The Map and the Territory (25 page)

When he returned to the scene of the crime, the temperature had fallen slightly. He also had the impression that the flies were less numerous. Stretched out on the grass, his rolled-up jacket serving as a pillow, Ferber was still engrossed in
Aurélia
. He now looked like he had been invited on a day out in the countryside. “He’s made of strong stuff, that boy,” Jasselin said to himself, doubtless for the twentieth time since he’d known him.

“Have the gendarmes left?” he asked, surprised.

“Someone came to look after them. People from the psychological-assistance unit—they came from the hospital in Montargis.”

“Already?”

“Yes, that astonished me too. The work of a gendarme has become harder these last years, they now have almost as many suicides as we do; but you have to accept that psychological support has made a lot of progress.”

“How do you know that? The statistics on suicides?”

“Don’t you ever read the
Internal Bulletin of the Forces of Law and Order
?”

“No.” He plopped down on the grass next to his colleague. “I don’t read enough in general.” Shadows were beginning to lengthen between the lime trees. Jasselin regained hope; he had almost forgotten the materiality of the corpse, a few meters from there, when the Peugeot Partner
of the crime scene investigators drew up noisily in front of the barrier. The two men got out immediately, perfectly synchronized, wearing those ridiculous suits which made you think of a nuclear decontamination team.

Jasselin hated the investigators from the criminal records office, their way of always functioning in pairs, in their specially equipped little cars stuffed with expensive and incomprehensible machines, their open contempt for the hierarchy of the crime squad. But in truth the people from the criminal records office in no way sought to be loved; on the contrary, they did their utmost to differentiate themselves as much as possible from ordinary policemen, showing in all circumstances the insulting arrogance of the technician toward the layman—this no doubt in order to justify the growing inflation of their annual budget. It’s true that their methods had made spectacular progress, and that they now succeeded in taking fingerprints or DNA samples in conditions inconceivable only a few years before, but to what extent could they deserve the credit for this progress? They would have been completely incapable of inventing or even improving the equipment that enabled them to obtain those results; they just used them, which demanded no particular intelligence or talent, just appropriate technical training that it would have been more effective to give directly to the policemen on the ground. At least that was the thesis that Jasselin defended, regularly and up to now unsuccessfully, in the annual reports he submitted to his superiors. While he had no hope of being heard—the division between the services was ancient and established—he did it mainly to calm his nerves.

Ferber had got up, elegant and affable, to explain the situation to the two men. Their brief nods were calculated to show their impatience and professionalism. At a given moment, Ferber pointed to Jasselin, no doubt to identify him as the leader of the investigation. They made no reply and didn’t even make a step in his direction, just put on their masks. Jasselin had never been especially strict on questions of hierarchical precedence. Never had he demanded strict observance of the formal deference to which he was entitled as an inspector. No one could say he had, but these two clowns were beginning to exasperate him. Accentuating the natural heaviness of his gait, like the oldest monkey of the tribe, he went toward them breathing heavily, waited for a salute which
did not come, and announced, “I’m coming with you,” in a tone that needed no reply. One of them gave a start: obviously they were used to doing their business in peace, going into the crime scene without letting anyone else approach the perimeter, taking their absurd little notes on their handheld terminals. But what could they do? Object? They could do absolutely nothing, and one of them handed him a mask. As he put it on, he became aware again of the reality of the crime, and even more so on approaching the building. He let them go ahead, walking a few steps ahead of him, and noted with a vague satisfaction that the two zombies stopped dead, afraid, at the entrance to the house. He joined and then overtook them, strolling into the living room, albeit uncertainly. “I am the living body of the law,” he said to himself. The luminosity began to fade. These surgical masks were amazingly effective, and the smells were almost completely blocked. Behind him he no longer felt or heard the two crime scene investigators, who, emboldened, had penetrated the living room, but stopped almost immediately in the doorway. “I am the body of the law, the imperfect body of the moral law,” he repeated to himself, a little like a mantra, before accepting, before looking fully at, what his eyes had already seen.

A policeman reasons on the basis of the
body
. His training demands that: he is trained to note and describe the position of the body, the wounds inflicted on the body, the state of conservation of the body; but here, strictly speaking, there wasn’t a body. He turned around and saw behind him the two investigators from the criminal records office who began to nod and sway to and fro, exactly like the gendarmes of Montargis. The head of the victim was intact, cut off cleanly and placed on one of the armchairs in front of the fireplace. A small pool of blood had formed on the dark green velvet. Facing him on the sofa, the head of a big black dog had also been cleanly cut off. The rest was a massacre, a senseless carnage of strips of flesh scattered across the floor. However, neither the head of the man nor that of the dog was frozen in an expression of horror, but rather one of incredulity and anger. In the midst of the strips of mixed human and canine meat, a clear passage, fifty centimeters wide, led to the fireplace, filled with bones to which some remains of flesh were still attached. Jasselin went in carefully, thinking that it was probably the murderer who had made this passage, and turned around; with his back to the fireplace, he looked around
the living room, which could have been about sixty square meters. The whole surface of the carpet was spattered with trails of blood, which in places formed complex arabesques. The strips of flesh in themselves, of a red color which sometimes became blackish, did not seem arranged at random, but followed motifs that were difficult to decrypt; he felt it was like being in the presence of a puzzle. No traces of footprints were visible: the murderer had acted methodically, first cutting the strips of skin that he wanted to place in the corners of the room, then returning gradually toward the center while leaving a path to the exit. They would need photos to help try and re-create the design of the whole. Jasselin glanced at the two investigators from the criminal records office: one of them continued to sway to and fro like a madman; the other, in an effort to get a grip on himself, had taken a digital camera out of his bag and was holding it at arm’s length, but didn’t seem able to switch it on. Jasselin took out his cell phone.

“Christian? It’s Jean-Pierre. I’ve a favor to ask you.”

“I’m listening.”

“You have to come and get these criminal records guys, they’re already out of action for now, and what’s more there’s a special thing to be done with photos in this case. They mustn’t do just close-ups as usual—I need views of every part of the room, and if possible of the room as a whole. But I can’t brief them immediately, we’ll have to wait until they come back to their senses a little.”

“I’ll look after it … In fact, the team’s arriving soon. They just called me from outside Montargis. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

Jasselin hung up pensively: that boy continued to astonish him. Ferber’s entire team was arriving, a few hours after the fact, and probably in personal vehicles. His ethereal, evanescent appearance was indeed deceptive: he had complete authority over his team, and was undoubtedly the best team leader Jasselin had ever had under his orders. Two minutes later, he saw him discreetly enter the back of the room, patting the shoulders of the two investigators to usher them gently out of the house. Jasselin was nearing the end of his career, having scarcely a year left, which he could perhaps prolong to two or three, four at most. He implicitly knew, and at their bimonthly interviews his division commander
sometimes made this explicit, that what was expected from him now was no longer
solving
crimes, but rather designating his successors, coopting those who, after him, should solve them.

After Ferber and the two investigators left, he found himself alone in the room. The luminosity was fading again, but he had no desire to turn on the light. He felt, without being able to explain it to himself, that the murder had been committed in broad daylight. The silence was almost unreal. He had the sensation that there was, in this case, something that concerned him particularly, personally, but why? He observed again the complex motif composed by the strips of flesh spread across the floor of the room. What he felt was less disgust than a sort of general pity for the entire earth, for mankind, which can, in its heart, give birth to such horrors. In truth, he was a bit astonished he could bear this spectacle, which had even revolted crime scene investigators inured to the worst. A year before, feeling that he was beginning to have difficulty bearing crime scenes, he had gone to the Buddhist Center of Vincennes to ask them if it would be possible for him to practice
asubha
, the meditation on the corpse. The lama had first tried to dissuade him: this meditation, he had opined, was difficult, and not adapted to the Western mentality. But when he learned of Jasselin’s profession, he had changed his mind, and asked for time to reflect. A few days later he phoned to say that yes, in his particular case,
asubha
could undoubtedly be appropriate. It wasn’t practiced in Europe, where it was incompatible with health and safety regulations, but he could give Jasselin the address of a Sri Lankan monastery which occasionally received Westerners. He had spent two weeks’ holiday there, after having found an airline that agreed to transport his dog (that had been the most difficult part). Every evening, while Hélène went to the beach, he went to a mass grave where they deposited the recently deceased, without precaution against predators or insects. After concentrating all of his mental faculties by trying to follow the precepts laid down by Buddha in the sermon on the direction of attention, he had thus been able to intently observe the wan corpse, the suppurating corpse, the dismembered corpse, the corpse eaten by worms. At each stage, he had to repeat to himself, forty-eight times: “This is my fate, the fate of all mankind, I cannot escape it.”

Asubha
, he now realized, had been a total success, so much so that he would have recommended it without hesitation to any policeman. He
had not, however, become a Buddhist, and even if his feelings of repulsion at the sight of a corpse had been reduced by notable proportions, he still felt
hatred
for the murderer, hatred and fear. He wanted to see the murderer annihilated, eradicated from the surface of the globe. On passing through the writer’s door, enveloped by the rays of the setting sun which illuminated the meadow, he rejoiced at the persistence, in him, of that hatred, which was necessary, he thought, for effective police work. The rational motivation, that of the quest for truth, was not generally sufficient; it was, however, sometimes unusually strong. He felt confronted by a complex, monstrous but rational mind, probably that of a schizophrenic. On their return to Paris, they would have to consult the files of serial killers, and probably ask for the delivery of foreign files, as he had no memory of such a crime ever being committed in France.

When he left the house he saw Ferber among his team, giving them instructions: lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t heard the cars arrive. There was also a big guy, in suit and tie, whom he didn’t know—probably the deputy public prosecutor from Montargis. He waited for Ferber to finish distributing the tasks to explain again what he wanted: general shots of the crime scene, wide shots.

“I’m returning to Paris,” he then announced. “You coming with me, Christian?”

“Yes, I think everything’s in place. Will we have a meeting tomorrow morning?”

“Not too early. Around midday will be fine.” He knew they would have to work late, no doubt until dawn.

Night was falling when they got onto the A10 motorway. Ferber turned the cruise control to 80 mph and asked if Jasselin minded him putting on some music. He replied no.

There is perhaps no music that expresses better than Franz Liszt’s last pieces of chamber music that funereal and gentle feeling of the old man whose friends are all dead, who in some way already belongs to the past and who in turn feels death approaching, who sees it as a sister, a friend, the promise of a return to the childhood home. In the middle of “Prayer to the Guardian Angels,” Jasselin began to think about his youth, his student days.

Quite ironically, he had interrupted his medical studies between the first and second years because he could no longer bear the dissections, nor even the sight of corpses. Law had immediately interested him a lot, and like almost all his classmates he considered a career as a lawyer, but his parents’ divorce was to make him change his mind. It was a divorce between old people; he was already twenty-three, and their only child. In young people’s divorces, the presence of children, whose care they have to share, and who are loved more or less despite everything, often lessens the violence of the confrontation; but in old people’s divorces, where there remain only financial and inheritance interests, the savagery
of the fight no longer knows any limits. He had then realized exactly what a lawyer is, he had got a full sense of that mixture of deceit and laziness which sums up the professional behavior of a lawyer, and most particularly of a lawyer specializing in divorce. The procedure had lasted more than two years, two years of endless struggle at the end of which his parents felt for each other a hatred so violent that they were never to see or even phone each other for the rest of their lives, and all that just to reach a divorce agreement of depressing banality, that any cretin could have written in a quarter of an hour after reading
Divorce for Dummies
. It was surprising, he’d thought several times, that spouses engaged in divorce proceedings do not more frequently murder their former partners—either directly or via a professional. The fear of the gendarme, he realized, was undoubtedly the true basis of human society, and it was in some way natural that he took the police entrance exam. He had entered at a good rank and, being from Paris, did a year’s training at the police station in the thirteenth arrondissement. It was demanding. Nothing, in all the cases he would be confronted with later, was to surpass in complexity and impenetrability the settling of accounts in the Chinese mafia, which he’d been confronted with at the start of his career.