“You must know it as well as a harbor pilot.”
“That’s an interesting point. You’d think that after sixty years I would. When I first took to the river I thought that, with practice, without turning to see where my bow was pointing I could chance gliding between bridge piers and hewing to the center of a channel, or taking the bends in the river while not hitting the bank. Align the stern tip on a waypoint, count the strokes, and have confidence that you won’t ram a stone pier. It doesn’t work that way, and I’ve never done it. Granted, I navigate well and don’t veer off course, but I have to turn my head and check all the time. It was a disappointment through all those years. I used to think, ten more years, and I’ll be able to do it without turning to check. No.”
“You’re familiar, however, with the currents.”
“They vary with the season and the rainfall.”
“You know the Bir-Hakeim Bridge?”
“It’s where I make my turn. I used to row, sometimes, when I had all day, all the way to Bercy, but now I turn at Bir-Hakeim.”
“So you’d know how the river ran from the ?le aux Cygnes to the boathouse.”
“You have to know. You’re pushed at sometimes ten kilometers per hour, and to keep the prow properly oriented in such a current you have to row at about five kilometers an hour at a minimum, so your speed below Bir-Hakeim on the return can be up to twenty, if the Alpine regions are gushing water into the ?le-de-France after big storms.”
“How do you keep from slamming into the dock?”
“You go past it, turn, and approach from the west in almost slow motion.”
“After the ?le aux Cygnes, what does the river do?”
“It veers south, pushing you toward the south bank. You have to keep away, because traffic can run against you there, and when you get to the boathouse you don’t want to try to cross against the current. Why do you ask? It seems very odd.”
“So if someone were to fall in the river at the ?le aux Cygnes, he would be swept West and South?”
“Yes.”
“Could he manage to stay on the north side enough to get out at the boathouse dock?”
Jules furrowed his brow, as if trying to plumb the reason for this question. “You know what a vector is?”
Arnaud, an engineer, did. Duvalier, a student of the humanities and Korean, did not. Jules saw that he didn’t, and even though Arnaud nodded, Jules explained for Duvalier. “Simply put, if you want to go straight ahead and the current is pushing you to the right, you pull to the left enough so that you end up where you intended to arrive in the first place. When I pass the ?le aux Cygnes, I row with a heavy bias to the north so as to compensate for the current taking the boat south. The wind complicates it further.”
“What if you’re in the water?”
“I am in the water,” Jules said, as if they were idiots.
“Not in a boat, swimming.”
Now looking at them as if they really were idiots, Jules said, “Nobody of any intelligence swims in the Seine. It’s filthy and dangerous.”
“If you capsized?”
Jules smiled. “You’ve given me an opportunity to boast. In almost sixty years I’ve never gone over, so I wouldn’t know. Everyone else goes over – once a year, twice, certainly in the beginning. Ask them. But it hasn’t happened to me. I’ve never been in the Seine.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Balance, caution, luck. Over the years I’ve had close calls. I’ve been out when the wind was so high there were whitecaps. The wakes of barges and motorboats have washed over me. I’ve been attacked by fat swans running across the water with outstretched wings. But I’ve never capsized.”
“Hypothetically, then. A swimmer south of the ?le aux Cygnes, who wants to get out at the boathouse dock ….”
“He’d better be a strong swimmer and he’d have to vector north, or he’d end up slammed against the bank of the ?le Saint-Germain. If he tried swimming directly across he’d be washed to Sèvres. The Seine runs strong. Geography has made a narrow channel, and the embankments narrow it further. When the flow of a wide river is narrowed, it must take on speed.”
“All right,” Duvalier said. “We’re almost finished. Two more questions.”
Jules waited. He looked neither apprehensive nor disturbed. What they didn’t know was that he could feel the touch of élodi as if she were still held against him. She was small-breasted and firm. It had seemed that when she was pressed to him the feel of her body was something that answered all questions by making them, for a time at least, irrelevant. Although Arnaud and Duvalier were unaware of it, now and then traces of her perfume on his clothing would drift up and absent him from the scene.
Duvalier asked where he was on the night of the murder, specifying the date.
“How could I possibly answer that?” Jules said. “Who remembers that way? Do you?”
“No one does. But that was the last day you rowed. Does that help?”
“Not really. I could look at my calendar, my checkbook, credit card statements.”
“Would you do that please?”
Jules went to his desk and opened some drawers, taking out his calendar of the previous year, 2014, and his check ledger. The day in question was blank except that he had recorded the number of the row, its distance, and the cumulative distance. He had written no checks that day, the day before, or for several days thereafter.
“Credit card statements,” Arnaud said. “May we see them?”
From a filing cabinet nearby Jules fished out the proper month’s statements. On the date in question there was nothing. Fran?ois had paid for dinner that evening, in cash.
“I see,” Duvalier said. “Did you know that, that night, there was a double murder, on the bridge and on the ?le aux Cygnes? The murderer jumped into the Seine. We have contradictory descriptions. One fits you approximately, and from all we can tell the perpetrator left the river at the boathouse dock.”
Jules looked momentarily stunned. Then he laughed. “You think it’s me?”
“It could be you.”
“I don’t know what to say. Why would I murder anyone? Who was murdered?”
“Two boys, or, depending on how you look at it, young men,” Duvalier told him. Then, observing very carefully and speaking precisely, he said, “The murderer met resistance and left a lot of blood. Therefore, we have his DNA. Would you object to giving us a sample – just a cheek swab – so that we can eliminate you as a suspect?”
Duvalier and Arnaud saw a momentary break in Jules’ composure. For just a moment, he looked like someone who was caught. But only for a moment, the time it took him to reflect that he had not been wounded, and to remember that the boy he had saved had bled profusely.
“And I might add,” Arnaud did add, “that the DNA tells us that the murderer was an Ashkenazi Jew, like me, and like you. Am I not correct?”
“That’s true,” Jules said. “I am. And I’d be happy to give you a cheek swab, or blood, if you’d like.”