Doctor Death (4 page)

The gentleman’s hat was pushed down onto his forehead, and a gray silk scarf hid most of his lower face so you could really see only his eyes.

“Yes, m’sieur!”

“Very well. Then I have a proposition for you.” The gentleman held out two coins. One was a twenty-five centime, which was a considerable amount of money. But the other . . .

“What kind of proposition, m’sieur?” said Louis, who could not stop looking at the other coin. A round shiny franc. A whole franc!

“When the clock up there”—the gentleman pointed at the Espérance church bell tower—“when it reaches eleven fifteen, then you must knock on the green door over there and deliver this message.”

“To the priest? But . . . that’s so late, m’sieur. Perhaps he will have gone to bed by then.”

“Then you will have to keep knocking until he gets up. Not a moment before, is that clear?”

“Eleven fifteen, yes, m’sieur.”

“Here is the first part of your payment.” It was the twenty-five centimes, of course. “You will get the other half when we meet here again—but that will not be until one in the morning. Can you manage that? Or do you have a mother who does not want you to be out that late?”

Grandma would carry on, scold, and maybe hit him if he did not come home before she went to bed. But it wouldn’t be the first time he had stayed out all night, and there was a whole franc at stake.

“No problem, m’sieur. You can trust me.”

“I am counting on that. Adieu, my friend.”

He spent the twenty-five centimes on a paper cone filled with roasted potatoes and garlic sausage ends, a specialty you could buy from Dreischer & Son on Rue Marronier. Ordinarily he would not have used all the money at once like that, but there was more to come. When the church tower clock struck the first toll of the quarter hour, he knocked on the door to the priest’s residence behind Espérance with the note held tightly in his left hand. It took a little while for anyone to answer, and it was not the priest himself but his housekeeper, who eventually came to the door with her hair poking out in disarray from beneath her cap and a big black shawl around her shoulders.

“What do you want?” she asked in an unfriendly tone, blinking her narrowed eyes.

“A message, madame. For the priest. I was to say it was important.”

The last part he came up with himself, but it
had
to be important when someone would pay that much money to have the message delivered.

She took it and shut the door in his face, with only a quickly mumbled “Thank you.” Just as well that someone else was paying him for his trouble!

He sat down with his back against the church wall, in the shelter of a large bush that provided a bit of protection from the wind as well as partly hiding him from curious passersby. A little later he saw the priest emerge, mount a bicycle, and drive away, with some hollow coughs and an irritated exclamation when one pedal slipped beneath his foot.

Louis smiled. Now all he had to do was wait for his big reward. It had been a good day after all.

Early the next morning, Arturo Udinese received a shock that gave him indigestion. “Shocking, shocking,” he repeated several times to his wife while he calmed his nerves with a cognac.

Mr. Udinese was the proprietor of a modest but popular brasserie just off July the 14th Boulevard, not far from the Varbourg East railway station. His customers consisted primarily of regulars, a builder or two, a few accountants, an occasional civil servant, and three or four retired officers from the nearby Veterans’ Home—all solid people who appreciated good food at reasonable prices. Mr. Udinese was therefore in the habit of buying his ingredients as cheaply as possible, which was the reason he got up this morning a bit after five, while darkness still hung heavily over the town, and made his way to the rail yard behind the station, where he was met by a track worker known to most people simply as the Shovel. The two men walked together across the tracks to a train
that had arrived from Stuttgart a bit after nine the previous evening. In the course of the evening, it had been emptied and loaded and was now ready to depart for Paris at six fifteen.

“And these are decent wares?” asked Mr. Udinese.

“First-class quality,” the Shovel assured him. “The entire first car is going directly to Hôtel Grande Duchesse.”

A number of bills changed hands, and the Shovel opened the sliding door—not to the Grande Duchesse’s wares, but to car No. 16AZ, number three in the lineup.

Mr. Udinese climbed into the boxcar. The Shovel handed him the guttering kerosene lantern that served as their only source of illumination. The lantern light flickered across stacks of wooden crates, piles of sacks, and rows of hanging carcasses. Great blocks of sawdust-covered ice kept the temperature at a level that was several degrees lower than the outside, even now in the morning chill. At one end of the car hung the halved or quartered cadavers of several full-grown steers, some pigs, and some lambs, while the plucked and skinned bodies of smaller animals like chickens and rabbits were packed with crushed ice into large wooden crates, a dozen to each one. The rough wooden floor of the boxcar was stained by dark puddles of blood, melted ice, and wet sawdust.

“Those twelve.” Mr. Udinese pointed at a box of plucked cockerels. “And a veal shank, and one of the lambs.” He moved farther into the car to find what he wanted.

“You can’t have all twelve,” said the Shovel. “What about six cocks and six hens?”

“How do you expect me to serve breast of cockerel in thyme sauce with just six cockerels?”

“Not all twelve,” insisted the Shovel. “The overseer is no more stupid than the next man.”

Mr. Udinese straightened up and looked sternly at the Shovel. “Sir,” he said, “there are other suppliers.”

“Not at this price,” said the Shovel. “Make up your mind. It will soon be light.”

Mr. Udinese sighed. “Fine, then. I suppose I will have to make a fricassee instead. Six cocks, six hens.”

He pushed aside a couple of quartered steers to make more room, hung the lantern on an empty meat hook, and raised the lid on a big crate that according to the label contained twelve soup hens.

It did not. The doubled-up figure of a man had been crammed into the box in a squatting position, and most of the body was covered with flakes of crushed ice. The extreme angle of the head revealed a closely shaved gray nape and two large waxlike ears, and you could see a red line where a collar had habitually rubbed against the base of the skull. The collar in question was a Catholic priest’s dog collar, and it was this, more than anything else, that enabled Mr. Udinese to recognize the man in the crate. His hand moved automatically in the sign of the cross.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said. “It’s Father Abigore!”

About an hour later, Father Abigore’s lifeless body was lying on a pallet in an unheated storeroom between the freight train yard and the railroad station. Rigor mortis had set in while the body was still in the soup-hen crate, and it had not been possible to straighten the priest’s sharply bent limbs without considerable use of force. Consequently, he was lying on his side now, curled up like a fetus in its mother’s womb, with his head pressed down against his chest. There were still flecks of ice in his hair.

Dawn had arrived, and in spite of the corpse’s position, one could see that the temple, the cheekbone, and the left eye socket had been hammered flat with a violent blow.

“Suspicious death,” the Commissioner noted. “Presumably murder. What do you think, Doctor?”

“It is hard to imagine that so considerable a lesion can have been caused by a fall or some other accidental occurrence. He was hit with an object more than twenty-five centimeters wide. My guess would be that he has been felled with a shovel or a spade, not with the edge but with the flat side of the blade—a coal shovel, perhaps? There seems to be some sooty residue in the wound. There was a great deal of power in the blow.”

“So we can call it homicide?”

“Everything suggests as much.”

The Commissioner nodded. “Then I will have to inform the préfecture. The chief constable will not be happy. A murder, and of a priest to boot. Can you give us a time of death? An approximation will do for now, for the purposes of the certificate, but Inspector Marot, or whoever will be in charge of the investigation, will no doubt soon be pressing you for a more precise estimate.”

The Commissioner had no jurisdiction over the police investigation. His job was merely to determine and attest the cause of death, and his authority went no further than the inquest. But all of Varbourg’s dead were under his jurisdiction. He was Le Commissaire des Morts—the Commissioner of the Dead.

“Rigor mortis is extensive but not complete. When was he found?” my father asked.

“A little after six. In a boxcar that was inspected at one ten last night according to the stationmaster’s log book. At that point there were no corpses except those of the slaughtered animals.”

“Hmmm. Then I would think that he must have died no earlier than eleven thirty last night. It would not have been possible to place him in the box if rigor mortis had already set in. On the certificate, you may write between eleven thirty and two thirty,
but in my opinion death must have occurred in the hour after midnight.”

The Commissioner grunted and made a note in his little black book.

“Who would smash in the head of a man of the cloth?” he said. “And this one in particular? There are much more disagreeable priests.”

“He did seem both compassionate and conscientious,” concurred Papa. “And why arrange the body in such a bizarre way?”

“To hide the crime, presumably. The murderer had good reason to assume that the train would depart for Paris according to plan, that is to say at six fifteen, so that the corpse would not be discovered until much later and in another city. That would have made the investigation considerably more difficult. Merely identifying the good pastor would presumably have taken several days.”

“But it would have been discovered eventually. There must be more effective ways of disposing of a corpse.”

The Commissioner nodded. “Normally they just throw them in the river. What do I know? Maybe it was too far to carry the body. Could the killing have occurred in the boxcar?”

“Perhaps, but unfortunately I do not know a method by which one can determine how much blood came from the animals and how much is poor Abigore’s. I would have expected spatters on the surroundings, not just blood on the floor. In my opinion, the boxcar is not the scene of the murder.”

The Commissioner growled, a short, unhappy sound. “Well. We will have to leave that to the police investigation.”

That clearly did not suit him, and my father permitted himself a small smile.

“You prefer to be closer to a solution before you let go of a case,” he said.

The Commissioner growled again. “I hate homicide,” he said.
“If some poor soul has died of pneumonia, then we know the cause. He was taken ill, and he died. And if the family wishes to know why, I can ask them to direct their questions to the Almighty. With homicide, it is different. There is such an unsatisfactory distance between the
cause
of a death and the
reason
for it. To know how is not the same as to know why. If someone asks, Why did Father Abigore die? I shall have to direct them not to Our Lord but to Inspector Marot, in whom I have nowhere near the same degree of faith.”