Thirteen, seven women and six men.
So one more tile would close the Hand of Honours. It would have to be either a white dragon or a green dragon. It would be a man no doubt, to get a balance between the sexes, father and mother. Aching and sweating, Adamsberg returned the precious dictionary to the librarian. Now he had found the open sesame, the key, the little golden key that opened the door to the room full of corpses in Bluebeard’s castle.
He returned to Clementine’s house exhausted and anxious to send the key across the Atlantic to his brother, to tell him his personal nightmare was over. But Josette did not give him time to do anything, as she pushed before his eyes the decoded message she had worked on.
‘Josette, I haven’t slept a wink, I’m in no state to understand this stuff.’
‘These are the letters from Michel’s computer. I was quite wrong, I should have realised. Look what it could mean.’
Adamsberg concentrated on the words.
‘Portage trail,’ he murmured.
‘Michel must surely have been passing this to someone. You weren’t alone on the path. Someone else knew you’d been there.’
‘It’s just one interpretation, Josette.’
‘There aren’t thousands of words with these combinations. I’m sure this is right.’
‘It’s remarkable, Josette, congratulations. But I’m afraid nobody will believe in an interpretation, it’s not the same thing as evidence for the police, you see. I’ve rescued my brother from the abyss, but I’m still there myself, buried under piles of rocks.’
‘Locks, you mean,’ said Josette. ‘Big strong locks. And where there are locks there are keys.’
LV
RAPHAEL ADAMSBERG FOUND THE MESSAGE ON THE FRIDAY MORNING. His brother had given it the name ‘Land!’ which must refer, Raphael thought, to the cry of sailors when they first see the faint outline of a landmass on the horizon. He had to read the email several times before he dared believe he had understood the meaning of this confusing mixture of dragons and winds, written down in great haste and in a state of exhaustion: the judge’s ear, sand, matricide, Fulgence’s real age, his father’s mutilated hand, the village of Collery, the trident, Mah Jong, the Hand of Honours. Jean-Baptiste had typed so fast that he had missed out letters and even entire words. Raphael could sense the trembling of his hands, a sensation that came directly from brother to brother, from shore to shore, carried through the waves and ending up in his Detroit bolt-hole, ripping devastatingly through the shadowy network in which he had been living his furtive life. He had not killed Lise. He stayed lying back in his chair, letting his body float along the shore, unable to guess what strange leaps Jean-Baptiste had made in order to exhume the judge’s murderous itinerary. As children once, they had wandered so far into the mountains that they were unable to find the way back to the village or even a path. Jean-Baptiste had climbed on Raphael’s shoulders. ‘Don’t cry,’ he had said. ‘We’ll try and find the way people went in the olden days.’ Every five hundred metres, Jean-Baptiste would climb up on his back. ‘This way,’ he would say as he jumped down.
So that’s what Jean-Baptiste must have done. Climbed up and seen where the Trident had passed by, following his blood-stained trail. Like a dog, like a god, thought Raphael. For the second time, Jean-Baptiste was bringing him home to the village.
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.’
‘Raphael’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,
‘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.’
