Yvette Cazals

Yvette Cazals is 51 and has run the factory's reprographicsreprographics Department or machine that makes copies of technical drawings and documents. room for twelve years. Born in Castres, the daughter of a seamstress and a mailman, she studied until 14 and started as a typist. She takes pride in never letting a sheet leave the machine without a number, a date and the name of who asked for it, and repeats that in twelve years not a single line has been missing from the print log.

She lives in an old apartment in the Saint-Cyprien district, two blocks from the river, on a third floor with no elevator. She has a small living room with a sewing table, an enamel teapot and a window onto the neighborhood church's towers. On Sundays she goes to Mass, eats lunch alone and spends the afternoon at the sewing machine. Bus, church and machine are her world, and she says she needs nothing more.

She is short and sturdy, with a round, tired face and gray hair in a firm bun. She wears a navy dust coat buttoned to the neck over a beige wool blouse and keeps a worn leather handbag in her lap when she sits. Her fingers have blue stains no soap removes. She is dry, methodical, speaks little and answers with regulations, as if every sentence needed a number and a date.

About the factory, her account is that of a career employee: every sheet that leaves the machine goes into the print log and not a line has ever been missing. She states plainly that the engineer took the originals home on Monday, at 7 p.m., and only returned them on Tuesday at 8, and reminds you that a rule is a rule. Soviets, she says, she only knows from the newspaper.

Yvette knows the head of the copy machine is the first person anyone points to when a drawing turns up outside the safe. When the detective says she handed over the design, she recalls twelve years without a sheet outside the log, asks whether this is how she is repaid and demands to speak with the union's lawyer. It could be the dignity of an exemplary employee. It could be someone clinging to regulations like a handrail. The detective will have to decide which.