“On my way,” I said.
When I walked in, he was making a permanent slide, using a pipette to touch a drop of Cargille melt mount on the edge of a cover slip while other slides warned up on a hot plate.
“I don’t know if it adds up to much,” he said right off. “Take a look in the scope. Diatoms from your un-I.D: d guy. Keep in mind the only thing an individual diatom will tell you, with rare exception, is if it’s saltwater, brackish or fresh.”
I peered into the lens at little organisms that looked as if they were made of clear glass, in all sorts of shapes that brought to mind boats, chains and zigzags and slivered moons and tiger stripes and crosses and even stacks of poker chips. There were pieces and parts that reminded me of confetti and grains of sand and other particles of different colors that probably were minerals.
Posner removed the slide from the stage and replaced it with another.
“The sample you brought back from the Seine,” he said. “Cymbella, Melosira, Navicula, Fragilaria. On and ón. Common as dust. All freshwater, so at least that’s good, but they really tell us nothing in and of themselves.”
I leaned back in the chair and looked at him.
“You ordered me here to tell me that?” I said, disappointed.
“Well, I’m no Robert McLaughlin,” he dryly said, referring to the world-renowned diatomist who had trained him.
He leaned over the microscope and adjusted the magnification to 1000X and began moving slides around.
“And no, I didn’t ask you to drop by for nothing,” he went on. “Where we lucked out is in the frequency of occurrence of each species in the flora.”
Flora was a botanical listing of plants by species, or in this case, diatoms by species.
“Fifty-one percent occurrence of Melosira, fifteen percent occurrence of Fragilaria. I won’t bore you with all of it, but the samples are very consistent with each other. So much so, actually, I would almost call them identical, which I find rather miraculous, since the flora where you, dipped in your Advil bottle might be totally different a hundred feet away.”
It chilled me to think of he Saint-Louis’s shore, of the stories of the nude man swimming after dark so close tó the Chandonne house. I imagined him dressing without showering or drying off, and transferring diatoms to the inside of his clothes.
“If he swims in the Seine and these diatoms are all over his clothes,” I said, “he isn’t washing off before he dresses. What about Kim Luong’s body?”
“Definitely not the same flora as the Seine,” Posner said. “But I did take a sample of water from the James River, close to where you live, as a matter of fact. Again, nearly the same frequency distribution.”
“Flora on her body and flora in the James, consistent with each other?” I had to make sure.
“One question I do have is whether diatoms from the James are going to be everywhere around here,” Posner said.
“Well, let’s see,” I said.
I got Q-tips and swabbed my forearm, my hair and the bottoms of my shoes, and Posner made more slides. There wasn’t a single diatom.
“In tap water maybe?” I asked.
Posner shook his head.
“So they shouldn’t be all over a person, I wouldn’t think, unless that person has been in the river, lake, ocean . . :’
I paused as an odd thought came to me.
“The Dead Sea, the Jordan River,” I said.
“What?” Posner asked, baffled.
“The spring at Lourdes,” I said, getting more excited. “The Sacred River. Ganges, all believed to be places of miracles where the blind, the lame and the paralyzed could enter the water to be healed.”
“He’s swimming in the James this time of year?” Posner said. “The guy must be nuts.”
“There’s no cure for hypertrichosis,” I said.
“What the hell’s that?”
“A horrible, extremely rare disorder, hair all over your body when you’re bone. A baby-fine hair that can get up to six, seven, nine inches long. Among other anomalies.”
“Ehhh!”
“Maybe he bathed nude in the Seine hoping he might be miraculously healed. Maybe now he’s doing the same thing in the James,” I said.