The Crowded Grave

the roads are like this, and there’s a lively culture in rallying.”
    “Do you kill many people—pedestrians, I mean?”
    “None yet.” Her face was flushed, animated. She still looked as if she were in her teens, but there was a self-confidence in her eyes from the display of her driving skills.
    “You love this, don’t you?” he asked.
    “Absolutely,” she said, grinning. “For once in my life, it’s me that’s in charge, with everything depending on me and my own abilities and on the training I’ve done. And of course it depends on the car, but I’m responsible for that too.” She turned out of the motor-cross circuit and onto the lane that led back to the road and then to Pamela’s house, where Bruno had left his car. “Do you mind if we stop in town to pick up a copy of
Libé
? They called me yesterday for an interview on this foie gras business. They were pretty hostile, which surprised me. I thought they’d have been sympathetic.”
    “I’d like a copy, so pick up two, and I’ll buy some croissants and we can have breakfast with Fabiola,” he said.
    Annette was tight-lipped and her face white when Bruno came back to the car with his bag of Fauquet’s croissants and baguettes. He was feeling rocked himself after looking at a message on his phone that had landed after he’d gone to sleep. From Isabelle, it had said she had dropped by his house after her dinner with the brigadier and Carlos, but was surprised to find it empty and no Gigi. She hoped he had a good night. What had she meant by that, he was asking himself when Annette, silent, passed him a copy of the newspaper and drove away fast before he could even fasten his seat belt.
    Fat Jeanne’s surprised face whished past as Annette’s tires squealed on the roundabout. Now the whole town would learn within the hour that Bruno had been seen in a car with St.Denis’s public enemy number one and was buying her breakfast before presumably racing back to the love nest where they had spent a night of passion.
    “Merde,”
he said, but not about Fat Jeanne. He was looking at the front page. It was all about Annette.
    It showed a picture of her taken the previous day as she spoke to the TV reporter, looking cool and professional with not a hair out of place, and a screaming headline that read “Poor Little Rich Girl.”
    Beneath the photo was a copy of a caterer’s bill for thirty-two thousand euros for a luncheon for forty people. It was made out to a Monsieur Meraillon with an address in Neuilly, the plush inner suburb of Paris. One of the items on the bill, costing twenty-eight hundred euros, was a course of
foie gras aux truffes
. The newspaper had circled it in red ink. Just below it was an even higher charge for caviar.
    “Billionaire’s daughter and magistrate Annette Meraillon has declared war on ‘barbaric foie gras,’ but hedge-fund king Papa spends more than the average French annual income on a single lunch, with 2,800 euros for foie gras alone,” read the caption at the bottom of the page.
    Page 2 was dominated by a big photo of Maurice and Sophie at the door of their farmhouse. “It takes three months for the foie gras farmer she is hounding to earn as much as Papa spends on the stuff for a single course to treat his fat cat friends.”
    “And rich Papa wants YOU to pay for his foie gras fun” was page 3’s massive headline. It was all about Papa and his hedge fund, and the tax dispute that had put his lunch bill into the public domain as one item in the evidence. Apparently he had declared it as a business expense.
    “I don’t think I’ll join you for breakfast,” said Annette, as heturned to page 4’s headline, “War Against Foie Gras,” and its long article about PETA’s campaign, with a photo of Gravelle’s demolished showroom.
    “I’m sorry. This is … it’s unbelievable,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s guilt by association.”
    “I hardly ever talk to my father,” she said. “I only go home at Christmas and birthdays because of my mother, and he’s usually away in New York or London or somewhere.”
    Page 5 had photos of Papa’s other houses—one in the Caribbean, his penthouse in London, his chalet in Gstaad and his château in Compiègne, just north of Paris. Each of the photos carried a price tag. The sums added up to over twenty million euros.
    Page 6 had a large photo, which must have been taken by Philippe Delaron just after the hose was turned off, of