A Provençal Mystery (7 page)

“And what might that be?” asked Fitzroy.

“Just another convent document,” I replied quickly. “My enthusiasms come and go. You know that, Griset.” He looked at me strangely for a moment, but did not give me away.

“Come on, Dory, you know how to keep an enthusiasm going,” said Rachel, amazing me with her sudden friendliness.

“I’ve noticed that, too,” said Fitzroy. He smiled at Rachel. “Not that you don’t know how to keep things going yourself, Rachel. Your performance yesterday, for instance. . . .”

“It wasn’t a performance!” Rachel replied, fingering the key. “Trying to pry documents out of Chateaublanc is a serious enterprise.”

“I don’t have much trouble,” Fitzroy said.

“Maybe that’s because you’re such an important man,” I said.

“I wasn’t aware that Chateaublanc knew anything about my great eminence,” Fitzroy said, with a sidelong glance at Rachel. He was smiling wryly—I could see why he had a reputation as a ladies’ man.

“What was the document you were looking at, Professor Ryan?” Jack asked. “Was it the one you were so excited about the other day?”

“Oh, that one. That one turned out to be disappointing. No, this was a death biography, from that big set of biographies for Our Lady of Mercy,” I said, lying. I knew by now, after talking to Agatha and watching her reactions, that the diary had a significance that went beyond that of an archive document. Could that significance spell danger? And, beyond that, I didn’t want anyone else appropriating it. “All about suffering and waiting to go into the arms of Jesus. Like all the others. It talks about a reliquary.” I surprised myself by mentioning the reliquary, almost simultaneously realizing that I had done so to arouse Fitzroy’s interest and detesting myself for wanting to. Then I decided to elicit more information from Agatha.“Is it still at the convent, Agatha?”

“What reliquary?” she asked

“It was shaped like a body part. A head. A human head.”

Agatha shook her head no. “I don’t know of any reliquary at the convent. Maybe one is hidden in the altar. My nephew studies such things. He works with the Ministry of Culture where he specializes in religious artifacts,” she said. “You should meet him, Professor Fitzroy.”

Fitzroy shrugged. “Uhhh,” he said. “Sometime.”

“And you, too, Dory, I must introduce you—he’s your type,” Agatha said.

“What type would that be?” Fitzroy asked.

“I’ll tell you sometime,” I replied.

Rachel leaned forward. “I wonder where the reliquary might be if it’s not at the convent?”

“I thought you weren’t interested in seventeenth century history,” I said.

“This goes beyond categories,” said Fitzroy. “Why should Rachel not be interested?” He shot a look at me, then turned to Rachel and said in his smooth, velvety voice—a voice, I thought, that you could lie down on, “Reliquaries shaped like human heads actually held saints’ heads, you know. But reliquaries shaped like human body parts are relatively uncommon. Usually it’s bowls and urns. Glass boxes and caskets. Church-shaped receptacles. Blood in vials. Pieces of the sponge filled with vinegar and offered to Christ on the cross. Nails that nailed him. Thorns from his crown of same.”

“What could possibly have happened to the reliquary?” Rachel asked. She had not been diverted by Fitzroy’s monologue.

“There was talk in the convent of selling it to a seigneur,” I said.

“When?” asked Fitzroy.

“The sixteen hundreds.”

“Reliquaries could be sold?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” said Fitzroy.

“Convents were often poor,” I put in. “They sold what they could to stay afloat.” I wanted to change the subject. What was I thinking of, telling Fitzroy about the convent document, even obliquely? Agatha was right ---I should keep the diary to myself. Fitzroy had a reputation for appropriating the work of historians farther down the professional ladder than he. His nickname was Dr. Hegemony; he knew, as did powerful nations, how to overshadow others and swallow them up. Those who liked him said it was largely because he was a master of the “big picture.” He could take many small, ordinary ideas and incorporate them into a grand theory. Those who disliked him said he was just a thief. “He can turn your whole dissertation into nothing but a footnote,” someone once told me. What if, after hearing about the reliquary, he decided to concentrate next on relics? It sounded as if he had already started.

Before I could marshal a diversion, Rachel asked Agatha a question that served the same purpose. “Are lay people permitted to do research at your convent’s archive?”

“We have no archive,” Agatha replied. “Just some old records of no interest that are stored in the cellar. It’s closed to the public.”

“I would like to be able to do some research there,” said Rachel. She leaned forward like a negotiator. “Perhaps there’s something important to me in those old records. Can you not make a special dispensation for me?”

“I don’t have the authority,” said Agatha.

“This doesn’t make sense to me. What secrets are the nuns trying to keep?”

“That’s not the problem,” Agatha said.

“Then what is the problem?” Rachel asked. She reached her hand back to push her hair off her cheek. It was just a nervous gesture; her hair had not been out of place at all—it never was.

“We are still enclosed,” Agatha said, “as we were in the Old Regime. Some of the space in the convent is holy space.”

“Why do you work in the archive, in the world, if your order is enclosed? Are not enclosed nuns supposed to stay within the convent walls?” By asking the question, Rachel was crossing a boundary. I was surprised. Rachel was direct, but rarely impolite.

“A dispensation.”

“No dispensations exist for
researchers
?”

Agatha sighed. “You might write a letter to the bishop outlining what it is you want to research and asking permission.”

“And you can’t make an exception for me? A historian?” Rachel was not letting go.

“No,” Agatha said. “I’m sorry.”

“All right. I will send a letter to the bishop,” Rachel said in a discouraged yet angry voice.

It was an opening to bring up a question I had wanted badly to ask: “What is it you want to study that makes you so anxious to get into the convent? What could it possibly have to do with your subject? Was a movie filmed there? Did an actress become a nun?”

“I’m not ready to talk about that now,” Rachel replied.

A movement at the window caught my eye—it was Madeleine, who stared in for a second, then walked quickly on.

“That was Madeleine,” I said to Agatha. “She didn’t come in.”

“She had errands,” Agatha replied smoothly. “Tell us more about the biography.”

It was my opportunity to turn attention away from Rachel’s rejection of my question—and, by implication, of her—and I took it. In the flattest voice I could muster, I described the mort-ification scene, knowing, because I had read scenes like this before in convent documents, that it was not unusual, though more graphic than most.

“That is a repellent example of the perversion of the Catholic religion.” Jack said. He lit a cigarette, looking at me over the match, which for some reason irritated me.

I didn’t reply. Buffaloed by my silence, Jack stared at me for a moment, then said in a voice that was challenging but held a bit of obsequiousness around the edges, “It speaks of the underlying misogyny of. . . .” He broke off and gestured for the restaurant owner, Michel, who took his time wandering over.

“Come on, Jack. You’re becoming much too overwrought,” Fitzroy said.

“Leave the poor boy alone,” Agatha said. “Don’t pick on him. Sometimes you American academics can be bullies.”

“And French ones can’t?” said Fitzroy.

Jack was blushing. He knew he had to reply. “I have to say that it’s a personal reaction,” he mumbled. It was the right answer. Jack’s saving grace was a certain confessional attitude, which he adopted at times. Sometimes I caught a sadness in his face that made me want to look beyond his affectations. This was one of those times. Fitzroy nodded graciously and put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, as if the hand were a sword and he was knighting a commoner.

“Mortification meant something to the nuns,” I said. “It meant that they were imitating the sufferings of Christ on the cross. And it was a dress rehearsal for the pain of death. Death meant they would finally meet their husband. Christ. He was waiting beyond the grave. They’d meet him face to face. Or body to body.” I believed none of this, and it showed in the way I described it—with sarcasm.

“They desecrated . . .” began Jack, stopping to take a drag on his cigarette.

I interrupted him: “But they were inventive. Needles in their tongues, for instance.”

Jack made a face.

“Once a common practice, mortification,” Griset said. “It interests me. You know how I am, Madame Red—perverse.”

“I didn’t imply it was perverse,” I protested. “Jack did.”

Rachel, who had been silent up until then, finally said, “Haven’t you discussed the subject more than enough?” Again, she pushed the hair off her face with the palm of her hand as if she were angry at it for not staying in place.

“See?” Jack said. “I am not the only one who finds it repugnant.” He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“I don’t find it repugnant,” said Griset. “I’m French. I don’t have to be puritanical like you Americans. I find it intriguing. Who was it who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me’?” He smiled, his dark face alight with devilment.

“Terence,” said Jack, calling on his irritatingly retentive memory, “or Publius Terentius Afer in his play Heauton Timorumenus, which means self-tormentor. The play might be largely a translation of Menander’s . . . .”

Agatha cut him off: “I think you’re right. Both of you. Nuns mortify themselves for a holy reason—as penance for the sins of the world. Pain has its uses. Like fasting. Though as you can see, I practice neither. So I am a bit of a sinner.”

“De Sade found joy in pain,” said Griset.

“He was a monster,” replied Rachel. She rubbed the key on the chain around her neck between her fingers, and I guessed that she was doing it to control herself.

“Not very scholarly of you,” said Fitzroy.

Rachel said fiercely, “I don’t care. I have no patience with cruelty,” threw some money on the table, got up and left.

“So Rachel has a temper! I wonder what that was all about?” Fitzroy said, but no one answered him. We fell into silence, and it wasn’t long before we all paid up and I took Foxy home.

The following morning, I set off for the archives with more reluctance than ever. The reading room did not exactly have the calm library atmosphere I was accustomed to. The readers made me nervous—too many secrets, too many unexplained animosities—Madeleine’s avoidance of Fitzroy, Jack Leach’s seeming hatred of Agatha, Rachel’s anger.

When I arrived, I saw that the genealogists and the Mormons were gone, their work done. Agatha was sitting at our table and said said hello, though she seemed distracted, then announced that she had work to do in the reference room, got up and left. Madeleine wrote in her notebook as she consulted a typed document. Fitzroy and Jack Leach were haranguing Griset, who appeared uninterested in what they had to say. Rachel was tapping her fingers waiting for Griset to deliver documents to the front.

I went to my place and robotically began entering records into my laptop. Remembering my emotional reaction at the nuns’ mortification, I swore I would stop reading the diary for a while. I was a bit afraid of going off into a subconscious place where I might discover something evil about myself. I would float on the surface, work on the article. It needed doing.

It was almost noon when I stood, stretched, and decided I needed a bathroom break. Deep in thought about the diary, which had not left my mind in spite of my efforts, I almost sleepwalked down the hall and tried to enter the bathroom, which was unisex. Something was obstructing the door, so I pushed strongly against it and it yielded enough so that I could get inside. I pulled the chain that turned on the overhead light. When I saw what the obstruction was, I stopped in my tracks. It was a dead body.

PART II

Chapter 7

Sister Agatha lay on the floor. Her habit was disarranged, her legs askew. The bottoms of her thick cotton underpants were showing. Her face was a livid purple-red. Her staring blank eyes told me that she was dead. But even more, those slack, thick legs spoke of death—never in life would Agatha have assumed that pose.

Cold with shock, I leaned down to look at the body—Sister Agatha’s body! I felt like a voyeur. I could not leave her this way. Slowly, I reached over to touch her open palm. The flesh felt cool and waxy. My hand jerked back.

I began to shiver in waves, my teeth chattered. But I had to straighten the legs. So I steeled myself to the task. I took an ankle in my hand and lifted up the leg. It flopped out of my grasp. Then I made myself pick the leg up again and move it so it was in line with the body. Did the same with the other leg. Pulled down the habit over the plump creased knees.

I stared into Agatha’s dead face surrounded by the white wimple. Glittering in the open mouth was what looked at first like a metal wire. Horrified, I realized what it was. A needle piercing Agatha’s tongue—it gleamed in the light coming from the bare light bulb. Leaning down, I noticed, as I had not when Agatha was alive, the thin mustache of black hairs on the upper lip. The age lines around the eyes. A mole over the left eyebrow. The face seemed to beg me to do something. So I put my hand under Agatha’s chin and gently shut the mouth.

Now no one else could see. The mouth looked swollen, as if the lips were closed around something. That could not be helped. I crouched, staring into the face. I looked for the woman I knew—the woman who laughed so loudly and touched people’s cold hands with her own warm one. Not here. Not here. Behind icy shock, I felt the inside of my nose burn with approaching tears. But disbelief that this—this!—could have happened stopped them from falling.

I stood. Saw everything. Details jumped out at me in an unnatural way. The two booth doors were open, no sign of anyone having been there. Sheets of toilet paper hung neatly out of the metal cubes beside the toilets. The faucets above the basins were mute. What to do? For a while I couldn’t move, but just stood, looking at paper and metal to avoid what was on the floor.

I finally opened the door and made my way down the high-ceilinged hall to the reading room. My footsteps echoed abnormally loud. Then I approached the desk—and went blank. For a moment, I could not remember a word of French. Then it came back to me. A sentence formed itself in my mind. I said, my mouth dry, “The nun, she is dead in the bathroom.” It sounded like something from Clue, the board game.

After he took in my message, Chateaublanc slowly shut the book he was reading, left a tiny piece of paper to hold his place, and, adjusting his sweater, arose slowly to follow me out of the room and down the hall. He was preternaturally calm. I speculated that perhaps he thought that the American woman had her French wrong, perhaps he thought that he must not alarm the others.

“A heart attack?” I said, over my shoulder. My voice croaked as I said it.

“We shall see.”

“I never saw a dead person before,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

When we arrived at the bathroom, I stood in front of the door, not wanting him to enter because that would make Agatha’s death all too real.

“Permit me to enter the room. I will see. She may be yet alive.” He was all authority.

“She’s dead.”

“We shall see, Madame!”

I waited outside, leaning against the wall, weak and dizzy. My body felt frigid, though the hall was warm enough, and I started shivering again. I could hear Chateaublanc inside walking around.

When Chateaublanc came out of the bathroom, he said, his face white but unreadable, “I think she is dead.” I followed him down the hall to the reading room, stood holding the door frame, and watched him call the police and the convent from the telephone at his desk. As he spoke in an abnormally loud voice, he absently played with a paper knife.

When the readers heard Chateaublanc’s conversation with the police, the silence in the room became electric. Madeleine ran weeping out of the room, her face blank with horror. The mistral howled outside and rattled the windows in unsettling gusts. Soon the other readers rose and gathered around me to find out what I knew, but I couldn’t talk. So they did—they talked and talked, as if to keep demons away.

The ice left my body, and the tears that had been threatening to fall burst from my eyes, I crumpled to the floor, sobbing, partly from fear.

Rachel Marchand stood above me, then sat down beside me. I felt her hand flat on mine. It was the only warm thing in the universe—until I thought of the needle in Agatha’s tongue and Rachel’s hand stabbing cloth as she sat at that table at the Cafe Minette. I jerked my own hand away, and Rachel rose to her feet.

Even Fitzroy abandoned his pose as sidelines dignitary to venture a guess that Agatha had had a heart attack.

“She was in terrible physical shape—you could see that!” Jack said inappropriately.

I was too shocked to respond. Why was Jack’s first thought to blame Agatha for her own death? Griset said he was going out in the hall for a cigarette.

The chilling, ululating scream of police car sirens going full blast assaulted our ears. Even the heavily insulated stone walls of the archive could not keep the sound out. Everyone stopped talking and waited in silence.

In minutes three police in visored hats filed into the reading room, then disappeared into the hallway on their way to the bathroom. Following them, a short man in civilian clothes. I, who at home watched police dramas, thought that perhaps he was from the medical examiner’s office or forensics. I watched as he came back into the reading room and made a phone call from Chateaublanc’s desk in a low voice.

Chateaublanc yanked at his sweater and his hair, cleaned his nails with the paper knife.

Shortly after, a tall man with a beret sitting on top of his long head entered the room and stood in front of Chateaublanc’s desk waiting for the attention of the readers. His very erect posture and face devoid of expression told me that he had to be an official of some sort. He introduced himself: “
Mesdames et Messieurs
, I am Lieutenant Jean-Jacques Schmidt of the Avignon Police Department. I will be interrogating you about the death.”

“It might be a heart attack?” pleaded Chateaublanc. It occurred to me that he feared the disruption of his domain, and therefore the lowering of his reputation if Agatha’s death turned out to be suspicious.

“What it looks like and what it is may be two different matters,” said the lieutenant, cutting off any more conversation. He proceeded to take each of the readers into the little reference room for questioning.

My interview went quickly. Schmidt sat waiting to take notes on a pad as I spoke. At first, looking at his attentive face, I found myself thinking that the interview would be like conducting an independent study session with an eager student who expected to be fed knowledge.

After getting the preliminary information, my name, address, and reason for being in the archive, he asked in French, “Professor Ryan, will you please tell me what you know of the dead woman?”

“She was about seventy and a nun of the order Our Lady of Mercy,” I replied, also in French, which now came to me relatively easily. “That religious order was founded in the Counter Reformation and was suppressed in the French Revolution. But it was reestablished again early in the nineteenth century. The nuns take in fallen women to reform them. The women live in special quarters called The Refuge.”

“I do not need a history lecture, Madame,” said the lieutenant—not like a student, after all. He laid three pens out in front of him like soldiers.

“Her order is the subject of my research, as well,” I said. “She has been working here longer than I have. At least six
weeks. She often helped me with my work. And was a friend.Why are you interrogating us? ”

“It is best to question everyone as soon as possible after the event, is it not?”

“I see,” I said. It made sense. “When I found an old document about the convent—from the seventeenth century—Sister Agatha encouraged me to work on it.” I wondered why I mentioned this. Then I realized that I was doing what I always do when I am under the gun—talk too much. A bad habit.

“Why do you think that was?”

“She has a motherly quality about her,” I said, hearing myself use the present tense, then realizing anew that Agatha was dead. “She wanted to help people.” I felt tears rising again.

He listened patiently, but I could see he thought of himself as marking time, waiting for the real evidence. “When did you arrive at the archives this morning?” He moved one of the pens slightly to the left.

“After nine. The others were already here.”

“Sister Agatha?” He looked up from his pen exercise to look at me directly.

“She was here when I arrived.”

He made a notation on his pad, including a question mark. It meant picking up a pen and returning it carefully to its place in the serried ranks.

I started to give him information he hadn’t asked for. “She was in the habit of teasing the director of the archive, Monsieur Chateaublanc,” I said.

“Indeed. And what did she tease him about?” He fixed me with his dark eyes

I shrugged again. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Unimportant things. His name, for instance.” I felt more tears filling my eyes. “She was actually very fond of him, I think.”

“And Chateaublanc, how did he take it?” He put a pen at right angles to the others.

“It wasn’t enough to kill for!” I said, converting grief to rage.

“
Doucement
, this is merely a preliminary investigation,” the lieutenant said with irritating patience. He leaned back in his chair, regarding me.

“Oh.” I could think of nothing else to say.

“Did you notice anything else that was strange earlier this morning?” he asked

“No. The first strange thing I saw was the body. The body in the bathroom.”

“Describe it.”

“She was lying on her back with her habit up, against the door. I had to push the door to open it.” I felt my hands tremble so I clasped them together.

The lieutenant wrote a couple of sentences in his tidy hand, then looked up and said, “You straightened her clothing?”

“Yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have, but I did it before thinking.” I felt my stomach go hollow as I remembered the feel of the cloth as, held down by the dead weight of Agatha’s body, it resisted me.

The lieutenant nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Propriety. The habit probably became disarranged when she fell. It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The others in the archive. Tell me about them. Start with Professor Fitzroy.” He arranged the pens again as if they were suspects in a lineup.

“A very, very important historian. American, a full professor from Rutgers. He has been here for a short while. Divorced.” I wondered why I volunteered that last piece of information.

“Did he spend much time talking to Sister Agatha?”

“Not really. He ordinarily does not spend much time talking to anyone,” I replied. “Too important. But I think he knew her from somewhere. I don’t know where.”

His long face cracked a bit in a small smile. “And Monsieur Jack Leach?”

“A graduate student, also from Rutgers. Fitzroy’s student. He works on a study of rebellion in the little villages. Sixteenth century. Married. I don’t know much about him except that he’s very anti-Catholic.”

The lieutenant wrote busily, then looked up. “And Professor Rachel Marchand?”

“She teaches at Green Valley College, a small but very prestigious institution in the Midwest.”

“And why is she here?”

I hesitated. Why should the police care what any of us was studying? I finally said,“She researches French cinema.” “Indeed?” he raised one eyebrow, a thin black one. “Cinema. In Avignon. The records would be in Paris, would they not?”

“It is what she studies.”

“She seems to be a nervous type.”

“There’s a reason for it—she has been having difficulty obtaining documents from Chateaublanc.” I felt as if I was explaining for Rachel, almost apologizing, and it got my temper up.

“Calm yourself, Madame Ryan!” He wrote something quickly. “And the young Fabre woman. Who is she?”

“She works with documents from World War Two. The Resistance. She has a close association with the nuns, I think. She keeps to herself.”

“Monsieur Chateaublanc?”

“He’s a bit testy,” I began, then thought of how Chateaublanc had almost run me and Foxy over with his Cadillac. I didn’t mention it. I knew what the cop would think: that I, an American woman, understood very little about how the French drive. I also didn’t mention that I thought Chateaublanc and Agatha had been meeting to discuss something secret.

He dismissed me after that—he had not asked me about the needle, and I wondered why. Had he not seen? And he had not asked me directly about Chateaublanc or Griset. He went on to call other people in, and they obeyed in characteristic ways. Rachel gathered herself in professor mode, pushed her hair off her face, then accompanied him to the room. Madeleine arranged her belt around her waist carefully before following him. Jack Leach, almost tap-dancing with nervousness, looked as if he had been called into the principal’s office. Fitzroy swept out of the room with him, furious at being interrogated by someone he obviously thought was his inferior. He needs a cape, I thought. Chateaublanc adjusted his sweater and tried to look official, and Griset acted as if being interrogated were something that happened to him every day.