‘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.’