Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

by Fred Vargas

  ‘No thanks, Clemmie, I need to concentrate.’

  Clémentine tiptoed away quietly. One shouldn’t bother Josette when she was working.

  Josette looked back at the letters again. Another country. Yes. And what other country was involved in this case? Canada. She suddenly had a thought. What if this referred to the events in Canada? What was the name of the place where Adamsberg had stayed? Gatineau? That gave an ‘ea’. A slight chance of course. Then she suddenly had the feeling that ‘dam’ was simply part of Adamsberg’s name, nothing to do with Amsterdam or Rotterdam. How odd it is, she thought, that you can be up against something and not see it. But she had seen it, in her sleep she had seen red leaves, red sheets of paper. Not blood, Clémentine was right, but the red maple leaves of Canada, falling on the portage trail in autumn. So ‘ort’ could be portage, ‘ero’ could be Corderon, Noëlla’s name. Rendezvous would still be the only possibility for ‘ezv’. Biting her lips, Josette tried to see where an alternative reading could lead her. She had the sudden warm feeling of a hacker breaking through a stubborn obstacle.

  A few minutes later, exhausted and now at last ready for sleep, she was looking at another sentence: dam ea ezv ort la ero. ‘Adamsberg – Gatineau – rendezvous – portage trail – Noëlla Corderon.’

  She put the sheet of paper on her knee.

  Adamsberg must have been followed out to Quebec by Michel Sartonna. It didn’t prove anything about the murder, but what it did show was that the young man was watching Adamsberg’s movements and reporting on his meetings on the portage trail, sending word of them to somebody else. Josette stuck the paper on the keyboard and went back to snuggle under her blankets. So it hadn’t been a hacking mistake, just a matter of straightforward code-breaking.

  LIII

  ‘YOUR MAH JONG SET,’ ADAMSBERG WAS REPEATING.

  Camille hesitated, then joined him in the kitchen. In drink, Adamsberg’s voice had lost all its charm, becoming harsher and less strong. She dissolved two tablets in a glass of water and handed it to him.

  ‘Drink this,’ she said.

  ‘I need dragons, you see, very, very big dragons,’ Adamsberg explained, before draining the glass.

  ‘Shh. Don’t talk so loudly. What do you want dragons for?’

  ‘I need them to stuff into some windows.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Camille. ‘All right, you do that.’

  ‘And that guy’s labradors as well.’

  ‘Yes, OK. Please don’t talk so loudly.’

  ‘Why?’

  Camille did not reply but Adamsberg followed her glance. At the back of the studio he could vaguely make out a little cot.

  ‘Aha! Yes, of course,’ he declared, raising one finger. ‘Mustn’t wake the baby. Oh no! Or its father, the one with the dogs.’

  ‘You know then?’ said Camille in a neutral voice.

  ‘I’m a cop. I know everything. Montreal, the baby, the new father and his bloody dogs.’

  ‘Right. How did you get here? Did you walk?’

  ‘On someone’s moped.’

  Shit, thought Camille. She couldn’t let him go out on the road in this state. She got out her grandmother’s old Mah Jong set.

  ‘Here you are, play if you like,’ she said, putting the box on the bar. ‘You have fun with the tiles, I’m going to read.’

  ‘Don’t leave me. I’m lost and I’ve killed a woman. Explain this Mah Jong to me, I need some dragons.’

  Camille looked sharply at Jean-Baptiste. The best thing to do at present, it seemed to her, was to get his attention firmly fixed on the tiles. Until the pills started working and he could be sent away. She’d make some strong coffee too, to stop him going to sleep on the bar.

  ‘Where are the dragons?’

  ‘There are three suits,’ Camille explained, soothingly, with the prudence of all women who are approached in the street by a man in an aggressive state. Humour him, distract him, and get away as soon as you can. Get him interested in your grandmother’s Mah Jong tiles. She poured him some coffee.

  ‘This suit is the Circles, this one the Characters, this one the Bamboos. They go from 1 to 9, see?’

  ‘What’s all that for?’

  ‘To play with. And these are the honours: East, West, North and South, and your dragons.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Adamsberg satisfied.

  ‘Four green dragons,’ said Camille putting them together for him to see, ‘four red ones and four virgins. That makes twelve dragons all together, OK? Is that enough?’

  ‘What’s that one?’ he asked, pointing a wavering finger at a tile covered with decorations.

  ‘That’s a Flower. There are eight of them. They don’t count except as extras, like ornaments.’

  ‘And what do you do with all this stuff?’

  ‘You play the game,’ Camille went on patiently. ‘You have to try and make up a special hand, or a sequence of three tiles, depending on what you pick up. The special hands carry the most points. Are you still interested?’

  Adamsberg nodded vaguely and sipped the coffee.

  ‘What you have to do is keep picking up tiles till you get a full hand. Without diluting if possible. Then you go Mah Jong.’

  ‘Aha, “dilute, and I’ll shoot you”. Like my grandmother. “Any nearer and I’ll spear ye.”’

  ‘OK. Now you know how to play. If you like it so much, you can have the rule book.’

  Camille went to sit at the far end of the room with a book. She would wait until it had passed. Adamsberg was building little columns of tiles until they fell over, then he rebuilt them, muttering to himself, wiping his eyes from time to time as if the collapses caused him deep sorrow. Alcohol brought out various emotions and outbursts from him, to which Camille replied by reassuring signs. After more than an hour, she closed her book.

  ‘If you’re feeling better now,’ she said.

  ‘I want to see the guy with the dogs first,’ said Adamsberg, jumping to his feet.

  ‘How do you think you’re going to do that?’

  ‘I’ll get him out of his hole. This fellow who’s hiding, and daren’t look me in the face.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  Adamsberg walked all over the studio, with uncertain steps and prepared to go up to the bedroom on the mezzanine floor.

  ‘He’s not up there,’ said Camille, as she cleared away the tiles. ‘You can take my word for it.’

  ‘Where is he then?’

  She shrugged, in a gesture of powerlessness.

  ‘Not there,’ she said.

  ‘Not there?’

  ‘No. Not there.’

  ‘He’s gone out?’

  ‘He went away.’

  ‘He left you?’ cried Adamsberg.

  ‘Yes. Hush, don’t shout, and stop trying to look for him.’

  Adamsberg sat on the arm of a chair, already sobering up from the remedies and the shock.

  ‘Good God! He left you? With the child?’

  ‘It happens.’

  Camille finished putting the tiles in the box.

  ‘Well, shit,’ said Adamsberg heavily. ‘You really know how to pick them, don’t you.’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone away,’ he declared, shaking his head. ‘I would have protected you, I would have put a wall round you,’ he said opening his arms, and was suddenly reminded of the Canada goose.

  ‘Can you walk now, do you think?’ said Camille gently, looking up at him.

  ‘Of course I can.’

  ‘Right, well, off you go now, Jean-Baptiste.’

  LIV

  ADAMSBERG RETURNED TO CLIGNANCOURT THROUGH THE DARKNESS, surprised to find that he was able to steer the bike fairly well. Camille’s treatment had given a shock to the system and cleared his head, so that he was neither feeling sleepy nor suffering from a headache. He went into the dark house, put a log on the fire and watched it flare up. Seeing Camille again had unsettled him. He had left her on an impulse, then found her aga
in in an impossible situation: she had been abandoned by that rat who had tiptoed away with his smart tie and polished shoes, taking his dogs with him. She had thrown herself into the arms of the first smooth talker who had come along, someone who had promised her eternal affection, no doubt. And there was the result. Goddamnit, he had not even thought of asking the child’s name, or even what sex it was. He hadn’t thought about it at all. He had just sat there piling up tiles. He had talked about dragons and Mah Jong. Why had he been so obsessed with dragons? Ah yes, to stuff them into the cathedral windows.

  He shook his head. Going on benders obviously didn’t suit him. He had not seen Camille for a year, and he had just turned up on her doorstep, roaring drunk, had insisted on her getting out the Mah Jong, and then clamoured to see the new father. Exactly like the boss of the Canada geese. Well that damned bird could certainly be thrust without any pity right into the cathedral, and could honk as much as he liked from the top of the spire.

  * * *

  He pulled the rules of the game out of his pocket and flipped through it sadly. It was an old set of rules, on yellowing paper from the days of the old grandmothers. Circles, bamboos, characters, winds and dragons, he could remember it all now. He looked through the pages slowly, searching for the famous Hand of Honours that Madame Guillaumond always mocked her husband for never getting. He stopped at Special Hands, the ones that were hard to get. The Green Snake for instance was a complete set of bamboos along with a trio of green dragons. He went on down the list and found it: ‘Hand of Honours’, made up of combinations of dragons and winds. Example: three west winds, three south winds, three red dragons, three white dragons and a pair of north winds. It was the ultimate hand, almost impossible to acquire. Old man Guillaumond had been absolutely right not to give a damn about it. Just as he, Jean-Baptiste, didn’t give a damn about the piece of paper he was holding. It wasn’t the paper he wanted to hold, it was Camille, one of the best things in his life. And he had messed everything up. Just as he had messed everything up on that Canadian path, and messed up his pursuit of the judge, which had come to a dead end in Collery, the home of the maternal white dragon.

  He froze. The white dragon. Camille hadn’t told him about that. He picked up the rules again and looked at them. Honours were red dragons, green dragons and white dragons. Camille had called them ‘virgins’. And the four winds: North, South, East and West. He gripped the fragile paper tightly. Four winds: Soubise, Ventou, Autan and Wind. And Brasillier had to be a red dragon. On the back of the rules, he quickly scribbled the twelve names of the judge’s victims, adding the mother, which made thirteen. The mother, the original White Dragon. Grasping his pencil tightly, he tried to relate the list to the Mah Jong tiles, to see if he could make up the Hand of Honours. The one that the judge’s father had never got, but that Fulgence was furiously assembling, in order to give him back his dignity. With a trident, like his father’s mutilated three-fingered hand, pulling out the tiles. Fulgence pulled out his victims with iron fingers. How many tiles would it take to make up a hand?

  With moist palms, he went back to the very beginning of the rules: you had to assemble fourteen tiles. There was just one left to make up the number.

  Adamsberg read and re-read the names of the victims, trying to find the missing piece. Ghislaine Matère: that must be related to ‘maternal’, the mother, so it could count as a white dragon. Jeanne Lessard, a green dragon, perhaps, since her name sounded like ‘lizard’. The other names were a puzzle. They didn’t seem to be either dragons or winds. He didn’t know what to do with Lentretien, Mestre or Lefebure. But he did have four winds and three dragons, seven out of thirteen, surely too many for coincidence. And, he realised with a start, that if he was right, if the judge really was trying to accomplish his fourteen tiles, Raphaël could not possibly have killed Lise. The choice of the young Mademoiselle Autan had been because of her name, which pointed to the Trident, thus clearing his brother. But not in his own case. The name of Noëlla Corderon, did not seem to be linked to anything. Flowers? thought Adamsberg. Camille had said something about flowers. He looked at the rules again. Flowers were supernumerary honours, you could hold them but they didn’t count in making up a hand. Ornaments, asides in some sense. Supplementary victims, allowed by the rules, but who did not have to be stabbed with the trident.

  By eight in the morning, Adamsberg was waiting in a cafe for the local library to open, looking at his two watches and learning the rules of Mah Jong, as well as checking over the victims’ names. He could of course have called on Danglard’s help, but his deputy would surely have sent him off with a flea in his ear at this new fantasy. Adamsberg had already put him through a dead man walking, a hundred-year-old murderer, and now he would be inflicting a Chinese game on him. But the Chinese game had been very popular in Fulgence’s childhood, even in the countryside, as in Camille’s grandmother’s house.

  Now he realised why, in his drunken condition, he had asked Camille for the game. He had been thinking about the four winds in the Richelieu hotel room. He had been in the company of dragons. He had discovered the game that in the judge’s boyhood home had been played every night, with pitiless references to the Hand of Honours, as opposed to the mutilated hand of the father.

  When the library doors opened, he hurried inside, and a few minutes later received at his table a large etymological dictionary of French surnames. With the same fervent prayer as a gambler rolling the dice, hoping for a treble six, he unfolded his list of names. He had already had three cups of coffee to neutralise his sleepless night, and his hands were shaking as badly as Josette’s.

  First of all, he checked to see if he was right about Brasillier: yes, it derived from ‘brazier’; fire, a red dragon. Next he looked for Lessard: ‘name of a place, Essart Essard, or can mean lizard.’ OK, green dragon. Then he looked under Espir, hoping it could be counted as a wind, since it seemed to contain the letters of ‘respiration’. Yes, Old French for ‘breath’. That made five winds, eight tiles out of thirteen. Adamsberg passed his hand across his face, with the feeling that he was only just clearing the jumps, his horse’s belly just brushing the bars.

  The other names were harder to fit in. The least promising was Fevre. Perhaps this was going to bring him to a juddering halt, in his fantasy of shovelling clouds. Fevre, he discovered, to his chagrin, came from the Latin faber, a blacksmith. Adamsberg shut his eyes and leaned back. Think about the blacksmith, with a hammer. Forging the points of the trident perhaps? He opened his eyes. From the old school book in which weeks ago he had found the picture of Neptune, he remembered now the opposite page had shown Vulcan, the god of fire, represented as a toiler in front of a blazing furnace. A smith, the master of fire. Taking a deep breath, he wrote red dragon, the second, opposite Fevre. When he tried Lefebure, he was referred back to Lefevre or Fevre. So that meant the same thing. The third red dragon. A trio. Ten out of thirteen.

  Adamsberg let his hands fall and shut his eyes for a while before embarking on the last names, Lentretien and Mestre. Lentretien turned out, amazingly to be a deformation of lattelin, meaning an obscure kind of lizard. Must be a green dragon then, he thought, his handwriting becoming a scrawl by now as his hands contracted with anguish. He flexed his fingers before trying Mestre.

  ‘Mestre: old Occitan term, southern form of Master. Diminutive forms Mestrel or Mestral, variants of Mistral. Refers to the north side of a hill exposed to the Mistral, the master wind from the north.’

  ‘The master wind,’ he wrote. He put down the pen and breathed deeply, trying to take in a lungful of the cold master wind from the north, which would close the list and cool his burning cheeks. He quickly sorted the suits. A trio of red dragons: Lefebure, Fevre and Brasillier; two trios of winds, Soubise, Ventou, Autan, Espire, Mestre and Wind. A pair of green dragons, Lessard and Lentretien. A pair of white dragons with Matère and the matricide. Thirteen, seven women and six men.

  So one more tile would close the Hand of Honours. It would
have to be either a white dragon or a green dragon. It would be a man no doubt, to get a balance between the sexes, father and mother. Aching and sweating, Adamsberg returned the precious dictionary to the librarian. Now he had found the open sesame, the key, the little golden key that opened the door to the room full of corpses in Bluebeard’s castle.

  He returned to Clémentine’s house exhausted and anxious to send the key across the Atlantic to his brother, to tell him his personal nightmare was over. But Josette did not give him time to do anything, as she pushed before his eyes the decoded message she had worked on. ‘Adamsberg – Gatineau – rendezvous – portage trail – Noëlla Corderon.’

  ‘Josette, I haven’t slept a wink, I’m in no state to understand this stuff.’

  ‘These are the letters from Michel’s computer. I was quite wrong, I should have realised. Look what it could mean.’

  Adamsberg concentrated on the words.

  ‘Portage trail,’ he murmured.

  ‘Michel must surely have been passing this to someone. You weren’t alone on the path. Someone else knew you’d been there.’

  ‘It’s just one interpretation, Josette.’

  ‘There aren’t thousands of words with these combinations. I’m sure this is right.’

  ‘It’s remarkable, Josette, congratulations. But I’m afraid nobody will believe in an interpretation, it’s not the same thing as evidence for the police, you see. I’ve rescued my brother from the abyss, but I’m still there myself, buried under piles of rocks.’

  ‘Locks, you mean,’ said Josette. ‘Big strong locks. And where there are locks there are keys.’

  LV

  RAPHAEL ADAMSBERG FOUND THE MESSAGE ON THE FRIDAY MORNING. His brother had given it the name ‘Land!’ which must refer, Raphaël thought, to the cry of sailors when they first see the faint outline of a landmass on the horizon. He had to read the email several times before he dared believe he had understood the meaning of this confusing mixture of dragons and winds, written down in great haste and in a state of exhaustion: the judge’s ear, sand, matricide, Fulgence’s real age, his father’s mutilated hand, the village of Collery, the trident, Mah Jong, the Hand of Honours. Jean-Baptiste had typed so fast that he had missed out letters and even entire words. Raphaël could sense the trembling of his hands, a sensation that came directly from brother to brother, from shore to shore, carried through the waves and ending up in his Detroit bolt-hole, ripping devastatingly through the shadowy network in which he had been living his furtive life. He had not killed Lise. He stayed lying back in his chair, letting his body float along the shore, unable to guess what strange leaps Jean-Baptiste had made in order to exhume the judge’s murderous itinerary. As children once, they had wandered so far into the mountains that they were unable to find the way back to the village or even a path. Jean-Baptiste had climbed on Raphaël’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry,’ he had said. ‘We’ll try and find the way people went in the olden days.’ Every five hundred metres, Jean-Baptiste would climb up on his back. ‘This way,’ he would say as he jumped down.