by Fred Vargas
“Why not Lemirail?”
“Who’s Lemirail?”
“The medium gendarme.”
“Good God. Too soon for that. I’m just going to have a chat with Massart.”
Johnstone revved his engine and soon was vanished over the hill.
He did not come back until lunchtime. Camille was feeling knocked out, she wasn’t hungry, she’d just put out bread and tomatoes and was nibbling as she leafed without paying much attention through yesterday’s newspaper. Even the A to Z would not have aroused her interest today. Johnstone came in without a word, put his gloves and helmet on a chair, glanced at the table, added some ham, cheese and apples to the spread, and sat down. Camille did not attempt to spring the conversation to life as she usually did. As a result Johnstone ate in silence, shaking his locks now and again, casting eyes wide with amazement at Camille from time to time. Camille wondered what would become of them if she did not take a verbal initiative. Maybe they would stay at the same table for forty years eating tomatoes in silence until one of them dropped dead. Maybe. The prospect did not seem burdensome to Johnstone. Camille cracked after twenty minutes.
“So, did you see him?”
“Vanished.”
“Why do you say ‘vanished’? He’s entitled to go out for a while.”
“Sure.”
“Was the dog around?”
“No.”
“There you are, then. He was out. And anyway, it’s Sunday.”
Johnstone raised his head.
“Apparently he goes to seven o’clock Mass every Sunday,” Camille said, “in some other village.”
“He would have been back already. I combed the whole area around his place for two hours. Didn’t come across him.”
“There’s lots of room in the mountains, you know.”
“Stopped at Les Écarts on the way back. Soliman’s come out of the john.”
“The psychologist?”
Johnstone nodded. “He’s not well. The doctor gave him tranquillisers. He’s now asleep.”
“Watchee?”
“Apparently he’s moved.”
“Good.”
“All of three feet.”
Camille sighed, tore off a crust of bread, and chewed it absent-mindedly.
“What do you make of Watchee, then?” she asked.
“A pain in the backside.”
“Really. I’m rather impressed.”
“Impressive types are always a pain.”
“That’s possible,” Camille conceded.
“I’ll go back to find Massart this evening, at his dinner time. Mustn’t miss him.”
But that evening Johnstone did not find Massart at home. He waited for more than an hour and half, watching the sun go down over the mountains. Johnstone was a champion waiter. He had once held out for twenty hours on the trot waiting for a bear to come by. When darkness had fallen completely he made tracks back to Saint-Victor.
“I’m worried,” he told Camille.
“You’re getting too worried about that one. Nobody knows what he does with his time. It’s hot. Maybe he spends his days away up on the mountainside.”
Johnstone pursed his lips. “He’s due at the slaughterhouse tomorrow. Should have been back.”
“Calm down about Massart.”
“Three possibilities,” Johnstone said, holding out a hand with three fingers extended. “One, Massart is as innocent as a new-born lamb. He’s gone for a walk in the mountains and got lost, and is fast asleep with his back propped against a tree-trunk. Or he’s got his foot caught in a trap. Or he’s fallen into a gully. Even wolves sometimes slip and fall into gullies. Or two . . .”
Johnstone paused for a long while. Camille shook his knee, as if she was jiggling an ill-wired lamp to make it come back on again. It worked.
“Or two: Massart is innocent again, but Suzanne came to talk to him, and this morning he learns she’s dead. He takes fright. What if the whole village came to get him? What if the old bag had shared her accusations with other people? He’s afraid he’s going to be sliced open from his neck to his crotch. So he goes into hiding, with his dog.”
“I don’t buy that,” Camille said.
“Or three: Massart is a killer. He killed the sheep, he and his dog. Then he murdered Suzanne. But Suzanne might have talked – to me, for instance. So he scarpers. He’s on the run. He’s mad, he’s bloodthirsty, and he carries out his killings with the jaws of his mastiff.”
“I don’t buy that one either. And all this because the poor guy has no body hair. Just because he’s ugly and on his own. Even without all this nonsense he can’t have much fun up there on his own without any hair.”
“No, that’s not it,” Johnstone cut in. “It’s all because the old bag was far from stupid and because the old bag would not have trapped a wolf in a corner. And it’s also all because Massart has vanished. I’m going back at dawn. Before he sets off down to Digne.”
“Do me a favour, Lawrence. Leave the poor man alone.”
Johnstone took Camille’s hand in his own. “You always take the other guy’s side,” he smiled.
“Yes.”
“That’s not the way the world works.”
“Yes it does. No it doesn’t. I don’t care. Leave Massart alone. He’s not done anything.”
“You don’t know that, Camille.”
“Don’t you think you would do better to go and look for Crassus?”
“Absolutely. Maybe Massart has got Crassus.”
“What do you mean? That he’s killed him?”
“No. Tamed him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Nobody’s seen Crassus for nearly two years. He must be somewhere. He was only a cub when he went missing. Could have been tamed. Could have been tamed by a man who’s not afraid of a giant mastiff.”
“So where would he have hidden it?”
“In the wooden shack where he keeps the dog. Nobody goes near Massart, let alone his mastiff’s kennel. No danger that anyone would ever see the wolf.”
“So how would he have fed it? Wolves need a bundle of feeding. And that would have been noticed.”
“He has to get loads of meat for the mastiff anyway. And remember, Massart does his shopping at Digne. Where he’s virtually unknown. He might go hunting, as well. And he works in a slaughterhouse. He could easily have raised Crassus without being found out.”
“But why should he have raised a wolf?”
“Same reasons as for keeping a mastiff. Power and vengeance. And to be special. Once knew a nutter who’d brought up a female grizzly. You know what? He thought he was lord of the universe. Having your own grizzly must be a great pick-me-up. Would make your head swim.”
“Same as a wolf, is that what you think?”
“Just the same. Especially if it looks like Crassus. Maybe he uses Crassus to do the killing.”
Camille pondered Johnstone’s three possibilities. The thought of Massart ordering Crassus to attack in the dark of night sent shivers down her spine.
“No,” she said. “Massart is caught in a trap. There are folk about laying traps for him all over the mountain.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Johnstone blurted out, with a shake of his hair. “Maybe the old bag turned my head the other night. Have to accept that for once she was out of her mind and backed the wolf into a corner. So the wolf jumped at her. And Massart is out walking. That leaves one question: where the hell is Crassus the Bald?”
XII
ON SUNDAY, 21 June it was raining cats and dogs on Paris. It had not stopped since dawn. At his bedroom window on the fifth floor of an unmodernised block in the Marais whose façade had a dangerous slant towards the street, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg stood watching the swirling rainwater pushing rubbish along the gutters and down the drains. Some bits of waste put up stubborn resistance, while others yielded without demur. So life’s unfairness was reflected even in the unrecognised world of urban litter. Some people could stand up to press
ure, others couldn’t.
He had been withstanding it for five weeks now. Not water pressure, but three girls who wanted to get him in the neck. One of the three in particular. A tall, scrawny redhead, usually but not always on dope, about twenty-five, with her escort – two pitiful, wasted, determined, twenty-year-old wraiths under her spell, for ever at her side, ever ready to do her bidding. The redhead was the only one who was really dangerous. She had shot at him ten days ago, in the street, in broad daylight; the bullet had missed his shoulder by barely an inch. One day or another she would finally manage to get a nice heavy bullet through his hide. That was all that girl had on her mind. She had let him know many times, on the phone, in a voice full of muffled rage. A nice heavy bullet, just like the one he had put in the big guy’s guts. The guy the girls called Dickie the D., but whose real name was plain Jérôme Lantin.
Under the swaggering pseudonym of Dickie the D., the man had turned a handful of boys and girls who could hardly stand up any more into a pathetic and servile gang that was supposed to provide protection. But Dickie was a dealer to be reckoned with. With his radical methods, he could twist other guys round his little finger. A plump, short brute with enough insight to do business, but not enough to realise that other people existed. He wore spiked bracelets and leather trousers. The initial “D” perhaps stood for Dictator, or Divine, or Demon. By some miserable twist of fate, the redhead had given herself body and soul to Dickie the D. He was her supplier, her man, her protector, her god and her undoing. This was the man that Commissaire Adamsberg had brought down in a cellar at two o’clock one morning.
A bloody battle was already raging between Dickie’s gang and the Oberkampf hoodlums when the flics burst through the door with their weapons raised. The guys weren’t play-acting – they were all armed to the teeth. Dickie was taking aim at a policeman, Adamsberg was about to shoot him below the waist. And at that point some idiot threw a cast-iron café table at the commissaire. It knocked Adamsberg three yards back and threw his shot off target, into the guts of Dickie the D.
The final score was one dead and four injured, two of them policemen.
Since which time Commissaire Adamsberg had been living with a man’s death on his conscience and a girl on his tail. It was the first time he had ever killed a man, in twenty-five years in the force. Certainly he had damaged some arms, legs and feet with the object of keeping his own, but he had never previously done a guy in for good. Certainly it was an accident. Of course it was the cast-iron table the idiot had thrown. Of course Dickie the Dunce, Dickie the Deranged, Dickie the Dread would have mown them all down if he had had the chance. Of course he was a real bad apple, and of course it was an accident. But it was a fatal one.
And now the girl was out to get him. After Dickie’s death the gang had evaporated, save for the angel of revenge and attendant cherubs. The avenging female possessed significant amounts of hardware that she had appropriated when the gang broke up, but her lair had not yet been found. Every time she had been arrested lying in wait on one of Adamsberg’s probable paths, she had managed to get rid of her weapon before she could be charged with unlawful possession. She always lay in wait next to a dustbin with her hands behind her back. By the time the flics had their hands on her, the gun was already somewhere else. It was a stupid set-up, but there was still no way of getting her charged with anything. Anyway, Adamsberg discouraged his colleagues from trying too hard. One day or another she would come out from behind the dustbin and shoot. So for heaven’s sake let’s leave her out there and wait for her to shoot. You’ll find out soon enough whether she’ll have the last word, or whether Adamsberg will. Basically, the avenging angel seeking to kill him expunged his own guilt. Not that he had resigned himself to being shot. But this long-drawn-out hunt, day in day out, kept him alert and on his toes.
Adamsberg could see her now, standing on the other side of the street. She was soaking wet, and was leaning against the door of the building opposite. Sometimes she hid, and sometimes she altered her appearance with makeup or even dressed up in disguise, like in a fairy tale. But when she came out in the open, like today, Adamsberg did not know whether she had a weapon on her or not. She often kept visible watch on him like that – to try his nerves, he reckoned. Adamsberg’s easygoing nature kept him at a steady rhythm, which was always slow, almost detached. It was not easy, therefore, to know whether he was taking a genuine interest in something or whether he didn’t give a damn. More out of indolence than courage, Commissaire Adamsberg did not know what it was to be scared.
His imperturbable low key had an almost magical calming effect on other people, and brought about genuine miracles in the interrogation of suspects. But it could also seem irritating, unfair, even offensive. People like Inspector Danglard, who felt all of life’s big and little bumps in his bones, like a cyclist for ever riding a new leather saddle, despaired of getting Adamsberg to react to anything. Just to react! That wasn’t asking for the moon, was it, now?
The redhead, whose name was Sabrina Monge, was quite unaware of the commissaire’s unusual rubber soul. Nor did she know that almost as soon as she had begun her tail the police had opened up an escape route for Adamsberg which led from the building’s basement through underground passageways into the open two streets away. Nor did she know that he had a plan to deal with her and was working at it quite hard.
Adamsberg cast a last glance at her before going out. He sometimes felt sorry for Sabrina, but all the same she was potentially lethal and not to be taken lightly – but for only a short while yet, he reckoned.
He sauntered towards a bar he had discovered two years ago barely six hundred metres from his flat and which constituted, to his mind, a kind of perfection. The Waters of Liffey was a brick-built Irish pub where there was always a tremendous din. Commissaire Adamsberg liked solitude, he liked to let his mind wander far out to sea, but he also liked people and the movement of people, and he fed on their presence around him like a flea. The only burdensome aspect of other people was that they would talk non-stop, and their conversations constantly interrupted Adamsberg’s musings. So he found himself obliged to retreat, but retreating from the crowd meant that he had to resume the loneliness he had wanted to suspend for a few hours.
The Waters of Liffey provided a first-rate solution to his dilemma. The only people in the bar were noisy, boozy Irishmen speaking what was for Adamsberg a completely hermetic tongue. He thought he must be one of the last people left on the planet to know not a single word of English. Such old-fashioned ignorance allowed him to fit happily into the Liffey, where he could enjoy the stream of life without being in any way inconvenienced by it. In this precious hidey-hole Adamsberg spent many an hour dreaming away, peacefully waiting for ideas to rise to the surface of his mind.
For that is how Adamsberg found his ideas – simply by waiting for them to turn up. When one rose before his eyes like a dead fish on the crest of a wave, he picked it up, turned it over, asked himself whether he needed this item at the moment, whether it was of any interest. Adamsberg never thought actively, he found it quite sufficient to daydream and then to sort his catch, like a fisherman scrabbling about clumsily in the bottom of a net and finally picking the prawn out of the mess of sand, seaweed, pebbles and shells. Adamsberg’s thoughts contained plenty of seaweed and sand, and he didn’t always know how to avoid getting caught in the mess. He needed to jettison a lot of it, evacuate great heaps. He was aware that his own mind produced a mixed bag of mental items of uneven size and value, and that things did not necessarily happen the same way for other people. He had noticed that the difference between his thinking and the mental products of Danglard, his number two, was identical to the difference between a netful from the river-bed and a fishmonger’s neatly laid-out slab. He couldn’t help it. Anyway, he always ended up fishing something useful out of his glory-hole, as long as people gave him enough time. That is how Adamsberg used his brain, like an ocean that you trust entirely to feed you well, but which yo
u’ve long ago given up trying to tame.
As he pushed open the door of the Waters of Liffey he reckoned it must be close to eight o’clock. Adamsberg never wore a watch and relied on his inner chronometer, accurate to within ten minutes, sometimes better but never worse than that. The tang of Guinness – or of Guinness-induced vomit – hung heavy in the bar-room air which the large ceiling fan had never managed entirely to refresh. Your elbows stuck to the lacquered tables permanently tacky from spilled beer too rapidly wiped away. Adamsberg put his spiral notepad onto one such table to bag his place, and stuck his jacket unceremoniously over the chair-back. It was the best table in the room, standing under a huge wall-sign bearing three crudely painted silver turrets being consumed by heraldic flames. The arms, so he had been told, of Baile Áthe Cliath, the Gaelic Dublin.
He gave his order to Enid, a strapping, fair-haired waitress endowed with uncommon resistance to Guinness, and asked her to do him a favour by allowing him to watch the evening television news. People knew he was a flic and granted him the privilege, when he needed it, of using the little set that was kept tucked inside the bar. Adamsberg knelt down and switched on.
“Trouble brewing?” Enid asked in her thick Irish accent.
“There’s a wolf eating lambs, but a long way away.”
“Why’s that anything to do with you?”
“Dunno.”
“Dunno” was among the most frequent of Adamsberg’s utterances. He fell back on it neither from laziness nor from lack of wits, but because he really did not know the right answer and was ready to admit it. The commissaire’s passive ignorance bemused and maddened his deputy, who could not conceive of the possibility of taking any appropriate steps in full ignorance of the facts. Wavering was Adamsberg’s most natural element, however, and his most productive by far.
Enid went off, arms laden with dishes to serve customers seated at tables, and Adamsberg concentrated on the broadcast that had just begun. He put the volume right up as that was the only way of making out the commentary over the Waters’s hubbub. He had been following the national news since Thursday, but there’d been nothing more about the wolves of the Mercantour Wildlife Reserve. Story over. He was surprised by the apparently abrupt ending, and convinced that it was more a truce than a final victory. The story was going to pick up again, and go on in a not necessarily very nice manner towards some ineluctable fatality. Why it should do so he did not know. And why it should hold his interest he knew even less. Which is what he had said to Enid.