Hey, Vince.
Here are the initial results of my investigation. No scoop, but a few little things that will paint a rather different portrait of Éric Lombard from the one the public is fed. Not so long ago, during a billionaire’s forum in Davos, our man adopted the definition of globalisation as postulated by Percy Barnevik, the Swedish former president of the ABB Group: ‘I would define globalisation as the freedom for my group of companies to invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible from labour laws and social conventions.’ Which is also the creed of most multinational CEOs.
To get an idea of the increasingly powerful pressure these groups are exerting on governments, just think that in the early 1980s there were roughly 7,000 multinational corporations around the world, that by 1990 there were 37,000, and now 15 years later there are over 70,000, controlling 800,000 subsidiaries and 70 per cent of trade flow. And the tendency is only getting stronger. Consequently, there has never been so much wealth, and the wealth has never been so inequitably distributed: the CEO of Disney earns 300,000 times what the Haitian worker manufacturing the company’s T-shirts gets. The 13 board members of AIR, to which Éric Lombard belongs, earned salaries of €10 million each last year – in other words, twice the total combined salaries of all 6,000 workers in one of the group’s Asian factories.
Espérandieu frowned. Was Kleim162 about to rehash the entire history of socialism for him? He knew that his contact had a visceral mistrust of the police, politicians and multinational corporations, that he was not only a journalist but also a member of Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch, and that he had been in Genoa and Seattle during the anti-globalisation demonstrations that were held on the fringe of the G8 summits. He had been in the Diaz school in Genoa, which the demonstrators were using as a dormitory, when the Italian carabinieri had burst in and beat them up with such incredible brutality that the walls and floor were covered in blood. Eventually they called the ambulances. The final toll: 1 dead, 600 injured and 281 arrests.
Éric Lombard was groomed in the family’s sporting goods company: a brand name that everyone knows thanks to the champions who use their products. He succeeded in doubling the branch’s profit in five years. How did he do that? By developing a veritable ‘art’ of subcontracting. Shoes, T-shirts, shorts and other sporting equipment were already being manufactured in India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, by women and children. Éric Lombard went out there and modified the existing agreements. Now in order to obtain a licence, the supplier has to agree to draconian conditions: no strikes, flawless quality and production costs so low that the workers receive a pittance. To keep up the pressure the licence is subject to revision on a monthly basis. A tactic his competitors had already used. Since he inaugurated this policy, the branch has been more prosperous than ever.
Espérandieu looked down. He studied his T-shirt, emblazoned with the words ‘I’m next to a moron’, with an arrow pointing left.
Another example? In 1996, the pharmaceutical branch of the group bought the American company that had developed eflornithine, the only medication known to be effective against African trypanosomiasis, commonly known as sleeping sickness. A disease that affects 450,000 people in Africa every year and which, if left untreated, can lead to encephalitis, coma and death. The Lombard Group immediately stopped producing the drug. Why? Not profitable enough. To be sure, the disease affects hundreds of thousands of people, but they are people without real purchasing power. Countries like Brazil, South Africa and Thailand decided to manufacture the drugs to combat AIDS or meningitis, given the humanitarian urgency, disregarding the patents that belonged to the major pharmaceutical companies; Lombard joined forces with the companies to bring a suit against those countries at the World Trade Organisation. At the time, old Lombard was already dying, and it was Éric who took over the reins of the group, at the age of twenty-four. So are you beginning to see our handsome adventurer and media darling from another point of view?
Consequently, thought Vincent, Lombard must have no lack of enemies. Which wasn’t really good news. He skipped over the following pages, which were more or less the same sort of thing, and figured he’d go back to them later. He did pause, however, to read a passage a bit further along:
For you the most interesting aspect might be the bitter conflict between the Lombard Group and the workers of the Polytex factory, near the Belgian border, in July 2000. In the early 1950s Polytex was manufacturing one of the first synthetic fibres in France, and they employed 1,000 workers. By the end of the 1990s there were only 160 workers left. In 1991 the factory had been bought by a multinational who handed it over almost immediately to a private equity firm: it wasn’t profitable anymore because of competition from other less costly fibres. Although it certainly could have been – the superior quality of the product meant that it was ideal for surgical use. There was a market for it. Finally, after a series of firms had taken over the factory, a subsidiary of the Lombard Group came forward.
For the workers, a multinational the size of Lombard seemed like a dream come true. They wanted to believe. The previous raiders had all given them the usual shutdown blackmail: salaries frozen, compulsory overtime including weekends and holidays. Lombard was no different: at first, he asked them to put in an even greater effort. In fact, the group had bought the factory for one purpose alone: to acquire the patents. On 5 July 2000, the commercial court of Charleville-Mézières ruled that the factory should be liquidated. For the workers this was a terrible blow. It meant compulsory redundancy, an immediate end to work and destruction of all the equipment. The Polytex workers were so angry that they decided to take the factory hostage, and declared they were ready to blow it up and pour 50,000 litres of sulphuric acid into the Meuse if their demands were not taken into consideration. They were well aware of the weapon they had: the factory contained a whole host of very toxic chemicals, which in the case of a fire or explosion would have caused a catastrophe even worse than the AZF disaster in Toulouse in 2001.
The authorities immediately ordered the evacuation of the nearby town, hundreds of policemen were positioned around the site, and the Lombard Group was ordered to begin immediate negotiations with the help of the unions. The affair lasted five days. As they were not making any progress, on 17 July the workers poured 5,000 litres of sulphuric acid, symbolically coloured red, into a stream that fed into the Meuse. They threatened to do it again every two hours.
Politicians, trade unionists and leaders then denounced what they called ‘indefensible eco-terrorism’. A major evening paper ran the deadly serious headline ‘Advent of Social Terrorism’ and spoke of ‘suicidal Taliban’. Which is all the more ironic when you think that for decades Polytex had been one of the biggest polluters of the Meuse and the whole region. Finally, three days later the factory was captured by the GIGN special forces and the CRS riot police. The workers went home with their tails between their legs: they hadn’t gained a thing. I imagine quite a few of them have still not digested what happened.
That’s all I have for the time being. I’ll keep on digging. Goodnight, Vince.
Espérandieu frowned. If this was relevant to the case, why now? Eight years later? Had any of the workers ended up in prison? Or after several years of unemployment had they killed themselves, leaving behind families filled with hatred? He made a note to find the answer to these questions.
Espérandieu looked at the time in the corner of his screen: 7.03 p.m. He switched off the laptop and stretched on his chair. He got up and took a bottle of milk from the fridge. The house was silent. Mégan was playing in her room; Charlène wouldn’t be back for several hours; the babysitter had left. He leaned against the sink and took an anxiety supressant. Prompted by a sudden thought, he looked for the name of the laboratory on the box – only to find that, in order to calm the worry brought on by the doings of the Lombard Group, he had just taken one of their drugs!
He wo
ndered how he could go about finding out more about Lombard, and remembered a contact in Paris – a brilliant young woman whom he had known at the police academy and who would surely be well placed to obtain juicy revelations.
* * *
‘Martin, come and have a look.’
They had gone back to searching every floor. Servaz had started on a little room which, judging by the layer of dust, had not been used for ages. He opened cupboards and drawers, lifted up a mattress and pillows, was even trying to remove the metal sheet blocking the fireplace when Irène’s voice reached him.
He went out onto the top-floor landing. On the other side was an inclined ladder with a handrail, like on a ship. And an open trap door directly above. A ribbon of light fell from the gaping hole and pierced the darkness on the landing.
Servaz climbed up and put his head through the opening.
Ziegler was standing in the middle of the room, and motioned to him to join her.
The attic consisted of one long, attractive space under the beams, and served both as bedroom and study. Servaz emerged from the hole and got his footing. The furnishing and décor were like something you’d find in a mountain chalet: rough wood, a wardrobe, a bed with drawers beneath the window, a table that served as a desk. On one of the walls was an immense map of the Pyrenees – with valleys, villages, roads and peaks. Right from the start Servaz had been wondering where Chaperon slept, as none of the bedrooms had seemed lived in; now the answer was before his eyes.
Ziegler looked all around the room, as did Servaz. The cupboard was open.
Empty hangers in a tangle inside; a pile of clothing lying on the floor.
On the desk, loose papers, and, under the bed, a gaping drawer revealed a tangle of men’s underwear.
‘I found it like this,’ murmured Ziegler. ‘What is going on here?’
Servaz noticed a detail that he had initially missed: on the desk, among the papers, was a box of bullets, open …
In his haste, Chaperon had dropped one on the floor.
They looked at each other.
The mayor had fled, as if he had the devil at his heels.
And he was afraid for his life.
21
Seven p.m. Diane had become very hungry and she hurried to the little cafeteria where something would be provided for the staff who did not go home. On her way in she greeted two guards eating at a table near the door, and picked up a tray.
She made a face as she looked through the glass display where the warm meals were served: chicken and chips. She would have to get organised if she wanted to eat a balanced diet and and not leave with ten extra kilos at the end of her stay. For dessert she took a fruit salad. She sat by the picture window and gazed out at the nocturnal landscape. Little lamps set around the building lit the snow at ground level, beneath the fir trees. The effect was magical.
Once the two guards had left, she was all alone in the silent room – even the server behind the counter had disappeared – and a wave of sadness and doubt overcame her. And yet as a student she would often be alone in her room, studying and working while others were scattered among the pubs and clubs in Geneva. Never had she felt so far from home. So isolated. So lost. It was the same thing every evening, as soon as night fell.
She told herself angrily to get a grip. What had become of her lucidity, of her human and psychological knowledge? Couldn’t she do a better job of observing herself, instead of succumbing to her emotions? Was she simply maladjusted here? She knew the basic equation: maladjustment = torn = anxious. She brushed the argument aside. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know why she felt so ill at ease. It had nothing to do with her. It was because of what was going on here. She would have no peace of mind until she got to the bottom of it. She stood up to leave. The corridors were just as deserted as the cafeteria.
She went round the corner of the corridor leading to her office and froze. A chill, right down into her gut. Xavier was there. He was slowly closing the door to her office. He glanced first to the right then left, and she quickly stepped back behind the wall. To her great relief, she heard him head off in the opposite direction.
* * *
Audio cassettes.
That was the next thing that caught his attention. Among the loose papers on the mayor’s desk were tapes of the kind no one used anymore but which, it would seem, Chaperon had kept. Servaz picked them up and read the labels: Birdsongs 1, Birdsongs 2, Birdsongs 3. He put them back down. There was a small stereo with a tape deck in a corner of the room.
Mountaineering, birdsongs: the man was truly passionate about nature.
And old things, as well: old photos, old cassettes … All these old things in an old house – what could be more normal?
Yet somewhere at the back of his mind an alarm bell was sounding. It had something to do with the things in this room. More precisely, with the birdsong. What did it mean? He tended to trust his instinct as a rule; it rarely warned him in vain.
He racked his brain, but nothing came. Ziegler was calling the gendarmerie to have them come and seal off the house, and bring forensics with them.
‘We’re getting near the truth,’ she said when she had hung up.
‘Yes,’ he agreed solemnly. ‘But clearly we’re not the only ones.’
He could feel the fear in his guts again. At this point he no longer doubted that the foursome made up of Grimm, Perrault, Chaperon and Mourrenx, and their former ‘exploits’, were at the crux of the investigation. But the killer, or killers were at least two steps ahead. Unlike Ziegler and himself, they knew everything there was to know, and they had known it for a long time. And what did Lombard’s horse or Hirtmann have to do with any of it? Once again, Servaz told himself that there was something he had failed to see.
They went back downstairs and out onto the lit porch. The trees tossed shadows about and painted the garden with darkness. Somewhere a shutter creaked. Servaz wondered why the birdsong obsessed him so. He took the cassettes out of his pocket and handed them to Ziegler.
‘Have someone listen to this. And not just the first few seconds. The whole thing.’
She gave him a surprised look.
‘I want to know if it really is birdsong on the tape. Or something else.’
His mobile vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the caller ID: Antoine Canter, his boss.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, going down the steps. ‘Servaz here,’ he replied, trampling on the snow in the garden.
‘Martin? It’s Antoine. Vilmer wants to see you.’
Divisional Commissioner Vilmer, the head of the Toulouse crime unit. A man Servaz did not like, and who returned the feeling. In Vilmer’s opinion, Servaz was the sort of cop who had had his day: resistant to innovation, individualistic, working by instinct and refusing to follow the latest directives from the ministry to the letter. Vilmer dreamt of pliable, trained, interchangeable civil servants.
‘I’ll stop by tomorrow,’ he said, glancing over at Ziegler, who was waiting by the gate.
‘No. Vilmer wants you in his office tonight. He’s waiting for you. Don’t go pulling a fast one, Martin. You’ve got two hours to get there.’
* * *
Servaz left Saint-Martin shortly after eight o’clock. Half an hour later, he left the départementale 825 for the A64. He was overcome by fatigue as he tore down the motorway, with his headlights dipped, dazzled by the oncoming traffic. He pulled off into a service area for a coffee. After that he bought a can of Red Bull, opened it and drank the entire thing before he went back to the car.
A fine drizzle was falling when he reached Toulouse. He greeted the security guard, parked his car and hurried to the lift. It was half past nine when he pressed the button for the top floor. Ordinarily Servaz avoided coming here. The corridors were too vivid a reminder of his early days in the force, in the General Directorate of the National Police, which was full of people to whom ‘police’ was little more than a word to be typed, and who greeted any request o
n the part of a policeman in uniform as if it were a new strain of the Ebola virus. At this time of day most of the staff had gone home and the offices were deserted. He compared the atmosphere in these muffled corridors with the chaotic one of permanent tension that reigned in his own unit. Of course Servaz had also encountered a good number of competent, efficient people in the directorate. They were rarely the pushy sort. Even rarer among them was any tendency to wear the latest fashion. With a smile he recalled Espérandieu’s theory, which posited that once you had a certain number of suits and ties per square metre, you entered a zone he called ‘the zone of rarefied competence’, and which he further subdivided into zones of ‘absurd decisions’, ‘hogging the stage’ or ‘taking cover’.
He checked his watch and decided to let Vilmer wait five more minutes. It wasn’t every day he had the opportunity to keep a navel-gazer like Vilmer hanging about. He took the time to go to the coffee room, and dropped a coin into the machine. Two men and a woman sat chatting around a table. When he came in, the volume of conversation dropped a few decibels; one of them told a joke in a low voice. A sense of humour, thought Servaz. One day his ex-wife had told him it was something he didn’t have. Maybe it was true. But did that mean he was any less intelligent? Not if you went by the number of idiots who excelled at it. But it was certainly the sign of a psychological weakness. He would ask Propp. Servaz was beginning to like the shrink, despite his tendency to pontificate.
When he’d finished his umpteenth coffee, he left the room and the conversation resumed. The woman behind him burst out laughing. An artificial, graceless laugh, which grated on his nerves.
Vilmer’s office was a few metres further down the hall. His secretary greeted Servaz with a friendly smile.
‘Go on in. He’s expecting you.’
Servaz told himself that this did not bode well, and wondered at the same time whether Vilmer’s secretary was able to claim overtime.
The Frozen Dead Page 36