Moments later we were down in the parking lot wrapped in those foil blankets . . .
There—that’s more or less what I told the police and repeated to the investigating magistrate.
It emerged that Monsieur Delambre had laid down his weapon and the remaining full magazine on the floor by the entrance of the office he’d retreated into. The RAID team discovered him crouching at the foot of a desk, head between his knees and his hands clutching the back of his neck.
He didn’t put up any resistance.
I must have taken part in a good fifteen or so operations that were considerably more dangerous and complicated than this one. Yasmine, Kader, and I carried out a thorough debriefing the following day. Every operation has its learning outcomes, so it’s always worth playing back the film in slow motion, frame by frame, pulling out every detail, however insignificant, to feed into our experience. After all, experience is what earns us our bread and butter. Then we move on to new destinations, new missions.
Except this time it didn’t work out that way.
The images from that half day whirled through my head on repeat, as if they contained some subliminal message that had eluded me.
I told myself this was pointless, that I should focus on other things, but to no avail—for days later the images were still coming back to me.
Always the same.
We were in the parking lot. An air of relief had descended on everyone. The RAID team that discovered Monsieur Delambre in an office radioed down to the agents positioned outside to inform them that the operation was over. My leg was receiving attention. Paramedics were all around us. The RAID captain came to shake my hand and we exchanged a few passing comments.
I could see the freed hostages from where I was standing. Each person’s reaction matched his or her temperament. Monsieur Guéneau was wearing his full suit again, in complete disarray; Mademoiselle Tràn had already touched up her makeup; Madame Camberlin had also regained some color and wiped away the smudges that had covered her cheeks just moments before. They were all in a circle around Monsieur Dorfmann, who was answering their questions with a smile. Authority hadn’t taken long to restore itself. It even seemed like the hostages needed it, as though it were a vital touchstone. What was extraordinary was that none of them resented the Exxyal Europe boss for organizing the hostage taking, an ordeal that had been cruel and violent in equal measure. To the contrary, everyone seemed to find the whole thing perfectly worthwhile. For some of them, this was to garner credit for their performance; for others, to atone for their weaknesses. It was remarkable how quickly normal life resumed. Monsieur Cousin’s hulking frame stood out from the others. The verdict was clear: he was the man of the moment, the embodiment of altruism and courage, the day’s big winner. He wasn’t smiling. He looked like an election candidate whose victory had just been announced but who was pretending to take the result in his stride to demonstrate mental superiority. Yet all you had to do was consider the position he occupied alongside Monsieur Dorfmann, or gauge the invisible, admiring circle his colleagues had formed around him—colleagues who just a few hours before must have scorned him—to understand that he was the undisputed champion of this adventure. No one was in any doubt that he’d just sealed his ticket to the Sarqueville refinery.
Monsieur Lacoste was already on the telephone. Animal reflex, without a doubt. He was speaking animatedly. I think he had a lot on his plate. He’d have to answer to his client, Monsieur Dorfmann, and with that I wished him luck . . .
A little farther away, Monsieur Renard was already relaying the details of our incarceration and release to the press, his measured movements becoming increasingly flamboyant. His finest role to date. I remember feeling that he’d have been quite happy to die in his sleep that night.
The flashing lights were turning slowly, engines purring, lending the entire scene a reassuring sense that the crisis was over.
That’s how I remember it.
And then there were the two women I didn’t know. Mother and daughter. Monsieur Delambre’s wife is a very pretty woman. I mean, really lovely. Her daughter, thirty or so, had her arm wrapped around her mother’s shoulder. Neither of them was crying. They gazed at the entrance to the building. They’d been told that Monsieur Delambre had been apprehended without resistance, and that he hadn’t been injured. A third woman arrived, also around thirty. Her face, although very pretty, was drawn and aged. The three of them held one another’s hands tight as the RAID team left with Monsieur Delambre.
There you have it—these are the recurring images that have come back to me since that day.
I’m at home, by myself. All this happened about six weeks ago.
It’s Tuesday. I have some work to do, but nothing urgent.
Yasmine called me from Georgia the day before yesterday for an update. She asked if I was still “mulling over” the affair. I laughed it off, but the fact is that I was. This morning again, as I was stirring my coffee and looking out on the tall trees in the square, I replayed Monsieur Delambre’s exit.
It’s funny sometimes how it plays on repeat. It was 10:00 a.m. Again I watched the RAID agents bringing out Monsieur Delambre.
As soon as they had secured him in the interrogation room, they fastened him into a straitjacket made of black material. This was not a method I was familiar with, but Captain Prungnaud assured me it was highly practical. In short, Monsieur Delambre was handcuffed underneath, and the straitjacket formed a sort of hammock to carry him on his back. The RAID officers were holding him up by four straps, his body swinging to the rhythm of their running as they headed for the vehicle. We could only see his face. He passed by a few yards from the three women, who started crying when they saw him in this position. His wife made a futile gesture in his direction. The police were running so fast that he was past us in less than a second.
This is what’s been lingering in my mind since the end of the ordeal. The look in his eyes. His face . . . It was almost impassive, which was hardly out of the ordinary for anyone who saw it. It was even to be expected that Monsieur Delambre’s expression should be so relaxed, so relieved after this saga.
But it was the way he looked at me as he went by. It lasted a fraction of a second. It wasn’t the defeated loser’s look I might have anticipated.
He held my stare very deliberately.
It was the look of a winner.
And beneath it, I could have sworn there was the hint of a smile.
The image is vague, but it’s there nonetheless.
Monsieur Delambre departed the scene with an air of triumph, satisfaction, and the faintest of smiles. He may as well have winked at me. It was bizarre . . .
I played back the film one more time.
Now I’d put my finger on the right memory, I could see his face clearly. That smile—it wasn’t the final revenge of a loser; it was the smile of a winner.
The image had become crystal clear.
I rewound the film even farther. RAID swooped in throwing smoke grenades. Before that, the hostages flocked to the window. And before that, Monsieur Delambre said: “It’s over.”
Shit.
Monsieur Delambre was alone in that room waiting to be arrested. The RAID team discovered him crouched at the foot of a desk, head between his knees and his hands clutching the back of his neck.
That’s the reason I highlight the coincidence, because it was at that precise moment my telephone rang.
It was Monsieur Dorfmann.
I had never spoken to him on the phone. He was the end client. My only point of contact had been my employer, Monsieur Lacoste, a point I tried to make to him.
“There’s no more Lacoste,” he replied.
His tone was direct. As you have no doubt noticed by now, Monsieur Dorfmann is not a man who takes kindly to being contradicted.
“Monsieur Fontana, would you be willing to accept a new mission? It follows on from the one you were previously assigned.”
“In principle, yes. It’s
a matter of—”
“Money won’t be an issue,” he said, cutting me off with disdain.
After a moment, Monsieur Dorfmann said:
“You see, Monsieur Fontana, we have . . . a serious problem.”
Yes, they did, as I’d just realized myself.
“This is not coming as a great surprise,” I responded. “With all due respect, sir, I do believe we’ve been fucked. Hard.”
Silence.
“You could say that, yes,” Monsieur Dorfmann concluded.
AFTER
27
I used to think I’d stop at nothing to get a job, but that was because prison had never crossed my mind.
I realized I had none of the necessary genetic traits for survival in this habitat. In Darwinian terms, my capacity to adapt to the prison environment placed me at the bottom of the hierarchy. Like me, there are some who have landed here by chance, accident, or lunacy (all three, in my case) and who are struggling with the deep anxiety of their situation. They may as well stroll around wearing a placard with the words “Easy pickings: help yourselves!” This condition is known as “cell shock,” and it’s the primary cause of early suicide.
To establish which subspecies you belong to, you just need to take one step outside your cell. It turns out I belong to the group that gets punched in the face right away, and then relieved of any possessions the officials haven’t already taken. I didn’t even see the guy coming, but there I was sprawled across the floor with my nose split open. He crouched over me, took my watch and my wedding ring, then entered my cell and swiped everything that took his fancy. As I got to my feet, I realized that my altercation with Mehmet had anticipated my new circumstances very accurately, but with two crucial differences: first, I was on the losing side this time; and second, for a single agent like myself, there were plenty more potential Mehmets out there. The opening exchange had not gone well for me. All the others were watching me with their arms folded. Taking one in the face like that (the first time I step out of my cell) wasn’t the most humiliating thing; in one way or another, it’s what I’ve had to endure since day one of unemployment. No: the humiliating thing was being the victim of an action that had been predictable to everyone except me. The guy who stole everything I owned just happened to be at the front of the line. In the space of a few seconds, he taught me that this place is a zoo, that at some point everything ends up with a fight.
Since I’ve been here, I have seen about thirty new prisoners arrive, and the only ones who avoid this initiation are the reoffenders. Being a first-timer at my age didn’t let me off the hook. Now I’m part of the club: I fold my arms and watch the show.
Nicole visited me at the start of my detention. My nose looked like a pig’s snout. We made an odd couple, because unlike me Nicole had made herself pretty as a picture, with lovely makeup and the beautiful patterned dress that crosses over at the front, and which I love because I always used to pull at the little cord . . . In short, she wanted to project confidence, desire; she wanted to do me a good turn, to put on a brave face despite the circumstances, because she felt it was necessary for enduring the long road ahead of us. When she saw me, she acted as though everything was normal, which was impressive. The nurse, a brutish fellow, had just changed the bandages, leaving me with large bloodied cotton wads up each nostril so I had to breathe through my mouth, and the scar running beneath the two sets of stitches was still covered in dried blood. I was also struggling to open my right eye because the lid had tripled in size. The antiseptic cream was a pissy yellow and gleamed beneath the neon lights.
And so it was that Nicole sat down in front of me and smiled. She swallowed back the “How are you?” question and started talking about the girls, all the while staring at an imaginary point in the middle of my forehead. She talked about the house, day-to-day stuff, and in a few minutes silent tears began streaming down her cheeks. She carried on talking as though she hadn’t noticed them. Finally, the words stuck in her throat and, afraid of seeming weak when I needed her to be strong, she said: “Sorry.” Simply “sorry,” just like that. And then she lowered her head, devastated by the scale of the catastrophe. She decided to get a tissue out of her bag, fumbling around for an eternity. We were both dejected, defeated.
It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d been so apart since we met.
That “sorry” from Nicole unsettled me deeply. Things have been hard enough for her already, and it’s only just getting started. There are stacks of paperwork—the whole thing is a fucking mess. I told her that she mustn’t feel she has to come and see me, but she replied:
“It’s already enough that I have to sleep without you . . .”
Those words suffocated me.
After that, in spite of her distress, Nicole managed to compose herself. She had some questions for me. There was so much she didn’t understand. What had happened to me? I no longer resembled her husband, not even physically. The man she’d lost would never have done those things.
This was the essence of her question: what have I become?
A bit like in accidents, her brain was fixated on peripheral details. She was in shock.
“How did you find a gun with real bullets?”
“I bought it.”
She wanted to ask me where, how much, how, but her real question was too pressing.
“Did you want to kill people, Alain?”
Now that was a tricky one. Yes, I think I did.
“No! Not at all . . . ,” I answer.
Nicole clearly didn’t believe a word coming out of my mouth.
“So why did you buy it?”
I got the impression that this gun was going to stay between us for some time.
Nicole started crying again, but this time she didn’t try to hide it. She took my hands in hers, and there was no hiding the proof anymore: my wedding ring had disappeared. Our wedding ring had probably already changed hands for a blow job from a young rent boy, who’d worn it in his ear for a few days before trading it for some weed, a couple of pills, or some methanol . . . Nicole said nothing. She simply filed the information away in the spreadsheet that one day will calculate the sum total of our shared losses. Or perhaps in our statement of affairs when we file for bankruptcy.
I’m now aware that the one question burning on her lips was also the one she’d never ask me:
Why have you abandoned me?
Chronologically speaking, however, the first visit was from Lucie. Not unexpectedly, in fact. The police remanded me in custody and asked if I had a lawyer. And I said Lucie. She was willing enough to come. The second RAID arrested me, she knew I’d call her first. She squeezed me in her arms and asked me how I was, without a single word of judgment or criticism. It was incredibly comforting. That’s why I would have called her ahead of her sister even if she hadn’t been a lawyer.
The police installed us in a little room and hit the timer. We cut short the gushing to avoid being overwhelmed by the emotion of it all, and I asked Lucie how everything would pan out, and in what order. After giving me a broad outline of all the procedures, the penny dropped.
“Oh, no! No, Papa, not a chance!” she protested.
“Why not? Come on: I’m in prison and my daughter’s a lawyer . . . it makes perfect sense!”
“I might be a lawyer, but I can’t be your lawyer!”
“Why, is it illegal?”
“No, it’s not illegal, but . . .”
“But what?”
Lucie aimed a gentle smile at me that reminded me of her mother. Given the circumstances, this made me enormously depressed.
“Listen,” she said with as much composure as possible, “I don’t know if you realize, Papa, but what you did was really . . . disturbing.”
She spoke to me as if I were a toddler. I pretended not to notice because at that stage in the conversation, it seemed a fair assessment on her part.
“It all depends on the charges the investigating magistrate decides to bring forwa
rd. At the very least, he’ll get you for ‘false imprisonment,’ maybe ‘aggravated,’ and because you fired at the police—”
“I didn’t fire at the police, I fired at the windows!”
“Yes, fine, but the police were on the other side of the windows, and that’s known as ‘armed assault against a police officer in the execution of his duty.’”
For someone who doesn’t know the first thing about law, this was a terrifying expression. It raised just one question:
“So how long are we talking? Worst-case scenario . . .”
My throat was dry, as was my tongue, and I felt like my vocal cords were lined with sandpaper. Lucie stared at me for a moment. She had the hardest task, namely giving me a reality check. And she did it very well. My daughter is a mighty fine lawyer. She spoke slowly and clearly.
“What you did is about as serious as it gets, Papa. Worst-case scenario: thirty years in prison.”
Until then, the number had been hypothetical. On Lucie’s lips, it became real and terrifying.
“Any chance of a reduced sentence . . . ?”
“We’re a long way from that, believe me.” Lucie sighed.
Thirty years! She could tell that the prospect shattered me. Things had been desperate enough before, but this news finished me off. I must have seemed shrunken in my seat, and I couldn’t hold back the tears. I knew I mustn’t, because nothing is worse than seeing old men cry, but it was beyond my control.
Two days before the hostage taking, before throwing myself into the fray, I spent a mere hour weighing up the legal risks. I consulted two or three law books, reading them in the mad grip of my fury. I knew I was embarking on something desperate, but the consequences were far less tangible than my anger.
As I gazed at Lucie, I felt convinced I would die in prison. And the look in her eyes indicated that she thought the same. Even half this sentence, a measly fifteen years, was unthinkable. How old would I be when I got out? Seventy-five? Eighty?
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