Black Diamond

of the fly that indicated the presence of truffles beneath the ground. He’d miss Hercule’s special way with dogs, the quick understanding that he brought forth from Gigi when training him to find the truffles and stand and mark the spot without digging. He’d miss the cognacs at dawn in the open air, and the easy camaraderie that he and the baron and Hercule had enjoyed, three old soldiers. They might have known different wars, but it had been the same army.
    He walked to the back of the house and took his hay box from the barn and then picked up the herbs and bay leaves and went into his kitchen. The casserole was bubbling gently. He stirred the stew, added in the thyme and bay leaves and ahandful of black peppercorns and went off to shower and change into his uniform. When he returned, he turned off the gas, opened the hay box and nestled the casserole inside its thick bed of hay. He settled the small sack of hay on top to keep the heat in and closed the tin lid. Now it would cook itself in the insulating hay for the rest of the day. He checked that he had a fresh towel in his sports bag and headed out to the Land Rover to supervise the setting up of the Saturday morning market. Gigi sat solemnly at the head of the lane, as he did every morning, watching him go. Bruno wondered what he did then. Probably padded back to the chicken coop to pick up the scent of the long-gone fox and patrol his master’s land.

13
    Bruno walked twelve or thirteen miles on a good day of hunting, ran two or three times a week, played tennis and taught the children of the town to play rugby. But he’d be forty on his next birthday, and he knew that a full ninety minutes of rugby would be rough. It was less the stamina to keep running than the constant bursts of acceleration that the game required. And once again the team had insisted he play at wing forward, where he had to be as fast as the backs and as relentless as the forwards.
    He rubbed liniment into his thighs and strapped his sometimes suspect ankle. And then he watched in disbelief as his teammate Stéphane slid on some black tights under his shorts. One of the biggest and toughest men who’d ever played for St. Denis, he was known to be impervious to pain, but suddenly he was dressing up to keep his legs warm. Stéphane saw Bruno looking and said defensively, “It’s cold out there.”
    “Not after the first couple of minutes,” Bruno said. “Mind you, that’s about all I’ll be good for.”
    “Look at the rest of us,” grunted Stéphane. He was right.As Bruno glanced around the changing room, he saw a bunch of middle-aged men carrying too much weight and capable of too little stamina, each of them probably wondering, like him, whether he’d be able to walk tomorrow.
    It was the day of St. Denis’s annual youth-versus-age rugby game, the over-thirty-fives against the under-eighteens, maturity and cunning against the energy of youth. There were only two ways for the old men to win. The first was to pile up a huge lead in the first fifteen minutes when they could still play with some of their old fire and then dig in for a solid defense. The other was to crush the striplings with their bulk and ruthless aggression. Bruno had been on teams that played it both ways, and it never quite worked. The speed and resilience of the youngsters always told in the second half. And the one time the oldsters had played rough, the wife of one player had run onto the field to hit her husband with her handbag after he’d flattened their son with a brutal tackle. It was in the hope of another such scene that the town’s stadium and the railings around the pitch were always filled for this match, which was one of the club’s best fund-raisers of the year.
    Raoul handed around a bottle of cognac, but Bruno shook his head. Maybe at halftime, if he lasted that long. He looked around at the team. He knew each of his teammates and had played with all of them before except for the one newcomer, Guillaume Pons. So he was over thirty-five, even if he didn’t look it, bouncing up and down on his toes. Bruno wondered how much rugby he had played in China. Still, he looked in good shape and in the little preparation they had done, a few jogs around the playing field, he’d shown himself to be pretty fast. He was playing on the wing.
    “Okay, gather around,” said Louis, the rugby club chairmanwho had appointed himself their coach, which was one way to avoid having to play. “Go like