Black Diamond - Martin Walker [60]
“What’s the brown stuff?” asked J-J.
“Bouillon, made from the bones of the last wild boar Hercule shot. He gave me the bones for Gigi, but I made a stock first.” He stirred the vegetables and sipped his Ricard. “I heard on the radio about the Asian supermarket. Was it arson?”
“Gasoline bombs again. Crude but effective,” said J-J. He went on to describe the pattern that made Paris fear another gang war. There had been similar trouble between Vietnamese and Chinese in Marseilles two years earlier before they agreed to a truce, and more serious trouble in the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris before that. It always started with attacks on street vendors and restaurants. Local truces could be negotiated, agreements to divide sections of a city. In Marseilles the truce broke down because of a third party, the Corsicans, who wanted to keep the whores, the drugs and the docks. That left the Asians fighting over illegal immigrants, gambling, loan sharking and protection rackets. But the Chinese had the counterfeit goods that gave them a foothold in the street markets. Above all, the Chinese had more and more illegal immigrants. A decade earlier, the Vietnamese had outnumbered the Chinese. Now the balance had shifted.
“How many are you talking about?” Bruno asked. The vegetables were mashed, the stock on the fire but not yet simmering. He splashed in some water and then slowly added the milk, stirring carefully.
“Altogether, there’s about a hundred and fifty thousand Viets and about two hundred thousand Chinese, probably more with the illegals. Then there are the Chi-Viets, the ones who got out as boat people. But the Viets have been here longer. That’s why they’re spread out more across France, and the trouble comes when the Chinese start to follow. And now the Chinese are muscling their way into the southwest, so we’ve been getting trouble in Bordeaux and Toulouse and Cahors, and it’s spilled over here.”
Bruno nodded and began grating nutmeg into the pot. He took a spoon from the drawer and sipped. The liquid at the center had begun to move, the signal that the simmering had begun.
“That’s it,” he said. “Now we walk Gigi, and you can tell me the rest.” He looked outside, where it was not yet dark, handed J-J a spare woolen cap, and they set off.
“Don’t tell me,” Bruno said when they had reached the top of the ridge. “When you got Vinh’s citizenship papers, it was Hercule who was his sponsor. That wasn’t hard to guess.”
“In fact, it wasn’t,” gasped J-J. He wasn’t used to walking in the dark woods. Nor was he accustomed to climbing even the modest slope they had taken through the trees to the ridge. Bruno stopped, waiting for J-J to get his breath back and feeling the soreness in his own legs from the rugby game. At least the stiffness had gone, and the cold night air had cleared the remaining fuzziness from his head and brought back his appetite. He breathed in deeply, relishing the deep quiet of the woods in winter when all the vegetation seemed asleep. The terrain was made for hunters, with only the game stirring and the knowledge that beneath the ground the finest of the truffles were reaching their ripeness. He heard Gigi rustling through the undergrowth and whistled softly.
Gigi gave a soft bark, almost a cough. Bruno signaled J-J to follow him and struck out down the slope. Gigi was waiting for him beneath a white oak, one front paw lifted and his nose to the earth. Bruno took a small trowel from his pocket and gave his flashlight to J-J, asking him to hold it. Bruno began to scrape away the earth just beneath Gigi’s nose. The dog backed off slightly to give him room, making a noise that was almost a purr, deep in his throat. Trusting Gigi, Bruno loosened the earth around the spot, and then began to dig by hand, piling the loose earth to one side.
The unmistakable scent of a truffle began to rise, rich