Black Diamond

the main door to speak in private. As the door closed behind him, Fabiola let a gust of laughter escape from the lips she had held tightly closed.
    “Did you get them, Jules?” Bruno asked urgently. He had seen Jules discreetly scribbling the numbers down on his palm. Jules nodded and showed his hand so Bruno could see. It was a French mobile number, and Bruno punched the digits into the memory of his own phone and then called J-J, to pass them on to his contacts in Paris. Fabiola rolled her eyes and left them to it.
    Poincevin returned, slipping his phone into an elegant pouch at his waist. He was followed by a young Chinese in a black suit, white shirt and dark tie. The lawyer, back in control of himself after his mysterious phone call, kept his voice flat and his face immobile as he announced that he wished to see his client, Yiren Guo. The client was twenty-two, a Chinese citizen and student, visiting France as a tourist. He read out a passport number from a notebook. Jules wrote it all down and then solemnly led the way downstairs to the interview room.

7
    They took the baron’s hunting car for the rendezvous with Hercule. It was one of the few vehicles that had ever aroused Bruno to pure, burning lust. An old French army jeep, still bearing the markings of the baron’s former regiment of Chasseurs, it had all its old military fittings, including the can of fuel on the back and the circular canvas bag to carry the towing chain. Bruno had spent a considerable part of his military career in jeeps such as this, and his sense of nostalgia was almost as powerful as the four-wheel drive that could haul the vehicle over any terrain that wasn’t vertical, and even that could usually be tackled with the winch. And it was simple, quite different from the computerized mysteries of modern cars. Bruno knew that, armed with a basic tool kit, a little ingenuity and a lot of patience, he could fix just about anything that went wrong with a jeep. The speed might be modest and the cornering dangerous and there was zero protection from the weather. But for the woodland trails and the muddy, boulder-strewn streambeds and the steeper slopes of the Périgord hills it was perfect.
    Not that the current journey needed the jeep’s specialattributes. The tract of forest that was reserved for Hercule’s hunting club—covering a long ridge with wooded valleys on either side—was easily reached via the road from Ste. Alvère to the medieval abbey church of Paunat. A gravel road rose gradually into the woods for a kilometer and then became a dirt track for the final sweep to the shaded clearing where Hercule’s elderly Land Rover was parked.
    A narrow footpath through the trees led to the small shack that was formally known as the hide. In reality, like most such structures used by the region’s hunters, it was more of a club-house, with a long table and battered benches, a cast-iron stove and barbecue stand. In a locked cupboard they kept tin plates and enamel mugs and an old shovel that did service as a frying pan on the hot embers of a fire. A stream tumbled down the hillside nearby and offered running water. Over the years they had built a little dam that provided a pool large enough for two or three tired hunters to stand and sluice off under the tiny waterfall. Below that was a washing place for utensils and for the knives used for bleeding and gutting the deer and wild boar. The dogs they brought ensured that there was little left to bury.
    The rule among Bruno, the baron and Hercule was that the guests provided the
casse-croûte
, the hunters’ morning snack. As always, they erred on the side of generosity. In the baron’s rucksack were two cans of his own duck pâté, three beefsteaks and some of his crop of apples. His hip flask was filled with cognac. Bruno carried two bottles of the Lalande de Pomerol that he and the baron bought each year in a barrel, to spend a happy afternoon bottling it themselves. He also supplied half a dozen of his own eggs, hard-boiled, two baguettes of fresh bread and half a Tomme d’Audrix, a local cheese made by his friend Stéphane.
    Leaping from the back of the jeep as soon as it was parked, their dogs were already sniffing up the trail after Hercule as Bruno and the baron pulled out their rucksacks and guns and followed. The baron used his father’s old gun, a venerable English-made Purdey that was worth more than Bruno’s annual salary. Bruno had a secondhand St. Etienne model from