Black Diamond

outskirts of town. Nicco pointed, waved and drove off, and Bruno pressed the cheap plastic button that flanked the narrow door to the upstairs apartment. He heard the sound of a distant buzzer and then steps coming down a staircase.
    “Bruno!” Florence said with surprise as she opened the door, at once putting one hand to her hair, another smoothing her apron. Animated, her face had softened and become more … Bruno searched for the word. He could never callher pretty. It made her more attractive, and much less remote. “I hadn’t expected …”
    “Nicco picked me up at the station and told me you’d called, about the logbook. But if this is a bad time …”
    “I was just getting the children ready for a walk.” She gestured vaguely at the folding double stroller that almost blocked the narrow stairs.
    “Then I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Let me get the stroller ready, and you bring the kids down.” He reached in and took the folded stroller from the hall, and with a hurried smile she nodded and went back up the stairs.
    Bruno smiled to himself as he looked at his watch. Perhaps two minutes to dress the kids, another two minutes to bring them down, and the rest would be spent changing her clothes and fixing her face. Some women would keep him waiting half an hour. He suspected that Florence would be down more quickly than that. She made it, changed and hair brushed, and with the kids in overcoats and gloves and little woolen hats, in less than five minutes.
    “Dora and Daniel,” said Florence. “ ‘Dora’ is short for ‘Dorothée.’ ”
    Bruno knelt down to the height of the children and solemnly greeted each of them before lifting them into their seats and fastening the little seatbelts. The children were clean and cheerful and glowing with health.
    “I found the logbook,” she said as he rose. “I know how Didier’s mind works. He’s careful. He likes to have proper excuses when things go wrong. I didn’t think he’d destroy the logbook or even hide it somewhere that had no reasonable explanation.”
    “As if it had been accidentally misfiled?”
    “Exactly,” she said. Somehow, Bruno had automatically taken the helm of the stroller as they walked, Florence striding briskly as she explained her thinking. Rather than search Didier’s office, she’d gone down to the basement storeroom, telling the secretary who gave her the key that she needed to check some of last year’s figures. She’d found the logbook in the third box she looked in, tucked beside a pile of
taxe d’habitation
returns. She pointed to a red leather accounts book with a black spine peeking from the bag attached to the stroller.
    “I guess you’ll need to compare it with the main set of accounts,” she added. “I saw you had sealed that box so I couldn’t examine it. But I checked it against my own records, and two things struck me. The first was that the prices paid at these end-of-day auctions were consistently much lower than prices at the market itself.”
    “That suggests a ring,” said Bruno. Florence looked blank. “It means an agreement among the bidders in order to keep the prices low. It can only work over time if the auctioneer, which means Didier, is prepared to go along and sell at the lower price rather than withhold his stock. What’s the second thing?”
    “The main buyer almost every time was someone called Pons, and he seemed to be paying less than his official winning bids. And he always paid cash.”
    “Was there an initial? There’s a Boniface Pons and a Guillaume.”
    Florence shook her head. Bruno cast his mind back to a conversation with Hercule. The old man had said Didier once worked for Boniface Pons, running a truffle plantation before Pons gave up and sold the trees as timber. So Pons wouldknow something of the truffle trade. It was possible that Pons’s name was being used without his knowledge, but either way Bruno reckoned that Florence had come across something far more serious than some cheap Chinese truffles stuffed into a vacuum pack.
    “It seems you’ve done my work for me,” he said, turning his head to smile at her. She looked at him directly, her gray-blue eyes suddenly seeming less cold than he remembered.
    “Watch out!” she grabbed his arm, as he was about to run the stroller into a lamppost.
    “Sorry, I’m not used to this,” he said.
    “I do it myself, once I start thinking and I’m suddenly miles away.” She looked down at the