Old Bones

'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 hotel 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 hotel 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.

[Back to Table of Contents]

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