A Climate of Fear

by Fred Vargas

  ‘He hangs him, but he spares his life?’ said Kernorkian. ‘What sense does that make?’

  ‘Just so that Bérieux can tell us that his attacker was wearing a white wig, from the revolutionary period. So we’d never move away from Robespierre.’

  ‘I see,’ said Estalère, concentrating hard and chewing the inside of his cheek.

  ‘Yeah, I get it,’ sighed Mordent.

  ‘And Lebrun, thinking ahead, even leaves a lock of white hair on the ground, just in case his hanged man does actually die. But Bérieux survives. He tells us about the wig, but that’s all. He does it for the same reason as his attacker: to keep us thinking “Robespierre society” and not Iceland. So that nobody ever finds out that he too had eaten the bodies of his fellow travellers, like all the others. He told me he went to the assemblies because he’d always been “keen on Robespierre”, but he was lying of course. He went because he was summoned, like the others.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mordent, with an even deeper sigh.

  ‘It was all working like clockwork for Lebrun, the wig sent us towards someone crazy enough to go around killing people while dressed in eighteenth-century costume. And which crazy individual might we think of? Someone who regularly puts on a white wig?’

  ‘Robespierre,’ said Retancourt.

  ‘Whom we’d probably have arrested sooner or later. A descendant of the Incorruptible himself, a man whose childhood was blighted by a grandfather fanatical about the legend, a man who played the role in the assembly as if he really was inhabited by his ancestor, yes, he had everything to make us think he was unbalanced, out of his mind, and a killer. That’s where Lebrun/Charles Rolben was leading us, I’m quite sure. Don’t forget he hanged Bérieux one night when he knew François Château would be working late at the hotel, alone, so without an alibi.’

  ‘He was sending his friend to the guillotine!’ said Froissy.

  ‘People like him don’t have friends, Froissy.’

  ‘But why,’ she asked, looking up from her laptop screen, ‘did he attack Masfauré after Alice Gauthier? Why not Gonzalez or Breuguel?’

  ‘Because once we started to investigate the Robespierre circle, we’d discover that Masfauré was their financial backer. So we’d think it was the association that the killer was trying to wipe out, not some former visitors to Iceland.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ repeated Mordent, breathing out heavily. ‘But to attack you was very risky.’

  ‘Not more than anyone else. What he really feared was that Amédée, the weak link in the chain, would end up giving in to my questioning him. And after I returned from Iceland, I had visited the two brothers again. So I must have come up with something there. And found out, somehow or other, what really happened on the island with the warm rock. So when I went off by car last night, he followed me. I started heading for Le Creux, which fulfilled his worst fears. This time, he can’t afford to let us survive. He’s ready. He goes straight there by main roads and gets there first, because I was driving along side roads to try and get rid of my gendarmes. He goes through the holes in the fence between the big house and the woods, he immobilises Céleste and her pet boar on the way, and he arrives at the pavilion where we are.’

  ‘And you didn’t hear him shooting in the forest?’ asked Voisenet.

  ‘It was over a kilometre away, and the wind was blowing to the west. If Lebrun hadn’t learned about my trip to Iceland, Danglard, he would have stayed his hand, hoping to get us fixated on the Robespierre circle and perhaps arresting François Château. We could have picked him up quietly on Monday night, when he went out via the car park. He wouldn’t have injured Céleste, and he wouldn’t have shot at us. I should remind you all that no private information about the movements of any member of the squad should be divulged to an outsider. Not even if someone goes out to take a leak or feed the cat. Not even if the outsider seems friendly, cooperative and frightened. Sorry, Danglard.’

  Danglard took a moment, then stood up, regaining his sober and dignified elegance. Adamsberg, who had no taste for grand gestures, especially when announced with solemnity, flinched slightly, but Danglard’s expression gave no hint of bombast.

  ‘I wish,’ he said calmly, ‘to offer you my congratulations. I on the other hand, have committed a very serious mistake, one which might, and indeed ought to have led to the death of four people, of whom you could have been one. Consequently, I will give you my resignation in writing this evening.’

  ‘No, impossible this evening,’ said Adamsberg, as if he were declining an invitation to dinner, ‘because it’s Sunday, and I don’t read things on a Sunday. Impossible tomorrow, because we have to tackle the report, and I’ll need your drafting skills. Impossible after that, because I’ve put in a request for three weeks’ , leave. Consequently you will be heading the squad in my absence.’

  Where’s he going? wondered Danglard. To the Pyrenees of course, to soak his feet in the green water of the Gave de Pau.

  ‘Is that an order?’ asked Mordent, whose neck had re-emerged from his shoulders.

  ‘It is indeed,’ Adamsberg confirmed.

  ‘That’s an order,’ Mordent hissed to Danglard.

  ‘You can all leave now,’ said Adamsberg gently. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  Veyrenc caught Adamsberg by the arm as he made for the door.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘if it wasn’t for those gendarmes, you’d have had it.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Because an afturganga never abandons those he has summoned.’

  ‘That’s true, I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Looking at it that way,’ Danglard muttered softly, following them out, ‘the afturganga also summoned the gendarmes from Saint-Aubin.’

  ‘Looking at it that way,’ said Adamsberg, ‘that’s an excellent observation from you, commandant, after recent days. I’ll be able to go off happily.’

  XLVII

  AFTER DINING TOGETHER, Adamsberg and François Château were strolling in the almost deserted garden at the end of the Ile de la Cité, walking around the statue of Henri IV. François Château was still struggling with the horror and intense anger into which he had been plunged by Adamsberg’s information about his secretary, Charles Rolben aka Lebrun.

  ‘Imagine! A magistrate turning cannibal! Charles! Charles stabbing people in order to eat them! No, I can’t visualise that, I’m quite unable to absorb it.’

  It was about the twelfth time Château had repeated that sentence in one form or another. This evening, he was certainly Château, not Robespierre. He wasn’t wearing the locket, Adamsberg felt sure of that.

  ‘Has he said anything?’ Château asked.

  ‘No, he’s refusing to say a word. The doctor has diagnosed a state of some kind of fury . . . hang on, Château, I’ll have to look it up . . . “a state of destructive fury”,’ Adamsberg went on reading from his notebook, ‘“with extreme signs of frustration and execration, no doubt emanating from a psychopathic personality.” He’s smashed everything he could find in his hospital room, television, phone, window, bedside table, he’s been put under sedation. Such violence, and you never noticed it in him?’

  ‘No,’ said Château with a shake of his head, ‘no. Except . . .’ He hesitated.

  ‘What kind of a judge was he?’

  ‘The kind they call “pitiless”. I didn’t want to pay too much attention to that kind of gossip, it bothered me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the extreme fondness he had for Robespierre’s Revolutionary Tribunal. It was rather upsetting. He sometimes said that, by comparison, our law courts were very lukewarm affairs.’

  ‘You were friends?’

  ‘Colleagues. He always kept his distance. He did have a very clear sense of social distinctions. I was just an accountant, and he was a judge. In the circles he moved in, he was on good terms with bigwigs, personalities from politics, high finance and so on. He used to entertain very lavishly, so Leblond told me, at his villa in Versailles, where all
the best people met. Or you could say all the worst.’

  ‘Was Leblond invited?’

  ‘He’s a distinguished psychiatrist at the hospital in Garches.’

  ‘That’s where Lebrun asked us to come, to provide him with police protection.’

  ‘Well, that’s complete nonsense,’ Château said, with a shrug. ‘Charles was never a psychiatrist. Is that what he told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose in a way that makes sense, because he was interested. He wanted to be able to “diagnose” people, he pestered Leblond with questions: could you tell, by such-and-such signs or expressions, or tone of voice, if a person was in a fragile state? Depressed, suffering remorse? Other people’s weaknesses, that’s what fascinated him. And when he invited Leblond to his soirées, he would give him a mission. Observe such-and-such politician or banker or industrialist and report back. Leblond was uneasy about this, he said he was a doctor not a spy on people’s souls, but Charles was very persuasive when he wanted to be. People did what he said. But sometimes,’ said Château with a smile, ‘it was me he was frightened of, or worse, forced to admire.’

  ‘When you were Robespierre.’

  ‘Yes, commissaire. He was a passionate Robespierrist. He had only one criticism of him, and that was his famous belief in virtue. The fact that Robespierre never wanted to be present at an execution. His distaste for blood. He said that was contemptible hypocrisy. “That, my friend,” Leblond used to say, “is an amateur analysis.” But Charles wouldn’t have it. He wanted Robespierre to be a man of action, not a man behind a desk, he’d have liked to see him cutting off heads, hoisting them on the ends of pikes, running through the streets with the people, going up on to the scaffold in person to operate the guillotine. I see now what that was about. Charles loved all that, blood, executions, massacres. And he loved himself. What did those two lives in Iceland matter if he could survive? But why did he start killing them all so many years later? Was he suddenly overcome with a murderous urge?’

  ‘More likely an urge for self-protection, Château. Alice Gauthier had confessed, and that threw into imbalance the whole equilibrium of the Iceland survivors. Amédée Masfauré might tell people after that, as might his father, or Victor. Control of the group was likely to escape Rolben. He decided he’d better get rid of the whole lot of them, once and for all.’

  ‘I just can’t conceive it,’ said Château for the thirteenth time. ‘Six murders, and he could have gone on to do eleven. And how is that woman, the one he tried to mow down with a machine gun in the woods, like the horrible Fouché in Lyon?’

  Adamsberg stood still.

  ‘Not out of danger yet,’ he said.

  ‘I’m so sorry. After the final assembly, the ones of the 8 and 9 Thermidor, I’m going to wind up the association.’

  ‘You told me that your finances – paid out by Masfauré, but on orders of Charles Rolben of course, as you may imagine – would allow you to complete your research.’

  ‘Never mind, commissaire, it would be indecent to carry on now. The curtain must fall. And when people learn who Charles was, what he’s done, and the name of the association of which he was secretary, we shall be swept away by scandal in any case, whatever happens. The page is turned.’

  Château sat down on a bench, his legs out in front of him, but his back still very straight, and Adamsberg lit a cigarette in the gathering dusk.

  ‘Why not?’ said Adamsberg. ‘But why not live him a different way?’

  ‘Live whom?’

  ‘Robespierre. You’re not wearing the teeth tonight.’

  ‘What teeth?’

  ‘His teeth. Retrieved by the surgeon on the night of the 9 Thermidor and given to Éléonore Duplay, passed on to François-Didier Château, and handed down from one male descendant to the next, till they reached you. You are descended from the presumed son of Robespierre.’

  ‘You’re inventing stories, commissaire.’

  ‘There,’ Adamsberg said, putting a finger to Château’s chest. ‘You wear them there, in a locket. And then He enters you. He expels François Château, body and soul, and comes back to life, he alone exists then, not you.’

  Château put out his hand to ask for one of Adamsberg’s cigarettes, no longer surprised at their tattered appearance.

  ‘Why go on holding out?’ Adamsberg asked as he gave him a light. ‘The story’s coming to an end.’

  ‘What does that matter to you? Whether the teeth exist or not? Whether I’m wearing them round my neck or not? Whether HE enters me or not? What interest can it possibly hold for you?’

  ‘I suppose my interest’s in “François Château, body and soul”. Who might end up being devoured by Him, why not? But this evening, I guess, I can’t bear the thought of anyone being devoured.’

  ‘There isn’t a solution,’ said Château gloomily.

  ‘Get a DNA analysis. Of the teeth and then of yourself. You’ll have your answer. You’ll know then whether you really are descended from him, or whether, back in 1790, some unmarried mother merely boasted that the great man was the father of her unborn child.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Why? Because you’re afraid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Afraid of being his descendant, or of not being?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Fears that spread inside doubt, like mushrooms in a cellar, can only be dealt with by having certain knowledge.’

  ‘That sounds so simple, commissaire.’

  ‘It does. But then you’ll know, and it will make a big difference.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want there to be a big difference?’

  ‘What will be different will be the historical facts,’ Adamsberg went on. ‘Whatever the result is, you can still go on acting in the persona of Robespierre if you like. But you’ll know which is him and which is François Château. And that’s not nothing. As for the teeth, you can put them where they ought to be: with the people, as Robespierre might say. Give them back to the people. Offer them to the Carnavalet Museum, where all they’ve got is a measly lock of his hair.’

  ‘Never!’ said Château. ‘No, never, do you hear me?’

  Adamsberg stubbed out his cigarette and stood up to take one more turn around the statue of Henri IV.

  ‘Well, I’m off now,’ he said at last, returning to the bench.

  And Adamsberg walked away, leaving Château to his heavy destiny, crossing the bridge over to the Left Bank, breathing in the smell of the Seine as he went. He paused, leaning on the parapet, to watch it flowing past, dirty, polluted, but still powerful. A quarter of an hour passed, more perhaps. Suddenly Château appeared at his side, by the wall, not looking exactly happy, but perhaps a little relieved, with a slight smile on his face.

  ‘I will do it, commissaire. The DNA test.’

  Adamsberg nodded. Then Château stood upright, with his ramrod back – which he would always have – and held out his hand.

  ‘Thank you, Citizen Adamsberg.’

  This was the first time Château had ever addressed him by his name, and not his rank.

  ‘May life be good to you, Citizen Château,’ Adamsberg replied, shaking his hand. ‘And may all your descendants be girls.’

  Adamsberg walked all the way home. Before he opened the little gate, he looked down at his palm. It’s not everyone who gets a chance to shake hands with Robespierre.

  XLVIII

  ADAMSBERG HAD WAITED to hear better news about Céleste before he left, and Danglard had driven him to the airport. They separated at the departure lounge. Next day, the commandant would have to start interrogating the killer, Charles Rolben, on his own.

  ‘How to tackle him, which way to get at him, what tactics to adopt – the whole thing is perplexing me.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Danglard. Rolben is a cruel man with no conscience, so there’s no point working out a tactic for him. He’ll never give in, whether you try kindness, wit, intimidation, or even your white-wine trick. H
e’s a master of violence, don’t expect to get anything out of him. Just line up our evidence and the witnesses. There’s just one thing that might make him go berserk. If you don’t seem to pay him much attention, if you act as though he were someone of little significance. Keep me posted. Are you going to see Céleste?’

  ‘Yes, this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, you can give her this then,’ said Adamsberg, taking her pipe out of his pocket. ‘That’ll cheer her up. And tell her Marc is safely back home again at the stud farm.’

  Once Adamsberg had gone through the departure gate, Danglard waited in the big lounge, holding tightly the pipe and the ladybirds that went with it. He wanted to wait for the plane to take off, before leaving the airport. It would be spring there now, the grass would be growing up again tall and green. The commandant looked at his watch.

  9.40. Danglard nodded. The plane was taking off: ultimate destination the island of Grimsey.

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  Copyright © Fred Vargas and Flammarion 2015

  English translation copyright © Siân Reynolds 2016

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