Julien Arbogast

Julien Arbogast is 31 and for six years has waited tables at the brasseriebrasserie French café-restaurant, informal and open all day, serving simple meals and drinks. across from the Museum of the Coopers' House in Colmar. He was born in Colmar itself, the son of a nurse and a boatman who dropped out of the story early. He did two years of hotel school in Strasbourg, quit before the diploma and came home with a way of moving between tables without touching anything, which his boss considers his greatest talent.

He lives with his mother in a narrow half-timbered house, and pays for the electricity and the groceries. The staircase is steep, which explains the way he climbs two steps at a time and his habit of taking off his shoes at the door. On Sunday mornings he fishes without ever catching anything, and says he's not supposed to. He has a black high-handlebar bicycle that he uses for everything, including going to work two hundred meters from home.

He has straight brown hair combed back, a sparse, always well-trimmed beard and the attentive brown eyes of someone who reads the table before it orders. He wears the starched white shirt, black waistcoat and bow tie his boss requires, with a dish towel folded over his shoulder. He speaks softly, chooses every word carefully and smiles at just the right angle, neither too much nor too little. The old customers say he is a well-mannered young man. His colleagues say nobody knows what he thinks.

About the Saturday of the robbery, his account is that of someone who worked: the usual lunch shift, the house full of tourists in the heat, and he between the tables and the bar. He knows the portrait room from hearsay, because the copyist lunches at the brasseriebrasserie French café-restaurant, informal and open all day, serving simple meals and drinks. every day, and says he knows how the museum works at lunchtime because the whole town knows. When the subject is who might have done it, his answer is always a question in return.

Julien knows that a waiter across from a museum is, to the police, the kind of neighbor who saw everything. When the detective presses, he stays polite, only speaks even lower and folds the towel on his shoulder twice. It may be the discretion of someone who learned to serve without being seen. It may be someone who measures every sentence because every sentence may cost dearly. The detective will have to decide which.