Have Mercy On Us All

by Fred Vargas

  “No, it’s not,” Danglard concurred.

  “To count as action art, it would have to be original, wouldn’t it?”

  “In theory, yes.”

  “What are we going to do with your radical action artist, then?”

  Danglard pursed his lips. “I think we take him off the board for now.”

  “And so what do we put in his place?”

  “Some oddbod who’s no business of ours.”

  Adamsberg walked up and down and straight through the decorators’ mess on the floor, getting plaster dust on his well-worn shoes.

  “May I remind you, sir, that we have been transferred?,” said Danglard. “Transferred to the Brigade Criminelle.”

  “I’ve not forgotten that,” said Adamsberg.

  “Has any offence been committed in these blocks of flats?”

  “No, no offence.”

  “Has there been any violence? Any threats of violence? Any intimidation of innocent parties?”

  “You know very well there’s been no such thing.”

  “So why are we discussing the matter?”

  “Because, Danglard, there is a presumption of violence.”

  “In those 4s?”

  “Yes. We have a silent campaign. A very serious campaign.”

  Adamsberg looked at his watch.

  “I’ve got time to take …”

  He opened his memory-jogger then closed it quickly again.

  “… to take Barteneau with me to see some of these places.”

  While Adamsberg went to fetch the jacket he’d left all crumpled on a chair, Danglard slipped on his own, making sure it hung correctly on his frame. He might not be a handsome man, but that was no reason not to keep himself looking shipshape and Bristol fashion.

  XI

  DECAMBRAIS CAME HOME quite late and only just had time before dinner to pick up the evening “special” that Joss had put aside for him.

  […] when come forth toade stooles and when fields and woods be covered in spiderwebs, when oxen ail or die in the meadow, likewise beastes in the forest; when bread doth quickly go mouldie; when new-hatched flies & worms & fleas can be seen on snow […]

  He folded up the sheet while Lizbeth was touring the house to call residents down to the dinner table. With a less radiant expression on his face than he’d had that morning, Decambrais put his hand on Joss’s shoulder.

  “We must talk,” he said. “Tonight at the Viking. I’d like us not to be overhead.”

  “Good trawling?”

  “Good but deadly. The fish is too big for us to handle.”

  Joss gave the old man a dubious glance.

  “No, Le Guern, I’m not exaggerating. Breton’s honour.”

  At dinner Joss managed to get a smile out of Eva’s half-hidden face by telling a partly fanciful family story, and he felt mightily pleased with himself. He helped Lizbeth clear the table, out of habit, mainly, but also as an excuse for having her company. He was just ready to set off for the Viking when she came down from her room dressed to kill in a shiny, tight-fitting black dress. She bustled past with a smile and Joss’s heart sank to his boots.

  Decambrais had stationed himself at the very back of the Viking, and was waiting for Joss in that overheated and smoke-filled room with two glasses of calva on the table in front of him.

  “Lizbeth went out in full battledress as soon the dishes were done,” Joss said as he pulled up a chair.

  “Yes,” said Decambrais without the slightest surprise.

  “She has a date?”

  “Lizbeth goes out in a gown every night except Tuesdays and Sundays.”

  “Is she seeing someone?” Joss asked anxiously.

  Decambrais shook his head.

  “No, she sings.”

  Joss frowned.

  “She’s a singer,” Decambrais repeated. “She performs. In a cabaret. Lizbeth has a voice to die for.”

  “Since when, dammit?”

  “Since she moved in and since I taught her the tonic sol-fa. She pulls in the crowds every night at the Saint-Ambroise. One day, Le Guern, you’ll see the name of Lizbeth Galston in lights. When you do, don’t forget.”

  “Can’t imagine I could forget. Where is this cabaret, Decambrais? Can you just go along to listen?”

  “Damascus goes along every night.”

  “Damascus? Damascus Viguier?”

  “Who else? Didn’t he tell you?”

  “We have coffee together every day of the week, and he’s never breathed a word about it.”

  “That’s only to be expected. He’s in love. Not something to be shared.”

  “Bloody hell! Damascus! But he’s thirty years old, he is.”

  “So is Lizbeth. Being overweight doesn’t make her any older.”

  Joss’s mind wandered for a moment towards the implausible conjunction of Damascus and Lizbeth.

  “Could that ever work?” he asked. “Seeing as you’re an expert on keeping an even keel.”

  Decambrais smiled sceptically.

  “Lizbeth hasn’t been impressed by men’s bodies for a very long time.”

  “Damascus is a nice lad, though.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “What does Lizbeth want from a man?”

  “Not much.”

  Decambrais downed a slug of calva. “Love’s not the topic of tonight’s seminar, Le Guern.”

  “I know. Tell me about it. The big fish you’ve hooked.”

  Decambrais’s face darkened.

  “Bad as that, is it?”

  “I fear it is.”

  Decambrais looked around the room and seemed reassured by the racket that people were making. Worse than marauding Norsemen stomping off a longboat.

  “I’ve tracked down one of the authors,” he said. “It’s Avicenna. An eleventh-century physician from Persia.”

  “Great,” said Joss, who was much more interested in Lizbeth’s affairs than he was in Avicenna’s.

  “I’ve found the passage quoted, in his Liber canonis.”

  “Great,” said Joss again. “Tell me, Decambrais, were you a teacher, like your dad?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Easy as that,” said Joss with a snap of his thumb and middle finger. “I’ve knocked about a bit as well, you know.”

  “Look, you might be bored by what I’m telling you, Le Guern, but you’d do well to listen properly.”

  “All right, then.” Joss felt he’d been whisked back to the classroom and brought to order by Ducouëdic Senior.

  “All the other authors he’s quoting are people who rewrote Avicenna. They’re all talking about the same thing. They’re skirting around the subject but not saying its name. Like vultures circling in the air before diving on their prey.”

  “Circling around what?” Joss wasn’t sure he was following.

  “Around the subject, Le Guern, I just told you. Around the sole real subject of all the ‘specials’. Around what they portend.”

  “So what do they portend?”

  A moment’s pause while Bertin served two more calvas. Decambrais waited for the hulking barman to move away before he whispered:

  “Plague.”

  “What plague?”

  “THE plague.”

  “The great plague of yore, you mean?”

  “None other. Black Death. The great affliction. The plague.”

  Joss took a deep breath. Could the bookworm be off his rocker? Could he be taking Joss for a ride? Joss had no way of checking up on the Liber canonis stuff, so Decambrais could lead him up the garden path if he wanted to. He cast his sailor’s eyes over Decambrais’s face. No, he certainly did not look as if he was pulling anyone’s leg.

  “Are you trying to set me up, Decambrais?”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because Mr Know-All sometimes likes to score a point over Captain Dimwit. University challenge beats the intellectually challenged. But watch it, professor. If you’re going to play games with
me, I can steer you out to sea as well, and leave you there without so much as a paddle.”

  “Le Guern, you’re a rough customer.”

  “Yep,” Joss agreed.

  “I guess you’ve beaten up a few guys in your time.”

  “I’ve lost count.”

  “Look, I’m not into competition. What would I get out of proving I’m an educated fellow?”

  “Power.”

  Decambrais smiled, and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Could we get back to business?” he suggested.

  “If you like. But why should I bother about it? For the last three months I’ve been reading out stuff that some guy has been copying out of the Bible. And so what? He’s been paying his fees, I’ve been reading the messages. What’s the problem?”

  “The messages belong to you, legally speaking. So if I go to the police with them tomorrow morning, I’d like you to know in advance. And I would also like you to come with.”

  Joss nearly choked on his calva.

  “Police? You’re off your head, Decambrais! What have the police got to do with it? This isn’t a red alert, after all!”

  “How do you know?”

  Joss restrained himself from uttering the words that rose in his throat, because of the room. He did not want to lose that room.

  “Listen, Decambrais,” he said in an effort to regain his self-control. “According to you we’re dealing with a guy who plays around copying out bits of old books about the plague. He’s obviously nutty, he’s got a bad case of bees in the bonnet. If we had to go the police every time a crackpot opened his mouth, well, we’d hardly have time for a drink.”

  “First point,” said Decambrais as he drank half of his glass of spirits. “The man is not adequately entertained by just copying out the extracts, because he pays you to bawl them out. He’s talking to the wide world, through you, anonymously. Second point: he’s getting closer. He’s still on the opening passages, he hasn’t yet got to the bits that contain the word ‘plague’ or ‘disease’ or ‘death’. He’s lingering on the doorstep, but he’s not standing still. Do you get that, Le Guern? He is moving forward. That’s what’s serious. He’s moving. But what is he moving towards?”

  “Well, he’s moving on towards the end of the books he’s quoting, I suppose. Common sense, really. People don’t begin a book at the end, do they?”

  “Actually, it’s several different books. I suppose you know how they end?”

  “How could I, I haven’t read any of the damn things!”

  “In death, Le Guern. That’s how they end. With tens of millions of people dying.”

  “So you imagine this crackpot is going to kill half the country?”

  “That’s not what I said. I’m saying he’s creeping step by little step towards a ghoulish ending. It’s not like he’s reading us The Arabian Nights.”

  “That’s only your opinion. I think he’s going round in circles. He’s been boring us with his foul air and his worms and beasts for more than a month, and one way or another these messages all say the same thing. I don’t call that moving forward.”

  “But he is moving forward, Le Guern. Do you remember the other messages that sound like random extracts from somebody’s diary?”

  “That’s my point. They’re completely unrelated. It’s just some fellow who eats, beds women, sleeps and so on. Hasn’t got anything else to say.”

  “The fellow in question is Samuel Pepys.”

  “Talk about a stupid name!”

  “Let me introduce you. Samuel Pepys, pronounced Peeps, 1633–1793. An upstanding yeoman of the city of London. And, as I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear, Secretary to the Admiralty.”

  “You mean a bigwig on the Harbour Board?”

  “Not exactly. But that’s not the point. The point is that Pepys’s diary runs from 1660 to 1669. The passages your crackpot has put into your urn all come from entries made in 1665. The year of the Great Plague of London, when seventy thousand people died. Do you see? Day by day, the ‘specials’ are moving inexorably forward towards the date when the plague broke out. The last one is almost there. That’s what I mean by moving forward.”

  For the first time Joss felt a twinge of fear. What the bookworm was saying made sense and seemed to fit together. But going to the police was something else.

  “The flics will be tickled pink when we tell them a lunatic is making us read a three-hundred-year-old diary, you know. They’re quite likely to think we’re the lunatics.”

  “Well, we won’t exactly say that to the police. We’ll say that there’s a madman about who’s making public forecasts of mass death. Then it’s their problem to do something about it. At least I’ll have a clear conscience.”

  “They’ll split their sides, even so.”

  “Quite. That’s why we’ll not go to see any old flic. I know a rather special policeman who doesn’t laugh at the same things as other flics. He’s the one we should go and see.”

  “You can go if you like, but count me out. Anyway, it would be a miracle if they took my word for gospel. My record isn’t exactly a blank slate, Decambrais.”

  “Nor is mine.”

  Joss was speechless. Hats off, old man. Hats off to the toff. Not only was the bookworm a genuine Breton, like you would never have guessed, but he’d got a record too. Which was presumably why he’d changed his name.

  “How long?” Joss asked plainly, refraining from asking what the charge had been, noblesse oblige.

  “Six months,” said Decambrais.

  “I got nine.”

  “Inside?”

  “Inside.”

  “Same here.”

  They were quits. A moment of heavy silence ensued.

  “OK, fine,” said Decambrais. “So you’re coming with?”

  Joss screwed up his face.

  “But they’re only words. Not sticks and stones. You know the rhyme? Words can never hurt you. If they could, we’d know about it by now.”

  “But we do know, Le Guern. Rhyme isn’t reason. Words have always been killers.”

  “Since when?”

  “Ever since someone shouted ‘Off with his head!’ and people rushed in to do the job. Since for ever.”

  “All right, you win,” said Joss. “And what if the police close down my business?”

  “Come on, Captain! Are you saying you’re frightened of policemen?”

  Joss pulled himself up to face this challenge.

  “Now look here, Decambrais, the Le Guerns may be rough customers, but who ever said we were afraid of the police?”

  “Well, there you are then.”

  XII

  “WHO’S THE FLIC we’re off to see?” Joss asked as they walked down Boulevard Arago at ten next morning.

  “Someone I came across a couple of times in the course of the … of my …”

  “Mishap?” Joss suggested.

  “My mishap.”

  “You can’t have the measure of a man if you’ve only seen him twice.”

  “You get a bird’s-eye view, and the picture looked good. On first meeting I thought he was in custody himself, and that’s a pretty good sign. He’ll give us five minutes of his time. The worst he can do is log our call and forget it. At best he’ll get interested enough to find out a few things for himself.”

  “Things after the fact.”

  “After the fact.”

  “Why would he get interested?”

  “He likes woolly stories and tracks that lead nowhere. At least, that’s what one of his bosses was reproaching him for when I first ran across him.”

  “Are we going to see a little fish, then?”

  “Would that bother you, Captain?”

  “Look, I’ve already told you, Decambrais. I don’t give a damn about the whole business.”

  “He’s not small fry by any means. He’s a commissaire principal now, and he’s got his own squad. Murder Squad.”

  “Murder? Well, well, he’ll really lap up our quotations
game, won’t he?”

  “How do you know?”

  “And thanks to what did a woolly mind get to become commissaire principal?”

  “He’s brilliant as well as woolly, so I was given to understand. I mean, I said woolly, but I could also have said magical.”

  “I won’t argue over words.”

  “I like arguing over words.”

  “I’d noticed.”

  Decambrais came to a halt in front of a tall archway entrance.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  Joss surveyed the front of the building.

  “They could use a decorator on this place.”

  Decambrais leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms.

  “What’s up? Are we backing out, then?”

  “We have an appointment six minutes from now. He must be very busy. So we keep to time.”

  Joss leaned against the wall next to Decambrais, and they waited side by side.

  A man walked past with his eyes on the ground and his hands in his pockets. He sauntered into the building without seeing the pair of them standing against the wall.

  “I think that’s him,” Decambrais hissed.

  “The swarthy little fellow? You must be joking. With that old grey jumper and crumpled jacket? Needs a haircut, too. I’m not saying he runs a market stall, but no way is that a commissaire principal!”

  “I’m telling you that’s him. I recognised his gait. He pitches.”

  Decambrais kept his eye on his watch until the appointed hour, and then took Joss into the building, or rather, the building site.

  “I remember you, Ducouëdic,” said Adamsberg as he showed the two men into his office. “Well, to be honest, I didn’t remember straight off, but I took out your file after your call and that brought you back. At the time we talked a bit about things. They weren’t going too well, were they? I think I advised you to leave the profession.”

  “Which is what I did,” said Decambrais, raising his voice to cover the clatter of the power drills, though Adamsberg seemed not to notice them.

  “Did you find another job when you got out?”

  “I took up consulting,” said Decambrais, omitting the sub-letting and lace-making sides of his life.

  “Tax consulting?”

  “No, personal consulting. Even Keel Counselling, that’s what I call myself.”