MOISSAC WAS ON THE verge of sleep when the telephone rang. He had been several times only to come fully awake again tormented by the recollection of one and then another of the day’s humiliations. He ran to the phone so that it would not waken Maman.
It was the night man at the desk of the prefecture. A woman identifying herself as a nun from Ste. Geneviève’s had phoned the hospital for an ambulance and the hospital had phoned the prefecture.
“So?” Moissac said.
“She phoned from Place de Gare, mon préfet, a public kiosk. It would seem she tried to take another nun to the hospital in a camionnette.”
“So?” Moissac snapped again.
“It is thought it might be a Maquis trap—to hijack the ambulance.”
“It is thought by whom?”
“By me, mon préfet.” The answer was almost inaudible.
“It would be easier to hijack an elephant. Order the ambulance to proceed and I shall go there myself.”
Moissac, having to dress, arrived at the moment they were lifting the stricken woman into the ambulance. He shone his torch about trying to be useful. The sick one was very young and a novice. He asked the older nun if there was any way in which he could be of assistance.
“The camionnette, monsieur, we must not lose the camionnette.”
He promised to have one of his men pick it up.
The ambulance driver said, “Monsieur le Préfet, we are going to need Doctor Lauzin.”
“I’ll bring him at once.”
“That will be the day,” the driver said and closed the ambulance door. Lauzin was the only really competent surgeon in St. Hilaire, and therefore the most independent.
Lauzin was also the town’s only declared atheist. He made it plain to Moissac on the way that he came because a human being needed him; he was in no greater haste because she wore a veil. Moissac hunched his shoulders and concentrated on the road. He had no wish to engage in an argument his friend the monsignor had been pursuing for years to no avail whatever.
“Eh, nothing to say in defense of your friends, Moissac?” “They are good women.” He remembered saying the very words to the Gestapo that morning.
“Because they are chaste? Is that what makes them good?”
Moissac knew he was being baited. “It must help,” he said.
“Help? Mon Dieu, what does it help?” “Mon docteur, I am a policeman, not a theologian.” “A splendid distinction, Moissac, but I have never known one who did not assume the prerogatives of the other.”
In the hospital Rachel was taken directly to the surgery. There was a moment, only a moment, in which Sister Agathe was left alone with her. She leaned close to Rachel while she untied the coif. “Sister Gabrielle?”
Rachel opened her eyes. Agathe nodded approval. “I will answer their questions, do you understand?”
“Yes…Sister.”
“We shall have you back with your husband in no time,” she whispered, “but you must not betray us.”
“I shall not betray you,” Rachel said.
“I know that, my dear. It is only that in the fever you might say something. You must think of yourself as Sister Gabrielle, and a novice never speaks as long as there is a superior present to speak for her.”
A consumptive-looking orderly wearing a stained white jacket that would have better become a butcher came in, clip-board in hand, and asked to have the patient’s identity card. Sister Agathe gave it to him. From it he took the statistics he needed, scarcely so much as glancing at the patient herself.
To Agathe he said, “You are the person responsible for—” he looked at the record, “—Sister Gabrielle’s commitment to the hospital?”
“I am the infirmarian of the Convent of Ste. Geneviève.”
“So that the patient’s progress will be reported to you.”
“To us, yes.”
“And the hospital charges, Sister?”
Sister Agathe had not had so much as a centime in her hand in twenty years. “You will discuss that with Reverend Mother, please.”
“It should have been discussed with Reverend Mother before you came,” the man grumbled, his pen hovering over the blank place in the form.
Agathe said, lifting her chin: “You may put down ‘pauper.’”
At the sound of the word Rachel opened her eyes.
“We are paupers. Poverty is one of our vows,” Agathe said firmly.
The orderly shuffled out. Agathe drew her first easy breath in hours. She observed the room, so cheerless, the walls a bilious green, shelves stacked with aluminum and porcelain vessels. There was a rolling case of surgical instruments. The sterilizer looked like a fish aquarium. Several doctors’ gowns hung on a rack, all of them having taken on the shape of the men who had worn them. The door to the operating room was open, a dark pit with the chrome of the equipment picking up glints of light like eyes in the night. She thought of her own infirmary, spotless white. And she thought of Reverend Mother who was to be wakened when she and Sister Gabrielle returned. She should telephone, but the very thought of trying to explain was more than she felt able to cope with at the moment.
A buxom and sullen nurse came, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep. She proceeded to prepare by turns the patient and the operating room. Agathe, despite her anxiety, was fascinated to see the equipment. After taking Rachel’s temperature, the nurse read it and handed it to Agathe. It registered almost forty degrees. She brought a hospital gown and left Agathe to undress the sick woman.
The moment Dr. Lauzin entered the room Sister Agathe felt confident. He went to the patient even as he removed his coat, dropping the coat on the floor when the nurse failed to take it in time. With two fingers he parted one of Rachel’s eyelids. She opened her eyes. He continued to study the eyeball. Then he stood back and looked down at her. “Well, well,” he said, “we shall have to see what’s inside you to stir up all this trouble in the middle of the night.”
Agathe liked him, particularly when he turned to her and asked, “Are you competent to assist me, Sister?”
“I’ve had nurse’s training and I am in the habit of doing what I’m told,” she said.
“That is a habit to which our regular staff is not particularly addicted. Good.”
She watched him explore the abdomen with fingers far more efficient than her own. “Is there a matter of permission to be got for the operation?”
She said, “I ought to telephone Reverend Mother in any case.”
“Then do so at once, madame. I shall want you in the surgery in a quarter of an hour.”
Sister Agathe went down to the admissions office to put through the phone call to the convent. Sitting in the dingy room with the orderly was the prefect of police. Moissac rose as the nun entered.
Reverend Mother came to the phone almost at once. She had been waiting for over three hours. It was five minutes past one.
“We are at the hospital, Reverend Mother,” Agathe said. “I am needed to assist the surgeon.” Then, because within the hearing of the orderly and the prefect of police she could not otherwise explain, she added: “Sister is very ill.”
There was a brief silence before Reverend Mother said, I see.
Moissac, coming close to the nun, said, “Excuse me, Sister, but if she wishes to come here I will bring her at once.”
Sister Agathe told this to Reverend Mother.
“Perhaps it is best,” Reverend Mother said. “I shall be waiting for him.”