Nice

Nice is more than a backdrop: its streets and districts shape the investigation, bring its inhabitants into contact, and place contemporary violence beside the city’s older histories. The novel moves from the heat-hazed tram platforms and crowded avenues to the concealed courtyards of Old Nice, from the prayer room on Rue Verbier to the roads and rooftops occupied during the Tour de France. The city’s public spectacle and private enclosures coexist, and the distance between them is often only a street, a gate, or a locked door.

Urban contrasts and concealed spaces

The city first appears in summer heat. From a balcony on Rue Verbier, Marie Lacroix watches passengers emerge from a tram at Jean Médecin, looking for a family due to take an apartment. Her attention shifts from a living statue dressed as Medusa to a bald man across the road: he appears to tie the laces of slip-on loafers, fingers the cap of an Evian bottle, and then hurries toward a circular billboard. The view is at once ordinary and watchful. From a private balcony, everyday street life becomes the first stage on which the novel makes observation consequential.

That street lies among the grimy, airless roads around Nice’s main railway station, but Rue Verbier itself is a leafy oasis. Apartment buildings and converted ground-floor shops line its northern side; the Basilique Saint Eustache and its car park occupy the southern flank. At the far end, in former bistro premises near a small marketplace, is the prayer room. The contrast between the green street and its surrounding district is joined by a sharper division: a place of worship stands within view of the basilica, while police and onlookers gather around a killing during a prayer service. An anonymous woman reports the death from a phone box outside a pharmacy. Because she uses the free, cardless emergency number, investigators cannot trace the call unless she is identified or comes forward.

Old Nice supplies a different kind of enclosure. After leaving Place Saint-Sépulcre, Paul Darac disappears into the Babazouk, a dense quarter of narrow streets and alleys with the atmosphere of a Moorish souk. Coffee, fish, flowers, and drains mark its crowded life, but the neighborhood is also secretive: behind spice-colored façades are everything from run-down flats to ornate palaces, and shutters shield the windows from prying eyes. Its street signs appear in French and Nissart, giving the district a distinct local character within the larger city.

Place Saint-Sépulcre, or Plassa in Nissart, is a cobbled courtyard bordered by old apartment buildings and the back wall of its church. Darac’s roof-terrace apartment there has been his home for five years. From this vantage he lives between the tangled old town and the broad boulevards, a position that makes the Babazouk both domestic refuge and an atmospheric counterpoint to the city’s more exposed streets. Its locked iron gate and inward-facing terraces express a recurring feature of Nice: close proximity does not mean access.

Neighborhoods, institutions, and civic disputes

The city’s geography ranges from the Babazouk to Cimiez, an elegant northern quarter laid across rising ground. Near midnight, Agnès Dantier returns to her home patch there, passing Roman arenas, shady avenues, stuccoed mansions, modern apartment blocks, and classical ruins. The historical remains are not merely scenery in this passage: after a long day, Agnès imagines herself as a ruin too, and recalls a blunt encounter with young Australians whom she had directed to a memorial plaque. In her tired self-reproach, the ancient city becomes a measure for present feeling, while the contemporary streets remain places where the past is made visible and pointedly interpreted.

Nice’s civic life is also shaped by a dispute over a first mosque for the city. Agnès explains that she initially took the demand as the sole genuine objective of the group behind a threat, imagining that all the other demands were pieces intended to be sacrificed. A DCRI intelligence report changes her assessment. Paul reports that opinion at the Mairie, once heavily tilted toward the anti-mosque lobby, has become more evenly balanced, according to Imam Asiz and his community. The mosque question therefore belongs not only to religious life but to a contest over public space and municipal decision-making; the shifting balance is part of the investigation’s political context.

The city’s police work follows the same varied terrain. When Darac is told he may be off the case, he protests that he has not even begun it; outside the prayer room, the public prosecutor Jules Frènes paces while speaking on his mobile. Later, as investigators search for a white van connected to the Dantier kidnapping, the geography of Mont Boron becomes operational evidence. Avenue Célestine is a cul-de-sac of just fifteen houses, and police divide into pairs to question residents. A van could have approached from Boulevard Carnot, but only three quiet residential roads lead from there to Vincent’s home, so the search has to widen along those possible routes. In Nice, street layouts are not incidental: they determine who might have seen a vehicle and how quickly officers can act.

A city staged for spectacle

The Tour de France brings another kind of public attention to Nice. On the morning of 4 July, the novel sets the event against the annual Formula One Grand Prix in Monaco: 100,000 fans attend that race, while twice as many are expected for the Tour’s opening stage. The opening 15-kilometre individual time trial is shorter than the 182-kilometre second day, but it marks the Tour’s return and promises three weeks of drama, fun, and likely scandal. Its arrival turns the city and nearby roads into a carefully managed public stage.

The Garde Républicaine motorcycle detail begins its working day before the first rider is due to start at 2 p.m. By 7.30 the forty-five officers have showered and eaten breakfast; each officer checks his motorcycle whether the day’s route is 15 or 215 kilometres. The route carries the officers through identifiable urban stations. On the Colline du Château, Yves Dauresse, Roger Lascaux, and David Jarret reach a quayside traffic island opposite the Monument aux Morts, while crowds wait behind barriers. Lascaux stops at Station 37, acknowledges a spectator’s wave, and signals that the riders are coming. At Station 38 on Quai des États-Unis, Dauresse must direct the riders across to the left-hand carriageway. His attention shifts from the promenade to the flat roof of the Ponchette, where he spots a silhouette that appears to be an MP5 muzzle. The orderly spectacle has become a security operation, and the crowd-facing route contains a threat that the crowd cannot see.

The Tour’s scale also intensifies the search for Jarret. Darac tells Granot that the whole world is looking for him, but warns that finding witnesses is not the same as learning what they saw in time to act. He drives north along Boulevard François Grosso toward the rail and road viaduct, then stops beneath it to inspect a large blue civilian BMW resembling a reference photograph of a Garde Républicaine motorcycle. The resemblance is not enough to make it the sought machine. Around the city, crowds, radio traffic, and hurried sightings create both a network of potential witnesses and a race against time.

Investigation, rescue, and the city’s aftermath

The search also takes Darac beneath the city’s transport infrastructure, where tracks and roadways cross in an Escher-like tangle. Train noise and passing traffic make it difficult for him to hear the radio as he approaches a row of lock-ups built into adjoining arches. At the first, a pick-up stands outside and a bald man in overalls strips a pine chest of drawers, watching Darac suspiciously through goggles. The scene’s cramped, noisy setting contrasts with the open streets and public barriers of the Tour route; investigative movement in Nice repeatedly passes from exposed civic space into obscured, privately occupied corners.

The kidnapping’s consequences return the story to the body and to a home. Darac removes Agnès’s shackles, gathers her into his arms, and carries her outside as the first ambulance comes into view. That night he sits on his roof terrace in the Babazouk, with Charlie Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” drifting in his slipstream and a cold beer on the tile-top table. After three days of oppressive heat, the air feels fresher, but the change in weather does not dispel the event’s moral and emotional weight. Darac thinks of the Holocaust and of the limits of the universe as an answer to it, then returns to Agnès’s condition: doctors expect her to make a complete physical recovery, while he understands that she will need fortitude for the trauma that remains.

Nice’s narrative significance rests in this conjunction of intimacy and exposure. A balcony offers a view but not knowledge; shutters and gates protect homes while also concealing what lies behind them; a public road becomes a security perimeter, and a modest city address can become the destination of a kidnapping search. The Tour’s crowds make the city visible to the world, yet the investigation depends on details noticed in the margins: a possible weapon above a market archway, a van’s narrow approach routes, or a witness who may not be found in time. The city’s varied spaces do not resolve its conflicts, but they give them their routes, barriers, witnesses, and places of return.