Sitting behind his desk, Giscard closes the copy of L’Express that he was leafing through and puts his hands together in silence.
D’Ornano (tapping his foot): “Coincidence, my ass! If—and I mean if—a group, of whatever kind, or a government, or an agency, or a service, or an organization possesses the means and the determination to set off a bomb that kills eighty-five people just to hamper our investigation, then I think we have a problem. The Americans have a problem. The English have a problem. The Russians have a problem. Unless it’s them, obviously.”
Giscard asks: “It seems like the kind of thing they’d do, Michel, don’t you think?”
Poniatowski unearths some celery salt. “Random killing with as many civilian victims as possible? I have to say that’s more the far right’s style. And anyway, according to Bayard’s report, there was that Russian agent who saved the kid’s life.”
D’Ornano (startled): “The nurse? She might just as easily have planted the bomb.”
Poniatowski (opening a bottle of vodka): “Why would she show herself in the station, then?”
D’Ornano (pointing at Poniatowski as though he were personally responsible): “We checked. She never worked at Salpêtrière.”
Poniatowski (stirring his Bloody Mary): “It’s more or less proven that Barthes no longer had the document by the time he got to the hospital. In all probability, things went like this: he comes out of the lunch with Mitterrand, gets knocked over by a laundry van—driven by the first Bulgarian. A man posing as a doctor pretends to examine him and steals his papers and his keys. Everything suggests that the document was with his papers.”
D’Ornano: “In that case, what happened at the hospital?”
Poniatowski: “Witnesses saw two intruders whose description matches the two Bulgarians who killed the gigolo.”
D’Ornano (trying to keep count of the number of Bulgarians involved): “But since he didn’t have the document anymore?”
Poniatowski: “They probably came back to finish the job.”
D’Ornano, who is soon out of breath, stops pacing and, as if his attention has been suddenly drawn to something, starts examining a corner of Delacroix’s painting.
Giscard (picking up the biography of JFK and stroking the cover): “Let’s assume that it was our men who were targeted in Bologna.”
Poniatowski (adding Tabasco): “That would prove they’re on the right track.”
D’Ornano: “Meaning?”
Poniatowski: “If it was really our men they were trying to eliminate, it must have been to prevent them from discovering something.”
Giscard: “This … club?”
Poniatowski: “Or something else.”
D’Ornano: “So we should send them to the USA?”
Giscard (sighing): “Doesn’t he have a phone, this American?”
Poniatowski: “The kid says it’ll be a chance to ‘get down to brass tacks.’”
D’Ornano: “You don’t say! So that little twat wants to go on a trip paid for by the Republic?”
Giscard (perplexed, as if chewing on something): “Given the available evidence, wouldn’t it be just as useful to send them to Sofia?”
Poniatowski: “Bayard’s a good cop, but he’s no James Bond. Maybe we could send a Service Action team?”
D’Ornano: “To do what? Bump off some Bulgarians?”
Giscard: “I’d rather keep the Ministry of Defense out of all this.”
Poniatowski (grinding his teeth): “Besides, we don’t want to risk a diplomatic crisis with the USSR.”
D’Ornano (trying to change the subject): “Talking of crisis, what’s happening in Tehran?”
Giscard (starting to leaf through L’Express again): “The shah is dead, the mullahs are dancing.”
Poniatowski (pouring himself a neat vodka): “Carter is screwed. Khomeini will never free the hostages.”
Silence.
In L’Express, Raymond Aron writes: “It is better to let laws become dormant when, rightly or wrongly, they are refused by the morals of the day.” Giscard thinks: “How wise.”
Poniatowski kneels in front of the refrigerator.
D’Ornano: “Uh, and the philosopher who killed his wife?”
Poniatowski: “Who cares? He’s a Commie. We shut him up in an asylum.”
Silence. Poniatowski gets some ice cubes from the icebox.
Giscard (in a belligerent voice): “This case must not have any influence on the campaign.”
Poniatowski (who understands that Giscard has returned to the subject at hand): “We can’t find the Bulgarian driver or the fake doctor anywhere.”
Giscard (tapping his index finger against his leather desk blotter): “I don’t care about the driver. I don’t care about the doctor. I don’t care about this … Logos Club. I want the document. On my desk.”
50
When Baudrillard learned that under the weight of more than 30,000 visitors the metallic structure of the Centre Georges-Pompidou, opened by Giscard in 1977 on Rue Beaubourg and immediately nicknamed “The Refinery” or “Our Lady of the Pipes,” risked “folding,” he grew as excited as a child, like the rascal of French Theory that he is, and wrote a little book entitled The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.
“That the mass (of visitors) magnetized by the structure should become a destructive variable for the structure itself—this, if the designers intended it (though how could we hope for that?), if they planned, in this way, the possibility of putting an end, in a single blow, to the architecture and culture … then Beaubourg constitutes the most audacious object and the most successful happening of the century.”
Slimane knows the Marais quarter well, and in particular Rue Beaubourg, where students line up as soon as the library opens. He knows it because he’s seen all this when coming out of clubs, exhausted by the night’s excesses and wondering how two worlds could coexist in parallel like this without ever touching.
But today, he is in the line. He smokes, his Walkman’s earphones stuck in his ears, trapped between two students with their noses in books. Discreetly, he tries to read the titles. The student in front is reading a book by Michel de Certeau entitled The Practice of Everyday Life. The other, behind him, Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born.
Slimane listens to “Walking on the Moon” by the Police.
The line advances very slowly. Someone says it’ll be another hour before they get in.
“MAKE BEAUBOURG FOLD! The new watchword of the revolution. No need to burn it. No need to protest it. Come on! It’s the best way of destroying it. Beaubourg’s success is no longer a mystery: people go there for that very reason; they rush to enter this building, whose fragility already exudes catastrophe, with the single aim of making it fold.”
Slimane has not read Baudrillard but when his turn comes he goes through the turnstile, unaware that he is participating in this post-Situationist undertaking.
He crosses a sort of press room where people are looking at microfiche on viewers, and takes an escalator up to the reading room, which resembles a huge textile workshop, except that the workers are not cutting out and assembling shirts using sewing machines but reading books and making notes in little notebooks.
Slimane also spots youngsters who’ve come to cruise and tramps who’ve come to sleep.
What impresses Slimane is the silence, but also the height of the ceiling: half factory, half cathedral.
Behind a large glass wall, an immense TV screen shows images from Soviet television. Soon, the images switch to an American channel. Spectators of various ages are sprawled in red chairs. It smells a bit. Slimane does not hang around here, but begins striding through the aisles of shelves.
Baudrillard writes: “The people want to accept everything, swipe everything, eat everything, touch everything. Looking, deciphering, studying doesn’t move them. The one mass affect is that of touching, or manipulating. The organizers (and the artists, and the intellectuals) are alarmed by this uncontrollable impulse, for they reckoned only with the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture.”