Doctor Death

  “No,” he said. “I know I am asking a lot of you right now, perhaps more than you are ready to cope with. I am sorry.”

  “No,” I protested. “That is not it at all.” My gaze fell on the collection of medical journals on the tobacco table next to the laudanum bottle. “What are you reading?” I was not asking merely in order to change the subject. My interest was genuine.

  “I was trying to find something that resembles our micrococci,” he said.

  “Did you succeed?”

  “I’m not sure. Fehleisen’s work with erysipelas is interesting. Did you know that he managed not just to cultivate the bacteria but also to inoculate several terminally ill patients with the erysipelas culture with amazing results?”

  “Yes. I read the article. I believe he actually managed to get a cancerous tumor to shrink?”

  “Yes. And cured a patient with lupus. But what is interesting in this connection is that although erysipelas is not restricted to humans, there are apparently distinct erysipelas bacteria for different species—one for humans, one for swine, one for horses, and so on.”

  “If we are dealing with a species-specific bacterium of the micrococci type . . . ,” I began.

  “. . . Then that might explain why the wolves did not get sick while humans do.”

  “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,” sa
id 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.

  “I understand from Christine that Cecile was not quite herself the last few days before she disappeared,” I said instead.

  “Her young man had broken off their engagement,” said Mother Filippa. “And I have the sense that the news was not received well at home. Are you suggesting that that is why she ran away with Emile?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But you believe it was her initiative?”

  “I assume so. Emile was not like that.”

  “Not even if you take his handicap into consideration?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand he had certain . . . troubles.”

  “What has Christine told you? There was nothing wrong with Emile.”

  “Inspector Marot seems to have got the impression that he was not quite right in the head.”

  “Mademoiselle Karno, I am about to get angry. Emile may need a bit more kindness and understanding than most people are willing to offer. But there is nothing wrong with his mind. And as far as Christine’s gossip goes, let me describe it precisely, so that there is no misunderstanding. When he is strongly moved, Emile gets an involuntary erection. It is an unhappy condition for him and it makes it difficult for him to be among people, which is one of the reasons he has found a haven here. And if you in your human charity cannot understand and accept that, I can assure you that God does.”

  I felt as if she had just pulled down my pants and given me a well-deserved spanking.

  “I . . . I just came to say goodbye,” I managed to stammer.

  “Of course you did, Mademoiselle Karno. Thank you for your visit. And thank you for bringing my old friend home.”

  I just nodded mutely and fled with my tail between my legs.

  That night Sister Marie-Claire was awakened a few hours after compline when someone knocked quietly on her door. In the hallway stood Mother Filippa, still in her nightdress, with a knitted shawl thrown hastily over her shoulders and just a scarf covering her short hair.

  “The new wolves are restless,” she said. “I heard them howl several times. And I thought I saw a light. I’m just going to check on them.”

  “Do you want me to come?” asked Marie-Claire.

  “No. Best if I go alone—in case it’s him . . .” It was not necessary to use names. “But I want you to go down to the kitchen and get some food. Bread, cheese, perhaps some smoked meat if we have it. Apples, there must still be some apples. Things that will keep, things that are easy to carry. And plenty of it, please. Just set it outside the wolf stables. Do not go in. It is enough that one of us may have something to hide from the authorities and Father Augustine.” Father Augustine was the sisters’ confessor.

  Marie-Claire smiled. “I think we have some smoked duck,” she said, “and ham.”

  “Thank you.” The two women exchanged a warm, conspiratorial look. But then a shadow crossed the abbess’s face. “I shall have to explain to him what happened to the old wolves,” she said. “It will be hard for him.”

  She disappeared down the corridor, with bare ankles in the frayed brown shoes she usually wore in the stables and the garden. An odd pairing with the nightdress.

  Marie-Claire listened but could not hear any wolf howls, only an owl from somewhere over by the a
pple orchards.

  In the cool cellar under the kitchen, she found the duck, kept in a jar covered by fat, and she also cut some generous slices from one of the smoked hams that hung from the ceiling on large iron hooks. Two whole loaves of bread, one white and one dark. Nine apples. But it had to be portable, Mother Filippa had said, so she emptied the last potatoes out of a sack and used that to pack the food in.

  When she came back up, the night was completely still. The owl was silent, and the moon shone pale and calm on the convent courtyard, so bright that the tall yews cast long blue shadows. She walked through the colonnade that connected the convent with the oldest stable buildings where the wolves were. And then she suddenly did hear a noise. She spun around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Only moonlight and columns, yews and long shadows.

  She put down the sack by the stable door as she had been ordered to do and returned to the convent. It was not until Mother Filippa failed to appear at the matins prayer that her unease led her to look for her in the wolf stables.

  Later she often asked herself just what she would have seen if she had opened that stable door the night before.

  III

  Mother Filippa lay on her back on the bare earth of the wolf pen with an odd neatness to her dead limbs—her arms along her sides, her legs straight and together, the nightdress smoothed so it almost covered her ankles. Her feet were bare. The morning light touched the white folds of the dress with a soft golden glow and lent the scene an air of false serenity, making me think of gilded icons and portraits of martyred saints.

  But there was nothing serene about this death. A bloody gash ran down the abbess’s face and continued along her neck and chest, under the nightdress. It looked almost as if someone had attempted to cleave her in two, like a log.

  “I suppose we may put ‘homicide’ on the certificate without further ado,” said the Commissioner.

  “Yes,” said my father. He could not kneel by the body, and stood awkwardly leaning on his crutch. “But I will have to get her on a table before I can say with certainty what kind of instrument was used.”

  A few paces from the abbess lay another dead body—the new male wolf’s. His fur was matted with blood, and a coil of his intestines hung out through an incision in the abdomen. A grimy trail of blood and feces led from the beast to the abbess, or perhaps the other way around. The Commissioner made a note in his book.