An Uncertain Place (45 page)

‘He was right about that.’

‘So, now, we got to the villa, and he didn’t have to watch the road. He’d got into a worse state, he wasn’t talking properly. He was whispering some stuff I couldn’t hear, then he would like, bellow? He stuck that knife in my hand. He told me about the family tree of the Plogovitches – is that their name?’

‘Plogojowitz.’

Zerk obviously had the same difficulty in remembering names. For a very brief moment, Adamsberg felt he knew him through and through.

‘Yeah, right,’ said Zerk, frowning with his dark joined eyebrows, just like Adamsberg’s father when he was watching his soup cook. ‘So he talked about “inhuman sufferings” and he said he’d never
really
killed anyone, because these were “creatures from deep in the earth”, not human beings at all, and they were destroying human life. He said it was his job, cos he was this brilliant doctor, to heal wounds, and he was going to rid the world of this “filthy menace”.’

Adamsberg took a cigarette from Zerk’s packet.

‘How did you get my mobile number?’

‘I nicked it from Uncle Louis’ phone, when he was working with you.’

‘Did you intend to use it?’

‘No, I just thought it wasn’t right Louis should have it when I didn’t.’

‘And how did you tap in the number then? Inside your pocket.’

‘I didn’t need to, I’d saved it under number 9. Last of the last, see?’

‘Well, I suppose it’s a start,’ said Adamsberg.

É
MILE CAME INTO HEADQUARTERS ON CRUTCHES
. A
T RECEPTION
, he had to face
Brigadier
Gardon, who didn’t understand what this man was doing, asking about a dog. Danglard came up, shambling as usual, but wearing a light-coloured suit, which was unexpected enough to provoke comment, though that came a poor second to the arrest of Paul de Josselin, a descendant of Arnold Paole, the man who had had his life destroyed by the Plogojowitz vampires.

Retancourt, who was still the leader of the rational-positivist movement, had been arguing since the morning with the peacemakers and the cloud-shovellers, who accused her of having kept inquiries narrowed down since Sunday, because she couldn’t accept any explanation to do with
vampiri
. Whereas there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, as Mercadet had pointed out. Including people who eat wardrobes, Danglard thought. Kernorkian and Froissy were on the point of giving in and believing in
vampiri
, which complicated matters. This was because they had been persuaded by the state of conservation of the bodies in the story, something which had been empirically observed, historically recorded, and how were you supposed to explain that away? On a small scale, the debate which had excited the whole of Europe in the third decade of the eighteenth century was being reopened in the offices of the Serious Crime Squad in Paris, without having made much progress in almost three hundred years.

It was indeed this detail which had unsettled some members of the squad, the horror aroused by hearing of ‘pink and intact’ corpses, with blood coming from their orifices, and with skin looking fresh and unlined, while their old skin and nails were under them in the grave. Here, Danglard’s superior knowledge came into its own. He had the answer, he knew precisely why and how the bodies had been preserved, a fairly frequent phenomenon in fact, and he could even explain the cry of the vampire when it was pierced with a stake, or the sighs of the shroud-eaters. The others had formed a circle around him and were hanging on his words. They had just reached the moment in the debate when science was going to dispel obscurantism all over again. Danglard was just starting to tell them about the phenomenon of gases which sometimes, depending on the chemical composition of the earth, didn’t come out of the bodies, but inflated them like a balloon, stretching the skin – when he was interrupted by the hullabaloo of a dish being overturned on the floor above, and then Cupid came bounding down the stairs, rushing straight through to reception. Without breaking step, the little dog gave a very particular kind of yap as it rushed past the photocopier, where Snowball was, as usual, stretched out, its paws hanging over the edge.

‘In this case,’ observed Danglard, as he watched the dog going frantic with joy, ‘we have neither knowledge nor fantasy. Simply pure love, unquestioning and unlimited. Very rare in humans, and very dangerous. But Cupid is a tactful dog, because he said goodbye to the cat, with a mixture of admiration and regret.’

The dog had jumped right up into Émile’s arms and was clinging to his chest, panting and licking and scrabbling at his shirt. Émile had had to sit down, pressing his ugly mug against the dog’s back.

‘We ran the tests – the manure on his feet matched the stuff on the floor of your van,’ Danglard told him.

‘What about that love letter from old Vaudel? Did that help the
commissaire
?’

‘Yes, plenty. It led him almost to his death in a stinking vault. Full of corpses.’

‘And the secret tunnel from Madame Bourlant’s house, that helped him too?’

‘Yes, that got him to Dr Josselin.’

‘Never liked him, poser he was. So where is he, the boss?’

‘You want to see him?’

‘Yeah, I don’t want him to make trouble for me, we can settle it friendly like, if he wants. Help I gave him there, he owes me one.’

‘Settle what?’

‘For his ears only.’

Danglard called Adamsberg’s mobile.

‘
Commissaire
, we’ve got Cupid here, he’s sitting on Émile’s knee, and Émile wants to talk to you to settle something.’

‘Settle what?’

‘No idea, he says he’ll only speak to you.’

‘
Personally
,’ insisted Émile self-importantly.

‘How is he?’

‘Looks fine to me – new jacket and blue badge in his lapel. When will you be back?’

‘I’m on a beach in Normandy, Danglard, I’m coming back soon.’

‘But what are you doing there?’

‘I had to talk to my son. We’re neither of us very good at this, but we’ve managed to communicate a bit.’

No, of course, Danglard thought, Tom isn’t a year old, so he can’t talk yet.

‘I told you more than once. They’re in Brittany, not Normandy.’

‘I’m talking about my other son, Danglard.’

‘What—?’ said Danglard, unable to finish his sentence. ‘Wha …
other
son?’

He was seized with instant rage against Adamsberg. How had he managed to have another child somewhere else, when little Tom was still a baby?

‘How old is this other one?’

‘Eight days.’

‘You are such a bastard,’ Danglard hissed.

‘It’s the way it was,
commandant
. I didn’t know about him.’

‘No, you never bloody know about anything, do you?’

‘And you never let me finish either, Danglard. He’s eight days old for me, but for other people, he’s twenty-nine. He’s beside me here, smoking a cigarette. His hands are covered in bandages. Paole pinned him to that Louis XIII armchair with a knife last night.’

‘The
Zerquetscher
?’ asked Danglard weakly.

‘Correct. Or Zerk as I call him. Aka Armel Louvois.’

Danglard looked blankly across at Émile and his dog, while he tried to concentrate on the facts of the situation.

‘This is a figure of speech, isn’t it? You’ve adopted him, or some crazy stunt like that?’

‘No, no, Danglard, he’s my son. That’s why Josselin had a lot of fun choosing him as a scapegoat.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Look, you’d believe Veyrenc, wouldn’t you? Ask him. He’s his
uncle
and he’ll give you a glowing report on him.’

Adamsberg was half reclining on the sand, drawing on it with his finger. Zerk was lying down, his arms across his body, his hands now numbed, thanks to a local anaesthetic, and was soaking up the sun and relaxing like the cat on the photocopier. Danglard ran through his head all those photographs of the Zerk from the papers, and at once realised how familiar that face had been. Yes. It had to be the truth, but it was a shock.

‘Not to worry,
commandant
. Put Émile on, will you?’

Without a word, Danglard handed the phone to Émile, who hobbled away towards the door.

‘This colleague of yours is stupid,’ he began. ‘It’s not a badge, it’s my winkle pin. I went and fetched it from the house.’

‘Because you’re nostalgic.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘So what deal is this you want to settle?’ said Adamsberg sitting up.

‘I kept a record. Nine hundred and thirty-seven euros. Now I’ve got plenty of cash, I can pay it back, and then you don’t know nothing about it. Because I got you that stuff about the postcard, and the door in the cellar. Savvy?’

‘What don’t I “know nothing about”?’

‘Vaudel’s money, for fuck’s sake. Bit here, bit there, total nine hundred and thirty seven. I kept a record.’

‘I’m with you now, Émile. Well, for a start, I’ve got nothing to do with that money, like I said. And in any case, it’s too late. I don’t think Pierre junior, since you’re already getting half his inheritance, will be too happy to find out that you were pinching his old man’s money and that you want to pay him nine hundred and thirty-seven euros.’

‘Ha,’ said Émile pensively.

‘So just keep the money, and shut up about it.’

‘Got you,’ said Émile, and Adamsberg reflected that he must have picked up the expression at the hospital in Châteaudun from that tall paramedic, André.

‘You’ve got another son?’ asked Zerk, as they got back in the car.

‘He’s very, very small,’ said Adamsberg, demonstrating with his hands apart, as if that made it less of a fact. ‘Does it bother you?’

‘Nope.’

No doubt about it, Zerk was an accommodating sort of chap.

T
HE
P
ARIS
C
ENTRAL
L
AW
C
OURTS WERE UNDER A CLOUD, WHICH
was entirely appropriate to the place and the time. Adamsberg and Danglard, sitting at the terrace of the cafe opposite, were waiting for people to emerge from the trial of Mordent’s daughter. It was ten to eleven by Danglard’s watch. Adamsberg was looking at the gold-tipped railings which had been carefully repainted.

‘When you scratch the gold, what do you find underneath, Danglard?’

‘Nolet would say: the scales of the snake.’

‘Coiled round the Sainte-Chapelle. Not a very suitable combination.’

‘It’s not such a contrast as you might think. There are two chapels there one on top of the other and quite separate. The bottom one was reserved for the common people and the top one for the king and his courtiers. Everything leads back to that in the end.’

‘The great snake was already there in the fourteenth century then,’ said Adamsberg, looking up at the top of the steep Gothic spire.

‘Thirteenth century,’ Danglard corrected him. ‘Built by Pierre de Montreuil between 1242 and 1248.’

‘Did you get in touch with Nolet?’

‘Yes. The school friend was indeed a witness to the wedding between Emma Carnot and a young man aged twenty-four, Paul de Josselin Cressent, at the town hall in Auxerre, twenty-nine years ago. Emma had fallen for him, her mother was impressed by the name with a “de” in it, but she told us that Paul was the last of a damaged line. The marriage didn’t last three years. There were no children.’

‘Just as well. Josselin would hardly have been a good father.’

Danglard chose not to pursue that line of thought. He would wait and see what Zerk was like.

‘There would have been another little Paole loose in the world,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘and God only knows what he would have got up to. But no, this is the end of the Paoles, the doctor said so.’

‘I’m going to help Radstock dispose of the feet. Then I’m taking a week off.’

‘Going fishing in that loch perhaps?’

‘No,’ said Danglard evasively, ‘I think I’ll probably stay on in London.’

‘With a rather abstract sort of plan in mind.’

‘Yes.’

‘When Mordent has got his daughter back, which will be tonight, we’ll unleash the torrent of mud in the Emma Carnot affair. It’ll run from the Council of State to the Appeal Court, then to the public prosecutor and the Gavernan Assize Court, and it will stop there. We won’t let it reach down as far as the junior judge and Mordent, since that is no consequence to anyone but us.’

‘It’ll cause an almighty row.’

‘Of course. People will be shocked, they’ll propose a far-reaching reform of the judicial system, then it will all be forgotten when they dig up some other scandal. And you know what will happen then.’

‘The great snake will have lost three of its scales, after an attack, but it will have regrown them again in a couple of months.’