The Man Who Risked It All

by Laurent Gounelle

  “What gives you this ability?”

  “From time to time I know about events before they are made public.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “And how do you have access to that information?”

  “I am an employee of the company.”

  He stared at me contemptuously. “What do you want in exchange?” he said, with the look of someone who no longer has any illusions about human nature.

  “Nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t do it if there wasn’t something in it for you.”

  “I agree.”

  “So, what do you get out of it?” he asked, inquisitorially.

  I met his eyes. “I hate Marc Dunker. Anything that can hurt him delights me.”

  He seemed to accept my answer. It fitted in with his vision of the world. He motioned to the waiter to bring him a coffee.

  I went on, “Every time you print a negative notice about his firm, he’s beside himself.”

  No reaction. Fisherman remained impassive.

  “So, you’ll pass on to me in advance the events you know about, is that it?”

  “No, I won’t reveal the events. But when I know for sure that a piece of information is about to become public, I’ll warn you.”

  “In that case, what’s the difference?”

  “If you take into account an important piece of information even before it becomes public and give a negative notice on the share, it’ll increase the general feeling that something is not right at Dunker Consulting. It will make matters worse. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  He looked at me in silence for a few moments.

  “What interests me,” he said, “is the information, not just the announcement that it’s going to come out.”

  “That I’m not going to give you. You mustn’t be too greedy. In any case, your job is to make predictions about the share price of companies quoted on the stock exchange, isn’t it? I’m giving you the means of announcing before everyone else that Dunker Consulting shares are going to go down. That’s already quite a lot.”

  He didn’t reply, but continued to stare at me suspiciously.

  “Exclusive to you,” I added.

  “There’s nothing to prove that your predictions will turn out to be true.”

  “You can judge for yourself this week.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  I leaned toward him slightly and lowered my voice to underline the importance of my revelation. “The day after tomorrow, Dunker Consulting’s shares will fall by at least three percent before the end of trading.”

  He stared at me for a few moments, gloomily, and then drank his coffee in silence, looking very doubtful.

  “In any case,” he finally said, “I can’t publish a notice on the basis of a rumor from someone I don’t even know.”

  “Do what you like. I will give you, let’s say, three tips. If you don’t use them, after that I’ll give the others to one of your colleagues on a rival paper.”

  I got up, fished some coins out of my pocket, and put enough on the table to pay for my coffee. Then I left him to his skepticism.

  42

  THE RINGING OF the telephone interrupted my thoughts. I picked it up.

  “Hold on, please, my husband would like to talk to you.”

  A long silence.

  “Hello? Monsieur Greenmor?”

  I recognized the drawling voice at once.

  “Speaking.”

  “Raymond Verger here. You know, the ex-editor of Le Monde. I’m calling because I think I’ve found the name of the person hiding behind the pseudonym Jean Calusacq.”

  Luck was turning in my favor. I was at last going to be able to talk with the author of an article on Igor Dubrovski that was, admittedly, provocative but also so precise that it was impossible to think the author hadn’t known Dubrovski personally.

  “It’s just what I thought,” Verger went on. “It was someone famous. That’s why his name wasn’t on my list of pseudonyms.”

  I felt my heart racing. “Tell me, what’s his name?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  I’d forgotten he was partially deaf. I started again, articulating carefully: “What’s his name?”

  “Well, first of all, Monsieur, please note that I am following standard practice. I’m revealing his identity only because he has been dead for a long time; otherwise I would protect his anonymity. But it’s been so long, it’s ancient history.”

  My blood froze. It was no good.

  “I found his name when I remembered that some people found it amusing to create a pseudonym that was an anagram of their name. It took me a good hour to work out that behind Jean Calusacq lay Jacques Lacan.”

  “Lacan, the great psychoanalyst?”

  “The very same.”

  I was dumbfounded. Why had Lacan been so angry with Dubrovski that he had written a vitriolic article about him?

  I put the question to Raymond Verger.

  “That I can’t tell you. Only a specialist might be able to answer. You could always try Christine Vespalles.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Christine Vespalles, a former journalist at the review Sciences Humaines. Psychoanalysis is her passion. She would get great pleasure from answering your questions. You will find her easily; since her retirement, she spends her afternoons at the Deux Magots.”

  “The café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés?”

  “That’s the one. You could go and see her. You’ll spot her right away: She always wears extraordinary hats. Nowadays, you don’t see that many hats. She’s very easy to talk to; you’ll see. I’ll give her a call and tell her about you.”

  I had trouble finding the street, lost behind the Place de la Bastille in an unrenovated area that still had the old-fashioned charm of working-class neighborhoods in days gone by. Most of the apartment buildings housed a workshop or business on the ground floor. Their doors were open to the street, and the tradespeople congregated on the sidewalks, as busy with neighborhood gossip as with their work. Deliverymen were unloading their goods in the middle of the street, calling out to familiar faces and interrupting the conversations by talking louder than anyone else.

  There was a shoe repairer working at his polishing machine, which gave off a smell of warm leather. His neighbor was a hardware shop with the poetic sign Color Merchant. A glance at his stall was enough to realize that he kept his promise. There was an incredible profusion of everyday objects: multicolored clothes hangers, sponges, tea towels; green, yellow, and blue aprons; bowls and buckets in red, yellow, and beige plastic. A fruit-and-vegetable seller was trying to nab passersby by shouting the price of his goods. Farther on was a newspaper seller’s metal stand: the headlines of his papers announced various scandals. Jets of steam poured out of the dry cleaner’s next door, while across the street, there was a delicatessen with sausages hanging from metal hooks.

  I finally found Number 51, a building whose façade was patinated by time. Next to the entrance was a handmade plaque that announced:

  SPEECH-MASTERS: STAIRCASE IN THE COURTYARD

  I passed under an archway and came out in an internal courtyard. Facing me was a second building, but its door was closed and there was no sign. Finally, I spotted a staircase off to one side. A small sign was attached to the handrail by metal wire. When I got closer, I saw that the sign said Speech-Masters, with an arrow pointing down. I descended the stairs, which disappeared into darkness at the bottom. Not very inviting.

  I rang the bell and waited. Finally, the door opened partway, and a red-headed man of about 30 greeted me, introducing himself as Éric.

  I liked the place right away. It was a vast space, with a magnificent vaulted ceiling of stone. In each corner of the room, glass bricks admitted shafts of natural light. At the far end of the room was a wooden platform. Facing it were perhaps 100 stools, arranged neatly in rows. Near the entrance was a kitchen table with a coffee machine and an impressive number of plastic cups. Beneath the table, a little f
ridge was quietly purring away.

  “You’re in the old storeroom of a family of cabinetmakers,” explained Éric. “They worked here for several generations until 1975, when the last one retired without finding a successor.

  “Tell me,” he asked. “What makes you want to enroll here?”

  “Well, I can’t speak in public,” I said. “I get terrible stage fright, which leaves me completely at a loss, and it so happens that probably I will soon have to speak in front of a large group of people. I would like to train first, to avoid a catastrophe.”

  “I see.”

  “What’s the procedure for the lessons?”

  “They’re not lessons. Each member trains by diving into the deep end with a talk of ten or so minutes on a topic of his choice. After that, the others write feedback on bits of paper, which are then given to the speaker.”

  “Feedback?”

  “Yes, information about his performance. Comments about his little defects, his tics, his imperfections—everything, in short, that can be improved, whether it’s his voice, his posture, or the structure of his talk.”

  “I see.”

  “If there are thirty of us, you’ll get thirty pieces of paper. It’s for you to see what crops up most frequently in the comments so you can correct yourself and try to do better the next time you speak.”

  He had emphasized the words correct and better with a slight frown, like a schoolteacher. In spite of that, the method seemed interesting.

  “When can I start?”

  “We start again on the 22nd of August. Thereafter, we meet once a week.”

  “Only on the 22nd? Not before?”

  “No, everybody is on holiday now.”

  I was done for. The annual meeting was on August 28. I would have the benefit of only one session, which seemed a bit light. I told him about my problem.

  “It’s not ideal, that’s for sure. Our teaching demands long-term effort. But you’ll still get some comments that might help you a little with your performance. You should have started sooner,” he said in a reproachful tone.

  43

  “ALAN, DARLING! HOW are you?”

  I was taken aback to be greeted so dramatically by a woman I had never seen before, as if we had been friends for 20 years. Half the customers in the Deux Magots turned around. Madame Vespalles held out her hand in a theatrical gesture, wrist bent and palm down. What was she expecting—that I kiss her hand?

  I shook it as best I could.

  “Dear Raymond Verger has said so many nice things about you,” she gushed.

  I couldn’t imagine the ex-editor-in-chief of Le Monde lavishing compliments on me.

  “Do sit down,” she said, pointing to a chair next to her. “Welcome to my table. Georges?”

  She turned to me as the waiter appeared at her side.

  “What will you have, Alan? You don’t mind me calling you Alan, do you? It’s such a nice name. You’re English, I presume.”

  “American.”

  “Same thing. What would you like?”

  “Er … a coffee.”

  “Oh, come on, do have some champagne. Georges, two glasses, please!”

  Late in the afternoon, the terrace at the Deux Magots was packed, with tourists as well as with regulars who were obviously used to talking to one another across the tables. As predicted, Christine Vespalles was wearing a monumental hat, pale pink with a veil and a fuchsia-colored bird on the side. Dressed all in pink and very elegant despite her eccentric garb, she was a good 70 years old even if she had the spirit and spark of a 20-year-old.

  “Raymond told me you were interested in Jacques.”

  “Jacques?”

  “‘Tell him all you know about Lacan,’ Raymond said, and I replied, ‘Darling, you’re underestimating the extent of my knowledge of the subject! The whole night wouldn’t be enough, and I don’t know how much time Alan has.’”

  “In fact, what interests me very specifically is his relationship with another psychiatrist, Igor Dubrovski.” I told her about the article I’d read.

  “Oh, Lacan and Dubrovski! You could write a novel about those two and their perpetual rivalry!”

  “Their rivalry?”

  “Of course! You have to call a spade a spade, and their relationship a rivalry! Lacan was jealous of Dubrovski, that was clear.

  “Jealous, but at what period?”

  “In the 1970s, when Dubrovski was becoming known.”

  “But Jacques Lacan was already famous and recognized, wasn’t he? It was at the end of his life. How could he be jealous of someone young and virtually unknown?”

  “You have to put it in the context of the time. Lacan was the key figure in psychoanalysis in France. Psychoanalysis being what it is, people thought it was natural for a patient to spend fifteen years on a couch talking about his problems. Then one day a young Russian comes along and solves his patients’ problems in a few sessions. He upsets things somewhat, don’t you see?”

  “Perhaps the patients weren’t treated in depth,” I suggested.

  “That I have no way of knowing. The fact remains that a patient suffering from a phobia—I don’t know, fear of spiders, for example—had a choice between fifteen years on the couch with Lacan or thirty minutes with Dubrovski. Which would you choose?”

  “So Lacan was jealous of the results obtained by Dubrovski?”

  “Everything. One was old, the other young. Lacan was an intellectual who had a theoretical approach and published books. Dubrovski was a pragmatist preaching action and seeking results. And then, there’s the origin of their different theoretical models.”

  “You mean the methods they used?”

  “Yes. Psychoanalysis is a European invention. Dubrovski was the pioneer in France of cognitive therapies from the States.”

  “How was that a problem?”

  “Let’s say it was a period when anti-Americanism was the norm in intellectual circles. But that’s not all, you know. They were also separated by money.”

  “Money?”

  “Yes, Dubrovski was rich, very rich. A family fortune. That wasn’t the case for Lacan, who obviously had a problematic relationship with money.”

  She took a sip of champagne.

  “In fact,” she went on, “I think Lacan became completely obsessed with Dubrovski. Jealous of the speed of the younger man’s sessions, he began to shorten his own. At the end, when a patient arrived in Lacan’s consulting room, he had barely opened his mouth when Lacan interrupted him and said, ‘Your session is over.’”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “That’s not all. He was so jealous of Dubrovski’s fortune that he started to increase his own rates exorbitantly. Lacan was known to charge five hundred francs, a considerable sum at the time, for a few minutes’ session. When one of his patients protested, he grabbed her handbag to take out the money himself. Poor Jacques: He’d really lost it.”

  I took a sip of champagne, savoring its delicate taste and aroma.

  “The great pity,” she went on, “is that if Lacan had simply ignored Dubrovski, everyone would have forgotten him.”

  “Dubrovski? Why? If he got better results …”

  “Oh, my poor friend, only an American would ask that question. You value results. In France, we admire intellect. Results seem almost secondary.”

  She rummaged in her handbag, pink crocodile to match her outfit, and extracted a paperback book.

  “Here! I brought you this. Open it at random and read a passage.”

  I took the book, which was signed by Jacques Lacan, and opened it in the middle. I glanced down the page.

  “It’s incomprehensible, but then I’m not a psychologist.”

  “I assure you, psychologists don’t understand it either. But this is France—the less people understand what you’re talking about, the more you are taken for a genius. So just imagine Dubrovski, with his very practical, pragmatic side, his tasks to be carried out. He looked almost stupid next to Lacan.”

>   At that moment, I moved my hand and knocked over my glass. Champagne spilled on the table, then dripped onto my shoes.

  “Now that’s something Lacan couldn’t have endured,” Madame Vespalles said.

  “Spilling champagne on his feet?”

  “I should say. He was fanatical about shoes.”

  I shuddered.

  “Fanatical about shoes?”

  “His passion! He was capable of slipping out of his consulting room by a hidden door between sessions, leaving his next patient sitting in the waiting room while he went to buy himself a pair of shoes. Bizarre, isn’t it?”

  44

  LET’S JUST SUPPOSE that young François Littrec committed suicide. He had two doctors, one of whom was Igor Dubrovski. Jacques Lacan, jealous of Dubrovski, does all he can to bring about his rival’s downfall. Under a pseudonym, he writes an extremely hostile article in Le Monde to denounce Dubrovski’s methods. He also visits the young man’s parents to manipulate them into accusing Dubrovski of murder. Then, having failed to get his colleague convicted by a court, Lacan nonetheless influences the medical council to take away his license, ending a promising career that had become an annoyance. But if Igor Dubrovski really was innocent in this business, how to explain all the shady areas that remained? Why attract, through his article on the right to suicide, depressives to the Eiffel Tower, where he could then pick them up before they carried out their plan? The better to manipulate them? To obtain promises from them? For what purpose? And how to explain the notes he took on me before my attempted suicide? And what about Dubrovski’s relationship with Audrey?

  Lost in thought, I was not following the proceedings at our Monday morning business meeting. With a certain animosity, Luc Fausteri and Grégoire Larcher were reviewing columns of figures projected on a screen—figures and more figures, then graphs, bar charts, pie charts. I felt light-years away from their concerns; all these barely intelligible results were foreign to me. Their voices seemed muffled, distant, incomprehensible. They sounded like two wardens in an asylum vehemently criticizing the assembled madmen for having chosen the wrong numbers on their lottery tickets. The inmates clapped. They must be masochists.