The Map and the Territory (32 page)

“The world is mediocre,” Jed finally said. “And the person who committed this murder has increased the mediocrity in this world.”

On arriving in Souppes (for that was the name of the village where the writer had lived out his last days), they thought, at almost the same instant, that nothing had changed. Nothing, of course, had any reason to change; the village remained stuck in its rural perfection for tourist consumption. It would remain this way for centuries to come, with the discreet addition of a few elements of creature comforts like Internet connections and car parks. But it could remain so only if an intelligent species was there to look after it, to protect it from the aggression of the elements and the destructive voracity of plants.

The village was as deserted as ever, peacefully and as if structurally deserted; it was exactly what the world would look like, thought Jed, after the explosion of an intergalactic neutron bomb. The aliens could penetrate the tranquil and restored streets of the small town, and delight in its measured beauty. They would even possess a rudimentary aesthetic sensibility; they would rapidly understand the necessity of maintenance, and would carry out the necessary restorations; this hypothesis was both reassuring and plausible.

Jasselin gently parked his Mercedes in front of the farm building. Jed got out and, struck by the cold, suddenly remembered his first visit, the dog which leapt and gamboled to greet him; he imagined the head of
the decapitated dog, the head of its decapitated master as well, became aware of the horror of the crime, and for a few minutes regretted he had come; but then he came to his senses. He wanted to be useful, all his life he had wanted to be useful, and ever since he became rich the desire had become even stronger. Here, now, he had the opportunity to be useful in some way. It was undeniable. He could help in the capture and elimination of a killer, and could also help this discouraged and morose old policeman currently standing beside him, looking slightly worried, while he remained in the winter light, motionless, trying to control his breath.

They had worked remarkably well to clean the crime scene, Jasselin thought on entering the living room, and he imagined his colleagues picking up, one by one, the scattered fragments of flesh. There were not even traces of blood on the carpet, just here and there a few faded and worn stains. Apart from that, the house hadn’t changed at all; he recognized perfectly the arrangement of the furniture. He sat down on a sofa, forcing himself not to look at Jed. You had to leave the witness in peace, you had to respect his spontaneity, not obstruct the emotions, the intuitions which could come to him. You had to put yourself entirely at his service so that he would be, in his turn, at yours.

In fact, Jed headed in the direction of a bedroom, and was preparing to visit the whole house. Jasselin regretted not having taken Ferber with him: he had a sensibility, he was a
policeman with a sensibility
, he would have known how to deal with an artist—while he himself was just an ordinary policeman, old and passionately attached to his aging partner and his impotent little dog.

Jed continued to come and go between the rooms, regularly returning to the living room, burying himself in contemplation of the bookshelves, whose content astonished and impressed him even more than during his first visit. Then he stopped in front of Jasselin, who started and leapt up.

However, Jed’s posture had nothing worrying about it; he stood upright, hands crossed behind his back, like a schoolboy preparing to recite his lesson.

“My painting is missing,” he finally said.

“Your painting? What painting?” Jasselin asked feverishly while being aware that he should have known, that he should
normally
have
known, that he was no longer in complete control of his faculties. Shivers went through him; maybe he had a cold coming on, or worse.

“The painting I made of him. That I offered as a gift. It’s no longer here.”

Jasselin took some time to analyze this information; the cogs of his brain were turning slowly and he felt more and more ill. He was dead tired—this case was taking it all out of him, and he needed an incredible amount of time to ask the essential question, the only one worth asking: “Was it worth any money?”

“Yes, quite a lot,” Jed replied.

“How much?”

Jed thought for a few seconds before saying: “At this moment, my value is going up a little, not too quickly. In my view, nine hundred thousand euros.”

“What? … What did you say?” he had almost screamed.

“Nine hundred thousand euros.”

Jasselin fell back onto the sofa and remained motionless, prostrate, mumbling incomprehensible words from time to time.

“Have I helped you?” Jed asked hesitantly.

“The case is solved.” His voice betrayed discouragement, an awful sadness. “There have already been murders for fifty thousand, ten thousand, sometimes one thousand euros. Well, nine hundred thousand euros …”

They left for Paris soon afterwards. Jasselin asked Jed if he could drive, as he didn’t feel very well. They stopped at the same motorway service station on the way back. For no apparent reason, a white-and-red cordon isolated several tables—perhaps the obese salesman from earlier had finally succumbed to a heart attack. Jed again ordered coffee; Jasselin wanted some spirits, but they didn’t sell any. He ended up discovering a bottle of red wine in the section for regional products, but they didn’t have a corkscrew. He went to the restroom and entered a cubicle; with a sharp blow, he broke the neck of the bottle on the edge of the toilet seat, then returned to the cafeteria, holding his broken bottle; a little wine had spattered his shirt. All that had taken some time. Jed had got up and was daydreaming in front of the mixed salads; he finally opted
for a cheddar–turkey duo and a Sprite. Jasselin had served himself a first glass, which he downed in one long swallow; slightly cheered up, he was now, more slowly, finishing his second. “You’re making me hungry,” he said. He went off to buy a wrap of Provençal flavors, and served himself a third glass of wine. At the same instant, a group of Spanish preteens got out of a bus and came into the cafeteria, speaking very loudly; the girls were overexcited, shrieking; their hormone levels must have been incredibly high. The group was probably on a school trip, they must have visited the Louvre, Beaubourg, that sort of thing. Jasselin shuddered at the thought that he could, at that time, be the father of a similar preteen.

“You said the case is solved,” remarked Jed. “But you haven’t found the murderer.”

Jasselin then explained to him that the theft of artworks was a very specific domain, which was dealt with by a specialized organization, the Central Office for the Struggle Against the Traffic in Artworks and Cultural Goods. Of course, they would still be in charge of the investigation—after all, it was a murder—but it was from that office, now, that you had to expect significant advances. Very few people knew where to find the artworks when they belonged to a private collector, and even fewer had the means to treat themselves to a painting worth a million euros; that amounted to perhaps ten thousand people globally.

“I suppose you can give a precise description of the painting.”

“Obviously; I have all the photos you want.”

His painting was immediately going to be identified in the database of stolen artworks, whose consultation was obligatory for any transaction beyond fifty thousand euros; and because the penalties for nonrespect of this obligation were heavy, he added, the resale of stolen artworks had become more and more difficult. Disguising this theft as a ritual crime had in fact been an ingenious idea, and without Jed’s intervention they would still be going nowhere. But now things were going to take another turn. Sooner or later, the painting was going to reappear on the market, and they would have no difficulty tracing the culprits.

“But you don’t seem particularly satisfied,” Jed remarked.

“That’s true,” Jasselin agreed as he finished his bottle. At the start,
this case seemed particularly atrocious, but original. You could imagine you were dealing with a crime of passion, a fit of religious madness, various things. It was quite depressing to fall back in the end on the most widespread, universal criminal motivation: money. He was going to mark, next year, his thirtieth anniversary in the police. How many times, in that career, had he dealt with a crime that wasn’t motivated by money? He could count them on the fingers of one hand. In a sense this was reassuring, it proved that absolute evil was rare in human beings. But that evening, without knowing why, he found this particularly sad.

His boiler had survived Houellebecq, Jed thought on returning home, looking at the machine which welcomed him with an insidious roar, like a vicious beast.

It had also survived his father, he would speculate a few days later. It was already 17 December, Christmas was only a week away, and he still had no news of the old man and decided to phone the manageress of the retirement home. She informed him that his father had left for Zurich the week before, without giving a precise return date. Her voice did not betray any particular concern, and Jed suddenly became aware that Zurich was not only the operations base of an association that euthanized old people, but also a place of residence for rich, even very rich, people—among the richest people in the world. Many of its residents must have had family, or relations, who lived in Zurich; a trip to Zurich by one of them could only appear perfectly normal to her. He hung up, discouraged, and reserved a ticket on Swiss Air Lines for the following day.

While waiting for the departure of his flight in the immense, sinister, and itself quite lethal lounge in Roissy 2, he suddenly wondered what he was going to do in Zurich. His father had already been dead, obviously, for several days, his ashes already floating on the waters of Lake Zurich. By searching on the Internet, he had learned that Koestler (it was the name of the group of euthanizers) was being sued by a local
ecology association. Not because of its activities—on the contrary, the ecologists in question rejoiced at the existence of Koestler, and even declared themselves
in complete support of its struggle
—but because the quantity of ashes and human bones that it was dumping in the lake was in their view excessive, and had the disadvantage of favoring a species of Brazilian carp, recently arrived in Europe, to the detriment of char, and more generally the local fish.

Jed could have chosen one of the palaces standing on the banks of the lake, the Widder or the Baur au Lac, but felt he would have difficulty bearing such excessive luxury. He took the safe option of a hotel near the airport, vast and functional, situated on the territory of the commune of Glattbrugg. Besides, it was itself quite expensive, and seemed very comfortable. But did cheap, uncomfortable hotels even exist in Switzerland?

He arrived at about ten in the evening. It was freezing cold, but his bedroom was cozy and welcoming, despite the sinister façade of the establishment. The hotel restaurant had just closed, so he studied for some time the room-service menu before realizing that he wasn’t hungry, that he in fact felt incapable of ingesting anything. For a moment he considered watching a porn movie, but fell asleep after managing to work out the pay-per-view.

The following day, on waking, he found the surroundings were bathed in a white mist. The planes couldn’t take off, the receptionist told him, and the airport was paralyzed. He went to the breakfast bar, but only managed to swallow a coffee and half a pain au lait. After studying his map for some time—it was complex; the association was also in a suburb of Zurich, but a different one—he gave up and decided to take a taxi. The taxi driver knew the street well; Jed had forgotten to note the number, but he assured him that it was a short street. It was close to the train stop at Schwerzenbach, he informed him, and, besides, it followed the railway line. Jed felt uneasy at the thought that the driver probably saw him as a
candidate for suicide
. However, the man—a thickset fiftysomething who spoke English with a thick Swiss-German accent—occasionally sent him dirty-minded and complicit looks which sat badly with the idea of a
dignified death
. He finally understood when the taxi stopped, at the bottom of the street, in front of an enormous,
neo-Babylonian building, whose entrance was adorned with very kitsch erotic frescoes, a threadbare red carpet, and potted palm trees, and which was clearly a brothel. Jed felt deeply reassured at having been associated with the idea of a brothel rather than that of an establishment devoted to euthanasia; he paid, giving him a big tip, and waited for the driver to turn round before going farther up the street. The Koestler association boasted, in peak periods, of satisfying the demands of one hundred clients every day. It was in no way certain that the Babylon FKK Relax-Oase could boast of a comparable attendance, despite the fact that its business hours were longer—Koestler was essentially open in regular office hours, with a late opening until nine on Wednesdays—and the considerable efforts at decoration (of dubious taste, that’s true) that had been put aside for the brothel. Koestler, on the other hand—and Jed realized this on arriving in front of the building, about fifty yards farther on—had its headquarters in a building of white concrete, of irreproachable banality, very Le Corbusier in its girder-and-pole structure opening up the façade and, with the absence of decorative embellishment, a building basically identical to the thousands of white concrete buildings that characterized semiresidential suburbs across the globe. A sole difference remained the quality of the concrete, and there you could be sure: Swiss concrete was incomparably superior to Polish, Indonesian, or Malagasy concrete. No irregularity, no fissure came to tarnish the façade, and that was probably twenty years after its construction. He was sure his father would have made this remark to himself, even hours before dying.

Just as he was about to ring the bell, two men dressed in cotton jackets and trousers came out carrying a pale-colored wooden coffin—a light, bottom-of-the-range model, probably made of chipboard—which they placed in a Peugeot Partner van parked in front of the building. Without paying any attention to Jed they went back in immediately, leaving the doors of the van wide open, and came out a minute later, carrying a second coffin, identical to the previous one, which they in turn put in the van. They had blocked the shutting mechanism of the doors to facilitate their work. That confirmed it: the Babylon FKK Relax-Oase hardly buzzed with such activity. The market value of suffering and death had become superior to that of pleasure and sex, Jed thought, and it was probably for this reason that Damien Hirst had, a few years
earlier, replaced Jeff Koons at the top of the art market. It’s true that he had botched the painting which was meant to retrace this event, and that he hadn’t even managed to finish it, but this painting remained imaginable, and someone else could make it—though no doubt it would have required a better painter. Yet no painting seemed to him capable of expressing clearly the difference in economic dynamism between these two businesses, situated only a few dozen yards from each other, on the banal and rather sad street which followed a railway line in the eastern suburbs of Zurich.