An Uncertain Place

Adamsberg. ‘Your neighbour’s no fun, I prefer Weill.’

‘Look, Zerketch, I’ve got to get out. Sitting still too long makes me edgy. It’s the only thing that does. But it makes me really edgy.’

‘No kidding,’ scoffed the young man. waving the gun. ‘So the cop’s had enough, the cop wants to get out.’

‘That’s right, you got it. See this bottle?’

Adamsberg was holding a little glass tube filled with liquid, no bigger than a perfume sample.

‘If I were you, I wouldn’t touch the gun till you hear what I’ve got to say. See the cork? I take it off and you’ll be dead. In less than a second, in 74.3 hundredths of a second to be precise.’

‘You bastard,’ said the young man. ‘Is that why you’re so pleased with yourself? Why you aren’t scared?’

‘I haven’t finished explaining. The time it takes for you to slip the safety catch on your gun is 65 hundredths of a second, and then to press the trigger, 59 hundredths. Time for the bullet to hit, 32 hundredths. Total: one point fifty-six seconds. Result, you’re dead before the bullet hits me.’

‘What’s that bloody stuff?’ The young man had stood up and was walking backwards, holding his hand towards Adamsberg.

‘Nitrocitraminic acid. Turns into a lethal gas on contact with air.’

‘So you’ll snuff it with me, fucker.’

‘I still haven’t finished explaining. All us cops in the squad get immunised by a special course of injections for two months, and believe me that’s no picnic. If I push the top off, you’ll die – your heart will dilate and burst – but what will happen to me is I’ll be sick, and empty my guts out for three weeks, and I’ll have a skin rash, and lose my hair. But after that I’ll recover.’

‘You wouldn’t do it.’

‘In your case, Zerquetscher, like a shot.’

‘You son of a bitch.’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t kill a man like that.’

‘Yes I can.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Put the guns down. Open that drawer in the chest, take out two pairs of handcuffs. You put one pair on your wrists, the other on your feet. Hurry up, I said I was getting edgy.’

‘Fucking cop.’

‘Yes. But get a move on. Maybe I shovel clouds up there, but down here I can be quick.’

The young man swept the table with his arm, scattering papers round the room, and threw the holster on the ground. Then he put his hand behind his back.

‘Careful with the P38. If you stick it in your waistband, you shouldn’t push it in so far, especially in tight jeans. One false move and you’ll shoot yourself in the backside.’

‘You think I’m a baby!’

‘Yes, you are a baby, a kid who’s lost it. But not an idiot.’

‘If I hadn’t let you get dressed, you wouldn’t have that bottle.’

‘Correct.’

‘But I didn’t want to look at you with your kit off.’

‘Oh really? Same thing for Vaudel, you didn’t want to look at him with his kit off, as you put it, either?’

The young man carefully pulled the P38 from his trousers and dropped it to the floor. He opened the drawer and took out the handcuffs, then turned round suddenly with a burst of strange laughter, as irritating as the cat’s mewing earlier.

‘You don’t get it, do you, Adamsberg? You still don’t get it. You think I’d risk getting arrested? Just for the pleasure of seeing you? You don’t understand that if I’m here it’s because you can’t arrest me. Not today, not tomorrow, never. Don’t you remember why I’m here?’

‘You said you wanted to fuck up my life.’

‘Yeah.’

Adamsberg had stood up too, holding the bottle in front of him like a chisel, his fingernail under the lid. The two men turned around each other, like two dogs looking for a chance to pounce.

‘Give it up,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t know who my father is. You can’t kill me, you can’t shut me up, and you can’t go on chasing me.’

‘Why not? Are you untouchable? Who is your father then? A government minister? The Pope? God perhaps?’

‘No, scumbag, it’s you.’

XXIV

ADAMSBERG STOPPED IN MID-MOVEMENT, DROPPED HIS ARM, and the bottle rolled on to the red tiled floor.

‘Shit! The bottle!’ shouted the young man.

Adamsberg picked it up automatically. He was looking for a word that meant ‘someone who makes up a story and then believes it’, but he couldn’t think of it. Fatherless kids who go round saying they’re the son of royalty, or the son of Elvis, or a descendant of Julius Caesar. One notorious gangster had had eighteen fathers, including famous politicians like Jean Jaures, and he changed them all the time. Mythomaniac, that was it. And people said you shouldn’t shatter the illusions of a mythomaniac, it was dangerous, like waking a sleepwalker.

‘Well, while you’re about it,’ he said, ‘you might have found a better father than me. Not very interesting, is it, to be the son of a cop?’

‘So, Commissaire Adamsberg,’ the young man laughed as if he hadn’t heard a word, ‘father of the Zerquetscher! Don’t like that, do you? But that’s how it is, motherfucker. One day the long-lost son comes back, he crushes his father, he takes over the throne. You know stories like that, don’t you? So his father has to go away with nothing, and beg on the streets.’

‘Yes,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Now I’m going to make the coffee,’ said the young man, mimicking him. ‘Bring your fucking bottle, and watch me.’

Looking at him pouring water into the funnel, the cigarette hanging from his lower lip, one hand scratching his dark hair, Adamsberg felt something like a depth charge in the pit of his stomach, an acid spurt more biting than the awful wine in Froissy’s car, spreading to the roots of his teeth. ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ In his concentration on the coffee, the young man did look very like his own father used to, as he knitted his dark eyebrows while watching a stew on the stove. In fact, he looked like half the young men of the Bearn, or two-thirds of those from the valley of the Gave de Pau: thick curly hair, receding chin, well-shaped lips, a compact body. Louvois, not a name he recognised at all from his home valley. He could equally well be from the other valley where his colleague Veyrenc had been born. Or he could have been from Lille or Reims or Menton. Not London though.

The young man took the bowls and refilled them. The climate had changed since he had dropped his bombshell. He had carelessly tucked the P38 into his back pocket, and put the holster near him on a chair. The confrontational phase was over, like the wind dropping at sea. Neither of them knew what to do, so they stirred their sugar into the coffee. The Zerquetscher, leaning forward, tucked his long hair behind his ear. It fell out and he pushed it back again.

‘All right, it’s quite possible you’re from the Bearn,’ said Adamsberg, ‘but pull the other leg, Zerketch. I haven’t got a son, and I don’t want one. Where were you born?’

‘In Pau. My mother went to town to have me, so people wouldn’t know.’

‘And what’s your mother’s name?’

‘Gisele Louvois.’

‘No, doesn’t ring a bell at all. And I know everyone in the three valleys.’