Doctor Death (24 page)

Eventually, the captive was placed in a private room in the convent’s hospital wing, with two armed policemen at the door. They were there not so much to prevent Oblonski from running away—he was not going anywhere in his condition—but to make sure that no vengeful mob broke in “to finish the job.”

While my father placed cold cloths and ice on Oblonski’s bruises with the aid of one of the nursing sisters, I took several pipette samples from his nostrils. They were so full of blood, however, that it was impossible to tell if mites were present with the naked eye.

“You will have to go home to examine it,” said my father. “We must know whether there is a risk of infection.”

“That is not necessary,” I said. “There is an excellent microscope in the school’s laboratory. Better than ours, in fact.”

“Very well. Hurry. The sooner we know, the better.”

There were no classes that day. Those students who could had gone home to their families as soon as the terrible news of the abbess’s death had spread. Those who remained, for the most part because they did not live close by, had gathered in the school’s dining hall, from which you could hear the faint and somehow unsettling sound of hymns. I could not find anyone to ask permission, but the laboratory was not locked, so I just sat down with my samples and began. It was quiet there. A window was ajar, and the scent of wet earth and daffodils from the garden mixed with the smell of floor wax and book dust, and the sharper reminiscences of Bunsen burner gas and chemicals. For some reason, a part of the school’s collection of stuffed animals and birds was stored here. A jay with spread wings, a marten and a squirrel, the skeleton of a bird of prey and a glass-lidded case full of carefully mounted beetles . . . There was not much of a system to it, so perhaps it was just a random overflow from the biology room.

I dripped saline solution into the bloody mucus in order to see better. But even though I studied all the samples carefully, I found not a single mite.

I got up from the stool and stretched my sore back. Could it be true? We had been so convinced that the close contact with the wolves had transferred the mites from Emile Oblonski, who thereafter had infected Cecile. There was perhaps a possibility that she had been infected directly from the wolves; Mother Filippa had said that she was interested in them, and that was how she had got to know Emile. But why did he, who lived with the wolves in the stable and had been in close contact with them
every single day . . . why did he have no mites whatsoever in his nostrils?

I sat down to look through the samples one more time. But while I was looking at the next to last, I suddenly had an odd feeling of being studied myself.

Behind me, a few meters away, stood Imogene Leblanc. I had not heard her come in, and the unexpected sight sent a jolt to my stomach and made my hand jump so that I almost dropped the last slide.

She stared at me silently, and I felt a need to explain.

“I am sorry,” I said. “But it is of critical importance that we get these results without delay, and since there are no classes today . . .”

She had taught physics, biology, and chemistry, I remembered. Perhaps that was why she succeeded so well in giving me the sense that I had invaded a room in which I did not belong.

“I will be done in a minute,” I concluded and controlled a desire to curtsy.

She nodded briefly. Then she walked deliberately to one of the cabinets along the wall, the one that was crowned by the slightly worn jay, and opened it. She had a light-blue cardboard box in her hand that she apparently wanted to put away on the cabinet shelf. But at that moment the box slid from her hand and hit the floor with a flat tinkling. The lid came off and four or five glass pipettes rolled out. She stood for a moment staring at them with a disapproving look, as if they were naughty pupils who did not know how to behave as was expected.

Then she slowly and with difficulty squatted down, and I remembered that she suffered from arthritis.

“Let me,” I said, and jumped down from the stool to help her.

“No.”

It was so abrupt and harsh, with no attempt at courtesy, that
I automatically stopped in my tracks. She picked up the wayward pipettes, placed the box in the cabinet and closed it, and left the room, still without saying more than that one word.

An odd woman, I thought. What was it Mother Filippa had said? Something about it being less the love of God and more the fear of the world, and in particular of her father, that had made her seek the safety of the convent walls.

“There were no mites,” I said.

My father looked up from his own examinations, astonishment written across his face. Both he and the sister helping him were wearing white mouth covers.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I examined all six specimens three times.”

“How very odd.”

His gaze fell to the still form of Emile Oblonski. There was a touch of reproach in his manner, as if the unconscious boy in his miteless state were guilty of a breach of conduct far more serious than anything he had done with Cecile Montaine. My father had taught me to receive all results with the same clearheaded acceptance, whether they supported my hypothesis or not, but it was a dogma to which he was not himself always able to adhere.

In the yard outside, the last men, dogs, and horses were dispersing. You could hear the men exchanging greetings and slapping shoulders and could sense their reluctance to dissolve the brotherhood of the hunt. It would be dark soon; the sister had already lit the kerosene lamp in the ceiling and now raised the glass on the table lamp to light that as well.

“How is he?” I said quietly.

“He is fairly stable,” said my father. “There is no doubt that
there are internal injuries, but how serious they are . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

It is always difficult to determine how tall a person is when he is lying down, but my impression was that Emile Oblonski was rather short. As he lay there, still curled up and on his side, with filthy and unkempt hair and a thin and patchy beard covering his throat and chin, he shifted constantly in my perception between boy and man. Other than the bruising left by the blows and kicks he had received, he had no deformities as far as I could see. Whether he was ugly or not was difficult to determine with his face so battered. For some reason I had imagined that he was dark haired, but he was not. The greasy locks were straw colored, and the beard a shade darker and more reddish. His ribs were clearly defined beneath the skin, and under the sheet that covered his lower body I could, even now, see the contours of what Sister Bernadette had called his “priapism.”

I turned my head in order not to stare and instead caught my father’s gaze.

“It is an entirely involuntary and uncontrollable reaction,” he said. “You have to consider it simply a symptom.”

The heat washed up into my cheeks.

“Of course,” I said firmly, and felt hopelessly unprofessional.

Throughout the night the sisters kept vigil at Mother Filippa’s bier in the convent chapel, while I sat next to the person she had considered her adopted son. Papa, who like the Commissioner had had the previous night interrupted by the unfortunate kitchen maid, lay in the room next door, catching a bit of much-needed sleep. I had strict orders to wake him up if Oblonski’s breathing, pulse, temperature, or color changed significantly.

This was an unusual duty for me. Most of my father’s living patients were admitted to the Saint Bernardine Hospital and thus in the sisters’ care, and the dead did not require watching. Toward morning I must have dozed off a bit because I had the dizzy sensation of waking up and being in the process of sliding down from the chair on which I had been sitting.

His breathing was different, but it was hard to determine whether it was worse or better. A bit more rapid, yet at the same time less congested. Then I caught a liquid shimmer under the half-closed eyelids and understood that the change was caused by the patient being conscious.

“My name is Madeleine,” I said. “I am here to take care of you.”

Why did I immediately feel this need to console and soothe? Was it a legacy Mother Filippa had managed to pass on to me? Perhaps it was because I had seen the newspaper page she had hidden in her drawer for seven years and thus knew precisely how inhumanely people could behave toward someone like him.

He lay completely still and looked at me through his eyelashes. He did not say anything, but after a few seconds he placed his free hand discreetly over the erection bump and pressed it against his thighs in an attempt to make it less visible. Why that gesture seemed so heartbreaking that it came close to making me cry, I did not completely understand.

“Are you thirsty?” I asked. “Does it hurt? I can get my father. He is a doctor.”

He did not answer and did not in any way show that he had understood me. His eyes closed again, but I did not think he was sleeping. It was merely the only way he could hide.

I let him do so. In this way we remained, silently next to one another in the faint glowing circle of the lamp, and waited for it to be morning.

Emile Oblonski did not resist when my father pushed the thick wax plate into his mouth and made him bite down on it with a light pressure against his chin. He just seemed confused yet eager to do what was asked. He still had not said a single word, but his eyes followed our every move, as if he constantly had to make sure that we did not want to hit him.

I mixed plaster powder with water and poured it carefully into the tooth print. In this way we would soon have a model of Emile’s teeth that could be compared to the bite marks on Mother Filippa’s body.

“Has anyone told him that Mother Filippa has died?” I quietly asked my father while we waited for the plaster to set.

“Not that I know of,” he said, and tried to scratch himself under his own plaster cast. “Of course one cannot rule out that some of the proud hunters may have run their mouths.”

“But . . . shouldn’t he be informed?”

“You assume that he does not already know because he didn’t kill her himself.”

Papa was right. I did. And I had no cause for that assumption.

Still I insisted. “She considered him her adopted son. And if he is innocent . . .”

“
If
he is innocent, you will ruin a great deal for him by giving him that kind of information before Marot has questioned him,” said my father sternly. “The more you tell him about the crime, the harder it will be for him to appear ignorant and unimplicated.”

The questioning. It was of course necessary and unavoidable, but when I looked at the poor battered human being lying curled up in the hospital bed, trying to hide behind his closed eyes . . . I could barely stand the thought.

“Go home, Maddie. You need to sleep.”

“I can do that here.”

He looked at me for a few seconds. He needed a haircut, I noticed distractedly, it was starting to curl at the ends, which did not suit him.

“I will have Marot find a carriage,” he said.

I wanted to protest. I did not want to be packed up and sent home as if I were a fretting child; I wanted to know what was happening.

“You need me here,” I said.