“Please,” Duvalier said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, which for a while in the beginning he was. “We won’t be long. Now, moving on, you row on the Seine, is that correct?”
“How do you know that?”
“But you haven’t rowed since October.”
“You know that, too?”
“According to the log in the boathouse.”
“I went to America. Then it was winter. Then I learned I have an aneurysm. The doctor told me that I shouldn’t row, and that means I’ll have to sell my boat. If I die suddenly, I don’t want to be lost in the Seine. It’s deep, turgid, and flows fast. I don’t want my daughter not to know where I’ve come to rest.”
“But,” Duvalier said, “after winter, before your aneurysm, you didn’t row. Others have started up again, months ago. Why not you?”
“No mystery,” Jules said. “I got out of shape. Every new season you have to begin again, and the older you are the more difficult it is.”
“Fair enough. How long have you rowed on the Seine?”
“Sixty years or so.”
“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 Île 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 Île-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 Île 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 Île 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 Île 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 Île 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 Île 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. François 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 Île 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.”
“The swab is enough.”
“By all means,” Jules said, opening his mouth wide, and, they noted, suppressing a laugh, which they could see in his eyes and because he shook like someone who is laughing.
“WELL,” DUVALIER DECLARED when they were in the car, as he held up the plastic envelope that contained the cheek swab, “that takes care of him, one way or another.”
“Yes it does,” Arnaud answered.
“He fits the description, Arnaud.”
“Except that he’s forty-five years older, he has hair, and he’s not as fat as a hippopotamus.”
“You can’t have everything.”
“I know. God works in strange ways, doesn’t He? What do you think he’s doing now?”
“God or Lacour?”
“Lacour. It would be easier to figure out what God is doing.”
“I don’t know. If I were he I’d be sitting in a chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply, remembering again and again how I kissed that beautiful girl.”
Élodi Alone
YEARS BEFORE HE DIED, Élodi’s father, explaining that he no longer wanted to argue, left the practice of law. He preferred to trim the hedges, cut the lawn, and sit on the terrace in the sun – a terrace distinguished by its healthy geraniums in long-lasting, vivid red. In the summer season, from its balustraded expanse one could watch white clouds riding on the wind over snow-covered mountains high enough not to feel the heat of May or June.
He told her – after a while repetitively – that when he was young he loved the sight of things so much that he needed nothing else, and found extraordinary happiness in color, a graceful line, the sun on rippling water, a strong wind waving through the wheat. When by necessity he had had to make a living, pay taxes, pass exams, fight opponents, this had left, and he wanted it back.
Neither he nor her mother was able to convey to her the common quality of knowing how to get along in the world, to read what people said when they were saying something else, and to withhold the truth when it had to be told. This was fine in the lush park where she grew up. There, she had music, mountains, and even a rushing stream in the sound of which she heard melodies that she could later repeat as she played. But in the society of others she was at sea. She went to Paris to study music so she could work as a musician and have the ability to live, if not on a grand scale, for the music itself.
Music asked nothing, required nothing, needed nothing, betrayed nothing. It appeared instantly when called, even in memory. It was made of the ineffable magic in the empty spaces between – and the relation of – its otherwise unremarkable components. It arose ex nihilo to encompass and express everything. It fled into silence most modestly when it was done. It seemed to have a mind and a heart of its own. It teased with its perfection and led right up to the gates of heaven. Even at rest it was always ready to be called, it had existed forever, and it would last as long.
She practiced for many hours a day, but as she had to break them up she walked a great deal, and rested in parks, sitting still – as she had learned from her father – and harvesting strength and well-being from form, color, and light.
She knew it was sad that she was in love with a man who, although he was still strong and virile, was so ancient it was absurd. And unlike the love that would be appropriate to a woman her age, it ebbed more than it flowed. At times she was infilled by it, but it would always flee and leave her empty. Even at its strongest, it was dying.
PARIS IN JULY IS frenetic and hot, but unlike the heat of August, when everyone leaves anyway, the heat of July doesn’t slow the pace that builds to a frenzy in spring and early summer, and is still a great encourager of hopes, actions, and sex. Summer dresses, light clothing, bare arms and shoulders, the ease of a hot afternoon, open windows with warm breezes sweeping over white bed linen turned back, work done, the telephone not ringing …. But Élodi was still alone.
Her infatuation with Jules was ending in nothing. That he would not take the lead, she knew, was in large part out of consideration for her. Had he slept with her, as he and she wanted, it would have been easy to end. Instead they had had weekly lessons that were tense and exciting for what they withheld, which was somehow poured into the musicianship.
“Because we perform,” he said, “we’ve become addicted to praise. At an early age we look not to the music but to a teacher’s approval, and later to the applause of the audience, the reviewer’s sentence or two, or perhaps, eventually, to the world tour, posters in front of the concert hall, the wide-eyes of hotel clerks and managers as fame knocks them back like a wave. The object seems to be to become so revered that you have to build a wall around your house – except where its lawns meet the Lake of Geneva or the sea off Antibes. And as you seek approval, praise, position, wealth, and fame, the music becomes the means rather than the end.”
“For me, music is the end,” she replied, “as I have and likely will have none of those other things.”
“You don’t have them, yet,” he insisted. “If you do have them, as I think you will, you’ll be pointed in the wrong direction whether or not you want to be. And when those things fail, as they must, you’ll have been diverted from the music after having betrayed it. Grocery clerks, railroad workers, farmers, private soldiers, and street cleaners expect neither praise nor fame. Their reward comes quietly as they pass through life unrecognized. Learn to live like them. The music is all you need. And if you stray from it, it won’t have you back.”
AT THE END OF July, when heat and diesel fumes had begun to push the city into the slough of August but there was still enough of the freshness of summer to sustain the excitement of the month’s last days, Élodi had practiced all morning, had a picnic in the Place des Vosges, returned home to practice until three, and then walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg. She found a bench with an open prospect and took a seat next to two elderly women miraculously in coats and hats.
Élodi placed a bottle of mineral water between herself and the adjacent old lady, and put a folded newspaper on her lap. She tried to read it, but instead her eyes fixed on a ridge of palaces and domes beneath a sky in full and turbulent motion. She was in the yellow dress. It was hot enough that her skin glistened, and parts of the dress that pressed at her sides and beneath her breasts were wet enough that the silk clung to her body. In the direct sun, strong in July even at four, her hair shone blindingly gold.
Perhaps she was the first one in all of Paris to see the beginnings of a black-and-purple thunderstorm coming in from the east. The clouds were as massive as alps and would bring cooling rain and wind. She knew and was sure that they would rescue her from the heat even though she hadn’t hoped for their aid. She thought back to the mountains she could see from her room when she was a girl. Snow pouring down like a torrent over a fall, with musical rhythm, filling the world: furious, joyous, suicidal, glorious. Stop the trains, stop the cars, cloak the trees and telephone wires in white, clear the paths of cracks and imperfections, silence footfalls, quiet the world, and amplify light until day lasts into night.
She almost forgot where she was and that it was summer, but then the wind picked up. It fluttered dresses, and it ruffled newspapers, making them hard to read. But because it offered relief in evaporation no one seemed to understand that it was the emissary of an approaching storm.
Though she was far from her apartment and knew it would rain, she held her place, remembering distant thunder rumbling through the mountains, in hairpin echoes twisting along the valleys, like replicas of the jagged lightning that made it. Weak but long-lasting at a distance, the sound left no doubt that in the mountains themselves the crash of thunder was deafening. She used to hear it as it emerged in the night from a crucible of distant flashes, and she could track it in the crackling static on the radio. There was nothing quite like a Beethoven symphony from Bern or Berlin cast over the mountains in
the darkness of a storm and landing in her room, wounded by lightning but playing on. The glowing plastic obelisk on the radio dial was yellowed and warm as it locked on to music riding on the rain.
With clouds north and east of Paris rising to take up more and more of the sky, the wind picked up and distant thunder could be heard as little curls of lightning jumped from cloud to cloud. People fled. The wind gusted, and took a hat or two. Knowing that the storm wouldn’t arrive for ten or fifteen minutes, Élodi remained seated. She would have time to get to a café and watch the downpour scouring the streets and sidewalks until it passed as quickly as it had come, leaving in its wake ten minutes of humid air that would dry in the sun.
The old ladies struggled up, gathered their things, and waddled off. As she watched them go she discovered that a young man was sitting as close to the other end of the bench as he could get, deeply absorbed in sketching on a newspaper-sized pad. Because of the angle at which he held the paper so as to fight the wind, she couldn’t see what he was drawing, but she lifted herself a little higher and craned her neck. He glanced to his left, and after their eyes met he was slow in turning away, but he did, and reddened so much it looked like apoplexy. He was tall, he had a sensitive face with fine features, he was as young as she was, and so shy that, though he tried, he couldn’t unredden. To her, this meant that he was good. It meant as well that he would probably not approach her.