Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

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.

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 cite. 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."