Free Have Mercy On Us All by Fred Vargas Page A

took hold of a bunch of hair and looked at it.
    “You’re right, Joss, I’ll do it right away. Can you mind the store for me? Marie-Belle won’t be in before ten.”
    Damascus ran off, and Joss watched him bound across the square on his way to the drugstore. Poor lad, that Damascus, Joss thought with a sigh, he was too nice for his own good, and he really was one sandwich short of the full hamper. Like a lamb to the slaughter. The complete opposite of the aristo, who was all head and no heart. Why couldn’t things be shared out more fairly in this bloody world?
    Bertin’s thunder-gong rang out at a quarter past eight in the evening. Days were now getting distinctly shorter; the square was already deep in shadow, and the pigeons had gone to roost. Joss dragged himself ungraciously to the Viking. He spied Decambrais at the back of the room, dressed in a dark suit and tie, with a white shirt that was fraying at the collar. He’d already ordered two carafes of wine. The bookworm was reading, the only person in the whole crowded bar to be doing so. He’d had all day to work up his speech, and Joss was expecting it to be nicely tied up. But Le Guerns weren’t easy folk to enmesh. Joss knew his way around nets and knots.
    Joss slumped into the seat without even saying hallo. Decambrais filled both glasses straight away.
    “Thanks for coming, Le Guern, I’d much prefer not to put the business off until tomorrow.”
    Joss just nodded his head and gulped down a large dose of wine.
    “Have you got them with you?” asked Decambrais.
    “What?”
    “Today’s ads, the specials.”
    “I don’t lug everything around on me. They’re at Damascus’s place.”
    “Do you remember what they said?”
    Joss scratched his cheek for a minute or two.
    “The fellow who keeps telling his life story was at it again, complete gobbledegook as per usual,” he said. “Then there was another one in Italian, like there was this morning.”
    “It’s Latin, Le Guern.”
    Joss said nothing for a moment.
    “Well, I don’t like it a bit. Reading out things you don’t understand is not honest work. What do you think the nutter’s after? Trying to get up everyone’s nose?”
    “Could well be. Look, would it be too much trouble to go and get the messages?”
    Joss drained his glass and stood up. Things were not going as he expected. He was in a muddle, like he had been that night at sea when the instruments went haywire and he couldn’t get a bearing. The rocks were supposed to be to starboard, but at dawn, there they were straight ahead, to the north. The ship had come terribly close to disaster.
    He went over to get the messages and came back quickly, wondering all the while if Decambrais wasn’t really to port when he thought him to starboard. He put the three ivory envelopes down on the table just as Bertin was serving the main course – veal in cream sauce with boiled potatoes – and a third carafe of wine. Joss tucked in while Decambrais read out the lunchtime message under his breath.
    Up, and to the office (having a mighty pain in my forefinger of my left hand, from a strain that it received last night in struggling
avec la femme que je
mentioned yesterday … My wife busy in going with her woman to a hothouse to bathe herself, after her long being within doors in the dirt, so that she now pretends to a resolution of being hereafter very clean. How long it will hold I can guess.
    “I know that passage, damn it,” he said as he folded the sheet back into the envelope, “but as through a glass darkly. Either I’ve read too much or else my memory is failing.”
    “Sometimes the sextant does fail.”
    Decambrais poured more wine and went on to the next message:
    Terrae putrefactae signa sunt animalium ex putredine nascentium multiplicatio, ut sunt mures, ranae terrestres … serpentes ac vermes … praesertim si minime in illis locis nasci consuevere
    “Can I keep them?”
    “If they get you anywhere.”
    “Nowhere for the