Faced with his superior officer, Danglard scratched his chest in a gesture of illusory self-defence.
‘Quick, Danglard,’ whispered Adamsberg. ‘I need you. There’s a taxi waiting.’
His head cleared by this sudden return to calm, the capitaine hurriedly pulled on a jacket and trousers. Adamsberg evidently wasn’t bearing a grudge, his anger being already forgotten, swallowed up in the clouds of his habitual indulgence or indifference. If the commissaire had come to fetch him late at night, it must mean the squad had another murder to deal with.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Saint-Paul.’
The two men went downstairs, Danglard trying to tie his tie as well as putting on a thick scarf.
‘Is there a victim?’
‘Just get a move on, mon vieux, it’s urgent.’
The taxi dropped them off by the poster. Adamsberg paid the fare, while Danglard was looking in surprise down the empty street. No flashing lights, no technical team, just a deserted pavement and sleeping buildings. Adamsberg caught his arm and pulled him hurriedly towards the advertisement. Without letting go, he pointed to the picture.
‘Danglard, tell me, what’s that?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Danglard, in puzzlement.
‘The painting, for God’s sake. I’m asking you what it is. What’s it about?’
‘But where’s the murder?’ asked Danglard turning round. ‘Where’s the victim?’
‘Here,’ said Adamsberg pointing at his own chest. ‘Just give me an answer. What is it?’
Danglard shook his head, half shocked, half confused. Then the surreal absurdity of the situation seemed so funny to him that a pure feeling of hilarity swept away his black mood. He felt full of gratitude to Adamsberg, who not only seemed to be overlooking the earlier insults, but was also quite involuntarily offering him a moment of exceptional extravagance this evening. Only Adamsberg was capable of squeezing ordinary life to extract these escapades, these shafts of weird beauty. So what did it matter that he had been woken up in the middle of the night and dragged off in the freezing cold to stand looking at a picture of Neptune?
‘Who’s that man?’ Adamsberg was repeating, without letting go of his arm.
‘Neptune rising from the waves,’ Danglard said with a smile.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Neptune, or Poseidon if you prefer.’
‘Is he the god of the sea, or of the underworld, or what?’
‘They’re brothers,’ Danglard explained, delighted to be able to give a midnight lesson in mythology. ‘Three brothers, Hades, Zeus and Poseidon. Poseidon reigns over the seas, with all their storms and calms, but also over what lies under the sea, the vasty deeps.’
Adamsberg had let his arm go by now and was listening hard, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘In the picture,’ Danglard went on, moving his finger across the poster, ‘we see him surrounded by his court and his demons. Here are Neptune’s benign actions, and here is his power to punish mortals, represented by his trident and the evil serpent who drags men under the sea. This is an academic painting, sentimental and unremarkable. I can’t identify the painter. Some artist long forgotten, who did pictures for the walls of bourgeois householders and probably…’
‘So that’s Neptune,’ Adamsberg interrupted in a thoughtful voice. ‘OK, Danglard, thanks a million. Go home, go back to bed. My apologies for waking you up.’
Before Danglard could even ask what it was all about, Adamsberg had stopped another taxi and pushed his deputy inside. Through the car window, he watched his commissaire walking away slowly, a thin, dark, stooping figure, steering a slightly irregular course through the night. He smiled, automatically put his hand to his head and found the remains of the pompom on his woolly hat. Suddenly anxious, he touched it three times for luck.
V
BACK HOME, ADAMSBERG LOOKED THROUGH HIS HAPHAZARD collection of books to find one that might tell him more about Neptune/Poseidon. He found an old schoolbook where on page 67 the sea god appeared in all his glory, brandishing his divine weapon. He looked at it for a moment, read the little caption describing the bas-relief, then still holding the book, he collapsed on to his bed, fully dressed but worn out with exhaustion and worry.
He was woken at about four in the morning by a cat miauling on the rooftops. He opened his eyes in the darkness and stared at the lighter rectangle of the window opposite his bed. His jacket, hanging from the window catch, looked like a broad-shouldered, motionless silhouette, an intruder who had crept into his bedroom to watch him sleeping. It was the stowaway who had penetrated his secret cave and wasn’t letting him escape. Adamsberg closed his eyes then opened them again. Neptune and his trident.
This time, his arms started to tremble, and his heart beat faster. This was nothing like the previous four attacks, but sheer stupefaction and terror.
He took a long drink from the kitchen tap and splashed cold water on to his face and hair. Then he opened all the cupboards, looking for some alcohol, the stronger the better, a liqueur, anything. There must be something of the kind, the remains of an evening with Danglard, for instance. In the end, he found an unfamiliar earthenware bottle and uncorked it. Sniffing the neck, he looked at the label. Gin, 44 degrees proof. His hands holding the heavy bottle were trembling. He filled a glass and drank it straight off. Twice. Adamsberg felt his body loosen up and let himself fall into an old armchair, leaving only a reading lamp alight.
Now that the alcohol had deadened his muscles, he could start thinking, begin again, and try to face the monster that the image of Neptune had finally called up from his own vasty deeps. The stowaway, the dreadful intruder. The invincible and arrogant killer, whom he used to call ‘The Trident’. The murderer who always escaped, and who, thirty years earlier, had thrown his life off course. For fourteen years after that, Adamsberg had been chasing after him, following his tracks, hoping each time to catch him and then losing his moving target. He had run, fallen headlong, and run again.
And had ended by falling once more. In the course of this pursuit, he had given up hope and, above all, had lost his brother. The Trident had escaped, every time. He was a Titan, a devil, a Poseidon from hell. Raising his three-pronged weapon and killing with a single blow to the belly. Leaving his impaled victims with three bloody wounds in a straight line.
Adamsberg sat up in the chair. The three red drawing pins in his office, the three bleeding holes. Enid’s long three-pronged fork, echoing the trident’s three points. And Neptune raising his trident-sceptre. These were the images which had given him such pain, dredging up a great sorrow, and then, in a single stream of mud, liberating his resurrected anguish.
He ought to have guessed, he thought now. He ought to have linked these violent shocks to the long and painful trajectory of his pursuit of the Trident. Because no other living being had caused him more pain and dread, distress and fury than this man. Sixteen years earlier, he had had to close up the gaping wound the killer had made in his life, seal it up, cover it over, and forget about it. And suddenly, without rhyme or reason, it had opened up under his feet.
Adamsberg stood up and paced round the room, with folded arms. On the one hand, he felt relieved and almost peaceful, since he had identified what lay at the eye of the cyclone. The tornadoes would not catch him out again. But this sudden reappearance of the Trident alarmed him. This Monday 6 October, he had risen up like a ghost bursting through the walls. It was a troubling revival, an inexplicable return. He put the bottle of gin back in the cupboard and carefully rinsed out the glass. Unless, that is, he did somehow know, unless he did understand why the old man had risen from the past. Between his calm everyday arrival at the office and the spectre of the Trident, there was some missing connection.