Black Diamond

children. “They usually warn me when I’m about to run into something.”
    “I’m going to have to check this logbook against accounts at the
mairie
,” Bruno said. “But I expect I’ll see you at the children’s party. There’ll be lots to eat and drink there, so you needn’t bother feeding them beforehand.”
    She looked down. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to come. The other mother who usually gives me a lift has gone shopping in Périgueux. I don’t have a car.”
    “Mine is parked at your place. I’ll come back from the
mairie
and pick you up and take you all to St. Denis,” he said, thinking what kind of life it must be, stuck in a small country town with no car, little money and the supermarket at the other end of town.
    “And I can bring you back, if you don’t mind waiting while I change out of Father Christmas clothes.” He looked down at the children, now squabbling amicably over a picture book. “I’d hate the kids to lose their illusions too early.”
    “If it’s not too much trouble …”
    “Not at all.” Bruno checked his watch. “I’ll be back at your place at about four-fifteen because the party starts at five and I’ll need some time to change into my Christmas gear.”
    “You can find your way back?”
    “I think I can manage that.” He said good-bye to the children and went off down the rue République toward the
mairie
, the logbook tucked inside his jacket.
    With Florence’s advice to guide him, Bruno began to list the difference in prices paid at the morning market and the much lower prices at the later auction. Florence was right. One name kept recurring in the lists of buyers in the final auctions. Pons seemed to be buying every time there was an auction, although it wasn’t clear from the logbook whether it was father or son. Leafing back to the previous year, it was still Pons, still buying at every opportunity. It must have been Boniface, since Bill had not yet arrived in the district. Bruno began to list Pons’s purchases, whistling in surprise as he totaled the amounts that the man was buying. There were several days when Pons was spending more on truffles than Bruno’s monthly salary.
    He turned back to the spidery writing in the logbooks. Not only was Pons the biggest single buyer, but as Florence had noted he was consistently paying less per gram than others were paying for their batches of truffles, no matter what he bid at the auction. And they in turn were paying about two-thirds of what the customers in Paris and elsewhere were being charged when they bought direct from the market. This was like giving them a license to print money, a guaranteed profit. Was it possible that Pons was getting a discount because of the volume of his purchases?
    Bruno checked his figures again. Not only was Pons getting a consistent discount, but because he was invariably listed as paying in cash, that presumably meant Pons would have attended each auction. Bruno found that very hard to believe. But could he prove it? Then he remembered. He opened his own pocket diary and turned back to January, when he and Pons and the baron and others from the St. Denis rugby club had gone to Marseilles for three days to support the town’s team in a tournament there. Pons had been hundreds of miles away with Bruno when he was listed in the market logbook as present and buying truffles cheaply with cash.
    So if Pons was not present, then someone—presumably Didier—had been buying on his behalf. And Pons and Didier had worked together before at Pons’s truffle plantation. And what was Pons doing with all the truffles he bought? By Bruno’s calculation, he had spent half a million euros the previous year buying hundreds of kilos. He had to be selling them somewhere. And all that cash, tens of thousands of euros a week, had to come from somewhere. This stank of money laundering, and Bruno began to feel that this inquiry was getting far too big and complex for him. He’d have to call in J-J and the specialist accountants from the fraud squad. The national tax authorities would want to get involved.
    As he gathered his notes and logbooks and climbed up the stairs to the photocopying machine, another thought struck Bruno. If the investigation into Pons was launched within the next three months before the election, that would be the end of Pons’s campaign to become mayor. Those votes would drift back to their usual recipient, Gérard Mangin, the veteran mayor who had given