Black Diamond

about his father?”
    “Boniface Pons, at least seventy, a big local businessman, involved in timber, sawmills, truffles. We’re onto him for money laundering at the local truffle market, hundreds of thousands of euros. Not much liked locally, and he’s said to have been a wife beater. He and his son hate each other. They had a public fight not long ago. Oh yes, and he’s an ex-soldier, Algeria.”
    “Boniface Pons,” said the brigadier, as though thinking aloud. “So that’s what happened to him.”
    “Did you know him?”
    “I knew of him. Dirty work in Algeria. That’s for tomorrow, when we get tonight’s business finished. Thanks as always, Bruno.”

26
    J-J’s call woke Bruno just after five in the morning. He felt as if he had not slept long, lying awake and thinking about Isabelle waiting in the sand dunes by the Arcachon campsite as a darkened ship crept close to shore.
    “It’s over, we got them, but there’s some bad news,” J-J said.
    “Isabelle? What happened?” He shot up in bed, his heart pounding. He closed his eyes.
    “She’s been wounded. She took two on the bulletproof vest and one high on the leg. It’s a bad wound but she’ll recover. She’s in the operating room now at the
hôpital militaire
. We had a medevac chopper on hand, thanks to the brigadier.”
    “Have you seen her?” His voice sounded thick and slurred.
    “I saw her loaded into the chopper. She’ll be okay, Bruno. The brigadier spoke to the chief surgeon.”
    “Anyone else hurt?”
    “Just the bad guys. Isabelle got one of them when they opened up with AK-47s, and the marines got three more. Butit’s all under control. We’ve got the ship, the campers, the site, and we’re still counting the migrants. It was over two hundred last I heard. No kids, but some of them look pretty young.”
    “Do you know if the bullet hit the bone? Can I see her?”
    “I don’t see why not. It hit her high on the leg, close to the hip, but it didn’t get the joint. That’s all I know. And she lost a lot of blood. They were giving her transfusions as they loaded her into the chopper. She’ll still be under anesthetic for a while. Maybe better to wait till the afternoon. I think the hospital’s called Robert Piquet, or was that the old one? I’ll get you the address and see you there about three. The brigadier wants to see you first.”
    “Any idea why?”
    “That Guillaume Pons you were asking about, we just arrested him at the campsite. He was the only non-Asian there except for a couple dozen Iraqis and Afghanis who were paying their way. And there’s a lot about him in the brigadier’s files. He may have started as a croupier in Macau, but he rose fast. He took a bullet in the shoulder, and he’s probably going to lose an arm.”
    “Is he in the same hospital as Isabelle?” Bruno was surprised that Pons had been at the scene. He’d have thought Pons either too important to the organization to risk his presence at the landing of the illegals, or too peripheral to be so deeply involved. If he hadn’t been at the scene, the only count against him was allowing the campers to stay on his premises. He wouldn’t even have been charged.
    “He’s in a prison hospital,” said J-J. “He was armed and shooting back. He’ll be going down for a long time.”
    “What was he armed with?” It was hard to imagine Pons with a weapon.
    “A cheap handgun. A Norinco nine millimeter, Chinesemilitary issue. You find them all over Asia, they tell me. More and more of them here in Europe.”
    “What happens now?”
    “The brigadier says it’s time to play peacemaker between the
treizième
and the Vietnamese. Now that he’s rolled up this operation, he reckons he’s dealing from strength, and the
treizième
is on the defensive, so it’s time for the truce meeting. And that credit card you gave us—it’s leading right back to the big boys. There’s a whole network of connected accounts, and we’ve frozen all of them.”
    Bruno hung up and lay back on the tangled sheets, thinking of Isabelle and her wound and the fascination with which she had explored his own scar in this very bed, tracing it with her fingers. And now her perfect body would carry its own mark of violence received. Would she be as lithe, as skilled and fast at her karate, after her release from the hospital? Would she feel the dampness and the coming of winter somewhere deep in the wound, as Bruno did?
    Why did it matter so much to him? Their