The Blood of Lorraine Read online

  Before Martin could object, his companion continued as he retreated for the second time. “I’ll prepare the orders so that all three of the so-called witnesses will be at the Palais on Monday morning, waiting for you.” Reaching the door, Singer bowed slightly. “Please give my regards to Mme Martin.” His return to form accentuated, rather than covered up, the fact that Singer’s self-pitying outburst had been completely out of character. And, Martin sincerely hoped, just as completely unwarranted.

  As the door closed, Martin threw a pencil across his desk and watched as it bounced off onto the floor. Why did he have to go off tonight and examine the body of a mutilated baby? Why was he always the stranger, the new man in town, the one that others came to with their grisly cases? Now there’s self-pity for you! At least this time he had a reason: Singer.

  Martin got up with a sigh and followed the rolling pencil to the foot of his greffier’s desk, which stood near the wall in a position that allowed his clerk to face both judge and witnesses while taking down the official record of their conversations. After a moment’s hesitation, Martin placed the pencil beside Guy Charpentier’s inkwell. This was almost a malicious act. His clerk was rather officious for his young years, and his small, orderly workplace stood as a constant rebuke to the clutter on Martin’s much larger and more luxurious mahogany desk. Smiling to himself, Martin retrieved his bowler and long woolen coat from the coat rack in the corner.

  Clarie would understand his being late again. Best to get the worst of it over with.

  Martin exited through the main entrance of the Palais de Justice which lay on the southern edge of the sedate and dignified Place de la Carrière. He loved the “Carrière” because it expressed in greenery and stone everything he believed in his heart, that progress, equality and justice were possible. Part of the oldest section of the city, the stately elongated public square had once been a feudal playground for military parades and jousting, rimmed by palaces inhabited only by men of title and privilege. In the last enlightened century, the good Duke Stanislas had changed all that, harmonizing the façades of surrounding buildings, acquiring some of them for governmental functions, and transforming the central strip into a park open to all, graced by straight rows of clipped linden trees, stone benches, and elegant statuary. On most evenings before heading home through the town’s Arc de Triomphe, Martin would pause and contemplate all this with gratitude. Grateful that he was leaving the cares of his work behind at the courthouse, grateful that he no longer led a lonely existence in sleepy, pretentious Aix.

  But this was not a usual evening. Holding his hat over his face to protect it from a gust of cold wind, he hurried past the Place de la Carrière and Arc de Triomphe to the busy rue Saint-Dizier to catch the horse tram to the Faculté de Médicine.

  Hanging onto an overhead strap in the single crowded car, Martin watched ruefully as it paused at the head of the street that led to his apartment and to Clarie. Unaccustomed to public transport, he anticipated each clanging stop and influx of last-minute shoppers with growing impatience. What if Dr. Fauvet had given up on him and gone home? The jostling reached its peak at the open-air market, which was folding up for the night. Bustling, chattering women knocked him about with their sacks filled with paper-wrapped packets of fresh fish, bread, and dangling vegetables. It was only after the tram passed through an archway of the ancient porte Saint-Nicolas, a massive stone gate leading out of the old city, that Martin breathed easier. The crowd thinned and the broad-backed draft horse, relieved by the lighter load, clopped along the parallel iron tracks at a faster pace. When Martin spotted the steeple of Saint Pierre, it was his turn to ring for a stop. The Faculté de Médicine was only a block away from the church, which was at the center of one of Nancy’s newer, less densely populated neighborhoods.

  As soon as he extricated himself from the tram, Martin broke into a run. When he got to the Faculté, the morgue in the basement was locked and dark. After a quick search of the main hall, he saw a block of light on the floor, which led him to Lucien Fauvet’s office. He rapped on the clouded-glass window that formed the top half of the oaken door and was invited in.

  Martin was greeted by the gray-blue haze and pleasant aroma of tobacco.

  “Ah yes, Monsieur le juge, good to see you. I’ve been waiting.” Lucien Fauvet looked up from a pile of books and put down his pipe. He had the straw-blond hair and blue eyes of a true northerner and the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. Which he almost was. His beard and mustache, attempts to age and dignify his pudgy face, were still touchingly scanty.

  “Sorry—”

  “No need, no need,” Fauvet said as he got up from his cluttered desk. “I’ve just been reading up to make sure that my conclusions are correct. Come. Let’s get this over with and send you home to dinner.” He left his pipe on the ashtray and his jacket hanging on his chair. The young professor of physiology obviously was not done for the evening.

  “Quite an interesting case, very interesting,” Fauvet muttered as he led Martin back downstairs.

  As Martin walked behind the young doctor, a quiver of trepidation rose in his chest. Fauvet had a reputation for delighting in the grotesque.

  After opening the morgue with one of the keys that he carried in a brass ring in the pocket of his gray trousers, Fauvet pulled a cord to activate the electric bulb hanging over an iron table. Its light fell upon a small bundle covered with a white cloth. Fauvet rolled up his shirtsleeves and pulled the sheet back only far enough to reveal the head. Martin steeled himself not to react. The greenish face was more ghastly than he had imagined. The dead child had taken on the appearance of a toothless, wizened old man. Under the naked bulb, the fine strands of blond hair on the baby’s skull shone white against the mottled, darkened skin.

  Fauvet lifted the lid of one of the baby’s eyes.

  “See these little red specks?”

  Martin leaned forward and peered into the dead baby’s blue-gray eyes. He nodded as he fought down the bile rising in his throat.

  “Signs of asphyxiation. But,” Fauvet raised a triumphant finger, “not by strangulation. No bruising on the neck. Could have been suffocation. A pillow, a diaper. However, the nose was intact, and one does have to ask,” he pronounced as he tore off the sheet with a flourish, “why this?”

  The preternaturally thin little body was more shocking than the head. The torso had collapsed inward, toward a central jagged gash that ran from the child’s throat to the place where his genitals would be, if they had not been cut off. This time Martin stepped back against the cold stone wall for support and covered his mouth to hide his gasp.

  “Gutted him. Hinders my work a bit. But at least, you may have noticed, cleaning out the innards saved us from the smell.”

  Martin hadn’t noticed, although once Fauvet mentioned it, he knew he could start breathing hard without getting sicker. It took him a moment to get out a question.

  “Why do you think someone did that?” he rasped, echoing Fauvet’s rhetorical question with disgusted disbelief.

  “Suffocation is still a possibility, but my best guess is that he swallowed something, a stone, a piece of meat, and they tried to cover it up.”

  “But this?” Despite the sickening sour taste gathering in his mouth, Martin could not take his eyes off the body.

  Fauvet shrugged. “Perhaps the wet nurse was afraid of an accusation of neglect. He was only about seven months old. He should not have been eating anything hard. From what I’ve seen in my lab, we really need to outlaw the practice of sending babies off to the country. It’s impossible to regulate all the women who hire themselves out as wet nurses.”

  “But I thought that’s hardly done any more, sending infants away.”

  “Except for the working classes. When women go back to the factories….”

  “Yes, of course.” Martin paused as he tried to draw a picture of the probable sequence of events. “Why would the parents accept this bizarre story?”

  “Ignorance. Old wives’
tales about Jews. My own mother used to tell them to me.”

  “I never heard them.”

  “You didn’t grow up around here. Your parents probably didn’t come from one of the villages where Israelites and Christians lived cheek by jowl. Most of these villages are gone now, to Germany, of course.”

  Fauvet was speaking of the provinces lost in the last war, and the villages in which most of the Jews of France had lived. Or, at least, the poorer Jews—the horse traders, tinkers and peddlers. As far as Martin knew, this world of forests, goblins and legends was fast disappearing. It certainly was not part of Nancy, the only major city of Alsace-Lorraine still on the French side of the border. Or, at least, not the Nancy he knew.

  “Do you have children?” Fauvet asked.

  Martin shook his head.

  “I only asked because you appear a bit—”

  Did he seem all that squeamish? “My wife is pregnant,” Martin said, using Clarie’s condition to ward off Fauvet’s insinuations.

  “Ah, well, if I were you, I would not describe any of this to her. You know that pregnant women suffer certain mental imbalances.”

  “I have no intention of saying anything about this.” Even if, as some medical experts asserted, women were prone to hysteria because of their physiology, Martin knew this was not true of his Clarie. Still, this was a delicate time and, more than ever, he wanted to protect her.

  “So you told Singer that you thought the baby might have swallowed something,” Martin said, changing the subject.

  “I told him I could not be absolutely sure. Since they cleaned him out, I have no idea what he might have choked on.”

  “You keep saying they?”

  “They, he, she—just about any adult with normal strength could have cut through the kid’s middle. The cartilage is still pretty soft at this age.”

  They, he, she? No idea what the baby choked on? If, indeed, that’s what had killed him. Or had someone smothered him with his own diaper? The gruesome journey to the morgue had not gotten Martin very far—except to see why Singer had been so shaken. Martin stared at the tiny mutilated corpse as he heard himself ask if Fauvet had explained his hypotheses to Singer.

  “I tried to. He insisted on seeing the body, to find out, so he said, if his worst fears were confirmed. And when I showed it to him, he kept repeating, ‘How dare they. They say a Jew did this, a bloodthirsty Jewish peddler. How dare they.’ And on and on in that vein. I could not get through to him that anyone could have done it. Not necessarily even a man, for that matter. So when he declared that he should not be involved, I had to agree since he was not being at all rational. Rather hysterical really. That’s when he asked me to wait for you.”

  Martin considered “hysterical” to be a harsh and disrespectful judgment, even though he had witnessed Singer’s agitation. But he did not want to argue with the smug young professor. He just wanted to leave.

  “Have you found anything at all that would help us identify who mutilated the baby?” This was a crucial question. If the child had died by accident there might be no crime. However, in the atmosphere created by the news of Dreyfus’s alleged treachery, a false accusation of this type could be explosive. Martin needed to nip it in the bud.

  “If we could find a knife, perhaps we could match it to these marks,” Fauvet said, as he retraced the long, jagged line with his finger. Then mercifully he pulled the sheet over the body. “If they were smart, they would have dumped the knife in the river or cleaned it up very carefully.”

  Of course. The police would be lucky to find the knife. Even so, Martin would order them to try to do just that, first thing on Monday morning. Fingers fumbling, he began to button his overcoat. “It’s important that we not let any of this out, until we are certain about what happened. We don’t want this to get in the press.”

  Fauvet nodded in agreement as he rolled down his sleeves. “No need to upset some people more than they already are.”

  Was Fauvet, who had a perverse love of dead bodies, referring to the public, or to the weak stomachs of Martin and Singer? Regardless, before he made his escape Martin shook Fauvet’s hand and thanked him. Then he began the short walk home, praying that he would have time to compose himself before seeing his very pregnant wife.

  2

  THE DIN OF FRIDAY EVENING traffic on the busy rue des Dominicains penetrated even third-story windows shut tight against the cold. Clarie Martin didn’t mind. She had grown up in the center of the southern town of Arles. She liked hearing the clatter of horses’ hooves and carriages and the shouts and laughter of shoppers. These were the sounds of life, of home. If only she could lie back in the armchair, close her eyes, and drift with the shadows spreading across her sitting room. How she longed to catch just a bit of sleep before facing the ordeal of a formal dinner. But she had a guest. And getting Madeleine Froment to leave without hurting her feelings was an arduous and delicate task.

  Madeleine had arrived in Nancy four weeks ago to take Clarie’s place at the Lycée Jeanne d’Arc during the last two months of her pregnancy. Today, once again, Madeleine had appeared right at tea time, ostensibly to talk about new lesson plans for history, geography and literature. Clarie suspected, however, that her companion had really just come to talk.

  Clarie shifted in her chair, trying to make herself more comfortable. Winters were so dark in the north. In the sunlight, the sitting room was the most cheerful place in the apartment. Now Clarie could barely make out the delicate sprays of pink and yellow roses that decorated the wallpaper. She was about to suggest that Madeleine turn up the gas lamp on the table beside her armchair, when the baby kicked. Putting her hands on her bulging middle, she waited for another blow. How she loved the new tautness of her belly and the vigor of the being that was growing inside her! This was the life, the home that she and Bernard were making together.

  “You’re not listening.”

  “I’m sorry, the baby moved.”

  “I suppose I should understand; they do say that pregnant women get all dreamy.”

  Spoken with the true bitterness of an old maid, which, at forty-four years of age, Madeleine surely was. She had ceased fluttering to the rhythm of her latest enthusiasm—some article in the Catholic newspaper La Croix about the “miraculous” conversion of a prominent French Jew—to sit straight up and glare at Clarie. With her dark piercing eyes, sharp little nose, graying hair, and the flat black hat she wore for visiting, Madeleine looked for all the world like a scrawny little bird.

  Clarie bit her lower lip. Poor thing, she thought, as she tried to smile away this uncharitable image. “Please go on.”

  “All I was saying, my dear, is that if they all became Catholics, it might solve the problem.”

  “Umm,” Clarie managed a nod to show she was listening.

  “Although perhaps not, given the way they are.” Madeleine pursed her lips and thrust her chin upward, as if restraining herself from saying more.

  Clarie sighed. She knew how much Madeleine wanted her approval, her agreement, when all Clarie could give was her sympathy. She was tired of hearing about how, according to Madeleine, the Jews, the Protestants, and the Freemasons were responsible for all of France’s woes. It was hard to believe that the two of them had been trained to teach enlightened principles in the new public high schools for girls. Still, Clarie had to be kind. She owed so much to Madeleine, not least the very fact that she had come to Nancy to take over Clarie’s classes.

  Clarie smoothed over the hard round mound of her stomach, pondering the different paths their lives had taken. Eight years ago, when Clarie entered the experimental teacher’s college at Sèvres, she had been so frightened. She had known nothing and felt everything: her inexperience, her loneliness, her lack of style and money. Worst of all, she had arrived in a state of emotional turmoil because she had stuck to her dreams and left Bernard Martin, her judge, her sweet young judge, in Aix-en-Provence.

  Back then Madeleine, an older student who had taught in pr
ivate schools, took Clarie under her wing, guiding and consoling her. Now it was Clarie’s turn to be understanding. The intervening years had not been kind to Madeleine. She had never found a permanent position, in part because she returned to Bordeaux to care for her father. He died suddenly in 1889 after discovering that he had just lost what remained of his small fortune in the catastrophic failure of the Panama Canal Company. Clarie frowned, knowing all too well that the story did not end there. A few years later, the tabloid press uncovered the bribery scheme that had kept the Company’s dire financial straits a secret from its investors. Although the ensuing scandal engulfed an entire political class, the anti-Semitic press gleefully emphasized the role that a few prominent Israelites had played. That’s when Madeleine had begun to blame her misfortunes on the Jewish people.

  Madeleine cleared her throat.

  “Sorry,” said Clarie, “guess I was dreaming.” As if to make up for this harmless lie, Clarie began to push herself up from the chair. “Are you chilly? Perhaps I should stoke the fire.” She had given Madeleine the armchair by the marble hearth, because the older woman always complained of the cold.

  “Please, my dear, don’t bother. I’ll be leaving any minute.”

  Clarie sank back and tugged her maroon wool shawl more tightly around her shoulders and chest, wondering what tack Madeleine would use to prolong the conversation. Where is Bernard?

  “Before I go, my dear, I need to ask you again,” Madeleine said as she began to put on her gloves. “Don’t you think you and the judge should think of moving?”

  That old question. Clarie could never decide whether Madeleine’s main criticism of their living quarters stemmed from some notion that a juge d’instruction should have a more elegant address or because the Martins lived above a Jewish shop. She clenched her jaw and patiently explained, again, how much they liked being in the middle of things—close to the Palais and to the school, on a street so beloved by the city’s inhabitants they always simply called it the rue des Dom.