Comrade Lecoq turned the page, took out a fountain pen, and in his thoughts thumbed through the day’s material. Then carefully, at the top of the page, he wrote out the title for a new chapter in an even, crimpy hand:
No one really noticed or bothered their heads much about the little blustering fellows in navy-blue capes who suddenly went missing from the street corners, where they had been planted for decades like natural, inevitable fixtures.
But we all know that nothing in nature ever truly perishes.
The disoriented and superfluous police, repelled in turn from each new state, by force of habit flocked to their barracks on Île de la Cité, which was bordered on three sides by independent republics: the Chinese, Jewish, and Anglo-American.
Île de la Cité lies embraced between the two arms of the Seine, and thus cut off by nature herself; it seems to constitute a sort of independent territorial unit.
On that day it swarmed with unemployed blue men.
Left to their own devices, the police found themselves for the first time in a troublesome quandary. Suddenly stripped of the compass of the law, unable to decide which of the emergent governments should be considered lawful, and realizing the fictitiousness of any government outside the ring of the cordon, the unemployed blue people swiftly came to realize that they were less real creatures with every passing day, becoming metaphysical fiction, pure nonsense, insubstantial, like the very concept of “police for police’s sake.”
On the third day, Île de la Cité bore witness to the first demonstration of unemployed policemen in the history of the world.
The crowd of jobless blue people spread all across the island, flowing into the square below the prefecture. At the head of the procession demonstrators carried placards with slogans: “The Republic is dead – Long live the Republic!” “We demand some form of government!” “The police without a government is like an electric tram without a power plant!” and so forth.
An impressive meeting was held in the square before the prefecture. After long discussions on how to save the police as such, it was decided to turn to the various governments of the new states one at a time, offering law enforcement services.
“This is not about the color, or even the national status of a government,” claimed the man who devised the idea. “In order to win back their raison d’être, to return from the land of fiction and onto the lists of real institutions, the police have to immediately support a government of any sort, even the idea of government. Without the notion of law and order, we are but shadows.”
The project was unanimously accepted and messengers were sent bearing letters to all the governments, except to the Soviet government of Belleville.
All the governments gave their refusal for fear of introducing foreign elements into their territories, explaining their positions by their inability to feed any new arrivals, on account of their low food supplies (“We have enough of our own mouths to feed.”).
In a final spasm of self-preservation, a policeman’s motion was accepted: a random civilian was to be forced to proclaim himself dictator of Île de la Cité. A manhunt was hastily organized.
After a fruitless half-hour search, a patrol showed up at the end of a street carrying a strange, paralyzed old man. The old man displayed sure signs of terror. When he was carried into the prefecture he began to cry and tried to tear himself free – ineffectively, of course.
In the prefecture’s office, a delegate of the police informed him that he was now a dictator, and as such, he ought to give out a few decrees to restore the notion of lawful authority.
The old man sat apathetically in his armchair, not responding in the slightest to the honors and power bestowed upon him. They tried to elucidate the matter in the simplest terms possible. In vain. As it turned out, he was deaf.
They finally managed to get through to him in writing. The head office put together a proclamation, which the old man, after a great deal of hesitation and with a revolver put to his head, finally decided to sign.
An hour later, the first proclamation of the new dictator appeared on the walls of Île de la Cité. In this proclamation the new dictator declared that he was seizing power over Île de la Cité, establishing his jurisdiction over the territory. Anyone who dared oppose the power of the new dictator would be held in contempt of the law and would be subjected to the most severe persecution. The proclamation was signed: Mathurin Dupont.
On that day the island breathed a collective sigh of relief. The institution of the police, as such, had been saved. The elated policemen jauntily stamped their feet, ringing their heels against the asphalt, as if to confirm their own irrefutable realness.
Unemployment was not eradicated, however, with the release of the proclamation. No one had any intention of acting against the authority of the new dictator, and thus the notion of lawbreaking remained, for this new state, in the realm of pure theory.
After a few days had passed, the old man saw that no one was doing him any harm. He became more talkative and could even be persuaded to have a closer look into state affairs.
The first self-motivated proclamation of the new dictator was to hold a great parade on the square in front of the prefecture. Overjoyed by these vital signs from their dictator, the policemen got in file with verve and enthusiasm. From high up on his balcony, the dictator greeted the review, clapping his hands in delight.
After this first show of life, however, he fell back into his old apathy.
On the third day, the head office informed the dictator in his morning report, after the conventional assurances that peace was reigning in the state and that there had been no incidents of crime, that a new definition of “lawbreaking” was urgently required, along with the designation of a few lawbreakers, because without said lawbreakers the police were starting to entertain doubts as to their reality.
In response to the report the old man unexpectedly became animated and, for the first time, requested pen and paper of his own accord.
Half an hour later a decree appeared on the walls of the Cité, generating some extraordinary excitement on the sleepy little island. By force of this decree, all the island’s blond inhabitants were declared enemies of the state, as opposed to the law-abiding citizens – the dark-haired ones. The lawful cadre of the police force was ordered to liquidate the new criminals as quickly as possible, and be none too scrupulous about the methods they employed.
By that evening Île de la Cité was back in fine form. Armed punitive patrols left one after another from the gates of the prefecture and vanished into the dark alleyways. The blond offenders were barricaded inside their dwellings. The roundup lasted three days, and in some places bloody skirmishes broke out. By the end of the third day the wrongdoers had been flushed out and put under arrest. Peace reigned once more on Île de la Cité.
Exhausted from this considerable burst of energy, the dictator fell once more into such a state of apathy that he could not even be forced to read the daily reports.
In concluding the above summary of events, we feel compelled to express our doubts as to whether the resourceful little island would have succeeded in rescuing the indubitably useful institution of the police had the somnolent dictator not been relieved by the equally somnolent, but more consistent, plague.