Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

‘Settle what?’

‘For his ears only.’

Danglard called Adamsberg’s mobile.

‘ Commissaire , we’ve got Cupid here, he’s sitting on Émile’s knee, and Émile wants to talk to you to settle something.’

‘Settle what?’

‘No idea, he says he’ll only speak to you.’

‘ Personally ,’ insisted Émile self-importantly.

‘How is he?’

‘Looks fine to me – new jacket and blue badge in his lapel. When will you be back?’

‘I’m on a beach in Normandy, Danglard, I’m coming back soon.’

‘But what are you doing there?’

‘I had to talk to my son. We’re neither of us very good at this, but we’ve managed to communicate a bit.’

No, of course, Danglard thought, Tom isn’t a year old, so he can’t talk yet.

‘I told you more than once. They’re in Brittany, not Normandy.’

‘I’m talking about my other son, Danglard.’

‘What-?’ said Danglard, unable to finish his sentence. ‘Wha… other son?’

He was seized with instant rage against Adamsberg. How had he managed to have another child somewhere else, when little Tom was still a baby?

‘How old is this other one?’

‘Eight days.’

‘You are such a bastard,’ Danglard hissed.

‘It’s the way it was, commandant . I didn’t know about him.’

‘No, you never bloody know about anything, do you?’

‘And you never let me finish either, Danglard. He’s eight days old for me, but for other people, he’s twenty-nine. He’s beside me here, smoking a cigarette. His hands are covered in bandages. Paole pinned him to that Louis XIII armchair with a knife last night.’

‘The Zerquetscher ?’ asked Danglard weakly.

‘Correct. Or Zerk as I call him. Aka Armel Louvois.’

Danglard looked blankly across at Émile and his dog, while he tried to concentrate on the facts of the situation.

‘This is a figure of speech, isn’t it? You’ve adopted him, or some crazy stunt like that?’

‘No, no, Danglard, he’s my son. That’s why Josselin had a lot of fun choosing him as a scapegoat.’

‘I don’t believe this.’

‘Look, you’d believe Veyrenc, wouldn’t you? Ask him. He’s his uncle and he’ll give you a glowing report on him.’

Adamsberg was half reclining on the sand, drawing on it with his finger. Zerk was lying down, his arms across his body, his hands now numbed, thanks to a local anaesthetic, and was soaking up the sun and relaxing like the cat on the photocopier. Danglard ran through his head all those photographs of the Zerk from the papers, and at once realised how familiar that face had been. Yes. It had to be the truth, but it was a shock.

‘Not to worry, commandant . Put Émile on, will you?’

Without a word, Danglard handed the phone to Émile, who hobbled away towards the door.

‘This colleague of yours is stupid,’ he began. ‘It’s not a badge, it’s my winkle pin. I went and fetched it from the house.’

‘Because you’re nostalgic.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

‘So what deal is this you want to settle?’ said Adamsberg sitting up.

‘I kept a record. Nine hundred and thirty-seven euros. Now I’ve got plenty of cash, I can pay it back, and then you don’t know nothing about it. Because I got you that stuff about the postcard, and the door in the cellar. Savvy?’

‘What don’t I “know nothing about”?’

‘Vaudel’s money, for fuck’s sake. Bit here, bit there, total nine hundred and thirty seven. I kept a record.’

‘I’m with you now, Émile. Well, for a start, I’ve got nothing to do with that money, like I said. And in any case, it’s too late. I don’t think Pierre junior, since you’re already getting half his inheritance, will be too happy to find out that you were pinching his old man’s money and that you want to pay him nine hundred and thirty-seven euros.’

‘Ha,’ said Émile pensively.

‘So just keep the money, and shut up about it.’

‘Got you,’ said Émile, and Adamsberg reflected that he must have picked up the expression at the hospital in Châteaudun from that tall paramedic, André.

‘You’ve got another son?’ asked Zerk, as they got back in the car.

‘He’s very, very small,’ said Adamsberg, demonstrating with his hands apart, as if that made it less of a fact. ‘Does it bother you?’

‘Nope.’

No doubt about it, Zerk was an accommodating sort of chap.

THE PARIS CENTRAL LAW COURTS WERE UNDER A CLOUD, WHICH was entirely appropriate to the place and the time. Adamsberg and Danglard, sitting at the terrace of the cafe opposite, were waiting for people to emerge from the trial of Mordent’s daughter. It was ten to eleven by Danglard’s watch. Adamsberg was looking at the gold-tipped railings which had been carefully repainted.

‘When you scratch the gold, what do you find underneath, Danglard?’

‘Nolet would say: the scales of the snake.’

‘Coiled round the Sainte-Chapelle. Not a very suitable combination.’

‘It’s not such a contrast as you might think. There are two chapels there one on top of the other and quite separate. The bottom one was reserved for the common people and the top one for the king and his courtiers. Everything leads back to that in the end.’

‘The great snake was already there in the fourteenth century then,’ said Adamsberg, looking up at the top of the steep Gothic spire.

‘Thirteenth century,’ Danglard corrected him. ‘Built by Pierre de Montreuil between 1242 and 1248.’

‘Did you get in touch with Nolet?’

‘Yes. The school friend was indeed a witness to the wedding between Emma Carnot and a young man aged twenty-four, Paul de Josselin Cressent, at the town hall in Auxerre, twenty-nine years ago. Emma had fallen for him, her mother was impressed by the name with a “de” in it, but she told us that Paul was the last of a damaged line. The marriage didn’t last three years. There were no children.’

‘Just as well. Josselin would hardly have been a good father.’

Danglard chose not to pursue that line of thought. He would wait and see what Zerk was like.

‘There would have been another little Paole loose in the world,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘and God only knows what he would have got up to. But no, this is the end of the Paoles, the doctor said so.’

‘I’m going to help Radstock dispose of the feet. Then I’m taking a week off.’

‘Going fishing in that loch perhaps?’

‘No,’ said Danglard evasively, ‘I think I’ll probably stay on in London.’

‘With a rather abstract sort of plan in mind.’

‘Yes.’

‘When Mordent has got his daughter back, which will be tonight, we’ll unleash the torrent of mud in the Emma Carnot affair. It’ll run from the Council of State to the Appeal Court, then to the public prosecutor and the Gavernan Assize Court, and it will stop there. We won’t let it reach down as far as the junior judge and Mordent, since that is no consequence to anyone but us.’

‘It’ll cause an almighty row.’

‘Of course. People will be shocked, they’ll propose a far-reaching reform of the judicial system, then it will all be forgotten when they dig up some other scandal. And you know what will happen then.’

‘The great snake will have lost three of its scales, after an attack, but it will have regrown them again in a couple of months.’

‘Or less. We’ll set in motion the counter-offensive, using the Weill technique. We won’t release anything to the press about the link to the judge at Gavernan, or name him. We’ll keep him in reserve for our own protection, and in order to protect Nolet and Mordent. And we’ll use the Weill technique to get the pencil shavings and the cartridge from Avignon to the quai des Orfèvres. Where they can moulder away in a cupboard.’