by Fred Vargas
XVII
AT FIVE IN the afternoon Adamsberg stood in front of twenty-three members of the murder squad – the full team save for Noël and Froissy, who were keeping watch at Place Edgar-Quinet, and the two officers on duty at Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They were all sitting on chairs set out in rows amid the unending decorators’ mess.
The commissaire principal had thumbtacked a large map of central Paris on to the recently decorated wall. He said nothing while he inserted red-capped drawing pins at spots listed in his notepad, at the addresses of the fourteen buildings that had had their front doors daubed with the talisman. A green pin went in at the crime scene.
“On August 17,” Adamsberg told his audience, “some alien turned up without warning. He intended to use his powers to do people in. Let’s call him CLT. CLT isn’t the sort of alien who cuts people’s throats just like that. No. He takes a whole month to set up his scenario, and he’d probably spent much longer than that working it out in advance. His plan is a two-pronged affair. Prong A involves a specific set of residential blocks in central Paris. He goes round at night painting a number in black on the front doors of the flats.”
He switched on the projector and showed a slide of the reverse 4 on the blank wall of the incident room .
“It’s a very particular version of the number 4. It’s inverted left-for-right but not top-for-bottom, the downstroke is splayed at the foot and there are two little notches on the outer extension of the cross. All observed instances have these specific features. And beneath the figure, you can see a kind of signature, in three upper-case letters: CLT. Unlike the digit, the letters are graphically plain, without flourishes. Our alien puts this sign on every door in the block bar one. The location of the undaubed door seems to be random. The choice of the blocks to be daubed seems equally haphazard. They are located in eleven different arrondissements, some are in main thoroughfares, others in side streets. The street numbers are varied, some are odd, some are even. There’s no consistency about the type of building either. Some of them are old and others new, some of them are upmarket and others are quite run-down. It looks like CLT wanted his sample to be as varied as possible. That might mean he wanted to say that he can get at anyone, that there’s no way of avoiding him.”
“What about the residents?”
“I’ll come on to that later,” Adamsberg said. “The meaning of the backward 4 has been established beyond doubt. It is a sign that served long ago as a talisman to ward off the plague.”
“What plague?” someone asked.
Adamsberg immediately recognised the brigadier’s bushy eyebrows.
“The plague, Brigadier Favre. It doesn’t come in fifty-seven varieties. Danglard, could you please say a few words about it.”
“Plague came to Europe in 1347,” Danglard began. “In the next five years it wrought havoc right across the Continent, from Naples to Moscow, and killed around thirty million people. This dreadful chapter of human history is known as the Black Death. The name is important to remember in the case we are dealing with. Originating in –”
“I said a few words, Danglard.”
“It reappeared periodically thereafter, once every ten years or so, and cut down whole regions at a time. It didn’t die out completely until the eighteenth century. – I’ve not said anything about the early Middle Ages, or plague today, or the Far East, sir.”
“That’s fine, you’ve said quite enough to give us a handle on what we’re dealing with. That’s to say, the Black Death. It leaves you dead in five to ten days.”
This set the whole room abuzz with questions and comments. Adamsberg stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head hanging down until the hubbub died away.
Someone raised a fearful voice to ask: “Did the man in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau die of plague?”
“I’ll come to that. Prong B. Also on August 17, CLT makes his first public announcement. He picks on the square at the corner of Edgar-Quinet and Rue Delambre, where some fellow has resurrected the ancient trade of town crier – rather successfully, as it happens.”
A hand went up on the right-hand side of the room.
“What’s that, sir?”
“The fellow in question leaves a wooden box on a tree round the clock, and people drop in messages they want to have read out aloud, for a modest consideration, I suppose. The town crier empties out the box three times a day and stands there reading out the messages.”
“How stupid can you get,” someone opined.
“Maybe it’s stupid, but it works,” Adamsberg replied. “Selling words is no more stupid than selling flowers.”
“Or being a flic,” said someone on the left.
Adamsberg caught the eye of the last speaker, a short man with a beaming smile who’d already lost most of his grey hair.
“Or being a policeman,” Adamsberg echoed. “The messages CLT put in that box are incomprehensible to the general public, or to mortals in general. They’re short quotations from antiquarian books, some in French and others in Latin, and they turn up in fancy big ivory envelopes. The copy comes from a printer, the computer kind. A fellow who knows his way around old books and who lives on the square found the messages sufficiently disturbing to do some research on them.”
“Name? Profession?” asked a brigadier with a pencil and notepad on his lap.
Adamsberg hesitated before answering.
“Decambrais. Retired, now runs Even Keel Counselling.”
“Are they all crazy in that area?” asked another officer.
“Quite possibly,” Adamsberg replied. “But it all depends on your angle of vision. Seen from afar, everything always looks neat and tidy. But when you get closer, and when you take the time to look at the details, you realise that everyone is more or less crazy – down in that square, or another one, or wherever. Even in this squad.”
“I don’t agree, sir,” said Favre, raising his voice in protest. “You have to have really lost it to spend your time spouting rubbish in a public place. Should get himself properly laid, that guy, that would clear his head a bit. It only costs three hundred francs a go in Rue de la Gaîté, no sweat.”
Sniggers rippled round the room. Adamsberg looked hard at each of his team in turn, and they fell silent one by one. His eyes came to rest on Brigadier Favre.
“Like I was saying, Favre, there are nutcases in this squad too.”
“Now hang on, sir!” Favre began as he shot from his seat, blushing from the neck up.
“Just keep your trap shut,” said Adamsberg sharply.
Favre seemed to have been hit by a heavy object. He sat down again, in a lump. Adamsberg crossed his arms and waited several seconds before saying anything.
“I’ve already had occasion to ask you to think, brigadier,” he said in a more collected voice. “I must ask you for the second time. You have a brain somewhere in your anatomy, so please try to locate it. If you are unable to find it and use it properly, you will be requested to go perform your stunts out of my sight, and out of this squad.”
Upon which Adamsberg dropped the Favre issue and turned back to the map of Paris.
“Decambrais succeeded in decoding the meaning of the messages CLT was having read out. They all come from old plague books, or else from a diary that covers a period of plague. For the first month CLT dealt only with signs that portend an outbreak of plague. Then he speeded up and announced that the plague had entered the city last Saturday, in what he called ‘Rousseau ward’. Three days later, that’s to say, today, the first corpse turns up in a flat in a block that had been daubed with the 4s. The murder victim is a garage mechanic and a bachelor with no police record. His body was found naked and covered in black blotches.”
“The Black Death!” someone whispered. It was the same officer who had asked a worried question about the cause of death ten minutes previously. Adamsberg identified the speaker, a shy, baby-faced man with large green eyes. The woman sitting next to him stood up, looking grim and pugnacio
us.
“Commissaire, sir,” she said, “plague is a highly contagious disease. We cannot assume that the victim did not die of it. Yet you took four officers to the scene without waiting for the path lab to report.”
Adamsberg cupped his chin in his hand. This emergency briefing was turning into his inaugural, with crossfire and intentional needling.
“Madam officer,” he said, “plague is not transmitted by contact. It is a disease of rodents that humans only catch when they are bitten by infected fleas.”
Adamsberg’s newborn medical expertise came straight from the encyclopaedia, where he’d just looked it all up.
“When I took four officers with me to the scene,” he continued, “I already knew for sure that the victim had not died of plague.”
“And how did you know that?” the woman asked.
Danglard came to Adamsberg’s rescue.
“The announcement that the plague had entered the city came in the town crier’s Saturday newscast. Laurion died in the night of Monday to Tuesday, three days later. However, the plague bacillus, once it has entered the system, takes a minimum of five days to kill its host, save in very exceptional cases. There was thus no possibility that we were dealing with a genuine case of plague.”
“Why not? The madman could have injected the germ into his victim earlier on.”
“No. CLT is a maniac. And maniacs do not cheat. If he says Saturday, then Saturday it is.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” the woman officer muttered as she sat down, not wholly reassured.
“The mechanic was strangled,” Adamsberg resumed. “His body was then blackened with charcoal. That was certainly done to resemble the symptoms of plague as well as its old nickname. That means CLT does not have the bacillus. He’s not a screwy lab technician with a germ jar in his duffel bag. He’s acting symbolically. But it’s clear he believes in his mystification and believes in it completely. The front door of the dead man was not daubed with a 4. May I remind you that those 4s are not threatening signs, they’re protective talismans. Therefore the only people at risk are those living in flats whose doors have been left unpainted. CLT plans who he is going to kill, then protects all the other people living in the block by painting on their doors. Taking such outlandish pains to ensure that bystanders are not harmed proves that CLT really does believe that he is spreading a contagious disease. He is therefore not a random killer. He deals with one person and worries about protecting others who, in his view, do not deserve to suffer the scourge.”
“Do you mean to say he thinks he’s spreading the plague while he’s throttling the guy?” the man on the right-hand side asked. “If he can believe that, then we’ve got a real schizophrenic on our hands.”
“Not necessarily,” Adamsberg answered. “CLT is the lord of an imaginary world which to him seems quite coherent. That’s not so unusual. There are heaps of people who think they can see the future in playing cards or tea leaves. Lots of them, in the street outside, or in this room. What’s the difference? Lots of other people hang an effigy of the Virgin Mary over their beds and believe that a manufactured doll costing sixty-nine francs can protect them from evil, for real. They talk to the doll, they tell it stories. What’s the difference? The borderline, brigadier, between what you think is real and what is real is entirely subjective. It depends on your point of view, on who you are, on where you come from.”
The grey-haired baldy broke in at this point.
“But are any other people at risk? Should we assume that everyone whose front door was not daubed could end up like Laurion?”
“I fear so. We’ll have extra forces stationed tonight outside every one of the fourteen unpainted doors. But we don’t have a list of all the blocks that CLT visited, only of the blocks where someone has made an official complaint. There’s probably a score or more of them in Paris, of which we know nothing.”
“Why not put out an appeal?” a woman officer suggested. “So as to warn people.”
“That’s a tough one. If we broadcast a public warning we could set off mass panic.”
“We only need to mention the 4s,” the balding grey-beard chipped in. “No need to let out anything else.”
“But the rest would leak one way or another,” Adamsberg responded. “And if it doesn’t leak, CLT will be only too happy to turn on the tap. He’s been stoking up psychosis from the start and this would be his golden opportunity. The town crier was a godsend, from his point of view, because if he’d sent his messages to the press, well, they’d have been thrown into the waste bin without a second thought. So he started at the bottom. But if we put him on TV tonight, he’ll be getting the ride he wanted all along. Anyway, it’s only a matter of days. He’ll unleash a huge scare in any case fairly soon. If he goes on, if there’s a second murder, if he spreads his black death a bit further, there’ll be no way of avoiding a nationwide nightmare.”
“So what are you going to do about it, commissaire?” said a sullen Favre.
“Save lives. We’re going to put out a request to the inhabitants of any block of flats where 4s have appeared to make themselves known to the local commissariat without delay.”
A warm murmur from around the whole room expressed unanimous agreement with Adamsberg’s plan. He felt very weary and very much a flic that evening, and the two feelings were closely connected. He would have liked to say just “Get down to work and sort it out for yourselves”. But instead he had had to lay out the facts, order the issues, focus the investigation and delegate tasks. In firm order, and with some authority. An image of his earlier self flashed before him – a naked child running free on a sunny mountainside path – and he wondered what the hell he was doing in that room, playing schoolmaster to twenty-three grown-ups who followed every move he made like clock-watchers.
It came back to him. He was there because someone was strangling other people, and he was supposed to find out who it was. It was his job to stop people from doing other people in. He pulled himself together.
“Our primary objectives are, one, to protect potential victims. Two, to profile potential victims and to find out whatever way we can if there are any common factors – family, age, sex, class, occupation, anything. And three, close surveillance of Place Edgar-Quinet. Four, obviously, is to catch the killer.”
He paced quite slowly to the back of the room and then to the front twice over before saying anything more.
“What do we know about him? Actually it could be a her, we can’t rule that out. But I imagine it’s a male. All this bookish learning saying ‘look how clever I am’ feels to me like macho swagger and male pride. If we get confirmation that death was caused by strangulation then we can pretty much bank on it being a male. An educated man; extremely well-educated, I should say; a man of letters. Not poor, since he’s got a PC and printer. Maybe he has expensive tastes – he uses fancy envelopes that don’t come cheap. He’s a very good draughtsman, he’s a neat worker and very meticulous. Definitely an obsessive cast of mind. So he’s also fearful and superstitious. Last of all, he may actually have done time. If forensics confirm that the lock was picked, we’ll have to go down that track. Look for all former convicts with initials CLT. But is it a signature? Well, to sum it all up, we know next to nothing.”
“And what about the plague? Why the plague?”
“When we can answer that question, we’ll have our man.”
Chairs scraped the floor as everyone got up and stretched.
“Danglard, could you work out who does what? I’m going for a walk. Back in twenty minutes.”
“Should I draft the public announcement?”
“Please, yes. You’ll do it so much better than I would.”
All the evening news programmes carried the mildly worded public announcement penned by Adrien Danglard. Residents of houses or buildings that had been marked with a figure of 4 were requested to get in touch with the police without delay. The pretext given was “to help the police with their inquiries into allegatio
ns of organised crime”.
Within half an hour of the all-channel broadcast, the Brigade switchboard was well-nigh jammed. One third of Adamsberg’s team was there to field the calls. Danglard and Kernorkian had brought in supplies of snacks and drinks to last through the night, and the electricians’ workbench had been converted into a temporary buffet bar. By nine thirty, fourteen additional blocks of flats with marked doors had been logged and located on the wall map with red pins. Now there were twenty-nine. A list of the addresses in chronological order of the presumed date of door-daubing was quickly drawn up, as was a list of the occupants living behind the twenty-eight doors which had been left unmarked. They made a mixed bag: the flats housed large families as well as bachelors, women as well as men, young folk, old folk and middle-aged folk. No age group, gender, category or occupation was unrepresented. It was past eleven when Danglard reported to his chief that there were two members of the force standing guard in front of every one of the unmarked doors.
Adamsberg told the officers doing overtime that they were free to go home, waited for the night roster to settle in, and then took a squad car to see what was up at Place Edgar-Quinet. The team that had relieved Noël and Froissy consisted of the greying baldilocks and the thickset woman who had almost got into a fight with him at the five o’clock briefing. They looked like they were taking it easy, chatting on a bench in the square, but they always kept one pair of eyes on the urn, hanging from a tree less than fifteen yards away. Adamsberg went over to say hallo.
“The main thing to watch for is the shape of the envelope,” he said. “With that street lamp and a bit of luck you might just make it out.”
“We don’t arrest anybody?”
“No, your job is surveillance. If you see someone who seems to fit, tail him, but don’t get noticed. We’ve put two photographers in the stairwell of that building, they’ve a full-frontal view of the urn and they’ll get a shot of anybody who gets close to it.”
“When do we go off?” asked the woman with a yawn.
