by Fred Vargas
The sources repeated each other, sometimes word for word. So they must be different writers dealing with the same idea, down to the seventeenth century, for sure; it was an idea being handed down from one generation to the next. Just as medieval monks handed down the precepts of the church through the ages. The source must have been related to some constituted body, to some cultured élite. But no, not to the monasteries. The texts were not remotely religious.
Decambrais had laid his head in his hand to think ever harder when a gay song rang out through the whole house. It was Lizbeth summoning them all to dinner.
When he went down to the dining room Joss found all the inmates of the Decambrais Hotel already at their seats unfolding their napkins from their individual wooden rings, each with its distinctive mark. Joss, overcome for once by shyness, hadn’t meant to join the common table on his first evening – residents weren’t obliged to take dinner, as long as they signed out the day before. But he had become used to living alone, eating alone, sleeping alone, and even talking by himself, except when he went to eat at the Viking, which wasn’t that often. In fourteen years of exile in Paris, he’d had three rather abbreviated affairs, but he’d never dared take any one of his girlfriends back to his room to share the mattress on the bare floor. Their places, however modest, had always been far more comfortable than his own dilapidated cabin.
Joss made a conscious effort to shake off the boorishness that seemed to be welling up from his far-distant youth, when he’d been a rough and awkward adolescent. Lizbeth smiled as she handed him his personal napkin ring. Lizbeth’s smile made him want to throw himself at her in a great leap, like a drowning man straining for a rock on a dark night. She was a splendid rock to be stranded on – smooth, dark and round, and worthy of eternal gratitude. Joss was amazed at himself. He’d never known such a violent urge, save with Lizbeth, and only when she smiled. The assembled company welcomed Joss, who took a seat next to Decambrais, on his right. Lizbeth presided at the other end of the table, and busied herself with serving the meal. The other two residents were there: Castillon, from room 1, a retired blacksmith who had spent the first half of his life as a professional conjuror, performing all over Europe; and Evelyne Curie, from room 4, a tiny, timid woman under thirty with a gentle old-world face which she kept lowered over her plate. Lizbeth had given Joss his navigation chart the moment he’d moved into the hotel.
“Now listen here, sailorman,” she’d begun, as she pulled him into the bathroom for the lecture. “Don’t you go putting your foot in it here. You can push Castillon around if you like, he’s got broad shoulders and he likes to think he can take a joke. He’s not as tough as he looks, but he can cope. Don’t worry if your watch goes missing during dinner, it’s an old habit of his, he can’t resist the temptation, but he always gives it back over dessert. By the way, dessert is stewed fruit on weekdays or fresh fruit in season, and semolina pudding on Sundays. No plastic food here, you can eat it all blindfold. But keep your hands off the little lady, sailorman. She’s been safe here for a year and a half. She ran away from a husband who’d been thrashing her for eight years. Can you imagine, eight years of battering? Apparently, she was in love with the brute. Anyway, she finally saw the light and turned up here one fine day. But watch it, sailorman. Her bloke is scouring the city looking for her, so as to flay her alive and welcome her home. The two things don’t really go together, but that’s how those sort of men work, and he’s on autopilot. He’s up to killing her so no-one else can have her – you’ve knocked around, you know the scene. So, mum’s the word – you’ve never heard of Evelyne Curie, never come across the name. We call her Eva around here, that keeps us in the clear. You got that, sailorman? Treat her nicely. She doesn’t say much, she’s quite jumpy, she blushes as if she was always afraid of something. She’s getting better bit by bit, but it’s a long haul. As for me, well, you know who I am, I’m OK but I’m finished with leg-overs and all that stuff. That’s about it. Go down to dinner, it’s nearly time. And I’d better tell you straight away, it’s two bottles per meal and not a drop more, because Decambrais has a weakness and I have to hold him back. If you want to tank up you go over to Bertin’s afterwards. And breakfast is from seven to eight, suits everybody except the blacksmith who’s a late riser, each to his own is what I say. I’ve said my piece, so don’t get in my way, and I’ll get your ring. I’ve got one with a chick and one with a boat. Which would you rather have?”
“What ring?” asked Joss
“The ring for your napkin. Oh, and there’s a wash every week, whites on Friday, coloureds on Tuesday. If you don’t want your smalls mixed up with the blacksmith’s, there’s a launderette two hundred yards down the road. If you want your stuff ironed, Marie-Belle, who comes to do the windows, will take it in for a consideration. So, which ring do you want?”
“The chick,” Joss said decisively.
Lizbeth sighed as she went downstairs. “Why do men always try to be smart?”
Soup, veal stew, cheese and cooked pears. Castillon wittered on, Joss kept his peace and looked for his bearings, as he would in unknown waters. Little Eva ate noiselessly and raised her eyes only once, to ask Lizbeth to pass the bread. Lizbeth smiled and Joss had the impression that Eva also wanted to bury herself in Lizbeth’s broad bosom. But maybe it was just him.
Decambrais said almost nothing during dinner. Lizbeth whispered to Joss, who was lending a hand with clearing the dishes, “When he’s like that it means he’s working during his meal.” Indeed, as soon as the pears were finished, Decambrais got up, made his excuses and went back to his cubbyhole to work.
Light dawned in the morning, at the very moment of awakening. The name rose to his lips even before he had opened his eyes, as if the word had been eagerly waiting all night long for the sleeper to wake so it could introduce itself to him. Decambrais could hear himself saying it softly and clearly: Avicenna.
He got up saying it over and over so it would not evaporate along with the mists of sleep. For safety, he wrote it down. Avicenna. Then he put alongside: Liber canonis. The canon of medieval medicine.
Avicenna. The great Avicenna: early eleventh century, Persian philosopher and physician, transcribed in a thousand manuscripts from East to West. Latin translations sprinkled with Arabic terms. He was on the right track now.
Decambrais hung about at the foot of the stairs with a broad smile on his face, waiting to bump into his Breton lodger. “Sleep well, Le Guern?”
Joss could see that something was up. Decambrais had a thin, pale face that often looked like death warmed up, but this morning he looked almost ruddy, as if he’d been out in the sun too long. And he wasn’t smiling his ordinary, slightly cynical and snooty smile, but simply beaming.
“I’ve got him, Le Guern, I’ve got him!”
“What?”
“Our pedant, of course! I’ve got him, dammit! Keep today’s ‘specials’ for me, won’t you, I’m off to the library.”
“You mean downstairs in your cubbyhole?”
“No, Le Guern. I do not have every book.”
“Oh really?” said Joss, genuinely surprised at the news.
Decambrais stood there in his overcoat with his briefcase wedged between his heels taking down that morning’s “special” from Joss’s dictation:
When the air varieth from his natural temperature, declining to heat and moisture, when it seemeth cloudie and dustie; when the wyndes are gross and hot; then are the Planets in disorder, and hang their poison in the sick air
He slipped the sheet into his briefcase, waited to hear the day’s shipwreck story, and at five minutes to nine strode down the steps to the metro.
X
THAT THURSDAY ADAMSBERG arrived at the office after Danglard – an event sufficiently rare for it to cause the latter to give his chief a long and meaningful glance. Adamsberg had the rumpled look of a man who’s had only a few hours sleep towards dawn. He went out again straight away to have an espresso at the corner café.
He had tried after much patient waiting to have a woman perform the reverse operation – to come in the door frontways and walk coolly down the corridor towards him in a green trouser suit, but nothing much came of that plan. The women who came into the flat never stayed very long, and while they were there relations tended to be stormy. He couldn’t aspire to a woman like Camille, he couldn’t ask for the moon. Her profile was so sharp and lovely that you were torn between wanting to paint her portrait instantly and wanting to kiss her lips. He would be happy with just a woman – any woman, really. Why should he object if her middle was as broad as his own?
Danglard saw Adamsberg come back in and shut himself in his office with a silent closing of the door. He wasn’t an oil painting either, but somehow he’d got the rainbow. Actually it would be truer to say that although none of Adamsberg’s features was handsome in itself, their combination paradoxically made him quite a good-looking man. None of the individual traits of his face could be called balanced, harmonious or handsome; in fact, he was a hotchpotch – yet the overall impression he made was attractive, especially when he got excited. Danglard had always found this random outcome quite unfair. His own face was no worse a mishmash than Adamsberg’s, but the cumulative effect was hopeless. Whereas Adamsberg, with no better cards to play, had got trumps.
Because Danglard had made himself read and think a lot since the age of two and a half, he wasn’t jealous. Also because he had his mental slide show. Also because despite the chronic irritation that Adamsberg caused him, Danglard quite liked the man; he even quite liked the way he looked, with his big nose and his odd, sideways smile. He’d not hesitated for a moment when Adamsberg had asked him to join his new murder squad. Adamsberg’s relaxed manner provided a much-needed counterweight to his own anxious and sometimes rather brittle hyperactivity; in fact, it calmed him down every day as much as a six-pack did.
Danglard meditated on Adamsberg’s closed door. One way or another the man was going to work on those 4s and was trying not to put his number two’s nose out of joint. He took his hands off the keyboard and leaned back in his chair. He was mildly worried: maybe he had been on the wrong track since yesterday evening. Come to think of it, he had seen those reversed 4s somewhere before. It had come to him in bed, as he was going to sleep, on his own. Somewhere long ago, maybe when he was still a young man, not yet a flic, and not in Paris. Danglard hadn’t travelled much in his life, so maybe he could try to track down that memory, assuming that anything of it remained save for an almost entirely obliterated trace.
Adamsberg had actually closed his door so as to be able to call around forty Paris commissariats without feeling the shadow of his deputy’s justified irritation looming over his shoulder. Danglard had plumped for a radical art operation; Adamsberg did not share that view. But to go from disagreeing with Danglard to launching inquiries over the whole metropolitan area of Paris was an illogical leap which Adamsberg preferred to perform on his own. Even this morning he hadn’t been quite sure he would do it. At breakfast, apologising to Camille for bringing work home, he’d opened his notebook and stared at Maryse’s sketch of the 4 as if he was playing double or quits. He asked Camille what she thought of it. “Pretty,” she said. Before she had woken up properly, Camille’s sight was so poor that she couldn’t really distinguish a landscape painting from a strip cartoon. If she’d actually seen the pencil drawing, she wouldn’t have called it pretty. She’d have said: “But that’s ghastly.” Adamsberg replied gently: “No, Camille, it’s not a pretty picture.” That was the moment, the word, the correction that made up his mind in a flash.
Feeling comfortably weary and agreeably woolly after his not very restful night, Adamsberg dialled the first number on his list.
He got to the end of his list by five, and he’d only once been out for a walk, at lunchtime. That was when Camille got him on his mobile, when he was munching a sandwich on a park bench.
It wasn’t her style to rehearse the events of the night before. Camille used words with care and discretion, relying on her body to express feelings. It was up to you to know what they were; it wasn’t easy to be sure.
Adamsberg jotted down on his pad: woman plus smart plus desire equals Camille. He broke off, and reread his note. Big words and flat words. But for all their obviousness, when applied to Camille they went into relief. He could almost see them rising like Braille from the surface of the paper. OK. Equals Camille. It was very hard for him to write the word Love. His ballpoint made an “L,” but out of sheer anxiety it stalled on the “o”. Adamsberg had long been puzzled by his own reticence until he’d managed to unravel it to its core, or so he thought. He liked loving. But he didn’t like what loving habitually brings in its train. Because love leads to other things, he thought. Staying in bed for ever or even for just a couple of days is an impossible dream. Love, hauled by a few common ideas, always leads on to four walls and no way out. It flares up out in the open like a grass fire but comes to rest under one roof, warming slippered feet at the stove. A man like Adamsberg could see from afar that the ineluctable train of other things was a ghastly trap. He shied away from its earliest symptoms, for he was as alert to its approach as an animal sensing the distant footfall of a predator. But he reckoned Camille was always a step ahead of him in flight. With her periodic leaves of absence, with her guarded emotions, and her boots always set ready in the starting blocks. But Camille played her game under better cover than he did, she did it less roughly, with more kindliness. As a result, unless you took the time to think about it for a while, you would not necessarily divine her imperious instinct for staying wild and free. And Adamsberg had to admit that he did not take enough time to think about Camille. He sometimes began to do so, but then forgot to follow through as other thoughts intervened and jostled him from one idea to another until they all fell into that kaleidoscopic pattern which presaged a moment of total mental blankness.
While hammer drills split his ears as the workmen carried on fixing the window bars, Adamsberg finished writing down the sentence in the notebook on his lap by placing a firm full stop after the L. Camille hadn’t called him to gurgle mutual congratulations but to make a serious point about the 4 that he’d shown her that morning. Adamsberg got up and made his way over yet more builders’ rubble into the building and Danglard’s office.
“Did you find that file?” he asked, so as to open a channel.
Danglard nodded and pointed to the scree
n: fingerprints were scrolling down so fast that they looked like galaxies seen from the Hubble.
Adamsberg went round to the other side of the desk so as to face Danglard.
“If you had to give a figure, how many buildings in Paris would you say had been marked with the number 4?”
“Three.”
Adamsberg raised the fingers of his hands.
“Three plus nine makes twelve. If we allow for the fact that not many people apart from neurotics and idlers would bother to report this sort of thing to the police, though I suppose there are quite a few neurotic idlers around, I would put the figure at a minimum of thirty blocks already ornamented by our action artist.”
“All the same 4s? Same shape, same colour?”
“The very identical.”
“Always on a blank door?”
“We’ll have to check that.”
“You mean you’re going to check?”
“I guess so.”
Danglard put his hands on his knees.
“I’ve seen that 4 somewhere before.”
“So has Camille.”
Danglard raised an eyebrow.
“In a book lying open on a table,” Adamsberg said. “At a friend of a friend’s place.”
“What was the book about?”
“Camille doesn’t know. She supposes it’s a history book, because the fellow who’s her friend’s friend is a cleaner by day and a medievalist by night.”
“Isn’t it normally the other way round?”
“What norm are you referring to?”
Danglard stretched out an arm towards the bottle of beer that was on his desk and raised it to his lips.
“So where did you see it, then?” asked Adamsberg.
“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago and it was not in Paris.”
“If there are previous instances of the reversed 4, then it’s not an original creation.”
