‘If Arandjel doesn’t believe in it, why does he look after the tomb?’
‘To reassure the people here. He changes the logs every year because the wood rots from underneath. And some people say that’s because Plogojowitz has eaten all the earth and is starting on the logs. So Arandjel replaces them, and cuts off any shoots. Of course he’s the only person who dares. Nobody else goes near, but on the whole people are reasonable enough. They think Plogojowitz isn’t so powerful now, because he’s transferred his powers to his descendants.’
‘And where are they? Here?’
‘You must be joking! Even before they dug Plogojowitz up, the rest of his family fled the village to avoid being massacred. His descendants are dispersed all over the place now, who knows where. Little vampirelets left and right. But some people still think that if Plogojowitz manages to get out of his grave, they will all get together in a great terrible entity. Other people say that part of Plogojowitz may be here, but he’s reconstituted himself whole somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. All this is what my dedo used to tell me. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to ask Arandjel. He’s kind of the Adrianus of Serbia.’
‘Vlad, do you know if any particular family was destroyed by Plogojowitz?’
‘I just told you, his own. There were nine deaths among his relations. Which means there was some sort of epidemic. Old Plogojowitz must have been ill, and passed the infection on to his own family, then it spread to their contacts. It’s that simple! But people got scared and looked for a scapegoat, found out who was the first mortal case, stuck a stake in his heart and that was that.’
‘And what if the epidemic carried on?’
‘Must have happened often. Well, they’d reopen the grave, thinking that the remains of the cursed person were still active, and they’d start again.’
‘What if they’d thrown the ashes into the river?’
‘Well, then they’d open up some other grave, a man or woman suspected of having saved a bit of the monster from the fire and eaten it, so that they became a vampir in turn. And it went on until the epidemic died out. So finally they’d be able to say: “The deaths came to an end.”’
‘But, Vladislav, the deaths haven’t come to an end. A man called Plögener in Pressbaum, and another called Plog in Garches have been killed. Two Plogojowitz descendants, one in Austria, one in France. Can we get something else besides rakija to drink? This stuff’s eating me up like your shroud-eaters. A beer? Could we have a beer?’
‘Some Jelen?’
‘Yes, fine, some Jelen.’
‘Perhaps something else happened to inspire the vengeance? Suppose that Plogojowitz wasn’t a vampire in 1725? What would you say then?’
Adamsberg smiled at the landlady as she brought him his beer and tried to remember how to say ‘thank you’.
He consulted the back of his hand.
‘Hvala,’ he said, with a gesture signifying smoking, and Danica produced from the folds of her skirt a packet he didn’t recognise, Morava.
‘A present,’ said Vlad. ‘She asked me why you have two wristwatches, when neither of them tells the right time.’
‘Tell her I don’t know.’
‘On ne zna,’ Vlad translated. And went on, ‘She fancies you.’
Danica returned to the office where she did the accounts and Adamsberg watched her go, her ample hips swaying under the red-and-grey skirt.
‘So,’ Vlad insisted, ‘what if there never was a vampire?’
‘Then I’d look for some family saga that led to reprisals and death sentences. A secret murder, a betrayed husband, an illegitimate child, a fortune diverted into the wrong hands. Vaudel-Plog was very rich, and he didn’t leave his money to his son.’
‘Well, there you are. That’s where you ought to look. Where the money is.’
‘But there are the bodies, Vlad. They’ve been taken apart so that they couldn’t possibly be reconstituted. Is that what they did to vampires, or did they just stick to the stake and the fire?’
‘Only Arandjel can tell you that.’
‘So where is he? When can I see him?’
There was a brief exchange with Danica, then Vlad came back, looking somewhat surprised.
‘Apparently Arandjel is expecting you to have lunch with him tomorrow and he’s going to prepare some stuffed cabbage. He knows you cleaned the tombstone and looked at it – everybody knows about that by now. He says you shouldn’t start meddling with that sort of thing. It could be fatal for you.’
‘I thought you said Arandjel didn’t believe in all that.’
‘Fatal for you,’ repeated Vlad, emptying his glass of rakija, and bursting out laughing.
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.’