Have Mercy On Us All

by Fred Vargas

  “A family avenger, like?”

  “Exactly. Take a sample of the charcoal too and send it off for analysis, rush job.”

  When they got her back to the station the old lady caused quite a stir. She had brought a big tin full of girdle cakes which she waved gaily at Damascus when she stopped in front of his cell. Damascus smiled.

  “Nothing to worry about, Arnaud,” she said without even trying to lower her voice. “Job’s done. They’ve got them all, the whole lot of them.”

  Damascus smiled even wider, took the tin that his granny was holding through the bars of his cell door, and went back with it to sit quietly on his bench.

  “Set up the cell next to Damascus’s for her,” Adamsberg instructed. “Get a mattress from the locker room and make it all as comfortable as you can. She’s eighty-six years old. Clémentine,” he said as he turned back to the old lady, “no more nonsense now. Do you want to give your statement right away, or are you feeling too tired?”

  “Right away,” she said determinedly.

  * * *

  Around six in the evening Adamsberg went out for a walk with his head buzzing with all that Clémentine Courbet née Journot had told him. He’d listened to her for two and a half hours, then he’d put the old lady up against the young man. Their certainty that the last three torturers would be dead very soon didn’t waver for an instant throughout the interviews. Not even when Adamsberg proved that the time lag between the release of the fleas and the deaths of the victims was too short, much too short, for the deaths to have been caused by plaguy fleas. The scourge is ever ready and at the command of God who brings it down and raises it away, as it pleaseth the Lord, Clémentine kept repeating, quoting word for word the “special” of 19 September. Nor even when Adamsberg showed them the negative lab test results which proved that the fleas were utterly harmless. Nor even when he showed them photographs of the choke marks on the victims’ necks. The faith they had in their insects was utterly unshakeable – and just as steady was their firm belief that three more men would soon die, one in Paris, one in Troyes, and the third in Châtellerault.

  He wandered round the streets for more than an hour and came to halt outside the walls of the Santé prison. Up top a prisoner had put his foot out through the bars. There was always someone twiddling his toes through the bars over Boulevard Arago. Not a hand, but a foot. Unshod, bare. Some guy like himself who only wanted to go for a walk outside. He looked up at that foot, and then thought of Clémentine’s and then of Damascus’s, twirling in the sky. He didn’t think they were completely mad, save down that dark passageway where their phantom led them. But the foot went suddenly back inside the prison bars, which reminded Adamsberg forcibly that there was a third member of the team still out there, getting ready to complete the job under way, be it in Paris, in Troyes or in Châtellerault.

  XXXV

  ADAMSBERG CUT OFF towards Montparnasse and made his way to place Edgar-Quinet. There were fifteen minutes to go before Bertin’s evening thunder-roll.

  He swung through the door of the Viking, wondering if the burly barman was going to lift him up by his shirt front, like he’d done to yesterday’s awkward customer. But Bertin didn’t budge as Adamsberg sidled under the longboat prow and sat down at his usual table. He didn’t budge, but he didn’t say hallo either, and went out as soon as Adamsberg had sat down. The commissaire was aware that it wouldn’t take more than two minutes for everyone in the neighbourhood to know that the flic who nabbed Damascus was in the café, and he would soon have a posse on top of him. Maybe that’s what he’d come for. It was even possible that the Decambrais crowd would move their dinner to the Viking this evening. He laid his mobile phone on the table and waited.

  They came five minutes later. An angry mob, led by Decambrais, with Lizbeth, Castillon, Le Guern, Eva and several others in the tail. Le Guern alone seemed unbothered. Upsetting news had ceased upsetting him long ago.

  “Sit down,” Adamsberg ordered, raising his head and facing up to the hostile eyes bearing down on him. “Where’s the girl?” he asked, as he couldn’t see Marie-Belle anywhere.

  “She’s ill,” Eva said flatly. “She’s in bed. Because of you.”

  “You sit down as well, Eva,” Adamsberg said.

  The young woman had undergone a transformation. Adamsberg saw unimagined depths of hatred in her face, which had lost its old-world look of elegant melancholy. Yesterday she made you feel sorry for her. Tonight she gave you the shivers.

  Decambrais broke the silence. “Let Damascus go, commissaire. You’re up the garden path, you’ve put your foot in the compost. Damascus is a gentle soul and a kind heart. He hasn’t killed anyone, ever.”

  Adamsberg held his counsel and went to the toilets to call Danglard on his mobile. Put two men on Marie-Belle’s door, Rue de la Convention. Then he went back to his seat at table, opposite the aged bookworm who returned his stare with haughty pride.

  “Give me five minutes, Decambrais,” he said, splaying the fingers of his raised hand. “I’ll tell you a story. And I don’t give a damn whether you like it or not, I’ll tell it all the same. And when I tell stories, I go at my own speed and I do it in my own words. I’ve been known to put my deputy to sleep.”

  Decambrais jutted his chin and kept his mouth shut.

  “In 1918,” Adamsberg began, “Emile Journot, a rag picker by trade, came back from the Great War in one piece.”

  “Fuck that,” Lizbeth said.

  “Shut up, Lizbeth, he’s telling a story. Give him a break.”

  “Four years in the trenches and not a scratch to show for it. In other words, a miracle. In 1915, the rag picker saved his CO’s life by going out into no man’s land and carrying him back to the trench. Before he was evacuated to the rear, the CO expressed his gratitude by giving Private Journot his ring.”

  “Commissaire,” Lizbeth butted in, “we’ve not come to listen to bedtime stories about the good old days. Don’t pull the wool over our eyes. We’ve come to talk about Damascus.”

  Adamsberg looked at Lizbeth. She had gone pale. It was the first time he’d seen a black person go pale. Her complexion had gone grey.

  “But Lizbeth, Damascus’s story is an old story about bygone days. Let me go on. It turned out Private Journot hadn’t been over the top for nothing. The captain’s ring had a diamond on it the size of a pea. All through the war Emile Journot kept the ring on his finger, but he caked the diamond with mud and turned it into his palm, so he wouldn’t get it stolen. He was demobbed in ’18, he went back to his hovel in Clichy, but he didn’t sell the ring. In Emile Journot’s mind the ring had been his salvation, and so it was sacred. Two years later, plague broke out in the shanty and swept away a whole street. But the Journots – Emile, his wife and their six-year-old daughter Clémentine – weren’t affected. People said things under their breath, then came out with accusations. A doctor working in the shanty told Emile that diamonds protect you from the scourge.”

  “Is that nonsense true?” Bertin asked from behind the bar.

  “It’s true in books,” Decambrais said. “Get on with it, Adamsberg. It’s slow going.”

  “I warned you. If you want news of Damascus, you’ll have to go slow with me right to the end.”

  “News is news,” Joss reflected. “Can be old, can be new, can be fast, can be slow. But news is still news.”

  “Thank you, Le Guern. Emile Journot was thereupon accused of being in control of the plague, maybe of spreading it on purpose.”

  “We don’t give a fuck for your Emile,” said Lizbeth.

  “Lizbeth, our Emile is Damascus’s great-grandfather,” Adamsberg retorted rather sharply. “The family could have got lynched, so they scarpered from the Hauptoul shanty under cover of darkness. The little girl rode piggyback as the father strode across the waste tips where plague-infected black rats lay dying. The diamond kept them safe. They took refuge at a cousin’s place in Montreuil and didn’t go back to Clichy until the whole awful busin
ess was over. But now they had standing in the neighbourhood. Before, they were hated and scorned; now they’re treated as heroes, as leaders, as the lords of the plague. Their miraculous story gave them status in the rag pickers’ world, it became their badge of office. Emile started taking the ring and all the plague stuff completely seriously. When he died, his daughter Clémentine inherited his ring, his status and all his notions about plague. She married and brought up her own daughter, Roseline, to believe in the Journots’ special force. And that daughter married Heller-Deville.”

  “You’re getting further and further away from the point,” Lizbeth muttered.

  “I’m getting nearer,” Adamsberg retorted.

  “Heller-Deville? You mean the aircraft manufacturer?” Decambrais asked stiffly.

  “That’s what he became later on. At this point in time he was a lad of twenty-three brimming with ambition, brains and brutality, and he wanted to have the whole world for breakfast. And he’s the father of Damascus.”

  “Damascus’s name is Viguier,” Bertin said.

  “No, it’s not. Damascus’s real name is Heller-Deville. He was brought up by a father who was a bruiser and a mother forever breaking down in tears. Heller-Deville beat his wife around and used his fists on his son; and he left them, more or less completely, when the boy was seven years old.”

  Adamsberg looked at Eva, who suddenly put her head down to hide her face.

  “What about the girl?” asked Lizbeth, who was beginning to get interested.

  “They didn’t say anything about Marie-Belle. She was born long after Damascus. He ran away to Clichy to stay with his grandma Clémentine whenever he could. She comforted the boy, gave him back his self-confidence, and propped him up with oft-told tales about his glorious Journot side. What with his father’s rough handling and then his disappearance, Damascus leaned completely on his famous Journot side, which turned into his sole source of strength. Granny solemnly gave him the diamond ring when he reached the age of ten, the ring that was supposed to give him lordship over the scourge of God. What was at the start just a toy soldier for the boy got deep inside him and grew into a fantastic, but still make-believe tool of vengeance. Over the years, scrabbling through the second-hand bookstalls in the flea markets at Saint-Ouen and Clignancourt, Granny built up an impressive collection of books about the plague – about the 1920 outbreak, her own plague so to speak, and also about all the other epidemics, which fed into and swelled the family legend. It’s not hard to see how that happened. Damascus grew up and had no trouble consoling himself on his own with all those ghastly accounts of the Black Death. They didn’t scare him; quite the opposite. He’d got the diamond that belonged to Emile the Great, the war hero and the master of the plague. The stories comforted him, they were like a natural way of overcoming the damage done to him in childhood. They were his lifebuoy. Do you all follow?”

  “I still can’t see the connection,” Bertin said. “It doesn’t prove anything.”

  “So Damascus turned eighteen. He was a weakling – a scrawny, lopsided weed. He did physics, probably to compete with his father. But he was also a great reader, as well as being a classicist, a plague expert, and an outstanding and wide-ranging scientist to boot. And he had a phantom in his head. He beavered away at his studies, specialising in aeronautics. At the age of twenty-four he invented a device for manufacturing superlightweight honeycomb steel alloys which makes them a hundred times less likely to fail – I didn’t really understand all the details, but that’s roughly it. Don’t ask me why, but the special steel was something that aircraft companies would have given their eye teeth to lay hands on.”

  “You mean to say that Damascus invented something?” Joss exclaimed in amazement. “At the age of twenty-four?”

  “Absolutely. And he wanted a handsome reward for it. But someone decided the boy wouldn’t get his reward. He would just take the invention off Damascus, and let the nerd go tell the marines. That someone hired a hit squad, six wild animals who humiliated Damascus, gave him the third degree and raped his girlfriend. Damascus spilled the beans there and then: and at a stroke he lost his dignity, his love and his invention. As well as his chance of glory. A month later his girlfriend threw herself out of an upstairs window. The case of Arnaud Heller-Deville came to trial just short of eight years ago. He was found guilty of defenestrating the young woman, and he copped five years. He didn’t get any remission, and wasn’t released until just over two years ago.”

  “Why didn’t Damascus say anything during the trial? Why did he let himself get flung into clink?”

  “Because if the police had been able to identify the animals, Damascus would have lost his freedom of action. No price was too high for the chance of avenging himself. At the time he wasn’t up to the fight. But five years on it was a different story altogether. The weedy nerd had put on forty pounds of muscle in prison, he’d dropped metallurgy for good, and the only thing he could see in front of him was revenge. Prison is very conducive to seeing things in front of you. In fact, it’s just about the only thing you can do when you’re inside: see things in front of you. So he came out, with eight people to kill – the six animals, the girl who was with them, and the man behind the deed. Granny Clémentine had spent those five years patiently tracking them down, using information Damascus gave her. Now they were ready. To carry out the murders Damascus obviously had recourse to the family force. What else was there? Five went down this last week, there are three still to go.”

  “That cannot be right,” said Decambrais.

  “Damascus and his grandmother have admitted everything,” said Adamsberg, looking the old man in the eye. “Seven years in the planning. The rats, the fleas and the old books are at Granny’s place. She still lives at Clichy. So are the ivory envelopes. And the printer. Everything.”

  Decambrais shook his head.

  “Damascus cannot be a killer,” he repeated. “Or else I hang up my Even Keel Counsellor’s apron for good.”

  “Go ahead, I’m starting a collection. Danglard has already eaten his hat. Look, Decambrais, Damascus has confessed. He’s confessed to the whole thing. He’s told us everything except the names of the last three targets, he just can’t wait to see them drop dead.”

  “Did he confess to having killed the victims himself? With his own hands?”

  “No,” Adamsberg conceded. “He said the plaguy fleas had killed them.”

  “If the story is true, I’ll not hold it against him,” said Lizbeth.

  “Decambrais, go and see him if you feel like it, and meet his ‘Narnie’ in the next-door cell. He’ll confirm everything I’ve just told you. Go on, Decambrais. Go and hear him in his own words.”

  A heavy silence settled over the table. Bertin had forgotten to put out his dinner-call. Suddenly realising it was already eight twenty-five, he slapped his fist against the big brass disc and set off a growling wave of thunder which brought the ghoulish story of Arnaud Damascus Heller-Deville’s good old days to a fittingly sombre full stop.

  By half past nine the news had been more or less digested, bit by lumpy bit, and Adamsberg was hanging round on the square with Decambrais, who’d calmed down after his meal.

  “That’s the way it is, Decambrais,” said Adamsberg. “Can’t do anything about it. I don’t like it, either.”

  “There’s something not quite right about it,” said Decambrais.

  “That’s true. There’s something not quite right. The charcoal.”

  “Ah, so you knew?”

  “It’s a bloody great howler for an expert on the plague,” Adamsberg said under his breath. “Nor am I sure, Decambrais, that the three pending targets are going to escape the chop.”

  “Damascus and Clémentine have been locked up.”

  “Notwithstanding.”

  XXXVI

  ADAMSBERG LEFT THE square around ten with the feeling he’d missed a link, and he knew which link it was. He would rather have seen Marie-Belle in the crowd.

&n
bsp; Family business was what Ferez had called it.

  Marie-Belle’s absence had made a hole in the mob at the Viking. He had to talk to her. She’d been the only note of discord in the marriage of Damascus and his “Narnie”. When Adamsberg had uttered the girl’s name, Damascus had wanted to say something, but old Clémentine had turned on him furiously and ordered him to forget that “slag’s spawn”. The old woman then muttered something under her breath; he thought he could make out something like “that blowsy hag at Romorantin”. Damascus looked pretty upset and tried to change the subject, with an intense and plaintive look at Adamsberg that seemed to be saying, please don’t bother about my sister. Which was precisely why he was bothering about her.

  He got to Rue de la Convention well before eleven. He spotted two of his men slumping in an unmarked squad car not far from the main door. The light was on up top, on the fourth floor. So he could ring Marie-Belle without fear of waking her from her sleep. But Lizbeth had said she was ill. He dallied. Marie-Belle cut his mind in two just as Damascus and Clémentine had, one half softened by their claims of innocence, the other half hardened by his determination to get the plague-monger, however many people he was.

  He looked up at the building. A typical late nineteenth-century residential block, quite grand, with a dressed stone façade and caryatids holding up the balconies. The flat had six full windows on to the street. Heller-Deville had made a lot of money, a real pile. Adamsberg wondered why Damascus, if he needed to work at all, hadn’t opened a luxury boutique instead of slaving away in the ill-lit, cluttered, ground-floor hole that he called Rolaride.

  While he was standing out of the light trying to make up his mind, Adamsberg saw the side door open. Marie-Belle emerged from it on the arm of a quite short man, and accompanied him a little way down the deserted street. She was talking to him, or rather, expostulating, remonstrating. Must be a lover, thought Adamsberg. A lovers’ tiff, about Damascus. He tailed them, slowly. He could see them clearly by the light of the street lamps. Two heads of fine blond hair. The man turned round to answer back, giving sight of his face. A quite good-looking lad, though rather blank, no eyebrows, a bit fragile. Marie-Belle gripped his forearm tightly, then kissed him on both cheeks and moved away.