Doctor Death Read online

  “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.”

  Nevertheless, he immediately thereafter sent a message to the préfecture, as his position required.

  “Can we bring him to the chapel of his own church?” he asked my father.

  “Why not? He might as well lie there as in the morgue at the hospital.”

  “Good. Then let us get him home.”

  It was not yet possible to maneuver the corpse into a coffin, so Father Abigore lay on his humble stretcher in the public hearse, covered by only a simple shroud.

  “May we offer you a ride, Doctor?” asked the Commissioner.

  My father consulted his pocket watch. “Yes, please. I can walk from Espérance to the hospital.”

  The hearse was no stately funeral coach; ther
e were no upholstered seats or other comforts. Its unadorned, boxy body was lined with lead, partly to make it easier to clean, partly to lessen the smell when it was necessary to transport what the Commissioner prosaically called “late arrivals”—corpses found in the more advanced stages of decay. Of course, the lead lining increased the wagon’s weight considerably, so on this mild March morning it was pulled across the wet cobblestones by two solid Belgian draft horses. Hooves the size of buckets, muscles that made each mouse-gray rear end about a meter wide. Progress was steady, but not quick. My father might have chosen a faster hansom cab, in which case much would have been different. But he did not.

  It happened right by the embankment where the new promenade had just been established in the fall. The spindly linden trees planted at regular intervals along the river were still so young that they needed the support of their wrought-iron stands. At this time of day the wide walkway was empty because no society lady worth her lavender tea had begun even to think about rising from bed, and the working women hurrying across the Arsenal Bridge toward the power looms of the textile factory had neither the time nor the inclination to go for a leisurely stroll.

  A dog came running along the riverbank, a very big dog, rough coated and brindled, with pointed ears. Its tongue was lolling out of its mouth, and it was not jogging, it was flat-out racing, heading directly for the hearse and the horses.

  “What—?” said the coachman, who sat on the box next to my father and the Commissioner. That was the next-to-last word he spoke in this life. The dog launched itself at the nearside Belgian in a long, rising leap and closed its jaws around the muzzle of the horse. The animal screamed and threw up its head, both horses careened to one side and reared up, jerking the coachman half out of his seat as the heavy wagon teetered and only slowly recovered its equilibrium. The dog could no longer be seen from the wagon, but from the bite marks on the flank and groin of the horse it was later determined that it had continued its attacks from below.

  Belgian horses are known for their stoicism, but this was too much. With an ominous creaking of swingletree and traces, they threw themselves forward. The coachman had let go of the reins with one hand to haul himself back onto the box, but this new and more violent jerk flung him first into the air and then down between the horses and the wagon. One of the Belgians lurched into the other with such force that they both began to slide down the embankment. The wagon hit one of the trees of the promenade with a splintering crash, keeled over onto one side, and was dragged for almost fifty meters by the panicked horses. By then, both my father and the Commissioner had long since been thrown from their seats. The Commissioner rolled down the embankment’s grassy slope and miraculously escaped with minor bruises. Papa was less fortunate. He was briefly caught—fortunately not under the carriage’s heavy lead-lined body but under the box’s somewhat lighter wooden construction. When he attempted to sit up, he noted that both the radius and ulna in his left arm were broken, and a fracture of the tibia was quickly confirmed as well. In other words, he had broken both an arm and a leg.

  The coachman had the worst of it. He survived, but one of the Belgian’s enormous iron-shod hooves had connected so violently with his head that he never regained the power of speech. Only one word occasionally escaped his lips, randomly and without any connection to what was being said and done around him.

  That one word was “devil.”

  Papa flatly refused to be hospitalized at Saint Bernardine’s. He ordered two of the ambulance drivers to see the injured coachman off to the hospital with great speed, then directed the third to set and splint his own fractures, after which he allowed himself to be transported back to Carmelite Street in an ordinary carriage.

  His face was drawn and pale. I am deliberately avoiding the term “pale as a corpse” because there is a difference, but worryingly pale, all the same, and glistening with the perspiration brought on by severe pain. The hansom cab driver literally had to carry him up the stairs to the salon. Fortunately, the driver Papa had hired was quite a big man.

  “What happened?” I asked, between clenched teeth.

  My father did not answer. He was busy groaning. The coachman had to explain about “the accident with the carriage,” and it was not until later when the Commissioner came to check on the patient that I got the whole story.

  “The beast must have been crazed,” he said of the dog that had attacked them. “It must have been rabid. Healthy dogs do not behave that way.”

  “Did they catch it?” asked my father. “Has it been put down? Can we examine it?”

  “No,” said the Commissioner. “It disappeared. We have three riflemen patrolling the area, and we have distributed leaflets. But so far no one has seen it.”

  “Get ahold of Pasteur’s vaccine,” said my father. “Make sure you get plenty. It is a cruel disease.”

  The Commissioner nodded. “We have sent word to the Institute in Paris,” he said. He sat on the edge of the plush-covered mahogany armchair that he preferred. He had not relinquished his hat but sat turning it in his hands, seemingly undecided whether to stay or go.

  “May we offer you some refreshment?” I asked, because I wanted him to stay. It was easier to extract details from him than from my father. “Cognac? Coffee? A glass of wine?” I knew better than to offer him tea.

  “I probably should be getting on . . . ,” he said.

  “Presumably the search for the dog is not within your jurisdiction?” I asked.

  “No, but the . . .” He interrupted himself. “No, I have to go. I will come back later.”

  “What is it?” asked my father, who like me had noted the Commissioner’s unease. “Is it the coachman? Is he dead?”

  “No,” said the Commissioner. “They say he will probably live.”

  “What, then?”

  The Commissioner got up abruptly. “I have no wish to tire you,” he said.

  “And you do not. You are, however, making me very impatient, and that is not good for my health. What has happened?”

  The Commissioner shook his head. “It is Father Abigore. Or rather his earthly remains. They have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes. Someone used the confusion after the accident to abscond with the body. We have not yet been able to determine who or how, to say nothing of why.”

  My father blinked a few times, a sign that his thoughts were racing in close succession through his head.

  “There must be something,” he said. And repeated it, loudly and with frustration: “There must be something!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From the murderer’s perspective. Can’t you see that? We found the body too soon. It was not supposed to have been discovered until Paris. And now he has taken care of that by abducting the dead priest. And that means . . .” He attempted to sit up but found it difficult. “It means that there must be something about that corpse. Something I missed!”

  His eyes were glistening and his breathing was labored. He had taken some laudanum drops for the pain and was not used to their effect. Even though he could appear delicate, with his naturally slender body and his slightly stooped posture, he was seldom sick and apparently was not harmed by physical exertion or the long hours he habitually worked. He took his own good health for granted and did not accept the helplessness of being a patient with good grace.

  “Papa,” I said. “Please be careful. Lie down.”

  “That corpse must be found,” he said, pointing at the Commissioner with his good hand. “And as soon as you find it, you must inform me. Without delay. Do you understand?”

  He would never have spoken to the Commissioner in this peremptory manner if he had been himself. I think the Commissioner understood that. He placed a calming hand on my father’s bony shoulder.

  “My dear friend,” he said. “Of course. Now lie down and await events. I am on the case.”

  Out in the hall I helped the Commissioner into his coat and handed him his cane
and gloves.

  “Sweet Madeleine,” he said. “Take care of him. He is not well.”

  I almost began to cry. I had not cried when the coachman arrived carrying Papa nor when I understood how badly he was injured. But now the tears burned behind my eyelashes, and I had to bow my head to hide them.

  “I shall,” I said, and wished right then, in a moment of weakness, that there was someone to take care of me.

  Perhaps now is the time to mention my mother. We might as well get it over with. She died when I was ten years old, of cholera. There. I have said it, and we do not need to discuss it any further.

  At first my father lay on the chaise longue in the salon, but it was not well suited as a sickbed, so I asked our neighbor, Monsieur Moulinard, and his strapping son to carry Papa’s own bed down from his bedroom. It would have been easier to carry Papa up to a bed than the other way around, but he would not hear of it. I think he found the thought of increasing the physical distance to the laboratory unbearable, even if he was at present incapable of making the short trip from the bed through the service pantry and down the kitchen stairs.

  The salon, never particularly spacious, was now decidedly cramped. One had to edge around the tea table and the book cabinet, and any touches of bourgeois elegance the room might once have had evaporated entirely under the influence of pillows, bedpans, hot-water bottles, and all the usual paraphernalia of the invalid. It felt utterly wrong to see my father bedbound like this, with the distant, sweaty, damp expression the pain and the laudanum drops gave him. It made me feel uneasy.