The past is present in its reverberations and sustain, and the future is present in the clarity and beauty of its promises. For example, the crowds in ’44, surging with joy at the Liberation, continue to echo with such fidelity that one need not even close one’s eyes to see them. The future is also palpable not in pathetically featureless glass buildings but in generations yet to be born who are just like us, recapitulating every emotion and fault and, like us, suffering the illusion that they stand apart from a chain of life unbroken since the beginning of time.
In spring the trees of Paris bloom so lightly they seem to float on the breeze. In summer, its deep green gardens often shade into black and an orange sun revolves in the air like a crucible risen from a foundry. In winter, white silence in the long, treed allées and not a breath of wind. And in the fall bright colors and deep blue sky roll in on cool north winds.
AFTER AN UNSATISFYING, late dinner in a restaurant impatient to close, Duvalier Saidi-Sief and Arnaud Weissenburger sat like exhausted zombies in front of two huge computer screens in a cramped room of the Commissariat de Police du 16e Arrondissement, Passy, from which by a census of white automobiles they had agreed to work. Police stations, never empty, come alive at night. The two detectives had been staring all day at surveillance images issuing from portable hard drives delivered weeks after the crime. Such was the efficiency of the authority – they didn’t know which – that ran thousands of cameras to capture a present that, although the bureaucrats in charge probably didn’t know it, someone like Fran?ois might claim did not exist.
To Arnaud and Duvalier, the inhabitants of the nonexistent present moved on astoundingly fast little legs. You could make them go faster, slow them down, stop them, or run them backward. Although both flics had the air of conspirators or people who know a great or terrible secret, they differed in their approach. Duvalier had to discipline himself not to force the images ahead at high-speed so he could watch clouds rushing with mysterious velocity across the rooftops. Arnaud was steadier and more thorough, perhaps because at one time he had had to stare at slabs of glowing steel as he guided them dangerously over giant hot rollers, and this he accomplished while sweating in heavy clothing and looking through a dark glass faceplate.
For hours they peered at the screens, sometimes trying to zoom in on the images of pretty girls so they could forget for a moment what they were doing and why. They didn’t even know exactly what they were looking for. There were two contradictory descriptions, but lab work had come back showing that the DNA of the O+ blood belonged to none of the three boys. Perhaps surveillance techniques of the future would chart the DNA of each fast-moving ant in the images, but now they had to find him before they could make a match. They did have a clue. The presumed assailant was male and 98% likely of Ashkenazi descent. So although it was neither necessary nor sufficient to do so, they kept their eyes open for Orthodox Jewish dress, even though they knew that only a small percentage of Jews would be identifiable by it, and that no one had described the suspect in those terms.
They saw such a person in images taken close to the time in question and not far from the bridge, near the école Militaire. The surveillance there was intense so as to protect the vast underground facilities of the GIC as it vacuumed up telephone and Internet communications throughout France. But this was a slight, young boy, hardly visible in the rain and walking in a direction opposite to that in which the assailant was known to have escaped. Although he might have seen something, they could not waste time searching for him rather than for the murderer. But they kept the Orthodox boy, along with many other things, in the back of their minds.
He had entered the Métro at the école Militaire and disappeared. They couldn’t check every surveillance camera at every station, even at that uncrowded hour. If he had been on the bridge, why wouldn’t he have entered the Métro at Bir-Hakeim?
“If he were there, why would he have skipped a station?” Arnaud asked himself out loud, quickly answering himself. “Maybe he wanted exercise. But it was raining. We know he’s not our suspect. What can we do?” They let it drop.
Though they were young, the posture into which they were forced by spending so many hours in front of their computers made them stiff and gave them headaches. They would stretch, complain, crack their knuckles, get up, and walk about. At midnight, Arnaud said, “I’ve got nothing.”
“How many cameras do you have left?” Duvalier asked.
“Something like forty or fifty. You?”
“Seventy or eighty.”
“You spend too much time looking at the girls. You can’t see anything anyway.”
“I can’t help it.”
“You think you’re going to ask them for a date?”
“Some of them I’d like to.”
“Good, keep on looking,” Arnaud said. “I’m going downstairs to get some coffee if it’s open across the street. You want some?”
“No thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”
“Tea? A cookie?”
“I’m fine.”
“Duvalier?”
Duvalier turned to receive the question.
“What kind of Arab doesn’t drink coffee?”
There was a pause. “I’m not really an Arab, Arnaud, I’m a French Muslim.”
“Excuse me then. What kind of French Muslim doesn’t drink coffee?”
“The kind that’s looking at you, a French Protestant who does.”
Arnaud shook his head in contradiction.
“A French Catholic.”
“No.”
“Atheist.”
“I believe in God.”
“Buddhist? Hindu? Jew?”
Arnaud smiled slyly.
“They put a Muslim and a Jew on a case where it appears that a Jew killed two Muslims.”
“They did.”
“On purpose.”
“They didn’t know at the time that the assailant was likely a Jew, but they did know that two Arabs were the victims. They could have chosen others from our divisions, but they didn’t.”
“To be fair to both confessions?”
“Maybe just to keep Christians out of the mix. It would be against the law, but who could prove it. And Houchard, you know, is that kind of asshole.”
“Arnaud, you don’t look Jewish.”
“That’s right, Duvalier, but you do, and I’ll protect you if any Arabs try to beat you up.”
“I have a gun.”
“You would shoot them?”
“I would. You would catch a Jew who murdered two Arabs?”
“For sure.”
“Maybe Houchard is not such an ….”
“I’ll bring you some tea,” Arnaud said.
WHEN ARNAUD RETURNED much later – because of the hour he had had to go farther than he had planned – Duvalier was leaning back in his chair, a contented look on his face.
“Sorry,” Arnaud told him, “the tea must be cold.”
“I think I have something.”
“In the time I was gone?”
“Look at this. I’ve been going down the river from the Pont de Grenelle. Nothing, right?”
“I’ve already done that. The cameras stop before the bend. I saw nothing.”
“Ah, but there’s a traffic camera on the left bank that stares across the road and, therefore, across the river.”
“That’s so far. How could you see anything? Unless someone climbed out on the left bank? Was it lighted there?”