The Twenty-Year Death (17 page)

No one paid attention to the chief inspector as he went through to the doors at the back of the room. The hallway there lined the rear of the building with evenly spaced doors down the length of the hall. One door was open at the center of the hall, and a radio could be heard playing a slow jazz song.

Pelleter opened the door to the makeshift morgue and was met with a hurried, fearful face that stared out over the draped form of a body on a gurney.

“I hope you’ve had something to eat since I saw you last,” Pelleter said to Madame Rosenkrantz.

She hung her head, resuming the position she no doubt had held for the last three days, her knees together, her shoulders hunched forward, her hands held in her lap, the pose of a praying supplicant. In other words, a daughter in mourning.

“Yes. The nurses feed me.”

Pelleter found another chair and turned it around just inside the door. He straddled it, resting his elbows on its back. The five coffins had been piled in two stacks to the side, and there was a sour smell of decay in the enclosed room.

“Your husband has been quite distraught over your absence.”

“But you knew where I was.” She spoke to her hands.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t tell him.”

Pelleter remained silent.

“When I was a girl, I would tell people that both my parents were dead...It was easier than admitting that my father was in prison...I never saw him and I had nothing to do with him, so it was almost like he was dead, and I would forget that it wasn’t true. Every now and then the thought would startle me that my father was still alive. I’d stop whatever I was doing, and think, my father is alive, but it wasn’t real. In truth, I believed my own lie.”

She spoke mechanically. There was none of the self-assurance, or meekness, or emotion, or any of the conflicting tempers she had shown at dinner three nights before. Her face was white, and her tone was flat.

“I didn’t even tell my husband the truth until after we had moved to Verargent, and at that point I had known him for over a year. Verargent was his idea. It was small, quiet, had the train but nothing else to attract people, and so he thought it would be the ideal place to live so that he could write undisturbed. I went along with it, only half-realizing the proximity to my father. It seemed to me, what difference could it make if I was twenty miles or one hundred from him, so I didn’t say anything until after we had bought our house. Even then I only explained that my father was in prison, not that he was in Malniveau.”

She spoke as though the body before her wasn’t the man she was speaking of.

“I told you that I believed my father had murdered my mother, and that’s true, and I told you that I didn’t hate him, and that’s true too...

“When I was little, he taught me how to take apart his watch and put it back together. My mother told him that was for little boys, but he said he didn’t care. His daughter could do anything. He set the watch on the table, and took out his tools, and
he showed me piece by piece, pulling each little gear and spring out of the bronze case and spreading them out on a cloth. There were all these pieces of metal, and I couldn’t understand how they could keep track of all of the seconds in the day. I thought that somehow the time must be contained in them, but when they were apart, everything went on, and when they were together, it wasn’t really different. Except, I remember when the last pieces went into the watch, and he would wind it, and the second hand would start turning, it felt as though we had started the world again.

“He was so patient with me those times. And he was not always a patient man. My mother got plenty of smacks and beatings when he felt things weren’t being done right...”

Pelleter reached into his inside pocket for a cigar, but he found that there were none there. He had smoked them all during the day.

“Other than that, I don’t have any good memories of my father. He wasn’t around a lot, and when he was, he frightened me. He could be laughing and he’d have my mother laughing, and then he’d suddenly start hitting her, or he’d storm out. I tried to stay out of his way.

“Do other people feel as though they are a part of their parents? Do they feel that the pieces of each of these grown strangers are really the parts that make them up? Can they say, this part is my mother and this part is my father? And if so, does it matter if their mother or father is still alive? If your parents die, are you the only part still living, or has a part of you died as well?”

She looked up as though she expected Pelleter to answer, and he could see just how young she was.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She looked at the shrouded form on the table in front of her. “I don’t know either. But I don’t want to be what’s left of my father. He was a bad man. I know that, even if I don’t feel it.

“When my mother was killed, they took me away to live with my aunt and cousins. My father was missing at that point... They found him later and then he went to prison, but I had already started telling people that both of my parents were dead...For me it was as though I was an accident created out of nothing. Maybe I was a bad person, and that was why I was all alone.”

“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Pelleter said. “What your parents do is not your fault.”

“Then why did I lie all those years?”

“That doesn’t make you a bad person. And in a way, it was true.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She reached out as though she were going to touch the sheet, and then drew back, gripping the hand that she had extended in her other hand. “It wasn’t true. I can tell you that now. There’s absent, and there’s dead, and there’s a difference. Because when he was just absent, then he was still out there in the world, affecting people, causing things, even if it was only to cause the prison cook to cook one extra meal and for a guard to check his name on a piece of paper. And even if I couldn’t imagine his life, and I didn’t know who he was really, my idea of him seemed as though it were outside of me.

“But now that he’s dead, he’s nowhere but in my head. What was he to the people in the prison? Nothing. One more prisoner. He’s just gone. But here...” She paused, and her eyes narrowed, the great strain of her thoughts and emotions somehow making her more precious, more delicate. She shook her head. “Now
it’s only building that watch, and...” She shook her head again as though shaking the thoughts away.

Pelleter could see how hurt she was, and he wanted to step around the gurney and to put a fatherly arm around her, to reassure her. But he knew it wasn’t his place. He stayed seated in his chair.

“I haven’t pulled back the sheet,” she said. “I haven’t looked at him directly...But I don’t need to.”

“Why don’t you go home? Your husband’s worried about you.”

She nodded her head, but without taking her eyes off of her father’s corpse. She had not cried once during her whole confession, but she looked wan and emptied.

“He loves you. He thinks you are not just a good person, but the best person. He’d do anything for you.”

“I know,” she said, almost a whisper.

“I’m just about finished with the case.”

She looked at him then, but it didn’t look as though she saw him. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It might not. But for the living, it’s all we can ever do.”

“It’s still nothing. I am nineteen years old and I am finally an orphan for real. Knowing that it’s going to happen, and having it happen...Not the same.”

Pelleter stood at that. The smell of the dead was going to his head. He felt as though it was surrounding them, and pulling them away from the world outside. He went to her then, and helped her to her feet with a firm hand on her elbow.

As he did, there was the squeak of a rubber soled shoe on the floor in the hallway. Pelleter listened without showing that he was listening, not wanting to alarm Madame Rosenkrantz. Had he been followed again? There was no other sound and he began to guide her towards the door.

Madame Rosenkrantz didn’t resist his guidance, and he led her out into the hall, where the door to the men’s ward was still easing shut on its hinges, no doubt the footsteps from a moment before. But when they went into the ward, there was no one there other than the same nurse who was now removing the dinner trays from each of the patients’ tables.

The nurse looked up at them with a matronly frown.

Pelleter stopped. “Did someone just come through here?”

“All you folks running through, and it’s not even visiting hours. I’m going to give that girl at the front desk a talking to.”

Pelleter looked ahead, and then he steered Madame Rosenkrantz back the way they had come.

The back hallway was empty still. The radio was off.

“What is it?” Madame Rosenkrantz said, awakening somewhat from her mourning stupor.

“Nothing yet.”

Pelleter stood in the center of the hall, holding tight to Madame Rosenkrantz’s arm and thinking. He pushed her up against the wall shared with the ward, and he went back to the morgue doorway.

He opened the door, but the room was as they had left it, storing the dead.

He returned to Madame Rosenkrantz and took her arm again, steering her down the hall as though she were luggage. She had to take small hurried steps to match his long strides, but she didn’t complain and didn’t ask questions.

They passed through a windowless door at the end of the hall, and found themselves in an alley beside the building.

There was a man at the end of the alley, a large silhouette peering around the side of the building watching the front entrance. He turned at the sound of them, startled to find them
behind him, and then he ran out into the street, disappearing from view.

Pelleter pushed Madame Rosenkrantz back into the hospital, saying sharply, “Wait here,” and he ran down the alley after the man.

The chief inspector reached the street just in time to see his quarry turn down one of the side streets that would lead him back into a series of uneven small passageways where houses had been built with no regard for keeping a thoroughfare.

The chief inspector darted after him. The blood was rushing up his arms and into his chest, constricting his airway. His heart beat dangerously in his head. He had not seen the man’s face, but he had seen the man’s size. He was a hulk.

The side street the man had taken was little more than an alley itself, and unlit. The crisp spring Verargent night was bright, but little of the light from the sky found its way down to these twisted cobble passages.

Pelleter plunged forward, almost twisting his ankle on one of the cobblestones, running after nothing, since there was nothing visible ahead of him.

He passed other openings, any one of which his man could have taken, and so he slowed his pace, trying to hear the other man’s footsteps over his own labored breathing. Running through back alleys was a young man’s work. Pelleter was no longer young.

He stopped, but heard nothing but his own body’s protest.

An oval ceramic tile screwed into the side of one of the buildings read “Rue Victor Hugo.” The provincialism of this almost made him laugh. To have a Rue Victor Hugo had apparently been deemed necessary, but that Verargent had settled on this back alley for the designation was small town politics in its most essential form.

He waited another moment, straining for some sign, and then he turned back.

As he did a large form materialized out of one of the doorways and brought both hands down on the back of the chief inspector’s neck, dropping Pelleter to his knees. A sharp jolt of pain shot from his kneecaps into his stomach, which threatened to empty itself.

The man swung again, still a two-fisted blow, this one landing across the chief inspector’s cheek, unbalancing the downed man, who fell to the ground.

Dazed, the chief inspector tried to look up at his attacker, but there was not enough light. The man pulled back, preparing to kick Pelleter in the ribs, and the chief inspector instinctively put his arms around his head, pulling his body into a ball.

The blow did not come.

Footsteps echoed and were soon beyond hearing.

The chief inspector rolled onto his back, looking up at the lighter patch of sky between the buildings. He took deep breaths, trying to control his breathing, to steady his heart rate.

He looked at his surroundings to distract himself from the pain. All of the windows were shuttered for the night. No one had seen the attack. The ceramic street marker caught a glint of light from somewhere, winking at Pelleter on the ground. Wink, wink. Wink, wink.

It was not the first time he had been beaten, but it had been a long time, many years, and he had forgotten what kinds of little details got imprinted on the mind in such moments. The winking Rue Victor Hugo! There was one in every town!

When his body had recovered enough to let him feel the throbbing ache stemming from the top of his spine, and the
sharp pain radiating from his cheekbone, Pelleter pulled himself up to a standing position, leaning one hand against the wall beside him.

His body had to accommodate the pain to his upright position, sending a shiver over Pelleter’s frame. He was thankful that his attacker held off that final kick. The man could have gotten away without any confrontation. But a panicked man too often made bad decisions. Once he struck he must have come to his senses.

Who had Pelleter angered? Or maybe the right question was, who had he scared? The lineup at the prison had clearly worried someone, if he was being followed and attacked. But too many of the guards could be described as large men for Pelleter’s shadowy impression of his assailant to be any help at identification. Pelleter had thought he was close, at least to identifying the people who knew most of the answers, but there must be some piece that he was missing.

He took his hand away from the wall, testing his weight on his feet, and rolled his head to one side, wincing with the movement. He started back the way he had come, towards the hospital.

The nurse behind the front desk stood as he came in. Half of the lights in the building had been doused, creating the cavernous feel of a public institution at night.