The Eyes of Lira Kazan (26 page)

The police had called in reinforcements and were trying to form a protective cordon. The demonstrators pushed against it. “We want bread, we want bread,” they chanted jeeringly. They had been yelling all the way from the RER station on the Avenue de Paris. Mobiles were working flat out, summoning more and more mates to the demo. The first images had already begun to appear on the Internet, short amateur films showing the mob, the militant chants and the police at bay.

It was now ten o'clock. One journalist, standing soaked to the skin in front of the gates, was speaking live on the radio:

 

 

As if in reply, one of the demonstrators shouted: “There's another entrance! They're going to escape through the gardens!”

Then there was another beep.

Eyvin, all his secrets, his body lying in an English wood – the story was now spreading throughout the Twitter community. Blood was flowing now. Down below, the mob bellowed louder still. Up in the galleries, Madame Douchet sobbed into her napkin. The ambassador awaited his orders. The fine cheeses were wheeled in on chrome-plated trollies pushed by robotic head waiters.

Young Mrs Louchsky was urging her husband to leave, and so was the director of the palace. He offered them the escape route already taken by the President and the British Prime Minister. It was a hidden passage, far from the noisy, angry crowds whose roar could be heard beyond the windows of the Hall of Mirrors. Louchsky didn't reply. He rose, tipping back his chair and shouted:

“Who the hell is this fucking Uche? Find him!”

Kay peeped out of the top of the container. Nobody in sight. He heaved himself up onto the top, and leapt over to another and then another, moving expertly among these cubes which had been his home since he was two. When he had climbed high enough, he sat down and lit a cigarette. He felt good. He looked out over the lagoon, at the houses on stilts. That was where he had been born, although there was no official record of his existence. Back there, not so long ago, he used to pretend that a bottle and a broom handle were a guitar and a microphone. The night was full of sounds, people talking, women shouting, the hum of engines, sometimes gunfire – all the usual background noise.

He lay down, stretching out, with the sense of having accomplished his mission. He still looked like a child, he was only nineteen. He gazed up, wondering if the crane might crash down on top of him. It always seemed to be leaning dangerously. He remembered that there had been more stars when he was little; it wasn't that they had disappeared, it was just that Lagos had grown so much bigger – the business district had been extended onto an artificial island and now lit up the sky.

He would move to a new container the next day. It would be safer.

“I'd like to turn on the radio,” Nwankwo said suddenly. He was like a nervous general awaiting news from the front.

Jacques obeyed without asking questions. First they heard the sound of a popular song, a glittering trifle totally unsuited to the occasion, almost disturbing in its frivolity. Jacques tuned through the airwaves searching for news, until he eventually found a crackling channel on which you could hear the sounds of demonstrators' shouts, people jostling one another, hooting and barracking, songs and revolutionary slogans.

“What's going on?” Lira cried.

“Listen!” Nwankwo said, not understanding what was being said any more than she did. He looked questioningly at Félix, who nodded and raised a triumphant thumb. A journalist was speaking live from the middle of the crowd. He was outside the Palace of Versailles, said he was awaiting the hurried departure of the President of France. He ended his report after a minute.

“Bingo! They're in the shit!” said Félix.

“What's happening?” Lira insisted.

“Well, Lira,” Nwankwo began, rather solemnly, “I didn't tell you anything because nothing was certain, and I didn't want you to be disappointed again. There's a kid I know in Lagos who's put everything we know on Twitter. He's sending out a scoop every fifteen minutes. So it's all going belly-up at the dinner in Versailles. They all know now – all the media people, all the politicians all over the world – they all know what sort of a man Louchsky is.”

“You mean—”

“I mean they know about the French Minister's kickbacks! They know he has blood on his hands! They know about Grind Bank's money-laundering activities!”

Sometimes these things leave you speechless – huge pieces of news, a final revenge or a too-long-awaited miracle. Lira sat frozen on her chair, letting Nwankwo's words wash over her, trying to imagine this magic thread that was sending their secrets from Africa to the Versailles dinner tables. Nwankwo went over to her and placed his hand on her shoulder, a simple but deeply tender gesture – was it the night they had spent together that allowed it, or just this hard-won victory? Perhaps both. “He'll pay dearly for what he did to you, the world will know him for what he is,” he murmured.

 

At the other end of the table, Félix was explaining to the judge and to Jacques and his wife what was happening. But he watched Lira from the corner of his eye, imagining the thoughts going through her head. He wanted to laugh, and above all he wanted to see her laugh.

“When I think that Finley must be plunging his fish knife into the British Prime Minister's back!”

“So you knew?” Lira said.

“A little. But not everything. I tell you, Nwankwo's a solo player. Brilliant work Nwankwo!”

And he raised his glass, erasing all traces of their earlier quarrel in London. He cursed out loud at this house with its lack of Internet and its wind turbine. They could have watched their victory spreading like wildfire. Jacques just laughed. His wife offered him some more roast lamb.

“Just do what I do, use your imagination!” Lira retorted. She was a little drunk now.

Polina kept looking towards the door in the hope that her father might reappear. She smiled at her mother's happiness, kissed her and let herself be kissed, but she always remained a little apart, on the edge of the story. The judge, too, was
simply observing the scene, but from another angle, that of the older generation. He was like an artisan watching his particular skill becoming redundant. That evening he had no regrets about leaving the law courts – justice was taking a different route now. Jacques and his wife saw to it that plates were laden and glasses filled; their eyes shone with pride at the fact that they were sheltering this scarred, united and fearless group, but they felt a cloud of anxiety, too, as they saw how vulnerable the lives of those assembled around their table were. Nwankwo, Lira and Félix formed a unified block in the eyes of the others, linked together by all those days they had spent together poring over figures, the fear, the doubts they had had about one another – it had all added up to a secret and unique experience that only they could understand.

Two famous newspaper columnists wandered around together in the Bosquet de l'Obélisque, bemoaning the fact that the pace of the news meant that one could no longer dine and write leaders in peace and at one's own pace. A man ran up behind them. It was the Prime Minister's press attaché; the Prime Minister wanted to see them straight away. One of the wives stood shivering over by the Bosquet du Rond-Vert, begging her financial-wonder-boy husband to get their little private jet to land on the Versailles lawn. By the fountain of Apollo a socialist deputy yelled at his chauffeur – if he wanted to keep his job he would do well to master the satnav and find a way out pronto. He lowered his voice when he saw other lost guests heading towards the fountain. He recognized one of them, the consultant Metton, an old friend from university and student activist days. He went over to him.

“How can we get out without being seen?”

“There's only one way – the Trianon, Petit or Grand, they're in the same direction. It's where the kings and queens used to fuck their lovers, there must be a way out towards Paris…”

The deputy didn't ask himself whether the layout might have changed somewhat after three centuries, he just followed his friend out of habit. They took a right-hand fork, and ran into the firework engineers who stopped them and told them to turn back; there were rockets and explosives all over the place, they were in a danger zone.

“I think you'll find the firework display will be cancelled,” the deputy said.

No. Louchsky was on the terrace. He now had only about thirty people around him. The Kremlin had called, ordering him to come home. He had replied that he would be
back early the next morning. His plane was waiting at the Saint-Cyr aerodrome, just behind the park of the palace. If this was the moment of his downfall, it was the moment to leave his mark on the sky of Versailles. He ordered the firework display to be launched. The director wondered out loud whether this would be appropriate given the situation, but he backed away fast under Louchsky's scorching glare.

 

Soon sparkling bouquets rose and exploded above the park and the palace, yellow, purple, red, blue and green, first separate and then mingled. The sky above Versailles lit up, visible for miles around, with loud explosions that seemed designed to drown out the sound of demonstrations and gathering rumours.

At the same time newspapers were junking their first editions and preparing new headlines. The printers were churning out banners about a government scandal; meanwhile the Élysée crisis unit was poring over the revelations and issuing frantic denials. The same thing was happening at the Quai d'Orsay, where Steffy watched as the Minister arrived back screaming with rage at these “little Internet fuckers”. He thought of Félix. He knew perfectly well that he and his friends were behind all this. In London Helen was woken up by the non-stop ringing of her telephone. In Nice, the prosecutor left a dinner party in a hurry, asking for the judge's private number – he wanted to assure him of his great esteem.

As the final display exploded in a blaze of pyrotechnic skill, the Prime Minister, who was still ensconced in the king's apartment, was whispering to a small group of senior journalists that he had always warned the President about this over-successful Russian. Madame Douchet wandered through the Hall of Mirrors, stroking the bronze chandeliers. Outside, the diehard demonstrators yelled in unison with the rockets; the soaking journalists asked where the
President could have got to – his car was still in the courtyard – and the socialist deputy and his old university pal had taken refuge in the Temple de l'Amour, between the Petit Trianon and the Hameau de la Reine.

Louchsky's plane took off for Moscow.

Kay was now fast asleep in his container.

They left a huge pile of newspapers on the table, “For the fire,” they said as they left. Jacques would quite like to have kept them, as they told the whole story of the hurricane they had lived through.

His invisible house was now empty, and he and his wife were alone together again. He looked out at his garden, at his wind turbine, at the slow and silent life that he had chosen for himself. He saw the bed of dying hollyhocks, the plump lettuces, the purple artichokes in front of the door, the light fading over the peaks and the footpaths winding above past the caves and tombs that had served as hiding places in so many wars over the centuries.

Jacques had built a lot of sets during his working career. He could produce a ship's hold, a minister's antechamber, a school dormitory, an eighteenth-century boudoir or a colonial brothel; he could plan it all, the moment when the door would slam, the wind rise, or a bomb would explode – that was what filming was all about. And yet he could not understand what had just been happening in his own house. He had seen Nwankwo marching down to the village with a telephone card at exactly four o'clock in the afternoon, and returning an hour later. And then that evening Versailles had exploded and the government had become engulfed in scandal.

The following morning they had all gathered around the radio, beaming and laughing. Dmitry had returned. Official denials were pouring in. Specialists were analysing the revelations; the opposition was calling for heads to roll; all the talk was of corruption; it looked as though Douchet would resign; Louchsky's shares had gone into free fall; the
Kremlin had removed him from control of the Russian state naval-construction company. And the United States had declared him
persona non grata
.

When Félix had translated one leader-writer's question: “But who or what is Uche? Some kind of secret organization?” Nwankwo had cried.

The judge had laughed hysterically when he found a small box in
Nice-Matin
referring to Linda Stephensen's death in Nice. “Was this story filed away too quickly?” the paper asked.

 

Jacques couldn't help thinking that as well as being dishonest they were pretty stupid to have left so many traces, but he kept that thought to himself. Because as the hours went by something seemed to be happening to his guests: the curious osmosis between them took the form first of a rush of ecstatic happiness, which grew fast and then seemed to wither away almost at once, as though crushed under mounting anxiety. Their new-found leisure allowed a hitherto forbidden question to be asked: what now?

One by one, they left. Lira, Polina and Dmitry had been the first to go, like a normal family, back up to Paris in their car. The university term was about to begin, Polina was enrolled again but under a different name. Then Félix had set off towards Nice with the judge. Nwankwo had gone alone, taking the bus to the station. Jacques had driven him to the bus stop. There were a lot of things he would like to have asked, starting with who Uche was, but he just shook his hand for a long moment, and told him that he would always be welcome.