almost entirely obliterated trace.
Adamsberg had actually closed his door so as to be able to call around forty Paris commissariats without feeling the shadow of his deputy’s justified irritation looming over his shoulder. Danglard had plumped for a radical art operation; Adamsberg did not share that view. But to go from disagreeing with Danglard to launching inquiries over the whole metropolitan area of Paris was an illogical leap which Adamsberg preferred to perform on his own. Even this morning he hadn’t been quite sure he would do it. At breakfast, apologising to Camille for bringing work home, he’d opened his notebook and stared at Maryse’s sketch of the 4 as if he was playing double or quits. He asked Camille what she thought of it. “Pretty,” she said. Before she had woken up properly, Camille’s sight was so poor that she couldn’t really distinguish a landscape painting from a strip cartoon. If she’d actually seen the pencil drawing, she wouldn’t have called it pretty. She’d have said: “But that’s ghastly.” Adamsberg replied gently: “No, Camille, it’s not a pretty picture.” That was the moment, the word, the correction that made up his mind in a flash.
Feeling comfortably weary and agreeably woolly after his not very restful night, Adamsberg dialled the first number on his list.
He got to the end of his list by five, and he’d only once been out for a walk, at lunchtime. That was when Camille got him on his mobile, when he was munching a sandwich on a park bench.
It wasn’t her style to rehearse the events of the night before. Camille used words with care and discretion, relying on her body to express feelings. It was up to you to know what they were; it wasn’t easy to be sure.
Adamsberg jotted down on his pad:
woman
plus
smart
plus
desire
equals
Camille
. He broke off, and reread his note. Big words and flat words. But for all their obviousness, when applied to Camille they went into relief. He could almost see them rising like Braille from the surface of the paper. OK. Equals Camille. It was very hard for him to write the word
Love
. His ballpoint made an “L,” but out of sheer anxiety it stalled on the “o”. Adamsberg had long been puzzled by his own reticence until he’d managed to unravel it to its core, or so he thought. He liked loving. But he didn’t like what loving habitually brings in its train. Because love
leads to other things
, he thought. Staying in bed for ever or even for just a couple of days is an impossible dream. Love, hauled by a few common ideas, always
leads on to
four walls and no way out. It flares up out in the open like a grass fire but comes to rest under one roof, warming slippered feet at the stove. A man like Adamsberg could see from afar that the ineluctable train of
other things
was a ghastly trap. He shied away from its earliest symptoms, for he was as alert to its approach as an animal sensing the distant footfall of a predator. But he reckoned Camille was always a step ahead of him in flight. With her periodic leaves of absence, with her guarded emotions, and her boots always set ready in the starting blocks. But Camille played her game under better cover than he did, she did it less roughly, with more kindliness. As a result, unless you took the time to think about it for a while, you would not necessarily divine her imperious instinct for staying wild and free. And Adamsberg had to admit that he did not take enough time to think about Camille. He sometimes began to do so, but then forgot to follow through as other thoughts intervened and jostled him from one idea to another until they all fell into that kaleidoscopic pattern which presaged a moment of total mental blankness.
While hammer drills split his ears as the workmen carried on fixing the window bars, Adamsberg finished writing down the sentence in the notebook on his lap by placing a firm full stop after the L. Camille hadn’t called him to gurgle mutual congratulations
Adamsberg had actually closed his door so as to be able to call around forty Paris commissariats without feeling the shadow of his deputy’s justified irritation looming over his shoulder. Danglard had plumped for a radical art operation; Adamsberg did not share that view. But to go from disagreeing with Danglard to launching inquiries over the whole metropolitan area of Paris was an illogical leap which Adamsberg preferred to perform on his own. Even this morning he hadn’t been quite sure he would do it. At breakfast, apologising to Camille for bringing work home, he’d opened his notebook and stared at Maryse’s sketch of the 4 as if he was playing double or quits. He asked Camille what she thought of it. “Pretty,” she said. Before she had woken up properly, Camille’s sight was so poor that she couldn’t really distinguish a landscape painting from a strip cartoon. If she’d actually seen the pencil drawing, she wouldn’t have called it pretty. She’d have said: “But that’s ghastly.” Adamsberg replied gently: “No, Camille, it’s not a pretty picture.” That was the moment, the word, the correction that made up his mind in a flash.
Feeling comfortably weary and agreeably woolly after his not very restful night, Adamsberg dialled the first number on his list.
He got to the end of his list by five, and he’d only once been out for a walk, at lunchtime. That was when Camille got him on his mobile, when he was munching a sandwich on a park bench.
It wasn’t her style to rehearse the events of the night before. Camille used words with care and discretion, relying on her body to express feelings. It was up to you to know what they were; it wasn’t easy to be sure.
Adamsberg jotted down on his pad:
woman
plus
smart
plus
desire
equals
Camille
. He broke off, and reread his note. Big words and flat words. But for all their obviousness, when applied to Camille they went into relief. He could almost see them rising like Braille from the surface of the paper. OK. Equals Camille. It was very hard for him to write the word
Love
. His ballpoint made an “L,” but out of sheer anxiety it stalled on the “o”. Adamsberg had long been puzzled by his own reticence until he’d managed to unravel it to its core, or so he thought. He liked loving. But he didn’t like what loving habitually brings in its train. Because love
leads to other things
, he thought. Staying in bed for ever or even for just a couple of days is an impossible dream. Love, hauled by a few common ideas, always
leads on to
four walls and no way out. It flares up out in the open like a grass fire but comes to rest under one roof, warming slippered feet at the stove. A man like Adamsberg could see from afar that the ineluctable train of
other things
was a ghastly trap. He shied away from its earliest symptoms, for he was as alert to its approach as an animal sensing the distant footfall of a predator. But he reckoned Camille was always a step ahead of him in flight. With her periodic leaves of absence, with her guarded emotions, and her boots always set ready in the starting blocks. But Camille played her game under better cover than he did, she did it less roughly, with more kindliness. As a result, unless you took the time to think about it for a while, you would not necessarily divine her imperious instinct for staying wild and free. And Adamsberg had to admit that he did not take enough time to think about Camille. He sometimes began to do so, but then forgot to follow through as other thoughts intervened and jostled him from one idea to another until they all fell into that kaleidoscopic pattern which presaged a moment of total mental blankness.
While hammer drills split his ears as the workmen carried on fixing the window bars, Adamsberg finished writing down the sentence in the notebook on his lap by placing a firm full stop after the L. Camille hadn’t called him to gurgle mutual congratulations
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