Special Envoy

by Jean Echenoz

  In the evening, before the banquet, the Supreme Leader himself appeared to the sound of the song “Footsteps” by Ri Jong-o, instantly provoking a unanimous low bow. Solid and paunchy, his large, chubby, oval-shaped head in proportion with his large oval torso—a duck egg atop an ostrich egg with no neck to join them—he moved forward obstinately, awkwardly, compensating for his lack of height (like his Dear Leader father) with thick heelpieces, holding his arms out wide to keep his balance. Constance quickly learned that he was cultivating his resemblance to his Eternal Leader grandfather, reproducing the same gestures, the same gait, wearing the same suits, his hair styled in the same way: temples shaved, the back puffed up, the middle parted. It was even rumored (though there were so many rumors) that this resemblance had been accentuated by no less than six surgical operations.

  He had come with his wife, an ex-cheerleader for the national athletics team, an ex–pop star well known for her hits “I Adore Pyongyang” and “We Are the Troops of the Party.” With her doll-like, fresh-faced appearance, she looked very sweet, though the spinach and bottle-green outfit she wore was less flattering. The Supreme Leader was also accompanied by his younger sister, recently promoted to the head of the department in charge of directing and organizing the Central Committee after previously leading the Workers’ Party’s mephitic Department 54, tasked with collecting foreign currency by any means necessary. With her diaphanous skin and oblong figure, dressed in a dark suit, the sister wasn’t bad-looking either, and Constance remembered seeing her on propaganda posters, astride a white Turkoman stallion with blue eyes—considered by some to be the most beautiful horse in the world—the Kim family always keen to show off its horse-riding prowess, intended to identify it, consciously or subconsciously, in the mind of the people as a dynasty of centaurs.

  Chain-smoking cigarettes, his glass of scotch refilled ad libitum, the Supreme Leader kept eating slices of Emmental from the dishes that were passed around. He apparently discovered this cheese during his years of study in Switzerland and now found it irresistible, though he was unhappy enough with its local fabrication to have sent some Korean cheese makers to Besançon in order to finish their training at the National School of the Dairy Industry. He smiled most of the time, the only alternative to this smile being a blank expression that somehow seemed to exude a combination of mistrust, envy, anger, menace, and sulkiness, as if his emotions were completely binary, with no shades of gray in between. He greeted Constance with an extended-play version of his smile number 1 before flashing Gang his expression number 2 and asking for a word in private. After that, the Supreme Leader went back to Constance and beamed an even wider version of number 1 at her as if he were casually seducing her, and his wife shot Constance a brief look in which various possible fates could be deciphered, from a strict labor camp to death by machine gun.

  In honor of Constance, the band was silenced and the original version of “Excessif” was played over the sound system. This was greeted with copious applause, before the Korean version—“”—was played, and its blushing, trembling singer introduced. The trembling may have resulted from the prospect of being sent to the Supreme Leader’s personal labor camp when the evening was over, as all artists were automatically regarded as potential dissidents, along with their family and friends, in accordance with the widely applied principle of guilt by kinship and association.

  After aperitifs, they sat down for the banquet, whose menu was beyond not only the imagination but also the digestive capacities of the guests. Conch and royal shark’s fin soup, mushrooms sautéed with quenelles of salmon, crawfish stew, fire-grilled whiting, horse mackerel and tuna, roast kid, Uzbek and Iranian caviar, Danish pork, and, best of all, special beef, exclusively for the use of the nomenklatura, reared on ultrasecret livestock farms run by communities of reclusive farmers on land protected by deep ditches and lined by trees, in the Hwanghaenam-do Province.

  The next morning, as they were lying in bed after getting back to the villa late after the party on the yacht, Constance ingenuously commented: It wasn’t bad, that party, was it? There are days when I can’t stand this anymore, confessed Gang, feeding the hopes of General Bourgeaud. I’m sorry if this is indiscreet, whispered Constance, nuzzling close to him, but what did he ask you yesterday, your boss, when he took you aside? He’s getting crazier and crazier, said Gang. He wants me to get my hair cut like him now. So you’re going to get your hair cut off? Constance asked. Better my hair than my head, Gang decided, not without discernment.

  34

  FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS, Nadine Alcover has not spent much time at the apartment in Rue Claude-Pouillet. In the evenings, Lou Tausk will sometimes see her, coming home late after he’s eaten dinner alone and going to bed in the back bedroom. But during the day, he is left in peace. Now, for example, it’s late morning and Lou Tausk is at a loose end. Sometimes when we have nothing to do, we tidy up, and so it was that, as Tausk was tidying up his papers, he found a few from Pélestor, which made him think of Hyacinth. So he called Hyacinth, who had dropped by a few days before to provide Tausk with a technical report on his stereo, a diagnosis so thorough that Tausk went out and bought another one. Hyacinth is waiting in his taxi at a rank near Botzaris when he receives the call: Are you free for lunch? I know a pretty good Chinese place, not too far from where you are. Sounds good, says Hyacinth, I’m not too busy at the moment. Not many customers these days, on account of the financial crisis.

  So they met outside the Pensive Mandarin, went inside, and were guided to Tausk’s usual table near the aquarium, whose inhabitants Hyacinth observed. They did not look back at him. In fact, they seemed to avoid or even flee his gaze, having spotted him as a former expert in halieutics, because when he was young Hyacinth used to take his dugout canoe—made from iroko wood and propelled by a combination of sail and paddle—out to sea beyond Sassandra’s mangroves. There, he would fish for local varieties such as the polygamous pearly razor fish (whose harem, at a loss when the male is hooked, chooses the largest female, who then devotes herself to changing sex), the dream fish (care required as it feeds on hallucinogenic seaweed), the completely inedible Atlantic stargazer, the combative pagrus, and the blind beaux-yeux.

  We are deep in these reflections when Tausk’s cell phone vibrates in his pocket: Hubert, announces Hubert. Hubert rarely calls Tausk, but he decides to complain: You only ever get in touch with me when you need me for something. You’d rather call your friends. Maybe you think it’s cheaper because they live closer to you. I don’t have many friends, admits Tausk. Me neither, acknowledges Hubert. Well, that makes things simpler. Why don’t you come and see me? Sure, says Tausk, but I don’t have much to tell you. Ah, but I have plenty to tell you, unfortunately, says Hubert.

  After lunch, Hyacinth was happy to take Tausk to Neuilly. They didn’t talk much in the car, except for a few comparisons about food from around the world. I like Chinese food, says Hyacinth, of course. They do it well. But if you’ve ever eaten food from my homeland—alloco or agouti or soso—well, it’s something else. Don’t you miss it sometimes, the Ivory Coast? Tausk asks him. Of course I miss it, exclaims Hyacinth. Every day. Maybe it was a bad idea to come to France. And they arrived in Neuilly.

  When we go through the front door of Hubert’s residence, we see the new assistant’s shimmering blond bun to our left, like an extra lamp; to our right, we see two men sitting in chairs. We have already seen one of them before—the one who looks like Jean Bouise and who has let his mustache grow since the other day in order to increase this resemblance. He is playing with a calculator beneath the magnetic lid of his open briefcase while the other one, whom we have never seen, consults his Patek Philippe, then gestures nervously with his chin toward the assistant. Who asks him to please be patient, because Maître Coste is very busy. As Tausk goes into Hubert’s office before them, the Patek wearer calls out coldly: What about him? We were here first. He’s family, says the assistant. It’s different.

  As expected, Hub
ert remarks to Tausk that the flap of his jacket pocket is tucked in. Now, as far as pocket flaps are concerned, you have a choice of two possibilities: either you tuck them in, or you leave them out. But whichever option you go for, you have to do the same for both. And yet Hubert seems distracted as he says this, as if he no longer really believes it, as if his heart’s not in it. I’m involved in something shady, he admits as he paces around his office, and I’m worried about a certain number of problems. I’m dealing with some increasingly questionable people. I wanted to talk to you about this to get your opinion, but I don’t have much time—they’re here. Can I call you back tonight?

  Tausk, leaving the office to the questionable people, hangs about for a while near the assistant with the bun. She’s actually not bad-looking: imagining her when she’s not wearing glasses, or even when she’s not wearing anything at all, he asks: Is Hubert in trouble? The girl frowns in the direction of the two empty chairs. I can’t talk about it, she says. Of course, Tausk agrees, I understand completely. But there are lots of other things we could talk about. Maybe we could go out one evening? I’ll give you my card, replies the assistant, scrawling ten figures on the back. This is my cell number. You never know. That’s true, thinks Tausk. I’m Charlotte, she says. And I’m Louis, he says. On his way out of Hubert’s house, passing a gray BMW with a gorilla inside, he examines the card: Charlotte Guglielmi. Good.

  When he got back to Rue Claude-Pouillet, he sensed something had changed. It was hard to put his finger on what it was exactly, but he felt quite sure. Something in the air had changed, unless it was something in the cupboards. A quick search of the cupboards revealed the fact that all of Nadine Alcover’s possessions had disappeared. All that remained of her was a note, inside an envelope, placed on the coffee table.

  35

  DURING THOSE SAME TWO WEEKS, Constance extended her knowledge of the city. As she was bored of the sightseeing, her two guides took her to see the movie studios (sets of a spectral Chinese or European or Japanese city, depending on the screenplay for the film that was being shot), to spend the afternoon at the circus (a small circle filled with gym apparatus on which, pretty often, the acrobats fell flat on their faces), to go on a roller coaster at the local amusement park (rusty armrests and handles), or to visit an ostrich farm (ostriches were very useful animals: their flesh was savored by the party bigwigs, and their feathers and skin were sold for high prices to foreign hatters and tanners).

  They also organized a few trips outside the capital for her: standard tourist excursions, to begin with, sometimes verdant, sometimes not, but always narrowly circumscribed. Then when she asked to see the provinces, she was told that all towns and cities beyond the capital were off-limits despite Gang Un-ok’s status and his various passes. They stuck to the highways, from which they saw a countryside that was bare, open, uniform, the earth apparently arid and mutilated, as if it had been turned in vain, as if it were exhausted, as if even the trees found it hard to grow here—and most of them were sawed down by the locals anyway, to feed their stoves.

  No derivation from the schedule was allowed to visit the villages they saw in the background, and whenever a secondary road took them past one of these villages, they always looked exactly the same: swept by two or three women pointed out to Constance as volunteers, with other volunteers digging in the grass on the roadside; men carrying bags, alone or in small groups, a man herding six goats, another pushing his bicycle. Sometimes an oxcart would go past, or a truck carrying some soldiers standing crammed together on its flatbed. Once, when they were blocked by a broken-down bus, Constance had time to count the eleven soldiers who pushed it out of the way. Maybe they weren’t all soldiers necessarily, but they were all wearing similar types of uniforms, often mismatched, in shades of brown, gray-beige, and dark green. Or perhaps this was just the local fashion? In the end, Constance stopped going on these excursions.

  When Gang Un-ok managed to get a day or two off work, they would go to vacation resorts for oligarchs, which—less luxurious than the Leader’s yacht—resembled the palaces of Saddam Hussein as discovered after his fall: successions of large, empty rooms, with monumental gold-fringed couches and coffee tables made of glass and convoluted wrought-iron patterns, of a kind that you can find on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine in Paris (notably at numbers 2 to 12). The walls were decorated with historical and revolutionary tapestries, which sometimes hung side by side, incongruously, with French paintings from the 1950s, Yves Brayer or Bernard Buffet, once an Utrillo. They went out in the garden to get some air; then they spent most of their time in the basement, in swimming pools or projection rooms, smelling respectively (and very strongly) of chlorine and cresol.

  While Gang’s schedule was slightly more flexible now, he admitted to Constance one night that it was part of a reduction—at first barely perceptible—in his responsibilities. His place in the hierarchy seemed to have taken a few blows: sensitive to the tiniest details, with a knowledge of political codes—the obliqueness of a look, a slipped precedence, an extra half smile—he was able to interpret all this, and the news was not good. Having had his hair cut (though perhaps not quite short enough) on the advice of the Leader, he feared he had fallen into disgrace, and soon he was no longer even invited to some Saturday meetings. When this happened, he and Constance went away for the weekend.

  On their way back from one of these weekends, Gang’s limousine passed near the airport where Clément Pognel had, at that moment, just landed. Bourgeaud’s services had fabricated a role for him as an agri-food adviser, and his visa was accepted without comment. In order not to risk any interference between agents, they had booked him into the Potonggang, another tourist hotel, far away from the Yanggakdo, where Jean-Pierre and Christian were beginning to feel downhearted, even though their hotel was much nicer than Pognel’s. Because the Potonggang, considerably less expensive than the Yanggakdo, did have a few inconveniences: little hot water most of the time, no water at all at night, frequent power cuts (hence the blocked elevators), an ice-cold bedroom, with the window and balcony sealed shut, disturbing nocturnal noises when Pognel was trying to fall asleep on his granite bed, which was even less comfortable than his tourist-class plane seat.

  The presence of Faust did not pose any problems. The inevitable guides, waiting for Pognel at the airport, even seemed amused by the dog, playing fearfully with him, though they did not go as far as feeding him. Unfortunately, two days after his arrival, Pognel would observe upon waking that Faust had vanished, probably abducted during the night by the guides, even if they immediately pretended to do everything they could to make sure he was found. These supposed searches were in vain, however, and there can be little doubt about the poor animal’s fate. While Faust had certainly been taken, first of all, for comestible reasons—because, when well prepared, dog is extremely tasty—it was also, of course, his fur that was targeted, as dogs are almost as versatile in their uses as ostriches. That beagle’s pelt, not big enough to line a coat, would probably be used in the confection of a hat or a muff that would be the delight of some neoliberal Pyongyang lady.

  And so a few days later, Pognel, in mourning for his pet, was in a very bad mood when he contacted Constance in accordance with the modus operandi indicated by Objat: in the toilet of the Hotel Koryo, with the two of them escaping the attentions of their guides for a few minutes. Given this context, their meeting was brief. And unbalanced: Pognel, having organized her kidnapping, knew exactly who Constance was, whereas she knew nothing about him at all. Well, Pognel asked, where do things stand with this guy? I think he’s starting to ripen, Constance replied, as in the days when people spoke of her in these terms. Things don’t seem to be going well for him, and I can see that he’s afraid. Perfect, said Pognel. I’ll await instructions and keep you informed. Let’s get back to the others now, before they start having doubts.

  And when she returned to the villa, Gang did indeed seem distraught. He had just been moved from the National Defense Commit
tee to a subsection on economic exchange with Syria. He had also been stripped of his functions as an adviser, which did not bode well at all since he had not been informed of this man-to-man, but through cold circumlocutions. But there was even worse news: while Gang’s status before now had allowed him to travel to China as part of various cooperation programs, those authorizations had now been removed, making him seriously worried. Why, Constance asked, did you want to go there?

  It’s not that, but it all happens quickly once it starts like that, answered Gang, becoming ensnared in demonstrative pronouns. He then went on: Well, the best thing would obviously have been to take advantage of an official visit. Now, if they won’t let me leave anymore, I don’t know how I’ll manage it. Don’t worry, Constance reassured him, we’ll find a solution. How could you solve this? Gang snapped. You don’t know anything about the system. You have no idea what they’re capable of being capable of.