‘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.’
LIV
ADAMSBERG RETURNED TO CLIGNANCOURT THROUGH THE DARKNESS, surprised to find that he was able to steer the bike fairly well. Camille’s treatment had given a shock to the system and cleared his head, so that he was neither feeling sleepy nor suffering from a headache. He went into the dark house, put a log on the fire and watched it flare up. Seeing Camille again had unsettled him. He had left her on an impulse, then found her again in an impossible situation: she had been abandoned by that rat who had tiptoed away with his smart tie and polished shoes, taking his dogs with him. She had thrown herself into the arms of the first smooth talker who had come along, someone who had promised her eternal affection, no doubt. And there was the result. Goddamnit, he had not even thought of asking the child’s name, or even what sex it was. He hadn’t thought about it at all. He had just sat there piling up tiles. He had talked about dragons and Mah Jong. Why had he been so obsessed with dragons? Ah yes, to stuff them into the cathedral windows.
He shook his head. Going on benders obviously didn’t suit him. He had not seen Camille for a year, and he had just turned up on her doorstep, roaring drunk, had insisted on her getting out the Mah Jong, and then clamoured to see the new father. Exactly like the boss of the Canada geese. Well that damned bird could certainly be thrust without any pity right into the cathedral, and could honk as much as he liked from the top of the spire.
He pulled the rules of the game out of his pocket and flipped through it sadly. It was an old set of rules, on yellowing paper from the days of the old grandmothers. Circles, bamboos, characters, winds and dragons, he could remember it all now. He looked through the pages slowly, searching for the famous Hand of Honours that Madame Guillaumond always mocked her husband for never getting. He stopped at Special Hands, the ones that were hard to get. The Green Snake for instance was a complete set of bamboos along with a trio of green dragons. He went on down the list and found it: ‘Hand of Honours’, made up of combinations of dragons and winds. Example: three west winds, three south winds, three red dragons, three white dragons and a pair of north winds. It was the ultimate hand, almost impossible to acquire. Old man Guillaumond had been absolutely right not to give a damn about it. Just as he, Jean-Baptiste, didn’t give a damn about the piece of paper he was holding. It wasn’t the paper he wanted to hold, it was Camille, one of the best things in his life. And he had messed everything up. Just as he had messed everything up on that Canadian path, and messed up his pursuit of the judge, which had come to a dead end in Collery, the home of the maternal white dragon.
He froze. The white dragon. Camille hadn’t told him about that. He picked up the rules again and looked at them. Honours were red dragons, green dragons and white dragons. Camille had called them ‘virgins’. And the four winds: North, South, East and West. He gripped the fragile paper tightly. Four winds: Soubise, Ventou, Autan and Wind. And Brasillier had to be a red dragon. On the back of the rules, he quickly scribbled the twelve names of the judge’s victims, adding the mother, which made thirteen. The mother, the original White Dragon. Grasping his pencil tightly, he tried to relate the list to the Mah Jong tiles, to see if he could make up the Hand of Honours. The one that the judge’s father had never got, but that Fulgence was furiously assembling, in order to give him back his dignity. With a trident, like his father’s mutilated three-fingered hand, pulling out the tiles. Fulgence pulled out his victims with iron fingers. How many tiles would it take to make up a hand?
With moist palms, he went back to the very beginning of the rules: you had to assemble fourteen tiles. There was just one left to make up the number.
Adamsberg read and re-read the names of the victims, trying to find the missing piece. Ghislaine Matere: that must be related to ‘maternal’, the mother, so it could count as a white dragon. Jeanne Lessard, a green dragon, perhaps, since her name sounded like ‘lizard’. The other names were a puzzle. They didn’t seem to be either dragons or winds. He didn’t know what to do with Lentretien, Mestre or Lefebure. But he did have four winds and three dragons, seven out of thirteen, surely too many for coincidence. And, he realised with a start, that if he was right, if the judge really was trying to accomplish his fourteen tiles, Raphael could not possibly have killed Lise. The choice of the young Mademoiselle Autan had been because of her
By eight in the morning, Adamsberg was waiting in a cafe for the local library to open, looking at his two watches and learning the rules of Mah Jong, as well as checking over the victims’ names. He could of course have called on Danglard’s help, but his deputy would surely have sent him off with a flea in his ear at this new fantasy. Adamsberg had already put him through a dead man walking, a hundred-year-old murderer, and now he would be inflicting a Chinese game on him. But the Chinese game had been very popular in Fulgence’s childhood, even in the countryside, as in Camille’s grandmother’s house.
Now he realised why, in his drunken condition, he had asked Camille for the game. He had been thinking about the four winds in the Richelieu hotel room. He had been in the company of dragons. He had discovered the game that in the judge’s boyhood home had been played every night, with pitiless references to the Hand of Honours, as opposed to the mutilated hand of the father.
When the library doors opened, he hurried inside, and a few minutes later received at his table a large etymological dictionary of French surnames. With the same fervent prayer as a gambler rolling the dice, hoping for a treble six, he unfolded his list of names. He had already had three cups of coffee to neutralise his sleepless night, and his hands were shaking as badly as Josette’s.
First of all, he checked to see if he was right about Brasillier: yes, it derived from ‘brazier’; fire, a red dragon. Next he looked for Lessard: ‘name of a place, Essart Essard, or can mean lizard.’ OK, green dragon. Then he looked under Espir, hoping it could be counted as a wind, since it seemed to contain the letters of ‘respiration’. Yes, Old French for ‘breath’. That made five winds, eight tiles out of thirteen. Adamsberg passed his hand across his face, with the feeling that he was only just clearing the jumps, his horse’s belly just brushing the bars.
The other names were harder to fit in. The least promising was Fevre. Perhaps this was going to bring him to a juddering halt, in his fantasy of shovelling clouds. Fevre, he discovered, to his chagrin, came from the Latin
Adamsberg let his hands fall and shut his eyes for a while before embarking on the last names, Lentretien and Mestre. Lentretien turned out, amazingly to be a deformation of
‘Mestre: old Occitan term, southern form of Master. Diminutive forms Mestrel or Mestral, variants of Mistral. Refers to the north side of a hill exposed to the Mistral, the master wind from the north.’
‘The master wind,’ he wrote. He put down the pen and breathed deeply, trying to take in a lungful of the cold master wind from the north, which would close the list and cool his burning cheeks. He quickly sorted the suits. A trio of red dragons: Lefebure, Fevre and Brasillier; two trios of winds, Soubise, Ventou, Autan, Espire, Mestre and Wind. A pair of green dragons, Lessard and Lentretien. A pair of white dragons with Matere and the matricide.
