Exiting the trees on the Allée des Cygnes were a man and a woman walking beneath an umbrella. They froze. The boy who had thrown away the knife inexplicably picked up and pocketed a piece of paper – as if at this point he was fastidiously concerned with litter. Then he began to scream in a high-pitched, threatened voice. “He killed my friends! He killed my friends! Raciste! Raciste!”
The woman pulled out a phone, but she was shaking too much to use it, so the man grabbed it from her as the umbrella he dropped began to roll around in the breeze. The Hasidic Jew was by this time long gone, and the two witnesses had seen only that Jules was standing over a body as a frightened boy cried for help.
Jules knew that even if his explanation were accepted or somehow proved, which it might well not have been, and even if they could locate the Hasidic Jew, they would never find the knife, and Jules would be condemned for overreaction. How he was supposed to have fought three, one of whom had a weapon, didn’t matter. Well protected citizens, who would not themselves have intervened and would have allowed the unknown Jew on the bridge to die, eschewed violence so passionately as to close their eyes and wish to be done with it all equally and without the labor and risk of judgment. Prosecutors would prosecute him with single-minded professionalism. If the assailants were Muslims, and it was likely they were (“Raciste!”), pressure from one side and the desire to appease it from the other would almost certainly send him to prison, and never could he have afforded to go to prison, most especially now.
The sound of sirens came from the Right Bank as a chain of cars with flashing blue lights began to ascend from the west onto the ramp leading up to the bridge.
Rather than run and thereby telegraph guilt, Jules began to walk west at a pace that suggested he hadn’t been aware of the events that had just occurred. Though his manner comported perfectly with his shock, to the witnesses it looked like indifference. He glanced back at the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, at the center of which dozens of lights flashed hysterically in blue. Police were running down the stairs.
Which meant that Jules had to run, too. He ran every day that he didn’t row, sprinting intermittently, and now he sprinted much faster than usual. As the police following him saw him pulling away they received the clear impression that he was a young man. They couldn’t catch him, but what would he do when he reached the end of the Allée des Cygnes at the foot of the Pont de Grenelle? It was late, and raining. The streets were empty and would be saturated with police.
The running and his desperation felt much like war. He had no fear, because, as in war, the feeling that he was already dead freed him. It had been like that in Algeria, a kind of joy at writing himself off, which left him free to act in a way that by stunning and confounding his enemies might have saved his life.
Ahead, the Pont de Grenelle was lit in a garland of flashing blue lights. Closed in, there was only one thing he could do. He had always loved to walk or run through the Allée des Cygnes, but now he would have to leave it. He went to the fence, put one foot on the bottom rail, and vaulted over the rest. Then he slid down the steep masonry, taking care not to sprain an ankle, and without the slightest hesitation or making much of a splash, launched himself feet first into the river.
Everything continued to happen fast and numbly. Still, he was able to realize that he was tasting the spattered blood of the first man he killed when he had smashed him against the wall. But going into the river washed away both the blood and its taste, which was like a piece of raw iron that has not rusted but, somehow, rotted. The river took him as he knew it would. It was painfully cold, but not enough to confuse him. In less than a minute he grew used to it, and by that time he was level with the ramp and stairs leading from the Pont de Grenelle to the Allée des Cygnes, down which police were running, the straight beams of their flashlights sweeping jerkily from one side to the other as they moved. Some of the police were keen enough on the chase to skim their lights over the river on both sides of the Allée. Swept downstream on the north side, Jules submerged himself.
He had rowed here for sixty years, and knew the river’s every trick. Although he had to check visually, he could fix the stern of his boat on a landmark and row without looking back for many strokes, and then turn the point of the stern to another landmark to round a curve or avoid a bridge pier. Just where he had now gone into the water was the point of greatest danger when rowing, and he probably knew this particular patch of river as well as anyone in the world. The wakes of the bateaux mouches, although miraculously less than that of a powerful outboard, often filled the cockpit of his shell, and it took some skill not to capsize as they passed. On very windy days, one couldn’t row safely on the Seine, which was a muscular river that had always refused to be completely conquered, even by the great mass of Paris. The bateaux mouches made their astounding turns here, pivoting at their centers, whirling like blades. This made the biggest waves. To be caught in them was extremely difficult. To be hit by an immense, twirling bateau was death. West of Bir-Hakeim it was quieter, the main threat being commercial barges. But now there were no barges or bateaux mouches, and had he been in his light boat he almost could have run the whole river blind. After he counted slowly to twenty he knew the current had swept him beyond the westernmost point of the Allée des Cygnes, and he surfaced with a gasp.
Flashing police lights on the bridges at either end of the Allée lit them more brightly than Christmas trees. Carried by the Seine into a new life dictated by chance, he felt electrically alive and excited, even as or perhaps because he thought that everything was headed to the kind of cataclysms and death he had been spared all his life – of the Jews, his parents, the Mignons, the soldiers and civilians in Algeria, Jacqueline, and now Luc, and himself. But the river carried him west, death still at bay.
He knew the current veered south, hit the left bank, and ricocheted north, which would carry him to the dock. He had observed this every day, traced by detritus on the surface. Letting the current carry him, he felt it move south, bounce off the south bank, and head north. It slammed him against the north end of the dock as if he had been shot out of a circus cannon.