Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand

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.’

‘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.’