The Chalk Circle Man (10 page)

He had to wait another two days, long enough to make one think that the circle man was obeying some kind of rule and didn’t operate at weekends. Not until the Monday night did his quarry pick up the chalk again.

A patrolling officer discovered a blue chalk circle in the rue de La Croix-Nivert at six in the morning.

This time, Adamsberg accompanied Danglard and Conti.

The object on the ground was a plastic model of a swimmer, about the size of his thumb. This effigy of a baby, lost in the middle of a huge circle, produced a certain malaise. That’s deliberate, thought Adamsberg. Danglard must have thought the same thing at the same moment.

‘This lunatic’s winding us up,’ he said. ‘Putting a human figure in the circle after the murder the other day … He must have searched for ages to find this doll, or else he brought it along with him. Though that would be cheating.’

‘He’s no lunatic,’ Adamsberg said. ‘It’s just that his pride is getting piqued. So he’s starting to make conversation.’

‘Conversation?’

‘Well, communicating with us, if you like. He held out for several days after the murder, longer than I thought he would. He’s changed his haunts and he’s more elusive now. But he’s starting to talk. He’s saying: “I know there’s been a murder, but I’m not scared of anything, and to prove it, here we go again.” And it’ll carry on. No reason he should stop talking now. He’s on a slippery slope. The slope of language. Where he’s no longer sufficient unto himself.’

‘There’s something unusual about this circle,’ Danglard observed. ‘It’s not drawn the same way as the others. It’s the same writing, that’s for sure. But he’s gone about it differently, wouldn’t you say, Conti?’

Conti nodded.

‘The other times,’ said Danglard, ‘he drew the circle in one go, as if he was walking round and drawing at the same time, without stopping. Last night he drew two semicircles meeting up, as if he did one side first and then the other. Has he lost the knack in five days?’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Adamsberg, with a smile. ‘He’s getting careless. Vercors-Laury would find that interesting – and he’d be right.’

Next morning, Adamsberg called the office as soon as he was up. The man had been drawing circles again in the 5th
arrondissement
, in the rue Saint-Jacques, just a stone’s throw from the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie where Madeleine Châtelain had been killed.

Carrying on the conversation, thought Adamsberg. Something along the lines of ‘Nothing’s going to stop me drawing my circle near the murder scene.’ And if he didn’t actually draw it in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie itself, it was simply out of consideration, a matter of taste if you like. This man is refined.

‘What’s inside the circle?’ he asked.

‘Some tangled cassette tape.’

While listening to Margellon’s report, Adamsberg was leafing through the mail from his letter box. He had in front of him a letter from Christiane, passionate in tone, repetitive in content. Leaving you. Egotistical. Don’t want to see you again. Have my pride. And so on for six pages.

All right, we’ll think about that tonight, he told himself, feeling sure that he was indeed egotistical, but having learned from experience that when people are really leaving you they don’t bother to warn you with six-page letters. They just go without a word, like the
petite chérie
. And people who walk about with the handle of a revolver sticking out of their pockets never kill themselves either, as some poet whose name he couldn’t remember had said, in more or less those words. So Christiane would probably be back, with plenty of demands. Complications ahead. Under the shower, Adamsberg resolved not to be too mean, and to think about her tonight, if he could remember to think about her.

He arranged to meet Danglard and Conti in the rue Saint-Jacques. The tangled cassette tape lay like spilled intestines in the morning sun, in the centre of the big circle, drawn with a single line this time. Danglard, a tall weary figure, his fair hair thrown back, was watching him approach. For some reason, perhaps because of his colleague’s apparent fatigue, or his air of being a defeated thinker who was still persevering in his enquiries into destiny, or because of the way he folded and unfolded his large, dissatisfied and resigned body, Adamsberg found Danglard touching that morning. He felt the urge to tell him again that he really liked him. At certain moments, Adamsberg had the unusual gift of making short sentimental declarations which embarrassed other people by their simplicity, of a kind not habitual between adults. He quite often told a colleague he was good-looking, even when it wasn’t true, and whatever the state of indifference he was undergoing at the time.

For the moment, Danglard, in his impeccable jacket, but preoccupied by some secret worry, was leaning against a car. He was jingling coins in his trouser pocket. He’s got money worries, Adamsberg thought. Danglard had owned up to having four children, but Adamsberg already knew from office gossip that he had five, that they all lived in three rooms with this providential father’s salary as their only income. But nobody felt pity for Danglard, nor did Adamsberg. It was unthinkable to feel pity for someone like him. Because his obvious intelligence generated a special zone around him, about two metres in radius, and you took care to think before speaking when you entered the zone. Danglard was more the object of discreet watchfulness than of gestures of help. Adamsberg wondered whether the ‘philosopher friend’ mentioned by Mathilde generated a zone like that, and how broad it was. The said philosopher friend seemed to know quite a bit about Mathilde. Perhaps he had been at the evening event at the
Dodin Bouffant
. Finding out his name and address and going to see him and question him would be a minor police task, to be carried out without broadcasting it. Not the sort of thing that tempted Adamsberg as a rule, but this time he thought he would take it on himself.

‘There’s a witness,’ said Danglard. ‘He was already at the station when I left. He’s waiting there for me now to make his statement.’

‘What did he see?’

‘At about ten to midnight a small thin man passed him, running. It was only when he heard the radio this morning that he made the connection. He described an elderly man, slight build, thinning hair, in a hurry and carrying a bag under his arm.’

‘That’s all?’

‘He left behind him, it seemed to this witness, a slight smell of vinegar.’

‘Vinegar? Not rotten apples?’

‘No. Vinegar.’

Danglard was in a better mood now.

‘A thousand witnesses, a thousand noses,’ he added, smiling and spreading wide his long arms. ‘A thousand noses, a thousand different interpretations. A thousand interpretations probably add up to a thousand childhood memories. One person thinks of rotten apples, another vinegar, and tomorrow we might have people talking about what? Nutmeg, furniture polish, strawberries, talcum powder, dusty curtains, cough mixture, gherkins … The circle man must have a smell that reminds people of their childhood.’

‘Or the smell of a cupboard,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Why a cupboard?’

‘I don’t know. But childhood smells come from cupboards, don’t they? All sorts of smells get mixed up together, it makes a sort of universal smell.’

‘We’re getting off the point,’ said Danglard.

‘Not that much.’

Danglard realised that Adamsberg was starting to float again, to disengage, or whatever he did; at any rate the already vague connections in his logic were being relaxed, so he proposed they should go back to the station.

‘I’m not coming with you, Danglard. Take the statement from the vinegar witness without me – I feel like hearing what Mathilde Forestier’s “philosopher friend” has to say.’

‘I thought you weren’t interested in Madame Forestier’s case.’

‘No, correction, she does
interest
me, Danglard. I agree with you. She’s blocking our path here. But she doesn’t seriously bother me.’

In any case, thought Danglard, so few things did seriously bother his
commissaire
that he wasn’t going to hang about thinking of them. Wait a minute, though. Yes, the story of the stupid dog that drooled and all the rest of it, that had seriously bothered him, and still did. And there were other things of the same order, as he would one day discover, perhaps. It was true, this irritated him. And the better he got to know Adamsberg, the more mysterious his boss became, as unpredictable as a night creature whose heavy, bumbling but effective flight wears out anyone trying to catch it. But he would have liked to borrow some of Adamsberg’s vagueness and uncertainty, the times when his gaze seemed to be dying or burning by turns, making you want either to get away from him or to get closer to him. He thought that if he had Adamsberg’s gaze, he might see things start to wobble, to lose their clear reasonable contours, like trees shimmering in a summer heat haze. Then the world would seem less implacable to him, he would stop wanting to understand every tiny little detail about everything, exploring the remotest areas of the heavens. He would feel less exhausted as a result. But as it was, only white wine enabled him to take his distance, for a brief and, as he knew, artificial moment.

X

A
S
A
DAMSBERG HAD BEEN HOPING
, M
ATHILDE WAS NOT AT HOME
. He found her elderly assistant, Clémence, leaning over a table covered with photographic slides. On a chair alongside her lay a newspaper, open at the personal ads.

Clémence was too chatty to be intimidated by him. She wore several layers of nylon overalls, one on top of the other, like onion skins. A black beret was perched on her head, and she was smoking a military-strength Gauloise. She hardly opened her mouth when she spoke, so it was hard to get a glimpse of the famous pointed teeth for which Mathilde liked to provide zoological comparisons. She wasn’t timid, she wasn’t vulnerable, she wasn’t bossy, yet her manner wasn’t exactly affable either. Clémence was such an odd individual that one couldn’t help wanting to listen to her for a while, to find out what it was, underneath all the banal trappings behind which she barricaded herself, that fuelled her energy.

‘How were the small ads today?’ Adamsberg asked.

Clémence shook her head doubtfully.

‘Not up to much, monsieur. See this one: “Male, retired, fond of quiet life, own maisonette, seeks female companion, under 55, with taste for eighteenth-century engravings.” Engravings? Not my cup of tea. Or this one: “Pensioner, ex-retail trade, seeks attractive woman, nature lover, for friendship, more if we click.” Nature lover? No, I don’t think so. They all write the same thing, never the truth. What they really should say is: “Self-centred old creep, running to seed, seeks young woman for sex.” Why don’t people say what they mean? Makes you waste a lot of time. Yesterday, now, I tried three of these,
none
of them any good. What it is, though, the minute they see what I look like they lose interest. So it’s pointless, really. But, my sakes, what else can I
do
, I ask you?’

‘You’re asking
me
? But why are you so keen to find a husband, Clémence?’

‘That’s a question I don’t ask, monsieur. You’re probably thinking, poor old Clémence, she’s a bit funny in the head because her fiancé disappeared long ago, leaving her a note. Ah, but you’d be wrong, because I didn’t care then, when I was twenty, and I don’t care now. Tell you the truth, monsieur, I’m not so keen on men. No, it must be for a bit of excitement in life. Can’t think of anything else to do, that’s the long and short of it. Plenty of women are like that, you want my opinion. I’m not so keen on women either, tell you the truth. They all think, like me, you get married, that’s it, it’ll give you a purpose in life. And you know what, I go to church as well. But if I didn’t keep doing all this, what would I do? I’d probably be out shoplifting, pinching things, spitting at people in the street. Well, there we are, Mathilde thinks I’ve got saving graces.
Better
to be nice in this world, isn’t it? Less trouble.’

‘What about Mathilde?’

‘If it wasn’t for Mathilde, monsieur, I’d still be waiting for a miracle down at the metro station. It’s
lovely
being here with her. I’d do anything to help Mathilde.’

Adamsberg didn’t try to disentangle all the contradictory messages he was getting. Mathilde had told him that Clémence could call something blue for an hour and red for the next hour, and made up stories about her life depending on who she was talking to. You would need to listen to Clémence for months before you could work out what it all meant. You’d need to be determined. Or a psychiatrist, some would say. But even that would be too late. Everything seemed to be too late for Clémence, that was clear enough, but somehow Adamsberg couldn’t feel sorry for her. Maybe Clémence
did
have some saving graces, give her the benefit of the doubt, but she wasn’t very appealing, so he wondered why Mathilde had felt like giving her lodgings in the first place, up there in the Stickleback, and then hiring her as an assistant. Now if there was a
good
person in the basic sense of the word, it was Mathilde. Haughty and sarcastic, but courteous and consumed with generosity. It struck you with violence in Mathilde, and more tenderly in Camille. Danglard, however, didn’t agree about Mathilde.

‘Does Mathilde have any children?’

‘A daughter, monsieur.
Very
beautiful. Would you like to see a photo?’

Suddenly Clémence had become genteel and respectful. It was perhaps time to take what he had come for, before her mood changed again.

‘No, no photos, please,’ said Adamsberg. ‘What about her friend, the philosopher, do you know him?’

‘You’re asking a lot of questions, monsieur. This isn’t getting Mathilde into trouble, is it?’

‘Not at all – on the contrary, so long as we can keep this confidential.’

This was the kind of police trick that Adamsberg disliked, but how else was he to answer questions like that? So he brought out his formulae like his multiplication tables, to move things on.

‘I’ve seen him twice,’ said Clémence with a touch of pride, dragging on her cigarette. ‘He wrote this.’

She spat out a few shreds of tobacco, reached over to the bookshelf and held out a thick book towards Adamsberg:
The Subjective Zones of Consciousness
by Réal Louvenel. Réal, that was a French-Canadian name. Adamsberg allowed a few recollections evoked by the name to swim up in his memory. None of them was very distinct.

‘He used to be a doctor,’ Clémence was saying in her distinctive closed-mouth way of speaking. ‘Supposed to be a great genius, I warn you. I don’t know if you’d be able to keep up with his talk. Not wanting to give offence, but you’ve got to be on the right wavelength to understand a
word
he says. Mathilde seems to know what he’s on about. What I can tell you is that he lives on his own with twelve Labradors. Imagine! Phew, his place must stink!’

Clémence had switched out of genteel mode. It hadn’t lasted. Now she was being the village idiot again. Then, suddenly, she came out with:

‘And what about you, anyway? This circle man, is that interesting? What do you want out of life? Are you in a mess, like everyone else?’

The old woman was going to unsettle Adamsberg soon, something that happened only rarely. Not that her questions embarrassed him. They were perfectly ordinary questions. He just found that everything about her made him uncomfortable: her clothes, her pinched lips, her hands in gloves so as not to smudge the slides, her weird bursts of conversation. If Mathilde was kind enough to rescue Clémence from her troubles, that was fine. But he didn’t want to be involved. He had the information he had come for, that would do. He withdrew, muttering a few polite words so as not to hurt her feelings.

Taking his time, Adamsberg looked up the address and phone number of Réal Louvenel. A male voice, strident and highly strung, replied that he could see him that afternoon.

Réal Louvenel’s house did indeed stink of dog. He was a man constantly in motion, so completely unable to sit for long in a chair that Adamsberg wondered how he managed to write anything at all. He found out afterwards that the philosopher dictated his books. Although he replied quite willingly to Adamsberg’s questions, Louvenel was doing half a dozen other things at the same time: emptying an ashtray, putting papers in the bin, blowing his nose, whistling to one of the dogs, strumming on the piano, doing up his belt another notch, sitting down, getting up again, closing the window, stroking the arm of his chair. A fly wouldn’t have been able to keep up with him, still less Adamsberg.

Adapting as best he could to this exhausting nervous energy, Adamsberg tried to register the information that emerged from Louvenel’s complex sentences, making strenuous efforts not to let himself be distracted by the sight of the philosopher as he ricocheted off all the surfaces of the room, or by the hundreds of photographs pinned to the walls, mostly representing litters of Labradors, or youths in a state of undress. He understood Louvenel to say that Mathilde would have been more eminent and a deeper thinker if she didn’t always allow her instincts to distract her from her original projects, and that they had known each other since their university days, when they’d sat together at lectures. Then he said that during the evening at the
Dodin Bouffant
she’d had a bit too much to drink, and had caused a sensation among the customers by saying that she and the chalk circle man were big pals, that only she and he understood anything about the ‘metaphorical renaissance of the pavement as a new field of scientific endeavour’. She had also announced that the wine was excellent and that she would like another glass, that she had dedicated her latest book to the chalk circle man, that his identity was no mystery to her, but that this man’s painful existence would remain a secret, a ‘Mathildism’. As it might be an ‘esoterism’. A ‘Mathildism’ was something she would tell nobody else about, though in any case it was of no intrinsic interest.

‘Since I couldn’t stop the flow, I left without hearing the end,’ Louvenel concluded. ‘I find Mathilde embarrassing when she’s had a few drinks. She gets boring, talkative, trying as hard as she can to get everyone to love her. Don’t
ever
let her start drinking when you’re with her.’

‘Did anyone else in the café seem particularly interested in what she was saying?’

‘I seem to recall that people were laughing.’

‘But why do you think Mathilde follows people in the street?’

‘The short answer could be that she collects oddities,’ said Louvenel, fiddling with the creases in his trousers and then with his socks. ‘You could say that these people she preys on are like her fish, she spots them in the street, she chases after them, then she pigeonholes them. But really it’s the opposite. Mathilde’s problem is that she’d be perfectly capable of going and living alone under the sea. Yes, she’s made it her life’s work, she’s a tireless researcher and a distinguished scientist, but all that means very little to her. The real draw is the territory she’s found for herself, underwater. Mathilde is the only deep-sea specialist I know who won’t let anyone accompany her – which is actually very dangerous. “I want to be afraid of everything, and understand everything for myself, Réal, and to go down when I feel like it into a deep trench, into the origins of the Earth.” That’s how she is. Mathilde is a piece of the universe. Since she can’t dissolve into it, she’s made up her mind to study it, so as to grasp its hugest physical dimensions. But the ocean takes her away from human society, and she realises that. Because she’s also got a big slice of good-heartedness, or generosity if you like, that can’t be satisfied with the underwater life. So at regular intervals she comes back to the surface, and gives in to the other temptation, the one that draws her to people, I mean people, not humanity. So she makes her peace with all the millions of little steps people take as they tread the Earth’s crust. She takes everything to extremes, and every scrap of behaviour she can capture, wherever it is, seems a miracle to her. She memorises it all, she notes it all, she “Mathildises” it all. And she picks up lovers along the way, because she’s quite capable of love. And then when she’s tired of all that, when she thinks she has loved her fellow creatures enough, she goes diving again. That’s why she follows strangers in the street. To get a kick out of the flicker of someone’s eyelids or the twist of an elbow, before she goes off again to defy the immensity of the universe on her own.’

‘And what about you? Does the chalk circle man suggest anything to you?’

‘Don’t think I’m being arrogant, but I’m not interested in such infantile things. Even murder I consider infantile. Child-adults bore me, they’re cannibals. They’re fit only to feed off other people’s vitality. They can’t perceive themselves. And because they can’t perceive themselves, they can’t live unaided, they’re greedy for the sight and the blood of other people. Since they have no self-perception, they bore me. You may know that it is man’s self-perception that interests me – note that I’m saying perception, sensation, not understanding, or analysis – more than all other human approaches, even if I live from day-to-day expedients like everyone else. That’s all I can say about the chalk circle man and his murder, about which I know next to nothing anyway, except that Mathilde talks about him a good deal too much.’

Réal was retying his shoelaces as he spoke.

Adamsberg sensed that Réal Louvenel had made an effort to adapt his way of speaking to his interlocutor. He didn’t feel annoyed with him. As it was, he couldn’t be sure that he had exactly understood what this excitable man had meant by self-perception, which was clearly a key word for him. But while listening to the philosopher he had started to think about himself, inevitably – as did everyone else, no doubt. And he had felt that while being unable to observe himself, he did indeed ‘perceive himself’, perhaps in precisely the way Louvenel meant, if only because he sometimes felt ‘uncomfortable at being conscious’. He knew that this perception of one’s own existence could take underground paths, where one’s boots became embedded in mud, and where no answer was forthcoming, and that one needed physical courage not to dismiss it all from one’s mind and get rid of it. But he didn’t dismiss the feeling when it came over him, since it was a moment when he felt quite sure that to do so would doom him to being nothing at all.

At any rate, the chalk circle man didn’t seem to be worrying anyone else. But Adamsberg was untroubled that nobody else was willing to accompany him in his apprehension. That was his own business. He left Louvenel to his fidgety movements, which had calmed down considerably once he had taken a small yellow tablet. Adamsberg deeply distrusted all medicines, and preferred to drag himself round with a high temperature all day rather than take any kind of pill. His little sister had told him that it was very presumptuous always to hope that he would come through it on his own, and that nobody had yet lost their identity by taking an aspirin. His little sister could be a pain sometimes, you wouldn’t believe.

Back at the station, Adamsberg found Danglard quite far gone. He had acquired some companions to help him start on the afternoon’s bottle of white wine earlier than usual. Sitting round his desk, as if round a café table, Mathilde Forestier and the handsome blind man were knocking the wine back merrily in plastic cups. Things were getting noisy.