The Map and the Territory (29 page)

He put on the television: it was time for the news. Michou jumped up at his side on the sofa. After the description of a particularly deadly bomb attack by Palestinian suicide bombers in Hebron, the reporter moved on to the crisis that had been shaking the financial markets for several days, and which threatened, according to some experts, to be even worse than that of 2008; on the whole, a very typical broadcast. He was about to switch channels when Hélène, leaving her kitchen, came to sit on the
arm of the sofa. He put down the remote; this was her domain after all, he thought, so she was perhaps slightly interested.

After a tour of the main financial markets, the program returned to an expert on the panel. Hélène listened to him closely, an undefinable smile on her lips. Jasselin looked at her breasts through the neckline of the dress: certainly they were siliconed breasts, the implants had been done ten years before, but it was a success, the surgeon had done a good job. Jasselin was completely in favor of siliconed breasts, which demonstrate in the woman a certain
erotic goodwill
, which is, if truth be told, the most important thing in the world on the erotic level, and delays by ten or even twenty years the disappearance of the couple’s sex life. And then there were marvels, small miracles: at the swimming pool, during their only stay in a HotelClub, which they had spent in the Dominican Republic (Michel, their first bichon, almost didn’t forgive them, and they vowed they would never repeat the experience, unless they found a HotelClub that admitted dogs—but, alas, he never found one), in short, during this sojourn, he had marveled at Hélène’s breasts as she lay on her back by the swimming pool, pointing skywards in an audacious negation of gravity.

Siliconed breasts are ridiculous when the woman’s face is atrociously wrinkled and the rest of her body degraded, flabby, and fat. But this was not the case with Hélène—far from it. Her body had remained slim, her buttocks firm, scarcely drooping, and her thick and curly auburn hair still gracefully cascaded upon her rounded shoulders. She was a very beautiful woman, and he had been very lucky indeed.

In the long term, of course, any siliconed breast becomes ridiculous. But in the long term you no longer think about these things. You think of cervical cancer, of a hemorrhage of the aorta, and other similar subjects. You also think of the transmission of inheritance, of sharing out property among presumptive heirs. You have concerns more serious than siliconed breasts; but they hadn’t yet got there, he thought, not completely. They would perhaps make love that evening (or rather tomorrow morning, he preferred the morning, that put him in a good mood for the rest of the day). You could say that they
still had some beautiful years
ahead of them.

The economics item had just ended, and they now passed on to the preview of a romantic comedy which was being released in France the following day. “Did you hear what that expert said?” asked Hélène. “Did you see his forecasts?” No, in fact he had listened to nothing at all, he’d just looked at her breasts; but he chose not to interrupt her.

“In a week’s time, we’ll see that all his forecasts were wrong. They’ll call another expert, even the same one, and he’ll make new forecasts, with the same self-assurance …” She was shaking her head, upset, even indignant. “How can a discipline that can’t even manage to make verifiable forecasts be considered a science?”

Jasselin hadn’t read Popper, he had no valid reply to make to her; he simply put his hand on her thigh. She smiled at him and said, “It’ll be ready in a second,” and returned to her cooking, but touched on the subject again during the meal. Crime, she told him, seemed to her a deeply human act, linked of course to the darkest zones of the human, but human all the same. Art, to take another example, was linked to everything: to dark zones, luminous zones, and intermediary zones. The economy was linked to almost nothing, except to what was most machine-like, predictable, and mechanical in the human being. Not only was it not a science, but it wasn’t an art. It was, after all is said and done, almost nothing at all.

He didn’t agree, and he told her so. Having dealt with criminals for a long time, he could tell her that they were certainly the most mechanical and predictable individuals you could imagine. In almost all cases they killed for money, and uniquely for money; besides, it was what usually made them so easy to catch. On the contrary, almost no one, ever, worked
uniquely
for money. There were always other motivations: the interest you had in your work, the esteem that could come with it, relations of sympathy with your colleagues … And almost no one had entirely rational buying behavior, either. It was probably this fundamental uncertainty surrounding the motivations of both producers and consumers which made economic theories so hazardous and, at the end of the day, so false, while criminal detection could be approached as a science, or at least as a rational discipline. The existence of irrational economic agents had always been the
dark side
, the secret fault in any economic theory. Even if she had distanced herself a lot from her work, economic theory still represented her contribution to the household
budget and her status at the university; symbolic benefits, for the most part. Jean-Pierre was right: nor did she herself behave in any way as a
rational economic agent
. She relaxed on the sofa and looked at her little dog, who was resting on its back, belly in the air, ecstatic, in the near left corner of the living-room carpet.

Later that evening, Jasselin looked again at the Investigation Brigade’s summary of the contents of the victim’s computer. Their first remark was that Houellebecq, despite what he had repeated in numerous interviews, was still writing; he was even writing a lot. That said, what he was writing was quite strange: it resembled poetry, or political proclamations, and Jasselin understood almost nothing of the extracts reproduced in the report. We’ll have to send all that to the publisher, he thought.

The rest of the computer didn’t contain much that was useful. Houellebecq used the address-book function of his Mac. The content of his address book was reproduced in its entirety, and it was pathetic: there were, in total, twenty-three names, of which twelve were of workmen, doctors, and other providers of services. He also used the diary function, and that wasn’t any better; the notes were typically along the lines of “garbage bags” or “fuel delivery.” When all was said and done, he had rarely seen someone with such an awful fucking life. Even his Internet Explorer revealed nothing very exciting. He visited no pedophile or even pornographic sites; his most daring connections concerned sites for female erotic lingerie, such as Beautiful and Sexy or liberette.com. So, the poor little old man contented himself with leering at girls in tight miniskirts or transparent T-shirts—Jasselin was almost ashamed to have read that page. The crime, undoubtedly, wasn’t going to be easy to solve. It is their vices that lead men to their murders, their vices or their money. Money Houellebecq had, although less than you might have thought, but nothing, apparently, had been stolen—they had even found in the house his checkbook, credit card, and a wallet containing several hundred euros. He fell asleep when he tried to reread Houellebecq’s political proclamations, as if he hoped to find in them an explanation or a meaning.

The following day, they went through the eleven names in the address book that were of a personal nature. Apart from Teresa Cremisi and Frédéric Beigbeder, whom they had already questioned, the nine other people were women.

If SMS’s are kept by operators for only a year, there is no limit concerning e-mails, especially when the user has chosen, as was the case with Houellebecq, to store them not on his personal computer but in a disk space allocated by his provider; in this case, even a change of equipment allows you to keep your messages. On the server me.com, Houellebecq had a personal storage space of forty gigaoctets; at the rate of his current exchanges, he would have needed seven thousand years to exhaust it.

There is a real legal fuzziness concerning the status of e-mails, as to whether they qualify as private correspondence or not. Without delay, Jasselin put the whole team onto reading Houellebecq’s e-mails, all the more so as they would soon have to go through letters rogatory: an examining magistrate would have to be appointed, and if prosecutors and their deputies generally showed themselves to be easygoing, examining magistrates could be a formidable pain in the ass, even for murder investigations.

Working almost twenty hours per day—if Houellebecq had a very reduced Internet correspondence immediately before his death, it had
been at other times much more substantial, and at certain periods, especially just after the publication of a book, he had received an average of thirty e-mails per day—the team succeeded by the following Thursday in locating the nine women. The geographical variety was impressive: a Spanish woman, a Russian, a Chinese, a Czech, two Germans—but three French women all the same. Jasselin then remembered that he was dealing with an author who had been translated throughout the world. “That looks pretty good,” he told Lartigue, who had just finished drawing up the list. He said it rather to put his mind at rest, much like you’d make a predictable joke; in reality, he couldn’t muster a drop of envy for the writer. They were all former mistresses, the nature of their exchanges left no doubt—sometimes mistresses from very long ago, the relationship in certain cases going back more than thirty years.

These women turned out to be easy to contact: with all of them he exchanged anodyne and gentle e-mails, describing the small or great sadnesses of their lives, occasionally also their joys.

The three French women immediately agreed to come to the quai des Orfèvres—one of them, however, lived in Perpignan, the second in Bordeaux, and the third in Orléans. As for the foreign women, they didn’t say no, but just asked for a bit more time to make arrangements.

Jasselin and Ferber received them separately in order to compare their impressions; and their impressions were remarkably identical. All of these women still felt a great tenderness for Houellebecq. “We wrote by e-mail quite often,” they said, though Jasselin abstained from saying that he had already read them. Never was the possibility of another meeting considered, but you felt that if one had been necessary, they would have agreed to it. It was terrifying, he thought, absolutely terrifying: women do not forget their
exes
, that’s what appeared evident. Hélène herself had had exes; even though he’d met her young there had still been exes. What would happen if their paths crossed again? It’s a disadvantage of police investigations: you find yourself confronted, despite yourself, with difficult personal problems. These women had known Houellebecq, some of them very well; Jasselin felt that they wouldn’t say any more about it; he expected it, as women remain very discreet about these matters, and even if they’re no longer in love the memory of their
love remains infinitely precious to them. But in any case, they had not seen him for years, some not in decades. The very idea that they would have thought of murdering him, or known someone likely to think of murdering him, was grotesque.

A jealous husband or lover after so many years’ separation? He didn’t believe it for a second. When you know that your wife has had exes, and you have the misfortune of being jealous, you also know that there would be no point in killing them—that would only put salt on the wound. Well, all the same, he was going to put someone in the team onto it—without forcing it, just part-time. He didn’t believe it, certainly; but he also knew that sometimes, you get it wrong. That said, when Ferber asked him, “Do we go any further with the foreign women? Of course that will cost money, we’ll have to send people, but we’re justified in doing it, after all it’s a case of murder,” he replied without hesitation that no, it wasn’t worth it. At that moment he was in his office and randomly shuffling, as he must have done dozens of times in the last fortnight, photos of the floor of the crime scene—branching, interweaving traces of blood—and those of the people present at the writer’s funeral—technically impeccable close-ups of human beings with sad faces.

“You look worried, Jean-Pierre …” remarked Ferber.

“Yes, I think we’re floundering, and I no longer know what to do next. Take a seat, Christian.”

Ferber looked for a moment at his superior, who continued to mechanically shuffle the photos, without looking at them in detail, a bit like a pack of cards.

“What are you looking for in these photos, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I feel there’s something here, but I couldn’t tell you what.”

“We might try and consult Lorrain.”

“Isn’t he retired?”

“More or less. I don’t understand his exact status, but he comes in a few hours every week. In any case, he hasn’t been replaced.”

Guillaume Lorrain was just a simple crime squad officer, but he possessed that strange aptitude of having a perfect, photographic visual memory: he just had to see a photograph of someone, even if it was only
in a newspaper, to recognize it ten or twenty years later. He was the one they called on before the appearance of the Visio software, which allowed instantaneous cross-referencing with the crime database; but quite obviously his particular gift was not restricted to offenders, but to anyone he might, in certain circumstances, have seen in a photo.