by Fred Vargas
Camille went up to the sheep farm roughly once a week to collect the box of provisions that Suzanne made up for her. As soon as she entered the grounds of Les Écarts she left the snide remarks and insinuations of the village behind her. The five men and women who worked there would have gone to the stake for Suzanne Rosselin.
She strode along the pebble path switching back and forth along the terraces up to the high and narrow stone-built farmhouse, with its low door and small, asymmetric windows. Camille reckoned that the decrepit roof owed its continued existence only to the moral solidarity between tiles that had bonded together long ago. The place was empty, so Camille walked onto the elongated sheepfold five hundred metres further up the steep slope. She could hear Suzanne bawling in the distance. Camille screwed up her eyes against the sun and made out the blue shirts of two gendarmes as well as Sylvain, hopping around. Whenever meat was involved, the butcher had to be there.
Then she made out the priestly silhouette of Watchee, standing erect against the wall of the sheepfold. She had not yet had an opportunity of seeing Suzanne’s shepherd close up, since this very old man was forever out in the fields guarding Suzanne’s flock. People said that he slept in the old shack with his animals, but they did not seem to find that shocking. He was called “Watchee”, meaning “watchman” or “keeper”, as far as Camille had been able to make out, but she did not know his real name. He was a slim, straight-backed old man with a head of longish white hair, and his two hands were resting firmly on the crook of a staff standing solidly in the ground, and with his haughty glance he cut a truly majestic figure, so much so that Camille wasn’t sure whether she had the right to speak to him directly.
On Suzanne’s other side stood Soliman, standing just as straight as Watchee, as if to match the old man. Seeing these two stationary guards to right and left of Suzanne, you could imagine them awaiting a signal from her to start using their staves to beat back an imaginary horde of marauders. But they weren’t. Watchee was just standing the way he always did, and in these rather dramatic circumstances Soliman was only following suit. Suzanne was in discussion with the gendarmes and filling in the incident report form. The dead and wounded sheep had been taken into the cooler darkness of the pen.
Seeing Camille, Suzanne took her shoulder in her huge grasp and gave it a rough shake.
“So where’s your trapper, eh? I could do with him right now. To tell us what’s what. He’s must have more between the ears than these two nitwits who’d be pushed even to wipe their own backsides.”
Sylvain the butcher raised an arm as if he was about to say something.
“Belt up, Sylvain,” Suzanne anticipated him. “You’re as dim as the others. No offence, you’ve got an excuse, and it’s not your job.”
No-one took offence in any case. The two gendarmes seemed quite bored with it all and carried on filling in the forms, laboriously.
“I let him know,” Camille said. “He’s on his way down.”
“If you’ve got a minute, afterwards. There’s a leak in my lavatory, I need you to mend it.”
“I haven’t got my tools with me, Suzanne. I’ll do it later.”
“Meanwhile, my lass, go take a peek at the mess in there,” said Suzanne, pointing a fat thumb towards the pen. “Murder most wild, by mad brutes.”
Before stepping through the low doorway Camille gave a respectful and humble nod to Watchee, Soliman she shook by the hand. She knew Soliman quite well. He followed Suzanne like a shadow and gave her a helping hand in all her tasks. Camille also knew Soliman’s story.
In fact it had been the very first story she’d been told after she arrived in the village, as if it was urgent for her to know it. Twenty-three years on, people still had not got over the shock of having a Black in the village. Just as in a fairy story, he’d been found as a baby in a fig basket on the church steps. Nobody had ever seen a Black at Saint-Victor or anywhere in the surrounding area, so they reckoned he must have been made in a town, maybe Nice, where anything can happen, even Black babies. But there he was at Notre-Dame de Saint-Victor, bawling his lungs out in the porch of the village church. As sun rose that day half the village stood around in complete bewilderment gazing at the basket and the utterly Black baby inside it. Then, bit by bit, initially hesitant female hands came forth to pick it up, then to rock it, then to comfort it. Lucie, who ran the café on the square, had been the first to dare to kiss its snot-stained cheek. But nothing seemed to calm the infant, who was almost choking on his screams. “The little darkie’s hungry,” said one old lady. “He’s messed himself,” said another. Then truck-sized Suzanne burst onto the scene, pushed her way forward, picked up the babe and nestled it in the crook of her brawny arm. The kid stopped yelling straight away and laid its head on Suzanne’s broad bosom. From that instant, everyone accepted as a plain fact of life – as if they lived in a fairy tale where princesses just happened to be wide-shouldered sheep breeders – that the little darkie would belong to the mistress of Les Écarts. Suzanne stuck her index finger into the infant’s mouth and shouted out words that Lucie would not forget as long as she lived:
“Look in the basket, you tossers! There’s bound to be a note!”
And there was. The priest went to the top of the church steps, ceremonially stretched forth an arm to call for quiet, and started to read the note aloud. “Pliz luk ater im –”
“Slower, you idiot!” Suzanne demanded, as she rocked the babe. “Can’t understand a word!”
Yes, Lucie would never forget that. Suzanne had no respect for anyone.
“Pliz”, the priest repeated, “luk ater im rit an proper. His name is Soliman Melchior Samba DIAWARA tell im is ma is good an is pa is crule as a swamp in hell. Luk ater im an luv im pliz.”
Suzanne pushed herself right up to the priest so as to read over his shoulder. Then she grabbed the pee-stained scrap and stuck it in a pocket of her sack-like dress.
“Soliman Melchior Whatsisname?” said Germain, the roadman, with a giggle. “And what came after? A load of nonsense if you ask me. Why can’t he be Gérard, like a normal person? Where does his mother think he came from? A leg of lamb?”
There was a ripple of laughter, which quickly subsided. You had to admit, Lucie would add, that the folk of Saint-Victor weren’t all bloody idiots, they could restrain themselves when push came to shove. Not like the Pierrefort lot, who held nothing sacred.
Meanwhile the baby’s little black head was still nestling in the big woman’s armpit. How old could he be? Four weeks at the most. And whom did he love? Suzanne. Life is like that.
“Right,” said Suzanne, looking the crowd up and down from the church steps. “If anyone comes asking for him, he’s up at Les Écarts.”
And that settled it.
No-one ever did come asking for wee Soliman Melchior Samba Diawara. But occasionally people wondered what would have happened if the boy’s natural mother really had come back to claim him. Because from that crucial moment – “the business on the steps”, villagers called it – Suzanne Rosselin had grown fiercely attached to the child and it wasn’t obvious she would have given him up without a fight. It took two years for the local notary to persuade her to get the official paperwork dealt with. Not to adopt the child, she wasn’t allowed to do that, but to become his legal guardian.
And that’s how baby Soliman became the Rosselin lad. Suzanne raised him like he was a local born and bred, but in her heart of hearts she treated him as if he were an African king, believing in a muddled sort of way that he was a bastard prince who’d been discarded by some powerful dynasty. Seeing how handsome he became – a real Adonis – he couldn’t be anything less. At the age of twenty-three young Soliman Melchior was as conversant with grafting tomato plants, pressing olives, cultivating chickpeas and spreading muck as he was with the traditions and lore of sub-Saharan Africa. All that he knew about sheep had been taught him by Watchee. And all he knew about Africa, its glories and misfortunes, its stories and legends, had been taug
ht him by the books that Suzanne scrupulously sought out and read to him, thereby making herself a highly knowledgeable Africanist too.
Even now Suzanne kept a weather eye open for serious television documentaries that would broaden the young man’s education – on repairing a tanker-truck on a Ghanaian highway, on the green monkeys of Tanzania, on polygamy in Mali, on dictators, civil wars and coups d’état, or the origins and glories of the Kingdom of Benin.
“Sol!” she would cry out. “Get in here! Your place is on TV!”
Suzanne had never been able to decide to her complete satisfaction which African country Soliman came from, so she found it simpler to treat the whole of black Africa as “his place”. And there was no question of the boy skiving a single one of these documentaries. Only once, when he was seventeen, had he attempted rebellion.
“I don’t give two damns about these guys,” he moaned, as a report on hunting warthogs dragged out on screen.
And for the first and last time Suzanne responded by slapping his face.
“Don’t you ever talk about your own folk that way!” she commanded.
But as Soliman was on the verge of tears, she tried to explain things in a kindlier way, clasping the boy’s slim shoulder with her outsized mitt.
“Look, Sol, you don’t have to give a tinker’s fart for the country you’re born in. You’re born where you’re born and that’s that. But you have to stop short of rejecting your own folk, because that can land you in a load of shit. What’s bad is the rejecting. Rejection, denial, contempt – that’s for little big men with nasty minds, who think they made themselves all on their own and owe nothing to nobody what came before. Fuckwits, right? You’ve got Les Écarts behind you and you’ve also got the whole of Africa. Take both, two helpings is better than one.”
Soliman took Camille into the pen and pointed her towards the bloodied carcasses laid out on the floor. Camille looked at them from a distance.
“What does Suzanne think?” she asked.
“Suzanne’s against wolves. She says nothing good will come of them, and that this beast kills for sport.”
“She’s in favour of hunting them down?”
“She’s against hunting, too. She’s says we won’t nab it round here, it’s already moved on.”
“And Watchee?”
“Watchee’s not happy.”
“In favour of the hunt?”
“Don’t know. Since he came across the savaged sheep he hasn’t opened his mouth.”
“And what do you think, Soliman?”
At that moment Johnstone walked into the pen and rubbed his eyes to adjust them to the sudden gloom. The old shack stank to high heaven of lanolin and stale urine. The French really were revolting people, he thought. They might have cleaned the place up. Behind Johnstone came Suzanne, and she smelled bad too, he reckoned, and then the two gendarmes, at a respectful distance, together with the butcher whom Suzanne had failed to chase off. “I’m the man with the cold store,” he had replied, “and I’ll be taking the carcasses away for you.”
“The hell you will!” Suzanne snapped back. “They’ll be buried right here at Les Écarts, and Watchee will do it with the proper ceremony for serving soldiers what die in action.”
That shut Sylvain up, no mistake, but he tagged along behind her nevertheless. Watchee stayed outside, by the door. Watching.
Johnstone nodded to Soliman and then knelt down next to the dismembered sheep. He turned them over, inspected the injuries, probed their dirty coats looking for the best-defined imprint of the teeth. He dragged over a very young ewe and looked hard at the bite mark on its neck.
“Sol, grab the torch and shine it over there,” Suzanne said.
Johnstone pored over the wound by the light of the yellow beam.
“The carnassial hardly scratched her,” he mumbled, “but the canine dug right in.”
He picked up a long straw and poked it inside the bloody hole.
“What the hell are you doing?” Camille asked.
“Probing,” Johnstone answered, calmly.
The Canadian pulled the straw out and used his thumbnail to score off the limit of staining on the now crimson piece of straw. He handed it without a word to Camille, then took another straw to measure the distance between the wounds. He stood up and went out into the fresh air with his thumbnail still marking the straw. He needed to breathe.
“The sheep are all yours,” he said, as he went past Watchee, who responded with a nod.
“Sol,” he said, “fetch me a ruler.”
Soliman bounded down to the house without breaking his stride, and came back in five minutes with the tape measure Suzanne used for sewing.
“Measure it,” Johnstone said, as he held the two straws out straight. “Exactly.”
Soliman stretched the tape along the blood-marked straw.
“Thirty-five millimetres,” he announced.
Johnstone screwed up his face. Then he measured the other straw himself and handed the tape measure back to Soliman.
“And so?” one of the gendarmes asked.
“The canine tooth was almost four centimetres long.”
“And so?” the gendarme repeated. “Is that awkward?”
Nobody said anything, pregnantly. They were beginning to see. They were beginning to understand.
“A large animal,” Johnstone concluded, summarising what everyone had grasped.
The group hesitated then began to break up. The gendarmes bade farewell with a salute. Sol went to the house again. Watchee went back into the pen. Johnstone went off to one side to wash his hands, then put on his motorcycle helmet and his gloves. Camille went up to him.
“Suzanne’s invited us in to have a drink, to get this out of our minds. Come on.”
Johnstone pursed his lips.
“She stinks,” he said.
Camille stiffened.
“She does not,” she replied rather harshly, flouting all factual accuracy.
“She does,” Johnstone said.
“Don’t be mean.”
Johnstone caught Camille’s frowning stare and suddenly smiled.
“All right,” he said, and took off his helmet.
He followed her along the scorched grass track that wound down to the stone-built hovel. He had nothing against that other French habit of knocking yourself senseless with hooch from the stroke of noon. Canadians could compete in that event.
“All the same,” he said to Camille with his hand on her shoulder. “She does stink.”
VII
THAT EVENING THE national news featured the latest victims of the Mercantour wolves at some length.
“Shit,” said Johnstone. “Why can’t they just leave us in peace.”
Actually, the issue was no longer the wolves as a group, but the wolf of the Mercantour National Park. The lead item of the news was an overexcited report from the Alps, with rather more substance to it than in earlier stories. It prompted fear and loathing. It kneaded the related ingredients of fascination and horror into an unhealthy dough. The savagings were deplored with prurient gloating, the power of the beast was spelled out in detail: uncatchable, wild and, above all, huge. That was what really hooked the whole country and propelled its now passionate interest in the “Monster of the Mercantour”. Its uncommon size raised it above the ordinary and placed it on a par with the cohorts of Satan. People had suddenly encountered a wolf out of hell, and no way were they going to let go of it.
“I’m astounded Suzanne let journalists inside,” Camille said.
“Went in without asking.”
“This time it’ll be a whole lynch-mob. No stopping them.”
“They won’t catch it in the Mercantour.”
“You reckon its lair is somewhere else?”
“Sure, it moves around. Maybe a sibling.”
Camille switched off the TV and looked at Johnstone.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Sibellius’s brother. There were five of them
in the litter: two she-cubs, Livie and Octavie, and three males, Sibellius, Porcus the Lame, and the last-born, Crassus the Bald.”
“Was he big?”
“Looked set to grow to a good size. Never seen him grown-up. Mercier reminded me.”
“Does he know where it is?”
“Can’t pin it down. With mating season there’s been lots of boundary shifts all over the place. Males can cover thirty kilometres in one night. Hang on, Mercier gave me a photograph. But only when it was a cub.”
Johnstone got up and looked for his rucksack. “Shit,” he grumbled. “I damn well left it with the old bag.”
“With Suzanne,” Camille corrected.
“With old bag Suzanne.”
Camille hovered, on the brink of starting a row.
“If you have to go down there,” she said in the end, “I’ll come with you. There’s a leak in the toilet.”
“Filth,” said Johnstone. “Filth just doesn’t bother you.”
Camille shrugged as she went to gather her toolkit. “It’s true, it doesn’t.”
At Les Écarts Camille asked for a bucket and scrubbing sheet and left Johnstone in the care of Suzanne and Soliman, who offered herb tea or a glass of spirits.
“Spirits,” he said.
Camille noticed how he shifted around so as to sit as far away from Suzanne as possible.
As she loosened the seized nuts on the sewer pipe Camille wondered if she could ever get Johnstone to utter a thank you, even a word of thanks. He wasn’t objectionable, really, just barely cordial. Mixing with grizzlies had left his social skills undeveloped. And that weighed on Camille, even with someone as rough-mannered as Suzanne. But she did not go in for preaching. Drop it, she told herself, as she prised a perished rubber seal off with the tip of a screwdriver. Say nothing. Don’t involve yourself, it’s not your job.
