For a moment, the room was still, and I cursed myself and my eagerness. Normally I did not say anything during this kind of discussion unless I was asked. I did not want to draw attention to myself for fear that they would then avoid any subjects that were not considered appropriate when ladies were present. But I was the one who had looked the wolf in the eyes and found the source. They could not claim that I had nothing to contribute!
“That is a possibility,” said my father hesitatingly. “But it would be simpler and more effective to use fire.”
“It is no small matter to burn a corpse,” objected the Commissioner. “And a fire can create unwanted attention.”
“It all assumes a kind of consideration that I think strongly contradicts the nature of the crime,” said Marot. “We are speaking of a priest, a man of the cloth. And because of the false message, we know that the murderer had full knowledge of the victim’s name and calling, and in fact used it to lure him into a trap. He is unlikely to have been killed by a conscientious God-fearing good citizen.”
“This Oblonski,” said my father, “what do we know about him?”
“He is an orphan and apparently also a bit disturbed. Barely speaks to anyone and mostly keeps to himself. He grew up in the convent and for some years has had the main responsibility of the tending of the wolves. Cecile Montaine was apparently interested in the animals, and that was how they met. It is hard to imagine what a beautiful young woman from a family like the Montaines would see in a wretch like Oblonski, so I sincerely doubt that she went along voluntarily,” said Marot.
That entirely contradicted what both Sister Bernadette and Mother Filippa had said, and I felt obliged to say as much.
“In fact they believe that Cecile could have been the one who initiated the elopement,” I added.
“I find that very hard to believe,” said Marot. “She was engaged to a young man from one of the city’s best families, I’ve heard. Why on earth would she ruin her reputation and her future in this way? I know that young women occasionally allow themselves to be dazzled and throw all good sense to the wind, but by all accounts Oblonski was practically a half-wit and not very attractive. Not exactly love’s young dream.”
“How did the family react to her disappearance?” I asked. “Did they call the police?”
“No,” admitted Marot.
“Don’t you find that odd?”
“They must have feared a scandal.”
Avoiding scandal was certainly a significant goal in Madame Montaine’s life, as her actions in connection with her husband’s suicide attempt demonstrated. But if a family had reason to fear that their daughter had been abducted by a disturbed half-wit, would they not do everything to find her?
“To whom was she engaged?” I asked.
“Rodolphe Descartier.”
“Descartier? Of Varonne Commerce?”
“Yes.”
You could only describe that as a sensationally good match. Not only did the Descartier family stem from a branch of Varonne’s nobility, they also owned and directed Varonne’s largest bank. For the daughter of a meat extract manufacturer, this was something of a coup.
But one thing struck me.
“He did not attend the funeral, did he?”
“No,” said my father.
None of this particularly interested Inspector Marot, it seemed. He was, perhaps understandably, more concerned with Father Abigore’s murder and impatiently returned to that trail.
“These mites,” he said, and gestured in the direction of the microscope. “Are we certain that Father Abigore got them from Cecile Montaine?”
“It is the most obvious explanation,” said my father. “He was not the convent’s priest and has never been in contact with the wolves.”
“But could he have been in contact with Oblonski?”
“We cannot say for certain, but there is nothing to suggest it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I am trying to connect the pieces. Let us say that Oblonski has kidnapped Cecile. She becomes ill. Perhaps she escapes, or perhaps Oblonski has a crisis of conscience and brings her to her parents’ house. He cannot knock, of course, so he just leaves her in the snow. The family discovers her, but she is dying. They call a priest, he hears her confession and administers the last rites, and she dies. Oblonski now realizes that the priest knows of his crime and fears that he will be exposed. That is why he kills Abigore. Oblonski is strong and used to physical labor, and he would be able to use the weapon with sufficient power.”
My father opened his mouth, but Marot beat him to it.
“No, no, I know it. The brother said that she was dead when he found her. I guess we have to believe him.”
“The clinical facts support his explanation.”
“Perhaps Oblonski sent for the priest when he saw that she was dying? Can one assume he had that much decency?”
“Then Father Abigore would presumably have told the family,” said the Commissioner.
“The Seal of Confession?” Marot shook his head in frustration. “No, I know. It does not fit together. Perhaps there is no connection whatsoever between the murder and Cecile’s disappearance. Perhaps mites and illness and wolves are entirely without significance for Abigore’s death.”
“Except for one thing,” said my father.
“And that is?”
“If the body was in fact put on ice to prevent the mites from finding another host, then the murderer must have known that Abigore was infected with them.”
The look that Marot sent my father was almost tormented. He got up abruptly and walked over to the window, where he stood rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet for several minutes.
“It makes no sense,” he mumbled, “no sense at all.”
“Is there any news of Marie Mercier’s little boy?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” answered Marot. “I have three policemen out taking statements from people in the area near Espérance, so that we may try to trace his movements. I am expecting a report soon.” He consulted his pocket watch. “I am afraid I have to get back to the préfecture. But this has been most interesting.”
I got up as well to see them out. When the inspector noticed that I was putting on my hat and jacket, he paused in the doorway.
“Where are you headed?” he asked. “The Commissioner and I have a coach waiting downstairs. May we escort you?”
“If it is not too much trouble,” I said. “I am going to Monsieur Montaine’s to change his dressing.”
“Ah, yes. They say it was an accident with a gun?”
“Yes. That is what they say.”
Inspector Marot nodded. He could easily read the subtext. “Poor man. To lose a daughter in that way must certainly make life appear burdensome and meaningless. Will he survive?”
“If we avoid infection.”
“Poor man,” he repeated. He performed a sort of salute to my father, who had followed us onto the landing at the top of the stairs. “Thank you for your effort, Doctor. Although you have mostly just contributed to my confusion.”
“We should not fear confusion,” said my father with a small smile, “but rather embrace it. It leads to questions, and with a bit of luck, to answers.”
I thought about the Montaine family. About a beloved daughter who was not reported missing although she had disappeared. About a fiancé who did not appear at her funeral. About a mother who would do anything to avoid scandal. About a father who was a practicing Catholic and still in sufficient despair to commit a mortal sin by attempting to take his own life. Very well, I thought. I will embrace my confusion and ask a few questions of my own.
You could hear it as soon as you entered the Montaine family’s mansion. A low but penetrating moan, drawn out and rhythmic like breathing.
“Aaaaaah . . . ahhh . . . Ahhhhh . . . ahhh . . .”
It affected everyone. The maid who showed me in had bright red spots on her
cheeks and glistening eyes. And when Madame Montaine met me on the first landing, I could see that she had developed a nervous tic in one nostril, like a slightly too purebred racehorse.
“Has he not been given laudanum?” I asked.
“As much as we are permitted,” said Madame Montaine, her jaw so tense it vibrated. “It makes no difference. I have asked him to try to pull himself together for the sake of the children, but . . .”
I remembered Cecile’s little sister from the funeral, her rigid paralyzed shock. I hoped that someone was taking care of her now.
“Can you help him?” she asked. “This is . . . unbearable.”
“I will try,” I said. “But . . .”
“No, what can you do that our own doctor cannot? And his visits have no effect.”
The moans stopped for a breath or two when I entered the bedroom. My patient was conscious and had registered my presence. But after that it continued unchanged, a long whine of anguish followed by a short moan, yet another long moan, then another short one, on and on.
I observed him for a while. His eyes were closed, but there was a wet glimmer behind sticky eyelashes, and I knew that he knew who I was and why I had come. His hand, which had been lying limply on the blankets, moved slightly.
His fists were not clenched. There was no tension in the body, no rocking or throwing back of the head. The suffering that made him moan was not a simple message of pain from nerves in the torn tissue; even if the laudanum drops could not eradicate this physical pain, it was not this, but rather something different and more deep-rooted that tormented him.
“Monsieur Montaine,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you? Should I send for a priest?”
He opened his eyes abruptly and gave a single shake of the head. “Ooohhhh.”
I waited a moment, but there were no more words from the abused mouth.
“Madame,” I said without turning around, “may I be permitted to be alone with your husband?”
I could almost feel her stiffen.
“Why?” she asked.
“Tending the wound can be painful,” I said. “I do not think your husband would wish you to observe it.”
“Oh. No. If you are sure . . .”
She quickly left the room. She was already witnessing more of her husband’s pain than she could take.
I sat down next to the bed but did not yet open the bag.
“Monsieur,” I said, “would you tell me what it is that is troubling you?”
There was no answer. Just another moan.
“I cannot help you if you will not tell me. You do not need to speak. I can bring you pen and paper.”
The moaning ceased.
“. . . ehhh,” he said, but it was not a moan, it was an attempt to pronounce the word “yes.”
I opened the door. Madame Montaine stood right outside, so I could present my errand with no delay.
“Why?” she said again, and her nostrils vibrated more strongly than ever. “What is it you want him to write?”
Her resistance puzzled me. I did not understand how she could refuse so simple a wish.
“Madame, you have seen yourself how difficult it is for him to speak. I simply wish him to describe his symptoms for me, so I can ask my father’s advice on how best to alleviate them.”
She still hesitated a moment but perhaps sensed how odd her reluctance must seem to a stranger.
“Naturally,” she said. “I’ll ask Odette to bring his writing instruments up from the office.”
“Thank you, madame.”
When the writing implements arrived and I helped Monsieur Montaine to sit up a bit so he more easily could use them, there were only three words, printed in careful script and with much space in between:
Let me die
“I cannot, monsieur.”
He looked up at me with eyes that shone alarmingly and were full of hate. Then he lashed out at the pen, tray, and inkstand, so they scattered in all directions, and a shower of blue-black ink soaked the wool blanket and the sheet that covered his lower body. The stains imprinted the white surface like some alien form of calligraphy, but if there was a meaning hidden in their arbitrariness, it was not one that I was capable of deciphering.
“I would like to speak with the young master,” I said to the unappealing cook whose pots I had borrowed on the day of the operation.
“Monsieur is in the garden,” she said, and pointed at the green back door. Then she added with a grim smile, “Mademoiselle can just look for the smoke.”
The smoke?
But she was right. I could smell it as soon as I entered the back garden, and it was not long before I saw a thin column of bonfire smoke rising from among the fruit trees a little farther away.
He stood with folded arms, observing the fire. It was a small, untidy bonfire, quickly thrown together from dried grass, old asparagus stalks, twigs, and damp leaves, and it smoldered more than it burned, except when the flames reached a new asparagus stalk and blazed up in a crackling, short-lived explosion.
“Monsieur,” I said.
He started, turning around only slowly. Something had happened to him since I’d seen him last. His face had closed up, had become expressionless and plaster-like. The happy, extroverted young man I had glimpsed last time was now gone.
“Mademoiselle,” he said measuredly. “Have you come to help my father?”
“I have done what I could,” I said, fully knowing that it had been insufficient. “He is sleeping now.”
“Thank God.”
“Yes.” But he would soon wake up again, and it would start over, unless I could find a way to ease his mind as well as his body. “Monsieur, there was one thing I wanted to speak to you about.”
“And what’s that?”
“When your sister disappeared . . . You did not go to the police. Why is that?”
“We had no reason to believe it was a matter for the police.”
“Why not? Inspector Marot is not convinced that her disappearance was voluntary. And the last time we spoke, you yourself believed that Emile Oblonski was responsible for what happened.”
He did not answer, just stared at me with his new, dead face.
“Have they found him?” he asked.
“No.”
“You must excuse me,” he said. “They are expecting me at the factory. There is a lot to do in Papa’s absence.”
“Of course.”
But still he took the time to burn old asparagus stalks in the backyard?
“Monsieur . . .”
“Goodbye, mademoiselle,” he said quickly. “I must go now.”
He walked rapidly up the garden path to the house. I had to hurry if I wanted more of my questions answered.
“I understand that Cecile was engaged,” I said, rushing after him.
“Yes.”
“To Rodolphe Descartier. But he did not attend the funeral. Do you know why? Was it because of the Emile Oblonski affair?”
He stopped suddenly and turned toward me.
“There was no Oblonski affair. Descartier broke off the engagement several days before my sister disappeared from the Bernardine school.”
“Why?”
“You will have to ask him that. And now I really must go. Louise or Odette can show you out.”
He disappeared into the house and left me on the garden path with the scent of bonfire smoke in my nostrils and a dissatisfied itch under my skin. My attempt to embrace my confusion had not led to answers, only to more questions.
Bonfire smoke. Asparagus stalks.
There was no doubt that the Montaine family had a gardener who normally took care of such menial duties. And I remembered the grim glint in the cook’s eyes when she said, “Just look for the smoke.”
I hurried back to the bonfire, found a branch, and scattered the smoldering stalks, grass, and twigs.
At the center of the fire lay a book, blackened and charred on the outside but not yet burned through. I could still
see that it had been bound in leather, with a clasp and a lock of the kind found on some diaries. I did not doubt for a moment that it was Cecile’s.
I managed to maneuver it out of the fire with the stick and attempted to pick it up. I burned myself and had to let go of it, then tried to douse the embers by pushing the book through the wet grass, but I did not succeed. The pages curled and crumbled, and only individual words were visible briefly when a page burned through and I could see the next page beneath it.
Skin, I read. Dream. Tongue.
Yet another page disappeared.
. . . kisses . . .
. . . breath . . . my thighs
. . . penetrated deeply . . . inside . . . melted
. . . when I long to . . .
. . . told no one . . .
And then a last amputated sentence before the embers took the rest: is not enough!
I felt my own breathing change. There was something about the disappearing, smoldering words that made me tremble inside, a shiver I could not control. I pressed the palm of my hand so hard against my mouth that one of my canines cut into my lower lip, and a brief taste of blood mixed with my saliva.
Is not enough. No. It was not. I wanted more, wanted to know more. It was intolerable that Cecile was dead and could no longer tell me who she was.
“I came as soon as I read the telegram,” said Professor Dreyfuss. “The circumstances are, of course, unfortunate, but I have to admit that I find them interesting professionally.”
Sufficiently interesting that he had not hesitated for a moment to climb into the Commissioner’s resurrected hearse to go with us to the convent. He was somewhat more conventionally dressed today, in a gray suit and a derby hat, with a burgundy silk waistcoat as the only flamboyant note. He had not had the automobile with him in Heidelberg and so had been obliged to travel by train like ordinary mortals.
The hearse was necessary because we wished to bring home at least one wolf for autopsy and further examination. Large quantities of ice we had procured from the town’s fish market made sure that we did not spread living mites all the way to Varbourg.
The Commissioner sat silent and inscrutable and reacted only sparingly to the professor’s attempt at conversation. I myself had the irritating thought that the professor had now seen me three times in the same slightly worn traveling suit, this time at least with a short beige linen jacket in a bolero cut that was more comfortable in the hot weather than the woollen one that matched the skirt. He must think that I had nothing else to wear, which was sadly close to the truth. At least I had occupied a couple of winter evenings with adding a border of dark-brown ribbon to the edge of the collar, the sleeves, and the hem to hide the most threadbare places.
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