Inhuman Resources

by Pierre Lemaitre

  The girl thinks for a second.

  “I think we can accept your apology. Can you submit it straightaway?”

  “Tomorrow. No problem. Then it’s up to you to terminate proceedings.”

  “Everything in its own time, Monsieur Delambre. You address a detailed apology to Monsieur Pehlivan as well as your former employer, and then we’ll take it from there.”

  I will need to think all this through, but I’ve bought some time. I am about to hang up, but there’s still something I want to know.

  “Actually, Maître Gilson. What makes you so sure that the events occurred as Monsieur Pehlivan described them?”

  The girl weighs up whether or not to take the bait. Her silence already speaks volumes. In the end, she bites.

  “We have a witness statement. One of your colleagues who was present at the scene guarantees that Monsieur Pehlivan only brushed past you and that . . .”

  Romain.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll drop it. I’ll submit my apology and we’ll leave it there. Deal?”

  “I look forward to receiving your letter, Monsieur Delambre.”

  Less than two minutes later I’m in the métro.

  A few months ago, I went to Romain’s place to pick up a hard drive he was lending me. I don’t remember the exact address, but I think I’ll be able to find it again. I can picture the street pretty well, with a pharmacy on the corner and his building a bit farther down on the right. I struggle to remember the number, but then it comes back to me—57, same as my age. There’s an intercom, I press Romain Alquiler’s button, and a sleepy voice answers.

  As it happens, Romain is not sleepy at all. I find him pale, anxious, his hands shaking. I had forgotten how small his place is. A shoebox. A sliding door shields the “kitchen space,” five square feet lined with stuffed cupboards above a sink the size of a hand. In the main room, his desk—pushed up against the wall and overloaded with computer equipment—occupies half the space. The other half consists of a sofa that must fold out for the night. That’s where Romain is sitting. He motions toward an amorphous mass of red plastic on the floor that might be some sort of stool, but I prefer to stay standing. Romain gets to his feet, too.

  “Listen,” he begins, “let me explain . . .”

  I silence him with a curt gesture. We are face-to-face in this tiny space like two rabbits in a hutch. He stops talking and looks at me with blinking eyes. He is scared about what might happen, and with good reason, because I’m not leaving until I get what I came for. Everything depends on him, and that makes me nervous. I spot some beads of sweat on his brow. I shake my head, trying hard to stay calm. I know that this episode between him and me is just a small part of a greater story, the story of our lives. His is easy to understand. Romain comes from a rural, provincial background, and the mentality that stems from those origins governs all his actions and reactions. He has learned to hold on to whatever he has, to guard it jealously. This applies to jobs as well as everything else. Whether he likes it or not, it’s a part of him, his property. And I shake my head again, despite agreeing with him wholeheartedly.

  To prove the extent of my detachment, I turn to admire his desk, which is dominated by an enormous flat-screen computer monitor. Technology like that sticks out in a hutch like this. I come back to him. He blinks. His shovel-like hands dangle at the end of his long arms. He’d rather be killed on the spot than back down from something that doesn’t matter. I don’t give a shit. This is an emergency.

  “Keeping your job is vital, Romain. I understand. And I don’t hold it against you. In your position, I’d be doing the same. But I have a favor to ask you.”

  He frowns, as if I were trying to sell him a tractor for an unfeasibly low price. I jab my thumb at the monitor:

  “It’s for a job, to be precise. I’m onto something. I need you to do a little bit of research for me . . .”

  His face brightens. He looks mightily relieved to have escaped so lightly and reaches for his keyboard with a broad smile. Everything in this place is within arm’s reach. An electronic jingle welcomes us to the virtual world, and I explain to Romain what I need.

  “This might be trickier than you think,” he says, his provincial prudence getting the better of him.

  But his fingers are already dancing over the keyboard. The BLC Consulting website appears, and he spends a second browsing three separate windows that are immediately relegated to the corner of the screen. He’s like a conductor. A few clicks later and one, two, three, eight windows burst open in succession. He’s only just begun and already I’m lost.

  “It’s virtually unprotected. What are they, idiots?” Romain says.

  “Maybe they don’t have anything to protect.”

  He turns to me, intrigued by such a novel concept.

  “Well, looking at it from my point of view,” I continue, “I can’t see what I would need to protect on my computer.”

  “Err, how about your privacy?”

  Romain is horrified. The idea that you wouldn’t protect your data, even if it was of no interest, is completely anathema to him. As for me, I find his indignation astonishing.

  “If you had access to my private stuff, what would you do with it? It’s the same as yours, same as everybody’s.”

  Romain sits there, stubbornly shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But it’s yours.”

  Like talking to a brick wall. I drop it.

  His fingers carry on dancing.

  “Here, this is their client file.”

  A list. One second later, the printer beneath his desk stirs into action. Romain e-mails me some zipped files. He’s disappointed that it was all so easy.

  “Anything else you want?”

  I have more or less everything. The list, with the heading “Current Clients,” is short, and leads to eight subfiles. I skim through their names on my way home. I’m at République now. I get off the train and duck into a corridor toward my connection, all the while scanning the list in my hand. Exxyal. I stop abruptly. A girl walks into the back of me and lets out a cry, so I move to the side. I quickly go back through the list to check. Exxyal Europe is the only company that fits the brief. Right scale, strategic industry . . . it’s all there. I continue slowly down the corridor—all my energy is focused on this name.

  Even for someone like me who knows nothing about oil and gas, Exxyal brings to mind one of those monstrous machines, with thirty-five-thousand employees stationed across four continents and a turnover greater than the Swiss federal budget, enough hidden profit in its coffers to pay off Africa’s debt twice over. I don’t know where Exxyal Europe sits in the multinational rankings, but it’s a heavyweight. I’m on the right track. I go back through the list again: the other companies are relatively hefty small- and medium-sized enterprises, along with a few other big companies of no great consequence working in the manufacturing or tertiary sectors. Additional detail: a hostage taking is a much more plausible scenario for a firm working in the oil and gas industry than it is for, say, a company manufacturing cars or garden gnomes.

  The day ends on a crucial success, the achievement of my first objective: I am almost certain about the identity of the recruiting company.

  I drift off for a moment. Head of HR at one of Exxyal Europe’s offices! It doesn’t get any better. I step on it with renewed enthusiasm and arrive home a few minutes later.

  As I turn the key in the lock and open the door, I immediately grasp the magnitude of the difficulty that awaits me. A glance at my watch: 7:45 p.m.

  I go in.

  On the kitchen table I see two large paper bags with the words “Discount Dishes” on the side. Nicole is still wearing her coat. She passes me in the corridor without a word. I’ve screwed up.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Nicole hears me but she doesn’t listen to me. She must have gotten home at around 6:00 p.m. Nothing ready for dinner. We’ve improvised the last three days, but today I had promised to go and buy new dishes.
So she must have gone out and done the shopping herself, hence the markedly tense atmosphere at my homecoming. Nicole, without a word, places the new plates, mugs, and glasses in the sink. All of it is horrid.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s the cheapest they had,” she says, reading my mind.

  “That’s why I’m looking for a job.”

  It’s like a broken record. We are starting to resent each other. What is so painful is that we’ve stuck together, stayed in love, through the hardest times, and just as we’re coming out the other side, we start pushing each other away. She has bought something in a container with a brown sauce that looks Chinese. It’s all ready—we eat it in silence. The atmosphere is so heavy that Nicole turns on the television. The Muzak to our marriage. “Tagwell announces 800 job cuts at Reims factory.” Nicole chews, looking at her plate, which seems even uglier now that it’s full. I pretend to be engrossed in the news, although it’s not telling me anything new (“. . . is soaring. Tagwell was up 4.5 percent at the close of the markets . . .”).

  After dinner, exhausted by the bitterness driving us apart, we go our separate ways without a word: Nicole to the bathroom after doing the dishes, me to my study. She seems to be in a particularly stubborn mood.

  My screen doesn’t display any of the balletic movement or graceful orchestration of opening and moving windows: just a businesslike webpage with the BLC Consulting logo. A little envelope indicates the arrival of Romain’s e-mails. In the BLC Consulting client files, I consult the correspondence between Bertrand Lacoste and his client, Alexandre Dorfmann.

  This from the CEO of Exxyal Europe: “Let’s be frank: our initial estimates forecast that the 823 layoffs at Sarqueville will, directly or indirectly, involve more than 2,600 people . . . The entire pool of employees will be gravely and permanently affected.”

  A bit later on: “This complex layoff program will add much value: the executive who gains the opportunity to run this confidential mission will find it to be not just an exceptional experience, but no doubt an emotional adventure, too. He or she will have to be psychologically sound, reactive, and will have to demonstrate a great capacity for shock resistance. Moreover, we must be certain of his or her unfailing adherence to our values.”

  On a pad I jot down:

  Sarqueville = strategic challenge for Exxyal

  → Essential selection of highly efficient executive to manage the issue

  → Hostage taking as test to choose the best from potential candidates

  All I need to do now is identify the candidates. But rummaging through Lacoste’s client file reveals no sign of a list of executives for assessment. I comb through everything again from the start, reviewing files in other folders in case they were simply in the wrong order, but I already know it’s futile. Maybe Lacoste doesn’t have it yet. I’ll need to look for it myself.

  The only thing on the Exxyal home page aside from a diagrammatic overview of the group’s structure is a photograph of the CEO, Alexandre Dorfmann, sitting pretty in the center of the page. Roughly sixty years old. Thinning hair, a fairly strong nose, a flinty expression, and a discreet smile at the camera that betrays the unwavering self-assurance of a powerful man at the pinnacle of his career, reaping the rewards that his success is due. Sometimes arrogance can be so blatant it makes you want to throw a punch. I study the photograph. If I cock my head to the right, I can see my reflection in the mirror hanging above the corner chimney. I come back to the photograph. I observe my negative. At fifty-seven, I still have all my hair, albeit with a few gray strands, a rounded face, and a boundless capacity for self-doubt. Apart from our determination, we are complete opposites.

  In Lacoste’s client files, I find a detailed prospectus for the whole of Exxyal Europe, which I print off. Armed with the criteria I derived from my BLC document, I go through all the Exxyal executives that might correspond with my research, ending up with a list of eleven potential candidates. That’s good going, but it’s still too many, and that’s the problem: the first sift is always the easiest. From now on, I can’t afford any mistakes. Every time I eliminate a candidate, my risk of failure is at its maximum. I open a document, copy and paste the eleven names, and rub my hands as though I were placing a bet at the roulette table.

  The door opens. It’s Nicole.

  Is it because of her intense fatigue, or because she’s wearing a T-shirt for bed? Is it because she leans her shoulder against the doorframe and tilts her head in that way that always makes me want to cry? I pretend to massage my forehead, but I’m actually checking the time in the corner of the screen—10:40. Too wrapped up in my own business to notice the evening pass by. I look up.

  Normally in these situations, if she’s happy she’ll speak to me. If she isn’t, I stand up and walk over to her. This time, both of us hold our ground in our respective corners of the room.

  Why won’t she understand?

  In all the time we’ve lived together, this is the only question I have never asked myself. Not until today. Never. Today there is an ocean between us.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Nicole says. “You think I don’t understand how important this is to you. You’re telling yourself that I have my own little life, my little job, and that I’ve grown used to having an unemployed husband. And that I think you’re incapable of finding a job that’s worthy of you.”

  “It’s a little of all those things. Not entirely, but a little.”

  Nicole walks up to my desk and stops in front of me. I’m sitting down, she’s standing. She takes my head and holds it against her belly. I move my hand under her T-shirt and let it rest on her bottom. We’ve done this for twenty years and still the sensation is nothing short of miraculous. The desire is still there, even today. Except that today the ocean separating us is not between us but within us. We are a couple.

  I pull away from her. Nicole contemplates the dancing fish of my screensaver.

  “What do you want me to do?” I say.

  “Anything but this. It’s just . . . it’s not good. When you start doing things like this . . .”

  This would be the moment to explain to her that Mehmet’s kick in the ass will be forcing an additional humiliation on me later tonight: writing a formal apology. But I would be ashamed to admit to it. Same with telling her that the job center is going to have fewer and fewer jobs for me thanks to my dismissal for gross misconduct. And that compared to what we have in store, buying ugly and cheap tableware will feel like the crowning glory of our many years of blissful happiness. I decide against it.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  She takes a step back and holds me by the shoulders. I’m still cupping her hips in my hands.

  “I’ll drop it.”

  “Seriously?”

  I’m a bit ashamed of this lie, but like all the others, it’s necessary.

  Nicole holds me tight. I can feel the relief in every part of her embrace.

  “None of this is your fault, Alain,” she says, trying to express herself. “There’s nothing you can do about it. But this whole job hunt . . . We won’t come out of it in one piece if we stop respecting each other. Don’t you agree?”

  There’s too much to say to that. I think I’ve played my cards right. I nod. Nicole runs her fingers through my hair, her tummy hugging against my shoulder, her buttocks tensed. This is what I’m fighting for, to keep all this. Getting her to understand is impossible. I have to do it without her and then present her with the finished article. I want to be the hero in her life again.

  “Are you coming to bed?” she says.

  “Five minutes. One e-mail and I’m there.”

  She turns and smiles at me from the door.

  “Will you be quick?”

  There can’t be more than two men in a thousand capable of turning down an offer like that. But I’m one of them.

  “Two minutes.”

  I think about writing the letter to the lawyer, but tell myself I’ll have ti
me to do it tomorrow. My attention is drawn inexorably back to the list. One click and the fish give way to the Exxyal Europe website.

  Eleven potential candidates that I need to narrow down to five: three men, two women. I go back through the list cross-referencing ages and degree subjects, then I take them one by one and focus on retracing their careers. I find them on different networks or alumni associations where some people give summaries of their careers. To head up the massive layoff program at Sarqueville, they will need to have solid leadership experience and have already carried out difficult or sensitive assignments that have caught the eye of senior management. This approach helps me reduce it to eight. Still three too many. Two men and one woman. But I can’t do any better. It would already be an enormous stroke of luck if the five I’m looking for are in this eight.

  I do a bit of flicking between the Exxyal site and the professional networks where I found a few of them and draw up a profile for each one.

  My desk isn’t that big, so for one of my birthdays Nicole gave me a set of corkboards to pin documents to: six large boards attached to the back of the door that fan open like the pages of a giant book.

  I tear down the stuff that’s been there for an age: yellowing job ads, lists of potential employers or training schemes that I’m too old to be eligible for, details of colleagues working in HR for other companies and whom I came across frequently in a professional association that I am no longer a member of. I run off large mug shots of each candidate along with their career profiles, leaving plenty of room for notes, and pin the whole thing on the corkboards.

  I take a step back to admire my work. Now I can browse my full-size dossier. I have left the outer boards blank, so when I close it you can’t see anything.

  I don’t hear the door behind me open. But the sound of Nicole’s tears does attract my attention. I turn around, and there she is in her big white T-shirt. It’s been two, maybe three hours since I promised to join her. Since I promised to relinquish everything. She takes in the series of colorful portraits and blown-up CVs, and without a word she moves her head from left to right. It’s the most devastating thing she could have done.