That was below the belt. I toss the photographs onto the table and she gathers them into her bag. Then she looks at me:
“I don’t give a damn about the apartment. I would have been happy anywhere so long as I was with you. All I wanted was to be with you. So without you, it’s there or somewhere else . . . At least we’ll be in less debt.”
This new place perfectly matches my notion of where a prisoner’s wife should live.
There’s too much to say, so I say nothing. Save it. Keep my strength for the trial, my best shot at being allowed to come home to her soon, even if it’s in that dump.
38
Everyone knows that there are good days and bad days. And you definitely want the day you go before the high court to be a good day. In fact, I’m going to need two of those days, as that’s how long the trial is expected to last.
Lucie is buzzing. No more talk of Sainte-Rose, who withdrew his help after my previous antics. Curiously, as irritating as I found the presence of this phantom by Lucie’s side (especially when I found out how exorbitantly high his fees were), seeing her reduced to making all these decisions by herself does panic me a little. What she said sixteen months ago about the need to be defended by a proper professional starts making perfect sense. I feel for her—her anxiety is overwhelming. The press have highlighted the fact that she’s my daughter, and numerous photos of her have been printed alongside weepy headlines. I know she hates this, but she shouldn’t.
My worry has increased in the run-up to the trial, but when she told me her line of defense, I once again found myself thinking I’d made the right choice. Broadly speaking, there are two potential strategies: political or psychological. Lucie is convinced the assistant public prosecutor will opt for the former, so she’s gone for the latter.
Everyone is on standby.
Alexandre Dorfmann’s press conference had been unanimously hailed a success. His magnificent gesture was all the more appreciated since neither he nor a single one of his executives had agreed to any follow-up interviews. This extreme modesty seemed to confirm—not that any confirmation was needed—that his move contained no ulterior motives whatsoever and that it was rooted in nothing but the purest sense of humanity. A few of the rags seemed skeptical, suggesting that there might have been some underlying, suspicious reason lurking behind his actions. But thankfully the majority of them fell in line with the broadcast media: in this tense period tarnished by labor disputes, with an almost permanent atmosphere of confrontation between business heads and employees, Exxyal’s benevolent decision represents a new chapter in social relations. After two centuries of relentless class war, the torch of peace now shines bright on a new entente cordiale, marking a historic instance of reconciliation between leaders, workers, and employees.
In the meantime, Exxyal has made me confirm that I will indeed be paying back all its money.
The second promising sign before the trial was the U-turn from Pharmaceutical Logistics. Lucie’s initial belief was that my former employer’s position had been morally compromised by my heroic man-of-the-people status and that they were afraid of defeat at the tribunal, but we recently found out the real reason: their key witness, Romain, quit overnight and is not even replying to urgent e-mails from the head office. Lucie looked into it. Romain has gone back to his home province, back to farming the land. Gleaming new tractors, vast irrigation projects, the works. It seems the young man is pushing ahead with some ambitious investments.
Despite these good omens, Lucie still has her concerns. Trial by jury can, apparently, be somewhat unpredictable.
The day before the start of the trial, the radio and TV stations summarize the charges against me and rebroadcast the archive footage. I beg Lucie to be kind with her predictions: best-case scenario, she’s hoping for eight years, four of which will be mandatory.
I do the math in my head and start panicking. Four years of mandatory prison means another thirty months inside! If I weren’t already sitting down, I would collapse. Even if I manage to stay in the VIP section, I’m so exhausted that . . .
“. . . I’ll die!”
Lucie rests her hand on mine.
“You’re not going to die, Papa. You’re going to be patient. But I’m warning you, even that would be an absolute miracle.”
I hold back my tears.
Last night, I didn’t sleep a wink. Thirty months in here! Almost three more years . . . When I get out, I’ll be an old man. And I will have given all the money back to Exxyal. I’ll be old and poor. The thought is completely shattering and makes me feel so alone.
All this in mind, I enter the courtroom with my shoulders sagging and a washed-out complexion. I am a shadow of a man. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it seems to make a decent impression.
The clutch of jurors has been picked at random from the kind of people I used to rub shoulders with on the métro back when I was employed. Men and women of all ages. But in the context of the high court, I find these familiar faces infinitely more sinister. Even though they’ve taken their juror’s oath (“. . . I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly try the issues joined between the parties and a true verdict give according to the evidence . . .”), I’m on edge. These people are like me—I’m sure they’re perfectly sensible.
I spot my little crew nearby.
Close family first: Nicole, more beautiful than ever, sending me discreet, confidence-boosting looks; Mathilde, on her own because her husband hadn’t managed to get away.
A bit farther along there’s Charles. He must have borrowed a suit from a better-heeled but much larger neighbor. He’s floating in the clothes, which look as though they’re being inflated by an air duct. Knowing from experience that he’s not allowed to booze in the courtroom, he must have tanked up ahead of time. I saw him walking in earlier, determined but slightly wobbly. When he raised a hand at me to make his salute, he veered off-balance, forcing him to grip the back of a chair. Expressive as ever, Charles. He views the proceedings from some inner place, utterly engrossed. At every phase of the hearings, his face seems loaded with comments. Charles is almost a barometer for the entire event. He makes frequent sideways glances at me, like a mechanic looking up from under the hood to assure his client that, for the moment, everything’s all right.
After the close family, the more distant relatives. Fontana, grave and earnest, calmly polishing his nails without looking at me once. His two colleagues are here, too: the young woman with the cold eyes, whose first name, Yasmine, was cited in the court documents; and the Arab who conducted the interrogations, Kader. They are on the list of witnesses cited by the public prosecutor. But first and foremost, they’re here just for me. I ought to feel flattered.
Then there’s the press and the radio and TV crowd. And my representative from the publisher, who’ll be somewhere in the room licking his lips at the thought of how many sales this trial is going to rack up.
And Lucie, who I haven’t seen wearing her official robe for ages. She has a good number of young colleagues in the room who, like me, must be shocked by how much weight she’s lost this past year.
As the first day draws to a close, I simply don’t understand why Lucie is predicting eight years. If the reporter summing up the courtroom action is anything to go by, the verdict will be nothing but lenient and the entire world is on my side. Except, of course, the assistant public prosecutor. A real shitbag, that guy. Bitter. He takes every opportunity to display his contempt for me.
It’s perfectly clear from the statement made by the psychiatric expert: my physical state at the time of the events was marked by a temporary disorder that “completely eliminated [my] judgment and control over [my] actions.” The assistant public prosecutor grills him, brandishing Article 122-1 of the Code pénal and seeking to emphasize that I cannot possibly be considered to have diminished responsibility on psychological grounds. All this wrangling goes over my head. Lucie contests his opinion. She has worked har
d on this aspect of the case, which she sees as vital to the trial. The exchange between her and the assistant public prosecutor gets heated, and the judge has to call the court to order. In the evening, the reporter concludes soberly: “Will the jury deem Monsieur Delambre to be responsible for his actions, as the assistant public prosecutor strongly maintains? Or, as his lawyer insists, will they see him as a man whose judgment was severely impaired by depression? We’ll know tomorrow evening at the end of the deliberations.”
The assistant public prosecutor, for his part, glorifies in the detail. He describes the prisoners’ anxiety as though he had been there himself. To hear his version, this hostage taking rivals Fort Alamo. He calls to the stand the RAID commandant who arrested me. Lucie makes few interventions. She’s relying on the witness testimonies.
Enter Alexandre Dorfmann, lord of all he surveys. Tribute to whom tribute is due. His testimony has been hotly anticipated ever since that overblown press conference he gave.
I look over at Fontana, who is watching and listening to his boss with an almost religious devotion.
A few days before, I said to him:
“I’m warning you, I want my ten mill’s worth! No way your client’s getting away with the legal minimum, you hear me? For three mill, I’m a lost soul. For five, I’m a brave man. For ten, I’m a fucking saint! That’s the way I see it, so go and tell that to your Lord on high. No way he’s playing the CEO up there—this time, he’s going to have to do some fucking work. For ten big ones and an honorable gesture from me to calm down his board of directors, he’d better bust his goddamn ass.”
Dorfmann turns out to be a total natural.
Not even in her wildest dreams did Lucie expect such a testimony.
Yes, of course, the hostage taking was “an ordeal,” but fundamentally the person before him was “no murderer, just a man who’d lost his way.” Dorfmann looks pensive as he runs through his memory. “No, I never felt threatened. The fact is, he wasn’t at all sure what he wanted.” In answer to a question about physical violence, Dorfmann says, “No, none whatsoever.” The public prosecutor presses him. I urge him on in my head: Go on, your Excellency, one more kind word. Dorfmann scrapes the barrel: “When he was firing, we could all see that he was aiming at the windows and not at anyone in particular. It was more like an act of . . . deterrence. The man seemed broken, exhausted.”
The assistant public prosecutor goes on the offensive. He brings to mind Dorfmann’s initial statements from a few minutes after the RAID operation, statements that appear “very damning for Delambre,” and then from the press conference, which were “astonishing almost to the point of suspicion,” in which Delambre was absolved of all wrongdoing.
“It’s hard to keep up, Monsieur Dorfmann.”
He’s going to have to do better than that to throw Alexander the Great.
Dorfmann brushes aside this criticism with three clear arguments, emphasizing each salient point by turn with a wag of the finger at the assistant public prosecutor, a look over at the jury, and a prodigal hand gesture in my direction. A flawless performance. The fruit of thirty years of sitting on supervisory boards. By the end, no one has understood a word of what he’s said, but everyone agrees that he is right. Everything seems clearer, logic perfectly restored. The assembly congregates reverently around the evidence Dorfmann puts before us. A business leader in full swing is as beautiful as an archbishop in his cathedral.
Lucie looks at me with pure elation.
My words to Fontana had been:
“I want everyone to be on their game! It’s a team game, and for ten million I want real unity, real team spirit, got it? Dorfmann picks the gap and then the pack follows behind in a nice, tight formation. No weak links! Tell them to remember the management tips they give their underlings—that ought to help.”
It does help.
Évelyne Camberlin steps up. A doyenne, dignity personified.
“Yes, I won’t deny that I was scared, but I soon realized that nothing was going to happen to us. What really frightened me was that he might do something clumsy, a blunder of some sort.”
As soon as the assistant public prosecutor intervenes, the audience starts jeering at him like a pantomime villain. He asks Évelyne Camberlin to describe her “terror.”
“I was afraid, but I wasn’t terrified.”
“Oh, but of course! A man waves a gun in your face and you don’t find that terrifying? You must be exceptionally cool under pressure,” he adds with a derisory tone.
Évelyne Camberlin glares at him before smiling and saying:
“Weapons have little effect on me. I spent my entire childhood in a barracks—my father was a lieutenant colonel.”
The audience is in raptures. I look at the jurors. A few smiles, but hardly all-out hysterics.
The assistant public prosecutor takes a sly turn.
“You dropped your charges entirely of your own volition, is that correct?”
“What you’re really asking,” she says, “is whether I did so under pressure from my employer. What would be the point?”
Deep down, this is the question on everyone’s lips. It’s at moments like this that we can tell whether the big man has got his case sewn up. With ten million on the table, I hope he has.
Before the assistant public prosecutor can respond, Madame Camberlin cracks on:
“Perhaps you’re suggesting that my employers might stand to gain from projecting a generous image.”
You’re fired, Camberlin! If it were up to me, I would kick her out immediately for making that kind of insinuation. Where did she learn her public speaking? I’m livid. If she doesn’t pull this one back, I’m making Dorfmann promise that her head will be the first to roll when the layoff plan gets underway at Sarqueville. She must have realized her error, because she backtracks:
“Do you really think Exxyal needs to boost its image in the eyes of the media by appearing charitable?”
Okay, that’s a bit better. But I need you to hammer this into the jurors’ heads.
“If so, why not ask whether I’ve been given a special bonus to testify before you? Or whether I’m being blackmailed with the threat of dismissal? Are these questions too tedious for you?”
There’s a general hubbub, and the judge calls the court to order. The jury seems perplexed, and I panic that my plan’s about to come apart at the seams.
“In that case,” the assistant public prosecutor says after a pause, “if you and Monsieur Delambre are in such close communion, why did you press charges the day after the event?”
“Because the police asked me to. They recommended it, and at the time it seemed logical,” Madame Camberlin replies.
Much more like it. Dorfmann’s instructions were clear after all. There’s a sense that all these people’s futures are in the dock, too. That makes me happy—it makes me feel less alone.
Maxime Lussay falls in line with his colleague. His approach is less polished, a bit more rustic. He speaks in straightforward but effective terms, answering with a simple “yes” or “no.” Low profile. Perfect.
Virginie Tràn, on the other hand, causes quite a stir. She’s wearing a pale-yellow dress and a silk scarf. She is made up as if it’s her wedding day, and she strides to the witness stand like a catwalk model. I can tell how badly she wants to please her boss. I figure she’s still in bed with the competition. If I were her, I’d be treading very carefully.
She goes for the categorical approach.
“Monsieur Delambre made no demands. I struggle to believe that his actions were premeditated. If so, surely he would have asked for something.”
Objection from the public prosecutor, and she gets a reprimand from both the assistant public prosecutor and the judge.
“We are not asking for your personal views on Monsieur Delambre’s motivations. Stick to the facts.”
She takes this onslaught as a chance to go all coquettish, lowering her eyes and blushing with embarrassment, like a little girl
caught with her hand in the candy jar. This paragon of innocence would have made the most hardened soul burst into tears.
Up last is His Majesty Paul Cousin. He’s the only one who takes a good look at me, square in the eye, as he walks to the stand. He’s even taller than I remember. The audience is going to love him.
Me to Fontana:
“That tall bastard of yours is the key to everything. It’s thanks to him that I’m behind bars, so you tell him that I want some serious tact. Otherwise I’ll make sure he’s back on fucking unemployment benefits until he retires.”
Solemn and austere, Cousin seems aware of his big-man status. Calm and collected, he’s an example to all.
With every question from the judge, with each cross-examination from the assistant public prosecutor, Paul Cousin makes a slight turn toward me. Before relaying his position, The Upstanding One observes The Lost One, then responds with a few sparse sentences. We barely know each other, he and I, but I feel like we’re old friends.
He answers the judge by confirming that he is currently posted in Normandy. With a heavy heart, he announces that there’d been a vast restructuring program: a difficult operation, “from a human perspective.” I hope he doesn’t overdo that phrase, because it has a bizarre ring when he says it. He explains that Sarqueville is at the heart of the group’s economic difficulties. In other words, he knows full well that times are tough. When they start quizzing him about his attitude during the hostage taking, we get a recap of the events: his opposition, his confrontation, his courageous dash for the exit . . .
“In order to stop you, Monsieur Delambre attempted to shoot you!”
A murmur of admiration goes around the room. Cousin swats it aside irritably.
“Monsieur Delambre didn’t shoot me, that’s all that matters. Perhaps he attempted to, but I cannot testify to that, since I never turned to see what he was doing.”
The audience interprets this as modesty.
“Everyone else seemed to see it!”
Inhuman Resources Page 27