“Well, Nicolas, three evenings in a row, aren’t things getting a bit suspicious here between the two of us?”
Suddenly, without actually knowing what strange impulse he was obeying, he put his hand on hers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She did not move hers, but said: “How did you know I was left-handed?”
He smiled tenderly and the same feelings of happiness he had had the day before came back to him, intact, as if nothing had interrupted them.
“If we end up meeting a fourth time, I shall need to be given a reason,” she said.
“Give me a bit of time.”
“People who like vodka have their own interpretation of time, just like they have their own interpretation of the world. We need to settle the question straight away: sing your praises for me.”
Nicolas looked confused.
“When people first meet, they love talking about their faults, hoping they’ll be absolved in advance. The listener, who’s already completely seduced, finds these confessions so charming, so romantic! As a general rule, things start going wrong very soon afterwards. We’re not going to fall into that trap; tell me what you like about yourself, the things you know you’re good at, make a list of all those little things that set you apart from other people.”
It seemed a pleasant enough exercise to him, but a risky one. Although it was neither a failing or a good quality, anxiety was his main characteristic, the key to his whole personality. She was making him go more slowly, more softly, more gently than anyone else. He would have been the first to know if the world belonged to the people who got up early and got on with things, first and foremost he was one of those who dared. From time to time he was tempted to carve out his own little place without feeling sure that he had any right to. There, in front of Loraine, he could not not mention this infirmity which stopped him seeing his own good points but which also shielded him from a number of excesses.
“I’d find it difficult talking about my good qualities but I do know some bad qualities that I don’t have. I’m not aggressive, and I’m proud of that.”
His anxiety had always forced him to recognize his limits and to avoid any sort of power struggle. All that time wasted on preparing for the worst had made him very self-effacing. Not without spark, or timid, just apart. You had to have no doubts to be on the offensive or even just threatening; Nicolas was full of doubts. He would never forget the day he had arrived bang on feed time with some friends who were proudly introducing their twins to the world. One of them was a grumpy baby, frantic to suckle; afraid of unleashing his screams, the mother fed him first. The other was shy, restrained, waiting his turn in silence. Nicolas saw it as a universal metaphor: the pains in the arse always came first.
“I don’t need scapegoats in everyday life.”
To be more precise, he did not try to make others pay for his failings, he already had plenty to get on with with the little sharp-toothed animal sheltering in his stomach.
“And I’m not cynical either. I feel sorry for people who laugh at the darkness around us.”
Without actually courting finer feelings (his anxiety precluded that too), he could not bear apocalyptic gloom or out-and-out decadence. They were only there to make his life more difficult, and Nicolas was good enough at that himself.
“I think I can say that I always try not to judge my contemporaries.”
He sometimes envied them but he did not judge them, that was a luxury he could not allow himself.
“In a crisis, I can very easily take things in hand and sort the situation out.”
This phenomenon was difficult to explain, a perverse effect of his anxiety. Paradoxically, Nicolas was unexpectedly calm at times of widespread stress, his mastery of his own anxiety became an asset in certain complex situations. If someone fainted in the Métro, he proceeded calmly, keeping a hold on the general panic so that the person could come to gently. Put another way, if some form of anxiety came to rival his own, he was able to gauge its significance and appease it.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop there,” he said with a mischievous smile.
Everything about him that was good or bad derived from this unspecified fear. The rest was just talk. As far as possible, he had been honest with his answers and he now wondered whether this honesty would pay. He saw a little something in Loraine’s eyes which might mean things would go on from there, and he ordered another drink.
Thierry Blin
“Try to find the client’s real motives, even if he doesn’t know them himself,” said Rodier. “Example: a senior manager, good-looking man, very elegant, asks me to follow a woman who’s just left him without explaining why. He suspects she’s met someone, he wants to know who. I follow the girl all over the place but don’t find anything, I’m going round in circles, the bill’s getting up towards 20,000 francs with absolutely no result. I try to tell the man that his ex is living alone and only seeing girlfriends, he refuses to believe it. I keep on kicking about until it gets to 35,000 and I give him another report, which doesn’t say any more than the previous one: in all likelihood, the girl hasn’t ‘met someone’. The client’s annoyed with me about this, he thinks I’m swindling him, the girl must have fallen in love with someone else, he’s convinced; but I really do have to stop an enquiry which is going nowhere. To be absolutely sure, he goes and asks the girl, who just confirms what I’ve said: she hasn’t met anyone. She was just bored with him, a man who never had any doubts about anything, let alone his own charms. By coming to me he was actually subconsciously asking: ‘How can a woman leave me, me, a senior manager with a flat stomach? I’m irresistible.’ To him the only possible answer was: ‘For someone richer, better-looking and more prominent.’”
“What happened to them?”
“He came by to tell me what happened after that – they often do, don’t be surprised if it happens when you’re working on your own. The girl – touched because he was still thinking about her – went back to him, they lived together for another three months, and he was the one who left her in the end.”
Rodier ordered another paupiette and poured every last drop of the cream sauce onto his plate. There was something almost fatalistic about this, a guilty greediness.
“Are you having anything else, Thierry?”
“Fruit salad’s on the menu today. That’s what I’ll have.”
“At your age it didn’t matter – food, I mean. It caught up with me round about fifty. I would never have guessed it would become the biggest worry of my life.”
“If I ate as much as you do, I’d be three times my weight.”
“It’s the only physical advantage I had at birth: I’ve always burned up everything. In the long run it can prove dangerous. I never put on any weight, I never had to watch anything, now I have to keep an eye on my cholesterol level and my diabetes.
“With paupiettes?!”
“Don’t look at my plate, I get enough of that from my wife.”
In three months Thierry had learned to let him speak about his longings, his aches and pains, his lottery hopes, his fly-fishing and his cholesterol. As the weeks passed, they had created an exchange which did more for both of them than they could have hoped. Rodier was coming down the home straight with a co-pilot he found he could lean on, and every day the ever-attentive Blin absorbed a key idea, a formula or a new message which would have taken him years to decipher on his own. When their commitments permitted, they had lunch at Chez Patrick, a little restaurant in the Eighteenth Arrondissement which had no particular cachet but was used by other investigators, most of them former police detectives who, for whatever reason, had felt obliged to leave the force. Only the day before, Rodier had rather unwillingly invited one of them to join them so that he could introduce his new recruit to him, setting him up in the profession with due form and ceremony. Thierry was especially friendly and played the part of the novice to win over the man who, grateful for a break from his loneliness, started telling old vetera
n’s anecdotes to impress him; Rodier could have done without the last of these. Twenty years earlier, he and four colleagues had cornered a blackmailer as he took delivery of a trunk full of money – the price of his silence – at the left luggage desk at the Gare de l’Est. Without thinking, Thierry asked a question which was perfectly legitimate but struck the other two as ridiculous.
“Why didn’t the victim contact the police?”
“Why do you think?”
“. . . Because he couldn’t contact the police?”
The grounds for the blackmail were real and serious, the man would have risked being taken to court if he had gone to the authorities. To get rid of the blackmailer he had had to take on a whole squad of private detectives, who had accepted the mission without any scruples. We were young, said Rodier, to exonerate himself. Thierry had not had the nerve to mention the conscience clause: was it right to save one criminal from another criminal’s clutches? The question unsettled him for the rest of the day until late into the night. In the early hours of the morning, he had not found an answer but promised himself he would avoid that sort of case if it were offered to him, more for his peace of mind than on moral grounds.
Today they were the only representatives of the profession at Chez Patrick, and they were having lunch at their usual little table set slightly apart from the others.
“A fruit salad, a crème brûlée and two coffees,” Rodier ordered.
“How does he come across to you, this Damien Lefaure?”
“A crook.”
Only recently, Rodier had let Blin attend his first meetings with new clients; very few of them had anything to say about it. Blin would put himself in a corner with his arms crossed, and would listen without ever interrupting, hiding his nerves as best he could behind a pro’s smile, pretending to be the sort who can listen to anything because he has heard it all before. But he had never heard anything like it, it was even the very first time he had been confronted with bizarre human circumstances where helpless confusion existed side by side with anger, greed with candour and generosity of spirit with revenge. Three days earlier they had received Maître Vano QC, a business lawyer who regularly called on Rodier’s services to check the reliability of various individuals who were preparing to work with his clients. Maître Vano’s caution was often rewarded, as it had been that time: the man by the name of Damien Lefaure was no newcomer to fraud.
In forty-eight hours Rodier and Blin had learned a great deal about the character. The day after his sixteenth birthday Lefaure had achieved the status of “emancipated minor” to set up his first company, Synenum, which went into liquidation five years later because of insufficient assets. He appeared in several more-or-less fictitious video and sponsorship companies, and in three modelling agencies which had never secured for any girl a single contract in the world of fashion. His tax debts had risen to two million francs and, in order to continue operating, he had himself declared a “legally incompetent adult”. Because he was now a ward of court, only his wife’s name appeared on official papers. On top of that, he had been under tight administrative scrutiny – not to mention the scrutiny of Rodier’s agency – for some time. Blin and Rodier knew all his account numbers, how many shares he had and what they were worth, the names of all of his companies and the addresses of his managers and administrators; they even suspected he had interests in an Internet prostitution network, but that was still only a rumour and would not appear in the report that Rodier had to submit to Maître Vano QC the following day.
“This man went from being an ‘emancipated minor’ to being a ‘legally incompetent adult’ as if he’d never actually been a normal adult,” said Blin.
“Well, at the end of the day, maybe that’s what a crook is,” said Rodier.
“In my framing workshop, I was more the type to be diddled by my customers. Even the tax inspector was suspicious; I was too honest, I must have been hiding something. There were days when I would have liked to have had the guts of someone like Lefaure.”
“You must be joking, he’s just a common thief.”
“Is that what you’re going to put in your report, then, Rodier? Lefaure is a common thief?”
Despite their complicity, the disciple always spoke with a note of respect and could not call him by his first name. Rodier did not understand this standing on ceremony.
“I’m not going to put anything in this report, you’re the one who’s going to do it.”
“Me?”
“You’re going to have to start doing them one day, aren’t you?”
Rodier asked for the bill and refused for the umpteenth time to split it with Thierry.
“So, this report,” Rodier asked. “On my desk in three hours?”
“Not before 7 o’clock, I’ve got something to do first.”
Rodier did not ask what. He was only interested in other people’s business if he was paid to be.
*
Doctor Joust’s clinic did not have much in common with the previous ones. It was in a residential area a few hundred yards from the Porte Maillot, and could hardly be seen behind a surrounding wall which was covered in ivy.
Joust was prepared to take on the job of giving Blin a face without any need for the story he had felt constrained to supply him with. He had played the part of a neurotic, convinced of his own ugliness, he even went so far as to compare his rejection of his face with an urge to burn down a house in which he had been unhappy. The only way to get rid of, symbolically, this tortured past, was to watch the house collapse in flames. Halfway through one of his sentences, he realized that he was not lying, and he broke out in a cold sweat.
“I must say, Monsieur Vermeiren, I have to tell you there’s a degree of dysmorphobia in all this. You’re not seeing yourself as you really are.”
Joust could not know how far he was from the truth. All Blin had to do now was accept an estimate of 65,000 francs, and the performance would be over. For a further 25,000 francs, the surgeon was even prepared to change his voice. Thierry wondered which of them was the more insane.
“Can that be done?” he asked.
“A little collagen injection in the vocal cords to fill them out alters the vibrations of the mucous surface; it changes the register of the voice quite a lot. I’m just suggesting it in case you no longer feel like hearing the voice of this man from the past . . .”
Blin heard the note of irony without really knowing how he felt about it. In order to get on with the process, Joust suggested that he should arrange a series of appointments so that he could meet his anaesthetist, draw up a preliminary account, and define as clearly as possible the various alterations to his face.
“For a significant change, you not only have to work on the soft tissue but also on the bone in order to add or take away prominent areas. It’s what’s called a mask-lift. Then, you have to restore the muscle- and skin-tone of the face in the frontal, facial and cervical areas. We could start with a cervico-facial lift and a frontal lift if you want a real change of look.”
Blin heard only the last words: change of look. The rest flitted away instantly.
“When we restore the muscle tone in the outside corner of the eye, we could add a slight oriental touch. Shall I show you?”
He drew the outline of Blin’s eyes on a white sheet of paper, then a few arrows to indicate where he would operate; something appeared out of this vague sketch, a new look which was indefinable, perhaps a little softer and probably more harmonious, already real.
“We’ll remove the excess fatty deposits which make the eyelids look hooded, and we’ll get rid of the bags under the eyes. We’ll also take the opportunity to smooth out that little bump on the nose, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes.”
“Personally, I can’t see anything else that needs doing to the nose. It’s a fine, narrow nose, there’s no need to improve it apart from that little filing job. On the other hand, your chin’s a bit weak. I would suggest bringing it out a bit by adding so
me bulk to it, a little silicon implant. I could do the same with your cheekbones – have a look at this.”
He showed him slides of his previous operations. Before and, more particularly, after. The most disturbing thing about these faces was neither the erasing of wrinkles nor the smoothness of the skin, but the gleam in the depths of the eyes, which said a great deal about the serenity the patients had found. Listening to Dr Joust, everything that had until then seemed unthinkable to Blin became a formality. It was as if you could just walk into his clinic one fine day with your everyday face on and come back out a few hours later with the one you had dreamed up for yourself.
“The incisions round the eyes and the chin will follow the natural lines of your face. I’ll hide the other scars in the hairline. They’ll be red at first then virtually invisible. Your barber will be the only person in the world who might see them . . .”
Someone Else Page 12