The Investigation

by Philippe Claudel

  The Policeman stood upright, gazed at the Investigator, seemed to reflect, and in the end dropped the sponge into the bucket. This act produced a strange sound, like a brief sob. Keeping his eyes on the Investigator, the Policeman slowly stripped off his gloves. Then he said, “Follow me.”

  He said it without violence, almost gently. The Investigator, still surprised by the words that had come out of his own mouth and the tone in which he’d spoken them, was on the verge of apologizing, but he opted instead to remain silent and followed the other’s lead.

  The Policeman stopped on the exterior steps of the Hotel and said, “I assume you’re getting ready to return to the Enterprise this morning for the purposes of your Investigation?”

  It was a morning identical to that of the previous day: soft, caressed by a golden light, and filled with intense human activity. A concentrated, compact Crowd surged along the sidewalks on either side of the street, and the roadway was invisible under a flood of vehicles, packed closely together and rolling past at an extremely reduced speed. None of the drivers appeared to be complaining about the slowness of their progress.

  “Mild in the morning, ferocious in the evening.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m speaking of the climate,” the Policeman explained. “At first, I was a little surprised, like you. It didn’t make any sense. During the first part of the day, the air is springlike, even summery, but inevitably, toward the end of the afternoon, there’s snow, followed in the evening hours by a frost that chews up your face, and then, to cap things off, down comes the night, too soon, falling like a guillotine blade. That could be a metaphor for life, but I’m not the Poet, I’m the Policeman.

  “You pay too much attention to appearances. I really wonder how you can conduct an Investigation of any sort with so little discernment. You see me wearing a housekeeper’s smock and carrying a brush, and you jump to premature conclusions. Because my temporary office looks like a broom closet, you tell yourself I’m a simple cleaning person who’s lost his mind. No, don’t protest! According to what I’ve been told, that’s just what you thought. What a lack of imagination on your part! I could have taken offense. I could have arrested you on the spot—you’ve given me any number of reasons for doing that, ever since yesterday morning. I could have exercised my arbitrary, limitless power and subjected you to torture of one kind or another, but I believe in the virtues of pedagogy. Come with me.”

  The Policeman crossed the sidewalk with the most breathtaking ease. The Crowd instantaneously divided into two separate floods. Men and women moved out of his way as he approached, colliding with one another to let him through. No one even grazed him. He reached the curb effortlessly and turned around to assess the Investigator’s reaction.

  His mouth agape, the Investigator was staring as though he’d just witnessed a miracle. Observing this, the Policeman shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as if to say that the Investigator hadn’t seen anything yet. Then he turned toward the street, simply raising one arm and, at the same time, placing his left foot on the asphalt roadway. All the vehicles stopped at once. The sight was astonishing. It was as if a sea had abruptly parted, revealing its rocky bottom—in this case, ordinary blacktop, with ruts or potholes here and there—and forcing its waters to one side or the other. The Policeman crossed the street in a few seconds and stepped onto the opposite sidewalk. There, too, the Crowd took the greatest care to avoid him.

  “Do you need any more proof that I’m really the Policeman?” he called out to the Investigator, but the latter was too stunned to reply. His brain was becoming some kind of dwarf mammal, shut up in a wheel and turning it from the inside at top speed, but not producing anything except gratuitous, meaningless, unnecessary motion, along with serious overheating.

  “Come on over!” the Policeman cried.

  Like an automaton, the Investigator obeyed, crossing the sidewalk and then the street under the mute protection of the Policeman, who oversaw the operation while holding vehicles and pedestrians, still unmoving, under his placid authority. When the Investigator reached the Policeman’s side, he set the traffic in motion again with a simple snap of his fingers. With bowed head and shame in his heart, the Investigator remained close to him. Then, after a silence that lasted an eternity, he sheepishly murmured, “Please forgive me.”

  XXXII

  YOU’RE NOT THE FIRST to be fooled. Before, of course, it was different; things were clear. But I’m not a man who regrets the past,” the Policeman concluded magnanimously, shaking hands with the Investigator. This made him feel even more ashamed, and he lowered his eyes and said, “I have a confession to make.”

  “Come, come, I’ve already told you that I—”

  “It’s important to me,” the Investigator said, cutting him off. “I need to confess: This morning, I trashed my room. I wrecked it. I broke everything. I don’t know what got into me. It was stronger than I was, or, rather, I wasn’t myself. I’m shy and mild-mannered by nature, but this morning I turned into a monster, a savage beast. When I think back on it, I believe I would have been capable of killing someone.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the floor. He was prepared to put up with a long interrogation, a re-enactment, perhaps prolonged standing at attention, but the Policeman’s reaction was immediately good-natured: “Come on, you’re too hard on yourself! Killing! The things you say! My profession has taught me that killing’s not easy. It’s not something just anybody can do. And I don’t want to offend you, but you don’t have what it takes to be a murderer. You haven’t been designated as the Investigator for nothing. You weren’t considered qualified to be the Killer. Stick to your proper job. As for your room, don’t give it another thought! My people showed it to me while you were having breakfast. Now, it’s true you went at it pretty vigorously, but you were right to do so! The room was unworthy of you. The person responsible is the one who dared to assign you to that room. Nobody’s going to quibble with you about a little breakage! Case closed! Moreover, I’ve already filed my report, and the Guilty Party shall pay, I can guarantee you that!”

  “But who is the Guilty Party?”

  “I’m looking into that. I’ll find him. And if I don’t find him, I’ll invent him. I’m formidable in my field. I forbid you to concern yourself for a single second with anything more than this: You have a very important mission to carry out. You’re the Investigator.”

  The two of them had arrived in front of the Guardhouse. The Policeman, who had insisted on accompanying the Investigator there, pressed the buzzer himself and spoke to the Guard. Was he the same one as the previous morning? If there were two of them, they were physically identical. The Policeman advised the Guard to treat the Investigator well. “He’s a friend,” the Policeman said meaningfully.

  Friendship is a rare thing, and the Investigator had never tried it. Many human beings go through life without ever experiencing friendship, and some miss out on love, too, whereas it’s a banal, frequent, and daily occurrence for them to feel indifference, anger, or hatred, and to be motivated by envy, jealousy, or the spirit of revenge. The Investigator wondered whether the Policeman really felt the emotions he was expressing. Were his words merely formulaic? When the polka-dot smock disappeared in the Crowd, the Investigator was still standing in front of the Guardhouse; the fingers of his right hand stroked the medicine bottle that contained the new tablets his friend had given him in parting.

  The Guard was waiting, smiling at him from behind the glass partition. The Investigator turned to him, moved his head in the direction the Policeman had taken, and heard himself say, “He’s a friend.” As he pronounced these words, the Investigator felt a pleasant stirring begin in his belly and rise gradually, in little waves, to his heart and lungs, and thence to his soul. “I’m sorry, but my identification documents still haven’t been returned to me,” he went on.

  “No problem,” the Guard replied. “You’re the Policeman’s friend. I’ll call the Guide. Would you please b
e so kind as to direct your steps toward the entrance?”

  The Investigator told himself that everything was decidedly looking up on this new morning. The sun was doing the sun’s job. The weather was fine. The behavior of all the persons he’d talked to had been strictly normal. I can even hear birds singing, he thought. The world is in its proper place and going round as it should.

  Less than an hour earlier, the Investigator had been devouring pounds of food under the eyes of famished, frightened, exiled human beings about to be sent back to the wretchedness they’d run from. Then, seized by a sense of guilt and shame he could neither master nor ignore, he’d violently vomited everything he’d eaten. So weak and disoriented had he been that he’d called into doubt the very existence of the universe he was moving in and the materiality of the people he was encountering. But a problem-free street crossing, a friendly word spoken by a man, the Policeman, whom to all intents and purposes he barely knew, a smile from a minor functionary separated from him by a glass partition, a ray of sunlight, and an air of spring had sufficed to make him forget the sufferings of others, his own confusion, his fever, his aching forehead, his solitude, his Investigation, and even his hunger. The Investigator was trying his hand at forgetting, which keeps many people from dying too soon.

  The Security Officer came out to meet him and, there could be no doubt, he was surely the same one as the day before. The realization dealt a blow to the Investigator’s good humor. The memory of this muscle-bound fellow’s arrogant indifference tarnished the young day’s early light.

  “Had a good night? Slept well?”

  The Security Officer was still two heads taller than the Investigator. As before, he was wearing a perfectly crisp paramilitary uniform, and the same tools for communications, attack, and defense were hanging from his belt, but he was looking at the Investigator with great benevolence, his mouth open in a smile whose whiteness was practically supernatural.

  “I must have seemed a bit harsh to you yesterday,” the Security Officer said. “But what can you expect? That’s my job. Yours is to investigate, and mine is to be on the lookout. And no one’s going to take me seriously as a vigilant sentry unless I put on a surly face and a whole array of knickknacks”—his broad hands indicated all the things dangling from his belt—“which, by the way, are totally useless. I spend my on-duty time silencing my feelings, disguising them, nipping them in the bud, even though yesterday, for example, all I wanted to do was to give you a hug.”

  “Give me … a hug?” the Investigator stammered.

  “You didn’t notice a thing, right? I don’t mean to boast, but I’m a good actor. I thought about it all night long. I was cross with myself for not having done it. Regrets are terrible. My life is loaded with regrets, and it’s getting harder and harder for me to live with them. I look into other people’s eyes, and I see what I am to them: a uniform, a brutish type doing a brutish job. They stare at me as if I were an animal, a mound of muscles, a beast without a brain. But I have a brain, and above all, I have a heart. A beating heart, a heart that needs love. Do you know, at night, when I take off this uniform and these doodads, when I’m naked and alone again, I weep? Like a child who’s been punished or abandoned. When I saw you yesterday, I felt you could understand me. I felt you were like me, and that we were two of a kind. I wasn’t mistaken, was I?”

  The Investigator was dumbstruck.

  “Tell me, was I mistaken?” the Security Officer repeated imploringly.

  The Investigator made a vague gesture that might have passed for encouraging.

  “I was sure I was right. I vowed last night that if the situation arose again, I wouldn’t cause myself any additional regrets. And so, if you have no objections, I’d love to give you a hug, right here, right now. It’s not every day that one has the good fortune to meet an investigator, to say nothing of the Investigator, a man who plays a leading role, whereas I, I’m a mere underling, a shadowy figure summoned at the last minute and very quickly forgotten, a secondary character. It’s my lot in life. A fate I’ve grown used to. I accept it.”

  Basically, the Investigator said to himself, this could be just another form of torture. The extravagant benevolence and the exaggerated friendliness, both of them unmotivated and ridiculously hyperbolic, were of a piece with the rest: the brutality, the mistreatment, the indifference, the nitpicking, the absurdity. This is another test, he thought. I’m being messed with. I’m being studied. I’m nothing but a toy, undergoing performance evaluations before being put on the market. Surely someone, somewhere, is watching me. But who? My boss, the Head of Section? His boss? His boss’s boss? The Manager? The Guide who is also the Watchman? The Policeman who claims to be my friend? The Giantess who rules the Hotel? God? Someone more important than God? All my reactions are being noted. I’m probably in the midst of some sort of validation protocol, some convoluted quality-control process, under observation by an entire team of men in white, Scientists, Censors, Judges, Arbiters, and who knows what else. I’m supposed to be the Investigator, but am I not myself the center of another Investigation, one that goes well beyond me, one whose stakes are much more vital than those of the one I’m conducting?

  “Well?” said the Security Officer ecstatically.

  “Well, what?”

  “May I give you a hug?”

  This was a strange scene indeed, though nobody saw it: the huge Security Officer, with his Minotaur’s forehead, clutching the puny Investigator to his bosom, wrapping his immense arms around him, holding him tight for a long moment, almost smothering him, as though desperately trying to experience the living character of another individual homologous to himself, yearning to feel a sense of belonging to the same species, seeking the certitude of being chained to the same bench in the same galley.

  The embrace was ended by a crackling sound in the Security Officer’s earpiece. As though he’d been called to order, he released the Investigator at once and took two steps backward, his face hard and serious again. He listened. And the Investigator, who’d been on the verge of suffocation, was finally able to breathe.

  The caller spoke to the Security Officer at length. Something was being explained to him. He responded from time to time, always in the same manner, repeating the word “Affirmative” or the expression “I read you loud and clear,” putting them in play alternately, as a juggler does with balls or tenpins.

  He towered over the Investigator, and it occurred to the latter that, of all the people he’d spoken to, only this man was so tall, so powerfully built, so young, so thick-haired; the others conformed to the same physical type—pretty short, pretty bald, pretty middle-aged—as he, the Investigator, did. This observation was of no use to him. Men often have thoughts whose immediate utility they don’t see, and besides, many of the said thoughts turn out to have no usefulness at all. But thinking is sometimes like running an empty washing machine: The exercise may serve to verify proper functioning, but the dirty laundry left outside the machine stays dirty eternally.

  XXXIII

  THE INVESTIGATOR WAS FOLLOWING the green line. He was doing what the Security Officer had told him to do, and the Security Officer had told him to do what he’d been told to tell him. Thus far, everything was clear. Someone had made a decision and that decision had been put into force, as witnessed by the Investigator’s scrupulous adherence to the indicated path. He stepped meticulously, one foot after the other, and neither foot ever deviated from the green line. The ribbon of color he trod had materialized on the ground at some time in the past, produced by a man who’d been given the mission to paint that ribbon and had carried out his task without trying to understand why it had been assigned to him or what good it served.

  The Investigator walked on. He didn’t know where he was headed, but that didn’t worry him. He’d poured out the tablets from the new medicine bottle his friend the Policeman had given him and popped them all into his mouth at once. He chewed them with relish, savoring their bitterness and their subtle bouqu
et of medicinal plants.

  He was thinking kindly thoughts about the Policeman and the Security Officer, and also about the Guide, who according to the Security Officer—there again, he’d been told to tell him—had fallen victim to a Level 6 Impediment and would be unable to receive the Investigator that morning. When the Investigator asked the Security Officer what a Level 6 Impediment was, the other replied that he hadn’t the least idea, and that it didn’t lie within the parameters of his function to possess such information; his mission was limited to ensuring that no unauthorized visitor penetrated inside the walls of the Enterprise. Order doesn’t exist without the concept of society. People often think the reverse, but they’re wrong. Man created order at a time when nothing was required of him. He thought himself clever. He’s had cause to regret it.

  Walking along at a moderate pace, the Investigator let strange theoretical analyses occupy his mind. A group of thirty-seven people—eleven women and twenty-six men, all Asians—overtook and passed him. Wearing hard hats and white coats and “External Element” badges, they were following the red line at a rapid clip. He envied them. Not because they were following the red line, but because of the hard hats and the coats. He missed them. The long white coat would have at least allowed him to hide his apple-green sweatpants and mended raincoat, and the hard hat would have given him a serious, professional air, which he thought he no longer had. But the Security Officer could do nothing for him in this regard, having in his possession neither a white coat nor a hard hat. It was the Guides’ job to provide External Elements with those items.

  By now, the Asian group was nothing but a memory on the horizon. The Investigator continued to follow the green line. He appreciated having a goal. His cold was getting better, even if his scarlet, swollen nose, an organ worthy of a clown, remained painful, as did his boiled foot, chafed by the rubber boot he was wearing, and the wound on his forehead, which was beginning to close, thanks to a sort of brownish crust whose design recalled a bishop’s crosier or a scorpion’s tail.