The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (Commissaire Adamsberg) (5 page)

‘At night?’

‘It’s only ever seen at night.’

Adamsberg was leading the little woman out of the office and asking her again to come back the next day, or to telephone him another time, when she’d sorted it all out more clearly in her mind. Veyrenc held him back discreetly, chewing on a pen.

‘Jean-Baptiste,’ he said, ‘do you really not know what she’s talking about? The Furious Army? The Ghost Riders?’

Adamsberg shook his head, rapidly combing his hair with his fingers.

‘Well, ask Danglard,’ Veyrenc insisted. ‘It’ll interest him a lot.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, as far as I know, if anyone sees them, it foretells disaster. Perhaps some big disaster.’

Veyrenc smiled again, and as if the intrusion of the Furious Army had made up his mind for him, he signed up to re-enlist.

IV

When Adamsberg arrived home, later than he intended, since the great-uncle had turned out to be complicated, his neighbour, the elderly Spaniard Lucio, was pissing noisily against a tree in the little garden, in the warm evening.

‘
Salud, hombre
,’ said the old man, without interrupting what he was doing, ‘one of your lieutenants is waiting for you. This big fat woman, tall as a house. Your boy let her in.’

‘She’s not a big fat woman, Lucio, she’s a goddess, a polyvalent goddess.’

‘Oh, that one?’ said Lucio, buttoning his trousers. ‘The one you’re always going on about?’

‘That’s the one. The goddess. So naturally she doesn’t look just like everyone else. Have you ever heard of something called the Curious Army? Mean anything to you?’

‘No,
hombre
.’

*   *   *

Sitting in his kitchen were Lieutenant Retancourt and Adamsberg’s grownup son, known to him as ‘Zerk’. (The commissaire couldn’t get used to his given name, Armel, having been aware of his son’s existence for only seven weeks: the nickname had its origin in the previous case, which had brought them together.) Cigarettes dangling from mouths, the pair were both peering into a basket lined with cotton wool. They didn’t look up when Adamsberg came in.

‘Have you got that?’ Retancourt was asking the young man sternly. ‘What you do is, you dip little bits of
biscotte
in water and you feed him gently with them. And a little water using the dropper, not too much at first. And you add one drop of the stuff in this bottle, it’s a tonic.’

‘Still alive?’ Adamsberg asked, feeling himself oddly a stranger in his own kitchen, which had been invaded by this large woman and his previously unsuspected son aged twenty-eight.

Retancourt stood up, hands on hips. ‘I don’t know if he’ll survive the night. Story so far: it took over an hour to peel the string off his legs, it’s cut right down to the bone, he must have been pecking at it for days. But it didn’t break. I’ve disinfected the wounds, and you’ll have to change the dressing every morning. There’s some gauze in here,’ she went on, tapping a little box on the table. ‘And he’s been treated with flea powder, should take care of that problem.’

‘Thanks, Retancourt. Did the young lad from forensics take the string?’

‘Yes, after a bit of fuss, because the lab isn’t paid to analyse string from pigeons. This one’s a male by the way. Voisenet identified it.’

Lieutenant Voisenet had missed his vocation as a zoologist, because his father had high-handedly decided he should join the police. Voisenet was really a specialist on fish, saltwater, and especially freshwater, and ichthyological journals were always strewn around his desk. But he knew a lot about other fauna, from insects to bats, by way of gnus, and his scientific interests sometimes distracted him from his duties. The chief superintendent, Divisionnaire Brézillon, who was well aware of this, had sent him a warning, as he already had to Mercadet, who suffered from narcolepsy. But then, Adamsberg wondered, who in his squad didn’t have some peculiarity? Apart from Retancourt, but then her capacities and energy were also a major deviation from the norm.

After she had left, Zerk stayed standing, arms dangling, and staring at the door.

‘Impressive, isn’t she?’ said Adamsberg. ‘It gets everyone that way the first time they meet her. And every other time as well.’

‘She’s really, really beautiful,’ said Zerk.

Adamsberg looked at his son in surprise, for beauty wasn’t the first
thing that came to mind on meeting Violette Retancourt. Or grace, subtlety or indeed affability. In every way she was the opposite of the charming and fragile delicacy of her first name. Although she had fine features, they were framed by broad cheeks and powerful jaws, mounted on a neck like a bull’s.

‘If you say so,’ Adamsberg agreed, not wishing to argue about the tastes of this young man he didn’t really know yet.

He wasn’t even sure about his son’s level of intelligence. High? Low? One thing reassured the commissaire. Most people, including himself, were still undecided about his own level of intelligence. He didn’t query his own intellectual capacity, so why start worrying about Zerk’s? Veyrenc had assured him that the young man was talented, but Adamsberg had yet to discover at what.

*   *   *

‘The Curious Army. Mean anything to you?’ asked Adamsberg, as he carefully placed the basket holding the pigeon on the sideboard.

‘The what?’ said Zerk, who was laying the table, putting forks on the right, knives on the left, just like his father.

‘Never mind. We’ll ask Danglard. It’s like I told your little brother when he was seven months old. And I’d have told you the same, if I’d known you at that age. There are three rules you have to remember, Zerk, and you’ll always get by. When you can’t find your way through to the end of something, ask Veyrenc. When you can’t manage to do something, ask Retancourt. And when you don’t know something, ask Danglard. Just bear those three things in mind. But Danglard is going to be very grumpy tonight, so I don’t know if he’ll tell us. Veyrenc’s rejoining the squad and he won’t like that. Danglard is an exotic plant and like all rare objects he’s fragile.’

Adamsberg called his oldest deputy while Zerk was serving up dinner. Steamed tuna with courgettes, tomatoes and rice, followed by fruit. Zerk had asked if he could stay with his new father for a while, and the agreement was that he would look after the evening meal. It was an undemanding arrangement, since Adamsberg was fairly indifferent to what he ate and could have gone on forever swallowing identical
platefuls of pasta, just as he always dressed in an identical manner, wearing a black canvas jacket and trousers, whatever the weather.

‘Does Danglard really know everything?’ the young man asked, frowning in a way that brought his eyebrows together: thick, like his father’s, they made a sort of thatch over his vague expression.

‘No, there are plenty of things he doesn’t know. He has no idea how to find a woman, although, just now, he’s had this lady friend for two months, which is an exceptional event. He can’t divine water, but he’s good at sniffing out white wine. He can’t control his anxiety or forget the mass of questions that he keeps circling around, like a rat in a maze. He’s no good at running, he doesn’t know how to sit and watch the rain fall or the river flow, he has no idea how to ignore the cares of life and, worse still, he manufactures them ahead of time so that they won’t take him by surprise. But he knows absolutely everything that doesn’t look useful at first sight. All the libraries in the world have found their way inside Danglard’s head and there’s still plenty of room. It’s something colossal, unprecedented, and I can’t describe it to you.’

‘But what’s the point, if it isn’t useful at first sight?’

‘Well, obviously, it does become useful at second or sixth sight.’

‘OK,’ said Zerk, apparently satisfied with the answer. ‘I don’t know what
I
know. What do you think I know?’

‘Same as me?’

‘And what’s that?’

‘No idea, Zerk.’

Adamsberg raised a hand to indicate that he had finally got through to Danglard.

‘Danglard? Everyone asleep at your place now? Can you pop over here?’

‘If it’s for that pigeon, forget it. It’s covered in fleas and I have very bad memories of fleas. Plus I don’t like their expression under the microscope.’

Zerk consulted his father’s two watches to find out the time. Violette had ordered him to give the pigeon something to eat and drink every hour. He soaked a few fragments of
biscotte
, filled the water dropper, including the drop of tonic, and set about his task. The bird’s eyes were closed but it accepted the food the young man put into its beak. Zerk
lifted the pigeon up gently as Violette had shown him. This woman had given him a shock. He would never have imagined that such a creature could exist. He could still see her large hands deftly dealing with the pigeon, and the blonde curls falling on the golden feathery down that covered her strong neck, as she lean over the table.

‘Zerk’s taking care of the pigeon. Anyway, it doesn’t have fleas any more, Retancourt’s sorted it.’

‘So, what do you want?’

‘Something’s bothering me, Danglard. That little woman in the flowery overall who was in the office today, did you notice her?’

‘I suppose so. Strangely inconsistent, physically evanescent. If you blew on her she’d fly away like the achenes of a dandelion clock.’

‘The
what
, Danglard?’

‘You know, dandelion seeds, with fluffy parachutes. Didn’t you blow on them when you were little?’

‘Yes of course, everyone does, but I didn’t know they were called achenes.’ ‘Well, they are.’

‘Anyway, apart from her fluffy parachute, this woman was paralysed with fear.’

‘Didn’t notice that.’

‘Yes, she was, Danglard. Pure terror, terror from deep inside some well of horror.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘It was as if she wasn’t allowed to say. On pain of death perhaps. But she whispered something to me. Her daughter had seen the Curious Army go past. Do you know what she meant?’

‘No.’

Adamsberg was bitterly disappointed, almost humiliated, as if he had just carried out a failed experiment in front of his son, and not lived up to the promise he had just made. Meeting Zerk’s anxious expression, he signalled to him that the demonstration wasn’t over yet.

‘Veyrenc seemed to know something about it,’ Adamsberg went on. ‘He suggested I consult you.’

‘Oh, he did, did he?’ said Danglard more sharply, as the name of Veyrenc
seemed to operate on him like the buzzing of a hornet. ‘And what did he hear her say, exactly?’

‘That her daughter saw this Curious Army go past in the night, and among this band of people, the daughter – Lina, her name is – saw this hunter and three other men. And since then the hunter has been missing for over a week, and the little woman thinks he’s dead.’

‘Where? Where did she see this?’

‘On some road near where they live, somewhere near Ordebec, in Normandy.’

‘Ah,’ said Danglard, now really animated, as always when his knowledge was requested, and as ever when he could plunge into his vast reservoir of information and bask in it. ‘Ah. You mean the
Furious
Army, not the Curious Army.’

‘Sorry. Furious, yes.’

‘That was what she said? Hellequin’s Horde?’

‘Yes, she did say some name like that.’

‘The Ghost Riders? The Great Hunt?’

‘Yes, that too,’ said Adamsberg with a triumphant wink at Zerk, like someone who has just managed to land a huge swordfish.

‘And this Lina, she saw the hunter with this troop?’

‘Correct. He was shrieking, apparently. So were the others. The group was apparently alarming in some way, the little woman with the dandelion parachute seems to think these men are under threat.’

‘Alarming,’ said Danglard, allowing himself a brief laugh. ‘That’s hardly the word for it, commissaire.’

‘That was what Veyrenc said too. That this wretched band was somehow indicating some kind of disaster.’

Adamsberg had mentioned Veyrenc once more deliberately, not with the intention of wounding Danglard, but to try and get him used to the idea that the lieutenant with the ginger stripes in his hair would be back in the squad, to vaccinate him so to speak, by injecting Veyrenc’s name in gentle repeated doses into his conversation.

‘Just some kind of internal disaster,’ said Danglard, more evenly. ‘Nothing urgent.’

‘Veyrenc couldn’t tell me anything else. Come round and have a drink, Zerk’s been laying in stocks for you.’

Danglard didn’t like to agree immediately to Adamsberg’s summonses, quite simply because he always accepted, and this lack of willpower humiliated him. He put up some muttered resistance for a few minutes, while Adamsberg, well used to the commandant’s reluctance, went on insisting.

‘Off you go, son,’ said Adamsberg, putting the phone down. ‘Go and get some white wine from the corner shop. Don’t mess about, get the best, we can’t serve any old plonk to Danglard.’

‘Can I have a drink with you?’ Zerk asked.

Adamsberg looked at his son without knowing what to say. Zerk hardly knew him, he was twenty-eight years old, he didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission, least of all Adamsberg’s.

‘Of course,’ he said automatically. ‘As long as you don’t knock it back like Danglard,’ he added, and the paternalism of this remark surprised him. ‘There’s some money on the sideboard.’

They both looked across at the basket. A maxi-punnet for strawberries, which Zerk had emptied to make a cosy bed for the pigeon.

‘How does he seem?’ Adamsberg asked.

‘He’s shivering, but he’s alive,’ his son replied cautiously.

Surreptitiously, the young man stroked the bird’s feathers with a finger on his way out. Well, he’s good at that, at least, thought Adamsberg, watching his son go, he’s got a talent for stroking birds, even one as ordinary, dirty and unprepossessing as this one.

V

‘It’ll go quickly,’ said Danglard, and Adamsberg didn’t know at first whether he was talking about the Furious Army or the wine, since his son had brought only one bottle back from the shop.

Adamsberg took a cigarette from Zerk’s packet, a gesture which irresistibly reminded him of how they had first met, during a particularly gruesome case. Since that time, he had been smoking again, usually Zerk’s cigarettes. Danglard was attacking his first glass.