by Fred Vargas
Danglard pursed his lips. He knew he had overstepped the line, trespassed too far on to forbidden territory. But exasperated by months of disapproval, exacerbated by the Quebec business, he had been unable to hold back. He rubbed his cheek with his rough woollen gloves, hesitating, and weighing up those months of heavy silence, of lies, and possibly of betrayal. Good or bad. Between his fingers, he caught sight of the map of Quebec spread out on the table. What was the point of getting worked up? In a week’s time he would be dead, and so would Adamsberg. The starlings would have been sucked into the left-hand engine, which would have burst into flames, and the plane would have exploded over the Atlantic. He picked up the bottle and took a swig of wine. Then he picked up the phone and called the heating engineer.
II
ADAMSBERG CAME ACROSS VIOLETTE RETANCOURT AT THE COFFEE machine. He stood back, waiting for his heftiest officer to take her cup from the machine’s udder – since in his mind the drinks dispenser was a kind of dairy cow, tethered inside the Crime Squad’s offices, like a silent mother watching over them all, the reason he was so fond of it. But Retancourt slipped away as soon as she saw him. Hey ho, thought Adamsberg, putting his plastic cup under the spout, it really isn’t my day.
His day or not, Lieutenant Retancourt was a rare bird. Adamsberg had absolutely no complaints about this statuesque woman of thirty-five, 1.79m tall, and weighing 110 kilos, who was as intelligent as she was strong, and capable, as she had reminded him, of channelling her energy in any direction. And indeed, the range of actions which Retancourt had accomplished in the past year, displaying a striking force of terrifying proportions, had made her one of the pillars of the squad, its all-purpose 4 × 4 war-machine, whether for brainpower, tactics, administration, combat or marksmanship. But Violette Retancourt did not care for Adamsberg. She showed him no hostility; she simply avoided him.
Adamsberg picked up his plastic beaker of coffee, patted the machine gently as a sign of filial gratefulness, and returned to his office, hardly allowing Danglard’s outburst to enter his mind. He did not intend spending hours of his time calming his deputy down, whether it was over Camille or a Boeing 747. He would simply rather not have learnt that Camille was in Montreal, something which he hadn’t known, and which now cast a slight shadow over the Quebec trip, to which he had been looking forward. He would rather Danglard had not revived those images which he had expelled into the corners of his eyes, into the gentle miasma of oblivion, where the sharp jawline, the childlike lips and the pale skin of Camille, daughter of the north, had become greyed-over and misty. He would rather his deputy had not revived the memory of a love which he was gradually and gently allowing to fall apart in favour of the different landscapes offered by other women. There was no getting away from it, Adamsberg was a compulsive chaser after girls, a collector of young bodies, and, naturally, that was something that upset Camille. He had often seen her put her hands over her ears after one of his escapades, as if her melodious lover had scratched his nails on a blackboard, introducing an unbearable dissonance into the delicate scoring laid out for him. Camille was a musician, which explained it.
Sitting sideways on his office chair, he blew on his coffee, looking at the noticeboard covered with reports, urgent messages and, in the centre, notes about the objectives of the Quebec expedition. Three sheets of paper, neatly lined up and attached with three red drawing pins. Genetic fingerprints, sweat, urine, computers, maple leaves, forests, lakes, caribou. Tomorrow he would sign the mission orders, and in a week’s time he would be taking off for Canada. He smiled and sipped his coffee, feeling settled and even happy.
Then suddenly, he experienced once more that cold sweat on the back of his neck, the same dread coming over him, the cat jumping on to his shoulders. He bowed his head under the shock, and carefully put the coffee cup on the table. The second sudden turn in less than an hour, an alien feeling of trouble, like the unexpected arrival of a stranger setting off an alarm or a panic button. He forced himself to stand up and take a few steps. Apart from the shock and sweat, his body seemed to be behaving normally. He ran his hands over his face, relaxing the skin and massaging his neck. A sort of convulsive defence reflex. The sharp bite of some distress, a warning of a threat, making his body react to it. And now he was able to move more easily, but was still left with an inexpressible feeling of sorrow, like a dark sediment that the wave leaves behind when it ebbs.
He finished his coffee and put his chin in his hands. He had many times failed to understand his actions, but now for the first time he felt he had lost touch with himself. It was the first time that he had reeled for a few seconds, as if some stowaway had slipped into his head and taken charge. For of that he was certain. There was a clandestine passenger aboard. Any sane person would have explained that this was absurd, and suggested he was coming down with flu. But Adamsberg diagnosed something very different, the brief intrusion of a dangerous unknown being, who wished him no good.
He opened the cupboard and took out an old pair of trainers. This time a short walk and a few moments daydreaming would not help. He would have to run, for hours if necessary, straight down towards the Seine, then along the embankment. And as he ran, he would try to shake off his pursuer, throwing him into the waters of the river, or perhaps transferring him to someone else, why not?
III
CLEANSED, EXHAUSTED AND SHOWERED, ADAMSBERG DECIDED TO EAT A meal at the Liffey Water, a dark bar whose noisy atmosphere and acrid smell had often punctuated his excursions round Paris. He understood not a word uttered by the other customers, who were almost exclusively Irish, so the pub offered the unique advantage of a warm human ambiance along with complete solitude. He found his usual table, sticky with beer and smelling of Guinness, and recognised the barmaid, Enid, whom he asked to bring him some roast pork and potatoes. Enid served the dishes up using an ancient metal fork, which Adamsberg liked, with its polished wooden handle and three irregular prongs. He was watching her put his meat on the plate, when the stowaway in his mind suddenly returned, but now with the force of a rapist. This time, he seemed to detect the attack a fraction of a second before it struck. Fists clenched on the table, he tried to resist the intrusion. He tensed his whole body, calling up different thoughts, imagining red maple leaves. Nothing worked, and the sense of dread swept through him like a tornado destroying a field, sudden, unstoppable and violent. And then carelessly, it abandoned its prey, going on to wreak havoc elsewhere.
When he was capable of unclenching his hands, he picked up his knife and fork, but could no longer touch the food. The deposit of distress that the tornado had left behind had taken away his appetite. He apologised to Enid and went out into the street, walking at random and without any sense of purpose. The memory flashed into his head of a great-uncle, who when he was ill, would go and curl up in a ball in some hollow rock in the Pyrenees until it was over. Then the old man would uncurl and come back to life, the fever having passed from him and been swallowed by the rock. Adamsberg smiled. In this huge city he could find no den to curl up in like a bear, no hollow in the rock that would drain the fever and eat his stowaway alive. Perhaps in any case the stranger had jumped on to the shoulders of one of his Irish neighbours in the pub.
His friend Ferez, the psychiatrist, would no doubt have tried to identify the mechanism that was provoking the intrusion. He would try to probe the hidden chagrin, the unavowed pain walled up inside Adamsberg and shaking its chains like a prisoner, causing these sudden sweats, clenched muscles and a singing in his ears that made him flinch. That’s what Ferez would have said, with the sympathetic pleasure he took in unusual cases. He would say, now what were you talking about when the first cat jumped on to your shoulders? Perhaps about Camille? Or about Quebec?
Adamsberg stopped on the pavement, searching his memory, trying to think what he had been saying to Danglard when the first cold sweat had broken out on his neck. Rembrandt, yes, that was it. He had been thinking about Rembrandt, and the absence of shades of dark an
d light in the D’Hernoncourt case. It was just then. So, it was well before any talk of Camille or Canada. Above all, he would have had to explain to Ferez that never before had any worry of that kind made a vicious cat spring on his back. This was something new, never experienced, quite unprecedented. And the shocks had recurred at different times and in different circumstances, without any apparent link between them. What connection could there be between his kindly Enid and Danglard, between the table at the Liffey Water pub and his own bulletin board? Between the noisy crowd in the bar and his quiet office? None at all. Even someone as quick on the uptake as Ferez would be quite lost. And he would refuse to believe that an alien had climbed on board. Adamsberg ran his hands through his hair, then rubbed his arms and legs energetically, trying to revive his body. He set off once more, making an effort to use his normal inner resources: walking round quietly, observing passers-by with detachment, letting his mind float like a log on the surface of the river.
The fourth tornado pounced on him about an hour later, as he was going up the boulevard Saint-Paul, a few yards from home. He flinched under the attack, and leaned against a lamp post, freezing like a statue as the wind passed over him. He closed his eyes and waited. Less than a minute later, he slowly lifted his head, shifted his shoulders, and flexed his fingers in his pockets, but was then assailed by the feeling of profound unease the storm had left in its wake for the fourth time that day. A distress which brought tears to his eyes, a sorrow without a name.
He had to put a name to it. To this red alert, this torture he was undergoing. Because the day that had begun so normally, with him walking in as he did every day to his headquarters, had left him a changed man, unable to contemplate resuming his routine. An ordinary human being in the morning, and by the evening a nervous wreck, paralysed by a volcano that had opened up under his feet, its fiery mouth containing an undecipherable enigma.
Peeling himself away from the lamp post, he examined his surroundings, as he would a crime scene of which he was himself the victim, seeking to identify the killer who had stabbed him in the back. He retreated a metre or so and stood again in the exact spot where he had been at the moment of impact. He looked along the empty pavement, the darkened shop window on the right, the advertising hoarding on the left. Nothing else. Only the advertising poster was clearly visible through the dark, since it was lit up inside its glass case. That must have been the last thing he saw before the assault. He looked at it carefully. It was a reproduction of a classical sort of painting, with a strip across it announcing ‘Nineteenth-century paintings in the academic tradition. Temporary exhibition. Grand Palais, 18 October–17 December.’
The painting depicted a muscular figure with pale skin and a dark beard, sitting comfortably on a huge shell in the middle of the ocean, and surrounded by nymphs. Adamsberg stared for a long moment at the picture, trying to work out what it might have done to unleash the whirlwind, in the same way as his conversation with Danglard, his office armchair and the smoke-filled Liffey Water bar. But surely a man can’t fall from normality into chaos with a snap of the fingers. There must be some kind of transition, some way through. Here, as in the D’Hernoncourt case, what was missing was the set of nuances, the bridge between the two river banks, one deep in shadow, the other brightly sunlit. Sighing with frustration, he bit his lip and peered out into the darkness, in search of a cruising taxi. He hailed one, climbed into the cab and gave the driver the address of Adrien Danglard.
IV
HE HAD TO RING THE BELL THREE TIMES BEFORE DANGLARD, befuddled with sleep, opened the door. The capitaine gave a start at the sight of Adamsberg, whose features seemed to have become more drawn, the nose more arched, the dark shadows under his high cheekbones more pronounced. So the commissaire had not been able to relax as quickly as usual after a tense moment. Danglard knew he had overstepped the line, earlier in the day. Ever since, he had been mulling over the possibility of a confrontation, a reprimand perhaps. Or a punishment? Or worse. Unable to stop the deep waves of pessimism, he had been thinking about his growing fears all through supper, trying not to let anything show in front of the children, about this concern or indeed about the aeroplane engine. The best distraction was to tell them another story about Lieutenant Retancourt, which would certainly amuse them, especially since this massive woman – who seemed to have been painted by Michelangelo, a painter whose mighty genius had not been at its best in rendering the supple uncertainties of the female body – had the name of a delicate wild flower: Violette. That day, Violette had been talking quietly with Hélène Froissy, who was suffering from an unhappy love affair. Violette had emphasised one of her remarks by bringing the palm of her hand down sharply on the photocopier, and it had immediately started working again, after having been stuck for five days.
One of the older children had asked what would have happened if Retancourt had banged Hélène Froissy’s head instead of the photocopier. Could she have sent her unhappy colleague’s mind off in a more positive direction? Could Violette change people and things by knocking on them? All the children had then tried their luck with the family television set, which was also out of order, to test their strength. Danglard allowed them only one go each, but alas, no image appeared, and the youngest one had hurt his finger. Once they were all in bed, his pessimism had once more overtaken him with dark forebodings.
Faced with his superior officer, Danglard scratched his chest in a gesture of illusory self-defence.
‘Quick, Danglard,’ whispered Adamsberg. ‘I need you. There’s a taxi waiting.’
His head cleared by this sudden return to calm, the capitaine hurriedly pulled on a jacket and trousers. Adamsberg evidently wasn’t bearing a grudge, his anger being already forgotten, swallowed up in the clouds of his habitual indulgence or indifference. If the commissaire had come to fetch him late at night, it must mean the squad had another murder to deal with.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Saint-Paul.’
The two men went downstairs, Danglard trying to tie his tie as well as putting on a thick scarf.
‘Is there a victim?’
‘Just get a move on, mon vieux, it’s urgent.’
The taxi dropped them off by the poster. Adamsberg paid the fare, while Danglard was looking in surprise down the empty street. No flashing lights, no technical team, just a deserted pavement and sleeping buildings. Adamsberg caught his arm and pulled him hurriedly towards the advertisement. Without letting go, he pointed to the picture.
‘Danglard, tell me, what’s that?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Danglard, in puzzlement.
‘The painting, for God’s sake. I’m asking you what it is. What’s it about?’
‘But where’s the murder?’ asked Danglard turning round. ‘Where’s the victim?’
‘Here,’ said Adamsberg pointing at his own chest. ‘Just give me an answer. What is it?’
Danglard shook his head, half shocked, half confused. Then the surreal absurdity of the situation seemed so funny to him that a pure feeling of hilarity swept away his black mood. He felt full of gratitude to Adamsberg, who not only seemed to be overlooking the earlier insults, but was also quite involuntarily offering him a moment of exceptional extravagance this evening. Only Adamsberg was capable of squeezing ordinary life to extract these escapades, these shafts of weird beauty. So what did it matter that he had been woken up in the middle of the night and dragged off in the freezing cold to stand looking at a picture of Neptune?
‘Who’s that man?’ Adamsberg was repeating, without letting go of his arm.
‘Neptune rising from the waves,’ Danglard said with a smile.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Neptune, or Poseidon if you prefer.’
‘Is he the god of the sea, or of the underworld, or what?’
‘They’re brothers,’ Danglard explained, delighted to be able to give a midnight lesson in mythology. ‘Three brothers, Hades, Zeus and Poseidon. Poseidon reigns over
the seas, with all their storms and calms, but also over what lies under the sea, the vasty deeps.’
Adamsberg had let his arm go by now and was listening hard, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘In the picture,’ Danglard went on, moving his finger across the poster, ‘we see him surrounded by his court and his demons. Here are Neptune’s benign actions, and here is his power to punish mortals, represented by his trident and the evil serpent who drags men under the sea. This is an academic painting, sentimental and unremarkable. I can’t identify the painter. Some artist long forgotten, who did pictures for the walls of bourgeois householders and probably …’
‘So that’s Neptune,’ Adamsberg interrupted in a thoughtful voice. ‘OK, Danglard, thanks a million. Go home, go back to bed. My apologies for waking you up.’
Before Danglard could even ask what it was all about, Adamsberg had stopped another taxi and pushed his deputy inside. Through the car window, he watched his commissaire walking away slowly, a thin, dark, stooping figure, steering a slightly irregular course through the night. He smiled, automatically put his hand to his head and found the remains of the pompom on his woolly hat. Suddenly anxious, he touched it three times for luck.
V
BACK HOME, ADAMSBERG LOOKED THROUGH HIS HAPHAZARD collection of books to find one that might tell him more about Neptune/Poseidon. He found an old schoolbook where on page 67 the sea god appeared in all his glory, brandishing his divine weapon. He looked at it for a moment, read the little caption describing the bas-relief, then still holding the book, he collapsed on to his bed, fully dressed but worn out with exhaustion and worry.
He was woken at about four in the morning by a cat miauling on the rooftops. He opened his eyes in the darkness and stared at the lighter rectangle of the window opposite his bed. His jacket, hanging from the window catch, looked like a broad-shouldered, motionless silhouette, an intruder who had crept into his bedroom to watch him sleeping. It was the stowaway who had penetrated his secret cave and wasn’t letting him escape. Adamsberg closed his eyes then opened them again. Neptune and his trident.
