I could not help asking Mother Filippa who it was that she had been so anxious to avoid meeting.
“Her father does not approve of her decision to devote herself to convent life,” said Mother Filippa. “He has attempted to prevent her from returning several times, the last time he physically locked her up, as far as I understand. She was in a very bad way for a long time afterward, both physically and mentally. As you can see, her health is delicate. I think it was her fear of her father that made her give up her teaching and seek permission to join the order. I think she was afraid just now that he had come to force her to leave us.”
“Can he do that?”
“Not without a fight. But . . . he is her father, after all. Until she takes her full vows, she is still under his authority. Come, we can go through here. I think we will find the last two sisters in the west wing.”
Sister Bernadette and Sister Beatrice were in a courtyard almost identical to the one we had just left, except that here an old mulberry tree grew between the sandstone tiles. The sisters were both quite old. One was clearly almost completely blind but sat crocheting with hands that saw more than her eyes did, and the other had clearly entered a second childhood and hugged a rag doll tightly, singing a lullaby in a high, clear, and astonishingly beautiful voice.
“This is Sister Bernadette,” said Mother Filippa, indicating the crocheting nun. “And this is Beatrice.”
“She is in a good mood today,” said Sister Bernadette. “When she is sad, she sings nothing but funeral psalms from morning to night. Poor dear.”
“Sister Bernadette was Cecile’s closest spiritual adviser,” said Mother Filippa. “I thought the two of you should meet. Perhaps a short stroll in the garden? I will sit with Beatrice in the meantime.”
Bernadette got up quickly and set her crocheting aside. “Thank you. She is the sweetest creature . . . aren’t you, Beatrice? But a little stroll will do me good.”
“Sweet Beatrice. You have to keep an eye on her,” said Sister Bernadette, with no apparent acknowledgment of her own sightlessness. Her hand was resting lightly on my arm, but I was not sure that she needed my support at all. It seemed as if she moved without difficulty, in spite of her blindness, at least on the neat garden paths where she presumably knew every stone and tree. “Otherwise she begins to walk around looking for her siblings, in spite of the fact that one has been dead for many years and the other is seventy-two and is unlikely to need her supervision any longer. But I understand that you are here because of Cecile?”
“Yes,” I said. “We are trying to determine with whom she has been in contact so we can trace the source of the illness she died from. Mother Filippa said that you knew her well?”
“I must be the sister that knew her best. But she was a girl with many secrets.”
“What do you mean by that?” Her brother had described her as open and alive, not secretive.
“Cecile was not suited to a life such as ours. But for her family, anything other than a convent school was unthinkable, and, as you know, we are more liberal than most others. We do not believe in too rigid a discipline. Still, Cecile kept butting her head against the rules again and again, especially in the beginning.”
“In what way?”
“She could not sit still. She had to get out, had to move, she was more like a boy than a girl in this respect, and then . . .” Sister Bernadette hesitated, and I think she changed her mind several times before she at last continued. “She was not of a contemplative nature. I might even call her . . . sensuous. Even though she was very independent, she was constantly hanging on some classmate’s arm, had to touch and be touched, could not tolerate isolation and enclosure. The one time we attempted to confine her to her room, she cried like a small child and hammered on the door with such force that we feared she would harm herself. In time, she got better at following the rules, but . . .”
“But what?”
A small and somehow sad smile pulled one side of the sister’s mouth out, not up.
“I do not think we taught her to obey the rules, just to pretend and cheat so that it was noticed less frequently when she broke them. That is not the kind of effort I think we should be proud of.”
“And now she is dead . . .”
“Yes. And Emile has disappeared.”
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Yes. He came here when he was ten or eleven, orphaned and very alone in the world. He, too, was . . . different from most. When he got older, he helped out in the stables and especially in the wolf pen; he had an amazing way with animals. Probably got along better with them than with people.”
“So they met each other here?”
“Yes. That must have been the way it was. Cecile loved animals, too.”
“But no one suspected that they developed an affection for each other as well?”
Even though she presumably could not decipher anything at all about my expression with her weak sight, she still looked directly into me.
“You know . . . everyone talks as if it was Emile who lured Cecile to run away. But I think it was the other way around.”
When we returned to the bench where Mother Filippa sat with Beatrice, Beatrice had moved on to a singing game that I had played as child.
The maid goes into the dark forest
picking berries
picking berries
Father Wolf, he is in the dark forest
Prowling here
Prowling there
First she drops one shoe
Then the other, then the other
First she drops one ribbon
Then the other, then the other
Father Wolf in the dark forest
is hungry for little girl pie
When the little maid does not come home
Oh, how her mother must cry, must cry
Willy-nilly
You’re in the wolf’s belly
Rip, nip, nip, you’re dead!
Suddenly I clearly remembered the prickling sensation of going through the “forest”—usually two older girls who stood with their arms in the air and pretended to be trees—waiting to see if the one caught in the “wolf’s belly” was me. If you were caught on the “Rip, nip, nip,” they pinched your arms and legs and especially your midriff and belly, and some of the most merciless pinched so hard the bruises lasted for weeks. Still, it was one of our favorite games.
I examined the two older sisters on the bench in the sunlight, and, as I had gradually come to expect, got a negative result.
“Then you are the only one left,” I said to Mother Filippa.
“Let us go back to the office,” said the abbess. “It is closer to the gate.”
This time I was prepared for the wolf, so it was not quite as disturbing to see it get up and come over to greet Mother Filippa, with lowered head and tail. It did not demean itself by anything so submissive and puppy-like as wagging its tail, and it was still not possible to mistake it for a dog. It ignored me completely this time.
I asked Mother Filippa to bend her head back and directed the lamp at her nostrils, not without a certain gratitude that this was the last nose I needed to examine for now. As I had gradually come to expect, her mucous membranes were healthy and normal, without a trace of irritation or mite infection.
“That was it, I believe,” I said and straightened, with a soreness in my lower back from having bent over so many times in so many hours. “I will return when we have examined the samples in the microscope, but I am happy to say that it looks as if both the school and the convent are free from infection.”
“Should I ask our coachman to drive you back to town?” asked Mother Filippa.
“No, thank you. The Commissioner is picking me up himself when his investigations are concluded.” He and my father had earlier that day taken samples from the entire Montaine household and were presumably now examining Father Abigore’s circle of acquaintances. The task of tracing the infection was daunting, but necessary, an
d the fear that we were not going to do it thoroughly enough was a nagging uneasiness in my stomach.
The abbess looked at me with clear, calm eyes. “I understand that you are not a Catholic?”
“No,” I said, somewhat surprised by the sudden change of subject. “We belong to the Reformed Church.”
“I do not wish to offend you,” she said, “but I would like to ask permission to bless you.”
I discarded the first responses that occurred to me—“Why?” and “Well, it can’t hurt”—and just said, “Thank you.” After which I just stood awkwardly, waiting.
“Would you kneel?” she asked. “It is not necessary, but . . . that is usually what one does.”
I hitched up the skirt of my traveling suit and got down onto my knees. Suddenly it felt natural, as if I had been doing it my whole life. She touched my forehead lightly while in a low voice she chanted the ancient Latin invocations and ended with an even quieter “Amen.”
At that moment the wolf sneezed several times and rubbed its snout energetically between its front paws. And I realized that Mother Filippa’s nostrils were not in fact the last that I would need to examine that day.
The wolf looked at me with its moon-pale eyes. Mother Filippa’s hands lay on either side of its broad skull, and its jaws were open so I could see the dark ribbed throat, the meat-colored tongue, and the yellowed, worn teeth.
“I promise you, he will not harm you,” she said.
Her words brought back memories from my childhood that I would have preferred to have forgotten. Big wild dogs that came running toward me, tongues hanging out, even more enormous and fear inducing because I myself was so little, while the owner cheerfully yelled, “Don’t worry, they’ll not hurt you,” from his comfortable position on a distant park bench.
And this was no dog.
I directed the lamp so that its light fell as directly as possible on the wolf’s face. It blinked once but otherwise stood completely still. I raised the mirror and the loupe, but my hands were shaking so badly that I could not see a thing.
Empty your heart of fear.
“What?”
I broke off my eye contact with the wolf for a brief moment and instead looked at Mother Filippa.
“I said, ‘Empty your heart of fear,’ ” she said.
But she had not spoken out loud. I was almost certain of that. Or had I just been so focused on the wolf’s gaze that I could no longer distinguish what I saw and heard from what I was merely thinking?
All at once I felt an extraordinary clarity and calm inside. The world was as it was. The wolf lived in it, and so did I. Its breath enveloped me, its body was as warm as mine. It breathed, and I breathed. Right now, in this moment, we breathed in the same rhythm and shared the same life.
My hands stopped shaking.
I directed the loupe first at its throat and, later, with great care, at one damp, dark nostril. Even with the mirrors it was almost impossible to see anything. But when I drew the delicate instrument out again, it was covered by yellow mucus. And something in the mucus was moving.
I reached for a pipette and managed to suck the struggling organism into the narrow glass tube and raised the tube to the light. In spite of the filaments of phlegm that had been sucked up with it, I could see it now: a mite, about two millimeters long, with a pale white abdomen. Until I placed it under a microscope I would not be able to identify it with objective certainty, but in my mind there was no doubt. Pneumonyssus, and the same species as the ones we had found on Father Abigore and Cecile.
The sadness that seized me had no place. Even though I immediately understood that the wolf’s life had to end, it ought not to have touched me in this way—more strongly than Cecile’s death, more strongly than Abigore’s. Where did that pain come from?
“You have found something, have you not?” whispered Mother Filippa. “You are now going to tell me that he has been infected by the parasite you are seeking.”
“I am afraid so.”
“What will happen now?”
“I must examine it under a microscope to be certain, but . . .”
Mother Filippa bent her head and hid her face in the wolf’s bushy neck for a moment. “He has had a long life,” she said without looking up. “But what about the others?”
“How long has he been separated from them?”
“For a few months. We lost a wolf in the fall, and that unsettled the pack. It was only then that the new pack leader began to bully him.”
“Lost? How?”
“It was not sickness, so it probably has nothing to do with this. But at feeding time, one of the females was missing. Emile found her all the way up the hill, at the far end of the pen, with one hind leg in a fox trap. We had to put her down, she had gnawed her leg almost all the way through in an attempt to break free. Poor Emile. He had nightmares for several days. It has been a long time since we were bothered by poachers, but a wolf pelt brings in a tempting sum for people of limited means.”
“Emile—that must be Emile Oblonski?”
“Yes. He was the one who took care of the wolves most of the time.”
“Before he ran off with Cecile.”
“They disappeared at the same time, at least.” She looked up and her eyes shone damply in the light from the lamp. “What are you suggesting?”
“I hardly know.” I shook my head. “I have no idea how it is all connected. We will have to examine the other wolves as well, of course, and take whatever measures are necessary.” I could not bring myself to use the words “put down.” “But it is just as important that we find your Emile. He might be seriously ill.” Or dead—but I did not say that out loud. “Do you have any idea at all where we should look for him?”
“If I had, don’t you think I would have told Cecile’s family when they disappeared?”
“Yes. I am sorry.”
The abbess was not lying, I thought. Still, there was something about her answer that bothered me, though it was not until sometime later that I realized what it was: her answer was no answer, just a counter question. And as my old school friend Hélène, who had been raised as a good Catholic, once taught me, this is how you avoid lying when you do not want to speak the truth.
“A professor of parasitology is on his way from Heidelberg,” said my father, and invited first the Commissioner and then Inspector Marot to look in the microscope. “You can await his judgment if you wish. But there is really no doubt. The mites from the wolf are identical to the ones we found on Cecile Montaine and Father Abigore.”
My father would not admit it, but I could see that he was in pain again. It was to be expected when you considered what he had done to his healing bones in the past few days, and I had therefore carried the microscope up into the salon so as to at least spare him the stairs. Similarly, the Commissioner had presumably discreetly twisted Marot’s arm until he agreed to meet in Carmelite Street, though the official excuse was that he had come to see the mites for himself.
“What bearing does this have on the case?” asked Marot, straightening from his inspection of the slide. With an unconsciously feminine gesture, he smoothed his forelocks. They did not need it; significant amounts of macassar oil ensured that the two dark spit curls stayed exactly as they had been arranged, on either side of a neat middle parting.
“We have most likely found the source of the infection,” said my father. “The wolf in question must of course be put down and that holds for the rest of the pack, too. Even if we do not immediately find mites in all the others, it would be too risky to let them live. Also, it would be difficult to accomplish an examination safely as long as the creatures are alive.”
Marot looked at him with an unusually expressionless face, possibly because he found my father’s priorities extremely peculiar.
“I meant the murder case,” he said. “What does all this have to do with my homicide?”
“The mites form a connection from the convent wolves to Cecile Montaine, and from her to F
ather Abigore,” said the Commissioner. “It could be pure chance: the wolves infected Cecile, Father Abigore then contracted the disease after sitting with her in the chapel all night—after which he was murdered for a completely different reason by person or persons unknown. But that does not explain why Cecile and the young man, Emile Oblonski, disappeared in the weeks leading up to her death. It is necessary for both the murder investigation and in order to stop the spread of disease that we find Oblonski, healthy, sick, dead, or alive, and determine where the young couple went, with whom they have been in contact, and why they acted as they did. It is also of increasing interest to determine who removed Father Abigore’s body from the scene of the accident and why it reappeared in the Pontis’ ice cellar.”
Inspector Marot was not stupid. Choleric and impatient, to be sure, and with an unfortunate tendency to jump to conclusions and go for the fast result rather than the correct one—indubitably a great failing in an investigator. Nevertheless, he did possess both a sense of logic and the ability to scrutinize things closely when he gave himself the time to do so.
“The cold,” he said. “First the chilled boxcar that was supposed to go to Paris, then an ice cellar. That suggests first of all that it was the murderer who stole the body and next that the cold itself was in some way a significant part of his intention.”
“To keep the body fresh?” the Commissioner suggested. “But why? It seems bizarre, and it is not otherwise a bizarre murder—a single powerful blow, like putting down a steer.”
“Perhaps it is because the cold kills the mites?” I said. “After a certain amount of time, anyway.”