Black Diamond

bright daylight, and he could see the sun on the stone of the
mairie
across the river.
    “Don’t worry,” said Fabiola. “J-J knows all about it. Everything is taken care of.”
    “The Chinese girls?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse and it hurt to talk.
    “A boy and a girl,” Fabiola said, but her face was grim. “They’ll be okay.”
    “A boy? I’m sure I saw two girls when we were there.”
    “You did. We both did. One of the girls didn’t make it.”
    “Did I leave her in the room?” he asked, dreading the answer.
    “No, she was in the front of the house. She’d have been dead before you arrived. You saved what there was to save, but Albert says he’s never letting you near a fire again.”
    “Fine with me,” Bruno said, waving away the milk and sinking back onto the bed.
    “There’s something else,” Fabiola said. “Those Chinese children, when I examined them, they’d been abused, sexually abused, not once but repeatedly and over a considerable time. We’re waiting for a Chinese translator and a child psychiatrist to try and find out what happened to them.”
    Bruno closed his eyes. That meant they can’t have been Minxin’s nieces. If only he’d gotten the children registered and into school he might have prevented all this. He’d been meaning to do that ever since he saw the girls at the restaurant.
    “The girl who died,” Fabiola went on. “She wasn’t alone. There was a big adult male with her. They died in bed together from the smoke.”
    “Do we know who he was?”
    “They’re checking the teeth with local dentists. It’s the only way he’ll be identified.”
    Arson and a double murder, thought Bruno. The Vietnamesewere in trouble. He hoped Tran and Bao Le had not been part of it.
    “You’ve got some visitors,” Gelletreau said. “I think you’re well enough to see them.”
    Fabiola opened the door and the mayor came in, then stood to one side and held the door wide open. A camera flashed from the outer room. Philippe Delaron again, thought Bruno wearily; he’s making a living out of me.
    “Look at these, Bruno,” said the mayor, coming to the bed and leafing through some prints. “By the way, I fed your chickens and dog and gave him a walk. In fact he’s in the back of my car.”
    He thrust one of the photos close to Bruno’s face. It showed him leaning out of the window, handing one of the children to a waiting fireman while fires leaped from a lower window. There was another, with Bruno swinging on the firemen’s ladder and silhouetted against a ball of flame erupting from the room behind him.
    “Tomorrow’s front page, and Philippe says he’s also sold them to
Paris Match
. That’s why he wanted the picture of you in the hospital, to round out the story.”
    “Did you know that young Pons has been arrested?” Bruno said.
    “J-J called to tell me. That means I win the election, as Pamela might say. She’s waiting outside, wants to know if you’d like to see her.”
    Of course he wanted to see her. “Does she know about Pons?”
    “I just told her.”
    “How did she take it?”
    The mayor shrugged as only a Frenchman can, a gesturethat carried with it all the weight of the world’s imponderables and prime among them the glorious mystery of women.
    “Have you heard anything from J-J about Isabelle? You know she was shot?”
    “J-J said to tell you she’s fine.”
    “What have you heard about the bodies they found at the fire?” Bruno asked.
    “No identification as yet. There’s a young
inspecteur
from Bergerac waiting to see you who wants to talk about that, when you’re ready.”
    “That’ll be Jofflin. Bring him in first, there’s things that have to be cleared up.”
    Jofflin too came into the room brandishing some photos, but his were gray and fuzzy.
    “The forensics people used infrared and then computer enhancement on those charred prints in Didier’s wastebasket. This is what they got. I think he was being blackmailed.”
    Bruno tried with little success to control the revulsion he felt at the images of Didier with a naked young Chinese boy. It somehow made it worse that Didier had kept his socks on. Bruno looked more closely at the chaise longue on which Didier was lying.
    “I think I recognize the furniture from Pons’s Auberge, the house where the children were.” He felt sick. If only he’d pressed the issue sooner about getting the kids into school, this would never have happened. He hadn’t even known there