Marius Agostini

Marius Agostini is 38 and knows every meter of the galleries running beneath Nice. Born in the working-class Riquier district, the son of a dockworker and a washerwoman, he joined the sewer company at 23 as a cleaning helper. Today he is foreman of the main avenue sector, fifteen years of sludge without a complaint, and he speaks of the tunnels with the affection of someone tending a river no one sees.

He lives in a two-room apartment on the street behind the market, with a blue-tiled kitchen, a table where he eats his meals without taking off his watch and a balcony where he dries his rubber boots. His mother, a widow, lives downstairs and calls him by his childhood nickname. In the company yard, where he spends most days, the stacked iron manhole covers become his colleagues' card table.

He is short and muscular, with a broad, dark face, a flattened nose, short curly black hair and two days of stubble. He wears a faded blue coverall stained with sludge, knee-high rubber boots and a helmet with a lamp, and carries at his belt the iron hook for lifting covers. He speaks loudly, takes offense easily, distrusts the police and takes pride that nobody knows those galleries like he does.

About the job, he says he tends the galleries under the avenue from end to end, with stone vaults six feet high, and that the collector runs down to the Paillon. He says the avenue's covers open with any iron hook and that the grate at the collector's outlet has an old padlock he has been asking to replace since winter. As for the weekend, he notes that the bank's assistant manager went in Saturday at 10 through the side door, with a leather briefcase, and left forty minutes later.

Marius knows whoever knows the whole way underneath is the first asked how someone got through it. When the detective says he guided the gang, he bangs the iron hook against his belt and answers that he cleans the city's filth and is no guide for thieves. The pride of an offended worker, or a raised voice to cover what he knows of the route: the hook clinks the same.