by Fred Vargas
‘On my pillow.’
‘Put it closer to your head.’
‘OK.’
‘Hvala. Please tell Arandjel that Arnold Paole’s wild ride came to an end last night. But I think he’s satisfied, because he has massacred five great Plogojowitzes: Plögener, Vaudel-Plog, Plogerstein and two Plogans, a father and daughter in Finland. And the feet of Plogodrescu. The curse of the Paoles is at an end, and according to him, they’re all away now. Free. And on Highgate Hill, the tree is dying.’
‘Plog.’
‘There are two shroud-eaters left.’
‘They don’t trouble anyone. Arandjel says you just have to turn them face down and they’ll drop like mercury to the centre of the earth.’
‘I don’t intend to have anything to do with them.’
‘Wow,’ said Vlad, apropos of nothing.
‘Tell Arandjel, without fail. Are you going to stay in Kisilova for ever now?’
‘No, I’m expected at a conference in Munich tomorrow. I’m getting back on the straight and narrow, which as you know does not exist and is neither straight nor narrow.’
‘Plog. What does “Loša sreća” mean, Vlad? Paole said it when he fell to the ground.’
‘It means “bad luck”.’
Zerk was now sitting on the sand a few metres away, watching him patiently.
‘We’ll go to a medical centre to get your hands seen to,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Then we’ll go and have some coffee.’
‘What does “plog” mean?’
‘It’s like a drop of truth falling to earth,’ said Adamsberg, miming the action by raising and dropping his hand vertically. ‘And it falls in exactly the right spot,’ he said, plunging his index finger into the sand.
‘Oh,’ said Zerk, looking at the little hole. ‘And what if it falls here or here?’ he asked, plunging in a finger at random. ‘Not a real plog then?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
XLVII
ADAMSBERG HAD STUCK A STRAW IN ZERK’S BOWL OF COFFEE, and buttered his bread for him.
‘Tell me about Josselin, Zerk.’
‘My name’s not Zerk.’
‘It’s the baptismal name I’ve given you. For me, just think about it, you’re only a week old. Like a newborn baby crying in a cot. Nothing more.’
‘Makes you only a week old too, so you’re no better’n me.’
‘So what will you call me?’
‘Don’t want to call you anything.’
Zerk sucked up some coffee through his straw and smiled unexpectedly, rather like Vlad’s sudden way of smiling, whether at his reply or the sound of the straw. His mother had been just the same, readily distracted from the business in hand at awkward moments. Which explained why he had been able to make love to her by the bridge over the Jaussène in the rain. Zerk was the product of a moment of distraction.
‘I don’t want to question you back at headquarters.’
‘But you’re going to question me all the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m going to answer like I would to the cops because, for me, that’s what you’ve been for twenty-nine years. A cop.’
‘That’s what I am, and that’s what I want. I want you to answer my questions just as you would the police.’
‘Well, I really liked Josselin. I met him in Paris four years ago, when he put my head right. Six months ago, things began to change.’
‘In what way?’
‘He started to go on at me that until I’d killed my father, I’d always amount to nothing. No, well, not literally kill, if you get my meaning.’
‘All right, I understand, Zerk.’
‘Before that I never bothered much about my father. I did think about it sometimes, but a cop’s son? Better forget it. Now and then, there’d be something about you in the papers, and my mother would be all proud, but not me. That’s it. But then Josselin started on at me. He said you were the root of all my problems and the reason I was such a failure, he could see all that in my head.’
‘How a failure?’
‘I dunno,’ said Zerk, sucking some more on the straw. ‘I don’t get bothered about anything much. Maybe like you and the light bulb in your house.’
‘So what did Josselin say?’
‘He said I should “confront” you and do you down. “Purge the system” he called it, as if there was all this rotten stuff inside me, and the rotten stuff was you. I didn’t like that idea.’
‘Why not?’
‘Dunno. I didn’t really feel like it – all this purging stuff seemed a lot of hassle to me. And I couldn’t feel any big heap of rubbish anyway, I didn’t know where it was supposed to be. But Josselin said, oh yes, it was right there inside me, and if I didn’t get rid of it, it would start to rot me from within. So I stopped arguing with him, because it made him cross, and he was cleverer than me. I listened. Few more sessions like that, I started to believe him. In the end, I really did believe him.’
‘So what did you decide to do?’
‘Get rid of the rubbish, but I didn’t know how you did something like that. He never told me. He said he’d help me. But he said, one way or another, I’d bump into you one day. And he was right, I did.’
‘Well, naturally, Zerk, because he’d planned it all out.’
‘Yeah, suppose so,’ said Zerk, after a moment.
Not a quick thinker, said Adamsberg to himself, feeling rather annoyed to be even a little in agreement with Josselin. Because if Zerk wasn’t very bright, whose fault was that? His gestures were slow too. He had only drunk half his coffee, but then so had Adamsberg.
‘When did you bump into me then?’
‘The first thing was this phone call, in the night of Monday to Tuesday, after that nasty murder in Garches. This man I didn’t know, he told me my photo would be in the papers next day, and I was going to be accused of the murder, and I’d better beat it and vanish from sight. And after that, things would be sorted out, and he’d get back to me.’
‘That will have been Mordent. One of my officers.’
‘Ah, so he wasn’t lying. He was like, “I’m a friend of your father’s, so for Pete’s sake do what I say.” Because I was thinking I should just go to the cops, and say there must have been some mistake. But Louis always told me to keep my distance from the cops as much as I could.’
‘Louis?’
Zerk looked up in amazement. ‘Louis. Louis Veyrenc.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Adamsberg, ‘Veyrenc.’
‘He should know, shouldn’t he? So I left home and I went to Josselin’s. Where else could I go? My mother lives in Poland now, and Louis was down in Laubazac. Josselin always said his door was open to me if ever I was in trouble. And that’s when he put the knife in. But I was up for it, that’s for sure.’
‘How did he put it?’
‘He said it was now or never. He said to take advantage of this misunderstanding, it must be destiny. Destiny only stops for a minute in the station, so jump on the train. Only idiots stay on the platform. That’s what he said.’
‘Well put.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
‘But wrong. Anyway, did he rehearse you what to say?’
‘No, but he told me how to act, really make you see that I existed, and you had to understand that I was stronger than you. He said what that would do would be, it’d make you feel really guilty, that was bound to happen. He was like, “This is your day, Armel. After this you’ll be a new man. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to come on strong.” I liked that. “Go ahead, purge, exist, it’s your day.” I’d never heard anything like that – go ahead, purge, exist. I really liked how that sounded.’
‘Where did you get the T-shirt?’
‘He went out and bought it for me, he said I wouldn’t be impressive enough in my scruffy old shirt. I spent the night at his place, but I was too worked up to sleep. I was going over stuff in my head. He gave me some pills.’
‘Uppers?’
�
�Dunno, didn’t ask. One pill at night, and two in the morning before I went out. I was already feeling like a new man. And the pile of rubbish, yeah, I could see that, plain as daylight. This feeling, it kept getting stronger. I could really have murdered you. And you’d have killed me,’ he added, suddenly sounding like the gothic Zerk.
The young man looked away. He took a cigarette and Adamsberg lit it for him.
‘Would you really have killed me with that horrible potion?’
‘What did it look like to you?’
‘Some fucking poison in a bottle.’
‘Nitrocitraminic acid.’
‘Yeah, if you say so.’
‘But what else did it look like?’
‘Dunno. Free sample of aftershave or something.’
‘That’s exactly what it was.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ gasped Zerk. ‘You’re just saying that because today, now, you’re ashamed. You were locked in your study. You wouldn’t keep aftershave in your study, would you?’
‘You locked me up, forgetting that cops have pass keys. I went into the bathroom to get it. Nitrocitraminic acid doesn’t exist. You can check.’
‘Shit,’ said Zerk, sucking up more coffee.
‘What is perfectly true on the other hand is that you shouldn’t push a gun so far down your trousers.’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘Did you really have TB, only one kidney, all that stuff?’
‘No. I did have ringworm once.’
‘OK, go on.’
‘Well, when I had to fish the cat out from under the boxes, that distracted me. Or maybe it was that old Spanish guy and his arm. I sort of came round as if I’d been drunk. I was getting a bit tired of all this ranting. But I did want to go on, all the same. I wanted to carry on bullshitting until you fell on your knees and begged me to stop. Josselin told me that if I didn’t keep yelling at you, I was finished. If I didn’t get you down on the floor, it was all over with me. I’d have that shit inside me for ever. And it’s true, I did feel better afterwards.’
‘But you were still in deep trouble.’
‘Bloody right I was, like the cat in the garden. I was waiting for them to find the DNA didn’t match. Or for this mystery man to call me back. But nothing happened.’
‘You never thought it might be a trap set by Josselin?’
‘No. He was hiding me, wasn’t he? I was in this box room in his apartment, strict orders not to come out because of his patients.’
‘After you left me, if you’d come out of your room between nine and midday, you’d have found me with him. I came to talk to him. I imagine Josselin must have appreciated the situation. He had us both under his roof, and he was manipulating the pair of us. But he did make me feel better and he got rid of my tinnitus. We’re going to miss him, Zerk, he really has got golden fingers.’
‘No way will I miss him. No way.’
‘So what happened next? That day?’
‘He came to fetch me out at lunchtime, he made me tell him everything, he wanted all the details, what I’d said exactly, he was having a great time, he seemed happy for me. He took away the T-shirt and cooked a nice meal to celebrate. He said not to worry about the DNA, it would just be a wrong analysis and that the cops would take some time to spot it. But I was starting not to believe that. I wanted to call Louis but I couldn’t switch on my mobile. Yeah, Josselin had a landline, but if the cops knew Louis was my uncle, they might have been listening in. I started to think someone was after me, trying to ruin my life. Was it him got the tissue?’
‘Yes, it was easy, and the hairs from your dog, Tintin. We found them on the chair in Garches. The same chair he pinned you to yesterday. I wondered where he could have got them, though. Did he ever come to see you at home?’
‘No, never.’
‘When you went to see him, did he take your coat?’
‘I just left my shoes in the hall, nothing else.’
‘Nothing else? Think.’
‘No. Yeah. A couple of times, he got me to take off my trousers to check my knees.’
‘Recently?’
‘No, couple of months ago.’
‘That’d be when he got hold of the handkerchief and the dog hairs. You never thought anything of it?’
‘No, why would I? Josselin had been helping me get my head straight for four years, why would I think he would harm me? He was on my side, with his wretched golden fingers. He got me to think he really liked me, but the truth was he thought I was a pathetic dickhead. Nobody cares if you live or die, was what he said to me last night.’
‘Loša sreća, Zerk, he had taken on himself the destiny of Arnold Paole.’
‘He wasn’t making that up, it was the truth. He really was a descendant of Paole. He told me that in the car when we were driving to Garches. He wasn’t kidding.’
‘No, I know that. He’s an authentic Paole, in the direct paternal line. What I mean is, he became as sick as the great-great-whatever-grandfather, the one who ate earth from the graveyard to protect himself against Peter Plogojowitz. What else did he tell you?’
‘That I was going to die, but by dying I’d be part of his great scheme for exterminating all these people who were under a curse, and that this would be a good death for a useless person like me. What he said was, there was this horrible other family, and it had been infecting his family for three hundred years, so he was going to put a stop to it. He said he was born with two teeth, and that was proof that he had this evil in him, but it was all these other people’s fault. But I couldn’t understand everything he was saying. He was like, talking too quickly, and I was afraid the car was going to crash.’
Zerk paused to finish his coffee, which was now cold.
‘He did speak about his mother. She abandoned him, because he was a Paole, and she knew right away, because he had these teeth when he was born. She said, “Ugh, he’s got teeth!” and left him at the hospital, “as if she was getting rid of something filthy,” he said. And then he started to cry, really cry. I could see him in the rear-view mirror. He didn’t blame his mother. He said “What can a poor mother do, if she’s given birth to a creature? A creature isn’t a child.” So I thought, now he’s going to break down, so he might let me go, and I begged him to let me go. But he started shouting again, and the car went all over the road. Hell, I was really scared. Then he went on telling me how his childhood was ruined because he was this “creature”.’
‘Was he adopted by the Josselin family?’
‘Yeah. And when he was nine, he opened this drawer in his father’s desk. And he found a whole file on himself. He found out he was adopted, he found out his mother had given him away, and why. He was a Paole, from a whole line of damned vampires. That’s what he says. A year later, the people who adopted him couldn’t handle him, he was smashing things, spreading his shit on the walls. He just told me all this stuff, straight out, he wasn’t embarrassed, to prove he was a damned soul. So one day in November, he said, his parents took him to this institution, and said that he was going to have his head examined. They said they’d come back, but they didn’t.’
‘Being abandoned a second time really fucked up his life,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Sort of plog, perhaps?’
‘If you like.’
‘Then when he was older he got married, to this woman “who was nothing much to look at, but very well set up”, he said. And he started to cut the feet off of people who were a threat to him. These were other people who’d been born with teeth. He wasn’t sure at first who he was looking for, he admitted that. “I was just a beginner then,” he said, “I may have cut some feet off harmless people, may they forgive me. But I wasn’t hurting them, they were already dead.” He said his wife left him soon after the marriage. A heartless woman, he called her, “scum of the earth, as I found out”.’
‘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 w
orse 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.
XLVIII
ÉMILE CAME INTO HEADQUARTERS ON CRUTCHES. AT 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.