Have Mercy On Us All (29 page)

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.

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?”

“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?”