Murder in the Sentier

Monday Evening

EX-POLICE COMMISSAIRE Marius Teynard, a snowy white-haired man in his late sixties, watched the streetlight pool in circles upon his desk blotter. Outside his window on rue de Turbigo, buses thrummed and the reflection of the spotlighted dome of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers glinted on his window.

Sighing, he balled up the offending faxes. “Coding cowboys, throbbing e-mail, Jews for Java” … Zut alors! What kind of language was this?

In disgust, he pushed back his burgundy leather armchair and stood. Cyber crime, encrypted e-mail … they called this detecting? Things traveled through the air like so many radio waves. Through the ether. He didn’t understand the Web.

Didn’t want to.

His nephew insisted he “get up to speed.” Let his nephew handle the new computers, the intricate log-on procedures. When Teynard had been a commissaire, all he’d had to do was type. And two fingers had sufficed for police headquarters at Quai des Orfèvres, as Teynard often pointed out to him. His nephew smiled. But he’d seen him rolling his eyes.

The fax machine spat out more. He groaned. Just what he needed, more cyber gibberish!

But after Marius Teynard tore off the fax, he sat down in surprise. A tingle ran down the outside of his thick arms, all the way to his fingertips. He hadn’t felt the once familiar rush in a long time. Like in the old days when his force could take care of vermin the way they should be dealt with, quickly and permanently.

How long had it been … five or six years since the last report? More? Now he remembered: It was when the Wall had crumbled and the Stasi files on the Haader-Rofmein and Action-Réaction gangs had come to light.

But now he saw that the terrorist Jules Bourdon was still alive. In Africa. Thriving.

Marius Teynard read further as the fax machine spewed out more sheets.

Correction, Marius Teynard realized. Jules Bourdon had left Africa … the embarkation reports from the Dakar airport were tallied once a week.

Teynard wanted to kick the fax machine to bits. And stomp on them. What did all this technological efficiency amount to when Jules Bourdon, that vermin, might already have been in Paris a week.