The First Fingerprint Read Free

significant details of the investigations he was conducting.
    One exercise book a year. An old-school policeman’s habit which he had inherited from a grumpy old commissaire when he had started out on the force.
    â€œMio superbo guerrier! Quanti tormenti
,
    quanti mesti sospiri et quanta speme
    ci condusse ai soavi abbracciamenti!
    Oh! Come è dolce il mormorare insieme: te ne rammenti?”
    Before the end of November, the book had been filled by a case which had been obsessing him for months. A murder: Samir, aged seven, raped, then his throat slit with an industrial cutter. In cold blood. And no-one had heard a thing, of course. He had been found at the end of August, in the rubbish chute of a ten-story block of flats in the La Castellane housing estate, far off in the northern suburbs of Marseille.
    De Palma had stood for a long time in silence in front of that child’s body, wound in a bin-liner, its eyes half-closed, its throat agape. He had taken little Samir’s cold hand, leaned over his puffy face, holding his breath to stop himself from vomiting, and had spoken to him tenderly, the way you speak to a child who cannot go to sleep in the dark: “I’ll get whoever did it. Trust me, kid. I always get them. I’m the best. I’ll make him eat his fucking mother.”
    Duriez, director of the regional police department, had told Commissaire Paulin, the head of the murder squad, to put de Palma on to the case because he was an ace. Since which time the affair had grown in importance: young Arabs were crying out for justice, the Maire wanted the police to be irreproachable, and Duriez had put him under immense pressure by declaring to the press, with his hand on his heart: “I have no doubt that this case will be solved in the very near future.”
    De Palma ran through the details of the Samir case for the umpteenth time. Occasionally he frowned as he examined a telephone number jotted in the margin, or a name followed by a question mark. His intense dark stare, as sharp as a facetted sapphire, darted out from his angular face, then faded again in an instant before returning to its journey through the tiny handwriting which went off in all directions, like rapacious weeds, across this great hunter’s pages of memories.
    â€œQuando narravi l’esule tua vita
    e i fieri eventi e i lunghi tuoi dolor
,
    ed. io t’udia coll’anima rapita
    in quei spaventi e coll’estasi nel cor.”
    De Palma would soon celebrate twenty-five years on the force. Five had been spent at 36 quai des Orfèvres, the holy of holies of the national police; the next twenty at the regional police department in Marseille. That made twenty-five exercise books. His retirement day was approaching slowly but surely, and with it the great emptiness of his future life.
    He would not be celebrating that.
    He looked up from his exercise book and peered around. The desk opposite was immaculately spick and span. Its occupant for the past six months was Lieutenant Maxime Vidal, a tall, dark lad who was as dry and thin as a capital I, and who smiled innocently in all circumstances. He had left the office at about 6:00 p.m. just like any other young officer who still had some kind of life outside of his job.
    De Palma’s gaze strayed over the white walls, lingered for a moment on the empty chair in front of him, then went back up to the gray metal ring hanging from the wall. He tried to remember various faces, but none came to him.
    â€œVenga la morte! E mi colga nell’estasi
    di quest’amplesso
    il momento supremo!”
    The décor was no longer quite what it had been since the false ceiling collapsed on to the heads of the officers in the Murder and Organized Crime Squads. It smelled of wet paint, enamel, fresh plaster and wallpaper paste. A heavy, heady, glycerophtalic smell still hung in the air.
    De Palma sat up on his chair, stretching his arms to waken the network of muscles that