"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."
"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."