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fake a lot of fingerprints wouldn’t
be easy. You would have to lug your victim, dead or alive, all over
the house, and he quickly discarded the idea.
    Guillaume’s approving eyes gleamed in
the lurid glare as he stared into Levain’s.
    “ That’s why we keep him
around, eh, Andre?”
    Levain shrugged. His head sank deeper
into his collar, that was about it.
    “ There’s never a shortage of
overtime in this department.” Guillaume laughed and slapped his
thigh with a sharp crack.
    Gilles was lost in thought. It could be
a suicide, or was it just a bunch of window dressing for a
homicide? Duval was a rich and important man, who held many
patents. That’s what Rene had been trying to tell him without
actually coming right out and saying it. He wasn’t trying to push a
point of view. Rene just wanted him to trust his
instincts.
     
     
     

Chapter Five
     
    What was real
     
     
    What was real, was when you could
forget, and those moments when you did forget, but there was always
that moment when you remembered. There was always a lurch, a
wrenching back from momentary pleasure into the pain of seeing her
face again. Lately even her image was fading, which was cause for
more heartache. There were times when he literally panicked, with
his guts trembling and heart pounding and knowing that it was real,
all real, and that life would never be the same again. He could not
think her name without pain. It was his new reality.
    There were times when the solitude was
comforting, and there were times when it was unbearable. It’s not
that Andre didn’t understand, he understood as well as any man
could. But there were things that must be borne, and they must of
necessity be borne alone. It was a common fate, and an individual
cross for each person to bear in their own way. Sooner or later,
they all had to do it.
    The pair sat in a small, lower-level
bistro that had the advantage of being quiet and out of the wind.
The other customers, more intent on drinking than eating, ignored
them. The blue haze in the air was close and warm, making strangers
seem like intimate friends, names forgotten but faces remembered
from some other time and place, far, far away and long, long time
ago. They were all familiar types to someone who had walked a beat.
Everyone had a role to play in life. That was the theory. The
surprise was that he loved them so, and for no good reason. It hurt
to think on it.
    “ Listen, Inspector, there’s
no good way to bring this up.” Andre sipped at his beer. “But the
boys and I got to thinking…”
    “ What’s this?” Gilles knew
he had been sort of absent in spirit lately, and had wondered with
a sense of guilt once or twice if it was affecting his job
performance.
    Of course it had to.
    This was something he once would have
sworn would never happen, but of course things did happen. Guilt
was his constant companion these days, and what was one more thing?
It was just icing on the cake. His life was shit, and he had
nothing but cake to eat anymore.
    There was a brief rise in the volume of
the background buzz in the room. A pair of fellows came in, voices
raised and likely with pay-envelopes in their blue coveralls. They
were greeted by some men at a big round table in the corner, who up
until now had been more subdued.
    Gilles belatedly recalled that it was
Friday, and not a bad afternoon. He found himself studying the
stubbled faces, the strong hands and forearms on some of them. They
had the brick-red faces and necks of the typical Poilu. It was a
word fraught with meaning to Gilles and the blood-tattered remnants
of his generation. No one ever really talked about the affection
felt by men for each other on the eve of battle, the night before
inevitable destruction and the bliss of their oblivion. They talked
about everything else but the war at times like that, in his
experience.
    Andre pulled a buff letter-sized
envelope from his inner jacket pocket. He placed it flat on the
table and shoved it