by Fred Vargas
“Getting worse, don’t you think?”
“That’s an understatement. The red cross he mentions was painted on the doors of houses where the plague had broken out, to allow illiterates to steer clear. So Pepys has just come into contact with the plague for the first time. As a matter of fact the disease had been smouldering in the poorer quarters of the city for some time already, but Pepys didn’t know because he only moved about in the wealthier parts of town.”
“So what was the noon special?” Adamsberg interrupted.
“Even worse. I’ll read it to you.”
“Slowly, please.”
On August 17 false rumours rode ahead of the affliction, Many are afeared but many kept up hope, believing the words of the illustrious physician Rainssant. But alas they hoped in vain. On September 14 plague entered the town. It first struck the Rousseau ward, where corpses falling one after the other manifested its presence among us.
“Let me just add, as you haven’t got the text in front of you, that there are lots of omissions marked by ellipses. Our fellow is obsessive, he can’t bear to cut a part of a sentence without signalling it. Furthermore ‘August 17,’ ‘September 14,’ and ‘Rousseau ward’ are printed in a different font. He must have altered the dates and place of the original, and the change of font must be a way of telling us that. At least, that’s what I think.”
“And today is September 14, isn’t it?” Adamsberg asked, since he was never very sure of the date, within a couple of days.
“Yes it is. Which means, as plainly as can be, that the nutter has just told us that plague came into Paris today, and that there is a victim. Or victims.”
“Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
“Do you think that’s what he means by ‘Rousseau ward’?”
“I’ve got a daubed block in that street.”
“What’s that about daubing?”
Adamsberg reckoned that Decambrais was already up to his neck in the case and so he told him about the other dimension of the madman’s campaign. He was interested to note that despite his learning Decambrais seemed as unaware as Danglard of the meaning of the signs of 4. So the talisman wasn’t that well known. The nutter using it must be really quite a scholar.
“Anyway,” Adamsberg said, to bring the call to a conclusion, “do go on pursuing the case without me, it may come in useful as background for Even Keel Counselling. It’ll make a nice addition to your collection of stories, and a prize item in the town crier’s annals too. But I think we can now forget about any risk of a criminal act being committed. Our nutter has gone off at a tangent, he’s gone completely symbolic, as my number two would say. Because nothing actually happened last night in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nor did anything happen in any of the other blocks that have had their front doors decorated. But the painter is still painting. We’ll let him go on until he stops.”
“All right then,” said Decambrais after a long pause. “That’s a relief. May I say how glad I have been to get to know you better. I hope you don’t resent my having wasted your time.”
“Not at all. I set much store by wasting time.”
Adamsberg hung up and decided that his Saturday shift was now over. There was nothing in the station log that couldn’t wait until Monday. Before leaving the office he checked in his memory-jogger so he could say good night to the ramrod from Granville with suitably friendly formality.
Outside, the sun had broken through the thinning clouds and Paris once again felt like a city enjoying the tail end of summer. He took off his jacket and hung it over his shoulder and sauntered towards the Seine. He reckoned that Parisians often forget that they live on a river. The Seine, with its smell of wet laundry and its flights of squawking birds, and however sluggish and soiled its waters may be, remained one of Adamsberg’s favourite city retreats.
As he wandered through side streets and alleyways, he told himself it was just as well that Danglard had stayed at home to nurse his apple hangover. He was happier to have buried the business of the 4s without any witnesses. Danglard had been right. It didn’t matter whether the door-painting lunatic was a situationist crackpot or a symbolist nutter, because he was running loose in a world of his own making, and that world was not of any relevance to the work of the police. Adamsberg had lost his gamble; he didn’t mind losing; and it was a relief, in any case. He didn’t get uppity about winning or losing against his number two, but he was glad that he could throw in the towel all on his own. On Monday he would tell Danglard he’d been wrong and that the affair of the 4s would be filed alongside the giant ladybirds of Nanteuil. Now who had told him that story? Ah, yes, the freckle-faced photographer. And what was his name? Adamsberg just couldn’t recall.
XVI
ON THE MONDAY morning Adamsberg gave Danglard the news that the affair of the painted 4s was over. Danglard kept to his notion of proper form by keeping his lips sealed, and by the merest nod of his head signalled that he had registered the end of the case.
The following day at two fifteen in the afternoon the phone rang in the office. It was the district station in the first arrondissement, reporting that a corpse had been found at number 117, Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Adamsberg put the receiver down in slow motion as if he were afraid of waking someone up in the middle of the night. But it was the middle of the day. He wasn’t trying to let anyone else sleep but to sink into oblivion without a sound. He knew he often had weird spells of withdrawal and they worried him. Spells when he would give anything to fall into a lap of nothingness, to curl up there for ever in mindless calm. But these moments when he found he’d been right without having been at all rational were not good. They plunged him into a black hole where he felt he had been burdened from birth by a poisoned gift imposed on him by a senile witch. “Since I’m not invited to this baptism,” the Wicked Fairy had croaked (this was hardly surprising, given that Adamsberg’s Pyrenean parents were as poor as church mice and had celebrated the occasion by wrapping the infant in a rug), “since I’m not invited, I give this child a special nose, for sniffing out shit in places where other people can’t see a thing.” Or something like that, anyway. In rather more stylish language, presumably, since the Wicked Fairy was supposed to be quite cultivated and not at all coarse.
Adamsberg’s weird spells never lasted very long. Firstly because he had no intention of curling up under a stone or anywhere else, given that his primary requirement was to spend half the day walking and the other half standing up; and secondly because he didn’t believe he had any gifts at all. What he had intuited from the start of the affair of the 4s was nothing if not logical, even if his logic was not of the same neat order as Danglard’s, and notwithstanding his inability to demonstrate its delicate coherence. What had seemed self-evident to Adamsberg was that the daubings had been intended from the start as a threat, a threat that could not have been clearer if its author had written on walls: This is me. Watch me, and watch out. It was no less obvious that the threat had acquired substance when Ducouëdic and Le Guern had come to tell him that a prophet of plague had started a campaign the same day as the daubings had begun. It was clear that the suspect, whoever he was, had been taking perverse pleasure in a tragedy he was in the process of setting up by himself. And no less obvious that he was not going to stop halfway, and that the chronicle of a death foretold with such rigour was likely to bring a corpse in its wake. It was all perfectly logical. So logical that it scared Ducoüedic just as much as it scared him.
Adamsberg was not particularly disturbed by the madman’s monstrous and complex staging of the murder nor by his high-flown language. Its very strangeness made it a rather classic case, an exemplary instance of the thankfully rather infrequent type of murderer who, motivated by immense hurt pride, raises himself to a height equal only to the depth of his own humiliation. What was more murky and very hard to understand was the use of the ancient bogey of the plague.
The report from the first arrondissement left no room for doubt. The
police officers who found the body had confirmed that the corpse was black all over.
“We’re off, Danglard,” the commissaire said as he went past his deputy’s door. “Get the emergency team together right now, there’s a body. Forensics are on their way.”
On these sorts of occasions Adamsberg could move fast. Danglard had to hurry to get everyone together so as to follow the chief to the scene of the crime, without a word of explanation to guide them.
Adamsberg got the lieutenant and the two brigadiers bundled into the back seat but held his deputy back from the front door of the car with a tug of his sleeve.
“Hang on, Danglard. Let’s not put the wind up these guys before we need to tell them what it’s all about.”
“Brigadier Justin, Brigadier Voisenet and Lieutenant Kernorkian, for your information, sir.”
“It’s hit the fan. The corpse is in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The building had just been daubed with backward fours.”
“Shit!”
“The victim is male, about thirty, and white.”
“Why did you say ‘white’?”
“Because his body is black. Black skin. I should say, blackened. So is his tongue.”
Danglard frowned deeply.
“So it is plague,” he said. “The Black Death.”
“Precisely. But I don’t think the man died of it.”
“What makes you think that?”
Adamsberg shrugged. “I don’t know. It seems over the top. Anyway, plague has been extinct in France for God knows how long.”
“You can infect people on purpose, though. That’s not very difficult.”
“Providing you have the bacillus. You can’t exactly buy it off the shelf.”
“Sure, but there must be plenty of it stacked away in research institutes here in Paris, places we’ve all heard of. The battle against bubonic diseases isn’t over yet. Anyone with inside knowledge and a warped mind could go into one of those high-security labs and walk out with a test tube full of Yersinia.”
“Yer what?”
“It’s the identity of the guilty party, sir. Family name Yersinia, given name pestis. Alias bacillus of the plague. Serial killer extraordinaire. Keeps a tally of its victims in powers of ten. Must be around seven by now, maybe eight. Motive: chastisement of the wicked.”
“Chastisement?” muttered Adamsberg. “Are you sure?”
“It never occurred to anyone in a thousand years to doubt that the Lord Almighty sent down the plague to punish humankind for all its sins.”
“I must say I wouldn’t like to bump into the Lord Almighty on a dark night. Are you making this all up, Danglard?”
“It’s gospel, sir. The plague is the most obvious example of a holy scourge. Just think what it could do to a man’s mind to strut around Paris with a tube of divine retribution in his pocket. It could blow it to smithereens. Paris, too.”
“Think a bit, Danglard. What if it’s really something else? What if someone just wants us to believe there’s a nutter walking around with the holy scourge in his pocket? That would be even worse. If it got out it would spread like wildfire and set off mass panic. The whole of Europe would go psychotic. It would be huge.”
Adamsberg called HQ from the car.
“This is the Brigade Criminelle, Brigadier Noël speaking,” said Noël, curtly.
“Look, Noël, get yourself over here and bring someone with you, someone who can handle himself properly, no, I mean, bring that woman, the brunette who doesn’t say much …”
“Brigadier Hélène Froissy, sir?”
“As I was saying, could you both get in a squad car and go straight to the junction of Edgar-Quinet and Rue Delambre. Keep a low profile and make sure that a Monsieur Decambrais is at home, it’s the block on the corner of Rue de la Gaîté, and wait there until the evening newscast.”
“Newscast, sir?”
“You’ll know what it is when you see it. A guy on a box, just after 6 p.m. Stay there until I send a relief team, and keep your eyes peeled. Especially for the people who are there to listen to the town crier. I’ll be in touch.”
Adamsberg and his four assistants clambered up the staircase to the fifth floor, where the district commissaire was waiting for them. On their way up they noticed that although the front doors of all the apartments had been wiped clean, they still bore clearly visible shadow-marks from the black paint.
“Commissaire Devillard,” Danglard whispered in Adamsberg’s ear just before they got to the top landing.
“Thanks.”
“I understand you’ve taken over the case?” Devillard said as he shook the detective’s hand. “I’ve just had Breuil on the line.”
“That’s right,” said Adamsberg. “I’ve been working on it since before it happened.”
“That’s fine by me,” said Devillard, who looked worn out. “I’ve got a really big video-store break-in to deal with, and thirty-odd torched cars on my patch. More than enough to keep me going for the week. So, you know who did this?”
“I don’t know anything, Devillard.”
As they were talking, Adamsberg pulled back the front door so as to look at it from the outside. Clean as a whistle. Not the faintest shadow of paint.
“René Laurion,” Devillard read out from his notebook. “Single man, aged thirty-two, garage mechanic. No criminal record. Body found by the cleaner. She comes in once a week, on Tuesday mornings.”
“Rotten luck for her.”
“Yes. She went hysterical, her daughter had to come and take her home.”
Devillard handed over his file of notes. Adamsberg nodded thanks. He went over to see the body, and the forensic team stood back to let him get a view. The victim was lying stark naked on his back, with his arms crossed on his chest. There were a dozen soot-black patches on his thighs, chest, one arm and face. His tongue was pulled out and was also blackened. Adamsberg knelt down.
“Is that fake?” he asked the pathologist.
“Don’t play games,” the medic snapped back. “I’ve not yet examined the corpse but I can tell you this guy is as dead as a dodo and has been so for some length of time. By strangulation, I’d say, because of the marks on his neck that you can see through the soot.”
“Sure,” Adamsberg said softly. “That’s not what I meant.”
He scooped up some of the black powder that had spilled on to the floor, rubbed his fingers and wiped them on his trouser leg.
“Charcoal,” he mumbled. “He’s been rubbed down with charcoal.”
“Looks like it,” said one of the forensics.
Adamsberg looked around.
“Where are his clothes?”
“Neatly folded in the bedroom. Shoes under the chair,” said Devillard.
“Any damage done? Any signs of a break-in?”
“No. Either Laurion opened the door or the murderer picked the lock very quietly. The latter seems the most likely at the moment. If we’re right, it would speed things up a lot.”
“You mean, it would have to be a specialist?”
“Exactly. You don’t learn how to pick locks properly at primary school. The murderer would have to be someone who’d done quite a lot of time and had used it to learn the trade. If so, he’s on file. Even a single smudgy print will give him away in ten seconds flat. I couldn’t wish you a better solution, commissaire.”
The three-man forensic team worked away quietly. One of them dealt with the body, one with the lock and one with the furniture in the room. Adamsberg made a careful tour of the premises, looking closely at the main room, the bathroom, the kitchen and the small, tidy bedroom. He’d put on gloves and mechanically opened doors and drawers in the wardrobe, the bedside table, the chest, desk and sideboard. As he was looking through the kitchen, the only room that showed some signs of muddle and life, his eyes alighted on an ivory envelope lying across a stack of letters and newspapers. It had been neatly slit open. He stood staring at it, patiently waiting for the image to click as per instructions to h
is memory. The image wasn’t very deep down, it wouldn’t take more than a minute or two. Adamsberg’s incapacity to log names, titles, brands, spelling, grammar rules and everything else related to writing was counterbalanced by extraordinary powers of recall for visual material. He was a genius of the inner eye: his peculiar mind registered whole frames with all their details intact, from the shadow made by clouds to the missing button on Devillard’s cuff. He could retrieve this frame too, and adjust the focus on Decambrais sitting opposite him in the station office and extracting his stack of “specials” from an oversize, thick ivory envelope with pearl tissue lining paper. That was also what he could see in front of him on the stack of newspapers. He signalled to the photographer to take a few shots while he scrabbled through his memory-jogger to look for the name.
“Thanks, Barteneau,” he managed, just in time.
He picked up the envelope and looked inside. Empty. He went through the pile of mail pending and checked all the envelopes: all of them had been opened raggedly with a finger, and they all still had their contents inside. In the waste bin, among rubbish that was at least three days old, Adamsberg found two ripped envelopes and several crumpled sheets of paper, but none of them were the right size to have come from the thick ivory envelope. He got up and rinsed his gloves under the kitchen tap. Why had the dead man kept the empty envelope? Why hadn’t he opened it quickly with his finger, the way he opened all the rest of his mail?
He went back into the main room where forensics were cleaning up.
“All right if we leave now?” asked the pathologist, unsure whether his question should be answered by Devillard or by Adamsberg.
“Off you go,” said Devillard.
Adamsberg slid the ivory envelope into a plastic sheath and gave it to one of the men in the forensic team.
“This needs to go to the lab with the rest of the stuff,” he said. “Only it’s very special. Mark it ‘urgent’.”
He stayed on for another hour, until they came to fetch the body bag. Two of his men remained on site thereafter, to conduct interviews with all the residents.
