be dead.”
    Bruno went to the stack of papers on the desk, looking for the sheets he’d been working on earlier. He pulled out his crude diagram with the boxes and the dotted line from Horst to Jan and the Basques. He showed it to Isabelle.
    “This means that Galder, the young guy with bad French whom Jan described as a cousin of his wife, is probably connected. Does Carlos have any mug shots of suspected ETA militants I could look at?”
    “We have our own as well as theirs, passed on to us under the intelligence-sharing agreement,” she said. He tried to come up with a mental image of the youth: medium height, slimly built, with dark hair and a prominent jaw; a straight nose and hands with long fingers that looked too delicate for a blacksmith’s work. Not much to go on, but Bruno would know him again if he saw him.
    “They’re in the file room downstairs, a big red folder on the shelf above the photocopier,” Isabelle said.
    “Do you want me to bring Jan in?” he asked, reluctant to believe that Horst could be his brother’s accomplice.
    “He’s ex-Baader-Meinhof, he’ll probably be armed. I’ll arrange a firearms team. Take a look at the mug shots and then go and check the map coordinates, and I’ll have the team ready to go within an hour. And I’ll arrange to use the gendarmerie when you bring him back. The Germans are faxing through an extradition order on a Euro-warrant.”

23
    The archaeology dig had been deserted, all the students still going through the explosives checks at Bergerac, but the coordinates on the hand-drawn map were precise. When Bruno paced out the numbers on the sketch he found himself standing at the ever-lengthening trench where he had first met Teddy and first seen the corpse. As he led the way to Jan’s smithy, a firearms team from Isabelle’s security force in its unmarked van following behind, he wondered at the coincidence that had led a Spanish murder squad to pick the same burial place as prehistoric people had chosen for their dead thirty thousand years before.
    Generation after generation, so many bodies must lie scattered in the soil of France, so many battlefields where the bones must lie thickly together. In Normandy and Dunkerque from the last war, at Verdun and the Somme from the Great War, at Gravelotte and Sedan from the Prussian war, the wars and bodies stretched back through the centuries to Spaniards, Englishmen, Normans, Arabs, Huns, Gauls and Romans. France is built on a heap of bones, he thought; we are the sum of all the dead that went before us. And here we are again, a troop ofarmed men with their weapons ready, heading across the placid Périgord countryside to enforce the will of the French state. He bit his lip to bring himself back to alertness, remembering how in the army he’d often been this way before going into action. He supposed it was some kind of defense mechanism, his subconscious trying to distract him from fear.
    Bruno stopped at the turnoff to Jan’s smithy and parked his car. He climbed into the back of the second vehicle and struggled into the flak vest handed to him as the van jerked and bounced over the ruts in the lane. The vest’s design did not seem to have improved since his days in Bosnia. It still left the throat and sides exposed, and he doubted if it would stop anything more than a nine millimeter. He’d seen men killed with an AK-47 round that had penetrated their vests. Bruno looked at the squad with him. They had the extra armor of ceramic plates slipped into their vests, front and rear. He raised his eyebrows at the sergeant of the Compagnies Républicaines de