Black Diamond

month he was getting a thousand a week. The mayor couldn’t hush that up even if he wanted to.”
    “A thousand a week?” Alain raised his eyebrows. “You’re kidding me.”
    “I can show you the books. One of you is going down for this, him or you. Which would you prefer?”
    “I just did what I was told.”
    “I know that. He was the boss. If Didier said open the packages up and seal them again, that’s what you did.”
    Alain nodded.
    “What happened to the logbooks for the auction? What did he do with them?”
    Alain looked blank. Bruno let it go. Some things Didier would have done for himself.
    “Alain, you have a choice to make right now. Either you sit down with me and make a statement and sign it, or I take you straight to the gendarmerie and charge you with theft and have you kept in jail under
garde à vue
. And then we go to your house and search everything with your wife and kids out on the pavement crying and all the neighbors watching in the street. And when you come out of prison, you never work again. It’s your choice.”
    “If I make a statement, I’ll lose the job anyway and still go to jail.”
    “Maybe. It’s a risk. But you’ll have me on your side. And you can say in the statement that you are speaking out of your own free will because you thought there was something funny going on. You did what you were told by Didier, but you became suspicious when you heard about the complaints.”
    “I would have spoken out, but who was I going to talk to—the mayor?” Alain said. “I’d have been fired on the spot.”
    “You make that statement with me as witness, and they can’t fire you. The mayor would be voted out overnight by the council if he tried, relative or no relative.”
    “I’m no good at statements, don’t know what to say.”
    “I’ll help you, Alain. We’ll do it question and answer, and then when we’re done you can read it over before you sign anything. How’s that sound?”
    Bruno pulled up two chairs to the low table beside the vacuum machine and placed them side by side. He took a notepad from his briefcase, turned to a fresh page and wrote “Statement of Alain Bruneval” and the date at the top and said: “Tell me when you started resealing the packages.”
    Alain paused and looked at him with a half smile. “I saw you play rugby the other day. You’re not as fast as you used to be.”
    “I remember when you used to play yourself,” Bruno said, putting down the pen.
    “I could have given you a run for your money.”
    “You still could, Alain. Maybe you should come out and start training again, get fit for next year.”
    Alain nodded contentedly, as if some scrap of pride had been satisfied, and Bruno started to write as he began to speak. “We’d always had a few resealings to do, when a packagebroke or we had the wrong label on it, but about a year ago, November last year, Didier began bringing package after package to be sealed again.…”
    Twenty minutes later, Bruno had a signed statement that would stand up in court and send Didier to jail.

17
    The mayor was chortling with delight as he looked at that day’s edition of
Sud Ouest
, and not only because of the photo of a manure-drenched Bruno that graced the front page under the headline HERO COP OF ST. DENIS SAVES CHILD .
    Inside, they had given it two pages. “Policeman Dives into Manure to Rescue Drowning Boy” topped one page. “Mayoral Candidate Apologizes for Dangerous Day Out” topped the other, with photos of Bill looking abashed, little Mathieu looking cheerful and Juliette the teacher looking angry, with a quote from her saying, “Bill the Green has lost my vote.” At the bottom of the page was a story about Bill’s use of manure to power his fuel cells, titled “Green Power’s Pool of Death.”
    The mayor was quoted condemning Bill for “the height of irresponsibility” in bringing schoolchildren to a place without security precautions and promising an investigation that could lead to the suspension of the restaurant license for L’Auberge des Verts. Prodded by the mayor, the water department was threatening to close the restaurant as a health hazard.
    “This is going to cost him a lot of votes,” the mayor said to Bruno, not bothering to conceal his delight at Bill’s embarrassment. “Mathieu comes from a big family, and every farmer in the valley knows his mother. And every pet owner.”
    Mathieu’s mother was the receptionist for St. Denis’s one