Someone Else

  “Except, what we really do need is someone like Queysanne.”

  “He’s just been indicted!”

  But there must have been hearts beating beneath all those Paul Smith shirts and Lagerfeld jackets. Thrust into this torment in spite of themselves, stressed rather than stimulated by the very idea of competition. The tall man on Broaters’ right had a good rural face, the sort of man you would want to buy milk and eggs from; giving orders was a part he had to play. Beside him was a blond woman with a round face, an executive woman; some people talked about her as if she were a shark but Nicolas had seen her in a very different light for the last few minutes; he could picture her praying to God and putting herself in His hands when things were going really badly; a spiritual side which, occasionally, competed with her ambition.

  “You wait, it’s going to be like British Airways all over again.”

  And the one who was almost going to sleep, taken on for his perfect mastery of Japanese and his connections in Tokyo, a man who could read Kawabata in the original and watch Ozu films without the subtitles, and who could have given the others the benefit of his Zen education.

  “Monsieur Meyer, could you say a word or two about the Lancero file?”

  Now, you must be the one called Lugagne, you’re entrusted with branding whole countries who want to boost their image in the West. You’re the only one who has that weird tomato soup from the drinks machine. No, not the only one, there’s Laurent too, the photocopier repairman. Who knows if the two of you haven’t got other things in common, if you couldn’t become the best of friends and if, at weekends, you wouldn’t like getting together with each other’s families for a barbecue. No one will ever know.

  “A word on the Vila business?” Broaters ventured.

  All eyes turned to Nicolas and the sudden silence woke him from his thoughts. Broaters had said the word “business” with a gentle irony to defuse a situation which was becoming far too tricky for his liking. Bardane set off on the offensive and Nicolas listened absently as he acted out his little sketch. The vodka running hot in his veins maintained his contemplative state. He did not see them as the warriors they thought they were, officers in the theatre of operations, exposed like everyone else. He did not see them as men recycling their natural aggression in business life. He no longer saw them as strategists ready to take on latter-day enemies far more frightening than those of old because they were masked. He saw them only as children playing a favourite children’s game: war.

  “. . . I can carry on as if this fax had never been sent,” Bardane concluded. “It’ll be the second and final time that I save the day on this, and it’ll be the last.”

  Bardane had had the decency not to indicate him directly, but all the managers turned towards Nicolas again, waiting for the poor man to speak at last and publicly admit how much he regretted his initiative. He said the only thing which came into his head: “If it’s the final time you save the day, Monsieur Bardane, it’s bound to be the last.”

  The ensuing silence was not of the kind recorded in business school. This was the law of retaliation put into practice by a foot soldier. It was the anathema of the condemned, spoken from the full height of the scaffold. If, just moments earlier, Nicolas might have got off with some sort of vague justification in public, now his boss was going to want to skin him alive.

  The youngest participant raised his hand discreetly to speak; he was one of the art directors recently taken on at Broaters’ request.

  “I was speaking to Vila’s Director of Communications just before coming to this meeting: it looks like they’re about to go with the vermilion.”

  Nicolas was no longer listening, relieved that someone else was speaking. The new mock-up for the job was passed to Broaters.

  “Combined with that typeface,” he said, “there’s an immediate feeling to it . . . reassuring and alternative at the same time.”

  Unbelievably, the gathering seemed in agreement with this “reassuring and alternative”.

  “Perhaps,” he added, “we could entrust the future of the Vila file to Monsieur . . .”

  “Gredzinski,” said Alissa.

  Nicolas acquiesced with a nod, and that was the signal to leave. He was first to go, avoiding Bardane’s eye at all costs. In the lift he thought of the millions of soldiers the earth had brought forth since man had invented warfare. On the scale of history, only a handful had gone to the front; the others had waited a whole lifetime for something to happen. Nicolas swore to himself that he would no longer be one of their number.

  *

  “A woman, sitting just there, yesterday, she was drinking wine, alone.”

  The barman from the Lynn thought for a moment, cocktail shaker in hand. Bored by Marcheschi’s ramblings at the aperitif club, Nicolas had left first, to head for the Rue Fontaine, still needled by his blunder of the previous evening.

  “She’s at a table, at the back on the right.”

  The fact that Loraine was in a late-night bar on two consecutive evenings said a good deal more about her way of life than the “personal questions” she was so afraid of. He downed a vodka without tasting it, without giving his taste buds or palate an opportunity to appreciate it. The anxious have never learned to savour. The ethyl alcohol molecule, known as ethanol or C2H5OH, had only just come into his life. He used it like some gadget you use as much as possible for fear of it breaking. He eventually found what he was looking for at the bottom of his glass: courage, liquid, transparent courage.

  “I don’t want to know who you are, I’d just like to have a drink.”

  Her pale eyes were already agreeing, but Loraine left him dangling for a minute before inviting him to sit down. He promised himself he would stay clear-headed to avoid the misunderstandings of the previous evening.

  “Was it tough getting up?”

  “I took your advice: I drank some beer and everything else raced past incredibly quickly. I’ve got this weird feeling I’ve lived three days instead of one.”

  “Do you believe everything you’re told in bars?”

  “I’ve finally grasped what everyone else has always known: the poison is in the remedy and vice versa. The worst of it is the dark looks from colleagues.”

  “They’re not the only ones who’ll give you a bad conscience, there are friends and family as well, not to mention children.”

  Mustn’t jump to the conclusion that she has a family and children.

  “You mustn’t hold it against them,” she went on. “People who love you worry when they see you drinking, only the people you don’t matter to find it reassuring.”

  “Reassuring?”

  “The sad people who don’t have much of a life, who have no one to love, nothing to think or to give – they have one last little pleasure left in life: other people’s vices. They find seeing you drink reassuring, they haven’t yet stooped that low.”

  Without having formulated it so clearly, that was exactly what he thought of Mergault, who had caught him with the can of beer in his hand.

  “Another piece of advice, but this is one you should take: whatever you do, be discreet. Not from a feeling of shame, just to deprive them of their pleasure.”

  Sitting there with Loraine, everything – especially outrageous things – seemed possible to him. He needed this element of fantasy in his life in the same way that he needed the intense energies in a glass of vodka.

  The chance diversions and small pleasures of conversation; the serious alongside the anodyne, one anecdote following another; Nicolas let himself be carried into this happy spiral, no longer paying attention to “personal” aspects. Two hours later, during the course of a sentence, he mentioned his friend Cécile who could “draw a cross-section of the Châtelet Métro station, with all its exits” and elevated her to the level of a “genius of industrial design”. Loraine pulled up short at the word genius, a word which, in her view, should be handled with care. They both started to circle round the idea of genius and their conversa
tion got its second wind.

  “Genius is my chosen specialized subject,” she said. “I’m a collector.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve got bookcases full of geniuses. I look after them and I’m always on the lookout for the ones I don’t know. I sometimes find new ones, but they’re few and far between.”

  “And what is it that you mean when you say ‘geniuses’ so specifically like that?”

  “Nothing personal, my understanding of the word is the dictionary definition. I’m talking about the recognized geniuses, the famous, indisputable ones: Mozart, Shakespeare, da Vinci and the like, the ones who are above all suspicion, the ones you just have to bow down in front of. I read everything I can on the subject. Nothing very arduous: biographies, essays that are accessible to someone like me. I find out about how they got to where they did, particular moments in their lives. I compile anecdotes, which I regurgitate to the people around me.”

  “Have you been collecting like this for long?”

  “Since I was about fifteen or sixteen. Because I’m not an artist or a scientist myself, I’m not afraid of the shadows they cast. What I like most of all is the idea of precociousness, of talent driven to extremes and of an infinite capacity for work. Each of them is a form of revenge for the bad faith all around us, the universal laziness and general destitution. They’re like ramparts against self-sufficiency and contempt for others. Each of them forces me to look at myself, to understand my limits and to accept them.”

  Nicolas was listening to her with his arms crossed and his eyes fixed on her, touched by the very elegant way she talked about herself without saying anything about her life – he had just gathered in passing that she had bookshelves and that there were people “around her” – but speaking from the heart about the things she felt were important.

  “Loraine, I will buy you your next drink if you choose one of the jewels of your collection and tell me about it.”

  “You’re mad!” she said, laughing. “That could take a long time.”

  He ordered a vodka and a glass of Sancerre.

  “I’ve got all night.”

  They had turned several corners together, but this was one of the most delicious: the moment when each could sense that the other had no desire to be anywhere else.

  “You choose from my collection, I don’t have any preferences. Shakespeare? Beethoven? Pascal? Michelangelo?”

  He had all night, but it would be brief.

  Thierry Blin

  Nadine was worried about Thierry’s insomnia. He gave all sorts of excuses, and these excuses had a much better ring to them than the truth. The truth was far and away the most absurd and least admissible, rather like a bad joke or the ramblings of someone who was still half asleep: I have an appointment tomorrow morning to tail someone.

  To do what? Tail someone? That doesn’t really happen. Tailing, fine in airport books, clichéd American films and paranoid fantasies, but not in real life. At about 4 o’clock in the morning, Blin came back down to earth, and back down to himself, the self who was a craftsman in a world where you do not follow people in the street. Did that world really exist? Did men and women really ask Rodiers to find out secrets about other men and women? He could not think of anyone he knew who had needed a private detective and had never heard a single first-hand account, not even an anecdote. At 4.20am he felt like the victim of a practical joke he had strayed into all by himself. Don’t worry, I’ll be there, Rodier had said; it was one of the most worrying sentences Thierry had ever heard. He pressed himself against Nadine’s back, brushing his lips over the nape of her neck and putting his hand on her hips, and yet no couple in the world had been separated by such a distance. Nadine would have forgiven him for losing his savings at poker, sleeping with her best friend or sneering at her photographs in public, but how could she forgive him for excluding her to this extent from his life and from his dreams which were becoming reality?

  “Are you getting up? . . . Already?”

  “Instead of going round in circles, I might as well go to the shop, I’ve got a backlog of work.”

  “Kiss me.”

  They kissed, and it was unexpectedly tender. For those few seconds, he almost lay back down next to her and forgot about all this madness.

  *

  The 7 o’clock Métro. The quiet one, with yawns and half-closed eyes. The sun was barely up when he came out at Saint-Germain; he was ten minutes early. Rodier was already there, in his little blue Volkswagen, parked opposite 70 Rue de Rennes. Blin sat in the passenger seat and they shook hands in silence. The car was clean, quite tidy in the front, a bit more of a mess on the rear seat where there were piles of magazines and half eaten packets of biscuits. Rodier was wearing the same clothes as the day before, beige trousers and a black leather jacket. He was sporting a smile like a priest’s, discreet, reassuring.

  “There isn’t a café outside number 70. We’re going to have to wait in the car till he comes out.”

  “Who?”

  Rodier opened his worn leather briefcase and took out a photocopy of a snapshot showing a young man of less than twenty, standing with his back to the sea, smiling at the camera.

  “It’s the most recent photo his parents had. He’s called Thomas and is living in a garret. He’s stopped going to lessons and isn’t showing any signs of life. His parents are convinced he’s become part of a sect, or he’s homosexual, which seems to be the same thing as far as they’re concerned . . . They want to know who he sees and what he does with his time.”

  “Are we sure he’s up there?”

  “No. The surveillance officially starts at 7.30 and will end at 10 o’clock if we can establish for sure that he spent the night somewhere else. We start again tomorrow once it’s agreed with the father; never forget that you always have to work out the hours with the client so that they don’t waste their money and you don’t waste your time. If, on the other hand, we see him come out, we’ll follow him, all day if need be, and perhaps some of the night. I get 300 francs an hour for tailing.”

  Nicolas was not sure whether to pick up his notebook for fear of looking like a student trying to earn good marks. Rodier took out a little square case of CDs.

  “I prefer classical music, it helps. I think this is a good time of day for Vivaldi.”

  The day was getting under way now. Little old men were out walking their dogs, a few metal shutters were being raised, the street lights were going out and the light suddenly changed from red to blue. Blin tried to catch his own eye in the wing-mirror and saw someone who looked like a conspirator with his head hunched between his shoulders. Since he had been sitting in this car, he no longer saw people in the same way: they all had something to hide, starting with that woman passing them now, pulling her shopping trolley long before the shops were open. Had the world been the same ten minutes earlier?

  “How do you tail someone?”

  “It’s simple and very complicated at the same time. It’s like everything else, you can only do it with practice and years of experience. When I started with my first tailing jobs, I was terrified of being seen, I couldn’t help myself looking like a policeman or a thief. Now, it’s lost all its excitement. I go off to work dragging my feet, and the advantage is that I no longer look like anything in particular. I’ve become invisible or better, transparent, the man in the street, the nobody, same colour as the walls. I’m no one. If the guy I’m following goes into a café, I might have half a glass of beer right next to him and he won’t notice a thing. People forget me because I forget what I’m actually doing myself. To get that sort of detachment, you need to have bathed in adrenaline, sweated buckets, failed a thousand times, lost hundreds of people in the Métro and wasted bloody hours waiting in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “The instinctive factor is mentioned a lot in the things I’ve read about the subject.”

  “That depends what you understand by ‘instinctive factor’; all I can say is that, if I’ve b
een following a woman for a few days in a row, I can tell just by the way she walks if she’s going to see her lover.”

  Blin pondered this example with a feeling close to happiness, and was asking endless questions about intuition, anticipation and all the things that fascinated him when Rodier cut him short. “I’ve spotted a fast-food place not far away. The coffee’s probably disgusting, but I want something hot. Shall I get something for you?”

  “. . . You’re not going to leave me here on my own, are you? Let me go.”

  “I need to stretch my legs a bit, and anyway I won’t be a minute.”

  “What if that’s exactly when he comes out?!”

  “Try and improvise.”

  Rodier slammed the door and disappeared round the corner. Bastard! What he needed was a whipping boy to brighten his last few days, it was all becoming clear. That bastard Rodier!

  Blin was in hiding for the first time in his life.

  As he might have expected, he heard the door of number 70 clicking.

  The concierge appeared, and looked around. Blin slid down in his seat and tried to look detached. The man took the dustbins in. Rodier reappeared with two cups.

  “There’s your coffee, they’ve got separate pots of cream and the sugar’s in these little sticks.”

  “Don’t do that to me again!”

  “We’re not even sure he’s in there,” he said, looking towards the roof of the building. “His room looks out onto the street but none of them have got the lights on, see for yourself.”

  With his coffee in his hand, Thierry glued his nose to the windscreen and looked up searchingly. He did not see anything worth noting, but derived a tingle of pleasure from the gesture.