Vernon Subutex Three

by Virginie Despentes

  “What a pity the great and the good didn’t think to join the Front National earlier. Now all the best jobs are taken, and they’re trapped on the left wing. It’s absurd. But that’s no problem, they’ll tell you – now that we all think the same thing, surely that must be proof that we’re right, self-evidently right, since we see France from above?

  “Stay tuned to the T.V., comrade, we’re not done yet: two days later, monsieur le Comte shows up to tell us his life story. He’s studied the labour laws. This man who’s never worked for the minimum wage. And he has a message for the people: the new legislation proposed by labour minister Myriam El Khomri is brilliant, any honest worker should be delighted. The government has come up with a series of measures that have already been applied in dozens of other countries, measures that have never boosted the economy or helped anyone to put food on the table, measures that have served only to concentrate wealth in the hands of the rich and piss off everyone else, but here in France, they will work . . . They trot out hoary old clichés about the national debt, and they tell us, ‘The time has come for you to make repayments. And to shut your mouth, like whores who have to spend their lives making repayments for the money spent by their pimp.’ And do the people up at the Palace pay back money when they’re caught with their hand in the cookie jar? Do they pay their taxes? They help themselves. You slog your guts out. And the kids you bring into the world are in debt. From the moment they’re born, they owe money to their overlords. It’s a clever move. You churn out little French citizens who belong to them body and soul before they’ve even learned to walk. But this isn’t a war. This isn’t a class war. This isn’t the rich bleeding dry the poor. Our culture, French culture isn’t about violence. French culture is not arms sales and colonisation and war it’s not indiscriminate bombing and genocide and supporting vicious dictators. No, no, no – don’t you get it? French culture is the Enlightenment. That just proves that we’re not ragheads, that we’re nothing like them. Because Arabs . . . well, they’ve got a culture of violence . . . but rich people aren’t violent. Never. Private greed before public need. But apart from that – no violence.”

  Patrice gives Xavier a sidelong glance. He has long since given up arguing with Olga. She runs rings around him. It is a torrent of words she mastered during the convergences, when people showed up and she joined in their conversations. She won’t stop until she has shouted herself hoarse.

  *

  They are joined by Daniel and Kiko. The trader has just come back from a spa in Brittany. Patrice wonders how he manages to lie still for all those massages and still take all that coke. Kiko is hyper. “Since we’re planning to restart the convergences, we need our own currency.” Around him, people glance at each other, wondering whether this time he has finally flipped out, or whether this is just another crisis. He brandishes a book, a history of Brittany he bought at the station before boarding the train. “There’s no such thing as a society that doesn’t print money. That’s the only way for us to set ourselves up as a state within a state.” He probably read three sentences at random during the journey, then spent two hours in the buffet car getting himself all worked up. He looks good. He must have spent time on the tanning beds at the spa. Olga folds her arms and sighs. “And people say I’m batshit crazy . . . I swear, if you didn’t have so much money, you’d have been locked up in an asylum years ago. What exactly are we supposed to do with this money? Sell each other peanuts?” “Try to think long-term for once, Olga. We don’t have an army, we don’t have a currency, we’ve got a guru who packs his bags and fucks off at the slightest comment . . . we’re a joke.” “Exactly,” Olga says. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s the whole concept: we’re a joke.”

  Kiko has various nervous tics. He gestures to the crowd. “Instead of screaming into the void, Olga, go up and take the mic, tell them we need to demolish the stock exchange. They won’t listen to me. But I’ve got a vision. The Bourse is ten minutes from here. It’s symbolic, and right now it’s pretty much empty. We need to pull it down, stone by stone. We need to stop burning cars and smashing shop windows, the Bourse is three métro stops from here, all we need is a few pickaxes and a little motivation.”

  *

  Vernon has his hands in his pockets. As is his wont, he doesn’t get involved. He watches. Patrice is happy that he is back, though he cannot quite work out why. What the fuck is it about him that makes them so happy to have him around?

  They have started dancing again, on certain nights. The artist’s studio in Aubervilliers is vast and high-ceilinged – no-one is disturbed by them playing music until two o’clock in the morning. The last occasion was a week ago. Antoine Dopalet had come by to see them. Afraid that his father might find out he has been working as an informant for them, he came into the studio without taking off his motorcycle helmet. When Céleste disappeared, he was in Libya, having been invited to one of the contemporary art symposiums that take him to the four corners of the earth. When contacted on Skype, he had been categorical: his father wasn’t involved. He wouldn’t have someone kidnapped, he wasn’t that crazy. “What about eliminating her,” the Hyena asked, “do you think he’s capable?” and Antoine shrugged. “He could press charges, obviously, in fact he’d have every right. A beating, I don’t know, maybe . . . he’s in a blind rage. But it wouldn’t go any further. Vernon must have misunderstood what Max said. If Céleste didn’t come home, it’s probably because she owes someone money and decided to disappear. It’s not like it would be the first time she took off . . .”

  He refused to budge. Even after Kiko got access to the bank accounts of Max and Dopalet, and had proof they were in Barcelona on the same dates . . . This was just a coincidence – surprising, certainly, but Antoine could see nothing suspicious about two Parisians being in Barcelona on the same weekend. It’s a favourite holiday spot for French people.

  *

  When Céleste was found, Antoine had been shocked but emphatic: his father had not been involved in this barbaric act. All the same, he arranged to spend a weekend in Paris so he could reassure everyone. But nothing about his visit to his father had been reassuring. Especially not the state in which he found Dopalet: pale and haggard from too much coke and too little sleep, barely coherent, opening the door to him wearing a silk dressing gown, claiming he had been very ill, that he hadn’t been into the office in some time, but that he’d watched the “Godfather” trilogy several times and had decided he wanted to make a gangster movie. To Antoine he had seemed rambling and confused. He had enquired about his father’s health: “You really don’t look well, you know.” “It’s the full moon. I’ve always been sensitive to the full moon.” “Are you sure it’s not the cocaine, Papa?” “The coke? No, that’s never stopped me sleeping . . .” But he had agreed to take the Ambien offered by his son, who always had some on him to deal with jetlag. In fact, he had taken two, gone into his room, and within seconds he was out like a light.

  Alone in the apartment, Antoine had undertaken a cursory investigation. He found the e-mail from Max which left little doubt about the nature of their partnership . . . And the son had been forced to recant: his father had ordered Céleste’s kidnapping. Going back through his old man’s e-mails, he found the address where Céleste had been held prisoner. Before setting off, Dopalet had Googled the neighbourhood where she would be. On his own computer. Finally, after rummaging around a little, Antoine stumbled on a cheap, shitty little mobile phone on which the text messages had been deleted, but not the call history. The Hyena had confirmed: one of the two most frequently called numbers belonged to Max.

  *

  Antoine was appalled – the thought that his father was capable of ordering a kidnapping, a rape, and of leaving the young woman so that her abductor could kill her and dispose of the body was beyond his comprehension. The fact that he had been dumb enough to call his accomplices using a burner phone – something he had probably seen in third-rate thrillers – only to keep the phone in a drawer in his
apartment, simply added to his distress. Not only was his father a vicious bastard, he was a clueless vicious bastard.

  He had left the apartment, but, two days later, he had managed to find a one-hour window in his hectic schedule as a rising star in the art world who is required to be permanently available, to drop by and see his father “on the off-chance”. He had called ahead – “I’m just round the corner, I bought some spirulina and I got some for you too, you looked completely shattered the other day” – and his father, who had spent a lifetime keeping him at arm’s length, since he invariably had something more important to do than spend time with his son, had said in a tone that Antoine had never heard before, “Sure, drop by, son, I’m just having a little drink with a few friends.” Jesus fuck, when he saw the friends. This was no movie-star machismo. It’s not hard to tell the difference between some candy-ass actor telling a make-up artist to piss off and a hardened criminal who’s already done his fifteen years. These guys were friendly, polite, clean-cut. They looked like hardened killers. With them was a little dark-haired girl, no more than twenty, pretty but forlorn, almost autistic, whose presence at this meeting was difficult to understand. His father had given him some bullshit excuse – they were working on a project for a T.V. series with some guys who were “in the life”. He was off his face. One of the other guys had snickered, “Yeah, I’m pretty good at choreographing fight scenes.”

  This was the day that Antoine cancelled all his appointments and turned up, wearing his motorbike helmet, at the studio in Aubervilliers.

  “You can’t hide Céleste here. I don’t know what they’re planning, but you won’t be able to protect her. You need to call the police. If only to stop my father from the serious fuck-up he’s about to commit. Hyena, are you sure that Aïcha is safe where she is?” and the Hyena stared at him quizzically, as though she was thinking about something else. Céleste was in a corner of the loft, working on Daniel’s tattoo, and between the whirr of the needle and Missy Elliott cranked up to eleven, she could not hear their whispered exchange. “We can make sure there are always two people with her,” Patrice suggested. Pamela said, “I know an empty house in the Landes, the woman who owns it offered to lend it to us for two or three months. If the offer still stands, we say nothing to anyone and hide out there.” Still Antoine was insistent: “We can’t keep the police out of this. It might sound weird coming from me, but the best way to protect my father from himself is to have him banged up . . . I don’t know what the fuck he was planning with those guys. But it wasn’t good. He has to be stopped,” and Pamela said, “Céleste doesn’t even want to talk about going to the police. It’s up to her whether to press charges, we’re not going to do it for her.”

  *

  That evening, to ward off the fear they could feel crawling in their bellies, they had danced. Vernon had hooked up a couple of speakers playing Bleach’s soundwaves and now dropped the needle on “She’s a Lady”. The stentorian voice of Tom Jones filled the room. There were no more than ten people. Patrice just had time to think, it can’t possibly work as well as it did at the convergences, I mean, sure, I’ll dance, but it won’t be like the other times, before everything clicked into place. Fuck. Just thinking about it now gives him goose bumps. They threw themselves into it with an energy born of despair, a sadness at losing the camp, a fury that they had arrived too late to protect Céleste, the shame that they could do nothing to ease her pain, their joy at being reunited, and it had taken off.

  At first, Céleste had stayed on the sidelines, then she had come closer, her movements slow and sensual, and Patrice had a flash – Valérie Kaprisky in that ’80s film, that movie directed by Żuławski . . . She pounded her feet on the floor and flailed her arms, it was tribal, she was in a trance. The others formed a circle around her as though they were Sioux warriors and had rehearsed this choreography – they danced around her, spinning wildly, a frenzied, whirling waltz.

  And as day was breaking, Céleste said, “I’d love to see what they’re like, the convergences.” And that’s how it began. No-one else would have dared make the suggestion. All eyes turned to Vernon, who threw his hands into the air. “I’m up for it whenever you like, Céleste. It’s a bit more complicated for Pamela . . . she’s the one who gets lumbered with all the difficult work of finding a site that’s free and . . .” Pamela grabbed him around the waist. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about what happened. We never talked about it. I was a complete bitch. It was horrible. And I forgive you for being dumb enough to storm off like that. I’ll call Jésus and we’ll head down to see what state the house is in.”

  *

  Céleste had already gone to bed without waiting to hear the end of the discussion. She does that strange thing – she constantly behaves as though nothing has happened. The other women all have an opinion about this, the same opinion: it’s completely normal. It would be months before she could face up to such a thing. And Patrice listens, not daring to ask the question at the back of his mind: how many of you have been raped? Because there is something implicit in their silence, something he finds unsettling. The impression that all of them have been through this, one way or another. All except Pamela, who is the only one to say “I’ve never been raped” before going on to tell a harrowing story about a guy who promised the XXX girls a series of film shoots in Hungary only to confiscate their passports as soon as they arrived and force them to do a striptease tour around the country that was unplanned and unpaid. And Patrice was not quite sure what Pamela meant by “striptease tour” because Pamela told the story with undisguised terror. They had had no mobile phones, no money, no passports, they didn’t dare run away for fear of what would happen to the others and, besides, in the arse end of Hungary, you’re not keen to find out how friendly the locals are when you’re dressed like a slut and haven’t got any other clothes to wear. The more he listens, the more Patrice wonders why there are no stories about a woman taking to the streets with a knife and killing thirty guys in a night. Not one.

  The camp has changed him. Until now, it had never occurred to him to storm out, slam the door and simply go for a walk before a quarrel with Pénélope got out of hand. He is convinced it’s because of the convergences. They change something, at a chemical level. He is calmer now. It feels as though these days he is driving a high-end car with perfectly calibrated brakes, whereas before he was hurtling downhill on a skateboard. Obviously, it makes for smoother handling. He doesn’t find himself veering off the road anymore, and ending up, wheels spinning, in a ditch.

  He asked the Hyena on the one night she came down to place de la République to say hello to Olga. She said, I’ve always hated gatherings like this, I’m constantly worried someone will come up to me and start mansplaining something, but she hung around long enough to have a beer with him. He asked point-blank: “Have you ever been raped?” He was expecting some sickening story. The Hyena had looked horrified, “I’ve never touched a cock. Not once in my whole fucking life. I don’t even want to think about it,” and Patrice had wanted to hug her. Finally. He had finally found a woman without a harrowing story to tell, it made a change.