Black Diamond

last night?”
    Duong’s eyes went blank. He shook his head.
    “A Chinese restaurant,” Bruno added. “Destroyed.”
    “Difficult times,” Duong repeated as his son came out. He gathered his family and went out toward the waiting car. At the door, he turned. “Vinh will get your message. Thank you for your help.”
    They climbed into the back of the car. With a last raking look around the parking lot, the bodyguard followed them, and the car took the Bergerac road. That was interesting. Bruno had checked the address on Madame Duong’s
carte vitale
, the French health insurance card. Their home was in Vergt, which lay in the opposite direction.
    Perhaps I should have been tougher, Bruno told himself. He could have insisted on taking them to the gendarmerie to make formal statements. Another kind of policeman, like Capitaine Duroc, would have threatened them with arrest for obstruction. But the very fact that a Duroc might have tried such a trick was reason enough for Bruno to avoid it. He needed these people’s cooperation and their trust, not their hostility.
    He walked into the empty waiting room and knocked on the door that led to Dr. Gelletreau’s consulting room. He could hear a string quartet on the radio and then the sound of a chair being pushed back and heavy footsteps coming to the door.
    “Ah, Bruno,” said the plump doctor with white hair and a heavy mustache. “What’s wrong with you? You look healthy enough to me.”
    “I’m fine. I just wanted to ask about Madame Duong, the woman you just treated.”
    “She’s fine, just some bruises and very sore skin after we cleaned the paint off her. Never seen anything quite like it.”
    “Did she say anything about the attack?”
    “Not a word, except to mutter about their livelihood being destroyed and how were they going to live. She was in quite a state so I gave her some tea and that calmed her down a bit.”
    “Did you tell her to come back and see you again?”
    Gelletreau shook his head. “She said she had her own doctor in Périgueux, and she’d go to see him. She gave me his name, another Vietnamese, a heart specialist at the hospital. I was going to give him a call later this evening, make sure he follows up. Her boy seemed like a responsible young man and said he’d make sure she went to see him.”
    “Did the boy say anything else?”
    “Nothing that comes to mind. He did say something about the Chinese, as though he knew they were the ones who attacked them. Do you think it’s tied in with the supermarket fire?”
    “Could be. How did you hear about that?”
    “The prefect’s office called. They’re making an inventory of burn units and doctors who know how to treat burn victims. I handled a lot of burns in the military so they had me down as a specialist. I got the impression they expected more fire bombings.”
    “Interesting,” said Bruno. “By the way, how’s that boy of yours?”
    “Doing well at the lycée in Paris. They expect him to get into Sciences Po next year, with a lot of thanks to you.”
    Bruno nodded. Young Richard Gelletreau had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder until Brunohad solved the case. “Give him my best wishes and tell him we expect him at the tennis tournament this summer. If he wants a doubles partner, I’d be happy to join him.”
    The waiting room was no longer empty when he left the doctor’s office. Rollo, headmaster of the St. Denis
collège
for pupils under sixteen, was sitting in the corner, leafing through an old magazine. One of Bruno’s regular tennis partners, he was still a handsome man in his early fifties, but appeared weighed down by the endless juggling of budgets and the difficulty of finding good teachers prepared to live in the countryside.
    “
Salut
, Rollo,” he said, shaking hands. “What’s up with you.”
    “More sleeping pills,” he replied. “I keep waking up at three and can’t get back to sleep, even when I haven’t had a drink.”
    “You’re not playing enough tennis. Exercise will cure your ills.”
    “I wish. No, I heard this week that old Joliot is determined to retire at sixty-two, so I’m going to need a new science teacher beginning in January. I’ve got the budget for it thanks to the new curriculum, but the only applicants so far aren’t really qualified.”
    “New curriculum? They only changed it last year.” Bruno remembered him complaining about it.
    “This was part of it, a new course on environmental