Martin Walker: Black Diamond

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 hate 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.

“Smells like a poule de luxe,” said the baron, and Bruno wondered why truffles made men think of sex. It had the same effect on him.

Hercule turned to the bottles on the tray. “This first one is the real thing. Olive oil with one of my decent blacks from last year.” He held it out for them. “Now try this. That’s a Chinese black in the same oil. Can you tell the difference?”

Bruno could. There was a sour note to the odor, like poor soil baked into dust by the sun. And another flavor lingered behind it, almost like gasoline.

“Now try this. That’s what they’re getting in Paris. It’s mainly Chinese, with a bit of the real thing to add flavor.”

This time Bruno smelled the real black Perigord first, but then the flavor seemed to die away. The sample had the same woodsy smell, but the vegetation had a touch of rankness.

“It starts off okay, but after a few moments my brumale is better than that,” he said.

“Big difference.” The baron nodded.

“Any idea who might be behind this?”

Hercule shrugged. “It has to be one of the regulars, someone we know and trust. It takes a long time to accept strangers in the market.”

“If the mayor decided to take you seriously, what could be done to stop this?” Bruno asked.

“Constant spot checks of everything that’s shipped out. It’s tough to fool the locals and the renifleurs. It’s no coincidence that this has started to happen with the online market. People buy over the Internet, and it gets shipped in vacuum packs. But checking all the shipments would mean time, extra staff and money.”

“And it wouldn’t catch the bad guys,” the baron said thoughtfully.

“I think this is a lot bigger than it looks,” Hercule went on. “It’s not just the odd Chinese merchant pulling a fast one. Or if it is, then it’s like reconnaissance to see if they can expand this business and start making real money.”

“How big is this?” Bruno asked. “Could organized crime be involved?”

“We harvested over fifty tons of truffles in France last year, and they went for between seven hundred and fifteen hundred a kilo. That’s a fifty-million-euro business, enough to attract some big players. China bought more than five million euros’ worth of Perigord truffles. It’s our fastest-growing market. Just three years ago, they bought nothing. It’s like cognac; anything that’s really rare and expensive has a snob appeal for China’s new rich. So if you can add a few scraps of our good stuff and then sell cheap Chinese truffles as if they were from France, there’s real money to be made at the Chinese end. But it won’t last long before they get caught and the market collapses in scandal. And that means the end of our truffle business, just as it’s about to take off.”