Old Bones

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.

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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 FRANCAISES DE LA RESISTANCE DONT LA LUTTE ET LES SACRIFICES ONT JALONNE LA ROUTE DE LA LIBERATION DE PLOUJEAN. FRANCOIS-RENE 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 cafe, 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 pretensions,' it said on the flyblown window of the cafe, 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 Cafe 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 bouche, 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 a 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