by Fred Vargas
“He’s been asleep for three-quarters of an hour,” said Noël.
Adamsberg put a hand on his shoulder.
“Wake up, Arnaud Damascus Heller-Deville. I’m going to tell you your story.”
Damascus opened his eyes, then shut them again.
“I’ve heard it before.”
“Is your father Heller-Deville, the aircraft manufacturer?”
“He was. He smashed himself to pieces in his private plane two years ago, thank the Lord. May his soul not rest in peace.”
“Why not?”
“No reason,” said Damascus, his lips beginning to quiver. “You’ve no right to interrogate me about it. Ask me about anything else. Anything at all.”
Adamsberg thought back to what Ferez had said and let the matter drop.
“You were sentenced to five years, you did your time at Fleury prison, and you came out two and half years ago,” Adamsberg said with his eye on his notes. “For manslaughter. Your girlfriend went out an upstairs window.”
“She jumped out.”
“That’s what you kept on saying like a speak-your-weight machine during the trial. Your neighbours told a different story. They’d heard you scrapping like cats for weeks. They’d been on the point of calling the police several times. What was the quarrel about, Damascus?”
“She was off her head. She shouted all the time. She jumped.”
“You’re not in court, Damascus, and you can’t ever be tried again. So you can change the tape.”
“No.”
“Did you shove her?”
“No.”
“Heller-Deville, did you or did you not kill four men and a woman last week? Did you strangle them?”
“No.”
“Are you good with locks?”
“I learned.”
“Had those four blokes and the girl done you any wrong? Did you do them in? Like you did for your girlfriend?”
“No.”
“What did your father do?”
“Make money.”
“What did your father do to your mother?”
Damascus clammed up again.
The telephone rang, the magistrate was on the line.
“Has he said anything?” the magistrate asked.
“No, he’s shutting his mouth.”
“Any prospect of getting it to open?”
“Nope.”
“House search?”
“Nix.”
“Get a move on, Adamsberg.”
“No. I want to keep the man in custody, sir.”
“No way, commissaire. You have no grounds at all for a charge. Get him to talk or get him out.”
“Viguier is not his real name and he’s carrying a fake ID. We’re dealing with a Mr Arnaud Damascus Heller-Deville who got five years for manslaughter. Will that do by way of grounds for custody?”
“No, it weakens the case further. I remember the Heller-Deville business very well, Adamsberg. He went down because the jury was swayed by the neighbours’ statements in the witness box. But the defence made just as good sense as the case for the prosecution. I won’t have a man lumbered with plague-mongering just because he went down for five years.”
“The doors were picked by a professional.”
“Look, you’ve got any number of jailbirds knocking round your square, if I’m not very much mistaken. Ducouëdic and Le Guern have got just as much form as Heller-Deville. All his probation reports are first-rate.”
Justice Ardet was a decisive man as well as a sensitive and cautious magistrate but these uncommon virtues were not what Adamsberg needed this evening.
“If we release this suspect,” Adamsberg said, “I will not answer for the consequences. He will either commit another murder, or give us the slip for good.”
“No custody order,” the magistrate hammered. “Produce some evidence by seven thirty tomorrow evening, Adamsberg. And I said evidence, not guesswork. Hard evidence. Like a confession. Good night, commissaire.”
Adamsberg hung up and said nothing for a long while. Nobody dared interrupt the commissaire’s silence. He leaned on the wall, then paced around the room with his head down and arms folded. Danglard noticed the strange glow beginning to suffuse Adamsberg’s cheeks and brow, the light of his concentrated thought. But however hard he concentrated he would never find the right angle to crack Arnaud Damascus Heller-Deville. Because Damascus may have murdered his girlfriend and he may be carrying fake ID, but Damascus was not the monger. He would eat his hat if that blank-eyed lad knew Latin. Adamsberg left the room to make a call and came back in.
“Damascus,” he began again as he sat on a chair and drew it closer to the suspect. “Damascus, you’ve been spreading the plague. You’ve been slipping messages into Joss’s urn for a month and more. You’ve been breeding rat fleas and releasing them underneath the front doors of your victims. These fleas are carriers of bubonic plague, they’re infected, and they bite. The corpses have fatal flea-bites all over them, and they’ve turned black. They died of plague, the whole lot of them died of the plague.”
“Yes,” said Damascus. “That was in the papers.”
“You’re the one who’s been painting black 4s on people’s doors. You’re the one who’s been spreading the fleas. You’re the murderer.”
“No.”
“There’s one thing you’ve got to understand, Damascus. The fleas you lug around make no distinction between your body and any other. You’ve got them on you. You don’t change your clothes very often and you’re not very clean.”
“I washed my hair last week,” Damascus protested.
Once again Adamsberg felt unnerved by the candid look in the young man’s eyes. It was the same innocent look that his sister Marie-Belle had. Almost simple-minded.
“These plague fleas are crawling all over you. But you’re safe, aren’t you, as you’ve got the diamond. So the fleas can’t do you any harm. But what if you didn’t have the ring, Damascus?”
Damascus clenched his hand to hide the stone.
“If you’re not involved in all this, what difference would it make? Because in that case you wouldn’t have any fleas. Do you get me?”
Adamsberg left a pause and kept his eyes trained on the twitches on the young man’s face.
“Give me the ring, Damascus.”
Damascus did not move.
“Just for ten minutes, Damascus. I’ll give it back, promise.”
Adamsberg stretched out his hand and waited.
“The ring, Damascus. Take it off.”
Damascus didn’t budge and everyone else in the room stood stock still too. Danglard could see the young man’s muscles tensing. Something was beginning to give.
“Give it here,” Adamsberg repeated, with his hand still out. “What are you scared of?”
“I can’t take it off. It’s a solemn vow. The girl who jumped. It was her ring.”
“I’ll give it back to you. Come on, take it off.”
“No,” said Damascus, and he sat on his left hand.
Adamsberg got up and walked around.
“You’re scared, Damascus. You know that you’ll be bitten as soon as the ring is off your finger, you know that this time they’ll pass the disease on to you. And that you’ll die like the others.”
“No. It was a vow.”
No goal, Danglard thought, with shoulders slumped. A good try, but no goal. The diamond story couldn’t drive that far. A hopeless angle.
“OK, take your clothes off.”
“What?”
“Undress, down to the altogether. Danglard, get a bin bag.”
A man Adamsberg couldn’t tell from Adam popped his head round the door.
“Martin,” he said by way of self-introduction. “Entomology department. You called, sir.”
“I’ll be with you in a minute, Martin. Damascus, take your clothes off.”
“In front of all these people?”
“What’s the problem? Noël, Voisenet, Favre, leave the roo
m please. Apparently he’s shy.”
“Why should I strip?” Damascus asked angrily.
“I want your clothes and I want to see your body. So bloody well get undressed!”
Damascus scowled as he carried out the order reluctantly.
“Put it all in the bag,” said Adamsberg.
When Damascus had finished and was wearing nothing but his diamond ring, Adamsberg knotted the drawstring and took the bag out to Martin.
“Rush job. Test for those …”
“Nosopsyllus fasciatus.”
“Exactly.”
“For tonight?”
“Tonight, as soon as you can.”
Adamsberg went back into the interview room where Damascus was standing with his chin on his chest.
Adamsberg lifted one of his arms then the other.
“Stand with your feet eighteen inches apart.”
Adamsberg stretched the skin around the groin to the left then to the right.
“Sit down, that’s over. I’ll get you a towel.”
He went to get a green bath towel from the washroom and threw it to Damascus, who caught it in the air.
“Aren’t you cold?”
Damascus shook his head.
“You’ve got bites, young man. Flea bites. Two in your right armpit, one in your groin on the left-hand side, and three on the right. Nothing to worry about, you’ve got your ring.”
Damascus carried on looking at his feet as he stood there wrapped in the towel.
“What have you got to say about that?”
“There are fleas in the shop.”
“Human fleas, you mean?”
“Yes. The back room isn’t very clean.”
“They’re rat fleas, and you know that full well. We’ll wait a little while, an hour or so, and then we’ll know. Martin will ring back. He’s a tremendous expert. One look at a rat flea and he’ll tell you its name and date of birth. You can get some sleep if you want. I’ll get you some bedclothes.”
He took Damascus by the arm and led him to the cell. The young man remained calm, but he had lost his bewildered indifference. He’d become worried and tense.
“It’s a brand new cell,” Adamsberg said as he handed him two blankets. “And the bedclothes are clean.”
Damascus lay down without a word and Adamsberg shut the door on him. He wandered back to his office feeling uneasy. He’d got the monger, he’d been proved right, but it left him with a bad feeling. All the same, the man had slaughtered five people in seven days. Adamsberg forced himself to remember, to recall the victims’ faces, and the woman stuffed under a truck.
Nobody said anything for the next hour as they waited, and Danglard didn’t dare express a view. You couldn’t rely on there being plague fleas on Damascus’s clothes. Adamsberg doodled on a pad in his lap. His face was looking drawn. It was one thirty in the morning. Martin rang at ten past two.
“Two Nosopsyllus fasciatus,” he announced gravely. “Both living specimens.”
“Thanks, Martin. Incredibly valuable items. Don’t let the little lasses hop away, because they’d take the entire prosecution case with them.”
“Lads, sir,” the entomologist countered. “They’re males.”
“Sorry, Martin, I didn’t mean to cause offence. Send the clothes back here, could you, so the suspect can get dressed again.”
Five minutes later Justice Anglet, who’d been woken up with the new information, gave his consent for the police to remand Damascus in custody.
“You were right, sir.” Danglard’s eyes were bleary and he could hardly lift his sagging body from the chair. “You were right,” he conceded, “but only by a whisker.”
“Whiskers can be tougher than you think. You just have to pull on them gently and persistently.”
“May I point out, sir, that Damascus has not confessed.”
“But he will. He knows the game’s up. He’s not stupid.”
“I can’t agree with that.”
“No he’s not, Danglard. He’s only pretending to be dim. But since he’s very clever he’s extremely good at it.”
“I’ll eat my hat if that lad reads Latin,” Danglard said as he left the room.
“Bon appétit, my friend.”
Danglard switched off his computer, picked up the basket and its sleeping woolly ball, put it under his arm, said goodbye to the night staff. In the hallway he came across Adamsberg hauling a camp bed and blanket out of the locker room.
“Hell,” he said, “are you going to bed down here?”
“In case he sings.”
Danglard made no comment and went on his way. What comment could he make, anyway? He knew Adamsberg wasn’t keen on going back to his flat where the wreck of his collision was still smouldering. He’d be over it by tomorrow. Adamsberg could bounce back with incredible speed.
Adamsberg set up the camp bed and folded the blanket to make a pillow. He had the monger a few feet away. The fourmonger, the scary lettermonger, the rat-flea-monger, the plague-monger, the monger who choked and charcoaled his victims. The charcoal was his final touch. And his only great howler.
He took off his jacket and his trousers and put his mobile phone on the chair. Ring, for heaven’s sake.
XXXIII
THE MAIN BELL rang in the dark of night, repeatedly, insistently, urgently. Brigadier Estalère unbolted the side door and found before him a man in a great sweat wearing a hastily buttoned two-piece suit and a tieless shirt revealing a chestful of thick black hair.
“Let me in, quick,” the man said as he barged in to the shelter of the Brigade Criminelle. “I want to make a statement. About the killer, the plague-man.”
Estalère didn’t dare alert the commissaire principal so he woke up his deputy Danglard.
“Bloody hell, Estalère,” said Danglard into the phone by his bed. “Why did you call me? Rouse Adamsberg, he’s napping in his office.”
“That’s just it, commissaire. I’m afraid of getting a row from the chief if it’s not important.”
“And you’re not so frightened of me, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re wrong. You’ve been working for Adamsberg for six weeks now. In all that time, have you once heard him shout or scream?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you can stay on for the next thirty years and you still won’t hear him let rip. But you’re about to get the wrong side of my tongue, young man. Fucking well wake the man up. Anyway, he doesn’t need much sleep. And I do.”
“Got that, sir.”
“Wait a minute. What does the guy want?”
“He’s in a blue funk, he thinks the killer is going to kill him.”
“We decided ages ago to stop looking after scaredy-cats. Ten a penny all over Paris. Chuck him out and leave Adamsberg alone.”
“He says he’s a special case, sir.”
“Chickenhearts always think they’re special cases. If they didn’t they wouldn’t panic.”
“No, sir, but he says he’s just been bitten by fleas.”
“When?” Danglard sat up in bed.
“Just now.”
“OK, Estalère. Wake him up. I’ll come over too.”
Adamsberg splashed cold water on his face and chest, told Estalère to get him a black coffee (the dispenser had at last been installed, less than twenty-four hours ago) and shoved the camp bed to the back of his office.
“Bring him in, brigadier.”
“Brigadier Estalère,” brigadier Estalère added.
Adamsberg nodded and took out his memory-jogger. With the monger locked up in a cell, he might have time to get to grips with his nameless horde of a squad. He entered: baby face, green eyes, scaredy-cat adds up to Estalère. Which prompted him to add: entomology plus fleas plus Adam’s apple equals Martin.
“What’s his name?”
“Roubaud, forename Kevin,” the brigadier supplied.
“How old?”
“Around thirty,” Estalère guessed.
“Got a flea bite in the night, is that the story?”
“Yes, sir, and he’s doing it in his pants.”
“As he should be.”
Estalère showed Kevin Roubaud to Adamsberg’s office while balancing a cup of sugarless black coffee in his left hand. Adamsberg took no sugar. Unlike his chief, Estalère liked personal quirks, he liked remembering them, and he liked showing that he remembered them.
“I didn’t put any sugar in, commissaire,” he said as he put the coffee on the desk and Roubaud into a chair.
“Thanks, Estalère.”
The customer sat there in a sweat and a fuss, running his fingers back and forth through the mat of hair on his chest. You could smell his sweat and his sweat smelled of booze.
“Never previously had fleas?” Adamsberg queried.
“Never.”
“Are you sure the bites are fresh tonight?”
“I was bitten less than two hours ago, it was the bite that woke me up. That’s why I rushed round here to let you know.”
“Are there any 4s on the doors of your stair, Mr Roubaud?”
“Two of them. The janitor put one on her window, in felt pen, and so did the guy on the fifth floor left.”
“Then it isn’t the killer. And these aren’t his fleas. You can go back to bed.”
“Are you joking?” Roubaud raised his voice. “I demand police protection.”
“The monger daubs every door on a stair save for one before he lets out his fleas,” Adamsberg said insistently and slowly. “Your fleas are of a different kind. Did anyone come to stay in the past few days? Did anyone drop in with a pet?”
“Yes.” The man’s face fell. “A friend of mine came by the day before yesterday. With his dog.”
“So there you are. Go home, Mr Roubaud, and get back to sleep. We’re all going to nap for the next hour or two, it’ll do us all good.”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“If you’re that worried,” Adamsberg said as he stood up, “call in pest control and be done with it.”
“That won’t be any use. The killer has got his finger on me, and he’s going to get me, fleas or no. I demand police protection.”
Adamsberg went round behind his desk, moved back to lean on his wall and took a better look at Kevin Roubaud. Thirty-ish, a bruiser and a worrier. There was something shifty about the look in his big, dark, slightly bulging eyes.