Fabrice Montclair

Fabrice Montclair is 36 and private secretary to Deputy Director Aristide Bellegarde. Slim and elegant, with a clean-shaven face, brown hair with a side part and brilliantine and very attentive dark eyes, he is courteous, patient and speaks five languages. He listens more than he talks, and smiles when cornered.

Before working for the deputy director, he was an interpreter on the ships from Le Havre to New York, and says he now has nowhere to use any of his five languages. He lives in a small, impeccable apartment near the Opéra, with bookshelves in several languages, a leather armchair, a ship's travel trunk serving as a coffee table and a gramophone that plays waltzes softly, after ten at night. He was hired in April, after a newspaper ad, on a rainy afternoon.

He wears an impeccable charcoal suit, with waistcoat, silver cufflinks and a fountain pen clipped in his jacket pocket. His nails are well kept and his chin slightly reddened, which he blames on the barber. He calls the detective monsieur without ever raising his voice and always answers with a question in return, polished and almost imperceptible.

About the job, he says the deputy director interviewed him on a rainy afternoon and hired him on the spot. He pays well and asks little, he says. In the week of the sale, he copied orders and arranged appointments, and saw no reason to suspect anything. As for Truchet's money, it is with his boss, where else would it be? Let them ask him.

When the question suggests he sold the tower together with the deputy director, Fabrice answers that this is an insult to a man who only copies orders and that he will say nothing more without a lawyer. He adjusts his cufflinks, courteous even in anger, and the detective is left with the doubt: the hurt of a loyal secretary or courtesy serving as a curtain?