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By Root 564 0

kitchen floor, blood on their heads and their backs broken. Ahmed casually shoved the dead rats into his plastic sack with his boot. The sound of moving furniture came from the sitting room, and as Bruno looked in he saw a terrier leap onto the back of the sofa to catch a scurrying rat by the neck. The terrier shook his head violently and tossed the dead rat aside before leaping down to growl at another hiding beneath a chair. Ahmed casually tilted the chair, and the terrier pounced as the rat tried to flee. Another shake of the head, another dead rat. In the bedroom, there were three more corpses on the bed, two on the floor and the sound of terrified squeaks from the other bedroom.

“I think that’s all of them,” said Albert. The terriers were prowling through the house, sniffing at cupboards and wardrobes and in corners for any rats that had escaped the slaughter.

“Twenty-two in the sack,” Ahmed announced. “But we’ll leave the rat traps here just in case. You’re lucky we caught them early. Once they start to breed, it’s terrible. The little ones can hide almost anywhere.”

“This didn’t happen by accident,” Albert said. “And I saw that hole in the window. Somebody came here and tipped the rats in deliberately. What’s all this about?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Bruno said, and turned to Madame Condorcet. “Thank you for calling me and alerting us to this, but it’s now police business, and I’d be grateful if you could keep all this to yourself. Don’t even tell your husband about it.”

“But who would do such a thing to the Vinhs?” she asked. “They’re such a nice, quiet family, and my husband likes those nems they make.”

“I like them too,” said Bruno. “And the sooner I can get to the bottom of this, the sooner we’ll have them and their nems back. But I’ll need you to keep quiet about all this while I’m working on this case. Will you do that for me? And I promise that when it’s all over I’ll come back here and have some more of your coffee and those lemon biscuits and tell you all about it. How’s that?”

“I won’t say a word,” she said. “But you’d better call before you come. The biscuits are even better when they are warm.”

“In that case,” said Albert, “can we come too?”

18

It was, thought Bruno, a splendidly French compromise. On one side of the coffin, the state saluted a member of the Légion d’Honneur with an honor guard of six French soldiers in parade dress who pointed their modern rifles into the air and fired a volley of blanks. As the echoes died away, civil society paid its own tribute as six members of the Chasseurs de Ste. Alvère, two with tears in their eyes and all in their hunting gear, fired their own blanks in ragged timing from an unmatched assortment of shotguns.

The mayor in his tricolor sash and the brigadier in a uniform with a chest full of medals both made brief speeches of appreciation, and then the brigadier read out a letter of praise and condolence from the minister of the interior. Finally the priest spoke the final, ritual words, and they all lined up to scoop a handful of earth from the pile and toss it onto the lid of the coffin.

At the mayor’s invitation, the mourners trooped off to a vin d’honneur at the mairie. Bruno drank one glass, made a swift circuit of the room and left for Hercule’s house to scour the library in search of books on—he had to look up the spelling he had written down during the call with Tran—the Binh Xuyen. The bookcase beside the big desk ran from floor to ceiling and was organized into books on Vietnam, books on Algeria and books on recent French history. The first that he found that seemed relevant was written by Capitaine Savani, who he remembered was Hercule’s boss in the Deuxième Bureau in Saigon. Titled Visage et images du Sud Viet-Nam, it had been published in Paris in 1955 and had been inscribed to Hercule by its author. Bruno turned eagerly to a bookmark, a folded sheet of paper on which Hercule had written: “This section taken largely from Savani’s secret DB report on Binh Xuyen.” Bruno assumed the initials stood for Deuxième Bureau, military intelligence.