Black Diamond

Hubert said. “But nobody can afford to drink much of that these days. I’m taking a bottle of the eighty-five because I really liked the old guy, and he bought a lot of wine from me. I’d thought of taking a ninety-nine because when we tasted it at the time he was right and I wrong. I thought it wouldn’t last, and Hercule told me it would, and he bought a case. We drank a bottle the last time Nathalie and I saw him. I’ve got a couple left in the bin.”
    “Let’s have them both, but I want to pay for them,” said J-J. “I’m a last-minute guest tonight.”
    Hubert raised his eyebrows and exchanged glances with Nathalie. Bruno knew that as head of detectives, J-J’s salary was at least double and maybe three times his own. But two bottles of Angélus would be more than a week’s pay even for J-J. Nathalie shrugged, as if to say it was up to Hubert what he charged. Hubert said, “Give me two hundred and I’ll open them now and bring them along to the baron’s.”
    “Not often that I pay that much for a bottle of wine,” said J-J as they settled back into Bruno’s vehicle. “But I suspect that if I hadn’t been coming to the dinner tonight I’d have paid a lot more.”
    Bruno nodded, thinking it would have been a great deal more and asked to hear the names from Hercule’s phone list. Most of them were familiar to him, hunters or men from the truffle trade or the Ste. Alvère
mairie
. J-J ticked them off on his printout and stuffed it back into his briefcase as they rounded the bend at the top of the hill that led to Bruno’s cottage. Gigi was sitting by the first of the row of young white oaks that bordered the track.
    “He recognizes the sound of the engine,” Bruno said proudly, greeting his dog. Pulling his sports bag from the rear seat, he led the way into his home.
    “A policeman who doesn’t lock his own front door,” chided J-J. Bruno grinned to himself, and unlocked the one door in his house that was always firmly secured, the storage room where he kept his shotgun and the washing machine. He rinsed his mud-soaked rugby clothes in the old sink before stuffing them into the machine. He set it in motion and relocked the door.
    “You have a choice,” he said to J-J. “Have a Ricard with me now while I make the soup and then join me in walking the dog in the dark, or take him out into the woods while there’s still some light and come back in half an hour.”
    J-J made two Ricards as Bruno went out to his
potager
with a garden fork and came back to the outdoor tap to rinse the dirt from the turnips, leeks and potatoes. In the kitchen, he began peeling and chopping the vegetables and lit the gas under a big iron saucepan. He tossed in some duck fat and began gently to fry them. From his refrigerator he pulled some of Stéphane’s milk and a glass jar full of a dark brown liquid and set them down. Then he began to peel garlic cloves.
    “What’s the brown stuff?” asked J-J.
    “Bouillon, made from the bones of the last wild boar Hercule shot. He gave me the bones for Gigi, but I made a stock first.” He stirred the vegetables and sipped his Ricard. “I heard on the radio about the Asian supermarket. Was it arson?”
    “Gasoline bombs again. Crude but effective,” said J-J. He went on to describe the pattern that made Paris fear another gang war. There had been similar trouble between Vietnameseand Chinese in Marseilles two years earlier before they agreed to a truce, and more serious trouble in the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris before that. It always started with attacks on street vendors and restaurants. Local truces could be negotiated, agreements to divide sections of a city. In Marseilles the truce broke down because of a third party, the Corsicans, who wanted to keep the whores, the drugs and the docks. That left the Asians fighting over illegal immigrants, gambling, loan sharking and protection rackets. But the Chinese had the counterfeit goods that gave them a foothold in the street markets. Above all, the Chinese had more and more illegal immigrants. A decade earlier, the Vietnamese had outnumbered the Chinese. Now the balance had shifted.
    “How many are you talking about?” Bruno asked. The vegetables were mashed, the stock on the fire but not yet simmering. He splashed in some water and then slowly added the milk, stirring carefully.
    “Altogether, there’s about a hundred and fifty thousand Viets and about two hundred thousand Chinese, probably more with