I could not understand why Mother Filippa had so carefully saved and hidden an article about something so generally known and so thoroughly discussed. I read it twice and still could not see that there was anything in it that was especially notable. Other than the article and some advertisements at the bottom there was nothing else. In those days, the Schnaebelé Affair had been the news, the only thing that was really worth writing about.
I carefully refolded the front page and put it in the box with the books. Then I turned around and looked the room over.
It had taken less than an hour and a half, and I had succeeded in removing every trace of the person who had lived here for more than ten years. In the physical world she had left only a light and fleeting mark, and it seemed brutal to remove it so quickly, and so soon after her death.
When I had delivered my boxes to Marot, I mentioned the name scribbled in Shockheaded Peter and told him where I had found the newspaper page. The newspaper did not really interest him.
“My wife uses newspapers as shelf paper,” he said. “She must just have failed to remove the old paper and placed the new on top. But the name is interesting. What was Mother Filippa called before she joined the order?”
“Sister Agnes suggested I ask the convent’s previous archivist. She is blind and no longer goes out into the world, but I have met her, and her mind is not weakened.”
“Yet another inaccessible witness?” His mustache stuck out aggressively. “How am I to conduct a murder investigation in this way?”
“It is just a simple question,” I said. “She is not a key witness, after all.”
“No, I don’t suppose she is, especially since she is blind. Fine. Go ask her and come back as quickly as possible with the answer.”
“There is something I should mention,” I said. “I overheard some kind of disagreement between Mother Filippa and a man yesterday. He was not someone I know, or have seen around the convent, but he was shouting at her, and I got the impression that she would rather not tell me why.”
“What did he shout?”
I tried to recall the words as precisely as possible.
“He called her the devil’s servant,” I said. “Not God’s.”
“What did he look like?”
I described him as well as I could—about fifty, dark haired, tall, and stocky, with broad shoulders, somewhat carelessly dressed but still clearly a man of a certain wealth and position—and I told what I could remember about the horse, which unfortunately was only its color.
“Someone must know who he was,” said the inspector. “I will make inquiries. Now, go talk to the blind nun.”
Sister Bernadette was still in bed. The news of the abbess’s death had hit her hard, and she simply did not have the strength or will to get up and face the trials of so cruel a day. Imogene Leblanc sat at her bedside, reading to her from the Book of Psalms.
“ ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul . . .’ ”
She turned the page with her arthritis-knotted hand and continued.
“ ‘He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .’ ”
Her eyes no longer followed the text; she knew it by heart. Sister Bernadette no doubt did as well, but there must have been consolation in the ritual, in the sound of the rustling of the pages, in the companionship of the familiar words.
“Excuse me,” I said.
Imogene looked up. “What do you want, mademoiselle?”
“Inspector Marot has requested that I ask Sister Bernadette a few questions.”
“She is not well.”
“It will not take long . . .”
Sister Bernadette pushed herself up so she sat leaning back against the pillows. Her face was even more lined than it had been when I saw her the first time, and the folds of skin around her blind eyes were swollen and red.
“It is all right, Imogene. Thank you for your concern, but if I can contribute in any way, it will do me good. Have a seat, Mademoiselle Karno.”
She had recognized me without hesitation, and when Imogene remained standing by the door, Sister Bernadette turned her face to her and said quite firmly, “Thank you, Imogene.”
And then the postulant was obligated to leave us alone.
“No one will tell me how she died,” said Sister Bernadette. “Only that she was killed.”
For a moment I imagined what it was like to sit there, helpless and unable to see anything but the pictures in her own mind.
“What do you want to know?” I said. “I am happy to answer if I can.”
She wanted to know everything. Not just the cause of death but all the circumstances, how it had looked, how and when the male wolf had died. She managed to extract from me even the body’s nakedness and the grotesque placement of the wolf, though I would have liked to shield her from that.
At last she sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I can hardly believe it, and yet I fear . . .”
“What, Sister?”
“They still have not found Emile?”
“No.”
“Is he suspected of the crimes?”
“I don’t know.” But I could imagine that Marot’s thoughts were leaning in that direction.
“Ohhhh . . .” This last utterance was a long, frustrated hiss, perhaps an expression of uncertainty.
“Sister Bernadette, there is something I need to ask you. What was Mother Filippa called before she joined the order?” When she hesitated, I decided to be more direct. “Was her name Louise-Clemente Oblonski?”
She shook her head slowly. “It is not as you might think.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Emile came here seven years ago, he did not have a name. She gave him hers. She always said that even though several hundred people called her mother, he was the only child she would ever have.”
Seven years. 1887.
“I thought he had been here longer.”
“No.”
“But he was not a baby. Why did he not have a name? He must have been ten or so by then.”
“He could not speak.”
“When I asked Mother Filippa, she said there was nothing wrong with his mental faculties.”
“No. He was intelligent enough. But how will someone who has grown up without human contact receive the gift of language?”
Suddenly I saw the newspaper in my mind’s eye. Not the article, though it was, naturally enough, what I had first focused on . . . but the advertisements at the bottom of the page. Among the ads for hair tonic and variety shows, there had been one for a traveling menagerie, which in addition to showing “deadly lions and tigers directly from Africa” boasted a true curiosity: “The Wild Boy from Bois Boulet. Half beast, half human. He speaks with wolves, and they do not harm him!”
“The Wild Boy,” I said.
“Yes. That is what they called him. But he was no more wild than you and I, just abandoned, and later caught and abused and exhibited like an animal.”
“He already had his . . . handicap back then?”
“Are you referring to his priapism? Oh, yes. That was a part of the attraction. And since he was terrified most of the time, it was presumably the high point of every performance.”
“And now you are wondering if he has killed Mother Filippa?”
“No. No, I cannot believe that. He worshipped her.”
“But?”
“No, it is just that . . . if you damage a child that badly, that early, and for so long . . . He is not guilty, don’t you see—no matter what he may have done.”
The hunt for Emile Oblonski officially commenced a few hours later. They hunted him as one would hunt a wild animal—with horns and horses, beaters, dogs, and riflemen on foot. Throughout the day one could hear the distant shouts, the baying of the bloodhounds, and now and then the sharp r
eport of a hunting rifle.
“Oh no, oh no. May God prevent them from shooting each other,” said Sister Agnes, who had arrived together with Sister Marie-Claire and six other nuns to escort Mother Filippa on the short trip from the hospital to the convent’s chapel.
“Amen,” said the Commissioner with particular emphasis. “I am not sure that it is wise to allow so many amateurs to participate. But, on the other hand, the professional effort to find Oblonski has admittedly failed miserably up to this point.”
Perhaps I had been infected with a hint of the protectiveness that Mother Filippa had felt, because my concern was not so much for the hunters as for the one they hunted.
“I hope they do not kill him,” I said quietly. “They are so angry and so . . . self-righteous.”
The Commissioner loosened his collar with an index finger. His night had been interrupted twice; before Mother Filippa, by a kitchen maid who had chosen to fill her apron pockets with rocks and throw herself into the river from the Arsenal Bridge, presumably because she was five months pregnant and could no longer hide her condition from her master. The lack of sleep was evident in the Commissioner’s bloodshot eyes and the increased heaviness in his movements.
“Inspector Marot has made sure that every group has a responsible leader with either police or military experience,” he said. “Men who can maintain discipline. Do not worry, dear Madeleine, we will catch him alive.”
But I knew him too well. He was far from serene himself.
Mother Filippa’s body was now dressed in the habit she had worn most of her adult life. The crucifix from her cell lay on her chest, and there were no outward signs of the incisions my father had performed during the autopsy. Even her face looked less disfigured—we had pulled the skin over the injury and closed the long wound with tiny, almost invisible stitches.
Four nuns carried her, while two others walked in front, and the two last, Marie-Claire and Agnes, made up the procession’s rear guard.
“Salve Regina,” they sang while they walked, not especially beautifully or loudly, but with great sincerity. “Mater misericordiae.” And when they reached the wrought-iron gate to the closed part of the convent, they were met by a gray host of Bernardine sisters, who added their voices to the old antiphon, so that the notes gained strength and fullness and carried the abbess home.
It was at that very moment that we heard a series of shots from the woods behind the field, and several hunting horns blew the signal “Hunt Over.” They had found Emile Oblonski.
He lay curled up on the bed of the wagon on which they had transported him. His face was swollen and discolored, and it later turned out that his chest, abdominal cavity, and especially the genital region were bloated with blood and damaged by numerous kicks and blows. He was mercifully unconscious.
“Maintain discipline?” said my father in an unusually sharp tone. “If this is discipline, I would hate to see the result of anarchy.”
“He is alive,” said Inspector Marot. “And the use of force is necessary when a suspect resists arrest.”
I did not say anything, but my jaw hurt from remaining silent.
“He must not be moved any farther,” said my father with his teeth similarly clenched. “God knows what kind of internal bleeding he has suffered, and whether he will survive the night. Besides, we will need to isolate him until we know whether he is infected. If he is, we will have to examine all those who have been in close contact with him during the arrest.”
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.”