Inhuman Resources

by Pierre Lemaitre

But fundamentally, from the moment I realized that Exxyal was screwing me over, when I discovered that everything I’d done to get a job had been in vain, that I’d stolen my daughter’s money for nothing . . . ever since I felt myself overwhelmed by that dark fury, I have been reacting, trying hard to come up with solutions, but without ever having an overarching strategy. No plan that could factor in the consequences. I’m no crook. I’ve got no idea what to do.

  I’m in a real bind.

  The fact is that if I had had a broad strategy, and it had brought me here, then at least I could say I’d had a strategy, albeit a piss-poor one.

  The first message has very much arrived. What now?

  One thing is for sure: I must find a way to prevent the second message from reaching me.

  Curiously enough, it’s the psychiatrist charged with my assessment who sets me on the right track.

  He’s fifty, and a proper, open kind of guy, despite all the buzzwords. Every sentence he utters is infused with meaning, betraying a lofty opinion of his function. While none of it rings false, the problem with my case is that it’s pretty self-explanatory. You just need to put my file next to my CV and there’s your diagnosis. I don’t go to too many pains to convince him of what he already knows.

  What does strike me is the question he uses to kick off the session: “If you were to tell me your life story, what would you say first?”

  After the interview, I launch myself wholeheartedly into my work.

  As I can’t write, I ask Jérôme to help: I dictate, he writes, I reread, he corrects. It’s going fairly quickly, though never quick enough for me. I’m trying to disguise the fact that I’ve entered a race against the clock.

  If everything goes according to plan, the manuscript will be done in four or five days. I embellish my adventure, making no shortage of additions and inserting plenty of symbolic violence. I write in the first person, and I mix up the tenses to give it impact and pace.

  And then I look into which newspapers might be interested.

  Relations with Nicole have become strained. She is very depressed, living in a precarious state of limbo, and can see me getting the full sentence. She is lonely and in a terrible state, and there’s nothing I can do for her.

  She came to visit last week.

  “I’m selling the apartment,” she said. “I’ll send you the paperwork. You have to sign it and send it straight back.”

  “Sell the apartment? Why?” I said, stunned.

  “Your trial against your former employer is about to start, and I want to be able to pay damages if it comes to it.”

  “We’re not there yet!”

  “No, but we will be. And anyway, I don’t need it—it’s too big for me on my own.”

  It was the first time I’d heard Nicole so clearly state the incontrovertible fact that I would never be coming back to live with her. I didn’t know what to say. I could tell she was sad to have resigned herself to that truth.

  “And then there are the legal fees,” she continued, clouding the issue.

  “But there are hardly any fees—we’re not paying for a lawyer!”

  Nicole seemed utterly dismayed, I wasn’t sure why.

  “Alain, I know things can’t be easy for you here, but seriously, you’ve lost all sense of reality!”

  I must have looked confused by these words.

  “I don’t want Lucie working for nothing,” Nicole said, hammering the point home. “I want her to be paid. She’s quit her job to defend you, using her savings to replace the salary she’s lost. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  After everything I’ve been through . . .

  “And Maître Sainte-Rose is expensive,” Nicole persisted. “Very expensive. And I don’t want her to keep on paying.”

  This shocked me. First Mathilde, now Lucie plunged into debt by their father.

  I couldn’t look her in the eye any longer, and she couldn’t look into mine.

  Lucie’s approach with Maître Gilson, her ex-pal from the university, has clearly been unsuccessful. Lucie didn’t offer anything in exchange. All she did was ask for a bit of goodwill and clemency. No matter how much I told her that these were not qualities that Pharmaceutical Logistics possessed in spades, she couldn’t resist trying her luck. Lucie is a very good lawyer, but she’s also naive. Must be a family trait. As it happened, the conversation soon turned to humiliation. Lucie’s old friend seemed to revel in this opportunity for revenge, as if a simple refusal from her client weren’t enough, and without showing the faintest compassion for what I’m going through and what I have at stake. As if stealing someone’s boyfriend was really on a par with consigning a sexagenarian to thirty years in prison. It defied belief. In short, Lucie now wants me to approach Romain. If he agrees not to testify, Logistics will lose their only witness, which she figures will bring their whole case crashing down. She would then step into the breach and get all the charges dropped. I find it a bit silly to focus on this issue when I’m headed for the high court, but it seems that Sainte-Rose, her henchman, is adamant about this.

  “He wants to clean up the case,” Lucie explains to me. “We have to present you as a peaceable person. Show that you’re not a violent man at all.”

  A nonviolent, Beretta-wielding man.

  Terrific.

  Anyway, I promise to send Romain a letter, or ask Charles to pay him a visit to talk about it, but I know I won’t do anything of the kind. To the contrary: all my fortunes, not to mention Romain’s safety, hinge on everyone regarding him as my foe.

  32

  Yesterday I found out that the second message was arriving.

  I didn’t sleep a wink.

  “Visits” are announced the day before, but you’re never told who’s coming. Sometimes it’s a surprise, and not always a pleasant one.

  As is the case with me this morning. It’s the messenger, I’m sure of it. Nicole isn’t meant to be coming this week, and I gave up expecting Mathilde weeks ago. Lucie is welcome anytime (the procedure is different for lawyers). And anyway, she’s working far too hard on my case right now to have any time to visit.

  It’s exactly 10:00 a.m.

  We’re standing in line in the corridor waiting for our names to be called. Some are excited, others despondent. As for me, I’m shit scared. Feverish. That was the word chosen by Jérôme, my main con man, when he saw me leave the cell. An inmate I know is staring at me. He’s worried for me. So he should be.

  David Fontana is wearing a suit and tie. Almost smart. If I didn’t know what he was capable of, I’d think he was just a normal middle manager. He’s a lot more than that. Even sitting in a chair, he’s threatening. The sort of guy who picks Boulon as his messenger, though he’d much rather do the job himself given half a chance.

  His eyes are gleaming. He hardly ever blinks.

  His presence fills the atmosphere of the tiny booth, behind which a guard passes every forty seconds. Fontana radiates terrifying levels of power and violence. He could kill me with his bare hands in the interval between the guard’s rounds, no doubt about it.

  Just seeing him brings back the sound of my snapping fingers, and a shiver runs down my spine.

  I sit down opposite him, and he smiles at me calmly. I’m not wearing a bandage anymore, but my fingers are still very swollen, and the ones that were fractured are still being supported in grubby splints. I look like someone who’s had a terrible accident.

  “So you received my message, Monsieur Delambre?”

  His voice is cold, abrupt. I wait. Don’t make him angry. Let him come to you. Play for time. But most of all—most of all—don’t do anything to annoy him; don’t make him give Boulon and Bébétâ the order to drag me into the workshop and crush my head in a vise.

  “I say ‘my message.’ I really mean my client’s message,” Fontana corrects himself.

  Sounds like there’s been a change of client. Exit Bertrand Lacoste. The great consultant has been tried, tested, and found wanting. His lit
tle Polish intern has cast him into the abyss, and he’s not getting out anytime soon. It doesn’t look pretty for the Lord High Headhunter. He needs to think long and hard about his fall from grace, and remember that you can never be too wary of the small fish, the mediocre ones. His ingenious hostage taking idea was an HR catastrophe of historic proportions. Exxyal will make sure everyone knows it. His career path has taken a major detour, and his firm’s future looks about as rosy as mine.

  So exit Lacoste, enter The Mikado. Alexandre Dorfmann himself is in the seat. Ex officio.

  We’re in a new category, now. Until now it’s been the semiprofessionals—now we’re into the big time.

  The difference in approach between Lacoste and Dorfmann is immediately noticeable. The former makes promises about jobs, so no real consequences there. The latter engages Fontana, who deploys Bébétâ and Boulon like a commando. Dorfmann will have said: “I don’t want to know details.” The gloves are off, but his hands are going to stay clean. Not that Fontana will mind: the need for total discretion in this operation means he can triple his fee, plus it gives him carte blanche to run things his own way (and I’ve already had a taste of what that entails).

  Fontana waits as I piece the puzzle together. With the fake hostage taking for Exxyal, his role was largely organizational. Now he’s in his element. He seems at ease taking me to task, like an athlete returning to the track after a niggling injury.

  Did I receive his message? You don’t say . . .

  I swallow hard and nod in silence.

  Not that the words would come anyway. Seeing him reminds me of my anger, of Exxyal, Bertrand Lacoste—everything that’s landed me here in this mess. The vision of Fontana pouncing at me, teeth bared, comes flooding back. If he’d had the chance to kill me then, he would have done it. But he just hobbled to the window, his leg bleeding. Here in the visiting room, I can smell the cordite again, and in my hand I can feel the cold, heavy weapon I used to shoot the windows. I wish I still had that gun in my hand; wish I could hold it in my outstretched arm and slam two bullets into Fontana’s head. But he’s not here to get himself killed by my fury. He’s here to take back what little I’ve won.

  “Little . . . ?” he asks. “I hope you’re joking!”

  So here we are.

  I don’t move.

  “We’ll get on to that, but first, congratulations, Monsieur Delambre. Very nice move. Really, very fine work. I certainly fell for it . . .”

  The admiring tone was at odds with his expression. His lips are pursed, his eyes boring into mine. Subliminal messages are oozing from every pore, and I’m picking up on each and every one of them. They all revolve around the same theme: I’m going to crush you like a piece of shit.

  “A rookie would say that you’d planned everything well, but I think the exact opposite. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here . . . You’re not a strategist. You’re improvising, making it up as you go along. You should never do that, Monsieur Delambre,” he says, wagging his finger. “Never.”

  I’m itching to remind him that his magnificent planning didn’t prevent his hostage taking from going belly-up. But I’m spending all my energy on giving nothing away: poker face. My heart is beating at a hundred miles an hour. I hate him with an intensity that scares me. The man is capable of sending murderers to my cell, even at night.

  “Although, that said,” he continues, “for an improvisation, it was a decent performance, I must admit. It took me a while to figure it out. And of course, by the time I did figure it out, it was too late. Well, I say ‘too late’ . . . We’ll make up for the lost time, Monsieur Delambre. You can be sure of that.”

  I don’t even flinch, breathing from my stomach. Not a movement—mustn’t let any emotion show. Stony eyed.

  “Monsieur Guéneau was the first man you interrogated. That was your stroke of luck, I think. Because, despite appearances,” he says, with a sweeping gesture that takes in the surrounding décor, “you have had some luck, Monsieur Delambre. Until today, that is.”

  I swallow hard.

  “If Monsieur Guéneau had been interrogated later,” Fontana continues, “your plan would have worked, but I’m not sure you would have gone through with it. You would have weighed up the situation more carefully. And ultimately, you wouldn’t have risked it . . . But it was served up to you on a plate, so you couldn’t help yourself. You couldn’t resist the temptation. Do you remember how scared he was, Monsieur Guéneau?”

  Jean-Marc Guéneau, eyes darting all over the place. I picture him sitting bolt upright as the young Arab fired him questions. And next to me, Lacoste’s turkey, who . . .

  But Fontana was front row for all that.

  “Monsieur Guéneau’s interrogation went badly wrong. You saw Mademoiselle Rivet wasn’t up to the mark with her clumsy questions. She lost her footing, never managed to assert herself, and sure enough, Monsieur Guéneau started having his doubts, thrashing his head from side to side, not quite figuring out the game. The whole thing was seconds away from collapsing on itself. Then you decided to intervene . . .”

  I remember approaching the microphone. And a few minutes later, Monsieur Guéneau had stripped down to his red-lace lingerie and was sobbing. Then he fell on the gun and swallowed the barrel.

  “The man was desperate. You might not be much of a forward-planner, but you’re not short of intuition.”

  There’s that admiring tone again. Fontana’s main aim is to shatter the icy wall I’ve put up against him. He’s trying every trick in the book.

  “You ruined him. He was willing to sell out his company, hand it to you on a plate. He was willing to give you anything: financial secrets, hidden deals, slush funds . . . And that’s what you were hoping for.”

  True, that was what I was waiting for, even if I wasn’t expecting it to come so quickly. And the fact that the first man to be interrogated was the one I’d been banking on was indeed a stroke of luck.

  He had sat down at the desk indicated by the commando leader and plugged his Blackberry into the laptop computer before logging into the Exxyal Europe system.

  He clicked once, twice, and opened the finance folder.

  I waited a few seconds, watching him very closely.

  He entered his personal passwords: the first, then the second.

  I was looking out for that classic bit of body language that we all exhibit when our password is accepted. When the path is open at last and you can finally get to work, a minute reflex in the hands and shoulders that represents release.

  “Then you stood up, and you said: ‘Bastard.’ Although I haven’t stopped wondering whether I misheard and it was actually plural: ‘bastards’?”

  I don’t move.

  He carries on:

  “The rest was all for show. You were terrified by what you were doing, and that played into your hands. Your fear was your trump card. Because your emotions were genuine, your terror was genuine—what you were doing took serious balls. Everyone read your fear at face value: an exec goes ballistic and ends up staging a spontaneous hostage taking. Of course he’s scared! But the whole point was that this was a diversion.”

  I lined up the hostages, following Kaminski’s instructions to the letter. I frisked them, spinning them around clockwise, fingers fully splayed. With my back to the door, I shot at the windows . . .

  “And finally, the opportunity came to you through Monsieur Cousin. Ah, how he wanted to be the hero of the day, that guy! But if he hadn’t provided you with your chance, it would have been someone else. It didn’t matter to you. My cameo could have given you your opportunity—the only reason you repelled me was to give weight to your ‘plan.’ By that point, all you wanted was to fail. That’s what no one could understand.”

  Paul Cousin, the specter. The color of chalk. He got to his feet and squared up to me. He was perfect. Precisely what I needed, it’s true. When he intervened, he was the epitome of the company’s values. Like a genre painting: Outraged executive making a stand against Adversity.


  “You needed to appear defeated. That way you could keep us contained. You could pretend you were giving up and surrendering. Ultimately, you could do what you were planning from the start: go and tuck yourself away in the other room, where the laptop was still logged on thanks to Monsieur Guéneau. Open goal. The hostage taking gave you free rein over Exxyal’s accounts. All you had to do was sit down, tap the keyboard, and help yourself.”

  David Fontana stops. He seems genuinely impressed. There’s something fishy about his admiration—it’s going to cost me dearly. It’s intended to cost me . . .

  “Ten million euros, Monsieur Delambre! You weren’t messing around!”

  I’m stunned.

  Not even his client is telling him the truth.

  I took 13.2 million.

  I can’t help but let the mask slip a little, and a glimmer of a smile crosses my lips. By now Fontana is over the moon:

  “Bravo, Monsieur Delambre. No, really, bravo! I couldn’t care less about the technical details. According to the IT specialist who examined the leak, you arranged a transfer to an offshore account without leaving a trace.”

  It was actually a lot cleverer than that.

  When I left the hostages and sat down at the laptop, I only had fifteen minutes to spare, and my computer skills are minimal, to say the least. I know how to do spreadsheets and word processing. But anything beyond that? Well, I do know how to insert a USB stick and send an e-mail. Romain told me that would be enough. He’d worked almost thirty hours straight to sort everything out. The software he’d installed on the USB stick did all the hard work as soon as it was plugged in. Once I’d given him the access, it took Romain (working from his desktop at home) less than four minutes to release a Trojan horse into the Exxyal system. The malware he installed would allow him to reenter the system during business hours: enough time to access their accounts, secure the transfer to a tax haven, then delete every trace.

  Fontana was right on this one point—the details don’t affect the result.

  “Especially well played, given you’re acting with total impunity. Cleaning out an oil company’s slush fund, one that’s used for paying out bribes and kickbacks here, there, and everywhere . . . You can be sure they won’t press charges against you.”