Apocalypse Baby (11 page)

It was Rafik too who went to tell our former boss that keeping tabs on teenagers would generate a lot of income, we should specialize in that before other people got in on the act. He was the first to bring a bugged telephone into the office
and to realize that its chief function wouldn't be for adultery cases. In those days, the divorce laws hadn't yet changed, but when they did, they'd make
in flagrante
redundant and at a stroke wipe out a big percentage of our clients. Rafik loves technology and he can predict where it's going to go. He was right. Mobile phones became extensions of teenagers' bodies. And their parents don't see why they shouldn't use them to know in real time what the kids are doing or saying, what messages they're sending and receiving, and where it's all going on. The growth in turnover was exponential. Reldanch was one of the first firms to handle this trade. In some ways it was because of Rafik's intuition that I was hired.

That morning, when I arrived, weighed down by the three-kilo hard disk in my handbag, I expected it would be like every time I have a request for the ground floor: they'd make me wait half an hour without even offering me a chair to sit on. In Rafik's team, being nice or welcoming is equivalent to displaying weakness. Their department keeps the whole firm afloat. Us, the people from upstairs, we're just a herd of dinosaurs, tolerated but in the way. But today, Rafik jumped up as soon as he saw me – before this, I don't think he's even troubled to say hello, it surprised me that he should be capable of recognizing me so easily. He acted as if we were old friends. I felt the team looking me up and down, one by one, without any benevolence, conveying a disagreeable mixture of envy and hostility.

Rafik asked me to sit on his right, at the end of the open-plan office. I therefore cleverly deduced that he'd been contacted by the Hyena and that she had been telling the
truth. She does know him, and well. I like getting this privileged treatment, but I'm surprised by the immediate ill will it has provoked towards me. I can feel the distrustful and hostile looks piercing my back.

I've never liked his team. Their little barbed remarks, their special language we don't understand, their unwillingness to speak, which comes more from a superiority complex than from shyness. I don't like the false jollity of the coloured gear they wear or the kind of glasses they choose. I don't like their twisted sense of humour. Their systematically racist remarks which you have to treat as deeply ironic so as to not be (horrors) politically correct, they're incapable of seeing anyone black, or Chinese, or Indian or Arab without making some reference to race. In Rafik's team in general they're free marketeers, they're happily pro-American, and see themselves becoming pro-Chinese, and they say all this in the tone of guys who aren't afraid to stand out from the crowd, aren't afraid to broadcast their opinions. Always on the side of whoever's in power, they like to think they're the subversive avant-garde. It perplexes me to think about the kind of France they seem to have dreamed up, in which collectivism and Bolshevism are the mothers of every vice. A relentlessly vegetarian France, full of interracial orgies, where every woman is ready to sodomize her neighbour, brandishing a Sandinista flag. As for having the courage to say out loud what no one else dares say, these young guys can't even pronounce the word ‘overtime' after spending three sleepless nights on the ground floor, and when someone tells them off, the gleam of hate behind their eyes has no chance of ever being fanned into the flames of rebellion, until the day pyromania gets on to the
school syllabus. They're against strikers, against demonstrators, against artists, and foreigners, against old people, public employees, and scroungers – but it doesn't bother them to collect housing or unemployment benefit whenever they can. Rafik talks dismissively to them, pays them badly, never thanks them, never congratulates them. Rafik treats them as they want to be treated, they respect him, and in return their work is impeccable. They have total scorn for anyone who doesn't work on their level, and we have ended up agreeing with them that we belong to the past.

Rafik is tapping furiously at his keyboard, you'd think he was launching a rocket. He mutters, ‘Don't worry, just a few minutes', which being interpreted means ‘you're just going to have to twiddle your thumbs alongside me all day long if we have to'. I want to be outside, I want to be back home, surfing the internet, I want to go and see a good film in a real cinema. I couldn't care less about what was on the computers of this family I don't know, who seemed perfectly odious when I went to see them. Their apartment put me off for a start. Too big, too clean, too grand. I'd vaguely prepared some questions: who she saw, where she went, her mother. Everything about François Galtan put me off: his snapped replies, his way of avoiding looking at me as if it was purgatory to have me in his house for five minutes, his whole attitude shouted, ‘Get out, you're incapable of finding my daughter.' The stepmother was less unpleasant, but in her politeness I sensed a class disdain that was even more humiliating. When she ended up admitting that she didn't get on too well with the kid, François Galtan rolled his eyes: ‘You're
her stepmother, God in heaven, when have the daughters of a first marriage ever got on with their stepmothers?' I didn't find out anything about the child's biological mother, they claim not to have had any news of her for over ten years. They were lying, but I didn't have the energy to insist. I just had one idea in my head. Get out of there as fast as possible.

Rafik gets up, and starts connecting various cables to the machine alongside his, then switches it on so that I can see what he's seeing. He speaks to me in an undertone, a hypnotic sound, typical of people who are doing two things at once. ‘To find the mother, I've got someone outside on the job, my team was all busy, it'll be faster and I'd rather it stayed between us. We'll have her details by tonight, I think.'

I agree, trying to look like the Queen of Cool. This is what it's like then, to be part of the privileged few: do sweet FA yourself, and let other people run round for you. I concentrate on the internet trawl which Rafik is now reading off aloud, as long lists scroll down on both screens. He starts with François Galtan's computer. I keep to myself the thought that comes to mind: we really don't care what the father's hard disk tells us. He's a pompous prick, but it's hardly likely he's got his daughter locked in the cellar, and even if he was that kind of man, I doubt he'd boast about it on the internet. Rafik explains that what's coming up are the searches the father does online.

A whole string of As with a yellow comma come up, I click on one of them and find I'm on the sales page for his last novel,
The Great Pyramid of Paris
. ‘What the hell's he doing on Amazon, looking at his own book thirty times a day?'

Behind us, a technician I hadn't noticed enlightens me,
not unhappy to reveal he's overheard everything we've been whispering. ‘He's looking up his ranking in sales figures, it changes every hour.'

I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to find he could put together a whole sentence without the words ‘firewall' or ‘router'.

‘I've got a pal who published an essay once. The sales rankings drove him crazy. He started placing orders for his own book. One a day. He tried not to, but if he saw his book slipping, he couldn't bear it. He'd ordered fifty copies before his mother hauled him off on holiday to the Caribbean, to a bungalow without an internet connection.'

‘Well, Galtan can't be ordering many of his, he's about seventy-seven thousandth. Not so good, is it? Perhaps we should buy a few. Poor guy, he's already lost his daughter.'

Rafik and the other kid burst out laughing, as if I'd displayed the most hilarious sense of humour. The assistant is laughing because I'm sitting at Rafik's right hand and Rafik is laughing because I've been sent by the Hyena. That must be it. A virtuous circle. Apart from this, the father looks up the book review pages of
Le Figaro
,
Les Echos
,
Bibliobs
,
L'Express
bestseller list,
Livres-Hebdo
and the kind of blog that rabbits on with great seriousness about Literature with a capital L. Galtan posts various shame-making contributions under different identities. It's quite easy to track him: ‘She's full of shit, she can go fuck herself in her big ass' was his obliging comment on one colleague. Completely self-confident, eh, a man who's not bitter, oh no, no personal hang-ups. The comments had all been posted
after
his daughter disappeared. Someone who doesn't let himself be easily distracted then.

I look through his inboxes. He has three addresses: one for activity as an author, almost entirely devoted to his press agent, whom he bombards with slightly flirtatious and falsely jocular messages: ‘I wonder why I haven't been invited to the radio programme
From the Bookshop
, since I understand it's about literature, and I happen to write books… I'm also asking myself if you're wearing that red dress that makes you look so fetching.' One wonders whether perhaps he'd like to be able to control himself and slow it down, but he sends her ten emails a day. If the girl has gaps in her press listings, he immediately jumps on them: he tells her what's out there, in any form of media, relating to novels. His second address is personal, for close friends and family. I can't find any mention here of his young daughter's disappearance. He simply tells people regularly that he's ‘feeling terrible' and cries off various parties, anniversaries or dinners. The third is a secret one, devoted to his mistresses, and he keeps every message. You can reconstitute for the last two years the clumsy and rather brief sequence of his consecutive mistresses, in order of breaking it off. He's a coward. When he dumps one of them – and he only does so when he's sure of a new one, no gaps between adulteries – he just stops answering, and there are plenty of messages from the rejected women, not even opened but saved to their files. Rafik is tackling the Word documents, versions of his CV, sketches for blurbs on the back of his books, the first few lines of a text about ‘Women', an official letter to the telephone company that hasn't cancelled his contract, and a few notes about Paris brothels of the last century. The fast succession of pages on the screen makes me feel sick, I want to take a break.

‘The only interesting thing is he doesn't mention his daughter at all.'

‘That's normal, he's a man, men don't like to moan.' He explains this to me as if I have never had the good fortune to observe at close quarters how life is lived by men, that little-known species of human being of whom we all know that they go through life standing tall and dignified, strong and silent. Rafik is opening the hard disk of the stepmother, and I get the impression now that I'm being punished. She is passionately interested in new recipes for roast duck, or beef, or lemon tart. She posts on mumsnets: pathetic little blogs about the books her daughters are reading. I'm already on automatic pilot when I move on to the emails. She sends a terrifying number of them. And she is soon talking about Valentine. ‘It's terrible to see her empty room.' Yes, we didn't expect her to announce right away that she's contemplating turning it into a dressing room for herself. ‘I hug my own daughters, praying never to be in this ghastly situation of not knowing where they are.' After thirty seconds' attention, I can already feel the sirens of total boredom calling me, but then if we go back a bit, just before the disappearance, it gets more interesting. ‘It's begun again. And in the kitchen again. She pushed me against the sink, shouting the most awful things, I'd just advised her to be a bit more careful what she eats, she called me all the names under the sun. Now I'm afraid when I hear her come into the house. She goes to her room without a word to me, but I know she's there, and I'm afraid any minute she's going to come out and hit me. I'm afraid at night before I go to sleep, I think, What if she got hold of a knife and came and cut my throat. François keeps
telling me not to worry, she'll get over it, but he's never seen her when she gets in a rage. She's unrecognizable, she's a monster.'

Rafik is silent, tense, opens all the emails one by one, and I'm sitting upright, my eyes riveted to the screen. Several sensations go through me, happiness at finding something, but also a certain pleasure in imagining that bitch in her beige body-warmer who looked down on me in her sitting room this morning, squirming against the kitchen sink, terrorized by her stepdaughter. ‘This morning Valentine slapped my face before she went to school. I know you'll say I should tell François and that I shouldn't stay here in the house with her. I spent all day crying.'

Rafik asks me at the same time as he reads: ‘What was she like, the stepmother?'

‘Well slappable.'

His fingers leave the keyboard for a moment and he turns to me. ‘If it was her bloke who was hitting her, you'd think that appalling, but when her stepdaughter does it, it's funny, is that it?'

‘No. Believe me, if her husband did it, I'd still think it was a good idea.'

Rafik hesitates, then smiles knowingly. I see I've scored some brownie points.

‘Doesn't surprise me to hear you're working with
her
then.'

I resist telling him that I grew up with a stepmother too, and it puts me pretty much on the side of any little wankerette who punches hers on the nose. Rafik discovers several exchanges between Claire and Madame Galtan senior, with
links to private psychiatric clinics: Switzerland, England, Canada, the States. They searched far and wide. Claire assures the grandmother that she'll press the case with the father, who seems resistant to the idea of having his little girl locked away. He's in denial, understandably, and luckily the two women are taking care of everything. Rafik holds out his hand towards me, as if I should congratulate myself about something. Still in an undertone, he tells me as he opens the last hard disk, ‘I'll leave you to work out the detail on your own, but it opens up a few avenues.'