He short-circuited the conversation to the point where a deadening silence set in. He stared at Michel for a long time, pulling on his cigarette and blowing smoke over his head until he was sweating, squirming in his chair, and feeling strangled by the knot in his tie. Soon Michel could no longer endure his gaze, and he fixed his eyes on the water snaking its way down the windows, cleared his throat, and asked:
“Are you here for what I think?”
Without saying a word, without moving his head, with only his eyes, he confirmed, “Yes.”
Michel gave a small, tight blow to the table with his fist.
“Does she know how much I brought in for her in the last year?”
“Almost 700,000 dollars. She had me and two accountants to remind her of that, but you know her: she’s pretty well certain that without her no one would be able to see their nose in front of their face.”
“Meanwhile, you’re doing her dirty work.”
“I’m chief executioner now. It’s all I’ve been doing for months. Not one contract, not one sale.”
Michel exploded:
“You want me to cry for you, maybe? I’m fifty-two years old, for God’s sake. Fifty-two years old, a sick wife, and three daughters at university. What am I supposed to do, can you tell me that? What does that fucking cow think we’re all going to do? That fucking fucking fucking cow…”
“Enough.”
“Do you know everything I did for her, and her father before her?”
“You worked, Michel.”
“We gave them our lives.”
“And they gave you yours.”
“We’re even-steven, is that it?”
“That’s not what I said.”
Michel became sullen.
“How do you think the company’s going to be able to function? That makes twelve who are gone.”
“Ten.”
“Who’s going to keep things going?”
He stubbed out his cigarette.
“Between the two of us, I don’t think she gives a damn. She must have awarded herself ten salary hikes in the last five years. She should be earning not far from half a million now, not counting bonuses. Her father’s dead, her mother’s convinced that everything’s going just fine, and as long as our old contracts are bringing in money and she’s chopping the payroll, the investors are happy. I think she’s going to milk everyone like dairy cows and then shut things down.”
“How many of us are there?”
“About four hundred, if you count manufacturing.”
“What’s she going to do afterwards?”
“I don’t know. Get Botox shots. Adopt Chinese kids. That’s about all she’s been doing for five years.”
“It’s not right.”
“I never said it was.”
Michel shot him a dirty look.
“You’re still going to clear us out one after the other, like your mistress’s good dog.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“That doesn’t seem to bother you very much.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Why don’t you tell her to do her own dirty work?”
“Why didn’t you say anything when the others were being let go? I’m no different from anyone else, Michel. The city’s burning, and I’m praying that the fire will spare my house.”
“Where are we heading, like that?”
“Nowhere.”
Michel got up, tottered a bit, then found his feet.
He got up in turn, held out his hand, and said:
“No hard feelings?”
Michel stared at his hand vacantly, without taking it, more shaken than he wanted to show.
“You’re the executioner now. And an executioner has no friends. Maybe she thinks we’re worthless, but we’ll pull things together, you’ll see. We still have our clients, and we can sell them more than her garbage. But you? Have you thought that no one’s going to want to help you when your turn comes?”
He sighed and looked at his watch.
“I’m going to have to catch my plane.”
“Oh, excuse me. I don’t want to detain you. Can you give her a message for me?”
“Of course, Michel.”
“Tell her that I’d have liked her to have had some real children rather than the stupid little Chinese kids she’s adopted, who she shows off everywhere to make it look like she has a heart. Tell her that I’d have liked her to have a real heart and real children and to have one of those children die right in front of her eyes. Will you tell her that?”
“I doubt it.”
The seat was comfortable, but the third gin and tonic had been one too many. He felt groggy. His wife said he was drinking too much these days. She was wrong, he wasn’t drinking more than before. He’d always liked to drink. These days, he found that beer had an acrid smell, cocktails tasted bland, and whiskies gave off an unbearable medicinal scent, but he swallowed them all the same. That’s all that had changed.
He felt better now that it was over with Michel. He could sleep on the plane, and in a few hours he’d be home. He’d take a shower and drink a glass of wine. Wine was still good. A bit oily perhaps, but still good.
In the old house, his first wife had organized the gardens according to a tiresome geometry. The flowers and shrubs grew in tight rows, like in a greenhouse, they never mingled, you’d have thought it was the window of an industrious florist. The house was smaller now, the garden more confined, and his second wife had this virtue: she arranged the plants any old way. Perhaps there’d been some order in the beginning, but very quickly it had disappeared. He didn’t know where the soil got its richness, but by mid-July the back yard looked like a jungle. The daturas became actual bushes, and every day produced dozens of big white flowers; the morning glories ran riot, climbing the length of the hedges and stippling the garden with hundreds of purple, blue, and violet blossoms; the roses showed no restraint, and as of the middle of June the Europeana and the two Prairie Stars produced dozens of flowers with delicate petals, and roses like an old lady’s closed fists. There were also lilacs, an apple tree, tulips, and dozens of other species, perennials and annuals, climbers and crawlers. He liked to sit in the midst of all these exhalations, in a chaise longue, and sip Long Island Iced Tea while doing crossword puzzles. Between the stems of the flowers and the branches of the shrubs, black and yellow spiders tended large webs. He liked to watch them at work, see the good Lord’s flies and beasties become trapped in them and be devoured. It was strange, if he’d come upon spiders that big in the house, he would have been shocked. In the garden, he was not at all put off. The spiders, sometimes, fell on him. He took them in his bare hands and dropped them delicately onto the leaves.
Someone was shaking his shoulder.
“They’re announcing our flight.”
It was his companion from earlier on, standing beside the table. He remembered, his name was André. He wondered if he’d been sleeping. He picked up his overcoat and his briefcase, and strode towards the gate.
Before leaving, Michel had said that his turn would come. Of course his turn would come. He’d never thought otherwise. Enormous spiders lived in his garden. Soon it would all be over, and he would make his home in their company, the yellow and the black.
América
The first mistake we made was to think we could bring off a coup like that after the Towers.
Big Lé’s mother and sister had gone back to live two years in Costa Rica between 1999 and 2001. Lévis went to see them a lot during that time, including for almost three months in 2000, starting with the holidays, so as to make it through the millennium with his ass in the sun. That’s when he met América and Luis, in the hotel restaurant his mother ran.