It was in mid-February, one early afternoon, that Heffner called Ivan on the telephone and invited him to come, with Francesca, to his office without delay.
They did not in fact meet at the Quai des Orfèvres. Heffner went out as soon as he had hung up. He was stamping his feet to keep warm on the pavement at the far end of the Pont Saint-Michel, and as soon as he saw Ivan and Francesca, he went up to meet them. He suggested they walk for a while. It was cold and gray, once again. They were expecting snow, once again. Straight off, Heffner headed down the Quai Saint-Michel toward Notre-Dame.
“It will take me two sentences to tell you what I have to say,” he said.
He stopped, as if he meant to look at the Seine. Van and Francesca did likewise, and leaned with their elbows against the railing.
“The judge has finished,” said Heffner. “For him, the investigation has lasted long enough. He is going to serve you an end of inquiry notice.”
“And have they taken you off the case?” asked Francesca.
“There is no case. The investigation will stop there. The judge maintains that there are neither ample charges nor sufficient evidence to warrant setting the wheels of justice in motion. There will be no suit. No charges against anyone.”
“The judge . . .” said Ivan. “Did you tell him everything that you found out?”
“Of course, I had to,” said Heffner. “I saw him any number of times. He has all my notes about the investigation. He knows as much about it now as I do.”
Francesca lifted up her collar: “And he does not think there’s enough to warrant a suit? Everything The Good Novel went through—the verbal attacks, the slander, the physical assaults—for him that’s all right?”
“He’s not saying that. I asked him exactly the same thing in more or less the same tone, and his best and most learned voice, he uttered the conventional formula for motioning a non-suit: ‘The investigation has not yielded sufficient evidence to charge anyone with attempted murder, as alleged by the civil party.’”
Below them, the Seine was running high and rough, the color of frozen mud. Van took Francesca by the elbow—he saw that she was numb—and turned to Heffner: “Let’s go somewhere warm. Do you have a moment?”
They went into the first café they could find, on the corner of the Quai and the rue du Petit-Pont. The café was crowded. The floor tiles were dirty and wet. “This is perfect,” said Francesca, forestalling Van’s gesture to go back out again. “It’s noisy, and smoky, and today that actually suits me.”
“You can appeal Blin’s decision,” said Heffner when they had sat down. “I don’t advise it. The way things are headed, you would gain nothing. But I am tempted to continue the investigation on my own.”
“What’s the point?” asked Francesca bluntly.
“To find out. To find out more.”
He talked for nearly an hour. He had stored up a lot of assumptions, near proofs, things he was so convinced of that he would have staked his life on it, nothing blatant or irrefutable. Nothing solid enough for a judge, he said.
The people they were dealing with were very cautious, very careful to remain within the bounds of legality, and whenever they did go beyond those bounds, they were extremely careful to cover their tracks.
Heffner was sure of one thing. All the people who, for over a year, had been attacking The Good Novel had not found themselves involved in that undertaking by mere chance.
What Van had believed for a long time, and had been trying to make Francesca believe for even longer, was that the first punch—that first aggressive article—had released the pent-up spite and unleashed the fury of a large number of careerist authors, unscrupulous publishers, venal judges, critics so well-ensconced in their laziness and positions of power that they would never move elsewhere; Heffner did not buy the theory of an unorganized movement arising spontaneously in ever increasing waves.
Nor did he believe the conspiracy theory Francesca had suspected from the very first press campaign. The idea of an organized group methodically planning to demolish The Good Novel was not a script that would stand up to an investigation.
The truth lay somewhere in between, borrowing elements from both hypotheses. Heffner spoke not of a group but of a movement, and he did not think it was run by a cold calculating individual but by someone frenzied, at least at the beginning.
“Frenzied, literally,” he said. “Because art and culture are the arena of insane violence. Everyone knows that there are no limits to passion where love is concerned. And it’s easy to imagine that political life is awash with extraordinarily ruthless antagonism, where ambitious people are capable of anything. Or that in business you hack out your place with a machete. We know only too well that there’s no longer much of a game where sports are concerned, that anything goes—lies, corruption, intimidation. But for vaguely idealistic reasons, we have not yet come to realize, and are loath to suspect, that artistic creation, and all the infrastructure surrounding its production and promotion, can also be an extremely hateful forcefield, impelled most often by envy and, in France anyway, the usual weapons of ideological discredit.
“The name of this frenzied individual is Eric Ervé. I found his trail nearly everywhere when I explored the places where the missiles against The Good Novel had been fired.”
Ervé: Ivan and Francesca had run into him. They knew precisely where he was situated in literary circles. Fifty-something, once very handsome, growing fleshy. Twelve novels, including one big success, The Glue. A prize, in the early years, for one of his other books. A desk job at a publishing house that was struggling, its image tarnished by a series of second-rate books. A column in a mass-media weekly. A man who could be servile on command around anyone in power, in publishing, the media, television, academies, and beyond, with prize juries, advertising people, filmmakers, politicians, philanthropists, aristocrats, the jet set, and finally the truly rich. But on the whole, despite so much energy spent trying to please, manipulate, and slander, despite the favors and titles and innumerable interested friendships he fostered, all he gained was the reputation of a writer of no interest, astonishingly conformist and stable.
“When he saw he didn’t have a single book at The Good Novel, he went ballistic,” said Heffner. “He’s a calculating bastard. He wouldn’t go to the front. He pinpointed several dozen authors like himself, slightly famous, very ordinary, and who were not represented at the bookstore. He got in touch with them, one by one. He used them as his tools. The four or five of them who lived through the Internet—he got them all riled up, so they would communicate, propagate, influence, and denigrate through the Web, the way others used to do by phone, in an earlier generation. He came up with sharp jibes and whispered them here and there, and was never more pleased than when he could read them or hear others say them.
“Ten times people mentioned him to me. He found relays in the press: he’s a genius for sniffing out who, in any social group, is the careerist who hasn’t made it, or hasn’t got as far as he’d like, dead drunk on frustrated zeal, shit-scared by the passage of time and the inexorable arrival every year of celebrated new young talents.
“He canvassed the publishers always looking for a hit, and frightened them. These are people who are well aware that they are supporting, incarnating and engendering impostors: no one fears more than they do that they might hear someone say, as they go by, The emperor has no clothes . . .
“Ervé also got in touch with the big chain bookstores. Times are hard as it is, he told them, the Internet is taking millions of customers away from you. So, just imagine that some sort of unscrupulous know-it-all is poaching on your territory, like some sort of Green movement for literary consumption, you see: it won’t even take ten years for bullshit like this to create a planetary wave. Imagine the same thing happening to your products that happened to tobacco, and that could happen to junk food: imagine people turning away from it in the name of mental health and a refusal to pollute their minds.”
Heffner had managed to trace the origins of the article signed Abéha, which had been the signal to start hostilities, thanks to the person in charge of the Op-Ed pages in Le Ponte. Nothing like a legal summons to loosen people’s tongues, he said. The article had been written by Ervé and submitted to Malinovic, the great corrupting publisher. Ervé feigned modesty: It’s a draft? You think it’s good? How can I go about publishing it? Neither of us is in a position to sign it . . . Malinovic had taken care of it.
“Don’t go thinking that I’m talking about the entire book business,” said Heffner. “You know as well as I do that’s not the case. Even here, we’re talking about a minority. Altogether the ones I would incriminate, who I would say are part of a movement, cannot number more than a hundred. That may seem astonishing, if you put together all the writers, media people, publishing people, and booksellers. It’s because some of them wear several hats, they might be writers, journalists, publishers, and judges all at the same time. Some of the novelists who were furious not to be sold at The Good Novel have long arms. They might, for example, be judges for a literary prize: so they have a hold over those journalists who are also authors and dream of winning a prize. Other novelists—or the same ones—have positions in the media. By virtue of that alone, if they find the least bit of favor in the eyes of publishers, they come first in line for the prizes—and we know that some publishers negotiate them with the judges. And to make sure they are compliant, the publishers will publish them no matter how second-rate their books are. So, we don’t find their books at The Good Novel.
“The Good Novel has caused every element of a fairly limited socio-professional group to break out in hives. Far be it from me to suggest, let me say that again, that this group represents everyone in publishing, the media, or criticism, or bookselling. They are a sub-faction of people who share the view that a book is a product that can make a lot of money and that literature can be a rich seam.
“Ervé was the strategist, the spur. But he couldn’t get very far on his own. And he didn’t want to risk exposure. He masterfully manipulated those I will call “the thirty”—there might be twenty of them, or maybe fifty—fourth-rate authors who had not given up on the idea of making it someday, and who saw that marketing confusion could earn them more points every year, and they dreaded being left to stew in obscurity if ever The Good Novel was so successful that it brought about the unexpected rebirth of a practice you would have thought was timeless—the appreciation of talent at its just value.
“So it’s perfectly clear,” explained Heffner, “at the beginning of the anti-Good Novel offensive, you can see Ervé’s hand or influence on any number of occasions. For example, he used at least twenty-five different e-mail addresses, in other words he had twenty-five identities on the Web. And then his signature became more rare, while his devoted henchmen’s signatures appeared more and more often.
“With all due allowance, something happened here that is comparable to what happened with Al Qaeda and all its consequences. In the beginning, a hard-core cell attacks in strength. But very quickly the brain grows smart enough make use of propaganda in addition to pure action, so much so that he succeeds beyond all expectation: other cells are created, other cores.
“I’m not implying that Ervé brainwashed and held the hand of every single person who attacked The Good Novel, but I believe he convinced a certain number of people to act, people who were just waiting for the opportunity, and who now developed their own ideas for striking a blow, and who went into action, either directly or through somebody else.”
“Give us some names,” said Ivan.
“This will come as no surprise. Breigne, Jovis, Levron, Dabant, Piéfort, Marin-Larmier, hang on . . . The elegant Mr. Miguel, the suave Olivia Venette. A lot of Malinovic authors, a lot of scribblers you see regularly on television. A number of big shots from the major media corporations.
“In other words,” continued Heffner, “the harder the strikes against The Good Novel, the more the responsibility is spread around; the greater the number of instigators, the more intermediaries there are—and the harder the investigation. To find out for sure who designed the attacks against the electors, who planned them, and who carried them out, would take weeks of investigation.
“The acts for which I had evidence for the judge were not the most serious: harassment on the Internet, bribing of journalists, spreading slander—the judge calls that freedom of expression, lobbying, normal competition . . .”
“How simple it is,” said Francesca. “One hundred determined people can shape opinion, influence the media, turn falsehood into reality, designate scapegoats . . .”
“Nothing new under the sun,” said Heffner.
“. . . Raise funds,” continued Van, “get the frustrated people all riled up, then go into action . . .”
“. . . And reward them,” said Heffner. “Reward them for their contribution. Nothing new, you know. The mechanisms of violent action are always the same. They are denounced when they go beyond legal bounds—provided you can identify them. But as long as they stay within those bounds, there are tolerated, by definition.”
“All the same, tell me,” asked Francesca, “who has the means to open bookstores in the Odéon?”
“Hundreds of people, dozens of companies,” said Heffner. “I’m surprised you ask. Here: you, your husband, any number of people who are not criminals but who want to defend their interests. You’re bound to know a few.”