by Fred Vargas
“At three.”
Adamsberg went into the Viking and spied Decambrais at his usual table right at the back, with the town crier and five others in attendance. The commissaire principal’s entrance caused the general noise of conversation to falter and slow, like a rehearsal stopped by the conductor. That meant everyone at the table knew he was from the police. Decambrais decided to take the bull by the horns:
“Commissaire Principal Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, allow me the pleasure of introducing to you the singer, Lizbeth Galston, to Damascus Viguier, proprietor of Rolaride, and to his sister Marie-Belle, to Castillon, recently retired from the blacksmithing trade, and to our muse and madonna, Madame Eva. I believe you are already acquainted with Captain Le Guern. Please join us for a glass of calva.”
Adamsberg waved off the kind offer and said, “Can I have a word, Decambrais?”
Lizbeth tugged cheekily at Adamsberg’s cuff. He was well acquainted with that relaxed and easy familiarity, with that way of saying, we’ve been through many a night down the station together. Only a prostitute who’d been hardened by countless police raids and identity checks could be so unintimidated.
“Say, officer, are you in disguise tonight? Is that costume meant to be your cover?”
“No, it’s what I usually wear.”
“Pull the other one! Don’t tell me flics are that laid back.”
“Appearances can be deceiving, Lizbeth,” Decambrais put in.
“Not always, they aren’t,” Lizbeth replied. “But this guy really is laid back. He doesn’t give a tinker’s fart for what other people think of him. Am I right, officer?”
“Which other people?”
“Women, for instance,” Damascus suggested with a grin. “You’ve got to want to make a stunning impression on women, haven’t you?”
“You’re really witless, Damascus,” Lizbeth said as she turned towards him, making him blush to the roots of his hair. “Women don’t give a damn about being stunned.”
“Yeah?” Damascus frowned. “So what do they give a damn about?”
“Nothing,” Lizbeth declared as she brought the flat of her black hand down on to the table. “They don’t need to give a damn about anything any more. Ain’t that right, Eva? We don’t give a damn about love, we don’t give a damn about affection, and we don’t give much more for a crate of green beans. You got that, then? Think about it.”
Eva said nothing and Damascus sullenly twirled his glass in his hand.
“You’re not being fair,” Marie-Belle piped up in a quavering voice. “Everybody gives a damn about love, by definition. What else is there?”
“Green beans, like I just told you.”
“You’re talking nonsense, Lizbeth,” said Marie-Belle with her arms folded on her chest. She was near to tears. “The fact that you’ve had lots of experience doesn’t entitle you to put other people off.”
“Try it out, sweetie,” Lizbeth replied. “I’m not stopping you.” Then she burst out laughing, gave Damascus a loud kiss on his forehead and ruffled Marie-Belle’s hair.
“Cheer up, sweetie,” she said. “You shouldn’t believe everything that Big Lizzy says. Big Liz has gone a bit sour. Big Liz gets on everyone’s nerves with all her talk of years in the trenches. Of course you should stand up for yourself. That’s right and good. But if you do try it out, go easy, sweetie. In my professional opinion, a small dose is all you can take.”
Adamsberg took Decambrais to the side.
“I’m sorry, commissaire, but I have to listen in to the chatter. It’s my job to tell them how to keep an even keel, you see, so I have to keep up with the gossip.”
“He’s in love, isn’t he?” Adamsberg asked with the less than passionate interest of someone who has taken only a small stake in a lottery.
“You mean Damascus?”
“Yes. In love with the singer?”
“Bull’s eye. So what did you want to say, commissaire?”
Adamsberg’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“He’s done it, Decambrais. A corpse in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, black all over. Found this morning.”
“Black?”
“Strangled, stripped naked and blackened with charcoal.”
Decambrais’s face tautened.
“I knew he would,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Was the door unmarked?”
“Yes.”
“Have you put a guard on the other doors?”
“All twenty-eight of them.”
“Sorry. I’m sure you know how to do your job.”
“I have to have those ‘specials’, Decambrais, everything you’ve got. With their envelopes, if you’ve kept them.”
“Follow me.”
Decambrais led Adamsberg across the square and into his cubbyhole, crammed full of books and papers. He shifted a pile so Adamsberg could sit down.
“There you are,” he said as he handed Adamsberg a swatch of sheets and envelopes. “Useless for prints, as I’m sure you realise. Le Guern’s handled them over and over, and so have I. Anyway, you’ve got all ten of mine on file.”
“I’ll need Le Guern’s too.”
“They’re on file too. Le Guern was done for GBH at Le Guilvenec fourteen years ago, that’s all I can tell you. Aren’t we being helpful? Doing your legwork for you. No sooner do you ask than we pop up on your computer.”
“Hang on, Decambrais. Everybody in this corner of the square has been inside.”
“Some places are like that, where the wind listeth. I’ll read you Sunday’s special, there was only one that day:
In the evening home to supper, and there to my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City … To the office to finish my letters, and then home to bed – being troubled at the sickness … and how to put my things and estate in order, in case it should please God to call me away – which God dispose of to his own glory.
“Sounds like another entry from the diary of that Englishman,” Adamsberg suggested.
“Correct.”
“Keeps?”
“Pepys, sir. Spelled P-E-P-Y-S.”
“And yesterday?”
“No specials yesterday.”
“Hmm,” said Adamsberg. “He’s slowing down.”
“I don’t think he is. Here’s the one from this morning.”
The scourge is ever ready and at the command of God who brings it down and raises it away, as it pleaseth the Lord.
“That rather suggests that he’s not letting his guard down at all. Did you notice that ‘ever ready’ and ‘as it pleaseth the Lord’? He’s blowing his trumpet. He’s taunting us.”
“He’s into being the great Almighty.”
“Which means he’s got an emotional age of three, roughly.”
“But you can’t use that to get at him. He’s no fool. He knows that the entirety of the Paris police is itching to catch him, so he’ll stop giving hints about locations from now on. He needs room to move around in. He gave the Rousseau address away so as to be sure we’d make the connection between the murder and the prophecy of plague, between the 4s and the ‘specials’. But I reckon he’ll get less precise from now on. Keep feeding me, Decambrais, send me each special as it comes in.”
Adamsberg went home with the “specials” collection under his arm.
XVIII
NEXT MORNING THE computer flashed up a name.
“Got him!” shouted Danglard as he waved an arm at a passing lieutenant.
A gaggle of detectives gathered round behind Danglard and trained their eyes on the screen. Adamsberg’s deputy had spent the morning combing the data base for a “CLT,” while others had been collating all the information they could find about the other twenty-eight flats and attempting to establish some connection between them, so far without result. Forensics had just sent in their preliminary report, which confirmed that the lock of Laurion’s flat had been picked by an expert lock-picker. There were no prints in the flat apart from those of the vi
ctim and the cleaner. The charcoal that had been used to smudge the corpse had been made from apple-wood. It could not have been obtained commercially, since ready-to-use charcoal available in stores was always made from a mix of different woods. On the other hand, the ivory envelope could have been bought at any decent stationer’s for three francs twenty. It had been opened with something like a paperknife. It was empty save for paper dust and one small dead insect. “Shouldn’t we get an entomologist to look at it?” someone asked. Adamsberg frowned, then gave his OK.
“Christian Laurent Taveniot,” Danglard announced as he leaned forward to read from the screen. “Age 34, born at Villeneuve-les-Ormes. Sent down twelve years ago for GBH, did his time at Périgueux prison. Sentenced to eighteen months, with two months on top for attacking a warder.”
Danglard scrolled down, and all his assistants craned their necks to see CLT’s mugshot. Low forehead, elongated features, a thick nose, close-set eyes. Danglard read out the rest of the file.
“Unemployed for twelve months after release, then got a job as a nightwatchman at a car-breaker’s yard. Lives at Levallois. Married, two kids.”
Danglard looked up enquiringly at Adamsberg.
“Education?” the chief said, unconvinced.
Danglard hit the keys again.
“Put on to the practical skills track at the age of thirteen. Failed the prelim for qualifying as a roofing technician. Dropped out of education, then earned a living from betting on football and from cannibalising broken-down motorbikes, which he then resold under the counter. Until he got into this fight, where he nearly killed one of his customers by hurling a motorbike straight at him, point blank so to speak. Then clink.”
“Relatives?”
“Mother, works at a packaging plant in Périgueux.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“One elder brother, also a nightwatchman at Levallois. That’s how he got his job.”
“Not much room there for serious learning. I can’t see where your Christian Laurent Taveniot found the time and the means to learn Latin.”
“Teach Yourself Books?”
“I really don’t see a guy who lets off steam by throwing motorbikes around getting excited by medieval languages. He would have to have changed his style a great deal over the last ten years.”
“And so?” said Danglard, audibly disappointed.
“Two lieutenants had better go see. But I’m not buying it.”
Danglard put his computer on sleep and followed Adamsberg to his office.
“I’ve got a problem,” he declared.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got fleas.”
Adamsberg was taken aback. Never before had his primly unforthcoming number two confided in him on matters of personal hygiene.
“Use one can of fogger for every ten square metres in the flat. Leave it alone for two hours and air the place completely when you get back. Works like magic.”
Danglard shook his head dismally.
“I caught them at Laurion’s place.”
“Who’s Laurion, then?” Adamsberg asked with a smile. “One of your suppliers?”
“Damn you, Adamsberg, Laurion’s the corpse we looked at yesterday!”
“I’m sorry. The name had clean gone out of my mind.”
“Well, keep it there from now on, all right? I caught fleas from Laurion’s place. They began to itch when I got back on Tuesday evening.”
“So bloody what? OK, the man wasn’t as neat and tidy as he looked. Or perhaps he caught them at work. What’s the fuss?”
“Good grief!” Danglard exclaimed in exasperation. “You told the whole damn squad in your own words less than twenty-four hours ago what the fuss was about! Plague is transmitted by flea bites, damn it!”
“Ah,” said Adamsberg. He looked straight at his number two. “I’m with you now.”
“You took your time.”
“I didn’t get much sleep. Are you sure it’s fleas?”
“I don’t need a doctor to tell me the difference between a mosquito and a flea. I’ve got bites in my groin and my armpits, and they’ve swollen up to the size of a thumbnail. I only looked at them this morning and I’ve not had time to check the kids.”
At last Adamsberg grasped that Danglard was really very worried and not far short of panic.
“But what’s scaring you? What’s going on?”
“Laurion died of the plague and I’ve picked up his fleas. I’ve got twenty-four hours to get treatment or else I’m done for. Same for the kids.”
“Heavens above, Danglard, have you been taken in by the nutter as well? Have you forgotten that Laurion died from a show of the plague?”
Adamsberg went over to shut his door and pulled up a chair to sit next to his deputy.
“I know, I know. CLT is conducting a symbolic campaign, OK. But the fleas in Laurion’s flat are completely real. They can’t be there just by accident. In the madman’s mind, they are plague fleas. And how on earth can I be sure that they are not, in actual fact, genuinely infected fleas?”
“But if they were plague-bearing fleas, why would CLT have gone to the trouble of strangling Laurion?”
“Because he wants to be the agent or angel of death himself. I’m not a coward, sir. But getting bitten by fleas released by a man with an obsession about plague is not my idea of fun.”
“Who else was there yesterday?”
“Justin, Voisenet, Kernorkian. You. The pathologist. Devillard, plus his men from the first arrondissement.
“Have you still got them?”
“What?”
“Your fleas, damn it!”
“Sure I have. Unless they’ve gone walkies around the station.”
Adamsberg picked up the phone and punched out the path lab number.
“Adamsberg here …Do you remember the insect you found inside the empty envelope? … Yes, that’s right. Could you please get on to the entomologist, tell him it’s an emergency, red alert … Well, so bloody what! Tell him to leave his dung-flies till later …Look, chum, this is red alert. We may have a case of the plague, damn it! …That’s right! So move your butt, and tell him I’m sending him more of the same, only these ones are still alive. He’d better be careful. And tell him to keep his trap shut tight.”
He turned to Danglard as he put the phone down.
“You’d better go straight upstairs, have a shower and put everything you’re wearing into a plastic bag. We’ll send them off to the lab.”
“And what am I supposed to do? Sit at my computer in my birthday suit?”
“I’ll go out and get you some things,” Adamsberg said as he stood up. “You don’t want to be spreading creepy-crawlies around town.”
Danglard was far too upset about his flea bites to worry very much about what clothes his boss would get him. But a vague apprehension of disaster did cross his mind.
“Hurry up. I’ll get the pest control people to go over your flat, and they’d better do this place as well. And I’ll tell Devillard.”
Before going out on his clothes-shopping trip, Adamsberg made a call to the medievalist-cleaner fellow. Marc Vandoosler, that was his name. By fortunate coincidence Vandoosler was having a late lunch at home.
“Do you remember the business about the 4s that I asked you about?”
“Sure,” Vandoosler answered. “I heard your announcement on the news last night as well. And I saw this morning’s papers. I understand you’ve found a corpse. One reporter says he saw the body being brought down and that one arm was sticking out from under the sheet. The arm had black patches.”
“Bugger,” said Adamsberg.
“Tell me, commissaire, was the corpse black?”
“What do you know about the plague, young man? Or do you just do numbers?”
“I’m a medievalist, commissaire. So yes, I know a thing or two about the plague.”
“Are there lots of people who know more than a thing or two?”
“You mean pla
gue specialists? Well, you could safely assume that there are five real specialists in the country today. Excluding biologists, that is. I have two friends in the south of France, they’re more into the medical aspects, and a colleague in Bordeaux who deals mainly with transmitting insects, and then there’s a more or less demographic historian at Clermont-Ferrand.”
“What about you? What’s your position in the field?”
“Centre-forward for Job-seekers United, sir.”
Five, Adamsberg thought. That’s not a lot for a population of sixty million. And so far Vandoosler was the only person he’d come up with who knew the meaning of the backward 4. He was a historian, a man of letters and a plague expert, and he could undoubtedly read Latin. It would definitely be worth checking up on him.
“Tell me, Vandoosler, how long would you say the disease lasts? Give me a ballpark figure.”
“On average, three to five days’ incubation, but it was sometimes as little as one to two days. Symptoms last five to seven days. More or less.”
“Treatable?”
“Only if you get it early, as soon as symptoms appear.”
“I think I’m going to need you. Would you mind if I came round?”
“Where do you mean?” asked Vandoosler suspiciously.
“Your place.”
There was a pause.
“OK,” said Vandoosler.
The man wasn’t keen. But lots of people weren’t keen to have a flic call round. A reluctance that was virtually universal, in fact. So the pause didn’t necessarily mean that Vandoosler was CLT.
“In two hours’ time,” Adamsberg proposed.
He hung up and set off for the big department store at Place d’Italie. He reckoned Danglard must be European size 48 or 50, since he was six inches taller and maybe sixty pounds heavier than Adamsberg was. He needed something that would go round his waist. Adamsberg harvested a pair of socks, a pair of jeans, and a big black T-shirt in a trice (he’d heard it said that whites and stripes make you look fatter, so black presumably did the opposite). No point getting a jacket, it was a mild day and beer kept Danglard warm in any case.
The naked commissaire was waiting in the shower room with a towel round his waist. Adamsberg gave him his new clothes.
