The Crowded Grave

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For once, the chef de police of the small French town of St. Denis was carrying a gun. That morning Benoit Courreges, known to everyone as Bruno, had taken his official weapon from the office safe in the mairie where it stayed throughout the year, except for his annual firearms refresher course at the police range in Perigueux. He had cleaned and oiled the elderly MAB 9mm carefully, and it was now tucked into the leather holster that he had polished just after dawn, along with the belt and the shoulder strap he hardly ever wore. His full dress uniform smelled faintly of the dry cleaner’s where he had picked it up on the way to the mairie that morning. His hair was newly cut, his morning shave had been unusually close, and his boots were polished to the kind of brilliant shine that only a former soldier can achieve.

Beside him, Sergeant Jules and the rest of the small team that staffed the Gendarmerie of St. Denis stood in formal ranks in front of their modest stucco-fronted building. The gendarmes also wore full dress uniform, and it would have taken a careful observer to note any difference between their dress as functionaries of the French state and Bruno’s as an employee of the town of St. Denis. On the flat roof of the gendarmerie, beside the radio antenna, the tricolor flew at half-mast, and above the door was a plaque of the flaming grenade that had been the symbol of the gendarmes since their founding in 1791. Of Capitaine Duroc, the nominal head of the post, there was no sign. He had called in sick, to avoid rather than disobey the official order that the police and gendarmes of France should not formally commemorate the death of Brigadier Nerin. But here in St.

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