This Night’s Foul Work

LII

A PEAL OF CHURCH BELLS WOKE ADAMSBERG AT MIDDAY. NO PEACE FOR the wicked, his mother used to say. He called the hospital at once and listened as Lavoisier gave a positive report.

‘She’s talking?’ he asked

‘No, she’s sleeping soundly now,’ said the doctor, ‘and probably will for some time. Remember, she’s also got concussion.’

‘Is she saying anything in her sleep?’

‘Yes, she mutters stuff from time to time. But it’s not really conscious or even intelligible. Don’t get excited.’

‘I’m quite calm, doctor. But I just want to know what she says.’

‘She keeps saying the same thing over and over. A bit of poetry that everyone knows.’

Poetry? Was Retancourt dreaming about Veyrenc? Or had he somehow infected her? Seducing all the women into his entourage one after the other?

‘So what poetry would that be?’ asked Adamsberg, with some annoyance.

‘Lines by Corneille we all learned at school:

To see the last Roman, as he draws his last breath,

Myself to die happy, as the cause of this death.’

They were indeed two of the few lines of verse that even Adamsberg knew by heart.

‘That’s not her style,’ he muttered. ‘Is that really what she’s saying?’

‘Oh, if you heard what people sometimes say under sedatives or anaesthetic, you’d be astonished. I’ve heard blameless people come out with unbelievable obscenities.’

‘Is that what she’s doing?’

‘Like I said, she recites Corneille. Nothing surprising about that. Mostly people in her state say things they remember from their childhood, especially stuff they learned at school. She’s just going back to what she was made to learn for homework, that’s all. Once I had a government minister who was in a coma for three months, and he went through his primary education, multiplication tables and all. He could still remember it pretty well.’

As he listened to the doctor, Adamsberg was staring at a sentimental picture over his hotel bed, a forest glade in which a mother deer was being followed by a cute little fawn through the ferns. ‘An accompanied hind,’ Robert would call her.

‘I’ve got to go back to Paris today, to my own hospital team,’ the doctor was saying. ‘It won’t hurt to move her now, so I’m taking her in the ambulance. We’ll be at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Hospital by this evening.’

‘Why are you taking her with you?’

‘Because it’s such an extraordinary case, commissaire. I’m going to see this one through.’

Adamsberg hung up, still looking at the painting. The tangled skein was in there too, the quick of virgins and the ‘living cross from the heart of the eternal branches’. He looked for a long time at the hind as if hypnotised, trying to touch something just beyond his reach. An element he still had not grasped. There’s a bone in the snout of a pig, and a bone in the penis of a cat. And if he was not much mistaken, and unlikely though that seemed, maybe there was a bone in the heart of a stag. A bone in the form of a cross, which would take him straight to the third virgin.