On the other hand, a carefully plotted murder or the murder of a stranger can take years, might never be solved, and, if you are a police officer, can assume for you the character of a job you go to month after month where you work hard most of the time, although sometimes not, and sometimes find a break, but never quite get there. It makes you feel that your life is a waste, that the world is cruel, dangerous, and impossible, and that you will always be unhappy.
It had been months since Duvalier Saidi-Sief and Arnaud Weissenburger had begun the case of the Bir-Hakeim Bridge. Their prime witness, Raschid Belghazi, who believed the Comédie-Fran?aise was a pornographic movie house, had said he told them everything he knew, and been cleared to leave Paris. Now he was gone. The families of the murdered boys were voiceless and oppressed. They had no special pleading anywhere, much less in a ministry, and their communities had recently rioted anyway about something else and quickly settled back. It was the kind of case that was forgotten, or at least pursued halfheartedly.
But, Weissenburger, because he was a Jew and the evidence pointed toward a Jew who had murdered two Arabs, was absolutely determined, in the name of fairness, objectivity, and la?cité, to solve it. Saidi-Sief, hating his own people’s lower orders who disgraced their long traditions by embracing rootlessness and delinquency, suspected that the events had a twist no one had envisioned, and was just as eager as Weissenburger. Further, their devotion to their work dissolved their differences and brought them together in a way that both hoped could be the future of France, even if both were highly skeptical that it would be.
They went over the surveillance footage too many times, looking for something they might have missed. They stared at the lab reports until they could dream them. They used every informant they could contact, and begged other officers for favors that in the end turned up nothing. At one point, Houchard called. “How’s it going?”
Duvalier said, “For several months we spent eight to ten hours a day looking at traffic surveillance tapes. It was fun.”
As the time passed, the only thing they really had was the rowing club. What were the chances that whoever killed the two boys and jumped into the river was a member of this club, and knew he could pull himself out on its dock and seek shelter there until morning traffic would camouflage his escape? Did he plan it that way in advance? It was a thin and unlikely thread, but as it was the only one they had, they followed it.
The judge was adamant that he would not give them blanket authority to collect DNA samples from all the members. Theirs was astoundingly too broad a request, based on a highly improbable supposition. But he did agree that if they narrowed it down enough he would issue warrants, and he did agree that if they needed to go outside Paris, he would arrange it. Houchard, the OPJ, wasn’t doing anything, and the judge liked that the two young APJs were so stubborn. So they investigated each member before they would seek an interview, make a visit, and ask for a cheek swab. Then they went ahead. As they suspected, most people were cooperative. It all had to be done politely and diplomatically, which took time.
They learned a lot about rowing clubs. You can hardly buy real estate on the river, so no matter how rich you are, if you want to row in Paris you have to join one and move among the musty lockers and garbage cans that tend not to be emptied because no club member thinks it’s his job to do so. There were some billionaires or almost-billionaires who racked their boats in the drafty, rough-hewn boathouse, as well as semi-impoverished rentiers who would eat or not, depending upon interest rates. There were horribly arrogant lawyers; obsessive professors; dull-as-paint businessmen; a few women, some of whom were young and beautiful, with goddess-like, lithe bodies; retirees who could barely get their boats in the water and wouldn’t have lived through the fight on the bridge; even a policeman; and a bus driver.
It would have been easy had Arnaud and Duvalier had some mechanism with which to sort out the Jews, of whom there could not have been that many, but this was strictly forbidden. Arnaud did it anyway, using computers in Internet cafés, but other than names and the occasional suggestion in an article or posting, which left little certainty, there was not much to go on over the Internet. They had to approach the subjects one by one. The few who refused a cheek swab were put on a list for heightened attention after all the subjects had been examined.
One thing they discovered was that athletic people who had single shells tended to live in beautiful places, mostly in houses, but, if in apartments, the kind that take up whole floors or more than one and have expansive terraces with colorful awnings, lots of geraniums, and distant views. It was an education, and their visits were interesting. They always went together. Both the innocent and the guilty were able to conceal much less when faced with two questioners, on opposite flanks, two men of different character supporting one another and observing. It was human nature not to lie as well to two people as to one, because it was human nature to be jangled by two sets of eyes at two different angles.
When Duvalier and Arnaud got around to Jules they had found out what they could about him, checked his address, and looked on Google Earth to see where he lived. Because the estate was shielded by many layers of trusts, they had no idea that it wasn’t his, and thought he was, in fact, their biggest billionaire, as he would have been had he had Shymanski’s wealth. Looking forward to seeing the gardens and the interior, and to being offered refreshments as in several other luminous houses they had visited, they were curious to see the compound.
They thought it highly unlikely that an aging billionaire would smash someone’s head against an abutment, slide down stone stairs on top of someone else, kill him at the bottom with a martial-arts punch in the throat, and escape by throwing himself into the Seine. But they were open to the possibility. And because they were detectives they had the habit of scoping things out before they moved. The more information in advance, the more time to think, to give play to intuition, the better prepared they would be. There was a kind of magic in it, or, as Duvalier liked to say, an art.