“Who am I?” the Policeman interrupted him.
“You’re … you told me you were the Policeman.”
“Exactly. Well, then?”
“Well, then, what?”
“Well, then! Does one question the Policeman’s orders?”
The Investigator opened his mouth, only to feel his throat dry up and his words die unspoken. His shoulders slumped. “Let’s get it over with,” he sighed.
The Policeman invited the Investigator to follow him to the ladies’ room, where the re-enactment took place. It lasted twenty-seven minutes. The Investigator was obliged to reconstruct his actions and movements during his prior visit to the ladies’ room. The Policeman observed him from different angles, jotted down notes, drew an extremely precise sketch, strode purposefully around the room, measuring its dimensions, and used his mobile telephone to take photographs of the broken towel dispenser, of the towel itself (which he’d extracted from the trash can after slipping on a fresh pair of surgical gloves), and of the Investigator (close-ups, frontal and profile views). He put some questions to the Investigator and ascertained that the stains on his trousers and jacket hadn’t disappeared. When he finally seemed convinced that the Investigator wasn’t hiding anything and had told him nothing but the truth, the Policeman asked the suspect to accompany him to his space.
“Your space? What space?”
“My office, if you prefer. Surely you don’t think I’m going to let you go without taking a statement from you?”
“A statem—”
The Policeman was already walking away, so the Investigator was forced to follow in his footsteps. They left the restroom. The Policeman closed the door behind them and put seals on it, to the Investigator’s great astonishment. Then they crossed the immense breakfast room, passed in front of the reception desk, which was still deserted, and stopped before a door situated to the right of the counter. This door bore a sign: STAFF ONLY. The Policeman drew a key from his pocket, opened the door, and showed the Investigator in.
It was a broom closet whose jumbled contents included a great many buckets, floor cloths, sponges, dustpans, and cleaning products, along with a very large vacuum cleaner. In one corner, an electric typewriter stood on a pair of boards laid across two trestles.
“I can’t stand computers,” said the Policeman, having noticed the Investigator’s skeptical look. “Computers dehumanize relations.”
He held out a pink plastic bucket to the Investigator, who took hold of it without grasping its purpose. Then the Policeman seized another bucket, a blue one, turned it upside down, and sat on it. “Go on, don’t be afraid,” he said. “They’re pretty sturdy and quite comfortable, too, once you get used to them. My chairs haven’t been delivered yet.”
The Policeman inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter. He performed this act most meticulously, removing and reinserting the sheet three times because it seemed slightly askew.
“What if I’m dealing with a madman here?” the Investigator wondered. “Maybe he’s a policeman like I’m God the Father. He didn’t show me his card. His office is in a hotel, and what kind of office is it? A nasty little storage room. Yes, that’s it — he’s nuts! Why has it taken me so long to see that?”
The thought revived his confidence. He nearly burst out laughing, but he restrained himself. Better not to let anything show, better to play along with this lunatic for a few more minutes, and then to clear out at top speed. He’d have plenty of time that evening to lodge a complaint with the Hotel Management about this obviously sick person, who must be a deranged janitor.
“There we are!” exclaimed the Policeman, smiling broadly at the sight of the white page, perfectly horizontal and flawlessly aligned with the upper edge of the typewriter’s platen.
“I’m at your service,” the Investigator replied.
XII
A BRIGHT SUN WAS BLEACHING the already very pale sky. The temperature was mild, almost hot, totally unlike the chill of the previous night. The Investigator blinked and stood unmoving for a moment on the Hotel steps, incredulous, happy, and relieved to be outside at last, however late in the day. He felt a little better. Could that be because of the medicine the Policeman had given him?
After having been so harried and upset during the past few hours, he was ready to become the Investigator again: a scrupulous, professional, careful, disciplined, and methodical person who didn’t allow himself to be surprised or bothered by the circumstances or individuals he was required to encounter in the course of his investigations.
On the sidewalk a few yards away, a human flood — a dense, fast-moving, utterly silent Crowd — was streaming past him as though pulled along by a powerful force of suction. The Crowd consisted of men and women of all ages, but they were all walking at the same speed, in silence, their eyes fixed on the ground or staring straight ahead. Equally strange was the fact that the Crowd on the nearer sidewalk was moving from left to right, while the Crowd on the sidewalk across the street was moving in the opposite direction, as though someone somewhere had instituted foot-traffic rules and no one dared go the wrong way.
The only perceptible sound, very soft, came from the vehicles on the street as they crawled along in one direction, from right to left. It was a huge traffic jam! The cars drove past extremely slowly, but in a most orderly fashion, and the Investigator was unable to detect any signs of agitation on the faces of the drivers; they kept their eyes fixed on what was in front of them and seemed to be suffering in silence. There were no horns blowing, no shouted insults — nothing but the elegant, muffled, almost inaudible hum of the engines.
The rhythm of the City had decidedly changed. Though deserted by night, by day it presented an image of great liveliness, of an industrious, concentrated, steady, fluid animation that excited the Investigator and provoked a surge of energy in him. Of course, given the empty desolation of the streets at night, the dense Crowd and heavy traffic were surprising, but when he considered the disconcerting events he’d just lived through and the weird persons he’d had to deal with, he felt he was getting back to a kind of normality. He wanted to accept it and avoid pondering hard questions.
Once again, however, the Investigator had to get his bearings. He’d chosen not to ask the Policeman for directions, being certain that the man, policeman or not, would use the request as an excuse to ask him another endless series of questions and maybe even to place him in custody in his cubbyhole.
The Investigator examined the structures he was able to see: immense warehouses, rows of large metal or stone sheds, office towers, administrative buildings, huge parking garages, laboratories, metal chimneys emitting clouds of nearly transparent smoke. The heterogeneity of those structures was in fact only superficial, for they all belonged to the operations of the Enterprise, as was demonstrated by the wall that encompassed them; and as the wall defined a boundary, it also created bonds, connections, bridges, and attachments between the entities it enclosed, absorbing them into the cells and members of a single, individual, gigantic body.
The whole City seemed to consist of the Enterprise, as if little by little, in a process of expansion nothing had been able to check, the Enterprise had extended itself beyond its original limits, swallowing up, digesting, and assimilating the neighborhoods on its perimeter by imbuing them with its own identity. The mysterious force emanating from the whole caused the Investigator to suffer a brief dizzy spell. Although he’d been aware for a long time that his place in the world and in society was microscopic in scale, this vision of the Enterprise, this glimpse of its brazen extent, allowed him to discover another unsettling fact: his anonymity. Over and above the knowledge that he wasn’t anything, he suddenly realized that he wasn’t anyone, either. The thought didn’t distress him, but all the same, it entered his mind as a narrow, curious worm penetrates an already fragile fruit.