The three officers considered this treasure haul, a faint smile playing over each of their lips. They let a few seconds go by in respectful silence.
“Do you want to take care of this?” Capestan asked Lebreton. Finders, keepers, after all.
“Gladly.”
Time to see whether Sir Lebreton of Internal Affairs was as efficient at wading through the Seine and its floating bodies as he had been at the IGS Capestan had already worked out teams should an investigation come up: she did not want Lebreton, and no one wanted Torrez.
“Capitaine, you partner up with him,” she said to Rosière.
“Perfect,” she replied, rubbing her chubby hands with their multicolored rings. “So, what’s this stiff trying to tell us?”
5
“Go on, marry me.”
Despite his efforts to keep his voice down and stay discreet, Gabriel could not stop his words ringing around the Pontoise swimming pool. His proposal traveled across the water and bounced off the indigo tiles before echoing back, eagerly awaiting Manon’s response.
It was the middle of the afternoon and the pool was all but empty, with the exception of a few determined regulars doing lengths. So long as Gabriel and Manon stayed out of their lanes, nobody minded their noisy chatter and splashing. Manon was swimming with an immaculate breaststroke, managing to maintain her rhythm despite Gabriel’s spluttering attempts to keep up with her. She was smiling through the water running down her face.
“We’re so young, Gab—”
Gabriel aimed for the start of each sentence to coincide with Manon coming up for air.
“It’s not like we’re minors,” he said.
“Only just.”
“Do you want me to prove I’m an adult?” he said, still delighting in his achievements of the day before.
He was lagging a bit and had to kick hard to catch up the two yards that Manon had gained on him.
“If you don’t want a marriage, we could have a wedding instead? Or a civil partnership? A blood ritual! We could cut our hands with a rusty knife and shake on it?”
“You’re not going to drop this, are you? This is already the thirtieth time we’ve spoken . . .”
They overtook an elderly woman in a floral rubber swim cap. She was too focused on her target to give them so much as a sideways glance. Gabriel had a target, too, and he had no intention of missing it.
“I could get down on one knee, you know. Even in the deep end. I’ll get down on one knee even if it means drinking the whole damn pool. Look, have your big spectacle if that’s what you want. Do you want a ring in a cake? Strawberries dipped in champagne?”
“Stop it, you’ll make me drown, you lunatic.”
Manon was gorgeous, and even soaked in gallons of chlorine she smelled wonderful. Gabriel was crazy about her. He was fooling around, splashing her with water as though they were bashful sweethearts from an American romcom. But in reality, every atom of his body was yearning for her answer: there was no joking about that. She had to marry him. She had to stay with him. She could never leave or run away or disappear from sight. He needed her by his side forever. If a piece of paper had the power to make that happen, even the tiniest amount, then he wanted to sign it.
“Please, Manon. I love you. And I plan to carry on loving you for the next fifty years,” he said.
“But we’ve got so much time . . .”
He flicked his hair like a dog shaking itself down, his red-brown locks sticking to his forehead.
“Exactly, fifty years. Starting whenever you want.”
She put her hand on the edge of the pool to catch her breath and look at him for a second. He stared into her eyes, so familiar with their every nuance, and he knew she was going to say yes. He prepared all his senses and engaged his memory, determined to save this moment. He had forgotten so many of the crucial points in his life—disappeared without any hope of retrieval—that he had etched this one into the innermost part of his brain.
“All right. Let’s do it,” she said, taking her time before adding, “Yes.”
Gabriel went home with a real spring in his step. He was going to tell his father the news. But on boulevard Beaumarchais, a few yards from his house, he started to feel a lead weight in his stomach. And the closer he got, the heavier it became. It was a nuisance, a hiccup, a piece of gravel in his shoe: it would go away. He was not sure what it was doing there in the first place, but it would go away.
It grew from the size of a marble to a pétanque ball. Outside, he gave a short ring on the doorbell before letting himself in. He saw his father, sitting comfortably in his Voltaire armchair, turn his head and stand up to greet him. Tall, strong, solemn. He was like a cathedral, Gabriel’s father. He took off his glasses and asked his son how his day had been, as he did every evening.
Gabriel launched in without any preliminaries:
“Dad, Manon has agreed to marry me!”
He seemed as though he was about to smile, but he did not really react. Gabriel thought he was a little shocked, caught off guard. Inevitably his father would think he was too young, that he wasn’t ready yet.
“We were hoping to do it this spring, if possible. I’ll be needing the family record book.”
His father seemed suddenly to tense up, letting out the slightest of shudders. Gabriel saw a shadow fall over his eyes and stay there.
6
As she stepped inside what she was now calling, with justice, her commissariat, Capestan bumped into a bald man in a blue suit who must have measured a cubic yard. He had missed a patch shaving his chin, and his tie was stained with leftovers from different days, let alone different meals. On his jacket lapel was a Lions Club badge that he was trying to pass off as a
