First of all, he checked to see if he was right about Brasillier: yes, it derived from ‘brazier’; fire, a red dragon. Next he looked for Lessard: ‘name of a place, Essart Essard, or can mean lizard.’ OK, green dragon. Then he looked under Espir, hoping it could be counted as a wind, since it seemed to contain the letters of ‘respiration’. Yes, Old French for ‘breath’. That made five winds, eight tiles out of thirteen. Adamsberg passed his hand across his face, with the feeling that he was only just clearing the jumps, his horse’s belly just brushing the bars.
The other names were harder to fit in. The least promising was Fevre. Perhaps this was going to bring him to a juddering halt, in his fantasy of shovelling clouds. Fevre, he discovered, to his chagrin, came from the Latin faber, a blacksmith. Adamsberg shut his eyes and leaned back. Think about the blacksmith, with a hammer. Forging the points of the trident perhaps? He opened his eyes. From the old school book in which weeks ago he had found the picture of Neptune, he remembered now the opposite page had shown Vulcan, the god of fire, represented as a toiler in front of a blazing furnace. A smith, the master of fire. Taking a deep breath, he wrote red dragon, the second, opposite Fevre. When he tried Lefebure, he was referred back to Lefevre or Fevre. So that meant the same thing. The third red dragon. A trio. Ten out of thirteen.
Adamsberg let his hands fall and shut his eyes for a while before embarking on the last names, Lentretien and Mestre. Lentretien turned out, amazingly to be a deformation of lattelin, meaning an obscure kind of lizard. Must be a green dragon then, he thought, his handwriting becoming a scrawl by now as his hands contracted with anguish. He flexed his fingers before trying Mestre.
‘Mestre: old Occitan term, southern form of Master. Diminutive forms Mestrel or Mestral, variants of Mistral. Refers to the north side of a hill exposed to the Mistral, the master wind from the north.’
‘The master wind,’ he wrote. He put down the pen and breathed deeply, trying to take in a lungful of the cold master wind from the north, which would close the list and cool his burning cheeks. He quickly sorted the suits. A trio of red dragons: Lefebure, Fevre and Brasillier; two trios of winds, Soubise, Ventou, Autan, Espire, Mestre and Wind. A pair of green dragons, Lessard and Lentretien. A pair of white dragons with Matère and the matricide. Thirteen, seven women and six men.
So one more tile would close the Hand of Honours. It would have to be either a white dragon or a green dragon. It would be a man no doubt, to get a balance between the sexes, father and mother. Aching and sweating, Adamsberg returned the precious dictionary to the librarian. Now he had found the open sesame, the key, the little golden key that opened the door to the room full of corpses in Bluebeard’s castle.
He returned to Clémentine’s house exhausted and anxious to send the key across the Atlantic to his brother, to tell him his personal nightmare was over. But Josette did not give him time to do anything, as she pushed before his eyes the decoded message she had worked on. ‘Adamsberg – Gatineau – rendezvous – portage trail – Noëlla Corderon.’
‘Josette, I haven’t slept a wink, I’m in no state to understand this stuff.’
‘These are the letters from Michel’s computer. I was quite wrong, I should have realised. Look what it could mean.’
Adamsberg concentrated on the words.
‘Portage trail,’ he murmured.
‘Michel must surely have been passing this to someone. You weren’t alone on the path. Someone else knew you’d been there.’
‘It’s just one interpretation, Josette.’
‘There aren’t thousands of words with these combinations. I’m sure this is right.’
‘It’s remarkable, Josette, congratulations. But I’m afraid nobody will believe in an interpretation, it’s not the same thing as evidence for the police, you see. I’ve rescued my brother from the abyss, but I’m still there myself, buried under piles of rocks.’
‘Locks, you mean,’ said Josette. ‘Big strong locks. And where there are locks there are keys.’
LV
RAPHAEL ADAMSBERG FOUND THE MESSAGE ON THE FRIDAY MORNING. His brother had given it the name ‘Land!’ which must refer, Raphaël thought, to the cry of sailors when they first see the faint outline of a landmass on the horizon. He had to read the email several times before he dared believe he had understood the meaning of this confusing mixture of dragons and winds, written down in great haste and in a state of exhaustion: the judge’s ear, sand, matricide, Fulgence’s real age, his father’s mutilated hand, the village of Collery, the trident, Mah Jong, the Hand of Honours. Jean-Baptiste had typed so fast that he had missed out letters and even entire words. Raphaël could sense the trembling of his hands, a sensation that came directly from brother to brother, from shore to shore, carried through the waves and ending up in his Detroit bolt-hole, ripping devastatingly through the shadowy network in which he had been living his furtive life. He had not killed Lise. He stayed lying back in his chair, letting his body float along the shore, unable to guess what strange leaps Jean-Baptiste had made in order to exhume the judge’s murderous itinerary. As children once, they had wandered so far into the mountains that they were unable to find the way back to the village or even a path. Jean-Baptiste had climbed on Raphaël’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry,’ he had said. ‘We’ll try and find the way people went in the olden days.’ Every five hundred metres, Jean-Baptiste would climb up on his back. ‘This way,’ he would say as he jumped down.
So that’s what Jean-Baptiste must have done. Climbed up and seen where the Trident had passed by, following his blood-stained trail. Like a dog, like a god, thought Raphaël. For the second time, Jean-Baptiste was bringing him home to the village.
LVI
THAT EVENING, JOSETTE WAS LOOKING AFTER THE FIRE. ADAMSBERG HAD telephoned Danglard and Retancourt, then slept all the afternoon. In the evening, still feeling dazed, he had taken his seat by the fire and was watching the little hacker stir the flames, then playing with a burning twig. She was drawing incandescent circles and figures of eight in the twilight. The orange tip of the twig shook as it turned, and Adamsberg wondered whether, like the wooden spoon in the sauce, the twig had the power of dispersing lumps, all the lumps that surrounded him. Josette was wearing some tennis shoes he had never seen before, blue with a gold stripe. Like the golden sickle in the field of stars, he thought.
‘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.’