An Uncertain Place

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Belgrade means “white city”,’ Vladislav announced as the train pulled to a halt. ‘It’s very fine but we don’t have time to look around because the bus goes in half an hour. Do you often wake people up in the middle of the night to ask if there are any Plogs in their family?’

  ‘The police spend their lives waking other people up in the middle of the night. And being woken up themselves. It was worth it, because there was a Plog.’

  ‘Plog,’ said Vladislav, trying it out again as if blowing a bubble. ‘Plog. And why did you want to know?’

  ‘Plogerstein, Plögener, Plogoff, Plogodrescu and Plog,’ Adamsberg recited. ‘If we rule out Plogoff, the other four family names are all linked to the murder at Garches. Two of them are victims, and a third, the woman in Germany, is a friend of a victim.’

  ‘What’s this got to do with my dedo? Was his cousin Plogodrescu a victim?’

  ‘Yes, in a way. Take a peep into the corridor. The woman, wearing a beige suit, between forty and fifty, wart on her cheek, trying to look nonchalant. She was in the next compartment. Have a good look at her when we get out.’

  Vladislav was the first to step down on to the platform and held out his furry arm to the woman in the suit, to help her with her suitcase. She thanked him without warmth and walked away.

  ‘Elegant, rich, nice figure, pity about the face,’ said Vladislav, watching her go. ‘Plog. I wouldn’t try anything.’

  ‘You went out to the toilet in the night?’

  ‘So did you.’

  ‘She left her door a little bit open, we could see her reading. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Unusual for a woman travelling alone to leave her door open on a night train.’

  ‘Plog,’ said Vladislav, who seemed to have adopted this new onomatopoeic word to mean ‘yes’, or ‘agreed’, or ‘obviously’, Adamsberg wasn’t sure which. The young man seemed to enjoy this made-up word as if it were a new kind of sweet, which one eats too many of at first.

  ‘Perhaps she was waiting for someone,’ Vladislav suggested.

  ‘Or she was trying to overhear someone. Us for instance. I think she was on the same flight as me to Venice.’

  The two men got into the bus. ‘Stopping at Kaluderica, Smederevo, Kostalac, Klicevac and Kiseljevo,’ the driver announced, and these strange names gave Adamsberg the sensation of being completely lost, which pleased him. Vladislav glanced at the other passengers.

  ‘She’s not here,’ he said.

  ‘If she’s following me, she won’t be here, it’s too obvious in a bus. She’ll take the next one.’

  ‘But how will she know where we’re getting off?’

  ‘Did we mention Kisilova while we were having dinner?’

  ‘Before,’ said Vladislav, adjusting his ponytail and holding the rubber band between his teeth. ‘When we were drinking champagne.’

  ‘Did we leave our door open?’

  ‘Yes, because of the cigarettes. But a woman travelling alone has a perfect right to go to Belgrade.’

  ‘Who in this bus doesn’t look as if they’re a Slav?’

  Vladislav went looking down the length of the bus, pretending to have lost something, then sat back down by Adamsberg.

  ‘The businessman is probably French or Swiss. The backpacker is from Germany; the couple are either southern French or Italian. They’re about fifty and are holding hands which isn’t usual for a Serbian couple in an old Serbian bus. And tourists aren’t coming much to Serbia at the moment.’

  Adamsberg made a vague sign without replying. ‘Don’t mention the war.’ Danglard had dinned this into him several times.

  Nobody else got off at the stop for Kiseljevo. Once they were outside, Adamsberg glanced quickly up at the window and it seemed to him as if the man in the unusual couple was watching them.

  ‘Alone,’ said Vladislav, stretching his arms up to the clear blue sky. ‘Kiseljevo,’ he added, pointing proudly to the village with its multicoloured walls and close-packed roofs, and its white church tower, nestling in the hills with the Danube sparkling lower down. Adamsberg got out his travel papers and showed him the name of the place they were staying: Krčma.

  ‘That’s not anyone’s name,’ said Vladislav, ‘it means “inn”. The landlady, if she’s still the same, is called Danica. She gave me my first sip of pivo – beer.’

  ‘How do you pronounce this word?’

  ‘With a “ch”: Krchma.’

  ‘Kruchema.’

  ‘That’ll do.’

  Adamsberg followed Vladislav to the kruchema, which was a tall house with wooden timbers painted and carved decoratively. Conversation stopped as they went inside and suspicious faces turned towards them, reminding Adamsberg of the Norman drinkers in the cafe at Haroncourt or the Béarnais in the bistro at Caldhez. Vladislav introduced himself to the landlady and signed the register, explaining that he was Slavko Moldovan’s grandson.

  ‘Vladislav Moldovan!’ exclaimed Danica, and from her gestures, Adamsberg gathered that Vlad had grown, that last time she had seen him he was only so high.

  The atmosphere immediately changed and people came up to shake Vladislav’s hand, the body language became more welcoming and Danica, who seemed as gentle as her name, sat them down immediately to eat. It was twelve thirty. Lunch today was burecis with pork, she said, putting a carafe of white wine on the table.

  ‘This is Smeredevka, a little known but reputed wine,’ said Vladislav, pouring out two glasses. ‘And how are you going to find any traces of your Vaudel? Show photos? Bad idea. Very bad. Hereabouts they don’t like people who ask questions, cops, journalists, nosy parkers. You’ll have to think of something else. But they don’t like historians either, or filmmakers or sociologists, anthropologists, photographers, novelists, nutters or ethnologists.’

  ‘That’s a lot of people they don’t like. Why don’t they like nosy parkers? Because of the war?’

  ‘No, just that they ask a lot of questions and they’ve had enough questions. All they want is to live in peace now. Except for him,’ he said, pointing to an old man who had just come in. ‘He’s the only one dares to get things going a bit.’

  Looking happy, Vladislav crossed the room and caught the newcomer by the shoulders.

  ‘Arandjel!’ he cried, ‘To sam ja! Slavko unuk! Zar me ne poznaješ?’

  The old man, who was very short, thin and rather unkempt, pulled back to examine him, then embraced Vladislav warmly, explaining with gestures that he had grown a lot, he was only so high last time he’d seen him.

  ‘He can see I’ve got a foreign friend here, he doesn’t want to interrupt,’ Vladislav explained, rejoining Adamsberg with flushed cheeks. ‘Arandjel was a big friend of my dedo. Not afraid of anything, either of them.’

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ Adamsberg announced after finishing his dessert – some sugary balls whose ingredients he could not identify.

  ‘Have some coffee first, so as not to offend Danica. Where are you proposing to walk?’

  ‘Towards the woods.’

  ‘No, they won’t like that. Walk along the river, that would look more natural. They’re going to ask me about you, the minute you go. What shall I say? I can’t possibly say you’re a cop – that won’t do you any favours round here.’

  ‘It doesn’t do you any favours anywhere. Tell them I’ve had a nervous breakdown and have been told to take a rest in a quiet place.’

  ‘Why would you come all the way to Serbia for that?’

  ‘Because my baba knew your dedo.’

  Vlad shrugged. Adamsberg gulped down his kafa and took out a pen.

  ‘Vlad, how do you say “hello”, “thank you” and “French” in this language?’

  ‘Dobro veče, hvala, francuz.’

  Adamsberg made him repeat the words and, as was his habit, wrote them on the back of his hand.

  ‘Not towards the woods,’ Vladislav said again.

  ‘I understand.’

  The young man watche
d him move off, then signalled to Arandjel that he was now free to talk.

  ‘He’s had a nervous breakdown, he’s going to walk along by the Danube. He’s a friend of a friend of Dedo’s.’

  Arandjel put a little glass of rakija in front of Vladislav. Danica, with a slightly anxious expression, watched the stranger going off on his own.

  XXXI

  FIRST, ADAMSBERG WALKED ROUND THE VILLAGE THREE times, his eyes wide open to absorb the new sights. By following his instinctive sense of orientation, he quickly grasped the layout of the streets and lanes, the main square, the new cemetery, the stone staircases, the village fountain and the market hall. The decoration of the buildings was unfamiliar, with notices in Cyrillic script, and red-and-white bollards. The colours, the shapes of the roofs, the texture of the stones, the weeds by the wayside, everything was different, but he could make his way around and even feel at home in these remote places. He worked out the paths leading to other villages, towards the woods and fields as far as the eye could see, and towards the Danube, where a few ancient boats were pulled up on the bank. On the other side, the blue fortresses of the Carpathians cascaded abruptly down towards the river.

  He lit one of Zerk’s remaining cigarettes, using the red-and-black lighter, and set off westwards, in the direction of the woods. A village woman was pulling a little go-cart along, and as he passed her, he involuntarily shivered at the memory of the woman on the train. They were nothing alike, this one having a rather wrinkled face and wearing a simple grey skirt.

  But she did have a wart on her cheek.

  He consulted the back of his hand.

  ‘Dobre veče,’ he said. ‘Bonjour. Francuz.’

  The woman neither replied nor did she move on. She ran after him, pulling her cart, and caught him by the arm. Using the universal language of yes and no, she explained that he shouldn’t be going that way, and Adamsberg made it clear to her that he did intend to head that way. She insisted at first, but finally let him go, looking distressed.

  The commissaire carried on. He walked into the outskirts of the wood where the trees were still far apart, then made his way across two clearings containing ruined huts, and after a further two kilometres came to a denser band of trees. The path stopped there, on a final space covered with wild flowers. Adamsberg sat on a tree stump, perspiring a little, listening to the wind rising in the east, and lit his last-but-one cigarette. A rustle made him turn his head. The woman was standing there, having abandoned her cart, and was staring at him with a mixture of despair and anger on her face.

  ‘Ne idi tuda.’

  ‘Francuz,’ said Adamsberg.

  ‘On te je privukao! Vrati se! On te je privukao!’

  She pointed to a spot at the end of the little clearing, where the trees started, then shrugged her shoulders in discouragement, as if she had done all she could and it was a lost cause. Adamsberg watched her go, almost at a run. Vlad’s advice and the woman’s persistence drove his determination in the other direction, and he looked over at the end of the clearing. Where the trees began in the spot she had indicated, he could see a little mound covered with stones and sawn-off rounds of wood. Where he came from, that might have been the remains of a shepherd’s hut. This must be where the demon lived, the one Uncle Slavko had talked about to the young Danglard.

  Letting his cigarette hang from his lip, as his father used to, he walked up to the little mound. On the ground, almost covered in grass, four lines of small logs, about thirty of them standing on end, formed a long rectangle. On top of the chunks of wood, someone had placed heavy rocks, as if the logs might fly away. There was a large grey stone at the head of the rectangle, crenellated, roughly dressed and with something engraved on it. It looked nothing like a ruin and much more like a grave, but a forbidden grave, if the woman’s insistence was anything to go by. The person buried here, far from anyone else, outside the graveyard, must be under some kind of taboo: perhaps an unmarried girl dead in childbirth, or a disgraced and excommunicated actor, or an unbaptised child. All round the tomb, the shoots of young trees had been cut, forming a dank background of rotting stumps.

  Adamsberg sat down in the warm grass and patiently began scraping away at the moss and lichen on the grey tombstone, using twigs and shards of bark. He engaged contentedly in this task for an hour, scratching at the stone with his nails, or using a fine twig to dig into the letters. As he uncovered the inscription, he realised that the characters were foreign to him, a long sentence written in Cyrillic. Only the last four words were in Roman lettering. He stood up, gave the stone a final wipe with his hand and took a step back to read them.

  Plog, as Vladislav would have said, and in this case it might have meant something like ‘Bingo!’ or ‘Success!’ He would have got there sooner or later in any case. Today or tomorrow, his steps would have brought him here, he would have sat down in front of this stone, looking at the root of Kisilova. The long epitaph in Serbian was indecipherable but the four words in Roman letters were ultra-clear, and quite enough to be getting on with: Petar Blagojević – Peter Plogojowitz. Then the dates of birth and death: 1663–1725. No cross.

  Plog.

  Plogojowitz, like Plogerstein, Plögener, Plog and Plogodrescu. Here lay the origin of the victim family. Original surname: Plogojowitz or Blagojević. The name must have been adapted or rearranged, according to the countries where his dispersed descendants had ended up. Here lay the root of the story, and the first of the victims, the ancestor banished, out of bounds to visitors, exiled to the edge of the wood. Perhaps murdered too, but back in 1725. By whom? The deadly hunt had not ended, and Pierre Vaudel, the descendant of Peter Plogojowitz had still been dreading it. Enough to warn another descendant of this man, Frau Abster-Plogerstein, with that KИCЛOBA as an alarm signal. ‘Guard our empire, resist to the end, stay beyond attack, Kisilova.’

  Nothing to do with love, needless to say. But an imperative warning, a prayer that the Plogojowitz clan must be protected, and that all of them should be on the alert. Had Vaudel known about the death of Conrad Plögener? He must have. So he realised that the vendetta had started again, if it had ever ceased. The old man was afraid of being killed in his turn. He had made his will after the massacre at Pressbaum, keeping his son out of his direct line of inheritance. Josselin had been wrong about that, Vaudel’s enemies were by no means imaginary. They did have faces and names. They too must have taken root in this place, in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Nearly three hundred years ago.

  Adamsberg sat on a stump, and thrust his hands into his hair. He was staggered. Three hundred years later, some kind of clan warfare was still going on, resulting in the heights of savagery. What for? What was at stake? Hidden treasure perhaps, a child might have said. Power, money, an adult might have said, which came to the same thing really. What on earth did you do, Peter Blagojević-Plogojowitz, to leave this kind of fate to your descendants? And what did they do to you? Adamsberg ran his fingers over the stone, warm in the sun, murmuring his questions to himself, and realising that if the sun was on his face and on the back of the stone, it was not facing east towards Jerusalem, but turned round, facing west. A murderer, then? Did you massacre the inhabitants of the village, Peter Plogojowitz? Or one of its families? Did you go round devastating the countryside, looting and terrorising people? What did you do for Zerk to be still fighting you, with his white skeleton on his black T-shirt?

  Peter, what did you do?

  Adamsberg carefully copied out the long inscription, reproducing the foreign lettering as best he could.

  Пролазниче, продужи својим путем, не освђи се и не понеси ништа ода6де. Ту лежи проклетник Петар Благојевић, умревши лета гоцподњег 1725 у својој 62 години. нека 6и му клета душа нашла покоја.

  XXXII

  HIS BEDROOM HAD A HIGH CEILING, LAYERS OF ANCIENT multicoloured carpets on the floor an
d a bed with a blue quilt. Adamsberg let himself relax on to it, and put his hands behind his neck. Fatigue from the journey had made his limbs feel heavy, but he smiled, his eyes closed, happy at having unearthed the roots of the Plog clan, but incapable of understanding their story. He didn’t have the strength to ring up Danglard and talk about it. He sent him two short text messages instead. Danglard pedantically insisted on using Latin for the plural of text messages, texti, since the usual word in French is texto. The first message read: ‘Ancestor is Peter Plogojowitz’, and the second: ‘†1725’.

  Danica, who on closer inspection was buxom and pretty and probably no more than forty-two, knocked on his door, waking him up a little after eight, according to both his watches.

  ‘Večera je na stolu,’ she said with a broad smile, indicating with gestures that she meant ‘come’ and ‘eat’.

  Sign language easily dealt with most basic functions.

  People seemed to smile a lot here in Kisilova and perhaps that was the explanation of the ‘sunny disposition’ shared by Uncle Sladko and his grandson Vladislav. Family ties made Adamsberg remember his own son. He sent a few thoughts towards little Tom, on holiday somewhere in Normandy, and lay back on the eiderdown. He had immediately taken to it: pale blue with cord piping and worn at the corners, it was nicer than the bright red one his sister had given him. This one smelt of hay, dandelions and possibly even donkey. As he went down the narrow wooden stairs, his phone vibrated in his back pocket like a nervous cricket tickling him. He looked at Danglard’s reply: one word – ‘Irrelevant’.

  Vladislav was waiting for him at the table, his knife and fork poised for action. ‘Dunajski zrezek, Wiener schnitzel,’ he said, pointing to the dish impatiently. He had put on a white T-shirt and his dark body hair looked even more striking. It stopped at his wrists like a wave that has run out of strength, leaving his hands smooth and pale.