Unknown

by Didier Van Cauwelaert

  A young man in a tracksuit is making coffee in the kitchen. Rodney introduces us.

  ‘This is Pascal, my Parisian friend. Professor Martin Harris.’

  We greet each other, say we’re delighted to meet. He’s the fellow who asked me for a light the day before yesterday, in front of the police station.

  ‘Would you like some coffee, professor?’

  ‘I’d love some, thanks.’

  ‘You like it strong?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The radio is broadcasting a tennis match. He fills a cup and hands it to me, explains that personally he likes it a lot weaker.

  ‘And if you’re hungry, please help yourself,’ he continues with a cordial smile, showing me the breakfast already begun on the table.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ says Rodney Cole.

  He goes back out into the hall, opens a door under the staircase. I take a biscuit and spread butter on it, waiting for the sound of flushing. When it starts, I walk toward Pascal, who is still pouring water into his filter and, exclaiming how good it is finally to feel like I’m in a climate I can trust, I slit his throat. Still talking, I muffle his cries, sit him in a chair against the wall, prop him up with the refrigerator door. The sports announcer salutes a magnificent volley, above the applause of the spectators. I wipe off the knife, slip it into the back of my trousers under my jacket, pick up my cup, and leave the kitchen just as Rodney comes out of the bathroom. I stop in the doorway. From where he is, he can’t see the corner of the refrigerator. He looks tense; his smile is askew. He invites me to come upstairs and see the file he’s assembled.

  I climb the stairs behind him, cup in hand, remembering how I ran away from here eight days ago. Running across the lawn, through the streets of Courbevoie, Muriel’s taxi crossing the avenue … All the details come together with clear precision.

  Rodney Cole opens the door to a room filled with boxes, shows me a hirsute, corpulent man sitting at a table in a cloud of cigar smoke.

  ‘Do you remember Dr Netzky?’

  I say no, nod at the defector who worked on me for three weeks at the conditioning center. A leading light in the KGB, he put himself up for auction in 1992. Beijing wanted him, Washington got him.

  ‘Incredible,’ he murmurs, standing up.

  He buttons his bulging jacket and comes closer. The other man pulls out a Mauser and presses the end of the silencer against my temple. I put on a flabbergasted face.

  ‘Rodney? What’s got into you?’

  He snickers. The several failures in his career have always been linked to his ego, to underestimating his adversary.

  ‘Sit down, Martin. I’ve got a surprise for you: your name isn’t Martin. And my name is Ralph Channing. Does that ring a bell?’

  I make it look like my knees are about to buckle, so that he’ll savor his little effect. He has always picked names that retained his initials – the mark of pride. He shoves me into a chair.

  ‘Easy,’ Netzky intervenes.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to break your little creation,’ retorts Ralph, straddling the seat facing mine. ‘Go on, then.’

  With the barrel pointed vaguely at me, he watches the conditioner put down his cigar and come over to look deep into my eyes, murmuring in a slow voice, ‘You will relax. When I count to four, you will be utterly relaxed. One: you’re relaxing your mind, letting down your guard … At eight, you will return to the wakeful state that you are now leaving …’

  I ask him what all this crap is about.

  ‘Two: you are completely yourself, and everything is fine … Your consciousness is receding and following my voice. Three.’

  He continues counting and I stop protesting. My eyes fixed and my mouth slack, I act like the model subject, the kind he’s used to.

  ‘You are now totally relaxed, you feel no more tension and, when you hear the number seven, I will tell you who you are and you will tell me if it’s the truth. Seven. You are Martin Harris, botanist, husband of Elizabeth Lacarrière.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’ve spoken without looking away, staring at his eyebrows.

  ‘Incredible,’ Netzky repeats.

  ‘Is he faking it?’

  ‘Why would he? If he ran out of here because he thought we were going to kill him, why would he walk back into the lion’s den?’

  ‘So then what happened?’ Ralph says impatiently.

  ‘It must have been the coma. The cover story we implanted has replaced his actual identity.’

  The Russian snaps his fingers in my face.

  ‘Eight!’

  He stuffs his cigar in his mouth, looking me over proudly.

  ‘What if I told you,’ he resumes after a minute in a tone of greedy jubilation, ‘that you’re a fictional character?’

  I defend myself with the same sincerity I’ve had for three days, except that now it’s credible: I’m controlling it.

  ‘And do you know how I know?’ he continues. ‘Because the fiction was devised by me.’

  ‘He crammed your head full of gardening books, Disney pamphlets, and the Yale directory. You get it now?’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ says the conditioner. ‘I programmed your identity as Martin Harris, your biography, the foundations of your character, and a file of botanical knowledge that you could dip into when you needed to be convincing.’

  ‘Steven Lutz – ever heard of him?’

  I shake my head mechanically, with no other reaction.

  ‘That’s you.’

  My dumbfounded silence is met with a gesture of impatience.

  ‘What really amazes me,’ continues Netzky, searching in my eyes, ‘is all the things your mind constructed from my basic outline. The quantity of memories you invented all by yourself. When Sabrina told me …’

  ‘That’s Liz, your wife,’ explains Ralph. ‘Sabrina Wells, actually, your partner on every contract for the past five years. Still nothing?’

  I remain speechless, looking frozen, incredulous. The scar on her forehead was from the shattering eyeglasses, on October second, when I blew away the head of Senator Jackson from the hotel window overlooking the ticker-tape of the national debt. Why did my unconscious mask that incident so strongly?

  ‘… when Sabrina told me what you said in the subway,’ Netzky resumes, ‘the intimate details I never programmed, entire scenes you described from a married life that never existed, I was amazed. Amazed by how the brain can elaborate a whole, logical world around a few bits of planted information.’

  ‘Does that refresh your memory?’ grumbles Ralph.

  I shake my head again, as if the shock left me unable to utter a sound.

  ‘I’ll give you a hint, pal: you’re part of Section 15.’

  I repeat the number with my brows furrowed. My handler turns an icy face toward the Russian, who continues talking with increasing elation.

  ‘Only once before have I seen things go so far … At the university in Leningrad, I hypnotized completely average art students into thinking they were Michelangelo. While under a trance, they drew in his style, but I discovered that the creative potential they developed continued to grow when they were back in their normal state. The result was, they become more and more talented, but in their own styles.’

  ‘What is that – Section 15?’

  ‘It’s your family, Steve. A secret service so secret that even the president doesn’t know about it. For his own safety, of course. So he can’t be implicated in our dirty work. Some joke, huh? You’re not laughing. Obviously, you can’t appreciate the irony …’

  I don’t see what’s so new about it; he would hardly be the first head of state assassinated by his own security forces. This time they’ll accuse the anti-American fanatics crawling all over France, just like they blamed the murder of Senator Jackson on the Mafia.

  ‘That means, Steven,’ the Russian continues, ‘that the ability and world vision that these students had acquired, under the hypnotic influence
of an artistic genius, leached into their own personalities, even when they were out of the trance! And that is exactly what has happened to you, but at a level I never would have expected …’

  ‘Who gives a rat’s ass?’ Ralph interrupts.

  ‘Maybe you should. I’m not just manufacturing cover stories for your killing machines – I’m giving people the possibility to completely modify their internal structure!’

  ‘Go get some coffee, Netzky.’

  The doctor replies that he isn’t thirsty, that he wants to understand how a few grafted memories, with no other external suggestion, were able to fabricate an autonomous virtual being and how – plop! he falls face forward, a hole in his skull.

  ‘Intellectuals can be such a royal pain in the ass. What we need here, Steven, is not to understand the situation but to clean up a mess.’

  I start trembling nervously, as convincingly as I can, while he announces the plan: the house will burn along with our corpses, Pascal will take care of my taxi girlfriend, and everything will be in place for tomorrow.

  ‘Get ready to say your prayers, bud, assuming Martin Harris believes in God.’

  I yelp out, ‘why?’ over and over as he steadies his gun.

  ‘If you only knew how lucky you’ve been, Steve … and how much trouble you’ve caused us since we pulled you from the mission.’

  ‘What mission?’

  He sighs, runs the silencer over the contours of my face.

  ‘You fuck up your hand, we stash you here while we install another shooter in your place, you get spooked and take a hike, we catch up with you in the truck, run you into the river … First we think you’re drowned, then safely in a coma, and then you show up at the apartment thinking you’re just coming home. You bring out the neighbors, so we can’t get rid of you on the spot, and then you go to the cops, you alert the embassy, you hire a detective to find out about you, you try every way you can to unmask your replacement … Of course he wasn’t as convincing as you: Netzky only had six days with him.’

  I ask him in a blank voice what the point of all this was.

  ‘The point of what? Fabricating a botanist? That was your idea, when you found the apartment for rent online. Since its window looks out onto Elysée Palace, head office keeps a file on the occupants. We also had to find someone the owner would like, so we offered him a real stroke of luck: a tenant who could help prove his theories.’

  I shake my head, looking dazed in my chair, broken by the collapse of what I believed was my life. I repeat over and over with dull obstinacy that I’m Martin Harris. Ralph watches me, plainly disgusted.

  ‘This hypnosis is a real son of a bitch,’ he mutters, shoving the gun toward my mouth.

  12

  The sun rises behind the banana trees. The kid opens the umbrellas, drags mats onto the sand, arranges them, lies down to test them out. His sister passes by on a horse at the edge of the lagoon. He shouts at her to go gallop somewhere else; he’s just finished raking the beach. Their mother opens the refreshment stand, a rosewood straw hut with a vetiver roof. I watch them from above. They’re beginning to relax, to let their terror fade with the passing days, to assume this dream life that I’ve given them posthumously.

  These days, Muriel Caradet is called Jeanne Grimm, a Swiss citizen who manages the Diamant Hotel on Mauritius Island, a quiet two-star at a remove from the palaces. Morgane is named Amandine, which she likes, but her brother thinks the name Cedric is even stupider than the one he used to have. With time, they’re learning not to make mistakes, to accept their new faces. I, in any case, look much better. Not very expressive, perhaps; I miss the wrinkles around my eyes, the crow’s feet that stretched toward my smile – but the sun will bring them back.

  The flora here is amazing. Protected by the tangle of mangroves with aerial roots, a natural reserve flourishes, where exchanges between species fly in the face of all the laboratory theories. I’m making discoveries, re-examining all my received knowledge. All that erudition they put in my head – it had to go to some use. And it’s my job to complete it. Of course I’m still an amateur; it’s too late to start a career under another name with an artificial vocation. But I want to train Cedric. He is genuinely motivated, and it’s a whole new thing to explore the Mauritian forest with him, to pass on to him everything they taught me and discover the rest together. He’s already decided that he wants to be a botanist when he grows up. He’ll carry on the torch.

  I shimmy down the tree trunk, bring them a coconut. Cedric slices it in half with one chop of the machete and we share it under the umbrella in the soft morning air, in this illusion of a desert island before our customers disembark.

  ‘Are you bringing him to school today?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Jeanne’s smile brightens her face, which has been modified to my taste. She’s pretending to be okay, but her personality no longer matches her appearance. By trying to protect her like this, I’ve taken away all her reference points, broken everything she’d built from the unfairness of fate and the pride of not owing anything to anyone. To make up for it, she spends twelve hours a day at the beck and call of the vacationers; exhaustion is her only mooring. How long will it be before we rediscover the chaotic magic of our night in Clichy? When will she be able to look the man I was in the face, chase away her doubts about my true nature, let our present erase my past? I wait. I love her in silence, wait for her to trust me again, and I watch over the family that I’ve built for myself.

  She asks if I slept well. I say yes, hoping it will soon be true. Try as I might to clear my brain, every night I find myself going back, my dreams stirring up memories that no longer have anything to do with me – memories from a former existence that, in the light of day, I manage to stop believing in.

  While Ralph Channing was sticking his gun in my mouth, I stabbed him. I set fire to the house as he had planned and rushed to the American embassy. When they heard the reason for my visit, they brought me straight up to the military attaché’s office. I demanded to see the First Secretary, the legal department, to get on the hotline so I could negotiate directly with the CIA. Before giving the slightest bit of information about the planned assassination, I demanded to be put under witness protection. R-37, confidential: official death, plastic surgery, and new identity. The only arrangement that really works. I know from experience – I owe it the only two failed contracts of my career. I explained that, if they ever eliminated me, I had taken steps to make sure the plot would be revealed to the press. They have no way of knowing if I’m bluffing or not. They don’t even know if I know who was behind the plot. I can guess, but I don’t really care. The only truth I care about these days is the truth of our false ID papers.

  The rest of it I learned like everyone else, from the news reports. On Friday night, a gas leak caused two deaths on Rue de Duras. Saturday morning, the President of the United States lunched at Elysée with his French counterpart. On the front steps, as they were shaking hands for the press, an explosion caused general panic. The security services immediately rounded up the group of photographers, but it was just a false alarm. The Dallas technique: an extra precaution to cover my replacement. While he had his target in his sights, the device Sabrina had planted in the camera would have made them think the fatal bullet came from a photographer. The time the police spent neutralizing him would have given the two of them a chance to clear out of the apartment before the area was cordoned off.

  Since they couldn’t hold him for an exploding flash bulb, the photographer was released two days later. The official version is that he died with us at the bottom of a ravine in the Val-de-Marne. At least he left some real human remains in the charred wreckage of the mini-van.

  All that seems very far away now, with no connection to me. As the weeks go by, the individuals who populated my former life have become more and more abstract. Much less real than the gardener father created out of a few hypnotic suggestions. The father who had taken form in my coma to tell me, You
’ll have a second existence. Only you can decide what to do with it. The voice of the unconscious, the refusal of the life I lived and that I couldn’t get out of.

  Steven Lutz is fading away. The persona of Martin Harris, and the feelings associated with his identity have grown over him, like ivy covering a dead tree. What remains of the man I was for forty-two years? That orphan of the Vietnam War, the precise and emotionless loner, the killing machine trained at West Point, broken in at Grenada, Palestine, Kuwait, refined at the training camp in Nevada, kept in reserve under cover of a real-estate agent in San Francisco; the man who spoke six languages, who could blend into a crowd, drop a target from three hundred yards, and assume any identity under hypnosis? What part of him have I kept? His physical form, his cautious reflexes, and three regrets: his piano, his two-story library with a view of the Golden Gate, and his cat, which the neighbors must have taken in.

  All the rest – the cold violence inculcated since childhood, recruitment into the army, the false camaraderie of the training camp, the indifference to death, the price of blood converted into rare books – has left only surface traces. My state of mind was the result of a conditioning from which hypnosis one day delivered me. Thanks to a personality graft that took root. Thanks to the mystery of a coma that transformed a database into a human being. The six days during which I really believed I was someone else triggered a process in my head, the consequences of which I’m still discovering.

  I’m not sure I really believe in redemption, but I’m giving it my best. In any case, I refuse to believe in fate, churning up the past, or remorse. What matters is not the harm I’ve done but the good I can do. I’ll give it the time it needs, but I have faith in the power of my will. I will become for good the man I thought I was.

  Acknowledgements

  To Dr Jean-Marie Pelt for the language of plants.

  To Jean-Claude Perez for deciphering DNA and his discoveries on transgenic mutations.