The German has long since retired from the Ministry of the Interior where he was am off-budget fixer. That is, he was a trouble-shooter who dealt mainly with criminal matters. If a baffling case was raising media hysteria, the German would be despatched to see what he could do to put a blanket on the fire.
Born Ludwig in Alsace, his few friends know him as Louis but his mother always called him Ludwig and he thinks of himself that way. In retirement he retains his network of contacts socially but they, too, are retiring. A man without family, a man without friends, a man without anything but a vocation – investigation – coupled with persistence and ingenuity, that is the German. Retirement offers him little reason to get up in the morning. He passes the time as a translator, currently working on a biography of the Iron Chancellor, which regrettably does not play into the story, as I had hoped.
Then an old friend, Marthe, brings him a problem. Her simple-minded ward seems to be embroiled in two murders. There is backstory of how he became her ward and then they later drifted apart. The ward was hired over the telephone to deliver pot plants to two women, each of whom was soon thereafter murdered with his finger prints on the door, on some furniture, on the pot plant….
While Ludwig is not convinced the dolt is innocent he owes Marthe a lot, which is not specified, and he is obliged to act on the assumption of dolt innocence. Hmmm. He trades on his past as an agent of the Ministry and first digs into the simple-minded youth’s past. There are ambiguities and gaps but by and large the lad seems within his mental limits an honest toiler, first as a gardener, but one who needs a lot of supervision, and as a busker with an accordion. That latter vocation supplies the title but again it does not play into the story.
The ward was set up to take the fall, as per the krimi manual. Yes, but why him? Is it all being done to get at this young man, or is it by chance that he was selected to serve as a scape goat, along with the murder victims. What could one so simple have done to earn such multiple, mortal enmity?
Following a parallel train of thought Ludwig ponders the two victims, who seem to have no mutual connection as far as he can determine from his police contacts.
He has the assistance of The Three Evangelists who recur in Vargas’s krimis, Mark, Luke, and Mathew. These three perennial graduate students share a house with the uncle of one, himself a retired plod. The three students are men and are students of history, one prehistorian, one a medievalist, the other who speaks only in the language of World War I trench warfare with which he is obsessed.
As the pages turn, each of them adds interpretations, facts, and insights into the mystery. Van Doosler, the uncle upstairs, does the cooking when he feels up to it but is otherwise aloof. Tant pis. I had rather hoped he would figure in the story as more than window dressing.
Fred Vargas, whose books have been purged from ideologically pure women’s libraries because of the name Fred. Amusing, n’est pas?
The title in translation places the focus on the simpleton, but the French is ‘Quand sort la recluse’ which refers to Ludwig stirring, I assume. He certainly is the core of the story. While I gulped it down, as always with a Vargas krimi, I felt it was underdone.
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