The Map and the Territory (33 page)

Just then, a third coffin was loaded into the van. Without waiting for the fourth, Jed entered the building, and went up a few steps to a landing where there were three doors. He pushed the one on the right, marked Wartesaal, and went into a waiting room with cream-colored walls and dull plastic furniture—similar, in fact, to the one in which he had waited at the quai des Orfèvres, except that this time there was no
unbeatable view of the pont des Arts
, and the windows only opened onto an anonymous residential suburb. The loudspeakers fixed at the top of the walls played an ambient music that was certainly sad, but to which could also be given the adjective
dignified
—it was probably by Barber.

The five people gathered there were undoubtedly
candidates for suicide
, but it was difficult to characterize them any further. Their very age was quite indiscernible, anywhere between fifty and seventy years old—therefore not very old; when he came, his father had probably been the
senior member of his class
. One of them, with his white mustache and rubicund complexion, was manifestly an Englishman; but the others, even from the point of view of nationality, were difficult to place. An emaciated man, with a Latin physique, a brownish-yellow complexion, and terribly gaunt cheeks—the only one, in fact, who seemed to be suffering from a serious illness—was avidly reading (he had briefly looked up when Jed entered, then had immediately plunged back into his book) a Spanish edition of the adventures of Spirou; he surely came from some South American country.

Jed hesitated, then finally chose to address a woman aged about sixty who looked like a typical Allgäu housewife, and who gave the impression of possessing extraordinary skills in the domain of knitting. She informed him that there was, in fact, a reception room, that he had to go back out onto the landing and take the door on the left.

Nothing was marked, but Jed pushed the door on the left. A girl who was decorative but nothing more (there were certainly better ones at the Babylon FKK Relax-Oase, he thought) was sitting behind the counter, laboriously filling in a crossword puzzle. Jed explained to her his request, which seemed to shock her: members of the family didn’t come after the death, she replied. Sometimes before, never after.
“Sometimes before … Never after …”
she repeated several times in English, chewing laboriously on her words. This retard was beginning to get on his nerves. He raised his voice, explaining again that he hadn’t been able to come before, that he wanted absolutely to see someone from the management, and that he had the right to see his father’s file. The word
right
seemed to impress her; with obvious reluctance, she picked up her phone. A few minutes later, a woman aged about forty, dressed in a light-colored suit, entered the room. She had consulted the file; in fact, his father had turned up on the morning of Monday 10 December and the procedure had gone “perfectly normally,” she added.

He must have arrived on Sunday evening, the ninth, Jed thought. Where had he spent his last night? Had he treated himself to the Baur au Lac? He hoped so, without believing it. He was certain in any case that he had
settled the bill on leaving
, and that he had left
none of his belongings behind him
.

He insisted again, imploring her. He had been traveling when this happened, he claimed, he hadn’t been able to be there, but now he wanted to know more, know all the details about his father’s last moments. The woman, visibly annoyed, finally gave in and invited him to come with her. He followed her down a dark corridor that was cluttered with metal filing cabinets before entering her luminous and functional office, which overlooked some sort of public park.

“Here is your father’s file,” she said, handing him a slim folder. The word
file
seemed a bit exaggerated: there was only a single page, with Swiss German writing on both sides.

“I don’t understand a word … I’ll have to get it translated.”

“But what do you want, exactly?” Her calm was breaking up with every minute. “I’m telling you that everything is in order!”

“There was a medical examination, I suppose?”

“Of course.” According to what Jed had been able to read in reports, the medical examination boiled down to taking blood pressure and asking
a few vague questions, a sort of
job interview
, with the only difference being that everyone succeeded, and everything was systematically sorted out in less than ten minutes.

“We act in perfect accordance with Swiss law,” the woman said, more and more glacially.

“What happened to the body?”

“Well, like the immense majority of our clients, your father had opted for cremation. We therefore acted according to his wishes; then we scattered his ashes in the open air.”

So that was it, thought Jed; his father now served as food for the Brazilian carp of Lake Zurich.

The woman took back the file, obviously thinking their conversation was over, and got up to put it away in the filing cabinet. Jed stood up as well, approached, and slapped her violently. She made a stifled moan, but didn’t have the time to consider a riposte. He moved on to a violent uppercut to the chin, followed by a series of sharp cuffs. While she wavered on her feet, trying to get her breath back, he stepped back so as to run and kick her with all his strength at the level of her solar plexus. At this she collapsed to the ground, striking a metal corner of the desk as she fell; there was a loud cracking sound. The spine must have taken a blow, Jed thought. He leaned over her; she was groggy, breathing with difficulty, but she was breathing.

He walked rapidly to the exit, more or less fearing that someone would raise the alarm, but the receptionist hardly looked up from her crossword; it’s true that the struggle had made little noise. The station was only two hundred yards away. When he entered, a train stopped at one of the platforms. He got in without buying a ticket, wasn’t checked, and got off at Zurich Central Station.

On arriving at the hotel, he realized that this bout of violence had put him in a good mood. It was the first time in his life that he’d used physical violence against someone; and that had made him hungry. He dined with great appetite, on a raclette of Grisons meat and mountain ham, which he washed down with an excellent red wine from the Valais.

The following morning, nice weather had returned to Zurich, and a fine layer of snow covered the ground. He went to the airport, more or less expecting to be arrested at passport control, but nothing of the sort happened. And in the following days, he didn’t receive any news. It was funny they’d decided against making a complaint; probably they didn’t want to attract attention to their activities in any way. There was probably some truth, he thought, to the accusations spread on the Internet concerning the personal enrichment of members of the association. A euthanasia was charged at an average rate of five thousand euros, when the lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital came to twenty euros and a bottom-of-the-range cremation doubtless not much more. In a booming market, where Switzerland had a virtual monopoly, they were indeed going to
make a killing
.

His excitement quickly subsided into a wave of deep sorrow, which he knew was definitive. Three days after his return, for the first time in his life, he would spend Christmas Eve alone. It would be the same on New Year’s Eve. And in the days that followed he was also alone.

A few months later, Jasselin retired. It was, truth be told, the normal time to do so, but up until then he had always thought he would ask for an extension of at least a year or two. The Houellebecq case had seriously shaken him; the confidence he felt in himself, in his ability to do his job, had crumbled. No one had held this against him; on the contrary, he had been nominated
in extremis
to the rank of detective chief inspector; he wouldn’t do the job, but his pension would be increased slightly. A farewell party had been planned—a big one at that. The whole crime squad was invited, and the chief of police would make a speech. In short, he was leaving
honorably
. This was clearly intended to make him know that he had been, if you considered the whole of his career, a good policeman. And it’s true, he thought he had been, most of the time, an honorable policeman, or at least an obstinate policeman, and obstinacy is perhaps the only human quality that matters at the end of the day, not only in the profession of the policeman but in many professions. At least in any that have something to do with the notion of
truth
.

A few days after his effective departure he invited Ferber to lunch in a small restaurant on the place Dauphine. It was Monday, 29 April, and many people had taken a long weekend; Paris was very quiet and in the restaurant there were only a few tourist couples. Spring had truly
arrived, the buds had opened, and particles of dust and pollen danced in the light. They had sat down at a table on the
terrasse
, and ordered two pastis before the meal.

“You know,” he said when the waiter put their glasses down in front of them, “I really fucked up this case, from start to finish. If the other guy hadn’t noticed the painting was missing, we’d still be floundering.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself; after all, it was your idea to take him there.”

“No, Christian,” Jasselin replied softly. “You’ve forgotten, but it was you who had the idea.”

“I’m too old,” he went on a little later. “I’m simply too old for this job. The brain gets stiff with the years, like all the rest; even quicker than anything else, it seems to me. Man wasn’t built to live for eighty or a hundred years; at most thirty-five or forty, like in prehistoric times. There are organs that resist—remarkably, even—and others that fall to bits slowly—slowly or quickly.”

“What do you plan to do?” Ferber asked, trying to change the subject. “Are you staying in Paris?”

“No, I’m going to move to Brittany. Into the house where my parents lived before coming up to Paris.” There was, in fact, quite a lot of work to be done on the house before they could consider moving in. It was surprising, Jasselin thought, to think of all those people belonging to a recent, and even very recent, past—his own parents—who had lived a large part of their life in conditions of comfort which today seemed unacceptable: no bath or shower, no really effective heating system. Anyway, Hélène had to work up to the close of the academic year; their move could realistically take place only at the end of the summer. He didn’t at all like DIY, he told Ferber, but gardening, yes, he promised himself real joys cultivating his vegetable patch.

“And then,” he said with a half smile, “I’m going to read detective novels. I’ve almost never done it during my working life, so now I’m going to start. But I don’t want to read the American ones, and I have the impression there’s mainly just those. Do you have a Frenchman you can recommend?”

“Jonquet,” Ferber immediately replied. “Thierry Jonquet. In France he’s the best, in my opinion.”

Jasselin wrote the name down in his notebook when the waiter
brought his sole meunière. The restaurant was good; they spoke little but he felt happy to be with Ferber one last time, and he was grateful he didn’t drone on about the possibility of seeing each other again and keeping in contact. He was going to move to the provinces and Ferber would stay in Paris. He was going to become a good policeman, a very good policeman. He would probably be promoted to captain by the end of the year, commander a little later, and then inspector; but in reality they would never see each other again.

They lingered in this restaurant; all the tourists had left. Jasselin finished his dessert—a charlotte with marron glacé. A ray of sunshine passing between the plane trees lit up the square splendidly.

“Christian …” he said after a moment’s hesitation, and to his own surprise he found that his voice quavered a little. “I’d like you to promise me one thing: don’t drop the Houellebecq case. I know it doesn’t really depend on you now, but I’d like you to keep in regular touch with people from the Central Office for the Struggle Against the Traffic in Artworks and Cultural Goods, and alert me when they’ve found something.”

Ferber nodded his head and promised.

As the months passed and no trace of the painting appeared in the usual networks, it became clearer and clearer that the murderer wasn’t a professional thief but a collector who’d acted alone without any intention of being separated from the object. It was the worst possible scenario, and Ferber pursued his investigations in the direction of hospitals, widening them to private clinics—at least those that agreed to cooperate; the use of specialized surgical equipment remained their only serious lead.

The case was solved three years later, quite by accident. Patrolling the A8 motorway in the direction of Nice–Marseille, a squad of gendarmes tried to intercept a Porsche 911 Carrera that was going at 130 mph. The driver fled, and was arrested only near Fréjus. It turned out that it was a stolen car, that the man was drunk, and that he was
well known to the police
. Patrick Le Braouzec had been sentenced several times for banal
and relatively minor offenses—procuring, grievous bodily harm—but a persistent rumor ascribed to him the strange speciality of
insect trafficker
. There exist more than a million species of insects, and new ones are discovered every year, particularly in equatorial regions. Certain wealthy collectors are ready to pay large, sometimes very large, sums for a beautiful specimen of a rare species—preserved, or preferably alive. The capture and
a fortiori
export of these animals are subject to very strict rules, which Le Braouzec had up until now managed to get around; he had never been caught in the act, and justified his regular journeys to New Guinea, Sumatra, and Guyana by claiming to have a taste for the jungle and life in the wild. In fact, the man had the temperament of the adventurer, and showed real physical courage: without a guide, and sometimes for several weeks, he crossed some of the most dangerous jungles on the planet, carrying only a few provisions, a combat knife, and water purification tablets.