Have Mercy On Us All (15 page)

Breuil was a likeable and complicated fellow. He took an ironical interest in art and had a passion for high-class cookery, and neither of these avocations inclined him to make peremptory judgements about his fellow men. When Adamsberg’s promotion to
commissaire principal
in charge of a murder squad had ruffled feathers at headquarters, largely because of his abysmal dress sense, his apparent slackness and his incomprehensible success as a sleuth, Breuil had been one of the very few to take him as he was and to refrain from trying to bring him into line. Breuil’s tolerance was
all
the more precious to Adamsberg because he was by no means a small fish in the big pond of the Paris police.

“So if anything untoward should happen in any of these blocks of flats,” Adamsberg summed up, “please be so kind as to pass the message on to me. I’ve been on the case for several days.”

“You mean you want me to hand it over to you?”

“That’s right.”

“You can rely on me,” said Breuil. “But I wouldn’t worry myself sick over it meanwhile, if I were you. Guys who work at one remove like your amateur lettering artist are rarely capable of direct action.”

“But I am making myself sick with worry. And I’m watching him.”

“Have they finished putting the bars in the windows at your new place?”

“Two windows to go.”

“Come round for a meal one of these days. My chervil-flavoured asparagus mousse will amaze you. Even you, I mean.”

Adamsberg smiled as he hung up and went out with his hands in his trouser pockets to look for lunch. He ended up walking around beneath a dull September sky for nearly three hours, and got back to the office in mid-afternoon.

An unidentified
flic
stood to attention as he came in.

“
Brigadier
Lamarre,” the young man blurted while fiddling nervously with one of his jacket buttons and staring hard at the blank wall opposite. “There was a call for you at 13.41. A certain Hervé Decambrais asked you to ring back at this number.” He proffered a Post-it to his chief.

Adamsberg looked the
brigadier
up and down, and tried to catch his eyes. The twiddled button gave up the ghost and fell to the ground, but Lamarre stood stock still, with arms held rigid to his trouser seams. Something about him – his height, his blond hair, his blue eyes – reminded Adamsberg of barman Bertin at the Viking.

“Are you from Normandy,
brigadier
?”

“Affirmative, sir. From Granville, sir”

“Were you in the military, Lamarre?”

“Affirmative. Enlisted as a gendarme, sir. Did the exam so as to get promotion and transfer to the capital, sir.”

“You have leave to pick up your button, you know,” said Adamsberg, “and you’ve got clearance for sitting down.”

Which Lamarre then did.

“And please try to look at me. In the eye.”

Lamarre’s face tautened in near-panic and his eyes remained firmly set on the paintwork.

“That was an order,
brigadier
. Please try harder.”

The young
flic
slowly rotated his head towards Adamsberg.

“Good. Stop there. Stay like that. Keep looking at my eyes. Now,
brigadier
, this is the police force. In the murder squad, more than in any other branch, you have to learn to be discreet, to be relaxed and to be humane. You’re going to have to infiltrate closed groups, you’re going to have to dissemble, to interrogate awkward customers, to tail them without being seen, and also to boost people’s confidence, as well as getting a wet shoulder time and again. Now, the way you are now, you can be spotted a mile off. You’re as plain as a pikestaff and just about as bendy. You’re going to have to learn to let go, and you won’t manage that overnight. So here’s training exercise number one: look at other people.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look at their eyes, not at their hairline.”

“Yes, sir.”

Adamsberg opened his memory-jogger and inscribed in it:
Viking, button
and
paintwork
make
Lamarre
.

Decambrais picked up the phone on the first ring.

“I wanted to warn you,
commissaire
, that our guy has gone over the top.”

“Meaning?”

“Best thing is for you to hear the specials from today’s morning and noon newscasts. Ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“The first one is the continuation of the 1665 diary entry.”

“You mean Keeps’s diary?”

“Pepys’s,
commissaire
.”

This day, much against my will, I did … see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and
Lord have mercy upon us
writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first time of that kind to my remembrance I ever saw.

“Getting worse, don’t you think?”

“That’s an understatement. The red cross he mentions was painted on the doors of houses where the plague had broken out, to allow illiterates to steer clear. So Pepys has just come into contact with the plague for the first time. As a matter of fact the disease had been smouldering in the poorer quarters of the city for some time already, but Pepys didn’t know because he only moved about in the wealthier parts of town.”

“So what was the noon special?” Adamsberg interrupted.

“Even worse. I’ll read it to you.”

“Slowly, please.”

On
August 17
false rumours rode ahead of the affliction, Many are afeared but many kept up hope, believing the words of the illustrious physician Rainssant. But alas they hoped in vain. On
September 14
plague entered the town. It first struck the
Rousseau ward
, where corpses falling one after the other manifested its presence among us.

“Let me just add, as you haven’t got the text in front of you, that there are lots of omissions marked by ellipses. Our fellow is obsessive, he can’t bear to cut a part of a sentence without signalling it. Furthermore ‘August 17,’ ‘September 14,’ and ‘Rousseau ward’ are printed in a different font. He must have altered the dates and place of the original, and the change of font must be a way of telling us that. At least, that’s what I think.”

“And today is September 14, isn’t it?” Adamsberg asked, since he was never very sure of the date, within a couple of days.

“Yes it is. Which means, as plainly as can be, that the nutter has just told us that plague came into Paris today, and that there is a victim. Or victims.”

“Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

“Do you think that’s what he means by ‘Rousseau ward’?”

“I’ve got a daubed block in that street.”

“What’s that about daubing?”

Adamsberg reckoned that Decambrais was already up to his neck in the case and so he told him about the other dimension of the madman’s campaign. He was interested to note that despite his learning Decambrais seemed as unaware as Danglard of the meaning of the signs of 4. So the talisman wasn’t that well known. The nutter using it must be really quite a scholar.

“Anyway,” Adamsberg said, to bring the call to a conclusion, “do go on pursuing the case without me, it may come in useful as background for Even Keel Counselling. It’ll make a nice addition to your collection of stories, and a prize item in the town crier’s annals too. But I think we can now forget about any risk of a criminal act being committed. Our nutter has gone off at a tangent, he’s gone completely symbolic, as my number two would say. Because nothing actually happened last night in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nor did anything happen in any of the other blocks that have had their front doors decorated. But the painter is still painting. We’ll let him go on until he stops.”

“All right then,” said Decambrais after a long pause. “That’s a relief. May I say how glad I have been to get to know you better. I hope you don’t resent my having wasted your time.”

“Not at all. I set much store by wasting time.”

Adamsberg hung up and decided that his Saturday shift was now over. There was nothing in the station log that couldn’t wait until Monday. Before leaving the office he checked in his memory-jogger so he could say good night to the ramrod from Granville with suitably friendly formality.

Outside, the sun had broken through the thinning clouds and Paris once again felt like a city enjoying the tail end of summer. He took off his jacket and hung it over his shoulder and sauntered towards the Seine. He reckoned that Parisians often forget that they live on a river. The Seine, with its smell of wet laundry and its flights of squawking birds, and however sluggish and soiled its waters may be, remained one of Adamsberg’s favourite city retreats.

As he wandered through side streets and alleyways, he told himself it was just as well that Danglard had stayed at home to nurse his apple hangover. He was happier to have buried the business of the 4s without any witnesses. Danglard had been right. It didn’t matter whether the door-painting lunatic was a situationist crackpot or a symbolist nutter, because he was running loose in a world of his own making, and that world was not of any relevance to the work of the police. Adamsberg had lost his gamble; he didn’t mind losing; and it was a relief, in any case. He didn’t get uppity about winning or losing against his number two, but he was glad that he could throw in the towel all on his own. On Monday he would tell Danglard he’d been wrong and that the affair of the 4s would be filed alongside the giant ladybirds of Nanteuil. Now who had told him that story? Ah, yes, the freckle-faced photographer. And what was his name? Adamsberg just couldn’t recall.

XVI

ON THE MONDAY
morning Adamsberg gave Danglard the news that the affair of the painted 4s was over. Danglard kept to his notion of proper form by keeping his lips sealed, and by the merest nod of his head signalled that he had registered the end of the case.

The following day at two fifteen in the afternoon the phone rang in the office. It was the district station in the first arrondissement, reporting that a corpse had been found at number 117, Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Adamsberg put the receiver down in slow motion as if he were afraid of waking someone up in the middle of the night. But it was the middle of the day. He wasn’t trying to let anyone else sleep but to sink into oblivion without a sound. He knew he often had weird spells of withdrawal and they worried him. Spells when he would give anything to fall into a lap of nothingness, to curl up there for ever in mindless calm. But these moments when he found he’d been right without having been at all rational were not good. They plunged him into a black hole where he felt he had been burdened from birth by a poisoned gift imposed on him by a senile witch. “Since I’m not invited to this baptism,” the Wicked Fairy had croaked (this was hardly surprising, given that Adamsberg’s Pyrenean parents were as poor as church mice and had celebrated the occasion by wrapping the infant in a rug), “since I’m not invited, I give this child a special nose, for sniffing out shit in places where other people can’t see a thing.” Or something like that, anyway. In rather more stylish language, presumably, since the Wicked Fairy was supposed to be quite cultivated and not at all coarse.

Adamsberg’s weird spells never lasted very long. Firstly because he had no intention of curling up under a stone or anywhere else, given that his primary requirement was to spend half the day walking and the other half standing up; and secondly because he didn’t believe he had any gifts at all. What he had intuited from the start of the affair of the 4s was nothing if not logical, even if his logic was not of the same neat order as Danglard’s, and notwithstanding his inability to demonstrate its delicate coherence. What had seemed self-evident to Adamsberg was that the daubings had been intended from the start as a threat, a threat that could not have been clearer if its author had written on walls:
This is me. Watch me, and watch out
. It was no less obvious that the threat had acquired substance when Ducouëdic and Le Guern had come to tell him that a prophet of plague had started a campaign the same day as the daubings had begun. It was clear that the suspect, whoever he was, had been taking perverse pleasure in a tragedy he was in the process of setting up by himself. And no less obvious that he was not going to stop halfway, and that the chronicle of a death foretold with such rigour was likely to bring a corpse in its wake. It was all perfectly logical. So logical that it scared Ducoüedic just as much as it scared him.

Adamsberg was not particularly disturbed by the madman’s monstrous and complex staging of the murder nor by his high-flown language. Its very strangeness made it a rather classic case, an exemplary instance of the thankfully rather infrequent type of murderer who, motivated by immense hurt pride, raises himself to a height equal only to the depth of his own humiliation. What was more murky and very hard to understand was the use of the ancient bogey of the plague.

The report from the first arrondissement left no room for doubt. The police officers who found the body had confirmed that the corpse was black all over.

“We’re off, Danglard,” the
commissaire
said as he went past his deputy’s door. “Get the emergency team together right now, there’s a body. Forensics are on their way.”

On these sorts of occasions Adamsberg could move fast. Danglard had to hurry to get everyone together so as to follow the chief to the scene of the crime, without a word of explanation to guide them.

Adamsberg got the
lieutenant
and the two
brigadiers
bundled into the back seat but held his deputy back from the front door of the car with a tug of his sleeve.

“Hang on, Danglard. Let’s not put the wind up these guys before we need to tell them what it’s all about.”

“
Brigadier
Justin,
Brigadier
Voisenet and
Lieutenant
Kernorkian, for your information, sir.”

“It’s hit the fan. The corpse is in Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The building had just been daubed with backward fours.”

“Shit!”

“The victim is male, about thirty, and white.”

“Why did you say ‘white’?”

“Because his body is black. Black skin. I should say, blackened. So is his tongue.”