Sila's Fortune (33 page)

‘I don't think so,' said Simon.

‘Sure you do. In fact you saw each other right here, a long time ago. Surely you can't have forgotten, Simon? I mean, you're the one who's so fond of victims. Ruffle gave some insolent waiter a hiding.'

The other man looked uncomfortable. This seemed to bring back memories.

‘Shoshana's not with you?' asked Matthieu.

‘No. You know how she is. Doesn't like to stray too far from home and with three kids, it's not easy I can tell you. What about you? How's the wife?' said Ruffle, eyeing up the bored young girl standing next to Matthieu.

‘Fine, fine. With a husband like me, what do you expect?' he joked.

Ruffle brandished his sledgehammer.

‘Well, I've got work to do. Catch you later, Hilland.'

At the name, Simon froze. For a moment, Matthieu looked a little embarrassed, then he regained his composure.

‘That's my new name. Hilland. John Hilland. Not bad, eh?'

Simon didn't respond. He needed to know.

‘She brought me everything, you know. Money, respectability, luxury. This is what I was born for: to satisfy my every
desire. I can't change now, you know that, we are what we are and my temperament was tried in the fire. No one in this world has been tried in the fire like I have, in the hell fire of desire, of energy and ambition. Desire is the only thing I believe in. My hand was made to grasp things. Material things, expensive things, objects. That is all that exists: things, and my hand to grasp them. And I grasped them. Not through intelligence, not through violence or crime. No, by sheer force of will. I went out into the world and carved out a place for myself.'

He shrugged and went on, ‘Thanks to you, thanks to Jane.'

Simon felt overwhelmed with disgust. True to form, Matthieu had betrayed him. But here he was flaunting his betrayal, inviting him to this hotel where it all started, so he could scream in his best friend's face that he had stolen his woman to take advantage of her money, to finally achieve his terrifying desire to exist. Looking back over the years Simon realised that this man's friendship could only be fulfilled through cruelty because the bottomless emptiness of his soul condemned him to destroy those closest to him. John Hilland despised those he loved and at this very moment as he confessed his betrayal, he probably loved his friend unconditionally. From Matthieu Brunel to John Hilland, the bastard had found himself and if Simon had loved Matthieu like a brother, like a curious, capricious double, an inverted twin, he loathed John Hilland with a contempt that was reassuringly simple. This man was not Matthieu. He might well be the true Matthieu, finally revealed by his incessant metamorphoses, his every contradiction merged into a repellent coherence, but the bond of brotherhood was broken.

His voice quavering slightly, Simon changed the subject: ‘I
hope at least some of your friends went bankrupt, if only to spice up your conversations.'

‘A couple, yes, but nothing serious,' Matthieu joked. ‘The most shocking thing was that there were no suicides. It's a clear sign of the lack of decorum in modern society. I mean, look at Ruffle, king of the subprime mortgage. He made his fortune at the expense of poor people who are homeless now, his debts were colossal, he even had to appear before the Senate Finance Committee. And what happened? A bank that had itself been bailed out by the US government bought out his company for a tidy little sum, probably not the billions it was notionally worth in the good old days, but enough to live on for several generations to come. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He can go on happily living with his wife and kids – by which I mean his mistresses and his kids, because his wife Shoshana is a depressive and she can't stand him, even if she can't bring herself to leave him. But, well, that's America for you: family is sacred. And I think that if Ruffle got divorced, his father would drown him in the swimming pool.'

‘I remember him very well,' Simon said with disgust. ‘What a pig! He punched that waiter for no reason at all.'

‘Yes. For no reason. But you didn't do anything, did you? You just carried on eating like everyone else. You accepted that man's humiliation. Or am I wrong?'

Simon raised his hand. A childlike gesture calling for peace. He didn't want to hear any more. He stammered an apology and walked away. He disappeared quickly into a long corridor and, suddenly stumbling across a sofa in a corner, slumped onto it. Images from his whole life whirled before his eyes: the faces
of Jane Hilland, Zadie Zale and others; the image of Matthieu, his erstwhile friend, raising a glass at the party they had jointly organised, just below the heavens in the golden age of the three terraces when nothing had mattered, when it had been enough to be friends and to live. How wonderful everything had been then, suspended in time and space, between earth and heaven, in the dazzling glare of youth. It was an ordinary story of betrayal, like so many others, and yet it was also his whole life, revised and corrected, distorted by bitterness and by the insistent, guilty and ultimately unendurable feeling that he had not done as he should have, that he had not been equal to the situation. The girl he had failed to seduce at the party, the young maths student that Matthieu had taken to his lair on the rooftops, and who had later found a partner, a husband, a man like him rather than like Matthieu, that girl was his life! It was life that he had failed to seduce, because he had been afraid of it, because he had shown himself incapable of being its partner, because he had stayed in his goldfish bowl. Just as he had allowed the waiter to be beaten in an incident of breathtaking social revelation, the rich man hitting the poor. The other man had simply sat down again looking affronted, when in fact he was revelling in having established his power, having demonstrated his apelike strength to his son, to his wife, to everyone present. Secretly satisfied. If he had really been a strong man – and he was all too aware that this belated remorse was pathetically weak, terribly pusillanimous, like children who in retrospect see themselves as gallant knights – Simon would have got up, gone over and broken the guy's nose. A punch, a single blow to break the bone. But he hadn't done so. He had
simply hesitated, glanced around him and then gone back to his meal, leaving the waiter to clamber to his feet amid the smashed crockery.

The strangest thing was that, of all his regrets, Jane's face was no more important than that of the young girl he had met only twice. She had probably cheated on him and he now understood why Matthieu had moved out of the apartment so suddenly. But Jane had at least given him a feeling for living, a fleeting completeness which deep down, he realised, was the only truth. Feeling and experiencing as intensely as possible. He chuckled: was this what he was turning into, a mystic?

Simon got to his feet and, stumbling awkwardly, looked for the exit. He pushed at the wrong doors, turned down several dead-end corridors before finding the grand lobby. And there, he stood open-mouthed.

They were destroying everything.

The party was over. The initial cheerfulness and jollity had turned, fuelled by alcohol, into a disturbing frenzy. Jaws clenched, muscles contracted round their sledgehammers, they pounded. They were breaking everything, mirrors, chandeliers, panelling, furniture. All these people had come from far-off countries to slake their thirst for carnage. They were drunk on their destruction. They hammered. They smashed. They shattered in a roar of annihilation. A barbaric pleasure came over them as they destroyed the old world.

Simon surveyed the scene, horrified and appalled. He walked across the lobby, invisible among these brutes, fleeing this orgy that sickened him. He stepped back into the street, whose darkness closed around him. And in the muffled echo
of the carnage, he walked along the pavement like a disoriented puppet, his footsteps making a dull thud. Abandoning all struggles, he hoped for nothing now but darkness and silence.

He was happy: he was vanquished.

I would like to thank my father, who has once again become one of my first readers, and my family for their support.

I would also like to thank the team at Le Passage, ever helpful and efficient, and my friends Julien Carmona and Emmanuel Valette for their precious information about the very precise world of finance – though this novel, of course, is entirely my responsibility.

Lastly, thank you to Caroline. For everything.