Doctor Death (34 page)

As I got up, I let my portemonnaie slide down between the backrest and the upholstered seat of my chair so that later, as we were preparing to mount the inspector’s carriage, I was able to pretend I had suddenly noticed it was gone.

“I am sorry,” I said, and tried to look confused. “I must have dropped my purse. If you would excuse me, I will be right back . . .”

And before he could offer to do it for me, I ran up the stairs and opened the front door without knocking.

Imogene was still standing in the hallway.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“My portemonnaie. I must have dropped it . . .”

She reluctantly escorted me back to the parlor. She walked like someone in pain, I noticed. Lupus was a merciless and often agonizing illness. I should feel more sympathy for her. I really should.

“Oh, there it is.”

“I see. Goodbye, Mademoiselle Karno. Again.”

But she would not be rid of me that easily.

“Mademoiselle Leblanc, I meant to ask you . . . How well did you know Cecile Montaine?”

“I taught her physics, biology, and chemistry.”

“And that was all?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just wonder at the fact that you helped her and Emile Oblonski during their flight. Without saying so to anyone, and without revealing it even after Cecile’s death.”

Her face once again changed color in a few seconds, from white to red.

“Who gave you that peculiar idea?”

“Cecile did,” I said. “She called you Imo, did she not? That is presumably not the way students normally address their teachers at the Bernardine school.”

She stood still for so long that the dog began to poke her with its nose.

“I think you should go now,” she said. “Have you no respect at all for the dead?”

And that was all I got out of her. The inspector called impatiently from the courtyard, and I barely had time to step out onto the stairs before Imogene shut the door with a sudden and demonstrative shove.

Emile Oblonski lay on a table that was normally used to strap down especially violent criminals. There was of course no need for the sturdy leather restraints, but the jail did not possess proper autopsy facilities, and the préfecture had decreed that
he could not be moved, since his soul-less body had become the subject of an unusual legal dispute.

When Inspector Marot and I came in, my father was standing with his back against the wall to relieve his healing leg. His scowl was intense and unmistakable, and it did not take me long to discover why.

He was not the one performing an autopsy on Emile Oblonski; the autopsist was an elderly gentleman who, it turned out, was a professor of anthropology by the name of Vespard.

“What is going on?” I asked quietly.

“This is madness,” said my father. “Complete madness.”

About the cause of death there was no doubt. Adrian Montaine had shot Emile Oblonski straight through the chest, and the shot had ripped a hole in one of the pulmonary arteries. Oblonski had bled to death in a few minutes. It was therefore not the death certificate itself that was the problem, my father eventually explained, but something completely different and considerably more bizarre.

“They want us to test his humanity,” said Papa. “They want an attestation of the degree to which Emile Oblonski’s physiognomy, heart, and internal organs are different from that of a ‘human being.’ They have even set a threshold. They will permit deviations of up to ten percent.”

“What?” I said. “What kind of nonsense is that?”

“Adrian Montaine’s defense lawyer has demanded it. His argument is that murder is the killing of a human being. Ergo this cannot be considered a murder if Emile Oblonski was not . . . sufficiently human.”

“Of course he is a human being!”

I had said it a little too loudly. Professor Vespard looked up from the measurements he was in the process of making on Emile’s skull. He had cut open the scalp and exposed the cranium
and now stood dictating numbers to his assistant, a ginger-haired young man with glasses, all the while letting his caliper touch down on various points that looked as if they had been selected with care.

“Is this your wife, Doctor Karno?” asked the professor.

“No. This is my daughter, Madeleine.”

“I see. Would you mind pointing out to the young lady that loud comments are disturbing for a scientist in the process of performing an examination that requires precision?”

I think we all three stared at him with more or less the same expression.

Then my father said, quite calmly, considering the circumstances, “Let me know when you are done. But I must prepare you for the fact that I will personally retest your results.”

Vespard raised his caliper in a kind of salute, much like a cavalry officer would have raised his sword.

“Feel free, Doctor. My measurements will stand up to whatever form of test you choose to subject them to.”

“It is not your measurements that I doubt,” said my father. “It is your conclusions.”

I thought of the newspaper that Mother Filippa had saved for so many years. “The Wild Boy from Bois Boulet, Half Beast, Half Human.” There was perhaps a certain mercy in the fact that she would not see this.

We ate lunch at a small café close to the préfecture—Marot, the Commissioner, my father, and I.

“Do you really think that the defense will succeed with this tactic, Papa?” I asked.

“It is not impossible. There is already a great deal of compassion
for young Montaine and his family, and a jury will be grateful to have a legal excuse to let him go free.”

“But . . . How can anyone claim that Emile Oblonski is not human? He had an intellect, could speak, read, and write. What animal can do that?”

“Now he can do none of those things. And it will not be difficult to find witnesses who will declare that he was backward, mute, and uncivilized. His priapism was well known, and that will not help the case, either.”

I could see my father’s anger at this attack and his frustration at not being able to defend what he considered one of “his” dead. As for me, I sat picking at my coq au vin without much of an appetite.

“Did you get a handwriting sample?” asked the Commissioner.

The inspector nodded and placed the shopping list and the letter draft on the table.

“The daughter identified the handwriting in the Bible as her father’s, and even when you take into consideration that this is not printed with capital letters, I believe one can conclude that we are talking about the same hand.”

The Commissioner held the letter up to the light and nodded.

“It looks that way.”

That gave me an idea.

“Do you remember that particular death?” I asked. “Lisette Arnaud from Les Merises, about sixty years old?”

“The cook. Yes. But her name was not Arnaud; her name was . . . No, I cannot recall.”

No, of course. The letter was addressed to
Madame
Arnaud, the two sisters no longer had the same last name.

“Do you remember the cause of death?”

“Pneumonia. The family’s own physician had cared for her, and there was no reason for an autopsy, and no wish for it, either.”

So why had Imogene Leblanc not just said as much?

Of the three men, it was only Inspector Marot who had actually met her. And none of them had seen the pages from Cecile’s diary.

“Inspector, what is your impression of Imogene Leblanc?”

He was in the process of wiping a bit of sauce from his mustache with his napkin and now hesitated in midgesture.

“Why do you ask?” he asked.

“I just thought . . . I have the sense that she had a closer relationship to Cecile than you might think.”

“That is possible, but what bearing does that have on the case?”

“I don’t know. I just thought I should say so.”

He finished wiping.

“Until now there is nothing to suggest that Cecile’s tragic but natural death has any connection to the two murders Antoine Leblanc committed,” he said. “The only oddity is the peculiar abduction of Father Abigore’s body, which may or may not have anything to do with your unappetizing mites. Right now I am leaning toward the theory that Leblanc simply had a bizarre way of handling bodies, and that there was in his disturbed mind just as good a reason for putting the good father on ice as there was for placing the wolf . . . well, you know. Perhaps we just have not found the correct Bible quotation yet.”

I refrained from pointing out that the Bible had been created out of a Middle Eastern experience of the world, and that the word “ice” was not likely to be mentioned very often.

“Would it not be an odd coincidence,” I insisted, “that Leblanc’s madness was constituted precisely so that it made him do exactly what was necessary to prevent the spread of disease?”

“Would it not be even stranger if he knew of the mites’ existence? He had barely met the man, and as far as we know, he never met Cecile Montaine, either.”

He was right. And still I was left with a frustrated feeling that we were missing something.

“I understand from your father that congratulations are in order,” said the Commissioner, possibly to change the subject. I must have looked fairly uncomprehending, because he added, “On your engagement, dear Madeleine.”

I had in fact managed to forget all about Professor Dreyfuss for a while. No, about August, I corrected myself. Probably not normal behavior for a newly affianced young woman, but both the engagement itself and days that had passed since then had, of course, been somewhat peculiar.

“Thank you,” I mumbled and gazed at Papa. “But . . . nothing is final yet.”

Antoine Leblanc’s inquest took place in the préfecture’s courtroom the following afternoon at two o’clock. Imogene Leblanc showed up dressed in black from head to toe and accompanied by her uncle. He was somewhat older than his brother, a balding, well-dressed man who tipped his hat politely when he and Imogene greeted us on the way up the front steps of the building. He looked oddly untouched by it all, as if he had not yet realized what a cruel story he had become a part of.

The courtroom was from an earlier era when this part of the préfecture had been the town hall of a minor medieval market town. It was no more than twelve meters long by eight meters wide, with tall dark wooden panels and a vaulted ceiling, whose once colorful ornamentation was now faded and cracked so that trellised roses, mythical animals, suns and moons could barely be made out. At one end of the room the judge was seated beneath a carved canopy worthy of a pulpit, while witnesses and lawyers had to make do with the humble wooden chairs that had been set out in front of the empty dock. The usher showed my father,
the Commissioner, and myself to seats next to Imogene Leblanc and her uncle. Inspector Marot sat on the other side of the aisle together with Marie Mercier and Louis.

The spectator rows behind us were crowded. The investigating judge had pushed the inquest forward in an attempt to avoid the rumors spreading and attracting too many curious onlookers, but the strategy had been only partially successful. The newspapers had reveled in the murder of Father Abigore and the following hunt for his vanished corpse, and later in as many details about Mother Filippa’s death as they had succeeded in extracting from Marot. By shooting himself with a hunting rifle, Antoine Leblanc had cheated the public out of a fascinating and prolonged trial and a suitable climax under the guillotine. A public inquest was, however, unavoidable when it was also the conclusion to the entire murder case, and the public was obviously determined to get as much out of it as possible. Many in the audience were equipped with pen and notebook—clearly gentlemen of the press.