Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "Okay, so who in Marseilles would want to send you a letter-bomb?"

  "Nobody. Nobody in Marseilles would want to send me anything. I don’t know anyone in Marseilles."

  "Mm," said John. "Well, moving right along, you check the handwriting on the address. If it looks disguised—"

  "Block letters," Gideon said grimly.

  John laughed. "Okay, block letters. Boy, you really think someone’s trying to blow you up, don’t you? Well, you could check it for flex."

  "Flex?"

  "You bend it—but only a little. A lot of these things have spring tension mechanisms in them, and they feel kind of springy. Sometimes you can even hear the metal creak."

  Gideon delicately picked up the envelope by two corners, lifted it to the level of his ears, and very gently—

  "Hey!" John shouted, "Go bend that thing somewhere else! What are you trying to do?"

  Gideon put it back down and gave John what he thought was a first-class imitation of Inspector Joly’s Jack Benny gaze. "I thought," he said, "that this was mere paranoia on my part."

  "I just think," John mumbled, "that if you’re really that worried about it, maybe you ought to call Joly’s office."

  "If I’m worried about it," Gideon said with richly satisfying contempt.

  JOLY was at Rochebonne, and neither Denis nor Fleury was at the hôtel de police. The sergeant on duty was not so much unsympathetic as incurious, reeling off bored, monotonic questions like a recording: Has someone threatened you? Do you have reason to think someone wishes to harm you? What reasons do you have for thinking this package might contain a bomb? The answers did nothing to arouse his interest, and Gideon was told he needn’t bother to bring the object to Dinan. Merely leave it with Sergeant Mallet at the hôtel de police in St. Malo. The sergeant would be happy to take care of it, and the police would be in touch with le professeur in due course.

  Glad it had not been Joly he’d talked to, Gideon hung up sheepishly and thought seriously about opening the damn envelope and forgetting about Sergeant Mallet. But in the end, having set (he thought) the wheels of the Police Judiciaire in motion, he felt it would be better to follow through.

  The envelope was duly left at the police station with Sergeant Mallet, or rather in his absence with a harassed young policeman who was trying to mediate a noisy argument between a stall-owner from the Place Poisonnerie and a motorist who had allegedly run over a fish. (Gideon might have mistrusted his translating abilities but for the indisputably flattened sea bass on the counter.) And by

  9:30 a.m., only half an hour late, they were in Dr. Loti’s office in St. Malo’s elegant old Place Guy-la-Chambre, just inside the ramparts at the St. Vincent Gate.

  THIRTEEN

  DR. Loti’s consultation room was a Frenchman’s version of Norman Rockwell’s idea of what a doctor’s office ought to look like: ageing books, heavy old mahogany furniture, a few comfortably faded red-plush chairs stuffed with horsehair, a worn, good carpet on a gleaming wooden floor, a big desk of golden oak. Pierre Loti himself looked something like an elderly Michelin Man, large and cheerful, with a round, pneumatic-looking torso. He sat behind his desk, fingers interlaced comfortably on his vest-clad abdomen, leaning back in his wooden swivel chair and staring at the ceiling while he talked. And talked.

  "Forgetful?" he said. "Do you mean, was he senile? Did he have Alzheimer’s disease? Did he lose track of where he was, so that he had to be led home? No-no-no-no." His wattles jiggled as he shook his head.

  "On the other hand, it’s true that he’d been getting a little absentminded with time, yes. A little impatient with the needs of others, a little set in his ways. A man of a certain age has a right to it, don’t you think so?"

  "I certainly do," Gideon said politely. Dr. Loti was no more than five years younger than Guillaume had been, if that.

  "Certainly," Dr. Loti agreed. "But you know, a good many people don’t know the difference between a mind that’s empty or confused, and a mind that’s truly‘absent’; that is, somewhere else, concentrating quite efficiently on some abstract or distant problem and ignoring the immediate trivialities of the moment." He nodded, tilting himself a little further back in the chair, pleased with the way he’d put it.

  So was Gideon, who tucked this appealing perspective on absentmindedness away for the next time he had to defend himself for unthinkingly dropping a batch of letters he’d just received into the next mailbox he passed. That or something equally trivial.

  "In that sense of the word," Dr. Loti rambled on, "yes, I think you could say Guillaume was absentminded. Enough so, regrettably, to cause his death."

  "You think he was concentrating so hard on his collecting that the immediate triviality of the incoming tide caught him by surprise?"

  Dr. Loti chuckled softly. Not many people can chuckle convincingly, but Dr. Loti was an exception. His eyes closed and his shoulders shook, and a low rumble vibrated comfortably out of his belly. "Well, yes, I do. Of course. What else?" In half an hour, this was his most succinct response.

  "What’s going on?" John asked Gideon. "You going to let me in on this?"

  "Sorry," Gideon said. The physician’s maundering French, punctuated by throat-clearings, chuckles, and snufflings at a cigar that was out more than it was lit (Dr. Loti seemed to enjoy it either way) had been taxing his

  ability to understand, and he had neglected to translate for a few minutes. He summarized briefly.

  John shrugged. "Makes sense."

  Yes, it did. On logical grounds he still had little reason to think there was anything more to Guillaume’s death than everyone said there was. There was only the intuitive, nagging feeling that it just didn’t sit right; strolling out into the most dangerous bay in Europe without a tide table simply didn’t sound like Guillaume du Rocher, regardless of where his mind happened to be at the time. It wasn’t much to go on, even with the provocative but conjectural questions Julie had raised.

  "Just one more question, Dr. Loti—"

  "As many as you like, as many as you like. It’s Sunday morning; no patients." He leaned expansively forward to get the soggy, dead cigar stub from his ashtray and stick it in his mouth, the better to consider the next question.

  "I was told that Guillaume only had a year to live. Is that accurate?"

  "Close enough. I told him so at his last examination in January. Maybe one year, maybe two. His kidneys weren’t functioning properly, his spleen, his liver …The damage he’d suffered during the Occupation was finally taking its toll." He picked a few moist shreds of tobacco from his lips and chuckled reminiscently. "But knowing him, it would probably have been closer to two years. He was quite something, Guillaume du Rocher."

  "Mm." Nothing was leading anywhere. As Joly had cogently pointed out, with Guillaume so close to dying anyway, why would anyone kill him? Not for an inheritance, certainly. He began to get himself ready to admit to John that his trusty intuition might have overstepped itself this time. It wouldn’t be the first time, as John would be sure to point out.

  "Look," Dr. Loti said, "let me show you something. You’re interested in these things." He billowed out of his

  chair and over to his oak file cabinets, emitting as he went a faint, clean scent of lavender. He rummaged for a moment, then waved a sheaf of X-rays at Gideon and began slipping them one by one into the clips of a shadow box on a side table; the only touch of modern medical technology in the office.

  "Just look at this," he murmured happily to himself as he got the transparent photographs up, sat down in front of them, and flicked on the fluorescent lights behind them. "It’s astonishing. Look at that…Just look at this…" He motioned John and Gideon nearer.

  "You go ahead, Doc," John demurred. "You can explain it to me later."

  "Now," said Dr. Loti to Gideon, "you know your bones. What would be your prognosis in this case?"

  "I’m not too good at reading X-rays, Doctor. I don’t—"

  "Never mind. Just for fun. Pretend you
’re a physician. What’s the diagnosis?"

  Gideon sat down next to him and leaned forward to study the two rows of photographs. He couldn’t make much of the muzzy gray shadows that represented the soft tissues, but he could see that the pictures were all of one person, and the condition of the bones made him wince.

  "So what would you say?" Dr. Loti urged. "Will he live?"

  "Will he live? I’d say he was already dead." He pointed at various photographs. "Six, seven fractured ribs; crushed left maxilla, shattered orbit—my God, some of the pieces aren’t even there." His finger skimmed the bottom row. "Crushed right humerus, fractured left ilium…And the legs! It looks like a tank ran over them…You’re not going to tell me this is Guillaume?"

  Dr. Loti laughed and nodded proudly. "Taken August 16, 1944; the first time I ever saw him, in the hospital in St. Servan—two days after the liberation of the cité. And you’re right, in a way. An ordinary man would have been dead twice over. Oh, he wasn’t far from it. He’d been under the rubble of a building on the Place Gasnier-Duparc for ten hours. Ruptured spleen, punctured lung, lacerated liver, crushed larynx…And every wound was septic. He was raving, delirious, hallucinating; for days he didn’t know who he was. A sensible physician would have given up. But me, I persisted." He gazed fondly at the transparencies.

  Gideon gazed too. Guillaume’s visible scars, shocking as they’d been, had given no idea of the devastation beneath. "It’s amazing that he lived."

  "Not only lived, but recovered, insofar as a man with such injuries can recover. But a missing eye, a paralyzed arm, a few metal pins and struts—these were mere annoyances to Guillaume. Overcoming physical disadvantages was nothing new to him. As a child his health had been very delicate, you know."

  "No, I didn’t. But didn’t you say you didn’t know him before 1944?"

  "Yes, but I saw the family records later. Of all the du Rochers, he was the only one who was a sickly child: rickets, asthma, rheumatic fever. They had little hope for him, but in the end he was a bigger success than all the rest of them put together. Well, he didn’t let his war wounds stop him either. As soon as he was well enough, he went back to pursuing his business and he prospered. He died a much richer man than his father, did you know? When he retired in 1975 he was still going to Paris three times a week. He was on nine boards of directors. And he managed to live a full life besides."

  Dr. Loti leaned forward, exuding lavender, mouthwash, and damp cigar. "You know what I mean when I say‘a full life’?" His eyes twinkled.

  "Uh, yes…" Gideon said uncomfortably. He wasn’t anxious for a clinical description of Guillaume du Rocher’s sex habits. "Well," he said, standing up, "thanks very much for your time, doctor."

  "My pleasure, young man." The physician flicked off the lights behind the X-ray display glass, stuck the cigar in his mouth, and rose to extend his hand.

  The hand remained extended. Gideon was staring, transfixed, at the now-opaque photographs. For some minutes he had been looking at them inattentively, not really seeing them, but when the bright light behind them had suddenly gone out, it had left a set of negative afterimages, dark where they had been light, light where they had been dark. It was those fading images in his mind, not the photographs on the glass, that he was staring so hard at. The third X-ray from the left in the upper row, a ventral view of the thorax; that dark, round shadow …

  "Dr. Loti," he murmured, "would you mind putting that light on again?"

  The physician did as he was asked, then turned his bland moon-face curiously up to Gideon.

  Gideon waited tensely while the fluorescent lamp flickered and then caught with a hum. The X-rays jumped into sharp focus, and there was the spot, not dark now, but leaping out at him, white against the frosted glass behind it. How could he possibly have missed it?

  He pointed at it. "That spot— What is it?"

  "This?" Dr. Loti said, obviously puzzled. "You don’t know? I would have thought—"

  "I have trouble reading these things," Gideon explained again.

  "Really?" The physician looked at him doubtfully. "Well, that’s a sternal foramen."

  "I understand, I understand!" John shouted over the piercing, salt-heavy wind that had cleared the St. Malo ramparts of other tourists and now drove the big breakers of the English Channel against the base of the walls fifty feet below in great, spuming surges. "A sternal foramen. Like the one on the guy in the cellar. What’s the big deal?"

  "The big deal," Gideon shouted back, his face turned away from the wind, "as I keep trying to tell you, is that this just about proves the body in the cellar isn’t any German officer—he’s a du Rocher. Or at least he’s related to Guillaume du Rocher."

  "That I don’t understand. What are you saying, that everybody who’s got a sternal foramen is related to everyone else who’s got one?"

  "No, of course not, but congenital features like that tend to run in families. Do you have any idea what the frequency of sternal foramina is?"

  "No, what?"

  "Well, I don’t know exactly—"

  This earned a grunt and a sidewise glance.

  "—but it’s rare; from what I’ve seen, maybe once in a hundred people. So what kind of likelihood is there that two once-in-a-hundred possibilities would show up in the same house just by chance, one on Guillaume and one on the body in the cellar?"

  John thought it over as they continued walking. "I don’t know. What?" he finally said.

  Gideon made a grumpy noise. John had a way of picking peculiar times to be literal-minded. "Guess," he said.

  "Once in two hundred?"

  "Once in ten thousand."

  "No kidding," John said, most of it carried off in a sudden gust.

  "Yes. You multiply the probabilities. John, what do you say we get down off these damn ramparts and go someplace we can talk without yelling at each other?"

  "Fine, what are you getting mad about? You’re the one who wanted to come up here."

  True enough. A breezy walk around the top of the famous fortified ramparts of St. Malo had seemed just what was needed to think through what they’d heard in Dr. Loti’s office. But the offshore breeze had become nasty and

  the sky had darkened, so that the sea to the west was now iron-gray and ominous. And the views of the stately, slate-roofed town within the walls, so lovingly rebuilt after the war, lost their charm and turned gloomy and flat. And it was going to rain any minute; a cold, dismal March rain blowing in from the Channel Islands.

  At the Bastion St. Louis they took the stone stairway down and went in search of a restaurant, the post-breakfast hollow having made its growly appearance some time before.

  "How about here?" Gideon suggested.

  John looked doubtfully at the signboard set up on the sidewalk. "Dégustation de crêpes," he read slowly. "Really sounds appetizing."

  "It’s just a pancake house."

  "Yeah, but who wants pancakes? Don’t you want some real food for a change?"

  "John, I know it’s tough to accept, but you’re just not going to find a Burger King in St. Malo."

  "Well, what about—"

  "And I’m not going into another pizza place for at least two days. Besides, Brittany’s famous for pancakes. Everybody eats them here. They’re unbeatable. Trust me."

  So he’d read in the guidebooks, and so it turned out to be, fortunately for his credibility. At a counter in the dining room a slickly self-assured cook poured dipper after dipper of batter onto a round griddle over a gas ring, smoothed out the buttery liquid with two casual but precise swipes of a push-stick, and flipped out thin, tender, perfect pancakes at the rate of two or three a minute. These were topped with fillings by an assistant, folded deftly into omelet-like rectangles, and delivered steaming to the customers almost as fast as they came off the griddle. John and Gideon had their galettes—dark, pungent buckwheat pancakes filled with creamy white cheese, ham, and tomatoes—less than a minute after sitting down.

  They wolfed them h
appily down and ordered more before leaning comfortably back to take upwhere they’d left off.

  "Not too bad," John admitted. "Okay, so those sternal foramens prove Guillaume and that skeleton were related?"

  "Yes." Gideon washed down the last of his galette with a mouthful of hot chocolate. "Well, maybe not exactly prove. It’s a matter of probabilities—"

  John’s eyes rolled up. "Oh, boy."

  "Look, John, there’s no way to prove anything like this from bones and X-rays. But when you run into something that can happen by chance only once in ten thousand times, you have to assume something other than chance is operating. And in this case the only reasonable possibility is a genetic relationship between Guillaume and the skeleton in the cellar."

  "What about coincidence? If it could happen by chance one out of ten thousand times, why couldn’t this be the one time?"

  "It could, but the chances of your being wrong are nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine out of ten thousand. Not a great bet. Anyway, do you really believe in coincidence? I don’t mean abstractly; I mean as a factor in a murder case."

  John poured himself a little more beer from his bottle of Kronenbourg, sipped, and considered. "No," he said. "I don’t. I don’t know any cops who do."

  "Okay, that’s settled. Now all I have to do is convince Joly."

  The fresh pancakes had arrived; a cheese-filled galette for Gideon, and a sweet dessert crêpe stuffed with cream and sugar for John.

  "Why should Joly be hard to convince?" John asked after a test-bite that apparently met his standards. "The guy’s peculiar, but he’s not dumb."

  "Well, for one thing, there’s the little matter of the SS paraphernalia that was buried in the cellar. For another thing…Well, I can’t think of another thing, but Joly will."

  "The SS stuff." John put down his fork. "I forgot all about it. How do you figure that, anyway? You think one of the du Rochers joined the SS? The Germans had Nazi police units made up of local nationals in the occupied countries, didn’t they? And Guillaume was in the Resistance, right? Maybe he killed this guy because—"