Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

LIII

‘YOUR MAH JONG SET,’ ADAMSBERG WAS REPEATING.

Camille hesitated, then joined him in the kitchen. In drink, Adamsberg’s voice had lost all its charm, becoming harsher and less strong. She dissolved two tablets in a glass of water and handed it to him.

‘Drink this,’ she said.

‘I need dragons, you see, very, very big dragons,’ Adamsberg explained, before draining the glass.

‘Shh. Don’t talk so loudly. What do you want dragons for?’

‘I need them to stuff into some windows.’

‘Mmm,’ said Camille. ‘All right, you do that.’

‘And that guy’s labradors as well.’

‘Yes, OK. Please don’t talk so loudly.’

‘Why?’

Camille did not reply but Adamsberg followed her glance. At the back of the studio he could vaguely make out a little cot.

‘Aha! Yes, of course,’ he declared, raising one finger. ‘Mustn’t wake the baby. Oh no! Or its father, the one with the dogs.’

‘You know then?’ said Camille in a neutral voice.

‘I’m a cop. I know everything. Montreal, the baby, the new father and his bloody dogs.’

‘Right. How did you get here? Did you walk?’

‘On someone’s moped.’

Shit, thought Camille. She couldn’t let him go out on the road in this state. She got out her grandmother’s old Mah Jong set.

‘Here you are, play if you like,’ she said, putting the box on the bar. ‘You have fun with the tiles, I’m going to read.’

‘Don’t leave me. I’m lost and I’ve killed a woman. Explain this Mah Jong to me, I need some dragons.’

Camille looked sharply at Jean-Baptiste. The best thing to do at present, it seemed to her, was to get his attention firmly fixed on the tiles. Until the pills started working and he could be sent away. She’d make some strong coffee too, to stop him going to sleep on the bar.

‘Where are the dragons?’

‘There are three suits,’ Camille explained, soothingly, with the prudence of all women who are approached in the street by a man in an aggressive state. Humour him, distract him, and get away as soon as you can. Get him interested in your grandmother’s Mah Jong tiles. She poured him some coffee.

‘This suit is the Circles, this one the Characters, this one the Bamboos. They go from 1 to 9, see?’

‘What’s all that for?’

‘To play with. And these are the honours: East, West, North and South, and your dragons.’

‘Ah,’ said Adamsberg satisfied.

‘Four green dragons,’ said Camille putting them together for him to see, ‘four red ones and four virgins. That makes twelve dragons all together, OK? Is that enough?’

‘What’s that one?’ he asked, pointing a wavering finger at a tile covered with decorations.

‘That’s a Flower. There are eight of them. They don’t count except as extras, like ornaments.’

‘And what do you do with all this stuff?’

‘You play the game,’ Camille went on patiently. ‘You have to try and make up a special hand, or a sequence of three tiles, depending on what you pick up. The special hands carry the most points. Are you still interested?’

Adamsberg nodded vaguely and sipped the coffee.

‘What you have to do is keep picking up tiles till you get a full hand. Without diluting if possible. Then you go Mah Jong.’

‘Aha, “dilute, and I’ll shoot you”. Like my grandmother. “Any nearer and I’ll spear ye.”’

‘OK. Now you know how to play. If you like it so much, you can have the rule book.’

Camille went to sit at the far end of the room with a book. She would wait until it had passed. Adamsberg was building little columns of tiles until they fell over, then he rebuilt them, muttering to himself, wiping his eyes from time to time as if the collapses caused him deep sorrow. Alcohol brought out various emotions and outbursts from him, to which Camille replied by reassuring signs. After more than an hour, she closed her book.

‘If you’re feeling better now,’ she said.

‘I want to see the guy with the dogs first,’ said Adamsberg, jumping to his feet.

‘How do you think you’re going to do that?’

‘I’ll get him out of his hole. This fellow who’s hiding, and daren’t look me in the face.’

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

Adamsberg walked all over the studio, with uncertain steps and prepared to go up to the bedroom on the mezzanine floor.

‘He’s not up there,’ said Camille, as she cleared away the tiles. ‘You can take my word for it.’

‘Where is he then?’

She shrugged, in a gesture of powerlessness.

‘Not there,’ she said.

‘Not there?’

‘No. Not there.’

‘He’s gone out?’

‘He went away.’

‘He left you?’ cried Adamsberg.

‘Yes. Hush, don’t shout, and stop trying to look for him.’

Adamsberg sat on the arm of a chair, already sobering up from the remedies and the shock.

‘Good God! He left you? With the child?’

‘It happens.’

Camille finished putting the tiles in the box.

‘Well, shit,’ said Adamsberg heavily. ‘You really know how to pick them, don’t you.’

She shrugged again.

‘I shouldn’t have gone away,’ he declared, shaking his head. ‘I would have protected you, I would have put a wall round you,’ he said opening his arms, and was suddenly reminded of the Canada goose.

‘Can you walk now, do you think?’ said Camille gently, looking up at him.

‘Of course I can.’

‘Right, well, off you go now, Jean-Baptiste.’