I made a note to look but did not depart from the procedure. I must not get ahead of myself. It was far too early to form a hypothesis.
I began to undress the body. It is often possible to ease rigor mortis by manipulating the limbs, and I did so, partly to make the undressing possible, partly thinking of the promise I had made to Fleur. Taking leave of the dead was always painful, but might be made at least a little easier if the corpse had been allowed some dignity, some appearance of repose.
Unclothed, the corpse’s brutal molestation was apparent. Less than twenty-four hours ago, this had been the body of a beautiful woman, alive and breathing, with gentle curves and blushing skin. Now the lacerations in her abdomen, garishly black and brown and purple against the pallid skin, were so numerous that only close examination allowed one to distinguish the individual lesions. The intestines had been perforated in several places, and I could smell the partially digested contents which, from what I could see, appeared dark and sparse. I did not want to start on the actual autopsy until my father arrived—not unless the Commissioner asked me directly to do so and thus authorized me. At the moment he was off again, to register a different and more peaceful death in the home of a master builder on Place Tertiaire. I was not a qualified physician in the eyes of the authorities, and I was not going to let my lack of official status cast even a shadow of a doubt on the evidence of the prosecution if it ever came to a trial. But we had an unspoken agreement that, for the sake of propriety, it was up to me to undress female corpses, and thus I could at least perform the initial examination. If Papa wished, he could check every fact I noted in the autopsy report. But he rarely felt that that was necessary anymore.
I undertook a minute examination of Rosalba’s undressed body, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. Postmortem lividity indicated that she had been lying on her side for some time after death had occurred, but her back was more vividly marked. In her mouth, besides a substantial amount of slime, I found a yellow substance that looked like wax—not a lot, just several thin flakes. I took a few samples, mostly because I was curious. How did a corpse end up with wax in its mouth? People did not usually go around gnawing on candles. A cheese crust, perhaps? I noted my findings but did not draw any conclusion.
Under her nails, I found nothing except a whitish mixture of soap residue and cast-off skin cells. Her feet too were just as clean as they had looked at first glance. Under the magnifying glass, the textile fibers that I had noticed during my first examination looked as if they had come from a towel rather than ordinary stocking lint, which would disappoint the Commissioner. And when I carefully brushed her hair, I found nothing except more soap residue. She did not have lice, which in itself was noteworthy. All in all, it seemed as if her sense of personal hygiene was well above the norm. And in spite of my initial assumption about how she had spent her last hours on earth, I found no traces of sperm, on her body or in her undergarments.
Jean-Baptiste knocked quietly on the door. “Mademoiselle Fleur has arrived,” he said.
“Thank you.” I looked around quickly. “Would you offer her a cup of tea and ask her to wait for a little while? I’ll come get her when I am ready.”
Rosalba’s face was already so peaceful that I could not add or subtract anything. So I merely fetched a clean white sheet and covered the rest of her. I sprayed a bit of carbolic around the room, in a sadly inadequate attempt to alleviate the ever-present smell of death. On a last impulse, I found two candles from our emergency stash—the electricity failed during our work quite often—and placed them in candlesticks on the instrument cabinet next to the examination table. I hoped that the soft candlelight would throw a meager glow of spirituality on the morgue’s patently concrete and practical approach to the decay of the flesh.
I washed my hands and face and took off the head scarf, telling myself that it was so Fleur would be able to recognize me more easily, but I knew deep down the real impulse—I did not wish to look like a washerwoman.
She was sitting on the small porch that led into the laundry yard, with the freshly washed white sheets as a billowing backdrop in the shimmering heat of the sun. She too had changed her apparel: She was now dressed in a dark gray walking suit with black trim, a flat-crowned black hat trimmed with a light veil, gray lace gloves, and high-heeled black ankle boots with spats of gray suede. No one would take her for a schoolgirl now. She balanced the saucer on her right hand, a few centimeters under the teacup she was sipping from. One got the impression that she was afraid of spilling.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “This way, please.”
She looked up with a glittering dark and observant gaze. Then she carefully put down the teacup and rose.
“I think I am still trying to convince myself that it did not happen,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” I answered. “I am so sorry.”
She followed me down the stairs. After the blinding white light of the laundry yard, the stairwell seemed like the entrance to a cave, dark and narrow, although the steps were actually quite wide and had been designed to allow coffins to be carried up and down. The temperature fell noticeably with every step. I had to overcome a desire to apologize for both the cold and the general bleakness of the surroundings.
Fleur walked directly to the dead woman, without hesitation this time, and stood looking at her for a long time.
“You cannot tell,” she said.
“What?”
“What happened. The way she died. She looks as if she died in her sleep.”
“Yes.”
“May I touch her now?”
“As long as you do not remove the sheet.”
“Thank you.”
She placed a hand against the dead woman’s cheek and neck and caressed both gently. There was an intimacy to the gesture that made me feel like a voyeur, spying on something treasured and intimate, and I instinctively turned away.
“I can give you a moment alone with her if you would like,” I said quietly.
“Thank you,” she answered.
I retreated to the long, narrow office located a few steps higher up the stairs. Two windows facing the autopsy room allowed an assistant to take dictation from the autopsy without having to be in the room. It was not an option I normally made use of, but right now it was practical because I would still be able to claim that I had not permitted anyone to approach the body without supervision.
I sat down and began to prepare the certificate of identification, the autopsy report, and our official book of records. In the records, I noted only the date and time the body was brought in, wrote “preliminary identification: Rosalba Lombardi,” and gave the case a number. In the report, I detailed the initial measurements and discoveries I had made, though not without having first outlined everything in my own notebook—partly to keep the report free from errors and corrections, partly because this automatically provided me with a copy for myself. The pile of notebooks at home in my drawer went back years; I had been my father’s secretary long before he officially agreed to let me assist him with the actual autopsies. I was fourteen when I began the first one.
Every few minutes, I cast a quick glance down into the autopsy room. Due to the difference in floor levels, Fleur probably had not realized she was under observation. From her point of view, the windows were so high up that they were not very noticeable, and she would not be able to see me unless I leaned really close to the glass. This should probably have made the voyeuristic sensation stronger but, paradoxically, I felt less of a spy than I had while standing next to her in the room.
She bent over the dead woman and kissed her. Then she held one of the candles close to the dead woman’s face, forced open an eyelid, and tried to peer into the dead eye underneath.
This was not what I had imagined would happen when I allowed her solitary devotions . . .
“Stop that!” I shouted through my hurriedly opened window. “What on earth do you think you are doing?”
Fle
ur glanced up at me without letting go of the dead woman. Her eyes were very dark and very shiny, her face at once expressionless and intense. I think she was calculating how long it would take me to get down there to stop her. Quickly, she bent over the corpse again and resumed her examination.
I raced down the stairs, pushed open the door, and marched up to her.
“I said ‘stop’! ”
I had to take hold of her thin shoulders and force her away. I was more than a head taller than she was, and for a brief moment it felt as if I was struggling with a child. But no child could have brought to bear such desperate strength of resistance. We were both breathing rather wildly before I succeeded in dragging her away from the body.
Abruptly, her resistance broke. She did not sob, but the tears were streaming down her face nonetheless.
“I couldn’t see anything,” she said. “Please, will you do it? You have instruments, microscopes . . . a camera.”
“What is it you imagine I would be able to see?”
“Him. The monster who did this. He ought to be there, but I can’t see him. Please, please get your photographer to—”
“Mademoiselle . . . ,” I said as gently as possible. “It is not possible. No matter what you may have heard or read, the eye does not have the ability to retain an image after death.”
The English journal The Lancet had attempted to bury this belief more than thirty years ago, but it kept reappearing, even in the normally well-informed part of the public debate. It was not the first time a distressed relative had demanded that we attempt to photograph the last sight that had passed before the eyes of a loved one, but I had never known someone to try to get that last glimpse with the naked eye.
“It is because her eyes were closed, is it not?” said Fleur slowly. “She died with her eyes closed and did not see him. That is why he is not there . . .”
I shook my head faintly. “There is no scientific evidence that—”
But she did not hear me. She turned to the dead woman on the table.
“You should have fought,” she told her. “You should have clawed him with your nails, bit him with your teeth, seen him . . . why didn’t you fight?”
One eye was still open, the other closed. It looked as if the body was trying to wink at us. I closed the forcefully opened eye and immediately felt better. I tried in every way to handle the dead with respect but without emotional weakness, and normally it took more than this to throw me off balance. But Fleur’s behavior had punctured my professionalism and turned Rosalba into something other than another body I needed to examine, I had to acknowledge that now.
“Mademoiselle . . . if you would come with me up to the office. I have prepared the certificate of identification.”
She made no move to leave. I had to place a hand on her arm before she turned to follow me.
She signed the certificate with a largely illegible signature. “Fleur” could be deciphered but not her last name.
“I have to ask for your full name,” I said. “Otherwise the certificate is not valid.”
“Fleur Petit,” she said.
I looked at her. Petit was, of course, a fairly common last name. There were no doubt a number of small women and short men who had to live with a last name that sounded more like a jocular sobriquet, but I did not think Fleur was one of them.
“Do you have any identification that I could see?” I asked.
For the first time she looked actively hostile.
“Why don’t you just write what I say?” she asked.
I considered my options. I was fairly convinced that whatever name she had been given at birth, it was not Fleur Petit. But on the other hand, it was not really my place to pry and question.
I wrote what she said.
“Address?”
“Rue Vernier. Rue Vernier 13.”
“And your relation to the deceased?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have to write whether you are a relative, a friend, or some such. So that it is clear by what right and with what degree of certainty you have made the identification.”
“She was my friend,” said Fleur with a voice that was full of cracks and breaks. “My loving friend. We shared everything. We took care of each other. Until now.”
I wrote “friend,” since there was no box for something more inclusive.
“When did you last see the deceased alive?”
“Two days ago. She did not come home as we had agreed, not that night nor the next . . .” She made a small involuntary gesture with her hand, as if she was reaching for something to hold on to. “I was frantic. I had told her she shouldn’t do . . . that I would . . .” She looked at me with eyes so dark they appeared completely black. “She was so afraid she would no longer be able to work, but I had promised her that it would be fine.”
“Where did she work?” I asked in a neutral tone.
“I think you know that,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I do not record assumptions or theories. I record only what I find or what I have learned from reliable sources.”
Her mouth curled in something that was more of a cynical grimace than a smile.
“Filles isolées,” she said. “That is what they call us, in their files. Because we want to live in an ordinary neighborhood and walk the streets and breathe the air like other people, instead of being caged in a brothel in the whore district. We have to report for medical examination twice as often as the brothel girls, and if the gendarmes see us in the ‘good’ neighborhoods, they have the right to arrest us, whether we are soliciting or just buying a pint of milk. Do you know how long we get locked up nowadays if those pigs decide we have broken one of their rules? Three months. In one of their fleapit jails, without judge, without lawyers, without visitors. Before, it was a month, which was bad enough; now it is three. For buying a pint of milk in the wrong place. Liberté, egalité, and fraternité, my Aunt Fanny.”
She looked to see if she had shocked me. She had, not so much because she openly acknowledged her profession, but because her daily life suddenly had become vivid and real for me. Theoretically, I knew that the authorities were trying to halt the spread of syphilis by registering and examining Varbourg’s prostitutes. The system was not quite as rigid and tightly meshed as its counterpart in Paris, but the thought of the frequent forced examinations was, for some reason, more deeply disturbing to me than the fact that she performed sexual favors for money. Perhaps because it violated something that was more important to me than public decency: the relationship between doctor and patient.
Then a realization followed that I should perhaps have had sooner. There might, of course, be any number of reasons for a prostitute to be afraid of no longer being able to work, but . . . the dress had been let out. Perhaps it was not because she had bought it secondhand.
“Was she pregnant?”
Fleur nodded, a series of minimal head movements barely more than a vibration in her muscles.
“How far along was she?”
“I don’t know. You could see it. She said she had felt the child, and that is why she did not want . . .”
“To abort it?”
“You can’t, not once it is alive, can you? Then it is a sin. And Rosalba believed with all her heart in God and Maria and a long line of saints.” It sounded as if Fleur herself had a more agnostic perspective on the God question.
If Rosalba had felt life, she was presumably at least four months along. If her abdomen had been less brutally treated, I might have noticed the signs of pregnancy at the initial examination of the body.
“Can you give me any information about her family?” I asked, though my thoughts were still circling around the pregnancy, the nature of the lesions, and oddly pristine state of the rest of the body. One might almost think the unborn child was the actual target of the attack.
“I am her family. She has no other.” She lifted her chin with a defiant jerk. “When can I bury her?”
“I
t will take at least a few days.”
She looked out through the open window, down at the body.
“It was kind of you to light the candles,” she said.
“It is the least we can do.”
“Perhaps. But many people would not have thought of it.” She glanced at me from under her veil. “You were also the one who helped find Marie Mercier’s little son, is that right?”
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“A bit. They say she is getting married. Do you know if it is true?”
I hesitated a bit, at the thought of how difficult it apparently had been for the Commissioner to share the news with us. Or rather, me. Papa was still happily ignorant of the upcoming event.
On the other hand, in two weeks everyone and their mother would be able to read it in the city records.
“Yes, that is correct.”
She nodded. And she was apparently also well informed as far as the rest of the betrothal was concerned, because she went on. “The Commissioner is a good man. Proper. To him, it makes no difference whether it is some society lady or one of us; the dead are all the same to him. Not like the gendarmes or those snotty quacks they hire to examine us. They look down on us, but they still help themselves to the goods when they can, you know.”
How well did she know Marie? She sounded as if she was somewhat better informed than I was, and I had known the Commissioner all my life.
“Mademoiselle. You can see yourself that your friend was not fully dressed. Can you tell me anything about the garments that are missing? Which stockings and shoes do you think she was wearing when she left home?”
The light in her eyes died again. There was no doubt that the sorrow she felt at Rosalba’s death was deep and searing, but though the tears began to run down her cheeks again, she answered my questions quietly and precisely.
Rosalba, she said, would probably have been wearing a corset of the make Evangeline, black silk stockings made in Belgium, a pair of ankle boots in brown calf leather from a local shoemaker, and unmentionables of linen, handmade and without laundry tags. In addition, there was a pair of pearl earrings missing, a hat matching the midnight blue dress and decorated with a single egret plume, a blue lace shawl, and a small chatelaine bag in black silk with pearl trimmings, also in black. I recorded the details carefully. Fleur Petit observed my work.