Even if I managed to avoid getting my face smashed in on a bimonthly basis, it would still be impossible.
I sobbed like a baby, and Lucie swallowed hard.
“We’ll fight this, Papa. First, that’s the maximum sentence, and there’s nothing to say that the jury will . . .”
“What do you mean ‘jury’? Won’t I be tried by a magistrate?”
“Nooo, Papa.”
She found my ignorance bewildering.
“Your actions mean you’ll be tried by a judge in the high court.”
“High court? But I’m not a murderer! I didn’t kill anyone!”
My tears had reached the next level, fueled by my indignation. For Lucie, the situation was becoming more and more complicated.
“That’s why you need a specialist. I’ve done some research and I’ve f—”
“I don’t have the money to pay for a specialist.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
“We’ll find the money.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that, then? Hold on, how about this for an idea: let’s ask Mathilde and Gregory if we can dip into their savings!”
That pissed her off. I carried on:
“Forget it. It’s fine, I’ll defend myself.”
“Don’t even think about it! In this sort of case, naivety will only go one way: the maximum sentence.”
“Lucie . . .”
I took her hand and stared her in the eye.
“If it’s not you, it’s me. No one else.”
My daughter saw there was no point persisting. Her arguments would fall on deaf ears, and the realization left her despondent.
“Why are you asking me to do this, Papa?”
I’d calmed myself down. I had a huge advantage over her: I knew what I wanted. I wanted my daughter to be my lawyer. I’d thought of nothing else over the last few hours. As far as I could see, there was no other solution. My decision was made.
“I’m going to be sixty, Lucie. That is what’s at stake for me—the rest of my time on this earth. I don’t want that to be in the hands of someone I’ve never even met.”
“But Papa, this isn’t psychotherapy, it’s a high court trial! You need a professional, a specialist!” she said, grappling for the words. “I don’t know how it all works. The high court is . . . it’s very particular. It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“Here’s what I’m asking you, Lucie. If you don’t want to, I understand, but if it’s not you . . .”
“Yes, so you’ve said! This is blackmail!”
“Absolutely. I’m banking on you loving me enough to agree to help me. If I’m wrong, then please let me know!”
The tone settled as quickly as it escalated. We’d come to an impasse, neither of us saying anything. She blinked nervously. I thought she might back down. There was light in the tunnel. There was still a chance.
“I have to think about it, Papa, I can’t give you an answer just like that . . .”
“Take your time, Lucie, there’s no hurry.”
But the truth is, there was a hurry. We needed to go through a whole lot of processes, and soon: the investigating magistrate will need to elect a suitable interlocutor, I’ll need counsel to establish my line of defense, and several other grim complications besides.
“I’ll think about it. I don’t know . . .”
Lucie hit the buzzer. There was nothing left to discuss. We said our good-byes quickly. I don’t think she had any hard feelings against me. Not yet, at least.
28
My case hit the headlines in no time. Even the eight o’clock news ran it, which wouldn’t sit well with the investigating magistrate—they never take kindly to media exposure. Two days after my arrest, I’d hoped against hope that the spotlight on me would fade when the CEO of some big company wound up in prison for embezzling an eye-watering sum of money (he’s in the same jail as me, but in the VIP wing). Maybe it’s because guys like him are ten a euro cent nowadays, or just because their cases aren’t considered that newsworthy anymore, but the diversion was short lived and the cameras were back on me soon enough. My story was more media-friendly than his. After all, more folk out there can identify with an unemployed guy blowing his fuse than with some bigwig who siphons off six times the value of his share options.
The press have treated my hostage taking like one of those nasty news items in which a teenager shoots up his school. They’re making out as though I were in some sort of unemployment-induced stupor. A fanatic. Reporters rushed to question a few idiots on my street (“Oh, well, you know, he was an easygoing sort of neighbor. If I’d had any idea . . .”); a few guys from work (“Oh, well, you know, he was an easygoing sort of colleague. If I’d had any idea . . .”); even my adviser from the job center (“Oh, well, you know, he was an easygoing sort of unemployed person. If I’d had any idea . . .”). It’s funny to see such unanimity on the matter. It feels like you’re attending your own funeral, or reading your own obituary.
On the Exxyal front, there’s been plenty of noise, too, not least regarding the hero of the day, Crown Prince Paul Cousin. His display of courage did more than enough to restore the company’s faith in him. He’s back in the fold. Everything I’d dreamed of for myself. I can just picture him, already back at Sarqueville heading up a round of layoffs that will affect several hundred families. Perfect man for the job.
In front of the cameras he seemed genial enough, a bit like he’d been with me once the hostage taking was over: rigid, ruthless, upright. Never one to gush. He’s like the epitome of an early Calvinist, or one of those puritans who set sail for the New World. Paul Cousin is to capitalism what Torquemada was to Catholicism. The Grim Reaper’s got nothing on him. As I said, the perfect man for the job.
“We could not stand by and watch the workplace turn into a crime scene,” he said to the camera. Just picture it: if every unemployed person were to take their potential employer hostage . . . Imagine. Tremble at the thought. His message was clear: senior executives like him are acutely aware of their duty, and any wrongdoer seeking to harm their employer can expect to find a Paul Cousin blocking the way. All a bit terrifying when you think about it.
Throughout, Alexandre Dorfmann has been taking an Oscar-winning turn as “The Victim.” Sober, solemn, and greatly saddened by these horrific circumstances. Let it be known that Alexandre Dorfmann is a CEO full of humanity, a CEO who has stood shoulder to shoulder with his executives in the face of terror. He has shown himself to be stoic, which is no surprise, considering the burden of his responsibility. And had it behooved him to lay down his life for his employees, let there be no doubt: he would have done so gladly and without hesitation. As for me, he had some stern words. I threatened his senior executives, which is not something he could ever forgive. The underlying message was clear: business chiefs are not going to be jerked around by some unemployed middle manager, gun or no gun. They will never be defeated. All bodes well for the trial . . .
When he stared into the camera, I had the impression that Dorfmann was looking directly at me. There was another, deeper message he was communicating: “Delambre, taking me for a prick was a very bad idea, and I’m not about to wait thirty years to string you up by the balls.” So all bodes well for the next few months behind bars, too . . .
Seeing him speak to me like that made me realize I’ll be hearing from him very soon. Let’s not dwell on that for now. Suffice to say that when it does happen, I have no idea how I’m going to escape unscathed.
Next up, the report focused on me, on my life, showing shots of the windows to our apartment and the entrance to our building. Our mailbox. It sounds silly, but the sight of our name written like that on the little yellowed label, which dates back almost to the time we moved, was painful. I imagined Nicole shut away inside the house, talking to our daughters on the telephone in tears.
The thought still tears my heart to pieces.
It’s incredible how far apart we are.
Lucie has explained to
Nicole what to do when she’s bombarded by journalists on the telephone, in the métro station, at the supermarket, on the pavement, or the stairwell, the foyer at the resource center, the elevator. The bathrooms of her fucking cafeteria. Her view is that if we ignore them, the newspapers will leave us alone until the start of the trial, which shouldn’t be for at least another eighteen months. When the date was announced, I reacted as bravely as possible. I’ve done my math. Take the most clement verdict, subtract any special remissions I might hope for, then subtract the time spent on remand. Even then, the resulting sentence is unthinkably long. My age has never seemed like such a threat.
Besides all that, the TV coverage has let me enjoy my fifteen minutes of fame in jail: people discuss my case, everyone expresses their opinion, I’m asked questions. There are a lot of know-it-alls in here. Some figure I’ll have extenuating circumstances working in my favor, which amuses those of the opposite persuasion: that I’ll be held up as an example to other unemployed people who might be tempted by an idea as absurd as mine. Everyone measures my situation against their own, factoring in all their hopes and fears, their pessimism or optimism. They each have their own definition of the word “lucidity.”
Some people call this “preventive detention,” and that seems about right: if you forget the endless forms of wheeling and dealing that go on in here, you’re prevented from doing pretty much anything. The only thing they take a liberal attitude to are the numbers. Instead of the four hundred detainees there should be, there are seven hundred. If you take the exact figure, it works out at almost 3.8 prisoners per cell. In other words, you’d need a miracle to avoid sharing a two-man cell with three others. At the start, it was really tough: in eight weeks, I changed cells or cellmates eleven times. Who would have thought that such a sedentary population could be so unstable? I’ve had a bit of everything: psychos, loonies, depressives, fatalists, armed robbers, junkies, suicide risks, druggy-suicide risks . . . It’s like a trailer for what prison has in store for me.
The spirit of enterprise is alive and well. Everything here is bought, sold, swapped, exchanged, and valued. Jail is a nonstop marketplace for basic valuables. My flattened snout taught me a lesson: since then, I haven’t kept anything, cutting my wardrobe down to two unspeakably ugly outfits that I wear on alternate weeks. I’m keeping a low profile.
Charles is my adviser. Apart from the girls (by which I mean Nicole and Lucie), he was the first to make contact with me. My letters to Charles arrive in three days tops, but when he writes to me, it takes at least a couple of weeks—his letter has to be screened by the investigating magistrate’s office, which lets it through in its own sweet time. I picture my pal Charles in his car, pad resting on the steering wheel. The image of him deep in concentration comes naturally. The effort must be monumental. In his first letter, he wrote: “If you answer don’t feel you have to but just tell me if Morisset is still there Georges Morisset he’s a good guy I knew him from my time inside.”
Reading Charles’s literary output is much like listening to him speak. Free of punctuation, extremely long-winded stream-of-consciousness stuff.
A little later on, he wrote: “I will come and see you soon it’s not that I can’t where there’s a will there’s a way and all that but it brings back awful memories so I’d rather not but I do want to see you so I’ll come anyway.” The advantage to his prose style is that you can follow his line of thought nice and easily.
The Georges Morisset he mentions has one of the best reputations of all the guards. He has gradually worked his way up the rungs of the penitentiary ladder. I told Charles he’d been made a prison officer, and in his last letter he wrote: “Morisset officer doesn’t surprise me cause he’s a workhorse he’s hungry and he’s got the talent you’ll see he’s not going to leave it at that I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes senior officer at the next round of exams you’ll see.”
There were a few other admiring lines. Charles was ecstatic about the meteoric rise of Officer Morisset. Of course it took going to jail myself to find out that my best friend—my only friend, in fact—had been locked up twice himself. And this was the very place he’d been remanded the first time. I have so far resisted the urge to ask him what he did.
In one of his letters, he also wrote: “As I know the lay of the land sort of I can help you see how it works cause at the start it’s definitely hard and you’re at a bit of a loss and maybe when you arrive you get smacked in the face so when you know things sometimes you can manage to avoid the most shitty problems.”
This offer was timely, since I’d just been given two extra stitches beneath my left eyebrow following a contretemps (of the sexual sort, this time) in the showers with a somewhat simpleminded body builder who hadn’t been turned off by my age. Charles is now my mentor, and I follow his advice to the absolute letter.
The advice about the clothes was one of his, along with a stack of other little things that have, by turn, let me: hold on to the best part of my lunch; not stray inadvertently into any of the different factions’ “restricted areas,” whose size and location seem to vary according to a baffling set of rules and customs; not be robbed of items the second I buy them; and not be flipped out of my bunk by new inmates too quickly.
Prompted by the news that I’d already had my face smashed in twice, Charles also explained that the worst thing of all was to be seen as a punching bag, the sort of guy you can rough up: “You will need to put a stop to that and reverse the tide and to do that there are two solutions first crack the biggest guy on your wing in the face or if you can’t do that no offense but maybe that’ll be the case with you then find protection from someone who can get you some respect.”
Charles is right. These might be chimpanzee tactics, but that’s how prison works. I’ve been keeping this in mind and have started trying to butter up the big guns in the hope that one of them will offer me protection.
First up I set my heart on Bébétâ. He’s a guy of about thirty who must have been lobotomized at a very young age, with the result that he functions exclusively in binary mode. When he’s pumping iron, he can only process two instructions: up/down. If he’s eating: chew/swallow. Walking: right foot/left foot. Et cetera. He’s waiting to be sentenced for beating a Romanian pimp to death (fist forward/fist back). He must be about six foot six, and if you removed all his bones, there’d still be almost three hundred pounds of muscle. Interacting with him requires a scientific approach that borrows from the field of animal cognition. I have made preliminary contact, so he can register my face, a process that might take several weeks. I’m not even holding out hope that he’ll remember my name. These initial moves have gone well. I’ve managed to effect a preliminary reflex: he smiles when he sees me. But it’s going to be a long, long road.
For some reason, Charles’s words about Officer Morisset kept simmering away in the background. At various points in the day, I would catch myself thinking about him, or notice him walking past my cell or in the yard during exercise time. He’s about fifty years old, strongly built despite a slight paunch, and you get the feeling he’s been at the prison for a while, and that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t be afraid of a confrontation. He surveys everything with a keen eye. I even saw him reprimand Bébétâ once, who must be three times his weight. There was something in his manner with the big guy, his way of explaining to him what he was unhappy about, that intrigued me. Even Bébétâ can grasp that this is a man who breathes authority. That was when I had the idea.
I hotfooted it to the library and tracked down the details of the competitive examinations for becoming a senior prison officer. I checked that my intuition wasn’t leading me up the garden path and that my plan had a vague chance of success.
“So, Officer, these exams . . . ? Not easy, from what I hear.”
It was the following day, in the yard. The weather was nice, the inmates calm, and Morisset didn’t seem the sort to throw his baton about. He smokes light cigarettes with meticulous concentrati
on, as if each one is worth four times his annual salary. He holds his fag between thumb and index finger, cupping it with an almost maternal devotion. Quite odd, really.
“No, not easy,” he answered, drawing delicately on the filter, where a little fleck of ash had settled.
“And what have you chosen for the written part: general dissertation or executive summary?”
That made him look up from his cigarette.
“How do you know about all that?”
“Oh, I know these civil service exams well. I’ve coached people preparing for them for years. All the government departments: health, labor, local authorities . . . The courses are all pretty similar—the core issues don’t vary much.”
I was worried I’d overplayed my hand with the “core issues” bit. Too impatient. I almost bit my lip, but I managed to restrain myself. The officer returned to his cigarette and kept silent for a long while. Then, smoothing over the fold in the paper with a fingernail, he said:
“You know what, I do struggle with the executive summary . . .”
Bingo! Delambre, you’re a genius. You may well be looking at thirty big ones, but you’ve still got it when it comes to manipulation. All those years of management have really paid off. I let a few seconds pass before saying:
“I hear you. The problem is, almost every candidate chooses the dissertation. Because almost every candidate is the same as you—they’re afraid of the executive summary element. So basically, if you play the percentage game, you can stand out in the eyes of the examiners. The numbers would work in your favor. And what’s even better is that the executive summary, once you get the hang of it, is far more straightforward than the dissertation. It’s more clear-cut.”
This gave Officer Morisset plenty to think about. I had to be careful not to take him for a fool: I wouldn’t gain anything by pushing him and risk losing the little ground I’d made. So I said:
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