by Fred Vargas
She brought the lorry to a halt in the lengthening shade, switched off the engine, let her arms fall to her side and closed her eyes.
“Break,” Soliman said to Watchee. “‘Respite from labour, pause in activity, downtime, rest.’ Let’s get down and make dinner while she’s getting her strength back.”
It wasn’t so easy to get out of the cab and Soliman had to lend the old shepherd a helping hand and almost lift him down the two steps.
“Don’t treat me as if I was ready for the scrap-heap,” Watchee said sharply.
“You’re not ready for the scrap-heap. You’re just very old, very stiff, and quite knocked about, and if I don’t give you a hand you’ll most likely break your neck. Then we’d have to look after you for the rest of the trip.”
“Bugger off, Sol. Let go of me now.”
One hour later, Camille joined the two men for dinner in the open, sitting on the folding stools set around the tea chest. It was getting dark. Camille looked over the peaks and pine trees that filled the landscape as far as the eye could see. Not a hamlet, not a shack, not a single human being could be seen moving in what was the wolves’ natural habitat. At this moment the two cyclists panted over the top of the Col and disappeared down the other side.
“There we are now,” she said. “All on our own.”
“There are three of us on our own together,” said Soliman as he passed her a plate.
“Plus Warp,” Camille added.
“Woof,” Soliman insisted. “‘Threads that cross from side to side of the loom.’”
“Yes,” Camille said. “Sorry.”
“There are four of us,” Watchee said by way of correction.
Sitting up straight on his stool he gestured towards the high pastures.
“We three, and him,” he said. “He’s about. He’s gone to ground, but he’s lurking. In an hour’s time, when it’s completely dark, he’ll move off with his animals. He’ll be looking for meat to feed them, and himself.”
“Do you think he too eats the flesh of the sheep he kills?” Soliman said.
“He has to drink their blood, at least,” Watchee asserted. “We forgot to get the wine out,” he added without a pause. “Go and get it, Sol. I put a whole case behind the canvas curtain, by the toilet.”
Sol came back with an unlabelled bottle of white wine. Watchee held it out for Camille’s approval.
“Vin du pays,” he said as he took the corkscrew from his pocket. “Our own, from the vineyards of Saint-Victor. Doesn’t travel at all. It’s a miracle, like a gift of life. It’s got a fair nose, good legs, and a broad bottom. It’s all the wine we need.”
Watchee raised his elbow and took a swig.
“You’re not all on your own up here,” said Sol, pulling down the shepherd’s arm. “You’ve got company. Don’t drink like a pig. From now on we’ll use wine glasses.”
“I was going to share it,” said Watchee.
“That’s not the point,” said Soliman. “The point is glasses.”
He gave a tumbler to Camille who held it out for Watchee to fill.
“Careful,” the old man said as he poured. “It’s got a tail.”
It certainly was an unusual wine – sweet and slightly sparkling; and it had been warmed right through in the back of the lorry. Camille could not decide whether it would keep them alive for the rest of the trip or kill them off in three days. She held out her glass for more.
“Be careful about that sting in the tail,” Watchee warned again with raised index finger.
“We’ll take turns at sentry duty over there,” said Soliman, pointing to the bare knoll on their right. “From there you can keep an eye on the whole mountainside. Camille, you take first watch until half past midnight, I’ll do second watch. I’ll call reveille at five thirty.”
“The young lady should get some sleep,” Watchee said. “She’s got to get us all down the mountain in the morning.”
“That’s true,” said Soliman.
“I’ll be fine,” Camille said.
“We haven’t got a gun,” said Watchee with a resentful glance at Camille. “What do we do if we see him?”
“He won’t come over the Col by the road,” said Soliman. “He’ll use a sidetrack. All we can hope for is to catch sight or sound of him. If we do, we’ll know to within the hour when we can expect to nab him at Loubas.”
Watchee rose with the help of his crook, folded his canvas stool and put it under his arm.
“I’ll let the dog stay with you, young lady,” he said to Camille. “Woof defends women.”
He shook her hand very formally, the way tennis players do at the end of a match, and got into the lorry. Soliman watched him with mistrustful eye, and then went on in after him.
“Hey!” he said when he was inside. “Don’t sleep starkers. Did that occur to you? You can’t sleep in the altogether.”
“I’ll do as I please in my own bed, Sol. Bugger off.”
“You won’t be in your bed, you’ll be on your bed in this stifling tin can.”
“So what?”
“She has to come past to get to her bed. I don’t see why she should have to set her eyes on you in your birthday suit.”
“How about you?” Watchee said.
“I’m in the same boat,” said Soliman haughtily. “I’ll keep a whatsit on.”
Watchee sighed and sat on his bunk. “If it makes you happy, OK,” he said. “You’re a complicated fellow, Sol. Makes me wonder how you got to be like that.”
“Civilisation,” said Sol. “Meaning . . .”
Watchee shut him up with a wave of his hand. “Stop that dictionary nonsense for now.”
Soliman jumped down from the back. A few yards away Camille stood gazing into the dusky distance. She was side-on to Soliman, with her hands stuffed in her trouser back pockets. She had a clean profile, a strong chin, a long neck and dark hair cut short at the back. He had always thought of Camille as delicate, pure and almost perfect. The idea of sleeping so near to her made him uneasy. He had not thought of it ahead of time. Camille was supposed to be the driver, and Soliman had never thought about what sleeping with a trucker might mean. Because once the lorry was parked Camille ceased to be a trucker and suddenly became simply a woman dropping off to sleep on a sheet a mere two metres away from you just behind a canvas screen, and a piece of canvas is not a big deal at all. Whereas a woman like Camille sleeping two metres away from you is a very big deal indeed.
Camille turned towards him. “Do you know if there’s any water or suchlike around here?” she asked.
“An unending supply,” said Soliman. “Fifty metres down the road there’s a spring and a pond. We went and washed there while you were asleep. Take your turn before the night turns really cold.”
His stomach tightened at the thought that Camille might be going to take off her jacket and jeans and boots. He imagined her freshening up in the mountain stream no more than fifty metres away, a pale, vulnerable, naked form in the gloom. Without her boots or her jacket or her T-shirt or her truck. It was as if a protective boulder had suddenly rolled back and put Camille almost within reach. Disarmed and therefore unprotected. Fifty metres is no big deal.
Almost within reach. Everything always hangs on that “almost”. If you could only jog a carefree fifty metres to riverbanks where naked women bathe, and if naked women were always happy to see you, then quite a lot of the world’s miseries might evaporate. But things are not like that. They never have been like that. The last fifty metres are unimaginably complicated, from the start through the middle to the finish. Nothing doing.
Camille walked past with a towel round her shoulders. Soliman was sitting cross-legged on the ground, and he hugged his knees a little harder.
Almost within reach. The hardest last straight in the world.
XX
JEAN-BAPTISTE ADAMSBERG HAD reached Avignon the previous evening and already found the perfect spot on the opposite bank of the River Rhône where he could go to
let his mind drift on its own tide. Wherever he was, he could sniff out by instinct, almost immediately, like a pointer, the kind of haunt he needed to keep himself going. So when he had to travel he never really worried about where he would land. He knew he would find a bolthole of his own. Adamsberg’s private perches were always quite similar despite differences in climate, vegetation and the lie of the land, whether he happened to be in Avignon or at the other end of the universe. What he needed to find was a spot that was sufficiently uninhabited, untended and unseen to let his mind unbutton and unbelt itself, but also sufficiently unprepossessing for him not to have to look at it and declare it to be beautiful. Breathtaking landscapes aren’t good for thinking in. You are obliged to take notice and you cannot put your muddy feet anywhere you have a mind to.
Adamsberg spent the entire day on the premises of Avignon police HQ laying siege to the wily businessman whose brother-in-law was the lad murdered in the Latin Quarter. The commissaire had not yet played all his cards, the time was not ripe. But he had lured the man into a free-flowing, easygoing chat that had drifted rather further than the suspect would have wished, like little ripples on the water drawing a kayak away from the bank and into deep water. And when the canoeist looks around, all of a sudden it’s too late, he’s gone too far, he’s now got no way of getting back to the shore. Adamsberg frequently encircled his targets in difficult cases, but he had no idea how to explain what he was doing or even to give the technique a name, even when someone as precious to him as his colleague Danglard asked him to teach him the basic steps.
He did not know how to explain it. He just did it, because there was nothing else you could do with some people. Which people? Well, the sort of person he had got right now at Avignon.
For the time being the man was vaguely aware that the commissaire was leading him down paths he ought to avoid like the plague, into deep waters where he might drown. He was fighting back and ducking for cover in fits and starts. Adamsberg reckoned it would take him another ten hours or so to catch the man off balance and pin him down. When he did finally confess to the murder Adamsberg would feel that brief pang of satisfaction that always came when his intuition was vindicated by reason. He smiled. He was frequently unsure of himself, but not in this case. The man would go down. It was just a matter of time.
Adamsberg was sitting on the riverbank a few yards from a side road that followed the Rhône, in a little clearing blocked off by a willow hedge, and he was struggling to make a long branch that he had picked up and dipped in the water resist the river’s flow. The current eddied around the obstacle and then resumed its course downstream, brushing leaves over and under the branch. This was obviously not going to keep him occupied for the rest of his life.
He had called Paris. Sabrina Monge had not yet made a move to find out where he had gone to ground. Since she had not seen Adamsberg go home last night she had put one of her young slaves on sentry duty at the main entrance and taken up her own position near the basement exit. The second slave was ferrying supplies to the pair of them. However, said Danglard, as Adamsberg had not appeared this morning at either door, it seemed that Sabrina was getting concerned.
“Actually, she’s worried sick about you,” Danglard had said on the phone. “I can’t really make out any more if what she wants is to top you, or to marry you.”
Adamsberg knew which was the right answer. She wanted to kill him.
He pulled the branch back out of the water and consulted his mental clock. Between twenty and half past eight. He had forgotten to listen to the eight o’clock news on the radio.
So he had not got an update on the big wolf.
He laid the branch down in the long grass, which almost hid it. Perhaps he would be happy to find it there again tomorrow, who knows, who can tell? It was a long, solid bough, an excellent tool for discussing things calmly with rivers. He stood up and brushed some of the grass off his crumpled trousers. He would go and find somewhere to eat in town, back in the noise, with people, and with a bit of luck he would find himself next to a party of English speakers.
He shook his head. He was a little distraught at having missed the big bad wolf.
XXI
SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON a flat stone, with the dog nestled against her feet, Camille watched night fall on the Mercantour. Wherever she cast her eyes the mountains loomed in their dense, dark, opulent and hopeless solidity.
Sooner or later he would have to come down from the mountains. Sooner or later Massart would have to abandon their sanctuary. In all likelihood. The Loubas garage theory was interesting. But maybe they were all making a mistake about that. Maybe Massart would avoid roads and vehicles altogether. Maybe he would stay holed up in the Mercantour for ever. This no longer seemed impossible, now that Camille could see this huge and primevally empty space for herself. Nothing but stone and almost virgin forest for seventy kilometres from end to end – but with all its slopes and inclines, all its cliffs and rock faces, the surface area must actually be immensely larger. A hundred times, maybe a thousand times bigger. What Massart had here was a vast and vacant territory where he just had to hold out a pitcher for water, and put out his fangs for as much meat and as many victims as he cared for.
But then there was the temperature. Camille huddled inside her jacket for warmth. Now that night had fallen it was 10°C at most, and Watchee had said that by dawn it would go down to 6°. And this was high summer, late June. She put out her hand for the bottle of white Saint-Victor wine and poured herself a thumbnail. Could Massart hold out against the cold? Months and months under snow? With no shelter beside a wolf’s coat? He could light a fire, but then he would be spotted.
So he would be cold. So he would leave the Mercantour sooner or later. But not necessarily tomorrow, via Loubas, as Soliman and Watchee seemed convinced he would. Their certainty surprised Camille. They seemed to reckon they had the right plan and were bound to succeed. Whereas to Camille it sometimes seemed on the one hand a defensible and reasonable project, but on the other hand half-baked and brainless.
Massart might not come down from the Mercantour until the first frosts, in October. Were they going to camp out in the lorry outside Loubas for four months? Nobody spoke about that, nobody even mentioned that their pursuit of Massart had no foregone conclusion. Even had they been tracking a wolf with a transponder they still would not be any surer of finding it. Camille shook her head in the dark, turned her jacket collar up, and took another swig of the wine with the tail. She was not at all confident. She could not see the story proceeding the way the young man and the shepherd thought it would. She saw something darker, more disorderly, something basically more fearful than the clockwork search they were clinging to with the map laid out in front of them.
Fearful and dangerous, too. Camille looked through the binoculars. She could not see a thing on the pitch-black mountainside. She would not even notice if Massart slipped past a few feet away with his wolf. Having the dog was a comfort. He would smell them coming long before they could get at her. Camille ran her fingers through his coat. He smelled of dog sure enough, but she was thankful to have him curled around her boots. Now what was his name? Wart? Hoof? And why did he always wrap himself around people’s feet?
She switched on the torch, glanced at her watch, and switched it off again. In fifteen minutes she’d wake Soliman.
With her left hand hugging the dog and her right hand round her wine glass, she stared straight at the mountain. The mountain did not bother to stare back. It remained sublimely indifferent to her existence.
XXII
GETTING DOWN THE mountain in the half-light was no easier than going up had been, and it took almost as long. It was just before six when Camille brought the lorry to a halt thirty metres from Massart’s cousin’s garage at Loubas. She had sore arms and an aching back. The only thing to do now was to wait for Massart to appear.
Nobody had seen him from the Col and the dog had not even growled once all night long. Massart must have
given them a very wide berth, Watchee reckoned.
Camille got out of the cab to make coffee at the back. Her eyes were stinging. She thought that Watchee had snored a lot during the five hours they had both been asleep, but it had not really bothered her. All in all she had not slept too badly on the old sprung bedstead, in a lorry that had been lubricated inside and out with wool fat. The smell had not actually wafted away with the draught. The notion of the odour disappearing was just one of Buteil’s fantasies, and about as reliable as a magic carpet. She had had a dream of danger, she could still feel the lorry being bumped. Someone banging on the outside. But actually nothing had shifted in the truck. Soliman had been on watch no more than twenty metres away, and he had not seen anything. Nor had Wafty, or whatever his silly name was. Maybe Watchee had had a patch of insomnia and got up for a bit. He said that sometimes he stayed up until dawn with his flock. Camille picked up the pot full of coffee, the sugar and three tin mugs.
“What exactly is lanolin?” she asked as she got back into the cab. “Does it come from their skins? Or from the wool?”
“Lanolin,” Soliman piped up immediately. “‘Fatty matter permeating sheep’s wool. Also called wool-fat, wool-wax, wool-oil.’”
“I see. Thanks,” Camille said.
Soliman shut his mouth as if it were a book, and the three of them, tin mugs in hand, returned to staring at the steel door of the garage. Soliman wanted six eyes instead of two trained on it. If a car were to shoot out all of a sudden, they’d need all their eyes to register the vital clues. Soliman had shared out the jobs: Camille was to catch the driver’s face and nothing else, Watchee was to get the model and colour of the car, and he himself would log the number plate. They would fit the pieces together afterwards.
“At the beginning of the world,” said Soliman, “people had three eyes.”
“Bugger that,” said Watchee. “Lay off with your stories. Keep quiet.”
“They could see everything,” Soliman continued undeterred. “They could see very far, they could see very bright, they could see in the dark, they could see colours below the wavelength of red and colours beyond purple. But men could not see into their womenfolk’s minds, and that made them sad, and sometimes sent them crazy. So they went to ask the marsh god for help. He warned them, but the men pleaded so hard that he finally gave them their hearts’ desire. From that day on people had only two eyes, and men could see into their womenfolk’s minds. And what they saw there was so astounding that they quite lost the ability to see anything else properly. That’s why people can’t see straight nowadays.”