The First Fingerprint by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

residence for snobs. All the old guard of the city’s police knew this exotic bird of the streets of Marseille. De Palma slowed down to get a look at Solange’s face, for that’s what she called herself. She had not changed; she seemed immune to time, this woman who was as hard as the pavement she pricked with her shiny high heels. He stopped alongside her and wound down his window.
    Solange welcomed him with a false smile.
    â€œA hundred francs for a blow job, and two hundred for love. With a condom.”
    â€œDon’t you recognize me, Solange?”
    â€œMy God, is it you Inspecteur?”
    â€œCommandant, Solange.”
    â€œSame difference. With all these new words for the ranks, I’m completely lost.”
    She looked at the weary officer greedily.
    â€œDo you fancy something?”
    â€œNo, I was just passing and I spotted you. Not a soul out this morning.”
    â€œYou’re telling me! It’s a disaster area. There’s only the Holy Ghost left. I haven’t had a single customer. I’m always the last one here, you know that. In the morning there’s always someone who stops. So I stay here. That’s all I know how to do.”
    Solange looked up. A dark gray BMW had turned back along the boulevard. The first customer that night. And maybe the only one. De Palma put his car into gear, said goodbye to his old acquaintance and drove off. In the rearview mirror, he saw Solange getting into the BMW.
    Never mind, he would have had trouble getting it up.
    He thought about Marie, and about his good-time girls. Their faces mingled together, their soft smiles, the subtle scents of their skin and the fragrance of their sexes. He closed his eyes to block up these thoughts, and when he opened them, they were brimming with tears.
    At the top of boulevard Michelet, at the square with its obelisk, he turned right into Mazargues, to get a sense of the neighborhood where Christine Autran had grown up.
    He drove a good hundred meters between the small houses bordering boulevard de la Concorde and turned left into rue Emile Zola, trying to get slightly lost so as to put off the time when he would have to go home to his flat.
    At the end of the road, the modest Mazargues church blocked out the skyline. The neighborhood still looked like a Provençal village, far from the tumult of the city center. On place de l’Eglise, a pensioner was letting his incontinent dog piss along the parked cars. A few strings of multicolored fairy lights were still glimmering above the streets, even though Christmas was now over, even though the day was now dawning. A vertical banner hung down from the clock tower reaching the ochre façade of God’s house: “A savior has been born to us.”
    De Palma looked at the clock on his dashboard: 7:00 a.m. It occurred to him that Jo Luccioni must be sweating by his ovens this Sunday morning and could be paid a little visit.
    Fifteen minutes later, he pushed open the door of Joseph Luccioni’s bakery in Pointe-Rouge. He was welcomed by the aroma of warm bread and butter cream. Little Bérengère was presumably still asleep, because it was her mother who emerged from the bakehouse to serve one of the first customers of the day.
    She stared at him frostily before forcing herself to speak.
    â€œCan I help you?”
    â€œGood morning, Madame. I’d like to speak to Jo.”
    â€œI knew I recognized you,” Ma Luccioni said, glaring. “I’ll go and see if he’s free. As you know, a baker’s work is never done.”
    She disappeared for some time. De Palma looked at the cream buns, lined up neatly in two rows between the chocolate and strawberry tarts. They looked excellent down to the last detail, with a sprinkling of icing sugar and a generous dollop of praline cream between the two layers of choux pastry.
    Madame Luccioni reappeared.
    â€œO.K., you can see him. Come behind the counter.”
    In his lab,