The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  “Are you okay? You look bizarre.”

  “A strange case has come my way.”

  Hélène went silent and waited for what would follow. During the twenty-five years they had been together, Jean-Pierre had practically never spoken to her about his work. Confronted daily with horrors that surpass the dimensions of normal understanding, virtually all policemen choose, once back at home, to keep quiet. The best prophylaxis for them consists of creating a vacuum, or trying to create a vacuum, during the few hours of respite they are given. Some indulge in drink, and end their dinners in an advanced state of alcoholic mindlessness that leaves them nothing else to do but drag themselves off to bed. Others, among the younger ones, indulge in pleasure, and the vision of mutilated and tortured corpses ends up disappearing in a loving embrace. Almost none of them choose to speak, and again that evening, Jasselin, after putting Michou back down, went over to the table, sat down at his usual place, and waited for Hélène to bring the celery remoulade—he had always greatly liked celery remoulade.

  29

  The following day, he walked to work, turned at the top of the rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, then strolled along the quays. He stopped for a long time on the pont de l’Archevêché: it was from there that you had, in his opinion, the most beautiful view of Notre-Dame. It was a fine October morning with fresh and limpid air. He stopped again for a few moments in the square Jean-XXIII, observing the tourists and the homosexuals who were out for a stroll, mostly in couples, kissing or hand in hand.

  Ferber arrived at the office at almost the same time and joined him on the stairs near the third-floor control center. They would never install an elevator in the quai des Orfèvres, he thought resignedly; he noticed that Ferber was limiting his strides, abstaining from going ahead of him in the last part of the climb.

  Lartigue was the first to join them in the team’s office. Usually a rather jovial guy, he didn’t look at all well; his dark and smooth southern face was tense, worried. Ferber had asked him to gather witness statements on the spot.

  “We drew a blank,” he announced at the outset. “I’ve nothing at all. No one saw or heard anything. No one has even noticed a car from outside the village in weeks.”

  Messier arrived a few minutes later, greeted them, and put on the desk the backpack he carried on his right shoulder. He was only twenty-three. Having joined the crime squad six months before, he was the junior member of the team. Ferber liked him, and disregarded his casual clothes, generally track-suit bottoms, sweatshirt or canvas jacket, that went quite badly with his angular, austere face, which was almost never crossed by a smile; and if he occasionally advised him to change the general design of his clothing, he did so in a friendly way. Messier went to get himself a Diet Coke from the machine before giving them the results of his investigations. His features were more drawn than usual; he looked like he hadn’t slept all night.

  “As for the cell phone, there was no problem,” he announced, “it didn’t even have a code. But that wasn’t very interesting, either. Some conversations with his publisher, with the guy who was to deliver him fuel, another who was to install some double glazing … only practical and professional conversations. This guy seemed to have no private life.”

  Messier’s astonishment was, in a sense, incongruous: a statement of his own phone conversations would have given almost identical results. But he didn’t, it’s true, intend to get murdered; and it’s always supposed that the victim of a murder has something in his life that justifies and explains it; that something interesting is happening or has happened, at least in some obscure corner of his life.

  “As for the computer, that was something else,” he went on. “Already there were two consecutive passwords, passwords without capitals, and rare punctuation marks … Then, all the files were encrypted—a serious code, SSL double layer, 128 bits. In short, I couldn’t do anything, I’ve sent it to the Investigation Brigade for IT Fraud. What was this guy, paranoid?”

  “He was a writer,” said Ferber. “He maybe wanted to protect his work, keep it from being pirated.”

  “Yeah,” said Messier, who didn’t look convinced. “That level of protection rather makes me think of a guy who exchanges pedophile videos.”

  “It’s not incompatible,” Jasselin observed with common sense. This innocuous remark ended up dampening the atmosphere of the meeting by emphasizing the deplorable uncertainty that surrounded this murder. They possessed, they had to admit, absolutely nothing: no obvious motive, no witness, not a single lead. It threatened to be one of those difficult cases, characterized by an empty file, that sometimes take years to be solved—if at all—and owe their solution only to pure chance, a repeat murderer arrested for another crime who, in the course of his statement, confesses to an extra murder.

  Things got a little better with the arrival of Aurélie. She was a pretty girl, with curly hair and a face spotted with freckles. Jasselin found her a bit scatterbrained, lacking in rigor. You couldn’t count on her a hundred percent for tasks demanding precision; but she was dynamic, and of inexhaustible good humor, which is precious on a team. She had just received the first conclusions of the criminal records office. She began by handing Jasselin a thick file. “The photos you asked for …” There were about fifty A4 prints on glossy paper. Each represented a rectangle of the floor of the living room where the murder had taken place, of basically a square meter. The photographs were clear and well exposed, devoid of shadow, taken from practically directly above. They overlapped only very slightly, and put together they faithfully re-created the floor of the room. She had also received some preliminary conclusions on the weapon used for the beheading of the man and the dog, which had been exceptionally clean and precise: there had been almost no projections of blood, though the sofa and the entire zone should have been spattered. The murderer had proceeded with a very particular tool, a laser cutter, a sort of cheese wire where the role of the wire was played by an argon laser that severed limbs while cauterizing the wound as it went on. This equipment, which cost tens of thousands of euros, could be found only in the surgery departments of hospitals, where it was used for radical amputations. In fact, all the cutting up of the body had probably, given the precision and the cleanness of the incisions, been carried out with professional surgical tools.

  Some appreciative murmurs went around the office. “That puts us on the trail of a murderer belonging to the medical world?” Lartigue suggested.

  “Maybe,” said Ferber. “Anyway, we’ll have to check with the hospitals to see if any equipment of this kind is missing; although, of course, the murderer could just have borrowed it for a few days.”

  “What hospitals?” asked Aurélie.

  “All French hospitals, to begin with. And, of course, the clinics as well. We’ll also have to check with the manufacturer to see if they’ve made an unusual sale in the last few years. I guess there aren’t that many manufacturers of this kind of equipment?”

  “Just one. One for the whole world. It’s a Danish company.”

  Michel Khoury, who had just arrived, was briefed. Of Lebanese origins, he was the same age as Ferber. Chubby and well turned out, he physically was as different from Ferber as could be; but he shared with him that quality, so rare among policemen, of inspiring trust and, with that, of effortlessly drawing out the most intimate secrets. That very morning, he had dealt with informing and questioning those close to the victim.

  “Well, if you can say they were close,” he added. “You could say that he was very much alone. Divorced twice, with a child he never saw. For more than ten years, he had had no contact with anyone in his family. No love affairs, either. We’ll perhaps learn some things by going through his phone conversations, but for the moment I’ve found only two names: Teresa Cremisi, his publisher, and Frédéric Beigbeder, another writer. And what’s more: I had Beigbeder on the phone this morning, he seemed devastated—sincerely, I think—but he nevertheless told me that they hadn’t seen each other for two years
. Curiously, he and his publisher repeated the same thing: he had lots of enemies. I’m meeting them this afternoon, and maybe I’ll learn more about that.”

  “Lots of enemies …” Jasselin interjected pensively. “That’s interesting: in general the victims have no enemies, and you get the impression they were loved by everyone … We’ll have to go to his funeral. I know that’s not done very often, but sometimes you can learn things there. Friends come to the funeral, but sometimes enemies as well. They seem to take a sort of pleasure in it.”

  “By the way,” remarked Ferber, “do we know what he died of? What killed him exactly?”

  “No,” replied Aurélie. “We’ll have to wait … for them to perform an autopsy on the pieces.”

  “The beheading couldn’t have taken place when he was alive?”

  “Surely not. It’s a slow operation, which can take an hour.” She shuddered a little, and shook herself.

  They broke up immediately afterward to get on with their tasks, and Ferber and Jasselin found themselves alone in the office. The meeting was ending better than it had begun; they each had things to do; without really having a lead yet, they at least had some directions for the investigation.

  “Nothing has come out in the press,” Ferber remarked. “No one knows the situation.”

  “No,” replied Jasselin, looking at a barge going down the Seine. “It’s funny, I thought that would happen right away.”

  30

  That did happen the following day. “Author Michel Houellebecq Savagely Murdered” was the headline in Le Parisien, which devoted half a column to the news, though quite uninformed. The other papers gave it almost the same amount of space, without giving more details, mainly just repeating the communiqué from the prosecutor in Montargis. None of them, it seemed, had sent a reporter to the spot. A little later the declarations of different personalities, including the minister of culture, were printed: all declared themselves “shattered,” or at least “deeply saddened,” and saluted the memory of “an immense creator, who would forever remain present in our memories.” In short, it was a classic celebrity death, with its consensual chatter and its appropriate inanities, none of which were of much help.

  Michel Khoury came back disappointed from his rendezvous with Teresa Cremisi and Frédéric Beigbeder. The sincerity of their sadness, according to him, was in no doubt. Jasselin had always been astounded by the calm assurance with which Khoury asserted things that in his view belonged to the eminently complex and uncertain domain of human psychology. “She really liked him,” he said, or “The sincerity of their sadness is in no doubt,” and he said that completely as if he were relating experimental, observable facts; the strangest thing was that the rest of the investigation generally proved him right. “I know human beings,” he had told Jasselin once, in the same tone in which one would say “I know cats” or “I know computers.”

  That said, neither of these witnesses had anything useful to tell him. Houellebecq had lots of enemies, they had repeated, people had shown themselves to be unjustly aggressive and cruel toward him; when asked for a more precise list of them, Teresa Cremisi, impatiently shrugging her shoulders, offered to send him a press file. But when asked if one of these enemies could have murdered him, they both replied in the negative. Expressing herself with exaggerated clarity, a little like the way you address a madman, Teresa Cremisi had explained to him that you were dealing with literary enemies, who expressed their hatred on Internet sites, in newspaper or magazine articles, and, in the worst case, books, but that none of them would have been capable of committing physical murder. Less for moral reasons, she went on with notable bitterness, than because they would simply not have had the guts. No, she concluded, it was not (and he had the impression that she had almost said “unfortunately not”) in the literary milieu that you had to look for the culprit.

  As for Beigbeder, he had said almost the same thing. “I have complete trust in my country’s police …” he began by saying, before laughing out loud, as if he had just made an excellent joke. But Khoury hadn’t held this against him; the author was visibly tense, lost, completely destabilized by the sudden death. He then added that Houellebecq had as enemies “almost all the assholes in the Parisian scene.” When pushed by Khoury, he had cited journalists on the site nouvelobs.com, while pointing out that if they currently rejoiced at his death, none of them seemed to him capable of taking the slightest personal risk. “Can you imagine Didier Jacob driving through a red light? Even on a bike, he wouldn’t dare,” the author of A French Novel had concluded, clearly upset.

  In short, Jasselin concluded as he put the two statements into a yellow folder, you were dealing with an ordinary professional milieu, with its ordinary jealousies and rivalries. He put the folder at the back of the Statements file, aware that he was at the same time closing the literary milieu part of the investigation, and that he would doubtless never again be in contact with the literary milieu. He was painfully aware, too, that the investigation wasn’t going very far. The conclusions of the criminal records office had just arrived: both man and dog had been killed with a Sig Sauer M-45, in both cases with a single bullet, shot in the heart, from close range; the gun was fitted with a silencer. They had first been knocked unconscious with a long, blunt object—something like a baseball bat. A precise crime, committed without needless violence. The cutting up and laceration of their bodies had happened afterwards. All this took, and the investigators had performed a rapid simulation to arrive at this figure, a little over seven hours. The death had occurred three days before the body was discovered. Therefore the murder had taken place on a Saturday, probably in the middle of the day.

  Examination of the victim’s phone communications, which, in accordance with the law, the operator had kept for a full year, had brought nothing. Houellebecq had indeed phoned very little during that period: ninety-three calls in total, not one of which was of an even slightly personal nature.

  31

  The funeral had been arranged for the following Monday. On this subject the writer had left extremely precise instructions, which he had put in his will, accompanied by the necessary sum. He did not wish to be cremated, but very classically buried. “I want the worms to free my skeleton,” he added, allowing himself a personal note in an otherwise very official text. “I have always had excellent relations with my skeleton, and I am delighted that it can free itself from its straitjacket of flesh.” He wanted to be buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, and had even bought the plot in advance, which by chance was a few meters away from that of Emmanuel Bove.

  Jasselin and Ferber were both quite good at funerals. Often dressed in somber colors, slightly emaciated, and with a naturally pale complexion, Ferber had no difficulty in putting on the sadness and gravitas required in these circumstances; as for Jasselin, his exhausted, resigned attitude of a man who knows life, and no longer has any illusions about it, was also completely appropriate. They had, in fact, already attended together quite a few funerals, sometimes of victims, more often of colleagues: some who had committed suicide, others who had died in the course of duty—and the latter was the most impressive kind: there was generally the award of a medal which was solemnly pinned to the coffin, and the presence of a high-ranking official or even the minister; in short, with all the honors of the republic.

  They met at ten in the police station in the sixth arrondissement; through the windows of the reception rooms of the town hall, which had been opened to them for the occasion, there was a very good view onto the place Saint-Sulpice. It had been discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that the author of The Elementary Particles, who throughout his life had displayed an intransigent atheism, had very discreetly been baptized, in a church in Courtenay, six months before. This news drew the ecclesiastical authorities out of a painful uncertainty: for obvious media reasons, they did not want to be kept away from the funerals of personalities; but the regular progress of atheism, the steady fall in the rate of baptism and even bapt
isms of pure convenience, and the rigid perpetuation of their rules led them more and more often to this disheartening solution.

  Alerted by e-mail, the cardinal archbishop of Paris enthusiastically gave his agreement to a mass, which would take place at eleven. He himself wrote the homily, which emphasized the universal human value of the novelist’s work and recalled only very discreetly, as a coda, his secret baptism in the church in Courtenay. The whole ceremony, with the communion and the other fundamentals, was to last about an hour; it was therefore at about midday that Houellebecq would be led to his last resting place.

  There too, Ferber informed him, he had left very precise instructions, going as far as designing his gravestone: a simple black basalt tombstone, at ground level; he insisted on the fact that it was not to be raised at all, even by a few centimeters. The tombstone carried his name, without dates or any other facts, and the design of a Möbius strip. He’d had it made before his death, by a Parisian marble mason, and had personally overseen the work.

  “So,” Jasselin remarked, “he didn’t think he was a piece of shit.”

  “He was right,” Ferber replied softly. “He wasn’t a bad writer, you know …”

  Jasselin immediately felt ashamed of his remark, formulated without any real reason. What Houellebecq had done for himself was no more, and even rather less, than what would have been done by any notable of the nineteenth century, or any minor nobleman of previous centuries. Indeed, when he thought about it, he realized that he totally disapproved of the modest, modern trend, consisting of having yourself cremated and your ashes scattered somewhere in the heart of the countryside, as if to show more clearly that you were returning to its bosom and mixing again with the elements. And even in the case of his dog, who died five years before, he’d made a point of burying it—placing next to its little corpse, at the moment of burial, a toy he’d particularly liked—and erecting a modest monument to it, in the garden of his parents’ house, in Brittany, where his father himself had died the previous year, and which he had chosen not to sell, with the idea perhaps that they, he and Hélène, would go and spend their retirement there. Man was not a part of nature, he had raised himself above nature, and the dog, since its domestication, had also raised itself above it, that’s what he thought in his heart of hearts. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him impious, even though he didn’t believe in God, the more it seemed to him in some way anthropologically impious, to scatter the ashes of a human being on the fields, the rivers or the sea, or even, as he remembered had been done by that clown Alain Gillot-Pétré, who had been considered in his time as having given a flush of youth to weather reporting on television, in the eye of a cyclone. A human being had a conscience, a unique, individual, and irreplaceable conscience, and thus deserved a monument, a stele, or at least an inscription—well, something which asserts and bears witness to his existence for future centuries; that’s what Jasselin truly believed.