Inhuman Resources

by Pierre Lemaitre

  After lights-out in my cell, I cry, sometimes all night. The idea of anything happening to Nicole is unimaginable. Or to Mathilde . . .

  I don’t know what Fontana said through his ski mask. No doubt he told her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted her husband to stay alive behind bars. Nicole must have realized that the main point of this episode was to take the photograph and for me to see it.

  I know she hasn’t pressed charges. Lucie would have told me. Nicole hasn’t said anything; she’s kept it all to herself. She hasn’t written to me because all the letters have to go via the investigating magistrate. Mathilde said she was getting ready to visit me, but now I don’t think she’ll come.

  Since then, time has gone by and nothing’s happened. Days and weeks have passed and I’ve heard nothing from her.

  She must be asking herself how I managed to get into this mess, and about what’s going to happen to us.

  To her. To me.

  To us.

  Maybe Nicole sometimes thinks it would all be easier if I were dead.

  To find peace, does she dream that I’m gone? Is that her way of dealing with this thing that’s killing us both?

  Last night I woke up, delirious, and walked to my cell door. At first I hit it once, as hard as I could, with my injured hand. The pain was blinding and my wounds reopened immediately. But I carried on because I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to end everything. I was so alone. The pain was so intense, the worst I’ve ever experienced, but I carried on: right, left, right, left, harder, harder, harder. I felt like the ends of my arms were stumps. I was sweating, yet still I was punching the steel door. I collapsed on my feet, like a boxer on the ropes. In my unconscious state, I carried on pounding away until my legs gave way and I fell. There was so much blood that it flowed in rivulets through my bandages. Fists on steel—a lot of damage and not much noise.

  In the morning, the pain was extreme. My fingers were broken and reset, and both hands are now bandaged up again. More X-rays and no doubt another operation.

  Five more weeks pass, and still no news from her.

  They could have put me in solitary, in a hole, in a dungeon. Anything would have been better than this.

  My point of reference is not time or meals or noise or days turning to night.

  Only Nicole.

  My world is defined by her love. Without her, I no longer know where I am.

  37

  “And it has nothing to do with you?”

  The news is so momentous that Nicole has decided to come and see me again.

  I see the change close up, and it’s terrible. She’s been washed out by this affair, aging ten years in the space of a few months. I miss my Nicole, the one I relied on so much. I miss her horribly. I want to dispense with this new, shattered version sitting before me, and bring back my Nicole, my wife, my love.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  Nicole nods.

  “Nothing else is going to happen to you, you know that?”

  She doesn’t answer. Instead she does something ghastly: she attempts to smile. Her way of saying, “I’m behind you”; of saying, “I have no words, but I’m behind you, I’m here, and that’s all I can do.” No questions. No reproaches. Nicole has given up trying to understand. A man assaulted her. She doesn’t want to know who. He strangled her. She doesn’t want to know why. Will he come back? She doesn’t want to know. I promise her it was an accident, and she appears to believe me. What’s hard for her is not that I’m lying, but that she can never believe me again. But what the hell can I do?

  One thing has shifted between us, and it’s what she’s come to discuss. This is a game changer. I’m bursting to say:

  “Did you see? I did it! How can you not believe in me anymore?”

  But Nicole is drained. The bags beneath her eyes tell of hundreds of sleepless nights, but there is a small glimmer of hope, and I can feel it, too. Fucking hope.

  “A colleague told me about the program. I went home early to record it and Lucie came over to watch it with me in the evening.”

  She’s cross, but one of her great qualities is her total inability to lie (if I were like her, I’d already be dead).

  “Lucie’s wondering whether you’ve got anything to do with it,” she says.

  I make a show of looking outraged, but Nicole stops me dead by lifting her hand. With Lucie, lying is an option. With Nicole, it’s not even worth considering. She closes her eyes for a second before saying her piece:

  “I don’t know what you’re planning, Alain, and I can assure you that I don’t want to. But don’t drag our girls into this mess! It’s different with me, it doesn’t count—I’m with you. Fine if you had to do what you did. But not the girls, Alain!”

  As she defends her daughters, she turns into a different Nicole. Not even her love for me would get in the way of this. If I only I could have placed her in front of Fontana when he threatened to dismember them. However, we might be past “not dragging our girls into this mess”—the two of them are already up to their necks in it. One of them has lost a vast amount of what little she had; the other has been instructed to get her father out of this quagmire.

  “Please let me explain . . .”

  All it takes is a shake of the head for me to stop.

  “If it helps us, then great, but I don’t want to know.”

  She looks down, trying to hold back her tears.

  “Not our girls, Alain,” she says as she pulls out a tissue.

  The fact is that this might be a wonderful opportunity, and Nicole knows it.

  “Do you think it’s going to change anything?” she says, changing the subject.

  “Did you get the money? For the interview?”

  “Yes, you already asked me.”

  Various publishers have offered me advances of forty, fifty, sixty-five thousand euros, and good royalties, which will be paid straight into Nicole’s account. Since I’m going to have to give Exxyal back all their money, this is undoubtedly all the girls will have left.

  “I split your advance between Lucie and Mathilde,” Nicole confirms. “It helped a lot.”

  I chose the most sensationalist, rabble-rousing publisher I could, the one who could make the biggest splash. The book’s called: I Just Wanted a Job . . . with the subtitle: Out of Work, Over the Hill, and in Prison. It’s coming out just a month before the trial. Lucie objected to the title, but I insisted. On the cover is a silver-gilt médaille du travail for thirty years of work with my mug shot superimposed over the face of the Goddess of Liberty. It’s going to cause a massive stir. The publicist can barely cope on her own, so she’s taken on an intern (unpaid, of course—no point wasting money). Lucie will be appearing on the TV and radio shows on my behalf, not to mention speaking to the papers. The first print run will be a hundred and fifty thousand copies, and the publisher thinks the trial will boost sales.

  “I’m trying to take you out of harm’s way . . .”

  “So you keep saying, Alain. You want to protect us, but all you do is make things worse. I’d rather you did nothing at all—that way we’d still be living together. But you didn’t want that life anymore, and now it’s too late. Now I’m completely alone, can’t you see?”

  She pauses. We’re like uncommunicating vessels—as soon as one of us goes up, the other goes down.

  “I don’t need money,” Nicole says. “I couldn’t care less. All I want is for you to be there, with me. I don’t need anything else.”

  Her words are a bit disjointed, but I get the overall message: she’s willing to resume our impoverished life from where we left off, even if it means being poorer.

  “You don’t need anything, but that didn’t stop you from selling from our apartment!” I protest.

  Nicole shakes her head, as if confirming my inability to understand a thing. It really gets to me.

  “So do you think it’ll make a difference?” she asks, changing the subject.

  “What?”

  “The i
nterview.”

  I shrug, but inside I’m in overdrive.

  “If everything goes according to plan, it should.”

  A long table. The media everywhere. The place was sizzling.

  Behind the table, the entire wall was taken up with a banner bearing the EXXYAL EUROPE logo in enormous red lettering.

  “It must be said, he’s got stage presence, your CEO,” Nicole says with a hint of a smile.

  Alexandre Dorfmann was in his element. Last time I’d seen him he was sitting on the ground with my loaded Beretta resting on his forehead, and me saying, “So, your Higher-Than-Highness, how many exactly are you firing from Sarqueville?” or something like that. Not even a bead of sweat that day—a frozen-blooded animal. At the press conference, he was cool and calm, too. When he entered the room, it was as if I still had the Beretta held to his head. It might not have looked that way, but I’ve got him by the balls, old Alexander the Great. He entered the fray like a circus performer: solid yet supple movements, rigid smile, bright face. His lapdogs were lined up behind, stretching back into the wings.

  “Were they all there?” asks Nicole.

  “No, they were one down.”

  Right from the start, I noticed that Jean-Marc Guéneau, our red-lingerie-wearing friend, was late. Maybe he’d been held up in a sex shop—who knew. Something told me he wouldn’t be joining the party. I hoped I wasn’t in for a nasty surprise.

  The stars’ entrance had been edited, but I was able to catch a glimpse of the main characters: behind Dorfmann, Paul Cousin was first in line. He was standing so straight you’d swear he was a head taller than the others. Seconds later, there they all were sitting next to one another. Like the Last Supper. Dorfmann playing Jesus Christ, revving up to beatify the world with His word. Four brown-nosers instead of twelve: not bad going in these days of austerity. At the Lord’s right hand: Paul Cousin and Évelyne Camberlin. At His left: Maxime Lussay and Virginie Tràn.

  Dorfmann put on his glasses. There was a swarm of journalists and reporters, but silence fell as the crackle of flashes died out.

  “The whole of France has been moved, and rightly so, by the unfortunate fate of a man, stricken by unemployment, resorting to . . . violent extremes during his search for work.”

  His announcement was prepared in advance, but this bombastic start to proceedings was not Dorfmann’s usual style. He took off his glasses, more confident in his natural brilliance than his memory. He looked out to the assembly, staring straight at the camera.

  “The name of our company has become embroiled in this regrettable matter because a man, Monsieur Alain Delambre, in a moment of madness, took several of our company’s executives, including myself, hostage for several hours.”

  His expression hardened for a split second at the memory of the ordeal. Bravo—a marvelous turn. The faint shadow that crossed Dorfmann’s face for a split second conveyed a clear message: we’ve been to hell and back, but we’re not going to make a song and dance out of it; we have the dignity and the nobility to keep our pain to ourselves. The apostles flanking him joined in this almost indiscernible display of keen emotion. One looked down, desolate at the memory of the unbearable nightmare they’d been through; another swallowed hard, visibly racked by those hours of horror and the indelible mark they’d etched on her heart. Bravo to them, too! The vultures didn’t miss out on any of it: flashes burst into action, seizing on this prize-winning pang of televisual suffering. Even I felt an urge to turn to my cellmates and applaud the show. But I was on my own (VIP).

  “They’re a real bunch of obsequious bastards, aren’t they?” Nicole says.

  “You could put it like that.”

  Dorfmann again:

  “Whatever this job seeker’s motivations, no circumstances—I repeat, no circumstances—can justify physical violence.”

  “How are your hands?” Nicole asks.

  “Up to six functioning fingers. These four, and these two. So not bad—that’s over half. The others aren’t healing too well. The doctor hinted that bending them might not be easy in the future.”

  Nicole smiles at me. My love’s smile, the entire reason for my fighting and my suffering. I could die for this woman. Shit, that’s what I am doing!

  Or maybe not:

  “However,” Dorfmann continued, “we cannot be deaf to the cries of the suffering. As business leaders, we must fight every day to win the economic struggle that would guarantee their return to work. We understand their frustration. And the truth is, we share it.”

  I would have loved to be watching the show in a café in Sarqueville. It must have been like a World Cup match. They’ll have that little soundbite playing on loop.

  “Monsieur Delambre’s terrible misadventure perhaps epitomizes the tragedy faced by many unemployed people. That is why, on my initiative, Exxyal Europe has decided to drop all charges against him.”

  A huge commotion followed, with photographers greedily snapping the table of execs.

  “My colleagues,” he continued, with a proprietorial sweep of the hand that set off a stadium wave of earnest eye-closing from his subordinates, “have stood by me in this decision, and for that I thank them. Each of them, individually, had pressed charges. All of them have been withdrawn. Monsieur Delambre will face court action for what he did, but the state prosecution alone will be responsible for ensuring that justice is served.”

  The executives on either side of God the Father remained deadpan, fully aware of their momentous role. Dorfmann had just unveiled a new stained-glass panel in the history of capitalism: The Lord shows Pity to the Unemployed and the Needy.

  That was when I truly fathomed the value Dorfmann placed on his ten million. There must have been plenty of chatter backstage at Exxyal, because he’d just painted on another layer, and not just any color: a fine, virginal, almost Christ-like white. The white of innocence.

  “Of course, far be it from either Exxyal or its staff to sway the scales of justice, which must be served with total impartiality. Our show of compassion is, nonetheless, a plea for lenience. A plea for clemency.”

  There was a general hubbub around the room. Everyone knows that CEOs are capable of superiority—just look at their bonuses—but this magnanimity . . . honestly, it brings a tear to the eye.

  “Lucie thinks their dropping the charges might have a big impact on the verdict,” Nicole says.

  She said the same to me. I think it’s far from enough, but I hold my tongue. We’ll see. The trial will take place in three or four months, record time apparently. It’s not every day that France’s most famous unemployed person goes up to the high court.

  Back on-screen, Dorfmann cranked it up:

  “Having said that . . .”

  Silence almost fell. Dorfmann hammered each syllable home, asserting His word.

  “Having said that . . . this move will have no bearing on jurisprudence.”

  That’s a tricky word for the mere mortals of a TV audience.

  Simplify: return to the universal principles of communication.

  “Our gesture is an exception. Anyone tempted to follow the example of Monsieur Delambre . . .”—cue rapturous applause in the cafés of Sarqueville—“. . . should know that Exxyal Group will stand firm in its absolute condemnation of brutality and unreservedly support the prosecution of anyone who commits violent acts against any assets or personnel belonging to our company.”

  “No one seems to have picked up on that,” Nicole says, “but it was weird, no?”

  She sees that I’m not following her, so explains:

  “Dorfmann spoke about the ‘assets or personnel belonging to the company,’” says Nicole. “That’s pretty serious.”

  No, still not with her.

  “The ‘assets,’ fine, but the ‘personnel,’ Alain! They don’t ‘belong’ to their company!”

  Without thinking, I say:

  “That didn’t shock me. At the end of the day, didn’t I do what I did to ‘belong’ to a company again?�
��

  Nicole is appalled, but she lets it rest.

  She supports me, no matter what. She’ll support me to the very end. But our worlds are expanding in opposite directions.

  “Here,” she says.

  She rummages in her bag and brings out some photographs.

  “I’m moving in a couple of weeks. Gregory’s being very good to me—he’s coming with a couple of friends to do the heavy lifting.”

  I am only half-listening because my attention is on the photographs. Shots from various angles, ambient lighting . . . Nicole’s gone to a lot of effort to make the place look nice, but it’s no use. It’s dingy. She’s talking about the move, about the lovely neighbors, about taking a few days off, but I’m looking at the shots and I’m devastated. She tells me which floor it’s on, but the number doesn’t stick. Maybe the twelfth? I’m treated to several zoomed-out photos of Paris. When you’re dealing with real estate agents, panoramic shots are rarely a promising sign. I don’t even bother with the bird’s-eye views.

  “We can eat in the kitchen . . .” Nicole says.

  We can puke in there, too. The patterned parquet is a real ’70s throwback: a dull, right-angled affair. Just by looking at the photographs you can hear the voices echoing around the empty rooms and, come nightfall, the sound of the neighbors yelling at one another through the hollow partition walls. Living room. Corridor. Bedroom. Another bedroom. Everything I hate. How much is a shithole like this worth? Did she really trade in our apartment for this, when we were so close to paying off the mortgage?

  “Close to paying it off? With what payments? I’m not sure if you noticed, Alain, but we’ve got a few cash-flow issues!”

  I sense that it’s better not to test her. Nicole has reached a level of exasperation that is close to breaking point. She opens her mouth and I close my eyes in readiness for the tirade, but she goes for the underhand option instead.

  “It’s not like I’m the only one who’s decided to move house,” she says, motioning toward the décor around us.