Doctor Death (20 page)

“But erysipelas does not normally cause lung abscesses,” I said. “And if it is a human-specific bacterium, then what is it doing in wolves in the first place?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. And my stomach is growling so loudly that I cannot think. Where on earth is Elise? Isn’t it almost seven?”

“I will go find her,” I said. “Or else I will run over to Chez Louis myself to pick up something.”

“I know this is a tough time for you,” he said. “But it will get better soon. Lanier will put a new plaster cast on my leg next week, one I can walk on.”

“That is good news,” I said, smiling. But as I went down the stairs and headed for Chez Louis, conflicting feelings stirred inside me. Of course I wanted my father to get better and regain his mobility. But at the same time I had to admit that his temporary handicap was not just a burden to me. It had also given me a certain freedom, a freedom that I did not wish to lose again.

“I thought that you might want to bury him,” I said to Mother Filippa as the driver of the hansom cab hauled the meter-long wooden box from the rack at the top of the carriage. “Fire is not necessary; the ice has had the same effect now.”

“That was thoughtful of you,” she said. “Not many people would understand. Thank you.”

The two other wolf cadavers had been cremated in the hospital’s furnace, but in spite of my father’s puzzlement, I had insisted on bringing the old wolf back to the convent.

“I understand that you have already acquired some new wolves?” I said.

“Yes. Someone higher up in the hierarchy than I felt that it was necessary because of the myth.”

“The myth? Don’t you believe it?”

She smiled. “Yes and no. I firmly believe that God’s mercy gave us the wolves three hundred years ago, and that He had a purpose in doing so. Perhaps we were supposed to learn to understand ourselves better through living with them? But that the mere presence of a few wolves at the convent is enough to save the nation from defeat and human stupidity . . . that I doubt. Do you want to see them? Sadly, they are a bit of a sorry sight right now; we have to keep them caged in quarantine for a couple of weeks.”

She was right. It was a depressing sight. There were only three, a male and two females, the male from Varbourg’s Zoological Garden, the two half-grown females caught in the mountains and brought here in the cage they still crouched in.

One pup lay listlessly and had apparently withdrawn into herself completely; the other snapped at us and bit the bars as soon as she caught our scent. The grown wolf also lay flat at the bottom of its cage, not as panicked as the two wild ones, but his eyes were rheumy and his nose looked dry and crusty.

“He does not look well,” I said.

“No. I don’t know if it is just the trip and the change of environment, or if he is really ill,” said Mother Filippa. “I wish Emile was here. He had an instinct for getting them to thrive.”

I noticed that she said
had
not
has.

“You do not believe he is coming back?” I asked.

She sighed. “I don’t know what to think. Police Inspector Marot has been here several times now, and he seems convinced that poor Emile was responsible for all kinds of crimes, from abduction to the murder of a priest.”

“But you are not?”

“No. Emile is a very gentle soul, but most people misunderstand.”

“Did Cecile understand?”

The abbess shook her head doubtfully. “She was the only one of the girls who was not afraid of him.”

I thought of what she had done with Rodolphe Descartier and of the diary’s smoldering soot-stained words:
Kisses
 . . .
breath . . . my thighs . . . penetrated deeply . . . inside . . . melted.

And that last despairing cry:
is not enough!

Generally speaking, Cecile did not seem overly afraid of men, I thought.

“May I see Cecile’s room?” I asked.

The abbess raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

I could perhaps have said something or other about the importance of finding Emile Oblonski, especially if he was sick. And something about “signs a man would not notice.” But I had the feeling that it was better just to be honest.

“Because I would like to understand her better,” I said. “And understand her death. My father always says that the dead can no longer speak, and that we must therefore help them tell their stories.”

“There is certainly a great deal about this story that I do not understand,” said Mother Filippa. “And the police have already gone through everything. I can’t see what harm it would do for you to satisfy your curiosity.”

The younger girls slept in a dormitory, while the older ones, like Cecile, slept four to a room on the floor above the dormitory. The school’s facilities did not permit much in the way of privacy, I thought, at the sight of the narrow room that was made even narrower by the bunk beds along the walls. Any illusion of finding a secret diary hidden under her pillow evaporated at once. Two of the beds were tidily made up with white sheets and gray blankets, the third, the one I assumed had been Cecile’s, was covered only by a bare mattress. On the fourth, a chubby schoolgirl lay on her side, crying quietly.

“What is it now, Christine?” asked Mother Filippa.

“My stomach hurts,” said the girl.

“Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary, then?”

“Sister Marie-Claire said I was in the way. They are having a big cleanup.”

Her pudgy face was red and tear streaked, and Sister Marie-Claire’s slightly insensitive comment had probably been prompted by a suspicion that Christine was not physically ill. That she was sad and miserable was, on the other hand, quite obvious.

Suddenly I realized that my feeling that I had seen her before was caused not just by the likelihood that I had studied her nose intensely. She had attended Cecile’s funeral—she was the school friend who had cried most openly and loudly.

I held out my hand. “Hello, Christine. My name is Madeleine Karno. We met at the funeral.”
Met
was of course a bit of an exaggeration
since we had been about twenty meters apart at the time. But Christine took my hand and snuffled even more loudly.

“She was my best friend,” she said, runny nosed and tearful. “I miss her so much.”

“I can understand that,” I said, and sat down on the bed across from her. “It must be hard.” I looked up briefly at Mother Filippa. She nodded her permission for me to speak with Christine and perhaps give her a little attention, which she clearly needed.

“I will be in the wolf stables,” she said. “Come say goodbye before you go.”

“Thank you, Mother,” I said.

“It is all so terrible,” said Christine. “I keep thinking that I will wake up and it will all be just a bad dream.”

“How long have you known Cecile?” I asked.

“We roomed together for a year and a half. I knew her before as well, of course, but it was not until then that we became friends.”

“What was she like?”

“She was wonderful.”

That did not help me much.

“Did you talk a lot?”

“Every evening. She would climb down and get into my bed, and we would hold each other and talk. Anette once got so mad that she threw her pillow at us, but we did not care. It is so strange that she is no longer here. I can’t sleep without her; it feels all wrong.”

“Did you ever talk about Emile Oblonski?”

Christine stopped sniveling. “Him,” she said. Her brown eyes grew a shade darker.

“Did she talk about him?”

“Not really. She just said that the others did not understand him.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“All the girls—they did not think that he should be allowed to be here. Some of them even got their parents to complain. That made Cecile angry. She said they were a bunch of narrow-minded, cruel ninnies.”

“Why did they think he did not belong here? Because he was a man?”

“No. There are other men employed here, not in the school and in the actual convent, but on the farm and the apple orchards and so on. Of course there are men.”

“What was it about Emile, then?” Inspector Marot had called him unattractive and slow-witted. I wondered to myself if that was the reason for the complaints.

It sounded almost as if Christine was giggling.

“Well, he couldn’t help it. It was a kind of illness. But . . .”

“But what?”

“Well, if he was scared, or angry, or . . . well, it did not take much. Then it got hard.”

I stopped myself the second before asking her what she meant by “it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yes. That must have been why he was so shy, too. But there were those who thought that a convent couldn’t have someone like him around. Even though he lived in the wolf stables and kept to himself, and never came to the school.”

“If he never . . . Then how did you . . . ?”

“Oh, everyone knew. And once there were some girls who sneaked down with sheets over their heads like ghosts, just to scare him. Just to see . . . well,
it.
”

“Did you?”

“No! But . . .
some
girls did. Aprile Beauforte, for one. I think it was her idea. At least, she was the one Cecile took revenge on.”

“How?”

“She pulled her out of bed in the middle of the night and dragged her into a cold shower. Aprile was screaming her head off, but Cecile had the strength of a man almost. Aprile did not stand a chance.”

“But you did not know that Cecile was going to run away with Emile?”

The giggling ceased. Christine’s face grew blank and expressionless.

“No.”

“Or where they were planning to go?”

“No. I . . . I knew something was wrong. She was not herself for the last two days. And someone had hit her. She was terribly sore and could barely sit. And she . . . she . . .”

“What is it, Christine?”

“I just wanted to hold her as usual. That was all.” Now it was no longer just sniveling; tears spilled heavily from her eyes.

“And then what?”

“She bit me. Really hard. First in the shoulder and then . . .” Christine’s hand flew unconsciously, protectively, toward her left breast. And I thought of the many marks we had found on Cecile’s own dead body. Her chest, her stomach, and the inside of her thighs, human tooth marks. Old marks and new. Who had taught her to bite this way?

When I approached the wolf stables again to say goodbye to Mother Filippa, there was a large chestnut horse tied to the fence, and from inside I heard a man’s voice shout very loudly and with uncontrollable anger, “You are not God’s servant. You are Satan’s!”

I stopped, taken aback. At that moment an unusually
broad-shouldered man in a riding habit came tearing out, wrenched the reins loose from the fence, and threw himself onto the chestnut. He spurred it so hard that it jumped more sideways than forward, and then disappeared along the road between the farm buildings at a clattering gallop.

Mother Filippa came out. She looked as calm as always. “Is your curiosity satisfied now, mademoiselle?” she said, a bit pointedly, I thought. Maybe she thought that I had not just probed into Cecile’s background but had also eavesdropped on her conversation with the angry man. And so I refrained from asking her, “Who was that?” which was on the tip of my tongue.