Clovis Escande

Clovis Escande is 46 and heads the Zéphyr's landing gear engineering. Born in Albi, the son of a watchmaker, he graduated in Toulouse with the second-highest grade in his class and spent six years drawing, bolt by bolt, the assembly of wheels and brakes that must hold a hundred tons at three hundred an hour. He talks about brakes the way others talk about children and takes offense when anyone doubts his work.

He lives in a bright three-room apartment near the Canal du Midi, with a shelf of technical books, a scale model of the airplane on the sideboard and a leather armchair his wife would like to replace. He drinks a double coffee at six, crosses the city by tram and reaches the factory before everyone else. At night he returns late, with a bulging briefcase, and dines alone while listening to the radio softly.

He is tall and thin, with a long face, permanent dark circles and graying brown hair combed back with brilliantine. He wears thick black-framed glasses, a white open-collared shirt with a loosened tie and a gray engineer's smock with mechanical pencils in the pocket. He rarely lets go of his slide rule, which he taps against his palm when thinking, and corrects the vocabulary of people who talk about mechanics without knowing.

About the drawings found with the Soviet, his account is that of a technician: they are revision C, signed by him on Tuesday at 5 p.m., and the original went into the safe half an hour later with no copy requested. He notes that the blue ammonia-smelling paper comes from only one machine in the factory. Whoever enters the drawing room at night, he adds, is the guard with the ring of master keys.

Clovis knows the head of landing gear engineering is the man who knows those drawings best and so the first to be looked at when they turn up in a foreigner's hands. When the detective accuses him of selling the design, he replies that he spent six years drawing every bolt and asks for proof, not insults. It could be the wounded pride of a proud technician. It could be someone shielding a minor mistake behind a scowl. The detective will have to decide which.