An Uncertain Place

XXV

AS HE WENT INTO THE DOCTOR’S SURGERY, ADAMSBERG Realised that he reeked of aftershave, and that Dr Josselin had also noticed it with surprise.

‘It was a sample I spilt on myself,’ he explained. ‘Nitrocitraminic acid.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘I made the name up, it sounded good.’

There had been one good moment, when Zerketch had fallen for it, when he had believed that the nitrocitraminic acid really existed, believed in the little bottle and the hundredths of a second. Just then, Adamsberg had thought he had got him, but the young man had a secret weapon far more powerful. A different trick, a different illusion, but it had worked. He, Adamsberg, the cop, had let Zerketch go, without lifting a finger to stop him. When his revolver was on the table, he could have grabbed it in a couple of steps. Or he could have had the area surrounded in five minutes. But no, the commissaire hadn’t budged. ‘COMMISSAIRE ADAMSBERG LET THE MONSTER GO FREE.’ He could see the headlines. In Austria too. It would begin something like ‘KOMMISSAR ADAMSBERG’. In big letters dripping with blood, like the ribs on the Zerquetscher’s T-shirt. Then there would be a court case, people screaming, a lynch mob, a rope from a tree. The Zerquetscher would turn up, his fangs red with blood, thrusting his fist in the air and yelling with the others, ‘The son crushes the father!’ The characters of the headline began whirling into a cloud of black and green spots.

He could taste pear-flavoured alcohol in his mouth; his head was swimming. He opened his eyes and focused on the face of Josselin who was bending over him.

‘You fainted. Does that happen often?’

‘First time in my life.’

‘Why did you want to see me? Is it about Vaudel?’

‘No, it was because I didn’t feel well. I was leaving the house and I thought I’d come here.’

‘You don’t feel well? What’s the trouble?’

‘Sick, confused, exhausted.’

‘Does that happen often?’ the doctor repeated, helping him to his feet.

‘No, never. Yes, once in Quebec. But it didn’t feel the same and anyway that time I had drunk way too much.’

‘Lie down,’ said Josselin, tapping his examination couch. ‘Lie on your back and take your shoes off. Maybe it’s just a touch of flu, but I’ll examine you all the same.’

Adamsberg hadn’t really intended, when he had come to the surgery, to end up on the padded table while the doctor moved his large fingers over his head. His feet had simply taken him away from the office and towards Josselin. He had just intended to talk. The fainting fit was a serious warning. Never would he tell anyone that the Zerketch claimed to be his son. Never would he admit to anyone that he had let him go without lifting a finger. Free as a bird. On the way to a fresh massacre, with a smile on his lips and his deathly shirt on his back. Zerk was easier to say than Zerketch and it was almost onomatopoeic, a sound of rejection and disgust. Zerk, the son of Matt or Loulou, the son of a pisspot. But all the same, no one had felt any remorse over the grocer’s wife.

The doctor put his palm across Adamsberg’s face and pressed two fingers against his temples. The immense hand easily covered the distance between his ears. The other hand was cupped under the base of his skull. Under this slightly perfumed hand, Adamsberg felt his eyes closing.

‘Don’t worry I’m just testing the PRM of the SBS.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Adamsberg with a slight question in his voice.

‘The primary respiratory movement of the sphenobasiliar symphysis, a simple basic check.’

The doctor’s fingers continued to move, like attentive moths, on to his nose, his jaws, touching his forehead, going into his ears.

‘Right,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘what we have here is a fibrillation incident, which is hiding your basic state. Some recent event has put the fear of death into you, and that has caused an overheating of the system. I don’t know what happened, but you didn’t like it. A major psycho-emotional shock. What it’s done is immobilise the parietal, block the pre-post sphenoid, and blown three fuses. Major stress episode, no wonder you weren’t feeling well. That must be why you fainted. Let’s get rid of this first, if we want to check the rest.’

The doctor scribbled a few lines and asked Adamsberg to roll on to his stomach He pulled up his shirt and felt the sacro-iliac joint. ‘I thought you said it was in my head.’

‘The head has to be reached through the sacrum.’

Adamsberg stopped talking and let the doctor move his fingers up his vertebrae, like kindly gnomes trotting up his back. He kept his eyes wide open, so as not to fall asleep.

‘Stay awake, commissaire, and lie on your back again. I’m going to relax the mediastinal fascia which are also completely blocked. Do you have some pain between your ribs on the right. Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good,’ said Josselin and put two fingers as a fork under the nape of his neck and then with the flat of his hand stroked his ribs as if he was ironing a shirt.

Adamsberg woke up groggily, with the unpleasant feeling time had passed. It was after eleven, he saw by the clock. Josselin had let him go to sleep. He jumped down, slipped on his shoes, and found the doctor sitting at the kitchen table.

‘Sit down, I’m having an early lunch because I’ve got a patient in half an hour.’

He pulled out another plate and cutlery and pushed the dish towards Adamsberg.

‘You put me to sleep?’

‘No, you just dropped off. The state you were in, there could be no better solution after the treatment. Everything’s back in position,’ he added, like a plumber reporting on a repair. ‘You were deep inside a well, totally inhibited from action, you couldn’t go forward. But it should settle down now. You might feel a bit drowsy this afternoon, and tomorrow you may feel a bit low and have a few aches and pains, but that’s only to be expected. Within three days, you ought to be back to normal. Better in fact. I had a go at the tinnitus while I was at it, and maybe a single session will be enough. Now it would be a good idea to have something to eat,’ he said, pointing to the dish of couscous and vegetables.

Adamsberg obeyed. He felt a bit stunned but also better, lighter, and very hungry. Nothing like the sickness and the feeling that he was carrying lead weights in his feet that had assailed him earlier. He raised his head to see the doctor give him a friendly wink.

‘Apart from that,’ he said, ‘I saw what I wanted to. What your natural structure is.’

‘Oh?’ said Adamsberg, who felt somewhat diminished alongside Josselin.

‘A bit as I had hoped. I’ve only ever seen one similar case, in an elderly woman.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a total absence of anguish. A rare case. To compensate of course, your emotional temperature is low. The desire for things is only moderate, there’s some fatalism, a temptation to walk away, some difficulty relating to people around you, blank spaces. Well, you can’t have everything. Even more interesting, there’s a sort of interaction between the conscious and the unconscious. You could say that the airlock is badly adjusted, that sometimes you forget to shut the gate. Take care all the same, commissaire. It can result in ideas of genius which seem to come from out of the blue – intuition as it’s sometimes wrongly called, for short – immense stocks of memories and images, but it also allows toxic elements to rise to the surface, things that absolutely ought to remain buried in the depths. Do you follow me?’

‘Sort of. And if these toxic elements come to the surface, what happens?’

Dr Josselin whirled a finger round near his head.

‘Then you can’t tell the true from the false, the fantasy from the real thing, the possible from the impossible, in short you will end up mixing saltpetre, sulphur and carbon.’

‘Explosive,’ Adamsberg concluded.

‘As you say,’ said the doctor, wiping his hands and looking satisfied. ‘Nothing to fear if you keep a grip on things. Keep up your responsibilities, carry on talking to other people, don’t isolate yourself too much. Do you have any children?’

‘One, he’s very little.’

‘Well, tell him about the world, take him for walks, hang on to him. That will help you throw down some anchors, you mustn’t lose sight of the harbour lights. I’m not going to ask you about women, I can see. Lack of confidence.’

‘In them?’

‘No, in yourself. That’s the only little worry, if it can be called that. I have to leave you now, commissaire. Make sure to shut the door when you go out.’

‘Which door – the apartment or the one in my head?’