Black Diamond

left Vietnam with the French forces in 1954, he’d brought with him a new Vietnamese wife. Stillattached to military intelligence, he was based briefly at the NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau and was then posted to Algeria soon after learning that his wife was pregnant. She stayed in Paris with Vietnamese relatives and died in child-birth. Hercule had remained in Algeria, and the daughter had remained in Paris. He had seen her only on his occasional leaves, and she barely knew her father. For security reasons, even these brief contacts ceased when the generals launched their coup attempt in 1961 and the war with the OAS had begun. Hercule had been one of their targets. To visit his daughter would have put her at risk.
    Now, looking around the council table in the
mairie
of Ste. Alvère, listening to the predictable questions from the mayor and the council members, Bruno found it daunting to comprehend a France that had been so close to civil war. Bruno recalled Hercule when last they met saying he would have shot the baron if he had joined the OAS. Bruno had assumed he was joking, or at least exaggerating for effect. Now he knew better. Had some fearsome echo of those OAS years cost Hercule his life?
    Suddenly aware that J-J and the rest of the gathering were looking at him and evidently awaiting an answer, Bruno hauled his attention back to the meeting. J-J had been talking about full cooperation, and Bruno had spent years learning the army rule that one could seldom go far wrong repeating an officer’s words back to him and adding “sir.”
    “Full cooperation, Monsieur le Commissaire,” he said, which seemed to suffice. J-J’s penetrating gaze lingered on him a moment, but moved on.
    The mayor began to explain ponderously that Hercule’s death could have had nothing to do with Ste. Alvère, since the truffle market was thoroughly monitored. Bruno tuned outagain and looked gloomily at the DGSE man in the gray shirt who had arrived so late from Paris yesterday that after meeting with him there had been no time for a drink or even much of a conversation with Isabelle as he had raced her back to the station at Le Buisson to catch the evening train to Bordeaux. A little less speed, a bit more braking on the corners and just slightly more caution before passing other cars and she’d have missed her last train and been stuck for the evening. The thought had crossed his mind with a brief flutter of temptation. It was not that he wanted to restart their affair but that he still felt baffled and frustrated at the way it had ended. It felt unfinished and untidy; there were still matters between them to be resolved.
    But there was other unfinished business that nagged at him. Once he had dropped Isabelle at the station, he had driven to Vinh’s house on the outskirts of St. Denis. It was one of the small modern homes, built from prefabricated kits for a hundred thousand euros and the cost of a small tract of land. They had been spreading around the region since the foreigners and the Parisians had pushed the price of the traditional Périgord houses out of reach. Bruno understood the need for them, but disliked them all the same with their shallow roofs of rounded red tiles, as if they were in Provence or Italy rather than the Périgord. But he remembered Vinh’s pride at his single-story home with two small bedrooms all on a flat platform of cement, and the feast he and his wife had given to celebrate his new status as a man of property.
    The house had been closed and silent when Bruno arrived, the window shutters closed and no sign of Vinh’s small truck that he used to get to the local markets. As he tried to peer through the shutter gaps and poked around the tiny rear garden for any sign of life, Bruno remembered his mild surpriseat finding Hercule among the guests that evening of Vinh’s feast. Hercule, the only Frenchman there who was not in some way attached to the St. Denis market, had made a brief speech, reminiscing fondly of his own days in Vietnam and his admiration for the
nems
and
pho
that Vinh’s wife made. Probably Vinh had taken his wife away for a few days to get over the shock of the attack. But he was not answering his mobile phone, and Bruno had no other Vietnamese contacts in the area, which meant he was stuck, although he very much wanted to know why Vinh had been attacked by a Chinese illegal immigrant with an expensive lawyer.
    Beside him, the councillors were starting to pack away