A Climate of Fear

by Fred Vargas

  ‘That’s the heart of the situation, the heart of the knot of seaweed,’ murmured Adamsberg. ‘But can you nevertheless give me the names of the ancestors of the three you identified?’

  ‘Yes, we can do that, because their descendants have different names.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘That way, we can at least say we have never let pass our lips a name linked to the association,’ said Leblond with a smile.

  ‘Sounds like hypocrisy,’ said Adamsberg, smiling back at him.

  ‘Contemptible hypocrisy,’ said Lebrun, and he scribbled three names down on the notebook the commissaire had passed him.

  He had spent a total of two and a half hours with them, and Adamsberg put on his jacket feeling a bit bemused after they had left. Sanson, Danton, Desmoulins. Of the three names he had been given, the only one he recognised was Danton. And that was only because of the colossal statue of Danton at the Odéon crossroads in the middle of the Latin Quarter, with this sentence engraved on it: ‘Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace’ – ‘We must have audacity, more audacity, always audacity.’ As for knowing anything about Danton’s deeds or words, and why he had ended up on the scaffold, that was beyond him.

  The many possible leads which this twosome had provided, acting in perfect harmony, neither one dominating the other, Lebrun and Leblond, the psychiatrist and the logician, seemed to add a harmonic note to the chaos of the bundle of seaweed. Which had got bigger, and now obstinately pursued him to the banks of the Seine. He walked past the second-hand bookstalls, astonished to find himself suddenly drawn to ancient volumes. For two days now, he had been living in the eighteenth century, and he was gradually acquiring a taste for it. No, he wasn’t acquiring a taste, he was just getting used to it, that was all. He could perfectly well imagine François Didier Château, the humble presumed son, the strangely privileged person who found himself in charge of the stagecoaches of the Loiret, the whole network of post horses, inns and halts. He went down to the river, found a mossy stone bench, and dropped off to sleep on it, as some wayfarer might have two centuries ago. It felt fitting and comfortable.

  XXIV

  ADAMSBERG WOKE UP as the sun was setting, sending a rosy glow over Notre-Dame and the dirty river. He called his deputy.

  ‘Danglard, where are you eating?’

  ‘I’m not eating, I’m drinking.’

  ‘Yes, but where will you be eating? The Brasserie Meyer for instance? Between your place and the Seine? I’ve got three names here, and I’ve never heard of two of them.’

  ‘What sort of names?’

  ‘People who were guillotined. Whose descendants are haunting the association from the top benches.’

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ said Danglard. ‘And where are you? They’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘I was working away from my desk.’

  ‘They tried to reach you.’

  ‘I was asleep, Danglard. On an eighteenth-century stone bench. You see, I’m sticking to the subject.’

  The Brasserie Meyer had not changed decor for sixty years. The smell of sauerkraut was all-pervasive and reassured Danglard that the white wine would be of good quality.

  Adamsberg waited for his deputy to eat one sausage and drink two glasses of Alsatian wine, before telling him what he had learned from the perfect double act of Lebrun, with his thick black beard, and Leblond, with his silky fair one, and explaining to him their tale of the infiltrators and the guillotined. Then he put the notebook in front of him, with the names of the ancestors of the ‘descendants’.

  ‘You only recognise one of these?’ asked Danglard.

  ‘Yes, Danton. A name, a statue, a saying in stone. The others are absolutely foreign to me.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate your candour and honesty.’

  ‘Come on, Danglard, out with it,’ said Adamsberg, hesitating in front of his dinner. He knew he now had only to listen, and be ready perhaps to ask for the tale to be abridged. He was prepared for that.

  ‘Well, Danton was a friend of Robespierre’s from the start, a patriot with a loud voice, and a huge appetite for life, he was a man of passion and faith, but at the same time he was a man of blood, a womaniser, hungry for food and other pleasures that had to be paid for, and he mixed his own finances up with those of the state, even did deals with the court. If there were profits to be made, he was up for it. He was loyal to the Revolution, but corrupt. He wrote letters to Robespierre which are amazing examples of affection. The Incorruptible sent him to the scaffold in April 1794. Robespierre wasn’t sensitive to friendship, either to its benefits or to its vices. Towards the end, he could only accept adulation, such as he got from his younger brother and that other acolyte, Saint-Just. Danton’s excessive lifestyle must have caused Robespierre unspeakable disgust. This big powerful man could easily dominate the assembly with his voice, whereas skinny little Robespierre had to shout his lungs out to get heard. In four years, any early indulgence Robespierre was prepared to exercise towards others had greatly changed. The execution of the patriot Danton and his friends, after a travesty of a trial, was the first really traumatic shock felt by the people and some of the assembly. The tumbril carrying Danton to the guillotine went along the rue Saint-Honoré where Robespierre had his lodgings. As they went past the house, Danton called out: “Your turn next, Robespierre.” And everyone knows his famous instruction to the executioner, as he was mounting the guillotine.’

  ‘Well,’ said Adamsberg patiently, ‘perhaps not everyone knows it.’

  ‘He said: “Show my head to the people. It’s worth it.”’

  Adamsberg, despite not being oversensitive, or rather avoiding the possible places where sensitivity might hurt, like a bird flying close beside a wall, chose to eat his sausage with his fingers rather than to slice it, piece by piece, head by head, with a sharp knife. And it tasted better that way too. Danglard looked on disapprovingly.

  ‘You’re eating with your fingers now? In the Brasserie Meyer?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg. ‘De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace . . .’

  ‘Well, that’s Danton. It was a terrible execution. Even if Danton was very far from being a man of “virtue”.’

  ‘And Dumoulins?’

  ‘Desmoulins, you mean. An even sadder case, if there are degrees of this kind of thing. He’d been a school friend of Robespierre. A fervent republican. Camille Desmoulins had idolised the older pupil. He invited him to his home, he and his pretty young wife thought of him as their friend. Robespierre had played with their baby, or at any rate had held him on his knee. But his school friend Camille was a journalist who had let it be known that he was weary of the Terror and afraid of its repercussions. He was guillotined on 5 April, the same day as Danton. And his wife was condemned to death by Robespierre next day, for plotting her husband’s escape. Which left as an orphan the little boy he had once dandled on his knee. Everyone understood then that however long-standing and close your relationship had been with Robespierre, he was a man for whom pity did not exist. Robespierre had no close relationships. The guillotining of Desmoulins was atrocious, and at the same time very revealing.’

  Adamsberg had finished his Alsatian sausages. He now had to tackle the sauerkraut, which reminded him somewhat of the tangle of seaweed, though it was less dense. This was turning out to be a very peculiar dinner.

  ‘And the third?’ he asked. ‘Sanson? Was he guillotined the same day too, with Danton’s friends?’

  Danglard smiled and slowly wiped his lips, appreciating in advance the surprise he was about to unfold.

  ‘No, that very day it was Sanson who guillotined them!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As he had Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and many others during the Terror. Sanson and his son kept the blade of the terrible machine working non-stop, operating it thousands of times in three years.’

  ‘Who was he, Danglard?’

  ‘The famous executione
r for Paris, commissaire. “Executioner for capital offences” as he was officially known. Charles-Henri Sanson. He had an awful life, you can be sure of that. I say Charles-Henri, so as not to confuse him with the other Sanson, the son.’

  ‘There’s no risk of my doing that, Danglard.’

  ‘Because,’ said Danglard, ignoring the interruption, ‘the Sanson family were statutory executioners in Paris, and had been from father to son, since the time of Louis XIV, and they carried on into the nineteenth century. The sequence was eventually broken by a later Sanson heir to the name, a homosexual with no issue, who was also incidentally a gambler and deep in debt. Six generations of executioners. But Charles-Henri and his son had the toughest assignment, because they did their service in Paris during the Terror. Over 2,900 heads to cut off. All the executioners of the time complained of the appalling “workload”, not on moral grounds, but because they were the proprietors of the machine, and it was their responsibility to clean it, sharpen the blade, get rid of the bodies and severed heads, wash down the scaffold, see to the horses and tumbrils, provide the straw to soak up the blood, and so on. In 1793, presumably because he was worn out, Charles-Henri handed the job over to his son, Henri. Just to add to the horror, another of his sons was killed falling off the scaffold when he held up a head for the crowd to see.’

  ‘Why would a descendant of Sanson be hostile to the Robespierre association?’

  ‘Well, executioners, as you might guess, have never had a very good press, and that was already so, well before the Terror. People wouldn’t shake hands with them, or touch them at all, they were paid by having money placed on the ground. They could only marry into other families of executioners. Nobody wanted anything to do with them. But of all the executioner families all over France, only one name has survived in popular memory: that of Sanson. Because he cut the king’s head off. And the queen’s. And one or other of the Sansons did the same for all the victims of the Terror. Robespierre made their name terribly famous, and transformed it into a symbol of abject cruelty.’

  ‘And one of the present-day descendants can’t stand that?’

  ‘Well, it’s not an easy weight to bear.’

  Danglard let silence fall, while Adamsberg attacked his knot of sauerkraut without much appetite.

  ‘No link with Danton and Desmoulins, then,’ he said.

  And he felt the knot falling over him again, grasping him with its stinging tentacles, full of traps and dead ends, such as he had never before encountered. He dropped his fork, defeated.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘From when this all started, in Le Creux, we have already chalked up fourteen suspects. Fourteen! In nine days. Too many, Danglard. We’re all over the place like marbles on ice. We’ve lost our way. Or rather, we’ve never really found it.’

  ‘Don’t forget that we went skidding over some ice in Iceland, to begin with. That lost us some time. And then we were suddenly propelled into the middle of the Revolution, with this improbable descendant of Robespierre and a string of people wanting vengeance. It’s no wonder we’re feeling lost!’

  It was extremely rare for Danglard, the pessimist, to try to cheer Adamsberg up, since the commissaire’s temperament was one of detachment to the point of indifference, something which was one of Lieutenant Retancourt’s major grouses about him: his dreamy indolence infuriated her. But tonight, without exactly expressing anxiety, the commandant could see an unusual kind of puzzlement in the commissaire. He was worried by this, chiefly on his own account. Because in Danglard’s view, as someone under perpetual assault from worry and distress, which tended to overwhelm him in many threatening forms, Adamsberg represented a sure compass, from which he never took his eyes, possessed of calming virtues which were clinically healing. But the commissaire was right. Since the start of this investigation, they had been as it were lost in a dark forest, exploring paths that led nowhere, organising unsuccessful searches, interrogating left and right, without pause – but without profit.

  ‘No,’ said Adamsberg, ‘it’s not the fault of the facts in the case. It’s our own fault. We’ve missed something. And it’s making me itch till it hurts.’

  ‘You mean itching in the Lucionic sense?’

  ‘The Lucionic sense?’

  ‘Like your old pal Lucio’s itch.’

  ‘Yes, exactly, Danglard. There’s something not quite right about that couple Leblond and Lebrun.’

  ‘I thought you said the interview had gone very well.’

  ‘Very well. Perfectly, in fact.’

  ‘And that means something’s not quite right?’

  ‘Yes. Too smooth, too harmonious.’

  ‘Do you mean they’d prepared it? But that would be a pretty normal thing to do.’

  Adamsberg hesitated.

  ‘Possibly. And working together, in impeccable harness, they provided us with seven suspects. Four infiltrators and three descendants.’

  ‘And you don’t believe them?’

  ‘No, I do believe them, they’re serious leads, and we certainly ought to question the “guillotined” ones. That’s something right up your street, Danglard. I can’t see myself being able to discuss historical questions with the descendants of Danton, or of the executioner, or that Dumoulin person.’

  ‘Desmoulins.’

  ‘Danglard, why do you amass such a lot of stuff in your brain?’

  ‘Precisely that, to stuff it full, commissaire.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  To stuff it full, so that there was little room left to think about himself. A reasonable plan, though the results were generally imperfect.

  ‘Do these seven new suspects bother you?’ Danglard asked. ‘You think that Leblond–Lebrun are sending them to us just to confuse us?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘And perhaps they are trying to protect someone else? Their friend François Château for instance?’

  ‘Does that sound unreasonable to you?’

  ‘No, not at all. But the descendant of Sanson does intrigue me. The fact that descendants of Danton and Desmoulins come along to these sessions is borderline understandable. After all, without having any murderous intentions, they might have some reason to try and find out about the period when their ancestors were involved in dramatic historical events. But what on earth is the descendant of Sanson doing there? He was never mixed up in politics, he just did his job as executioner, and that was that. Anyway, what you’re thinking is that Leblond and Lebrun suspect that François Château is the killer?’

  ‘Or possibly that they have doubts about him. Or fears. They might be afraid of him and be protecting him so as not to become his victims.’

  ‘Where’s Froissy got to with the innkeeper François Didier?’

  ‘She’s working her way through the records. There was some problem around 1848, because of the Revolution that year, the archives are in a mess. She’s reached 1912, though, when the Château family was still living in the same place. But the town hall where the registration records are kept shuts up shop at 6 p.m, and nothing’s digitised. She’ll start again tomorrow.’

  ‘She’ll manage.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘After the Great War, the family could have dispersed. If she loses the thread at Château-Renard, she might have to look in the nearest big towns that were industrialising after that: Orléans, Montargis, Gien, Pithiviers, or smaller ones like Courtenay, Châlette-sur-Loing or Ramilly.’

  ‘Geography must be good material to stuff your head with too,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘It’s like cement,’ said Danglard with a smile.

  ‘With cracks though.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That can’t be fixed with Polyfilla.’

  ‘Or protected with the droppings of hooded crows.’

  ‘You never know. You could try putting them in front of your door and round the bed.’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  XXV

  ADAMSBERG DID NOT even go into his house b
efore sitting down on the wooden packing case under the beech tree. Three minutes later, Lucio appeared with three bottles of beer held between his fingers.

  ‘I’ve got something itching, Lucio,’ said Adamsberg, accepting a beer.

  The commissaire got up to open it against the bark of the tree.

  ‘Stay standing,’ said Lucio, ‘so I can see your face in the light of the street lamp. Ah yes,’ he said, returning to his own bottle. ‘This time it’s really itching, hombre. No question.’

  ‘It’s really bad.’

  ‘Not necessarily a spider. Could be worse. A wasp, a hornet even. You need to find whatever it was that stung you.’

  ‘That’s just it, I can’t, Lucio, I’m going round in circles. Fourteen suspects, less the four who have been eliminated. Ten left, plus a possible seven hundred others! All of them spectacular and living in another century, but I can’t get a proper grip on a single one of them. Even if I succeed in understanding what’s causing the itch, I’ll have wasted precious time.’

  ‘No, that’s never true.’

  Adamsberg leaned up against the tree.

  ‘Yes it is, because the thing that’s bothering me has nothing to do with the investigation.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I can’t allow myself to go roaming around looking for my hornet, when there’s some maniac out there killing people left, right and centre.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you’ve no choice, hombre. You haven’t found the guy, and your head’s empty. So what’s the difference? Can you remember when it started itching?’