by Fred Vargas
“Yeah,” someone said. “And there’s no way you can put it back in the bottle. Same as for maize and beef.”
“Three down already! Do you realise what that means? And how are they going to stop it from spreading? I bet they haven’t got a bloody clue.”
“You can say that again,” said a young fellow leaning on the end of the bar.
“Lordy, Lordy!” Lizbeth’s voice rang out above the hubbub. “The geezers got it in the neck! They weren’t ill, they were throttled to death!”
“But!” said a man wagging his finger like a schoolmaster. “They died because their doors weren’t protected by a 4! It was because they didn’t have the talisman! Isn’t that what they told us on the news? Or was I dreaming? Do you get it? Or don’t you?”
“OK, but if that’s how it is, then it’s not a germ that got out of a lab. It must be a guy who’s spreading it on purpose.”
“No, you haven’t got it,” the pedagogue said. “It’s an acccidental release from a top secret biowarfare establishment. And there’s a guy who knows about it going round trying to save people. He’s doing his best.”
“Look, that doesn’t add up. How come he leaves some people off his list? How come he’s only done a couple of dozen blocks in the whole of Paris?”
“Give us a break! The guy’s not God Almighty! He’s only got one pair of hands. Go paint some 4s yourself if you’re shitting in your pants.”
“Lordy, Lordy!” Lizbeth hollered at the top of her voice.
“Lizbeth, please, what’s the matter?” Damascus asked quietly, without anyone noticing.
“Give up, Lizbeth,” Decambrais advised as he took the mountainous singer by the arm. “They’ve all gone mad. Maybe the night will bring wiser counsel. Let’s get on with dinner. Be so good as to round up the residents.”
Lizbeth calmed down and gathered in her flock while Decambrais went to the back of the room to ring Adamsberg on his mobile.
“Commissaire, it’s hit the fan down here. They’re all going mad.”
“Same here. I’m in a pub, and they’re off their rockers. A scare story at prime time sends the whole country psychotic.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep on saying that the three men were strangled. And keep on and on until the cows come home. What are people saying at your end?”
“Lizbeth wasn’t born yesterday, so she’s keeping her head. Le Guern’s not making too much of a fuss, as he doesn’t want to damage his business. Anyway, he’s been through worse at sea. I think Bertin’s quite alarmed. Damascus doesn’t know what’s hit him and Marie-Belle is hysterical. Everyone else is stampeding down the usual path to the cliff – they’re keeping us in the dark, they’re pulling the wool, and haven’t you noticed what funny weather we’ve been having. When the air varieth from his natural temperature, when the wyndes are gross and hot; then are the Planets in disorder, and hang their poison in the sick air.”
“You’ve got your work cut out, Mr Even Keel Counselling.”
“You too, commissaire principal.”
“I can’t see what’s cut out and what’s not right now.”
“What’s your next step?
“Sleep, Decambrais. I’m going to bed to sleep.”
XXII
BY 8 A.M. on friday Adamsberg had twelve extra officers helping to man the fifteen additional phone lines he’d had put it to cope with the flood of calls that local stations were transferring night and day. Thousands of Parisians were demanding to know whether or not the police had told the whole truth about the black deaths, whether they should take any special precautions, and if so, how. The commissioner of police had given strict orders to all local stations to log all such calls and to deal with them individually. Unconsoled hysterics could be a major factor in spreading havoc.
The morning papers were not likely to be much help in staunching the rising tide of fear. Adamsberg laid them all out on the table and glanced through. For the most part they just printed what had been said on television, plus their own ha’p’orth of commentary, with more photos. Several of them had also put the backwards 4 on the front page. Some of them hyped it up but others tried to keep a low key in their accounts of the affair. All of them covered themselves by reproducing substantial parts of Chief Superintendent Brézillon’s statement. All of them also printed the last two “specials”. Adamsberg reread them trying to imagine what it would be like to see them for the first time in the present context, that is to say, with three corpses attached:
The scourge is ever ready and at the command of God who brings it down and raises it away, as it pleaseth the Lord.
To my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City, in two parishes together. They said […] that both had been found with tokens that could not be denied or mistaken.
Those two paragraphs were quite enough to sway the gullible, and that made 18 per cent of the population, since 18 per cent had fallen for the Y2K scare. Adamsberg was surprised by the amount of attention to the case in the press, and just as surprised by the speed with which the story had flared up, even though he’d worried that it might happen that way from the moment the first body was found. An obsolete affliction buried beneath the dust of ages was hatching anew and rising up to strike again with almost as much vigour as it ever had had.
Adamsberg glanced at the wall clock since he was due to hold a press conference at nine, by order of the Super. He didn’t like orders and he didn’t like conferences but he was aware that circumstances required him to put up with both for the moment. The line he had to take was to head off panic by showing the marks of strangulation on the photographs of the victims and by demonstrating the vacuousness of the rumours going round. The police doctor who’d done the autopsy came along to back him up, and in the absence of any more killings or a particularly terrifying “special,” he reckoned he could keep things under control. He could hear the swelling crowd of journalists outside his door and the rising tone of their jabber.
At the same hour Joss was drumming out his shipping forecast to a rather larger crowd than usual and was about to come on to the “special” that had arrived in the morning post. The Super’s orders were crystal clear: carry on reading, don’t cut the only line we have to the plague-thrower. There was a slightly apprehensive silence as Joss announced ad number 20:
A direction concerning the plague or pestilence for poor or rich. Containing a description of the same with its symptoms and effects, and instructions concerning preservatives and antidotes dot dot dot. He shall know himself afflicted by said plague who hath lumps in the groin, commonly clept buboes, hath the fevers and or is afflicted by fainting, sickness of mind and other kinds of folly, and also blains that are also called tokens that may be blue or green or black and grow ever larger. He who would fain ward off such affliction should attend to placing on his door the talisman of the four-pointed cross, for it will most surely keep the pestilence from his house.
Joss had barely finished stumbling through this long description when Decambrais picked up the phone to relay it to Adamsberg.
“It’s full steam ahead from now on,” he said. “Our killer has finished setting the stage. He’s describing the disease as if it really had broken out. I would guess the text he’s quoting is early seventeenth century.”
“Repeat the last sentence, would you? Slowly, please.”
“Have you got people with you? I can hear noises.”
“Only about sixty yapping reporters, Decambrais. How about the square?”
“A bigger audience than usual. Almost a crowd. Lots of new faces.”
“Try to remember the regulars. Write me a list of people who’ve been attending for a while. Scour your memory. Make it as full as you can.”
“You don’t get the same people at all three newscasts.”
“Do your best, Decambrais. Ask the other pillars of the local establishment to help you. The barman, the sports-shop fellow, his sister, the singer, the town crier, any
body who knows anything.”
“You really think he’s here?”
“Yes, I do. That’s where he started, that’s where he’ll stay. Everyone has his own hole, Decambrais. So, read me that last bit again.”
He who would fain ward off such affliction should attend to placing on his door the talisman of the four-pointed cross, for it will most surely keep the pestilence from his house.
“He’s appealing to people to start painting 4s on their own front doors. Then we really won’t see the wood for the trees.”
“That’s right. I said early seventeenth, but I suspect that this is actually the first instance of him fabricating a passage for his own ends. It sounds genuine but I think it’s a pastiche. There’s something wrong with the language in that last part.”
“For instance?”
“That ‘four-pointed cross’. I’ve never seen that before. The writer clearly means us to understand a figure of four, he wants that to be crystal clear, but I think he’s made up the whole thing.”
“If the passage was sent to a wire service the same time it was sent to Le Guern, then we’re going to be submerged.”
“One moment, Adamsberg, I can hear the wreck coming.”
Two minutes passed before Decambrais came back on the line.
“So what happened?”
“All saved,” Decambrais answered. “What were you betting on?”
“All saved.”
“So we got something right.”
As Joss was getting off his soapbox in the square to go and have his cup of coffee with Damascus, Adamsberg was walking into the conference room at the Brigade and stepping up on to the low rostrum that Danglard had set up. The police doctor was there already, the slide cassette was loaded and the projector plugged in. He turned to face the horde of reporters and their bristling microphones.
“Your questions, please.”
The press conference took ninety minutes and went rather well. Adamsberg answered the queries point by point and kept it all in low key. He reckoned he dealt with all the doubts the press had about the three black deaths. But halfway through he caught Danglard’s eye and guessed from the tautened jaw that something was up. Squad members started trickling discreetly out of the room by the back. As soon as the conference was over Danglard followed Adamsberg into his office and shut the door behind him.
“There’s a body been found in Avenue de Suffren,” he announced. “Stuffed underneath a pick-up, alongside a heap of clothes. Only noticed when the driver pulled out at 9.15 a.m..”
“Bloody hell.” Adamsberg collapsed into his seat. “Male? Thirty-something?”
“No, female, twenty-something.”
“That’s our one lead done for. Did she live in one of these bloody daubed blocks?”
“Number fourteen on our list. Rue du Temple. It was daubed with 4s two weeks ago, but the victim’s door was untouched. Second floor right.”
“What’s the info?”
“Name, Marianne Bardou. Bachelor girl, parents live in Corrèze, weekend lover in Mantes, and another boyfriend for nights out in Paris. A salesgirl in a high-class deli in Rue du Bac. A pretty woman, kept herself fit, belonged to several gym clubs.”
“I don’t suppose she came across Laurion or Viard or Clerc on the rowing machines?”
“I would have told you that straight off.”
“Was she out last night? Did she say anything to the man on duty?”
“We don’t know yet. Voisenet and Estalère have gone to her flat. Mordent and Retancourt are at the scene and are waiting for you to get there.”
“I can’t remember who’s who, Danglard.”
“They’re squad members, sir. Men and women.”
“And the girl, was she strangled? Was she naked? And charcoaled?”
“Same as the others.”
“Any sexual aggression?”
“Apparently not.”
“Avenue de Suffren is a canny choice of locale. One of the emptiest spots in Paris at night. You could dump forty corpses there without any worry. But why do you reckon she was left under a pick-up truck?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. He must have dumped her quite early in the evening and not wanted the body discovered before dawn. Perhaps because the dead carts used to come round at dawn during the plague. Perhaps to ensure that the morning newscast would go out before the body was found. Was there a special to announce the death this morning?”
“No, there wasn’t. Today’s message told us how not to get the plague. And guess how?”
“Fours?”
“That’s right, fours. Do-it-yourself fours. Be a big boy and paint your own front door.”
“So the killer’s too busy killing, do you reckon? No time for artwork now. So he’s delegating.”
“I don’t think that’s quite it,” said Adamsberg. He got up and slipped on his jacket. “It’s so as to blind us. Imagine just 10 per cent of the population following the order and putting the talisman on the front door. We’ll never know which are genuine and which are fake. It’s an easy shape to make, and it’s been spread over all the front pages. All you have to do is copy it.”
“A handwriting expert could soon sort the real ones from the fakes.”
“No, not soon he wouldn’t. Not when you’ve got five thousand 4s painted by five thousand different hands. And that’s certainly an underestimate. What’s 18 per cent of two million?”
“Why the 18 per cent?”
“Because that’s how many anxious, gullible and superstitious people live among us. The people who are afraid of an eclipse, who panic at the end of a millennium, who are scared by prophecies and believe that Doom is Nigh. The 18 per cent who admit to these things in surveys, at all events. So how many does that make it, Danglard?”
“Three hundred and sixty thousand – in central Paris, that is.”
“So that’s roughly how many 4s we can expect to have to deal with. If it becomes a real scare we’ll be completely snowed under. If we can’t sort the real 4s from the fake we won’t be able to identify the unmarked doors either, will we? So we won’t be able to provide any security at all. The killer will have the city to himself, because there won’t be a flic standing in front of the flat he wants to get into. He’ll be able to paint away in the middle of the day when the main doors aren’t even locked. No more door-code busting! We aren’t going to arrest every one of the thousands of people who’ll be painting their doors at the same time. Danglard, do you understand what he’s doing? He’s manipulating public opinion because it suits him to do so, and because he needs to do so in order to get the flics off his back. He’s sharp, Danglard. He’s got a very smart practical mind.”
“Smart? He didn’t need to paint his bloody 4s. He didn’t need to single out his victims for us. The trap was entirely of his own making.”
“He wanted to get us to think plague.”
“But he could have done that by putting a red cross on the door after the murder.”
“True enough. But his plague is targeted, not random. He picks his victims, then does his best to protect bystanders from contagion. That’s also joined-up practical thinking.”
“Joined up inside a completely loopy mind. He could have murdered people without setting up any of this bloody antique scourge nonsense.”
“But it’s not him who wants to kill. He wants people to be killed. He wants to be the agent directing where the curse will strike, but not the curse itself. That must be a hugely meaningful difference for our killer. In his own mind, he’s not responsible.”
“Good Lord, but why does it have to be an outbreak of plague? It’s grotesque! Where’s this man coming from? The loony bin? Or has he crawled out of a grave?”
“Danglard, I’ve said this before. When we can understand where our man’s coming from, we’ll have him. But yes, of course the plague’s a grotesque idea. All the same, don’t underestimate the old bogey, the plague’s got life in it yet. You’d be surprised how many pe
ople are still bewitched. OK, so it’s an outdated old bogey all tattered and torn, but nobody thinks it looks remotely funny. The scare may be grotesque, but we have to handle it with care.”
Adamsberg got in the car. On the way to Avenue de Suffren he called the entomologist to ask him to go over to the last victim’s flat in Rue du Temple with a guinea pig. Nosopsyllus fasciatus had been found in the flats of Viard and Clerc – fourteen in the former, nine in the latter – plus some more in the clothing that the plague-monger had dumped alongside them. All healthy fleas. All released from a large ivory envelope slit open with a paperknife. Then he rang the AFP wire service. Anyone receiving an envelope of that description should contact the police immediately. And please get a picture of the envelope on to the lunchtime television news.
Adamsberg was deeply saddened by the sight of the naked woman. She was disfigured by strangulation and almost entirely black from charcoal and truck dirt; the small heap of clothes beside her looked quite pathetic. Rubbernecks were now being kept at bay behind a cordon but hundreds of passers-by had already seen the sight. Not a chance of keeping this out of the limelight. Adamsberg thrust his hands into his trouser pockets in a gesture of despair. His intuitions were deserting him. He couldn’t get a fix on the plague-monger, couldn’t see where he was going. Whereas the killer was deadly effective. He announced his moves openly, he was master of the media and, despite a massive police operation that was supposed to have him cornered, he killed where and when he pleased. There were now four victims that Adamsberg had failed to protect even though he’d been on the alert well ahead of the murders. When was it he’d first sniffed what was in the air? When Maryse, the woman with kids on the verge of a breakdown, had come back to see him a second time. He remembered precisely when he’d started worrying. But he couldn’t recall exactly when he’d begun to lose the thread, the point at which he’d got lost in a fog of detail and sank in a sea of facts.
He stayed to see Marianne Bardou bagged and loaded on to the hearse. He gave a few curt orders and lent an inattentive ear to officers reporting back from Rue du Temple. The woman hadn’t gone out for the evening, she simply didn’t go home from work. He sent two lieutenants off to see her boss, though he’d didn’t expect to get much out of that, and walked back to the Brigade. He walked for over an hour and then cut off towards Montparnasse. If only he could summon up the memory of the exact moment when he lost the thread of this case.
