Bruno rammed an elbow into the man wrenching his neck and kicked back hard to free himself. He turned, picked up Axelle by the waist and thrust her back behind him, luckily into the path of Montsouris, who was steaming into the brawl with Marcel and a couple of the younger workers. Then the mayor and the baron were at each side of him, their arms in the air, advancing to make a gap between the two crowds and calling for calm. Bruno held up his hand to restrain Montsouris, and suddenly he heard the cawing of the rooks from the oak trees as a silence fell and all the angry energy seemed to leak away.
Everyone seemed chastened by the eruption of violence and the sight of blood. Axelle was sobbing quietly as Father Sentout led her back to Emile, who was kneeling as he held his dumbstruck children. The priest helped Bruno steer the townspeople back along the fence to the road that led to town.
“I’ll see the old ones back,” said Father Sentout. “That was a very sad moment, the son and the father.”
“Whatever happened to the Pons family, it was all before my time. Do you remember any of it?” Bruno asked.
“There was a very ugly separation when the boy was twelve or so, and he left for Paris with his mother. I think they got divorced in the end. I heard she died in Paris, it must be fifteen or twenty years back.”
Bruno nodded as Father Sentout gave his arm to two elderly women. Old Pons himself was helping Rosalie. The mayor would know the background, thought Bruno, or perhaps the baron. Whatever the origins of the family feud, the return of the son meant that it could become Bruno’s problem. He turned back toward the sawmill and paused to take in the arresting tableau.
But for the chimney and buildings of the sawmill, the scene reminded him of one of the religious paintings in the church of St. Denis. Guillaume Pons lay on his back, his head on Pamela’s lap and blood all down his shirt, while Fabiola, the young doctor from the St. Denis medical center, tended to his battered face. The mayor and the baron stood solemnly at each side of them, and Albert was kneeling at Pons’s feet. Around them stood the silent ecolos, looking down at the son felled by his father.
Bruno remembered precisely the last time he had studied the painting. He had been sitting near it during the Easter choral concert in the church, when Father Sentout had spent weeks rehearsing the choir for a performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.” Bruno had remembered studying the photocopied text of the work and Father Sentout’s short commentary. One of the phrases had stayed with him, and emerged again now, unbidden, into his head. Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani -Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?
2
Bruno loved to drive in the baron’s old Citroen DS, a car that had been built before he was born. He enjoyed the way the car hardly leaned when cornering and how it still looked like the most modern car ever made. Bruno had heard the baron sing its virtues a score of times: that it had been the world’s first car with disc brakes and hydraulic suspension and some other features he could never quite remember. But one thing the baron had ensured Bruno never forgot was that it had saved the life of the baron’s hero, Charles de Gaulle, whom he always called le general, rather than president. During one of the several assassination attempts in the 1960s by the OAS, the military and colonialist rebels who wanted to keep Algeria French, the car’s tires had been shot out, yet it could still drive away at full speed. Every time the baron’s DS came in for service, Lespinasse at the garage would almost purr with pleasure.
“Did you know I bought this car from Pons?” the baron asked, his eyes on the narrow road ahead, dense trees on either side flickering past in the glow of the headlights. It was still an hour before dawn, but they had wanted to be at the Ste. Alvere market before it officially opened at 8:00 a.m.
“It must be over twenty years ago, maybe more, not long after his wife left him. I got it cheap. These days they can go for over a hundred thousand at classic car auctions.”
“You’ll never sell this,” Bruno said. “It’s part of you. But I wanted to ask you about Pons. How come the wife left?”
“I’m told he used to beat her. She came from the south, near Carcassonne. Got a job teaching at the college here. A real beauty, blond hair but with that lovely golden skin you sometimes get in the Midi. I was living in Paris then, and Pons had already grabbed her when I came down one summer. Olivia, her name was.”
“Jealous?”
“I certainly was.” The baron laughed. “But then things changed. Pons was never known for fidelity. She put up with it for a while. Then she started taking her revenge. I was one of the lucky ones. Not the only one, though. When Pons found out, that was the end of the marriage.”
“How was she doing, financially?”
“I helped her get a lawyer. She did okay. Pons was never mean about money, at least not where the boy was concerned. But I know he complained the boy never wanted to see him, that Olivia had poisoned the kid’s mind about him.”
“Did the boy know about you?”
“I doubt it. I’m pretty sure Pons never knew about me either, we were always discreet. I was married by the time she came to Paris.”
“Why the delay before she got a divorce?”
The baron shrugged. “Divorce wasn’t so easy in those days, not with the kid, and even trickier after she took the boy to Paris. Pons claimed she’d abandoned the family home, but the lawyer got her a decent settlement.”
“What happened then?”
“She taught for a while. Later she got a management job in a good hotel by the Opera and then opened her own restaurant. I helped her a bit, but it was never a great success. Then she got breast cancer, and everything fell apart. The boy went off backpacking around Asia, didn’t even make it back for the funeral. It was just me, some other old boyfriends and the staff from her restaurant. Pons didn’t come. At least he sent a wreath.”
They had arrived, just a few minutes before seven. Bruno climbed out of the car’s warm interior and shivered as he pulled on his old army greatcoat. He looked up to see if he could discern the first hint of lightness in the eastern sky. Not dawn yet, he thought, and pulled his small basket from the backseat. It was a modest haul he had to offer, and he only had the second grade of truffle, the brumale. The real black diamond, the melanosporum, would not be traded until later in December. The best of them, ones that could go for more than a thousand euros a kilo, seldom came onto the market until January.
Bruno had planted the alley of white oaks that would nourish the growth of truffles on his land soon after his arrival in St. Denis, knowing that it would be a few years more before he would have the chance of a real harvest. But he had six small and knobbly brumales of different shapes and sizes, three from his own trees and three from his forays in the woods behind his home. They weighed in total something less than half a pound. The largest was just a little bigger than a golf ball. He might with luck get a hundred euros for them, but the price would depend on the market. He dipped his nose into the basket to smell the deep, earthy scent. He wrapped the truffles inside a page of Sud Ouest and stuffed it into his pocket; they smelled better when they were kept warm.
He had left the two best of his brumales at home, steeping in virgin olive oil. They would be for his own use. Normally, he would not bother to attend the market until late December, even with his brumales, but the baron had said Hercule wanted to see him, and Bruno owed Hercule a great deal.
When Bruno had first seen the tiny darting fly beneath one of his trees that signaled the presence of truffles, he had begun to think about investing for the future. The baron had introduced him to one of his old army friends from the Algerian War, Hercule Vendrot, who lived near Ste. Alvere, the town that was to truffles what Chateau Petrus was to wine lovers. Hercule had visited Bruno’s property, lunched well, given his advice on what trees to plant and where and returned every year since to enjoy a meal and to stir up the leaves under Bruno’s young oaks to see if the flies might be dancing. The two men had exchanged war stories, admired each oth
er’s dogs and become friends.
At first, they made a point of hunting and then dining together at least twice a year, once on Bruno’s land and again on Hercule’s. Their meetings had steadily become more frequent, lubricated by the fine wines on which Hercule spent the money he made from his truffles. Three years ago, Hercule had pointed out the first sign of terre brulee around Bruno’s sapling oaks, the ring of dark earth that seemed to have been scorched. Bruno had his truffles and had made two hundred euros in his first year, but fewer than a hundred in the second. He was hoping for much more this year and a steady future income that would never come to the attention of the tax man.
The formal market started when the doors opened to the modern glass-walled building that the city fathers had constructed beside the churchyard. Now they even had an online market, but Hercule had taught Bruno that the real business was transacted before the market opened. And much of the trade was done outside the building as it always had been, men in ancient overcoats with patient dogs at their heels, discreetly slipping from their pockets small handfuls of truffles wrapped in newspaper. Some were standing there already, each of them solitary, glancing almost furtively at his neighbors along the street, wondering what treasures the rivals might bring. They looked, to Bruno’s professional eye, deeply suspicious, like a collection of voyeurs trying to summon the courage to spy through bathroom windows. It made the prospect of joining their ranks unappealing. He planned to sell his own truffles in the town market.
The baron led the way up the steps onto a small terrace and into the cafe opposite the church. The windows were steamed up, and as he opened the door a rush of noise came from inside, where thirty or forty men and their dogs crowded into a space designed for half that number. Desiree, the only woman in the room, was serving croissants and tartines, ringing up sales at a furious pace, while her husband manned the espresso machine.
Hercule was taking his coffee at the corner of the bar and signaled to Desiree for two more when he saw them squeezing their way through to him. A big man, his back starting to stoop now that he was well into his seventies, Hercule had sharp blue eyes and a fringe of white hair under the beret he invariably wore. His thick white mustache was brown in the center from the Gauloises he smoked. His elderly mongrel Pom-Pom, a legendary truffle hunter, craned his head forward to sniff at Bruno’s trousers, picking up the scent of his dog, Gigi. The three men shook hands and turned to the counter where Desiree had placed three coffees, three croissants and three large cognacs. Like the cognac at dawn when they went hunting, it was a ritual.
“ Salut, Bruno, show me what you’ve got.”
He nodded when Bruno turned toward the bar. Sheltered by the baron and Hercule, he took out his small parcel and opened it so that only Hercule could see. The beret dipped, and even over the noise in the cafe Bruno heard him sniff.
“Not bad for brumales. Mine aren’t ready yet, and prices always go up the nearer we get to Christmas. I know who’ll want some of that. But let’s finish our breakfast first.” He downed his cognac and ordered three more to tip into fresh cups of coffee.
Thirty minutes later, they were in the churchyard and talking to a renifleur, one of the scouts who bought on behalf of a group of Bordeaux restaurants. The scout pulled out a small scale, and Bruno was pleased to receive six twenty-euro notes in return. He offered one of them to Hercule as commission, but he waved the money away.
“I asked you here,” he said. “We need to talk. But I’ll take a look in the market first, just to show our faces.”
A small knot of men was gathered at the door. Bruno recognized his counterpart in Ste. Alvere, the town policeman, Nicco. Bruno shook hands with him, a much older man close to retirement, saying he was off-duty and just there for the market. Nicco introduced him and the baron to the town’s mayor, a live wire who had pushed for the online truffle market and had gotten European funding to turn Ste. Alvere into a pilot project for alternative energy. Just before 8:00 a.m., a plump man appeared with a key in his hand, almost breaking into a trot when he saw the mayor. It was Didier, the market manager, an ingratiating grin on his face, scurrying to unlock the door into the large room with a series of tables covered in white cloth. A gleaming digital scale held pride of place beside the new computer that ran the online market. Three webcams covered the room. And on a side table in the corner stood a high-grade microscope, to help settle disputes about the grading of the various truffles. Bruno understood enough of the technicalities to know that some unscrupulous dealers tried to pass off a chatin as a brumale.
“It’s a joke,” Hercule murmured in Bruno’s ear. “All the real deals are still done outside, between people who’ve known each other for years and don’t need fancy machines to know what’s what. You’ll see the renifleur didn’t even bother to come inside. There’ll be another auction at the end of the day for the stocks left over, but there’s something fishy about that.”
Hercule prowled around the tables where the sellers were laying out their wares in small baskets. He bent to sniff a couple of times but moved on. A third time he bent and then turned to Bruno.
“Sniff this one. It’s good, maybe even a bit better than yours.” He turned his back on the vendor to whisper into Bruno’s ear. “He’s asking fifty euros a hundred grams. You did better, and you didn’t have to pay the market fee.”
Hercule plucked Bruno’s sleeve and jerked his head at the baron to lead them outside. They walked up the hill past the tower of the ruined castle, its stone improbably pale in color after enthusiastic cleaning and its surroundings of fresh turf looking too picturesque to be true. Hercule’s dog paused to lift a back leg on the base of the ruin, and the old man led them at a brisk and warming pace up the lane to his home.
Each time he visited Hercule’s house, Bruno was curious that such an evidently learned and cultivated man should affect the style and dress of a country hayseed. The walls were filled with books. From the way they were stuffed sideways onto crammed shelves, with small note cards and bookmarks in the pages, it was clear they were constantly being used. In the spaces between bookshelves were paintings and hangings with foreign calligraphies. Bruno could not have identified, far less read, them had Hercule not explained the difference between the Viet, the Khmer, the Thai, the Lao and the Mandarin.
The furniture was old and heavy and comfortable, of a dark, dense wood and a style that Bruno now knew to be Vietnamese. A vast desk squatted by the window, covered by newspaper clippings, a laptop computer and framed photographs of an Asian woman and child, plus several of French soldiers in uniforms of an earlier era. The baron moved to the desk and picked up one of the photos, turning it to the light.
“Bab el-Oued, when they still loved the French army. I recognize that corner by the St. Eugene Cemetery,” the baron said as Bruno looked over his shoulder. “That’s General Massu himself on the right, so it must be fifty-seven, when he was running the battle of Algiers. I didn’t know you knew Massu that well, Hercule.” He put it down and looked at his old friend. “You had something on your mind. Tell us.”
“I don’t know if you can do anything to help, but I’ve got to get this off my chest.” He knelt to put a match to the nest of newspapers beneath the kindling in the fireplace and then stood, watching the fire catch hold.
“A drink? Coffee?” They shook their heads. “It’s the market. There’s something nasty going on, and they won’t listen to me. When they think of fraud, they think only of the old tricks like people dyeing the white summer truffles and selling them as blacks. But this is different. One of the renifleurs, not the one you met, says a couple of his big clients in Paris claim they’ve been fobbed off with fakes, cheap sinensis, Chinese black truffles. It’s common enough in oils and prepared foods, but each of them reckoned they got some Chinese rubbish in a shipment of tailings, that’s the small and crumbled stuff they use for truffle oil and stews.”
“No official complaints yet?” asked Bruno.
“The big hotels hat
e to do it because it could hurt their reputation. These are places where they’ll pay a thousand, fifteen hundred euros for a good Perigord black. But if they feel cheated they just won’t buy any more.”
“You said nobody will listen to you. Who did you tell?” asked Bruno.
“Didier, the market manager. When he said I was crazy I went to the mayor. But he’s invested a lot of money in the market and new equipment designed to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. He gave me the brush-off. And Nicco is so close to retirement he didn’t want to know. So I thought of you, Bruno. You know truffles, you know what they mean to this part of the world.”
“How do these Chinese truffles get here?”
“Straight from the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris, down around place d’Italie. It’s the biggest Chinatown in Europe. The truffles come in from China, and we’re the next stop. There’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s going to ruin Ste. Alvere. Look, I’ll show you what I mean.”
Hercule went to his kitchen and came back with a tray. It held a cheeseboard with a quarter of what looked like Brie de Meaux, some slices from a baguette and three small bottles, each filled with oil covering a layer of small black lumps.
“I want you to try this,” Hercule said, putting down the tray as a rich, almost gamy scent reached Bruno’s nostrils. “A couple of days ago, I sliced this Brie in half horizontally and slipped three slices of truffle between the halves. I just took them out, but the perfume will be wonderful.”
He smeared thin wedges of Brie onto three slices of bread and handed one each to Bruno and the baron.
“Glorious,” said Bruno. The rich and succulent cheese had suddenly developed whole new depths and layers of taste, as if… Bruno tried to think of a way to put it. And then he thought that it tasted as if it had grown up and gone to university and won doctorates and become a professor and had a loving wife and handsome children and won a Nobel Prize and spent the money on expensive mistresses and vintage champagne.
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