“They’re coming,” Ferber said softly, drawing him out of his meditation. Indeed, although it was only half past ten, about thirty people had already gathered in front of the entrance to the church. Who could they be? Some anonymous people, Houellebecq’s readers. It could happen, mainly in the case of murders committed for revenge, that the criminal would come and attend his victim’s funeral. He didn’t believe it was the case here, but he had nonetheless arranged for two photographers, two men from the criminal records office who had taken up position in a flat in the rue Froidevaux that offered a perfect view of the cemetery of Montparnasse, equipped with cameras and telescopic lenses.
Ten minutes later, he saw Teresa Cremisi and Frédéric Beigbeder arrive on foot. They caught sight of each other and embraced. With her oriental physique, the publisher could have been one of those hired mourners who were until very recently employed at certain Mediterranean funerals; and Beigbeder seemed deep in particularly dark thoughts. In fact, although the author of A French Novel was only fifty-one at the time, and it was undoubtedly one of the first funerals he’d had the occasion to attend for someone of his generation, he had to think that it was far from being the last; that, increasingly, phone conversations with his friends would no longer start with the expression “What are you doing tonight?” but rather with “Guess who died.”
Discreetly, Jasselin and Ferber left the town hall and came to mingle with the group. About fifty people had now gathered. At five to eleven, the hearse drew up in front of the church—a simple black van from the municipal funeral directors. When the two employees took out the coffin, a murmur of consternation and horror went through the crowd. The investigators from the criminal records office had had a trying task gathering together the rags of skin scattered at the crime scene, grouping them together in hermetically sealed plastic bags which they had sent, with the intact head, to Paris. Once the examinations were finished, all of it formed only a small compact pile, of a volume far inferior to that of an ordinary human corpse, and the employees of the municipal funeral service had judged it right to use a child’s coffin, one meter twenty in length. This will to rationality was perhaps praiseworthy in principle, but the effect it had, when the two employees took the coffin out onto the church steps, was absolutely awful. Jasselin heard Ferber stifle a gulp of sorrow, and he himself, as hardened as he was, had a heavy heart; several people present had broken down in tears.
As usual, the mass itself was for Jasselin a moment of total boredom. He had lost all contact with the Catholic faith at the age of ten and, despite the great number of funerals he had attended, he had never succeeded in returning to it. Basically he understood nothing about it, he did not even see exactly what the priest wanted to talk about; there were mentions of Jerusalem which seemed to him irrelevant, but which must have had a symbolic meaning, he thought. However, he did feel that the rite seemed appropriate, that the promises concerning a future life were in this case obviously welcome. The intervention of the Church was basically much more legitimate in the case of a funeral than in that of a birth, or a marriage. There it was perfectly in its element; it had something to say about death, whereas about love this was more doubtful.
At a funeral, the close members of the family usually stand by the coffin to receive condolences; but here there was no family. Once mass had been said, the two employees again took the little coffin—once more, a shiver of sadness ran through Jasselin—and put it back in the van. To his great surprise, about fifty people were waiting, on the steps, for them to leave the church—probably those readers of Houellebecq who were allergic to any religious ceremony.
Nothing special had been put in place, no blocking of the streets, no traffic control, so the hearse left directly for Montparnasse cemetery, and it was on the sidewalks that about a hundred people made the same journey, along the Jardin du Luxembourg, through the rue Guynemer, then taking the rue Vavin, the rue Bréa, for a moment going up the boulevard Raspail before cutting through the rue Huyghens. Jasselin and Ferber had joined them. There were people of all ages and all backgrounds, most often alone, sometimes in couples; basically people that nothing in particular seemed to unite, in whom no common trait could be discerned, and Jasselin suddenly had the certainty that they were wasting their time. They were readers of Houellebecq and that was all. It was implausible that anyone involved in the murder would be among them. Too bad, he thought; it was at least a pleasant walk; weather was keeping fine in the Paris region, the sky was a deep, almost winter blue.
Probably briefed by the priest, the gravediggers had waited for them to start shoveling. In front of the grave, Jasselin’s enthusiasm for funerals grew again, to the point where he took the firm and definitive decision to be buried himself, and to phone his solicitor the following day and have this made explicit in his will. The first shovelfuls of earth fell on the coffin. A lone woman, aged about thirty, threw a white rose—they’re good all the same, women, he said to himself. They think of things that men don’t have a clue about. In a cremation there are always noises of machinery, the gas burners which make a terrifying din, while here the silence was almost total, troubled only by the reassuring sound of the shovelfuls of earth landing on the wood, spreading out gently on the surface of the coffin. At the center of the cemetery, the noise of the traffic was almost imperceptible. As the earth gradually filled the grave, the noise became more muffled and dull; then the tombstone was laid.
32
He received the photos the following day, mid-morning. The investigators from the criminal records office might well have annoyed Jasselin with their arrogance, but he had to acknowledge that they generally provided excellent work. The pictures were clear, well lit, in excellent definition despite the distance, and you could recognize perfectly the features of each of the people who had bothered to go to the writer’s funeral. The prints were accompanied by a memory stick containing the photos in digital form. He immediately sent this to the Investigation Brigade by internal mail, with a note asking them to check them against databases with photos of criminals; they were now equipped with face-recognition software which allowed them to carry out the operation in a few minutes. He didn’t have much hope, but you had to at least try.
He got the results early that evening, when he was preparing to return home; they were, as he expected, negative. At the same time, the Investigation Brigade had added a summary of about thirty pages concerning the contents of Houellebecq’s computer—whose codes they had finally succeeded in breaking. He took it with him to study at home in peace.
He was greeted by the yappings of Michou, who leapt around for about a quarter of an hour, and by the aroma of cod à la galicienne—Hélène tried to vary the flavors, passing from Burgundian to Alsatian, from Provençal to Southwestern; she was also good at Italian, Turkish, and Moroccan, and had just joined a workshop initiating her to Far Eastern dishes that was organized by the municipality of the fifth arrondissement. He came over to kiss her; she had put on a pretty silk dress. “It’s ready in ten minutes, if you like,” she said. She looked relaxed, happy, as she always did when she didn’t have to go in to the university—the All Saints’ Day holidays had just begun. Hélène’s interest in economics had waned considerably over the years. More and more, the theories that tried to explain economic phenomena, to predict their developments, appeared almost equally inconsistent and random. She was more and more tempted to liken them to pure and simple charlatanism; it was even surprising, she occasionally thought, that they gave a Nobel Prize for economics, as if this discipline could boast of the same methodological seriousness, the same intellectual rigor as chemistry, or physics. And her interest in teaching had also waned considerably. On the whole, young people no longer interested her much. Her students were at such a terrifyingly low intellectual level that, sometimes, you had to wonder what had pushed them into studying in the first place. The only reply, she knew in her heart of hearts, was that they wanted to make money, as much money as possible; aside from
a few short-term humanitarian fads, that was the only thing that really got them going. Her professional life could thus be summarized as teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins, even if she avoided formulating it to herself in terms that stark. She had planned to take early retirement as soon as Jean-Pierre left the crime squad—he was not in the same state of mind and still liked his job just as much. Evil and crime appeared to him to be subjects just as urgent and essential as when he’d started, twenty-eight years before.
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.
33
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 c
ase, 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.
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