by Fred Vargas
“But I fear I’m going to put a spanner in your works. I wouldn’t go looking for your monger among the descendants of the families that died. I’d look for him in a family that was spared. That gives you thousands of candidates, not just thirty-four.”
“Why the spared?”
“Because your man is using plague as an instrument of power.”
“And so?”
“He wouldn’t do that if his family had been victims of the plague. He would hate the scourge.”
“I thought I’d made a mistake somewhere down the line,” said Adamsberg as he began to stride forward again with his hands clasped behind him.
“That’s not a mistake, Adamsberg, it’s just a nut you put on upside down. If your man is using plague as a power tool, then it must have given power to his forebears once upon a time. Some apparent miracle must have saved them from the fate of all the neighbours. The survivors might have had to pay a heavy price for the miracle. People slip only too easily from hating the lucky ones to suspecting them of having a secret force on their side and then to accusing them of being agents of the disease. It’s the same old story, I’m sure you’ve come across it before. I wouldn’t be surprised if our monger’s ancestors had fingers pointed at them, then got threatened and blackballed, and were forced to leave the original area for fear of getting torn to shreds by the neighbours.”
“Good Lord!” Adamsberg said, kicking a clump of grass at the foot of a tree. “You’re right!”
“I may be.”
“You most certainly are. The family saga is the miracle of survival followed by persecution and social isolation. The story is the escape from the plague and, on top of that, mastery of the disease. They turned what was held against them into a source of pride.”
“People often do just that. If you tell a man he’s dumb, he’ll answer back that he’s proud not to be too smart. It’s a normal mechanism of defence. Irrespective of what you’re being accused of.”
“The phantom in that man’s mind was hearing over and over that ‘our’ family was different from others, that ‘we’ could control an affliction sent down by God.”
“But don’t forget, Adamsberg – your monger must have had a broken home, or else lost his father or his mother, at all events he felt abandoned, and immensely fragile. That’s the most likely explanation for the boy clinging on to the violent side of the family’s sole claim to glory as his only source of power. Probably rehashed over and over by a grandfather. Inheritances of this kind often skip a generation.”
“All that’s not going to help find the man’s ID,” said Adamsberg, who’d gone round in a circle and was berating the same clump of grass again. “Hundreds of thousands of people didn’t die of the plague.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Never mind, Ferez. You’ve really helped.”
XXVI
ADAMSBERG WENT UP Boulevard Saint-Michel on the side that was just beginning to be warmed by the sun. He’d taken off his jacket and was drying it off as he walked. He wasn’t trying to find ways round Ferez’s arguments, he knew the psychiatrist was right. That put the plague-monger out of reach, just when he thought he’d nearly got him cornered. All that was left was Place Edgar-Quinet, which was where he was heading. He kept coming back to the conclusion that someone on the square had great-grandparents who’d been rag pickers in 1920. Actually on the square, or else a constant visitor, despite the danger. But what did the monger have to be frightened of, in fact? He felt he was in command, and he’d proved that he was, at a time in his life when he’d needed to show his strength. Twenty-eight flics weren’t going to scare a guy who could lay on the scourge of the Lord and lay it off with a flip of his wrist. Twenty-eight flics were no more threat to him than twenty-eight bird droppings.
The whole story to date could only boost the plague-monger’s pride and self-confidence. Parisians had obeyed his command and were painting the talisman on their doors. Twenty-eight flics hadn’t been able to stop the killing. Four down, and Adamsberg hadn’t the faintest idea how to prevent the next murder. Except by stationing himself at this crossing and keeping his eyes open. But what was he looking for? He didn’t rightly know. But at least it would let him dry off his jacket and his wet trouser legs.
He was just stepping on to the square when Bertin’s thunder-roll rang out. Now he’d got the hang of the routine, he hastened into the Viking to enjoy a hot lunch and to join Decambrais, Lizbeth, Le Guern and melancholy Eva round a table with a few other people he didn’t yet know. Conversation stuck doggedly to any topic other than the plague-monger, as if an order to avoid the subject had been given, obviously by Decambrais. On the other hand, Adamsberg could eavesdrop on other tables where the topic was clearly not taboo, and he picked up a number of declarations in support of the press attacks on the police. Those photos of neck wounds, they were obviously faked, do they think we’re blind, or stupid, or what? That’s as may be, someone riposted, but how do you account for the victims having time to get undressed and to pile their clothes up neatly before they died? How did they get themselves stuck under a truck, eh? You can explain that, can you? You think that looks like plague, do you? Looks more like murder to me, chum! Good thinking, Adamsberg said to himself, and he craned round to get a glimpse of a firm and intelligent female face on top of an extremely large bust tightly encased in a flowery top. Look, her decidedly weakened opponent said, I didn’t say this was simple. You’re not with it at all, someone else butted in – a desiccated fellow with a falsetto voice. It’s both together. They did die of plague, but as the mystery man doesn’t want it to be hushed up, he goes round to haul them out of their flats, and he undresses them so everyone can see what it’s all about and not be kept in the dark. He’s not a faker. He’s trying to help. Come off it, the woman replied, if that were the case he’d only have to come clean. I’ve never trusted mystery men or fellows who don’t say who they are. He’s hiding because he can’t come out in the open, said the falsetto, spinning his laborious theory as he spoke. He’s a lab technician, and this technician, he knows they let the plague out when they bust a test tube, or something. He can’t come out with it because the lab’s under orders to hush it up to prevent panic. Politicians don’t like the people panicking, they only like the people when they keep quiet. So mum’s the word. But the technician, he’s trying to tell people, without breaking cover. Whatever for? the woman riposted. Afraid of losing his job, is he? If that’s all that’s stopping him from coming clean, then let me tell you this, André: your saviour is a despicable little man.
Adamsberg moved away from the table when coffee was being served so as to take a call on his mobile from one of his lieutenants, Mordent. Current estimate of buildings daubed, six thousand. No, no new murders reported, they had a breathing space on that front. But on the other front, they were being run into the ground. Couldn’t they now stop responding to panic callers? Because on top of all that, there were only six of them on Sunday duty at the Brigade. Of course, Adamsberg answered. Good, Mordent responded, that’s a relief. The commissaire, for his part, was relieved that things were really beginning to move in Marseille as well. The more the merrier. Masséna had asked Adamsberg to come down south.
Adamsberg shut himself in the WC and sat on the lid to call Masséna.
“It’s started, commissaire. As soon as local radio broadcast your nutter’s message and journalists started explaining, it’s just piling in.”
“He’s not my nutter, Masséna,” Adamsberg replied rather curtly. “He’s yours too from now on. Share and share alike.”
Masséna paused while sizing up who he was dealing with.
“All right, fair shares. Our crackpot has put his finger on a sore point down here. The Marseille plague may be long gone but it doesn’t take much to bring it to life again. The Archbishop of Marseille still holds a Mass every June to thank the Lord for ending the epidemic. We’ve still got streets named after Chevalier Roze and Bishop Belsunce, and statues of them to
o. Those names haven’t dropped off the map, because down here people don’t have a drainpipe in the place of memory.”
“Who are these fellows?” Adamsberg asked calmly.
Masséna had a short fuse and it had probably been lit in advance by the traditional mistrust that Marseillais have for Parisians. Adamsberg didn’t give a damn because he wasn’t from Paris, and anyway he wouldn’t have given a damn if he were. Where you came from didn’t make any difference. But Masséna was all bluster, really; it wouldn’t take Adamsberg more than ten minutes to get behind the façade.
“These fellows, as you call them, commissaire principal, slaved away day and night to help people during the great contagion of 1720, when cart-loads of local officials, bigwigs, medics and priests took to their heels. They were heroes, damn it!”
“It’s perfectly all right to be afraid of death, Masséna. You weren’t there.”
“Look here, it’s not our job to rewrite the history books. I am simply explaining that in Marseille when you touch the Grand Saint-Antoine it’s like you’d hit a live wire.”
“Are you telling me that everyone in your town knows who Roze and Belsain are?”
“Belsunce, commissaire.”
“Belsunce.”
“No, I’m not saying that,” Masséna conceded. “Not everyone knows. But the plague, the fact that the city was wiped out, the containment wall around the whole of Provence – everyone around here is aware of the history. The plague is permanently lodged somewhere in people’s heads here in Provence.”
“Looks like the same is true up here too, Masséna. We’ve got to ten thousand buildings daubed with 4s. All we can hope is that shops run out of paint.”
“Well, here, just this morning, I counted about two hundred in the area around the Vieux-Port. Work out how many that makes for the whole city! Bloody hell, Adamsberg, have people gone completely crazy?”
“They’re doing it for protection, Masséna. If you counted up all the people who go around with a brass bracelet, or a rabbit’s foot, or a St Christopher, or Lourdes water, or who knock on wood – and I’ll leave out the crucifixes – you would tot up forty million just in France, easy as pie.”
Masséna sighed.
“As long as they’re doing it themselves,” Adamsberg continued, “it’s no big deal. But is there anything at all that looks to you like it might be authentic? A 4 painted by the plague-monger himself?”
“That’s a hard one, Adamsberg. People are copying the sign. It’s true that lots of them forget to thicken the downstroke at the bottom, and others put one notch instead of two on the crossbar. But about 50 per cent of them do it carefully. Their signs look bloody close to the original. How do you expect me to get it right?”
“Any envelopes reported?”
“No.”
“Have you recorded any blocks where all doors are marked save for one?”
“There are some of those, commissaire. But there are also heaps of people who are keeping their heads and wouldn’t think of painting on their own front doors. There’s also a contingent of faint-hearts who draw a tiny little 4 at the bottom of the door. That way they can have the talisman and not have it at the same time, or not have it and be protected nonetheless, take your pick. I can’t go over every door in the city with a magnifying glass, can I? Would you?”
“It’s a tidal wave up here, Masséna, it’s what everyone’s doing by way of weekend redecoration. We aren’t even checking any more.”
“Not at all?”
“Almost. I’m keeping an eye on a thousand square feet, out of one thousand million square feet in central Paris. All I’m keeping under surveillance is the patch where I hope to see the monger – but he could be prowling round the Vieux-Port even as I speak.”
“Have you got a description? Any idea what he looks like?”
“No. Nobody’s seen him. I don’t even know if it’s a man.”
“So what are you looking out for on your patch, Adamsberg? An ectoplasm?”
“An impression. I’ll call you back tonight, Masséna. Keep it up.”
Someone had been violently rattling the handle of the WC door for a while. Adamsberg exited calmly, slipping past an exceedingly impatient beer drinker in need of urgent relief.
Adamsberg asked the barman if he could leave his jacket to dry out on a chair-back while he went for a walk in the square. Ever since the commissaire had bolstered Bertin’s courage in his hour of need and thereby saved him from general ridicule and from the irrecoverable loss of divine authority over his customers, the barman considered himself to be in Adamsberg’s eternal debt. So he gave his hundredfold permission, insisted that he would watch over the wet jacket with maternal solicitude, and pressed the commissaire to please borrow a green oilskin before he ventured into the wind and the shower that Joss had forecast at his midday performance. Which Adamsberg accepted, so as not to risk offending the proud scion of Thor.
He idled away the whole afternoon on the square, alternating between coffees in the Viking, plodding around and making calls. By evening, he learned, the Paris total would hit fifteen thousand, and Marseille was having a spectacular start and was well on the way to four thousand already. Adamsberg was ceasing to care, inflating his already considerable capacity for indifference so as to resist the rising tide. He wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow if he were told there were two million 4s. He was going slack right through, closing himself down. Except for his eyes. They were the only parts of his body still alive.
He took up his position for the evening newscast by the plane tree, standing sloppily with his arms at his sides, swallowed up by Bertin’s oilskin which was several sizes too big for him. Le Guern’s Sunday timetable ran later than the weekday schedule, and he didn’t set up his soapbox on the paving until almost 7 p.m. Adamsberg wasn’t expecting anything from this newscast, since there was no mail delivery on Sundays. But he was beginning to recognise faces in the crowd that was gathering around Joss’s rostrum. He got out the list Decambrais had drawn up and checked off his new acquaintances as they rolled up. At two minutes to seven Decambrais emerged on to his doorstep, Lizbeth elbowed her way through the crowd to her usual place, Damascus appeared in front of Rolaride wearing a sweater and leaned against the steel shutters that hadn’t been raised that day.
Joss launched himself energetically into the newscast, projecting his resonant voice to the four corners of the square. Adamsberg enjoyed listening to the harmless small ads in pale sunlight. An entire afternoon spent doing bugger all except letting body and mind wind down had helped him recover from the dense discussion with Ferez. He had reached the level of animation of a sponge bobbing about on a stormy sea. It was a state he sometimes sought specifically.
And at the close of the newscast, as Joss was announcing the wreck of the day, he jumped, as if a pebble had just hit the sponge hard. The bump almost hurt physically, leaving Adamsberg nonplussed and alert. He could not tell where it had come from. It was necessarily a picture that had hit him while he’d been drowsing with his shoulder leaning on the trunk of the plane – a fleeting frame, a split-second flash of a visual detail of some kind.
Adamsberg straightened up and scanned the whole scene in search of the lost image, trying to recover the sense of shock. Then he went back to leaning on the tree positioned exactly as he had been at the moment of impact. His field of vision ranged from Decambrais’s hotel to Damascus’s shop, bridging Rue du Montparnasse and incorporating about a quarter of Joss’s audience, seen face on. Adamsberg pursed his lips. That made quite a large area and quite a lot of people – and they were already drifting off in all directions. Five minutes went by. Joss had already packed up his box and the square had emptied. All gone. Adamsberg closed his eyes and lifted his head towards the sky as if light falling on his eyelids would make the image return to him, ethereally. But the picture had dropped back to the bottom of the well like a moody, unlisted asteroid, maybe because it was irritated that Adamsberg hadn’t paid more attention
to it during its brief flight through the light of his eye. It would probably be months before that shooting star would deign to crop up again.
Adamsberg left the square in a state of dismay. He was convinced he’d just missed his one and only chance.
When he got home and started to undress he realised that he’d still got Bertin’s green oilskin on and had left his old black jacket drying on a chair-back beneath the Viking prow. Did that prove that he too had started believing the barman could exercise divine protection? It meant more probably that he was letting everything go to pot.
XXVII
CAMILLE CLAMBERED UP the four narrow flights that led to Adamsberg’s flat. As she crossed the third floor landing she noticed that the resident of the left-hand flat had daubed a huge black 4 on his door. She and Jean-Baptiste had agreed to spend this night together, but she wasn’t to turn up before ten because of the hectic timetable the plague-monger had imposed on the squad.
The kitten was a bloody nuisance. It had been following her down the street for ages. Camille had stopped to stroke it, then left it, then tried to lose it, but the kitten kept on catching her up in jerky leaps and bounds, and stayed glued to her heels. Camille had crossed to the other side of the square to put an end to the stalking. She’d left it outside when she’d gone in to have dinner but found the thing still on the landing when she came out again. The kitten bravely resumed its unwavering pursuit of her. Fed up with the effort of keeping the cat at bay, Camille picked the beast up and stuck it on her shoulder when she got to Adamsberg’s staircase door. It was just a ball of white and grey fluff weighing no more than a globe of foam, with two round blue dots for eyes.
At five past ten Camille went through the front door that Adamsberg almost never locked, and found the lounge and the kitchen deserted. The dish rack showed that he’d done the washing-up and Camille guessed that Adamsberg had dropped off to sleep while waiting for her to turn up. She would get into bed without waking him up – she knew how much the first hours of sleep mattered during a stressful case – and lay her head on his belly for the night. She put down her backpack, took off her jacket, settled the kitten on the sofa and tiptoed into the bedroom.
