Doctor Frigo (2 page)

My father accepted my declaration of intent philosophically, and when later he agreed to pay for my studies in Paris he became his usual businesslike self. ‘I’m glad you didn’t press to go to the United States,’ he said, ‘that would have been even more expensive. Anyway, I have no doubt that you will work hard and make the most of your opportunities.’ And then he added thoughtfully: ‘Some
medical doctors have done quite well in politics. They seem – God knows why – to be trusted.’

But if those lessons, learned, so to speak, at my father’s knee, did not predispose me to the law as a career, they did instil in me an awareness of some of the accepted ways of avoiding legal pitfalls.

The subject of written evidence was one of which he never tired.

‘Beware the policeman with his dog-eared notebook,’ he would say. ‘The man may be, indeed probably is, unable to write more than his own name and only just able to read. But when he gets into court, what is down in that notebook, no matter when or by whom it was put there, will be treated as if it were Holy Writ.’

And he would wag his finger at us. ‘So remember, children,’ he would say after some horrendous account of justice mocked or perverted, ‘and remember carefully. If ever you should commit a crime, which God forbid, or if ever you have reason to suppose that you may be falsely accused of some misdemeanour or indiscretion, keep a written record of all your actions and thoughts at the relevant time. Keep it in your own handwriting, date it and never make subsequent alterations in it which can be seen unless you have a creditable and convincing explanation for them.’

This is one of his injunctions that I have not forgotten. From time to time I have kept written records of the kind suggested and often found them useful later. Not, I may add, that I have been or have expected to be accused of a crime, but because, while most foreign nationals obliged to have dealings with French bureaucracy must expect to suffer minor inconvenience, a foreign doctor so placed, even if he has qualified in France itself, is at a more serious disadvantage. When he is Dr Frigo working in the state-subsidized medical service of an overseas department of France, he is peculiarly vulnerable.

At the moment it seems to me that the extent of my vulnerability has been suddenly and considerably increased.

Hence this written record. I should have begun it three days ago.

Now, while my actions and thoughts at what may prove to be the relevant periods are still fresh in my mind, I must make up for lost time.

Only three days ago? It seems longer.

I was in the hospital mortuary assisting Dr Brissac at an autopsy when the summons came from the Préfecture.

The male cadaver on which we were working was that of a middle-aged Belgian who had been with a package-tour
party staying at the Hotel Ajoupa. He had collapsed while listening to the steel band there and had been dead on arrival at the hospital. The apparent cause of death was an aortic aneurysm, but the man’s widow had made a strong statement to the police. She had said that he had died of food poisoning and accused the hotel. Although no one else in the group had suffered anything worse than the indigestion and ill-temper which are the normal after-effects of an Ajoupa barbecue – charred island beef is virtually inedible – the examining magistrate had ordered a full autopsy and we were following strictly the prescribed procedures.

Dr Brissac is our medical superintendent as well as senior surgeon of the hospital, and if it should be thought surprising that he had not delegated so menial a task, I can only say that nowadays Dr Brissac always insists on doing the autopsies himself. Why? I can only guess. Some of my colleagues consider that as a surgeon he is inclined to undue timidity, that many interesting surgical cases which could and should have been dealt with here have been cravenly flown to Fort de France. They say that he ought to make way for a younger man. If those judgements are valid it may well be that Dr Brissac, inhibited by memories of occasional mistakes with live patients, now prefers to exercise his skills on the dead. I must say that he does display a certain gusto at the mortuary table. His work there is invariably swift, sure and a pleasure to watch.

He had just made the abdominal incision. I was pulling on the ascending colon so that he could snip away the peritoneal reflections, when the mortuary attendant came in to say that I was wanted on the telephone.

I told him to take a message. He said that it was someone from the Préfecture on behalf of a Commissaire Gillon and that the matter was urgent.

Dr Brissac stopped cutting and waved his scissors impatiently. ‘Tell the Préfecture from me that Dr Castillo is too busy to speak,’ he said. ‘Tell them that he has a man’s entrails in his hands and that he will call back.’

The attendant went away grinning and we worked on. Dr Brissac grunts a good deal as he works but does not usually talk much. However, when we got to the transverse colon he glanced up at me.

‘Do you know Commissaire Gillon?’

‘Very slightly, Doctor. A week or two ago his youngest boy gashed a leg swimming by a reef. The Commissaire brought him in to have the wound attended to. I happened to be on duty.’

Dr Brissac pursed his lips. ‘He did not tell me about that.’ After a bit he went on. ‘He was at my house for bridge the other evening and was making enquiries about you. Not about your professional qualifications – he would have all that information in your dossier – but about your personal interests, your character.’

‘Oh.’

‘What did you do with your spare time apart from bedding your girl friend and that amateur photography of yours? When you were in charge of the mobile clinic last year what had been my impressions of your work? Were you self-reliant or are you the type who always has to have his hand held?’

‘Interesting questions.’ I tried to sound as if I didn’t much care how he had answered them.

He didn’t tell me anyway; he was cutting his way into the splenic flexure. When he spoke again he said: ‘I take it you don’t know who Commissaire Gillon is or what precisely he does here?’

‘I assumed that he was a policeman. I didn’t know that police worked in the Préfecture.’

‘He is a policeman, but not an ordinary one. He commands the DST antenna in this department. At least “antenna” is what he calls it. Officially the unit is a brigade, I believe, but perhaps he thinks that antenna sounds more mysterious and important. These political types …’ He broke off as if aware suddenly that he had been straying on
to dangerous ground. ‘It’s as well to be polite to them,’ he added.

I got no more out of him. It was clear that he knew more about the telephone call and the reason for it than he was prepared to tell me.

When we had finished with the cadaver, I typed out the preliminary report for his signature and had the various specimens we had taken sent to the laboratory for examination. By then it was ten o’clock. I was due in the out-patients’ department, but there was little privacy there and I did not want to be overheard talking to the Preéecture about personal matters. In spite of Dr Brissac’s hints about Gillon’s interest in my character the only reason that I could think of for my having attracted the attention of the DST was that I was an alien in government service and therefore in some way suspect.

I was put through to a secretary. She was brusque. Dr Brissac’s little joke about entrails had evidently not gone down well. Commissaire Gillon wished to see me in his office at eleven-thirty. Not at twelve, not a quarter to twelve, but at eleven-thirty please. Yes, it was understood that I had my duties at the hospital, but no doubt I could arrange with a colleague for those to be attended to in my absence if necessary. Eleven-thirty in Commissaire Gillon’s office then, on the second floor of the annexe. Thank you, Doctor.

In the out-patients’, as it happened, there were only a few persons for me to see that day; but one of them was an old fisherman with diabetes whose case I had come across when I had been out covering the smaller islands with the mobile clinic. The local dispensary now took care of his insulin requirements but every three months he came in for me to look him over. His wife always came with him. She could never quite understand the nature of the disease – or remember what I had told her about it last time – and, asI had difficulty translating my over-simplified explanations into patois, patience on both sides was necessary. It was
eleven-fifteen before I could get away. Then I had trouble starting my moto and had to pedal up to the main road. That made me very hot as well as nervous, so the fast ride down the hill into the town was not as refreshing as usual.

The island of St Paul-les-Alizés was first sighted by Columbus on his second voyage to the Indies and named San Pablo de la Montanas. The ‘mountains’ then visible were twin peaks of the volcano now called Mont Velu, the two craters of which became joined during the eruptions of 1785. San Pablo was never colonized by Spain. The idigen-ous Caribs were a ferocious lot and three Dominican missions sent to convert them to the Faith were all in the end massacred. It was not until a French trading company took possession a century and a half later that the Caribs of St Paul were, by better armed savages from Europe, themselves massacred. Aside from a temporary occupation by the British during the Napoleonic wars, St Paul has been French territory ever since.

Although, like Martinique, Guadeloupe and other islands of the French Antilles, it is fast being ‘developed’, few of St Paul’s recent acquisitions – the Plan Five light industry complex and commercial centre, the municipal low-cost housing estate, the new elementary school, the Alizés supermarket and the Hotel Ajoupa – have yet impinged on the old port of Fort Louis and the streets above it. Within the amphitheatre bounded by the Vaubanesque ramparts on the headland, the Môle du Bassin and the foothills of the Grand Mamelon, the place still looks much as it did in the nineteenth century. True, there are now microwave dishes mounted on the roof of the citadel beside the flagstaff, jumbo jets from the lengthened airport runway now thunder overhead, and out across the bay the concrete pylons of the new Club Nautique can be seen sprouting like toadstools on the green slopes of La Pointe de Christophe; but the town of Fort Louis itself is little changed. It is still ugly, overcrowded, ramshackle, noisy and, for the most part, squalid.

The Préfecture occupies one side of the Place Lamartine halfway up the hill.

The claim, made in the guidebook put out by the Bureau de Tourisme, that the old quarter of the town is ‘a picturesque evocation of the colonial past’, though not completely false, is certainly misleading. A few years back the balconied façades of a street of early limestone and maçonne-du-bon-dieu houses near the old church were restored. That is all; and, for those of us who actually live in the houses, it was not enough. Nothing was done about our plumbing. This continues to evoke the colonial past in ways which can sometimes surprise even the hard-faced men of the Service Sanitaire. The money that should have been spent on it was used instead to install an air-conditioning system in the Préfecture. The bureaucratic tricks employed to legalize that bare-faced swindle are still resented.

Built in 1920 to replace a wooden predecessor destroyed by fire, the Préfecture looks like a mairie of the period transported from some industrial town in north-east France and then whitewashed. It stares brazenly across the Place at the statue of Lamartine, the poet who as a statesman sought to make men free and who was so little corrupt that he became penniless.

The black policeman under the drooping tricolour eyed me curiously when I asked for Commissaire Gillon’s office and then directed me to the annex.

I know the main building and its creaking parquet well enough – the Bureau des Etrangers is on the entresol – but I had never before penetrated as far as the annexe. This was put up after the ‘assimilation’ of 1946 and occupies most of what was once the Préfet’s garden. It is approached, I found, by a narrow bridge-of-sighs leading from the second floor. A signboard with a pointing hand told me that it housed among other things the divisional offices of the Ministère de l’Intérieur and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire.

The DST is sometimes described by North American news magazines as the French FBI, but although this may be a convenient shorthand explanation it is not strictly valid. The FBI exists to combat a number of federal crimes within the United States, one of which happens to be espionage by foreign powers. The DST deals only with counter-intelligence and related matters on French territory, and, although it is a branch of the Sûreté Nationale, it more or less confines itself to crimes against internal security. There are other differences. Films and television programmes depicting ‘G men’ as heroes may not be popular any more but at least they exist. If even one film depicting a DST agent in a sympathetic light exists I should be very surprised. Certainly I have never seen it. While an ordinary citizen of the United States invited to talk to FBI representatives could conceivably feel flattered, most Frenchmen, who distrust all policemen anyway, would accept a similar invitation from the DST with extreme reluctance and the deepest misgivings. I may not be a Frenchman born but France is my adopted country. Going to keep my appointment with Commissaire Gillon I was very much on the defensive.