RUE DES DEGRÉS

BY DIDIER DAENINCKX
Porte Saint-Denis

Translated by David Ball

Not very far from what used to be the cour des Miracles, rue de Cléry and rue Beauregard almost merge. They are separated only by a narrow series of old buildings, with sweatshops and showrooms in them. The clacking of sewing machines mingles with the noise of traffic, the shouts of men pushing hand trucks and carrying clothing, and the curses of drivers blocked on the street by the interminable deliveries. The eyes of women with plunging necklines glitter in the shadow of the doorways. Men look at them longingly, hesitating over their beers. Just before they meet the Grands Boulevards at the Porte Saint-Denis, the twin streets are linked together thanks to the smallest street in Paris, six yards long at the most, in fact a set of stairs with fourteen steps that gives the street its name: rue des Degrés. A lamppost, steps framed by two walls, and a metal handrail in the middle shined to brilliance by the clothing of countless passersby rubbing against it.

That was where the cleaning lady of Chez Victoria found the corpse of Flavien Carvel while taking out the garbage cans at daybreak, below a red stencil of a punk girl’s face with the caption, What if I lowered my eyes?He was lying on his belly across the flight of stairs, and his bloody head was resting on the pile of flattened cartons left there by the neighborhood storekeepers. Brown stains cut across the right-hand wall, under the flaking billboard for Artex Industries. When the policemen turned the body over, they saw that the blood had flowed from his belly, stab wounds no doubt, drenching the head of hair lying below it on the steps. As they were roping off the area, one of the men, Lieutenant Mattéo, followed other signs along the walls of rue Beauregard up to the café Le Mauvoisin. The owner was raising its iron curtain. Over the sign for the café, a candle was burning at the feet of a Madonna sheltered in a niche of the wall.

“You closed late, last night?”

“Shut down by midnight … Somebody complain?”

“No, the only one who could have has no way to do it anymore! Everything calm? Nothing special happen?”

He raised a hand to his mustache and stroked it a couple of times, spreading his thumb and index finger.

“No, almost nobody here because of the soccer game, since I never put in a TV … I run a café, not an entertainment center. Two customers at the little table, under the photo of the Voisin girl, the poisoner—she lived here, they say … I was waiting for them to finish their beers before I packed it up.”

The police officer stepped forward to take a look inside. It smelled of dampness and cold tobacco.

“Was one of them blond, kind of long hair, wearing black jeans, white sneakers, and a reporter jacket … About twenty-five … ?”

“Yeah … the one facing me. He had a couple of beers—Leffes—but he couldn’t hold his drink … unless he started before he got to my place. They walked out onto the sidewalk, toward where you are, they walked maybe fifteen yards away while I was locking up. I remember they stopped to keep talking. The young one you’re talking about leaned against the wall while the other guy crossed the street toward rue de la Lune, a little lower down. He clearly didn’t feel like dragging the other guy along. Not very nice, leaving a pal in such a bad state … The guy in jeans staggered away toward the Porte Saint-Denis, and I went home to bed.”

Lieutenant Mattéo looked the owner of Le Mauvoisin up and down.

“Sorry, but I don’t think you’re opening this morning … You’re going to have to come along with me. Your last customer of the night wasn’t drunk: He’d just been stabbed in the belly a couple of times. We picked him up off the stairs of rue des Degrés. The bloodstains begin at the exact spot you just pointed out to me.”

His interrogation revealed that the two men had come into the café one after the other, Carvel first, around 11:00, then his presumed murderer ten minutes later. They had talked quietly, in low voices; it was impossible to grasp the topic of their conversation. It was the victim who had paid for the drinks, with a fifty-euro bill. The second man was about thirty. The café owner didn’t know him, any more than he knew the man he had been talking to. Elegantly dressed, shorter than average, brown hair, a round face, he talked with a slight Spanish accent.

“He had a little birthmark near his temple that he kept trying to hide by pulling a lock of hair forward. Kind of a nervous tic …”

They learned almost everything about Flavien Carvel from the passport and other ID they found in the pockets of his reporter jacket. He was born April 21, 1982 in Antony, listed his profession as “decorator,” and lived on the impasse du Gaz in La Plaine-Saint-Denis. The visas and stamps decorating his passport showed that over the last eight months, Carvel had traveled to the United States, Australia, Japan, Vanuatu, and Lebanon for visits never longer than a week. Robbery was not the motive of the crime since the murderer had not taken his collection of credit cards or the eight hundred euros in cash that filled his pockets.

Mattéo discovered a piece of newspaper slipped between the plastic rectangles of the American Express Platinum and Visa Infinity cards; someone had penned on it:

Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in thesecond arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wifeof a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumorsof the American star’s separation from Katie Holmesare making headlines in the celebrity magazines.

He had gone to La Plaine-Saint-Denis early in the afternoon after grabbing a slice of Tuscan pizza at the Casa della Pasta on rue Montorgueil. He hadn’t set foot in the northern suburbs for years. In his memory it was all gray, gas meters, oil-refinery walls, Coke plants, chimney stacks, ash-colored façades stained by constant rain, the open trench of the Au-toroute du Nord and its constant flow of smoking carcasses … When they built the huge new soccer stadium—the Stade de France—it had completely transformed the geography of the area. The last remnants of the old industrial revolution had been razed to the ground. The buildings with the corporate main offices in them stood as if on parade along the huge flowered concrete slab that now covered the sewer of flowing cars. The rectilinear greenery and the erratic movements of clouds were reflected in the shining aluminum, the smoked glass, and the polished steel. The recipe had worked wonders in Paris: Thanks to the construction of the Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, the Forum des Halles, the Bastille Opera, the Arche de la Défense, and the Very Big Library, the city had been emptied of its lower strata. Now the recipe was being applied to the nearby districts outside the city. Nothing like a grand architectural gesture in the middle of the urban jungle to regain possession of a city.

Lieutenant Mattéo had always lived in the second arrondissement. He couldn’t imagine the slightest exile from it, not even in a neighborhood next door. Montorgueil, Tique-tonne, Réaumur, Aboukir, Sentier, all these streets were like lifelines in the hollow of his palm. But for ten years now he’d really had to hang on, ever since the massive arrival of the bohemian yuppies: They spent way more every month at the sidewalk tables of the Rocher de Cancale, the Compas d’Or, and the Loup Blanc than he paid in rent. He walked along the canal, passed the camps of Romanian gypsies mixed with all the homeless displaced from the banks of the Seine, then took rue Cristino Garcia, moving into what remained of the old Spanish neighborhood. The impasse du Gaz was no more than four or five attached redbrick houses, like a mining town. It felt a little like England. Cranes were wheeling in the sky just behind this relic of the past. A mailbox had the name Carvelon it followed by the first name, Mélanie. He reflected that it was the same as his assistant’s. He pulled the chain that hung next to the door with thick iron mesh over it.

A woman of about fifty came to open it, dragging her feet and grumbling. Yellow hair, tired waves of an old permanent, pallid face, bluish bags under her eyes, the corners of her lips sagging … and the same for the rest of her body: Flavien’s mother was the very image of defeat, of abandonment. Contrary to what the lieutenant had feared, she absorbed the news of her son’s death without collapsing. All she did was clench her jaw and suppress a tremor in her right hand before wiping away the tears welling in her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

“How’d it happen?”

As he entered, Mattéo glanced at the dining room where a low table in front of the TV, lit like a night-light, was buckling under empty bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

“We don’t know much yet. His murderer might be Spanish. There are plenty of them in the neighborhood: Your son must have known some of them …”

“Sure, dozens. Back in the day, he used to go next door to the Youth Center, to play cards, dance, eat tapas …”

“Back in the day, that means when?”

She had pushed open a sliding panel, revealing a messy bedroom with walls studded with posters. A smiling Bill Gates with pinched lips was like a stain in the middle of the rows of sparkling teeth of the stars of showbiz, movies, and sports.

“For the last two years he’d just drop by in a rush. We must’ve eaten together once or twice, with his current girlfriend … Last week he brought me flowers for my birthday …”

“You remember their names?”

She removed a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of her cardigan, lit the end of a cigarette with a Zippo that stunk of gas.

“The names of the girls? No. He changed them even more often than he changed cars … I don’t know the brands either.”

Mattéo hadn’t asked her permission to enter the room. He began to look through the collections of video games, photo albums, films, magazines. A few lines scrawled on a piece of notebook paper suddenly caught his eye:

Sunday, August 28th, New Orleans. The storm’s gettingnearer, stronger and stronger. The telephone never stopsringing. “You staying or leaving?” “Where’re you livingnow?” “You have the cats with you?” “What should wedo?” The governor is asking us to “pray for the hurricaneto go down to Level 2” … Finally I give in. I’m going tomove into a stronger building. An old cannery downtownmade of brick and cement, five stories high. There are sevenof us in the apartment, with four cats.

It was the same slanted, energetic handwriting as the message about Tom Cruise and the wife of the presidential candidate. He held out the paper under Flavien’s mother’s eyes.

“He’s the one who wrote this?”

“Yes, that’s his handwriting. He never stopped taking notes, scribbling … stuff he’d hear on the radio, on the phone, or things he found in the papers. It was like an obsession. I wore myself out telling him to stop, but he couldn’t help himself.”

“You know where he was living these last few months?”

She shook her head.

“All I know is, he bought a place in Paris … He never gave me his phone number. Just his e-mail address. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t even have a computer!”

The lieutenant’s cell phone began vibrating in his pants pocket. He waited to get outside the house on the impasse du Gaz to call back. He quickly jerked the phone away as Burdin’s shrill voice drilled through his ear.

“I wanted to tell you we’ve got a lead for the corpse on rue des Degrés. He isn’t in any of our files, a real ghost. I went through my usual stoolies with his photo on my chest. He’s been hanging out for some time in the back room of the Singe Pèlerin, where the sex-shop customers of rue Saint-Denis leer at the two-legged meat … Seems he was interested in one of those places, but I don’t know which one.”

Mattéo knew the chatterbox of the Singe Pèlerin—a bartender—because he’d recruited him five years ago, when he caught the guy with his nose buried in white powder. The café used to be a ripening room for bananas; it was hidden in a little nook near the start of the Place du Caire, built over one of the entrances to the mythical cour des Miracles. For dozens of years he’d never even wondered about this name. Its probable meaning had been given to him the week before by an exhibitionist alcoholic they had to yank from rue Saint-Sauveur. It had taken him about an hour to give this explanation in the drunk tank of the police station, but it could be summed up in a few words. Every evening, when the beggars around the city returned to their dens with change jingling in their pockets, it was as if Christ had turned His face to them: The blind regained their sight, amputees stood up on their legs, the scrofulous lost their scrofula, the deaf became sensitive to noise, the mute began to sing, Siamese twins stood face to face; all they had to do was enter the perimeter of this refuge for miracles to happen!

The lieutenant pushed down on the handle and opened the glass-paned door where the old phone number was still displayed from the time when the numbers began with letters. Thirty girls or so were sitting on the imitation leather chairs, waiting to take their exams in the back room. Most of them were kids from Eastern Europe or Africa, along with an Asian girl and one from India. He walked straight to the bar. Leaning on his elbows in front of his debtor, he ordered almost without opening his mouth.

“Give me a strong coffee, real strong, then get out of here and make a little stop at the usual place …”

The bartender was about to protest, but Mattéo had already turned around to admire the slender legs of an Estonian girl who was passing the time by stretching out a pink piece of chewing gum in front of her silicone-enhanced lips. He made a face as he swallowed his coffee without putting sugar in it, crossed the room, walked about thirty yards up the sidewalk toward rue Saint-Denis, and entered the shop of the last strawhat maker in Paris.

Assaf, the master of the house, was born on the second floor of the shop. Rounded up by the French police like all the Jews of the neighborhood, he had survived the hell of Auschwitz before making a detour of almost ten years in the camps of his liberators. The lieutenant and the hat maker came together when Mattéo had chased out a gang hitting him up for protection money. Mattéo had then formed the habit of coming to play chess with the old man. He practically never brought up his past, except to reminisce about the games he’d played against a champion of the USSR suspected of Trotskyite sympathies. (Assaf had lost every one of them.) As tournaments were forbidden in the gulag, an inmate had someone tattoo a chessboard on his back. He would get down on all fours, naked from the waist up, until one player was checkmated.

Mattéo gave his old friend a hug. “A customer’s going to come in for a visit. Don’t waste your saliva, I can tell you he won’t buy a thing …”

“You can go into the kitchen. I’ll take him in to you as soon as he shows up.”

When the bartender of the Singe Pèlerin arrived, the lieutenant saw that he had put on a raincoat over his working clothes. The bartender asked for some water to take a handful of pills, then refused the chair the lieutenant pointed him to.

“I can’t stay, it’s the noon rush. All the big boys are there. What do you want from me? Is it about the guy who got shot on rue des Degrés?”

“If you ask the questions and then answer them, it’ll go a lot faster … His name was Flavien Carvel and he wasn’t shot, he was stabbed … What can you tell me about him?”

The bartender raised his head with his mouth open, as if he was trying to get some fresh air. “All I know is, he was loaded. He began hanging around the neighborhood about six months ago. He bought some shares in The Sphinx as a way of getting in with the mob. Recently there was a rumor of his buying heavily into the peep show on the corner of rue Greneta … a first-class business. They were talking about his coming in with 200,000 euros.”

“I took care of them two years ago; a real rough place. You sure you’re not giving me the wrong club?”

Mattéo got up to fill a pot of water and put it on the gas stove.

“No, everything’s back on track again. It’s one of the joints that brings in the most. All the bread in cash, tax-free. From what I know, there were lots of extras too …”

“What kind?”

“They opened up little trapdoors so the customer could stick his hands through ’em and feel up the dancers’ tits and stick dildos or vibrators up their asses or pussies. Stuff they bought exclusively at the shop, for the highest price imaginable. It went both ways—if the customer asked for it, the dancers screwed them with the same utensils.”

“You have any idea where he lived?”

The bartender stuck his hand into the pocket of his raincoat and took out a business card he then handed to the police officer. “I did him a favor by telling him what I heard … He told me I could reach him through this real estate agency if it was urgent.”

Mattéo took the card. It was from Luximmo, a business on rue Marie-Stuart. He memorized the name of the person printed under the company name: Tristanne Dupré. Then he turned the paper rectangle over, mechanically. The other side was covered with Carvel’s tense writing:

December 26 could have been the happiest day in Rafiq’slife if the tsunami hadn’t struck, because he was supposedto get married that day. The time of the wedding was set fornoon, but the waves came in the morning. Rafiq was in thevillage of Patangipettai, near the other villages that werehit. Immediately, all the men in the community swung intoaction with Jamaat, their local organization. They tookaway the food for the wedding and gave it to the disastervictims. Up to the day we met them, one week after thetsunami, the organization provided breakfast and lunch tothe victims, cooking lemon rice or veg. biryani.

The lieutenant drank a mint tea sweetened with acacia honey before saying goodbye to old Assaf.

All you had to do was walk a hundred yards and you left the sex and garment district behind; you were entering the area reserved for the winners in the new economic order. All the pretty little faces in the world of finance, advertising, top civil service jobs, TV and movies would be walking around on these harmless decorative cobblestones. They crowded into sidewalk cafés, their cell phones glued to their ears, connected to vitamin cocktails by means of fluorescent straws. Mattéo liked the place, despite everything: the façades, the smell of eternal Paris. But he had lived here too long to forget how fake it all was. Going beyond rue Saint-Denis into Mon-torgueil was like crossing a border. He felt almost as if he were at a show, or a tourist: Sometimes he was sorry he hadn’t slung a camera across his chest.

He quickened his pace. Street people were sorting through the garbage cans lined in front of Suguisa, La Fermette, and Furusato, the Japanese restaurant. They were looking for edible garbage in the form of organic food. He cut onto rue Marie-Stuart, which used to be a fierce competitor of rue Brisemiche in the old days, when they were more prosaically called Passage Tire-Vit and Tire-Boudin. * The realtor was on the ground floor of an old house with exposed oak beams and stone. Tristanne Dupré looked like one of the girls who waited on customers in the Singe Pèlerin. The bodywork was identical, but the license plate was quite different. Everything she was wearing, from her stockings to the cut of her hair, from her pumps to her perfume, came straight out of the pages of Vogue.Badgley Mischka skirt, Alexander McQueen shoes, Carolina Herrara glasses … With one look, you save the price of buying a copy. Mattéo slid the card along the desk.

“According to what I’ve been told, you’re the one who acted as a go-between for Flavien Carvel …”

She stared at him with eyes wide open behind her lightly smoked glasses before looking over the inspector from head to foot, scornfully. “I don’t understand.”

“Mattéo, Criminal Investigation. Carvel’s in the morgue, and I’m trying to nail the guy who bought him a one-way *“Prick-Pull” and “Sausage-Pull.”

ticket there. The sooner the better. You teamed up to buy the peep show on rue Greneta, right?”

The theory had come out of his mouth without even thinking about it. From the panic-stricken fluttering of her eyelashes, he realized he’d hit a bull’s-eye. Now he had to proceed with caution.

“Flavien is dead? No, he can’t be!”

She threw herself back in her chair, her chest under the silk shaken by spasmodic breathing. Her distress was not affected. He wondered if she was one of those interchangeable girls who waited for the prodigal son in the car when he made a visit to his mother on the impasse du Gaz. Mattéo pushed away a pile of interior design magazines and sat down on the couch.

“Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were that close … He was found this morning near the Porte Saint-Denis, stabbed … I’d like to learn how you met him …”

She stuck a Camel into a cigarette holder with a python emblem and lit it with a matching lighter.

“In the simplest possible way. He opened that door and sat down in the exact same spot you’re in now … He wanted to buy an apartment in the no-car area, preferably Tiquetonne … After ten visits or so, he decided on a big four-room in a historical landmark building on rue Léopold Bellan …”

“It’s not cheap, in that sector. You gave him a good deal?”

She shrugged.

“Seven thousand euros a square meter. He had about a hundred and twenty square meters … You can do the math … Flavien had a third of the money and he was sure he’d have no problem getting the rest from what the peep show brought in. He was supposed to move in next month.”

“Where was he living in the meantime?”

“Upstairs, fourth floor, a studio apartment that belongs to the agency … I have a copy of the keys.”

Mattéo learned that the real estate agency owned the building with the rooms for voyeurs, that Tristanne had tipped off her rich client, and that his bank was on the Place de la Bourse, near the editorial offices of the Nouvel Observateur.

The lieutenant then brandished the notes Flavien had taken.

“Do you know why he wrote down these bits of human interest stories on paper scraps?”

“No. He used to copy them onto his computer in the evening, to post them on a website, that’s all he told me … I held onto a few of them. I also remember he backed up all his work on his flash drive.”

The young woman opened her bag—a Vuitton—and fumbled around in it.

“Here, this is something he wrote.”

The police officer took the paper:

The police have been heating up since the start of the riots,they’re provoking us more and more. The brother of oneof the electrocuted children was hanging out with us asusual, in front of his building, when the police got there.

They started to look us up and down and finally they saidto him: “You, go home to your mother.” He walked threesteps toward the cops to talk to them and one of themsaid: “Stop or you’ll regret it.” We ran away to the eleventhfloor, they started firing gas cartridges into the lobby. Theysmoked out the family in mourning.

He had just finished reading it when she gave him another one:

Cotonou Airport, December 25. I had a very bad premonitionand I really felt ill at ease. Every time something badis going to happen to me, I can feel it. And this time mysixth sense was telling me we weren’t going to take off. Iwas really expecting something to happen. I even told oneof my coworkers what I felt. A few seconds later, the planewas in the water. The people who were still alive werescreaming. I wasn’t afraid because I’d sensed somethingterrible was going to happen. Everything happened veryfast. I’d say there were two minutes between takeoff andthe accident. When I got out of the plane, I wasn’t far fromthe shore. So I swam back to the land and survived.

The lieutenant put them away in his wallet with the others, then walked to the stairs. He didn’t need to use the keys the real estate agent had given him. The door had been forced open and every nook and cranny of the studio had been searched. He looked at the disaster—the drawers thrown over, the bed upside down, the slashed mattress. He picked up the furniture, looking for the computer or the flash drive Tristanne had mentioned. Apparently the visitor had taken everything away. Mattéo found one more enigmatic message in a trash can in the bathroom:

December 26. Rababa and his son Hamed were sleepingwhen the earthquake hit the little town of Bam, in Iran.

Before they had time to run outside, their house had collapsedaround them. They remained trapped for four daysuntil a neighbor came to the rescue, digging into the wreckagewith his bare hands.

He walked back to rue de la Lune, near the old postern of la Poissonnerie, the fish-market gate: They used to bring the day’s catch into Paris through it at dawn. A tiny, almost provincial enclave, with its small public garden, its church, and its little bands of children. Just a step away from the noisy Grands Boulevards, the excitement of rue Saint-Denis, and the sector reserved for bohemian yuppies. From the kitchen he could make out the ceramic advertisement for Castrique, promising Total dust removal when you vacuum. He had kept the apartment after his divorce, when Annabelle left with the kids, s almost half his income on rent for a place where he used only two rooms out of four. Everything was ready for their return. Moving out would have meant admitting defeat.

He heated up a tajine, lemon chicken with carrots, cooked by the Moroccan woman who took care of the building as well as his laundry and cleaning. Later he watched a gangster film on TV the way you look at the passing landscape from the window of a train, unable to follow the plot, his mind fixated on the murder of Flavien Carvel.

The next morning, after stopping by the offices of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mattéo went to the bank that managed Carvel’s accounts, the Financière des Victoires.

No one seemed to be aware they had lost an important client the day before on rue des Degrés. The dead man’s financial adviser very grudgingly agreed to enter the password to access information in his computer about Carvel’s financial transactions.

“Monsieur Carvel’s net holdings amount to nearly 400,000 euros. We have also approved transactions for double that amount. Real estate projects. I can give you a statement to the last centime.”

“Thank you very much, but what would really help would be to know where Flavien Carvel got his money from … If I understand correctly, he made his fortune rather suddenly. One might wonder … Everything was legal, in your opinion?” The banker tensed up at the mere suggestion of money-laundering. “I don’t see why you would have any doubt …”

“No reason … Experience, maybe … I’m just asking you to reassure me. Where did those 400,000 euros come from?” “From all over … Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, South Africa. Close to a hundred countries in all … Last month, he received nearly 10,000 transfers via the Internet at an average of three euros per transaction. He sold connection time, access to information …”

Mattéo took out his wallet and unfolded the scrap of paper found on the corpse.

“This kind of information?”

The banker pinched it between his fingertips to read the message:

Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in thesecond arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wifeof a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumorsof the American star’s separation from Katie Holmesare making headlines in the celebrity magazines.

“Our role is limited to making sure that all transactions are legal and managing the flow of money in the best interest of both the bank and its clients. We would never intervene in our clients’ activities in any way. All I can tell you is that Monsieur Carvel got his income from selling information on the web. Nothing more. I am putting these lists at the disposal of the examining magistrate.”

“We’ll wait.”

When he got outside, a gathering had formed on rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. A rainbow-colored banner attached to the iron fence around the stock exchange proclaimed the construction of the Marker of Evil. Mattéo mingled with the onlookers to watch the inauguration of some kind of monument in the form of a coffin with the names of all of today’s dictators and warmongers printed on it. He walked away when he heard the police sirens.

His steps carried him toward the garment district. As he walked up rue Beauregard, he saw the mustached owner of the Mauvoisin polishing his coffee machine in the shadowy light of his café, then he retraced the last path of Flavien Carvel up to the fourteen steps of rue des Degrés. The sanitation workers had erased all traces of the murder. All that remained was a memory of the bloodied body rubbing against the wall under the peeling billboard for Artex. The lieutenant pressed himself up against the wall, into the exact spot where the victim had been found. He raised his eyes and then noticed a few drops of blood a foot or so above his head. He stood on tiptoe and saw that there were some more drops a bit higher, at the edge of the plaque where it said, ARTEX distributes CHAL-DÉEcreations, manufacturer. He slipped a fingertip under the inside right corner, which was slightly raised, and wiggled it around. A small object, freed from behind the metal, fell to his feet. He bent down to pick up the small flash drive that Flavien had managed to hide before he died.

Ten minutes later, Mattéo was loading the contents of the drive onto his office computer. Two icons indicating videos popped up in the middle of a dozen other files. The first was titled 09-11-01, the other one Tom-Cécilia. He double-clicked on the second one. The scientologist actor and the flighty wife were walking near the Opéra de Paris and laughing as they stepped into Café de la Paix arm in arm. Insignificant pictures that only a tendentious commentary managed to turn into a secret idyll. The content of the second sequence, also a minute long, was totally different. It was clearly filmed from a surveillance camera with a zoom lens at the top of a building with a roof terrace; Mattéo could make out a corner of the façade when the camera swept around. He began to recognize the massive architecture of the Pentagon, with gardens, parking lots, and entrances sprinkled with sentry boxes at checkpoints. After about fifteen seconds of the webcam’s slow scanning, a white object came into its field of vision, from the right, and smashed into one of the sections of the large concrete wall, sinking into it with a huge burst of flame. A digital clock gave the date and time of the crash: 09-11-01, 9:43 a.m. The slow motion that followed allowed Mattéo to recognize the fuselage of a Boeing 757 with the colors of American Airlines. It was as obvious—and as horrifying—as the newsreels showing the two planes moments before slamming into the Twin Towers. Mattéo could not recall seeing a film as precise as this about the attack on the Pentagon. Everything the Bush administration had made public to refute the conspiracy theories failed to stand up to scrutiny, whereas here, before his eyes, the reality of the explosion of AA Flight 77 was indisputable.

He opened the other files to find several dozen messages similar to the ones he’d already found in his investigation of Flavien Carvel: testimony from all the disasters that had struck the planet in the course of recent history—tsunamis, earthquakes, environmental disasters, suicide bombings, tornados, volcanic eruptions … Every message corresponded to visual imagery and was labeled with its source—last name, first name, and a telephone number or an e-mail address—followed by a sum in euros. A group of tourists in the Philippines running wildly from an incandescent cloud was 300 euros; the confession of a Hezbollah martyr child wearing an explosive belt was valued at 200 euros; while the pictures of an old man swept away by a gigantic wave in Thailand was worth 1,000. Just one paragraph had no price tag on it:

the one relating exactly how the Pentagon’s outer rings had been destroyed. Yet the alleged source of this document was listed: Fidel Hernandez. The lieutenant figured this might be the elegant guy with the Spanish accent who had been with Flavien Carvel in the Mauvoisin café shortly before his death. It took his assistant less than two hours to locate the address Hernandez had given for his cell phone bill: a hotel near the stock exchange.

“It doesn’t seem fake. I was able to check calls from his cell over the last three days; a number of them were traced to that neighborhood.”

“Thanks, Mélanie.”

Mattéo walked around the Opéra building and headed toward the old library, the Bibliothêque Nationale. The Royal Richelieu, wedged between two banks, displayed its gilded, intertwined initials under the windows of all six stories of this Haussmannian building. The police officer set his forearms on the reception desk.

“Good morning. I would like to talk to Monsieur Fidel Hernandez. I don’t have his room number …”

The receptionist looked at her reservation screen.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have anybody with that name.”

“I was told he was still here yesterday.”

She typed on her keyboard, consulted several pages of listings. “No, no Hernandez over the past few weeks … None.”

Mattéo slid his police card over the varnished wood. “I can’t explain, but it’s very important … This Hernandez may have registered here under another name. Very elegant, fairly short, round face, a slight Spanish accent …”

“That doesn’t ring a bell.”

Mattéo pointed his forefinger at his temple. “He has a birthmark right there, which he tries to hide by pulling his hair over it …”

Her face lit up with a smile.

“That’s not Monsieur Hernandez, it’s Monsieur Herrera! You have the wrong name. He’s been a guest here for a week. Room 227, third floor. Do you want me to call him?”

He stopped the hand about to pick up the phone.

“Absolutely not. Hand me the duplicate keys for his room, I’m going to give him a little surprise.”

When the lieutenant reached the floor, he drew his revolver before opening the lock. Hernandez was stretched out naked on his bed watching TV; he jumped when he heard the click. To Mattéo’s surprise, instead of trying to grab a weapon, he clapped his two hands over his penis.

When the manager opened the safe under the name Herrera in the hotel strong room, Mattéo recovered Carvel’s computer and palm pilot stolen from his temporary apartment above the offices of Tristanne Dupré. Fidel Hernandez wasn’t really named Herrera either, but Miguel Cordez. Originally from Mexico, he had been in France for about ten years, living lavishly through a series of swindles, each one more clever than the last. The development of sites like Flickr, Dailymotion, Starbucks, and YouTube, with pay-per-view amateur videos on them, had attracted his attention. Too big for him. He had then set his sights on a little upstart, NewsCoop, created a few months back by Flavien Carvel.

“I knew a lot of guys who worked in planes. As soon as there was a disaster somewhere, I’d run off to Roissy or New York to get the photos or video tapes from the first people coming back from the place. I was able to buy exclusive coverage of the tsunami and Katrina for next to nothing …”

“Where does the one filmed by the surveillance camera of the Pentagon come from?”

“A cousin who works for a security company in Washington … He pirated it before the FBI picked up every piece of material and embargoed it. He was asking a hundred thousand dollars for it. Carvel agreed right away, except I later found out that he was secretly negotiating to resell it for six times that much.”

“Is that what you were talking about in the Mauvoisin? He didn’t want to back off, or return the tape … ?”

“Correct.”

At the end of the day, a special adviser from the State Department came to pick up the video showing the impact of AA Flight 77 on the Pentagon and return it to the American authorities. The only thing Lieutenant Mattéo was still wondering about was what the wino on rue du Gaz was going to do with all the loot she inherited from her son.