“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.
26
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.
27
When he returned to the scene of the crime, the temperature had fallen slightly. He also had the impression that the flies were less numerous. Stretched out on the grass, his rolled-up jacket serving as a pillow, Ferber was still engrossed in Aurélia. He no
w looked like he had been invited on a day out in the countryside. “He’s made of strong stuff, that boy,” Jasselin said to himself, doubtless for the twentieth time since he’d known him.
“Have the gendarmes left?” he asked, surprised.
“Someone came to look after them. People from the psychological-assistance unit—they came from the hospital in Montargis.”
“Already?”
“Yes, that astonished me too. The work of a gendarme has become harder these last years, they now have almost as many suicides as we do; but you have to accept that psychological support has made a lot of progress.”
“How do you know that? The statistics on suicides?”
“Don’t you ever read the Internal Bulletin of the Forces of Law and Order?”
“No.” He plopped down on the grass next to his colleague. “I don’t read enough in general.” Shadows were beginning to lengthen between the lime trees. Jasselin regained hope; he had almost forgotten the materiality of the corpse, a few meters from there, when the Peugeot Partner of the crime scene investigators drew up noisily in front of the barrier. The two men got out immediately, perfectly synchronized, wearing those ridiculous suits which made you think of a nuclear decontamination team.
Jasselin hated the investigators from the criminal records office, their way of always functioning in pairs, in their specially equipped little cars stuffed with expensive and incomprehensible machines, their open contempt for the hierarchy of the crime squad. But in truth the people from the criminal records office in no way sought to be loved; on the contrary, they did their utmost to differentiate themselves as much as possible from ordinary policemen, showing in all circumstances the insulting arrogance of the technician toward the layman—this no doubt in order to justify the growing inflation of their annual budget. It’s true that their methods had made spectacular progress, and that they now succeeded in taking fingerprints or DNA samples in conditions inconceivable only a few years before, but to what extent could they deserve the credit for this progress? They would have been completely incapable of inventing or even improving the equipment that enabled them to obtain those results; they just used them, which demanded no particular intelligence or talent, just appropriate technical training that it would have been more effective to give directly to the policemen on the ground. At least that was the thesis that Jasselin defended, regularly and up to now unsuccessfully, in the annual reports he submitted to his superiors. While he had no hope of being heard—the division between the services was ancient and established—he did it mainly to calm his nerves.
Ferber had got up, elegant and affable, to explain the situation to the two men. Their brief nods were calculated to show their impatience and professionalism. At a given moment, Ferber pointed to Jasselin, no doubt to identify him as the leader of the investigation. They made no reply and didn’t even make a step in his direction, just put on their masks. Jasselin had never been especially strict on questions of hierarchical precedence. Never had he demanded strict observance of the formal deference to which he was entitled as an inspector. No one could say he had, but these two clowns were beginning to exasperate him. Accentuating the natural heaviness of his gait, like the oldest monkey of the tribe, he went toward them breathing heavily, waited for a salute which did not come, and announced, “I’m coming with you,” in a tone that needed no reply. One of them gave a start: obviously they were used to doing their business in peace, going into the crime scene without letting anyone else approach the perimeter, taking their absurd little notes on their handheld terminals. But what could they do? Object? They could do absolutely nothing, and one of them handed him a mask. As he put it on, he became aware again of the reality of the crime, and even more so on approaching the building. He let them go ahead, walking a few steps ahead of him, and noted with a vague satisfaction that the two zombies stopped dead, afraid, at the entrance to the house. He joined and then overtook them, strolling into the living room, albeit uncertainly. “I am the living body of the law,” he said to himself. The luminosity began to fade. These surgical masks were amazingly effective, and the smells were almost completely blocked. Behind him he no longer felt or heard the two crime scene investigators, who, emboldened, had penetrated the living room, but stopped almost immediately in the doorway. “I am the body of the law, the imperfect body of the moral law,” he repeated to himself, a little like a mantra, before accepting, before looking fully at, what his eyes had already seen.
A policeman reasons on the basis of the body. His training demands that: he is trained to note and describe the position of the body, the wounds inflicted on the body, the state of conservation of the body; but here, strictly speaking, there wasn’t a body. He turned around and saw behind him the two investigators from the criminal records office who began to nod and sway to and fro, exactly like the gendarmes of Montargis. The head of the victim was intact, cut off cleanly and placed on one of the armchairs in front of the fireplace. A small pool of blood had formed on the dark green velvet. Facing him on the sofa, the head of a big black dog had also been cleanly cut off. The rest was a massacre, a senseless carnage of strips of flesh scattered across the floor. However, neither the head of the man nor that of the dog was frozen in an expression of horror, but rather one of incredulity and anger. In the midst of the strips of mixed human and canine meat, a clear passage, fifty centimeters wide, led to the fireplace, filled with bones to which some remains of flesh were still attached. Jasselin went in carefully, thinking that it was probably the murderer who had made this passage, and turned around; with his back to the fireplace, he looked around the living room, which could have been about sixty square meters. The whole surface of the carpet was spattered with trails of blood, which in places formed complex arabesques. The strips of flesh in themselves, of a red color which sometimes became blackish, did not seem arranged at random, but followed motifs that were difficult to decrypt; he felt it was like being in the presence of a puzzle. No traces of footprints were visible: the murderer had acted methodically, first cutting the strips of skin that he wanted to place in the corners of the room, then returning gradually toward the center while leaving a path to the exit. They would need photos to help try and re-create the design of the whole. Jasselin glanced at the two investigators from the criminal records office: one of them continued to sway to and fro like a madman; the other, in an effort to get a grip on himself, had taken a digital camera out of his bag and was holding it at arm’s length, but didn’t seem able to switch it on. Jasselin took out his cell phone.
“Christian? It’s Jean-Pierre. I’ve a favor to ask you.”
“I’m listening.”
“You have to come and get these criminal records guys, they’re already out of action for now, and what’s more there’s a special thing to be done with photos in this case. They mustn’t do just close-ups as usual—I need views of every part of the room, and if possible of the room as a whole. But I can’t brief them immediately, we’ll have to wait until they come back to their senses a little.”
“I’ll look after it … In fact, the team’s arriving soon. They just called me from outside Montargis. They’ll be here in ten minutes.”
Jasselin hung up pensively: that boy continued to astonish him. Ferber’s entire team was arriving, a few hours after the fact, and probably in personal vehicles. His ethereal, evanescent appearance was indeed deceptive: he had complete authority over his team, and was undoubtedly the best team leader Jasselin had ever had under his orders. Two minutes later, he saw him discreetly enter the back of the room, patting the shoulders of the two investigators to usher them gently out of the house. Jasselin was nearing the end of his career, having scarcely a year left, which he could perhaps prolong to two or three, four at most. He implicitly knew, and at their bimonthly interviews his division commander sometimes made this explicit, that what was expected from him now was no longer solving crimes, but rather designating his successors, coopting those who, after him, should solve them.
After Ferber and the two investigators left, he found himself alone in the room. The luminosity was fading again, but he had no desire to turn on the light. He felt, without being able to explain it to himself, that the murder had been committed in broad daylight. The silence was almost unreal. He had the sensation that there was, in this case, something that concerned him particularly, personally, but why? He observed again the complex motif composed by the strips of flesh spread across the floor of the room. What he felt was less disgust than a sort of general pity for the entire earth, for mankind, which can, in its heart, give birth to such horrors. In truth, he was a bit astonished he could bear this spectacle, which had even revolted crime scene investigators inured to the worst. A year before, feeling that he was beginning to have difficulty bearing crime scenes, he had gone to the Buddhist Center of Vincennes to ask them if it would be possible for him to practice asubha, the meditation on the corpse. The lama had first tried to dissuade him: this meditation, he had opined, was difficult, and not adapted to the Western mentality. But when he learned of Jasselin’s profession, he had changed his mind, and asked for time to reflect. A few days later he phoned to say that yes, in his particular case, asubha could undoubtedly be appropriate. It wasn’t practiced in Europe, where it was incompatible with health and safety regulations, but he could give Jasselin the address of a Sri Lankan monastery which occasionally received Westerners. He had spent two weeks’ holiday there, after having found an airline that agreed to transport his dog (that had been the most difficult part). Every evening, while Hélène went to the beach, he went to a mass grave where they deposited the recently deceased, without precaution against predators or insects. After concentrating all of his mental faculties by trying to follow the precepts laid down by Buddha in the sermon on the direction of attention, he had thus been able to intently observe the wan corpse, the suppurating corpse, the dismembered corpse, the corpse eaten by worms. At each stage, he had to repeat to himself, forty-eight times: “This is my fate, the fate of all mankind, I cannot escape it.”
The Map and the Territory Page 19