by Fred Vargas
Joss had got to the forecast break. He would raise his eyes to the sky and give his estimate of the coming turn of the weather on Avenue du Maine, and then forecast wind, sea and visibility for Channel, Falmouth, Finisterre and Irish Sea as if this was vital information for his land-lubbing listeners. But nobody, not even Lizbeth, had ever dared tell him what to do with his shipping news. People listened with religious awe, as if they were stranded on Rockall with a radio tuned in to the BBC.
“Dull September weather,” Joss clarified, with his face to the heavens.
No clear spells before 1500 GMT, brightening around sunset. You can go out this evening if you like, but take a woolly. Wind fresh, moderating to light. Now here is the shipping forecast. General situation: anticyclone 1030 millibars off south-west Ireland, cold front strengthening south of Cornwall. Biscay, Fitzroy, Sole, east-north-east, 5 strengthening to 6; Fastnet, Lundy, Irish Sea, 6 strengthening to 7. Sea moderate, turning heavy locally in west to north-west gales.
Decambrais knew that the shipping forecast would take some time. He turned over his note-sheet to reread the ads he’d jotted down over the past two days:
Up and walked with my little boy (whom because of my wife’s making him idle, I dare not leave at home) … to excuse my not being at home at dinner to Mrs T; who I perceive is vexed because I do not serve her in something against the great feasting for her husband’s reading in helping her to some good penn’orths, but I care not.
Decambrais’s forehead creased as he scoured his memory. He was sure this was a quotation from something he’d read, once upon a time, somewhere, at some point in his life. Where? When? He moved on to yesterday’s puzzle-message:
Moreover if at that time there appeare any increase of such creatures as are engendered of putrefaction; when as rats, moules and other creatures accustomed to live underground do forsake their holes and habitations; it is a token of corruption of the same
The sailor had stumbled over the last phrase, pronouncing it “correction of the sane”. Decambrais reckoned it might have been a seventeenth-century text, but he was far from sure.
Most likely they were quotations collected by a nutter, by someone with an obsession. Or by a pedant. Or by some poor blighter trying to assert his own power over people by feeding them incomprehensible scraps, so as to raise himself above the vulgum pecus by forcing it to admit to its own crass ignorance. In which case, he was probably present somewhere in the crowd, gloating over the blank stares in people’s faces as they listened to the learned texts that the crier could barely decipher.
Decambrais tapped his pencil on the paper. Even with those assumptions, he thought, the purpose and personality of the culprit were still mysterious. While yesterday’s number 14, Up yours, you arseholes – one of a thousand variations of the same oft-heard theme – had the virtue of expressing its author’s rage in summary, crystal-clear form, the contorted, cryptic communications from the pedant were just unfathomable. He needed to enlarge the corpus before trying to decode it; he would have to listen on, day after day. And maybe that was actually all that the message-writer wanted – to have people hanging on his lips every morning.
The shipping forecast came to its abstruse conclusion, and Joss resumed his newscast in his fine deep voice that carried right to the other side of the square. He went through “The World This Week,” a regular feature that allowed him to put his own cast on recent international news. Decambrais caught the last few sentences: Life’s still tough in China, you can get flogged for a farthing. In Africa it’s not too hot either, like it always has been. Not likely to improve very soon seeing as no-one’s lifting a finger to help. Then he came back to the small ads with number 16: For sale, electric pinball machine, first registered 1965, topless backboard, perfect condition. Decambrais was waiting, almost impatiently, with his pencil at the ready. And when it came it was quite easy to make out among the I love … I hate … For sale … and Wanted. Decambrais imagined he saw a moment’s hesitation on the seaman’s face before he started on the message. Had the Breton identified the intruder?
“Nineteen,” barked Joss.
Moreover if at that time there appeare any increase of such creatures as are engendered of putrefaction …
Decambrais jotted it down on his sheet of paper. Always the same old stories, the same ancient stories of filth, vermin, and beasties. He pondered over the complete message on his page while Joss concluded his newscast with his customary extract from Everyman’s History of France, consisting exclusively of tales of ships lost at sea. Decambrais supposed that this Le Guern must have once been in a shipwreck. And it wasn’t too hard to guess that the boat must have been called Nor’Easter. That must have been when the fisherman’s mind sprang a leak just like his bathtub. Because just below the Plimsoll line, that apparently fit and firm-minded man was mad, clutching on to obsessions like they were lifebuoys. Just like me, really, Decambrais thought, though I’m neither fit nor firm.
“City of Cambrai,” Joss declaimed.
September 15, 1883. French steamer, fourteen hundred tons. Out of Dunkirk for Lorient, carrying iron rails. Ran aground at Basse Gouac’h. Boiler burst, killing one passenger. Twenty-one crew, all saved.
Joss didn’t need to signal to send his listeners on their various ways, because everyone knew that the shipwreck story always marked the end of the news. It was such a famous feature of the show that people had started to lay bets on how that day’s story would end – “all saved,” “all lost,” or half-and-half, and they settled up in the café opposite straight after, or else when they got to the office. Joss had misgivings about cashing in on tragedy, but he also realised that weeds had to grow back over wrecks on the seabed and that life had to go on – and that was no bad thing.
As he jumped off his podium he saw Decambrais putting his book away, and their eyes met. As if Joss didn’t know that the old hypocrite had just listened to the newscast! The old bore couldn’t bear to admit that a mere Breton fisherman could brighten his gloomy life. If Decambrais only knew what he’d found in this morning’s catch: Hervé Decambrais makes his own lace napkins. Hervé Decambrais is a queer. Joss had a moment’s temptation before putting the message in the pile of “better nots”. That made two of them – three perhaps, if you included Lizbeth – to know that Decambrais had a clandestine one-man lace-making business. In one way this made the bookworm less repulsive; for Joss had spent many a long winter evening watching his own father mending the nets.
Joss gathered up the rubbish, put his pulpit on his shoulder and, with the help of Damascus, put all his tackle away in the back room of Rolaride. Two cups of hot coffee were waiting, as they always were after the morning cast.
“I didn’t get number 19 at all,” Damascus said from his perch on a tall bar stool. “That thing about putrefaction. It wasn’t even a complete sentence.”
Damascus was young, burly, quite handsome, as open as the mouth of the Loire, but just not very bright. His eyes reminded Joss of looking at windows papered over on the inside. Was it to hide an excess of feeling, or a genuine vacancy? Joss couldn’t make up his mind on that. Anyway, Damascus never looked straight at anything, even when he was talking to you. His vague and woolly eyes ranged all around; his glance was as hard to pierce as a Channel fog.
“A nutter,” Joss explained. “Give up.”
“I’m not trying,” said Damascus.
“Hey, did you listen to my weather forecast?”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t you twig that summer’s over? Or are you trying to catch cold?”
Damascus was wearing shorts, a denim sleeveless V-neck top, and nothing else.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I can manage.”
“What good does it do you to have your biceps on show?”
Damascus downed the rest of his coffee.
“Look, I’m not selling lace napkins here. This is Rolaride: surfboards, rollerblades, skateboards and go-karts. This,” he said, pointing to the hair on his
chest, “is what moves the stuff.”
Joss suddenly became suspicious.
“Why did you say that about lace?”
“Because that old stick insect Decambrais sells it.”
“Do you know where he gets his napkins?”
“Sure I do. From a wholesaler in Rouen. Decambrais is not a fence. He even gave me a free session.”
“You asked for one?”
“Sure. So what? ‘Even Keel Counselling’ is what his nameplate says, doesn’t it? There’s nothing wrong in getting advice, is there, Joss?”
“The sign also says ‘Thirty minutes, 40 francs. Charges apply per quarter-hour.’ That’s pricey for a rip-off, Damascus. What does the old fogey know about keeping an even keel? He’s never even been on a boat.”
“It’s not a rip-off, Joss. You want me to prove it? ‘Damascus,’ he says to me, ‘you’re not showing off your body for the sake of your business, you’re doing it for yourself. Let me give you some friendly advice: Put on a proper jacket, and trust yourself. You’ll be just as good-looking and you’ll look less of a twit.’ How about that, then, Joss?”
“That’s fair enough, I grant you,” Joss agreed. “So why don’t you put on some sensible clothes?”
“Because I do what I like doing. Only Lizbeth’s afraid I’ll catch my death, and so is Marie-Belle. In five days’ time I’ll pull myself together and get dressed.”
“OK,” said Joss. “Because there’s real rough weather coming in from the west.”
“Decambrais?”
“What about Decambrais?”
“He really gets up your nose, doesn’t he?”
“Not quite, my friend. It’s me who gets on Decambrais’s nerves.”
“That’s a pity,” Damascus said as he cleared away the coffee cups. “Because I’ve heard one of his rooms is free. Would have suited you down to the ground. It’s right next to where you work, it’s got central heating, you get your room cleaned and a square meal every evening.”
“Bugger that,” said Joss.
“Right. But you can’t take the room because you can’t stand the man.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Really stupid, that is.”
“Extremely.”
“Then there’s Lizbeth as well. That’s a very big plus.”
“A huge plus.”
“Right. But you can’t do it. Since you can’t bear the guy.”
“Not quite. He can’t bear me.”
“Comes to the same thing as far as the perch is concerned. You just can’t do it.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Things don’t always work out as they should. Are you sure you can’t?”
Joss tightened his jaw. “I’m sure, Damascus. No point going on about it. End of story.”
Joss left Rolaride to saunter into the Viking, the café over the road. Now the Bretons had never got on well with the Norse, they’d even spent a few centuries barging their boats into each other’s, but Joss knew full well that he could easily have been born the other side of St Malo Sound and been a Norman instead. Bertin the barman, a tall man with ginger hair, fair eyes and high cheekbones, had a supply of calva like no other. What it did to your insides was nobody’s business, save that far from hastening your path to the grave it injected an elixir of everlasting youth. The apples from which it was made were supposed to come from Bertin’s own orchard, and in those parts, apparently, the cattle lived to a hundred and were still full of beans when they died. So just think what the apples were like.
“Rough patch this morning?” Bertin asked as he poured the precious liquid.
“Not too bad, really. Just that sometimes things don’t work out as they should. Would you say that Decambrais just can’t bear the sight of me?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said the Norman, with the caution characteristic of his race. “I’d say he thinks you’re a rough customer.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, let’s say it could sort itself out, given time.”
“Time, that’s all you ever talk about, you northerners. One word every five years, if you’re lucky. If we were all like you, things wouldn’t move very fast, you know.”
“But maybe they’d move better.”
“Time! But how much time, Bertin? Tell me that.”
“Not long. Ten years, maybe.”
“Well, that’s that, then.”
“So it’s something urgent, is it? Are you in need of an ‘Even Keel’ session?”
“Bugger that. I wanted his room.”
“Better get a move on, then. I hear there’s already a candidate. He’s stalling because the guy is crazy about Lizbeth.”
“Why should I get a move on? The old fraud thinks I’m a rough customer.”
“Have a heart, Joss. The fellow’s never even been on board. Anyway, aren’t you a just a bit rough really?”
“Never denied it.”
“So you see. Decambrais knows a thing or two. Say, Joss, did you understand your number 19 this morning?”
“No.”
“I thought it was a special. Like those other specials we’ve had these past few days.”
“Very special. I don’t like those specials one bit.”
“So why do you read them out?”
“They’ve been paid for, top rate too. And though the Le Guerns may be rough customers, they’ve never stolen a penny.”
IV
“I WONDER,” MUSED commissaire principal Adamsberg, “whether spending all this time in the force isn’t going to turn me into a flic.”
“You’ve said that before,” Danglard remarked. He was trying to set up the paperwork system for the still-empty steel cupboard. Danglard wanted to make a fresh start and keep things neat, like he’d said. Adamsberg entertained no such wish and had already laid out the files on the seats of the chairs around the conference table.
“Do you think there’s a risk?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be a disaster if twenty-five years in the service did make some kind of a flic out of you.”
Adamsberg stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, leaned back against the recently redecorated wall, and cast a nonchalant eye over the new incident room he’d been allocated just a month ago. New case, new room. The Brigade Criminelle attached to the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. No more cat burglars, handbag-snatchers, alleyway bruisers, idiots with flick knives – on or off the catch – and all those tons of papers after the fact. He’d heard that phrase “after the fact” twice over in recent days. Must come from being a flic, he reckoned.
Not that there wouldn’t be tons of paper after the fact landing on his desk here as well. But here, like everywhere else, he would find men who liked to chew through paperwork. In his early youth, just when he’d left the Pyrenees, he’d discovered that there really were people who lived on paper, and he’d quickly come to regard them with considerable awe, a degree of pity and boundless gratitude. Adamsberg mostly liked to walk, muse and act, and he knew that his tastes inspired little awe and much pity in many of his colleagues. An eloquent pen-pusher had once explained: “Paperwork, that’s to say drafting and then perfecting the charge sheet, is the mother of all Ideas. No Ink means no Idea! Ideas germinate in wordage like bean sprouts in blotting paper. An action not written down is a seed that can’t sprout.”
In that case, he thought, he must have left many a bean high and dry in his life as a flic. All the same, his long walks often left him with the feeling that not entirely uninteresting notions had started to squirm inside his head. Maybe they weren’t quite as straight up as bean sprouts, maybe they were more slippery and tangled, more like seaweed, but germination is germination whatever you say, and once you’ve got your idea it doesn’t matter two hoots whether it grew on a clean piece of blotting paper or on a rubbish tip. That said, Danglard, his number two, was a paper addict. He loved the stuff in forms high and low, from incunabula to kitchen rolls, including books new and old, flysheets, loose sh
eets and pre-punched bond. He could even think while sitting down, and as long as he had a beer to sip and a pencil to chew, he could be relied upon to germinate a whole tray of sprouts at a time. A worrier like Danglard, with his slack, heavy, slightly weary physique, cultivated fully grown ideas equipped with beginnings, middles and ends, quite unlike those that Adamsberg came up with.
They’d often come into conflict over this. Danglard had no time for ideas not issuing directly from conscious thought and he looked on informal, intuitive reckoning with deep suspicion. Adamsberg didn’t try to distinguish the one from the other, and in any case held no strong views. But when he was transferred to the Brigade Criminelle, Adamsberg stamped his foot until they allowed Danglard to come along, with a promotion to boot. He could not manage without that dogged mind and its carborundum edge.
Well, in the new digs they’d got, neither Danglard’s trained and powerful nor Adamsberg’s woolly wanderer would be switching from smashed windows to bag-snatchings. Their job had one name and one name only: murder. Murder ad infinitum, without a broken pane to let a healthy gust of teenage delinquency take your mind off the subject; murder ad aeternam, unrelieved by having to lend a handkerchief to the nice young lady who’d just lost her keys, her address book and a love letter. It would be total immersion in the nightmare of humanity, the killer species.
No, sir, no relief. Violent crimes only. Murder squad.
This unambiguous definition of their duties felt as sharp as a knife. Well, all right then, he’d got what he asked for, what with having solved a score and more mysteries through his walking, dreaming, straggly-thinking method. As a result they had put him right up on the front line. Tracking killers was something he’d been unexpectedly good at. Diabolical, in fact. That was Danglard’s term, to account for the surprising results of Adamsberg’s impenetrable mental meanderings.