Black Diamond bop-3

by Martin Walker

  “A small chateau, they tell me.”

  “Very small. More of a chartreuse than a chateau. It looks imposing, but it’s only one room wide. Leave your car here. You can start reading out those names as we drive.”

  “Let’s start with buying the wine,” said J-J. Bruno drove the short distance to the cave of Hubert de Montignac, a legendary place that sold individual bottles of wine for as much as three thousand euros but also dispensed local wine for little more than one euro a bottle from giant vats at the back of the store. Hubert himself came out from behind the counter to greet Bruno and usher the two men into his office that also served as a private tasting room.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Nathalie, rising from her desk and offering her cheeks to be kissed. “You’re limping.”

  “Rugby,” Bruno explained and made the introductions. “You’ll be seeing Hubert at dinner tonight, so you should take his advice on what to bring,” he told J-J.

  “Hercule loved his St. Emilion, and Chateau Angelus most of all,” Hubert said. “But nobody can afford to drink much of that these days. I’m taking a bottle of the eighty-five because I really liked the old guy, and he bought a lot of wine from me. I’d thought of taking a ninety-nine because when we tasted it at the time he was right and I wrong. I thought it wouldn’t last, and Hercule told me it would, and he bought a case. We drank a bottle the last time Nathalie and I saw him. I’ve got a couple left in the bin.”

  “Let’s have them both, but I want to pay for them,” said J-J. “I’m a last-minute guest tonight.”

  Hubert raised his eyebrows and exchanged glances with Nathalie. Bruno knew that as head of detectives, J-J’s salary was at least double and maybe three times his own. But two bottles of Angelus would be more than a week’s pay even for J-J. Nathalie shrugged, as if to say it was up to Hubert what he charged. Hubert said, “Give me two hundred and I’ll open them now and bring them along to the baron’s.”

  “Not often that I pay that much for a bottle of wine,” said J-J as they settled back into Bruno’s vehicle. “But I suspect that if I hadn’t been coming to the dinner tonight I’d have paid a lot more.”

  Bruno nodded, thinking it would have been a great deal more and asked to hear the names from Hercule’s phone list. Most of them were familiar to him, hunters or men from the truffle trade or the Ste. Alvere mairie. J-J ticked them off on his printout and stuffed it back into his briefcase as they rounded the bend at the top of the hill that led to Bruno’s cottage. Gigi was sitting by the first of the row of young white oaks that bordered the track.

  “He recognizes the sound of the engine,” Bruno said proudly, greeting his dog. Pulling his sports bag from the rear seat, he led the way into his home.

  “A policeman who doesn’t lock his own front door,” chided J-J. Bruno grinned to himself, and unlocked the one door in his house that was always firmly secured, the storage room where he kept his shotgun and the washing machine. He rinsed his mud-soaked rugby clothes in the old sink before stuffing them into the machine. He set it in motion and relocked the door.

  “You have a choice,” he said to J-J. “Have a Ricard with me now while I make the soup and then join me in walking the dog in the dark, or take him out into the woods while there’s still some light and come back in half an hour.”

  J-J made two Ricards as Bruno went out to his potager with a garden fork and came back to the outdoor tap to rinse the dirt from the turnips, leeks and potatoes. In the kitchen, he began peeling and chopping the vegetables and lit the gas under a big iron saucepan. He tossed in some duck fat and began gently to fry them. From his refrigerator he pulled some of Stephane’s milk and a glass jar full of a dark brown liquid and set them down. Then he began to peel garlic cloves.

  “What’s the brown stuff?” asked J-J.

  “Bouillon, made from the bones of the last wild boar Hercule shot. He gave me the bones for Gigi, but I made a stock first.” He stirred the vegetables and sipped his Ricard. “I heard on the radio about the Asian supermarket. Was it arson?”

  “Gasoline bombs again. Crude but effective,” said J-J. He went on to describe the pattern that made Paris fear another gang war. There had been similar trouble between Vietnamese and Chinese in Marseilles two years earlier before they agreed to a truce, and more serious trouble in the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris before that. It always started with attacks on street vendors and restaurants. Local truces could be negotiated, agreements to divide sections of a city. In Marseilles the truce broke down because of a third party, the Corsicans, who wanted to keep the whores, the drugs and the docks. That left the Asians fighting over illegal immigrants, gambling, loan sharking and protection rackets. But the Chinese had the counterfeit goods that gave them a foothold in the street markets. Above all, the Chinese had more and more illegal immigrants. A decade earlier, the Vietnamese had outnumbered the Chinese. Now the balance had shifted.

  “How many are you talking about?” Bruno asked. The vegetables were mashed, the stock on the fire but not yet simmering. He splashed in some water and then slowly added the milk, stirring carefully.

  “Altogether, there’s about a hundred and fifty thousand Viets and about two hundred thousand Chinese, probably more with the illegals. Then there are the Chi-Viets, the ones who got out as boat people. But the Viets have been here longer. That’s why they’re spread out more across France, and the trouble comes when the Chinese start to follow. And now the Chinese are muscling their way into the southwest, so we’ve been getting trouble in Bordeaux and Toulouse and Cahors, and it’s spilled over here.”

  Bruno nodded and began grating nutmeg into the pot. He took a spoon from the drawer and sipped. The liquid at the center had begun to move, the signal that the simmering had begun.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Now we walk Gigi, and you can tell me the rest.” He looked outside, where it was not yet dark, handed J-J a spare woolen cap, and they set off.

  “Don’t tell me,” Bruno said when they had reached the top of the ridge. “When you got Vinh’s citizenship papers, it was Hercule who was his sponsor. That wasn’t hard to guess.”

  “In fact, it wasn’t,” gasped J-J. He wasn’t used to walking in the dark woods. Nor was he accustomed to climbing even the modest slope they had taken through the trees to the ridge. Bruno stopped, waiting for J-J to get his breath back and feeling the soreness in his own legs from the rugby game. At least the stiffness had gone, and the cold night air had cleared the remaining fuzziness from his head and brought back his appetite. He breathed in deeply, relishing the deep quiet of the woods in winter when all the vegetation seemed asleep. The terrain was made for hunters, with only the game stirring and the knowledge that beneath the ground the finest of the truffles were reaching their ripeness. He heard Gigi rustling through the undergrowth and whistled softly.

  Gigi gave a soft bark, almost a cough. Bruno signaled J-J to follow him and struck out down the slope. Gigi was waiting for him beneath a white oak, one front paw lifted and his nose to the earth. Bruno took a small trowel from his pocket and gave his flashlight to J-J, asking him to hold it. Bruno began to scrape away the earth just beneath Gigi’s nose. The dog backed off slightly to give him room, making a noise that was almost a purr, deep in his throat. Trusting Gigi, Bruno loosened the earth around the spot, and then began to dig by hand, piling the loose earth to one side.

  The unmistakable scent of a truffle began to rise, rich and fecund, as if the earth itself were ready to give birth, and he eased the trowel down around the sides of the hole he had made, levering gently. He used his hand again to touch the truffle, the feeling of it slightly warmer than the surrounding soil. It was big, perhaps the biggest he had ever found. Carefully, he loosened the soil around it and began picking out the soil a pinch at a time. The smell became almost overwhelming, and then the truffle was in his hand, a marvel of maybe half a pound.

  “It looks perfect,” he said as J-J shone the light on it.

  “I never s
aw that done before,” said J-J. “I can smell it from here. What would that be worth?”

  “At least three hundred euros, maybe more,” Bruno said. “But I’m not going to sell this one.”

  He put it into his pocket and then knelt again to push the pile of loose earth back into the hole.

  “Very neat and tidy,” said J-J, “but I don’t think the woods will notice.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Bruno. “That soil contains spores. By putting it back, chances are this tree will produce more truffles in the same spot. That’s why I’m marking this place in my mind, and why I’m going to imprint it into Gigi’s memory.”

  Bruno caressed Gigi, murmuring to him and pushing his nose gently down to sniff the earth again and then the tree, stroking him all the time and telling him what a fine dog he was.

  “That’s why I prefer a dog to a pig for hunting truffles,” said Bruno. “Some people will tell you it’s because the pigs eat them and the dogs won’t, but that can be fixed by putting a muzzle on the pig. The real reason is that a properly trained dog remembers the spot and remembers the trail back to it. Speaking of that, we’d better be heading back.”

  Bruno rose and brushed his hands together, then led the way toward his cottage, Gigi happy at his heels and J-J at the rear, following the flickering glow of the flashlight he shone on the earth before his feet.

  “You were saying it wasn’t Hercule who acted as Vinh’s sponsor for the immigration.”

  “It surprised me, but no,” J-J said. “Vinh’s sponsor was a Capitaine Antoine Savani. My team’s trying to find out what we can about him. Vinh’s file also had a supporting letter from one General Gambiez. But Vinh was just a baby when he came here. It was his parents who got the sponsorship, along with a few thousand others who decided that Vietnam without French protection wasn’t a safe place to be.”

  “Like the Harkis who fought for us in Algeria and got slaughtered when we left.”

  “Exactly,” said J-J. “It’s a dangerous move to pick the wrong side in that kind of war.”

  “So you’ll start putting all this together next week?” Bruno asked.

  “We’re going through channels. I’m not sure how frank the defense ministry will be with the files.”

  “You think I can do any better?”

  “You have that friend in the military archives, the one who helped us out before with that dead Arab. He might be useful.”

  “I can try, but I think you’d have more luck with the brigadier.”

  “He’s a last resort,” said J-J. “He’s not a cop, so he doesn’t have our concerns about catching murderers. He’ll only help if it suits his own agenda.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on him,” said Bruno. “He’ll help so long as it doesn’t hurt his own agenda. There’s a difference. I think his regard for Hercule means he’ll go a long way to help us catch his killers, plus he owes us some favors.”

  Back at Bruno’s house, they loaded the hay box into the back of the Land Rover, fixed a tight lid on the saucepan of soup and put that between J-J’s feet. Bruno grabbed a couple of spare towels, a sleeping bag and an old rugby shirt and threw them into his sports bag. The wake would go on late, and they’d probably bed down at the baron’s. He boosted Gigi into the back of the vehicle, and they set off down the hill toward town and the tiny hamlet beyond it that huddled around the baron’s chartreuse. They parked in the small square that was named after the baron’s grandfather.

  The chartreuse covered more than a side of the square. It was almost two hundred feet long, built of stone that had stood for nearly four hundred years, and it soared three stories high with a tower at each wing. It was only one room wide, but each room was more than twenty feet deep, and each of the stone walls added another few feet. The rear wall facing the square was a long line of stone, marked by arrow slits in the towers and some small, shuttered windows in the upper levels. But the front of the house facing the lawn, with its long avenue of alternating apple and walnut trees leading up the slope of the hill, displayed an open face to the world. Its wide, tall windows and handsomely welcoming path of flagstones led up to an imposing iron-studded wooden door. The baron claimed it bore the original scorch marks of the attempt to burn out his ancestor after the revolution of 1789.

  It led into a large hall that the baron had turned into a kitchen with an open fireplace, festooned in black iron hooks and large enough for a man to stand in. From one of them an age-blackened cauldron was suspended. Chains hung down that could raise and lower the hams that were hoisted there to smoke. On either side of the grate, where a couple of long logs flickered above a bed of red ashes, stood tall iron stands, notched to hold spits and roasting irons. To one of the thinnest of them were affixed a dozen pigeons, turning slowly through an alignment of cogs, each smaller than the next. They were moved by clockwork sturdy enough to rotate a sheep, as Bruno knew from experience.

  Including J-J, they were twelve for dinner. Nicco from Ste. Alvere was accompanied by Roland, the president of Hercule’s hunting club. Roland had brought his two sons, who claimed that their father had taught them to shoot, but Hercule had taught them how to hunt. From St. Denis were Stephane, Hubert and Jo, Bruno’s predecessor as chief of police, whose farm stood on the outskirts of the baron’s hamlet. With them were the mayor and Sergeant Jules from the gendarmerie, each of whom had memories to share of hunting with their departed friend. They gave a chorus of welcome as Bruno carried his hay box into the big kitchen, took out the heavy pot and hung it unopened on one of the big hooks over the fire. J-J was carrying the soup, and Bruno directed him to put it on top of the modern six-burner stove. The ritual of handshakes followed, interrupted by a festive pop as the baron opened another bottle of champagne.

  “Thank you for the wine,” the baron said to J-J, nodding across to the sink where Hubert was decanting bottle after bottle. “It’s very generous. We’ll give Hercule a grand sendoff.”

  “The real send-off will be when we catch his killers,” said J-J. “But it looks as if they were professionals. It won’t be easy. While you’re all here, we’ve been going through Hercule’s phone records, and there are some numbers Bruno didn’t recognize that you may be able to help identify. Come and take a look at these printouts.”

  “You’re assuming he knew his killers, or that they’d phoned him?” asked the mayor.

  J-J shrugged. “Who knows? At this stage we’re just looking for anything unusual. Hercule may have been doing something or making some inquiries that put his life in danger. Maybe his phone calls can lead us onto that trail.”

  A handful more numbers were identified as local friends from Ste. Alvere, Nicco winking as he explained that at least one of the unregistered cell phones was owned by a friend who was having an affair. Nervous that his wife might be keeping an eye on the bills for his usual cell phone, he kept a separate phone for his mistress. He must have confused the phones when he called Hercule.

  “And this one is Didier, who manages the truffle market,” Nicco added, putting a fat thumb beside one of the numbers on J-J’s list. “He lost his old phone recently and got a new one but probably never got around to registering the number. And these two are renifleurs from the market who don’t want the tax man looking into their phone records.”

  “That leaves me with just three unidentified numbers,” said J-J. “That’ll make life easier as we try to track them down. There’s one more bit of business where you might be able to help, at least those of you from Ste. Alvere. Anybody see Hercule receiving any unusual visitors in the last week or so, or any strangers in town?”

  “He had the son of an old army friend to stay for a weekend, maybe ten days ago,” said Roland. “An Italian-sounding name or maybe Corsican. It began with an S. He was a middle-aged guy, a fancy dresser. Sanni or Salani or something like that.”

  “Savani?” asked J-J.

  “That’s it. Savani. I’d seen him before. It wasn’t the first time he stayed at Hercule
’s place.”

  “The man who sponsored Vinh’s citizenship papers,” said Bruno, exchanging glances with J-J.

  “I think it would have been the son of Capitaine Antoine Savani,” the baron interjected. “He ran the Deuxieme Bureau in Saigon back when Hercule was stationed in Vietnam. He’d have been Hercule’s boss. I met the son, Pierre or Paul, a couple of times at Hercule’s place.”

  “Hercule had a lot of Vietnamese visitors as well, from being stationed there in the fifties,” Nicco said. “He had quite a social life, old Hercule. Anyway, let’s drink to him, a great friend and a good hunter.”

  After the toast, Bruno turned to the soup, and the baron lifted the lid from the pot of venison hanging over the fire and began to stir, breathing in the rich smell of the wine sauce.

  “Ah, that’s good,” he said. “You added some black pudding?”

  Bruno nodded from his place by the soup. “But now comes something else,” he said, and took from his pocket the truffle he had found in the woods, holding it up for all to see.

  “ Putain, but they’d give you a million centimes for that one up in Paris,” said Nicco. “It’s a real black diamond, black as night.”

  “Gigi found it this evening, just before we came here. And since it’s Hercule’s dinner, that makes it Hercule’s truffle, and we’ll enjoy it for him.”

  Bruno passed it around, and each man took a slow, reverent sniff. Then Bruno began to shave the black diamond into the soup, its scent expanding with the warmth of the pot and filling the room.

  Hubert opened another bottle of champagne and refilled the glasses. The mayor washed two big lettuces that he had brought from his greenhouse, and Sergeant Jules began to make his special vinaigrette. Roland chopped garlic and parsley for the pommes sarladaises, and one son spooned duck fat into two giant frying pans, while the other dried off blanched potatoes. Bruno grated nutmeg into his simmering soup, tasted it and added salt before stirring in the pot of thick cream brought by Stephane. Jo donned a thick glove to take the long spit from the fire and eased a pigeon onto each of the warming plates. From the stove he took the reduction of red wine and stock that he had made and poured it into a saucepan of cabbage and bacon he had prepared. Bruno never ceased to be amazed at how these cooking tasks were done almost automatically, the legacy of dozens of hunters’ dinners such as this and feasts for family and neighbors after the annual slaughter of a pig.