Old Bones (2 page)

   "… AND I know we’ve all enjoyed and will much benefit from this morning’s fascinating presentation." The conference chairman, Pierre Chagny, Deputy Director of the Central Directorate of Criminal Investigation of the Police Nationale, paused with a smile on his round face and mimed the clapping of his hands, encouraging a spiritless spatter of applause for Professor Wuorinen, who acknowledged it from a seat at the back of the room with a gloomy frown and a curt nod.

"And now it will be my pleasure to introduce a speaker already known to many of you as the Skeleton Detective of America…."

   GIDEON winced. Obviously, this skeleton detective business, hung on him by a fanciful crime reporter years before, was not going to go away, and in fact he had begun to resign himself to living with it. But "the Skeleton Detective of America"? That was another rung up the ladder of absurdity. With luck, it might never get back to his academic colleagues, but he doubted it. They were maliciously efficient at ferreting out such tidbits, and it wouldn’t be long before he arrived at some committee meeting to find a meticulously printed place card labeled "Dr. G. P. Oliver, the Skeleton Detective of America." That or worse.

He sighed, laid down his note cards, and looked around the room. Ninety people, sitting on stackable plastic chairs and regarding him with the sleepy and unhopeful gaze of an after-lunch audience that believes it is in for a long, dry lecture. Since France was the host country this year, most of the attendees were French, but everyone was supposed to have a command of English, the organization’s official language. This Gideon doubted (certainly Professor Wuorinen’s command was dubious), and he had considered speaking in French, but his courage had failed him. They would have to settle for English, along with printed translations of his charts and tables.

Off to the side in the second row, John Lau slumped on the small of his back, comfortably askew, one ankle up on the empty chair in front of him, and already two-thirds asleep. Old friends, they had come to St. Malo together, John to attend lectures and Gideon to give them. If that was as much enthusiasm as he could expect from his one and only crony in the place, Gideon thought, he was in big trouble.

"…my privilege to put you into the capable hands of the renowned Dr. Oliver for the first of his four presentations on forensic anthropology. I know you will find him thoroughly fascinating. Dr. Oliver."

Gideon rose to transparently doubtful applause, shook hands with Monsieur Chagny, and waited for the room to settle down.

"What I hope to do over the next few days," he began, "is to acquaint you with what bones can tell us, and how they tell it. I’m afraid we’ll have to work with medical school specimens; there haven’t been any murder cases involving skeletons in Brittany for some time, unfortunately. Or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it…."

   WITHOUT looking at the dark, solemn servant who proffered the tray of apéritifs, Mathilde du Rocher waved him away with an impatient flick of a beringed and impeccably manicured hand.

"I, for one," she had been saying, and now said again for the benefit of her amiably smiling husband, "I, for one, find the entire business intolerably overbearing on Guillaume’s part, and inexcusably rude as well. We’ve been waiting here for nearly an hour.
An hour!
" She compressed her firm mouth eloquently. "Collecting seashells!"

"Well," said René du Rocher, accepting a champagne cocktail, "I’m sure there are reasons."

Mathilde did not dignify this feeble response with one of her own. She merely glared at his newly furry upper lip with a look that said: Your moustache is utterly ridiculous. René smiled pleasantly and sipped his cocktail.

Mathilde turned to her son. "That’s your second martini. Where did you learn to drink martinis?"

Neither were these comments acknowledged. Jules du Rocher’s plump arm swept the long-stemmed glass from the tray directly to his lips, which he smacked loudly after downing half the drink.

"What are
they
doing here, is what I’d like to know," he grumbled, openly staring across the room at another threesome, who sat stiffly in their high-backed wing chairs, as removed and alienated as if they’d been walled off.

"If I’d known they were really going to be here, I assure you we would still be in Frankfurt," said Mathilde, grimly watching her son drain his glass with a second swallow and then go grubbing with a pudgy thumb and forefinger after the anchovy-stuffed olive at the bottom.

"Don’t do that, Jules," she said disgustedly.

"Well, why don’t they put a toothpick in it, then?" he asked, not unreasonably. He capitulated, however, bringing the glass to his lips, upending it, and helping the olive into his mouth with a pinky that followed it in rather more deeply than Mathilde thought strictly necessary.

That, said Mathilde’s look, is repulsive. Unconcerned, Jules concentrated on liberating the anchovy with his tongue, then munching with deep satisfaction; first the anchovy, then the olive.

"Now, Mathilde," René said reasonably, "if Guillaume invited the Fougerays, he must have had a very good reason. And you know he’s not being late on purpose. He’s probably forgotten about the time; you know how absentminded the old fellow’s been getting."

You, his wife’s eloquent look said, are not the person to talk about absentmindedness.

René took no offense; indeed, he seemed to take no notice. "So why upset yourself?" he continued. "There’s no point, is there?"

Indeed, there wasn’t. The patriarchal Guillaume du Rocher convened these "family councils"—formal meetings of the dwindling and far flung du Rocher clan— whenever it pleased him, and he ran them however he wished. If it was increasingly in his nature to be high-handed and eccentric, well, that was to be borne with good humor. What choice was there?

"Best to simply be thankful these things occur so infrequently," René concluded with a radiant smile, his logic triumphant and irrefutable.

René du Rocher was a soft, placid, somewhat dandified man of sixty-two, a year younger than his wife—with shiny, thinning, plastered-down hair, a cherubic pink-and-white complexion, and small, delicate hands that he frequently rubbed together with a dry, rustly sound. He was clean in his habits, used cologne liberally, and took pride in the masculine vigor of his three-week-old moustache.

In all, he looked like an affable and self-contented bank manager, which in fact he was. Or close enough; Monsieur du Rocher was a corporate-lending officer in the international division of the Crédit Lyonnais in Frankfurt, to which city he had moved three years earlier with his family, after three decades of unexceptional advancement in Paris, Geneva, and London. The advancing years had enhanced his naturally sweet temper and, less fortunately, his predisposition toward a slight vacancy of mind. At the urging of his superiors, he was now contemplating retirement.

"I’ve always liked this room," he said mildly. "Did you know that Henri IV and his party were once feasted here? In 1595. The manoir was already a hundred years old."

"Oh, be quiet," Mathilde said absently, picking an invisible shred of lint from the dark, broad, woolen field of her bosom.

Jules had consumed the olive. His eyes roved to the hors d’oeuvres tray on the coffee table. "The point
is,
" he said querulously to his father, "that Cousin Guillaume hasn’t asked the Fougerays to a family council in
decades,
or haven’t you noticed?" Emulating his mother, he had adopted this petulant, deprecatory tone toward his father at fourteen, had found it satisfactory, and had not modified it in the ensuing sixteen years. "And with good reason. Look at the man; the quintessential peasant. Aside from a certain repulsive fascination, it’s awkward to be in the same room with him. Is he
really
related to us?"

"You shut up too," Mathilde muttered, now brushing a thread from her ample skirt. "What a prig you are, Jules."

If her son felt injury at this inconsistency, he did not show it. He concentrated instead on loading a triangle of buttered toast with all the beluga caviar it would bear and conveying it slowly and carefully to his mouth. As cautious as he was, a few oily, shining beads fell into his lap. Mathilde lowered her lids and looked the other way.

Across the room, Claude Fougeray smiled stonily at his wife and daughter, not easy for a man whose hyperthyroid condition afflicted him with a pop-eyed stare of permanent, outraged surprise. "Let them look down their long noses at us, these damned du Rochers," he said. The tight smile faded to a sneer. "Look at them. I could buy all of them put together, if I wanted to. I have—"

Leona Fougeray, tiny, vivid, raven-haired despite her fifty-three years, interrupted her husband. "Yes? I’d like to see you buy Guillaume du Rocher." Her mobile lips turned downward. "And you’re drinking too much. As usual."

"Goddamn it," Claude whispered throatily, bald head lowered like an angry bull’s, so that his neck, thick and stubby at the best of times, all but vanished. "I didn’t say Guillaume, did I? I said anyone in this room. Do you see Guillaume in this room?"

Leona, on the verge of replying with heat, thought better of it and settled for glaring reproachfully with her intense, jet-black Italian eyes. This was lost on Claude, who glowered at the ancient Aubusson carpet, an artery throbbing sluggishly at each temple.

"
I’m
not leaving," he said suddenly. "They can kiss my ass. Who the hell are they supposed to be? They don’t even live in Brittany. They don’t even live in
France.
" He took an angry gulp of his third Pernod. "And what are
you
looking so glum about?"

The question was directed at their daughter, who sat staring mutely at her untouched glass of
blanc-cassis.
Of necessity she had long ago grown used to being snubbed by her distant relatives, but she had never felt it so keenly.

"I asked you a question, my girl."

She started and looked up. "Father," she murmured, "no one is talking to us. Nobody wants us here. Please, mayn’t we go?"

Her lips trembled slightly, emphasizing the tiny, radiating lines that had recently begun to appear around her mouth so prematurely. Not yet thirty and never beautiful, with fine, pale hair, she already had a wan, faded look that her birdlike mother would not have at eighty. Only her eyes, a lucid gray-green, shone with warmth, but these were often cast down, as they were now.

"Why should
we
go?" Her father’s voice was harsh. "Didn’t we get invited?" He finished the Pernod and hissed at the solemn servant for another. When he got it he took a long pull, then nodded to himself and smiled. "Well, I know a few things they don’t know. Oh, yes, they have a surprise coming, a big—"

"
What
do you know?" Leona said impatiently, tossing her head, her Italian accent broadening, her eyes flashing more dramatically still. "You’re living in a dream world. Claire is right. They’ll make us look like fools."

A second interruption was more than Claude Fougeray could tolerate. His hand clenched, his eyes bulged a little more. "Shut up, you Italian bitch!" he said in a voice that carried plainly throughout the room.

The effect on Madame Fougeray was immediate and colorful. Bright disks of crimson leaped out on her cheeks, as round and red as a pair of checkers. Her mouth, caught closed while forming a word, sprang open with an audible pop. She stood abruptly.

"The master speaks," she hissed. "Master of the sausages!"

She spun about, the full, Turkish-style trousers of her red-and-black Paco Rabanne outfit swirling dramatically around her, and stalked out, her blazing eyes focused straight ahead of her. A few moments later her heels could be heard clacking forcefully up the stone stairs leading to the bedrooms.

On the other side of the room Jules du Rocher had watched this domestic scene with amused, piggy eyes. "Did you hear that?" he asked through a mouthful of
páté de foie gras
and bread. "Wait until she gets him alone. She’ll eat him alive." He snickered at this witticism and glanced at his mother, who busily aligned her rings.

Jules’ words, coming as they did in a moment of silence, carried further than he had intended. Claude Fougeray jumped out of his chair, brushed away his daughter’s hesitantly restraining hand, and marched quickly to the du Rochers.

"Do you want to repeat that?" he said flatly, staring down at Jules, his thick fists held at his sides.

Superficially they were somewhat alike, short and stubby-limbed, with torsos like beach balls, but Claude, older by thirty-five years than his distant cousin, was tense and compact while Jules was soft, flaccid, and spreading.

"Apologize," Claude said.

Jules coughed and blinked. Uneven streaks of red mottled his round cheeks.

"I apologize."

"Louder."

Jules glanced dartingly at the others in the room: at his parents; at Claire Fougeray, who looked utterly miserable; at the dark, grave servant who stood against the wall watching impassively; at another threesome that sat looking on silently from a grouping of carved wooden chairs on the other side of the Louis XIV billiard table.

"I apologize," he repeated, his eyes on Claude’s belt buckle.

"Louder," Claude said again.

"Really," Mathilde said, pulling at her pearl choker.

René du Rocher echoed his wife weakly, reflecting her gesture with a tug at his little moustache. "Really…really, my dear man, this is really—"

"No one’s talking to you," Claude said savagely.

"Well…well, I was only—"

"Don’t encourage him," Mathilde said under her breath in German, her face stiff. "Ignore him. He doesn’t know any better, the—"

"Speak French!" Claude shouted suddenly enough to make the three of them jump. "You’re in France. Don’t give me any of that damned Boche! Ik-bik-blik-bluk!"

"Who in hell are you to say that to anyone, you collaborationist bastard?" The speaker was one of the three people on the other side of the table, a square, big-boned woman of fifty in a functional tweed suit. She had observed quietly until that moment, then leaped to her feet and shouted, her husky voice strained with emotion.