An Uncertain Place

‘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.’

‘Losa sreca, 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 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.

XLVIII

EMILE 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.

It was indeed this detail which had unsettled some members of the squad, the horror aroused by hearing of