The Man Who Risked It All

by Laurent Gounelle

  She had agreed to rent me the apartment reluctantly and not without alerting me to the favor she was granting me. Normally, she didn’t rent to foreigners, but as her husband had been freed by the Americans during World War II, she had made an exception for me that I had to show myself worthy of.

  It goes without saying that Audrey had never stayed over. I would have been afraid to see the agents of the Inquisition burst in, in their dark robes, faces hidden by the shadow of their hoods, and put us to the question, then hanging Audrey naked and chained hand and foot, from the hook in the ceiling for a chandelier, as the flames of a crackling fire began to lick at her body.

  That morning, I went out—without banging the door—and ran down the five stories of my apartment building. I hadn’t felt so light since my separation from Audrey. And yet I had no objective reason for feeling better. Nothing had changed in my life. Wait, yes, it had: Someone was interested in me, and whatever his intentions, that was perhaps enough to soothe my suffering. Admittedly, I did have a little knot in my stomach, like the stage fright I experienced before going to the office on those rare occasions when I would have to speak in public.

  As I went out, I came across Étienne, the neighborhood vagrant. From the entrance hall, a small flight of stone steps went down to the street. Étienne was in the habit of hiding underneath it. He must be a real matter for Madame Blanchard’s conscience, no doubt divided between her Christian charity and her passion for order. That morning, Étienne, his hair unkempt, had come out of his hole and was leaning against the wall of the building, sunning himself.

  “Lovely day,” I threw out as I went past.

  “If ye says so, sonny,” he replied in his rasping voice.

  I ran down into the Métro, and the sight of all those depressed faces going to work as though they were going to the abattoir almost brought back my melancholy from the day before.

  I got out at the Rue de la Pompe station and came up into the smart part of Paris. I was immediately struck by the contrast between the fetid smell of the dark underground corridors of the Métro and the fresh air, the green scent of this luminous district. The few cars on the street and the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne were no doubt the reason for the clean air. The Avenue Henri Martin is a wide avenue, with four rows of trees down the center and on either side, and sumptuous mid-19th-century houses in carved stone, set back behind high, ornate railings of black and gold.

  I was very early for my appointment, so I went into a café to have breakfast. It smelled of hot croissants and coffee. I sat down near the window and waited. The waiter didn’t seem particularly busy, but when I gestured to him I had the impression he was pretending not to see me. Finally, I called and he came over, grumbling. I ordered a hot chocolate and bread and butter, and while I waited, leafed through a copy of Le Figaro that was lying on the table. When the steaming chocolate came, I threw myself on the deliciously buttered slices of fresh baguette, overhearing bits of local gossip being passed around at the bar. Parisian cafés have an ambiance and smells that you don’t get in the States.

  I set off again half an hour later. The Avenue Henri Martin is quite long, and as I went along I thought about Yves Dubreuil. What had led the man to propose this strange deal? Was his intention really positive, as he assured me it was? His attitude had been ambiguous, to say the least, and it was difficult to trust him. Now, as I drew close to his house, I felt a growing anxiety.

  I counted off the numbers as I went past apartment buildings, each more handsome than the last. I reached number 25 and looked for 23, which should be next, but here the series was interrupted. Thick foliage behind the railings hid the building. I arrived at the gate. Number 23 wasn’t an apartment building but a magnificent stone mansion. Immense. I got out the visiting card to check. Very impressive. Was this really his house?

  I rang. The little camera behind the glass in the videophone went into action, and a woman’s voice invited me to go in, as a door next to the gate opened electronically. I had scarcely walked a few steps into the garden when an enormous black Doberman launched itself in my direction, barking, its eyes threatening and its fangs lubricated by saliva. I was getting ready to leap to one side when the chain around its neck suddenly tightened. It was held back at the last moment, its front paws in the air, the strangulation this provoked propelling from its mouth a stream of slobber that hit my shoes. The dog immediately turned around and went silent, as if the fright it had just inflicted on me was enough to satisfy it.

  “Please forgive Stalin,” Dubreuil said as he welcomed me at the front door. “He is hateful!”

  “He’s called Stalin?” I stuttered, as I shook his hand, my pulse at 140.

  “We only let him out at night, so during the day he stretches his paws from time to time, when we have a visitor. He terrorizes my guests a bit, but that makes them more conciliatory! Come on, follow me,” he said, going before me into a vast marble hall where his voice immediately rang out.

  The ceiling was impressively high. On the walls hung gigantic old master paintings in frames of antique gold.

  A liveried servant took my jacket. Dubreuil started up the stairs, and I followed. It was a monumental staircase in white stone. Above it was an imposing chandelier with black crystal prisms that must have been three times my weight. Reaching the first floor, Dubreuil swept along a wide corridor, its walls lined with tapestries and more paintings, lit by crystal sconces. It was like a château.

  Dubreuil walked with confidence and spoke in a loud voice, as if I was ten yards away. His dark suit contrasted with his silvery hair. Stray locks of hair made him look like a fiery conductor. His white shirt was open at the neck, showing a silk cravat.

  “Let’s go into my office. It’ll be more private.”

  Privacy was exactly what I needed in this place, which, although magnificent, was not really conducive to intimate conversations.

  His office did indeed seem cozier. The walls lined with antique bookcases full of books, most of them old, warmed the room. The parquet floor was partially hidden under a thick Persian rug. Heavy dark red curtains completed the muffled atmosphere. In front of the window was an imposing mahogany desk inlaid with gold-tooled black leather. The top was piled with books and files and, in the center, a large, threatening, silver paper knife, its tip turned toward me, like a murder weapon carelessly left behind by the killer in his haste to quit the scene. Dubreuil invited me to sit down in one of the two large, brown leather armchairs that faced each other on one side of the desk.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked me as he poured himself a glass of bourbon.

  “No, thanks. Not at the moment.”

  He sat down calmly and took a sip while I waited to learn what, exactly, would be my fate.

  “Right, listen. Here’s what I propose. Today, first and foremost, you will tell me your life. You said you had had plenty of problems. I want to know everything. Let’s not play the timid maiden; don’t be afraid of confiding in me. In any case, rest assured that I’ve heard enough sordid things in my life not to be shocked or surprised by anything. But, conversely, don’t feel obliged to lay it on to justify the act you wanted to commit yesterday. I just want to understand your personal history.”

  He fell silent and took another sip.

  There is something shameless about telling your life story to a stranger, when you go beyond the trivial details of your existence, such as work, everyday encounters, and daily routines. I was afraid of confiding in him, as though exposing myself amounted to giving him power over me. After a while, I got started and no longer questioned what I was doing. I accepted revealing myself, perhaps because I didn’t feel judged. And then I must admit I was hooked. After all, it’s rather pleasant, when you’ve passed the barrier of propriety, to have an attentive ear at one’s disposal. You don’t often get the opportunity in life to be really listened to—to feel that the other person is trying to understand you, to uncover the twists and turns of your thoughts, the dept
hs of your soul. Making myself transparent was liberating and even, in a certain way, exciting.

  I spent the day in the château, as I got into the habit of calling it. Dubreuil spoke little and listened to me with extreme concentration. People capable of sustaining their attention for such a length of time are rare. We were interrupted an hour or two after the start of our conversation by a woman who must have been in her 40s. He introduced her as “Catherine, in whom I have total confidence.” Lean, with dry hair tied back clumsily and drab, inelegant clothes that suggested a contempt for feminine finery. She could have been Madame Blanchard’s daughter, without the violence. She asked Dubreuil his opinion, pointing to a short written text on a piece of paper. Impossible for me to know what it was about. She looked a bit too cold to be his wife. Was she a colleague? His assistant?

  Our conversation—I should say my monologue—resumed until it was time to eat. We went down to have lunch in the garden, under an arbor. It was hard to believe we were in the heart of Paris. Catherine joined us but did not have much to say. Dubreuil tended to do both the questions and the answers, as if to make up for the silence he had observed during our meeting. The meal was served by a different servant from the one who had buzzed me in. Dubreuil’s natural, if refined exuberance contrasted with the reserved and mannered style of his staff. His outspokenness tended to reassure me, unlike the absorbed, unsettling expressions I occasionally saw on his face as he listened to me.

  “Would you mind if Catherine stayed with us this afternoon? She is my eyes and ears, and sometimes my brains as well,” he added with a laugh. “I have no secrets from her.”

  A clever way of informing me that, in any case, everything would be repeated to her.

  “I have no objections,” I lied.

  He suggested I go for a stroll in the park to stretch my legs before we started again. I think he took advantage of this to summarize what I had said during the morning.

  All three of us went back to his office. I felt less at ease for the first few minutes, but Catherine was one of those people whose extreme neutrality means that you quickly forget them.

  It was nearly 7:00 P.M. when we had exhausted the subject of my tormented life. Catherine discreetly withdrew.

  “I’m going to think about all this,” said Dubreuil in a pensive voice. “And I’ll get back to you to tell you your first task. Leave me all your contact details.”

  “My first task?”

  “Yes, your first mission, if you prefer. What you’re to do while you wait for further instructions.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You have experienced things that, in a certain way, have engraved themselves upon you, conditioning the way you see the world, the way you behave, your relations with others, your emotions. The result of all that is that things aren’t working, to be quite frank. It’s causing you problems and making you unhappy. Your life will be mediocre as long as you live it this way. So we need to bring about certain changes.”

  I had the impression he was going to brandish a scalpel to operate on my brain straightaway.

  He went on: “We could talk about it for hours but it would do no good, apart from informing you of the reasons for your unhappiness. But you’d stay unhappy. Look, when a computer malfunctions, you have to install new programs that work better.”

  “The problem is, I’m not a computer.”

  “You grasp the philosophy, at any rate: You must live a certain number of experiences that will make your point of view change and lead you to go beyond your fears, your doubts, your anxieties.”

  “And how do I know you know how to program properly?”

  “You’ve given your word. So, no point asking the question. It would only feed your fears, which are already numerous, if I’ve understood properly.”

  Silently, I looked at him for a while. He met my gaze without saying anything. Seconds that seemed like hours went by. I finally broke the silence.

  “Who are you, Monsieur Dubreuil?”

  “Now that’s a question I ask myself every now and then!” he said, getting up and walking before me to the corridor. “Come on, I’ll show you out. Who am I? Who am I?” he declaimed as he walked, and his powerful voice resounded in the vast staircase.

  3

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT I had a nightmare such as I hadn’t had since childhood.

  I was in the mansion. It was dark. Dubreuil was there. We were in an immense, dark drawing room. The very high walls were as black as those of a dungeon. The room was lit only by the flickering flames of chandeliers that gave off a smell of old wax burning. Dubreuil was staring at me intensely, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. Catherine, a little farther on, was wearing only a black leotard and high-heel shoes, her hair in a ponytail. She was holding a big whip that she regularly cracked on the floor with unsuspected violence, grunting like a tennis player who has just served. Stalin was opposite her, furiously barking after each crack of the whip. Dubreuil didn’t take his eyes off me, displaying the calm air of someone who knows he is all-powerful. He held the sheet of paper out to me.

  “Hey! It’s your mission!”

  I took the paper with a trembling hand and tipped it toward the flames to read it. Names. A list of names and next to each one, an address.

  “What is it?”

  “You’ve got to kill them. All of them. It’s your first mission. The first.”

  Catherine’s whip cracked very loudly, setting off a flood of barking.

  “But I’m not a criminal! I don’t want to kill anyone!”

  “It’ll do you good,” he said, separating each word.

  A wave of panic came over me. My legs were shaking. My jaw was trembling.

  “No, it won’t. I don’t want to. At all. I don’t want to.”

  “You need to, believe me,” he said in a wheedling voice. “It’s because of your history, you understand. Your past is in darkness that you’ll learn to come out of. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I can’t,” I panted. “I can’t.”

  “You have no choice.”

  His voice was insistent. His eyes were boring through me as he slowly advanced toward me.

  “Don’t come near me! I want to leave!”

  “You can’t. It’s too late.”

  “Let me go!”

  I rushed to the great drawing room door. Locked. I rapidly turned the handle in every direction.

  “Open up!” I screamed, banging with my fists. “Open this door!”

  Dubreuil was getting closer. I turned around, my back to the door, and crossed my arms in front of my chest.

  “You can’t force me! I will never kill anyone!”

  “Remember: You gave your word!”

  “And if I took it back?”

  My reply brought an immense laugh from Dubreuil. A demonic laugh that froze my blood.

  “What’s the matter? What’s making you laugh?”

  “If you break your word …”

  He turned toward Catherine, a snarl on his lips. Catherine looked at me and gave a broad smile that was a grimace, a hideous smile that made me want to be sick.

  “If you break your word,” he went on in a slow, sardonic voice, as the flames gave a diabolical glow to his face. “If you break your word, then I’ll put your name on a list, a list that I will give to someone else.”

  At that moment, behind me, I heard the lock activate. I turned around, opened the door, pushed the servant aside, and fled across the hall.

  “You gave your word! You gave your word! You gave your word!”

  I woke with a start, panting, in a sweat. The sight of familiar objects around me brought me back to a universe that was known, controlled.

  I was both reassured to realize that it was only a dream and disturbed at the thought that reality might be just as I had imagined it in my nocturnal ravings. After all, I knew nothing about Dubreuil and his real intentions. I had entered a game of which I knew neither the rules nor the purpose. The only certainty:
I couldn’t get out of it. That was the rule of the game that I had been mad enough to accept.

  It was 6 A.M. I got up and slowly got ready to go to the office. Life was reasserting itself, and I really had to get back to work, even if the very idea of going back to that vipers’ nest was enough to undermine my morale.

  Vanessa leapt on me as soon as I arrived, pursuing me down the corridor leading to my office.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming in today or not, but until I heard from you, I let your appointments stand. To be frank, Fausteri wasn’t too pleased about your absence yesterday. But I stood up for you. I told him that you sounded like death on the phone and that you’d looked really ill the day before. I don’t mean to boast, but if I hadn’t been there, he’d probably never have believed you.”

  Vanessa loved situations that gave her an opportunity to show she was indispensable, even if she had to make them up. I would never know if Fausteri had even noticed my absence. Indeed, Vanessa had such a need for recognition that she was quite capable of killing two birds with one stone, covering for me while at the same time earning congratulations for bringing my unjustified absence to our boss’s attention. I trusted her no farther than I could throw her.

  Luc Fausteri, the head of the Accounting and Financial Sector Recruitment Department, in turn reported to the director of the recruitment side of the company, Grégoire Larcher. Dunker Consulting was a European leader in human resources, with two big internal divisions: Recruitment and Training. The company had been floated on the stock exchange two months after my arrival. This was a matter of pride for our CEO, Marc Dunker, who now saw himself as a captain of industry, despite the fact that the company had only a few hundred employees, admittedly spread over three countries. The first decision Dunker took after our stock market flotation was to purchase a luxury car with a chauffeur. The freshly garnered money had to be used somehow. His second decision was to appoint a bodyguard, as if listing the company on the Paris stock exchange made its boss a prime target for the local underworld. The bodyguard followed Dunker everywhere, in a dark suit and shades, constantly looking around as if to locate snipers hidden on the roofs.