‘Goodness, yes, I wondered where I’d put it.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s got wet.’
‘Never mind. I’ll take it to the office. Can you tell Hélène I’ll be right back?’
‘Ginette,’ said Adamsberg, holding her back by the arm and pointing to the brochure. ‘That Camille Forestier, the viola player, is she always in the Montreal quintet?’
‘No, she isn’t. Alban told me their viola player’s on maternity leave. She was already six months pregnant when they needed to start rehearsals.’
‘Alban?’
‘The first violin, a friend of mine. He met this Camille Forestier, who’s French, and auditioned her. She was good, so he took her on at once.’
‘Hey, Adamsberg,’ called Laliberté, ‘get a move on there.’
‘Thanks, Ginette,’ said Adamsberg, joining his partner.
‘What did I say?’ said the superintendent, as he climbed into the car, laughing once more. ‘Always after the ladies, aren’t you? And with one of my inspectors too, on your second day here. Fast worker or what?’
‘It’s not what you think, Aurèle, we were talking about music. Classical music,’ added Adamsberg, as if ‘classical’ somehow lent respectability to their conversation.
‘Music, my eye!’ laughed the superintendent, switching on the engine. ‘Don’t play the little plaster saint with me. You saw her downtown last night, right?’
‘It was quite by chance. I was eating at the Cinq Dimanches, and she came over to my table.’
‘Drop it with Ginette, she’s married. And happily married.’
‘I was just giving her back a concert programme. You can believe me or not, please yourself.’
‘No need to take offence. Only kidding.’
By the end of the long day, punctuated by the loud voice of the superintendent, and when all the samples had been taken from the public-spirited Jules and Linda Saint-Croix, Adamsberg got back into his official car.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ asked Laliberté, putting his head through the window.
‘I’m going to look at the river again, go for a walk. Then go downtown for something to eat.’
‘You’re real antsy, Jean-Baptiste, you gotta be moving all the time.’
‘I told you, I like walking.’
‘You like checking out the talent, that’s what. Me, I never go downtown looking for a woman. I’m too recognisable. When I want some fun, I take off for Ottawa. Go on, man, best of luck!’ he added, slapping the door with his hand. ‘Ciao till tomorrow.’
‘Tears, urine, snot, dirt and semen,’ recited Adamsberg.
‘Semen, I wish,’ said Laliberté frowning, his professional concerns returning. ‘If Jules Saint-Croix can make a bit of an effort tonight. He said yes at the start, but I get the feeling he’s gone off the idea. Well, we can’t force people, for God’s sake.’
Adamsberg left Laliberté to his test tube worries and set off for the river.
After listening for a long while to the sound of the Ottawa, he took the portage trail to make his way downtown on foot. If he had read the map right, the path ought to come out by the big bridge across the Chaudière Falls. From there, it was only a quarter of an hour to the centre. The rocky path was separated from a cycle track by a strip of forest which plunged him into complete darkness. He had borrowed a flashlight from Retancourt, the only member of the mission likely to have thought of bringing one. He made more or less good progress, managing to avoid a small pool the river made at one point and dodging low branches. He no longer felt the cold when he came out near the bridge, a huge metal structure whose crossbars made him think of a triple Eiffel Tower fallen across the Ottawa river.
The Breton pancake house downtown had made an effort to recall the owner’s ancestors’ native heath, with fishing nets, buoys and dried fish. And, indeed, a trident. Adamsberg froze when he saw the implement with its three points staring him in the face from the wall. A sea-trident, a fishing spear for Neptune, with its three fine blades ending in fishhooks. Very different in fact from his personal trident, which was a farmworker’s tool, solid and heavy, an earth-trident so to speak. As one might talk of an earthworm or even an earth-toad. But all that was a long way off, murderous tridents, exploding toads, left behind in the mists across the Atlantic.
The waiter brought him an outsize pancake, while chatting about life in general.
Yes, far across the Atlantic: tridents, toads, judges, cathedrals and the locked chamber of Bluebeard’s castle.
Left behind, but waiting for his return. All those faces, all those wounds, all those fears, attached to his footsteps by the untiring thread of memory. As for Camille, she had reappeared to him here on the spot, right in the middle of a town lost in the huge wastes of Canada. The idea of the five concerts about to be given, two hundred kilometres from the RCMP post, worried him, as if he would be able to hear the viola from his balcony. He prayed that Danglard would not get to hear of this. The capitaine would be quite capable of rushing off full tilt to Montreal and then giving him dirty looks all the next day.
He chose to have a coffee and a glass of wine instead of dessert, and without looking up from the menu, he became aware that someone had sat down at his table uninvited. It was the young woman from the Champlain stone, and she called the waiter back to order another coffee.
‘Good day?’ she enquired, smiling.
She lit a cigarette and stared at him straight in the eyes.
‘Oh shit,’ thought Adamsberg and then wondered why. Any other time, he might have jumped at a chance like this. But he felt no desire to take this girl to bed, either because the torments of the past week were still affecting him, or perhaps because he was trying to disprove the intuition of the superintendent.
‘I’m bothering you, Jean Baptiste,’ she stated. ‘You look tired. The pigs have given you a hard time.’
‘That’s it,’ he replied, and realised he had forgotten her name.
‘Your jacket’s soaked,’ she said feeling it. ‘Does your car let in the rain? Or did you come on a bike?’
Did she want to know everything about him?
‘I walked.’
‘You walked? Nobody does that here. Hadn’t you noticed?’
‘Yes. But I came along the portage trail.’
‘The whole way? How long did it take you?’
‘Just over an hour.’
‘Well, you’ve got some nerve, as my chum would say.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because that path at night, it’s a homosexual cruising place.’
‘So what? What harm would they do me?’
‘Well, rapists too. I don’t know, it’s what people say. But when Noëlla goes there at night, she doesn’t go farther than the Champlain stone. That’s far enough to look at the river.’ Noëlla yawned. ‘I’ve been serving dumb French people all day, I’m worn out. I work at the Caribou, did I say? I don’t like the French, when they all start shouting in a group, I prefer the Québécois, they’re nicer. Except for my boyfriend. I told you about him, didn’t I? He chucked me out, the bastard.’
The young woman was launched once more on her story, and Adamsberg couldn’t think how to get rid of her.
‘See, here’s his photo. Good-looker, wouldn’t you say? Though you’re not bad yourself, of your type. You’re unusual-looking, and you’re not so young. But you’ve got a nice nose and eyes. And a nice smile,’ she said, running a finger across his eyelids and lips. ‘And when you talk, your voice is lovely, did you know that?’
‘Hey, Noëlla,’ the waiter interrupted, putting the bills on the table. ‘You still working up at the Caribou?’
‘Yeah, gotta save up for the airfare, Michel.’
‘Still feeling sore about that boyfriend?’