Old Bones

by Aaron Elkins

  "Uh-uh. You’re talking about the Milice, I think. They had second-rate uniforms, nothing like the flashy German SS. Denis did some checking; this stuff was definitely bona-fide Allgemeine SS, straight from Berlin, and the rank insignia were Obersturmbannführer. Helmut Kassel’s rank."

  "So then what do you think…"

  "I don’t know what I think. At this point it’d be nothing but speculative inference anyway."

  John’s hand went to his heart. "Speculative inference! Jesus, Doc, far be it from me to suggest that a man such as yourself would stoop to engage in speculative inference."

  "All right," Gideon said, laughing, "maybe I’ve done it from time to time in certain rare circumstances, but in this case I just don’t have any data to go on. But I don’t care what else they find down there. Those bones belong to a du Rocher."

  John nodded slowly. "So the question is: Who?"

  "Oh, I think I know who."

  John’s eyebrows lifted.

  "Alain du Rocher," Gideon said.

  JOHN’S eyebrows remained suspended for some seconds. A forkload of crêpe and crème Chantilly also paused inquiringly. "The guy the Nazis killed? The one Claude didn’t warn?"

  Gideon nodded.

  "That’s crazy."

  "John, it all fits. He was living right there in the manoir during the war, and those bones got buried down there right about the time he was killed. And it just happens to turn out that nobody seems to know where his body is."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "And those bones look like du Rocher bones; the same proportions and conformations as Guillaume’s, and some of the same features; I could see it in the X-rays. And remember when I said the bones made me think of Ray? It’s a look that runs in the family."

  "What about René? He’s built like a doorknob. So’s Jules."

  "Well, sure. You can’t expect everyone in a family to look alike, but where you can see it, it’s distinctive."

  "Yeah, but I still don’t see why it’s got to be Alain. Why not somebody else in the family?"

  "How many du Rochers do you think disappeared without a trace in 1942?"

  The fork finally finished its journey and John chewed thoughtfully. "Okay, I agree with you: We’re not talking proof here, but it makes a lot of sense. Hey, wait a minute. If Alain got killed by the Nazis, what’s he doing in Guillaume’s cellar?"

  "Yeah, that’s a slight problem."

  "I’d say it’s gonna take some world-class speculative inference."

  They had finished eating and ordered espressos before either spoke again.

  "Doc, you gonna tell all this to Joly?"

  "Sure, not that I’m looking forward to it. I know he appreciates us, but I’m not sure how much he enjoys these new and startling developments every few hours."

  "Well, then, what would you say if I pass it along for you? I was thinking of dropping by Rochebonne this afternoon to sort of see how things are going anyhow. If you don’t mind visiting those tombs by yourself."

  Gideon swallowed the tiny portion of coffee in two rich, bitter sips. "Tell you what: Why don’t I ride over there with you? You can drop me off at Ploujean."

  "Ploujean? What’s at Ploujean?"

  "Joly said there’s a plaque to the six men the Nazis executed."

  John studied him over the rim of his cup. "You’re going to do some more burrowing into things on your own, aren’t you?"

  "Well, things have gotten a little more interesting, and—" At John’s expression he hurriedly altered course. "No, honestly, what is there to find out in Ploujean?"

  "Doc," John said with a sigh, "every time you start thinking you’re a detective, I wind uphaving to bail you out."

  "John, I don’t think I’m a detective. All I want to do is— well, pay my respects to Alain, I guess. See what the monument’s like. That’s all."

  And it was, more or less. But if something came from it that would be fine too. You never knew.

  FOURTEEN

  THE plaque was easy to find. Ploujean had only two dusty streets, intersecting in a T, and at the center of the T was a small, bare plaza of brown gravel, and at the center of the plaza was a granite boulder surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. On the granite was a plain rectangular plate of patinaed bronze with a few lines of simple, raised lettering.

  16 OCTOBRE 1942

  EN HOMMAGE AUX COMBATTANTS DES FORCES FRANÇAISES DE LA RÉSISTANCE DONT LA LUTTE ET LES SACRIFICES ONT JALONNÉ LA ROUTE DE LA LIBÉRATION DE PLOUJEAN. FRANÇOIS-RENÉ BRIZEUX CHARLES KERBOL AUGUSTE LUPIS HENRI DE PILLEMENT JEAN-PIERRE QUEFFELLEC ALAIN DU ROCHER

  Gideon turned slowly from it and looked at his watch. Two-thirty; in half an hour he was supposed to walk to the manoir and meet John for the drive back to St. Malo. Thinking about what he’d just read, he strolled towards Ploujean’s only café, a tiny awninged place that looked out on the square. Had he learned anything from the plaque? Yes, he thought, maybe he had. "La lutte et les sacrifices," it said—"the struggle and the sacrifices." There was no reference to executions; not even a mention of the Nazis. Why not? Was it simply the dignified restraint of a little village that had had enough of blood and passion? Or was it conceivable that Ray and his family had the story wrong? That Alain and the other five had not died at the hands of the SS, but in some other way? If so, new possibilities arose as to how his body had wound up in Guillaume’s cellar.

  "Sans prétensions," it said on the flyblown window of the café, and the interior lived up to its promise. A few rough wooden tables and chairs—not folksy wooden but utilitarian wooden—gritty floor, no menus, flyblown travel posters on the wall (Venice, Costa del Sol, Miami). Three elderly men sat at one of the tables nursing a carafe of red wine. From the attentive, quiet way they watched him come in, he knew they’d been talking about him. Ploujean’s Café de la Paix, unlike its Paris namesake, was hardly on the tourist track and any stranger was no doubt worth serious and protracted consideration, particularly one who took the time to study their memorial.

  "Bonjour," he said, and the three nodded in unison, swiveling their heads to watch him go by and choose a table.

  He ordered cidre bouché, Breton cider, which the barman brought to him in a bottle with a blue earthenware bowl instead of glass.

  "The men whose names were on the plaque," Gideon said conversationally in French as the bottle was set down. "How did they die?" Talk stopped abruptly at the other table.

  "Executed, monsieur," the barman said.

  "By the Germans? The SS?"

  The barman looked at him as if he were simpleminded. "Of course, monsieur."

  So much for that half-formed line of thought. Easy come, easy go. Still, it was worth following a little further. "Do you know what became of the bodies?"

  "The bodies?" the barman said, looking at him as if he were not only simple-minded but dangerous. "No, monsieur. You’re American?"

  "Yes. I’ve heard that the SS colonel who was in charge at the time was assassinated by the Resistance. Is that true?"

  "So I’ve heard," said the barman nervously. "Thank you, monsieur."

  He went back to the bar, leaving Gideon embarrassed and self-conscious. Asking sensitive questions of strangers in foreign places, particularly under scrutiny, was not something that came naturally to him. It was a good thing, he thought, as he had many times, that he’d switched to physical anthropology during his first year in graduate school. He’d have made a hell of a cultural anthropologist.

  He drank some of the tart, cool cider from the bowl, turned his chair slightly away from the other table, and looked up at the black-and-white television set on a metal shelf over the bar. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the barman go to the table with the three men to report on his bizarre conversation with the newcomer. He drank some more cider. There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon on television. Bugs was wearing a waiter’s uniform (consisting entirely of a jacket with a towel over the arm). On a tray behind his back he had a cigar with a sputtering fuse sticking
out of it. He was bending solicitously over a seated Elmer Fudd, who was elegantly dressed in quilted smoking jacket and ascot.

  "Permettez-moi de vous servir, monsieur," said Bugs urbanely. "Voulez-vous encore un cigare?"

  But Elmer wasn’t about to be had. "Non merci," he said, "je suis bien à mon aise."

  What would "Bugs Bunny" be in French, he wondered idly—Lapin Fou? Insecte le Lapin? He didn’t find out. The oldest of the three men had come to his table and sat down. He was about eighty, a small man with eyes like shiny coffee beans, a nose like a zucchini, and a drooping but exuberant white moustache. His blue smock was covered with dark smudges and the cheerful, pungent aroma of shoe polish was all around him. The wrinkles on his otherwise clean fingers were lined with it, as if someone had carefully traced them with a pen.

  "Bonjour," Gideon said again.

  "American, eh?" the man responded.

  "Yes, I am."

  The man laughed. "I knew it as soon as I saw you. I told them." His French was rustic, thickened with a heavy Breton accent and hard to follow. "So you’re interested in Colonel Kassel, are you?"

  "Well—"

  "I can tell you what you want to know," the man said and smiled shrewdly. "I know who you are, you know. I know where you’re from."

  "Pardon?"

  The man laid a forefinger alongside his huge, pockmarked nose and leaned forward. "Say…Eee …Aah," he whispered.

  "I’m afraid—" Gideon began in confusion, then laughed. The sounds were letters of the French alphabet. "CIA?" he said. "No, I’m a professor of anthropology. I teach—"

  But the man only nodded his head conspiratorially.

  "Wah… sheeng… ton," he whispered with the same respectful cadence. "Don’t try to fool me."

  Gideon decided that maybe he wouldn’t. "Yes," he said solemnly, "I am from Washington." True enough, on its face.

  "Aah," the man sighed with pleasure. "I thought so. I can always tell."

  "What do you know about Colonel Kassel?" Gideon asked. He would have preferred being a little less direct and a little more polite, but he supposed that being an agent called for bolder style.

  "What do I know?" Under the shapeless smock the thin, old shoulders shrugged. "I killed him."

  Gideon blinked. "You killed him?"

  The man was offended. He turned to his friends at the other table and called to them. "Hey—did I kill him or not?"

  They knew immediately what he was talking about, and agreed loudly, with the barman joining in, that Jean-Honoré Bourget had indeed killed him, and no one in the village would say otherwise.

  Gideon, sensing that protocol called for it, invited them over and earned smiles and nods by ordering them another carafe of wine. Jean-Honoré wondered politely if he might have a Pernod instead, and this was brought in a slender glass with an ice cube floating in it. He poured some water into it from a squat bottle with an "Anisette Berger" label on it, took a contented sip of the resulting milky-green liquid, and settled happily back to tell them all how he killed SS Obersturmbannführer Helmut Kassel.

  It was like watching a father deliver a familiar bedtime story to his children. When he couldn’t remember a detail, they supplied it for him, so they wound up telling a lot of it themselves, and when they contradicted him on a minor point, he said: "No, truly?" and went equably along with them. There was a lot of laughter.

  But on the major points there were no contradictions, and no laughter either. In retribution for the murders of the six men named on the plaque, Jean-Honoré and three other Maquis had done away with the SS man. One of the other three was the local barber, the second was a woman schoolteacher, and the third was the leader: Guillaume du Rocher. Only Jean-Honoré was still alive.

  Kassel, who had seen himself as a ladies’ man, had been lured to an afternoon assignation with the schoolteacher in the Hunadaie forest not far from town. There, they had killed him.

  "How?" Gideon asked.

  "With a claw hammer, mostly," the old man answered pleasantly. "Edmond wanted to use his razor, but Guillaume said it would be best to have no clean knife wounds." He nodded with approval. "He was right, too."

  Working quickly, they had stripped him of his uniform, even his underwear, and dressed him in old farm clothes that smelled of pigs and manure. They carried him a few hundred feet to the road that runs between Ploujean and Plancoet. There Guillaume, whom the Nazis permitted to have a car because of his status and apparent docility, ran over him, making sure that his face was crushed against the asphalt. The body was left in the road to be found by the authorities—some drunken peasant who’d stepped in the way of a transport truck or a speeding staff car—and that was the end of that.

  "But wasn’t there any retribution? Didn’t the Nazis—"

  Jean-Honoré grinned. "Not very smart, the Boches."

  "Well, you see," one of the others explained, "the last thing the SS wanted was to let it out that somebody with a rank like that might have been assassinated. They didn’t want us to know, and they certainly didn’t want Berlin to know. And as for the regular army, the regular administration, they just wanted the SS out of here, the sooner the better; they hated them more than we did."

  "As much, maybe," Jean-Honoré said. "Not more."

  "As much," the man agreed. "So in the end they settled for the story that he just disappeared on one of his little trips to somewhere or other; one of his private, unannounced‘investigations’ to the Argoat, or the Morbihan, or maybe Normandy. Nobody knew where."

  "Anywhere but this district," Jean-Honoré said. "Bureaucrats are the same everywhere." He finished his Pernod with a sigh, turned down the offer of another, wiped the ends of his moustache between thumb and forefinger, and looked with sparkling little eyes at his satisfied audience.

  "What did you do with Kassel’s uniform?" Gideon asked.

  "What kind of a question is that?" the barman said.

  "No, why shouldn’t he ask?" Jean-Honoré said. He shot a melodramatically cryptic glance to Gideon. "He has to know many things." Gideon nodded, soberly and mysteriously.

  "The uniform…" mused Jean-Honoré, searching his mind.

  "You burned it," said one of the others.

  "Burned it?" Gideon said.

  "Oh, yes, that’s right…" said Jean-Honoré. "Well, the parts that would burn without making a stink; the cloth parts. The rest Guillaume took away with him to bury somewhere. In his wine cellar, maybe," he said and laughed. "My God, it hurt to bury those boots. You should have seen what we were wearing for shoes."

  So that explained that, and much to Gideon’s satisfaction. The SS regalia simply had no connection with the bones in the cellar. Two separate murders, two separate burials. No relationship beyond the fact that one had been executed by the other, and the other killed to avenge him. So much for the SS insignia that had so pleased Joly.

  But the main questions still remained. How had Alain’s skeleton (a third of it, anyway) gotten into Guillaume’s cellar in the first place? Where was the rest of it? And now most disturbing of all: What possible connection might Guillaume have had with it? For it was next to impossible that Alain had been dismembered and buried in his cellar without his knowing about it. He sighed. The more he found out, the more confusing it got.

  Jean-Honoré decided that perhaps another Pernod might be very nice after all. Gideon bought it, thanked the old man, and shook hands all around, finding himself bobbing up and down as each one popped out of his chair in turn. As he left he heard the barman’s querulous voice: "Well, what does he care what happened to the bastard’s uniform?"

  Gideon glanced over his shoulder as he pulled the door closed behind him. There was Jean-Honoré hunching forward over his Pernod, eyes glittering, explaining the situation to his attentive cronies.

  "Say …" he whispered knowingly, his forefinger alongside his nose, "Eee …"

  JOHN was right. Joly was beginning to appreciate them, or at least he was getting used to their popping up with
astute insights to muddle his investigation into Claude’s death. When Gideon got to Rochebonne after a ten-minute walk along the tree-lined road from Ploujean, he found the inspector on a cigarette break from whatever he’d been doing, strolling amicably with John in the courtyard and enjoying the rare spring sunshine. Gideon fell in step with them.

  "Alain du Rocher, eh?" was Joly’s greeting. Not exactly a full-hearted endorsement of Gideon’s deduction, but not a contemptuous rebuff either. Just the mildly amused, not unfriendly skepticism with which he tended to receive ideas other than his own. Gideon was getting used to Joly, too.

  "You were right, Doc. Lucien doesn’t buy it." So the two of them had graduated to first names too, which was good. John’s pronunciation—Loosh’n—brought no more than a momentary strain to the papery skin under Joly’s eyes. Something like Mathilde’s look when he’d referred to "Roach Bone" in her presence.

  "It’s very hard to see how it can be Alain," the inspector said. "I called our local prefect of police as soon as Mr. Lau—ahum, John—told me what you thought. As a matter of fact, it turns out that Alain du Rocher’s height, weight, and age do conform to what you learned from those bones."

  "Well, then—"

  "But so do many other people’s. Bretons are in general shorter and more slender than other Frenchmen, as I’m sure you’re aware. And unfortunately for your theory, there’s simply no doubt whatever about Alain’s execution by the Nazis."

  "Yes, I know. That’s the one thing that doesn’t add up; how he got into the cellar."

  "Gideon, he was picked up by the SS at 5 a.m., October 16, 1942, and taken to the mairie. Between 10 a.m. and noon the other five Maquis were brought in. There were many witnesses, including the prefect himself as a child. None of them ever came out again. No," Joly said comfortably, walking erectly along, hands behind his back, face turned up slightly towards the pale sun, "everything suggests that the bones in the cellar are Kassel’s. Surely you see that."