‘Dobro jutro, Vlad.’
‘Dobro jutro, Adamsberg.’
‘Where’s your phone? I can’t hear you very well.’
‘On my pillow.’
‘Put it closer to your head.’
‘OK.’
‘Hvala. Please tell Arandjel that Arnold Paole’s wild ride came to an end last night. But I think he’s satisfied, because he has massacred five great Plogojowitzes: Plögener, Vaudel-Plog, Plogerstein and two Plogans, a father and daughter in Finland. And the feet of Plogodrescu. The curse of the Paoles is at an end, and according to him, they’re all away now. Free. And on Highgate Hill, the tree is dying.’
‘Plog.’
‘There are two shroud-eaters left.’
‘They don’t trouble anyone. Arandjel says you just have to turn them face down and they’ll drop like mercury to the centre of the earth.’
‘I don’t intend to have anything to do with them.’
‘Wow,’ said Vlad, apropos of nothing.
‘Tell Arandjel, without fail. Are you going to stay in Kisilova for ever now?’
‘No, I’m expected at a conference in Munich tomorrow. I’m getting back on the straight and narrow, which as you know does not exist and is neither straight nor narrow.’
‘Plog. What does “Loša sreća” mean, Vlad? Paole said it when he fell to the ground.’
‘It means “bad luck”.’
Zerk was now sitting on the sand a few metres away, watching him patiently.
‘We’ll go to a medical centre to get your hands seen to,’ said Adamsberg. ‘Then we’ll go and have some coffee.’
‘What does “plog” mean?’
‘It’s like a drop of truth falling to earth,’ said Adamsberg, miming the action by raising and dropping his hand vertically. ‘And it falls in exactly the right spot,’ he said, plunging his index finger into the sand.
‘Oh,’ said Zerk, looking at the little hole. ‘And what if it falls here or here?’ he asked, plunging in a finger at random. ‘Not a real plog then?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
XLVII
ADAMSBERG HAD STUCK A STRAW IN ZERK’S BOWL OF COFFEE, and buttered his bread for him.
‘Tell me about Josselin, Zerk.’
‘My name’s not Zerk.’
‘It’s the baptismal name I’ve given you. For me, just think about it, you’re only a week old. Like a newborn baby crying in a cot. Nothing more.’
‘Makes you only a week old too, so you’re no better’n me.’
‘So what will you call me?’
‘Don’t want to call you anything.’
Zerk sucked up some coffee through his straw and smiled unexpectedly, rather like Vlad’s sudden way of smiling, whether at his reply or the sound of the straw. His mother had been just the same, readily distracted from the business in hand at awkward moments. Which explained why he had been able to make love to her by the bridge over the Jaussène in the rain. Zerk was the product of a moment of distraction.
‘I don’t want to question you back at headquarters.’
‘But you’re going to question me all the same?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m going to answer like I would to the cops because, for me, that’s what you’ve been for twenty-nine years. A cop.’
‘That’s what I am, and that’s what I want. I want you to answer my questions just as you would the police.’
‘Well, I really liked Josselin. I met him in Paris four years ago, when he put my head right. Six months ago, things began to change.’
‘In what way?’
‘He started to go on at me that until I’d killed my father, I’d always amount to nothing. No, well, not literally kill, if you get my meaning.’
‘All right, I understand, Zerk.’
‘Before that I never bothered much about my father. I did think about it sometimes, but a cop’s son? Better forget it. Now and then, there’d be something about you in the papers, and my mother would be all proud, but not me. That’s it. But then Josselin started on at me. He said you were the root of all my problems and the reason I was such a failure, he could see all that in my head.’
‘How a failure?’
‘I dunno,’ said Zerk, sucking some more on the straw. ‘I don’t get bothered about anything much. Maybe like you and the light bulb in your house.’
‘So what did Josselin say?’
‘He said I should “confront” you and do you down. “Purge the system” he called it, as if there was all this rotten stuff inside me, and the rotten stuff was you. I didn’t like that idea.’
‘Why not?’
‘Dunno. I didn’t really feel like it – all this purging stuff seemed a lot of hassle to me. And I couldn’t feel any big heap of rubbish anyway, I didn’t know where it was supposed to be. But Josselin said, oh yes, it was right there inside me, and if I didn’t get rid of it, it would start to rot me from within. So I stopped arguing with him, because it made him cross, and he was cleverer than me. I listened. Few more sessions like that, I started to believe him. In the end, I really did believe him.’
‘So what did you decide to do?’
‘Get rid of the rubbish, but I didn’t know how you did something like that. He never told me. He said he’d help me. But he said, one way or another, I’d bump into you one day. And he was right, I did.’
‘Well, naturally, Zerk, because he’d planned it all out.’
‘Yeah, suppose so,’ said Zerk, after a moment.
Not a quick thinker, said Adamsberg to himself, feeling rather annoyed to be even a little in agreement with Josselin. Because if Zerk wasn’t very bright, whose fault was that? His gestures were slow too. He had only drunk half his coffee, but then so had Adamsberg.
‘When did you bump into me then?’
‘The first thing was this phone call, in the night of Monday to Tuesday, after that nasty murder in Garches. This man I didn’t know, he told me my photo would be in the papers next day, and I was going to be accused of the murder, and I’d better beat it and vanish from sight. And after that, things would be sorted out, and he’d get back to me.’
‘That will have been Mordent. One of my officers.’
‘Ah, so he wasn’t lying. He was like, “I’m a friend of your father’s, so for Pete’s sake do what I say.” Because I was thinking I should just go to the cops, and say there must have been some mistake. But Louis always told me to keep my distance from the cops as much as I could.’
‘Louis?’
Zerk looked up in amazement. ‘Louis. Louis Veyrenc.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Adamsberg, ‘Veyrenc.’
‘He should know, shouldn’t he? So I left home and I went to Josselin’s. Where else could I go? My mother lives in Poland now, and Louis was down in Laubazac. Josselin always said his door was open to me if ever I was in trouble. And that’s when he put the knife in. But I was up for it, that’s for sure.’
‘How did he put it?’
‘He said it was now or never. He said to take advantage of this misunderstanding, it must be destiny. Destiny only stops for a minute in the station, so jump on the train. Only idiots stay on the platform. That’s what he said.’
‘Well put.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’
‘But wrong. Anyway, did he rehearse you what to say?’
‘No, but he told me how to act, really make you see that I existed, and you had to understand that I was stronger than you. He said what that would do would be, it’d make you feel really guilty, that was bound to happen. He was like, “This is your day, Armel. After this you’ll be a new man. Go ahead, don’t be afraid to come on strong.” I liked that. “Go ahead, purge, exist, it’s your day.” I’d never heard anything like that – go ahead, purge, exist. I really liked how that sounded.’