Black Diamond

assume it was an official volume on the work of British intelligence in France in World War II. The English was almost too much for him, but Bruno made a note of the number of the page that had been held open. The text on the page seemed to be about a British officer named Starr who had become the mayor of the small commune of Castelnausous-l’Auvignon in Gascony, and whose role allowed him to provide quantities of official but false documents. Why would Hercule be interested in that?
    Also on the desk was a thick file of notes and what looked like the draft of a book of Hercule’s memoirs, almost all of it about Vietnam and Algeria. On top of the file were two transparent plastic file folders. The first contained an account of a farm at a place called Ameziane, a detention center in Algeria run by a Centre de Renseignement et d’Action, one of thecounterinsurgency intelligence units based in the nearby city of Constantine. Hercule’s notes said that torture had been practiced there on an “industrial scale” and added that more than eleven thousand Algerians had been detained at the farm, all of them tortured with a hellish blend of electric shocks, beatings, starvation, mock drowning, cigarette burns and rape. There was a page, headed with the word “Ameziane,” with a list of French names and military units beneath. Some of the names were just initials. A final sheet was the photocopy of a news clipping from
Vérité Libre
with a passage marked that said some inmates had been able to bribe their way out. Against this Hercule had written another list of names, military ranks and initials.
    The second plastic folder was titled “Crevettes Bigeard,” which sounded to Bruno like food. But as he read on, he saw that General Bigeard’s shrimps were corpses or survivors of torture who were loaded into helicopters, taken over the Mediterranean and dropped into the sea. After some of their bodies floated ashore, the torturers began taking the precaution of putting the feet into a large plastic bucket filled with cement before dumping them. These, with a kind of black humor that Bruno found repellent, were known as Bigeard’s shrimps. Again, Hercule had appended a list of names and units.
    Bruno put the folders back in their place. No wonder the brigadier was alarmed. Hercule’s memoirs would open a lot of old wounds. He looked at the photographs, all expensively framed in silver, which took up part of the wide surface of the desk. The one the baron had recognized was still in the front row, but pride of place was held by a studio portrait of a beautiful Asian woman with a small child in her arms. Another photo of the woman showed her arm in arm with a muchyounger Hercule. Yet another showed her sitting in the middle of a row of young Asian girls, all wearing the tabard, the traditional French school uniform.
    There were more photos of young Hercule in army camouflage, one of him in a jeep wearing the shoulder bars of a captain and looking up at a cluster of parachutes dropping from the sky. A MAS-38 machine gun was balanced across his knee. Bruno thought he recognized the event from other photos of the same scene. It was the relief of Dien Bien Phu, when the Foreign Legion paratroops were dropped in to reinforce the doomed French outpost whose defeat heralded the end of France’s empire in Indochina. In an adjacent photo, this time in Algeria from the look of the buildings, he was surrounded by young Asian troops, presumably some of their Vietnamese allies the French took with them when they withdrew after Ho Chi Minh’s victory.
    By now Hercule was a major. More photos showed him with a very old de Gaulle pinning the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur to his chest. At the back was a much smaller photo of Hercule with an impressive-looking uniformed black man with a beard and a white man in commando camouflage with a face that was vaguely familiar. Half the history of modern France was spread out in the photos before him, some of it doubtless secret, and Bruno marveled at the way a man such as this had been content to sit back and help him learn about truffles.
    He thought of the manpower it would take to go through Hercule’s mounds of files and papers, looking for whatever embarrassments or secrets the state wished to guard. But there was one book he expected to find and so far he had drawn a blank. It was Hercule’s truffle journal, the one Didier had been so eager to see. Bruno assumed that Hercule