by Fred Vargas
In the unlit bedroom Jean-Baptiste was not sleeping. It took Camille a moment to work out what she was seeing – a tanned, naked back among white sheets, moving about on top of a girl.
A flash of pain hit her forehead like a metal shard driving right between her eyes. For a split second the intensity of the flash made her believe she would stay blind for the rest of her life. Her knees gave way and she sank on to the cabin trunk that served various functions and which this night had served as the place to put the girl’s clothes. The two bodies, unaware of her silent presence, carried on jiggling about. Camille was stunned by the sight. She watched Jean-Baptiste do things with his hands and lips, things that she recognised, each and every one. The red-hot bit drilling a hole in the middle of her head forced her to screw up her eyes. It was a violent sight and an ordinary sight, it was deeply wounding and utterly trivial. Camille looked down.
Don’t cry, Camille.
She left off looking at the bodies in bed and stared hard at a spot on the floor.
Beat it, Camille. Scram right now, and take your time about coming back.
Cito, longe, tarde.
Camille tried to move but realised that her legs wouldn’t support her. She lowered her gaze further and concentrated hard on the toes of her boots. On her black leather boots. On their squared-off toes. On their side buckles. On the dirt in their creases. On the corners of their heels, worn smooth from walking.
Carry on, Camille, carry on looking at your feet.
I am.
It was a stroke of luck that she still had her shoes on. If she were barefoot and defenceless, she could not have got up to go any place at all. Most likely she would have stayed nailed to the trunk with a drill bit in her head. A masonry bit, for sure, not a woodworking bit. Look at your boots since you’ve got them on. Look hard, Camille. Now run.
But it was too soon. Her legs were still no stiffer than flags on a windless day. Don’t look up, Camille, don’t look.
Of course she knew. It had always been like that. There had always been other women, lots of other women, for longer or shorter periods, depending on how tough the girl was, since Adamsberg always screwed up his affairs, let them fall apart. Of course there’d always been other women, other fish in the sea, other Loreleis beckoning from the river bank. “They get to me,” Jean-Baptiste used to say laconically. Sure, Camille knew all about it, she knew what was going on when Jean-Baptiste went into eclipse, when he disappeared behind a curtain, she knew what the fuss was about in the far distance. On one occasion she’d turned her back and given up. She had managed to forget Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, his overpopulated river bank, his world of whispers and upsets that came just too close to her. She’d stayed away for years, and given Adamsberg the kind of grand burial that great love requires.
Until he’d crossed her path by chance once more last summer. Though she’d blocked up the river, by some convoluted process the headwaters still ran as strong as ever. She’d put one foot back in while keeping the other on dry land, she’d done the splits trying to hold a balance between freedom’s embrace and that of Jean-Baptiste. Until tonight when that unforeseen collision had stuck that thing between her eyes. All because of a diary mistake. Jean-Baptiste had never been very careful about dates.
The long stare at her boots had given some consistency back to her legs. Things were going quiet on the bed. Camille stood up very carefully and made her way round the trunk. She was just slipping out of the door when the girl sat up and screamed. Camille heard the ruffling of bedclothes and bodies in panic, of Jean-Baptiste jumping to the floor and calling out her name.
Scram, Camille.
I’m doing what I can. Camille grabbed her bomber jacket and her backpack, then saw the lost kitten on the sofa and grabbed that too. The girl was talking, asking questions. Scram right now. Camille clattered down the stairs, ran out into the street and kept running for a long while. She stopped when she was out of breath and found herself in a deserted square around a locked garden. She climbed over the railings and hunched up on a park bench, cuddling her knees. The thing in her head began to slacken off.
A young man with dyed hair sat down beside her.
“Not too happy tonight, are we?” he said softly.
He kissed her on the temple and walked off without a sound.
XXVIII
IT WAS PAST midnight but Danglard was still awake when he heard a timid knock at his door. He was in his vest, in front of a television he wasn’t watching, with a beer in his hand, going over and over the notes he’d made on the plague-monger and his prey. It could not be random. The killer chose his victims, there had to be some kind of a connection between them. He’d interviewed the relatives for hours on end in the pursuit of some point of intersection, and now he was going over his notes trying to find that elusive link.
Danglard’s day-time dress sense gave way in the evening to inherited working-class attire – off duty, Danglard, like his father before him, slouched around shirtless, unshaven and in heavy cord trousers. The five kids were asleep, so he slid noiselessly down the long corridor of his flat to answer the door himself. He expected to see Adamsberg, but clapped eyes on Queen Matilda’s girl standing bolt upright on the landing, breathing heavily, with some sort of kitten in the crook of her arm.
“Have I woken you up, Adrien?” Camille asked.
Danglard shook his head and motioned her to follow him without making a noise. Camille didn’t even stop to wonder whether Danglard had a girl or anything like that in the flat, and flopped down exhausted on the worn settee. In the light Danglard could see she’d been crying. He switched off the television without saying a word, opened a bottle of beer and pushed it towards Camille. She downed half of it in one gulp.
“I’m in a bad way, Adrien,” she blurted out as she put the bottle down.
“Is it Adamsberg?”
“Yes. We got it wrong.”
Camille drank the rest of her beer. Danglard knew what it was like. When you’ve been crying you need to replace all the lost liquid. He leaned over the arm of his chair, took another bottle from the still nearly intact six-pack, uncapped it and pushed it towards Camille across the shiny top of the coffee table between them, as if he was moving a pawn and hoping to take a piece.
Camille made a broad gesture with her arm, and explained.
“There are fields of different kinds, Adrien. Your own field, which you dig by yourself; and other people’s fields, which you can visit. There’s lots to see – clover, rape, flax, wheat. Then there are fallow patches and nettles as well. I keep away from the nettles, Adrien, I don’t try to uproot them. They’re not mine, you see, no more than anything else.”
Camille put down her hand and smiled.
“But all of a sudden you make a mistake, you put your foot in the wrong place. And you get stung, without meaning to.”
“Does it itch?”
“It’s OK, it’ll stop soon.”
She picked up the second bottle and took a few sips, slower now. Danglard was watching her. She looked a lot like her mother Queen Matilda, she had the same square jaw, the same slender neck, the same slightly hooked nose. But Camille had a very fair complexion and her lips were still very childlike, quite different from Matilda’s wide, imperial smile. They said nothing for a minute or two. Camille emptied the second bottle.
“Do you love him?” asked Danglard.
Camille propped her elbows on her knees and gazed intently at the little green bottle standing on the coffee table.
“Major hazard,” she said quietly, shaking her head.
“You know, Camille, the day when God made Adamsberg, He’d not slept at all well the night before.”
Camille looked up.
“Really? No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, it’s true. Not only had He had a bad night, He’d run out of stuff. So like an idiot He popped down to ask the Other Guy if he could borrow some gear.”
“You mean … the Guy down below?”
<
br /> “Himself. So the Other Guy seized a golden opportunity and lent Him loads of gear. And God, who still hadn’t recovered from His night on the tiles, didn’t get the mixture right either. That’s the primal soup He made Adamsberg from. Not your usual working day.”
“Nobody told me that before.”
“You can check it in all the right books,” Danglard said with a smile.
“And what then? What did God give Jean-Baptiste?”
“He gave him intuition, gentleness, beauty and ease.”
“And what did the Devil give him?”
“Indifference, gentleness, beauty and ease.”
“Bugger.”
“Quite. But it was never discovered what proportions the absent-minded Lord used for His concoction. It remains a major theological mystery down to this day.”
“I don’t want to be involved in the argument, Adrien.”
“That’s only to be expected, Camille. It’s a well-known fact that when God created you, He’d just woken from seventeen hours’ sleep, and was consequently in tip-top shape. He spent a whole blessed day shaping you with His skilled hands.”
Camille smiled.
“And what about you, Adrien? How was God feeling when he made you?”
“He’d spent the whole evening boozing with his mates, Raphael, Michael and Gabriel. They got right pickled. It’s not such a well-known story.”
“The result could have been great.”
“No, it gave the Lord the DTs. That’s why I’ve got this fuzzy, jellywobble look.”
“There’s a reason for everything.”
“Yep. Things aren’t that complicated, really.”
“I’m going out for a walk, Adrien.”
“Are you sure?”
“Have you got a better idea?”
“Drop him.”
“I don’t like dropping people. It makes dents in them.”
“You’re right. I’ve been dropped, once.”
Camille nodded.
“You have to help me. Call me tomorrow when he’s got into the office. Then I can go round and collect my stuff.”
Camille grabbed a third bottle and downed a good part of its liquid contents.
“Where are you off to?” Danglard asked.
“No idea. Where is there room for me?”
Danglard pointed to his own forehead.
“Yes indeed,” Camille said with a smile, “but you’re an old sage, my friend, and I’m quite devoid of wisdom. Adrien?”
“Yes?”
“What can I do with that?”
Camille pointed to a fur ball on the settee. It was actually a kitten.
“It’s been trailing me all evening. I suppose it wanted to help. It’s tiny, but wise and very proud. I can’t take it with me, it’s too delicate.”
“Do you want me to look after that cat?”
Danglard picked it up by the scruff, looked at it, and put it down in alarm.
“I would rather give houseroom to you,” said Danglard. “He’ll miss you.”
“The kitten will miss me?”
“Adamsberg will miss you.”
Camille finished her third beer and put the bottle back down without a sound.
“No, he won’t. He’s not delicate.”
Danglard didn’t try to sway Camille. It’s not a bad idea to take a trip after an accident. He’d keep her cat, it would be a souvenir, as soft and cute as Camille herself, though obviously less spectacular.
“Where are you going to sleep?”
Camille shrugged.
“Here,” Danglard decided. “I’ll make up the sofa bed.”
“Please don’t bother, Adrien. I’ll lie out on the settee, with my boots on.”
“Whatever for? You’ll be uncomfortable.”
“That doesn’t matter. From now on I shall always sleep in my boots.”
“That’s not very hygienic,” said Danglard.
“Better to be upstanding than hygienic.”
“You know, Camille, fine words never did mend broken bones.”
“Yes, sure, I know. It’s just the stupid bit of me that makes me spout sometimes. Or trickle.”
“Spouting words fine or foul won’t give you what you need, my dear. Nor even a Shakespearean soliloquy.”
“What will, Adrien?” said Camille as she began to undo her laces.
“Thinking with your head.”
“OK. I’ll go and get one.”
Camille lay down on her back on the settee with her eyes open. Danglard went to the bathroom and came back with a towel and a bowl of cold water.
“Dab your eyes, it’ll help the swelling go down.”
“Adrien, did God have any soup left when He’d finished making Jean-Baptiste?”
“A bit.”
“What did He do with it?”
“A few bits and pieces, tricksy things like leather soles. They’re great to wear, but they slip on slopes and skid as soon as it gets wet. Mankind has only solved this ancient conundrum in recent years with rubber stick-ons.”
“Can’t we stick rubber soles on Jean-Baptiste?”
“To stop him slipping away? No, can’t do that.”
“What else did He make, Adrien?”
“He didn’t have much soup left, you know.”
“What else?”
“Skittles.”
“There you are, you see. Skittles are really clever.”
Camille dropped off and Danglard stayed up for another half an hour to take off the cold compress and switch off the lights. He looked at the girl in the half-light. He’d give a year’s beer just to be able to stroke her every time Adamsberg forgot to give her a kiss. He picked up the kitten, brought it up to his face and stared in its eyes.
“Accidents are bloody stupid,” he told the cat. “Really stupid. You and me, kid, we’re going to have to get along together for a while. We’ll wait for her to come back, if she does. Won’t we, Woolly?”
Before going to bed Danglard hovered over the phone, wondering whether he should let Adamsberg know. Whether to rat on Camille, or to rat on Adamsberg. He pondered for a good while as he stood at this sombre fork in his path.
As Adamsberg put his clothes on in a rush to go after Camille, the girl didn’t stop firing worried questions at him – how long had he known her, why had he never mentioned her, did he sleep with her, did he love her, what was he thinking of, why was he running after her, when would he come back, why didn’t he stay, she didn’t like to be left on her own. It made Adamsberg dizzy and he didn’t know how to answer a single one of the questions. He left the girl in the flat, confident that she’d still be there when he got back, and left the unopened parcel of questions for later. Camille was much the greater of his worries, because Camille didn’t mind being on her own. She minded it so little that the slightest bump could have her setting off on one of her treks.
Adamsberg strode at a good pace in Bertin’s billowing oilskin with its cold and draughty arms. He knew Camille. She was going to take off, pretty damn quick too. When Camille wanted a change of scenery, she was as hard to pin down as a bird on helium, as hard to catch as her mother Queen Matilda was when she launched herself on to the high seas. Camille would go and potter about in her own far yonder once she’d had enough all of a sudden of the here and now with its twisting paths all awkwardly tangled up with each other. Right now she was probably lacing up her boots, packing her keyboard, shutting her toolbox. Camille relied a great deal on that toolbox to sort her out in life, much more than she relied on him, because she didn’t trust him that much, and quite right too.
Adamsberg came round the corner into her street and looked up at her loft. Lights out. He sat on the bonnet of a parked car to catch his breath and crossed his hands on his waist. Camille hadn’t gone back to her place and she would probably take off without looking over her shoulder. That’s the way it was when Camille went walkabout. Who knows when he would see her again? In five years, in ten years, or never. You couldn’t
tell.
He walked miserably back home. It wouldn’t have happened if his time and his mind hadn’t been consumed by the plague-monger. He collapsed on to his bed, weary and speechless, while the girl picked up the skein of her worried questions.
“Stop it, please,” he said.
“It’s not my fault!” she protested.
“It’s my fault,” said Adamsberg as he closed his eyes. “But you either stop it or you get out.”
“You don’t care either way?”
“It makes no difference to me. Nothing makes any difference.”
XXIX
DANGLARD WAS QUITE worried when he went into Adamsberg’s office at 9 a.m., despite knowing that, at bottom, nothing would ever alter the commissaire principal’s eternally roving eye, owing to his extremely limited contact with reality. And there indeed sat Adamsberg at his desk, leafing through a heap of morning papers with fairly disastrous front-page headlines, but seeming quite unaffected by them, his face as calm as it ever was, with maybe just a slightly more distant look in the eye.
“Eighteen thousand blocks now daubed,” Danglard said as he put a memo on the chief’s desk.
“That’s fine, Danglard.”
Danglard stood there, speechless.
“I almost caught the man, yesterday, on the square,” Adamsberg said in a rather muted voice.
“The plague-monger?” queried Danglard in surprise.
“The monger himself. But he slipped away. Everything’s slipping out of my hands, Danglard,” he added as he looked up at his deputy and met his eyes.
“Did you see something?”
“No. That’s the point. I didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t see anything? So how can you say you almost nabbed him, then?”
“Because I felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“I don’t know, Danglard.”
Danglard gave up. It seemed wiser to leave Adamsberg on his own when he was wandering in such dark waters, walking out behind the tide with his feet squelching in the mud up to his ankles. With the shameful feeling of being a spy in his own squad Danglard slipped away to the courtyard entrance to ring Camille.
