Have Mercy On Us All (10 page)

Joss gave them to him that evening when he’d finally settled in. Once he was at last on his own in his new room for the first time, he took off his shoes and socks, closed his eyes, relaxed his arms and stood blissfully still on the carpet. That very same moment Nicolas Le Guern, born at Locmaria in 1832, came to sit on his huge bed with its wooden posts, and said good evening.

“Good evening to you,” said Joss.

“Nice one, my lad,” the ancestor said as he leaned on his elbow on the quilt.

“Not bad, eh?” Joss replied, half opening his eyes.

“You’re better off here than you were over there. Didn’t I tell you newscasting had real potential?”

“You’ve been saying that for seven years. Is that the reason you turned up tonight?”

“Those messages,” old Le Guern drawled as he scratched his stubbly cheek, “those screeds you call ‘specials’, the ones you’re passing on to the toff, well, if I were you, I’d give them a wide berth. They don’t smell right.”

“They’ve been paid for, old fellow, and top rate too.” Joss was putting his socks and shoes back on.

The ancient mariner shrugged. “If I were you, I’d give them a wide berth.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what it means, Joss my lad.”

Decambrais, quite unaware that Nicolas Le Guern was visiting on the first floor of his house, was working away in his cubbyhole on the ground floor. He reckoned that this time one of the “specials” had rung a bell – faintly, to be sure, but maybe it was the ring of truth.

The morning’s trawl had contained what Joss called “the next chapter from the gobbledegook guy”. That’s just it, Decambrais thought: it was a quotation that followed on from the last, from the middle of some source text. The mystery scribe had avoided quoting from the beginning of it. But why? Decambrais read and reread the messages in the hope that something in these familiar yet unplaceable sentences would suddenly give away the name of their author.

Up (and with my wife, who has not been at church a month or two) … Now I am at a loss to know whether it be my Hares-foot which is my preservative against wind, for I never had a fit of the Collique since I wore it.

Decambrais sighed and put the sheet down, then turned to the other one, the one that had rung a bell:

Et de eis quae significant illud, est ut videas mures et animalia quae habitant sub terra afugere ad superficiem terrae et pati sedar, id est, commoveri hinc inde sicut animalia ebria …

He had scribbled a quick and over-literal translation under it, with a question mark in the middle:
And among the things that are a sign of it, there is that you see rats and animals that live under ground fleeing towards the surface and suffering(?), that is to say that they come forth from that place like drunken animals …

He’d been grappling with that
sedar
for an hour, because it was not a word of Latin. He was pretty sure it was not a copying error, because the pedant was in all other respects quite meticulous, and even used ellipses to indicate omissions from the source text. So if the pedant had written
sedar
, it must be because
sedar
occurred in the middle of a passage that was in all other respects written in impeccable medieval Latin. Decambrais slowly clambered up the steps of his library ladder to fetch another dictionary, and then stopped dead in his tracks.

Arabic. It was a word of Arabic origin.

He climbed back down in almost feverish haste and sat at his desk with his hands flat on the screed, as if to make sure it would not fly away. Arabic
and
Latin: a hybrid text. Decambrais shuffled through the papers on his desk to find all the others that referred to subterranean beasts coming to the surface, including the first Latin text that Joss had read out the previous day, and that begin in almost exactly the same way:
You will see …

You will see animals born of corruption, such as worms, frogs and
flies
, multiply beneath the earth, and if the reason for it is also subterranean you will see reptiles that live in the depths coming to the surface of the earth, abandoning their eggs, and sometimes dying. And if the cause is in the air, the same will happen to the birds.

The sources repeated each other, sometimes word for word. So they must be different writers dealing with the same idea, down to the seventeenth century, for sure; it was an idea being handed down from one generation to the next. Just as medieval monks handed down the precepts of the church through the ages. The source must have been related to some constituted body, to some cultured élite. But no, not to the monasteries. The texts were not remotely religious.

Decambrais had laid his head in his hand to think ever harder when a gay song rang out through the whole house. It was Lizbeth summoning them all to dinner.

When he went down to the dining room Joss found all the inmates of the Decambrais Hotel already at their seats unfolding their napkins from their individual wooden rings, each with its distinctive mark. Joss, overcome for once by shyness, hadn’t meant to join the common table on his first evening – residents weren’t obliged to take dinner, as long as they signed out the day before. But he had become used to living alone, eating alone, sleeping alone, and even talking by himself, except when he went to eat at the Viking, which wasn’t that often. In fourteen years of exile in Paris, he’d had three rather abbreviated affairs, but he’d never dared take any one of his girlfriends back to his room to share the mattress on the bare floor. Their places, however modest, had always been far more comfortable than his own dilapidated cabin.

Joss made a conscious effort to shake off the boorishness that seemed to be welling up from his far-distant youth, when he’d been a rough and awkward adolescent. Lizbeth smiled as she handed him his personal napkin ring. Lizbeth’s smile made him want to throw himself at her in a great leap, like a drowning man straining for a rock on a dark night. She was a splendid rock to be stranded on – smooth, dark and round, and worthy of eternal
gratitude
. Joss was amazed at himself. He’d never known such a violent urge, save with Lizbeth, and only when she smiled. The assembled company welcomed Joss, who took a seat next to Decambrais, on his right. Lizbeth presided at the other end of the table, and busied herself with serving the meal. The other two residents were there: Castillon, from room 1, a retired blacksmith who had spent the first half of his life as a professional conjuror, performing all over Europe; and Evelyne Curie, from room 4, a tiny, timid woman under thirty with a gentle old-world face which she kept lowered over her plate. Lizbeth had given Joss his navigation chart the moment he’d moved into the hotel.

“Now listen here, sailorman,” she’d begun, as she pulled him into the bathroom for the lecture. “Don’t you go putting your foot in it here. You can push Castillon around if you like, he’s got broad shoulders and he likes to think he can take a joke. He’s not as tough as he looks, but he can cope. Don’t worry if your watch goes missing during dinner, it’s an old habit of his, he can’t resist the temptation, but he always gives it back over dessert. By the way, dessert is stewed fruit on weekdays or fresh fruit in season, and semolina pudding on Sundays. No plastic food here, you can eat it all blindfold. But keep your hands off the little lady, sailorman. She’s been safe here for a year and a half. She ran away from a husband who’d been thrashing her for eight years. Can you imagine, eight years of battering? Apparently, she was in love with the brute. Anyway, she finally saw the light and turned up here one fine day. But watch it, sailorman. Her bloke is scouring the city looking for her, so as to flay her alive and welcome her home. The two things don’t really go together, but that’s how those sort of men work, and he’s on autopilot. He’s up to killing her so no-one else can have her – you’ve knocked around, you know the scene. So, mum’s the word – you’ve never heard of Evelyne Curie, never come across the name. We call her Eva around here, that keeps us in the clear. You got that, sailorman? Treat her nicely. She doesn’t say much, she’s quite jumpy, she blushes as if she was always afraid of something. She’s getting better bit by bit, but it’s a long haul. As for me, well, you know who I am, I’m OK but I’m finished with leg-overs and all that stuff. That’s about it. Go down to dinner, it’s nearly time. And I’d better tell you straight away, it’s two bottles per meal and not a drop
more
, because Decambrais has a weakness and I have to hold him back. If you want to tank up you go over to Bertin’s afterwards. And breakfast is from seven to eight, suits everybody except the blacksmith who’s a late riser, each to his own is what I say. I’ve said my piece, so don’t get in my way, and I’ll get your ring. I’ve got one with a chick and one with a boat. Which would you rather have?”

“What ring?” asked Joss

“The ring for your napkin. Oh, and there’s a wash every week, whites on Friday, coloureds on Tuesday. If you don’t want your smalls mixed up with the blacksmith’s, there’s a launderette two hundred yards down the road. If you want your stuff ironed, Marie-Belle, who comes to do the windows, will take it in for a consideration. So, which ring do you want?”

“The chick,” Joss said decisively.

Lizbeth sighed as she went downstairs. “Why do men always try to be smart?”

Soup, veal stew, cheese and cooked pears. Castillon wittered on, Joss kept his peace and looked for his bearings, as he would in unknown waters. Little Eva ate noiselessly and raised her eyes only once, to ask Lizbeth to pass the bread. Lizbeth smiled and Joss had the impression that Eva also wanted to bury herself in Lizbeth’s broad bosom. But maybe it was just him.

Decambrais said almost nothing during dinner. Lizbeth whispered to Joss, who was lending a hand with clearing the dishes, “When he’s like that it means he’s working during his meal.” Indeed, as soon as the pears were finished, Decambrais got up, made his excuses and went back to his cubbyhole to work.

Light dawned in the morning, at the very moment of awakening. The name rose to his lips even before he had opened his eyes, as if the word had been eagerly waiting all night long for the sleeper to wake so it could introduce itself to him. Decambrais could hear himself saying it softly and clearly:
Avicenna
.

He got up saying it over and over so it would not evaporate along with the mists of sleep. For safety, he wrote it down.
Avicenna
. Then he put alongside:
Liber canonis
. The canon of medieval medicine.

Avicenna. The great Avicenna: early eleventh century, Persian philosopher and physician, transcribed in a thousand manuscripts from East to West. Latin translations sprinkled with Arabic terms. He was on the right track now.

Decambrais hung about at the foot of the stairs with a broad smile on his face, waiting to bump into his Breton lodger. “Sleep well, Le Guern?”

Joss could see that something was up. Decambrais had a thin, pale face that often looked like death warmed up, but this morning he looked almost ruddy, as if he’d been out in the sun too long. And he wasn’t smiling his ordinary, slightly cynical and snooty smile, but simply beaming.

“I’ve got him, Le Guern, I’ve got him!”

“What?”

“Our pedant, of course! I’ve got him, dammit! Keep today’s ‘specials’ for me, won’t you, I’m off to the library.”

“You mean downstairs in your cubbyhole?”

“No, Le Guern. I do not have every book.”

“Oh really?” said Joss, genuinely surprised at the news.

Decambrais stood there in his overcoat with his briefcase wedged between his heels taking down that morning’s “special” from Joss’s dictation:

When the air varieth from his natural temperature, declining to heat and moisture, when it seemeth cloudie and dustie; when the wyndes are gross and hot; then are the Planets in disorder, and hang their poison in the sick air

He slipped the sheet into his briefcase, waited to hear the day’s shipwreck story, and at five minutes to nine strode down the steps to the metro.

X

THAT THURSDAY ADAMSBERG
arrived at the office after Danglard – an event sufficiently rare for it to cause the latter to give his chief a long and meaningful glance. Adamsberg had the rumpled look of a man who’s had only a few hours sleep towards dawn. He went out again straight away to have an espresso at the corner café.

It must be Camille, Danglard concluded. Camille must have come back last night. He switched on his computer in desultory fashion. He’d slept alone, as usual. With his ugly mug and his pear-shaped torso, he was damn lucky if he got to touch a woman once every two years. Danglard pulled himself back from the brink of this habitual slough of despond and its accompanying Pilsner six-pack with his usual trick of running a mental slide show of the faces of his five children. The fifth with his pale blue eyes wasn’t actually his, but his wife, when she left him, let him keep the whole bunch as a job lot. That was a while back now – eight years and thirty-six days. It had taken him two years and six thousand five hundred bottles of lager to free his mind of the full-screen image of Marie’s back in a green trouser suit walking down the corridor in their flat, cool as a cucumber, and slamming the front door shut behind her. Since then, the kids’ gallery – twin boys, twin girls, then blue-eyes on his own – had become his place of mental safety, his refuge and comfort. In that time he must have spent thousands of hours grating carrots, washing socks, checking schoolbags, ironing T-shirts, and scrubbing the toilet bowl to a microbe-free sheen. His Stakhanovite parenting gradually subsided to a mellower if still strenuous
routine
, while the lager intake fell to only fourteen hundred cans a year. On bad days, though, it was supplemented by supplies of white wine. What remained was the bright sun of his relationship with the five kids, and no-one, he told himself on particularly gloomy awakenings, was ever going to take that away from him. Nobody had the slightest wish to do so, in any case.

He had tried after much patient waiting to have a woman perform the reverse operation – to come in the door frontways and walk coolly down the corridor towards him in a green trouser suit, but nothing much came of that plan. The women who came into the flat never stayed very long, and while they were there relations tended to be stormy. He couldn’t aspire to a woman like Camille, he couldn’t ask for the moon. Her profile was so sharp and lovely that you were torn between wanting to paint her portrait instantly and wanting to kiss her lips. He would be happy with just a woman – any woman, really. Why should he object if her middle was as broad as his own?