The Investigation Read online

  NAN A. TALESE | DOUBLEDAY

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2012 by John Cullen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Originally published in France as L’Enquête by Éditions Stock, Paris, in 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Éditions Stock. This edition published by arrangement with Éditions Stock.

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design and illustration by Emily Mahon

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Claudel, Philippe

  [Enquête. English]

  The investigation : a novel / Philippe Claudel; translated from the French by John Cullen.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in France as L’Enquête by Éditions Stock, Paris, in 2010.”

  I. Cullen, John. II. Title.

  PQ2663.L31148E5713 2012

  843′.914—dc23

  2011034662

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53535-9

  v3.1

  For those to come

  so they won’t be next

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Seek nothing. Forget.

  —HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT, L’Enfer

  I

  WHEN THE INVESTIGATOR LEFT the train station, a fine rain mingled with melting snow greeted him. He was a small, slightly round fellow with thinning hair, and nothing about him, neither his clothes nor his expression, was remarkable. Anyone obliged to describe him—as part of a novel, for example, or in a criminal proceeding or judiciary testimony—would surely have found it difficult to give a detailed portrait of the man. The Investigator was, in a way, a disappearing person, no sooner seen than forgotten. His aspect was as insubstantial as fog, dreams, or an expelled breath, and in this he resembled billions of human beings.

  The station square resembled countless other station squares, surrounded by impersonal buildings crowded against one another. Across the top of one of these tall structures, a giant billboard displayed the hugely enlarged photograph of an old man, who gazed down at the viewer with amused, melancholy eyes. The slogan accompanying the picture was illegible and maybe even nonexistent; the Investigator couldn’t tell, because the upper part of the billboard was hidden in clouds.

  The sky was crumbling and falling in a wet dust that dissolved on shoulders and then, uninvited, entered every body part. It wasn’t really cold, but the dampness acted like an octopus whose slender tentacles managed to find their way into the tiniest open spaces between skin and clothing.

  For a quarter of an hour, the Investigator kept still, standing upright with his suitcase on the pavement beside him, while raindrops and snowflakes continued to expire on his head and raincoat. He didn’t move, not at all. And during that long moment, he thought about nothing.

  No vehicle passed. No pedestrian. He’d been forgotten. It wasn’t the first time. Eventually, he turned up the collar of his raincoat, grasped the handle of his suitcase, and resolved to walk across the square to a bar before he got completely drenched. The lights in the bar were already on, even though the clock mounted on a lamppost a few yards away from him indicated that it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon.

  The room was curiously empty, and the Waiter, who’d been dozing behind the bar while distractedly watching the horse-racing results on a television screen, cast a less-than-friendly glance in the Investigator’s direction. He had time enough to remove his raincoat, take a seat at a table, and wait a little before the Waiter asked in a doleful voice, “What would you like?”

  The Investigator was neither very thirsty nor very hungry. He simply needed to sit down someplace before betaking himself to where he was supposed to go. He needed to sit down, to assess the situation, to prepare what he was going to say, and little by little to enter, as it were, into his persona as the Investigator. Finally, he said, “A rum toddy.”

  The Waiter quickly answered, “I’m sorry, but that’s impossible.”

  “You don’t know how to make a rum toddy?” asked the Investigator in surprise.

  The Waiter shrugged his shoulders. “Of course I do, but that particular beverage isn’t included in our computerized list, and the automated cash register will refuse to record the charge.”

  The Investigator was on the point of making a remark, but he restrained himself, sighed, and ordered some sparkling water.

  Outside, the rain had yielded to the steady advance of the snow: light, swirling, almost unreal, falling in slow motion now, orchestrating its effects. The Investigator gazed at the snowflakes as they hung a moving screen before his eyes. He could barely make out the pediment of the railroad station, and, farther off, the platforms, the tracks, and the waiting trains were no longer visible. It was as if the place where he’d stopped and stood a short while before had abruptly faded away, leaving no trace of his arrival in this new world, where he had to make an effort to get his bearings.

  “It’s winter today,” the Waiter said, uncapping a little bottle of water and placing it on the table. He was looking not at his customer but at the snowflakes. Moreover, he’d spoken without even addressing the Investigator, as if his thought had escaped from his brain and flitted around his head for a bit, like a poor insect resigned to its imminent demise but nevertheless determined to play its role of insect right to the end, even if its performance interests no one and will save it from nothing.

  And for a long moment, the Waiter remained like that, standing immobile beside the table, completely ignoring the Investigator, and staring out the window, entranced by the snow, by the milky particles gliding down along their elegant but irrational trajectories.

  II

  THE INVESTIGATOR COULD HAVE SWORN he’d seen two or three taxicabs when he left the train station. Waiting taxis with headlights on and engines running, their exhaust smoke gray, delicate, quickly vanishing. But the cabs must all have gone so
mewhere else; the Investigator imagined the passengers, warm and comfortable on the back seat. It was really too bad.

  The snow had decided to stay awhile and was falling still, imposing itself like a monarch. The Investigator had asked the Waiter for directions, expecting a disagreeable response, but the Waiter had seemed happy to inform him that it really wasn’t difficult at all, the Enterprise was vast, he couldn’t miss it. It spilled over everywhere. Whatever street he took, it would necessarily lead him to a surrounding wall, a wire-mesh gate, an entryway, a warehouse, a loading dock belonging to the Enterprise.

  “One way or another,” the Waiter had added, “everything here more or less belongs to the Enterprise.” He’d placed a lot of emphasis on everything. “It’s simply a matter of following the wall,” he went on, “and you’ll come to the main entrance and the Guardhouse.”

  And with that, the Waiter had gone back to his horse races. His elbows on the bar, his head in his hands, and his eyes fixed on the foaming thoroughbreds as they hurtled across the television screen, he hadn’t reacted at all when the Investigator told him good-bye, crossed the threshold of the establishment, and stepped out of his life.

  The Waiter’s part was at an end anyway.

  It wasn’t yet night, but the nocturnal atmosphere was nonetheless quite evident, augmented by the total solitude through which the Investigator moved as he walked along snow-covered sidewalks without ever passing a living soul. Only every now and then did he get the feeling that the place was inhabited, and that was when his little silhouette entered the creamy yellow halo shed by a streetlight and remained there briefly, the time required to cover a few yards, before being swallowed up again in the thick, impenetrable shadows.

  His suitcase was getting heavier. His raincoat needed wringing out. Ignoring discomfort, the Investigator marched on. He was shivering more and more. His thoughts were wandering around, just like his cold, sore feet. Suddenly he saw himself as a convict, an outlaw, a last survivor, someone looking for shelter after escaping a final catastrophe, whether chemical, ecological, or nuclear. He felt his body becoming his enemy and stepped along in a dream. There didn’t seem to be any end of stepping along. He had the impression he’d been roaming hither and thither for hours. All the streets were identical. The snow, in its abstract uniformity, covered up every distinguishing feature. Was he going in circles?

  The shock was brief and muffled, but it nevertheless left him quite stunned. He’d collided with a man or maybe a woman—he wasn’t sure which—but in any case a human shape that had erupted out of the night, coming toward him at a moderate but uncheckable speed. The Investigator murmured his excuses in a few polite words. From the other he heard nothing, except some grumbling and the sound of footsteps moving away. He glimpsed a silhouette before the night dissolved it.

  Another dream?

  No, some tangible signs of the incident remained: a sharp pain in his left shoulder, and a sore spot on his forehead, which he rubbed as expiring snowflakes ran down his face. And then there was his suitcase, of course. His suitcase. Burst open, its contents spread over the ground, reminiscent of the bags and baggage one sees in news reports, floating on the surface of the ocean in the aftermath of one plane crash or another, the final witnesses of lives tossed by the currents, of lives disappeared, pulverized, annihilated, reduced to sweaters soaked in salt water, to trousers still in movement, even though the legs they contained are gone, to stuffed animals, surprised at having lost forever the arms of the children who held them.

  The Investigator experienced some difficulty in gathering up his five shirts, his underwear, his pajamas, his toilet things, his polyester pants, his alarm clock, several pairs of socks, a bag (still empty) for his dirty laundry, his electric razor, and its rebellious cord. During the process, he stepped on a tube of toothpaste, which spurted out and lay on the ground like a big pink-and-blue worm, redolent of synthetic mint. Eventually, he was able to close the suitcase, which was heavier, because along with his personal items he was now carrying a little snow, a little rain, a little melancholy.

  But it was imperative that he keep on walking. It was by this time full night, and he was finding the City more and more inhospitable, uninhabited, as it appeared to be, except by the occasional shadow with a body as solid as a bull, capable of staggering a man with a single blow of its horn. And to cap his misfortune, the Investigator launched into the first of three violent sneezes. He was sure he’d wake up the next day with his nose running, his throat dry, raspy, and nearly closed, and his feverish head stuck inside a snare drum. The prospect of such a morning filled him with mild dread. Ah, to wake up feeling like that, he thought, before beginning a long and no doubt tedious day of investigating, what rotten luck!

  To wake up, yes. In a room, of course. But what room? Where?

  III

  SO THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE the Guardhouse? But it didn’t look anything like a guardhouse, nor did its surroundings look like the entrance to any enterprise whatsoever, much less to the Enterprise itself.

  The Investigator had passed the place some three or four times without suspecting that it could be the Guardhouse: a kind of bunker, a massive parallelepiped of raw, unfinished concrete, pierced at irregular intervals by thin, vertical openings as narrow as arrow slits. All these features combined to give the impression of absolute closure. The building designated whoever approached it as an intruder, perhaps even an enemy. The chevaux-de-frise set up on all sides suggested that an attack was imminent and must be parried, and the rolls of barbed wire, the caltrop barriers, and the chicanes that could be glimpsed behind them intensified the general atmosphere of imminent threat. Images of fortified embassies in war-torn countries crossed the Investigator’s mind. But the Enterprise wasn’t an embassy, and the country wasn’t at war. According to the information that had been made available to him, the only things manufactured within these guarded precincts were innocuous communications products and the software to implement them, nothing with any strategic value, and it had been a long time since the production had been carried out in any actual secrecy. There was really no justification for taking such measures as these.

  At last, the Investigator found a window on one side of the Guardhouse. There was a counter behind the window, and next to the window a buzzer set into the exterior wall. Behind the counter, on the other side of the thick glass panel—was it bulletproof glass?—a surgical light illuminated a small room, a few dozen square feet in area. The Investigator could see a desk, a chair, a calendar pinned to the back wall, and, higher up, a big display board with several long lines of lights, some on, some off, some blinking. On the left-hand wall, a group of television monitors offered a regular mosaic of views of the Enterprise: offices, warehouses, parking lots, stairways, empty workshops, cellars, loading docks.

  The snowfall had stopped. The Investigator was trembling. He couldn’t feel his nose anymore. He’d turned up the collar of his raincoat as high as he could in an effort to protect his neck, but the coat was now thoroughly drenched, and the upturned collar only added to his discomfort. He pressed the buzzer. Nothing happened. He pressed it again and waited. He took a look around and called out, but without much hope, because no sound of human origin could be heard, only mechanical noises, the hum of engines or boilers or power stations or generators, which mingled with the rising murmur of the wind as it began to blow harder.

  “What is it?”

  The Investigator jumped. The crackling, slightly aggressive words had come from an intercom speaker located just to the left of the buzzer.

  “Good day,” the Investigator managed to say after recovering from his surprise.

  “Good evening,” answered the voice, which seemed to come from a great distance, from the depths of an infernal world. The Investigator apologized, explained himself, said who he was, recounted his waiting in front of the train station, his stop in the café, the Waiter’s directions, his long walk, his mistakes along the way, his repeated passages in front of
the … The voice interrupted him right in the middle of a sentence.

  “Are you in possession of an Exceptional Authorization?”

  “Excuse me? I don’t understand.”

  “Are you in possession of an Exceptional Authorization?”

  “Exceptional Auth—? I’m the Investigator.… I don’t know what you’re talking about. Surely my visit here has been announced. I’m expected.…”

  “For the last time, are you in possession, yes or no, of an Exceptional Authorization?”

  “No, but I’ll surely get one tomorrow”—the Investigator, who was gradually losing his grasp, hesitated—“after I meet with a Manager.…”

  “Without an Exceptional Authorization, you are not authorized to enter the premises of the Enterprise after 2100 hours.”

  The Investigator was preparing to reply that it was only … But he glanced at his watch and could hardly believe it: almost quarter to ten. How was it possible? So that meant he’d been walking for hours? How could he have lost all sense of time like that?

  “I’m confused,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  The Investigator heard a sound like a cleaver coming down on a butcher’s block. The crackling ceased. He started to tremble even harder. His socks, too thin for the season anyway, were soaked through. The bottom parts of his trousers looked like wet rags. His fingers and toes were getting numb. He leaned on the buzzer one more time.

  “Now what?” said the distant voice furiously.

  “I’m very sorry to disturb you again, but I need a place to spend the night.”

  “We’re not a hotel.”

  “Exactly, so perhaps you could tell me where to find one?”

  “We’re not the Tourist Office.”

  The voice disappeared. This time, the Investigator concluded that it would be useless to ring again. He was seized by a great weariness, and at the same time, panic made his heart beat at an unusually high rate. He placed his hand on his chest and felt, through the layers of wet clothing, the rapid rhythm, the dull blows of the organ against the wall of flesh. It was as if somebody were knocking at a door, an inner door, a closed door, desperately, without ever getting a response, without anyone’s ever opening it for him.