Black Diamond

signaled to one of the chefs to take over when he saw Bruno.
    “Did you get any sleep?” Bruno asked.
    “They let me go about two with Bao Le, after giving our statements. J-J was helpful. How about you?”
    “I gave my statement this morning,” Bruno said. “I just wanted to say hello before heading back to St. Denis and see if you needed anything. I can’t be here to help with security, but I have some advice, starting with those deliveries.”
    “Don’t worry. I have a guy in the alley checking every box before it comes in the back door. Come up to the office. Bao Le is there, and he said he needed to talk to you.” Tran turned to the kitchen and called for coffee before he led Bruno upstairs.
    Bao Le was working on a laptop at the wrong side of the desk. A pleasant courtesy, thought Bruno, to leave the main chair for Tran. He looked up, quickly closed a program and rose to shake Bruno’s hand.
    “Sorry,” he said. “But I have to keep up with my real job.”
    “What’s that?” Bruno asked.
    “I’m a partner in an international consultancy, but I wanted to follow up on your question about Hercule’s daughter. You know Hercule had been pressing us for information on this for years?”
    “I’d be surprised if he hadn’t,” Bruno said. “Is she still alive?”
    “No, and Hercule knew it, but it gets complicated. You know she ran away from home as a teenager?”
    “I know nothing, not about his wife, his daughter, anything. In this area he was a very private man.”
    “Maybe I should start by saying I’m involved in this too. Hercule’s wife was my aunt, so his daughter was my cousin.”
    “Both members of the royal family.”
    “Very distant and junior members. My great-grandfather was a cousin of the father of Emperor Bao Dai. Our family was never rich but they were courtiers, mostly living and working in the palace. When Bao Dai fled to France, almost the entire family left with him. By then my aunt had married Hercule, but she died giving birth to Linh. Because Hercule was in Algeria, Linh lived with us. She and I grew up together in Paris, with her as my big sister. I adored her—I say this to let you know that I was as committed to finding her as Hercule was.”
    “She must have been considerably older than you,” said Bruno.
    “Eleven years older, so she was my babysitter,” said Bao Le. He pulled a wallet from his jacket and withdrew a small, passport-sized black-and-white photograph of a pretty teenager with a Western face and Asian eyes and hair that fell in curling waves to her shoulders. He passed it to Bruno. “I always carry this. In a way, she brought me up. She alwaysspoke Vietnamese to me, taught me to read and to swim and how to ride a bike. But this was the end of the sixties, with the Vietnam War raging and the so-called peace talks under way in Paris. You probably remember, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho eventually got the Nobel Peace Prize. To his credit Le Duc Tho declined it.”
    “I can’t say I remember, but I’ve read the history,” Bruno said.
    “As you can imagine, the whole émigré community in Paris was obsessed with the war, and none more than Linh,” Bao Le said. “We were all Vietnamese patriots, but we despised the Saigon regime and hated the way the Americans fought the war. But we also detested the Communists in Hanoi. Except for Linh. She became committed to the Vietcong. She wasn’t a Communist, but she felt going back to the war was the only practical way to be a patriot.”
    “She could have been right, looking back,” said Tran. “If I’d have been born then, I might have made the same decision.”
    Bao Le looked at Tran thoughtfully. “Who knows?” he said. “History takes a long time to work out who was right and who was wrong. We make the best choices we can at the time. And she was very young.”
    “When did she run away?” Bruno asked.
    “In seventy-four, when she turned eighteen and was able to get a passport. She flew to Warsaw and then to Hanoi to volunteer for the war. The embassy in Paris had given her a visa. But when she arrived, they didn’t know what to do with her. She was a distant member of the royal family, half French and with French citizenship. They sent her to train as a nurse. We know from the handful of letters we received that she was with an army unit when they took Saigon the following year.And she was with the same unit when they were ordered into Laos and later into Cambodia. She was an outspoken