Inhuman Resources Read online

  Inhuman Resources

  Also by Pierre Lemaitre in English Translation

  Alex

  Irène

  Camille

  The Great Swindle

  Blood Wedding

  Three Days and a Life

  Rosy & John

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2010 by Pierre Lemaitre

  English translation © 2018 by Sam Gordon

  Jacket design by Richard Jones @ The Picture Production Company

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  eISBN 978-1-63506-083-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950985

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  To Pascaline

  To Marie-Françoise, with all my affection

  I belong to an unlucky generation,

  swung between the old world and the new,

  and I find myself ill at ease in both.

  And what is more, as you must

  have realized by now, I am without illusions.

  G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

  translated by Archibald Colquhoun

  CONTENTS

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  During

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  After

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  BEFORE

  1

  I’ve never been a violent man. For as long as I can remember, I have never wanted to kill anyone. The odd flare of the temper, sure, but never any desire to inflict proper pain. To destroy. So, when it did happen, I suppose it took me by surprise. Violence is like drinking or sex—it’s a process, not an isolated phenomenon. We barely notice it set in, quite simply because we are ready for it, because it arrives at precisely the right moment. I was perfectly aware that I was angry, but I never expected it to turn to cold fury. That’s what scares me.

  And to take it out on Mehmet, of all people . . .

  Mehmet Pehlivan.

  The guy’s a Turk. He’s been in France for ten years, but his vocabulary is worse than a ten-year-old’s. He only has two settings: either he’s shouting his head off, or he’s sulking. When he’s angry, he lets rip in a mixture of French and Turkish. You can’t understand a word, but you never doubt for a second what he means. Mehmet is a supervisor at Pharmaceutical Logistics, my place of work. Following his own version of Darwin’s theory, the moment he gets promoted he starts disparaging his former colleagues, treating them like slithering earthworms. I’ve come across people like him throughout my career, and not just migrant workers. No, it happens with lots of people who start out at the bottom. As soon as they begin climbing the ladder, they align themselves wholeheartedly with their superiors, and even surpass them in terms of sheer determination. The world of work’s answer to Stockholm syndrome. The thing is, Mehmet doesn’t just think he’s a boss. He becomes the boss incarnate. He is the boss as soon as the boss is out the door. Of course, at this company, which must employ two hundred staff, there’s not a big boss as such, just managers. But Mehmet is far too important to be a humble manager. No, he subscribes to an altogether loftier, more intangible concept that he calls “Senior Management,” a notion devoid of meaning (around here, no one even knows who the senior managers are) yet heavy with innuendo: the Way, the Light, the Senior Management. In his own way, by scaling the ladder of responsibility, Mehmet is moving closer to God.

  I start at 5:00 a.m. It’s an odd job (when the salary is this low, you have to say it’s “odd”). My role involves sorting cardboard boxes of medication that are then sent off to far-flung pharmacies. I wasn’t around to see it, but apparently Mehmet did this for eight years before he was made “supervisor.” Now he is in the proud position of heading up a team of three office drones, which is not to be sniffed at.

  The first drone is Charles. Kind of a fancy name for a guy of no fixed abode. He is one year younger than me, thin as a rake and thirsty as a fish. I say “of no fixed abode” to keep things simple, but he does actually have an abode. An extremely fixed one. He lives in his car, which hasn’t moved for five years. He calls it his “immobile home.” That’s typical of Charles’s sense of humor. He wears a diving watch the size of a satellite dish, with dials all over the place, and a fluorescent green bracelet. I haven’t got a clue where he’s from or how he ended up in these dire straits. He’s a funny one, Charles. For instance, he has no idea how long he’s been on the social housing waiting list, but he does keep a precise tally of the time that has passed since he gave up renewing his application. Five years, seven months and seventeen days at the last count. Charles counts the time that has elapsed since he lost any hope of being rehoused. “Hope,” he says, as he raises his index finger, “is a pack of lies invented by the Devil to reconcile men with their lot.” That’s not one of his, I’ve heard it before somewhere else. I’ve searched for the quote but never managed to track it down. Just goes to show that behind his veneer of drunkenness, he is a man of culture.

  The second drone is Romain, a young guy from Narbonne. Following a few prominent turns in his school drama club, he dreamed of becoming an actor and, straight after passing his baccalaureate, moved to Paris. But he failed to make even the smallest of splashes, not least because of his Gascon accent. Like a true young D’Artagnan, or Henri IV arriving at court, hi
s provincial drawl—all r’s and ang’s—prompted sniggers among the drama school elite with all its urbane courtiers. It amuses us all no end, too. He had elocution lessons for it, but to no avail. He took on a series of part-time jobs, which kept a roof over his head while he attended castings for roles he never had a hope in hell of landing. One day, he understood that his fantasy would never come true. Red-carpet Romain was done. What was more, Narbonne had been the biggest city he had known. It didn’t take long for Paris to flatten him, to crush him to dust. He grew homesick, yearning for the familiar surroundings of his childhood. Problem was that he couldn’t face going back empty handed. Now he works hard to pay his way, and the only role he aspires to is that of the prodigal son. With this aim in mind, he does any piecemeal job he can find. An ant’s vocation. He spends the rest of his time on Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, and a whole load of other networks—places where no one can hear his accent, I suppose. According to Charles, he’s a tech wizard.

  The third drone is me. I work for three hours every morning, which brings in 585 euros gross (whenever you talk of a part-time salary, you have to add the word “gross,” because of the tax). I get home around 9:00 a.m. If Nicole is out the door a bit late, we might run into each other. Whenever that happens, she says, “I’m late,” before giving me a peck on the nose and closing the door behind her.

  This morning, Mehmet was seething. Like a pressure cooker. I suppose his wife had been giving him grief, or something. He was pacing angrily up and down the aisle where all the crates and cardboard boxes are stacked, clutching his clipboard so tightly his knuckles had turned white. He gives the impression of being burdened with major responsibilities, exacerbated by personal strife. I was right on time, but the moment he set eyes on me he yelled out a stream of his gibberish. Being on time, apparently, is not sufficient to prove your motivation. He arrives an hour early at least. His tirade was fairly unintelligible, but I got the gist, namely that he thinks I’m a lazy asshole.

  Although Mehmet makes such a song and dance about it, the job itself is not very complicated. We sort packages, we put them in cardboard boxes, we lay them on a palette. Normally, the pharmacy codes are written on the packages in large type, but sometimes—don’t ask me why—the number is missing. Romain figures the settings on one of the printers must be wrong. If this does happen, the correct code can be found among a long series of tiny characters on a printed label. The numbers you want are the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth. It’s a real hassle for me because I need my glasses for this. I have to fish them out of my pocket, put them on, lower my head, count the characters . . . A loss of precious time. And if Senior Management were to catch me doing this, it would annoy them greatly. Typical, then, that the first package I picked up this morning didn’t have a code. Mehmet started screaming. I leaned over. And at that precise moment, he kicked me right in the ass.

  It was just after five in the morning.

  My name is Alain Delambre. I am fifty-seven years old. And four years ago, I became unemployed.

  2

  Initially, I took the morning job at Pharmaceutical Logistics as a way of keeping myself occupied. At least that’s what I told Nicole, but neither she nor the girls fell for it. At my age, you don’t wake up at 4:00 a.m. for 45 percent of the minimum wage just to get your endorphins going. It’s all a bit more complicated. Well, actually it’s not that complicated. At first, we didn’t need the money—now we do.

  I have been unemployed for four years. Four years in May (May 24, to be exact).

  This job doesn’t really make ends meet, so I do a few other little things, too. For a couple of hours here and there, I lug crates, bubble-wrap stuff, hand out fliers. A spot of nighttime industrial cleaning in offices. A few seasonal jobs, too. For the past two years, I’ve been Father Christmas at a discount store specializing in household appliances. I don’t always give Nicole the full picture of my activities, since it would only upset her. I use a range of excuses to justify my absences. As this is harder for the night jobs, I have invented a group of unemployed friends with whom I supposedly play poker. I tell Nicole that it relaxes me.

  Before, I was HR manager at a company with almost two hundred employees. I was in charge of staff and training, overseeing salaries and representing the management at the works council. I worked at Bercaud, which sold costume jewelry. Seventeen years casting pearls before swine. That was everyone’s favorite gag. There was a whole load of extremely witty jokes that went around about pearls, family jewels, et cetera. Corporate banter, if you like. The laughter stopped in March, when it was announced that Bercaud had been bought out by the Belgians. I might have had a chance against the Belgian HR manager, but when I found out that he was thirty-eight, I mentally started to clear my desk. I say “mentally” because, deep down, I know I wasn’t at all ready to do it for real. But that was what I had to do—they didn’t waste time. The takeover was announced on March 4. The first round of layoffs took place six weeks later, and I was part of the second.

  In the space of four years, as my income evaporated, I passed from incredulity to doubt, then to guilt, and finally to a sense of injustice. Now, I feel anger. It’s not a very positive emotion, anger. When I arrive at Logistics, and I see Mehmet’s bushy eyebrows and Charles’s long, rickety silhouette, and I think about everything I’ve had to endure, a terrible rage thunders inside me. Most of all, I have to avoid thinking about the years I have left, about the pension payments I’ll never receive, about the allowances that are withering away, or about the despair that sometimes grips Nicole and me. I have to avoid those thoughts because—in spite of my sciatica—they put me in the mood for terrorism.

  In the four years we have known each other, I have come to count my job center adviser as one of my closest friends. Not long ago, he told me, with a degree of admiration in his voice, that I was an example. What he means is that I might have given up on the idea of finding a job, but I haven’t given up looking for one. He thinks that shows strength of character. I don’t want to tell him he’s wrong; he is thirty-seven and he needs to hang on to his illusions for as long as possible. The truth is I’ve actually surrendered to a sort of innate reflex. Looking for work is like working, and since that is all I have done my whole life, it is ingrained in my nervous system; something that drives me out of necessity, but without direction. I look for work like a dog sniffs a lamppost. No illusions, but I can’t help it.

  And so it was that I responded to an advertisement a few days ago. A headhunting firm looking to recruit an HR assistant for a big company. The role involves hiring staff at executive level, formulating job descriptions, carrying out assessments, writing up appraisals, processing social audits, et cetera, which is all right up my street, exactly what I did for years at Bercaud. “Versatile, methodical, and rigorous, the candidate will be equipped with excellent interpersonal skills.” My professional profile in a nutshell.

  The moment I read it, I compiled my documents and attached my CV. Needless to say, it all hangs on whether they are willing to take on a man of my age.

  The answer to which is perfectly obvious: it’ll be a no.

  So what? I sent off my application anyway. I wonder whether it was just a way of honoring my job center adviser’s admiration.

  When Mehmet kicked me in the ass, I let out a yelp. Everyone turned around. First Romain, then Charles, who did so with greater difficulty as he was already a couple of sheets to the wind. I straightened up like a young man. That’s when I realized that I was almost a head taller than Mehmet. Up to now, he had been the big boss. I’d never really noticed his size. Mehmet himself was struggling to come to terms with kicking me in the ass. His anger seemed to have abated entirely. I could see his lips trembling and he was blinking as he tried to find the words, I’m not sure in which language. That was when I did something for the first time in my life: I tilted my head back, very slowly, as though I were admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and then whipped it forward with a sharp motion
. Just like I’d seen on television. A head-butt, they call it. Charles, being homeless, gets beaten up a lot, and knows all about it. “Nice technique,” he told me. For a first-timer, it seemed a very decent effort.

  My forehead broke Mehmet’s nose. Before feeling the impact on my skull, I heard a sinister crack. Mehmet howled (in Turkish this time, no doubt about it), but I couldn’t ram home my advantage because he immediately took his head in his hands and sank to his knees. If I had been in a film, I almost certainly would have taken a run-up and laid him out with an almighty kick in the face, but my skull was aching so much that I also took my head in my hands and fell to the ground. Both of us were on our knees, facing each other, heads in hands. Tragedy in the workplace. A dramatic scene worthy of an old master.

  Romain started flapping around, no idea what to do with himself. Mehmet was bleeding everywhere. The ambulance arrived within a few minutes. We gave statements. Romain told me that he’d seen Mehmet kick me in the ass, that he would be a witness and that I had nothing to worry about. I kept silent, but my experience led me to believe that it definitely wouldn’t be as simple as all that. I wanted to be sick. I went to the bathroom, but in vain.

  Actually, no, not in vain: in the mirror, I saw that I had a gash and a large bruise across my forehead. I was deathly pale and out of it. Pitiful. For a moment, I thought I was starting to look like Charles.

  3

  “Oh my goodness, what have you done to yourself?” Nicole asked as she touched the enormous bruise on my forehead.

  I didn’t answer. I handed her the letter in a way that I hoped would seem casual, then went to my study, where I pretended to rummage through my drawers. She looked long and hard at the words: “Further to your letter, I am delighted to inform you that your application for the role of HR assistant has been accepted in the first instance. You will shortly be invited to take an aptitude test, which, if successful, will be followed by an interview.”