The Man Who Risked It All (33 page)

“So Lacan was jealous of the results obtained by Dubrovski?”

“Everything. One was old, the other young. Lacan was an intellectual who had a theoretical approach and published books. Dubrovski was a pragmatist preaching action and seeking results. And then, there’s the origin of their different theoretical models.”

“You mean the methods they used?”

“Yes. Psychoanalysis is a European invention. Dubrovski was the pioneer in France of cognitive therapies from the States.”

“How was that a problem?”

“Let’s say it was a period when anti-Americanism was the norm in intellectual circles. But that’s not all, you know. They were also separated by money.”

“Money?”

“Yes, Dubrovski was rich, very rich. A family fortune. That wasn’t the case for Lacan, who obviously had a problematic relationship with money.”

She took a sip of champagne.

“In fact,” she went on, “I think Lacan became completely obsessed with Dubrovski. Jealous of the speed of the younger man’s sessions, he began to shorten his own. At the end, when a patient arrived in Lacan’s consulting room, he had barely opened his mouth when Lacan interrupted him and said, ‘Your session is over.’”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s not all. He was so jealous of Dubrovski’s fortune that he started to increase his own rates exorbitantly. Lacan was known to charge five hundred francs, a considerable sum at the time, for a few minutes’ session. When one of his patients protested, he grabbed her handbag to take out the money himself. Poor Jacques: He’d really lost it.”

I took a sip of champagne, savoring its delicate taste and aroma.

“The great pity,” she went on, “is that if Lacan had simply ignored Dubrovski, everyone would have forgotten him.”

“Dubrovski? Why? If he got better results …”

“Oh, my poor friend, only an American would ask that question. You value results. In France, we admire intellect. Results seem almost secondary.”

She rummaged in her handbag, pink crocodile to match her outfit, and extracted a paperback book.

“Here! I brought you this. Open it at random and read a passage.”

I took the book, which was signed by Jacques Lacan, and opened it in the middle. I glanced down the page.

“It’s incomprehensible, but then I’m not a psychologist.”

“I assure you, psychologists don’t understand it either. But this is France—the less people understand what you’re talking about, the more you are taken for a genius. So just imagine Dubrovski, with his very practical, pragmatic side, his tasks to be carried out. He looked almost stupid next to Lacan.”

At that moment, I moved my hand and knocked over my glass. Champagne spilled on the table, then dripped onto my shoes.

“Now that’s something Lacan couldn’t have endured,” Madame Vespalles said.

“Spilling champagne on his feet?”

“I should say. He was fanatical about shoes.”

I shuddered.

“Fanatical about shoes?”

“His passion! He was capable of slipping out of his consulting room by a hidden door between sessions, leaving his next patient sitting in the waiting room while he went to buy himself a pair of shoes. Bizarre, isn’t it?”

44

L
ET
’
S JUST SUPPOSE
that young François Littrec committed suicide. He had two doctors, one of whom was Igor Dubrovski. Jacques Lacan, jealous of Dubrovski, does all he can to bring about his rival’s downfall. Under a pseudonym, he writes an extremely hostile article in
Le Monde
to denounce Dubrovski’s methods. He also visits the young man’s parents to manipulate them into accusing Dubrovski of murder. Then, having failed to get his colleague convicted by a court, Lacan nonetheless influences the medical council to take away his license, ending a promising career that had become an annoyance. But if Igor Dubrovski really was innocent in this business, how to explain all the shady areas that remained? Why attract, through his article on the right to suicide, depressives to the Eiffel Tower, where he could then pick them up before they carried out their plan? The better to manipulate them? To obtain promises from them? For what purpose? And how to explain the notes he took on me
before
my attempted suicide? And what about Dubrovski’s relationship with Audrey?

Lost in thought, I was not following the proceedings at our Monday morning business meeting. With a certain animosity, Luc Fausteri and Grégoire Larcher were reviewing columns of figures projected on a screen—figures and more figures, then graphs, bar charts, pie charts. I felt light-years away from their concerns; all these barely intelligible results were foreign to me. Their voices seemed muffled, distant, incomprehensible. They sounded like two wardens in an asylum vehemently criticizing the assembled madmen for having chosen the wrong numbers on their lottery tickets. The inmates clapped. They must be masochists.

The meeting finished late, after which everyone disappeared for lunch. Everyone but me. I went back to my office and waited to be sure that my floor was deserted. Then I opened the file perched on top of the bookshelf, pulled out two sheets of paper, and slipped them into my pocket I went out into the corridor, glanced both ways, and listened. Silence. At the top of the stairs, I stopped again. Still no one. I crept down to the floor below and peered around. I was alone. Stage fright was beginning to mount as I snuck into the fax room, my heart beating. I put my papers in the machine, aligning them carefully in the document feeder so the machine wouldn’t jam. I glanced into the corridor one last time. Still nothing. With trembling fingers I dialed the first number. Each key I pressed emitted what sounded like a deafening beep. Finally I pressed
Start,
and the machine began to swallow the first page.

It took me nearly 20 minutes to send the list of Dunker Consulting’s bogus job vacancies to every newsroom in France. Every one except
Les Echos’s.

45

I
GOR
D
UBROVSKI WAS
alone that evening in his immense drawing room. He was playing a Rachmaninoff piano sonata, his muscular fingers dominating the keyboard as the pure sound of the Steinway resounded in the vast space.

The door behind him opened swiftly. He glanced over his shoulder without stopping. Ah, Catherine. She didn’t usually enter in such an abrupt manner.

“Vladi is quite sure!” she said, visibly agitated.

Dubrovski took his hands off the keyboard, keeping the right pedal down to prolong the vibration of the last chord.

“Vladi,” she went on, “confirms that Alan is preparing to stand as a candidate for the position of CEO of his firm at the annual meeting!”

Igor swallowed hard. He wasn’t expecting that at all. He released the pedal, and the last vibrations of the music died instantly, creating a heavy silence. Catherine, usually so calm, was pacing up and down as she spoke, visibly upset.

“He has apparently enrolled in an institute specializing in public speaking. For one session. Just one. And in three weeks he’ll be standing up in front of I don’t know how many people, to convince them to vote for him. He’s in for one hell of a beating. It’s a catastrophe!”

Dubrovski turned around, deeply moved. “You’re right,” he muttered.

“It’ll destroy him! Can you imagine? Being humiliated in public, there’s nothing worse. He’ll be devastated. Everything we’ve done from day one will go up in smoke. All the progress he’s made wiped out at a stroke. He’ll be even more weak and fragile than before.”

Igor didn’t reply, merely nodding in agreement. She was obviously right.

“But why on earth did you give him the task?”

He sighed and then replied in a flat voice, “Because I was convinced he would refuse.”

“Well, in that case, why give it to him?”

“Precisely in order to make him refuse.”

A long silence.

“I just don’t follow you anymore, Igor.”

He looked around at her.

“I wanted to make him rebel. Against me. I wanted to put him in such an untenable situation that the only way out would be to dare to confront me and break our pact. The moment has come for the disciple to free himself from his master. You can easily understand, Catherine, that there’s a paradox in guiding someone toward freedom by leading them by the hand all the way. Strict control was necessary because it made him do what he would never have done otherwise, but now he must free himself from my control to become really free. It’s not for me to free him. It’s got to come from him; otherwise he’ll never have really won his freedom.”

Dubrovski took a swig of bourbon from the glass on the piano. The ice had disappeared.

“By ordering him to take the place of his CEO, even if it’s impossible, I was giving him permission to question authority. I was sending him a metaphorical message about our own relationship.”

He put the glass down. He could feel the weight of Catherine’s reproachful look.

“Except that it didn’t work,” she said. “He didn’t rebel. On the contrary, he’s carrying on.”

Igor nodded.

“We must help him,” she said. “We must do something. We can’t leave him on his own to face this situation, after having brought him there!”

A long silence followed, and then Igor sighed. “For once, I really don’t see what we can do, unfortunately.”

“Why don’t you just tell him to drop it, that you realize what you asked him to do is too difficult?”

“Absolutely not! That would be worst of all. It would amount to telling him that I, his mentor, don’t have confidence in his abilities. That would be a severe blow to his self-esteem. Never mind that it would permanently reinforce the dependency I’m trying to loosen!”

“Okay, but you’ve got to do something! We can’t let him go like a lamb to the slaughter. Even if we can’t change the course of events, we must at least stop him from experiencing his failure too violently. We absolutely must avoid a total public humiliation. Let him save face, not feel pathetic.”

“I’ve no idea what to do. I can’t see a way out. Leave me alone, please.”

Catherine suppressed a response and left the room. Her steps sounded in the hall. He heard them recede, then vanish in the night.

Silence returned, empty and oppressive. He was alone with his mistake, a huge mistake, unforgiveable. A mistake charged with consequences.

He slowly placed his hands on the keyboard and joined Rachmaninoff in his tormented dreams.

46

C
OMING OUT OF
the house that morning I saw Madame Blanchard’s black silhouette at the foot of the staircase. She was giving something to Étienne. I recognized from its shape that it was a cake like the one she had given me. Étienne looked highly surprised.

I crossed the street to go to the newspaper kiosk, a knot in my stomach. The bakery was giving off its aroma of fresh baguettes and warm
pains au chocolat
.

I bought all the daily newspapers, then went and sat on the terrace of the café next door. I opened
Le Figaro
and turned to the business section. I could feel my heart beating as I skimmed the articles, jumping from title to title. I searched in vain, my stress level going up as my chances went down, until suddenly I held my breath.

“Suspected Malpractice at Dunker Consulting,” read the headline. There followed a few lines of explanation, neutral in tone.

Excited, I grabbed
Le Monde,
and also found a brief item, followed by a feature on recruitment agencies, their methods, and the criticisms often leveled at them.
Libération
printed a relatively short but very visible article, with a photo of our company headquarters under a catchy headline, “When the Head Hunters Lose Their Heads.”
Le Parisien
calculated the time a candidate would have wasted applying for all the bogus vacancies, and the estimated cost of printing and sending out his CV.
France Soir
explained the extreme competition in the recruitment sector that could have made Dunker step over the line.
L’Humanité
devoted half a page to the matter, with a large photo showing an alleged candidate circling ads in a paper with a black marker pen, under a headline that announced “The Scandal of Dunker Consulting’s Bogus Job Vacancies.” The article included testimonies from numerous unemployed people relating that they had never received replies to their applications. For good reason, the journalist wrote. There were no vacancies to fill.

The kiosk didn’t sell provincial papers, but given that there were Dunker offices dotted around the country, I felt confident that a similar mention would appear in those local papers, too.

But most important was what the financial papers reported. From
La Tribune
to
La Cote Desfossés
and
Le Journal des Finances
, all published the information I had sent them. This meant the critical information had reached the decision makers. I had achieved my goal.

I rushed to the office. I wanted to be there before 9
A.M.
, to see the opening of the stock market and follow the movement of our share price. At 8:50, I was at my computer, on the
Echos
website. I had no way of knowing whether or not publishing the information about Dunker Consulting’s phony recruitment ads would have any impact on the company’s share price. Perhaps I was dreaming.

At 9
A.M.
precisely, Dunker Consulting’s opening price came on the screen. It was down 1.2 percent. I was flabbergasted, unable to believe my eyes. I suddenly felt enthusiasm, joy, extreme excitement. I, Alan Greenmor, had influenced the Dunker Consulting share price on the Paris stock exchange! It was incredible! Unheard of! Monumental!

I remembered my prediction to Fisherman. I had announced a drop of 3 percent over the day. I had plucked the figure out of thin air, of course. But to maintain my credibility, the drop had to be as close to that as possible. And in this affair, my credibility was essential; my plan rested on it.

I spent a good part of the day checking the share price on my screen. Even during my interviews, I couldn’t help but glance at it every now and then.

Except for a slight improvement in the middle of the day, the downward trend continued. At the close of trading, the final price was down 2.8 percent. Luck was on my side.