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?
Danglard saw Adamsberg come back in and shut himself in his office with a silent closing of the door. He wasn’t an oil painting either, but somehow he’d got the rainbow. Actually it would be truer to say that although none of Adamsberg’s features was handsome in itself, their combination paradoxically made him quite a good-looking man. None of the individual traits of his face could be called balanced, harmonious or handsome; in fact, he was a hotchpotch – yet the overall impression he made was attractive, especially when he got excited. Danglard had always found this random outcome quite unfair. His own face was no worse a mishmash than Adamsberg’s, but the cumulative effect was hopeless. Whereas Adamsberg, with no better cards to play, had got trumps.
Because Danglard had made himself read and think a lot since the age of two and a half, he wasn’t jealous. Also because he had his mental slide show. Also because despite the chronic irritation that Adamsberg caused him, Danglard quite liked the man; he even quite liked the way he looked, with his big nose and his odd, sideways smile. He’d not hesitated for a moment when Adamsberg had asked him to join his new murder squad. Adamsberg’s relaxed manner provided a much-needed counterweight to his own anxious and sometimes rather brittle hyperactivity; in fact, it calmed him down every day as much as a six-pack did.
Danglard meditated on Adamsberg’s closed door. One way or another the man was going to work on those 4s and was trying not to put his number two’s nose out of joint. He took his hands off the keyboard and leaned back in his chair. He was mildly worried: maybe he had been on the wrong track since yesterday evening. Come to think of it, he had seen those reversed 4s somewhere before. It had come to him in bed, as he was going to sleep, on his own. Somewhere long ago, maybe when he was still a young man, not yet a
flic
, and not in Paris. Danglard hadn’t travelled much in his life, so maybe he could try to track down that memory, assuming that anything of it remained save for an
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?
Danglard saw Adamsberg come back in and shut himself in his office with a silent closing of the door. He wasn’t an oil painting either, but somehow he’d got the rainbow. Actually it would be truer to say that although none of Adamsberg’s features was handsome in itself, their combination paradoxically made him quite a good-looking man. None of the individual traits of his face could be called balanced, harmonious or handsome; in fact, he was a hotchpotch – yet the overall impression he made was attractive, especially when he got excited. Danglard had always found this random outcome quite unfair. His own face was no worse a mishmash than Adamsberg’s, but the cumulative effect was hopeless. Whereas Adamsberg, with no better cards to play, had got trumps.
Because Danglard had made himself read and think a lot since the age of two and a half, he wasn’t jealous. Also because he had his mental slide show. Also because despite the chronic irritation that Adamsberg caused him, Danglard quite liked the man; he even quite liked the way he looked, with his big nose and his odd, sideways smile. He’d not hesitated for a moment when Adamsberg had asked him to join his new murder squad. Adamsberg’s relaxed manner provided a much-needed counterweight to his own anxious and sometimes rather brittle hyperactivity; in fact, it calmed him down every day as much as a six-pack did.
Danglard meditated on Adamsberg’s closed door. One way or another the man was going to work on those 4s and was trying not to put his number two’s nose out of joint. He took his hands off the keyboard and leaned back in his chair. He was mildly worried: maybe he had been on the wrong track since yesterday evening. Come to think of it, he had seen those reversed 4s somewhere before. It had come to him in bed, as he was going to sleep, on his own. Somewhere long ago, maybe when he was still a young man, not yet a
flic
, and not in Paris. Danglard hadn’t travelled much in his life, so maybe he could try to track down that memory, assuming that anything of it remained save for an
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