This is Life (15 page)

Aurélie thought about the chain of events that had brought them together. If it hadn’t been for her project, this wouldn’t be happening. She supposed that there was something
to be said for throwing stones at babies after all.

He noticed the sketchbook in her hand. ‘May I see?’

She showed him her half-finished picture of Herbert. He liked it very much. ‘It’s really . . .’ He didn’t finish his sentence.

It was the rarest of things – a kiss with no instigator. He didn’t kiss her, and she didn’t kiss him. They both just kissed. Aurélie clung on to him,
and he held her as though she was a precious object. Which, to him, she was.

Minutes later, when at last their lips parted, they suddenly became keenly aware of the watching eyes of an approximately nine-month-old boy. The man felt it was time to introduce himself to his
new acquaintances. ‘I’m Léandre,’ he said. ‘Léandre Martin.’

‘Aurélie Renard. And this one here is Herbert.’

‘I know. Hello, Herbert,’ he said. He too had pronounced his name correctly first time. Aurélie felt that things were getting better in a big way. ‘Herbert . . .’
He looked sceptical. ‘Herbert Cruchaudet-Gingembre?’

‘Er . . .’ Aurélie thought she had better come clean. ‘No. That’s not his real surname.’

He laughed. ‘I thought not.’

‘I was lying to the old woman. I didn’t think his name was any of her business, so I made one up.’

‘You did a good job.’

‘He is called Herbert, though.’

‘Herbert Renard.’

‘No.’ She told him the truth. ‘He’s not my baby. He’s . . .’ She wondered whether her new boyfriend, if that’s what he was, was quite ready to hear the
whole truth. ‘I’m looking after him for a friend who’s out of town for a few days.’

J
ean-Didier Delacroix was a happy man for many reasons, four of which were in the forefront of his mind as he lay in his bathrobe on his large bed
in the large bedroom of his large apartment:

1. He was called Jean-Didier Delacroix, and a man can hope for no better name than that. Every day the first thing he said to himself was
Good morning, Jean-Didier Delacroix
. Just
the thought of his name was enough to lighten his mood, and when he saw it in print it was enough to make him feel like jumping for joy. It was perfect.

2. He was an arts correspondent for a major newspaper, and nobody can hope for a better job than that. Parents leaning over a newborn’s crib will barely even dare to hope that one day
their child might become an arts correspondent for a major newspaper. They tell themselves that they only want them to be healthy and happy,
although of course if he does become an arts
correspondent that would be . . .
They will try to stop this train of thought, knowing that it would be wrong to burden a child with such expectations, and true enough the parents of his
classmates had found they had no choice but to content themselves with seeing their offspring embark on the road to such humdrum careers as airline pilot, heart surgeon, engineer, lawyer,
architect, tennis star, sometimes even artist, taking any path but the golden one upon which he had embarked.

His parents, unlike most, had been forthright about their ambitions for their child. From the crib they had refused to countenance the possibility of him entering another profession.
How is
our little future arts correspondent today?
they would ask him, when his nanny presented him for his daily appearance before them. And little Jean-Didier Delacroix had indeed shed his sailor
suit and grown up to fulfil their dream: they had seen their son become an arts correspondent for
L’Univers
. He would never forget the day the editor-in-chief of
L’Univers
, his uncle Jean-Claude Delacroix, had called him into the office and told him, very sternly, that he wanted him to know that he was not being offered the job because of any
family connection, he was being added to the staff for no reason other than his undeniable brilliance. Jean-Didier Delacroix took in every word.

Now twenty-four, he had been in his position for two years, and had already had the title
chief arts correspondent
created for him. He was also already in line to become
deputy arts
editor
, and the editorship itself was widely regarded as an inevitability once the post had become vacant – something which was due to occur in around five years’ time.

3.  He had a beautiful girlfriend. He had just finished having sex with her, and right at this moment she was undertaking a carefully orchestrated shower in the large en suite bathroom. At
six feet and one inch she was almost a head taller than him even before she had stepped into her inevitable heels, a height which had helped to establish her on the catwalks of the world. She was a
foul young woman of twenty – arrogant, scowling and stone-cold, and this suited him very well. She was his type.

4.  And this was the reason which occupied his mind above all others: he, Jean-Didier Delacroix, was the only person from the entire media to have been granted access to Le Machine in the
run-up to the opening of
Life
. This was the biggest event of the year in the art world. Everybody was talking about it, and everybody was going to want to read Jean-Didier Delacroix’s
take on it. This was his most high-profile assignment to date, and to be trusted with something of this magnitude was a sure indicator to the outside world that he had arrived. His piece was going
to be a triumph. He had already had a long conversation with the arts editor about it, and they were in full agreement on their opinions of Le Machine. It was as much as they could do to stop
themselves from rubbing their hands together and cackling with glee.

Those were four very solid reasons for happiness, and Jean-Didier Delacroix was content as he leafed through the research materials his assistants had collated for him. He
drafted the article in his head, smiling at the occasional
mot juste
that drifted into view. He was going to interview Le Machine shortly before he went on stage, and be there for the first
two hours of the performance, turning the copy over in his mind as he watched. Then he would retreat to a private booth in a nearby restaurant and while eating his pre-ordered food he would write,
incorporating his review of the event into the body of the piece. He had seen the layout, which was just waiting for his words to be added. He would finish the job with lightning speed. He was
known for this: Jean-Didier Delacroix did not waste time.

Once it was ready, he would email the article to the subeditor, who would neither dare nor feel the need to change a single word, and it would be emblazoned across the front page of the arts
supplement on Saturday morning.

He yawned and stretched, and imagined the looks on the faces of the rivals he was trouncing with this coup. He was well aware that it wasn’t possible to reach the position he had reached
without ruffling feathers. He knew that people were jealous of him, and he knew that there were those who accused him of taking advantage of the nepotism that is considered to be endemic across the
media. But he also knew that his uncle had been absolutely right to employ him – he
was
brilliant. And now, with this article, more people than ever would become aware of this.

His uncle, Jean-Claude Delacroix, was an honourable man who had agonised over his appointment, spending hours in conference with the arts editor as he tried to avoid hiring his
nephew, but the conversation kept coming back to the same point: they would not find anyone better than Jean-Didier Delacroix. His mind was incredible, his knowledge encyclopaedic. He could write
extensively, impeccably and at lightning speed on ballet, opera, sculpture, classical music, rock, theatre, circus; anything from the world of the arts that was thrown at him. His mind was as sharp
and as deadly as Damascus steel, and he wrote with a lightness of touch that belied the incisiveness and the gravity of his analyses. Even the harshest critics of his life story and his modus
operandi found themselves obliged to acknowledge, though only ever through gritted teeth, that Jean-Didier Delacroix had an exceptional talent. His freelance pieces had attracted a lot of
attention, and it would only be a matter of time before he was snapped up. If
L’Univers
didn’t get him, then a rival would, and then where would they be? There was nothing they
could do but offer him a generous contract.

His piece on Le Machine was going to be a simple undertaking. It was already more or less written in his head. Without having seen it, he knew that he hated
Life
more than anything he had
written about before. He saw it as vulgar, sensationalist and populist, in the worst possible senses of all three. And what’s more, he was convinced that it had not one iota of intellectual
foundation. The more he read about Le Machine, the more evasive he found him to be. In the interviews he had given prior to his previous presentations of the piece, he had never provided a
satisfactory answer to the simplest of questions:
Why do you do what you do
? and
What is the meaning of
Life?, and if an artist cannot, or will not, answer such basic questions when
they are put to them by an arts correspondent, then they are not worthy of the name. Le Machine was no artist. He was nothing more than a charlatan. And now, he smiled as he thought about it, he
was a doomed charlatan.

Jean-Didier Delacroix’s research had not only been into the man and his supposed
art
. He had also looked into Le Machine’s business dealings, sending the newspaper’s
keenest financial researchers on his tail, a small battalion of business-minded Lisbeth Salanders, all pierced faces and magical powers.

He knew that
Life
’s Paris run was to be an independent production, that the risk of presenting it outside an established gallery had been taken by Le Machine’s management,
using the profits that had built up over the course of its previous stagings. It had not been a cheap production, either. To read his rivals’ previews of the event, it would seem as if the
show consisted of nothing more than a naked man and a few bottles. He knew better, though. The technical side was complex, and required a skilled team led by audio-visual experts whose time and
expertise were expensive. Some were employees, and others had been embedded within the production from the start, and had stakes in it.

In addition to the payroll for his team, there was the money needed up front to make the cinema suitable for their needs, not to mention round-the-clock stewarding and security. He learned that
they had emptied their account to get it all set up, sure that they would recoup the investment and much, much more through ticket sales and merchandising. They had taken out insurance, of course,
to cover themselves in the event of a fire, or the star of the show being taken gravely ill. What they could not insure against though, was the abject failure of
Life
. With nobody coming
through the doors, they would be sunk.

Le Machine’s organisation had confidently bet everything they had on the success of this run. The public might have fallen for this rubbish in London and Tokyo, but he would personally see
that Paris did not follow suit.

The interview itself was almost incidental. Jean-Didier Delacroix needed only a handful of quotes from the man with which to flay him, and it would all be over. He would turn Le Machine into a
laughing stock, and his
coup de grâce
would be to present him as such a monumental fraud that all the serious art lovers, the curiosity seekers, the armies of people who had professed
their determination to see him so they could make up their own minds, the students, the tourists and even the perverts would steer clear for fear of being seen to fall for such a blatant con.

A few days from now, once the unlucky few who had bought advance tickets had come and gone, Le Machine would be standing naked on a stage in an empty porno cinema, desperate for his contractual
obligations, and his pathetic excuse for an art exhibition, to end. With nothing to show for it but a mountain of unsold merchandise, he would find himself with little to think about but what he
was going to do now that all his money was gone.

Jean-Didier Delacroix carried on reading the research material. It was thorough. He felt a momentary pang of pity for the seedy little man who had leased them the cinema. He had been offered a
fair deal by Le Machine’s organisation, but as the bulk of his remuneration came from a cut of the ticket sales, he was dependent on the exhibition being as successful as they had assured him
it would be. There was no way his business was going to survive the impending catastrophe, but Jean-Didier Delacroix turned the page and forgot about him. He wasn’t going to lose sleep over
the fate of a middle-aged pornographer. He would be going down with the rest of them. Call it collateral damage.

The one thing that was missing from his pages of research was a positive identification: they could not verify the real name of Le Machine. It had been buried by a maze of paperwork, a network
of holding companies and trails of deliberately placed red herrings. There had been a rumour that the original Le Machine had quit after Tokyo and been replaced by a doppelgänger, and even one
that he was really a pair of identical twins who would work in shifts. Jean-Didier Delacroix’s researchers had examined official and clandestine photographs, and had found no truth in these
stories.

It was not of crucial importance, anyway; he had chosen not to make any mention of the mystery surrounding his identity. To do so would be to play into his hands. Who cared who he was anyway?
All that mattered was taking him down.

Jean-Didier Delacroix had already settled on the headline with his editor, who was right behind him in his efforts to contain and destroy this monstrosity.

The article was to be called
The End of Life
.

Jean-Didier Delacroix’s girlfriend walked into the room, a tower of perfect skin. She looked at him as though he were a dead spider in a bowl of soup.