‘Where did you get the T-shirt?’
‘He went out and bought it for me, he said I wouldn’t be impressive enough in my scruffy old shirt. I spent the night at his place, but I was too worked up to sleep. I was going over stuff in my head. He gave me some pills.’
‘Uppers?’
‘Dunno, didn’t ask. One pill at night, and two in the morning before I went out. I was already feeling like a new man. And the pile of rubbish, yeah, I could see that, plain as daylight. This feeling, it kept getting stronger. I could really have murdered you. And you’d have killed me,’ he added, suddenly sounding like the gothic Zerk.
The young man looked away. He took a cigarette and Adamsberg lit it for him.
‘Would you really have killed me with that horrible potion?’
‘What did it look like to you?’
‘Some fucking poison in a bottle.’
‘Nitrocitraminic acid.’
‘Yeah, if you say so.’
‘But what else did it look like?’
‘Dunno. Free sample of aftershave or something.’
‘That’s exactly what it was.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ gasped Zerk. ‘You’re just saying that because today, now, you’re ashamed. You were locked in your study. You wouldn’t keep aftershave in your study, would you?’
‘You locked me up, forgetting that cops have pass keys. I went into the bathroom to get it. Nitrocitraminic acid doesn’t exist. You can check.’
‘Shit,’ said Zerk, sucking up more coffee.
‘What is perfectly true on the other hand is that you shouldn’t push a gun so far down your trousers.’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘Did you really have TB, only one kidney, all that stuff?’
‘No. I did have ringworm once.’
‘OK, go on.’
‘Well, when I had to fish the cat out from under the boxes, that distracted me. Or maybe it was that old Spanish guy and his arm. I sort of came round as if I’d been drunk. I was getting a bit tired of all this ranting. But I did want to go on, all the same. I wanted to carry on bullshitting until you fell on your knees and begged me to stop. Josselin told me that if I didn’t keep yelling at you, I was finished. If I didn’t get you down on the floor, it was all over with me. I’d have that shit inside me for ever. And it’s true, I did feel better afterwards.’
‘But you were still in deep trouble.’
‘Bloody right I was, like the cat in the garden. I was waiting for them to find the DNA didn’t match. Or for this mystery man to call me back. But nothing happened.’
‘You never thought it might be a trap set by Josselin?’
‘No. He was hiding me, wasn’t he? I was in this box room in his apartment, strict orders not to come out because of his patients.’
‘After you left me, if you’d come out of your room between nine and midday, you’d have found me with him. I came to talk to him. I imagine Josselin must have appreciated the situation. He had us both under his roof, and he was manipulating the pair of us. But he did make me feel better and he got rid of my tinnitus. We’re going to miss him, Zerk, he really has got golden fingers.’
‘No way will I miss him. No way.’
‘So what happened next? That day?’
‘He came to fetch me out at lunchtime, he made me tell him everything, he wanted all the details, what I’d said exactly, he was having a great time, he seemed happy for me. He took away the T-shirt and cooked a nice meal to celebrate. He said not to worry about the DNA, it would just be a wrong analysis and that the cops would take some time to spot it. But I was starting not to believe that. I wanted to call Louis but I couldn’t switch on my mobile. Yeah, Josselin had a landline, but if the cops knew Louis was my uncle, they might have been listening in. I started to think someone was after me, trying to ruin my life. Was it him got the tissue?’
‘Yes, it was easy, and the hairs from your dog, Tintin. We found them on the chair in Garches. The same chair he pinned you to yesterday. I wondered where he could have got them, though. Did he ever come to see you at home?’
‘No, never.’
‘When you went to see him, did he take your coat?’
‘I just left my shoes in the hall, nothing else.’
‘Nothing else? Think.’
‘No. Yeah. A couple of times, he got me to take off my trousers to check my knees.’
‘Recently?’
‘No, couple of months ago.’
‘That’d be when he got hold of the handkerchief and the dog hairs. You never thought anything of it?’
‘No, why would I? Josselin had been helping me get my head straight for four years, why would I think he would harm me? He was on my side, with his wretched golden fingers. He got me to think he really liked me, but the truth was he thought I was a pathetic dickhead. Nobody cares if you live or die, was what he said to me last night.’
‘Loša sreća, Zerk, he had taken on himself the destiny of Arnold Paole.’
‘He wasn’t making that up, it was the truth. He really was a descendant of Paole. He told me that in the car when we were driving to Garches. He wasn’t kidding.’
‘No, I know that. He’s an authentic Paole, in the direct paternal line. What I mean is, he became as sick as the great-great-whatever-grandfather, the one who ate earth from the graveyard to protect himself against Peter Plogojowitz. What else did he tell you?’
‘That I was going to die, but by dying I’d be part of his great scheme for exterminating all these people who were under a curse, and that this would be a good death for a useless person like me. What he said was, there was this horrible other family, and it had been infecting his family for three hundred years, so he was going to put a stop to it. He said he was born with two teeth, and that was proof that he had this evil in him, but it was all these other people’s fault. But I couldn’t understand everything he was saying. He was like, talking too quickly, and I was afraid the car was going to crash.’
Zerk paused to finish his coffee, which was now cold.
‘He did speak about his mother. She abandoned him, because he was a Paole, and she knew right away, because he had these teeth when he was born. She said, “Ugh, he’s got teeth!” and left him at the hospital, “as if she was getting rid of something filthy,” he said. And then he started to cry, really cry. I could see him in the rear-view mirror. He didn’t blame his mother. He said “What can a poor mother do, if she’s given birth to a creature? A creature isn’t a child.” So I thought, now he’s going to break down, so he might let me go, and I begged him to let me go. But he started shouting again, and the car went all over the road. Hell, I was really scared. Then he went on telling me how his childhood was ruined because he was this “creature”.’
‘Was he adopted by the Josselin family?’
‘Yeah. And when he was nine, he opened this drawer in his father’s desk. And he found a whole file on himself. He found out he was adopted, he found out his mother had given him away, and why. He was a Paole, from a whole line of damned vampires. That’s what he says. A year later, the people who adopted him couldn’t handle him, he was smashing things, spreading his shit on the walls. He just told me all this stuff, straight out, he wasn’t embarrassed, to prove he was a damned soul. So one day in November, he said, his parents took him to this institution, and said that he was going to have his head examined. They said they’d come back, but they didn’t.’
‘Being abandoned a second time really fucked up his life,’ said Adamsberg.
‘Sort of plog, perhaps?’
‘If you like.’
‘Then when he was older he got married, to this woman “who was nothing much to look at, but very well set up”, he said. And he started to cut the feet off of people who were a threat to him. These were other people who’d been born with teeth. He wasn’t sure at first who he was looking for, he admitted that. “I was just a beginner then,” he said, “I may have cut some feet off harmless people, may they forgive me. But I wasn’t hurting them, they were already dead.” He said his wife left him soon after the marriage. A heartless woman, he called her, “scum of the earth, as I found out”.’