We’ve just escaped from the crowds of tourists inundating Saint Mark’s Square. They are not Japanese. Chinese, I suppose, content to buy tiny souvenirs from the displays, without photographing anything. “I’ve even recognized a few words in Mandarin,” Stan ventures, having temporarily abandoned his passion for 9999. From now on, he says he’s hooked on foreign languages, in particular the language that sings in his headphones, which provide a refuge he likes. With his absolute pitch, he is going to make rapid progress, Astro prognosticates.
As for me, I empty myself of passing time, my eyes full of Titian.
I don’t really succeed. The globalized wave that grabbed us a while ago, in front of the Campanile, is still oppressive. Stan and I are not of that world. These fake travelers do not inhale the scents of the city, the colors, the lines, the lights, the years incrusted in the stones, the bells ringing the celebrations, nothing. They don’t listen to the summer disseminated by the ruby-red sun at some billions of light years from another galaxy that my Astro is studying I don’t know where. They are in a hurry to buy, to shout, to eat, to telephone, to leave. To fabricate memories, to save them. It’s just an impression, a sensation that separates me from them, distances me. I am ashamed: I should be sometimes.
“What can they be thinking of …?” It happens that Stan formulates my ideas.
His voice suspends the noise. He absorbs my states like a sponge, is even able to formulate them. We hear the beauty that surrounds us and makes a summer in our soul.
“Do you remember the Universal Exposition in Shanghai?”
Our two synchronized antennas capture the same thing, even in that dreary Expo of a world without a world that we visited at the other end of the world.
Immense plain strewn with more or less massive cubes, open doors of reunited nations. Blasé visitors enter and leave these containers filled with local expertise. Millions of dollars or euros gobbled up, globalization exhibits itself: the cultures of Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, limited to their memory of dead matter. Did Big Brother disappear? He continues to run rampant, in secret. The experience yields to the process, as they say: labyrinth, programs, schedules, rows of entities conserved for absolutely nothing, as far as the eye can see.
The guide’s whistle returns the Sichuan peasants to their coach. Here they provide for the transportation of groups, not of individuals: “No individuals,” the man with the whistle warns us, in English. He finds our situation amusing—what a crazy idea to travel so far without a tour operator!
I try to appease him: we are a group, just a little group, since we are two. The whistle becomes optimistic; he finds us an interpreter sporting the same smile but even broader. “A taxi stand is situated at the other end of the Expo. To get there, it’s a bit of a trot … The equivalent of the fifth arrondissement in Paris!” She has been there. “The most charming of all the Parisian arrondissements … do you know it?” And how! No connection to the Long March … I thank them: xièxie in Chinese.
That night in Shanghai, looking for the exit among the multicultural bric-a-brac, I thought I understood Edith Stein. While Nazism was infesting the world, the philosopher abandoned philosophy to become a Carmelite, then let herself be immolated in Auschwitz: bear witness, engrave a memory, save her people, for later, for ever. Sublime Edith. Too heroic, too melancholy for Nivi the swimmer, the mother courage. What to do, then? Row against the current?
“Can we go see the clock again? They’ve put on a big exhibit about science at Versailles.”
Stan always finds the solution, even in the dusty kingdom of cultural diversity. I am sick and tired of crisscrossing globalization; I would be glad to stand once and for all in the Clock Cabinet. I would lean on Apollo’s window and dream all of history in the present, here and now.
39
SUPERLUMINAL SPEED
Astro bombards my Blackberry with a series of photos of Einstein. The last one shows the famous genius at the blackboard solving an equation about the density of the Milky Way. His moustache is tousled; his overheated eye pulsates in my direction. Astro’s own lab is bubbling over: he announces the astonishing news.
“Superluminal neutrinos surpass the speed of light by sixty nanoseconds (sixty billionths of a second)! Do you understand? Six kilometers per second faster than light! Was Einstein mistaken? That’s question number one. There are no others. With this we are at the very heart of things, aren’t we? I remind you that every second, sixty-five billion neutrinos emitted by the Sun pass through every square centimeter of the Earth’s surface, including you and me. And that only one in ten thousand billion of these particles is intercepted by an atom of our planet, potentially by you and me. But we’re going to grab it, damn it all! ILY.”
All the labs in the world are ecstatic. From the CERN in Geneva, to the Gran Sasso in Italy, along with the international experiment Opera, the APC (AstroParticule et Cosmologie) at the Denis Diderot University, not forgetting the Vatican Observatory on the Alban Hills near Rome and the United States, in Arizona, where Theo is. The lives of particles illuminate the lives of stars and vice versa. But this news upsets everything! We’ll have to revise the theory of relativity. Or at least find some clever way to twin it with these new facts, which let us glimpse another matter beyond the supposedly impassable limits of the universe as Einstein defined them!
And what if they are wrong?
“Of course we can be wrong,” Theo continues, “mistakes are part of research, some even open new avenues of research, permit unexpected discoveries.”
My A accepts uncertainty: he’s passionate about enigmas, seeks astonishment, delights in surprises.
Fine. Why not? But what will that change for the rest of us? How does this concern us, you, Theo, me, Nivi, the anesthetized crowds at the Universal Exposition at Shanghai, Justine who doesn’t know how to read, Marianne with her baby by no one knows who, the motorcycle cops on strike at la Concorde? These superluminal species and their nanoseconds are of interest to no one. The little world of utopians who had put God in the Big Bang or the Big Crunch will not hesitate to locate Him from now on in the superluminal neutrino. Couldn’t this new discovery that transcends matter and all existence be the physical proof of the miracle? As rare as genius or ecstasy? As improbable as Eternal Life?
No. Astro is not into that fiction. Quite simply, neutrinos, for him, evoke the rapidity of our agreements.
“Think about it a bit: our thoughts, sensations, excitations traverse the density of the earth’s crust and the randomness of timepieces and unite us in a few dozen nanoseconds. I’m not making this up! We only have to think about one another to touch each other and reach pleasure at luminal, maybe superluminal, speed. Is it banal, when we love each other? No, it’s rare. It’s unique. It’s us. An experience we write as ‘ILY’ both dematerializes us and materializes us. Superluminal Nivi and Theo adjust their incompatible diversities nevertheless correlated by that power of desire that the ancients called love.”
He writes me this e-mail the same day they realize their calculations are incorrect. The miracle matter does not exist. Not yet! It’s of no importance! Let’s continue our research! As a consolation or an inextinguishable desire for exploration, Theo lands like a lover on our planet. Do I believe it? Does Astro believe it? He looks for new words. All lovers do. Each love is incommensurable, without comparison or qualification. Unless it’s by stellar, quantic, utopian words. What does it matter: they are ours; they carry us at six kilometers per second faster than light. Tomorrow other neutrinos will exhibit an even greater celerity, just wait and see.
Astro’s buddies will tell him he’s reversed into poetry, no connection with astrophysics. They don’t know that metaphors are seeds of language launched at top speed, neutrinos that interpenetrate and separate at a speed no “Double Chooz” (that is, particle accelerator) has yet detected. It’s in process. No one knows about it. But we two hold the key to love, the vibration of time. The encounter is instantaneous. Pleasure
also. A sort of particular reason: the raison d’être.
40
INESTIMABLE TROPHY
The Owl is not involved. Poor woman! I don’t know why I keep harping on her. “Analyze it,” Astro sneers. On the other hand, a cluster of presumptions weighs on Aubane Dechartre. Rilsky interrogates me in depth, acting casual (I know him). It seems the brains of the gang is the brother of my informer, Thibault Dechartre, an antiquarian in the Gulf affiliated with certain sovereign families in the region.
The sideways glance of the police chief signifies his confidence, which doesn’t prevent him from arguing his point: “Needless to say, Nivi, the Persian Gulf has always been a stopping point for travelers, through the centuries. Which is to say, a den of traffickers. People have been talking about it much too much ever since the French government lent its support for the creation of a universal museum there. Mind-blowing! An aerial vessel in the sand. Flanked by hotels, restaurants, gardens, with a microclimate as well, because the action takes place on a little island, if you can imagine, Saadiyat, connected to the capital by a sort of dike. The construction site is colossal! Oh yes, Abu Dhabi is no longer reduced to its stadiums or its seven-hundred-meter towers … Earthquake, new epoch? Let’s go! … And since heat devours the place, we help them protect the accumulated treasures ranging from high antiquity to the twentieth century. The fiber-reinforced white concrete of the site will be topped by a superb dome in pierced steel that filters the sun in a rainfall of light. Magical, isn’t it? The architect’s magic projects only 2 or 3 percent of solar light; imagine the investment! All our museums, our cleverest art patrons, are keeping an eye out. Naturally Versailles is among the sources. Our sources, the ones we entrust them with. You have no idea, my dear, how many petrodollars are flowing in this furnace! And imaginations that consequently catch fire!”
Ergo, a guy like Thibault Dechartre will not let this business pass him by—the great upheaval taking place, in a word. He’s in on it! A true expert, this fellow, who lets nothing faze him. The police chief knows what he’s talking about. Does Islam constitute an obstacle? Don’t believe it! That pendulous member of 9999? Those people aren’t fooled. And for good reason: the Louvre label was lent to them for thirty years in exchange for four hundred million euros, to which are added twenty-five million for the sponsorship. It’s not enough, but that’s not the point. Because in the wings—let’s be clear about this, the police chief is only talking about offstage—shady areas exist. They always do: I ought to know that …
What’s his point? Here my voluble friend returns to his pose as a not so much aloof as perfidiously mysterious detective.
Aubane’s brother is often seen at the Hypnosis Café during his stops in Paris. Substances and alcohol.
“Which means?”
“We’re on it.”
“Dechartre’s lawyer maintains there is nothing in the file that accuses his client.” I’m repeating information that Marianne takes pleasure in transferring to me minute by minute.
“That’s his job.”
Infiltration of security through the intermediary of Aubane, who doesn’t suspect a thing—white as snow. The guards are bribed, and the object is exfiltrated on a day when, as if by chance, there is construction going on in that particular wing. One more large crate being moved out of the Château is not too remarkable if the aforementioned security is duly paid to be distracted for the time needed. Rilsky seems sure of his scenario. To be verified. But there’s a problem.
“The object has evaporated. No one is claiming the robbery, needless to say. The nutcase who gives himself the gift of the royal clock at home, so he can contemplate it at will—you can imagine, that marvel, all set to strike midnight before the year 10,000, just for him—or for her—that creature is not in any hurry to make himself known urbi et orbi. Of course not. He has all the time in the world!” Rilsky, ecstatic.
“You’re telling me that the robbery was not committed by an institution, a museum or whatever, possibly with an eye to bargain or blackmail, but by an individual, by someone? Primo: I sort of suspected as much, poor little me who knows nothing about it but at least as much as you.” Nivi never tires of teasing him; good old Rilsky, who doesn’t like to remember that she has often been a much more perspicacious detective than his own staff. “Secundo: there’s no chance of seeing the clock again at Versailles, is that it? The enthusiast wants it for himself alone. And his booty will remain a secret trophy until the end of time. Unless the eventual heirs of the ultrarich thief decide differently. One day, why not, and even … Or, tertio: the clock on exhibit was a fake …” I try to think.
“It was certified, not fake!” Rilsky is full of pride: at least one thing is settled. “As for the ultrarich fellow, that’s not saying much. In your opinion, what does a masterpiece like that fetch today? Knowing that at least half, if not three-quarters, has to be distributed to the team of operatives who laid hands on your Passemant.”
“No idea. Cezanne’s The Card Players went for … how much? 191 million euros, I think, paid in cash by Qatar. An absolute record! As for the auctions of the Picassos at Sotheby’s, not my department … The last two paintings sold by his granddaughter Marina came to something like 19.7 million, if I’m not mistaken. But Passemant … I’m stumped!”
“According to our experts, not less than 100 million, objectively speaking. Not so sure, in my opinion … Since it’s not an object of speculation like the paintings you like … Well, let’s say 50 million!” Rilsky doesn’t know any more than I.
Marianne does not agree at all. “One million at the very most, I tell you, not even … That’s already too much … All right, two, to please Nivi … What? … It’s simple, really, if there’s no market, there’s no value, right?”
She’s right. But not in this exact case. Hence the theft. Unlike Sotheby’s, the value of the Passemant includes risk value: foil the security, transport, hide, sell, hide again. An enormous part of the operation that only the police chief and his “experts” can evaluate. Which implies, at the top of the chain, someone somewhere. An obsessional who imagines the Hall of Mirrors, marquises and wigs, Beloved or not-loved-at-all king, a last minuet before the guillotine, and a whole world of scientists who know how to measure the sky and the earth, who gravitate around him and his courtesans … A megaspectacle … Priceless!
I stop projecting myself into the affair. After all, I know nothing about the thief … I’m giving myself a headache … And why not? Rilsky himself is not far from saying you have to be crazy to steal such an unsellable object. That’s not exactly my thinking, but okay … Furthermore, the police chief suspects nothing of my affinity with Passemant …
I just answer that the thing is priceless. Such a spread, between 100 and 1 million—something’s wrong, someone’s wrong. Or else the thieves come from another planet. The police chief is totally in agreement with me.
“I’ll tell you what I think. The guy behind this heist is necessarily a foreigner. To be infatuated with such an item at Versailles—you won’t find anyone in France for that. On this point there is no doubt … Moreover, the associates of the elegant Dechartre who piloted the affair are pros. They disarmed the identification chip installed in the clock—child’s play. But to get the booty out of the Château without getting caught, construction or no construction, they have to have accomplices, and they succeeded … What doesn’t make sense is the export … 9999 will never make it past any border! Otherwise we’d have to despair of our surveillance programs, which go over everything that moves on the planet with a fine-toothed comb. I’m speaking now of Interpol … My dear friend, it’s not only the e-mails from the Élysée Palace or the White House that are under surveillance through the Internet and other providers of electronic services, I’m not telling you anything new … The fact is that as of today we have lost track of the object. But nothing proves that it has left the Hexagon … All our customs stations have been given its description, and the external boundaries of the Sche
ngen Area are bolted shut, triple locked. Red alert, needless to say!”
41
SIGNED, PASSEMANT
Astro was not in Chile. Or actually, after a single week spent at the European Central Observatory at Vitacura, not far from Santiago, he had precipitously left his telescope to shut himself in at the Notarial Registry of the National Archives in Paris. Nivi’s passion for his improbable relative, the homonymous Passemant, had amused him at first, then annoyed him. Until that night in Vitacura when he changed his mind while studying the birth of a new planet resembling the Earth.
Theo was in the process of confirming the discovery made by his colleagues at the SETI Institute of the NASA Ames Research Center: Kepler-186f, an exoplanet of a size comparable to ours, on which water could be present. Could life exist in those parts? “It’s only a matter of time before we know if our galaxy contains a multitude of planets similar to ours or if we are an exception,” he wrote to Nivi.
Was he, Theo Passemant, an exception to the norm? This question, however banal, had until then never crossed his mind. An avalanche of reasoning, of implacable logic, was to follow, determining him at last to take an interest in the notorious clockmaker. He’d had enough of hearing her speak of the “clock by the same name.” He wanted to find out for himself, more than by Nivi and if necessary in spite of her.
Theo’s father, Jean Passemant, had never shown any taste for family trees. So a vague ancestor may have had his moment of glory at Versailles, what’s the big deal? “It was May ’68, a little before, a little after, nobody saw things that way, your father didn’t either,” his mother would repeat unceasingly, and Theo understood her. He had always understood her … until that day.
The Enchanted Clock Page 21
