The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

he ought to make. Now, gazing at the honey-coloured stone of his house topped with the traditional red tiles of the Périgord, he worried what the panels might do to the look of the place.
    His reverie was interrupted by the vibration of the phone in his pocket. As he extracted it, Balzac squirmed free andbegan creeping towards the grazing chickens. Bruno reached out to haul him back, missed, dropped his phone and a furious squawking erupted as the puppy bounded forward and the hens half-flew and half-scurried back to the protection of their hut.
    ‘Sorry, Father,’ Bruno said as he recovered the phone, having seen that his caller was the local priest, Father Sentout. He picked up Balzac with one hand and headed back to the house.
    ‘Sorry to disturb you so early, Bruno, but there’s been a death. Old Murcoing passed away and there’s something here that I think you ought to see. I’m at his place now, waiting for his daughter to get here.’
    ‘I’ll shower and come straight there,’ Bruno said. ‘How did you learn of his death?’
    ‘I called in to see him yesterday evening and he was fading then, so I sat with him through the night. He died just as the dawn broke.’
    Bruno thanked the priest, filled Balzac’s food and water bowls and headed for the shower, wondering how many towns were fortunate enough to have a priest who took his parochial duties so seriously that he’d sit up all night with a dying man. Murcoing had been one of the group of four or five old cronies who would gather at the cheaper of the town’s cafés. It had a TV for the horse races and off-track betting on the
Pari Mutuel
and the old men would nurse a
petit blanc
all morning and tell each other that France and St Denis were going to the dogs. Without knowing the details, Bruno recalled that Murcoing was one of the town’s few remaining Resistance veterans, which could mean a special funeral. If so, he’d be busy. The decision about the solar panels would have to wait.

1
    As if determined to make it his last sight on earth, the dead man clutched what at first appeared to be a small painting on canvas or parchment. Bruno moved closer and saw that it was no painting, but a large and beautiful banknote, nearly twice the size of the undistinguished but familiar euro notes in his wallet.
    Impeccably engraved in pastel hues stood Mercury with his winged heels before a port teeming with sailing vessels and steamships. Facing him was a bare-chested Vulcan with his forge against a backdrop of a modern factory with tall chimneys belching smoke. It was a Banque de France note for one thousand francs of a kind that Bruno had never seen before. On the quilted counterpane that was tucked up tightly to the corpse’s grizzled chin lay another banknote, of the same style and value. Picking it up, Bruno was startled by its texture, still thick and crinkly as if made more of linen than paper. It was the reverse side of the note the dead man held. Against a cornucopia of fruits and flowers, a proud cockerel and sheaves of wheat, two medallions contained the profiles of a Greek god and goddess. They stared impassively at one another against the engraved signatures of some long-dead bank officials, and above them was printed the date of issue: December 1940.
    His eyebrows rose. For any Frenchman 1940 was a solemn year. It marked the third German invasion in seventy years, and the second French defeat. But it was the first time Paris had fallen to German arms. In 1870, the capital had withstood months of siege before French troops, under the watchful eye of the Kaiser’s armies, stormed the capital to defeat and slaughter the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune. After the invasion of 1914, the Germans had been held and eventually defeated. But in 1940, France had surrendered and signed a humiliating armistice. German soldiers had marched through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elysées and launched an occupation that would last for over four years. France under Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime had retained some shred of sovereignty over a truncated half of the country while the Germans took over Paris, the north and the whole Atlantic coastline. So this was a Vichy banknote, Bruno mused, wondering how long after the war’s end it had remained legal tender.
    There were more notes, all French and for varying amounts, inside a black wooden box that lay open at the dead man’s side. Alongside them were some old photographs. The one on top