The Map and the Territory (24 page)

It was Sunday January the first, thought Jed; it was the end not only of a weekend but of a holiday period, and the start of a new year for all these people who were going home, slowly, probably cursing the slowness of the traffic, who would now reach the outermost Paris suburbs in a few hours, and who, after a short night’s sleep, would retake their places—subordinate or high-ranking—in the Western system of production. Near Melun-Sud the atmosphere filled with a whitish mist, and the cars slowed even further, crawling for more than three miles before the road gradually became unblocked near Melun-Centre. The outside temperature was barely above zero. He himself had been singled out, less than a month before, by
the law of supply and demand
. The wealth that had suddenly enveloped him like a rain of sparks had delivered him from any financial yoke, and he realized that he was now going to leave a world he’d never genuinely been a part of. His human relations, already few, would one by one dry up and disappear, and he would be in life like he was at present in the perfectly finished interior of his Audi A6 allroad: peaceful and joyless, completely neutral.

As soon as he opened the door of the Safrane, Jasselin knew that he was going to experience one of the worst moments of his career. Sitting on the grass a few steps from the cordon, his head in his hands, Lieutenant Ferber was prostrate and utterly still. It was the first time Jasselin had seen a colleague in such a state—in the detective branch, either they developed a hard surface that enabled them to control their emotions, or they resigned, and Ferber had been in the profession for over a decade. A few meters farther away, the three men from the Montargis gendarmerie were in a state of shock: two of them were kneeling in the grass, staring vacantly, and the third—probably their commanding officer; Jasselin thought he recognized the insignia of a brigadier—was swaying slightly, on the brink of passing out. Waves of stench emanated from the farm building, carried by a breeze that bent the buttercups on a bright green meadow. None of the four men had reacted when the car pulled up.

He went toward Ferber, who remained prostrate. With his pale complexion, his very pale blue eyes, and his black medium-length hair, Christian Ferber had at thirty the romantic physique of a sensitive, darkly handsome kid, which was quite unusual in the police; he was, however, a competent and stubborn policeman, one of those you preferred to work with. “Christian,” said Jasselin softly, then more loudly. Slowly, like a scolded child, Ferber looked up, with an expression of plaintive rancor.

“It’s as bad as that?” Jasselin gently asked.

“It’s worse. Worse than you can even imagine. Whoever did that … should not exist. He should be wiped off the face of the earth.”

“We’ll catch him, Christian. We always catch them.”

Ferber nodded and began to cry. All this was becoming very unusual.

After what seemed a very long time, Ferber stood up, still unsure on his feet, and led Jasselin over to a group of gendarmes. “My superior, Inspector Jasselin,” he said in a low voice. At these words, one of the younger gendarmes began to vomit at length, got his breath back, and then vomited on the ground again, without paying attention to anyone. This wasn’t very usual, either, for a gendarme. “Brigadier Bégaudeau,” his superior said mechanically, still swaying meaninglessly. In short, nothing could be expected from the Montargis gendarmerie.

“They’re going to be taken off the case,” said Ferber. “We’re the ones who started the investigation: the victim had a meeting in Paris he didn’t go to, so we were called. As he lived here, I asked them to check; and they found him.”

“If they found the body, they can ask to be given the case.”

“I don’t think they will.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I think you’ll agree with me on seeing … the state of the victim.” He stopped, shuddered, and again felt sick, but he had nothing to vomit, just a little bile.

Jasselin looked at the door to the house, which stood wide open. A cloud of flies had accumulated nearby; they hovered buzzing, as if awaiting their turn. From a fly’s point of view a human corpse is meat, pure and simple. More stinking air wafted over to them, and the stench was truly atrocious. If he was going to assess the crime scene without going to pieces, he should, he was clearly aware, adopt the fly’s point of view for a few minutes: the remarkable objectivity of the housefly,
Musca domestica
. Each female of
Musca domestica
can lay up to five hundred eggs, and occasionally a thousand. These eggs are white and measure around 1.2 mm long. After only a day, the larvae (maggots) leave them; they live and feed on organic matter (generally dead and in an advanced state of decomposition, such as a corpse, detritus, or excrement). The maggots
are pale white, about 3 to 9 mm long. They are slender in the mouth region and do not have legs. At the end of their third metamorphosis, the maggots crawl toward a cool, dry place and transform into pupae of a reddish color.

The adult flies live from two weeks to a month in nature, longer in laboratory conditions. After emerging from the pupa, the fly stops growing. Small flies aren’t young flies, but flies that didn’t get enough food in the larval stage.

Around thirty-six hours after its emergence from the pupa, the female is receptive to coupling. The male mounts on its back to inject sperm. Normally the female couples only once, storing the sperm in order to use it for several clutches of eggs. The males are territorial: they defend a certain territory against the intrusion of other males, and try to mount any female entering this territory.

“What’s more,” added Ferber, “the victim was famous.”

“Who was it?”

“Michel Houellebecq.”

At his superior’s lack of reaction, he explained: “He’s a writer. Well, he
was
a writer. He was very well known.”

Ah, well,
the famous writer
was now a nutritional support for numerous maggots, thought Jasselin in a brave attempt at
mind control
.

“You think I should go in there?” he finally asked his subordinate. “Go inside and see?”

Ferber hesitated at length before replying. The one responsible for an investigation should always examine the crime scene in person; Jasselin always insisted on that in the lectures he gave at the training institute for inspectors at Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or. A crime, and especially one that is villainous and brutal, is a very intimate thing, where the murderer necessarily expresses something of his personality and of his relationship with the victim. Hence in the crime scene there is almost always something individual and unique, practically a signature of the criminal; and this is particularly true, he would add, of atrocious or ritual crimes, of those for which you are naturally disposed to steer the investigation toward a psychopath.

“If I were you,” Ferber finally replied, “I’d wait for the crime scene investigators. They’ll have sterilized masks that will allow you, at least, to escape the smell.”

Jasselin reflected, then decided it was a good compromise.

“When do they arrive?”

“In two hours’ time.”

Brigadier Bégaudeau was still swaying to and fro, but he had reached a cruising speed in his swaying and no longer seemed in danger—he just had to go and lie down, that’s all, in a hospital bed or even at home, but after taking some strong tranquilizers. His two subordinates, still kneeling at his side, began to nod their heads and sway slowly in imitation of their chief. They’re rural gendarmes, Jasselin thought benevolently, authorized to issue speeding tickets or investigate minor credit-card fraud.

“If you don’t mind,” he told Ferber, “I’m going to take a walk around the village in the meantime. Just to soak in the atmosphere.”

“Go on, go on … You’re the one in charge.” Ferber smiled wearily. “I’ll look after everything, I’ll
receive the guests
in your absence.”

He sat back down on the grass, sniffed several times, and took a paperback from his jacket—it was
Aurélia
by Gérard de Nerval, Jasselin noticed. Then he turned around and started for the village—a tiny little village, no more than a group of sleepy homes in the heart of the forest.

Police detectives constitute the leadership and coordination corps of the national police force, which is a superior technical corps with an interministerial vocation answerable to the Ministry of the Interior. They are responsible for elaborating and putting into effect policing doctrines and managing the various services, for which they assume operational and organic responsibility. They have authority over the personnel appointed to these services. They participate in the design, execution, and evaluation of the programs and projects relative to the prevention of insecurity and the struggle against crime. They have the magistrate’s powers conferred on them by law. They are given uniforms.

The remuneration at the start of their career is on the order of 2,898 euros a month.

Jasselin was walking slowly along a road that led to a copse that was of an abnormally intense green color, and where snakes and flies probably proliferated—even, in the worst case, scorpions and horseflies. Scorpions were not rare in the Yonne, and some ventured as far as the limits of the Loiret. He had read that on Gendarmeries Info before he left, an excellent site, which put only carefully checked information online. In short, Jasselin thought sadly, in the countryside, contrary to appearances, you could expect to find anything, and frequently the worst. The
village itself had given him a very bad impression: the white houses with black shingle roofs, impeccably clean; the church, pitilessly restored; the supposedly playful information signboards—it all gave the impression of a décor, a fake village re-created for a television series. What’s more, he hadn’t met a single inhabitant. In such an environment, he could be sure that no one would have seen or heard anything. The gathering of statements immediately seemed an almost impossible task.

But he turned back, rather through idleness. If I meet a human being, just one, he told himself with childlike enthusiasm, I’ll solve this murder. For an instant, he thought he was lucky to catch sight of a café, Chez Lucie: the door onto the main street was open. He hurried over in this direction, but when he was about to go in, an arm (a woman’s, perhaps that of Lucie herself?) emerged to shut the door violently. He heard the lock click closed twice. He could’ve forced his way into the establishment and demand she give a statement, he had the necessary police powers, but the approach seemed to him premature. Anyway, it would be someone from Ferber’s team who would look after it. Ferber himself excelled at gathering statements: no one, on meeting him, felt they were dealing with a cop, and even after he had shown his card people forgot it instantly (he rather gave the impression of being a psychologist, or an ethnology research assistant) and confided in him with disconcerting ease.

Just next to Chez Lucie, the rue Martin-Heidegger descended toward a part of the village he had not yet explored. He went down it, meditating on the almost absolute power that mayors had been given to name the streets of their towns. At the corner of the impasse Leibniz he stopped in front of a grotesque painting, with strident acrylic colors on a tin sheet, which portrayed a man with a duck’s head and an excessively large penis; his torso and his legs were covered with a thick brown fur. An information board told him that he was standing in front of the “Muzé’rétique,” dedicated to
art brut
and pictorial productions by the residents of the Montargis mental home. His admiration for the inventiveness of the municipality grew more when, on arriving at the place Parménide, he discovered a brand-new parking lot: the lines of white paint delimiting the parking spaces could not have been more than a week old, and it was equipped with an electronic toll machine that accepted European and Japanese credit cards. A sole car was parked
there for the moment, a sea-green Maserati GranTurismo, and Jasselin noted at random its license plate. In the course of an investigation, as he always said to his students at Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or, it is fundamental to take notes—at this stage of his exposé he would take out his own notebook, a standard 105-by-148-mm Rhodia pad. You should never let a day of an investigation pass by without taking at least one note, he insisted, even if the fact noted seemed to be totally lacking in importance. The rest of the investigation would almost always confirm this lack of importance, but this wasn’t the essential point: the essential point was to remain active, to maintain a minimum intellectual activity, for a completely inactive policeman becomes discouraged, and therefore becomes incapable of reacting when important facts do start to manifest themselves.

Curiously, Jasselin was thus unknowingly formulating recommendations almost identical to those that Houellebecq had given on the subject of his work as a writer, the one time he agreed to teach a creative-writing workshop, at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, in April 2011.

In the southerly direction the village ended at the Immanuel Kant roundabout, a purely urbanistic creation of great aesthetic sobriety—a simple circle of totally gray tarmac which led to nothing, enabled access to no road, and around which no house had been built. A bit farther on, a river flowed slowly. The sun shot its rays, more and more intensely, on the meadows. Bordered with aspen, the river offered a relatively shaded space. Jasselin followed its course for a little more than two hundred meters before running into an obstacle: a wide and inclined concrete wall, whose upper part was at the level of the riverbed, fed a diversion channel which, he realized after a few meters, was more of an extended pond.

He sat down in the thick grass on the edge of the pond. Of course he didn’t know it, but this part of the world where he sat, tired, suffering from lumbar pains and a digestion that was becoming more difficult with the passing years, was the exact place that had served as a theater for Houellebecq’s games as a child. Most often they were solitary games. In his mind Houellebecq was simply a
case
, one that he could already feel was difficult. When
personalities
are murdered, the public’s expectation of a solution is high, and its propensity to denigrate the police and attack their inefficiency becomes manifest after a few days; the only thing
worse that could happen to you was to have on your hands the murder of a child, and worse still the murder of a
baby
. In the case of babies it was awful; a baby murderer would have to be apprehended immediately, before even turning the street corner. A delay of forty-eight hours was already considered unacceptable by the public. He looked at his watch: he had been away for more than an hour, and he chided himself for having left Ferber on his own. The surface of the pond was covered in duckweed; its color was opaque, unhealthy.