by Fred Vargas
Well then, what was stopping her giving Adamsberg a call? Nothing. Just that she expected to be irritated by it. Just that she felt tired at the prospect of stirring the remnants of a past that was now a foreign land. The kind of weariness you feel when you realise you have to go all the way back to check on some piddling detail like a gas cut-off. Making a detour. Wasting time. Killing time. The sinking feeling that you’re taking a sidetrack back down a burned-out memory lane.
But Soliman, with his suffering on his sleeve, his pressing glance, with his fables and stories and dictionary definitions – Soliman had begun to breach her defences, and Camille had spent all night exercising the privilege of the wise, taking pause for thought. And in addition, all through the night Massart with his fangs and Suzanne with her Black boy-child and her Watchee had mounted noisy attacks on her uncooperative and selfish mood.
Came the dawn, and she found herself sitting or rather wobbling on the fence, torn between two equally distasteful prospects – going back to Les Écarts in defeat, or calling Adamsberg.
On the other side of the screen Soliman and Watchee were up. She could hear the young man unhooking the moped, no doubt to go in search of fresh bread. Then Watchee putting on his shirt and trousers. Then the smell of coffee and the noise of the moped coming back. Camille slipped on her top, her jeans and her boots before putting a foot on the ground – walking around inside the back of the truck in bare feet was out of the question.
Soliman smiled when he saw Camille appear, and Watchee showed her her breakfast stool with the tip of his crook. The youngster filled Camille’s mug, put in two sugar-lumps, and cut her slices of bread.
“I’m going to manage now,” Camille said.
“We thought you would, young lady,” said Watchee.
“We’re going back,” Soliman declared. “Retreat. ‘Act or action of retiring or withdrawing in face of difficulty.’ Retreat’s not a defeat. The dictionary makes that quite clear. Doesn’t mention being beaten.”
Camille frowned sceptically. “Can’t that wait?” she said. “In a day or two there could be more sheep. Then we’d know where to go.”
“So what?” said Soliman. “We’ll always be one step behind. We’re on his tail. And if we stay on his tail we’ll never be able to head him off, right? To do that you have to be one step ahead. And to be ahead of him you have to have much more information than we have. We’re useless. We’re tracking him, we’re closing in on him, but we can’t actually touch him. We’re going home, Camille.”
“When?”
“Today, if you’re up to driving over those passes again. We could be at Les Écarts by nightfall.”
“At least the animals would be glad to see us back,” said Watchee. “They don’t feed properly when I’m away.”
Camille drank her coffee and ran her fingers through her hair.
“I’m not happy with that,” she said.
“But that’s the way it is,” said Soliman. “Stuff your pride down your boots. Do you know the story about the three foolish men who tried to learn the secret of the tree with the 120 branches?”
“What if I rang?” Camille said. “If I rang that policeman?”
“If you call that flic, then it’ll be the story of the three idiots and the genius who tried to learn the secret of the man with no hair.”
Camille nodded and pondered for a few minutes. Soliman tried to chew silently, while Watchee sat bolt upright with his hands on his knees, looking at Camille.
“I’ll call him now,” she said, getting up.
“You’re the driver,” said Soliman.
XXV
“I’M THE ONE standing in for him,” adrien danglard said for the third time. “Are you phoning to make a complaint? Or to report a theft? Threatening behaviour? GBH?”
“It’s personal,” Camille said. “Strictly personal.”
She had reservations about that word. She did not like saying “personal” for fear it would be taking a liberty and create ties she did not wish to have. Some words are like that – like insurgents stealing fields not their own.
“I’m his stand-in,” Danglard said blankly. “Please tell me what your call is about.”
“I cannot tell you what my call is about.” Camille remained imperturbable. “I wish to speak to Commissaire Adamsberg.”
“Personal, is it?”
“I said so.”
“Are you in the fifth arrondissement? Where are you calling from?”
“From the side of the N75 in the department of Isère.”
“Then I’m afraid we can’t help you,” said Lieutenant Danglard. “You’d do better to contact the nearest gendarmerie.”
He grabbed a sheet of paper, scribbled the name SABRINA MONGE in capitals, jerked his head, shoved the paper towards the man sitting on his right, and with a jab of his pencil turned on the speakerphone.
Camille thought of hanging up. By blocking her, the Inspector was providing an easy way out, making it seem like fate. She could say that they just would not put her through to Adamsberg and she wasn’t going to fight to get put through. But once combat had been engaged, Camille, with her streak of not entirely commendable pride, was simply inept at giving up. A quirk that had often wasted a lot of her time and energy.
“I don’t think you understand me,” she said patiently.
“Of course I do,” said Danglard. “You wish to speak to Commissaire Adamsberg. But Commissaire Adamsberg cannot be spoken to.”
“Is he away?”
“He cannot be reached.”
“This is important,” Camille said. “Tell me where I can get hold of him.”
Danglard gave another nod to his assistant. The Monge girl was giving herself away with astounding naivety. She really must think flics were complete idiots.
“He can’t be reached,” Danglard said again. “He’s gone away. Flown the nest. There is no Commissaire Adamsberg any more. I’m standing in for him.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“Is he dead?” Camille inquired in a quavering tone.
Danglard’s forehead puckered into a frown: Sabrina Monge’s voice wouldn’t go wobbly like that. He was quite astute. He had not heard the fury or the mistrust he would have expected in the voice of Sabrina. The girl he was listening to was simply incredulous and taken aback.
Camille waited tensely, more stunned than anxious, as if she had seen the tide come to a halt. It could not be. She would have seen it in the papers, she would have heard about it. Adamsberg was a name.
“No, just away,” Danglard informed her in a different tone of voice. “Leave me your name and number. I’ll get him to call you back.”
“That won’t work,” Camille said as her nervous tension returned to normal. “This mobile is nearly out of power and I’m in the middle of nowhere.”
“Your name, please,” Danglard insisted.
“Camille Forestier.”
Danglard sat up straight, waved his assistant out of the room and switched off the speakerphone. So it was Camille, Mathilde’s girl, Queen Matilda’s only daughter. Adamsberg had patches of trying to find out where on earth the girl was, but it was like trying to pin down a cloud, so he let it drop. Danglard took a fresh sheet of paper with the excitement of a boy who’s been fishing at sea for days and suddenly feels a tug on the line.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Cautious Danglard quizzed Camille for fifteen minutes before he was satisfied that it was she. He had never met her but he had known the mother well enough to be able to test Camille on a file’s worth of details that Sabrina Monge could never have known even if she had done all her homework. And what a beautiful mother Mathilde had been!
When Camille hung up she felt dizzy with all Danglard’s questioning. The way Adamsberg was being protected made it seem as if a team of killers was after him. She reckoned the memories of her mother had done a lot to bust the policeman’s barrage. She smiled. Queen Matilda was a pass key all
to herself, and always had been. Adamsberg was in Avignon: she had the name of his hotel and his number.
Camille paced up and down beside the main road for a while, deep in thought. She had a vague idea in her head of where Avignon was on the map of France, and that it was relatively near. Tackling Adamsberg viva voce suddenly seemed infinitely preferable to speaking to him on the telephone. She did not trust a device unsuited to even moderately delicate circumstances. Telephones were fine for heavyweight and middleweight conversations but quite useless for the featherweight stuff. Calling a man you’ve not seen for years – and who is probably under deep cover – to ask him to help you find a werewolf that nobody else believes exists suddenly seemed a risky, not to say clumsy, way to proceed. Bumping into him seemed much more hopeful.
Soliman and Watchee were waiting at the back of the lorry in what had become their customary positions – the younger man sitting on the metal foothold, the straight-backed shepherd standing beside him, and the dog curled round his feet.
“He’s at Avignon,” Camille said. “I couldn’t get through. I guess we ought to be able to get there.”
“So you don’t know where Avignon is either?” asked Soliman.
“I do, in flashes. Is it far?”
Soliman looked at his watch.
“You go down to Valence and join the motorway south,” he said. “Then follow the Rhône gently downstream. Should get there by one. Aren’t you going to call ahead?”
“No. Better see him first.”
“Why?”
“Special reason,” Camille said with a shrug.
Watchee put his hand out to request the mobile phone.
“It’s almost dead,” Camille said. “Needs recharging.”
“I won’t take long,” mumbled Watchee as he wandered off.
“Who’s he calling?’ she asked Soliman.
“The flock. He’s having a wee word with the flock.”
Camille raised her eyebrows.
“So who picks up?” she asked. “A ewe? Mauricette?”
Soliman shook his head crossly.
“Don’t be silly. Buteil picks up. But after . . . well . . . Buteil puts one or two sheep on the line. He did it yesterday. He rings every day.”
“You mean to say he talks to the sheep?”
“Of course he does. Who else is he going to talk to? He tells them not to let themselves get down in the dumps, he tells them to eat properly, he tells them to keep their spirits up. He mostly talks to the leading ewe. As you might expect.”
“Are you telling me that Buteil shoves the mobile into the ear of the leading ewe?”
“Bloody hell. Yes, he does,” said Soliman. “How else is he going to talk to the sheep?”
“All right,” Camille said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just wanted to know, that’s all.”
She stared at Watchee pacing up and down with the mobile to his ear. His face had a caring expression and he was making soothing gestures with his free arm. His baritone carried all the way over and Camille could make out louder expressions like “Listen to what I’m telling you, old girl”. Soliman followed Camille’s gaze.
“Do you reckon a flic could take on board all that sort of thing?” he asked, waving generally at the mountains, the sheep wagon and the three of them.
“I wonder,” Camille said. “It’s not obvious.”
“I know what you mean,” Soliman said.
XXVI
AT AROUND THREE in the afternoon camille left the city walls of Avignon behind her and crossed the bridge to the right bank of the Rhône. She sauntered along the downstream towpath in search of Adamsberg, under a broiling sun. Nobody knew exactly where he was to be found. The hotel people did not know, nor did anyone at police HQ, where he had spent half the night and which he had left at around two. All they knew was that the commissaire hung around on the far side of the water.
It took an hour of walking for Camille to come upon him. He was sitting quite still, on his own on a narrow strip of grass cut through the willow thicket. He was at the water’s edge, his feet touching the surface. He did not appear to be doing anything at all, but for Adamsberg sitting out in the open air was an activity in its own right. Actually, though, Camille saw as she looked at him more attentively that he was doing something. He was holding a long branch in the water and he was staring intently at its tip and at the eddies that this minor barrier created in the stream. Unusually, he had kept his leather holster-strap on over his shirt. It was a piece of gear which always made quite an impression, and it stood in stark contrast to Adamsberg’s crumpled shirt, his worn trousers, and his bare feet.
Camille was standing at three-quarters angle behind him and saw him almost in profile. He had not changed these past few years, and that did not surprise her. Not that he was exempt from the passing of time, but it left no visible mark on Adamsberg because his face was, so to speak, too eventful. Ageing leaves its signs on faces that are regular and harmonious. But from childhood Adamsberg had had irregular, discordant features, and on the asymmetric muddle of his countenance, the subtle symptoms of advancing years were overwhelmed by the chaotic effect of the ensemble.
For safety’s sake, Camille made herself stop to look again at the face she had once put on a pedestal above all others. Basically it was all in his nose and lips. A large and fairly hooked nose, well-defined and dreamy lips. They did not match, they weren’t refined, they weren’t modest. As for the rest – swarthy complexion, hollow cheeks, receding chin, hastily swept back ordinary dark hair. Brown eyes, which rarely stopped moving and often looked distant, deeply set beneath bushy eyebrows. The face was all wrong. Camille’s rigorous intellect had never solved the mystery of its unique seductiveness. Maybe it came from its intensity. Adamsberg’s face was, so to speak, overloaded, overdefined, saturated.
Camille saw it all again and ran through the list of details dispassionately. Long ago the glow in Adamsberg’s face had been a source of warmth and light. Today she looked on it quite neutrally, as if she was checking the bulb in a lamp. That face wasn’t speaking to her any more; and her memory wasn’t going to come up with a prompt.
She walked up to him calmly, with almost ponderous indifference. Adamsberg must have heard her, but he did not budge and kept on watching the branch that was holding back the Rhône on its path to the sea. When she was ten paces away from him she stood stock-still. Adamsberg was still looking at the river. But his left hand was holding a pistol, and pointing it straight at her.
“Stay right where you are,” he said softly. “Freeze.”
Camille did as she was instructed, without a word.
“You know I can pull the trigger much faster than you can draw,” he went on without taking his eyes off the branch in the water. “How did you find me?”
“Danglard,” Camille replied.
At the sound of this unexpected voice Adamsberg slowly turned to face her. Camille well remembered Adamsberg’s slightly graceful, utterly casual low-speed movements. He gazed at her in amazement. Gently, he dropped his guard and rather embarrassedly put the gun down on the grass beside him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was expecting someone else.”
Camille nodded awkwardly.
“Forget the gun,” he went on. “It’s because of a girl who’s obsessed with the idea of killing me.”
“I see,” Camille said politely.
“Please sit down,” said Adamsberg, motioning to a patch of grass.
Camille wavered.
“Come on, sit down,” he insisted. “You came all this way so you might as well sit down.”
He smiled.
“I killed the girl’s partner. A shot from my gun did for him as I was knocked over. Here’s where she wants to lodge her bullet,” he said, pointing to his midriff. “And that’s why she won’t get off my back. Unlike you, Camille. You’ve been keeping out of my way. Avoiding me. You made yourself really scarce.”
Camille had ended up sitting down cross-le
gged fifteen feet from him while he pursued the conversation single-handedly. She was waiting for the questions. Adamsberg knew perfectly well that she had not sought him out for love, but because she needed him.
He looked her over for a moment. No doubt about it: that grey jacket that was too long for her, with its cuffs down to her knuckles, those pale jeans and black boots belonged to the girl he had seen on the television news. Camille had been in the square at Saint-Victor-du-Mont, leaning against the old plane tree. He looked away.
“Made yourself very scarce,” he repeated as he pushed his branch back into the water. “Something really fearsome must have made you come and find me. In response to some kind of higher authority.”
Camille said nothing.
“So what’s happened to you?” he asked gently.
Camille ran her fingers through the dry grass, restrained by her own embarrassment but tempted to run away again.
“I need help.”
Adamsberg lifted his branch out of the water and changed his position so as to be sitting facing her, with his legs crossed. Then carefully, meticulously, he placed the branch horizontally on the ground in front of him, and between the two of them. It wasn’t quite straight so with one hand he adjusted its lie. Adamsberg had very fine hands: strong, well-proportioned, and large in relation to his overall size.
