Apocalypse Baby

by Virginie Despentes

  But she hadn’t stayed much longer in debt collecting. Too many rules, too much timekeeping, paperwork, trivial internal quarrels, egos squabbling in a teacup. She’d taken on fewer missions, plugged the gaps in her income by selling grass, then moved on to dealing in coke. Because of her former contacts in debt recovery, she was naturally contacted by the French intelligence services. A good-looker and fast talker, she had very long legs, a powerful motorbike, and the best suppliers in town… Within a year, her network was set up: politicians, sportsmen, doctors, actors, journalists, officials, hairdressers, prostitutes, traders, drivers. Apart from sex, nothing unites people like drugs. It wasn’t hard in the circumstances to get hold of various pieces of private information about the wife of a minister, the son of a left-wing singer, the neighbour of a captain of industry. Cocaine was the ideal vehicle to get her into every kind of milieu, and even those who weren’t users were willing to see her, there was always someone close to them who might be interested in the service she provided. Her appearance and her business fended off curious questions. No one asked what she was up to, why she was so interested in everyone’s affairs. Her androgynous looks were an advantage: the man of the house was always a little turned on by the thought that she might make a pass at the lady of the house before leaving the family sitting room. People didn’t enquire too closely into her life. But she did enquire closely into theirs, and knew who to pass her findings on to. The more information she delivered, the more protected her own racket became; the better able she was to carry it on with impunity, the better she could inform, and the more she was appreciated and introduced to new circles. She ran all over Paris, with wads of cash the size of Big Macs in one pocket and sachets of coke in the other. When she ran out of supplies, the narcotics squad helped her out. It was hard work – people siphoned the stuff up like crazy, she’d hardly got to a new address before she was being called back for more. It was well paid too. Those were the days: wherever she arrived, people were pleased to see her, even if she turned up five hours late.

  Waugheirt had moved her on to a higher level. Still passing intelligence. He had a dark comb-over on his bald head, and his long fingers, bristling with hairs, made his hands look like impatient spiders. He wore a wedding ring. She found it hard to believe that a woman could be in such deep shit that she’d want to share her life with him. He spoke slowly, like in films from the Far East, you had time to think of a hundred other things while he was explaining something. Waugheirt was ugly, yes, but he gave an impression of intelligence, deep concentration, an impression reinforced by his voice, which was amazingly deep and throaty. He said he’d spotted her and observed her at work. It was time for her to give up dealing, he said, give up the amateurism and the info picked up in exchange for trivial favours, small-time protection rackets or perks, flats belonging to the Paris city council, freebies. He thought she should work – without official cover – on more ambitious projects. Full-time, at the going rate. Which was quite a lot. Thinking to refuse the offer, she’d replied that Paris wasn’t short of double agents ready to do anything to get on the right side of French intelligence. ‘People aren’t that complicated. You just have to hint that someone in power’s behind you, and all they want is to go and brown-nose. So why me?’

  ‘You’re just a small-time dealer. How long can you go on doing this? You’re getting on for thirty, right? Someone younger will come along one day soon, and take your place in your “in” circles. You’re happy with what you can make from it for now. But everything could change if you’re willing to make the break.’

  Waugheirt had taken his wallet from his inside pocket, glanced at the bill, paid for the two coffees, leaving a small tip, but a tip all the same. Before standing up, he had added, soberly, ‘Why you persist in playing below your real level is your own business. I’ve got contacts. Everywhere else, to get a quarter the information you bring in calls for three times the work. And that’s not taking into account this disconcerting gift you have for knowing where to look.’

  She’d shrugged her shoulders, unconvinced by his argument. ‘But it’s no big deal.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Your “no big deal”, my dear child, is incredibly hard for common mortals. A gift isn’t to be trifled with. It’s an order to go on a mission. I advise you to take it on, while there’s still time.’

  He’d stood up and left her there. For a moment she’d felt like in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker gets his lungs blasted.

  It was logical. You want some information. You have three contacts in town, you think a bit, you concentrate, you relax, you ask questions, and that’s it. She was just a bit faster on the draw than the other people doing this kind of job, that’s all. On the ball people don’t often have to go through their neighbours’ dustbins. But the conversation had hit home: in fact, yes, for three months now, she’d found nothing out about anyone. She knew what he was talking about. It was her old history that was undoing her brain… She knew. Even if she carefully avoided being aware of it. She knew she had one GPS too many in her head that never stopped working.

  And often she got things wrong. Between a right and a wrong intuition there was no difference. They felt the same. She’d assumed it would come more into focus. But time had shown her that no, the more she tried to refine her talent, the less use she would be able to make of it. In the end, that was what had made the difference between an exceptional agent and herself.

  But she’d gone back to see Waugheirt, and he’d become her boss. He’d begun by giving her files on people’s networks. Easy: compile a dossier on someone without their noticing. She hadn’t had to try too hard. People liked to talk to her. She’d changed milieu. It was goodbye to the districts of Paris where the pavements were thronged with people, goodbye to smoke-filled bars frequented by prostitutes and addicts, goodbye to basements that were sordid but lived in, kitchens smelling of grease, and flea-infested bedsits. Now she only did trips to districts full of banks and town houses. She’d specialized in businessmen, politicians, industrialists… Waugheirt kept her at it, but he was a little disappointed. He had expected a more brilliant success. She didn’t care, because now she was making three times as much money. Then a journalist from Ivory Coast had gone missing in the centre of Paris, nobody explained to her why it was urgent to find him fast, but they took it very seriously. It had taken her three days to locate the place he was hiding out, in Canada. Getting hold of him physically was someone else’s job. Waugheirt had been so pleased that he patted her on the shoulder, the equivalent in his body language of a bear hug. It was as if someone had pointed out the zone to her on a map. Built-in compass. From then on, her name had become blue-chip. She’d started to play for high stakes, probably for the thrill of getting caught. Selling information commissioned by one person to someone else, or passing it to a third party. Selling false intelligence, playing a double game, making sure someone else would pay better. Protected. Always protected. It had lasted ten years. Of tightrope walking. The feverishness of the gambler. Raw emotion takes you close to disaster. Around her, accidental deaths started to become frequent, suicides, overdoses, unexpected fatalities from a minor infection, often after a stay in hospital. But as time passed, her talent was becoming worn out, following a curve inverse to that of her popularity.

  She had become too well-known in her milieu. She couldn’t turn up anywhere without people immediately knowing who she was. Even in the depths of Chechnya, a cub reporter could spot her at once. The Hyena’s here. In the circumstances, it was hard to keep on being a good agent. And she realized that for her, it was over.

  The evening she had met Lucie, she had only turned up to see the little brunette who hung around at Cro-Mag’s bar, and who was playing sufficiently hard-to-get to make it exciting. She didn’t feel she’d slipped so far down the rankings as to envisage seriously going after a missing kid. Still, it was a way to find out how Reldanch worked, pick up some information, keep in the loop… but on finding o
ut what Lucie looked like physically, she’d felt rather depressed: typical bog-standard straight girl, a bit scruffy, but not enough to show character. No fun, full stop. And then she’d seen the photo of Valentine. A bombshell of emotion, stunning and irrational. Something in the kid’s eyes had burst open her thoracic cavity. Nothing sexual, no, much more disturbing than that. A tailspin, out of control. Inexplicable but imperative. This little girl had called for her entire attention. She had to be found, it was impossible to define exactly what she had to be protected from, but the Hyena had immediately known that she had no choice, she had to get going. She had to see this kid. It was poorly paid work, not interesting, and she was teamed up with a dozy mollusc. On the trail of a little rich girl, indistinguishable from thousands of other mixed-up teenagers… but this one had called out to her. And yet the Hyena had understood almost at once that it would be no use. What was on the way was inevitable, but she had to go and take a closer look.

  Now she goes back into the church, finds the agreed place, front pew facing another crucifix on the right of the main door. Juan’s late. Always incapable of arriving on time at the rendezvous he’s arranged himself. One of the strategies of this poor man’s Anthony Blunt: he makes you wait, to make sure you need him enough to hang about for an hour. Juan is undeniably a genius, his memory above all is remarkable. His brain holds an encyclopedic amount of knowledge, he could beat anyone at Trivial Pursuit, but in the age of the internet, who cares if someone knows everything? Juan had arrived in Paris convinced he was going to have a brilliant career, and that his alpha-plus academic patter would wipe out his working-class origins. It had taken him a while to realize that the upper classes sense each other by smell, and spot intruders the same way. Try as he might to be invited to fashionable dinner parties, nobody had ever offered him the kind of work he’d dreamed of. Then he’d been run into by a smart alec from the secret services, who’d spotted him, and treated him well, in exchange for some gossip and a few nuggets of real information. Juan quickly realized he had become an informer, and the idea filled him with joy. He’d specialised in Zionist milieux. He’d been helped to find a suitable publisher, with whom he’d put out a book on the question. An attentive observer would have been surprised at the ease with which he managed to write articles in the newspapers and receive state grants. For a while, he’d published on subjects that interested his paymasters. His books got him entry to conferences, to book launches, to debates with specialists, and he wrote reports, not always very serious, on the chattering classes. He was well connected, so he provided good material. Informers are like prostitutes: made to believe they’re protected, that they’re irreplaceable and respected. But they can be quickly crossed off guest lists, nothing is sadder than a tart who’s been around the block one too many times. So he’d served his turn, survived a few months longer by specializing in placing comments on the internet. On current affairs, or personalities who were to be protected or attacked, depending on the orders he received: he bombarded the internet with messages. Then, overnight, probably after some kind of administrative shakeout, he’d been dropped like a stone, and offered up to exposure. The kind of thing that didn’t necessarily happen because one had made a mistake, it could just be because of a personnel reshuffle, different mood music, one’s face didn’t fit. So he had changed country. These days, he is an assiduous visitor to the Alliance Française, and passes on as best he can what the expats are up to in his neck of the woods. He must still be getting a few state grants for books yet to be written. By dint of playing the affable little Frenchman, politically active and turning up at all kinds of demos, he knows the city very well.

  He arrives a good half-hour late, stops at the threshold of the chapel, looks round, then comes to sit near enough for them to hear each other but not for anyone to realize they’re talking. Leaning forward, hands clasped, he’s looking straight ahead, at the altar.

  ‘There are a lot of French girls her age in Barcelona, not sure I’ve identified her.’

  ‘You got me all the way here to say that?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been told about a kid who could be her… but I’m not sure. She’s been seen several times, talking to a sister of the Mission of Charity.’

  ‘Sister of what?’

  ‘Remember the Mother Teresa look? Sandals, blue and white habit? It’s that lot, the Sisters of the Mission of Charity.’

  ‘Valentine? I think you may be barking up the wrong tree, you know.’

  ‘Well, it’s all I’ve got. A Sister Elisabeth. I’ve been told about her and a little French girl who looks like your one.’

  ‘Do they have a convent round here, these sisters?’

  ‘Not in Barcelona anyway. I’ve been trying to find out what they’re doing here. Perhaps they were taking part in an international seminar on emigration organized by Opus Dei last month. That’s all I know.’

  He’s lying, without trying to hide it.

  ‘Big help, what you’ve given me. Finding a nun in Barcelona…’

  ‘These nuns go round in a group, they’re not staying in a hotel, they must be being put up in a local convent. And there aren’t that many left, come to that.’

  He must have his reasons to send her chasing round all the convents in the region.

  The Hyena leaves the cathedral, in the streets you hear all the languages in the world. There are too many people for the surface of the city centre. She has to walk a long way to find an internet café, they’ve got rarer now that everyone has a laptop. She sits in front of a computer with a keyboard that’s been used so much that some of the keys are worn bare. She googles ‘Barcelona convent’ and orders a cortado.

  An hour in the train to get to the foot of the mountain. She’s opted for Montserrat. Because you should never pass up the chance to see a Black Virgin. Harsh sunlight. A range of giant stone mountains rising up from the ground stretches kilometres up into the sky.

  To reach the summit, you have to take a funicular. The trip seems long and oppressive, because of the deep ravine that the train climbs through. Slightly disappointing when you get to the top: a burger bar, a souvenir shop, cobbled streets. Less impressive than it looked from down below. A determinedly contemporary effort has been made to desacralize any place where your soul might take wing. Naked emotion without the mediation of shops would probably get in the way of selling knick-knacks.

  Most of the tourists have brought their children along, though it’s hard to see what fun a kid of three years old could have in this kind of place. They are either crying or running wild under the indulgent eyes of their mummies. Children are the authorized vectors of their parents’ anti-social behaviour. The adults roll their eyes, pretending to be unable to cope with the destructive vitality of their little ones, but it’s easy to see they’re happy to be able to get on everyone else’s tits with impunity via their progeny. What hatred of the world can have driven them to duplicate themselves so much?

  ELISABETH

  STANDING IN THE COURTYARD, ELISABETH listens with half an ear to the little Indian woman describing in her precise but unattractive English the attack on the convent of the Sisters of Charity which she had witnessed one night in Sukananda. Hundreds of men, armed with axes, clubs and knives, sacked the order’s building. The brothers and sisters had had time to take refuge a few kilometres away. Fundamentalist Hindus were demanding that the Christians get out of the region. Someone somewhere hadn’t been properly bribed. Things like that didn’t happen in Mother Teresa’s day. The Albanian nun knew where to find the best protection.

  It’s the tenth time in two days that the Indian woman has repeated her story, including the most sordid details. At first, it was very moving. But in the end, the sisters are wishing above all that she’d cut it short. Around her, they all exhibit the same patient smile. The level of sincerity behind the grimace varies from one to another. Not all of them are dead from the neck up. But others are, frankly, a bit touched. The austere mode of life to which they have submi
tted doesn’t rule out the ardent awakening of superior faith, but more often it encourages the most arid kind of idiocy. The day before yesterday, Elisabeth saw two of them praying that the doors of the truck into which they were supposed to be loading large refrigerators would get wider. On their knees in front of the trailer, fervently supplicating God, in his great goodness, to create a little extra space so that they could get the load in. You can get used to that, even, but it takes a lot of patience.

  Elisabeth observes the figure approaching the group. She recognizes it from a distance. She never forgets a face. She interrupts the Indian woman with a gentle gesture, excusing herself in order to walk away unaccompanied. Her juniors are used to it. She has her privileges. She walks with little steps, bending over. An elderly woman, slightly built, radiant and energetic, her face framed in the blue and white coif of the Sisters of Charity. The resemblance is striking. It makes you think right away of the famous Albanian. A closer examination of her features immediately destroys the illusion, but the point has been made: at her approach, people are already disarmed.