The Chalk Circle Man

‘Hate other people, feel like killing them,’ said Charles through clenched teeth, as if to excuse himself.

He cast about for a chair, bumped into the unfamiliar furniture and Mathilde did not help him. So he remained standing and turned towards her.

‘Am I more or less facing you?’

‘More or less.’

‘Put the light on, Mathilde.’

‘It is on.’

Charles took off his glasses and Mathilde looked at his eyes.

‘Well, obviously,’ she said after a moment. ‘Don’t expect me to tell you your eyes look fine, because they don’t, they’re horrible. Against your pale skin, frankly they make you look like the living dead. With your glasses on, you’re terrific. But when you take them off, you look like a scorpion-fish. If I was a surgeon, my dear Charles, I’d try and fix them for you, clean them up. There’s no reason why you should carry on looking like a scorpion-fish if there’s a way out. I know someone, a surgeon. He did a great job on a friend who’d had an accident that left him with a face like a John Dory. The John Dory’s not a pretty fish either.’

‘What if I like looking like a scorpion-fish?’ asked Charles.

‘Dear God,’ said Mathilde. ‘Are you going to plague me for the rest of my days moaning about being blind? You want to look terrible? OK, go ahead, look terrible. You want to go on being mean and nasty, making cutting remarks that reduce other people to shreds? All right, go ahead, my dear Charles, see if it bothers me. You won’t know about this yet, but you’re out of luck, because it’s Thursday today. So we’re at the start of a section two of the week, and until Sunday, inclusive, I will have absolutely no moral sense. You want compassion, a sympathetic ear, insight, encouragement, or any other humanitarian sentiments, sorry, that’s all over for this week. We get born, we die, and in between we destroy ourselves wasting time while we pretend to be spending it productively, and that’s all I want to say just now about the human race. Next Monday, I shall find humanity perfectly splendid with all its foibles and procrastinations, as it slouches towards the millennium. But today, nothing doing, the office is closed. Today’s a day for cynicism, laissez-aller, futility, and immediate gratification. If you want to look like a scorpion-fish, or a moray eel, or a gargoyle or a two-headed hydra, or a teratomorph, well, feel free, Charles, go ahead. You won’t upset me. I like all the fish in the sea, even disgusting fish, so this isn’t a conversation for a Thursday at all. You’re unsettling my week, carrying on like this with your hysterical revenge. See, what would have been a good thing to do in a section two of the week, would be to go upstairs and have a drink in the Flying Gurnard, where I could have introduced you to the old lady who lives on the top floor. But today, no, out of the question, you’d be too nasty to her. You have to treat Clemence with kid gloves. Seventy years old and she’s just got one idea in her head, to find the love of her life, and a man, hopefully at the same time, which is a tall order. You see, Charles, everyone has their own troubles. She’s got plenty of love to give, she falls for every lonely-heart announcement in the paper. She looks through all the small ads, she replies to them, she goes along for a date, she’s invariably humiliated, so she comes back home and starts again. To tell you the truth, I think she’s a bit soft in the head, desperately nice, always trying to help, and pulling packs of cards out of the pockets of her baggy old trousers to tell people’s fortunes. And I’ll tell you what she looks like, since you have this silly habit of not seeing: she’s not very attractive, she’s got a bony, rather masculine face, with sharp little teeth like a shrew-mouse, Crocidura russula, you wouldn’t want to get your hand caught by them. And she wears far too much make-up. I hire her two days a week to file my papers and slides. She’s very precise and patient, as if she was never going to die, and sometimes I find that restful. She works away with her mind on other things, whispering about her dreams and her pathetic adventures, going over the hypothetical meetings with Mr Right, preparing what to say to the next one, and despite all that she’s very good at filing, although like you she couldn’t care less about fish. That’s the only thing you might have in common.’

‘So you think we’ll get on?’ asked Charles.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll hardly ever see her. She’s always trotting off somewhere looking for the future husband. And as for you, you don’t love anyone, so as my mother would say, what’s the rush?’

‘True,’ said Charles.

VI

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY MORNING TWO CIRCLES WERE discovered: in the rue de l’Abbe-de-l’Epee was the cork from a wine bottle, and in the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, in the 5th arrondissement, lay a woman with her throat cut, staring up at the sky.

In spite of the shock, Adamsberg could not help thinking that the discovery had been made at the beginning of section two of the week, the time for unimportant things, but that the murder must have been committed at the end of the first section, the serious one.

He paced around his office, with a less vague expression than usual on his face, his chin thrust forward, his mouth open as if he was out of breath. Danglard saw that Adamsberg was preoccupied, but that he nevertheless didn’t give the impression of deep concentration. Their previous commissaire had been just the opposite. He had been completely tied up in his thoughts, a man of perpetual rumination. But Adamsberg was open to every wind, like a cabin made of rough planks, letting his brain receive fresh air, Danglard thought. Yes, it was true, you could imagine that everything that went in through his ears, eyes and nose – smoke, colours, paper rustling – caused a draught to whistle through his thoughts and stopped them solidifying. This man, thought Danglard, is attentive to everything, which means he pays attention to nothing. The four inspectors were even getting into the habit of walking in and out of his office without fear of interrupting any particular train of thought. And Danglard had noticed that at certain times Adamsberg was more absent-minded than at others. When he was doodling, not resting his notepad on his knee but holding a little piece of paper against his stomach, then Danglard would say to himself: ‘If I were to announce to him now that a giant fungus was about to engulf the Earth and squeeze it to the size of a grapefruit, he wouldn’t give a damn. And that would be a pretty serious matter – not room for many people on a grapefruit. As anyone can see.’

Florence was also watching the commissaire. Since her conversation with Castreau she had thought again, and had announced that the new commissaire made her think of a rather depraved Florentine prince she had seen in a picture in some book, but now she couldn’t remember which. Anyway, she would like to sit on a bench and look at him as if he were a picture in an exhibition when she’d had enough of life, enough of finding ladders in her tights, and enough of hearing Danglard tell her he didn’t know when the universe would come to an end, or indeed why it was the universe anyway.

She watched them drive off in two cars to the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.

In the car, Danglard muttered: ‘A cork and a woman with her throat cut. Can’t see the connection – it’s beyond me. I don’t understand what’s going through this character’s mind.’

‘If you look at water in a bucket,’ Adamsberg said, ‘you can see the bottom of the bucket. You can put your arm in, you can touch it. Or even a barrel, same thing. But if it’s a well, there’s no hope. Even if you chuck pebbles in to see how deep it is, it’s no use. Problem is, you keep on trying to understand. People always want to “understand”. And that way madness lies. You wouldn’t believe the number of little pebbles there are at the bottom of a well. It’s not to hear the splash that people throw them, really. No, it’s to understand. But a well is a terrible thing. Once the people who built them have died, nobody knows anything about the well. It’s beyond our reach, it’s laughing at us from deep inside its mysterious cylindrical belly, full of water. That’s what a well’s like, for me. But how much water is there? How deep does it go? You have to lean over, to find out, you have to lower ropes down inside it.’

‘You can get drowned like that,’ said Castreau.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I don’t see what this has to do with the murder,’ said Castreau.

‘I didn’t say it had anything to do with it,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Then why did you get us started on wells?’

‘Why not? The things we talk about don’t always have to be relevant. But Danglard’s right. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between a wine cork and a dead woman. But that’s exactly what’s important.’