The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  “I see … So you weren’t especially close,” the inspector concluded.

  Yes, he could say that, Jed agreed; but he didn’t really sense that Houellebecq had had what could be called intimates, at least in the final part of his life.

  “I know, I know.” Jasselin looked completely discouraged. “I don’t know what made me hope for more … I think I’ve bothered you for nothing. Well, we can still go into my office and take down your statement.”

  The surface of his work table was almost entirely covered with photos of the crime scene, which he had, for perhaps the fiftieth time, vainly spent most of his morning examining. Jed approached with curiosity, and picked up one of the photos. Jasselin tried to stifle his look of surprise.

  “Forgive me,” said Jed, embarrassed. “I don’t suppose I have the right to see that.”

  “Indeed, in principle it’s covered by the secrecy of the investigation. But go on, feel free—maybe it will remind you of something.”

  Jed examined several of the enlargements, which for Jasselin looked virtually all alike: drips, lacerations, a formless puzzle. “It’s funny,” he finally said. “It looks like a Pollock, but a Pollock who would have worked almost in monochrome. In fact, he did do that, but not often.”

  “Who’s Pollock? Forgive my ignorance.”

  “Jackson Pollock was a postwar American painter. An abstract expressionist, even a leader of that movement. He was very influenced by shamanism. He died in 1956.”

  Jasselin stared at him intently, suddenly interested.

  “And what are these photos?” asked Jed. “I mean: what do they represent in reality?”

  Jed’s reaction surprised Jasselin by its intensity. He scarcely had the time to bring up a chair before Jed collapsed into it, trembling and shaking with spasms. “Don’t move … you must drink something,” he said. He hurried into Ferber’s office and came back with a bottle of Lagavulin and a glass. It is impossible to perform serious police work without a reserve of high-quality spirits, that was his conviction, but he abstained from mentioning it. Jed downed an entire glass, in long sips, before his trembling calmed down. Jasselin made himself wait, holding back his excitement.

  “I know it’s horrible,” he finally said. “It’s one of the most horrible crimes we’ve had to deal with. Do you think,” he went on carefully, “do you think that the murderer could’ve been influenced by Jackson Pollock?”

  Jed said nothing for a few seconds, shaking his head in disbelief, before replying: “I don’t know … It resembles his work, that’s true. There were quite a few artists who used their bodies at the end of the twentieth century, and in fact some partisans of body art presented themselves as the heirs to Pollock. But the bodies of other people … There are only the Viennese actionists who crossed the limit in the 1960s, but that didn’t last long and has no influence today.”

  “I know this may seem absurd,” Jasselin insisted. “But given where we are … You know, I shouldn’t tell you this, but the investigation is going absolutely nowhere. It’s already two months since the corpse was discovered, and we’re still stuck.”

  “Where did it take place?”

  “At his home, in the Loiret.”

  “Ah, yes, I should have recognized the carpet.”

  “Have you been to his place? In the Loiret?”

  This time Jasselin couldn’t contain his excitement. He was the first person they had questioned who knew the place where Houellebecq lived. Even his publisher had never been: when they met, it was always in Paris.

  “Yes, once,” Jed calmly replied. “To give him his painting.”

  Jasselin went out of his office, and called Ferber. In the corridor, he summarized what he had just learned.

  “That’s interesting,” Ferber said pensively. “Truly interesting. More than all we’ve had since the start, it seems.”

  “How are we going to take this further?” said Jasselin.

  They held an impromptu meeting, including Aurélie, Lartigue, Michel Khoury. Messier was absent, held up by an investigation which seemed to passionately interest him—a psychotic teenager, a sort of otaku who had apparently found the operating procedure for his murders on the Internet. They’re beginning to lose interest in the case, Jasselin thought sadly, they’re starting to resign themselves to the eventuality of failure … Proposals flew in all directions, for quite some time. None of them knew anything whatsoever about the art world, but it was Ferber who had the decisive idea.

  “I think we should return with him to the Loiret. To the crime scene. He’ll perhaps see something that escaped us.”

  Jasselin looked at his watch: it was half past two and the lunch hour had long since passed—but, above all, that made it three hours that the witness had been waiting, alone in his office.

  When he entered the room, Jed glanced at him absentmindedly. He didn’t seem at all bored. Sitting behind the inspector’s desk, he was closely examining the photos. “You know,” he said finally, “it’s just a rather mediocre imitation of Pollock. There are forms and drips, but the whole thing is arranged mechanically, there’s no force, no vital élan.”

  Jasselin hesitated: he didn’t want to get his back up. “That’s my desk …” he ended up saying, unable to find the best wording. “Oh, sorry!” Jed leapt up, giving him his seat, though he was not particularly concerned. Jasselin then explained his idea. “No problem,” Jed quickly replied. They arranged to leave the following day, in Jasselin’s own private car. On arranging a meeting place, they noticed they lived only a few hundred meters from each other.

  “Strange guy,” thought Jasselin after he left, and, as so often in the past, he thought of all the people who coexist in the heart of a city without any particular reason, without any common interests or preoccupations, following incommensurate and separate trajectories, sometimes joined (more and more rarely) by sex or (more and more often) by crime. But for the first time this thought—which fascinated him at the start of his career as a policeman, and which made him want to dig further, to know more, to go right to the heart of human relations—now aroused in him just an obscure weariness.

  36

  Although he knew nothing about his life, Jed was hardly surprised to see Jasselin arrive at the wheel of a Mercedes Class A. The Mercedes Class A is the ideal car for an old couple without children, who live in an urban or periurban area, yet do not hesitate to treat themselves from time to time to an escapade in a hôtel de charme; but it can also suit a young couple of conservative temperament—it will, then, often be their first Mercedes. An entry into the range offered by the firm with the Silver Star, it is a discreetly different car; the Mercedes four-door sedan Class C and the Mercedes four-door Class E are more paradigmatic. The Mercedes in general is the car preferred by those who aren’t really interested in cars, who place security and comfort over driving sensations—also for those, of course, who have sufficient means. For more than fifty years—despite the impressive commercial strike force of Toyota, despite the pugnacity of Audi—the global bourgeoisie had, on the whole, remained loyal to Mercedes.

  The traffic was moving freely on the motorway to the south, and both remained silent. You have to break the ice, thought Jasselin after half an hour, it’s important to put the witness at ease, as he often repeated in his lectures at Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or. Jed was completely absent, lost in his thoughts—unless, more simply, he was falling asleep. This guy intrigued him, and impressed him a little. He had to admit that his career as a policeman had allowed him to meet, in the person of criminals, only simplistic and evil beings, incapable of any original thought and generally almost any thought, degenerate animals which it would have been better, in their own interest as well as that of others and of any possibility of a human community, to kill on capture; at least this was—more and more often—his opinion. Well, that wasn’t his business, it was up to the judges. His own work was to hunt the game, then bring it back to drop it at the feet of the judges, and more generally of the
French people (they operated in its name, and this was at least the time-honored expression). In the course of a hunt, the game dropped at the feet of the hunter is most often dead—its life was ended during its capture, the explosion of a bullet fired in the appropriate place had put an end to its vital functions; sometimes, the fangs of the dogs had finished the job. In the course of a police investigation, the guilty person dropped at the feet of the judges was almost always alive—which enabled France to still receive good marks in reports on human rights regularly published by Amnesty International. The judge—subordinate to the French people, which he represented in general, and to which he was more precisely subordinate in the case of serious crimes involving a jury, which was almost always such for the cases Jasselin dealt with—was then to give a ruling on his or her fate. Various international conventions forbade (and even in the case where the French people had in their majority pronounced themselves in favor) putting him to death.

  Once past the tollbooths of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, he proposed to Jed that they stop for a coffee. The motorway service station made an ambiguous impression on Jasselin. In some ways, it clearly reminded him of the Paris region: the choice of magazines and national dailies was vast—it would reduce rapidly as they penetrated the depths of the provinces—and the main souvenirs offered to tourists were Eiffel Towers and Sacré-Coeurs available in different forms. On the other hand, it was difficult to pretend that you were in the suburbs: passing through the toll barrier, as through the limit of the last travel-card zone, symbolically marked the end of the suburbs, and the start of the regions; besides, the first regional products (Gâtinais honey, rabbit rillettes) had made their appearance. In short, this motorway service station refused to choose sides, and Jasselin didn’t like that too much. However, he took a chocolate brownie to accompany his coffee, and they chose a place to sit among the hundred or so empty tables.

  An opening gambit was necessary, and Jasselin coughed several times. “You know …” he finally ventured, “I’m very grateful you agreed to accompany me. You were not at all obligated to.”

  “I find it normal to help the police,” Jed replied seriously.

  “Oh, well …” Jasselin smiled, without managing to elicit from Jed an analogous reaction. “I’m delighted by that, of course, but few of our fellow citizens think like you.”

  “I believe in evil,” continued Jed in the same tone. “I believe in guilt, and punishment.”

  Jasselin’s jaw dropped; he had in no way foreseen that the conversation would take this turn.

  “Do you believe in the exemplary nature of sentences?” he suggested, encouragingly. An old waitress passing her mop between the tables approached them, shooting hostile stares. She seemed not only exhausted and despondent, but full of animosity toward the world in general, and twisted her mop in her bucket exactly as if that was what the world meant for her: a dubious surface covered with various dirty stains.

  “I don’t know,” replied Jed after some time. “In truth, I’ve never asked myself that question. The sentences appear just to me because they are normal and necessary, because it’s normal that the guilty man receives a punishment, so that balance is re-established, because it’s necessary that evil should be punished. Why? Don’t you believe they are?” he went on, slightly aggressively, on seeing that Jasselin was remaining silent. “Well, it’s your profession.”

  Jasselin got himself back together to explain to him that no, that was the work of the judge, assisted by a jury. This guy, he thought, would be pitiless on a jury. There’s the separation of powers, he stressed, it’s one of the bases of our constitution. Jed quickly nodded to show that he had understood, but that for him it seemed a mere detail. Jasselin considered starting a debate on the death penalty, for no precise reason, just for the pleasure of conversation, but then gave up; he had undoubtedly a lot of trouble making sense of this guy. Between them, silence fell again.

  “I’ve also accompanied you,” Jed finally said, “for other reasons, more personal ones. I want Houellebecq’s murderer to be found, and punished. It’s very important to me.”

  “Yet you weren’t especially close.”

  Jed uttered a sort of painful groan, and Jasselin understood that he had unintentionally touched a sensitive area. An almost obese man, dressed in a dull gray suit, passed a few meters from them, carrying a plate of fries. He looked like a technical sales representative who was nearing the end of the line. Before sitting down, he put his hand on his chest for a few moments, as if he were expecting an imminent cardiac arrest.

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

  37

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.