Doctor Death (10 page)

I have never seen an aggressive walrus butt its head against a boulder, but I believe I have a fair idea of what it would look like. The two men were of a similar age, height, and weight, but in temperament they could not have been more different. The Commissioner simply stood there waiting with a gravitas all his own, and this more than anything else finally robbed the inspector of the last of his composure.

“Have you nothing to say, man?” he exclaimed.

“Only if you are done,” said the Commissioner.

“What?”

“I just want to draw your attention to the date of the young man’s disappearance.”

“He is not a young man, he’s a nine-year-old street urchin.”

“Who disappeared last Sunday and has not been seen since.”

“And?”

“I permitted myself an interview with Madame Brunot.”

“Madame who?”

“Father Abigore’s housekeeper. The poor woman is still shocked by her employer’s death and is desperately anxious about her future. Once the new priest is installed, she risks losing both her position and her place of residence. By no means easy for a woman past sixty.”

“What has that got to do with the case?”

“Nothing. I am merely presenting it as an excuse for the fact that her first testimony regarding the night the priest died was not as complete as one might have wished.”

It took Inspector Marot a few seconds to grasp that what the Commissioner was handing him was not really an excuse for Madame Brunot but rather for the inadequacy of that first interview. But he had not yet grasped the rest of the implications.

“I still fail to see . . .”

“Madame Brunot now describes the boy who came with the message as eight or nine years old, but she could barely see his face because his cap covered his eyes. Louis Mercier, who disappeared the same night as the priest was murdered, was most likely wearing a milkman’s cap that was much too big for him.”

Marot fell silent for a while. “We had better find him,” he finally said.

“Yes,” said the Commissioner. “I think so, too.”

Four days later, two events occurred in Varbourg that appeared to have no connection but nonetheless turned out to be of significance for the investigation of our two deaths. A sudden warm front swept over the town and made flowers and trees
explode with growth, and Cecile Montaine’s father attempted suicide.

My father had just begun to move around a bit with the help of a crutch. Because of his broken arm he could use only one, which we constantly had to pad with fresh rags so that it would not rub his armpit raw. He grew sweaty and disgruntled from having to fight like this for minimal mobility, but at least he was now capable of descending to our modest bathroom and, of much greater importance to him, to his laboratory.

He was in the middle of taking as much of a bath as the plaster cast would allow when there was a knock on our door. Adrian Montaine Junior suddenly appeared in the hallway, unannounced and clearly shaken. He would not reveal the nature of his errand until “the Doctor himself” was present. At first he would have nothing to eat or drink, but in the end he accepted a glass of cognac, which he swallowed in one gulp without even tasting it. He began to cough and then had to drink a glass of water.

“I am sorry,” he said. “It has been an utterly horrible day.” He was in his early twenties, a slender and extravagantly clad young man with a smooth-shaven chin and a narrow little mustache that looked as if a child penciled it on his upper lip. The closest Varbourg came to a dandy, I presumed. I think that he typically had an open and happy nature, but the burden that weighed on him now made him restless and distracted, one foot tapping ceaselessly on our faded Boukhara carpet, and several of his sentences hung incomplete in the air between us.

The door to the rooftop garden was open, and the scent of pansies and daffodils wafted in from outside.

“Would you like me to show you the garden?” I asked to lighten the mood. “It is quite pleasant right now.”

“Yes, please,” he said, and got up at once, more likely because he found it hard to sit still than because of a true interest in horticulture.
But he was nonetheless surprised when we stepped out into our little oasis.

“What an enchanting place,” he said. “Is this your work?”

“No,” I said. “My mother created this garden. I just take care of it.”

“Your mother was an artist in her medium,” he said.

We walked in silence among the flowerbeds, and he especially admired the corner display of ferns and climbing ivy, currently providing a dark, sylvan background for the last spring snowflakes. My mother had not attempted to cultivate exotic orchids or palm trees from more southern climes. Instead, she had grasped the essence of our own rich nature here in the province of Varonne and had re-created it
en miniature
in the few square meters she possessed. The surrounding walls now suggested a mountain backdrop, and the very modest goldfish pond was somehow transformed into a shaded woodland lake.

“I am so sorry about your sister,” I said at last.

He nodded, but I could see that he had received such condolences so many times that the words had lost their meaning.

“Thank you,” he said politely.

“Please tell me if you do not wish to discuss it,” I said carefully. “But have you learned more about what happened? Has the young man reappeared?”

“No,” he said.

“I am sorry if I am prying.”

He shook his head. “Do you know what? People are so careful not to impose, not to speak of her, not to ask. It is almost as if she is more than just dead, she has been . . . erased. Removed from the family portrait. No longer a part of us. And I find that hard to bear. Yes, it hurts to remember and to speak of her. But if we don’t . . . then we are killing her all over again. Do you understand?”

I spontaneously placed a hand on his arm. “Yes, I do.”

“Cecile was bursting with life—happy and warm and outgoing, and no paragon of virtue. No . . . no demimondaine, you understand? Just in love with life.”

I nodded.

“In the summer she freckled because she refused to wear a hat. Mama could scold her as much as she pleased. It only worked until we could not be seen from the house, then the bonnet came off, and Cici would run and climb trees and catch frogs in the pond with me and François. She ran away from the first convent school she was sent to because she could not stand the discipline, especially being cooped up inside all day. We tried the Bernardine sisters because they are less strict and permit more outdoor activities, and that worked much better.” He looked at me imploringly, repeating his plea for understanding.

“Do you understand what I am saying? She was
alive.
She hated to be closed in, could not stand not being able to move. But now . . . her body lies in a box in the ground. And her spirit . . . her memory . . . Papa would prefer to make her into a pure and pale saint who must not be soiled by coarse suggestions that she might have been something other than the most innocent and untouched lily of the convent garden. She was always Papa’s little girl, but it is as if he has completely forgotten that what he loved most about her was her passion for life and her inability to be tamed. The gossip—and, yes, we hear that, too, in roundabout ways and in what people are
not
saying—the gossip paints her as a slut whose sins were justly punished. And they are all merely boxes, do you see what I mean? Whether the label on the box says slut or saint doesn’t really matter. Cici would hate either just as much as she would hate the awful black coffin they buried her in.”

“You loved her very much. That makes it hard now, but . . .”

“I
miss
her,” he said, and stood for a moment breathing through his open mouth, as if it was difficult for him. “
Damn
Emile Oblonski and everything he did to her. If I knew where he was, I would kill him.”

“So you are convinced that he is responsible for her death?”

“If he had not brought her along . . . If he had not convinced her . . .” He shook his head several times. “You are right, she might have fallen ill anyway. But at least the illness would have come upon her at the school, where the good sisters would have cared for her, and where a doctor might have been called in time. So, yes, Oblonski has good reason to hide. And I am not going to stop looking.”

Supported by his crutch, my father came limping out into the garden, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat with his hair still damp.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said to Adrian Montaine. “What can I do for you?”

Cecile’s brother darted a quick sideways glance in my direction, but our conversation had apparently already been sufficiently confidential for him to feel he could speak freely.

“Monsieur le Docteur, we hope you can help us. My father . . . My father has been in an accident.”

“An accident? How so?”

“His . . . a gun went off. An injury to the jaw. Our own doctor has done what he could to stop the bleeding, but he believes an operation is necessary if my father is to survive.”

“Did you bring him to the hospital?”

“No. We were afraid of that journey . . . and besides . . . My mother has asked me to say that she is hoping you will be discreet.”

My father looked at the young man without expression for a few seconds. He knew as well as I did what this meant. This was no accidental shot, and any doctor who was not blind in both eyes would be able to see as much. Madame Montaine was trying to protect the family and her poor husband against yet another scandal.

“I see,” he said simply. “But at the moment I am not in a position to carry out an operation without assistance.”

“Our own doctor . . .”

“Does he have experience with surgery? Ether? Lister’s antibacterial regime?”

Adrian Montaine looked confused. “I don’t know.”

Papa sighed. “Fine. Either you must permit me to call in a colleague and inform him of the case. Or my daughter will have to assist me.”

An entirely unsuitable little prayer almost escaped my lips.
Choose me. Choose me. Choose me.

“Is your daughter . . . ?”

“Extremely well qualified, yes.”

Thank
you
, Papa.

The Montaine family lived in one of the more stately homes along Boulevard Saint-Cyr. The family fortunes had been founded on a meat extract, Bovillion, which was sold in colorful cans with a picture of a fat soup-tasting cook who ecstatically murmured, “
Mmmmh. C’est bon—
c
’est Bovillion!
” But it was produced at a factory down by the railroad, and Madame Montaine’s elegant salons bore no sign of that colorful vulgarity. Here all was pale rose and pearl gray, with silver and crystal accents. Adrian Montaine’s bedroom had a similar aesthetic. The heavy rose velour curtains were closed and the pile in the pastel-colored Chinese carpet was so long and thick that one sank into it as if walking on a lawn.

The man in the bed lay unmoving. His breathing was a wet, animal-like snuffle, the effect of both blood and fluid in the throat, and of the massive dose of laudanum the family doctor had given him to make the pain tolerable.

He had shot himself through the mouth, but had done it at such an angle that the bullet had torn its way out through the cheek and upper jaw instead of going up through the brain, as had presumably been the intention. There was thus no visible entry wound, only the jagged, bloody exit, with a diameter of ten to fifteen centimeters. One could see bone fragments and shattered molars through the hole.

“How much laudanum has he received?” asked my father.

“Twelve milliliters,” answered the family physician, a Doctor Berger.

“Then we will have to wait,” said my father through clenched teeth.

“Wait? But he—”

“If we give him ether now, we risk paralyzing his ability to breathe,” my father interrupted him. “We have to control the bleeding and stabilize him as well as we can, but I cannot operate until his breathing is less labored.”

In the meantime, he chose the adjoining bathroom as a reasonably suitable operating theater. A frightened chambermaid was set to scrubbing the ceiling, floor, and walls with a solution of carbolic acid, and a table from the kitchen was carried upstairs and cleaned. I went down to the kitchen with the maid and asked the cook to boil some water so I could scald the instruments.