by Fred Vargas
He walked down Rue de la Gaîté and sauntered into the Viking. He ordered a sandwich and took a seat at the table by the window which was always empty because you had to bend low when approaching it to avoid banging your head on the fake longboat prow sticking out of the wall. He’d not had more than two bites when Bertin stood up and gave a sudden blow to a brass plate over the bar, setting off a great thunder-roll. Adamsberg was taken aback. There was a great flutter of pigeonry in the square as all the birds flew off, whereas customers flocked into the restaurant part of the bar. Le Guern was among them, and Adamsberg caught his eye. Without a question, the town crier came and sat down opposite the commissaire.
“You’re down in the dumps, commissaire.”
“I am pretty down, Le Guern. Is it really obvious?”
“Yeah. Lost at sea?”
“Could not put it better myself.”
“That happened to me three times in all. We went round and round in the fog, just missing one disaster after another. On two occasions it was the equipment that had gone wrong. But once, it was my fault. I’d misread the sextant after a sleepless night. When you’re overtired you can easily get it wrong, you can make a really bad howler. And you don’t ever get away with that.”
Adamsberg sat up straight and Joss saw in those seaweed eyes the same flame he’d seen come alight when he first encountered Adamsberg at the Brigade.
“Say that again, Le Guern. In the same words.”
“You mean about the sextant?”
“Yes.”
“Well, OK, it was the sextant. You get it wrong, you make a howler, you don’t get away with it, ever.”
Adamsberg stayed stock still, staring hard at a fixed point on the café table, with an arm stretched out as if to silence the town crier. Joss didn’t dare open his mouth as he watched Adamsberg’s clenched fist slowly compress the remnants of a sandwich.
“I’ve got it, Le Guern. I know when I lost the thread, when I stopped being able to see the fellow.”
“What fellow?”
“The plague-monger. I stopped being able to see him, I lost my bearings. But now I know when that happened.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters as much as being able to go back to get a proper reading on your sextant and start over from where you were before you got lost.”
“In that case, commissaire, it matters.”
“I must go,” said Adamsberg as he put money down on the table.
“Watch out for the longboat!” Joss warned him. “You could brain yourself.”
“I’m not that tall. Was there a ‘special’ this morning?”
“You would have been told if there had been.”
As Adamsberg stepped out on to the street, Joss asked, “Are you off to find your bearing?”
“That’s right, Captain.”
“Do you really know how to find it?”
Adamsberg pointed a finger to his forehead, and off he went.
It was when he heard about the howler. When Marc Vandoosler had explained the howler. That’s when he lost the thread. As he walked along the street, Adamsberg tried to reconstruct the exact words Vandoosler had used. He scanned the recent images in his memory and tried turning up the sound. Vandoosler leaning on the doorpost, Vandoosler with his clunky trouser belt, Vandoosler gesticulating, Vandoosler with his slender hand and his silver rings, one two three silver rings. That’s right, they were on to the charcoal. When your bod smudged his victim’s corpse with charcoal, he was making a big mistake. A bloody great howler, if I may say so.
Adamsberg gave a great sigh of relief. He sat on the first bench he could find, wrote Marc Vandoosler’s remembered words in his notebook and munched through the rest of his sandwich. He still had no idea what course to set, but at least he now knew where he was starting from. Where his sextant had let him down. He also reckoned that from now on the mist might lift. He felt a sharp pang of gratitude for sailorman Joss Le Guern.
He wandered peacefully back to the office, though he could not keep his eyes from being accosted by headlines at every newsvendor’s kiosk on his route. This evening, or maybe tomorrow. If the plague-monger sends his vicious direction concerning the pestilence to the AFP. And when the fourth murder gets out. Could happen this evening, could happen tomorrow. That’s when the plague of gossip and rumour would run amok, and no press conference in the world would hold it back. The monger had mongered, and won hands down.
Could be tonight, could be tomorrow.
XXIII
“IS THAT YOU?”
“It’s me, Narnie. Open up,” he said insistently.
As soon as he was inside he buried himself in the old woman’s bosom, twisting gently from side to side.
“It’s working, Narnie. It’s working!”
“They’re falling like flies. Like flies!”
“They wriggle and then die, Narnie. Do you remember how in the old days the sick went crazy, tore off their clothes and ran into the river to drown themselves? Bashed their brains out on brick walls?”
“Come on in,” the old woman said as she tugged him by the hand. “Let’s not stay here in the dark.”
Narnie led the way to the lounge by the light of her torch.
“Settle down, I’ve made you some girdle cakes. Have a glass of Madeira.”
“In the old days there were so many affected they got thrown out of windows on to the street like piles of rubbish. That was sad, wasn’t it, Narnie? Parents, brothers, sisters, all thrown out with the rubbish.”
“They’re not your brothers or sisters. They’re wild animals who don’t deserve to breathe the same air as you do. Later, when it’s over, you’ll recuperate. It’s your turn now.”
Arnaud smiled. “You know they go dizzy and collapse within a few days?”
“The scourge of God will strike them down where’er they may hide. Where’er they flee they’ll not be saved. I think they’ve realised.”
“Sure they’ve twigged, and they’re scared, Narnie. Their turn now,” Arnaud added as he emptied his glass.
“Now no more of this nonsense. You’ve come for the necessary?”
“I need lots of it. I’ll be out and about from now on, Narnie. I’ll be moving around.”
“The necessary was all right, wasn’t it, my boy?”
The old woman moved between the cages in the attic amid squealing and scratching.
“Now, now, my dearies,” she mumbled, “are we going to stop making such a fuss? Doesn’t Narnie give you enough to eat?”
She picked up a small, tightly sealed bag which she handed to Arnaud.
“Here you are. Give me a surprise.”
Arnaud went down the ladder ahead of Narnie to save her from a fall, and he felt deeply moved by the bag with the dead rat in it that he held well away from his body. Narnie was a fantastic ratter, the best in the world. He would never have managed it all without her. He was in charge, of course, he thought as he twiddled the ring on his finger, and that was now plain to see. All the same, he would have wasted ten years of his life if Narnie hadn’t been around to help. He needed all the life he had, and he needed it now.
Arnaud left the tumbledown house in the black of night. In his pockets were secreted five envelopes full of wriggling Nosopsyllus fasciatus, full to the brim with the power of death. He mumbled to himself as he picked his way down the dark alley. Ingluvies. Median stylet of the oral apparatus. Proboscis, probe, insertion. Arnaud loved fleas and Narnie was the only person he could talk to about the vast universe of their anatomy. Not cat fleas, though. They were out of the question. Frivolous, ineffective insects which he held in utter contempt. As did Narnie.
XXIV
EVERYONE IN THE squad who could do overtime had been asked to stay on throughout Saturday and, save for three members with insuperable domestic problems, the team with the twelve extra officers was at full strength at the start of the weekend. Adamsberg had been at his desk since 7 a.m., sifting through the pile of papers
in his in-box. He cast a dreary eye over the latest lab reports and then got down to the morning newspapers. Actually, he tried to keep the word “in-box” out of his mind. It rhymed with cell blocks, door-locks, stocks. “In-tray” wasn’t a lot better but it had a less gloomy assonance, struck a less burdensome chord. You could stray with a tray. Imagine a surfboard or a sleigh. Whereas “in-box” felt like a ton of rocks.
He put to one side the recent forensic reports which only confirmed what was known or supposed already: Marianne Bardou had not been raped; her boss had stated she had changed in the back room for an evening in town but hadn’t said where she was going. The boss’s alibi was watertight; Marianne’s two lovers, idem. Death by strangulation had occurred around 10 p.m. Like Viard and Clerc she’d also had a whiff of tear gas. Bacillus test, negative. Zero flea bites found on the corpse, and the same for François Clerc. But nine Nosopsyllus fasciatus had been found in Bardou’s flat, bacillus negative. Type of charcoal used – apple wood. No trace of grease or oily substance found on any of the doors.
It was 7.30 a.m. and phones began ringing all over the building. Adamsberg had put his own line on divert and was relying on his mobile to keep in touch. He turned to the pile of morning papers. The front page facing him did not bode well. He had warned Brézillon after news of the fourth “black death” had gone out on television on Friday evening: if the plague-monger had sent the press his “instructions concerning preservatives and antidotes,” then the police would no longer be able to offer protection to potential victims.
“What about the envelopes?” Brézillon queried. “We’ve highlighted that aspect so far.”
“He could change stationery. Not to mention the jokers and score-settlers who’ll be slipping dozens of the things under their best friends’ doors.”
“And the fleas? Shouldn’t we ask anyone who gets bitten by a flea to report to a commissariat, for their own safety?”
“Fleas don’t always bite straight away,” Adamsberg told the Chief Superintendent. “Clerc and Bardou had no bites at all. If we do what you’re suggesting, sir, we’ll have thousands of panicky walk-ins fussing about bites that turn out to be just human fleas or cat fleas or dog fleas. That way we’d probably miss all the real targets.”
“And help set off mass psychosis too,” Brézillon added glumly.
“The media are doing their best to get that going in any case,” Adamsberg replied. “We can’t do a thing about it.”
“You do something about it all the same,” was Brézillon’s final command.
Adamsberg had hung up aware that his recent promotion to the Brigade Criminelle was in the balance, with the plague-monger tipping the scales the wrong way. He wouldn’t be especially upset if he lost this job and got transferred somewhere else. But what he would really hate would be to lose the thread of it again, just when he’d remembered when it was that it had all gone haywire.
He spread the papers out and then closed his door so as to muffle the staccato medley of the telephones that were keeping the entire team busy in the conference room.
The plague-monger’s direction concerning the plague or pestilence for poor or rich was the lead item in all the papers. Plus photos of the latest victim and background pieces on plague with scary headlines:
COULD BE PLAGUE, COULD BE KILLER
DIVINE SCOURGE IS NUMBER ONE SUSPECT
POLICE SAY MURDER, OTHERS MALADY
FOURTH SUSPICIOUS DEATH IN PARIS
And so on and so forth.
There were articles that tackled and tried to pick holes in the official statement that four cases of death by strangulation were being investigated. Most of the papers rehearsed the facts that Adamsberg had provided at the press conference, but only to question their reliability and to muddy the issue with guesswork. The press seemed altogether less cautious than on Friday. Seasoned reporters and normally unflappable commentators were clearly haunted by the blackened corpses. As if, after lying dormant for three hundred years and more, a headless horseman had galloped out of his hollow and on to the streets of Paris. Despite the fact that the blacking of the bodies was nothing more than an ignorant blunder. A bloody great howler, as Marc had said. But it could still send the city howling mad.
Adamsberg looked for the scissors and began to cut out an article that struck him as more disturbing than all the others. Before he had finished, an officer – Justin, probably – knocked and came in. He sounded out of breath.
“Sir, masses of 4s have been found in the area around Place Edgar-Quinet. It goes from Montparnasse to Avenue du Maine and it’s spreading along Boulevard Raspail. Apparently, two or three hundred separate blocks of flats affected, about a thousand doors done. Favre and Estalère are out on a recce. Estalère doesn’t want to pair with Favre any more, he says Favre gets on his tits, what do I do about it, sir?”
“Change the detail and pair up with Favre yourself.”
“He gets on my tits too, sir.”
“Brigadier …”
“Lieutenant Voisenet,” Voisenet corrected.
“Look here, we’ve not got time for Favre’s tits, your tits or anyone else’s tits!”
“I’m aware of that, sir. We’ll handle that one later.”
“Precisely.”
“Carry on with the patrols, sir?”
“Might as well try to drain the Channel with a chamber pot. And we’ve got spring tides coming. Take a look at that,” Adamsberg said as he shoved the morning papers under Voisenet’s nose. “The plague-monger’s instructions are right up front: paint your own 4s to keep the scourge at bay.”
“I’ve seen it, sir. It’s a disaster. We’ll never be able to cope. We haven’t a clue who needs protection, apart from the first twenty-nine.”
“There’s only twenty-five of them now, Voisenet. Has anyone called about envelopes?”
“Over a hundred calls, sir, to this office alone. We can’t keep up.”
Adamsberg sighed.
“Tell them to come here with their envelopes. And have every one of the things tested. There could be a genuine one among them.”
“Carry on with the patrols, sir?”
“Yes. Try to get an idea of how big this is. Do some sampling.”
“At least we didn’t have a murder overnight, sir. Our twenty-five were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for breakfast.”
“I know, Voisenet.”
Adamsberg finished cutting out the article which had struck him as particularly well-informed and firmly put. It was the last straw, or rather, all that was needed to light the whole haystack. A veritable incendiary device.
DISEASE NUMBER 9
The police authorities have assured us in the statement put out by Chief Superintendent Pierre Brézillon that four suspicious deaths that have occurred in Paris over the last seven days were murders committed by the same serial killer. The victims are alleged to have died from strangulation, and the detective in charge of the investigation, Commissaire Principal Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, has provided journalists with persuasive photographs of the alleged neck wounds. It is, however, common knowledge that an anonymous informant has claimed that these deaths were actually caused by bubonic plague and that an epidemic of this terrible scourge of yesteryear is upon us.
The official position is open to serious question. It is rarely recalled that the last outbreak of plague in Paris took place only eighty years ago, in 1920. This third bubonic pandemic began in China in 1894, ravaged the Indian subcontinent, where it killed a million people, and made its way to all the major European ports – Lisbon, London, Oporto, Hamburg and Barcelona. It reached Paris on a river barge from Le Havre which cleaned out its hold near Levallois. In Paris as elsewhere in Europe, this outbreak did not spread very far and died out within a few years. Nonetheless, 96 people were infected, most of them in the working-class districts to the north and east of the city. Nearly all the victims were indigents and rag pickers living in unsanitary hovels. Even so, the contagion spread into the city cen
tre where it killed 20 people.
The French authorities successfully covered up the outbreak. The press was not allowed to know the true nature of a quite unusual vaccination campaign carried out in vulnerable areas. The Public Health Department and the Police Authority agreed in an exchange of confidential notes that total secrecy had to be maintained, and they referred to the outbreak only under the codename of “Disease Number 9”. As the Chief Medical Officer wrote in 1920: A number of cases of disease number 9 have been reported at Saint-Ouen, Clichy, Levallois-Perret, and in the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements […] May I stress that this note is entirely confidential and that unnecessary public alarm must be avoided at all costs. This leaked document allowed L’Humanité to reveal the true story in its issue of 3 December 1920. The upper chamber spent yesterday’s session debating disease number 9. What is disease number 9? By 3.30 p.m. we had our answer. Senator Gaudin de Villaine let it drop that he was talking about bubonic plague …
We hesitate to accuse police spokesmen of falsifying information so as to hide the true state of affairs. But it has happened before, as we trust this note has demonstrated. It would not be the first time that the truth has been sacrificed to expediency by those who rule over us. The authorities have long known how to be economical with the facts.
This devastating clipping trailed from Adamsberg’s fingers as he put his arm down and plunged into thought. Plague in Paris in 1920. First time he’d heard of it. He dialled Vandoosler.
“I’ve just seen the papers,” Vandoosler said before Adamsberg got a word in. “We’re heading over the edge.”
“At full speed,” Adamsberg agreed. “Is it true, that story about the 1920 plague, or is it bullshit?”
