Vernon Subutex One

by Virginie Despentes

  Inciting a media lynching is much easier than generating a positive buzz – she claims that she knows how to do both, but cruelty makes for better clickbait in this day and age. A man who breaks things is a man who makes himself heard – it is crucial to adopt a male persona when trashing someone. The only sound that soothes the savage breast of the lunatics who haunt the corridors of the web is the splintering sound of a warder breaking a prisoner’s bones. Three rave reviews for some T.V. pilot and people start to suspect they’re being manipulated, thirty vicious comments and no-one thinks to question it. The casual browser can pat himself on the back and think “I wasn’t born yesterday”, but he has already passed on the message as intended. Scorn is as contagious as scabies.

  In the village that is Paris, word quickly spreads that she is a first-class troubleshooter. People discreetly invite her for coffee in cafés they do not usually frequent and where they are unlikely to be spotted. They ask her to rough up a competitor, a friend, a rival. For two hundred euros, she will break a virtual leg, for twice that, she can ruin an online reputation, and if money is no object, she can quite literally ruin someone’s life. The internet is the perfect forum for anonymous exposés, for smoke without fire, for rumours that spread like wildfire without anyone knowing where they started. Case in point: that prick Laurent Dopalet, who has not stopped calling since last night, has shelled out a small fortune for her to troll actresses who do not respond favourably to his advances, colleagues who have had – or might have – a hit on their hands, and former associates who have turned their back on him . . . He is constantly adding names to his hit list, and she is his voodoo priestess.

  Dopalet is supremely self-absorbed. He can be bitter, lucid, sometimes droll, clueless or raving – he only ever talks about himself. And yet he has a very fragile ego, he is wounded by the slightest criticism, the slightest stain on his reputation sends him into a towering rage. If some other producer is praised on the radio, he immediately interprets it as an insidious way of implying that he is shit. Dopalet reads the newspapers, watches the television, spends time on the internet. And Dopalet suffers. The actors are better paid. The directors are more admired. The distributors are bankrupting him. The public are out for his blood. Everyone is getting public subsidies except him. Everyone is having fun, everyone is having a wild time, everyone but him, a poor little man who works like a dog and gets whipped for his pains. This tragedy is played out in a two-hundred-square-metre apartment overlooking the Seine – since he married a woman who is fabulously wealthy – but this is of little comfort to him. He is suffering. He is a first-rate client. The Hyena has become crucial to his equilibrium, something on which he is prepared to spend a packet . . . The personal trainer, the shrink, the hypnotherapist, the meditation coach, the acupuncturist, the magnetic therapist and the osteopath divvy up a small fortune every month and, between them and the weekends with his mistresses, it is a wonder Dopalet finds any time to work. The Hyena sends him extortionate invoices. From her years working as a dealer, she remembers that the junkie needs the seller to be hard-nosed. That is what makes the dealer a demi-god.

  She specialises in the film industry. That way she can avoid getting landed with political gigs that are no better paid but require considerably more effort. In 2014, the only people interested in film are the professionals. No-one else is prepared to waste ten minutes discussing a tracking shot, defending an action movie or dissing a psychological thriller. She often works with actresses. Not all of them are spiteful and self-centred. They constantly feel insecure and they have a high disposable income. A lucrative combination. They are prepared to pay for someone to plaster the internet with love notes, photos, passionate declarations and real-life accounts about how lovely and approachable they are when encountered at the local café. But most of the time, her role is to take down the other actresses in the running for some part they desperately want. Or to stop some young starlet from making it too quickly. For the pleasure. Conflicts of interest quickly arise: can you take on a client when you are actively in the process of trashing her for another client? Of course you can. This is the third millennium, everything is permitted.

  She has her notebook. A little black notebook chosen for its size and the soft feel of the faux-leather, an object she likes to cradle in the hollow of her hand. She fills it with rather cryptic messages so as not to be embarrassed should she ever be searched. Decoding it would require an effort altogether disproportionate to the value of the information it contains. The phone numbers next to the pseudonyms do not exist – the prefix 06 means that she can post messages from her own computer, 01 that she can send them from the internet café next door, 04 that she needs to be in a different arrondissement. A number that ends in a 3 refers to comments on general news items, those ending in 7 refer to comments on the film industry. The second digit corresponds to the year the identity was created, and so on. Sometimes she varies – but, once decoded, the phoney numbers let her know which identities she can use. It is not a code sophisticated enough to stand up to serious scrutiny, but if whoever is looking does not pay close attention, it is enough to throw them off the scent.

  As a matter of habit, Dopalet is precisely thirty minutes late; for him discourtesy is a precept. He is dressed as though it is Sunday and he is planning to spend the afternoon having a kick-about with his kids on a patch of waste ground. A hideous, tatty jacket, jeans that are not even his size, but his hands, as always, are perfectly manicured. Usually he comes alone. But, he announces straight off, before taking a call – gesturing to indicate that he will only be two minutes – “this time, it is a little exceptional”. The girl with him constitutes the only interesting thing about his entrance. She is a smash hit, like when you hear a song on the radio that you’ve never heard before but you immediately recognise it, it has always existed, it runs through your head all day, and all you want to do is listen to it over and over. Now this was worth putting on some slap, facing the grey sky and dragging her sorry arse over here. The little hottie introduces herself: Anaïs. The Hyena pretends not to be flustered.

  Dopalet comes back and sits down, looking glum. His eyes are deep-set, but never enough to give him a thuggish look, his nose is too turned up, his gaping nostrils are thick with hair, his lips thin, all in all he looks like a wimp. He is a tubby little guy. Even when he loses weight he moves like a ball, his arms held away from his sides. Anaïs takes the floor. As he listens to her, Dopalet shifts his jaw from right to left and stares into space. At regular intervals, he makes vague expressions to indicate that he is listening, that he agrees.

  From what the assistant is saying, it seems the producer is trying to track down “some guy” in Paris whose name and address he does not know. But apparently this “guy” told another “guy” – Xavier, whom they describe as “a screenwriter” – that he could lay hands on some unseen footage. The boss wants to see this footage. He needs to find this “other guy”, who weighs about 100 kilos and has close-cropped hair. So they called the Hyena. She stares at them, wondering if they are joking.

  “And how precisely do you expect me to go about it?”

  “My words exactly,” says the wondrous assistant, throwing up her hands in defeat. Dopalet is beginning to get irritated, he is squirming in his seat. The Hyena rubs her eyelids, making no attempt to hide her helplessness:

  “What sort of footage is it?”

  She is expecting that this question will calm Dopalet, that he will fumble for words to explain that sometimes he discusses geopolitics with young boys and he does not want anyone to find out. He knows the great unwashed: they do not know the first thing about the sophisticated passions of his management team. It is the assistant who speaks:

  “It’s an interview. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the singer Alex Bleach. It seems this may be a recording in which he might have been manipulated . . .”

  The Hyena interrupts Anaïs and addresses herself to the boss, forcing him to meet her gaze.

/>   “I don’t see the connection with the work I usually do for you.”

  “Everyone knows what you used to do before.”

  “I’ve had a career change . . . and if it were still my job, I would regretfully inform you that your little plan is mission utterly-fucking-impossible. I’m not going to try and track down some random guy in Paris called Xavier . . .”

  “. . . who’s a screenwriter.”

  “If he were a screenwriter and you’d met at a party, you wouldn’t need to pay someone to find his name . . . So no-one knows who he is, this guy?”

  Anaïs pipes up again, she sits like a schoolgirl, back straight, hands flat on the table.

  “I’ve tried calling some of the guests who were at the party . . . but it didn’t lead anywhere. I don’t think he moves in the same circles.”

  “There are, what, fifteen of you in the business? Which means he’s a screenwriter the same way I’m a lacemaker. So, in a nutshell, you’re telling me that you’re looking for a fat, bald guy called Xavier who lives in Paris. Great! I know exactly where to start.”

  Anaïs raises her eyebrows, worried to hear anyone speaking to Dopalet in this tone. But all in all, the expression means that she gets the picture: it is not much to be going on with. Dopalet slips his iPhone into his jacket pocket – as far as he is concerned, the meeting is over.

  “You may not know where to start, but I’ll tell you why you want this job: you can name your price. Secondly, you’re not scouring the city for ‘some guy called Xavier’, you’re looking for someone who knew Alex Bleach.”

  “You didn’t mention that.”

  “The bit about the price or the bit about Alex Bleach?”

  “Either.”

  “They knew each other. And the guy who has the footage was still seeing him shortly before he died.”

  “Alex Bleach . . .”

  “He despised me. He was obsessive. Absurdly obsessive. I don’t know why. Maybe I helped him out once too often . . . I want to preempt matters and find out what is in this footage before it ends up in the public domain . . . and I have good reason to think that you are the best person to help me.”

  *

  He does not know why Bleach nursed a grudge against him . . . The Hyena studies Dopalet intently: how many times has he hired her to deal with the Bleach problem? If Alex’s hostility was an obsession, then it is fair to say it was mutual. She knows the guy’s reputation better than anyone – rapist, thug, anti-Semite, guilty of fraternising with Islamists, of embezzling public funds. She should know: she is the source of these rumours, they were launched in various stages. If Bleach had lived, all that remained was to brand him a paedophile. She knows the dossier, knows it well. If Alex Bleach ever guessed who was orchestrating the nebulous attacks against him, he had ample reason to want to see Dopalet’s little empire destroyed.

  Alex was the perfect target – famous enough for the slightest rumour about him to set people talking, but defenceless enough so that there was no risk in taking him down. Journalists had a field day. Alex represented everything about the last century they wanted to destroy, what they call la pensée unique, a neoliberal conformism that claimed to combat brutality by raising a few ethical objections or making a small donation . . . the same neoliberalism that no-one in the entertainment industry would defend these days, except for a handful of deluded beatniks like Alex Bleach. You could count them on the fingers of one hand, they put out a new record every five years; it’s called tyranny. The media are quick to jump on anything that might tarnish their image. It pissed them off that this big black guy got an easy ride. It has to be said, with his angelic face and his deep, husky voice, he had probably fucked more women than all the editors in Paris put together. Nor were the accusations of rape or violence likely to put them off, everyone knows these things are a turn-on for nice straight girls. Now that he was dead the journalists rushed to praise his talent, but the relief in every obituary was palpable. One down. Alex Bleach was among the tiny minority of artists who have no friends in the business.

  Dopalet looks into the eyes of the Hyena and baldly lies in front of a witness, as though they have never discussed the subject of Bleach before now.

  “Bleach used to call me up, insult me, send me threatening emails . . . I considered filing a restraining order, but because he was famous, it was too complicated . . . Can you imagine if the media had found out he lost the plot?”

  “And yet, it’s fair to say you never let it drop.”

  Insolence, even in homeopathic doses, is something Dopalet cannot abide. She can see it in his eyes: “You’ll get what’s coming to you, but right now he knows that he needs her. He gets to his feet and, without looking at her, declares: “I want this done quickly.”

  Then he stalks out of the bar, without paying the tab or saying goodbye, his mobile phone already glued to his ear. Fuckwit. The Hyena would happily confide her thoughts to the assistant, but all she can see in the girl’s eyes is her pride at having such an assertive boss.

  SITTING CROSS-LEGGED IN THE LARGE OFFICE CHAIR, SYLVIE IS reading her horoscopes: Rob Brezsny, the Village Voice, the Huffington Post, Figaro Madame, and lastly Susan Miller. It is something she has been doing for years. As regular as clockwork. Now, all that will have to change. She used to get up at 6.00 a.m., make a pot of black tea and turn on her computer with the radio playing softly. She would log into her various Facebook accounts – she has three. The two fakes exist so that she can make comments she does not want associated with her real identity, check whether her lovers are being faithful or catch out friends. She created the first fake profile in order to get revenge on the boys bullying her son at school. Having completed that mission, she kept a taste for shifting identities. At 7.30 a.m. she would prepare a cup of Ricoré and a toasted bagel with cream cheese for Lancelot and go into his room to wake him. She would throw open the curtains and the day would begin in earnest.

  Lancelot having left for university, she would play games on her computer. Candy Crush, Ruzzle, Criminal Case occupied the remainder of her mornings. Her afternoons were devoted to her appointments – Pilates, manicure, aqua gym, the hairdresser . . . She would make sure she was back by the time Lancelot came home, she did not like the idea of her son coming home to an empty house.

  He left home two weeks ago. He enthusiastically packed up his boxes – a boy who had to be asked a dozen times before he would sigh and do the smallest chore. He sorted out his clothes, piled up his books, threw out papers that had been lying around for years. She did not need to help him; his efficiency broke her heart. Worst of all was his excitement. Logical, understandable, predictable. But difficult to stomach.

  When he was little, there was no more powerful consolation for her than her son’s kisses. The memories of his childhood are so crystal-clear that she would not be remotely surprised to open the kitchen door and find Lancelot teetering on a stool searching the cupboards for a piece of chocolate. Sweet things had to be hidden away in high cupboards, otherwise he would have gorged until he made himself sick. All that is over now. That little body she used to lavish with affection. His tiny feet, the Dragon Ball Z duvet covers. Things became more difficult when he turned sixteen. She never stopped loving him but there were times she could have killed him, what with the football and the macho bigoted bullshit he came out with all the time. She felt hurt and betrayed, they had always got along so well. Three years of friction, then it was over. Her son is right-wing. At first she thought he did it simply to needle her, but eventually she had to face facts: intelligent young people are no longer routinely left-wing.

  He is in love. With a vapid young woman who likes to play wife but is incapable of taking a pizza out of the oven. The girl is a practising Christian. As long as she doesn’t saddle him with a kid right away . . . They have found a two-room flat in the nineteenth arrondissement. The sort of bleak, miserable neighbourhood where no-one would want to live. The lovebirds are very sensible on the subjects of Islam and Jud
aism, so they should enjoy themselves in the quartier Crimée. Lancelot showed her around the apartment with the half-witted happiness he has exhibited since falling in love. He knows he has to make a break from her. Boys do not kill their mothers, they leave them. She has never been as generous to any other man, because no other man made her so happy. Nor so bereft, in leaving her.

  Vernon showed up at just the right time. So many memories have flooded back since he has been staying with her. When she used to go to the record shop, he would let her use the back office so she could discreetly roll a spliff. She would close the door and snort lines of smack – she had not started jacking up yet. She did not talk about the fact she was using, on the rock scene you could do anything you liked, except for the best of all drugs. She knocked it on the head while she was pregnant but was back on the junk by the time she was warming the first baby bottles; she only finally kicked the habit, in a Swiss rehab clinic, when Lancelot was learning to read. It is difficult, being a high-functioning addict, not many people can manage it. Good addicts, like good alcoholics, are those who are able to control their consumption. It is a happy medium that is difficult to strike – controlling the substance that you love because it is making you lose your head. She was a member of that select group. But at the age of thirty, she realised that managing her intake of skag was not enough: she was ageing more quickly than others. She got clean. Fifteen years later, she still dreams of scorched teaspoons, of dealers showing up late, of wads of cash. When it comes to the menopause, she’ll see. If it’s as tough as people say, she can imagine going back to hard drugs – after all, Lancelot has left, and besides she has already lost her looks – why not have a little fun? She has always dreamed of retirement homes where you could choose your own medication: M.D.M.A., coke, hash, morphine, crack . . . since everything has gone tits up, why not go out with a bang?