Supported by his crutch, my father came limping out into the garden, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat with his hair still damp.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said to Adrian Montaine. “What can I do for you?”
Cecile’s brother darted a quick sideways glance in my direction, but our conversation had apparently already been sufficiently confidential for him to feel he could speak freely.
“Monsieur le Docteur, we hope you can help us. My father . . . My father has been in an accident.”
“An accident? How so?”
“His . . . a gun went off. An injury to the jaw. Our own doctor has done what he could to stop the bleeding, but he believes an operation is necessary if my father is to survive.”
“Did you bring him to the hospital?”
“No. We were afraid of that journey . . . and besides . . . My mother has asked me to say that she is hoping you will be discreet.”
My father looked at the young man without expression for a few seconds. He knew as well as I did what this meant. This was no accidental shot, and any doctor who was not blind in both eyes would be able to see as much. Madame Montaine was trying to protect the family and her poor husband against yet another scandal.
“I see,” he said simply. “But at the moment I am not in a position to carry out an operation without assistance.”
“Our own doctor . . .”
“Does he have experience with surgery? Ether? Lister’s antibacterial regime?”
Adrian Montaine looked confused. “I don’t know.”
Papa sighed. “Fine. Either you must permit me to call in a colleague and inform him of the case. Or my daughter will have to assist me.”
An entirely unsuitable little prayer almost escaped my lips. Choose me. Choose me. Choose me.
“Is your daughter . . . ?”
“Extremely well qualified, yes.”
Thank you, Papa.
The Montaine family lived in one of the more stately homes along Boulevard Saint-Cyr. The family fortunes had been founded on a meat extract, Bovillion, which was sold in colorful cans with a picture of a fat soup-tasting cook who ecstatically murmured, “Mmmmh. C’est bon—c’est Bovillion!” But it was produced at a factory down by the railroad, and Madame Montaine’s elegant salons bore no sign of that colorful vulgarity. Here all was pale rose and pearl gray, with silver and crystal accents. Adrian Montaine’s bedroom had a similar aesthetic. The heavy rose velour curtains were closed and the pile in the pastel-colored Chinese carpet was so long and thick that one sank into it as if walking on a lawn.
The man in the bed lay unmoving. His breathing was a wet, animal-like snuffle, the effect of both blood and fluid in the throat, and of the massive dose of laudanum the family doctor had given him to make the pain tolerable.
He had shot himself through the mouth, but had done it at such an angle that the bullet had torn its way out through the cheek and upper jaw instead of going up through the brain, as had presumably been the intention. There was thus no visible entry wound, only the jagged, bloody exit, with a diameter of ten to fifteen centimeters. One could see bone fragments and shattered molars through the hole.
“How much laudanum has he received?” asked my father.
“Twelve milliliters,” answered the family physician, a Doctor Berger.
“Then we will have to wait,” said my father through clenched teeth.
“Wait? But he—”
“If we give him ether now, we risk paralyzing his ability to breathe,” my father interrupted him. “We have to control the bleeding and stabilize him as well as we can, but I cannot operate until his breathing is less labored.”
In the meantime, he chose the adjoining bathroom as a reasonably suitable operating theater. A frightened chambermaid was set to scrubbing the ceiling, floor, and walls with a solution of carbolic acid, and a table from the kitchen was carried upstairs and cleaned. I went down to the kitchen with the maid and asked the cook to boil some water so I could scald the instruments.
“Is it true that the master has shot himself?” she asked. There was a peculiar half-repressed excitement in her gaze, as if she were already imagining what it would be like to regale her friends with the tale: there he was, I tell you, gurgling as if he were choking on his own blood . . . She was a bony, skinny woman with iron gray hair, and I immediately disliked her. I had no desire to add grist to her gossip mill.
“There has been an accident,” I said. “May I borrow a slotted spoon and a tray, preferably metal?”
She showed me two trays, one in silver and a less fancy one in pewter.
“Is he going to die?”
I looked at her. If she had been a decent person, she would have asked me, “Is he going to live?”
“I cannot say,” I said. “Thank you, that one is fine.” I took the pewter tray because she would presumably protest if I dumped the silver one into the boiling water.
At least the place was clean. No dirty dishes, no smell of old leftovers, and only a single winter-surviving fly buzzing against the windowpane in an attempt to get out. The cook stared at me with unfriendly eyes. I think she was having a hard time figuring out how to address me. I was dressed as if I belonged upstairs in the parlors, but then what was I doing down here, performing a task that in her eyes was probably servants’ work?
“All this carrying on,” she mumbled, executing a fly with a quick and efficient swat of a kitchen towel. “And all because of that little missy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I am not one to gossip. But you see things. And a real lady . . . Mademoiselle was hardly that!”
I fished the instruments out of the boiling water with the slotted spoon and arranged them on the tray. Then I went upstairs without saying another word.
It took more than an hour to remove the bone splinters and tooth fragments, tie up the largest of the damaged arteries, reconstruct the split upper jaw as well as possible, and pull the skin across the wound so it could be closed. I had to carry out a considerable part of the operation, much more than I had ever been permitted to do before, because my father still had only limited use of his left arm. His calm and precise instructions helped me through it, and I could not help thinking that this was the way it could be, the way it should be. He had taught scores of students at Saint Bernardine, not all of them God’s gift to surgery, but it required two broken limbs before he treated me as something more than his occasional assistant.
It was only when the last sutures were in place that my hands began to shake and I felt a deep exhaustion that made my knees a bit unsteady. My father removed the ether mask, and I sprayed the wound one last time with carbolic acid before placing a bandage on it. Montaine was still breathing heavily, but with less difficulty now.
He had not used a powerful handgun but rather a small, ornate pocket pistol, by Flobert. Otherwise he would probably not have survived.
“Do not touch the bandage,” said my father. “My daughter will come and change it once a day.”
He didn’t dare to leave this part of Montaine’s care to the family or to the amicable but not very modern Doctor Berger. Antibacterial treatment required diligence and experience, and an infection now would most likely be deadly.
Montaine was coming around. There was a wet glint under his swollen eyelids, and his breathing contracted in an abrupt gasp. A sound came from him, an unformed word he could not finish because of the immobilized jaw.
“O! O! O!” he gasped, and it was more than an inarticulate keening. It was a denial and a desperate attempt to refuse life. He was trying to say “No.”
Darkness hugged the street, and the night was still unusually warm when the hansom cab stopped in front of our house on Carmelite Street.
“Fffffff . . .” My father inhaled sharply the moment he placed his crutch on the cobblestones and transferred his weight from the cab’s seat to his own legs. Or rather, his own leg. The broken one could not yet support him.
&nbs
p; “Let me help . . .”
“No, Maddie, I am perfectly capable. If you would just take the bag.”
The front door opened, and the Commissioner emerged.
“Elise said you would be back soon, so I waited for you,” he said.
“You have news?” asked my father.
“Yes. You can get back into that hansom cab. We have found Father Abigore.”
“Pull yourself together, Sophie,” hissed Madame Ponti to her sobbing maid. “It is hardly the end of the world . . .”
“He . . . he . . . he,” the girl stammered, and pointed in the direction of the ice cellar with her wobbling index finger. “I touched . . . I touched . . .”
She proceeded no further in her explanation. Her wet face looked dark and reddened against the white bonnet she was wearing. It covered her hair completely, so that one could not see the color of it, but her eyes and eyebrows were black, and there were dark hairs on her exposed underarms and a downy shadow on her upper lip. She still clutched the ice pick in her left fist, in spite of the fact that it must have been at least an hour since she had gone down into the ice cellar to get supplies so that Madame Ponti’s guests could enjoy a cool glass of white wine on this unusually warm evening. No one had been able to persuade her to let go of it.
Madame Ponti turned to the Commissioner. “How long will it take to move it?” she asked.
“Not long,” he said. “Doctor Karno and I just need to perform certain examinations in situ, as it were. An hour at the most, I would think.”
She did not look as if this suited her. Madame Ponti was a lady of about fifty, fairly well known in Varbourg society in spite of the fact that she hardly ever stepped out. At the age of forty-five she had married an Italian manufacturer, which in itself wouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy. What caused the gossip was her past as a vaudeville artist in Paris.
It didn’t show. She was dressed in a dove-blue taffeta dress, which revealed a still almost perfect hourglass figure but was otherwise quite conservative. Her golden-blond hair was in an elegant evening coiffure, not boldly loose as in one of the postcards that had once circulated in the kiosks of Varbourg.
“I suppose I might as well send the guests home,” she said. “Nothing suggests that Sophie will be capable of serving anytime soon.”
“Madame, unfortunately I must ask that you detain your guests a little longer,” said the Commissioner. “Since we are dealing with a crime, it’s necessary for everyone in the house to be questioned.”
Madame Ponti stared fixedly at him for several seconds.
“One of the guests is a chief justice at the préfecture,” she said. “Claude Renard. I presume you know him.”
The Commissioner smiled politely. “Unfortunately, that makes no difference, madame.”
The Commissioner occasionally resembled his ultimate employer in his impartial obduracy; like Death, he was completely unaffected by position and class. He could not be fired, and there were no promotions to strive for. He was invited to dinner parties like that of Madame Ponti’s no more regularly than my father was. But sooner or later he visited everyone.
Madame Ponti looked him over with the gaze that had once been described by the society pages as “smoldering sapphire.” She determined, quite correctly, that there was nothing to be done.
“Fine,” she said. “I can get the cook to set up a buffet, I suppose. You may find us in the conservatory when you wish to speak to us.”
She gave one last irritable look at the still incoherent Sophie and turned to leave in a swish of taffeta and petticoats. Then she stopped in midexit.
“I assume all the ice will have to be thrown out now?” she said.
“I think that would be wisest, madame. For reasons of hygiene.”
The ice cellar was not under Manufacturer Ponti’s elegant Empire home but behind it, beyond the carriage shed and the stables, and was completely subterranean, so that only the top of the steep stairs was visible. I hastened to take my father’s arm, not just because I knew he needed help to manage the steps, but also because it gave me the opportunity to join him in the cramped cellar.
The blocks of ice had been placed in large zinc-lined wooden stalls, and at this time of year they were all filled up, so it was like turning back the seasonal clock from spring to sudden winter. My short bombazine jacket was completely inadequate and I soon began to shiver.
Father Abigore’s earthly remains lay in one of these stalls, directly on top of the ice block and squeezed in between two of the sturdy beams that supported the ceiling. One arm had slipped and stuck out into the air; otherwise you would not have noticed the dead figure right away.
The Commissioner took one of the two lamps that hung on the wall and attempted to illuminate the scene better, but it was not easy.
“I can’t see a thing,” he said. “We might as well take him down at once.”
At this point almost twelve days had passed since death had occurred, and decomposition had naturally set in. Still, the smell was not as strong as you might expect. When we got the corpse onto the floor, my father’s mercury thermometer showed that the body had cooled to between zero and three degrees Celsius, depending on the extent of its contact with the block of ice.
I was not prepared.
That is the only excuse I have.
One side of his face was his own—brow and eye socket, stubble-covered chin and jaw, and an eye that was carefully closed in the hollow of the eye socket. Death had removed much of his personality, but his humanity was still there.
But the other eye no one could have closed. The blow had been so powerful that both brow and cheekbone had been hammered flat, and there was no longer a socket in which the eye could rest. It had popped out and instead ran and melted down the remains of the nose cartilage.
I had just assisted at an operation of a person who had been equally disfigured without feeling any need to swoon or tremble. Why I reacted so strongly now puzzled me. I thought I had long since left behind my fear of the dead.
But the dead were not usually familiar. I had never before seen a murdered human being whom I had met and known in life.
Suddenly, I could not breathe. At least not enough. The cellar darkness swirled around me, and I grasped frantically at the nearest object on which I could steady myself. This happened to be the Commissioner’s left arm.
“Madeleine . . . what is wrong?”
His words echoed at once far away and much too close. And it was too late to pretend that I was not affected, even though I tried.
“I just stumbled,” I said, lips clenched. “Nothing happened.”
But I had become visible again. I had revealed myself. Woman. Young. Fragile. Everything I did not want to be.
“You had better go up, Maddie,” said my father.
It was no use arguing. I had to leave the cellar and sit and wait in the hansom cab while they brought a stretcher down and carried the body up and across to the ambulance that served as a hearse while the Commissioner’s own vehicle was being repaired.
By the wrought-iron fence that separated the property from the street a number of curious bystanders had gathered. Two nursemaids, each pushing a pram, stood staring uninhibitedly. An older couple had interrupted their evening walk and were observing the scene with slightly more discretion. On the other side of the street, a broad-shouldered man in tweeds had stopped, even though the dog he was walking was whining impatiently. A newspaper boy halfheartedly announced that the evening edition of the Varbourg Gazette could be had for ten centimes, but it was clear that his real interest concerned what was happening on the other side of the fence. That was probably why he noticed me.
“Mademoiselle,” he shouted. “Please.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Is it old Ponti? Has he shot himself?”
Shot himself?
“Why on earth would he do that?” I could not help asking.
“Is it him?”
“No,” I s
aid. “It is not someone from the house.”
The gossip mill was clearly already grinding. How thrilling for Madame Ponti, I thought. But then, she was probably used to it.
Even though it was late, and he was presumably about to keel over with exhaustion, my father insisted on performing yet another examination of Father Abigore’s body that very evening. This time, a constable from the préfecture stood guard outside the morgue, and I was not allowed to assist. To my great regret I was sent home in a hansom cab and thus was not present for the autopsy that the Commissioner gave my father permission to perform.
When he came home, I could see at once on his face that something had happened. The Commissioner had to help him up the stairs, and while I presumed he was again in severe pain, this was not what disturbed him. “Turn up the light, Maddie!”
There was an edge to his voice that made me obey without question.
“Sit there. Put your head back.”
“Here?”
“Yes, so the light falls properly.”
On what? Perhaps I understood that he wanted to examine me before the Commissioner handed him the magnifying glass but not why. He bent over me, and I could smell the distinctive perspiration caused by pain even through an otherwise penetrating smell of carbolic acid.
“Raise the lamp,” he ordered the Commissioner. “No, a little higher.”
With a speculum held clumsily with the fingers protruding from his cast, he dilated my left nostril first and then my right, examining them thoroughly with the magnifying glass. Then he extracted some of the nasal fluid with a pipette. He held the pipette up to the light and studied its contents at length.
“Open your mouth,” he commanded, and carried out a more normal examination of my throat.
“I am fine,” I said when he was done depressing my tongue and observing my tonsils.
He did not answer but at least allowed himself to drop down onto the chaise. I could now see that his healthy hand was also trembling with exhaustion or agitation.