An Uncertain Place

XLII

ADAMSBERG HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD FROM THE AIRPORT to convene a meeting of the squad – exceptionally, given that it was a Sunday evening. Three hours on, they had all more or less assimilated the latest episodes of the inquiry, rather at random and in some confusion, rendered greater by the commissaire’s state of exhaustion. Some people whispered during a break that it was obvious he had spent a night mummified in a freezing tomb and on the point of suffocation. His aquiline nose looked pinched, and his eyes had sunk even deeper into the distant depths. They greeted Veyrenc warmly, slapped him on the back and congratulated him. Estalère was particularly perturbed by the account of Vesna, a corpse almost three hundred years old but looking lifelike, alongside whom Adamsberg had spent the night. He was the only one in the squad who knew the story of Elizabeth Siddal, and he had remembered every detail of Danglard’s story. He was still not sure about one point. Had Dante Gabriel Rossetti opened his wife’s grave out of love, or to retrieve his poems? His answer varied depending on the day and his state of mind.

There were some gaps in the commissaire’s account of the past few days, on which he did not seem disposed to elaborate. One of them was the inexplicable presence of Veyrenc in Kisilova. Adamsberg had no intention of revealing to the squad that he had a son whom he had abandoned, that this son had suddenly turned up like a figure from hell, aka Zerk, and that everything pointed to his being the author of the atrocities in Garches and Pressbaum. Nor had he mentioned the ambiguous questions raised by the intervention of Weill. And apart from Danglard, no one in the team knew about the danger emanating from Emma Carnot. That would have obliged Adamsberg to reveal the treacherous activity of Mordent, which he was not ready to do. The daughter – Elaine, wasn’t it? – was due to stand trial in a few days. Dinh had managed to hold up the lab tests for three whole days without being disciplined. His talent for levitation, real or imagined, no doubt explained the indulgence of his colleagues.

On the other hand, Adamsberg had described in detail the enmity between the Plogojowitz and Paole families. So, not to put too fine a point on it, as Retancourt said, there was some all-out war going on between two clans of vampires, each trying to annihilate the other, after the original clash three hundred years before. And since, ahem, vampires did not exist, what were they supposed to do about it and where was the investigation heading?

At this point, the antagonism which divided the members of the squad resurfaced: the materialist positivists were seriously annoyed by Adamsberg’s vague wanderings, sometimes to the point of rebellion, while the more conciliatory group did not object to a spot of cloud-shovelling from time to time. Retancourt, who had at first beamed with pleasure on finding Adamsberg alive, had gone into a sulk at the first mention of vampiri and the place of uncertainty. She had had to admit, as Adamsberg pointed out, that there were a lot of Plogs in the surnames of the victims and their entourage. And that Vaudel senior, who was the authentic grandson of an Andras Plog, had written to Frau Abster, a half-Plogerstein, to warn her and to keep Kisilova free from attack – in other words to protect the Plogojowitz family. And that he, Adamsberg, had been well and truly locked in the vault holding Plogojowitz’s nine victims. That the severed feet in London – feet cut off to prevent the dead coming back to life – had been deposited in Plogojowitz’s English domain, Highgate Cemetery. That one of those pairs of feet belonged to a certain Mihail Plogodrescu. That the massacre of Pierre Vaudel/Plog and Conrad Plögener corresponded strictly to the method of exterminating a vampire; as had already been ascertained, they hadn’t just been killed but annihilated, and more especially their thumbs, teeth and feet. That their functional, spiritual and manducatory organs had been systematically destroyed. That everything indicated that this triple destruction was meant to prevent any possible reconstitution of the body from a single fragment and the recomposition of the accursed whole. As the dispersal of the fragments showed, comparable to the practice of placing a vampire’s head between its feet. That Arandjel, the Danglard of Serbia, as Adamsberg called him to provide authority for his remarks, had identified the family of the soldier Arnold Paole as being the tragic and unquestionable victims of Peter Plogojowitz.

The positivists were shattered, while the conciliatory group were acquiescent and were taking notes. Estalère was following Adamsberg’s pronouncements with passionate intensity. He had never missed a word his boss let drop, whether pragmatic or irrational. But during these moments of confrontation between the commissaire and Retancourt, a woman he idolised, his mind was divided into two warring halves.

‘We’re not looking for a vampire, Retancourt,’ said Adamsberg firmly, ‘we’re not going out into the streets to search for some creature who got a stake through his heart in the early eighteenth century. Surely that’s clear enough for you, lieutenant.’

‘No, not really.’

‘What we’re doing is looking for some deranged descendant of Arnold Paole, who knows the whole story of his ancestor. Who has identified some other person as the source of his own suffering, and who has decided it must be the old enemy, Plogojowitz. And who has set about destroying all the remaining descendants of that man, in order to escape from his own destiny. If a man went around killing black cats because he was convinced they were bringing him bad luck, you wouldn’t think that absurd, would you, lieutenant? Unthinkable? Impossible to understand?’

‘No-oo,’ admitted Retancourt, encouraged by a few grunts from other positivists.

‘Well, it’s the same thing. But on a much bigger, monumental scale.’

After the second coffee break, Adamsberg set out his instructions. They were to trace the Plogojowitz line, find any possible members of the family, and put them under police protection. They should alert Kommissar Thalberg and have him move Frau Abster to a safe place.

‘Too late,’ came Justin’s high-pitched voice, laden with regret.

‘What, like the others?’ asked Adamsberg, after a silence.

‘Same thing. Thalberg called us this morning.’

‘It must be the work of Arnold Paole,’ said Adamsberg, deliberately looking Retancourt in the eye. ‘So let’s protect the others. Work with Thalberg to find out if there are any more members of the family.’

‘What about Zerk?’ asked Lamarre. ‘Do we get reinforcements in? Showing the photos around hasn’t brought any results yet.’

‘This bastard’s good at slipping the net,’ said Voisenet. ‘He must be on his way back from Cologne now, but where’s he going? Who’s he going to dismember next?’

‘It’s possible,’ said Adamsberg hesitantly, ‘that the bastard is only Paole’s executioner, a henchman. He doesn’t have any Paoles in the maternal line.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Noël, ‘but what about his father’s family?’

‘Could be,’ said Adamsberg in a whisper.

Zerk’s photo had been circulated to all police stations, gendarme headquarters, stations, airports and public spaces, in both France and Austria. In Germany, where the massacre of the old lady in Cologne had caused an outcry, the same was being done. Adamsberg didn’t see how the young man would be able to escape the net.

‘We need a rapid and thorough investigation of this choirmaster, Father Germain. Maurel and Mercadet, can you get on with it?’

‘What about Vaudel junior?’

‘Still at liberty,’ said Maurel, ‘and he’s got a very loudmouthed lawyer.’

‘What does Avignon say?’

‘Oh, that shower that managed to lose the samples,’ said Noël.

‘What samples?’ asked Adamsberg innocently.

‘Some pencil shavings left by whoever planted the cartridge case that rolled under the fridge.’

‘They’ve lost them, have they?’

‘No, found ’em in some lieutenant’s pocket. It’s not a station down there, it’s a holiday camp. They got them off to the lab in the end. Three days lost like that, pff!’

‘Pff,’ echoed Adamsberg, hearing in his ears Vladislav’s ‘plog’.

‘And Émile?’

‘Professor Lavoisier sent us a secret note, very conspiratorial. Émile’s being rehabilitated. He even asked for winkles to eat – which he didn’t get, naturally – and he’ll be out in a few days. But not before there’s some way to keep him secure, the doctor says. He’s waiting for instructions.’

‘Not before we find Paole.’

‘Why would Émile be in any danger from Paole?’ asked Mercadet.

‘Because he’s the only person that Vaudel-Plogojowitz really talked to.’

A danger both for Paole and for Emma Carnot, Adamsberg thought. The clumsy shooting near Châteaudun was looking like an operation on behalf of the hierarchy.

‘We don’t call him Zerk any more, do we?’ Estalère asked his neighbour, Mercadet. ‘We call him Paole?’

‘One and the same, Estalère.’

‘Oh, all right.’

‘Or not.’

‘I see.’