Orsini had been faxed a series of articles about the shipwreck. They showed the incident in a different light, one that was both more emotionally charged than the Wikipedia entry Lebreton had printed off and better synthesized than the sailor’s dossier. But none of the cuttings contained the smallest clue for them to hang on to. Orsini was going to deepen his research at the public library.
At their end, Rosière and Lebreton still hadn’t managed to reach Maëlle Guénan, though they had had better luck with Jallateau. The name Sauzelle “rang a vague bell,” and “yes, it might have been from the petition,” but the main point to emerge was that they should “just get lost for once.” Rosière was filling in Capestan, who was writing all the information up on the board, when Dax called out to them from his PC:
“I’ve got it!”
In a split second the officers swooped on the lieutenant and his pal Lewitz, who was already congratulating him with a shake of the shoulder. With his fingers on the keyboard and wearing a gleeful expression, Dax jabbed his chin at the screen:
“Jallateau’s criminal record! It took me ages to crack the préfecture’s security system, but I got it in the end. Jallateau: blank folder.”
Capestan was so incredulous that it took a moment for her to pull herself together. For the last few hours, she had watched him thrash his mouse around and hammer at his keyboard like a jazz pianist on speed. His forehead glistening with sweat, Dax had paused just once, and only then for as long as it takes to siphon off three pints of tap water. All that energy and determination for him to come up with a document that was present in the original file they had received from the brigade criminelle. Capestan smiled to mask her dismay:
“Fine effort, lieutenant. But we already had that folder. Rosière’s put in a call to have it updated. I mentioned it to you earlier on . . .”
“Ah,” Dax said, then gnawed the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Right, I suppose I heard ‘folder’ and then just started looking.”
Capestan nodded, as if this explanation justified his actions in full, then headed to the kitchen. She needed a coffee.
The commissaire unfolded a paper filter and slipped it into the machine. Rosière’s giggling could be heard drifting in from the terrace, where she was smoking with Lebreton.
“‘Muscle memory’—that’s a good one! Shame he hasn’t been to the gym for a while! The guy knows how to run a search, he just doesn’t know what for. Did you see him in there?” she said, turning to Lebreton for approval. No reaction, but she carried on in the same vein anyway:
“Most teams get an IT whizz. Not us—we get an IT cretin.”
She exhaled wearily:
“We’ve got a long way to go, I’m telling you. A long way to go.”
Lebreton made no comment beside her. Capestan could not tell whether his silence was due to indifference or a stubborn refusal to bad-mouth anyone. It was too close to call, but her intuition was leaning toward the latter option.
She joined them outside, soon followed by Évrard and Lewitz. As she stirred the sugar into her coffee, she shared the latest cause for surprise with her colleagues:
“I didn’t find the passenger list in the file from crim. There’s the one from Guénan’s dossier with the names of the petition signatories, but nothing about who was on board.”
Rosière and Lebreton shook their heads to indicate that they had not tracked it down either.
“Leave it to me. I’ll sort that out with the US ferry company,” said Évrard, checking her watch to calculate the time difference. “I’ll call them this evening.”
“Are you bilingual?” Lewitz asked, clearly impressed.
“Vacations in Vegas. Didn’t always work out for the best, but at least I picked up some English.”
All they had to do now was touch base with the elusive Maëlle Guénan.
Lebreton was sitting at the back of a Vietnamese restaurant on rue Volta. A television perched next to some fluorescent tubes was playing video clips with the sound turned off. The commandant was watching it without taking anything in, mixing his bo bun with nem sauce. With the big bowl in his hand, he was shaking the broth off the noodles on his chopsticks when his iPhone rang on the Formica table. Maëlle Guénan. He set down the bowl and the chopsticks and wiped his fingers on his paper napkin before answering.
“Hello?”
“Hello, I’m sorry to be calling you so late. I’ve spent the whole day in the countryside with my son for his birthday. It was wonderful but there wasn’t any signal.”
“No problem.”
“We can meet up tomorrow, if you like? I’m not sure what’s going on—everyone seems to want to talk to me right now.”
30
Lebreton locked his mailbox with a half turn of the key, then walked out into rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin. That morning, a pale gray sky was sucking all the color out of the city. Paris was suffocating, floundering helplessly beneath the grubby canvas of this parachute. Lebreton took a right toward rue de l’Échiquier. The journal, the link with Sauzelle, the passengers, and anything the widow had forgotten or kept hidden. The commandant had spent the whole night attempting to collate all of Maëlle Guénan’s stories: the salt shaker, the glasses, the feet trampling on faces, the wives drowning their husbands . . . The panic had made those human souls seethe, provoking any number of
