Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

"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. "Degustation de crepes," 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 happily 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."