THAT EVENING, JULES was driven and possessed. Though he would see Élodi the next day, he went to a website that he could enter as a faculty member, and saw her address on the Avenue Bourdon. He was shaking as he did so, as if committing a crime. “That’s enough,” he said out loud, thinking it would stop him. But it didn’t, and he left the house to walk to the RER.
Increasingly nervous all the way to Paris, he went not to the Place de la Bastille but, pulling against himself, to his office, hoping that whatever was driving him would dissipate and that he could then return home. He sat down at his desk and turned on the lights, but in the sudden glare all he could see was her face. Alternate surges of magnetic pull, fear, excitement, and a kind of dizziness ended up getting him on his feet and eventually walking fast toward the Bassin de l’Arsenal, where the barges were moored in front of her building.
It was possible to walk from his office to the Cité de la Musique, which for reasons of self-preservation he had never done even in daylight. And the bridges crossed the Seine in such a way that it was plausible that in going there he would pass by her house. But not this late. Driven on and feeling the terrible pleasure of madness, he thought at one moment that there would be none but happy consequences and at another that it would be the end of everything. And yet he kept going, even past La Pitié-Salpêtrière.
His thoughts raced until he was giddy with guilt, hope, and pleasure, and he moved as if falling forward. He had at least to look at the building where Élodi lived. He hoped to ring the bell if he could bring himself to do it. He found himself loving – to the point where it reverberated throughout his body like a warm wave – the innocent and artless charm that she could not contain, and which had caused her to write “dernier étage” after her address. It had carried into the computer. She hadn’t had to supply such detail. It was a sign, somehow, of her goodness.
Pushed and drawn as if against his will but entirely as a result of it, he went directly past La Pitié. At times, memory was so strong it was as if Jacqueline were still there and alive. If he turned into the ancient and depressing precincts of La Pitié might he not be able to go past the yellow awnings, the banana trees, the tired nurses and doctors coming off shift, ascend to the room in which Jacqueline had died, to find her there, alive, to speak to her, even if just for a moment, to tell her how much he loved and missed her, that above all he wanted to join her, and that now he knew he would? She would smell like the sea, which was what had happened with the intravenous liquids that had flowed into her before the end, but it wouldn’t matter. The question was answered by his legs, and soon he was crossing the Seine.
Once on the Right Bank, and with guilt so sharp it had become physical, all his emotion turned toward Élodi. He wanted her as if he were young, as if after making love there would be no “Now what?” but rather a magical subtraction of the fifty years between them. Twenty-five again, with time not a dying horse but a young one, full of unconscious energy and ignorant of what was ahead except that the very end could be neither seen nor felt.
Walking along the canal, on the west side of the Avenue Bourdon, he passed the police station and came to her address, closer to the Place de la Bastille than he had thought. What if he encountered her on the street? What would he say? He feared but wanted it. Everything was quiet. On the highest floor, one in a row of tiny dormers – the tops of which were level with the peak of the roof – was lit, her light. She was right there. All he had to do was press the buzzer, and she would come down. It would be either the end or the beginning.
One thing among the many things Jules didn’t know about Élodi was that she wore contact lenses and was extremely nearsighted without them. When home for the evening she took them out and put on glasses, the clear lenses of which in magnifying her eyes brought to them a strange perfection and clarity – in blue of course – and the frames of which, in combination with her hair falling past the temple bars, added another irresistible attraction. Perhaps had he seen her relaxed on her bed – her legs folded beneath her as she read – slowly and carefully reaching for a cup of tea while keeping her eyes on the book, deeply absorbed, utterly beautiful, he might not have tried so hard to keep his promises.
He took a step toward the door, but then he thought how shameful and ridiculous it was for an old man to pursue a young girl, and he knew he was old, and he knew it was unmanly to do such a thing, for it showed that he was unable to face what he had become and what was in store. He turned away from the door and toward the empty street, and with deep, inconsolable regret, he walked on.
MURDER IS ONE THING when a distraught lunatic kills his wife and children, sits in his car for two hours pointing a gun at his head and, before anyone gets wind of what he has done, pulls the trigger. Case closed, except for the sad and difficult gathering of evidence and stories, but it’s mainly paperwork after the first few days, and is usually wrapped up in a week or two. An idiot high on drugs robs a little grocery store and kills the old Moroccan woman behind the counter. Witnesses see his beaten-up Fiat and get a partial license plate. They notice that it has a little flower on the aerial, to help the idiot find the car either in a parking lot or after he robs a store. Ten minutes later, he’s speeding and running stop signs, a tail light is out, and his muffler is dragging. Two patrol officers pull him over. He bails. They chase. He turns with a gun. They fire. Case closed and, again, wrapped up in a week.
On the other hand, a carefully plotted murder or the murder of a stranger can take years, might never be solved, and, if you are a police officer, can assume for you the character of a job you go to month after month where you work hard most of the time, although sometimes not, and sometimes find a break, but never quite get there. It makes you feel that your life is a waste, that the world is cruel, dangerous, and impossible, and that you will always be unhappy.
It had been months since Duvalier Saidi-Sief and Arnaud Weissenburger had begun the case of the Bir-Hakeim Bridge. Their prime witness, Raschid Belghazi, who believed the Comédie-Française was a pornographic movie house, had said he told them everything he knew, and been cleared to leave Paris. Now he was gone. The families of the murdered boys were voiceless and oppressed. They had no special pleading anywhere, much less in a ministry, and their communities had recently rioted anyway about something else and quickly settled back. It was the kind of case that was forgotten, or at least pursued halfheartedly.
But, Weissenburger, because he was a Jew and the evidence pointed toward a Jew who had murdered two Arabs, was absolutely determined, in the name of fairness, objectivity, and laïcité, to solve it. Saidi-Sief, hating his own people’s lower orders who disgraced their long traditions by embracing rootlessness and delinquency, suspected that the events had a twist no one had envisioned, and was just as eager as Weissenburger. Further, their devotion to their work dissolved their differences and brought them together in a way that both hoped could be the future of France, even if both were highly skeptical that it would be.
They went over the surveillance footage too many times, looking for something they might have missed. They stared at the lab reports until they could dream them. They used every informant they could contact, and begged other officers for favors that in the end turned up nothing. At one point, Houchard called. “How’s it going?”
Duvalier said, “For several months we spent eight to ten hours a day looking at traffic surveillance tapes. It was fun.”
As the time passed, the only thing they really had was the rowing club. What were the chances that whoever killed the two boys and jumped into the river was a member of this club, and knew he could pull himself out on its dock and seek shelter there until morning traffic would camouflage his escape? Did he plan it that way in advance? It was a thin and unlikely thread, but as it was the only one they had, they followed it.
The judge was adamant that he would not give them blanket authority to collect DNA samples from all the members. Theirs was astoundingly too broad a request, based on a highly improbable supposition. But he did agree that if they narrowed it down enough he would issue warrants, and he did agree that if they needed to go outside Paris, he would arrange it. Houchard, the OPJ, wasn’t doing anything, and the judge liked that the two young APJs were so stubborn. So they investigated each member before they would seek an interview, make a visit, and ask for a cheek swab. Then they went ahead. As they suspected, most people were cooperative. It all had to be done politely and diplomatically, which took time.
They learned a lot about rowing clubs. You can hardly buy real estate on the river, so no matter how rich you are, if you want to row in Paris you have to join one and move among the musty lockers and garbage cans that tend not to be emptied because no club member thinks it’s his job to do so. There were some billionaires or almost-billionaires who racked their boats in the drafty, rough-hewn boathouse, as well as semi-impoverished rentiers who would eat or not, depending upon interest rates. There were horribly arrogant lawyers; obsessive professors; dull-as-paint businessmen; a few women, some of whom were young and beautiful, with goddess-like, lithe bodies; retirees who could barely get their boats in the water and wouldn’t have lived through the fight on the bridge; even a policeman; and a bus driver.
It would have been easy had Arnaud and Duvalier had some mechanism with which to sort out the Jews, of whom there could not have been that many, but this was strictly forbidden. Arnaud did it anyway, using computers in Internet cafés, but other than names and the occasional suggestion in an article or posting, which left little certainty, there was not much to go on over the Internet. They had to approach the subjects one by one. The few who refused a cheek swab were put on a list for heightened attention after all the subjects had been examined.
One thing they discovered was that athletic people who had single shells tended to live in beautiful places, mostly in houses, but, if in apartments, the kind that take up whole floors or more than one and have expansive terraces with colorful awnings, lots of geraniums, and distant views. It was an education, and their visits were interesting. They always went together. Both the innocent and the guilty were able to conceal much less when faced with two questioners, on opposite flanks, two men of different character supporting one another and observing. It was human nature not to lie as well to two people as to one, because it was human nature to be jangled by two sets of eyes at two different angles.
When Duvalier and Arnaud got around to Jules they had found out what they could about him, checked his address, and looked on Google Earth to see where he lived. Because the estate was shielded by many layers of trusts, they had no idea that it wasn’t his, and thought he was, in fact, their biggest billionaire, as he would have been had he had Shymanski’s wealth. Looking forward to seeing the gardens and the interior, and to being offered refreshments as in several other luminous houses they had visited, they were curious to see the compound.
They thought it highly unlikely that an aging billionaire would smash someone’s head against an abutment, slide down stone stairs on top of someone else, kill him at the bottom with a martial-arts punch in the throat, and escape by throwing himself into the Seine. But they were open to the possibility. And because they were detectives they had the habit of scoping things out before they moved. The more information in advance, the more time to think, to give play to intuition, the better prepared they would be. There was a kind of magic in it, or, as Duvalier liked to say, an art.
After Élodi had arrived, they did. Not wanting to be noticed, they parked on the street and waited, hoping that the feel of the place might give them something unexpected to go on in the interview.
ÉLODI, WHO WAS wearing the yellow silk print, had some music in a portfolio, and no cello to burden her. As Jules watched her walk from the gate to his door he realized that from a distance he’d never really seen her move without the cello. Although she had been graceful even with it, when she was without it he witnessed something of extraordinary beauty. If someone walks when she knows she is observed it can make her stiff and awkward, but Élodi took not a single, self-conscious, unbalanced step. In the fading, primarily reflected light, with the sun, now high over the Western Atlantic, draping the eastern parts of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in shadow, the color and sheen of the silk made it glow. As he had noticed before, it was tight on her. But now he didn’t avert his eyes, and as she came closer he saw her body moving against the material, and the slight shuffle of the fabric as she made her way forward. He knew that were he to cup his hand around her side as he pulled her into an embrace, what he would feel through the silk would be intoxicatingly firm and strong.
When they were sitting down in the same places as before, she asked, “Why not bring my instrument? Is there something wrong with it?”
“No, it’s perfectly fine. But I can’t teach anymore.”
She looked at him questioningly.
“Or, rather I mayn’t teach anymore. I have a cerebral aneurysm, and I collapsed on the train. The aneurysm is wrapped around my brainstem, partially at least, and inoperable. I shouldn’t quite say that. It is operable, but the risk of damage or death is so great that it’s better just to let it run its course and see how long I can live.”
This recalled for Élodi the deaths of her parents, and the nausea and terror it had brought. Now whatever she had felt for him, confused as it was, was intensified.
“I have an insurance policy that covers disability, and they tell me that I’m now disabled. I’m not, but if I do any kind of work it voids the policy. I can’t have that, because I need it for the people I’ll leave behind. So I can’t write or teach, even privately, even without compensation. Bureaucracy, public or private, is both stupid and monstrous.”
“If you can’t teach, why am I here?” she asked, thinking that although she herself had flirted with it, now it was he who was being what people of his age – unlike many of her contemporaries, she knew the expression and understood its context – called being ‘too forward’. She both wanted him to be forward enough to make love to her, and not to be forward at all, which was exactly the way he felt. When they were thinking the same way, with a bias to attraction and risk, it made heat as if by induction: they could actually feel it between them. But when thinking the same way, with a bias toward caution and regret, they felt an internal, physical coldness. And when, as often happened as things changed between them in rapid oscillation, one was hot and the other cold, it made for a turbulence they could not master. But one kiss, one embrace, would have clarified everything.
“I’m not allowed to work, it’s true. However, nothing prevents you from trying out my cello with the prospect of buying it,” he said. “That’s not work, but the sale of personal effects.”
“And you can give me tips on how it should be played.”
“Absolutely. The older the instrument, the more idiosyncratic.”
“But you know,” Élodi told him, losing her footing and out of character, “I can’t afford it.”
“Oh? I haven’t set a price. How do you know? You haven’t made an offer. And most instruments like these are passed down, with never a price.”
“But you have a family.”
“A daughter who doesn’t play – and it must be played. That’s why it exists.”
“How much would it be worth if you did sell it?”
“I have no idea, but it’s not one of those things to which a high monetary value is attached. If it were, I would have sold it to help my grandchild, who’s sick.”
“Is that what the insurance is for?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Jules?” It was extremely pleasurable when she addressed him that way for the first time. It changed things and relaxed her. It also made him seem very old, so she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have done it. “I’m interested, perhaps, in purchasing your cello, as you cannot work ….”
“Ah,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Yes. May I try it? And will you guide me in playing it, because things that are aged are so often idiosyncratic?”
“Very much so,” he answered, meaning, also, yes.
She leaned forward and asked, not in a whisper but quietly and skeptically, “Are they watching you? Would anyone care?”
“They questioned me. They were here just recently. As unlikely as it seems, I wouldn’t rule it out. But don’t worry.” He gestured toward the cello.
She took hold of it. “What would you like me to play?”
“Play what you brought.”
“The Bach.”
IN WHAT FOLLOWED, they passed the cello back and forth, and in so doing, touched lightly. Although this might have made them less comfortable with one another, it made them more comfortable, particularly because after each touch came the Bach. Sometimes he had to cross the gap and sit next to her, and when he did she reddened and her perfume rose. She was life.
He wanted so much to stay with her that when she had to leave he saw her to the gate and beyond. As soon as they stepped into the street he saw the spectre of Damien Nerval catercorner in a car and pointing a large telephoto lens in their direction. Undoubtedly the camera had a motor drive, and the interior of the car now sounded like the inside of a cuckoo clock just before the cuckoo pops out.
Jules placed his hand against Élodi’s left side, pivoted so his back was to Nerval, and said, “Don’t look. They are watching. We should talk a while.” He had been right about what he would feel – the silk, taut musculature, lovely breathing.
“They can find out that I’m enrolled, that I chose you as …” she began.
“I know. But if we talk …” he said.
“So what?”
“Perhaps,” he dared, “we should pretend to kiss? That might put them off.”
She thought it was funny that, suddenly, he was as awkward as a preadolescent. As seductive as she had ever been, with intense physical pleasure coursing through her as she spoke, she asked, “What level of verisimilitude do you have in mind?”
“I suppose it would have to be unambiguous.”
“I think that’s right.”
He had never intended to kiss or embrace her, and was afraid to do so. “I’d be afraid of joining my imperfection to your perfection. Afraid that I would be like someone who’s just gotten up in the morning.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, “but I get up in the morning, too. So let’s by my perfection find your imperfection out.”
And they kissed – holding close – and it lasted for almost ten minutes.
FLOATING AND IN LOVE, Jules went inside to work on his homage to Bach’s Sei Lob, and found that he couldn’t. All he could do was vibrate with pleasure and love as he replayed the kiss again and again and again. Although he knew it would never happen, Jules wanted to return with Élodi to her tiny apartment and forget everything that had kept him from her. He felt and imagined this so strongly it was as if he were with her in a new life that other than in dreams was impossible. And on the train, numb all the way home, hardly turning her head, Élodi would feel intense pleasure echoing through her entire body, with sadness following insistently in its wake.
But on the street outside the Shymanski compound, reality was still in command. After Élodi turned the corner on her way to the station, Arnaud and Duvalier simultaneously and explosively opened the doors of their car. Arnaud spoke for both of them as he alighted onto the pavement. “Who the hell is that?” For as Jules and Élodi had embraced and kissed, Nerval, in his nondescript Peugeot, was using the motor drive on his camera, and the two detectives had watched him, unable to move until Jules and Élodi had left.
As if it were a person to be interrogated, Arnaud approached the Peugeot at an investigative forty-five-degree angle. He was massive enough that it seemed as if he could have actually blocked the car had it tried to drive away. Duvalier rapped on the driver’s window. Nerval calmly turned his head and sneered. Duvalier rapped again. Nothing.
“Open the window,” Duvalier ordered.
Nerval stared at him without moving, “Why?” He asked so quietly that Duvalier knew what he said only because he read his lips.
Duvalier yanked open the door. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded to know.
“I am,” came the answer, royally, “Damien Nerval, investigateur. Who are you?” He was still sneering, not because he wanted to, but because his face was constructed that way.
Duvalier held up his identification. “I am,” he said, echoing and mocking Nerval’s tone, “Duvalier Saidi-Sief, flic. If you don’t want to be arrested, you’ll tell me what you’re doing.”
“Arrested for what?” Nerval asked, and actually laughed.
“For obstructing an investigation. You’re ten seconds away.”
“Me? You’re investigating him, too?”
“Who?”
“Lacour,” Nerval answered. “What are you investigating him for?”
“That’s not your business,” Duvalier told him. “What are you investigating?”
“I asked first.”
“Get out of the car.”
“All right, all right, irregularities in the purchase of an insurance contract.”
“Really,” Duvalier said. “That’s fascinating, but we take precedence. You’ll leave now and if I see you here again you’ll be lucky to be arrested, understand?”
“No no no,” said Nerval. “You don’t get it. My employer is … well, I won’t say anything. Believe me, you can’t step all over our investigation.”
“No no no no no,” Duvalier echoed, wagging his finger. “My employers are … well, I will say that they don’t have to bribe, trade, or ask for favors, because they’re the people of France. Get it? Remember the Bastille? Yes? Good. Fuck off.”
“We’ll see,” Nerval said, starting his engine. “We’ll see what the minister says. I believe he’s your employer, although at such a high level he could not possibly have heard of you.”
“He can fuck off, too,” Arnaud said.
Nerval tried to close the door, but Duvalier blocked it, pulled him out of his seat, pushed him up against the side of his car, and hit him in the face – not half as hard as he could have. “Give the minister that message for me. And if I see you here again, I’ll shoot you.” He pushed the finally ruffled Nerval back into his car.
After the Peugeot sputtered up the street, an amazed Arnaud asked Duvalier, who was still shaking with anger, “Is that how you do it in Marseilles?”
“Yeah.”
“We have to.”
IT WAS DARK, almost time for dinner, everyone was hungry, his visitors had pulled Jules from the music he was writing, and he had to receive them in his quarters rather than Shymanski’s study. But he didn’t care, because kissing Élodi was still with him.
They thought he had a saintly nature, because at this rare moment he was as beatific as a Tibetan monk. He offered them food and drink. They refused politely. He told him that the apartment was a study he had built as a private retreat. Would they like to go upstairs? No, they said, not necessary. They had a feeling that something was off, because he fit the profile and because he didn’t. They had already eliminated almost everyone else in the rowing club. Of course this alone had elevated their suspicion, although logically it should not have.
“We’re investigating an incident,” Arnaud said. “We’d like to ask a few questions.”
“Certainly. What incident?”
“We’ll get to that later.”
“That’s strange.”
“We’re roundabout,” Duvalier stated.
Jules countered, “I’m roundabout too, and I have all evening. I have all day. Whatever you’d like. We can have dinner. We can go bowling.” He was elated.
“You seem quite happy.”
Jules just laughed.
“The girl?”
“You saw?”
“Yes. She’s young for you.”
“Far too young,” Jules agreed. “Impossible. I don’t understand. This kind of thing is happening to me now, when life should be quieting down.”
“You’re not taking it further?” Duvalier asked. “I saw her. I would.”
“I would, too, but she’s half a century younger than I am. That’s insane. I do love her, but I don’t know if she feels anything for me other than curiosity and, perhaps, respect, or, who knows, pity.”
“People carry such things further every day.”
“You mean, like the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old man who married a young woman of twenty? I’m not that stupid.”
“Well, in your case it’s only fifty years. What have you got to lose?” Duvalier asked. Everyone was amused, certainly Jules, who understood the humor better than did his guests.
“Listen, there are two ways of meeting death.”
“Death?” Duvalier asked. This alone was enough to wake up a policeman.
“I collapsed on the RER and lay there half dead for as many stops as it took for someone to suspect that I might not have been a drunk. It was at the Gare de Lyon, very convenient to the hospital. Had I gone to the end of the line I’d be dead. I have what’s called a basilar aneurysm, and could go at any moment. The guy on the street with the camera? Suddenly I attract scrutiny, because I bought an insurance policy just before it happened.”
“He’s not there anymore.”
“You met him?”
“We did. We told him to get lost.”
“Oh.”
“So, the girl. You’ll keep yourself from her?”
“Yes. It’s crazy that I love her, but I do. Still, I know that to meet death, and for me death is near, you either strip all things of their value so as not to regret too much, or you learn distance.”
“What do you mean, ‘learn distance’?”
“With distance, as things recede, you need not reject or devalue them to protect yourself. If you achieve distance, that which you might otherwise betray for fear of losing it still seems benevolent, loving – but gently dimming, going silent. Life recedes gradually until all that was bright and startling is like a city seen from afar, the noise of wind and traffic a barely audible hiss. You glide away without pain, and you love it still. She’s in the bright world that I have to leave.”
Duvalier and Arnaud hardly knew what to say, but they had a mental list and they went through it. “You served in Algeria,” Arnaud said. He could not help but think of Duvalier.
“You’ve been looking into me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We may get to that later. But you don’t seem especially surprised.”
“What should surprise me? An idiot from the insurance company is taking pictures of me as I kiss a young woman I love but cannot have. I collapsed on the train. I have to deal with a detestable man whose name is Rich Panda. My grandson has leukemia. Classical music is as popular as hoopskirts. Two policemen show up at my door. Look, I wouldn’t be surprised if aliens came down and chopped me up for cat food. What did you say?”
“Algeria.”
“What about it?”
“What do you think about Arabs?”
“I don’t.”
“What do you mean, you ‘don’t’?” Duvalier asked.
“I don’t think about Arabs, per se.”
“What is your opinion of them?”
“I’m a Jew,” Jules told him. “My parents were murdered by the Germans because they were Jews. The gravest, most persistent sin of mankind lies in not treating everyone as an individual. So, in short, I take Arabs as they come, just like everyone else.”
“But as a group?”
“As a group? They have a very high incidence of killing innocents with whom they disagree. It’s part of the culture, part of Islam, part of their nomadic origins. But no individual is merely a reflection of a group. That’s the injustice that ruins the world. So, my answer is that for me an Arab is the same as a Jew, a Frenchman, a Norwegian, anything you’d like. If I were to judge people by their identity, I’d be like the people who killed my parents. Those were called Nazis. Do you think I could ever be one?”
“Did you have the same opinion in Algeria when you were at war with Arabs?”
“In Algeria, officers – before you were born – I had very little contact with Arabs. I was surrounded by French soldiers or alone in the forest. Even had I been prone to developing prejudices, I had very little material with which to work.”
“But now,” Duvalier pressed, “do you think they’re ruining the country?”
“Yes,” Jules answered, “along with everyone else. If you must speak collectively, they don’t get a pass. Some people burn cars, sell drugs, and rob passersby. Others buy drugs, live off the state, or, in airy offices at the top of skyscrapers, allocate capital, as they say, which is playing Chemin de Fer with other people’s money. Non-Arab politichiens take bribes and thrust their grossly inferior selves into positions they’re not competent to fill. And, may I add, pretentious, dissolute, beatnik philosophers sleep with the wives of their best friends.”
“I’m not going to let you get off that easy,” Duvalier announced. “What you say is anodyne. But I want to know what you think of the Arabs in France, one in ten of the population – as a whole, a community, a culture, a polity. Good for France? Bad? Indifferent?”
“Why would you want to know that? You’re not an opinion survey, you’re a policeman.”
“It bears upon the incident we’re investigating.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“No. We have no suspects at the moment.”
“I don’t understand, but I’ll be happy to offer my opinion. It was wrong for France to try to make Algeria a little France, to construct a replica of itself there and in other countries. We became a foreign master that destroyed the rhythms and tranquility of those places – both their qualities that were good and their qualities that were not. And it’s just as wrong – because we did not by and large assimilate in the Arab lands, and the Arabs do not by and large assimilate here – to have a little North Africa in France. Those who are here already should be made more welcome than they have been, but they must become French.”
Duvalier, because he agreed, played the devil’s advocate: “Why?” He expected a long essay. François would have supplied one, in impassioned, bear-like tones, with Italianate gestures.
But Jules replied, “They must become French, because this is France.”
“You enjoy this,” said Arnaud, who had been quietly observing, ready to be either the good cop or the bad cop.
“Sometimes I enjoy everything, but what do you mean by ‘this’?”
“The questioning.”
“Certainly,” Jules told him. He couldn’t resist adding, in English, “I’m having a whale time.”
Arnaud, whose English was only elementary, thought that whatever the reference to a whale, it was very sophisticated. “The people we interview usually hate it. They get jumpy, tortured. Why are you having fun like a whale?”
“A lot of it,” Jules said, “is left over from what you saw on the street, but it’s not just that. My wife is dead, my only child long married, I have no more students, and my oldest friend is a quisling and a liar to whom I will not speak ever again. I can go a whole day saying only five or ten words to a human being – a waiter, the man who sells newspapers, the guard at the swimming pool. Now you show up, two cops, and you’re asking me interesting questions purely out of left field – what do I think about Arabs, am I going to make love to the girl you saw me with at the gate. And, then, maybe, we’ll get to why you’re here. Of course it’s fun. Stay all night. Have you had dinner? We don’t have to go out. I can fix you something. I have a big American steak, enough for three, even him,” Jules said, meaning Arnaud. “I can barbecue it ….”
“Please,” Duvalier said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, which for a while in the beginning he was. “We won’t be long. Now, moving on, you row on the Seine, is that correct?”
“How do you know that?”
“But you haven’t rowed since October.”
“You know that, too?”
“According to the log in the boathouse.”
“I went to America. Then it was winter. Then I learned I have an aneurysm. The doctor told me that I shouldn’t row, and that means I’ll have to sell my boat. If I die suddenly, I don’t want to be lost in the Seine. It’s deep, turgid, and flows fast. I don’t want my daughter not to know where I’ve come to rest.”
“But,” Duvalier said, “after winter, before your aneurysm, you didn’t row. Others have started up again, months ago. Why not you?”
“No mystery,” Jules said. “I got out of shape. Every new season you have to begin again, and the older you are the more difficult it is.”
“Fair enough. How long have you rowed on the Seine?”
“Sixty years or so.”
“You must know it as well as a harbor pilot.”
“That’s an interesting point. You’d think that after sixty years I would. When I first took to the river I thought that, with practice, without turning to see where my bow was pointing I could chance gliding between bridge piers and hewing to the center of a channel, or taking the bends in the river while not hitting the bank. Align the stern tip on a waypoint, count the strokes, and have confidence that you won’t ram a stone pier. It doesn’t work that way, and I’ve never done it. Granted, I navigate well and don’t veer off course, but I have to turn my head and check all the time. It was a disappointment through all those years. I used to think, ten more years, and I’ll be able to do it without turning to check. No.”
“You’re familiar, however, with the currents.”
“They vary with the season and the rainfall.”
“You know the Bir-Hakeim Bridge?”
“It’s where I make my turn. I used to row, sometimes, when I had all day, all the way to Bercy, but now I turn at Bir-Hakeim.”
“So you’d know how the river ran from the Île aux Cygnes to the boathouse.”
“You have to know. You’re pushed at sometimes ten kilometers per hour, and to keep the prow properly oriented in such a current you have to row at about five kilometers an hour at a minimum, so your speed below Bir-Hakeim on the return can be up to twenty, if the Alpine regions are gushing water into the Île-de-France after big storms.”
“How do you keep from slamming into the dock?”
“You go past it, turn, and approach from the west in almost slow motion.”
“After the Île aux Cygnes, what does the river do?”
“It veers south, pushing you toward the south bank. You have to keep away, because traffic can run against you there, and when you get to the boathouse you don’t want to try to cross against the current. Why do you ask? It seems very odd.”
“So if someone were to fall in the river at the Île aux Cygnes, he would be swept West and South?”
“Yes.”
“Could he manage to stay on the north side enough to get out at the boathouse dock?”
Jules furrowed his brow, as if trying to plumb the reason for this question. “You know what a vector is?”
Arnaud, an engineer, did. Duvalier, a student of the humanities and Korean, did not. Jules saw that he didn’t, and even though Arnaud nodded, Jules explained for Duvalier. “Simply put, if you want to go straight ahead and the current is pushing you to the right, you pull to the left enough so that you end up where you intended to arrive in the first place. When I pass the Île aux Cygnes, I row with a heavy bias to the north so as to compensate for the current taking the boat south. The wind complicates it further.”
“What if you’re in the water?”
“I am in the water,” Jules said, as if they were idiots.
“Not in a boat, swimming.”
Now looking at them as if they really were idiots, Jules said, “Nobody of any intelligence swims in the Seine. It’s filthy and dangerous.”
“If you capsized?”
Jules smiled. “You’ve given me an opportunity to boast. In almost sixty years I’ve never gone over, so I wouldn’t know. Everyone else goes over – once a year, twice, certainly in the beginning. Ask them. But it hasn’t happened to me. I’ve never been in the Seine.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Balance, caution, luck. Over the years I’ve had close calls. I’ve been out when the wind was so high there were whitecaps. The wakes of barges and motorboats have washed over me. I’ve been attacked by fat swans running across the water with outstretched wings. But I’ve never capsized.”
“Hypothetically, then. A swimmer south of the Île aux Cygnes, who wants to get out at the boathouse dock ….”
“He’d better be a strong swimmer and he’d have to vector north, or he’d end up slammed against the bank of the Île Saint-Germain. If he tried swimming directly across he’d be washed to Sèvres. The Seine runs strong. Geography has made a narrow channel, and the embankments narrow it further. When the flow of a wide river is narrowed, it must take on speed.”
“All right,” Duvalier said. “We’re almost finished. Two more questions.”
Jules waited. He looked neither apprehensive nor disturbed. What they didn’t know was that he could feel the touch of Élodi as if she were still held against him. She was small-breasted and firm. It had seemed that when she was pressed to him the feel of her body was something that answered all questions by making them, for a time at least, irrelevant. Although Arnaud and Duvalier were unaware of it, now and then traces of her perfume on his clothing would drift up and absent him from the scene.
Duvalier asked where he was on the night of the murder, specifying the date.
“How could I possibly answer that?” Jules said. “Who remembers that way? Do you?”
“No one does. But that was the last day you rowed. Does that help?”
“Not really. I could look at my calendar, my checkbook, credit card statements.”
“Would you do that please?”
Jules went to his desk and opened some drawers, taking out his calendar of the previous year, 2014, and his check ledger. The day in question was blank except that he had recorded the number of the row, its distance, and the cumulative distance. He had written no checks that day, the day before, or for several days thereafter.
“Credit card statements,” Arnaud said. “May we see them?”
From a filing cabinet nearby Jules fished out the proper month’s statements. On the date in question there was nothing. François had paid for dinner that evening, in cash.
“I see,” Duvalier said. “Did you know that, that night, there was a double murder, on the bridge and on the Île aux Cygnes? The murderer jumped into the Seine. We have contradictory descriptions. One fits you approximately, and from all we can tell the perpetrator left the river at the boathouse dock.”
Jules looked momentarily stunned. Then he laughed. “You think it’s me?”
“It could be you.”
“I don’t know what to say. Why would I murder anyone? Who was murdered?”
“Two boys, or, depending on how you look at it, young men,” Duvalier told him. Then, observing very carefully and speaking precisely, he said, “The murderer met resistance and left a lot of blood. Therefore, we have his DNA. Would you object to giving us a sample – just a cheek swab – so that we can eliminate you as a suspect?”
Duvalier and Arnaud saw a momentary break in Jules’ composure. For just a moment, he looked like someone who was caught. But only for a moment, the time it took him to reflect that he had not been wounded, and to remember that the boy he had saved had bled profusely.
“And I might add,” Arnaud did add, “that the DNA tells us that the murderer was an Ashkenazi Jew, like me, and like you. Am I not correct?”
“That’s true,” Jules said. “I am. And I’d be happy to give you a cheek swab, or blood, if you’d like.”
“The swab is enough.”
“By all means,” Jules said, opening his mouth wide, and, they noted, suppressing a laugh, which they could see in his eyes and because he shook like someone who is laughing.
“WELL,” DUVALIER DECLARED when they were in the car, as he held up the plastic envelope that contained the cheek swab, “that takes care of him, one way or another.”
“Yes it does,” Arnaud answered.
“He fits the description, Arnaud.”
“Except that he’s forty-five years older, he has hair, and he’s not as fat as a hippopotamus.”
“You can’t have everything.”
“I know. God works in strange ways, doesn’t He? What do you think he’s doing now?”
“God or Lacour?”
“Lacour. It would be easier to figure out what God is doing.”
“I don’t know. If I were he I’d be sitting in a chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply, remembering again and again how I kissed that beautiful girl.”