Jean-Yves, meanwhile, feeling a little depressed after he left us, had parked on the Avenue de la Republique. The excitement of the day had subsided. He knew that Audrey would not be home, but he was actually rather glad of that. He would run into her briefly tomorrow morning, before she went out rollerblading. Since coming back from vacation, they slept in separate rooms. Why go home? He pushed back in his seat, thought about finding a station on the radio dial but didn't. Gangs of young people, boys and girls, went past on the street. They looked like they were having fun, or at least they were yelling. Some of them were carrying cases of beer. He could have gotten out and mingled with them, maybe started a fight. There were many things he could have done. In the end, he would go home. In some sense he loved his daughter. At least he supposed he did; he felt for her a primal, almost blood-bespattered, emotion that corresponded to the definition of the word. He felt nothing of the kind for his son. In fact, the boy might not even be his, making his reasons for marrying Audrey rather insufficient. For her, at any rate, he felt nothing more than contempt and disgust—too much disgust, in fact, as he would have preferred to feel indifferent. This state of indifference was probably the only thing he was waiting on before filing for divorce. At the moment, however, he still keenly felt that she should be made to pay. I'm more likely to be the one to pay, he thought suddenly and bitterly. She would get custody of the children, and he would be landed with huge alimony payments. Unless he tried to get custody of the children, unless he fought her on that. But no, he decided, it wasn't worth it. It would be too rough for Angelique. He would be better off on his own, when he could try to "start a new life," which meant, more or less, find some other girl. Saddled with two kids, Audrey would have it tougher, the bitch. He consoled himself with the thought that it would be hard for him to do worse, and that, at the.end of the day, she would be the one to suffer as a result of the divorce. She was already no longer as beautiful as when he had met her. She had style and dressed fashionably, but, knowing her body as he did, he knew she was already over the hill. On top of that, her career as a lawyer was far from being as brilliant as she made it out to be, and he had a feeling that having custody of the children would not help matters. People drag their progeny around with them like a ball and chain, like some terrible deadweight that hinders their every move—and that, as often as not, effectively winds up killing them. He would have his revenge later, at the point, it occurred to him, when it had become a matter of complete indifference to him. For some minutes more, parked near the bottom of the now-deserted avenue, he practiced feeling indifferent. His worries came crashing down on him all at once as soon as he had walked through the door of the apartment. Johanna, the baby-sitter, was sprawled on the sofa watching MTV. He hated this listless, absurdly trendy preadolescent. Every time he saw her, he wanted to slap her, if only to wipe the jaded expression off her nasty, sulking, insipid face. She was the daughter of one of Audrey's friends. "Everything OK?" he shouted. She nodded casually. "Could you turn that down?" She looked around for the remote control. Exasperated, he turned the television off. She shot him a hurt look. "What about the children, everything go all right?" He was still shouting, though there was no longer a sound in the apartment. "Yeah, I think they're asleep." She curled up, a little scared. He went up to the second floor and pushed open the door to his son's bedroom. Nicolas looked around at him abstractedly, and then went back to his game of Tomb Raider. Angélique, on the other hand, was sleeping like a log. He went downstairs, a little calmer. "Did you bathe them?" "Yeah—No, I forgot." He wandered into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. His hands were shaking. On the counter, he saw a hammer. A slap wouldn't have been enough for Johanna; smashing her skull in with a hammer would be much better. He toyed with this idea for a while; thoughts crisscrossed his brain rapidly, barely controlled. In the hallway, he noticed in terror that he was holding the hammer. He placed it on a low table and looked in his wallet for the baby-sitter's taxi fare. She took it, mumbling thanks. He slammed the door behind her in a gesture of uncontrolled violence. The sound reverberated through the entire apartment. Something was clearly not right in his life. In the living room, the liquor cabinet was empty; Audrey wasn't even capable of looking after that. Thinking of her, a wave of hatred coursed through him, surprising him with its intensity. In the kitchen he found an open bottle of rum; that would probably do. In his bedroom he dialed in turn the numbers of three girls he had met on the Internet, getting an answering machine each time. They had probably gone out, fucking for their own pleasure. They were certainly sexy, cool, and fashionable, but they were costing him two thousand francs a night, which was humiliating after a while. I low had he come to this? He should go out, make friends, spend less time on his work. He thought about the Aphrodite clubs again, realizing for the first time that it might be difficult to get the idea past his superiors—there was a fairly negative attitude to sex tourism in France at the moment. Obviously, he could try getting a toned-down version past Leguen, but Espitalier wouldn't be fooled; he sensed a treacherous shrewdness in the man. Anyway, what choice did they have? Their midmarket positioning made no sense up against Club Med —he would have no problem in proving that. Rummaging through his desk drawers, he found the Aurore mission statement, drafted ten years earlier by its founder and displayed in every hotel in the group:
The spirit of Aurore is the art of marrying know-how, tradition, and innovation with rigor, imagination, and humanism to attain a certain form of excellence. The men and women of Aurore are the repositories of a unique cultural heritage: the art of welcoming. They know the rituals and the customs that transform living into an art, and the simplest of services into a privileged moment. It is a profession, it is an art; it is their gift. Creating the best in order to share it, getting in touch with the essential through hospitality, devising spaces of pleasure: these are what make Aurore a taste of France that is revered throughout the world.
He suddenly realized that this nauseating spiel could just as easily apply to a chain of well-run brothels. Maybe there was a card here he could play with the German tour operators. Defying all reason, Germans still thought of France as the country of romance, of masters of the art of love. If a major German tour operator agreed to include the Aphrodite clubs in its catalogue, it would mark a turning point: no one in the industry had yet succeeded in achieving such a thing. He was already in contact with Neckermann over the sale of the North African clubs. But there was also TUI, which had turned down their initial approaches because it was already well established in the bottom end of the market; it might be interested in a more narrowly targeted product.
11
First thing Monday morning, he set about making some initial approaches. From the start, he was hicky: Gottfried Rembke, president of the board of TUI. was coming to spend a few days in France at the beginning of the month. Rembke would pencil them in for lunch. In the meantime, if they could put their proposal in writing, he would be delighted to give it his careful consideration. Jean-Yves went into Valerie's office to tell her the news; she froze. TUI's annual gross was twenty-five billion francs, three times that of Neckermann, six times that of Nouvelles Frontières; they were the largest tour operator in the world. They devoted the rest of the week to writing up a sales pitch that was as detailed as possible. The project didn't require substantial financial investment. There were some small changes in furnishings; the hotels would definitely have to be redecorated to give them a more "erotic" feel. They had quickly settled on the term "friendly tourism," which would be used in all of the business documentation. Most important, they could expect a significant reduction in their fixed costs: no more sporting activities, no more children's programs. No more salaries to be paid to registered pediatric nurses, to windsurfing, archery, aerobics, or diving instructors, or to specialists in ikebana, ceramics, or painting on silk. After running a first financial simulation, Jean-Yves realized to his surprise that, allowing for depreciation, the annual costs of the
clubs would drop by a whopping 25 percent. He redid the calculations three times and each time got the same result. It was all the more impressive because the catalogue rates he intended proposing were 25 percent above the category norm—essentially pegging the rates with those of the midrange Club Med. Profits leapt by 50 percent. "Your boyfriend's a genius," he told Valérie, who had just come into his office.
The atmosphere in the office at this time was a little strained. The clashes that had taken place on the streets of Évry the previous weekend were by now a familiar story, but the death toll—seven —was particularly high. Many of the employees, especially those who had worked there longest, lived in the vicinity. At first they had lived in apartment buildings that had been built at much the same time as the offices; later, as often as not, they had borrowed in order to build. "I feel sorry for them," Valérie told me, "I really do. They all bought their places in order to get out of town, live somewhere peaceful, but they can't just leave now, they'd end up losing a chunk of their pensions. I was talking to the switchboard operator, who has three years before she retires. Her dream is to buy a house in the Dordogne; she's from there originally. But a lot of English people have moved there, and the prices there now are outrageous, even for some miserable dump. And on the other hand, the price of her house here has collapsed, since everyone knows that it's a dangerous suburb nowadays. She'd have to sell it for a third of its value. "Another thing that surprised me is the second-floor secretarial pool. I went up there at half past five to get a memo typed up, and they were all on the Internet doing their shopping. They told me that they all do it that way now. It's just safer to go home, lock themselves in, and wait for the delivery man."
In the weeks that followed, this obsessive fear did not fade. If anything, it increased slightly. In the papers now, it was professors being stabbed, schoolteachers being raped, fire engines attacked with Molotov cocktails, handicapped people thrown through train windows because they had "looked the wrong way" at some gang leader. Le Figaro was having a field day. Reading it every day, you got the impression of an unstoppable escalation to civil war. True, this was an election year, and law and order was the only issue likely to hurt Lionel Jospin's chances. In any case, it seemed very unlikely that the French would vote for Jacques Chirac again. He seemed to be such an idiot, it was affecting the country's image. Whenever you saw this lanky half-wit, hands clasped behind his back, visiting some country fair, or taking part in a heads-of-state summit, you felt sort of sorry for him. The Left, obviously incapable of curbing the rising tide of violence, behaved well, kept a low profile, agreed that the figures were bad, very bad even, called on others not to make political capital of it, and reminded people that when they'd been in power, the Right hadn't done any better. There was just one little slip, a ridiculous editorial by one Jacques Attali. According to him, the violence of young people in the projects was a "cry for help." The shop windows stocked with riches in Les Halles and the Champs-Elysées, he wrote, constituted so many "obscene displays flaunted at their misery." Neither should it be forgotten that the suburbs were a "mosaic of peoples and ethnicities, who had come with their traditions and their beliefs to forge new cultures and to reinvent the art of living together." Valérie stared at me in surprise: this was the first time I had burst out laughing while reading L'Express. "If he wants to get elected," I said, handing her the article, "Jospin would be well advised to shut him up until after the primaries." "You're clearly getting a taste for strategy ..."
Despite everything, I too was beginning to feel anxiety gnawing at me. Valérie was working late again, and it was rare for her to get home before nine o'clock. It might be wise to buy a gun. I had a contact, the brother of an artist whose exhibition I had organized two years before. He wasn't really part of the scene, he'd just been involved in a couple of scams. He was more of an inventor, a sort of jack-of-all-trades. He had recently told his brother that he'd discovered a way to forge the new identity cards, the kind that were supposed to be impossible to replicate. "Out of the question," Valérie said immediately. "I'm not in any danger: I never leave the office during the day, and at night I always take a cab home, regardless of what time I leave." "There's still the traffic lights." "There's only one set of traffic lights between the office and the highway. After that, I take the exit at Porte d'ltalie and I'm practically home. And our area isn't dangerous." It was true: in Chinatown, strictly speaking, there were very few assaults or rapes. I didn't understand how they managed it. Did they have their own neighborhood watch? In any case, they had noticed us as soon as we moved in. There were at least twenty people around who regularly greeted us. It was rare for Europeans to move in here, and we were in a very small minority in our own building. Sometimes, posters written in Chinese characters seemed to extend invitations to meetings or parties, but what meetings? what parties? It's possible to live among the Chinese for years without understanding anything about the way they live. Nevertheless, I phoned my contact, who promised to ask around. He called me back two clays later. I could have a serious piece, in very good condition, for ten thousand francs. The price included a healthy quantity of ammunition. All I would have to do was clean it regularly to make sure it didn't jam if ever I needed to use it. I talked to Valérie again, who refused again. "I couldn't," she said. "I wouldn't have the courage to pull the trigger." "Even if your life was in danger?" She shook her head: "No," she repeated, "It's not possible." I didn't insist. "When I was little," she told me later, "I couldn't even kill a chicken." To be honest, neither could I, but as a man, it seemed significantly easier. Curiously, I was not afraid for my own sake. It's true that I had very little contact with the "barbarian hordes," except perhaps occasionally at lunchtime when I went for a walk around the Forum des Halles, where the subtle infiltration of security forces (the riot squad, uniformed police officers, security guards employed by local shopkeepers) eliminated all danger, in theory. So I wandered casually through the reassuring topography of uniforms: I felt as though I was in the Thoiry Safari Park. In the absence of the forces of law and order, I knew, I would be easy prey, though of little interest. Very conventional, my middle manager's uniform had very little to tempt them. For my part, I felt no attraction for this youthful product of the "dangerous classes"; I didn't understand them, and made no attempt to do so. I didn't sympathize with their passions, or with their values. For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes, or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and nondesigner goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference, though it was an infirmity that I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one expect a blind man to set himself up as an expert on Postimpressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty. Their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms. It was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed. Thinking about it carefully, however, I had to admit that Valérie and Marie-Jeanne, the only two long-term female presences in my life, manifested a complete indifference to Kenzo blouses and Prada handbags. In fact, as far as I could make out, they bought any old brand at random. Jean-Yves, the highest-paid individual I knew, exhibited a preference for Lacoste polos, but he did it somewhat mechanically, out of habit, without even checking to see if the reputation of his favorite brand had been surpassed by some new challenger. Some of the women at the Ministry of Culture whom I knew by sight (though I regularly forgot their names, their job titles, even their faces, between each encounter) bought designer clothes, but they were invariably by yo
ung, obscure designers, each of whom had only one outlet in Paris, and I knew perfectly well that the women would not hesitate to abandon the designers if by chance they ever found a wider public. The power of Nike, Adidas, Armani, Vuitton was, nonetheless, indisputable; I could find proof of this whenever I needed simply by glancing through the business section of Le Figaro. But who, exactly—aside from youths in the projects —assured the success of these brands? Clearly there had to be whole sectors of society that were still alien to me, unless, more prosaically, they were bought by rich people in the third world. I had traveled little, lived little, and it was becoming increasingly clear that I understood little about the modern world.