“When I was a boy, women went around in furs with the heads attached and hanging from their shoulders. Minks, nutrias, baby foxes. They – the minks, nutrias, and baby foxes, although maybe some of the women, too – had whiskers and glass eyes. Sometimes they’d be three or four in a bunch, even five. That was only seventy years ago. You see how things change? But don’t get on your high horse. Now they go around with bare breasts, like the women of the Germanic tribes at the time of Caesar, or Cleopatra’s bath attendants, at least in Italian movies. ‘Oh, Hercules! Cleopatra enters the bath!’”
The young doctor was struck dumb.
“You don’t believe me about the minks, I can tell. Look it up. ‘Google’ it.”
“Okay.”
“But first, where can I buy medical books?”
“Where can you buy medical books?”
“I asked you.”
“For laypersons or physicians?”
“Physicians. I know how to read. I have an education. I know Latin and Greek. I once took chemistry, organic chemistry, even histology. But that’s immaterial. Where do you buy these books?”
“Try the Librairie Vigot Maloine. They have something like a hundred and thirty thousand books on medicine, thirty thousand in the store. They have everything.”
“Where is it?”
“On the Rue de l’École de Médecine, right off Saint-Germain, near Métro stop Odéon.”
Jules took out a ten-Euro note and pressed it into the young doctor’s hand. “I don’t … that’s not necessary,” the young man said.
“Yes it is,” Jules said. “Lunch.”
“You really don’t have to do that.”
“Why not? You just saved me ten-million Euros.”
The bookstore was bright and colorful. “I need a summary,” Jules told the clerk – a devastatingly attractive, thin, dark-haired girl wearing glasses, “a handbook that will cover all the diseases and conditions, not just internal medicine, or oncology, etcetera, but something comprehensive. More or less an outline of the whole thing, not for laymen.”
“What you need then,” she said, is Le Manuel Merck, Fifth French Edition, more than four thousand pages. It’s just what you want.”
“The cost?”
“Ninety-nine Euros.”
“That seems like a bargain,” Jules said, “for every disease in the world.”
He couldn’t resist looking into the book, so at the end of the alley he sat down on the steps near a statue of Vulpian, a great nineteenth-century French physician, the spitting image of Robert E. Lee. Jules, who had never heard of Vulpian, felt painfully ignorant.
AT HOME, THE QUIET and stillness were oppressive. He wanted to write a symphony, to sleep with Élodi, to be with Jacqueline. He so much wanted to live, and he so much wanted to die, but the conflict would resolve itself, because, without fail, he would do both.
The symphony, a full, over-spilling cadenza on the theme of the Bach Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, had to be written, as a homage and in the face of the barbarism that neither for the first time nor the last assaulted the West. It had to be written, with need of neither name, nor credit, nor claim, to complete a song that was started in Reims at the Liberation. Jules had needed his entire life, event after event, test after test, failure after failure, finally to understand that he had been meant to do this from the time his father had played the last note, and that, if he did, somehow, without explanation, beyond reason, there would be enough justice and love in his life so that he could finally let go.
He could allow neither the necessity of obtaining the money for Cathérine and Luc to block the writing of the piece, nor the writing of the piece to block the necessity of obtaining the money. And he would be perfectly happy to write it not for audiences, the world, or posterity, but only and simply for Élodi. He was unsure that he could compose something worthy and vital enough to bear the weight intended to appeal to a beautiful young woman with most of her life ahead of her. And given Damien Nerval, if indeed that was his real name, it would have to be physically untraceable to Jules himself.
On the lowest level of the bookshelf was a neatly stacked half-meter pile of paper: odd groupings of bond, graph paper, letterhead, and musical notation pads. It had accumulated since the Lacours had moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And near the bottom of the stack, wrapped in yellowed, partially disintegrating cellophane, were two hundred pages of music paper he had bought in the sixties. He pulled it out. It was slightly jaundiced but not disintegrating. He put it on the desk, from which he pulled the wide, shallow, center drawer. Several bottles of ink had been sitting there since he had stopped using fountain pens long before. He took out a bottle of navy blue, dated 1946, to see if it had dried. It hadn’t. Although almost seventy years old, it was perfectly liquid.
He opened the leather box that was the sarcophagus of his Mont Blancs, seized what once was his favorite, a type from before the war and before he was born, and found that the point was encrusted with the ancient residue of the same ink that had survived in its heavy Mont Blanc glass bottle. At the hot water tap after ten minutes of filling and emptying the reservoir and wiping the nib with paper towels, Jules had given himself the means to find shelter many years back in time, there to fulfill a task that when he was young he had felt but could not identify. Paper, ink, and pen had been waiting. They knew nothing of what had happened in the years between.
SOMEONE WHO ALWAYS ate alone in restaurants, preferred rabbit in beer, dressed in shiny black silk, was as bony and tall as a chain-link fence, and took stairs with aggressive rapidity preceded by the stiff-legged hop that midgets have when they begin to ascend a ramp, would, perhaps not surprisingly, be named Damien Nerval. Who could tell if he had become the man he was because his name was Damien Nerval, or, because of the man he was, he had changed his name to Damien Nerval from something like “Mouton de Bonheur”. But, for whatever reason, he was the man he was: hostile, intimidating, hateful, tortured, and yet obsequious – his studied way of putting prey off guard. He was able to exist because most people want to avoid confrontation, and he always gave them a prescribed way to do so – a narrow exit they could take only if they left behind exactly what he had come to obtain. But he had never encountered someone quite as damaged and devoted as Jules Lacour.
Jules Lacour, whom Nerval assumed had neither much testosterone, time, nor muscle tone left. A music teacher. A hospital patient, barely alive, a man who collapses on the RER. He would be quick work. Nerval, at forty-five, the sweet spot between strength and experience, was backed by the great, indefatigable, trillion-dollar machine of Acorn, a dispositif with neither soul nor conscience but rather a thousand lawyers and a good many laws that over the years it had cooked up in legislatures all over the world. Jules Lacour could not make a credible stand against such combined powers. And yet professionals take nothing for granted, and Nerval was nothing if not professional.
Jules had thirty years of experience beyond Nerval’s, and much else, not least the spirit of the survivor who believes his duty is to die. He had lived his life in an alternate moral dimension: that is, where day in and day out love and loyalty forge the soul into a steel capable of resistance unto annihilation. More than a decade before Nerval’s birth, Jules had been, summer and winter, a soldier in the mountains of North Africa. He had been immune to the terror of death since the age of four. In his child and the life of his grandchild he had a devotion that drove him on. Since infancy, he had been fighting with God in an argument that surpassed the demands of prayer or interrogation. And though he loved much, he feared little, and had always met superior power, its arrogance, and its self-enjoyment, with a direct challenge and a rising within that fed upon and strengthened itself.
In the days before Nerval showed up, Jules studied medicine. It wasn’t hard, as the way he planned the encounter meant that he would decide how it would proceed, not Nerval, who would have no inkling of the advance preparation. So when Claude nervously announced Nerval, Jules was pleased even if it
meant another twenty Euros gone.
Nerval was wiry, dark, and sharp-featured, with sparkling eyes and a half-jack-o’-lantern, bent mouth. The muscles of his face tensed when he met Jules, in an expression that said, ‘I’m looking through and into you, I accuse you, and won’t let go.’ This was intensified by a tic that, although neither Parkinson’s disease nor any other malady, involved the near-continual short oscillations, like the action of a fishing lure, of his head upon his neck. Left, right. Right, left. Ad infinitum. He impolitely refused the offer of something to eat or drink, instead sitting down opposite Jules in Shymanski’s study and, without the normal human curiosity that might have caused him to note or appreciate his surroundings, getting right to business.
He loved to catch people. Some hunters hunt for food and regret that they must kill. Others enjoy and take pride in it, the ones who become elated after a day in the uplands in which they’ve left two thousand birds dead on the ground. Nerval believed that he was doing justice as long as he followed the rules, and he gave not a moment’s thought to the fate or motives of perpetrators of fraud against the company. No one could fault him for doing his duty according to the law, but as he did so he never tempered his view of what he did by taking into account that Acorn itself was a perpetrator of fraud – in bribing legislators and bureaucrats to allow premiums far in excess of covering costs and reasonable profits; in fighting savagely to deny claims, especially to anyone with neither much education nor a lawyer; in greasing judges; in accomplishing illegal trades and rigging markets with the vast capital it controlled; in false accounting; paying off auditors; and stiffing independent contractors; not to mention false advertising, impenetrable contracts, monopolistic control of certain sectors, and billing statements as easy to comprehend as hieroglyphics. In short, Nerval was so heavily un-nuanced he would have made a happy executioner.
He opened Jules’ file and laid it out on his lap. Reading for a moment, he said, both contemptuously and with the enjoyment of a fisherman who sees a fat trout about to swallow the hook, “We know exactly what you’re up to.”
Absolutely still, without a blink or a twitch, as if he were made of stone, Jules waited and waited and waited, unnerving Nerval. “Who’s we?” he then asked quietly.
“Acorn,” Nerval answered. “Our agents, officers, and investigators – like a sock around the ball of the world.”
“Oh,” said Jules, amazed at the metaphor – it was too strange to be just a simile – “I see.”
“What do you see?” Nerval pressed.
“What do you think I see?”
“I think perhaps you see, or you should see, that we know what you’re up to.”
“And what am I up to?”
“You tell me.”
“No,” Jules said firmly. “You brought it up. You tell me.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Nerval said aggressively.
“Yes you do.”
“Why?”
“Because you came out of the blue. You have to initiate. All I have to do is sit here.”
“What other than guilt would prevent you from answering my question?”
“What question?”
“What you’re up to.”
“You didn’t ask me what I’m up to. You told me that you know. That’s not a question.”
“All right then, what are you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“How do you know?” Jules asked.
“Because we know exactly what you’re doing.” Frustrated, Nerval then assumed the position not of the interrogator but the interrogated. “You have a ten-million-Euro policy. Weeks after the start of coverage, you suffered a cerebral aneurysm. Upon admission to the hospital, semi-conscious, you made an accurate diagnosis – inoperable basilar aneurysm. The attending emergency physician, a radiologist, and two neurosurgeons were able to reach that conclusion only after imaging and consultation. How, exactly, were you able to do that?”
“Did I do that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“It is remarkable, in that it has fraud written all over it. Are you a physician?”
“No.”
“Were you trained as such, or in any related field?”
“I’m a cellist, although in University I ranged widely, including in the sciences, and now I read widely, including in the sciences. I resent when scientists assume that because I’m a cellist I know nothing of their subject matter. I read scientific journals and have done so for … let me see … fifty-seven years.”
This unnerved Nerval. “Do you have them?”
“The journals?”
“Yes.”
“I discard them. I found that I never reread magazine articles. I don’t think I’ve ever done so more than once or twice in my life. I used to save them, but then I realized it was unnecessary.”
“Can you prove that you’ve read these?”
Jules let seconds go by, long enough to see satisfaction, a slight reddening, and relaxation in the face of his tormentor, whom Jules allowed to rise a little before slapping him down. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Just enquire of the two or three journals I’ve read over the years as to whether I’ve subscribed. And, to protect myself in an examination of the tax authorities, I’ve kept my financial records, including my checks, which will document my subscriptions.”
“Beginning when?”
“Beginning after I got back from the war in Algeria.”
“You have your records since then?”
“Yes, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t born then. It’s ridiculous.”
“That you weren’t born then?” Jules asked.
“No, that you keep such records.”
“They will prove what you asked to be proved, if you wish to look.”
“You claim that on the basis of having read scientific journals you were able to make an accurate diagnosis, without imagery, that four physicians required a day to make, in consultation, only after test results?”
“I don’t claim that. It was you who did. You may think whatever you wish.”
Nerval now wanted to kill Jules, or at least beat him physically. “You know that we’re carefully checking your medical records. Nothing will pass.”
“And you’ll find nothing you seek. I’m not quite sure what that is.”
“In all of France?”
“In all of France and in all the world.”
“We have a very wide net.”
“How nice to have a wide net.”
“Have you traveled abroad in the last ten years?”
“I was in America in the fall.”
“We can’t look there without a judicial determination, both French and American, which, eventually, we can and will get.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll sign any release,” Jules said, pivoting from resistance to overwhelming cooperation. It amazed Nerval.
“You will?”
“Of course, to speed your investigation. What else can I do for you?”
“You can explain how you did what you did.”
“The diagnosis?”
Nerval nodded. Now he was the sheep, and Jules the shearer.
“That’s easy,” said Jules, enjoying, without showing any sign of it, that the medical question distracted Nerval from the trust account Jules had used as a bank reference. He needed only to last until the first of August, baiting Nerval with the bullfighter’s cape of the complex medical situation, which had the irresistible air of a scheme, because that’s what it was.
“Okay. How?”
“Winston Churchill.”
“Winston Churchill?”
“Exact. Like most geniuses, he was indifferent to what didn’t interest him. ‘Good’ students are like good dogs. They can fetch what their teachers want them to fetch. Churchill was not made to fetch. He was, as he once said, ‘Bloody Winston
Churchill’.”
“How does that possibly …?”
“It does. The entrance examination for Sandhurst had a geography component. He wasn’t interested in geography and hadn’t prepared. A list of all the countries in the world was given to the candidates, and most spent months studying them as intended. Having neglected to do this, Churchill began the night before. His eye was drawn to New Zealand. Realizing that in five or six hours he couldn’t master the geography of the entire world, he stayed with New Zealand and arrived the next morning an expert on the geography of that country and no other. By the grace of God and for the salvation of England, the West, and France, the sole topic on the exam was … New Zealand.”
“So what you’re saying is that by the grace of God you studied basilar aneurysms?”
“Not exactly, but I do have time to read. I’m pretty old and my body is failing. How long does it take to train in medicine, including preparation for medical school and the professional training afterwards? Ten years, fifteen? One must tackle an enormous body of knowledge. And yet I’m interested in the subject. So, like Churchill, I threw a dart. I chose one topic each from a number of areas – esophageal diverticula, insulinoma, spasmodic torticollis, idiopathic pulmonary hemosclerosis, autosomal recessive Von Wellebrand’s disease, Ehrlichiosis, dystonia, orthostatic hypotension ….”
“Enough!”
“And, for the brain, only one thing – inoperable basilar aneurysms. The point is not that I know a lot, or that I’m accurate. I know just a little. If it had been something entirely different I still would have said inoperable basilar aneurysm, I would have been wrong, and you would not be sitting in that chair.”
“Nonetheless, we’ve not finished with you,” Nerval told him.
Jules sat back and said, “Ah! But you are for today.”
This did not sit well with his guest, but, then again, seldom did anything.
JULES RETURNED TO his own quarters where for half an hour he stared across the terrace and over the Seine toward Paris. Claude had moved the potted trees and bushes from the greenhouse back to their warm-weather stations, and there they stood guard in a light drizzle. It felt like a summer morning when the day should be bright and hot but is gray and warm, and the lights in stores are gleaming through the rain as if on a winter evening. He loved such summer mornings, with the sound of water dripping peacefully from lush foliage, and the special noise, a swoosh, that cars and buses make as they push across wet pavement.