The Reader on the 6.27 (2 page)

On the technical side, the Zerstor 500’s name was derived from the 500 hammers the size of men’s fists arranged in alternating rows on the two horizontal cylinders covering the entire width of the tank. There were also 600 stainless-steel knives aligned along three axes and spinning at a speed of 800 revolutions per minute. On either side of this hell, twenty or so nozzles formed a guard of honour continually gushing 300-bar-high pressure jets of water at a temperature of 120°C. Then came the four powerful arms of the mixer in their stainless-steel casing. And finally, caged in its iron prison, the monstrous 1,000-horsepower diesel engine brought the entire machine to life. The Thing was born to crush, flatten, pound, squish, tear, chop, lacerate, shred, mix, knead and boil. But the best definition ever heard was the one old Giuseppe liked to yell when the plonk he guzzled all day long hadn’t sufficiently dulled his visceral hatred for the Zerstor 500, stored up over the years: ‘Genociiiiide!’

4

At this early hour, the plant had the chilling atmosphere of an empty ballroom. No trace remained of what had taken place there the previous day. Nor was there the slightest hint of the sound and fury that would erupt between those walls in the minutes to come.
Leave no clues.
That was one of Felix Kowalski’s obsessions. Night after night, the boss had the scene of the crime cleaned so that it was always immaculate. A crime repeated over and over, every day of the year, apart from weekends and public holidays.

Guylain crossed the floor with reluctant steps. Lucien Brunner was waiting for him. The young man in his always spotless overalls was leaning nonchalantly against the Thing’s control panel. Arms folded across his chest, he greeted Guylain with his usual wry grin. Never a hello, never a gesture, just that arrogant smile bestowed with the superciliousness of a twenty-five-year-old who stood more than six feet tall. Brunner was forever sounding off for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen: civil servants were all lazy lefties; women were only good for waiting on their husbands, in other words cooking during the day and getting knocked up at night; immigrants (a word he chuntered rather than uttered) were taking the food out of French mouths. Not forgetting the stinking rich, benefits scroungers, corrupt politicians, Sunday drivers, junkies, poofters, junky poofters, the disabled and whores. Brunner had views on everything – very firm views which Guylain had long since given up attempting to challenge. For a while he had used rhetoric to try and explain to Brunner that things weren’t quite so black and white, that in between there was a whole range of greys, from very pale to very dark. To no avail. Guylain had eventually come to terms with the fact that Brunner was an idiot beyond redemption. Beyond redemption and dangerous. Lucien Brunner was a dab hand at royally taking the piss out of you while licking your boots. His ‘Monsieur Vignolles’ tinged with condescension exuded a veiled contempt. Brunner was a serpent of the worst kind, a cobra ready to strike at the tiniest blunder. Guylain did his best to avoid him, keeping well away from his fangs. And worst of all, that arsehole loved his executioner’s job.

‘Hey, Monsieur Vignolles, will you let me turn the machine on today?’

Guylain gloated inwardly. No, M’sieur Vignolles was not going to allow him to turn the machine on today. Or tomorrow, or the next day! M’sieur Vignolles had no intention of affording him the immense pleasure that lay in the simple act of starting up that bitch of a machine! ‘No, Brunner. You know very well that you can’t until you’ve got the appropriate qualifications.’ Guylain loved that expression, which he uttered in a compassionate tone, even though he was dreading the day when that moron would thrust the coveted licence under his nose. That day was not far off and then he would have to give in. Not a week went by without Brunner raising the matter with Kowalski, urging old Fatso to talk to management about his application. At every opportunity, that two-faced bastard would pester him, with his ‘Monsieur Kowalski’s and his ‘Yes, Chief’s, never missing a chance to poke his weasel face round the office door and butter him up. An oxpecker on the back of a buffalo. And Kowalski lapped it up. All that kowtowing flattered his vanity. Meanwhile, Guylain sheltered behind the regulations to lecture Brunner, always with the fleeting impression of goading a cobra with a stick. No qualification, no press button!

‘For fuck’s sake, Vignolles, start it up! What are you waiting for? The rain to stop?’ Kowalski, who had spotted him from the top of his ivory tower, had burst out of his office to come and screech at him in his falsetto voice. His glazed eyrie was almost ten metres up in the air, suspended beneath the roof. From up there, Kowalski could see everything, like a little god keeping watch over his dominion. The slightest alert, the tiniest slip-up, and he’d come rushing out onto the bridge to yell his orders or to unleash a torrent of abuse. And if he felt that was not enough, as in this instance, he would come clattering down the thirty or so metal stairs which groaned under the weight of his mass of lard.

‘Get a move on, Vignolles, damn it! There are already three lorries waiting outside.’ Felix Kowalski didn’t speak; he barked, yelled, bellowed, cursed and roared, but he had never been able to talk in a normal voice. He couldn’t help it. He never began his day without directing a volley of abuse at the first person to come within earshot, as if the rancour that had built up inside him overnight had to escape from his mouth before it choked him. That first person was often Guylain. Brunner, who was stupid but not blind or deaf, had quickly twigged the boss’s game and generally stayed out of sight behind the Zerstor’s control cabinet. Fatso’s tirades didn’t bother Guylain one way or the other. They rarely lasted more than a minute. You just had to let them wash over you and wait until the tsunami was over. Pull your head in and wait until Kowalski had finished belching abuse in a cloud of sour sweat. Of course, Guylain sometimes felt like rebelling, or crying foul. Pointing out to that bile-spewing, potbellied brute that the big hand of the clock above the cloakroom door, the only one you could rely on according to Kowalski, was more than ten minutes away from the hour, that he in no way deserved these groundless invectives given that the time for him to come on duty stated on his contract was 7.00 on the dot and not 6.50! But he chose to hold his tongue. It was the best solution: keep your mouth shut and head for the cloakrooms, without even waiting for the torrent of verbal diarrhoea that came from goodness knows where to cease.

Guylain opened his metal locker. The inscription in flocked white lettering on the back of his boiler suit glowed fluorescent in the dark. TERN. When he talked about it, Brunner always referred to it as the TERN treatment and recycling company. He felt that sounded classier. The logo was a magnificent arctic tern, a creature that spent most of its time in search of summer, on the wing for nearly eight months of the year in its permanent quest for the sun, never taking the time to break its journey. Brunner, who knew as much about ornithology as he did about theology, insisted this bird shape was a swallow. Guylain had never wanted to argue with him about that either. He zipped his fifty-eight kilos into the boiler suit, closed his locker door and took a deep breath. The Thing was waiting to be fed.

5

Guylain was loath to lift the lid of the Zerstor 500’s control cabinet. Inexplicably, he felt the unpleasant sensation of the sheet metal vibrating beneath his fingers as he often did, as if the Thing were well and truly alive, juddering with impatience at the thought of beginning a new day. At those times, he went into autopilot. Confining himself to his role as chief operator for which he was paid the generous sum of 1,840 euros each month, including his bonus for having lunch on the premises. He read out every item on the checklist while Brunner went from one checkpoint to the next, twirling around as Guylain named each part. Before releasing the trapdoor that shut off the bottom of the funnel, Guylain glanced over at the gaping mouth, just to check that no intrepid animal had stupidly taken it into its head to venture inside. Rats had become a real problem. The smell drove them wild. The funnel attracted them the way the fragrant lobes of a Venus flytrap lure flies. And it was not unusual to find one that was greedier than the others stuck at the bottom of the hole. When he came across one, Guylain would go and fetch the scoop from the cloakrooms and fish the creature out from the tight spot it had got itself into. And without further ado, it would scamper off towards the back of the plant and vanish from sight. Guylain was not particularly fond of rodents. He was motivated essentially by the wish to deprive the Zerstor of a hunk of meat. It loved meat, he was certain of it, loved those screeching, wriggling little bodies that it crunched like a mere snack when it managed to nab one. And he was convinced that, given the chance, it would gobble up his hands without any qualms. Since Giuseppe’s accident, it had been clear to Guylain that rat meat was not always enough to satisfy the Thing.

After priming the pump and flicking the switches to the ON position, he pressed his thumb on the green button which Brunner dreamed of pushing one day. Guylain counted to five and then released the pressure. You always had to count to five, no more, no less. Less, and the machine wouldn’t start; more and you flooded the whole thing. You had to earn your place in hell. High up on his sea captain’s bridge, Kowalski did not miss Guylain’s slightest movement. The button winked for about ten seconds then shone brightly. At first, nothing happened. The floor barely shuddered when the Thing gave an initial splutter of protest. Its awakening was always laborious. It burped, gasped, sounded reluctant to get going, but once it had gulped down the first mouthful of fuel, the Thing went into action. A dull rumble rose from the ground, followed by a first tremor that assailed Guylain’s legs and then ran through his entire body. Soon the thrusts of the powerful diesel motor made the shed shake from floor to ceiling. The earmuffs clamped on Guylain’s head barely filtered out the infernal clamour that was unleashed. Down in the belly of the Zerstor, the hammers started up, banging together, metal against metal, in a din that sounded like Armageddon. The blades below chopped frenetically, gleaming in the dark depths. There was a loud whoosh as the water gushed from the nozzles, followed almost immediately by a column of steam that rose up and caressed the roof. The pit exhaled the foul stench of mouldy paper. The Thing was hungry.

Guylain motioned to the first lorry to present its rear at the unloading bay. Raring to go, the powerful thirty-eight tonner manoeuvred into position and emptied its tipper. The avalanche of books cascaded onto the concrete floor, sending up a cloud of grey dust. Sitting at the controls of the bulldozer, Brunner, who was seething with impatience, swung into action. Behind the grimy windscreen, his eyes shone with excitement. The huge blade swept the mountain of books into the void. The stainless steel chute vanished under the tide of books.

The first mouthfuls were always tricky. The Zerstor was a temperamental ogress. She sometimes became congested, victim of her own greed. Then she would stall, in the midst of chomping, her mouth full to bursting. Then it took nearly an hour to empty the funnel and open up the cylinders to remove the surfeit of books already imprisoned by the hammers and clear all the parts one by one before priming the pump again. An hour Guylain spent contorting himself in the stinking belly, sweating all the moisture his body contained and submitting to the abuse of a Kowalski more enraged than ever. This morning, the Thing had got off on the right piston. It snapped up and gobbled its first ration of books without the slightest hiccup. Only too happy to crunch something other than air, the hammers were having a field day. Even the noblest spines, the sturdiest bindings, were crushed in seconds. The books disappeared into the Thing’s belly in their thousands. The scalding rain relentlessly spewing out of the nozzles around the sides of the tank washed the few flyaway pages that tried to escape down towards the bottom of the funnel. Below, the 600 razor-sharp blades took over, reducing what remained of the sheets of paper into thin strips. The four huge mixers finished the job, converting the whole thing into a thick soup. No trace remained of the books that had lain on the floor only a few minutes earlier. There was nothing but the grey mush that the Thing expelled in the form of great, steaming turds that fell into the vats with a gruesome giant plopping sound. This coarse pulp would be used one day to make other books, some of which would inevitably end up back here, between the jaws of the Zerstor 500. The Thing was an absurdity that greedily ate its own shit. Watching this thick sludge being shat out non-stop by the machine, Guylain often recalled the words of old Giuseppe with three grammes of alcohol in his blood, barely a few days before the tragedy: ‘Just remember, kiddo, we are to the publishing industry what the arsehole is to the digestive system, that’s all!’

A second lorry drove up to empty its tipper. The Thing’s gaping mouth belched out a string of acid burps, its 500 hammers chomping at thin air. The leftovers from its previous meal, a few sodden, ragged pages dangled from the machinery like strips of skin. Brunner pressed hard on the eager accelerator, launching the attack on the new mound of books, his tongue peeping out of the corner of his mouth.

6

The security guard’s hut was an oasis where Guylain liked to take refuge during the lunch hour. Unlike Brunner, who ranted on for the sake of it, Yvon could sit for ages without saying a word, completely engrossed in his reading. His silences were full. Guylain could slip into them as into a warm bath. Sitting with Yvon, his sandwich had less of the aftertaste of boiled cardboard that tainted everything he ate since he’d begun working here. Yvon sometimes asked him to give him his cues. ‘A sounding board,’ he had explained the first time. ‘I just need a sounding board to bounce my speeches off.’ Guylain willingly accepted the part, reciting to the best of his ability lines he barely understood, sometimes changing sex to read the part of Andromaque, Berenice or Iphigenia, while Yvon Grimbert, at the peak of his art, spouted at the top of his voice Pyrrhus, Titus and other Agamemnons of his own composition. Yvon did not eat, contenting himself with his twelve-syllable verses alone, lines which he washed down with the black tea he loved and which he drank by the Thermosful all day long.