Aaron Elkins: Old Bones

"What are they doing here, is what I’d like to know," he grumbled, openly staring across the room at another threesome, who sat stiffly in their high-backed wing chairs, as removed and alienated as if they’d been walled off.

"If I’d known they were really going to be here, I assure you we would still be in Frankfurt," said Mathilde, grimly watching her son drain his glass with a second swallow and then go grubbing with a pudgy thumb and forefinger after the anchovy-stuffed olive at the bottom.

"Don’t do that, Jules," she said disgustedly.

"Well, why don’t they put a toothpick in it, then?" he asked, not unreasonably. He capitulated, however, bringing the glass to his lips, upending it, and helping the olive into his mouth with a pinky that followed it in rather more deeply than Mathilde thought strictly necessary.

That, said Mathilde’s look, is repulsive. Unconcerned, Jules concentrated on liberating the anchovy with his tongue, then munching with deep satisfaction; first the anchovy, then the olive.

"Now, Mathilde," Rene said reasonably, "if Guillaume invited the Fougerays, he must have had a very good reason. And you know he’s not being late on purpose. He’s probably forgotten about the time; you know how absentminded the old fellow’s been getting."

You, his wife’s eloquent look said, are not the person to talk about absentmindedness.

Rene took no offense; indeed, he seemed to take no notice. "So why upset yourself?" he continued. "There’s no point, is there?"

Indeed, there wasn’t. The patriarchal Guillaume du Rocher convened these "family councils"-formal meetings of the dwindling and far flung du Rocher clan- whenever it pleased him, and he ran them however he wished. If it was increasingly in his nature to be high-handed and eccentric, well, that was to be borne with good humor. What choice was there?

"Best to simply be thankful these things occur so infrequently," Rene concluded with a radiant smile, his logic triumphant and irrefutable.

Rene du Rocher was a soft, placid, somewhat dandified man of sixty-two, a year younger than his wife-with shiny, thinning, plastered-down hair, a cherubic pink-and-white complexion, and small, delicate hands that he frequently rubbed together with a dry, rustly sound. He was clean in his habits, used cologne liberally, and took pride in the masculine vigor of his three-week-old moustache.

In all, he looked like an affable and self-contented bank manager, which in fact he was. Or close enough; Monsieur du Rocher was a corporate-lending officer in the international division of the Credit Lyonnais in Frankfurt, to which city he had moved three years earlier with his family, after three decades of unexceptional advancement in Paris, Geneva, and London. The advancing years had enhanced his naturally sweet temper and, less fortunately, his predisposition toward a slight vacancy of mind. At the urging of his superiors, he was now contemplating retirement.

"I’ve always liked this room," he said mildly. "Did you know that Henri IV and his party were once feasted here? In 1595. The manoir was already a hundred years old."

"Oh, be quiet," Mathilde said absently, picking an invisible shred of lint from the dark, broad, woolen field of her bosom.

Jules had consumed the olive. His eyes roved to the hors d’oeuvres tray on the coffee table. "The point is, " he said querulously to his father, "that Cousin Guillaume hasn’t asked the Fougerays to a family council in decades, or haven’t you noticed?" Emulating his mother, he had adopted this petulant, deprecatory tone toward his father at fourteen, had found it satisfactory, and had not modified it in the ensuing sixteen years. "And with good reason. Look at the man; the quintessential peasant. Aside from a certain repulsive fascination, it’s awkward to be in the same room with him. Is he really related to us?"

"You shut up too," Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. "What a prig you are, Jules."

If her son felt injury at this inconsistency, he did not show it. He concentrated instead on loading a triangle of buttered toast with all the beluga caviar it would bear and conveying it slowly and carefully to his mouth. As cautious as he was, a few oily, shining beads fell into his lap. Mathilde lowered her lids and looked the other way.

Across the room, Claude Fougeray smiled stonily at his wife and daughter, not easy for a man whose hyperthyroid condition afflicted him with a pop-eyed stare of permanent, outraged surprise. "Let them look down their long noses at us, these damned du Rochers," he said. The tight smile faded to a sneer. "Look at them. I could buy all of them put together, if I wanted to. I have-"

Leona Fougeray, tiny, vivid, raven-haired despite her fifty-three years, interrupted her husband. "Yes? I’d like to see you buy Guillaume du Rocher." Her mobile lips turned downward. "And you’re drinking too much. As usual."

"Goddamn it," Claude whispered throatily, bald head lowered like an angry bull’s, so that his neck, thick and stubby at the best of times, all but vanished. "I didn’t say Guillaume, did I? I said anyone in this room. Do you see Guillaume in this room?"

Leona, on the verge of replying with heat, thought better of it and settled for glaring reproachfully with her intense, jet-black Italian eyes. This was lost on Claude, who glowered at the ancient Aubusson carpet, an artery throbbing sluggishly at each temple.

" I’m not leaving," he said suddenly. "They can kiss my ass. Who the hell are they supposed to be? They don’t even live in Brittany. They don’t even live in France. " He took an angry gulp of his third Pernod. "And what are you looking so glum about?"

The question was directed at their daughter, who sat staring mutely at her untouched glass of blanc-cassis. Of necessity she had long ago grown used to being snubbed by her distant relatives, but she had never felt it so keenly.

"I asked you a question, my girl."

She started and looked up. "Father," she murmured, "no one is talking to us. Nobody wants us here. Please, mayn’t we go?"

Her lips trembled slightly, emphasizing the tiny, radiating lines that had recently begun to appear around her mouth so prematurely. Not yet thirty and never beautiful, with fine, pale hair, she already had a wan, faded look that her birdlike mother would not have at eighty. Only her eyes, a lucid gray-green, shone with warmth, but these were often cast down, as they were now.

"Why should we go?" Her father’s voice was harsh. "Didn’t we get invited?" He finished the Pernod and hissed at the solemn servant for another. When he got it he took a long pull, then nodded to himself and smiled. "Well, I know a few things they don’t know. Oh, yes, they have a surprise coming, a big-"

" What do you know?" Leona said impatiently, tossing her head, her Italian accent broadening, her eyes flashing more dramatically still. "You’re living in a dream world. Claire is right. They’ll make us look like fools."

A second interruption was more than Claude Fougeray could tolerate. His hand clenched, his eyes bulged a little more. "Shut up, you Italian bitch!" he said in a voice that carried plainly throughout the room.

The effect on Madame Fougeray was immediate and colorful. Bright disks of crimson leaped out on her cheeks, as round and red as a pair of checkers. Her mouth, caught closed while forming a word, sprang open with an audible pop. She stood abruptly.

"The master speaks," she hissed. "Master of the sausages!"

She spun about, the full, Turkish-style trousers of her red-and-black Paco Rabanne outfit swirling dramatically around her, and stalked out, her blazing eyes focused straight ahead of her. A few moments later her heels could be heard clacking forcefully up the stone stairs leading to the bedrooms.