An Uncertain Place

XXXIII

AN UNPAVED LANE LED TO ARANDJEL’S HOUSE ON THE BANKS of the Danube, and the two men walked along it without exchanging a word, as if some foreign element had altered their relationship. Unless perhaps Vladislav’s evening smokes made him unsociable in the morning. It was already warm. Adamsberg swung his black jacket at the end of his arm, relaxing, letting the noises of the town and the inquiry fade away in the mist of oblivion rising from the river, and blotting out the fierce image of Zerk, the nervous atmosphere in the squad, the deadly threat hanging over him, and the arrow that had been loosed by someone high up, which would soon be reaching its target. Was Dinh still lying in bed with his so-called fever? Had he managed to hold back the samples? As for Émile, and his dog, and the man who had painted his patron in bronze, they were all ghostly images fading into the fog which Kisilova was gently spreading into his mind.

‘You were late up this morning,’ Vladislav said eventually, in a disgruntled tone.

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t come down for breakfast. Adrianus says you are always up at cockcrow, like a peasant, you’re always four hours earlier than him getting into work.’

‘I didn’t hear the cock crow.’

‘I think you heard the cock crowing very well. I think you slept with Danica.’

Adamsberg walked a few paces in silence.

‘Plog,’ he said.

Vladislav kicked a pebble with his shoe, hesitatingly, then laughed softly. With his hair now loose on his shoulders, he looked like a Slav warrior about to launch his horse against the West. He lit a cigarette and started talking in his usual bantering way.

‘You’ll be wasting your time with Arandjel. You’ll find out a whole lot of obscure information, but nothing that will help your inquiry, nothing you could write in a report. Irrelevant, like Adrianus says.’

‘Not a problem, I can’t write reports anyway.’

‘What about your boss? What will he say? That you were dallying with a woman on the banks of the Danube, while a killer was on the loose in France.’

‘He always thinks I’m doing more or less that. My boss – or whoever up there has some sort of hold over my boss – is trying to get me sacked. So I might as well find out what I can here.’

Vladislav introduced Adamsberg to Arandjel, who nodded and produced a dish of stuffed cabbage, which he put on the table. Vladislav served it out in silence.

‘You cleaned Blagojević’s stone,’ observed Arandjel, starting to eat, and forking huge helpings into his mouth. ‘You scraped the moss off. You made the name visible.’

Vladislav was translating so fast that Adamsberg had the impression of holding a direct conversation with the old man.

‘I shouldn’t have done that?’

‘No. You shouldn’t touch his tomb, in case it wakes him up. The people round here are scared of him, and some of them might be angry with you for making his name visible. Some people might even think he summoned you here, to be his servant. And they might want to kill you before you bring death to the village. Peter Blagojević wants a servant – you understand? That’s what Biljana was afraid of, the woman who tried to stop you. “He’s calling you, he’s calling you,” that’s what she told me she said to you.’

‘On te je privukao, on te je privukao,’ Vladislav repeated.

‘Ye-es, that is what she said,’ Adamsberg admitted.

‘Don’t set foot in the world of vampires without knowing what you’re doing, young man.’ Arandjel paused significantly, so that the idea could penetrate into Adamsberg’s mind, then poured out some wine. ‘Vlad told me yesterday that you were interested in Blagojević’s story. Feel free to ask. But don’t go walking in the place of uncertainty.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The place of uncertainty. That’s what they call the clearing where he’s buried. It’s not poor old Peter who might attack you, but someone who’s alive and kicking. You have to understand that the safety of the village is what matters most around here. Eat up before it gets cold.’

Adamsberg obeyed, clearing most of what was on his plate before speaking again.

‘There’ve been two horrible murders, one in France, one in Austria.’

‘Yes, I know, Vlad told me.’

‘I believe that the two victims belonged to Blagojević’s family, that they were descendants of his.’

‘Blagojević didn’t have any descendants who carried his name. All the members of his family left the village under their Austrian surname, Plogojowitz, so that the people here wouldn’t be able to trace them. But the word got out, because someone from the village went to Romania in 1813, and when he got back he added the Plogojowitz spelling to the gravestone. If any descendants are still around they’d be called Plogojowitz. So what’s your theory?’

‘The victims weren’t just killed, their bodies were totally demolished. I was asking Vladislav yesterday what you have to do to destroy a vampire.’

Arandjel nodded several times, pushed back his plate and rolled a bulky cigarette.

‘The point isn’t so much to destroy the vampire as to make sure he can’t come back. He has to be blocked, stopped. There are plenty of ways to do it. What most people think is that you have to put a stake through his heart. But they’re wrong, the crucial thing is the feet.’

Arandjel blew out a cloud of acrid smoke and spoke at some length to Vladislav.

‘I’m going to put on the coffee,’ Vladislav explained. ‘Arandjel apologises for not offering you a dessert, but he lives alone and he doesn’t like sweet things. Or fruit. He doesn’t like getting juice on his hands. And he wants to know if you liked the stuffed cabbage, because you didn’t ask for a second helping.’

‘It was delicious,’ Adamsberg replied sincerely, embarrassed that he had not complimented his host on the food. ‘But I never eat much at midday. Please ask him not to be offended.’

Having listened to this reply, Arandjel indicated that he accepted the apology, asked Adamsberg to call him by his first name, and went on with his explanation.

‘The most urgent thing to do is to stop the dead man walking. So if in doubt they always dealt with his feet first, so he couldn’t move.’

‘What do you mean “if in doubt”, Arandjel?’

‘There could be signs during the wake. If the corpse still looked rosy-cheeked, or if some of the shroud was in his mouth, if he was smiling, if the eyes were open. So then they tied his two big toes together with string. Or they bit the big toe. Or they put pins in the soles of his feet, or tied the legs together. All the same sort of thing.’

‘Did they ever cut the feet off?’

‘Oh yes. A more radical method, but they didn’t hesitate to do that if they still felt uneasy. Of course the Church punished this as a sacrilege. Quite often they would cut off the head and place it between the feet in the tomb, so that the corpse couldn’t get hold of it. Or they tied his hands behind his back, or trussed him up on a stretcher, and stopped up his nose, and blocked all the orifices, mouth, ears, the lot. There was no end to it.’

‘And the teeth?’

‘Ah, well, the mouth, young man, is of course a crucial part of a vampire’s body.’

Arandjel stopped speaking, while Vladislav poured out the coffee.

‘Bon mangé?’ Arandjel asked in French with a sudden smile which lit up his whole face – and Adamsberg began to warm to the broad Kiseljevan grin. ‘I met this Frenchman when they liberated Belgrade in ’44. Vin, femmes jolies, boeuf mode.’

Vladislav and Arandjel both burst out laughing and Adamsberg wondered once more how people could find contentment in so little, and wished he were the same.

‘The vampire has an insatiable appetite,’ Arandjel went on. ‘That’s why he wants to gobble up his shroud, or the earth in the grave. So they might stop his mouth with stones, or they might use garlic or earth, or tie a cloth round his neck very tightly so that he couldn’t swallow. Or they buried him face down so that he would just eat the earth, and that way he’d sink deeper down.’

‘And some people eat wardrobes,’ said Adamsberg under his breath. Vlad stopped translating, unsure he had heard right. ‘Did you say wardrobes?’

‘Yes. Thekophagists, the people are called.’

Vlad conveyed this and Arandjel did not look too surprised. ‘Do you have many examples of that?’ he asked.

‘No, but there was a man who ate a whole aeroplane once. And in London, a lord ate the photographs of his mother.’

‘Now I once knew a man who ate his own finger,’ said Arandjel, sticking his thumb in the air. ‘He cut it off and cooked it. But next day he couldn’t remember a thing about it and he went round looking for his finger. It happened in Ruma. For a long time people wondered whether they should tell him the truth or pretend that a bear had attacked him in the woods and bitten off the finger. They chanced to come across a dead bear some time later, and they brought him the bear’s head. The man was quite happy after that – he thought his finger was inside the bear and he hung on to its head, even when it rotted away.’

‘Ah, like the polar bear,’ said Adamsberg. ‘The one that ate the uncle on the ice floe, and the nephew brought back its skin to his widow, and she kept it too. In her sitting room.’

‘Remarkable,’ said Arandjel. ‘Quite remarkable.’

Adamsberg felt somehow fortified, even if he had had to come all this way to find a man who appreciated the story of the bear as it should be. But now he had lost the thread of the conversation, as Arandjel could tell from his eyes.

‘Yes, vampires want to eat the living, and they try to eat their shrouds, the earth they lie in, everything,’ he said. ‘That’s why people didn’t trust anyone with abnormal teeth. People whose teeth were particularly long for instance, or babies who were born with one or two teeth.’

‘Born with teeth?’

‘Yes, it isn’t as rare as all that. Julius Caesar now, he was born with teeth, and so was your Napoleon and your Louis XIV in France. And plenty of others, who weren’t famous. Some people thought it wasn’t a sign of being a vampire but that you were a superior being. Take me,’ he said, tapping his glass against his discoloured teeth. ‘I was born like Caesar.’

Adamsberg waited for the loud howl of laughter from Vladislav and Arandjel to subside, then asked for a piece of paper. He reproduced the sketch he had done for the squad, marking the parts of the body which had been attacked. ‘Oh yes, splendid,’ said Arandjel, picking up the drawing. ‘That’s right, the joints, to stop the body moving. Feet, of course, specially big toes, so he couldn’t walk. Mouth and teeth. Liver, heart and soul. In the old days, the heart, which is the seat of a vampire’s life, might be taken out of the body for special treatment. This is a magnificent piece of destruction, by someone who knew exactly what he was doing,’ Arandjel concluded, as if he were judging a professional piece of work.

‘Because it wasn’t possible to burn the body perhaps?’

‘Precisely. But what he did came to the same thing.’

‘Arandjel, could it be that someone out there really believes all this sufficiently to make him want to wipe out Plogojowitz’s descendants?’

‘What do you mean “believes all this”? Everyone believes it, young man. Everyone is afraid that at night a tombstone will fall over and you’ll feel a cold breath on your neck. And nobody likes to think of the dead as making good companions. Believing in vampires is just the same.’

‘I don’t mean an ancient, traditional kind of fear, Arandjel. I mean someone who believes this literally, who thinks all the Plogojowitzes are authentic vampiri, and should be exterminated. Is that possible?’

‘Yes, undoubtedly, if he thinks this has caused all his misfortune. People look for an external cause for their suffering, and the more they suffer, the greater the cause must be. In this case, the killer’s suffering is immense. So his response is on the same scale.’

Arandjel turned round to talk to Vladislav, slipping Adamsberg’s drawing into his pocket. He wanted the chairs to be taken outside, underneath the lime tree, overlooking the bend in the river, and to take advantage of the sunshine, with some glasses on the table.

‘No more rakija… please,’ Adamsberg whispered.

‘Pivo? Beer?’

‘Yes, if it won’t offend him.’

‘No bother, he likes you. Not many people come to talk to him about his beloved vampiri and you’ve brought him a new case. It’s a great distraction for him.’

The three men sat around under the tree in the warm sunshine, listening to the chuckling of the river, and Arandjel began to close his eyes. A mist had started to rise, and Adamsberg looked across to the other bank at the peaks of the Carpathians.

‘Hurry up before he goes to sleep,’ Vladislav warned him.

‘Yes, this is where I take my siesta,’ the old man confirmed.

‘Arandjel, I have two final questions.’

‘I’ll keep listening as long as there’s still some drink in my glass,’ said Arandjel, taking a very small sip and looking amused.

Adamsberg felt as if he had been caught in an intelligent trap, where he would have to think quickly before the alcohol started to disappear, like sand running through an hourglass. When the glass was empty, the words of wisdom would dry up. He estimated that the time in front of him was about five mouthfuls of rakija.

‘Is there any connection between Plogojowitz and the old graveyard in north London, Higg-gate Cemetery?’

‘Highgate you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Much worse than a connection, young man. Long before they made the cemetery, people say that the body of a Turk was taken to the top of the hill, in his coffin, and that his was the only grave there for a long time. Well, people get a lot of things wrong: he wasn’t a Turk at all, but a Serb, and he’s supposed to be the master vampire, Plogojowitz himself. Fleeing his native land to go and reign from London. They even say that it was his presence on the hill that spontaneously caused the building of the cemetery.’

‘Plogojowitz, the master of London?’Adamsberg whispered to himself, quite taken aback. ‘So the person who put the shoes there wasn’t making an offering to him, but provoking him, picking a quarrel, showing him his powers.’

‘Ti to verjueš,’ said Vlad, looking at Adamsberg and shaking his long hair. ‘You really believe it. Don’t let Arandjel bewitch you with his tales, that’s what my dedo always told me. He’s just having fun with you.’

Adamsberg once more allowed the gales of laughter to finish, watching the level of the alcohol in Arandjel’s glass. Meeting his eyes, Arandjel swallowed another mouthful. Just a centimetre left now. ‘Time is passing, ask your second question.’ That was what Arandjel’s smile seemed to say, like the sphinx testing passers-by.

‘Arandjel, was there anyone who was specially singled out for treatment by Plogojowitz? Is it possible that there’s some family that thinks it is a particular victim of the Plogojowitz clan’s powers?’

‘Irrelevant,’ said Vlad, repeating what Danglard had said. ‘I already told you. It’s his own family that was targeted.’

Arandjel raised his hand to tell Vladislav to be quiet.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All right,’ he went on, pouring himself another small slug of rakija. ‘You have won the right to a last little glass before my siesta.’

A concession that seemed to suit the old man very well. Adamsberg took out his notebook.

‘No,’ said Arandjel firmly. ‘If you can’t remember it’s because it’s not interesting enough to you, so you won’t have missed anything.’

‘OK, I’m listening,’ said Adamsberg, pocketing the notebook.

‘There was one family at least that was persecuted by Plogojowitz. In a village called Medwegya, not far from here, in Braničevo district. You can read all about it in the Visum et repertum that Dr Flückinger wrote in 1732 for the military council in Belgrade after they closed the inquiry.’

I’m talking to the Danglard of Serbia, Adamsberg remembered. He had no idea what this Visum et repertum could be or where to find it, and old Arandjel had challenged him not to take notes. Adamsberg rubbed his hands together in his anxiety not to forget. Visum et repertum by Flückinger.

‘The case caused even more of a sensation than Plogojowitz’s. A major scandal throughout the Western world, with people taking sides. Your Voltaire had a good laugh about it, the Austrian emperor got involved, Louis XV ordered his envoys to follow the inquiry, the doctors were tearing their hair out, the priests praying for their salvation, the theologians didn’t know what to think. A great outpouring of literature and debate. And to think it all started here,’ Arandjel added, glancing round at the hills.

‘I’m listening,’ said Adamsberg.

‘This soldier came back to Medwegya after years of fighting in the Austro-Turkish wars. He wasn’t the same as when he went away. He said he had been the victim of a vampir during his tour of duty, that he had fought the vampire but it had followed him to the Turkish part of Persia and in the end he had managed to kill the monster and bury it. He had brought back some earth from the grave and he ate it regularly to protect himself from the vampir. It’s a sign that the soldier didn’t think he was safe from the living-dead creature, even if he thought he had killed it. So he lived on in Medwegya, eating earth, wandering around cemeteries and getting his neighbours worked up. Then, in 1727, he fell off a hay cart and broke his neck. In the month after he died, there were four deaths in Medwegya, “in the manner people die when attacked by vampires”, and people started to say the soldier had become a vampire too. They made such a fuss that the authorities agreed to his exhumation, forty days after his death. And the rest is well known.’

‘Tell me all the same,’ said Adamsberg, afraid that Arandjel might stop at this point.

‘The body was pink-skinned, fresh blood was to be seen in the orifices, the skin looked new and smooth, fingernails were lying in the tomb, and there were no signs of decomposition. They plunged a stake into the soldier’s chest and there was a horrible cry. Or some say not so much a cry as an inhuman sigh. They cut off his head and burnt the body.’

The old man took another mouthful of rakija under Adamsberg’s watchful eye. Only a third of the second glass left. If Adamsberg had remembered the dates right, the soldier had died two years after Plogojowitz.

‘The four victims too were taken from their graves and got the same treatment. But since they were afraid that the contagion of the Medwegya vampire might extend to his neighbours in the graveyard, they went further. An official inquiry was instituted in 1731, they opened forty tombs near the soldier’s and discovered that seventeen corpses were still in perfect condition: Militza, Joachim, Ruscha and her child Rhode, Bariactar’s wife and her son Stanche, Milo, Stanoicka, and others, they were all taken and cremated. And there were no more deaths.’

Only a few drops of liquor now remained in Arandjel’s glass, so everything depended on his rate of drinking. ‘If the soldier had been fighting with Peter Plogojowitz -’Adamsberg started quickly – ‘because we are talking about Plogojowitz, aren’t we?’

‘So they say.’

‘In that case, the members of the soldier’s family were – how shall I put it? – unintentional vampires, but they could consider themselves as victims of Plogojowitz, people who had been captured and enslaved. Men and women who were turned into vampires by force, destroyed by the creature.’

‘Yes, that’s it. That’s what they were.’

Arandjel swirled the last drop of rakija round and looked at the facets of his glass glinting in the sunlight.

‘And the soldier’s name?’ asked Adamsberg hastily. ‘Is that known?’

Arandjel raised his glass towards the blank sky and without putting it to his lips threw the last drop of rakija straight into his mouth.

‘Arnold Paole. He was called Arnold Paole.’

‘Plog,’ whispered Vladislav.

‘Try to remember it,’ said Arandjel, stretching out in his armchair. ‘It’s the kind of name that slips your mind.’

As if Plogojowitz’s breath had made it inconsistent.