He climbed into the much warmer air. It was completely quiet – no sirens and no lights. He couldn’t be seen from the street, no one ever came to the boathouse at night, and he had the key. After a moment’s rest, he went in, stripped off his clothes, and threw them into the washer to rid them of all traces of blood and the Seine. Wrapped in towels, he sat on the edge of the cot where he had slept not long before, and, as the washer agitated, he rocked slightly in the dark.
His mind racing, he stayed awake until the washer finished. Then he threw the clothes into the dryer. The tumbling sound and light escaping from inside were soporific. He lay back, noting to himself again and again that he must get up in the morning before others came early to row. He didn’t know who came then or exactly when they did or even if they did, for he rowed much later, but he had to arise before the light so as to be dressed and waiting. He would leave only when Paris was busy, the streets were full of early risers, and the cameras would be sucking up the imagery of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people making their ways, blurring, moving, innocent or not, an indistinct mass of men and women pressing hard upon the pedals of their ever-disappearing lives.
AWAKENED BY FIRST LIGHT reflecting off the gray river, he tried to go back to sleep. There were two worlds now, as perhaps there had always been: one of sleep without dreams, where anxiety did not exist; and the wakeful world in which fear came in paralyzing surges. Because it was impossible to sleep, he faced what had become of his life.
This was just before six, when someone might come to row, though it was unlikely, as the river flowed faster than it had the day before, and local rains had scattered garbage and tree limbs, sometimes whole trees, across the surface of the water. The weather was cold, dark, and foggy. Still, someone might come, so Jules rushed to prepare. He knew that later he would have to think very carefully about what to do, but what he had to do within the boathouse itself was obvious, and he moved fast. He threw the towels he had slept on and used as blankets into the hamper, and laid down a fresh covering, just as he had done the day before. Next, he went to the sink and cupped his hands to carry a little bit of water to sprinkle on his boat to make it look as if it had just been used. He turned on the shower and poured a little shampoo on the floor so that it would appear that after going out on the river he had bathed. The scent wafted through the rows of boats. Then he rushed to fix a light to the bow of his boat. He never rowed in the dark, so he fumbled with the unfamiliar attachment, but soon fastened it.
Should someone arrive now, the evidence would point to Jules having been out on the water early. He wasn’t yet dressed, as someone who had just finished showering would not have been. Probably no one would show, but whoever might wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. The next step was to dress, and as he did he thought through one scenario after another.
His life had been saturated with and overwhelmed by ever-present guilt for the deaths of people he hadn’t killed, people he had loved, whom he would have done anything to save. Now, in regard to the two men, or boys, that he was fairly sure he had actually killed, he felt no guilt at all. The very fact of feeling no remorse made him feel remorse sufficient to set him in an argument with himself even as he desperately tried to strategize a way clear of capture.
Was what he had done a crime? Was it murder? There were three of them – and at least one was armed with a deadly weapon. Might he have been more measured? He was not a boxer or a street fighter but a seventy-four-year-old musician. Had he tried to moderate his response, they probably would have killed him, or at least they might have pushed him aside and killed the Hasidic Jew. Should he have abstained, as required of a good citizen, leaving the monopoly of violence to the state but allowing the murder of an innocent man? Years before, a woman had been raped and murdered in the park at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And not that long after, another woman, both with extreme brutality. The neighborhood was literally terrified. And the response of the good citizens had been to hand out orange plastic whistles.
At the neighborhood meeting, imagining a bunch of frightened, impotent people watching a crime unfold as they provided the musical accompaniment with their whistles, Jules had asked why they didn’t hand out revolvers instead. A hundred people summoning another hundred more would be of absolutely no avail if not a single one was willing actually to intervene. He stated this, perhaps somewhat un-diplomatically, by referring to “sheep whistles not for calling sheep but to be blown by them.” He was ostracized forever by everyone present, an indignant crowd bravely determined to be militantly helpless. His last words before he left were, “One must have the courage to save a life.” They thought he was crazy, and now he thought that perhaps they had been right. He was so shaken, unsure, and fearful that it grayed his vision, and things would fade in and out as he tried to think of what to do.
“Steady yourself,” he said out loud, “hold through.” It began to work. He would be all right even if someone came in, and no one did, giving him time to think. In the quiet fog of early morning everything was muted in gray, and the vigorously flowing river, powerful and unperturbed, was a model for his thought.
For whom would they be searching? The three witnesses would undoubtedly think he was taller and heavier than he was. Just as children imagine monsters, and seafarers once returned with exaggerated tales of gargantuan creatures, the witnesses would most likely endow Jules with strength and size appropriate to their fear of him. That he could outrun young police officers suggested that they would estimate his age to be lower than it was, given also that he had been able to take on three young men and quickly kill two of them. The heavy rain that night had soaked his hair, turning it dark and plastering it down. And he had been wearing a distinctive saffron/marigold-colored rain jacket over his blazer. He had bought this in Switzerland many years before. Its color was unforgettable. The company that made it was Japanese, and the Japanese vision of the spectrum was somehow different from the European. He had seldom worn it, but that day he had pulled it from his closet in response to the weather forecast.