The Investigation

by Philippe Claudel

  The Investigator stood before the door of room 93. It was indeed located on the second floor, just as the Giantess had told him. He turned the key and pushed the door, which wouldn’t open more than about eight inches, despite his repeated efforts. With difficulty, he slipped into the narrow space, flipped the light switch, and discovered the room: a single bed, a night table, an armoire, a chair, a closed window through which he could see closed shutters. There was a door that led, no doubt, to the bathroom. The furnishings were the same as those in room 14; the walls were the same greenish color, blistered by dampness; the light was the same, an exhausted, intermittent, circular neon tube; and there was the same photograph of the old man, so much like the one on the key ring. The only difference regarded the size of the room: Here, the floor space was exiguous, and almost all of it was occupied by the bed. It blocked both the armoire door and the door of the bathroom, access to which, therefore, was strictly impossible. As for the chair and the night table, instead of standing on the floor, they had been laid on their sides across the bed, next to his suitcase.

  The Investigator closed the door behind him. “Hold on,” he exhorted himself, clenching his fists. “Hold on … hold on. At least get through the night.”

  He climbed onto the bed and pushed the night table and the chair as far as possible toward the bottom of the mattress. Then he grabbed his suitcase, lifted it with difficulty because it was so heavy—or was it, rather, that he was exhausted?—managed to raise it overhead, and tried unsuccessfully, three times, to slide it onto the top of the armoire. When he realized that the space between the ceiling and the armoire was smaller than the suitcase, he gave up the effort.

  He released the suitcase, which fell heavily to the bed and in doing so caused a small cylindrical object that had apparently been covered by a fold of the bedspread to bounce into the air, a bit like a little horned devil springing up out of a jack-in-the-box. The object was a small yellow-and-blue medicine bottle, the same as the one containing pain medication that the Policeman had given him that very morning. The Investigator picked up the little bottle, clutched it in one quivering hand, and felt a knot in his throat. So he wasn’t a totally bad person after all, the so-called Policeman, because he’d thought about the Investigator, he’d been concerned about the state of his health, he’d taken the trouble to put the medicine on the Investigator’s bed himself. It had to have been him; no one else would or could have done that. Only him.

  The Investigator smiled weakly and then lay down on the bed, once again without taking the trouble to undress. He rolled onto his side, drew his knees up to his stomach, tucked his chin into one shoulder, and closed his eyes.

  Immediately he plunged into a deep sleep, holding the medicine bottle and the dry sausage, one in each hand: an old sausage, desiccated and inedible, and a medicine bottle containing tablets he couldn’t even take because he had no water and couldn’t get into the bathroom. The two items, in short, were unequivocally of no use, but they nonetheless bore witness to a touching human possibility in a world that appeared to him more and more unfounded.

  XXVI

  SOMETHING WAS RINGING. A timorous, quavering, tired sound. The telephone. Like the previous morning. A little light was coming in through the closed shutters. The telephone. The Investigator opened his eyes. How small the room was, and how narrow! He felt as though he’d slept in a box. The ringing continued, but he couldn’t see any telephone. Where could it be, damn it? Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the armoire, or on the door of the armoire, or on the bathroom door. The ringing, though exceedingly weak, didn’t give up. Under the bed? Could someone have been so irrational as to put a telephone under a bed? No, nothing down there. The ringing went on. He pressed one ear against the armoire door, which he wouldn’t have been able to open in any case, but the ringing wasn’t coming from inside the armoire. The ceiling? The ceiling was all that was left! Could the telephone be attached to the ceiling? The ringing, timid but regular, persisted. The Investigator was on all fours on the bed. He didn’t want to look up; it was simply inadmissible that someone could have installed a telephone on the ceiling. The ringing didn’t stop. He resigned himself to tilting his head slowly upward, and there was the telephone, mounted a little to the left of the circular neon light.

  He bounded to his feet on the bed, stretched out his arms toward the telephone, tried to reach the receiver clipped to its cradle, missed it, dislodged it on his third try, and caught it as it yo-yoed at the end of its rubber cord.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?” replied a muffled voice, terribly far away.

  “Can you hear me?” the Investigator asked.

  “Can you hear me?” the voice repeated.

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?” the distant voice answered.

  “I’m the Investigator.”

  “I can’t take it anymore!” the distant voice said. “I can’t open it.”

  “Open what?”

  “It’s horrible, it’s absolutely impossible to open!”

  “Open what?” the Investigator hollered.

  “Impossible … I’ve tried everything. And it’s so hot! Help me …” the voice stammered, dying down.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I’ll never be able to leave.… It’s impossible.”

  “But leave what? Where? Who are you?”

  “Like a rat …” said the voice, and then it fell silent.

  The Investigator looked at the receiver. No more words were audible, but the telephone hadn’t been hung up; he could still hear breathing. However, there was no longer anything human about that breathing. It sounded like wind blowing over a flat, desolate landscape. Who was the caller? Was he the same man who’d called him the previous morning? How could he find out? And what could he do? Not a thing, no doubt about that. Someone must be watching his movements. This was all a joke, only a joke.

  After a few seconds, he stood on tiptoe, reached up to the base of the telephone, which was screwed to the ceiling, and put the receiver back on the hook; and at that moment, only at that moment, did he realize that he was completely naked.

  An idiotic reflex made him cover his groin with both hands. But who could see him? The room had only one window, and the closed shutters protected him from any prying eyes. Besides, even though he didn’t wish to verify his conviction, he was positive that he’d find the same concrete-block wall behind the shutters in this room as he had in room 14.

  Why was he naked? He wasn’t in the habit of sleeping in the nude. The Investigator felt so ashamed that he hid himself, head and body, under the bedcovers. All the same, he couldn’t stay there indefinitely. He rolled on the bed, wrapping the sheet around him, got to his feet on the mattress, and started looking for his clothes. He found the old sausage and the medicine bottle without difficulty, but there was no trace of his undershirt, his undershorts, his shoes, his shirt, his trousers, his suit jacket, or his raincoat. Vanished, evaporated, gone without trace. And yet they had to be there somewhere.

  The Investigator tried to remember where he might have put his clothes, but since he was utterly unable to recall getting undressed, it was all the more difficult for him to figure out what he’d done with them. His interior dialogue came to an end with a violent sneeze, then another, then a third. His stopped-up, running nose obliged him to breathe through his mouth, at an elevated rate, so that he looked like a goldfish imprisoned in a bowl. A boiling-hot shower, or even an ice-cold one, wouldn’t do him any harm, he thought. It would give him a boost, stimulate his mind, invigorate his body. All he had to do was get into the bathroom!

  Wrapped in his sheet, which gave him the air of a short, round-bellied Roman senator, the Investigator thought awhile before coming up with a plan he put into action without delay. The plan called for him to lift up the bed as high as possible—as high as his puny muscles would permit—to wedge the night table under it, and then, if he still had the strength, to raise the bed even higher,
jamming the chair between the night table and the bed frame. In the end, the bed was standing nearly vertically on one side, and the bathroom door was free.

  He could open it.

  XXVII

  TO HIS GREAT ASTONISHMENT, he found the bathroom a model of refined luxury. He’d never have suspected that such a grandiose space, its walls decorated with pale-green mosaics topped by a fretwork frieze of studs gilded with fine gold, could exist within the precincts of the Hope Hotel; the bathroom was probably the sole remaining vestige of a time when the establishment really did provide first-class lodging. And to think, this sumptuous bathroom came with the room he’d been put in, which was, as he could certify, incontestably the narrowest, nastiest, wretchedest room in the Hotel—it was a mystery that passed his understanding!

  A pearly light caressed the heavy gold fixtures of the two sinks, the bidet, the large bathtub—which had been hollowed out of a block of porphyry—and the shower, a spacious enclosure completely covered with bluish glass-paste tiles. From multiple loudspeakers—none of which he was able to locate, but which seemed to have been built into the walls—came music that mingled the cries of exotic birds, a gently stroked tambourine, soft brasses mimicking the sound of small coins falling on a stone floor, and flutes simultaneously shrill and mellow. In the center of the room, a small fountain threw up a stream of water, whose blithe gurgling and steamy vapor sent the Investigator into a reverie of distant seaports, of black and naked female slaves, of palm fronds wielded to cool his brow, of big ships anchored in the harbor, of their ebony macassar-wood decks laden with sacks of spices, pearls, amber, and bitumen. He’d been compelled to read a little poetry for school assignments in his youth, but he’d never understood any of it. And what he’d found especially hard to understand was that men could waste their time writing poems, which served no useful purpose, none at all; cold, precise investigative reports written to give an account of proven facts, to narrow a search for truth, and to draw valid conclusions struck him as a more intelligent—indeed, as the only valid—way of using language and serving humanity. How ill and unnerved must he be, that the mere sight of an opulent bathroom could set him daydreaming about languorous Negresses and palm wine, Oriental pastries and belly dances?

  A set of crystal shelves held bottles of multicolored bath salts and liquid soap. The Investigator opened a few and tried to inhale their scent, but his cold was so severe that he could smell nothing at all. He settled for reading the labels and decided on Mauve Lilac.

  He let the sheet fall. Once again totally naked, but not feeling the slightest embarrassment on that account, the Investigator poured the entire contents of the soap bottle into his hands and rubbed the liquid into his remaining hair and over his face and body. Then he turned on the two faucets in the shower, and at once a generous stream of water rained down, giving off a vapor that the opalescence of the glass-paste tiles turned blue.

  He thrust his right foot into the shower, shouted in sudden pain, and quickly drew back: The water was boiling! Not hot, but boiling! He closed the hot water faucet a little, opened the cold water faucet almost all the way, waited, and then ventured again to stick his foot into the cascade. It was even worse! He felt as though molten lead were being poured onto his flesh. He abandoned the shower for the bathtub, turned on the tap, waited: Clouds of steam rose at once from the porphyry block, and he didn’t dare put his foot in. He made do with holding one hand close to the water and determined that it, too, was flowing out at an atrociously high temperature. His only remaining choices were the sinks and the bidet. He hurried over to them and turned on the faucets, mixing a little hot water with a great deal of cold. Wasted effort: The water that came out of those faucets could have cooked an egg in thirty seconds. It was then that he examined the pipes and came to the astounding conclusion that there was no cold-water pipe leading to any tap in the bathroom.

  Even in the basin of the little fountain, the water, whose fine vapor he’d taken for the product of some sort of sophisticated atomizing system, was at the boiling point, as indicated by the three Japanese carp floating belly-up in it, their flesh white, cooked, and already disintegrating.

  The beauty of the bathroom served no useful purpose. It was a Paradise warmed by the flames of Hell. Washing oneself in it was impossible, just as it was impossible to dry oneself, since there was no towel and no bathrobe. His body entirely coated with sticky, redolent Mauve Lilac, the Investigator felt his recent and very modest upsurge in optimism plunging down again. At the moment when he stooped to gather up his bedsheet, a door opened behind him, and a big, heavily mustachioed man in his seventies entered, passed close to him, sat on the toilet, unfolded a newspaper, and began to read.

  The Investigator dared not move. Where had this old man come from? He was absolutely naked, just like him; he’d practically grazed him without even noticing; and he resembled, feature for feature, the old fellow on the Enterprise key rings, the one whose immense photographic portrait adorned the Manager’s office, the one whose image was reproduced in the pictures that hung in the Hotel rooms. Was this really the same person? It was difficult to say; people, whether naked or clothed, make such different impressions. And what immodesty! Whoever he was, his behavior was unbelievable. To come in like that and sit down on the toilet!

  The Investigator was on the verge of calling out when it occurred to him that perhaps it was he himself who was not in his proper place. Suppose this bathroom wasn’t his? After all, hadn’t he had to expend a considerable amount of effort and ingenuity to unblock a door that had no doubt been barricaded on purpose? But, yes, of course, that was it—he wasn’t where he ought to be. His only thought was to get out, to get out at once, before the septuagenarian noticed his presence and caused a scandal.

  The old man was thoroughly absorbed in his newspaper. A benevolent smile brightened his wrinkled face. The Investigator straightened up, very slowly. Then, equally slowly, he slid his feet inch by inch toward the door of his room, but when he reached it, he couldn’t open it. He didn’t try too hard, for fear of alerting the old man, who kept on reading and paid no attention to him. The Investigator resolved that his salvation lay in the only other exit, the door through which the old man had come in. It was directly opposite the spot he’d just laboriously reached, at the cost of great pain in his toes, particularly those on his scalded right foot, which had turned scarlet. But he had no other choice. He therefore set out again, smeared head to foot with Mauve Lilac, and, after a ploddingly slow slide across the marble floor, he reached the other door, opened it in silence, and disappeared.

  XXVIII

  THE ROOM HE CROSSED, almost running, was very different from his. Like the bathroom he’d just left, it was vast, luxurious, and comfortable, with a look of extreme refinement. He had just enough time to notice a cabin trunk that was standing open, revealing four or five suits, apparently all of them tailored from the same warm, supple fabric, a green-and-beige tweed. He also spotted a big cigar, about to burn itself out in an ashtray, weaving slate-gray coils into the room’s conditioned air.

  The Investigator found himself in the corridor, enveloped in his sheet. Or, rather, as he quickly determined, in a corridor. A corridor that he didn’t recognize, but which was fortunately deserted. Where was his room? To the right? To the left? Logically, it had to be to the left, but since nothing in the Hotel obeyed established rules, it was extremely probable that his room was to the right. He turned that way, trying his luck, but as he advanced, dragging his poached right foot, the numbers he read on the doors of the rooms—765, 3, 67B, 5674, 1.6, A45718, BTH2Z—gave him no clue about the location of his own. He went back, passed again in front of the old man’s room—00000@00000—and discovered that number 93, his room, was right next door to it. So he’d sent himself on a wild-goose chase with his convoluted reasoning! He went in.

  The damages to the room were catastrophic. The wooden chair had eventually broken under the pressure of the bed, which had pivoted on its side a
nd toppled over, striking the telephone on its way down and ripping it from the ceiling, along with the neon tube, before smashing the night table and staving in the door of the armoire. Destabilized by the blow, the armoire had fallen onto its side, blocking the door that led to the old man’s bathroom.

  Exhausted, the Investigator slid down to the floor and curled himself up with his head resting on his knees. Shaken by nervous spasms, in despair at what he considered the hopelessness of his situation, he felt like crying, but his body wouldn’t let him, as if it, too, had joined his tormentors. He would have liked to be no more. Yes, to disappear. How strange human desires are sometimes. Even though men fear death, they often consider it a solution to their problems, without even realizing that it solves nothing. Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t have to solve anything at all. That’s not its role.

  He felt something a little cool against his right thigh and opened his eyes: It was the medicine bottle left by the Policeman. He picked it up, gazed at it for a few seconds without managing to conceive the smallest thought in its regard, opened it, dumped all the tablets into his mouth, and started to chew them. Taken without water, they had a taste like aromatic herbs, pleasant and fresh. He reduced them to a slightly bitter pulp, which he then swallowed.

  The room looked like a tiny battlefield. As such, it became an image, but of what combat? And if there had been a combat, who was the victor, and who was the vanquished? The Investigator imagined the bill the Giantess wouldn’t fail to present to him. It would, he was sure, amount to a good part of his savings. Maybe even the whole of them. Strangely enough, the prospect didn’t bother him. He invested money without much knowing why, without even the desire to make use of it. At the end of every year, he had a meeting with the Financial Counselor, a man who would explain to him, with the aid of curves and diagrams, the most comfortable places for his money to nestle, places where it could nap in all tranquillity, like a pet, surrounded by all affection and necessary care, and where it would, beyond the shadow of a doubt and under the best possible conditions, reproduce itself. He didn’t understand much of what he was being told, but in the end he would agree to the Counselor’s proposals. Like most of his contemporaries, therefore, he was getting ready to die with money put aside. All at once, he realized the absurdity of that situation. If he had a little money, why keep it? For whom? Let it serve some useful purpose, like paying for damages! Why not?