The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  “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.

  38

  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.

  Just then, a third coffin was loaded into the van. Without waiting for the fourth, Jed entered the building, and went up a few steps to a landing where there were three doors. He pushed the one on the right, marked Wartesaal, and went into a waiting room with cream-colored walls and dull plastic furniture—similar, in fact, to the one in which he had waited at the quai des Orfèvres, except that this time there was no unbeatable view of the pont des Arts, and the windows only opened onto an anonymous residential suburb. The loudspeakers fixed at the top of the walls played an ambient music that was certainly sad, but to which could also be given the adjective dignified—it was probably by Barber.

  The five people gathered there were undoubtedly candidates for suicide, but it was difficult to characterize them any further. Their very age was quite indiscernible, anywhere between fifty and seventy years old—therefore not very old; when he came, his father had probably been the senior member of his class. One of them, with his white mustache and rubicund complexion, was manifestly an Englishman; but the others, even from the point of view of nationality, were difficult to place. An emaciated man, with a Latin physique, a brownish-yellow complexion, and terribly gaunt cheeks—the only one, in fact, who seemed to be suffering from a serious illness—was avidly reading (he had briefly looked up when Jed entered, then had immediately plunged back into his book) a Spanish edition of the adventures of Spirou; he surely came from some South American country.

  Jed hesitated, then finally chose to address a woman aged about sixty who looked like a typical Allgäu housewife, and who gave the impression of possessing extraordinary skills in the domain of knitting. She informed him that there was, in fact, a reception room, that he had to go back out onto the landing and take the door on the left.

  Nothing was marked, but Jed pushed the door on the left. A girl who was decorative but nothing more (there were certainly better ones at the Babylon FKK Relax-Oase, he thought) was sitting behind the counter, laboriously filling in a crossword puzzle. Jed explained to her his request, which seemed to shock her: members of the family didn’t come after the death, she replied. Sometimes before, never after. “Sometimes before … Never after …” she repeated several times in English, chewing laboriously on her words. This retard was beginning to get on his nerves. He raised his voice, explaining again that he hadn’t been able to come before, that he wanted absolutely to see someone from the management, and that he had the right to see his father’s file. The word right seemed to impress her; with obvious reluctance, she picked up her phone. A few minutes later, a woman aged about forty, dressed in a light-colored suit, entered the room. She had consulted the file; in fact, his father had turned up on the morning of Monday 10 December and the procedure had gone “perfectly normally,” she added.

  He must have arrived on Sunday evening, the ninth, Jed thought. Where had he spent his last night? Had he treated himself to the Baur au Lac? He hoped so, without believing it. He was certain in any case that he had settled the bill on leaving, and that he had left none of his belongings behind him.

  He insisted again, imploring her. He had been traveling when this happened, he claimed, he hadn’t been able to be there, but now he wanted to know more, know all the details about his father’s last moments. The woman, visibly annoyed, finally gave in and invited him to come with her. He followed her down a dark corridor that was cluttered with metal filing cabinets before entering her luminous and functional office, which overlooked some sort of public park.

  “Here is your father’s file,” she said, handing him a slim folder. The word file seemed a bit exaggerated: there was only a single page, with Swiss German writing on both sides.

  “I don’t understand a word … I’ll have to get it translated.”

  “But what do you want, exactly?” Her calm was breaking up with every minute. “I’m telling you that everything is in order!”

  “There was a medical examination, I suppose?”

  “Of course.” According to what Jed had been able to read in reports, the medical examination boiled down to taking blood pressure and asking a few vague questions, a sort of job interview, with the only difference being that everyone succeeded, and everything was systematically sorted out in less than ten minutes.

  “We act in perfect accordance with Swiss law,” the woman said, more and more glacially.

  “What happened to the body?”

  “Well, like the immense majority of our clients, your father had opted for cremation. We therefore acted according to his wishes; then we scattered his ashes in the open air.”

  So that was it, thought Jed; his father now served as food for the Brazilian carp of Lake Zurich.

  The woman took back the file, obviously thinking their conversation was over, and got up to put it away in the filing cabinet. Jed stood up as well, approached, and slapped her violently. She made a stifled moan, but didn’t have the time to consider a riposte. He moved on to a violent uppercut to the chin, followed by a series of sharp cuffs. While she wavered on her feet, trying to get her breath back, he stepped back so as to run and kick her with all his strength at the level of her solar plexus. At this she collapsed to the ground, striking a metal corner of the desk as she fell; there was a loud cracking sound. The spine must have taken a blow, Jed thought. He leaned over her; she was groggy, breathing with difficulty, but she was breathing.

  He walked rapidly to the exit, more or less fearing that someone would raise the alarm, but the receptionist hardly looked up from her crossword; it’s true that the struggle had made little noise. The station was only two hundred yards away. When he entered, a train stopped at one of the platforms. He got in without buying a ticket, wasn’t checked, and got off at Zurich Central Station.

  On arriving at the hotel, he realized that this bout of violence had put him in a good mood. It was the first time in his life that he’d used physical violence against someone; and that had made him hungry. He dined with great appetite, on a raclette of Grisons meat and mountain ham, which he washed down with an excellent red wine from the Valais.

  The following morning, nice weather had returned to Zurich, and a fine layer of snow covered the ground. He went to the airport, more or less expecting to be arrested at passport control, but nothing of the sort happened. And in the following days, he didn’t receive any news. It was funny they’d decided against making a complaint; probably they didn’t want to attract attention to their activities in any way. There was probably some truth, he thought, to the accusations spread on the Internet concerning the personal enrichment of members of the association. A euthanasia was charged at an average rate of five thousand euros, when the lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital came to twenty euros and a bottom-of-the-range cremation doubtless not much more. In a booming market, where Switzerland had a virtual monopoly, they were indeed going to make a killing.

  His excitement quickly subsided into a wave of deep sorrow, which he knew was definitive. Three days after his return, for the first time in his life, he would spend Christmas Eve alone. It would be the same on New Year’s Eve. And in the days that followed he was also alone.

  EPILOGUE

  A few months later, Jasselin retired. It was, truth be told, the normal time to do so, but up until then he had always thought he would ask for an extension of at least a year or two. The Houellebecq case had seriously shaken him; the confidence he felt in himself, in his ability to do his job, had crumbled. No one had held this against him; on the contrary, he had been nominated in extrem
is to the rank of detective chief inspector; he wouldn’t do the job, but his pension would be increased slightly. A farewell party had been planned—a big one at that. The whole crime squad was invited, and the chief of police would make a speech. In short, he was leaving honorably. This was clearly intended to make him know that he had been, if you considered the whole of his career, a good policeman. And it’s true, he thought he had been, most of the time, an honorable policeman, or at least an obstinate policeman, and obstinacy is perhaps the only human quality that matters at the end of the day, not only in the profession of the policeman but in many professions. At least in any that have something to do with the notion of truth.