The Chalk Circle Man

IV

DANGLARD HAD TRIED TO RESIST. BUT THE NEXT DAY HE FELL eagerly on the newspapers, leaving aside the political, economic and social news, all the stuff that usually interested him.

No, nothing. Nothing about the chalk circle man. Not that there was anything about these incidents to merit the daily attentions of a journalist.

But now he was hooked.

The night before, his daughter, the elder of the second set of twins, the one who was most interested in what her father told her about his work – although she also said to him, ‘Dad, stop drinking, you’re already fat enough as it is’ – had remarked: ‘Your new boss has a funny name, doesn’t he? Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, Saint John the Baptist from Adam’s Mountain, if you work it out. Looks funny when you put it together. But if you like him, I expect I’ll like him. Will you take me to see him one day?’ And Danglard loved his four twins so much that he would have wished above all to show them to Adamsberg, so that his boss could say ‘They’re angelic.’ But he wasn’t sure whether Adamsberg would be interested in his kids. ‘My kids, my kids, my kids,’ Danglard said to himself. ‘My angels.’

From his office, he called all the district police stations to find out whether any officer on the beat had noticed a circle. ‘Just asking, since everyone’s got interested in it.’ His questions provoked astonishment. He explained that it was on behalf of a psychiatrist friend, a little favour he was doing him on the side. And yes, of course, his fellow cops knew all about the little favours one did for people on the side.

And last night, it turned out, Paris had acquired two new circles. The first was in the rue du Moulin-Vert, where a policeman from the 14th arrondissement had come across it on his rounds, to his great delight. The other was in the same district, on the corner of the rue Froidevaux, and it had been reported by a woman who had complained to the police that she thought this was getting a bit much.

Danglard, feeling on edge and impatient, went upstairs to see Conti, the police photographer. Conti was all set to go, laden with straps and containers, as if on campaign. Since the photographer suffered from various health problems, Danglard imagined that all this complicated and impressive technical stuff must provide him with some kind of reassurance, although he knew perfectly well that Conti wasn’t stupid. They went first to the rue du Moulin-Vert, and there was the large circle, drawn in blue chalk, with the same elegant writing round the edge. Lying slightly off-centre was part of a watch strap. Why draw such big circles for such small objects, Danglard wondered. Until now he hadn’t thought about this discrepancy.

‘Don’t touch!’ he shouted to Conti, who had stepped into the circle to take a closer look.

‘What are you fussing about?’ said Conti. ‘This strap hasn’t been murdered. Call the pathologist while you’re at it!’

The photographer shrugged and stepped back out of the circle.

‘Don’t ask questions,’ said Danglard. ‘He said to take pictures of it exactly as it is, so please just do that.’

While Conti was snapping away, Danglard reflected all the same that Adamsberg had put him in a slightly ridiculous situation. If any local policeman should come past, he’d be right to say that the 5th arrondissement station was going round the bend if it had taken to photographing watch straps. And Danglard did feel that the 5th was indeed heading round the bend, himself along with the rest. What was more, he still hadn’t tied up everything on the Patrice Vernoux case, which he ought to have done first thing. His colleague Castreau was probably wondering by now where he’d got to.

In the rue Froidevaux, at the junction with the rue Emile-Richard, the lugubrious and narrow passage running through the middle of the Montparnasse cemetery, Danglard understood why the woman had complained, and was almost relieved to discover the reason.

Yes, it had got bigger.

‘See that?’ he said to Conti.

In front of them, the blue circle surrounded the remains of a cat that had been run over. There was no blood: the cat had obviously been picked out of the gutter where it had been dead for hours. Now it just looked morbid, a bundle of dirty fur in this sinister street, with the circle and the inscription ‘Victor, woe’s in store, what are you out here for?’ It made him think of some kind of weird witches’ spell.

‘All finished,’ said Conti.

Stupid, perhaps, but Danglard sensed that Conti was a bit impressed.

‘I’ve finished too,’ said Danglard. ‘Come on, back to base before the locals find us on their patch.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Conti. ‘We’d look pretty silly.’

Adamsberg listened to Danglard’s report impassively, allowing his cigarette to droop from his lips, screwing up his eyes to keep the smoke out of them. The only movement he made throughout was to bite off a piece of fingernail. And as Danglard was beginning to get the measure of his character, he realised that Adamsberg had assessed the discovery in the rue Froidevaux at its true value.

But what was that, exactly? For the moment, Danglard had no idea. The way Adamsberg’s mind worked was still enigmatic and impressive to him. Sometimes, but only for a second, he thought: Keep your distance.

But he knew the moment the report went round the station that the boss was wasting his own and his inspectors’ time on the chalk circle man, Danglard would have to defend him. And he was trying to prepare his defence.

‘Yesterday a mouse,’ said Danglard, as if talking to himself, practising future explanations to his colleagues. ‘And now a cat. It’s a bit nasty, yes. But there was the watch strap as well. And as Conti rightly pointed out, the watch strap wasn’t dead.’

‘It was dead all right,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Of course it was! Same thing tomorrow morning, Danglard. I’m going to see this psychiatrist who’s taken up the affair, Vercors-Laury. I’d be interested to hear what he thinks. But don’t tell anyone. The later anyone asks what I’m up to, the better.’

Before leaving, Adamsberg wrote a note for Mathilde Forestier. It had taken him less than an hour to track down her Charles Reyer, after telephoning the main organisations that employed blind people in Paris: piano tuners, publishing houses, music schools. Reyer had been in the city several months, and was staying in a room near the Pantheon, at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes. Adamsberg sent the information to Mathilde, and promptly forgot about it.

Well, René Vercors-Laury isn’t all that impressive, was Adamsberg’s first reaction. He was disappointed in the psychiatrist, since he always set out feeling hopeful and disillusion was invariably painful.

Not impressive at all, in fact. And exasperating with it. The psychiatrist kept interrupting himself with questions like: ‘See what I mean?’, ‘You follow me?’ or statements such as: ‘You’ll agree with me, won’t you, that the Socratic method of suicide is not the only model?’ – without waiting for Adamsberg’s reply, since the intention was simply to show off. Vercors-Laury expended an inordinate amount of time and words showing off. The portly doctor would first lean back in his armchair, fingers clutching his belt, seeming to think deeply, and would then hurl himself forward to begin a sentence: ‘Commissaire, this is no ordinary case.’

If one set all that aside, the man wasn’t lacking in intelligence; that much at least was clear. After the first quarter of an hour, things went better; still not impressive, perhaps, but better.

‘Our subject,’ said Vercors-Laury, launching into a peroration, ‘does not fit the normal pattern of subjects with a compulsive disorder, if you are asking for my clinical opinion. Compulsives are by definition compulsive, and one should never forget that – do you follow me?’

He was clearly highly satisfied with this formula. He went on:

‘And because they are compulsive, obsessive, they’re precise, careful, and ritualistic. You follow me? But what do we find with this subject? No ritual governing the choice of object, no ritual governing the choice of district, or the time of night, or even the number of circles to draw on any given night. So! You see the immense discrepancy? All the parameters of his actions vary unpredictably: object, place, time, quantity, as if they were entirely determined by chance circumstance. But, Commissaire Adamsberg, in the case of a compulsive personality nothing is determined by chance circumstance. Are you with me? And that is, in point of fact, the defining feature of the compulsive subject: he will make the chance circumstance bend to his will, rather than allow it to drive him. No contingency is strong enough to halt the relentless progress of his obsession. You see what I’m driving at?’

‘So what we have here is no common-or-garden crank? Not a compulsive personality at all?’

‘That’s right, commissaire, we could almost swear to it. And that opens up a whole field of inquiry. If we’re not dealing with an obsessive-compulsive personality in the clinical sense of the term, then the circles must be in pursuit of some aim which has been thoroughly thought through by their perpetrator, and our subject must have a genuine interest in the objects that he’s bringing to our attention, as if he meant to show us something. You follow me? Or to tell us something. For instance, that people don’t think enough about the objects they throw away. Once these objects have ceased to be useful, once they have served their purpose, our eyes don’t even see them as material any more. I could show you a pavement and say: “What do you see on the ground?” and you could reply: “Nothing.” Whereas in reality‘ (heavy emphasis) ‘there are dozens of objects there. You follow? This man appears to be grappling with a painful investigation of some kind: metaphysical, philosophical, or perhaps – why not? – poetic, about the way human beings choose to make the reality of the material world start and stop, something for which he has elected himself the arbiter. Whereas in his eyes, it may be that material objects continue their existence outside our perception of them. My sole aim, when I took an interest in this man, was to say: Take care, don’t joke about this obsessive behaviour pattern, the chalk circle man may be someone of perfectly lucid mind, who cannot express himself except through these manifestations, which are, indeed, evidence of a mind in some sense deranged, yet at the same time highly organised, you follow? But someone of above average intelligence, believe me.’

‘But there are mistakes in the series. The mouse and then the cat, they weren’t objects.’

‘As I said, there’s much less logic to the series than might appear at first, the kind of logic we would find if this were a case of authentic obsession. That’s what’s so unsettling about it. But from the point of view of our subject, he is demonstrating that death transforms a living creature into an object the moment the lifeless body ceases to feel anything – which is true enough. From the instant the top comes off the bottle, the top becomes a non-thing. And when the body of a friend stops breathing – what does it become? Our man is preoccupied with questions of this order. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it: he’s obsessed with death.’

Vercors-Laury paused, leaning back once more in his chair. He looked Adamsberg straight in the eye, as if to say: Listen carefully, I’m about to tell you something sensational. Adamsberg did not believe he would do anything of the sort.

‘From your point of view as a policeman, you are wondering whether he poses any danger to human life, aren’t you, commissaire? I’ll tell you this much: the phenomenon could remain stable at this stage and burn itself out, but on the other hand I see no reason why, theoretically, a man of this kind, in other words a deranged person who is nevertheless perfectly in control of himself (if you have followed me so far), a man burning with the need to exhibit his thoughts, should halt in his trajectory. Note that I’m saying theoretically.’

Adamsberg walked back to the office with vague thoughts running through his head. He was not in the habit of reflecting deeply. He had never been able to understand what was happening when he saw people put their hands to their foreheads and say, ‘Right, let’s give this some thought.’ What was going on in their brains, the way they managed to organise precise ideas, inferring, deducting, concluding, all that was a complete mystery to him. He had to admit that it produced undeniable results, and that after this kind of brainstorming, people took decisions, something he admired while being convinced that he was himself lacking in some way. But when he tried it, when he sat down and said ‘Right, I’ll give it some thought,’ nothing happened in his head. It was even at moments like that that he was aware of a complete blank. Adamsberg never realised when he was thinking and the instant he became conscious of it, it stopped. As a result he was never sure where all his ideas, his intentions and his decisions came from.

At any rate, he felt that nothing that Vercors-Laury had said had come as a surprise, and that he had always known that the man drawing the blue chalk circles was no ordinary crackpot. That some cruel motive lay underneath this apparent lunacy. That the sequence of objects could only lead to one conclusion, one blinding apotheosis: a death. Mathilde Forestier would have said that it was normal not to learn anything serious, since it was the second section of the week, but Adamsberg thought it was simply that Vercors-Laury was someone who knew his stuff all right, but wasn’t in the end all that impressive.

The following morning, a large blue circle had appeared in the rue Cunin-Gridaine in the 3rd arrondissement. The only thing in the centre was a hairpin.

Conti photographed the hairpin.

The next night brought a circle in the rue Lacretelle and another in the rue de la Condamine, in the 17th arrondissement, one containing an old handbag, the other a cotton bud.

Conti photographed the bag and then the cotton bud, without passing comment, but the look on his face betrayed his irritation. Danglard remained silent.

The next three nights produced a one-franc coin, a torch battery, a screwdriver, and something which cheered Danglard up somewhat, if that was the right expression, a dead pigeon with one wing torn off, in the rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire.

Disconcertingly, Adamsberg showed no reaction except a vague smile. He was still cutting out any newspaper articles that mentioned the chalk circle man and stuffing them into his desk drawer, alongside the photographs supplied by Conti. By now, everyone in the station knew about it, and Danglard was becoming rather anxious on his behalf. But the full confession obtained from Patrice Vernoux had made Adamsberg untouchable, at least for a little while.

‘How long is this business going to go on, commissaire?’ asked Danglard.

‘What business?’

‘The chalk circles, for Christ’s sake! We’re not going to stand in front of these damned hairpins every morning for the rest of our lives, are we?’

‘Ah, the chalk circles. Yes, it could go on a long time, Danglard. A very long time, even. But so what? Whether we follow this or do something else, does it matter? Hairpins provide a bit of distraction.’

‘So we drop the whole thing?’

Adamsberg looked up abruptly.

‘Absolutely not, Danglard, out of the question.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘As serious as I can be. It’s going to get bigger, Danglard, as I’ve already told you.’

Danglard shrugged.

‘We’ll need all this documentation,’ Adamsberg went on, opening the drawer. ‘It could be indispensable afterwards.’

‘After what, for God’s sake?’

‘Don’t get impatient, Danglard – you wouldn’t wish someone dead, would you?’

Next morning there was an ice-cream cone in the avenue du Docteur-Brouardel in the 7th arrondissement.