The Frozen Dead (46 page)

Then he pictured Chaperon as he had been on the bridge and in the car: someone who was scared to death, in desperate straits. Between those two meetings, the chemist had been murdered. Servaz took a moment to reflect: the death of the horse, however dreadful it may have been, had not had the same effect on the mayor.
Why not?
Was it because it was a horse? Or because he did not feel targeted at the time?

Servaz went on exploring, tormented by the feeling of urgency that had gripped him ever since Perrault's death. Upstairs he found a bathroom, WC and two bedrooms, one of them a master bedroom. He walked around it and was immediately overcome by a strange sensation. He studied the room, frowning. There was something he could not get out of his mind.

A cupboard, a dresser. A double bed. But judging by the shape of the mattress, only one person had been sleeping there for a long time, and there was also only one chair and one night table.

It was the bedroom of a divorced man who lived alone. Servaz opened the wardrobe.

Women's dresses, blouses, skirts, jumpers and coats. And just below, pairs of high heels.

Then he ran his finger over the night table: a thick layer of dust – just like in Alice's room.

Chaperon didn't sleep in this room.

This had been the former Madame Chaperon's bedroom, before their divorce.

Just like the Grimms, the Chaperons had had separate bedrooms.

Something wasn't right. He felt instinctively he was on to something. The tension was there again and wouldn't leave. This persistent impression of danger, of impending disaster. Once again he saw Perrault screaming like the damned in his cabin, and his head began to spin. He grabbed hold of a corner of the bed.

Suddenly he heard a shout, ‘
Martin!
'

He rushed out onto the landing. Ziegler's voice, coming from below. His feet hardly touched the stairs. The door to the cellar was open. Servaz rushed through it and on down to a huge basement with rough stone walls. The boiler and laundry room. Plunged in darkness. There was a light further along … He hurried towards it. A big room lit by a bare light bulb. Its misty halo did not reach into the corners. A workbench, climbing gear hanging from big cork panels. Ziegler was standing in front of an open metal locker. A padlock was hanging from the door.

‘What the—'

He broke off and went closer. Inside the cupboard was a black hooded waterproof cape and a pair of boots.

‘And that's not everything,' said Ziegler.

She handed him a shoebox. Servaz opened it and held it under the dim light. He recognised it immediately: the ring. Stamped ‘C S'. And a single yellowing dog-eared photograph. An old one. In it you could see four men standing side by side wearing the same capes as the one hanging in the metal cupboard, the same black hooded cape found on Grimm's corpse, the same cape that hung in the cabin by the river. The four men had their faces half hidden by the shadows of the hoods, but Servaz thought nevertheless that he could recognise Grimm's flabby chin and Chaperon's square jaw. The sun was shining on the four dark shapes, which made them seem even more sinister and out of place. A summer landscape, a bucolic vision all around – you could almost hear the birds singing. But the evil was there, thought Servaz. It was almost palpable: in that landscape flooded with sunlight, the form it had taken in the four figures, its presence, was even more obvious. Evil exists, he thought, and these four men were one of its countless incarnations.

He was beginning to get an idea of their set-up, a possible pattern.

The four men, in his opinion, had a shared passion: mountains, nature, hiking and camping rough. But there was something else, too, more secret. Deep in these valleys they were isolated from the world, in total impunity; they were exalted by the summits they knew so well, and they had finally come to believe they were untouchable. Servaz felt he was getting near the source from which everything flowed. Over the years, they had created a sort of mini-sect, living as they did in this remote part of the Pyrenees, where the outside world only reached them through television and newspapers; they were cut off both geographically and psychologically from the rest of the population, and even from their spouses – as the divorces and deep-rooted hatred proved.

Until reality caught up with them.

Until the first blood was spilled.

When that happened, the group had scattered, terrified, like a flight of starlings. And they were being shown up for what they really were: pathetic, terrified cowards and losers. Knocked brutally from their pedestals.

The mountains would no longer be the grandiose witness of their undetected crimes, but the theatre of their punishment. Who, now, was dispensing justice? What did he look like? Where was he hiding?

Gilles Grimm.

Serge Perrault.

Gilbert Mourrenx – and Roland Chaperon.

The ‘club' of Saint-Martin.

There was a question tormenting him. What was the exact nature of their crimes? Because Servaz no longer had any doubt that Ziegler was right: the blackmail they had threatened the girl with was only the tip of the iceberg, and now he dreaded finding out what lay below the surface. At the same time he sensed there was an obstacle somewhere, a detail that did not fit with the pattern. It was too simple, too obvious, he thought. Somewhere there was a screen they couldn't see, and the truth was hidden behind it.

Servaz went over to the basement window that looked out onto the darkened garden. It was pitch black outside.

They were out there, waiting to exact justice. In the night, ready to strike. No doubt searching for Chaperon, as he and Ziegler were. Where was the mayor hiding? Far away, or still nearby?

Suddenly another question struck him.
Did this club consist only of the four men in the photograph, or were there other members?

*   *   *

Espérandieu found the babysitter in the sitting room when he got home. She got reluctantly to her feet, apparently absorbed in an episode of
House.
Unless she had been hoping to make more money.
A first-year law student with an exotic name like Barbara, Marina or perhaps Olga,
he remembered.
Lyudmila? Stella? Vanessa?
He gave up on calling her by her first name and paid her for her two hours. He also found a note from Charlène under a magnet on the fridge:
Private view. I'll be late. Kisses.
He got a cheeseburger out of the freezer, put it in the microwave, then plugged in his laptop. There were several messages in his inbox, including one from Kleim162. The subject of the message was ‘Re: Various questions about L.' Espérandieu closed the kitchen door, put on some music (the Last Shadow Puppets album
The Age of the Understatement
), pulled over a chair and began reading.

Hey, Vince.

Here are the initial results of my investigation. No scoop, but a few little things that will paint a rather different portrait of Éric Lombard from the one the public is fed. Not so long ago, during a billionaire's forum in Davos, our man adopted the definition of globalisation as postulated by Percy Barnevik, the Swedish former president of the ABB Group: ‘I would define globalisation as the freedom for my group of companies to invest where it wants when it wants, to produce what it wants, to buy and sell where it wants, and support the fewest restrictions possible from labour laws and social conventions.' Which is also the creed of most multinational CEOs.

To get an idea of the increasingly powerful pressure these groups are exerting on governments, just think that in the early 1980s there were roughly 7,000 multinational corporations around the world, that by 1990 there were 37,000, and now 15 years later there are over 70,000, controlling 800,000 subsidiaries and 70 per cent of trade flow. And the tendency is only getting stronger. Consequently, there has never been so much wealth, and the wealth has never been so inequitably distributed: the CEO of Disney earns 300,000 times what the Haitian worker manufacturing the company's T-shirts gets. The 13 board members of AIR, to which Éric Lombard belongs, earned salaries of €10 million each last year – in other words, twice the total combined salaries of all 6,000 workers in one of the group's Asian factories.

Espérandieu frowned. Was Kleim162 about to rehash the entire history of socialism for him? He knew that his contact had a visceral mistrust of the police, politicians and multinational corporations, that he was not only a journalist but also a member of Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch, and that he had been in Genoa and Seattle during the anti-globalisation demonstrations that were held on the fringe of the G8 summits. He had been in the Diaz school in Genoa, which the demonstrators were using as a dormitory, when the Italian carabinieri had burst in and beat them up with such incredible brutality that the walls and floor were covered in blood. Eventually they called the ambulances. The final toll: 1 dead, 600 injured and 281 arrests.

Éric Lombard was groomed in the family's sporting goods company: a brand name that everyone knows thanks to the champions who use their products. He succeeded in doubling the branch's profit in five years. How did he do that? By developing a veritable ‘art' of subcontracting. Shoes, T-shirts, shorts and other sporting equipment were already being manufactured in India, Indonesia and Bangladesh, by women and children. Éric Lombard went out there and modified the existing agreements. Now in order to obtain a licence, the supplier has to agree to draconian conditions: no strikes, flawless quality and production costs so low that the workers receive a pittance. To keep up the pressure the licence is subject to revision on a monthly basis. A tactic his competitors had already used. Since he inaugurated this policy, the branch has been more prosperous than ever.

Espérandieu looked down. He studied his T-shirt, emblazoned with the words ‘
I'm next to a moron
', with an arrow pointing left.

Another example? In 1996, the pharmaceutical branch of the group bought the American company that had developed eflornithine, the only medication known to be effective against African trypanosomiasis, commonly known as sleeping sickness. A disease that affects 450,000 people in Africa every year and which, if left untreated, can lead to encephalitis, coma and death. The Lombard Group immediately stopped producing the drug. Why?
Not profitable enough.
To be sure, the disease affects hundreds of thousands of people, but they are people without real purchasing power. Countries like Brazil, South Africa and Thailand decided to manufacture the drugs to combat AIDS or meningitis, given the humanitarian urgency, disregarding the patents that belonged to the major pharmaceutical companies; Lombard joined forces with the companies to bring a suit against those countries at the World Trade Organisation. At the time, old Lombard was already dying, and it was Éric who took over the reins of the group, at the age of twenty-four. So are you beginning to see our handsome adventurer and media darling from another point of view?

Consequently,
thought Vincent,
Lombard must have no lack of enemies. Which wasn't really good news.
He skipped over the following pages, which were more or less the same sort of thing, and figured he'd go back to them later. He did pause, however, to read a passage a bit further along:

For you the most interesting aspect might be the bitter conflict between the Lombard Group and the workers of the Polytex factory, near the Belgian border, in July 2000. In the early 1950s Polytex was manufacturing one of the first synthetic fibres in France, and they employed 1,000 workers. By the end of the 1990s there were only 160 workers left. In 1991 the factory had been bought by a multinational who handed it over almost immediately to a private equity firm: it wasn't profitable anymore because of competition from other less costly fibres. Although it certainly could have been – the superior quality of the product meant that it was ideal for surgical use. There was a market for it. Finally, after a series of firms had taken over the factory, a subsidiary of the Lombard Group came forward.

For the workers, a multinational the size of Lombard seemed like a dream come true. They wanted to believe. The previous raiders had all given them the usual shutdown blackmail: salaries frozen, compulsory overtime including weekends and holidays. Lombard was no different: at first, he asked them to put in an even greater effort. In fact, the group had bought the factory for one purpose alone: to acquire the patents. On 5 July 2000, the commercial court of Charleville-Mézières ruled that the factory should be liquidated. For the workers this was a terrible blow. It meant compulsory redundancy, an immediate end to work and destruction of all the equipment. The Polytex workers were so angry that they decided to take the factory hostage, and declared they were ready to blow it up and pour 50,000 litres of sulphuric acid into the Meuse if their demands were not taken into consideration. They were well aware of the weapon they had: the factory contained a whole host of very toxic chemicals, which in the case of a fire or explosion would have caused a catastrophe even worse than the AZF disaster in Toulouse in 2001.

The authorities immediately ordered the evacuation of the nearby town, hundreds of policemen were positioned around the site, and the Lombard Group was ordered to begin immediate negotiations with the help of the unions. The affair lasted five days. As they were not making any progress, on 17 July the workers poured 5,000 litres of sulphuric acid, symbolically coloured red, into a stream that fed into the Meuse. They threatened to do it again every two hours.

Politicians, trade unionists and leaders then denounced what they called ‘indefensible eco-terrorism'. A major evening paper ran the deadly serious headline ‘Advent of Social Terrorism' and spoke of ‘suicidal Taliban'. Which is all the more ironic when you think that for decades Polytex had been one of the biggest polluters of the Meuse and the whole region. Finally, three days later the factory was captured by the GIGN special forces and the CRS riot police. The workers went home with their tails between their legs: they hadn't gained a thing. I imagine quite a few of them have still not digested what happened.