Theory of Remainders (16 page)

And then there had been the father, Olivier Morin, the small and awkward man, trying to protect his son from the maelstrom of public attention. A press operator at a printer, Morin was more at home with machines than with the vortex of events into which he’d been catapulted. The poor fellow had been overwhelmed, allowing himself and his son to be shepherded by the lawyer through a process he didn’t fully understand.

On more than one occasion the two men had come into contact. He’d seen Édouard’s father shield his eyes from the flash of cameras outside the courthouse and shrink into himself during the hearing. The son may have been dazed and nervous, but the father was entirely broken.

He remembered with particular crispness the afternoon when Olivier Morin entered the deserted cafeteria at the courthouse. He and Yvonne were huddled over vending machine coffees between sessions. After glancing in their direction, Morin had retreated to the far corner of the vast room, sinking into a chair.

Yvonne had clutched Philip’s arm when he stood, trying to hold him back. There was no reason for them to address the man whose son had murdered their daughter. But Philip had pulled himself free and walked across the room. The other man had looked up and gaped, amazement in his eyes, tinged with trepidation. Perhaps he was waiting for Philip to strike him. Or worse. But Philip wanted only to speak. He took a seat. They were both in a terrible situation, he said, both destroyed by the fate of their children. He wanted Morin to know he didn’t hold him accountable for his son’s actions.

Olivier Morin hadn’t responded, had merely continued staring at the tabletop. The two men remained together in silence for several minutes, and when Philip finally rose to leave, he extended his hand. The other father looked at it, thunderstruck by this generosity, before reaching out to shake.

Now Olivier Morin was dead, and Philip imagined how his existence must have thinned during the years following the case, layer after layer eroded by incessant waves of anxiety until there was nothing left.

The receptionist appeared at the door of the waiting room. The doctor was ready.

Suardet was a stout man with a brush of a moustache, sitting in his shirtsleeves behind a heavy desk. Philip presented his card, and the doctor studied it, glancing back as he sized up this transatlantic colleague. Philip knew that older doctors sometimes resented the younger ones, and Roger had intimated that this would be especially true in Rouen. But Philip wasn’t here to pass judgment. The circumstances were familiar to him: a facility with too many patients and too few doctors, where mostly they made do with medicating symptoms rather than solving problems. It felt like home.

They exchanged a few pleasantries about the profession. The medical community in Rouen was not large, so it didn’t surprise Philip to learn that Suardet knew Hervé Legrand. This meant that information about the visit would leak back to Yvonne’s household. Confidentiality was a relative term.

“It’s a good thing you speak French,” Suardet said as he rocked back into his chair. “So much of the literature is in English these days. I find it terribly annoying.”

Philip felt no need to defend his national tongue, and the doctor gave an approving smile as he pressed his hands together. “Before we undertake this meeting, I thought you and I should have a chat. I don’t mind telling you, Doctor Adler, that I advised Monsieur Morin against this encounter.”

“And why is that?”

“I appreciate the situation you find yourself in, but my first responsibility must be to my patient.”

“Of course.”

“And I see no therapeutic benefit to this meeting. I don’t know what Édouard Morin was like fourteen or fifteen years ago. He wasn’t my patient then. But today he is a difficult person to interact with. It’s hard to know exactly how he feels about things.”

“Perhaps he feels nothing.”

Suardet conceded that one could get that impression, but he didn’t believe it to be accurate. In fact, he compared Morin to a man who had been skinned alive, with nothing left to buffer his nerves. “The slightest contact touches him intensely,” he explained. “So he attempts to touch nothing. This avoidance may give the impression of insensitivity, but I take it to be a form of protection. A shell, if you will.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Suardet leaned in toward him, his blue eyes glowing below silver eyebrows. “Because I don’t intend to allow you to torture my patient, Doctor Adler. That’s why.”

“I’m not looking for revenge.”

“Then what?”

Philip clasped his hands. “Édouard Morin murdered my daughter,” he began. When the doctor began to protest, he cut him off. “I’m not talking about the legal definition of guilt. This is not an accusation, merely a description of what Morin himself has said. He made no secret of it during the court proceedings. But there was one piece of information he refused to reveal: What he did with the body.” The last word felt awkward in Philip’s mouth. He was still not used to speaking of his daughter this way, as a corpse, a lump of meat. He hoped he would never grow used to it.

If Suardet was shocked, he didn’t show it. “And why do you think Morin will help you now?”

Philip shrugged. “I don’t see why he would. But then, why did he agree to meet at all?”

Suardet stroked his jowls as he pondered the question. “I can only suppose it has to do with his obsession with order. He likes to dot every i. Perhaps he sees this meeting as a way to wrap something up.”

Philip recalled the obsessive-compulsive behaviors Morin had exhibited during the inquest. He couldn’t speak unless the chairs were lined up properly. Unless each ball of paper had made it into the wastebasket. Unless the ripple in the rug was smoothed and the rug itself straightened. Unless the judge’s robe sat evenly on his shoulders.

It wasn’t uncommon for obsessive-compulsive behavior to accompany schizophrenia disorders. They were, in the parlance of psychiatry, comorbid pathologies. Philip was not privy to the specifics of Morin’s official diagnosis, but the labels were not important. He remembered the symptoms: social dysfunction, the absence of real emotion, an unusual relationship to language, an excessive focus on detail.

As they entered the meeting room, Philip surveyed the space. Accessed by a door on either side of the white conference table, the narrow chamber served as an interface between two worlds, a point of overlap between the realm of patients and that of doctors. Around the Formica-topped table stood five plastic chairs with tubular legs and hard feet that scraped on the tiled floor. A round clock hung high on one wall. The plaster of the ceiling was cracked. Otherwise, the room was without ornament—a far cry from the cabinet of curiosities that was Philip’s office in Boston. Here one found nothing to excite the imagination, and it occurred to Philip that this was precisely the goal.

When Suardet led the patient in through the other door, Philip’s first impression was that the gangly seventeen-year-old had been replaced by someone else. Although he walked with the same high-stepping, birdlike gait, this person had filled out. He’d become a man. His hair, though still black, was receding and revealed a broad swath of forehead. Of slender build, Édouard had developed a stoop, and the slackness of his body left a bulge around his belly. The transformation shouldn’t have surprised Philip. Since his return to France every encounter reminded him how much time had elapsed. Everyone had aged—Roger and Yvonne, Évelyne and Sylvain, Philip himself. Still, Morin’s metamorphosis had been more dramatic. He had entered his first institution in late adolescence, emerging from the ward now in mature manhood.

Only Sophie never aged.

Morin took a seat across the table. His eyes, though more heavily lidded than before, were the same—overly wide, still intense. The Adam’s apple, less prominent than in the slender neck of the teenager, still bobbed with the frequent gulps. Beneath the superficial changes resided the same individual. Of that Philip was now sure.

Morin raised his right hand to the exact point on his forehead where his hairline began, and with his fingertips he smoothed the thinning strands backwards, although as far as Philip could tell, nothing needed straightening. His gestures were precise, delicate.

Dr. Suardet moved toward the head of the table, in the position of the mediator.

Morin stared at Philip, unblinking, and Philip found himself imagining Sophie on the ground, batting upward with her hands. Dirt on her face, leaves and bits of bark in her hair. A scream. Was that how it happened? His imagination was all too fertile. It could provide endless variations.

Morin’s lips were closed in a placid expression, and Philip wondered how to start. Beginnings can be so crucial, like openings in chess—or, as Yvonne used to say, the start of a sonnet: all the rest flows from the first verse. Usually Philip relied on his most powerful therapeutic tool: silence. He would wait for the patient to speak. But here he had come as the supplicant, and he thought it wise to begin with a conciliatory gesture.

“
Je vous remercie
—” Philip said, beginning to thank Morin for agreeing to the meeting.

“You can speak your own language, you know,” the other man said, breaking into English.

Philip paused. “I beg your pardon?”

“
O en español. En su país creo que se habla mucho.
” Morin left a beat, then switched again. “
Oder hätten Sie lieber Deutsch?
”

Philip turned to Suardet for assistance. The doctor folded his thick arms over his chest. “Édouard has an interest in languages,” he explained in French. “He has put his time to good use, you might say.”

“Thanks to you, Mr. Adler,” Morin said, continuing in English, “I have much time to occupy. I am pleased to have the opportunity to practice my English with a native speaker.” His tone was stilted and bookish, although the grammar was rigorously correct. His odd accent hovered between American and British, inflected with traces of French.

“I will not be of much assistance in English,” Suardet said in French. “But it’s up to you. I will attempt to follow.”

Philip weighed the options. Forcing Morin to express himself in a language that was not his own could give Philip a tactical advantage, flushing the other man out in a territory where the nooks and crannies were less familiar.

“I have no objection,” he responded. “Your English appears to be excellent. In fact, if you don’t mind, I would be glad to record a sample of it.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the digital voice recorder. He looked at Suardet, who made no protest, and he placed the device in the middle of the table.

Morin smiled. “I know why you are doing that. You don’t need to pretend, Mr. Adler. I am not an idiot.” Once again he raised his hand to his hair, gently brushing backwards with his fingertips. Then he reached for the recorder, moving it to the dead center of the table, and lining it up. “Do you mind? If we’re going to have that out, we may as well keep it straight. It’s best to keep things tidy, don’t you agree?”

“Sometimes,” Philip replied, “we have to live with a certain amount of untidiness.”

“
Qué lástima!
” Morin said with a smile. “You speak like my dear Dr. Suardet. Tell me, Mr. Adler, did you have a good trip? Were your travels incident-free?” There was a preciousness to Morin’s voice. “Incident-free,” he repeated, raising his finger. “Like smoke-free, error-free, chemical-free, duty-free, tax-free, alcohol-free, sugar-free. There are so many freedoms in English, aren’t there?”

There was something almost Germanic about Morin’s accent, the way every S hummed like a Z.

“My travels were fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Morin studied him. “On the subject of your journey, there is one thing I have been wondering about.”

Philip allowed the silence to hang in the air. He gestured with an open hand, inviting Morin to continue, and Morin smiled.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Adler. It’s not that important. I just wondered, did you take the 18:50 train from Paris last night, arriving in Rouen at 20:02? Or the train this morning, the 7:53, arriving at 9:01?”

“Neither.”

“Now there you surprise me. Certainly you did not choose the 19:50? That would have brought you to Rouen at a most inconvenient hour. And the others are so much slower. Unless you arrived yesterday afternoon. Perhaps to engage in some tourism? Rouen has much to offer in that department.”