Black Diamond

across the cheek, so hard that Guillaume staggered and fell to one knee, dropping his bullhorn. Pons stalked on into the crowd of his workers, not looking back and not pausing as some of his employees cheered and slapped him on the shoulders.
    White-faced except for the flaming red patch on his cheek, Guillaume shook his head and rose quickly, fury in his eye, surging forward after his father. Bruno wrapped his arms around the man to hold him back as Guillaume shouted, “You bastard, you dirty bastard!”
    Bruno felt hands wrenching at his arms, then someone was hauling him back by the neck as Guillaume’s
écolos
came to free their leader. Goaded into action, two of the younger workers from the sawmill piled in alongside Bruno, followed by a shrieking Axelle, who waded into the fray, raked her nails down Guillaume’s face and pulled on the lapels of his jacket to butt him hard in the face. She pushed him back, spitting in his eye as blood began to spout from his battered nose.
    Bruno rammed an elbow into the man wrenching his neck and kicked back hard to free himself. He turned, picked up Axelle by the waist and thrust her back behind him, luckily into the path of Montsouris, who was steaming into the brawlwith Marcel and a couple of the younger workers. Then the mayor and the baron were at each side of him, their arms in the air, advancing to make a gap between the two crowds and calling for calm. Bruno held up his hand to restrain Montsouris, and suddenly he heard the cawing of the rooks from the oak trees as a silence fell and all the angry energy seemed to leak away.
    Everyone seemed chastened by the eruption of violence and the sight of blood. Axelle was sobbing quietly as Father Sentout led her back to Emile, who was kneeling as he held his dumbstruck children. The priest helped Bruno steer the townspeople back along the fence to the road that led to town.
    “I’ll see the old ones back,” said Father Sentout. “That was a very sad moment, the son and the father.”
    “Whatever happened to the Pons family, it was all before my time. Do you remember any of it?” Bruno asked.
    “There was a very ugly separation when the boy was twelve or so, and he left for Paris with his mother. I think they got divorced in the end. I heard she died in Paris, it must be fifteen or twenty years back.”
    Bruno nodded as Father Sentout gave his arm to two elderly women. Old Pons himself was helping Rosalie. The mayor would know the background, thought Bruno, or perhaps the baron. Whatever the origins of the family feud, the return of the son meant that it could become Bruno’s problem. He turned back toward the sawmill and paused to take in the arresting tableau.
    But for the chimney and buildings of the sawmill, the scene reminded him of one of the religious paintings in the church of St. Denis. Guillaume Pons lay on his back, his head on Pamela’s lap and blood all down his shirt, while Fabiola,the young doctor from the St. Denis medical center, tended to his battered face. The mayor and the baron stood solemnly at each side of them, and Albert was kneeling at Pons’s feet. Around them stood the silent
écolos
, looking down at the son felled by his father.
    Bruno remembered precisely the last time he had studied the painting. He had been sitting near it during the Easter choral concert in the church, when Father Sentout had spent weeks rehearsing the choir for a performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.” Bruno had remembered studying the photocopied text of the work and Father Sentout’s short commentary. One of the phrases had stayed with him, and emerged again now, unbidden, into his head.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani
—Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?

2
    Bruno loved to drive in the baron’s old Citroën DS, a car that had been built before he was born. He enjoyed the way the car hardly leaned when cornering and how it still looked like the most modern car ever made. Bruno had heard the baron sing its virtues a score of times: that it had been the world’s first car with disc brakes and hydraulic suspension and some other features he could never quite remember. But one thing the baron had ensured Bruno never forgot was that it had saved the life of the baron’s hero, Charles de Gaulle, whom he always called le général, rather than president. During one of the several assassination attempts in the 1960s by the OAS, the military and colonialist rebels who wanted to