by Fred Vargas
“All right,” said Adamsberg. “Let’s say he’s fingered you. There’s not a single 4 worth the name on your staircase, but you know he’s got you on his list.”
“It’s the fleas,” Roubaud grunted. “It was in the papers. All the targets had fleas.”
“And your friend’s dog?”
“No, that’s not what it was.”
“How come you’re so sure?”
Adamsberg’s tone of voice had softened and Roubaud noticed. He pulled himself together and sat up straighter.
“It was in the papers,” he repeated.
“No, Roubaud, that’s not the reason. There’s something else.”
Danglard had just come in, at five past six in the morning, and Adamsberg motioned him to join in. Danglard walked across the room without a word and sat down at the workstation.
“Fuck that,” said Roubaud with renewed self-confidence. “I’m under threat, a nutter’s trying to kill me, and it’s me the police want to mess around with?”
“What’s your line, Roubaud?”
“I sell flooring materials in a furniture store behind Gare de l’Est.”
“Married?”
“Divorced, two years ago.”
“Children?”
“Two.”
“Do they stay with you?”
“With their mother. I have access rights at the weekend.”
“Do you eat out? Or in the flat? Can you cook?”
“It varies,” Roubaud said, rather nonplussed. “Sometimes I heat up a plate of soup and a frozen dinner. Sometimes I go down to the café. Proper restaurants are too expensive.”
“Do you like music?”
“Yes,” said Roubaud, now quite at sea.
“Have you got a hi-fi and a telly?”
“Yes.”
“Do you watch soccer?”
“Yes, obviously.”
“Do you follow it?”
“I’m quite keen, yes.”
“Did you watch the Nantes–Bordeaux?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty cool playing, wasn’t it?” said Adamsberg, who’d not watched the match.
“Well, up to a point,” Roubaud said with a pained expression on his face. “They took it easy and it ended in a nil-nil draw. You could see it coming in the first half.”
“Did you the watch the news bulletin at half-time?”
“Sure,” Roubaud answered without thinking.
“So,” Adamsberg said as he sat down opposite, “you know we brought in the plague-monger last night.”
“So they said,” the man muttered uneasily.
“In that case, what’s making you so scared?”
Roubaud bit his lip.
“What are you frightened of, Mr Roubaud?” Adamsberg repeated.
His voice was unsteady when he answered.
“I don’t think you’ve got the right man.”
“Oh, really? We can spot killers, can we?”
Roubaud almost swallowed his lip and massaged his chest hair again.
“So you’re giving me the second degree, when I’m the one at risk?” he repeated. “I should have known. As soon as you go to the flics you get jumped on, that’s the only thing they know how to do. I should have sorted it on my own. You try to help the law, and that’s all the thanks you get.”
“But you are going to help us, Roubaud, you’re going to help us a great deal.”
“Is that right, commissaire? You’re kidding yourself right and proper.”
“Come off it, Roubaud. You know you’re not smart enough to play the clever guy.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I do. But if you don’t want to help us with our inquiries, then off you go, Roubaud. Back home, back to bed. And if you try to give us the slip, we’ll give you an escort. All the way to the morgue.”
“Since when do flics tell me where I have to go?”
“Since you got up my nose. Off you go, Roubaud. You’re a free man. Scram.”
He did not move.
“You’re scared, aren’t you? You’re scared he’ll get you in the neck with a nylon tie, like he got the others. You know there’s no defence. You know he’ll catch up with you, in Lyon, Nice, Berlin, wherever. You are the target. And you know why.”
Adamsberg opened his desk drawer and got out the photographs of the five victims to date.
“You know you’ll be number six, don’t you? You know all of them, that’s why you’re shitting yourself.”
“Fuck off,” said Roubaud, turning his head to the side.
“Then push off. Get the hell out.”
Two minutes passed in silence.
“All right,” said Roubaud.
“You know these people?”
“Yes and no.”
“Explain.”
“It’s like, I met them all a long while back, one evening, it must have been seven or eight years ago. We had a drink.”
“I see. You all had a drink together, and that’s why someone’s knocking you off one by one.”
Roubaud was sweating heavily and the whole room reeked of his body odour.
“Do you want some coffee?” Adamsberg asked.
“Thanks.”
“Something to eat?”
“Thanks.”
“Danglard, tell Estalère to get some food and coffee.”
“And some fags,” Roubaud added.
* * *
“So tell me,” Adamsberg continued as Roubaud restored himself with sweet milky coffee. “How many of you were there?”
“Seven,” Roubaud mumbled. “We met in a bar, honest.”
Adamsberg glanced at the man’s big black eyes and reckoned there was a sliver of truth in that “honest”.
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Roubaud, I’ve got the monger in a cell. If you like, I’ll bung you in too, leave you there and close my eyes. End of story. In a half an hour from now you’re a dead man.”
“It’s like, we pushed a guy around.”
“What for?”
“It was a long time ago. We were being paid to make the guy sing, that’s all. He’d nicked a heap of stuff and he was supposed to give it back. We pushed him around, that was the deal.”
“What deal?”
“Like, we had a contract. No big deal.”
“Where did you ‘push him around’?”
“In a gym. We’d been given the address, the guy’s name and the bar where we were supposed to rendezvous. Because we’d never met.”
“None of you knew each other beforehand?”
“Nope. There was seven of us, and none of us knew any of the others. He’d got hold of us separately. Clever bugger.”
“Where did he get hold of you?”
Roubaud shrugged his shoulders.
“Places where you find blokes who’ll do a bit of rough stuff for bread. No great shakes. He picked me up in a shithole in the red-light district. I got out of that kind of stuff years ago, honest. I mean that, commissaire.”
“Who picked you up?”
“I dunno, it was all done in writing. One of the girls passed on a letter. Classy paper, it was. I fell for it.”
“Who wrote the letter?”
“Honest, I never found out who was behind the deal. He was too smart for that, the bugger. In case we asked for more cash.”
“So the seven of you got together and went off to nab the guy.”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“It was 17 March, a Thursday.”
“So you took him down to the gym. Then?”
“I told you already, bloody hell,” said Roubaud, twisting around on his chair. “We roughed him up.”
“Did it work? Did he split what he was supposed to split?”
“Yep. He made a phone call in the end. He spilled all the beans.”
“What was it about? Loot? Shit?”
“I wasn’t in on that, guvnor. But it must have been what the bi
g man wanted, because we never heard from him again.”
“Did it pay well?”
“Sure.”
“Roughed him up, did we? And the guy split nice and easy? Or was it more like, you gave him the third degree?”
“No. We thumped him.”
“And am I supposed to believe that the guy you roughed up is making you all pay for it eight years down the road?”
“That’s what I think.”
“For bumps and bruises? You’re pulling the wool, Roubaud. Go home.”
“It’s the truth,” Roubaud said, and gripped the side bars of his chair. “Fucking hell, why should we have tortured them? They were chickens, they were shitting themselves as soon as they clapped eyes on us.”
“You said ‘they’?”
Roubaud bit his lower lip again.
“There was more than one, wasn’t there? Get a move on, Roubaud, things are speeding up.”
“There was a girl as well,” Roubaud grunted. “We had no choice. When we went to get the guy, he had his girl with him, and so what? We took the pair of them down to the gym.”
“Did the girl get pushed about as well?”
“A bit. It wasn’t me, honest.”
“You’re lying. Get out of this office, I don’t want to set eyes on you again. Run away to what’s at the end of your road, Kevin Roubaud, it’s no skin off my nose.”
“It wasn’t me,” Roubaud hissed, “I swear. I’m not an animal. A bit of a rough customer when someone winds me up, but I’m not like the others. I was just having a bit of a giggle, I was the back-up man.”
“I believe you,” said Adamsberg, who didn’t believe a word of it. “What made you giggle?”
“Well, what they were doing.”
“Spit it out, Roubaud, you’ve got five minutes, then I’m throwing you out of here.”
Roubaud took a deep, noisy breath.
“They stripped him,” he went on, speaking almost in a whisper. “Then they poured kerosene on his …”
“Genitals?” Adamsberg prompted.
Roubaud nodded. Drips of sweat were forming on his brow and trickling down to his chest.
“They got their lighters, they went round and round, closer and closer to his …to his thing. The guy, he was screaming his head off, he was scared to death that his thing was going to go up in smoke.”
“So that’s ‘pushing around’,” Adamsberg muttered. “And then?”
“Then they flung him on his front on the gym table and tacked him.”
“Tacked him?”
“Sure. It’s what’s called a poster job. They stuck drawing pins in him all over, then stuck a club up his, up his, his arse.”
“Tremendous,” Adamsberg said between clenched teeth. “And the girl? Don’t tell me you left her alone.”
“I didn’t do it! I was just the back-up man. Only, I had a giggle.”
“Are you still giggling now?”
Roubaud lowered his head. He was still holding on tight to his chair.
“The girl,” Adamsberg repeated.
“Gang-raped, five guys, took it in turns. She started bleeding. When it was over she was out cold. I even thought we’d done something stupid and that she’d died. Actually, she’d gone off her rocker, she didn’t know who anyone was any more.”
“Five guys? I thought there were seven of you.”
“I did not touch her.”
“And number six? He didn’t either?”
“Number six was a girl. Her,” Roubaud said, pointing to the photograph of Marianne Bardou on the desk. “She and one of the guys was an item. We didn’t want any birds but she was hitched and so we let her come along.”
“And what did she do?”
“She was the one who poured the kerosene. She was having the time of her life.”
“Real good fun.”
“Yes,” said Roubaud.
“What next?”
“When the guy had made his phone call, all covered in sick, we threw them out stark naked with all their gear, and we all went off to get sloshed.”
“Nothing wrong with a pint after a hard day’s night, right?” Adamsberg said.
“Honest, sir, it really pissed me off. I’ve kept well away ever since, and I never clapped eyes on any of them ever again. I got the dough in the mail, as agreed, and that was the end of that.”
“Until this week.”
“Yep.”
“When you recognised the murder victims.”
“Only that one, and that one, and the woman,” said Roubaud, pointing to the photos of Viard, Clerc and Bardou. “I only saw them that one time.”
“Did it click straight away?”
“Only when the woman got done in. I recognised her because she had loads of moles on her face. So then I looked at the other mugshots and the penny dropped.”
“That he’s come back, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why he waited so long?”
“No, no idea.”
“Because he did five years inside straight after. His girlfriend, the lass you drove out of her mind, threw herself out of an upstairs window four weeks later. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Roubaud. That’s if you haven’t choked yourself to death on your own crap already.”
Adamsberg got up and opened the windows to get some fresh air in his lungs and to get rid of the smell of sweat and horror. He leaned for a while on the railing, looking down on people walking in the street, people who hadn’t heard the story he’d been listening to. Seven fifteen. The monger was still asleep.
“Since he’s in custody, what are you afraid of?”
“Because he’s not the one,” Roubaud hissed. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. The beanstalk we roughed up was a real pushover. A doormat, if you know what I mean. A patsy and a nerd who couldn’t swat a fly to save his life. But the bloke you put on telly is a big brawny fellow. No relation, believe you me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Our guy had a face like a bird, I can see it clearly. He’s still out there, and he’s waiting for me. I’ve told you everything now, so I want protection. Honest, I didn’t do anything, I was just the …”
“Back-up man, sure. We know that already. Don’t you think that five years inside might change a man, though? Especially if he’s got one thing on his mind, and one thing only: to get his own back. Don’t you think you can build your own body? Not the same as the brain, is it? You’ve stayed as thick as you ever were. But maybe he worked on himself and ended up with those biceps.”
“Why should he do that?”
“To wipe the slate clean, to survive without shame, and to get you for good.”
Adamsberg went over to the cupboard, took out a plastic bag, withdrew an ivory envelope from it and waved it in front of Roubaud’s nose.
“Seen that before?”
Roubaud furrowed his brow.
“Yes. There was one lying on the ground when I left the flat to come here. There wasn’t anything in it, it was empty, it had already been opened.”
“That’s him then, that’s the monger. It’s the envelope he used to get his fleas on to you.”
Roubaud hugged himself.
“Are you frightened of the plague?”
“Not really,” Roubaud answered. “I don’t swallow it. I think it’s nonsense, it’s eyewash, it’s meant to lead us up the garden path. I think he’s a choker.”
“And you’re right to think that. Are you sure the envelope was not lying there yesterday?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Adamsberg stroked his cheek pensively.
“Come and look at him,” he said as he stepped towards the door.
Roubaud hesitated.
“Not such a giggle now, is it? Those were the days! Come on, he’s not dangerous, the animal’s in a cage.”
Adamsberg dragged Roubaud to Damascus’s cell. He was still sleeping soundly, his head resting easily on the blanket.
“Now look at him properly’, Adamsberg said. “Take your time. Don’t forget you last saw him eight years ago, and he wasn’t in very good shape at the time.”
Roubaud stared through the bars, in a state close to fascination.
“And so?”
“Could be,” Roubaud said. “The mouth, could be. But I’d need to see his eyes.”
When Adamsberg unlocked the cell door Roubaud’s eyes filled with alarm.
“You prefer the door closed? Or do you want me to lock you two in together so you can have a good giggle for old times’ sake?”
“Cut the crap,” Roubaud said darkly. “He could be dangerous.”
“And you’re not? In your time you were bloody dangerous too.”
Adamsberg shut himself in the cell with Damascus and Roubaud looked on as if watching a lion-tamer stepping into the ring. The commissaire shook Damascus by the shoulder.
“Wake up, Damascus, you’ve got visitors.”
Damascus sat up with a groan and looked in bewilderment at the walls of his cell. Then it came back to him, and he threw his hair back over his shoulders.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Can I go?”
“Stand up. There’s a fellow wants to get a good look at you. An old acquaintance of yours.”
Obedient as ever, Damascus did as asked and stood up with his blanket wrapped around him. Adamsberg watched each man in turn. Damascus seemed to narrow his face, slightly. Roubaud gave a wide-eyed stare, then moved away.
“So?” Adamsberg enquired once they were back in his office. “Can you see it now?”
“Could be,” said Roubaud, far from confidently. “But if it is him, he’s doubled his weight.”
“Face?”
“Could be. He didn’t have long hair.”
“You’re covering yourself, aren’t you? Because you’re scared.”
Roubaud nodded.
“You could be right, of course,” Adamsberg put in. “The avenger is probably not a lone wolf. I’ll keep you here until we can see our way through a bit better.”
“Thanks,” said Roubaud.
“Tell me who the next target is.”
“Me, sod it.”
“I know that. But the one after? There were seven, minus five who are dead already makes two, minus you leaves one. Who’s left?”
“He had an ugly mug and was as thin as a rake. I reckon he was the nastiest one in the bunch. The one who did the thing with the club.”
