The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  Working almost twenty hours per day—if Houellebecq had a very reduced Internet correspondence immediately before his death, it had been at other times much more substantial, and at certain periods, especially just after the publication of a book, he had received an average of thirty e-mails per day—the team succeeded by the following Thursday in locating the nine women. The geographical variety was impressive: a Spanish woman, a Russian, a Chinese, a Czech, two Germans—but three French women all the same. Jasselin then remembered that he was dealing with an author who had been translated throughout the world. “That looks pretty good,” he told Lartigue, who had just finished drawing up the list. He said it rather to put his mind at rest, much like you’d make a predictable joke; in reality, he couldn’t muster a drop of envy for the writer. They were all former mistresses, the nature of their exchanges left no doubt—sometimes mistresses from very long ago, the relationship in certain cases going back more than thirty years.

  These women turned out to be easy to contact: with all of them he exchanged anodyne and gentle e-mails, describing the small or great sadnesses of their lives, occasionally also their joys.

  The three French women immediately agreed to come to the quai des Orfèvres—one of them, however, lived in Perpignan, the second in Bordeaux, and the third in Orléans. As for the foreign women, they didn’t say no, but just asked for a bit more time to make arrangements.

  Jasselin and Ferber received them separately in order to compare their impressions; and their impressions were remarkably identical. All of these women still felt a great tenderness for Houellebecq. “We wrote by e-mail quite often,” they said, though Jasselin abstained from saying that he had already read them. Never was the possibility of another meeting considered, but you felt that if one had been necessary, they would have agreed to it. It was terrifying, he thought, absolutely terrifying: women do not forget their exes, that’s what appeared evident. Hélène herself had had exes; even though he’d met her young there had still been exes. What would happen if their paths crossed again? It’s a disadvantage of police investigations: you find yourself confronted, despite yourself, with difficult personal problems. These women had known Houellebecq, some of them very well; Jasselin felt that they wouldn’t say any more about it; he expected it, as women remain very discreet about these matters, and even if they’re no longer in love the memory of their love remains infinitely precious to them. But in any case, they had not seen him for years, some not in decades. The very idea that they would have thought of murdering him, or known someone likely to think of murdering him, was grotesque.

  A jealous husband or lover after so many years’ separation? He didn’t believe it for a second. When you know that your wife has had exes, and you have the misfortune of being jealous, you also know that there would be no point in killing them—that would only put salt on the wound. Well, all the same, he was going to put someone in the team onto it—without forcing it, just part-time. He didn’t believe it, certainly; but he also knew that sometimes, you get it wrong. That said, when Ferber asked him, “Do we go any further with the foreign women? Of course that will cost money, we’ll have to send people, but we’re justified in doing it, after all it’s a case of murder,” he replied without hesitation that no, it wasn’t worth it. At that moment he was in his office and randomly shuffling, as he must have done dozens of times in the last fortnight, photos of the floor of the crime scene—branching, interweaving traces of blood—and those of the people present at the writer’s funeral—technically impeccable close-ups of human beings with sad faces.

  “You look worried, Jean-Pierre …” remarked Ferber.

  “Yes, I think we’re floundering, and I no longer know what to do next. Take a seat, Christian.”

  Ferber looked for a moment at his superior, who continued to mechanically shuffle the photos, without looking at them in detail, a bit like a pack of cards.

  “What are you looking for in these photos, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. I feel there’s something here, but I couldn’t tell you what.”

  “We might try and consult Lorrain.”

  “Isn’t he retired?”

  “More or less. I don’t understand his exact status, but he comes in a few hours every week. In any case, he hasn’t been replaced.”

  Guillaume Lorrain was just a simple crime squad officer, but he possessed that strange aptitude of having a perfect, photographic visual memory: he just had to see a photograph of someone, even if it was only in a newspaper, to recognize it ten or twenty years later. He was the one they called on before the appearance of the Visio software, which allowed instantaneous cross-referencing with the crime database; but quite obviously his particular gift was not restricted to offenders, but to anyone he might, in certain circumstances, have seen in a photo.

  They visited him in his office the following Friday. He was a stocky man with gray hair. Level-headed and staid, he gave the impression of having spent his entire life in an office—which was more or less the case. As soon as his strange aptitude had been spotted, he had immediately been transferred to the crime squad, and relieved of all other tasks.

  Jasselin explained what he expected of him. He went to work at once, examining one by one the photographs taken on the day of the funeral. Occasionally he passed very quickly over a picture; other times he stared at it, meticulously, for almost a minute before putting it to one side. His concentration was terrifying: how did his brain work? It was strange to watch.

  After twenty minutes, he seized a photo and began to sway to and fro. “I’ve seen him … I’ve seen this guy somewhere,” he said in an almost inaudible voice. Jasselin started nervously, but refrained from interrupting him. Lorrain continued swaying to and fro for a time that seemed to him very long, endlessly repeating in a low voice, “I’ve seen him … I’ve seen him …” like some kind of personal mantra, and all of a sudden he stopped rocking, and handed Jasselin the picture of a man aged about forty with delicate features, a very pale complexion, and black mid-length hair.

  “Who is it?” asked Jasselin.

  “Jed Martin. I’m sure that’s his name. Where I saw the photo, I can’t guarantee a hundred percent, but it seems it was in Le Parisien, announcing the opening of an exhibition. This guy must be linked to the art world, one way or another.”

  34

  The death of Houellebecq had surprised Jed, as he was expecting instead some sad news concerning his father any day now. Contrary to all his habits, he’d phoned Jed at the end of September to ask him to come and see him. He was now in a nursing home in Vésinet, set in a big Napoleon III manor, much more chic and expensive than the previous one, a sort of elegant, high-tech dying room. The apartments were spacious, with a bedroom and a salon; the residents had a big LCD television with a cable and satellite subscription, a DVD player, and a broadband Internet connection. There was a park with a little lake where ducks swam, and well-traced avenues of trees where does gamboled. They could even, if they wished, cultivate a corner of the garden which was reserved for them, grow vegetables and flowers—but few requested this. Jed had had to fight to get him to accept this move. He had insisted numerous times that there was no longer any point in making sordid little savings—to make him understand that, now, he was rich. Obviously, the establishment only accepted people who, in their working lives, belonged to the highest levels of the French bourgeoisie: “stuck-up snobs,” Jed’s father, who remained obscurely proud of his modest origins, had once said.

  Jed did not understand, at first, why his father had asked him to come visit. After a short walk in the park—he now had difficulty walking—they sat down in a room that aspired to be like an English club, with its wood paneling and leather armchairs, and where they could order a coffee. It was brought in a silver cafetière, with cream and a plate of sweets. The room was empty, except for a very old man sitting alone in front of a cup of hot chocolate, who was nodding his head and seemed on the verge of dozing off. His white hair was long
and curly and he was wearing a light suit, with a silk cravat around his neck; he made you think of an over-the-hill opera singer—an operetta singer, for example, who would have had his greatest triumphs at the festival of Lamalou-les-Bains. Well, you would have imagined him in some refuge for destitute artists rather than in a home like this, which did not have its equivalent in France, even on the Côte d’Azur: you had to go to Monaco or Switzerland to find something as good.

  Jed’s father silently studied the handsome old man, before addressing his son. “He’s lucky,” he finally said. “He has a very rare orphan disease—a demeleumaiosis, or something like that. He doesn’t suffer at all. He’s permanently exhausted, always falls asleep, even at mealtimes; when he goes for a walk, after a few dozen meters he sits down on a bench and falls asleep. He sleeps a little more every day, and one day he won’t ever wake up. Right till the end, there are some people who have all the luck.”

  He turned to his son, and looked him straight in the eyes. “It seemed better for me to warn you, and I couldn’t see myself speaking to you about it on the phone. I’ve contacted an organization in Switzerland. I’ve decided to be euthanized.”

  Jed didn’t react immediately, leaving his father time to develop his argument, which boiled down to the fact that he was sick of being alive.

  “Are you not all right here?” his son finally asked, his voice quavering.

  Yes, he was all right here, he couldn’t have been better, but what he had to get into his head was that he could no longer be all right anywhere, that he couldn’t be all right in life generally (he was starting to get worked up, his flow of words became loud and almost choleric, but anyway the old singer had sunk into sleep and everything was calm in the room). If he was to keep on going they would have to change his artificial anus; well, he thought he’d had enough of that joke. And what’s more, he felt pain. He couldn’t bear it any longer, he was suffering too much.

  “Don’t they give you morphine?” Jed asked in astonishment.

  Oh, yes, they gave him morphine, as much as he wanted obviously—they preferred the residents to be quiet—but was it a life, to be constantly under the influence of morphine?

  In truth, Jed thought yes, that it was almost even an enviable life, without worries, responsibilities, desires, or fears, close to the life of plants, where you could enjoy the moderate caress of the sun and the breeze. However, he suspected that his father would have difficulty sharing this point of view. He was a former chief executive, an active man. Those people often have problems with drugs, he said to himself.

  “And, besides, what’s it got to do with you?” his father said aggressively (Jed then realized that he’d stopped listening, for some time already, to the old man’s recriminations). He hesitated and dithered before replying that yes, all the same, in some sense, he had the impression that it had something to do with him. “Already, to be a child of a suicide is not much fun,” he added. His father was visibly shaken, and hunched up before violently replying: “That’s got nothing to do with it!”

  To have both his parents commit suicide, Jed went on without acknowledging the interruption, inevitably put you in an unstable and uncomfortable position: that of someone whose attachments to life lack solidity. He spoke at length, with an ease that in hindsight would surprise him, because, after all, he too felt only a hesitant love of life, and generally passed for someone rather reserved and sad. But he had immediately understood that the only way to influence his father was to appeal to his sense of duty; his father had always been a man of duty, and only work and duty had counted for much in his life. “To destroy the subject of morality in his own person is tantamount to obliterating from the world, as far as he can, the existence of morality itself,” he repeated mechanically to himself without truly understanding the sentence, seduced by its plastic elegance, while making one general argument after another: the regression of civilization that represented the generalized recourse to euthanasia, the hypocrisy and the fundamentally evil character of its most illustrious supporters, the moral superiority of palliative care, etc.

  When he left the residence at about five, the light was already fading, colored with magnificent golden reflections. Sparrows were hopping around on the lawn that was sparkling with frost. Clouds oscillating between purple and scarlet made strange, torn forms in the direction of the setting sun. It was impossible, that evening, to deny the world had a certain beauty. Was his father sensitive to these things? He had never displayed the slightest interest in nature; but on getting older, perhaps, who knows? As for him, while visiting Houellebecq he had noticed that he was beginning to appreciate the countryside—to which, up until then, he’d always been indifferent. He clumsily pressed his father’s shoulder before placing a kiss on his rough cheeks—at that precise moment he felt he’d won the match; but that very evening, and even more in the days that followed, he was filled with doubt. There would have been no point in calling his father, nor of visiting him again; on the contrary, it would have risked getting his back up. He imagined him standing on the crest of a hill, hesitating about which side to fall on. It was the last important decision he had to take in his life, and Jed feared that this time again, as he used to do when encountering a problem on a building site, he would choose to make a clear-cut choice.

  During the following days, his worries only increased; any moment now, he expected to receive a call from the manageress of the residence: “Your father left for Zurich this morning at ten o’clock. He left a letter for you.” Thus, when a woman on the phone announced the death of Houellebecq, he didn’t understand straightaway, and thought it was a mistake. (Marylin hadn’t introduced herself, and he hadn’t recognized her voice. She knew nothing more than what was in the papers, but she thought it was right to phone him because she thought—correctly in fact—that he hadn’t read the papers.) And even after hanging up he still thought, for a while, that there had been some kind of mistake, because his relationship with Houellebecq was for him only starting. He had always had in his head the idea that they were destined to see each other again, many times, and perhaps to become friends, insofar as that term was appropriate to people like them. It’s true that they hadn’t seen each other since he brought the painting, at the beginning of January, and it was already the end of November. It’s also true that he hadn’t been the first to call, or taken the initiative of proposing a meeting, but Houellebecq was a man twenty years older, and for Jed the only privilege of age, the single and sad privilege of age, was to have earned the right to be left alone, and it had seemed to him during their previous encounters that Houellebecq wanted above all else to be left alone; still, he’d nonetheless hoped that Houellebecq would call him, for even after their last meeting he felt he still had many things to tell him, and hear from him in response. Anyway, he’d done almost nothing since the start of that year: he had taken out his camera again, without putting away his brushes and canvases. Let’s just say his state of uncertainty was extreme. He hadn’t even moved home, a thing which was, all the same, easy to do.

  Being slightly tired on the day of the funeral, he hadn’t understood much of the mass. There was talk of sorrow, but also of hope and resurrection; well, the message delivered was confusing. In the tidy paths of Montparnasse cemetery, with their geometrical layout and calibrated gravel, things had, however, appeared absolutely clear: the relationship with Houellebecq had come to an end for reasons of force majeure. And the people gathered around him, none of whom he knew, seemed to share the same certainty. On thinking again of this moment he suddenly understood, with total certainty, that his father was inevitably going to persist with his lethal project, that sooner or later he was going to receive that call from the manageress, and that things could end this way, without conclusion or explanation, that the last word might never be said, that there would remain only a sense of regret, a weariness.

  Something else, however, was left for him to live through, and a few days later a guy called Ferber phoned hi
m. His voice was gentle and pleasant, not at all what he imagined from a policeman. He informed him that it would not be him but his superior, Inspector Jasselin, who would receive him at the quai des Orfèvres.

  35

  Inspector Jasselin was “in a meeting,” Jed was told on arrival. He sat in a small waiting room with green plastic chairs, leafing through an old issue of Police Forces before deciding to look out of the window: the view over the Pont-Neuf and the quai de Conti, and farther on to the pont des Arts, was superb. In the winter light the Seine seemed frozen, its surface a matte gray. The dome of the Institut de France had a true grace about it, he had to admit despite himself. Obviously, giving a rounded form to a building could not be justified in any way; on the rational level, it was just a waste of space. Modernity was perhaps an error, thought Jed for the first time in his life. A purely rhetorical question, that: modernity had ended in Western Europe some time ago.

  Jasselin burst in, tearing Jed from his thoughts. He seemed tense, almost annoyed. In fact, his morning had been marked by a new disappointment: the cross-referencing of the murderer’s surgery method with the files of serial killers had turned up absolutely nothing. Nowhere in Europe, or in the United States, or in Japan had anyone cut his victim into strips before spreading them out in the room; it was absolutely unprecedented. “For once, France is on the cutting edge,” Lartigue had joked, in a pathetic attempt to lighten the mood.

  “I’m sorry,” Jasselin said, “but my office is occupied for the moment. Can I offer you a coffee? It isn’t bad, we just got a new machine.”

  He came back two minutes later with two small plastic cups containing a coffee which was in fact excellent. It’s impossible to perform serious police work, he told Jed, without a suitable coffee machine. Then he asked him to talk about his relationship with the victim. Jed recounted its history: the plan for the exhibition, the text for the catalogue, the portrait he had made of the writer … As he went on, he felt his interlocutor’s mood darkening as he slumped back in his plastic chair.