Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand (16 page)

‘You like checking out the talent, that’s what. Me, I never go downtown looking for a woman. I’m too recognisable. When I want some fun, I take off for Ottawa. Go on, man, best of luck!’ he added, slapping the door with his hand.
‘Ciao
till tomorrow.’

‘Tears, urine, snot, dirt and semen,’ recited Adamsberg.

‘Semen, I wish,’ said Laliberté frowning, his professional concerns returning. ‘If Jules Saint-Croix can make a bit of an effort tonight. He said yes at the start, but I get the feeling he’s gone off the idea. Well, we can’t force people, for God’s sake.’

Adamsberg left Laliberté to his test tube worries and set off for the river.

After listening for a long while to the sound of the Ottawa, he took the portage trail to make his way downtown on foot. If he had read the map right, the path ought to come out by the big bridge across the Chaudière
Falls. From there, it was only a quarter of an hour to the centre. The rocky path was separated from a cycle track by a strip of forest which plunged him into complete darkness. He had borrowed a flashlight from Retancourt, the only member of the mission likely to have thought of bringing one. He made more or less good progress, managing to avoid a small pool the river made at one point and dodging low branches. He no longer felt the cold when he came out near the bridge, a huge metal structure whose crossbars made him think of a triple Eiffel Tower fallen across the Ottawa river.

The Breton pancake house downtown had made an effort to recall the owner’s ancestors’ native heath, with fishing nets, buoys and dried fish. And, indeed, a trident. Adamsberg froze when he saw the implement with its three points staring him in the face from the wall. A sea-trident, a fishing spear for Neptune, with its three fine blades ending in fishhooks. Very different in fact from his personal trident, which was a farmworker’s tool, solid and heavy, an earth-trident so to speak. As one might talk of an earthworm or even an earth-toad. But all that was a long way off, murderous tridents, exploding toads, left behind in the mists across the Atlantic.

The waiter brought him an outsize pancake, while chatting about life in general.

Yes, far across the Atlantic: tridents, toads, judges, cathedrals and the locked chamber of Bluebeard’s castle.

Left behind, but waiting for his return. All those faces, all those wounds, all those fears, attached to his footsteps by the untiring thread of memory. As for Camille, she had reappeared to him here on the spot, right in the middle of a town lost in the huge wastes of Canada. The idea of the five concerts about to be given, two hundred kilometres from the RCMP post, worried him, as if he would be able to hear the viola from his balcony. He prayed that Danglard would not get to hear of this. The
capitaine
would be quite capable of rushing off full tilt to Montreal and then giving him dirty looks all the next day.

He chose to have a coffee and a glass of wine instead of dessert, and without looking up from the menu, he became aware that someone had sat down at his table uninvited. It was the young woman from the Champlain stone, and she called the waiter back to order another coffee.

‘Good day?’ she enquired, smiling.

She lit a cigarette and stared at him straight in the eyes.

‘Oh shit,’ thought Adamsberg and then wondered why. Any other time, he might have jumped at a chance like this. But he felt no desire to take this girl to bed, either because the torments of the past week were still affecting him, or perhaps because he was trying to disprove the intuition of the superintendent.

‘I’m bothering you, Jean Baptiste,’ she stated. ‘You look tired. The pigs have given you a hard time.’

‘That’s it,’ he replied, and realised he had forgotten her name.

‘Your jacket’s soaked,’ she said feeling it. ‘Does your car let in the rain? Or did you come on a bike?’

Did she want to know everything about him?

‘I walked.’

‘You
walked?
Nobody does that here. Hadn’t you noticed?’

‘Yes. But I came along the portage trail.’

‘The whole way? How long did it take you?’

‘Just over an hour.’

‘Well, you’ve got some nerve, as my chum would say.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because that path at night, it’s a homosexual cruising place.’

‘So what? What harm would they do me?’

‘Well, rapists too. I don’t know, it’s what people say. But when Noëlla goes there at night, she doesn’t go farther than the Champlain stone. That’s far enough to look at the river.’ Noëlla yawned. ‘I’ve been serving dumb French people all day, I’m worn out. I work at the
Caribou, did
I say? I don’t like the French, when they all start shouting in a group, I prefer the Québécois, they’re nicer. Except for my boyfriend. I told you about him, didn’t I? He chucked me out, the bastard.’

The young woman was launched once more on her story, and Adamsberg couldn’t think how to get rid of her.

‘See, here’s his photo. Good-looker, wouldn’t you say? Though you’re not bad yourself, of your type. You’re unusual-looking, and you’re not so young. But you’ve got a nice nose and eyes. And a nice smile,’ she said, running a finger across his eyelids and lips. ‘And when you talk, your voice is lovely, did you know that?’

‘Hey, Noëlla,’ the waiter interrupted, putting the bills on the table. ‘You still working up at the
Caribou?’

‘Yeah, gotta save up for the airfare, Michel.’

‘Still feeling sore about that boyfriend?’

‘Maybe, evenings. Some people get the early morning blues, me it’s the evening.’

‘Well, forget him. The cops have run him in.’

‘You’re kidding!’ said Noëlla, sitting up straight.

‘I kid you not. He was stealing cars and selling them with new plates, that kind of thing.’

‘No, I don’t believe it,’ said Noëlla. ‘He’s in computers now.’

‘Wise up, sweetie. Your pal’s a crook. You better believe it, Noëlla, it was in the papers.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Black and white in the papers. Son of a bitch went too far one time, he’d had a skinful, the cops caught up with him, and he’s in big trouble now. Face it, Noëlla, he was just no good. You need to put that in your pipe and smoke it. I wanted to tell you, so you’d stop fretting over him. Excuse me, folks, I gotta move on to the other tables.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Noëlla, wiping the sugar from her cup with a finger. ‘Do you mind if I have a drink with you? That’s thrown me a bit.’

‘OK, ten minutes, then I’m going back.’

‘I get it,’ said Noëlla as she ordered a drink. ‘You’re spoken for. But gee, think of that. My boyfriend.’

‘What did he mean, about smoking it in your pipe?’ asked Adamsberg. ‘Did he just mean forget it?’

‘No, it means “Stop and have a good think about it”. See, my story’s even dumber than you thought.’ Finishing her glass in a single gulp, Noëlla went on, ‘I need a bit of distraction, after that. I’ll drive you back to your place.’

Surprised, Adamsberg hesitated to respond.

‘I’m in a car, you’re on foot,’ explained Noëlla impatiently. ‘You’re surely not going back via the footpath?’

‘I was planning on it.’

‘It’s pouring with rain. Are you scared of me, or what? Does little Noëlla frighten a big forty-year-old. A cop, what’s more?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Adamsberg, smiling.

‘Well then. Where are you staying?’

‘It’s off the rue Prévost.’

‘I know it, I’m three blocks away. Come along.’

Adamsberg got up, still not understanding why he felt so reluctant to follow a pretty girl into her car.

Noëlla parked in front of his building and Adamsberg thanked her as he opened his door.

‘Not even a little kiss goodbye? You’re not very polite, for a Frenchman.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m from the mountains. Not civilised at all.’

Adamsberg kissed her on both cheeks with a serious face, and Noëlla frowned, looking offended. He opened the front door with his key, and greeted the janitor, who was always on call after eleven o’clock. After taking a shower, he lay down on the large bed in his room. In Canada, everything is bigger. Except for the memories, which are smaller.

XIX

THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED TO MINUS 4 BY THE MORNING, AND
Adamsberg hurried out to see his river. On the path, the edges of the little pools had frozen over, and he enjoyed crunching the ice with his stout shoes, under the vigilant gaze of the squirrels. He was about to go further, when the thought of Noëlla, stationed on her stone, restrained him like a noose. He turned back and sat on a rock to observe the competition going on between a colony of ducks and a gaggle of Canada geese. Wars and territory disputes everywhere. One of the geese was obviously the big boss, and repeatedly returned to the charge, spreading its wings and clacking its beak with despotic obstinacy. Adamsberg disliked this goose – or maybe gander. He distinguished it from the others by a mark on its plumage, with the idea of coming back next day to see whether it would still be running the show, or whether geese practised some kind of democratic pecking order. He left the ducks to their resistance and went up to his car. A squirrel had taken refuge underneath it and he could see its tail near the back wheel. He drove off gently in stops and starts, so as not to squash it.

Superintendent Laliberté was in a good temper once more, having learned that Jules Saint-Croix had performed his civic duty and filled a test tube, which was now inside a big envelope.

‘Semen is absolutely fundamental,’ Laliberté said loudly to Adamsberg,
ripping open the envelope, without any consideration for the Saint-Croix couple, who were huddled in a corner of the room.

‘We’ve got two experiments to conduct, Adamsberg,’ Laliberté went on, shaking the test tube in the middle of the sitting room. ‘We need a warm sample and a dry one. The warm sample simulates semen taken from the victim’s vagina. Dried semen is more problematic. You have to use different ways of collecting it. Depends whether it’s on fabric, a road surface, vegetation or on a carpet, for instance. The worst surface of all is grass. You following me? We’ll have to distribute four doses in four strategic places: on the drive, in the garden, in the bed, and on the sitting room carpet.’

The Saint-Croix couple disappeared from the room like fugitives, and the morning was spent depositing drops of semen here and there, and surrounding them with chalk-marks so as not to lose sight of them.

‘While it’s drying, we can move to the toilet and tackle urine. Bring your card and kit.’

The poor Saint-Croix couple spent a difficult day, which filled the superintendent with satisfaction. He had made Linda cry, in order to collect her tears, and made Jules go running in the cold, to collect mucus from his nose. All the samples had been operationally usable, and he returned to the RCMP base a happy man, with all his cards and kits clearly labelled. There had been just one hold-up: the teams had had to be re-organised at the last minute, because two of the volunteers had refused to hand over semen samples to the all-women teams. This had sent Laliberté into a towering rage.

‘For Chrissakes, Louisseize,’ he yelled down the phone. ‘What do they think their semen is? Liquid gold? They’re happy enough to spread it around when they’re out chasing girls, but to oblige working women, oh no. Go tell him that, your damned volunteer.’

‘No I can’t, superintendent,’ said petite Berthe Louisseize. ‘He’s as stubborn as a mule. I’ll have to swap with Portelance.’

Laliberté had had to give in, but he was still snarling about it at the end of the day.

‘People can be as dumb as bison sometimes,’ he said to Adamsberg as they returned to HQ. ‘Now we’ve got all the samples, I’m going to give those stupid bastards a piece of my mind. The women in my squad know a damned sight more about their precious semen than that pair of dopes.’

‘Let it go, Aurèle,’ suggested Adamsberg. ‘They’re not worth bothering with.’

‘I’m taking it real personal, Adamsberg. You go off and find a woman tonight if you want, but I’m going out after supper to give them what for.’

That day, Adamsberg understood that the expansive jovial nature of the superintendent had another side, equally pronounced. The cheery, hail-fellow, tactless buddy could be a determined and ferocious bearer of grudges.

‘It wasn’t you that set him off, was it?’ Sergeant Sanscartier asked Adamsberg anxiously.

Sanscartier was speaking quietly, his whole bearing that of a mild-tempered man.

‘No, it was the two idiots who wouldn’t hand over their semen samples to the women’s teams.’

‘Just as well it wasn’t you. A word in your ear,’ he added, looking at Adamsberg with his big brown eyes. ‘He’s a good pal, our boss, but when he makes a joke, best to laugh and say nothing. What I mean is, don’t provoke him. Because when the boss gets going, he makes the ground shake.’

‘Does that happen often?’

‘If people cross him, or if he gets out of bed on the wrong side. Have you seen, we’re paired up for Monday?’

After a dinner for the whole group at the
Cinq Dimanches
to celebrate the end of the first short week, Adamsberg went back via the forest trail. He knew the way by now, and was able to avoid the potholes and sharp
drops, spotting the sparkling of the pools alongside. He made better time than on the way out. He had stopped to retie a shoelace when a flashlight shone out at him.

‘Hey, man!’ shouted a gruff, threatening voice. ‘What are you doing there? Are you after something?’

Holding up his torch in return, Adamsberg found himself facing a burly man, dressed as a logger and wearing a cap with earflaps. He was standing looking at him, legs planted firmly apart.

‘What’s all this?’ Adamsberg asked. ‘Don’t hikers have the right to use the trail?’

‘Ah,’ said the man after a pause. ‘You’re from the old country, I guess. French?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thought so,’ said the man, laughing this time, and coming closer. ‘Because you talk like a book. What are you doing here? Looking for a boyfriend?’

‘I could ask you the same.’

‘Now don’t be cheeky, I’m the site watchman. Can’t leave the equipment unguarded at night, it’s worth money.’