Isabelle Le Blanc, acquitted.
Jay stretches, snatches the camera out of her coat pocket and examines it from every angle. What was it doing at the bottom of the garbage in that garage on Gibson Street? Maybe Isabelle Le Blanc had simply lost it in a public place or sold it through the want ads. Maybe it was stolen from her. Maybe it was a combination of all those possibilities. Plenty of scenarios could explain how the camera might have gone from the (innocent until proven otherwise) hands of Isabelle Le Blanc into the (most likely criminal) ones of the Rokov gang.
Jay finishes her beer. Resists the urge to open another. She is losing the thread. Better turn off the computer and turn in. On the other hand, she could have another beer, try once again to read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. She starts to daydream. In two weeks, she turns forty. She wonders what the weather is like in Copenhagen. She mechanically scratches the label on the misty bottle.
Then she comes up with a fifth hypothesis. Isabelle may have lent the camera to someone in her circle, not knowing what would become of it.
Jay goes through Isabelle’s friends again. A lot of Danes, not many Le Blancs. The account suggests a family that has drifted apart, and everyone has lost touch with each other. Perhaps Isabelle is an only child. Even better: the only child of parents who had no siblings either—no uncles, aunts or cousins in the picture. A modern family. In any event, Isabelle has surrounded herself with friends who don’t exactly look like a group of radical Islamists. This Hilse could easily be a ballroom dancing instructor, and this one, Karl, you could lay odds that he enjoys salmon fishing, and Bjørn, here, no doubt collects hockey cards.
Click by click, Jay arrives at the profile of Isabelle’s son, Éric. Éric Le Blanc, twenty years old, max. He looks like a younger version of his mother and bears the same surname, suggesting that Anker is his stepfather. The young Éric probably left Quebec at the same time as Isabelle, when he was still a minor, which means his biological father is completely out of the picture. Disappeared? Drug problem? Premature death? It’s hard to draw conclusions merely from a Facebook account. What’s more, Éric appears to keep quite a low profile. His statuses are in Danish and deal with a company called Weiss PSL.
Jay automatically goes to the company’s site, and all at once the sky splits open and floods the room with light. Weiss PSL is in the business of intermodal logistics. On the home page, containers, gantry cranes, trucks and still more containers are on parade, a veritable orgy of containers, containers at night, at sunset and in the mist, photographed by keen-eyed professionals alive to the poetry of industry.
Jay trembles and watches the photos march past, too stunned even to smile. All these containers and container ships and lift trucks and gantry cranes. Never. Has she seen. Anything. More beautiful.
LISA NOW LIVES SURROUNDED BY tools in a rundown one-bedroom flat.
Every time she visited her father over the past months, she hoped he’d forgotten the whole business, but no. He forgets to take his medications, to eat, to change his underwear, he forgets the names of his neighbours, of the place he is in, he forgets which day of the week it is, which season, but never once, whenever Lisa came to visit, did he neglect to load up the Honda with a mitre-box saw, a set of sockets, clamps, a crate full of screws, a gas welder. From now on, nothing else matters to him but this final mission: to pass on the family hardware to his only daughter.
Twelve times, fifteen times, Lisa has returned from Valleyfield with the Honda crammed to bursting and riding low on shock absorbers weighed down by hundreds of tools, instruments and blades. Her father’s tools gradually invaded all the free space in her little room, a corner of the living room and the shed on the balcony, until her housemates presented her with an ultimatum: this isn’t working anymore, the tools have to go.
And so Lisa’s new place is a stone’s throw from the Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church, on the top floor of a crumbling three-storey building. She doesn’t really have more living space than before, but there’s no one complaining about stubbing a big toe against a plane.
It’s been barely twenty-four hours since she moved in; she hasn’t had time yet even to hang up the roll of toilet paper. She climbs the stairs, teetering a little, with her last carton. She has just spent the day at the Domaine Bordeur because of a medical appointment, and her father seized the opportunity to unload a last volley of tools on her. The workshop is empty now, except for the workbench and a cast iron surface planer that weighs half a ton.
For once, her father appeared quite calm, almost serene. He had just closed an important chapter and could finally let go.
Lisa opens the door to her apartment and flicks the light on with her shoulder. There are tools everywhere—in the corridor, in the bedroom, piled up to the ceiling in the living room—and the air is permeated with the smell of resin and machine oil. Lisa keeps telling herself the situation is temporary, but the truth is, no solution has come to mind. She has a storage locker in the basement, but it’s too damp to store anything there.
She walks along the corridor to the kitchen, strides over the tools, bumps her feet against the unscrewed heating grate. Her computer sits on the counter, between the microwave and a pyramid of canned food. She pours herself a large glass of milk and launches Skype. After a minute, Éric appears on the screen wearing a quasi-invisible headset straight out of a science fiction movie. He was waiting for Lisa’s call while drinking his second cup of coffee.
“Does the doctor have a diagnosis?”
She shakes her head and drains her glass in one go. “Apparently it’s the kind of disease that gets diagnosed in the autopsy.”
“Delightful.”
“They’re trying a new drug, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Momentary silence. Lisa starts to pour herself another glass of milk but instead opens the last bottle of beer. Éric raises an eyebrow.
“And the new apartment—how is it?”
“Poorly insulated.”
“Electric baseboard heaters?”
“No. There’s a kind of central furnace, in the basement, but I’m starting to think it doesn’t work. Can you hold on a minute? I’m gonna put on a sweater.”
She goes down the corridor, strides over the tools, bumps her feet against the unscrewed heating grate (she makes a mental note to screw it down, but first she has to find a screwdriver), pulls on a sweater and comes back.
“The landlord is a numbered company. My neighbour tells me they haven’t done any repairs in ten years. They buy dilapidated buildings and wait until they collapse to collect the insurance money and build condos.”
“Speculating on catastrophe.”
“Hm.”
“I don’t understand why you moved.”
“The tools, my dear. The tools.”
“You could have rented a storage space and stayed in your old apartment. Even if you factor in the fees for the storage, it would have cost you less.”
Lisa doesn’t know what to say. Her life is not an Excel spreadsheet; the numbers don’t necessarily have to balance. Maybe she just wanted to finally have her own space. The tools provided a convenient pretext; the cost was a secondary consideration. What’s more, she’s declined Éric’s many offers of financial aid. Her apartment may be broken-down, but her ego is made of reinforced concrete.
Éric also moved, two weeks ago. Despite Lisa’s repeated requests, he still refuses to show her around the property. However, she did notice several monitors and enormous bay windows. The beast has taken up residence in a control tower.
“You know, I don’t understand, either, why you moved. Your room in the attic was pretty nice. I liked the rafters. Were you and your mother not getting along anymore?”
“We got along just fine, she and I. I moved for tax reasons. If you want all the details, I can put you in touch with my accounting department.”
Éric announces he’s going to make himself a third cup of coffee. He disappears for a minute, and she can hear cup
s clinking, steam hissing. A budgie flits across her field of vision. He comes back with a steaming macchiato that Lisa greets with an admiring whistle.
“The good life! It hardly looks as if you’re the head of an empire.”
“I delegate.”
“Isn’t that a cliché?”
“I swear, both of my companies get by quite well without me. I’m still amazed. I do three or four video conferences a week, I’m couriered papers that need signing and that’s about it. Everything runs on automatic pilot.”
“Retirement sounds pretty sweet.”
The question of retirement is a running joke between them, even though, in reality, there’s nothing to laugh about. Éric is bored stiff. He lacks stimulation. For the past few months, his free time has been devoted to creating a new company, a curiosity called eQ, but for the time being it’s just an empty shell. Éric has hired just one assistant and a programmer, both part-time. The new company serves mainly as an excuse to doodle on a whiteboard with a blank look on his face.
Lisa wonders how you can run three companies, be a multi-millionaire and still be bored. This must be one of the downsides of achieving success at the age of eighteen.
Monday, 8:30 a.m. Lisa wakes with a start. There’s no time for breakfast, no time to take the bus. She jumps into a pair of jeans, strides over a box of shaper cutters, grabs her backpack, her computer and her course notes.
Outside, the temperature has dropped another few degrees. It feels like snow. On the way, Lisa buys a coffee and a muffin at the Colmado Real, and then climbs into her car, whose starter has been groaning more and more insistently. Chronicle of a breakdown foretold.
When she steps into the hardware store five minutes late, brown paper bag in hand, she gets the distinct impression that, as the saying goes, “nobody gives a shit.” She could be ten, twenty or forty minutes late—at her discretion. Business has been slow of late, the phrase of late referring to the last ten years.
“Morning, Ed!”
“ ‘ning.”
For nine months now, Lisa has been working at the HardKo hardware, and she still doesn’t understand why she was hired. Edwin Schwartz belongs to that breed of shop owner who doesn’t need employees or customers. He has the personality of a prophet and the looks of Isaac Asimov, and he spends his days in a tiny office on the mezzanine overlooking the sales area. He arrives early in the morning, goes home late at night and never leaves his office unless it’s absolutely necessary.
The hardware store has been at the same address since 1954. Although the fixtures and fittings have never been modernized, the shop has the reputation of carrying extremely rare securing systems and is thus assured of the fanatical patronage of aircraft and sewing machine technicians. Behind the cash register, in a tarnished frame, hangs a photo of the Pioneer 12 space probe. Legend has it that in the spring of 1976 Schwartz senior provided NASA with three tungsten-cobalt alloy screws, which are presently in orbit around Venus.
There is nothing terribly exotic to be found on the ground floor shelves; all the specialized material occupies an occult section situated below ground level, where Lisa herself is not authorized to enter. When a customer asks for ten 17-millimetre, number six, niobium Torx screws, it’s Edwin who, holding his set of keys, leaves the mezzanine muttering Biblical imprecations, unlocks the door and goes down to the cellar.
Lisa would willingly venture down there from time to time. It would make for a welcome change of place.
She hangs up her coat with a sigh. This day is going to be like all the days before, she can feel it. Work eight hours at the hardware store. Place screws on the shelves. Study for a math exam. Do the laundry. Go to Huntingdon. Help her father. Fill up the tank. Drive back from Huntingdon. Chat with Éric. Jog five kilometres. Talk to her mother. Promise to see her soon. Eight hours at the hardware store. Tell white lies. Eat ramen, drink coffee. Go to Huntingdon and back. Discuss dirty laundry with the CLSC nurse. Wash the dishes. Let the week roll by. The weeks. The months. Wonder about the meaning of life. Brood.
Lisa lives her life in the imperative.
She takes up her position at the cash register. Generations of forearms and packets of screws have polished the venerable wooden counter; you take your seat behind this piece of furniture as you would at the helm of History itself. She looks at the menu of the day: sort out the merchandise delivered yesterday afternoon. Nothing important, otherwise Ed would already have taken care of it. So it can wait another ten minutes.
She unrolls the paper bag and takes out the muffin. No sooner has she lifted the lid of the coffee cup than her mobile phone rings. Private number. At the other end, a husky female voice asks for Élisabeth Routier-Savoie.
“Yes, speaking,” Lisa answers as she bites into the rim of her muffin.
“Sergeant Perrault of the Sûreté du Québec. Are you the daughter of Robert Routier?”
ON THE XENAKISES’ FLOOR, the squabbles have grown more frequent and more intense. Coincidentally, it’s been several days since a buyer came by to visit the apartment. There’s a downward price adjustment in the air.
Jay is oblivious—too preoccupied with the Éric Le Blanc case. It turns out the young man is a celebrity of sorts, not just in Denmark but in the global subculture of intermodal transportation as well. Jay has just spent two days digging up dozens of articles on gossip and business sites; articles in English, Portuguese, German, Dutch, and a large number of articles in Danish, all translated using translation engines. Jay now knows that the Danish word for container is skibscontainer, that portalkran is a gantry crane, and that bølgede galvaniseret stål means galvanized corrugated steel.
Éric Le Blanc, with or without the accent, sometimes spelled Erik as per the journalist’s whims, and occasionally converted to Erik Weiss for local colour, attracted public attention early on as a programming prodigy. He arrived in Copenhagen at age fifteen and, despite having almost no grasp of the local language, quickly secured a number of contracts. Years later, some of his clients admitted they had never met their mysterious partner in person and knew practically nothing about him, especially not his age.
Éric works and has fun, hardly distinguishing between the two. Thanks to one of his early contracts, he discovered a passion for the shipping industry. In his spare time, he developed a management tool midway between reality and fiction. His work has been compared to an intermodal SimCity, where containers, terminals and ships are like the neighbourhoods of a vast moving metropolis.
After two years, he gave up freelancing and founded his first company. XYNuum offered a software suite enabling “the vertical and horizontal integration of the different spatiotemporal dimensions of the intermodal continuum.” Still SimCity but translated into business jargon. Not only did the financial crisis not hurt him, it actually helped him to expand his share of the market. All across the globe, hundreds of thousands of empty containers lay stacked in terminals, hibernating. The industry needed to optimize every detail of its operations, and young Éric’s customers soon included a few behemoths like Maersk and CMA CGM.
A year later, the kid celebrated his eighteenth birthday and sold XYNuum for 190 million euros. He could have retired, but he didn’t.
In the ensuing years, he founded a number of companies, among them Weiss PSL (container terminal management), T2T (refrigerated container tracking) and eQ, a micro-company whose function remains unclear. Despite searching high and low on the Web, Jay has found no information on this company; there is no way to find out what goes on there or even where its offices are. No website, no postal address, no telephone. Oh well.
Aside from his professional activities, Éric Le Blanc has made generous donations to a host of Danish organizations helping homeless youth, drug addicts and people with mental health issues, and has established various scholarships and funds to encourage emerging talent in the fields of science and technology.
In spite of his philanthropy, Éric appears to keep his distance from society. Many arti
cles underscore that he has no known political affiliations and has never made any statements about the country’s public or economic affairs. He turns down most requests for interviews, never speaks in public and does not belong to any club or chamber of commerce.
In short, he would seem like a somewhat bland young man were it not for the scores of rumours and urban legends circulating about him.
The only one that has been confirmed is that for years his agoraphobia has kept him from leaving his house. He conducts absolutely all his operations from inside the private sphere, and, what’s more, because very few photos of him have come to light, his situation is paradoxical: he was ranked eighth in the annual list of the most famous Danes under thirty, but he could go out in the street without running the risk of being recognized.
The more articles Jay reads, the more dissatisfied she grows. This Éric Le Blanc would be the ideal suspect if only he could leave his house. The question remains, why would a young software genius residing in Copenhagen come spend his vacation in an old garage in the Saint-Laurent industrial park?
Reviewing the press eventually becomes repetitive; Jay drags the bottom of the Web and discovers a variety of tidbits concerning Éric Le Blanc. An abandoned blog in which he published a manual on the art of launching a balloon into the stratosphere. An abandoned Flickr account filled with shots of budgies taken with an infrared camera. An abandoned GitHub account containing a plan for a drone piloting application. An abandoned Twitter account with three insipid tweets. This avenue looks more and more like a series of dead ends.
Jay falls back on the young prodigy’s 103 Facebook friends, an altogether modest number, given his celebrity. Yet these 103 represent a substantial number of trails to be combed, probed and classified, and while Jay still does not feel a great affinity for manual labour, no part of this chore can be automated. She is reduced to slogging through the Scandinavian names while questioning everything, including things that should be obvious, such as this Asløg, whose profile picture is a sequoia—is (s)he a man or a woman?
Six Degrees of Freedom Page 13
