Martin Walker: Black Diamond

“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 other’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.”