“I did pick that up.”
“He left Marseilles before I came in to the police, but he couldn’t take his reputation with him. He doesn’t do any of the work, then hogs all the credit. His reports hardly mention the people under him, so your prospects are dimmed in proportion to his as they brighten. Notice how he made himself a barrier between the judge and us. Okay, we’re working for him, but there’s no reason we can’t talk to the judge. I like talking to judges: they’re usually quite bright and interesting, and they often help a great deal. I don’t see why people in our position are afraid of them. Did you see that when we were finished I disappeared?”
“Yeah,” Arnaud answered. “Why did I have to meet you in the garage?”
“Because I ran after the judge. I asked if we could contact him directly. He said, ‘Why? You’re supposed to go through Houchard.’ I said – I took a big chance – ‘Monsieur le Juge, I want to put this as diplomatically as possible. Houchard is an asshole.’ The judge laughed. I said, ‘He’ll ruin the investigation. I’m not looking for credit, but we want to do our job without undo obstruction. Each of has to wrap up our other cases, but this is by far the most important. We’re going to have to work like hell to fit everything in.’ After thinking about this, he said, ‘First go to him. If you can’t reach him immediately – let’s say after two rings? – give me a call. The important thing is that we get this done, and although I haven’t worked with him before, I’ve heard things about him. This is not to be repeated.’”
“You should have asked me before you did that,” Arnaud said.
“You’re right. I apologize. I’m not good at procedure, and I didn’t have time. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. The OPJ is an asshole. We’ll go around him when we need to. It can be done. Who knows, he might even leave us alone, and the best time to risk your career is at the beginning, when maybe you can do something else. But what about the case? Which is what I asked you.”
“Okay, nine forty-five on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, a weeknight, rain and wind. Three skinny ‘Arabs,’ two of whom are dead, one we’ll meet shortly. An assailant who, according to the survivor, killed the first victim by smashing his head against an abutment after charging out of nowhere while screaming racial slurs in German.”
“Does he know German? How does he know they were racial slurs?”
“We’ll find out. Second victim, according to the survivor and the preliminary autopsy report, was ridden down the stairs like a magic carpet and punched in the throat expertly and hard. Airway collapse. Two witnesses, unconnected as far as we know, saw the assailant standing over the body and the panicked survivor screaming for help. When our men arrived they saw the alleged killer, chased him, and lost him in the river. They came from both ends, so it must’ve been that.”
“The body fished out?”
“Not yet.”
“Surveillance cameras? Along the river?”
“That’ll be our life for who knows how long. Just you and me, because we can’t trust eyes not invested in the case. They’d almost certainly miss something. We don’t have final autopsies, or DNA, but we do have blood typing. The first victim, one Firhoun Akrama, was Type B negative. Amire Bourrouag, victim number two, and the survivor, Raschid Belghazi, both A positive. But there was blood at the site of the initial encounter up on the bridge. It painted the pavement, left spatters, and some pooled and congealed into little recesses in the concrete where there had been cut-off pipes or the ends of rebar or something. It was pried out in thick, maroon circlets, and didn’t match the victims or the survivor. O positive. That’s our assailant.”
“Maybe they attacked him.”
“Self-defense or not, he went at them hard enough to kill them. Because of the severity of the crime it’s an expedited case. If there’s no defense of necessity it’s an aggravated homicide – homicides – if only because one of the victims was a minor. The judge allows that a defense of necessity may exist, but suspects that it would be disallowed on the principle of disproportionality. He suspects it’s a racial crime. And he hopes not.”
“Maybe,” Weissenburger speculated, “there was a fourth person.”
“Occam’s Razor,” Duvalier said. “What are the odds?”
“Occam’s Razor,” Arnaud replied, “is not sharp enough to exclude them. What is this supposed German’s description?”
“I spoke to the two witnesses who were walking on the ?le aux Cygnes, and I really don’t think they’re connected. The man is a high-school geometry teacher, his wife a salesgirl at a Monoprix. They said our guy looked like Gérard Depardieu only he wasn’t as fat as a hippopotamus, his nose wasn’t flat like a spatula, and his hair was shorter and darker.”
“So how did he look like Gérard Depardieu?”
“That’s what I asked. Then they said, ‘Oh, the young Gérard Depardieu, when he was about twenty or twenty-five, and after he dyed his hair blond.’ But this guy was about fifty. The woman said he had the look of someone in shock. He didn’t speak in their presence, so we have nothing more on his language or nationality.”
“When does the surveillance come in?”
“As it’s collected and formatted we’ll get everything available on both sides of the river downstream all the way to the bend north.”
“The bridge. What about the bridge and the streets leading to it?”
The cameras there have been out for more than six weeks. Lightning in August.”
“They couldn’t fix them?”
“They don’t have the money. It’s like the Third World here.”
“Duvalier, the Third World is going to pass us soon, not because it’s fast but because we’re racing backwards. Were you named for Papa Doc?”
“No.”
“Baby Doc?”
“I hope not.”
AS HE STUCK TO his narrative, Raschid Belghazi was noticeably nervous. They were up on the roof, having left his mother’s apartment not only so she could not interfere in the interrogation, but because the apartment smelled very bad.
“As I told them, we were walking to the station when he attacked us on the bridge, from nowhere. We went to the Comédie-Fran?aise and had dinner, and were going home. We had to walk to the Gare de Montparnasse because we didn’t have enough money for the Métro.”
The detectives were stunned, and for a while they said nothing, until Duvalier asked, “You went to the Comédie-Fran?aise?”
“Yeah. We go there a lot.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you see?” Arnaud asked.
“I don’t remember the title.”
“You don’t remember the title of a play you saw two days ago?”
“What play?”
“That’s what I asked you.”
“They don’t show plays there,” Raschid told Arnaud, as if speaking to an idiot. He laughed.
“To the contrary,” Duvalier instructed. “That’s where you see Molière, Racine ….”
“Who?”
“What did you see there?”
“A pornographic movie.”
“At the Comédie-Fran?aise?”
“Yeah.”