Black Diamond

only one exit from rue Gambetta. He ran back down the rue de Paris, seeing Léopold sitting solidly on the chest of the fallen Asian and holding the man’s hair. Vinh, soaked in black oil, was helping his wife to her feet. Bruno’s van was parked in the place de la Gendarmerie, near the exit from the rue Gambetta. He knew he wouldn’t have time to start the engine. He opened the door, released the hand brake and heaved the van forward a few feet to block the exit from rue Gambetta just as the Asians’ escape car navigated the slow twists and turns between the parked vans and accelerated toward him.
    Bruno dived out of the way as their car slammed into the side of his van, crumpling the front of their own car against one of the front wheels.
    The two Asians came out as Bruno clambered to his feet, the driver whirling a stick on the end of a short chain as he advanced, shrieking angrily. Trying to keep one eye on the second man, Bruno backed away slowly and saw his attacker put one hand across his eyes as his partner tossed something in Bruno’s direction. Suddenly there was a huge noise and a great flare of light and he was stunned and blind and deaf. The stun grenade had gone off.
    Bruno felt a sudden assault of cold water and a familiar scouring of his face before the sponge moved to the back of hisneck. Sergeant Jules from the gendarmerie had learned his rudimentary medical skills on the rugby field, where an icy sponge was deemed sufficient for anything short of a broken limb. The sergeant’s lips were moving, and Bruno tried to concentrate, but his head was throbbing. At first he heard nothing. Then Jules’s voice seemed to come from very far away.
    “They stole your van,” said Jules. In his hand was Bruno’s Father Christmas hat. “I’ve sent a car after them, and Capitaine Duroc is putting out an alert. We should catch them before they reach Périgueux. We’d better get you to the medical center.”
    “There’s another one, a prisoner at Léopold’s stall,” Bruno said, shaking his head to clear the stars from his eyes. Gingerly, he rose to his feet, still swaying; Jules put out a protective arm. Then there was another flash as Philippe Delaron, who ran the camera shop and took pictures for
Sud Ouest
, snapped a bedraggled and battered Father Christmas in the supportive arms of a gendarme.
    “You run that photo and you’ll never get another story out of me,” said Jules, his voice hard. “And you’ll be breath-tested every time you step into your car.”
    Leaving Delaron to take photos of the wrecked getaway car and the scraped and broken wing mirrors that marked its passage through the vendors’ vans, Jules helped Bruno limp back up the rue de Paris toward what was left of Vinh’s stall. There was no sign of Vinh or his wife, but Léopold was squatting beside his prisoner, a pocketknife pressed against the Asian’s throat. He wasn’t going anywhere. Fat Jeanne was sitting on his chest.
    “This little animal will know better than to attack ourmarket again,” said Léopold, slapping the youth almost playfully across both cheeks and grinning widely at Bruno. “And I saved your collection box,” he added, gesturing toward his stall as Bruno nodded his thanks.
    “Vinh said he was going to take his wife to the medical clinic,” Jeanne said as Jules bent to handcuff the young Asian, whose eyes were squeezed tightly shut. His face was smeared in blood. Bruno searched the man’s pockets for a wallet or some identification but found nothing except three hundred euros in new twenty-euro notes, a cheap mobile phone and a slip of paper with a single telephone number typed on it. Starting with the digits 0553, it was clearly local.
    “We can sort this out at the gendarmerie,” said Bruno. Jules attempted to haul the young man to his feet, but he crumpled back down again, whimpering as he tried to crawl behind Jules and away from Léopold. “We’ll need to bring in the forensics experts to look at his mobile phone. They’ll have to try and identify the source of that stun grenade, if there’s anything left of it. That means bringing in the Police Nationale from Périgueux.”
    “It looks like this boy might need an ambulance,” Jeanne said, to be howled down by other stallholders who were clustering around. Melanie from the cheese stall was close enough to give the young Asian a kick in the ribs with her heavy winter boots. Bruno began pushing the crowd back, but they were in no mood