Black Diamond

good speaker,” Pamela murmured, her eyes fixed on Pons. Beside her, Fabiola looked at Bruno and rolled her eyes. He winked back at her, relieved that he wasn’t the only one to find this party manifesto less than persuasive.
    “Now you may say that this program is not very detailed, and you’d be right,” Pons went on, running his fingers through his already tousled hair. “But we have spent a lot of time working together on this and learning that we can indeed work together. What we have produced here is a set of binding principles. I repeat, binding principles. They are our bedrock, our moral and political foundation, and these principles will inform and shape every decision we take as members of your town council.
    “I can’t tell you tonight what’s going to come up. Let’s be honest about this. I don’t know what new regulations on water supply and sewage we’ll get from Paris or what newrules on recycling we’ll get from Brussels. Nobody yet knows what the regional council may ask us to do about public housing or about building codes. But what we can promise you is that we’ll never violate the principles I have spelled out tonight. Your jobs are too important, and the air your children breathe is too important.”
    “So why did you close down the sawmill and put me out of work?” came a shout from the crowd. Bruno turned and saw it was Marcel, the foreman at the sawmill.
    “We didn’t,” Pons replied. “The law did that. We put up compromise after compromise to keep the sawmill open and to save your jobs. We offered to buy a piece of land that would have made the sawmill legal. And we all know who turned us down. We’ve done a lot here in St. Denis, all of us, all of you and every taxpayer, to help hang on to those jobs. Your own taxes helped pay for the last piece of antipollution equipment that was installed. And that was the right thing to do, because jobs and the environment have to go together. We can’t be made prisoners of a false choice between the two—that is principle number seven in our joint program.”
    More cheers. It was a clever answer, Bruno concluded, conciliatory and glib at the same time. And already Pons was changing the subject to talk about the plan to turn the empty sawmill into an industrial eco-park with tax-free premises for green jobs. He didn’t know where Pons had learned public speaking, but Bruno acknowledged that he was very good at it. Pamela was right about that. He cast his mind back to the evening in Pons’s restaurant when he had spoken of his various careers in Asia. Hadn’t he been a salesman, a champagne salesman, or was it cognac? And he’d been a teacher, so had grown accustomed to speaking in public. Andhe’d been a croupier in a casino, whatever skills that had taught him.
    He began to make mental note of the sequence of tricks that Pons was using: the joke, the arms opened wide, the self-deprecating grin, the sudden turn to solemnity as he banged one fist into his palm to make his points, one, two, three. This was political speaking by numbers, Bruno thought. Pons was playing his audience like an angler plays a fish, and from the rapt faces around him, they were enjoying the manipulation.
    Bruno glanced down at Pamela. Her eyes were shining, and the warm smile on her face gave way to a look of purpose as Pons struck another serious note. Her hand came up to touch her own cheek, her little finger just brushing the corner of her lips as if unconsciously caressing herself. It was an almost intimate gesture, and he was startled to see it here.
    Looking around the hall, Bruno noticed similar gestures among other women, touching their hair or putting a hand to their necks or their temples. The men were reacting differently, their heads nodding or their jaws set firm before relaxing into a smile again. Suddenly he was aware of Fabiola watching him as he studied the crowd. She seemed immune to Pons’s skills, shaking her head as she looked at Bruno. She was as unmoved as he.
    Fabiola sidled around Pamela and put a hand on Bruno’s shoulder. “I don’t like this. It feels creepy,” she said, too quietly for Pamela to hear.
    “I know what you mean,” he said.
    “Can you do something?” Fabiola whispered. “He seems to have cast a spell over people.”
    Bruno shrugged. He was known to be close to the mayor. Even if he could think of some way to intervene, it would beseen as a political move, even a hostile one. That might do more harm