BECAUSE THEY HAD come up with nothing, Duvalier and Arnaud decided upon a tactic they had been taught in training and that they and every recruit had hoped never to use. If everything you have is unavailing, the foundation of your investigation must be faulty. Therefore, you remove the strongest support, as upon it the rest of the edifice depends. In the bridge murders, the strongest element was negative. The DNA evidence ruled out all the suspects, including, most recently, Jules. What if the blood that had pooled on the bridge deck had come not from the perpetrator or any of the victims but from someone else? The blood at the bottom of the stairs didn’t match the blood on the deck. The killer rode the second victim down to the ?le aux Cygnes as if on a sled, but even if he left no blood on the way, had he stopped bleeding enough so as not to leave a trace on the second victim, or a trail as he ran? The forensics people had grid-searched a meter on each side of his path as reported by the witnesses and police, and found not the tiniest droplet.
Ignoring the DNA led to an even deader end, so they started over, which involved viewing the surveillance tapes and investigating more thoroughly each member of the rowing club who might have been physically able to mount the attack, take to the Seine, and survive. That it was a rowing club meant that nearly everyone was strong enough to have done so. They combed databases and started the long process of re-interviewing their prospects, from the top of the list down, even though, purely from intuition, they had drawn redlines under four of the names. They wanted to take these – of which one was Jules – as they came, so as to disallow a bias and yet not disallow anyone who might seem unlikely.
They started in May, alternating the numbing review of tapes (though these were hard drives, they still called them tapes) and doing interviews. Often they walked to the interviews, for exercise and to be in the open air, and so that they could have lunch in various interesting restaurants and sit in parks afterward, as they read the paper, discussed the case, or just took in the sun. Sometimes they did necessary shopping. They knew the case so well that they could read one another’s thoughts about whatever passed before them.
In the first days of August, with Paris largely empty of the French, they persevered automatically. Most of their subjects had left the city, everything was slow, they were almost forgotten, no one was looking over their work, and it was so hot that the birds sang less. Finishing in the middle of the afternoon of August 10th, a Monday, they returned to the office in a half-trance after the blazing light of the street. Dead leaves littering the parks because of heat kill were a reminder that fall would soon bring bright colors and cool wind.
Arnaud went off to splash water on his face, and as Duvalier, not even trying anymore to think of the case, sank into his chair he noticed a manila envelope on Arnaud’s desk. When Arnaud came through the door, Duvalier told him that something had arrived from his commissariat.
Arnaud sat down. “Probably changes in regulations. They’re always pestering us with crap like that and more things to do.” Leaning back in his chair, he opened the envelope the way one deals with the tenth piece of junk mail in a stack, his chief concern being to avoid a paper cut.
“What’s this?” he said as an envelope fell out, and a note from the commissariat. The envelope had Turkish stamps on it. “What is this?” he asked Duvalier, holding up the envelope.
“‘Türkiye Cumhuriyeti.’ That’s just like Arabic – jumhuriyatu: meaning republic.”
“And this building?”
Duvalier looked at the picture of a building on one of the stamps. “I don’t know, but it says ‘Askari Yargitay,’ and ‘a hundred years.’ It’s the hundredth anniversary of Askari Yargitay. Askari were soldiers. Yargitay I think is a court. Maybe it’s some sort of military court. So what? That’s just a stamp. What does the note say?”
“It’s from Koko,” Arnaud answered, displeased.
“Who’s Koko?”
“He’s the idiot who …. They can’t send him on patrol so they keep him at the office. He does secretarial work. I don’t know how he got through training. The second or third day he was on duty, he was sitting in a patrol car and he shot himself in the thigh and calf.”
“Through the thigh and into the calf?”
“No, two shots.”
“How can you shoot yourself by accident, twice?”
“He said he thought someone had shot him so he shot back. He limps, of course.”
“He says, ‘My dearest Arnaud ….’”
“What’s his native language?”
“French. ‘This letter came to you about two weeks ago from the DGSI, with no explanation. I left it on your desk but you never showed up so I’m sending it. They opened it and sealed it with the kind of tape you try to fix tears with when you mistakenly tear a letter or something. I didn’t read it. No one did. Hope to see you soon, Koko.’”
“Maybe you should try to transfer to this commissariat,” Duvalier said.
“Maybe I should.” Arnaud cut through the tape but before he took the letter out of the envelope he read the postmark. “It came into France in the middle of April. This is August, so it’s undoubtedly urgent.”
In the envelope was a letter and a folded receipt from a restaurant in Paris: Chez Renée, 14 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Arnaud swept his eyes to the bottom of the letter. “It’s from Raschid Belghazi. He was cleared to travel. He wasn’t at all a suspect.”
“I’ll be he went to Syria,” Duvalier said. “Am I right?”
“Yes. What does this say?” He passed the letter to Duvalier.
“It says ….”
“I thought you didn’t know Arabic?”
“I know enough to know this. It says, ‘La Allah illa Allah, wa Muham- madu Rasul’ Allahi. La qanun illa ashariyatu.’ ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the prophet of God. There is no law but the shariya.’” He handed it back to Arnaud.
“And this?” Arnaud turned the letter and held it up for Duvalier to translate.
“‘In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.’ The Arabic handwriting is pathetic, like a five-year-old’s – not that I can do much better.”
The rest was in French. Arnaud read, haltingly. He hadn’t much practice reading aloud, in that he was a policeman and he had no children. “He writes: ‘By the time you read this, I hope I will be a martyr. The caliphate is growing. In your lifetime France will be Muslim. There will be no unbelievers. Notre Dame will be a mosque of Allah, and the only book will be the Holy Quran.
“‘You gave me your card to tell you if I thought of anything. Now that I am waging jihad and will be a martyr I am proud to say that the three of us went to rob and kill a Jew. We found one on the bridge and beat him, but before we could cut off his head a man came from behind, the one you’re looking for. He was older than I said, and his description was what you said. He did yell something in German, but I don’t know what. I made a lot up because I didn’t want you to find him. Then he would have said that he saved the Jew, so I changed things. I threw our knives in the water and picked up this, which he dropped. Now maybe you can find him so he will die in prison at the hand of the brothers even before the armies of the Caliph enter Paris and clean it of all such filth when they come. And they will, God willing.
“‘Raschid Belghazi.’”
Arnaud and Duvalier were still for a moment before they turned their attention to the receipt, which they handled by pinching it at the edge. It was stained with blood.
“Get a plastic envelope,” Arnaud said.
“Why don’t you get a plastic envelope?” Duvalier asked.
“Because I don’t know where they are.”
“After all these months?”
“In which I haven’t had to use one.”
“They’re right next to the DNA pouches, in the cabinet,” Duvalier told him as he left, “the one near the copy machine.”