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published over a period of two days, the two days following the murder. Then the item vanished from the press completely, as tends to happen with all news nowadays: people don’t want to know why something happened, only what happened, and to know that the world is full of reckless acts, of dangers, threats and bad luck that only brush past us, but touch and kill our carelessfellow human beings, or perhaps they were simply not among the chosen. We live quite happily with a thousand unresolved mysteries that occupy our minds for ten minutes in the morning and are then forgotten without leaving so much as a tremor of grief, not a trace. We don’t want to go too deeply into anything or linger too long over any event or story, we need to have our attention shifted from one thing to another, to be given a constantly renewed supply of other people’s misfortunes, as if, after each one, we thought: ‘How dreadful. But what’s next? What other horrors have we avoided? We need to feel that we, by contrast, are survivors, immortals, so feed us some new atrocities, we’ve worn out yesterday’s already.’
    Oddly enough, during those two days, little was said about the man who had died, only that he was the son of one of the founders of the well-known film distributors and that he worked for the family firm, which was now almost an empire that had been growing for decades and constantly adding to its many ramifications, currently even including low-cost airlines. In the days that followed, there was no sign of any obituary for Deverne anywhere, no memoir or evocation written by a friend or colleague or comrade, no biographical sketch that spoke of his character and his personal achievements, and that was strange. Any wealthy businessman, especially if he has links with the cinema, and even if he isn’t famous, has contacts in the press or friends with contacts, and it wouldn’t be difficult to persuade one of those contacts to place a heartfelt note of homage and praise in some newspaper, as if that might compensate the dead person in some way for being dead or as if the lack of an obituary were an added insult (so often we only find out that someone has existed once they have ceased to do so, in fact, because they have ceased to exist).
    And so the only available photo was the one snapped by some quick-witted reporter while Deverne was lying on the ground, beforehe was taken away, when he was still receiving treatment there in the street. Fortunately, it was hard to see the image on the Internet – a very small, rather bad reproduction – because that seemed to me a truly vile thing to do to a man like him, who, in life, had always been so cheerful, so impeccable. I barely looked at it, I didn’t want to, and I had already thrown away the newspaper where I had first glimpsed the photo in its larger version without realizing who it was and not wishing to spend time over it. Had I known then that he was not a complete stranger, but a person I used to see every day with a sense of pleasure and almost gratitude, the temptation to look would have been too hard to resist, but then I would have averted my gaze, feeling even more indignant and horrified than I had when I failed to recognize him. Not only do you get killed in the street in the cruellest way possible and completely out of the blue, without so much as an inkling that such a thing could happen, but also, precisely because it did happen in the street – ‘in a public place’ as people reverentially and stupidly say – it is deemed permissible to exhibit to the world the humiliating havoc wrought on you. In the smaller photo on the Internet, I would barely have recognized him, and then only because the text assured me that the dead or soon-to-be-dead man was Desvern. He, at any rate, would have been horrified to see or know himself to have been thus exposed, without a jacket or tie or even a shirt, or with his shirt open – you couldn’t quite tell, and where would