Have Mercy On Us All (12 page)

“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.”

“Oh I see,” said Adamsberg, pensively. “And why not. Do you have many clients?”

“Can’t complain.”

“What do people come to see you about?”

Joss began to wonder whether Decambrais had got the right address, or whether this odd
flic
ever bothered to do any work. There was no terminal in the room, just papers in piles on the desk, on the chairs, on the floor, all covered with notes and doodles. The
commissaire
hadn’t sat down but stood leaning against the white wall with his arms to his side, and was leaning his head down so as to look at Decambrais from underneath his eyelids. Joss reckoned the
flic
’s eyes were the same colour and consistency as fucus, that brown and slippery seaweed that ties itself into knots around ships’ screws. Those eyes were just as soft, just as vague and just as shiny, but they had no sparkle and no clear object. The spherical vesicles of that kind of seaweed were called
floaters
, and Joss reckoned the word suited Adamsberg’s eyes to a T. The
commissaire
’s floaters were buried beneath a protective overhang of untidy, bushy brows. A hook nose and bony features gave the face some counterbalancing weight all the same.

“Well, mainly for love,” Decambrais went on. “Too much, too little, or none at all, that’s what they come about. Or else because it’s not the kind they want, or because they just can’t get hold of it because of this or that or other …”

“Things,” Adamsberg prompted.

“Other things,” Decambrais concurred.

“Look, Ducouëdic,” Adamsberg said as he took off from the wall and paced around the room, “this is a special unit here. We deal with murder.
So
if it’s your old mishap that’s the issue, if there’s a sequel or if you’re being bothered by it one way or another, I really can’t …”

“No, this isn’t about me,” Decambrais interrupted. “But we’ve not come about a crime, either. At least, not yet.”

“Threats?”

“Maybe. Anonymous announcements. Announcements of death.”

Joss put his elbows on his knees and began to pay amused attention. The bookworm was going to have a hard time making sense of his abstruse anxieties.

“Directed at a particular individual?”

“No. Announcements of general destruction and catastrophe.”

“OK,” said Adamsberg as he continued to pace up and down. “Are we dealing with a prophet of the Second Coming? Prophesying what? The apocalypse?”

“Bubonic plague.”

“Well, well,” said Adamsberg. He took a moment to think. “That rather changes things. How does he announce the coming of the plague, then? By mail? By phone?”

“By means of my friend here,” Decambrais said with a gracious nod towards Joss. “Monsieur Le Guern is by profession a town crier, the business was established by his great-great-grandfather. He gives the news broadcast for the Edgar-Quinet – rue Delambre crossing area. He’ll explain better than I can.”

Adamsberg turned his somewhat weary face to Joss.