An Uncertain Place (2 page)

Anxious and impatient, Lucio was scratching his missing arm by moving his fingers in the air. He had often explained that when he had lost his arm, aged nine, there had been a spider bite on it which he hadn’t finished scratching. And on account of that, the bite was still itching sixty-nine years later, because he hadn’t been able to give it a really good scratch and have done with it. This was the neurological explanation provided by his mother, and it had become Lucio’s philosophy of life: he adapted it to every situation and every feeling. You either finish something, or you don’t start. You have to go through to the bitter end, and that applies in matters of the heart too. When something was intensely important to him, Lucio scratched the interrupted bite.

‘Lucio,’ said Adamsberg clearly, walking across the little garden, ‘my train goes in an hour and a quarter, my deputy is having kittens himself at the Gare du Nord, and I’m not going to be midwife to your wretched cat when a hundred top cops are waiting for me in London. Do it yourself, you can tell me about it on Sunday.’

‘How am I supposed to manage like this?’ cried the old man, waving his stump in the air.

Lucio held Adamsberg back with his powerful right arm, thrusting forward his prognathous jaw, worthy of a Velázquez painting, according to Danglard. The old man couldn’t see well enough these days to shave properly, and his razor always missed a few bristles. White and tough, they glittered in the sunshine in little clumps, like a silvery decoration made of thorns. Every now and then, Lucio caught a bristle between thumb and fingernail and pulled it out, as he might a tick. He never gave up till he got it out, observing the spider-bite philosophy.

‘You’re coming with me.’

‘Let me go, Lucio.’

‘You’ve got no choice,
hombre
,’ said Lucio darkly. ‘It’s crossed your path now. You have to come. Otherwise it’ll scratch you all your life. It’ll only take ten minutes.’

‘My train’s crossing my path too.’

‘Time for that afterwards.’

Adamsberg dropped the suitcase and groaned impotently as he followed Lucio into the shed. A tiny head, sticky with blood, was emerging between the cat’s hind paws. Under the old Spaniard’s instructions, he caught hold of it gently while Lucio pressed the mother cat’s stomach with a professional gesture. She was miaowing piteously.

‘You can do better than that! Pull harder,
hombre
, get hold of it under its shoulders and pull! Go on, don’t be afraid, but be gentle, don’t squash its skull, and with your other hand, stroke the mother’s head, she’s panicking.’

‘Lucio, when I stroke someone’s head, they go to sleep.’

‘
Joder!
Go on, pull!’

Six minutes later, Adamsberg was putting two red and squeaking little rats alongside the others on an old blanket. Lucio cut the cords and placed them one by one at their mother’s teats. He looked anxiously at the mother cat, which was whimpering.

‘What did you mean about your hand? You put people to sleep?’

Adamsberg shook his head.

‘I don’t know how. If I put my hand on their heads they go to sleep. That’s all.’

‘And you do that with your own kid?’

‘Yes. And people go to sleep when I’m talking too. I even have suspects drop off when I’m questioning them.’

‘Well, do it for this mother cat.
Apúrate!
Make her sleep.’

‘Good grief, Lucio, can’t you get it into your head that I’ve got a train to catch?!’

‘We’ve got to calm the mother down.’

Adamsberg couldn’t have cared less about the cat, but he did care about the black look his old neighbour was giving him. He stroked the – very soft – head of the cat since, it was true, he really had no choice. The animal’s panting gradually subsided as his fingers rolled like marbles from its muzzle to its ears. Lucio nodded his approval.

‘Yes, she’s sleeping,
hombre
.’

Adamsberg gently removed his hand, wiped it on some wet grass and backed away quietly.

As he went up the escalator at the Gare du Nord, he could still feel something sticky drying on his fingers and under his nails. He was twenty minutes later than agreed for the
rdv
. Danglard hurried towards him. Danglard’s legs always looked as if they had been wrongly assembled, and that they would be dislocated from the knee if he tried to run.

Adamsberg raised a hand to pre-empt his reproaches, and stop him running.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘Something crossed my path and I had to deal with it, or I’d have had to scratch it for the rest of my days.’

Danglard was so used to Adamsberg’s incomprehensible sentences that he rarely bothered to ask questions. Like others in the squad, he let it pass, knowing how to separate the interesting from the useful. Puffing, he pointed to the departure gate, and set off back in that direction. As he followed without haste, Adamsberg tried to recall what colour the cat had been. White with grey patches? Ginger patches?

‘Y
OU GET SOME WEIRD GOINGS-ON IN
F
RANCE TOO, DON’T
you?’ remarked Detective Chief Inspector Radstock, in English, to his Parisian colleagues.

‘What did he say?’ asked Adamsberg.

‘He said we get weird things happening back home as well,’ Danglard translated.

‘Very true,’ said Adamsberg, without taking much interest in the conversation.

What concerned him just now was the possibility of taking a stroll. He was in London, it was a fine evening in June, and he wanted to walk about a bit. The two days of conference he had sat through were beginning to get on his nerves. Staying seated for hours on end was one of the rare experiences that disrupted his habitual calm, and made him undergo the strange state other people called ‘impatience’ or ‘feverishness’, usually foreign to his nature. The previous day he had managed to escape three times, and had explored the surrounding district, after a fashion, committing to memory the brick housefronts, the white columns, the black-and-gold lamp posts. He had taken a few steps into a little street called St John’s Mews, though heaven only knew how you were meant to pronounce ‘Mews’. A flock of seagulls had flown up in the air, calling (mewing indeed) in English. But his absences had been noticed. So today he had had to stay the course, sitting in his place, unresponsive to the speeches of his colleagues and unable to keep up with the rapid translation by a simultaneous interpreter. The hall was crammed full of police officers, all of whom were displaying much ingenuity in devising a grid intended to ‘harmonise the flow of migrants’, and to cover Europe with a net through whose meshes it would be impossible to slip. Since he had always preferred fluids to solids, the flexible to the rigid, Adamsberg naturally identified with the movements of the ‘flow’ and was inventing ways of outflanking the fortifications which were being perfected under his very eyes.

This colleague from New Scotland Yard, DCI Radstock, seemed to know all about nets, but did not seem to be fanatical about their efficiency. He would be retiring in under a year, and cherished the very British notion of spending his time fishing in some northern loch, according to Danglard, who understood everything and translated everything, including things that Adamsberg had no wish to know. He would have liked to tell his deputy not to bother with these superfluous translations, but Danglard had so few treats and he seemed so happy revelling in the English language, rather like a wild boar wallowing in a favoured spot of mud, that Adamsberg hadn’t the heart to deprive him of the least scrap of enjoyment. At this point, the
commandant
seemed to have attained a state of bliss, almost to have taken wing, his usually shambling body gaining stature, his drooping shoulders squared, displaying a posture which almost made him impressive. Perhaps he was nursing a plan to retire one day with this new-found friend, and go fishing for something or other in the northern loch.

Radstock was taking advantage of Danglard’s bonhomie to describe to him what it was like working in Scotland Yard, but he was also regaling him with a string of the kind of ‘spicy’ stories he thought suitable for his French guests. Danglard had listened to him throughout their lunch without any sign of boredom, while making sure to check the quality of the wine. Radstock called him ‘Donglarde’, and the two policemen were matching each other anecdote for anecdote, drink for drink, leaving Adamsberg far behind. Of all the hundred officers at the conference, Adamsberg was the only one who didn’t have even the slightest grasp of the English language. So he was following along in a marginal way, exactly as he had hoped, and few people had gathered quite who he was. At his side was the young junior officer,
brigadier
Estalère, with his wide-open green eyes, which made him look perpetually surprised. Adamsberg had insisted on taking him along on the mission. He maintained that Estalère would wise up one of these days, and from time to time he expended some energy trying to bring this about.

Hands in pockets and for once smartly turned out, Adamsberg was taking full advantage of this long stroll, as Radstock paraded them round the streets to show them the oddities of London by night. Such as a woman sleeping under a canopy of umbrellas sewn together, and clutching in her arms a three-foot-high object described as a ‘teddy bear’. ‘It’s a toy bear,’ Danglard had translated. ‘Yes, I did gather that,’ said Adamsberg.

‘And here,’ said Radstock, pointing down a long, straight avenue, ‘we have Lord Clyde-Fox. He’s an example of what you might call an eccentric English aristocrat. Not many left. They don’t make ’em like this any more. Quite a young specimen.’

Radstock stopped to allow them time to observe this individual, with the satisfaction of someone showing off a rather unusual phenomenon to his guests. Adamsberg and Danglard obediently observed him. Tall and thin, Lord Clyde-Fox was hopping clumsily about on the spot, first on one foot then on the other, barely avoiding falling over. Another man was smoking a cigar about ten feet away, swaying slightly and contemplating his companion’s trouble.

‘Er, interesting,’ said Danglard politely.

‘He’s quite often around here, but not every evening,’ said Radstock, as if his colleagues were benefiting from a rare sighting. ‘We get on all right. He’s very amiable, always a friendly word. He’s a sort of fixture, a familiar figure of the night. Seeing the time it is, he’s probably had an evening out and is trying to get home.’

‘He’s drunk?’ queried Danglard.

‘Not quite. He makes it a point of honour to see how far he can go, finds his limit, and then hangs on there. He says that if he walks along a ridge, balancing between one slope and another, he may suffer but he will never be bored. Everything all right, sir?’

‘Everything all right with you, Radstock?’ rejoined the man, waving a hand.

‘A joker,’ the chief inspector confided. ‘Well, if he wants to be. When his mother died, two years ago, he tried to eat a whole box of photos of her. His sister barged in to stop him, and it turned nasty. She finished up in hospital and him down at the station. The noble lord was absolutely furious because he had been prevented from eating the photos.’

‘Really, really eating them?’ asked Estalère.

‘Yes, really. But what are a few photos? I think, in Paris one time, some chap tried to eat a wardrobe, didn’t he?’

‘What did he say?’ asked Adamsberg, seeing Radstock’s frown.

‘He says there was some Frenchman once who tried to eat a wardrobe. Actually there was. He managed it over a few months, with the help of some friends.’

‘Weird, eh, Donglarde?’

‘You’re quite right, it was in the early twentieth century.’

‘Ah, that’s normal,’ said Estalère, who often chose exactly the wrong expression. ‘There was this man I heard about, he ate an aeroplane, and it took him a year. Just a year. A small plane.’

Radstock nodded gravely. Adamsberg had noticed that he liked to make solemn pronouncements. He sometimes came out with long sentences which – from their tone – were passing judgement on the whole of humanity and its probable nature, good or bad, angelic or devilish.

‘There are some things,’ Radstock began – Danglard providing a simultaneous translation – ‘that people can’t imagine themselves doing until some crazy individual has tried it. But once something’s been done for the first time, good or bad, it goes into the inheritance of the human race. It can be used, it can be copied, and people will even try to go one better. The chap who ate the wardrobe made it easier for that other chap to eat the aeroplane. And that’s how the vast dark continent of madness opens up, like a map, as people explore unknown regions. We’re going forward in the gloom, with nothing but experience to guide us, that’s what I tell my men. So Lord Clyde-Fox over there is taking his shoes off, and putting them back on, over and over again. Goodness knows why. When we do know, someone else will be able to do the same thing.’

‘Greetings, sir,’ said the chief inspector now, going closer. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Greetings, Radstock,’ said Clyde-Fox mildly.

The two men made signs of recognition to each other, two nightbirds, familiars who had no secrets. Clyde-Fox put one stockinged foot on the pavement, holding his shoe in his hand and looking intently inside it.