Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (43 page)

‘Can you lend me the magic wand?’ he asked.

He pushed its tip into the coals then waved it in the air.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ said Josette.

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t draw squares in the air, only circles.’

‘Doesn’t matter, I don’t like squares much.’

‘Raphaël’s crime was a big square lock,’ suggested Josette.

‘Yes.’

‘And now that lock has been exploded.’

‘Yes, Josette.’

Puff, puff, bang, he thought.

‘But there’s another,’ he went on. ‘And we can’t get any further with that one.’

‘There’s no end to the underground tunnels,
commissaire
. They’re designed for that, to get you from one place to another. Path to path, door to door.’

‘Not always, Josette. We have the biggest, firmest lock of all ahead of us now.’

‘Which one?’

‘My stagnant memory, dead at the bottom of a lake. My memory is blocked by a rock fall, and my own trap, my fall on the path. There’s no hacker can break through to that.’

‘Lock by lock, one after another, one thing at a time, that’s the way a hacker moves,’ said Josette, pushing the coals closer together. ‘You can’t get through lock number nine until you have unlocked number eight. Understand?’

‘Yes, Josette, of course I do,’ said Adamsberg gently.

She went on moving the coals into the centre.

‘Before the lock of the lost memory,’ she said, carefully picking up a coal in the tongs, ‘there’s the one that made you go out to get drunk in Hull, and then again last night.’

‘That’s blocked too, with a high barrier.’

Josette shook her head, obstinately.

‘Josette,’ sighed Adamsberg. ‘I know you’ve broken into the files of the FBI. But you can’t break into the files of life like you can into computers.’

‘They’re not so different really,’ replied Josette.

He stretched out his feet towards the fire, still turning the stick and letting the warmth of the flames warm him through his shoes. His brother’s innocence was coming back to him now in a slow boomerang movement, distancing him from his usual landmarks and habits, displacing his point of view, opening up forbidden places where the world seemed to be discreetly changing texture. What the texture was exactly, he didn’t know. What he did know was that in other times, and even as recently as yesterday, he would never have confided the story of Camille, the girl from the north, to a fragile little hacker wearing blue and gold tennis shoes. But that is what he did, from the beginning down to his drunken conversation of the previous night.

‘So you see,’ he concluded, ‘there’s no way through.’

‘Can you give me the stick?’ Josette asked timidly.

He gave her the twig. She rekindled the point in the fire and began her wavery circles in the air again.

‘Why are you trying to get through there, when you were the one that blocked it off, yourself?’

‘I don’t know. Because that’s where the air comes from, perhaps, and without air we choke or explode. Like Strasbourg Cathedral with all its windows blocked.’

‘What?’ said Josette in surprise, stopping her hand moving. ‘Has someone blocked up the cathedral? What on earth for?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adamsberg with a vague wave of his hand. ‘But it’s blocked. With dragons, lampreys, dogs, toads, and one third of a
gendarme.’

‘Hmm,’ said Josette.

She dropped the twig and disappeared into the kitchen. She brought back two glasses and put them shakily on the mantelpiece.

‘Do you know the name?’ she asked, pouring in the port and spilling some alongside the glasses.

‘Trabelmann. One third of Trabelmann.’

‘No, I meant the name of Camille’s baby.’

‘Ah. No. I didn’t ask. And I was drunk.’

‘Here we are,’ she said handing him the port. ‘It’s yours.’

‘Thank you,’ said Adamsberg, taking the glass.

‘I wasn’t talking about the drink,’ said Josette. She drew a few more incandescent circles, drank the wine, and passed the stick to Adamsberg.

‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you now. It was only a little lock, but maybe it’ll let in some air, a bit too much perhaps.’

LVII

DANGLARD WAS TAKING NOTES QUICKLY, AS HE LISTENED TO HIS
Québécois colleague.

‘Get it as fast as you can,’ he said. ‘Adamsberg has unravelled the judge’s career. Yes, and it all hangs together now, it looks pretty solid. All except the murder on the portage trail, which still doesn’t seem to fit. So don’t give up looking. No … Well, see what you can do. Sartonna’s message won’t cut any ice, it’s just a reconstitution. The prosecution would wipe the floor with it. Yes. Sure. He may still get away with it, so keep at it.’

Danglard exchanged a few more words with his interlocutor, then hung up. He had the sickening feeling everything would hang by a thread. It would stand or fall by very little. He only had a short time left and not much thread.

LVIII

ADAMSBERG AND BRÉZILLON HAD ARRANGED TO MEET AT A DISCREET
cafe in the 7th
arrondissement
at the quiet time of mid-afternoon. The
commissaire
was making his way there, head down and muffled in his lumberjack’s cap. The previous evening he had sat up long after Josette had left him, drawing circles in the fire. Since he had casually picked up that newspaper in the office, he seemed to have been travelling for five weeks and five days now, through endless tumult, buffeted by storms, on a raft tossed by the winds of Neptune. Josette, like a perfect hacker, had homed in straight to the target, and he was amazed at himself for not realising the truth earlier. The child had been conceived in Lisbon and was his. This stupefying truth had calmed one storm, only to provoke a wind of anxiety which was now puffing and blowing on the near horizon.

‘You really are a stupid bastard,
commissaire.’
Because he had understood nothing. Danglard had been sitting, like a sad heavy weight, on his secret. Meanwhile he and Camille had each retreated into a stiff silence, and he had fled so far away. As far as Raphaël in his exile.

Raphaël might be able to relax now, but Jean-Baptiste would have to keep running. Lock after lock, according to Josette in her celestial running shoes. The lock on the path still seemed impregnable. But the one relating to Fulgence was now within reach. Adamsberg pushed the revolving door of an upmarket cafe on the corner of the avenue Bosquet. A few ladies were taking tea, one was drinking
pastis
. He
spotted the
divisionnaire
, sitting like a grey monument on a red velvet bench, his glass of beer placed before him on the polished wooden table.

‘Take that hat off,’ Brézillon said at once. ‘Makes you look like a lumberjack.’

‘It’s my camouflage,’ Adamsberg explained, putting it on a chair. ‘Arctic technology, covers eyes, ears, cheeks and chin.’

‘Get on with it, Adamsberg. I’m already doing you a favour by agreeing to meet you.’

‘I asked Danglard to tell you about what’s happened since the exhumation. The judge’s false age, the Guillaumond family, the matricide, the Mah Jong stuff.’

‘Yes, he told me all that.’

‘And your view of it,
Monsieur le divisionnaire?’

Brézillon lit one of his coarse cigarettes.

‘Favourable, but two points bother me. Why did the judge make himself out to be fifteen years older? I can see why he’d change his name after killing his mother. And in the maquis, it must have been quite easy. But why his age?’

‘I think it’s because he values power, rather than youth. As a recent law graduate of twenty-five, what could he hope for after the war? Just the slow career path of a small-town lawyer, gradually moving up through the ranks. He wanted better than that. With his acute intelligence and a few fake references, he could quickly aspire to better posts. On condition he was the right age. Maturity was necessary to feed his ambition. Five years after he disappeared, he was already a judge in Nantes.’

‘All right, granted. Second point. Noëlla Corderon doesn’t seem to fit the profile of the fourteenth victim. The name doesn’t mean anything in Mah Jong terms, so I’m still talking to a murderer on the run. All this doesn’t get you off the hook, Adamsberg.’

‘There have been some other supplementary victims, on the way. Michel Sartonna for instance.’

‘We don’t know that for sure.’

‘No, but it’s a reasonable assumption. and it’s an assumption too for Noëlla Corderon. And it’s an assumption we could make for me as well.’

‘Meaning?’

‘If the judge did try to trap me in Quebec, the mechanism hasn’t worked properly. I got away from the RCMP, and the exhumation has smoked him out of his safe hiding-place. If I manage to persuade other people, he’ll lose everything, reputation and honour. He won’t want to take that risk. He’s going to react pretty soon.’

‘By taking you out?’

‘Yes. I should therefore try to make things easy for him. I mean, go back to my own flat quite openly. And he’ll come. That’s what I’ve come to ask you, to let me take a few days and do that.’

‘Adamsberg, you’re crazy. You’re going to do a stakeout for the lion, with yourself as the goat? With a madman who’s already committed thirteen murders?’

Or maybe the old trick of the mosquito in the ear, thought Adamsberg, or the fish in the muddy bottom of a lake, being tempted up by a lamp. Fishing by night with lanterns. Only this time the fish was holding the trident, not the fisherman.

‘There isn’t any other way to get him to break cover.’

‘That’s simply self-sacrifice, Adamsberg, and it won’t get you cleared of the crime in Hull. That’s if the judge doesn’t manage to kill you first.’

‘It’s a risk.’

‘If you’re found in your own flat, dead or alive, the RCMP will accuse me of incompetence or complicity.’

‘You’ll say you lifted the surveillance to trick me into coming back.’

‘Which would oblige me to extradite you right away,’ said Brézillon, putting out his cigarette with his thumb.

‘Well, you’ll have to do that anyway, in four and a half weeks.’

‘I don’t like sending my men over the top.’

‘Just let’s say I’m no longer one of your men, just an independent fugitive.’

‘Agreed then,’ sighed Brézillon.

Drawn in by the lamprey effect, Adamsberg thought. He got up and put his camouflage cap back on. For the first time Brézillon put out his hand to shake. An admission, no doubt, that he was not sure of seeing him alive again.

LIX

BACK IN CLIGNANCOURT, ADAMSBERG PUT ON HIS BULLET-PROOF VEST
, holstered his gun and kissed the two old women goodbye.

‘Just a little expedition,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

Not so sure about that, he thought as he went out into the alleyway. What was the point of this unequal high noon confrontation? Was it his last throw, or was he taking a chance to anticipate death, exposing himself to Fulgence’s trident rather than sink into the shadows of the portage trail without ever knowing whether or not he had stabbed Noëlla? He saw, as if through frosted glass, the young woman’s body trapped under the ice. He could hear her plaintive voice. ‘And you know what he did, my buddy? Poor Noëlla, all washed up? Has Noëlla ever told you that before? About the cop from Paris?’

Adamsberg quickened his pace, head down. He couldn’t involve anyone else in his old mosquito trap. The weight of guilt round his neck ever since the Hull murder made him incapable of it. Fulgence might surround himself with henchmen and unleash a bloodbath, killing Danglard, Retancourt, Justin, the whole department. The blood spread before his eyes, carrying off the red robes of Cardinal Richelieu. You’re on your own, young man.

The sex and the name. The idea of dying without ever knowing that seemed crazy, or neglectful. He pulled out the mobile by one of its red feet and called Danglard.

‘Any news?’ the
capitaine
asked.

‘Might be,’ said Adamsberg prudently. ‘But that aside, I should tell you I have worked out the name of the new father. He’s an unreliable character, whose shoes are not polished.’

‘No? Who is he then?’

‘Just this guy.’

‘Glad you’ve got the answer.’

‘Yes. There’s just one thing I want to know first.’

‘First, before what?’

‘I just want to know the baby’s sex and first name.’

Adamsberg stopped in order to take in the information properly. It wouldn’t stick in his memory if he went on walking.

‘Thanks, Danglard. One last thing. Did you know it works with frogs as well as toads? The cigarette thing.’

As he walked down to the Marais district, a gloomy fog surrounded him. He came to as he saw his block of flats, and looked carefully around. Brézillon appeared to have kept his word, there were no watchers around; the way was clear out of the shadows into the light.

He looked quickly round the flat, then wrote five letters: one each for Raphaël, for his family, for Danglard, for Camille and for Retancourt. On an impulse he wrote a quick note for Sanscartier as well. Then he placed the sombre packet in a hiding-place known only to Danglard. ‘To be read in the event of my death.’ After eating a snack, standing up, he tidied the rooms, sorted the linen and destroyed his private letters. You’re preparing for this as if you’d lost already, he said to himself, as he put the bin out in the hall. You’re a dead man.

Everything seemed ready. The judge would not need to break in. He would certainly have obtained a spare key through Michel Sartonna. Fulgence was a man who left nothing to chance. And to find the
commissaire
waiting for him with a gun would not surprise him. He knew he would be armed, just as he knew he would be alone.

By the time the judge learnt he had returned, he would have to plan his arrival either for tomorrow or the next day in the evening. Adamsberg could anticipate only one point of detail: the time. The judge was obsessed with symbolism. It would probably please him to try to dispose of Adamsberg at the same time of day as his brother thirty years ago. Between eleven and midnight. So there was the slight advantage of not being surprised by the time of day. He could therefore strike at Fulgence’s pride, where he thought he was untouchable. Adamsberg had bought a Mah Jong set on his way home. He set some of the tiles out on the coffee table and arranged the judge’s Hand of Honours on a rack. He added two flowers, one for Noëlla, one for Michel. The sight of his secret exposed to the light might provoke Fulgence to talk before he attacked. And that might give Adamsberg a few seconds’ start.