Black Diamond

was a boy as well as the nieces.
    “There’s no doubt it’s the same Chinese boy as the one here, the one you pulled out of the house,” Jofflin said.
    Bruno handed the photos to the mayor. “A hell of a cop I am. Didn’t even know someone was running a pedophile brothel in my backyard. That’s another crime we’ll be chargingyoung Pons with, and to think he might have been your successor.”
    “I tried to call his father, to let him know his son was arrested and in the hospital, but I haven’t tracked him down yet,” said the mayor. “I know they were badly estranged, but still, a son is a son. The tie of blood is strong.”
    Bruno nodded, feeling very tired, and wondering just what Pons might feel. He turned to Jofflin. “Do you have enough to arrest Boniface Pons for the truffle fraud?”
    “More than enough,” the young
inspecteur
replied. “We’ve already been in touch with the tax authorities about the money laundering. He’s not at home, not in the new office he set up in St. Félix, not answering his phones. I was going to ask you where that plantation of his was, we might find him there.”
    “It’s on that back road behind the cemetery,” said the mayor. “The one that leads down past the Lespinasse garage.”
    “Of course,” said Bruno, suddenly making the one connection that threw everything in a different light. “I’ve been a fool. They conned us all, the two of them.”
    He tried to sit up, but his legs were immobilized.
    “Get my feet out of these damn straps and bring one of those doctors in here. I’ve got work to do.”
    The mayor protested, but Jofflin unhooked Bruno’s ankles from the supporting straps and helped Bruno to his feet.
    “Pass me those trousers on the chair,” he said, clinging to the bedpost as he sat gingerly, his burned legs stretched out before him.
    Jofflin held up the trousers with a smile. They were in tatters. Another new uniform to go on his expense account, thought Bruno.
    “Pass them over and hand me those scissors on thecounter.” He snipped off the legs and was left with a pair of serviceable shorts. Jofflin helped him ease them over the gauze bandages, looked in the closet and held out the shirt and jacket that were hanging there. They stank of smoke and were still smeared with foam, but they would do. There were no socks, but Bruno jammed his feet into his boots and stood, swaying as the dizziness hit him, just as Fabiola reentered the room.
    “You’re mad,” she said. “You’re in no condition to be up.”
    The faces of Pamela and the baron peered around the door, and in the distance Bruno could hear the clattering sound of a helicopter. He tore his eyes away from Pamela’s worried face.
    “Which dentist did Boniface Pons use?” he asked the mayor, who shook his head.
    “Same one as me,” said the baron from the door. “Piguin in Siorac; I’ve met Pons in the waiting room there.”
    “Get Piguin to look at the teeth of that corpse in the Auberge,” Bruno said to Jofflin. “I’ll bet you a fortune it’s old Pons.”
    “Are you going to lie down?” Fabiola asked harshly.
    “No. I’m going with the
inspecteur
here to Pons’s place. All the answers will be there.”
    “You’re going nowhere,” Fabiola snapped. “Get back into bed.”
    “It struck me when you reminded me about Pons’s plantation,” he said to the mayor, but sitting back on the bed. “That’s where some of the campers were parked overnight before heading on to Arcachon, where Pons’s son was directing the landing of a shipload of illegal immigrants. They fooled us into thinking that they were estranged, but the two of them were in league all along. They were in it together,father and son, the truffles and the Chinese market, the alliance with the Chinese, the pedophile brothel and above all the election.”
    “But they were opposing each other in the election,” the mayor objected.
    “No, they weren’t,” said Bruno, remembering that book on British intelligence that had been on Hercule’s desk, the passage about a British agent becoming mayor of some small village in order to issue ID cards and ration books for other agents.
    “Old Pons was only running to take enough votes from you so that he’d get his son elected. And guess why? Who issues identity cards and birth and marriage certificates? You do, at the
mairie
. What better place to give a bunch of illegal immigrants good French identity papers than a
mairie
under your own