Black Diamond

bank account. There was also a handwritten note on each service statement, evidently put there by the technician, that gave a number followed by the words “digital counter.”
    Bruno punched the telephone number on the servicing invoice into his mobile phone and went up to the ground floor to make the call to the technician. Yes, there was a digital counter on the packing machine that tallied how many times it had been used, and the technician always listed the number on his monthly visit. Bruno went back to the basement and checked the monthly totals. They went from zero in the spring and early summer to a maximum of more than five thousand in January. He looked at the figures for November, a relatively quiet month. The digital counter said the machinehad been used 420 times that month. Bruno went back to the shipments log and found only 304 items that had been vacuum packed and shipped. That seemed like a sizable discrepancy, so he began to look at other months.
    He took a notepad from his briefcase and began making monthly lists. It was tedious, repetitive work, but he felt it was worth it. In December, he found the machine had been used 1,974 times, but there were only 1,214 shipments listed as packed. In January, the machine was used 3,447 times, but the logbook showed only 2,689 items packed and shipped. He went back to the previous year, and this time the figures for the digital counter and the logbook matched almost precisely, with a discrepancy of only a dozen or so, which could be explained by a faulty seal or a package damaged and having to be resealed. But the discrepancy for the latest year was extraordinary. The packages must have been opened and then resealed, which would have triggered the counter a second time. That would have been the opportunity for cheap Chinese truffles to have been inserted instead of the genuine Périgord variety.
    Bruno sat back, content. He had his evidence for the mayor that some kind of fraud was taking place at the market. But he also had a mystery in the absence of the separate logbooks for the auction sales. According to the account books, they contributed more than a hundred thousand euros a year to the market, about a fifth of its profit. That was serious money, and there should certainly be a logbook.
    He closed up the cardboard box, sealed it with tape and scrawled his own signature across the seal to ensure it was not reopened. He took the box up to the mayor’s secretary and asked her to lock it away. Then he walked across to the reardoor of the truffle market, knocked and pushed the door open. Alain, the packer with a red nose from the glasses of
petit blanc
he sipped all day in the café across the street, jumped back in surprise.
    “What the hell—oh, it’s you. Not done yet?”
    “No, I’m not. But you are, Alain,” Bruno said. Alain was alone in the room. Bruno walked across to the inside door, and the next room and the market hall were both empty.
    “Just you and me, Alain, and a nice quiet room for a chat. You’re in big trouble. I’ve been checking the books, and I want you to tell me why you’ve been reopening and then resealing about one package in four. Suppose you start by telling me who’s been giving you the cheap Chinese stuff to stick in the packages.”
    “What? I don’t know about any Chinese stuff.”
    “You’re lying. Let’s go to the gendarmerie and get your fingerprints taken. Then we can match them to the packages with the Chinese truffles. Or maybe you’d like me to call in the mayor first and tell him about the scam you’ve been running.”
    “What scam?” Alain blustered.
    Bruno turned to the vacuum-pack machine, studied the controls and pressed the catch that opened the service door. He pointed to the digital counter inside.
    “Ever notice this, Alain? See how it counts every time the machine gets used? When I compared this count with the number of packages that you signed for as packed and shipped, I get some very different numbers. Want to explain to me why that should be? Or do you want to do your explaining down at the gendarmerie?”
    Alain looked blankly at the digital counter, and then up at Bruno.
    “Putain,”
he said.
    “What did Didier pay you? A hundred euros a month extra?”
    Alain shrugged. “I’m saying nothing.”
    “So you go down instead of him.”
    “You won’t get him. He’s related to the mayor.”
    “Have you got any idea how much he was skimming off this? If you got a hundred a