The Man Who Risked It All

by Laurent Gounelle

  “A sliced sandwich loaf for the lady!”

  “One euro eighty.”

  “Madame?” the shop assistant asked the next customer.

  “No, excuse me,” I said, slightly louder. “I’ll have a bran loaf, actually.”

  “And a bran loaf with the baguette for monsieur!”

  “That’ll be three euros fifteen then,” said the cashier.

  “Young man, it’s your turn,” the shop assistant said to the next in line.

  “No,” I said. “It was instead of the baguette, not in addition.”

  “Two loaves,” the young man called out.

  “Right, that’s two euros five cents for the gentleman, and two euros ten for the young man.”

  “Madame?” said the shop assistant.

  I felt awful. I didn’t have the heart to carry on. A glance toward the car. The chauffeur was standing beside it, his arms folded. He wasn’t taking his eyes off me.

  “Half a baguette, well done,” said an old lady.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the assistant, “I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry, but I’d rather have a half-baguette as well.”

  “Make up your mind,” she said in her very high-pitched voice, taking the other half of the baguette she had cut for the old lady.

  I was very hot. I was sweating under my suit.

  “Sixty cents for the old lady and the same for the gentleman.”

  “Madame?” the shop assistant asked.

  “I’m still thinking,” said a young woman who was looking at the cakes with an obvious feeling of guilt.

  She must be counting the number of calories in each one, I thought.

  “Another problem, monsieur?” the assistant asked, suspiciously.

  “Look, I’m really sorry. I know I’m out of line, but a sandwich loaf. I think I want a sandwich loaf. Yes, that’s it! A sandwich loaf!”

  She stared at me with obvious annoyance. I didn’t dare turn around, but I had a feeling the customers stuck behind me were about to grab me by the collar and throw me out. She sighed, and then turned around to get the sandwich loaf.

  “Hang on! Stop! No, actually …”

  “Yes?” the assistant said in a choked voice, no doubt on the verge of hysterics.

  “I want … nothing. Actually, I don’t want anything. Thank you … sorry … thank you.”

  I turned on my heels and walked past the line of customers, head down, without looking at them. At the door, I broke into a run, feeling like a thief.

  The chauffeur was waiting with the car door open, as if I were a VIP, but I felt as ashamed as a little boy who has just been caught trying to steal a sweet from a stall. I dived into the Mercedes in a sweat.

  “You’re as red as an Englishman who’s just spent an hour in the sun on the Riviera,” said Dubreuil, visibly amused.

  “It’s not funny. Really not funny.”

  “Anyhow, you see, you did it.”

  I didn’t answer. The car moved off.

  “Perhaps I went a bit far for a first time,” he acknowledged. “But I promise you that in a few weeks you’ll be able to do it and treat it as a joke.”

  “But it doesn’t interest me! I don’t want to become a pain in the neck! I can’t bear people who are a pain in the neck, who are too demanding and piss everyone off. I don’t want to be like them!”

  “It’s not about you becoming a pain in the neck. I won’t make you go from one extreme to the other. I just want you to know how to get what you want, even if you have to put people out a bit. But he who can do more, can do less. I’m going to push you to do a bit more than necessary, so that later you’ll be quite at ease asking for what it’s normal for you to want.”

  “So, what’s the next stage?”

  “For the next few days, you will visit at least three bakeries a day, and you will ask for two changes of what you’re given. It’ll be easy.”

  Compared with what I’d just done, that did indeed seem acceptable.

  “For how long do I have to do this?”

  “Until it becomes quite natural for you, requiring no effort. And remember, you can be demanding and still remain nice. You don’t have to be unpleasant.”

  The Mercedes pulled up in front of my apartment. Vladi got out and opened the door for me.

  “Good evening,” said Dubreuil.

  I didn’t answer.

  Étienne emerged from under the staircase and stared at the car.

  “Well, someone’s doing all right for himself,” he said, coming up to me. He took off his hat and pretended to sweep the sidewalk in front of me, backing up as I advanced. “Monsieur le Président,” he said with an extra flourish.

  I felt obliged to give him some money.

  “His Highness is too kind,” he said in his hoarse voice, executing an exaggeratedly reverential bow.

  He had the crafty look of someone who always gets what he wants.

  Yves Dubreuil took out his cell phone and pushed two keys.

  “Good evening, Catherine, it’s me.”

  “Well?”

  “For the time being, he’s obeying. Everything’s as planned.”

  “I don’t think it’ll last very long. I have considerable doubts.”

  “You always have doubts, Catherine.”

  “He’ll rebel in the end.”

  “You say that because if you were in his place, you’d rebel.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “At any rate, I’ve never seen anyone so frightened of his own shadow.”

  “That’s what worries me so much. That’s why I think he will never have the courage to do all you’re going to demand of him.”

  “On the contrary. His fear can help us.”

  “How come?”

  “If he doesn’t want to go on, we’ll make sure he does … out of fear.”

  Silence.

  “You’re formidable, Igor.”

  “Yes.”

  4

  AFTER A WEEK, I knew all the bakeries in my district, the 18th arrondissement. In the end, I observed that the best bread was to be had in the bakery I usually patronized, next to my apartment. Now I was buying three baguettes a day and off-loading my surplus stock on Étienne. Delighted at first, he had the cheek to tell me after five days that he was fed up with eating bread.

  Human beings are made in such a way that we get used to almost anything. I have to admit that what had demanded a superhuman effort to begin with needed mere resolve by the end of a week. All the same, I had to consciously prepare myself for the bakery routine. One evening, I met my neighbor at the baker’s, and we talked as we stood in line. When my turn came and I was served an overcooked baguette, I didn’t have the reflex to refuse it. Being distracted by my conversation was enough to make me revert to my old habit of automatically accepting what was given to me. In short, I was being well looked after, but I was still not cured.

  My office life carried on, more dismal than ever. Was it to try and make up for the deterioration in the atmosphere that Luc Fausteri suggested that the consultants on his team join him every morning at 8 A.M. for a run? I was sure this ludicrous idea wasn’t his. He must have found it in a team-building book under a heading like How to change your employees into winners. The plan had obviously been approved by those higher up, however, since his boss, Grégoire Larcher, had okayed the installation of communal showers in the building.

  So it was that most of the consultants found themselves every morning inhaling exhaust from the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue de Rivoli, or the scarcely less polluted air of the Tuileries Gardens. They ran without saying a word, my boss being about as talkative as a funeral director. In any case, the purpose of the exercise was no doubt to stimulate everyone’s ardor, not to develop camaraderie. Fausteri kept his distance from us as always. I had managed the feat of declining his offer, and no doubt the shop assistants in the bakeries of the 18th arrondissement had a share in this achievement. My painful experience at baseball had turned me off sports, and mix
ing with a group of out-of-breath men feeling virile because they’re exercising was more than I was capable of.

  I arrived at the office each day at 8:55 A.M. so that I would already be hard at work when the team returned from its morning exploits. That way, the message was clear: While you’re prancing about, some of us are slaving away. That way, I was beyond reproach. Even so, the level of reproach had risen perceptibly. Having had an original idea for once, Fausteri was no doubt vexed that I wasn’t falling in line. He began to pick on me, to make remarks incessantly about anything or nothing, from the color of my shirts to the amount of time I spent on each interview.

  But the crucial point was the number of recruitment contracts signed. Since our role as salesmen had taken on more importance than searching for candidates, we had been allocated individual business targets, with commissions tied to our sales. Now our department had a business meeting every Monday morning. The decision probably hadn’t come from Fausteri. Very introverted, he hated mixing with us. Larcher must have forced him to do it. But Luc Fausteri was very clever and had succeeded in evading the thankless task of leading the weekly meeting. Larcher managed it himself, which suited him; he liked to be involved in everything. Fausteri made do with remaining silently at his side, playing the role of the aloof expert who only opened his mouth when absolutely necessary. He would regard us with a mildly condescending gaze, wondering no doubt why the simple-minded always repeat the same idiotic remarks.

  That particular morning, I met Thomas, a colleague, in the corridor.

  “Well, we thought you’d died the day before yesterday,” he said, sarcastically.

  If only you knew, my friend. “I must have picked up a virus going around,” I lied. “Fortunately, it didn’t last.”

  “Right. I won’t get close to you then,” he said, taking a step back. “Even if it would suit you all if I was so ill I couldn’t give you the usual hiding at the end of the month!”

  Thomas was the consultant who got the best results, and he never missed an opportunity to remind us of it. I admit his figures were fairly impressive. He was a workaholic who put in impossible hours, regularly went without lunch, and was so focused on his targets that he sometimes forgot to say hello to people he walked past in the corridors. At any rate, he never stopped to chat, except when he had an opportunity to blow his own horn, either by announcing his quarterly results or by telling you that he had just bought the latest fashionable car or had eaten the night before in the trendy restaurant that all of Paris was talking about.

  Everything about Thomas was calculated to serve his image, from the brand of clothes he favored to the Financial Times tucked casually under his arm when he arrived in the morning. Each gesture, each word, indeed everything he owned and did was an element of the persona he had carefully constructed and identified with. I would sometimes imagine Thomas naked on a deserted island without his Armani suit or Hermès tie or Weston loafers or Vuitton bag, without personal targets to reach or glory to obtain or anyone to impress. I could see him sliding into an infinite torpor, as unable to live without others’ admiration as the rubber plant in our waiting room could survive without Vanessa’s weekly watering.

  But in fact, he would probably become the archetypal Robinson Crusoe, adopting the appearance and behavior of the exemplary shipwreck as diligently as he had cultivated that of the dynamic executive. Once he had been rescued by fishermen—amazed by his capacity for survival—he would have returned to France a hero, recounting his exploits of survival on every TV channel, while carefully preserving his eight-month beard and wearing a loincloth like nobody else. The context would change, but not the man.

  “Having a chat, are we, then?”

  Mickaël was another of my colleagues. He didn’t take himself seriously, but he did think he was cleverer than everyone else.

  “It doesn’t matter for some of us,” retorted Thomas, quick as a flash.

  Mickaël just laughed and walked away. Slightly tubby, with jet-black hair, he always wore a crafty look. His results were perfectly decent, although I suspected he took it fairly easy. Several times I had gone into his office unannounced. Each time he had given the impression he was absorbed in a candidate’s tricky case on his computer, but the images on his screen, reflected in the glass doors of the bookcase behind his desk, made you wonder if candidates were so desperate for employment that they were sending naked photos of themselves in the hope of increasing their chances of getting a job as an accountant.

  “He’s jealous,” Thomas said in a confidential tone.

  Every week, companies contacted the firm with their recruitment needs and inquired about our terms and conditions. Vanessa took the calls, made out a file card for each query, and passed it on to a consultant. It goes without saying that we welcomed these leads. It was much easier to sign a contract with a company that had contacted us than to cold-canvass strangers by telephone. Vanessa was supposed to distribute the file cards evenly among us, but I had recently discovered that in fact she favored Thomas. Visibly fascinated by the image of a winner that he projected, she must take pleasure in the idea that she was vital to his success. I was sure I was the least favored member of the team, even though, on the rare occasions she passed a contract on to me, she did it in a way that suggested she was giving me alone a chance to profit from the only call that Dunker Consulting had received that month.

  5

  TWO WEEKS AFTER our first meeting, Dubreuil reappeared in circumstances similar to the previous time. When I came out of the office, I saw his Mercedes parked in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Vladi got out, walked around the car, and opened the back door for me. I ground out my cigarette, frustrated because I had just lit up after spending the whole afternoon without smoking. I was less anxious than the previous time, but slight apprehension still tightened my stomach, as I wondered what fate lay in store for me today.

  The Mercedes pulled away from the curb, making a U-turn on the Avenue de l’Opéra and heading toward the Louvre. Two minutes later, we were speeding along the Rue de Rivoli.

  “So, were you physically thrown out of the Paris bakeries?”

  “I’m going to eat sandwich bread from the supermarket for a month, the time it’ll take for people to forget me.”

  Dubreuil gave a sadistic little laugh.

  “Where are you taking me today?”

  “See, you’re making progress! Last time, you didn’t even dare ask. You allowed yourself to be driven like a prisoner.”

  “I am a prisoner of my promise.”

  “That’s true,” he confirmed with a satisfied air.

  We arrived at the Place de la Concorde. The muffled silence inside the luxurious sedan contrasted with the agitation of the drivers changing lanes in every direction and accelerating in spurts to try and overtake one or two cars. Big black clouds scudded across the sky above the Assemblée Nationale, as we turned onto the Champs-Élysées and the avenue opened up in front of us. The sky above the Arc de Triomphe was clear.

  “So, where are we going?” I repeated.

  “We’re going to test your progress since the last time, to make sure that we can go on to something else.”

  I didn’t like the wording. It reminded me of certain tests that my firm made the candidates take.

  “I never told you, but I have a distinct preference for theoretical tests, the ones with pieces of paper and boxes to check,” I said.

  “Life isn’t a theory. I believe in the virtue of experience lived in the raw. That’s the only thing that really changes someone. All the rest is waffle, intellectual masturbation.”

  “So, what have you cooked up for me today?” I asked, putting on an air of self-confidence, whereas in fact my heart was in my boots.

  “Well, let’s say we’re going to bring this chapter to an end by taking our business elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?”

  “Yes, instead of the local bakery, you’re going to a prestigious jeweler.”


  “You’re joking?” I said, suspecting that unfortunately, he was doing nothing of the sort.

  “Indeed, there’s not much difference between them.”

  “Of course, there is! There’s no comparison!”

  “In both cases, you’re dealing with someone who’s there to sell you something. It’s the same. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “Of course you do! Don’t play the fool!”

  “The main difference is located in the head.”

  “But I’ve never set foot in a big jeweler’s. I’m not used to that sort of place.”

  “You have to start someday. There’s a first time for everything.”

  “The place will make me feel awkward before I even open my mouth. Your dice are loaded …”

  “What’s troubling you, exactly?” he said, an amused smile on his lips.

  “I don’t know. Those people aren’t used to dealing with people like me. I won’t know how to behave.”

  “There’s no special code. It’s a shop like any other, except that it’s more expensive. That gives you the right to be harder to please!”

  The Mercedes stopped at the top of the Champs-Élysées. Vladi turned on the hazard warning lights. I stared straight in front of me, guessing that my scaffold was on my right, just over there, within eyeshot. I plucked up my courage and slowly turned my head to the right. The stone building was imposing, with an immense shop window more than two stories tall. Above it, in gold letters, was the name of my executioner: Cartier.

  “Imagine,” Dubreuil said, “what your life will be like when there is no longer any situation in the world that can make you feel awkward.”

  “Great. But as things stand, I’m a long way away from that.”

  “The only way to get there is to rub up against reality—to go and face the object of your fears until the fear disappears, not hide somewhere, which only heightens your fear of the unknown.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied. But I wasn’t convinced.

  “Come on, tell yourself that the people who are going to serve you are people just like you—wage-earners who probably can’t afford to buy jewelry at Cartier’s either.”