“I can’t teach?”
“No.”
“Not even privately, without compensation?”
“Perhaps you don’t remember, but we’ve been over this before.”
“I can’t write music, without compensation, for my own pleasure?”
“No. If you write it down or record it, it has the potential of being sold.”
“May I play the cello?” Jules asked, sarcastically.
“Yes, you can, as long as it is unrelated to compensation, performance, or teaching.”
“How would anyone know?”
“They might not,” Armand said patiently, “but if they do, the policy would be voided and you’d be sued for the costs of its implementation.”
“What if I give up the policy, or don’t take the disability payments? Can I refuse them?”
“You can give up the policy after two years if you’ve paid the premiums in full. If you refuse the disability payments, the policy is voided, with the consequences I described. Given your economic status, you have many options. For some people, the conditions might be a kind of trap, but if money is of little consequence you can more or less do what you wish. And how did you end up here? I would have thought you’d gone private immediately. Switzerland. England. The U.S.”
“That’s not important. What about you?” Jules asked.
“Me?”
“How would you fare with the various options that you relate?”
“Since you bought the policy, they’ve directed me to much more than my share of high-value business. They think I’m magic. I’ve purchased new equipment for our farm in Normandy, paid off its debts, and reacquired the land we had to sell to meet previous obligations. I’m going to go back there. You saved me. If there’s anything I can do ….”
“I’m happy that it’s been good for you.”
“I want things to work out, and I don’t want you in trouble,” Armand said. He moved closer so he could whisper. “Everything would be fine except for the fact that when you were brought to the emergency room, and were in and out of consciousness ….” Armand looked around to make sure that no one was there, “you diagnosed yourself. Correctly.”
“I did?”
“You did. You said, ‘inoperable basilar aneurysm.’ It took them an MRI, a radiologist, and two neurosurgeons to come to the same conclusion. This was noted in their report, the supposition being that you had received a previous diagnosis. When we got the report, all ears pointed up. Our chief has referred it along.”
“To whom?”
“Merde!” Armand said.
“What?”
“He ….”
“‘He’?”
“You will be scrutinized.”
“On everything?”
“Probably just the medical, although they can open up the whole case. I wanted to let you know,” he whispered. “That’s why I came.” Armand turned away, then back again, still whispering, and with urgency. “You’ll be getting a visit from our investigator. Terrible!”
“What do you mean, ‘terrible’?”
“His name fits him to a T. He hates everyone.”
The last thing Jules needed was a dogged investigator. “What’s his name, then?”
“Damien Nerval.”
“I guess it sounds satanic.”
“A little, yes. He likes to fight. We used to call him Flagellons, until someone did and he hit him with a stick.”
THEY WANTED TO bring him out in a wheelchair, the standard procedure, but he jumped up and ran down the hall, with the nurse calling after him in panic. What would they do, arrest him? For walking? Running? You are forbidden to run, because you’re not supposed to be able to walk. If he actually needed a wheelchair he would sit in one, but as long as he didn’t need one, he wouldn’t. In so many ways already outside the law, he didn’t care about rules.
Just before exiting the hospital he saw a young doctor in surgical scrubs, a stethoscope draped around his neck. “Excuse me,” Jules said. “The way the stethoscope hangs, it looks like mink heads.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I was a boy, women went around in furs with the heads attached and hanging from their shoulders. Minks, nutrias, baby foxes. They – the minks, nutrias, and baby foxes, although maybe some of the women, too – had whiskers and glass eyes. Sometimes they’d be three or four in a bunch, even five. That was only seventy years ago. You see how things change? But don’t get on your high horse. Now they go around with bare breasts, like the women of the Germanic tribes at the time of Caesar, or Cleopatra’s bath attendants, at least in Italian movies. ‘Oh, Hercules! Cleopatra enters the bath!’”
The young doctor was struck dumb.
“You don’t believe me about the minks, I can tell. Look it up. ‘Google’ it.”
“Okay.”
“But first, where can I buy medical books?”
“Where can you buy medical books?”
“I asked you.”
“For laypersons or physicians?”
“Physicians. I know how to read. I have an education. I know Latin and Greek. I once took chemistry, organic chemistry, even histology. But that’s immaterial. Where do you buy these books?”
“Try the Librairie Vigot Maloine. They have something like a hundred and thirty thousand books on medicine, thirty thousand in the store. They have everything.”
“Where is it?”
“On the Rue de l’école de Médecine, right off Saint-Germain, near Métro stop Odéon.”
Jules took out a ten-Euro note and pressed it into the young doctor’s hand. “I don’t … that’s not necessary,” the young man said.
“Yes it is,” Jules said. “Lunch.”
“You really don’t have to do that.”
“Why not? You just saved me ten-million Euros.”
The bookstore was bright and colorful. “I need a summary,” Jules told the clerk – a devastatingly attractive, thin, dark-haired girl wearing glasses, “a handbook that will cover all the diseases and conditions, not just internal medicine, or oncology, etcetera, but something comprehensive. More or less an outline of the whole thing, not for laymen.”
“What you need then,” she said, is Le Manuel Merck, Fifth French Edition, more than four thousand pages. It’s just what you want.”
“The cost?”
“Ninety-nine Euros.”
“That seems like a bargain,” Jules said, “for every disease in the world.”
He couldn’t resist looking into the book, so at the end of the alley he sat down on the steps near a statue of Vulpian, a great nineteenth-century French physician, the spitting image of Robert E. Lee. Jules, who had never heard of Vulpian, felt painfully ignorant.