"Anyone killed?"
"Both recipients were killed. And two bystanders injured. It’s terrible; like a plague. Like guns in America. France is afflicted with it."
"I didn’t know that," Gideon said.
"Oh, yes. Everywhere: Paris, Marseilles, even St. Malo. These damned…" His pale, lined face flushed angrily, then set. He bowed and left.
Gideon drank the last of his coffee. "Whose turn?"
"Yours," John said, and slid the bill to him.
Gideon signed it, put down his room number, and the two of them walked out to the hotel lobby.
"Letter-bombs suck," John said.
"I’m not too keen on them myself."
"No, I mean there are some kinds of killers you can almost sympathize with. But shredding a guy’s face through the mail, when you can be a thousand miles away…not giving a damn if someone else opens it up and gets his eyes blown out or his hand torn off-you just spend another ten bucks for a couple of ounces of commercial explosive and a cheap detonator, pack it in a manila envelope, and send off another one. Ah, it sucks."
"John, I agree with you. You don’t have to get graphic."
When they stopped at Reception to leave their keys, the man at the desk pulled a thick, plain manila envelope out of a rack behind him. It was heavily stamped, but there was no return address. Just "M. Oliver, Hotel Terminus, 20, rue Nationale, 35400 St. Malo," penciled on the front.
Gideon and John glanced at each other and laughed with a marked lack of conviction.
"Uh, when did it come?" Gideon asked. "I wasn’t expecting anything."
"It was in this morning’s mail. An express delivery. Is something wrong?"
"Wrong?" Gideon said. "No, of course not." He lifted the envelope-gingerly-and carried it carefully from the desk, resting it on both palms like an unstable souffle. It was stiff and heavy, about a quarter of an inch thick.
"John," he said, walking very slowly and keeping his eyes on the envelope, "am I being overly paranoid?"
"I don’t know about‘overly,’ but, yeah, I’d say you’re being paranoid. Who’d want to kill you?"
"That’s what Ray said about Claude Fougeray," Gideon muttered.
"Come on, you’re just spooked because of what that French cop said. Let’s get out of here. We’re supposed to be in that doctor’s office in twenty minutes."
"No, wait up a minute." The bar, which extended into the lobby, wasn’t open yet. Gideon set the envelope face up on one of the round, plastic-topped tables and looked at it. John was right; if not for that brief discussion with the commissaire, he would already have torn it open and been on his way to St. Malo. All the same…
"John, let’s say I thought this thing might be a bomb-"
"For the sake of argument, you mean."
"Right. Is there any way I could check it out, or would I just have to put it in the bathtub and turn on the water? Or call the police?"
"No, there’s a kind of commonsense standard routine you go through, if it makes you feel any better. You look at the point of origin and the sender. If they’re unusual-"
"It doesn’t say who the sender was. The point of origin’s Marseilles, according to the postmark." He frowned at John. "Marseilles?"
"Okay, so who in Marseilles would want to send you a letter-bomb?"
"Nobody. Nobody in Marseilles would want to send me anything. I don’t know anyone in Marseilles."
"Mm," said John. "Well, moving right along, you check the handwriting on the address. If it looks disguised-"
"Block letters," Gideon said grimly.
John laughed. "Okay, block letters. Boy, you really think someone’s trying to blow you up, don’t you? Well, you could check it for flex."
"Flex?"
"You bend it-but only a little. A lot of these things have spring tension mechanisms in them, and they feel kind of springy. Sometimes you can even hear the metal creak."
Gideon delicately picked up the envelope by two corners, lifted it to the level of his ears, and very gently-
"Hey!" John shouted, "Go bend that thing somewhere else! What are you trying to do?"
Gideon put it back down and gave John what he thought was a first-class imitation of Inspector Joly’s Jack Benny gaze. "I thought," he said, "that this was mere paranoia on my part."
"I just think," John mumbled, "that if you’re really that worried about it, maybe you ought to call Joly’s office."
"If I’m worried about it," Gideon said with richly satisfying contempt.
JOLY was at Rochebonne, and neither Denis nor Fleury was at the hotel de police. The sergeant on duty was not so much unsympathetic as incurious, reeling off bored, monotonic questions like a recording: Has someone threatened you? Do you have reason to think someone wishes to harm you? What reasons do you have for thinking this package might contain a bomb? The answers did nothing to arouse his interest, and Gideon was told he needn’t bother to bring the object to Dinan. Merely leave it with Sergeant Mallet at the hotel de police in St. Malo. The sergeant would be happy to take care of it, and the police would be in touch with le professeur in due course.
Glad it had not been Joly he’d talked to, Gideon hung up sheepishly and thought seriously about opening the damn envelope and forgetting about Sergeant Mallet. But in the end, having set (he thought) the wheels of the Police Judiciaire in motion, he felt it would be better to follow through.
The envelope was duly left at the police station with Sergeant Mallet, or rather in his absence with a harassed young policeman who was trying to mediate a noisy argument between a stall-owner from the Place Poisonnerie and a motorist who had allegedly run over a fish. (Gideon might have mistrusted his translating abilities but for the indisputably flattened sea bass on the counter.) And by
9:30 a.m., only half an hour late, they were in Dr. Loti’s office in St. Malo’s elegant old Place Guy-la-Chambre, just inside the ramparts at the St. Vincent Gate.
THIRTEEN
Dr. Loti’s consultation room was a Frenchman’s version of Norman Rockwell’s idea of what a doctor’s office ought to look like: ageing books, heavy old mahogany furniture, a few comfortably faded red-plush chairs stuffed with horsehair, a worn, good carpet on a gleaming wooden floor, a big desk of golden oak. Pierre Loti himself looked something like an elderly Michelin Man, large and cheerful, with a round, pneumatic-looking torso. He sat behind his desk, fingers interlaced comfortably on his vest-clad abdomen, leaning back in his wooden swivel chair and staring at the ceiling while he talked. And talked.
"Forgetful?" he said. "Do you mean, was he senile? Did he have Alzheimer’s disease? Did he lose track of where he was, so that he had to be led home? No-no-no-no." His wattles jiggled as he shook his head.
"On the other hand, it’s true that he’d been getting a little absentminded with time, yes. A little impatient with the needs of others, a little set in his ways. A man of a certain age has a right to it, don’t you think so?"
"I certainly do," Gideon said politely. Dr. Loti was no more than five years younger than Guillaume had been, if that.
"Certainly," Dr. Loti agreed. "But you know, a good many people don’t know the difference between a mind that’s empty or confused, and a mind that’s truly‘absent’; that is, somewhere else, concentrating quite efficiently on some abstract or distant problem and ignoring the immediate trivialities of the moment." He nodded, tilting himself a little further back in the chair, pleased with the way he’d put it.
So was Gideon, who tucked this appealing perspective on absentmindedness away for the next time he had to defend himself for unthinkingly dropping a batch of letters he’d just received into the next mailbox he passed. That or something equally trivial.
"In that sense of the word," Dr. Loti rambled on, "yes, I think you could say Guillaume was absentminded. Enough so, regrettably, to cause his death."