Black Diamond

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    “Well, my husband says it’s nothing and I’m dreaming things, but something suspicious has happened at the neighbor’s place, at the Vinhs’. You know they’ve been away. It might be nothing and I don’t want to waste your time.”
    “Go on, madame. What was suspicious?”
    “Last night I was woken up by a car. I don’t sleep too well.Anyway, it stopped at the Vinhs’ house, and thinking it might be them coming back I got up and looked through the window. It wasn’t them. It was Asians, but not the Vinhs. But since they were Asian, I assumed they must be friends. Then I heard what sounded like breaking glass, and then they left so it wasn’t a burglary.”
    “It certainly sounds suspicious.”
    “Well, it’s been on my mind since, so I went over there just now, and in the kitchen window there’s a small round hole cut in the glass and some kind of message pinned to the door in a foreign language. That’s all I could see that was wrong. But the Vinhs gave me a key. They have one of ours, you know, like neighbors do, so I thought you might want to take a look, just to be on the safe side.”
    “I’ll be right there, Madame Condorcet.”
    Vinh lived on the outskirts of the hamlet, and the Condorcets lived in an identical house, one of a group of four squeezed into what had been a small tobacco field. Madame Condorcet was already waiting on the front doorstep, a key in her hand, when Bruno pulled up in the Land Rover.
    “That’s not your police van,” she said.
    “I’m waiting for the new one to be delivered. The last one got wrecked by some criminals in a car chase,” he said. “It sounds more exciting than it was. But let’s go and see this hole in the window.”
    The hole was about eight inches in diameter and below it was an empty sack, one of the old-fashioned sort made of rough burlap. Although Bruno’s first thought was that the hole had been cut so that gasoline could be poured into thehouse, there was no smell of it, and looking through the window Bruno could see nothing wrong and no sign of life. He bent to look more closely at the sack.
    “One of them was carrying something,” said Madame Condorcet. “It could have been that, but it looked full.”
    Bruno opened the sack. Inside there was a whiff of something feral, something animal. He stood up to look through the window again and saw something dart across the far corner of the room. One of the curtains had been torn, and an empty cereal package was on the floor.
    A piece of cardboard had been pinned to the kitchen door, with what Bruno presumed was Vietnamese writing scrawled on it with a thick black marker. He pulled out his mobile and called Tran, his old army contact in Bordeaux.
    “I need you to translate something. Remember I told you about Vinh disappearing? There’s some writing I found nailed to the door of Vinh’s house,” he said. “It’s in what I think is Vietnamese.”
    “Spell it out, or describe each letter to me.”
    Bruno did so, letter by letter, Madame Condorcet standing nervously at his side.
    “It says ‘Next time we set them on your children,’ ” Tran said. “It’s bad Vietnamese, written by someone who’s almost illiterate or not a native speaker.”
    “Next time we set what on your children?” Bruno asked.
    “Not clear. It could mean ‘these things’ or ‘this item’ or even ‘this shit’—it’s a slang term. What is it about?”
    “I don’t know yet, but there’s a hole cut in the window big enough to put a cat through. I’m here with a neighbor who has a key. Stay on the line. We’re going inside now.”
    He handed the phone to Madame Condorcet, took thekey and opened the door carefully. He slipped inside, closing the door behind him, and his nostrils caught the same feral scent he had noticed in the sack. There was more darting from the far side of the room. As he moved into the sitting room beyond, he saw droppings on the carpet and sofa. Rats! A knot of four or five of them were huddling in a corner. In the bedroom, the coverlet had been pulled from the bed to make a nest, and more droppings were smeared on the bed. More rats were squeaking by the window. He checked the other rooms before he let himself out, depressed at the mess a dozen rats could make in what had been an impeccably neat home.
    “Rats,” he told Madame Condorcet, taking the phone as she put her hands to her face in horror. He spoke to Tran again. “They emptied a sackful of rats