Have Mercy On Us All (27 page)

“She was a prostitute, wasn’t she?” Adamsberg asked.

“Good Lord, no!” said Marie-Belle. “Whatever made you say that?”

Adamsberg wished he hadn’t said it. Marie-Belle’s innocence was way beyond his expectation, and all the more refreshing for it.

“It must be your job,” Marie-Belle diagnosed. “It distorts everything.”

“I fear so.”

“But what about you? Do you believe in love? I reckon I’ve got the right to ask lots of people because down here Lizbeth’s opinions rule the roost.”

Adamsberg didn’t answer. Marie-Belle shook her head.

“Seeing as what you have to put up with, it’s only natural. But my counsellor is in favour of love, whether it’s crap or not. He says it’s better to have a good crap than to soil your underpants sitting still. You can see it with Eva. She’s perked up since she started helping Damascus with the till every evening. Only trouble is that Damascus is head over heels about Lizbeth.”

“Yes,” Adamsberg replied, rather enjoying the way things had come full circle. Every time they went round he would have less to contribute, and the more the plague-monger and the hundreds of doors being painted with 4s in the same instant would seep out of his head.

“And Lizbeth is not in love with Damascus. So there’s no two ways, Eva’s going to get hurt, then Damascus is going to get hurt, and Lizbeth is … well, I don’t know, actually.”

Marie-Belle tried to think of alternative pairings that might make everyone happy.

“Tell me, Marie-Belle, do you have anyone?”

The young woman blushed and drummed her fingers on the letter she’d just written.

“I’ve got all the men in my life I can cope with, seeing as I’ve got two brothers.”

“Is that your brother you’re writing to now?”

“Yes, he’s the youngest of us three. He lives at Romorantin and he likes to get news from Paris. I write every week and I phone too. I’d like him to come up but he says the city scares him. He’s like Damascus, he’s not too smart. Actually, he’s not even as smart as Damascus. I have to tell him what to do all the time, even with girls. He’s a good-looking lad, though, with very blond hair. But he won’t lift a finger if I haven’t told him which one, when, and where. So I’ll just have to look after them until they both get married. I’ve got my work cut out for a long while yet, specially if Damascus goes on gaping at Lizbeth for years and for nothing. Who else is going to be there with a shoulder to cry on when it hits him? But the counsellor says I’m not obliged to look after him.”

“He’s quite right.”

“But
he
looks after people, doesn’t he? He’s got customers in that cubbyhole of his all day long. And they’re not throwing their money down the drain! He doesn’t talk bullshit. All the same, I can’t let go of my two brothers.”

“That doesn’t stop you having a man in your life.”

“Yes it does. Seeing as I’ve got my job to do and my hands tied at Rolaride, I don’t get to meet many blokes anyway. I haven’t seen Mr Right around here. The counsellor tells me I should look further afield.”

The café clock struck half past seven and Marie-Belle jumped. She hastened to fold up the letter, put it in an envelope, stick on a stamp and shove it in her handbag.

“’Scuse me,
commissaire
, I have to rush. Damascus is expecting me.”

She bustled away. Bertin came to clear the table.

“Quite a chatterbox, that girl,” the barman said, almost as an apology. “You have to take what she says about Lizbeth with a pinch of salt. Marie-Belle is jealous and she’s afraid of having her brother swept off. It’s only
natural
. Lizbeth comes from somewhere else, and you can’t expect everyone to understand. Will you be staying for dinner?”

“No, thank you. I’ve got things to do.”

“Hey,
commissaire
,” Bertin said as he showed Adamsberg to the door. “Are we supposed to paint our doors, you know, with that thing, that 4?”

“I’ve been told you’re a descendant of Thor,” Adamsberg said turning round to face the hulking restaurateur. “Or is that just silly gossip I’ve picked up on the square?”

Bertin drew himself up to full height and stuck his great chin forward.

“No, it’s not silly gossip. My mother was a Toutin and through her the blood of thunder runs in my veins.”

“Well, in that case, don’t paint a 4 on your door, Bertin. Otherwise your glorious ancestors will disown you and give you a kick up the backside to boot.”

Bertin pushed the door closed behind the
commissaire
but did not lower his proud chin. He had seen the light. No way was any 4 going to disfigure the door of the Viking.

Thirty minutes later Lizbeth had gathered all the regulars for dinner at the table of Decambrais’s hotel. Decambrais clinked his wine glass with a knife to call everyone to order. It was a vulgar thing to do, in his view, but sometimes it had to be done. Castillon recognised the call to order and fell in almost instantly.

“It is not my custom to instruct my guests on how they should behave.” (Decambrais much preferred to call them guests, rather than tenants, lessees or customers.) “Your room is your castle and you may do as you please in it. However, given the very special circumstances of the present moment, I must insist that none of you yield an inch to the current wave of collective lunacy, and that you all refrain from painting signs or talismans of any kind on your doors. It would bring dishonour on this house. But if any of you wish nonetheless to seek the protection of the 4, I shall not prevent you, for we live in a free country and it is not for me to restrain your liberty. On the other hand, if you do wish to do so, I would ask you to exercise your rights elsewhere, outside of this establishment, for as long as it takes
for
everyone to snap out of the hallucination which this plague-monger is trying to drag us into. I would like to hope that no-one present is tempted by this option.”

He looked at each of his dinner guests in turn, sitting in complete silence around the long table. Decambrais could see that Eva was hesitating on the brink, that Castillon wasn’t entirely at ease despite the brave and smiling face he was putting on, that Joss didn’t give two hoots and that Lizbeth was fuming at the mere idea of anyone sticking a four anywhere near her.

“That’s agreed then,” said Joss, who was getting hungry. “Approved
nem. con
.”

“All the same, if you hadn’t read out all those letters from the devil …” Eva began.

“I’m not afraid of the old bogey, Eva dearest,” Joss cut in. “I’m scared of rollers and breakers, I’ll admit to that, because they can really harm you. But you know what you can do with devils and 4s and all that rubbish? Wipe them off with your hanky and stuff it up your sleeve. Breton’s honour.”

“That settles it,” said Castillon, visibly bolstered by Joss’s words.

“That settles it,” Eva echoed in a mumble.

Lizbeth said nothing and got on with doling out generous helpings of soup.

XXV

ADAMSBERG WAS HOPING
that sunday would pour some water on the flames, as France doesn’t go in for weekend papers. The final estimate on Saturday evening had depressed but not surprised him – between four and five thousand blocks in central Paris daubed with mostly amateur 4s. On the other hand, on a Sunday almost everyone has time to get out the brush and paint tin, so maybe Saturday’s figure would be vastly exceeded by the end of the day. The weather would be the decisive factor. If Sunday September 22 turned out fine and sunny, people would get out into the country and drop the whole story for a few hours. But if it was a miserable day, they would feel low, and their first victims would be front doors.

As soon as he woke up, before even lifting a leg, Adamsberg looked at the window pane. It was raining outside. He folded his arm over his eyes and confirmed his intention of not setting foot inside the office for the day. The weekend staff knew how to get hold of him if, in spite of reinforced security at the twenty-five original blocks, the plague-monger had struck again.

He took a shower, dressed and lay down again fully clothed. He was just waiting, looking at the ceiling, letting his mind drift. He stood up at nine thirty reckoning he had one piece of good news: the death-monger had not struck on Saturday night.

He went down to the river bank of Ile Saint-Louis to keep the rendezvous he’d made on Saturday with Ferez, the forensic psychiatrist. Adamsberg didn’t like the idea of talking to him perched on a chair in his office, so
he’d
got clearance to hold the meeting outdoors, by running water. Ferez wasn’t accustomed to humouring the whims of his patients, but Adamsberg wasn’t a patient, and the mass emotions provoked by the 4-dauber had intrigued him from the start.

Ferez could be seen from afar. He was a very tall man stooping slightly under a broad, grey umbrella, with a square face, a high forehead and a fringe of white hair around his bald pate. Adamsberg had met him a couple of years back at a dinner party – he couldn’t remember at whose place. Ferez had seemed impassive yet sensitive, he had exuded quiet contentment, and maintained his distance from others without losing the ability to focus on them intently. As a result he had modified Adamsberg’s somewhat stereotyped notion of what psychiatrists were like. The policeman had thus fallen into the habit of consulting Ferez whenever his own surmises about how other people worked ran up against his lack of medical expertise.

Adamsberg didn’t own an umbrella so he was soaking wet when he got to the meeting point. Ferez knew only what the media had told him about the killer and his obsessions, so he listened intently with his eyes on Adamsberg’s face while the detective filled him in with the rest of the story. Ferez maintained his professional blank face while listening, but his clear steady gaze didn’t waver from the speaker’s lips.

“What I think,” Adamsberg said as he wrapped up his forty-five-minute briefing which the psychiatrist had not once interrupted, “is that we must try to elucidate why the killer is using the plague. The plague isn’t exactly ordinary or topical or knocking around in everyone’s mind, like …”

He stopped to try to find a suitable example.

“Like a front-page issue, or a talking-point such as …”

He stopped again. He sometimes found it difficult to find the right words to express something specific. Ferez wasn’t making the slightest effort to prompt him.

“Such as the Y2K scare, or Star Wars.”

“Yes,” Ferez agreed.

“Or standard fantasies about vampires, the second coming, or sun spots. Any of those things, Ferez, would be transparent covers for a killer who was trying to dissociate himself from his acts. When I say transparent, I mean
generally
comprehensible, in today’s context. If the killer claimed he was the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the Messenger of the Sun, or an envoy from outer space, then everyone would know straight away that we’d got a crackpot or a loony cult follower on our hands. Do you follow?”

“Carry on, Adamsberg. Would you like to stand under my umbrella?”

“Thanks, no, the rain will soon stop. Our plague-monger isn’t even living in the twentieth century. He’s a throwback. My deputy calls him ‘grotesque’. And he is like a gargoyle, because he’s completely out of touch. Spreading bubonic plague in modern Paris is like saying dinosaurs have arrived in the Jardin des Plantes. Our monger just isn’t with it. He’s out on his own. Am I making sense?”

“Carry on,” Ferez said again.

“On the other hand, even though it’s as dead as a dodo, plague can still reawaken ancient fears that are far less fuzzy than you might think. But that’s beside the point. The point I’m trying to make is that our man is out of sync, that he’s hit on an incomprehensible cover that no-one, but no-one else could have dreamed up. What we have to tackle is precisely the
eccentricity
of the idea. I’m not saying there’s nobody working away on the plague, as a historical issue, I mean. But Ferez, please tell me if I’m wrong: however fixated a fellow might be on his research topic, it can’t get so deep down inside as to turn him into a serial killer.”

“True. Intellectual pursuits are always outside the primitive psyche, especially if the pursuit’s been taken up in adult life. They’re activities of the mind, not psychological drives.”

“Not even if the activity becomes a frenzy, a passion?”

“Not even.”

“So I can rule out intellectual motivation, and I can rule out mere coincidence. We’re not looking for a chap who woke up one fine day and said, hey, let’s have a go with the scourge of the Lord, that’ll make a terrific impact. Nor are we looking for a fraud or a prankster. No way. Our man hasn’t got enough separation to play practical jokes. He believes profoundly in the whole thing. He paints the 4s with love and care, he’s completely absorbed by the thing. His recourse to the pestilence is instinctive, it’s got no basis in conscious life, in his education or his culture. He doesn’t give
a
damn whether people understand what he’s up to or not. Because
he
knows what he’s up to. He’s using plague because he has to. – And that’s where I’ve got to, Ferez.”

“Good,” said Ferez patiently.

“So if our monger is in the same place, then the plague is inside him, deep down inside. That means it comes from …”

“Family business,” Ferez filled in.

“Precisely. Do you agree?”

“No doubt about it, Adamsberg. Because there’s no alternative.”

“Good,” said Adamsberg, relieved to have the psychiatrist’s support and to have got over the worst of his vocabulary problems.

“To begin with, I imagined that maybe our man had caught plague in childhood, in some distant land, and that it had been his blight, his trauma, or whatever you call it. But I wasn’t happy with that.”

“And so?”

“So I scratched my head and tried to work out how anyone’s childhood could be deeply affected by a tragedy that ended in the early eighteenth century. I came to the logical conclusion that our plague-monger is 260 years old. But I wasn’t happy with it.”

“Not bad. Would make a fascinating client.”