A Provençal Mystery (13 page)

Thinking of Rose’s description of Mother Fernande’s progress down the hall, I decided to look at the convent plans I had ordered weeks ago but never examined. I wanted to see where Rose’s cell was. I unfolded the three large sheets of paper, laid them out, and stood over them, looking down, hands on the edge of the table, knowing I was being obvious. It occurred to me that the killer could be watching me. What if the key to the murder did lie in the seventeenth century, in the convent of Our Lady of Mercy? If so, maybe the killer feared what the plans might reveal about Agatha’s death. Maybe he or she would, in panic, make a mistake and reveal guilt. A dangerous game. So dramatic! Sobering, I told myself that all anyone saw was a researcher examining a large document. Nonetheless, eyes seemed to pierce my back.

The plans showed that the fallen women’s quarters, called the Refuge, were on one side of the convent and the converse and choir nuns on the other. Down one hall, marked “converse,” I found six cells, in two facing rows of three each. The middle cell on the right must have been Sister Rose’s. The plan, which had been drawn in the seventeenth century, did not have a scale, so I couldn’t estimate its size.

Older pensioners and the sacristan were assigned to attic cells; firewood also was stored there. There was a third sheet. It contained simply a border (outer walls?), lines to represent stairs, and two dotted lines leading from a door on the opposite wall to the outside

A loud voice broke my concentration. Schmidt was berating Griset. “You should know that, Monsieur Griset.”

Griset shook his head.

“Come with me, then. We will discuss this privately.” Schmidt said and took Griset out into the hall. After a few minutes, I followed and found them in the reference room. Schmidt had Griset backed up against some shelves and was saying, “Where are the records?”

“What records?” Griset asked.

“Of entrances and exits. Of those who came in and those who came out . . .”

Griset was face-to-face with Schmidt. Knowing that Griset kept no such records, I decided to interrupt, though I approached Schmidt with some apprehension. I don’t trust the police. When I was a Vietnam war protester as a teen-ager, a cop broke my arm with his nightstick during a demonstration, and more than once I was hauled off in a van for questioning by police who were too angry to be polite.

As Schmidt was saying, “Where is your record. . . . ?” I came right out with it: “You should know that it was not the needle in her tongue that killed her.”

“How so, Madame?” asked Schmidt, without much interest.

“Because she was talking to us only a couple of hours before she died, and no one can talk with a needle in the tongue.”

He nodded. “Thank you, Madame.” He did not say whether or not he had considered the question of Agatha’s behavior before her death.

“Blood poisoning would not have happened in just a few hours,” I added. I felt myself sweating. “So it was not blood poisoning from the needle.”

“A physician consults with us, Madame,” he said, leaning down from his height to look me in the eye. “Everyone is a practitioner of medicine these days, but not all who so pretend have been to medical school, is that not so?”

He had clearly dismissed me as an American busybody. But I persisted. “What kind of needle was it?” I asked anyway.

“Why should you want to know?”

“Perhaps it has some bearing on the case,” I said, not knowing why I was being so insistent. “Was it a special needle? All I could see was one end of it.”

“What are you getting at?” asked Griset in spite of his anxiety at being questioned. “Do you think that there is a convent supply house of mortification implements—hair shirts in small, medium, and large? Leather scourges? Little, but sharp iron rosettes sewed on the inside of a belt, the number specified at your order . . .”

He stopped talking as Schmidt’s eyebrows rose. Schmidt said, “Just a large sewing needle that one could buy in any
hypermarché
. Such interest in mortification seems excessive.” He included Griset in his quizzical glance. Griset hunched his shoulders self-protectively.

Then Schmidt looked at me inquiringly and said, “Someone closed her mouth over the needle some time after she died. Our specialists have determined that. Would you know anything about it, Madame?”

I hesitated, then said, “Yes, I closed her mouth.”

“And why?”

A shiver of fear went through me, but I answered. “It was so unseemly.”

“Indeed.” He stared at me.

I
recovered myself and said, “You should know that this method of mortification—needles in the tongue—was practiced a good deal in the Old Régime by nuns.”

“Truly. You are so helpful.”

“So the murderer probably has some knowledge of history, religious history.”

“Like you, Madame?”

Like everyone here, I thought, edging away and leaving Griset and Schmidt locked in interrogation.

I went back to my place and looked down at the convent plans again, imagining Rose in her cell, wondering why Mother Fernande was pacing the halls so late at night.

“
Vous êtes troublée
?” asked Madeleine. She had come from the other side of the room to lean over me, solicitous, which seemed strange to me. Madeleine was not the solicitous type.

“Of course,” I replied, also in French, “I am troubled. I am troubled about Sister Agatha.” I looked into Madeleine’s dark, unreadable eyes. “I am troubled because she is dead. I am troubled because someone killed her. And I am troubled because I miss her. She was always laughing.”

“Yes, she was. I have something for you that she left. Just a little thing.” She thrust a paper bag at me, with my name written across it in black marker. I recognized the writing: it was Agatha’s. And I knew what was inside: plastic bags for Foxy. Such a silly thing. I could picture Agatha as she wrote—fast, big, and clear—not knowing that in days she would be dead, the simple tasks of life beyond her. I felt tears rise in my eyes.

Gazing from under her hat brim, Madeleine seemed neither hostile nor friendly. Her eyes were bloodshot. As usual, she looked elegant. She wore a green dress probably with inside tabs tied in various places—the only explanation for why it fit so loosely yet so well, flowing with every move. Over it, she wore a purple beaded velvet vest. The outfit looked very French.

“Perhaps we might go for a glass of wine?” Madeleine said. “It is almost five o’clock.”

Amazed at the invitation and trying not to show it—before this, Madeleine had kept to herself—I nodded. If, for some reason, she needed to talk me, I was willing to listen. “
Bonne idée
. The American bar?” L’Américain was a local place, whose name amused me in better times.

Once on the concrete sidewalk of the Rue de la République, I found I was out of step with Madeleine and took a little hitching half-skip to try to mesh my stride with her click-clacking high-heeled tripping. After an awkward silence, I asked, “How is your work coming? On women in the Resistance, yes?”

“Yes,” Madeleine replied. “It goes slowly. I have trouble sleeping. At four, the church bells ring. I hear them, and I know I have not slept.”

“That happens to me, too, especially since Agatha. . . ,” I said. “I cannot . . .”

A tall man coming toward us smiled eagerly at Madeleine and started to speak, but Madeleine glared at him and quickened her step.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“
No one who matters,” she said.

“He seemed to know you.”

“He did not,” she replied, then, “So many World War Two documents are unavailable, but I am finding some.”

“Unavailable?” I asked the question, still wondering who the man was.

“Because of our shame over the atrocities committed by the Vichy government. The officials say that the documents are secret for security reasons, but I do not believe it.”

“Perhaps that’s why Rachel Marchand is also having so much trouble getting documents,” I said.

“I would not know,” said Madeleine. She stared straight ahead and walked along more quickly. It seemed odd to me that she didn’t want to discuss Rachel’s crossings of swords with Chateaublanc.

I changed the subject. “Did you ask Agatha about her part in the war? She must have been in the convent by then. Perhaps an eyewitness.”

Madeleine stopped walking and turned away. She looked down and pulled the belt of her dress a little tighter with her long, nervous fingers. “Eyewitness?”

“She must have been a young nun at the time.”

“No, we hardly ever talked about her past, only mine,” Madeleine said.

“This was a good idea,” I said, as we ordered a half liter of red wine. I wondered what the waiter thought of us: the stylish Madeleine, her dark hair neat in a short, chic cut, and frizzy-haired me, wearing the usual jeans, the blue sweater, and a pair of worn athletic shoes.

“You and Agatha were very close, but very different, too,” I said. The hell with subtlety. If she wanted to talk, we’d talk.

Madeleine raised her bent head, looking directly at me. “What do you mean?”

“You are very quiet. She was not. You seem sophisticated. She was not.”

“A good country woman,” replied Madeleine. She made me feel uncomfortable, she seemed so contained. “A woman of the earth.” Almost as if she knew what she had said sounded phony, she shrugged and added, in English. “I loved her.”

“Loved her?” I knew why she had used English—the French word
aimer
means both “like” and “love.”

Madeleine did not answer right away but sat back in the cushiony leather of the booth, regarding me, pensively holding the glass of red wine against her chest, then raising it to her lips. The pose reminded me of figures in religious paintings who hold hand to heart. Then her posture shifted. Something about the way her lips were set, her attitude of readiness, made me also think of an actor waiting behind a curtain for the play to start.

“It’s a long story,” Madeleine said, sipped the wine as if she were at the altar taking communion, and began talking. I wondered why she was revealing her past so suddenly. But I wasn’t going to stop her. “I had a bad adolescence. My parents put me in a rehabilitation center when they discovered what I was doing. Using drugs. They were not the kind to bother themselves with adolescent troubles. Alienating, the place was. Bars at the windows, and an atmosphere like a hospital. Hospital beds and bare rooms. At least we could wear our regular clothes.”

She paused, took a sip of wine, examined my face. It was as if she were checking to see if I was believing her. Apparently satisfied, she continued, “But there, in the hospital, I met a young man, another drug addict. Jean-Pierre. I developed with him what one might call a romance. But it was really a kind of addiction. I was addicted to him. Yes. He was young, slim, dangerous. A blond, with cruel eyes. He walked always as if he were carrying a knife. And in the world outside, he did carry a knife. The kind of young man young girls adore.”

“We used to call them hoods,” I said, gulping some wine. “I used to sneak out at night to meet one outside the high school. He was so bad the principal had expelled him. His name was Bob, and he had actually been in jail once. He rode a motorcycle.” I thought of the diary and wondered if riding behind a man in modern times wasn’t something like riding behind a man on a horse. The man in control of speed and danger, the woman gripping the sides of the . . .I saw Madeleine looking at me. When she caught my eye, she continued the story.

“And when we both were released, we stayed together in a little room in the old part of the city. He had no money and no way of earning any lawfully. Sometimes he stole radios from cars and sold them. And he dealt drugs when he could. So little money. So I supported us by taking to the streets. The ‘holy hooker,’ Jean-Pierre called me because of my sacrifice for him.”

I was not surprised at her revelation. I had expected it. Why else was someone like her living at the convent? “Wasn’t it a hard life, being a prostitute?” I asked.

“I did it for love, you know. I almost quit, but it was the only way to make money.”

Really? I thought. There are so many ways to make money—waiting tables, doing data entry, taking care of old people. Finally I said, “Your parents?”

“They disowned me,” Madeleine replied flatly. “Finally I was caught. Still underage. I was sent to the convent to be reformed. And I was reformed. The nuns were kind, especially Agatha, who developed a fondness for me. We spent long hours talking about my past, my sins, my life on the streets. She was never too busy to listen. Yes, she was in charge and I was an inmate, but still. . . I wanted to please her.”

“That comes in a relationship where one person has power over the other,” I said, wondering if Madeleine and Agatha were lovers, at least in spirit.

“She helped me develop an interest in history.”

“Did you study old documents at the convent?”

Madeleine hesitated, then she said, “No. The documents there are not relevant.”

“Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a police interrogator,” I said, gazing at her over the edge of the wine glass and thinking how strange—and yet banal—a story it was. “So you finally must have left the convent.”