Brussels Noir Page 4

  A first train comes, headed in the direction of the Forest municipality. Lea moves to the front of the crowd in order to board the next one as quickly as possible. It’s arriving in fifteen seconds. 8:31. Nine hours and twenty-nine minutes until the next blackout. The gray concrete, the orange walls, the dusty light that falls on the platform make the exhausted commuters look even paler and more washed-out.

  Then everyone rushes to board the train in a kind of controlled stampede. A sensual female voice announces: “Next stop, Porte de Haal; volgende halte, Halleport.” Lea is wedged beside a Flemish man with the air of a bureaucrat, reading the news on his tablet. She still remembers a smattering of Dutch—not enough to make spontaneous conversation with her colleagues, but enough to understand the article’s bold headline: “The Future of the Free Quarter of Matongé: A Problem for All of Regional Europe.” A jolt makes her stumble and hold on to the greasy pole beside her for balance. “Next stop, Hôtel des Monnaies—volgende halte, Munthof.” The streams of commuters rush past, blocking Lea between the pole and the Flemish bureaucrat. He puts his tablet away in its leather case.

  “Lea!”

  She looks up, recognizing the voice of Jo, her colleague at the Council of Strategic Development Logics. The European administration abounds with councils, courts, bodies, parliaments, secretariats, and departments, each with a name more absurd than the last. Lea gave up trying to understand it a long time ago. She concentrates on her work. Period. The two young women push their way through the crowd to meet in the middle. Jo is wearing a little black dress, black patent-leather Richelieus, a trench coat, and a leather bag. She’s from Brussels. She doesn’t have to worry about being stuck on a delayed train in the middle of the countryside. Sometimes, Lea misses the days when she could wear shoes other than her combat boots.

  “Ready for another day in Daedalus?” Jo asks.

  Lea glances away to read the name of the next station: Louise; Louiza.

  “I’m two points from my telecommuting license. Soon I won’t have to see Vibert’s old mug every day!”

  The train pulls into the Trône/Troon station. Jo’s face draws into a frown.

  “Go on . . . have a good day,” she sighs. “Say, can we meet up for lunch? My Decider has a meeting in your building.”

  The thought of spending her fifteen-minute break with Jo delights Lea. “Of course!”

  Jo kisses her on the cheek and hurries down into the metro. She works in the old offices, in Trône. With Regional Europe’s gradual rise to power, the city blocks from Ixelles to avenue Louise have been swallowed up by the bureaucratic machine. Matongé and its tenacious residents refuse to accept the same destiny. Lea gets off at Porte de Namur—renamed the Port of Insurgents by all of Europe—pushing her way off the train.

  The station is nearly deserted. A few commuters walk toward the exit on the chaussée d’Ixelles. The humid, polluted air vibrates with tension. Lea pulls on her gloves, feels the butt of her gun, its safety catch off, and tightens the straps of her backpack. She trembles a little as she walks toward the exit. A police cordon blocks off the rotunda in front of the entrance to the metro. A few hundred meters away, on the chaussée d’Ixelles, barricades have been erected, slogans painted on white bedsheets in lieu of banners. Black smoke rises toward the sky. Assault divisions are stationed in front of the buildings on either side of the wide avenue, paracommando cells ready to intervene. Lea shows her pass to one of the policemen. He clears the way with an imperious air.

  “Hurry!”

  With four other commuters following after her, Lea runs along the gloomy, rundown edifice perpendicular to the chaussée d’Ixelles and dashes into the building where the Council of Decisional Logics is housed, leaving the besieged street behind her.

  In the entrance hall, bags of sand and cement are piled at the base of the walls to protect them from possible attacks. Lea walks past the front counter, behind which Annelies, the receptionist, sits. She waves amiably and flashes a stiff smile, a gleam of amusement in her eyes. This is the paradox of Annelies: this odd mixture of composed spontaneity, of distant warmth; a flame that flickers but never burns. Lea responds with a quick, cordial bonjour.

  “He’s already here,” says Annelies in her impeccable French, with its hint of a Flemish accent.

  Lea consults her watch: 8:47. Nine hours and thirteen minutes until the next blackout. She curses under her breath. She already knows that, having arrived so late, she’ll need to run to catch the five o’clock train, and will be lucky if she’s not too far from Liège when the next blackout brings Europe to a halt. Lea sprints the few meters to the elevator and pushes the button for the sixth floor. Sebastien joins her, dusting off his suit with an elegant gesture. They greet each other with a kiss on each cheek.

  “The TGV was a nightmare!” Sebastien says. He commutes from Paris every morning. “How’d it go for you?”

  “No delays, no fights, I still have all ten fingers,” Lea replies glibly, showing her hands.

  The elevator rises into the heights of the tower. Sebastien fixes Lea with his green eyes encircled by thick black glasses and confesses in one breath: “I have an interview next Wednesday, in Paris.”

  Lea throws a nervous glance at the elevator mirrors and security cameras. “Not here. Tell me at lunch,” she murmurs.

  Sebastien shrugs, discouraged. “Who cares? Let them hear me!” And then, as if suddenly coming back to his senses, he whispers in his colleague’s ear: “I can’t go on like this anymore. We have to get out of here.”

  “I’m two points from my telecommuting license. I might have a chance—”

  “That won’t change a damn thing. We come here full of illusions, ambition, all of us. They break us in six months, and what’s left of our motivation?”

  The doors open. Lea sighs. “I know. I can’t stand it anymore, either. But what can you do, Seb?”

  “We were at the top of our class. They took everything from us, them and their shitty system.”

  A few more colleagues step into the elevator, arguing about something on the lunch menu. Sebastien throws a hateful glance at them.

  “That’s all we have left,” he whispers. “Cafeteria squabbles.”

  He suddenly looks pale. His suit is impeccably cut, his hair perfectly styled, his eyes accentuated by the shape of his glasses; he has the air of a weary gentleman torn from a black-and-white photograph.

  “We’re worth more than this,” he says before stepping out of the elevator. “You’re worth more than those two points.”

  Lea, tired of having the same arguments day after day with Lucas, with Jo, with Sebastien, cedes with a smile of resignation. “Meet you for lunch? With Jo?”

  Sebastien agrees with a slight nod and disappears, weaving his way between colleagues rushing toward their Deciders’ offices, dossiers under their arms.

  Lea arrives at Valère Vibert’s office door, her heart beating wildly, not from the exertion of running, but from the anxiety that comes over her all at once, as it does every day, in this same exact spot. 8:47, nine hours and thirteen minutes before the next blackout; she’s ready to pound her fist on the wooden door three times, knock-knock-knock, like every day of every week—her personal death knell. She closes her eyes and reluctantly announces the beginning of the tragicomic play she’s about to act in. Knock-knock-knock.

  A fraction of a second goes by before Valère Vibert calls from his desk in a feeble voice: “Come in!”

  Lea rests her palm on the door handle. As if by magic, Valère Vibert’s assistant appears at her side, blocking her way in, and stands there in the hallway, rapidly reeling off the notes from her clipboard.

  “Hi-Monsieur-Valère-Vibert-would-like-a-copy-of-the-city-planning-application-because-I-don’t-know-if-you-remember-we-had-started-a-procedure-with-the-municipality-but-the-constitutional-council-turned-us-down-because-of-the-delay-we-took-too-long-so-Monsieur-Vibert-preferred-we-go-ahead-without-their-authorization-but-I-don’t-know-if-you-remem
ber-the-contract-with-the-territorial-authorities-predicted-a-consultative-latency-period-a-priori-so-we-need-proof-of-the-community-agreement-except-that-we-have-no-trace-of-it-so-if-you-can-find-the-minutes-from-the-meeting-that-would-be . . .”

  Lea’s losing the thread but can’t help staring at this little woman in her snug prêt-à-porter suit, earnestly reciting her morning soliloquy. She nods, reassuring Monsieur Vibert’s assistant: “Yes, of course, I can find that in Daedalus. But I’ll need the exact date and time of the meeting with the territorial authorities.”

  Satisfied, Monsieur Vibert’s assistant starts walking, dossier in hand, toward the other backup generators arriving in the central hall, the “memos,” as they’re unceremoniously called, who arrive from their regions, dark circles under their eyes and coffee stains on their shirts.

  Lea takes a deep breath and steps into the office. Two surveillance cameras instantly turn toward her with a metallic clicking; the microdrone that will film her for the next eight hours opens its little iron wings and greets her. Lea can see her tiny reflection in its black eye.

  The musty smell of a rotting carpet permeates every corner of the room and its black and gray walls. A hard rain pelts the dirt-streaked window. Seated behind a desk from the era of Swedish reign, Valère Vibert reads an e-mail on the screen of a computer that should have been replaced long ago. The problem with technology in these past few years has been that in the time it takes to equip an entire department—to provide market studies, product comparisons, lists of posts to be reviewed, competitions to reward the most capable employees—a new model has already rendered the previous one obsolete. Valère Vibert enjoyed a certain prestige in the days when his ultralight silver laptop, branded with a bitten apple, was the gadget of the moment—but now, at the hour of spectral technology, he no longer impresses anyone. If he hasn’t yet been assigned to a different post, it’s simply because he’s too clumsy with his own ten fingers to manipulate an intuitive program like Daedalus and to navigate holographic space.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Vibert,” Lea says politely, seating herself on her rickety old chair.

  It’s been two years since she started working at the Council of Decisional Logics, and for lack of time and funding, they still haven’t bought her a proper desk chair. One day, while she was complaining of back pains, one of her colleagues—one of the “dinosaurs,” as they call themselves—burst out laughing, choking on his sludgy coffee.

  “What’s the memo complaining ’bout? S’been here a few weeks and already wants a comfy seat? Y’don’t want a backache, go home to your region! I waited five years t’sit my ass down on a padded chair!”

  Lea had felt too sorry for him, in his suit that matched the carpet, to bother coming up with an intelligent response. Jo, stubborn, continues to file requests every week; she bravely demands a chair worthy of the name, more stimulating tasks, the chance to learn and progress, and refuses to be discouraged by the jaded laughter of colleagues who threw in the towel ages ago. Lea admires Jo, would like to find the courage to be more like her, to say out loud what the others are thinking; but this would mean entering into endless debates at every level of hierarchy, and Lea isn’t very good at argumentation. And besides, she’s two points—two measly points!—away from her telecommuting license.

  She positions herself in front of the rectangular crystal plate mounted on the lens embedded in Vibert’s desk. At the merest touch, a bright light emanates from the lens, creating a holographic screen between her and Valère Vibert. She takes out her HUD glasses, fits them to her nose, and applies the digital sensors to her ten fingertips. Lea’s hands begin to move like a spider’s legs as she initiates Daedalus, the operating system that maps the deductive reasoning of the Deciders at the top of the administration. Her glasses are synchronized to the screen; Valère Vibert’s mental map, which Lea has been charting for the past two years, is displayed on the bright spectrum. Her work consists of following her boss around every day, of listening to his phone conversations, attending his meetings, and beta-reading his e-mails in order to record every idea, every potential choice and opportunity that arises, to follow his thought processes and trace his changes of mind—the paths abandoned or taken up again, sometimes months later—drawing an immense labyrinth of dormant possibilities. To forget nothing: that’s what Daedalus is for.

  “Well,” Valère Vibert says feebly.

  Lea braces herself to enter the syntactic segment connected to urban projects. With her glasses on, she has the sensation of stepping into a dark hallway whose walls are covered with key words, connectives, symbols, color codes. She uses her fingertip sensors to collect the occurrences one by one, examines them as if they are precious objects, and immediately places them back, so as not to lose sight of them.

  “Your assistant asked me to find the minutes from the meeting with the territorial authorities.”

  “Never mind.”

  Lea stops and looks up from the arborescence of decisions made these past few months. She moves up to the next highest branch in the arborescence and exits the syntactic segment. “Pardon?”

  “Forget about the minutes. I need you for something else. You’re going to insert a new scenario.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Valère Vibert laces his yellowish fingers on his desk and lets out a sigh, meaning: Is it possible to be so idiotic, my poor girl? “I don’t know if you’ve been following the news, but the Council of Urban Development Logics is nearing the end of two years’ negotiation with the Free Quarter of Matongé over the United Regions of Europe’s purchase of the agglomeration. Okay?”

  Lea nods. Though she has, like everyone else, been following the protests at the Port of Insurgents, she lets Valère Vibert talk, for Valère Vibert doesn’t like to be interrupted.

  “But the Council of Urban Development Logics has underestimated the Matongé collective, and especially the popular fervor all this media song-and-dance has created. The dossier isn’t looking great and the final hearing is set for today, okay?”

  Lea nods automatically. It’s been nearly a year since the clashes began. Now, activists are coming from the four corners of the United Regions of Europe to support Amani Mutamba.

  “And their little circus is cute, okay, but it’s time to come back to Earth. Matongé can’t win against Europe.”

  “I don’t really see where you’re going with this, Monsieur Vibert,” Lea allows herself. “Nor what the Council of Decisional Logics has to do with it.”

  “The president of the Council of Urban Development Logics is a friend of mine. You are going to invent a scenario, as well as the proceedings that are missing from the dossier, and you’ll file it all in Daedalus, okay?”

  After a few seconds of bewildered silence, Lea blinks, takes off her goggles, places them on the desk, and says, already exhausted: “I’m not sure I understand you correctly. You’re asking me to create a false history? Not for you, but for the president of the Council of Urban Development Logics?”

  “There’s nothing to understand,” Vibert replies in a dry, professional voice, sliding a thick dossier over the tabletop. “Here is all of the information you’ll encode in the minutes of the six fictional meetings.”

  Lea can’t hold back her distress: “Tampering with the history will have an unprecedented butterfly effect!”

  Blood rushes to Valère Vibert’s cheeks, giving them a slightly orange, waxy tint. “I’m asking you to do your job, so that we can be done with this so-called Free Quarter.”

  “It’s not my job to pirate the mental map of another Decider!”

  “Lea, how many points are you from your telecommuting license?”

  She lets her gaze roam the winding paths of Daedalus. “Two points, Monsieur Vibert.”

  “It would be a real pity to get a sanction now, wouldn’t it?”

  Lea steels her gaze, forces herself to hide the contempt she feels. Valère Vibert’s sluggish cheeks droop on either side of his dry, blood
less mouth. She thinks of Lucas, of how worried he looked this morning as she was getting ready to leave. Just two more points and she won’t have to commute any longer. No more insomnia. No more walking home through the snow after the blackout. At last, they’ll be able to make plans for their future. She takes off her glasses. “Yes, sir.”

  He grins, showing his false teeth, and slides the dossier closer. “That’s a girl. There. You have everything you need right here. Be sure to backdate all the documents, okay? It’s important to be consistent.”

  * * *

  Only twelve minutes until lunch is over. In the cafeteria hall, Lea spots Jo among the dozens of administrative employees of the United Regions of Europe, her neck craned toward the giant screen where a live broadcast of the tribunal hearing plays. Just as Lea is about to greet her, Jo points up at the screen, warning: “Shhh! They’re about to give the verdict.”

  Lea feels the tension running through her body. The Decision Room is packed with journalists, with citizens of Matongé and the United Regions of Europe. The Deciders are all gathered in the auditorium. With no suspense for Lea, the verdict comes down like a guillotine: the residents of Matongé have six hours to vacate the district. In the popular assembly where the activists are rallying, a tall black man draws Lea’s attention: Amani Mutamba. When the president announces the council’s decision, cries of protest mount from the four corners of the room and police attempt to contain the crowd. A furious resignation burns in Amani Mutamba’s eyes.

  In the hall of the cafeteria, functionaries comment on the news; the renewal of the building projects and the possibility of being transferred to new offices has everyone in good spirits. Lea sits mutely amid this buzzing crowd, unable to take her eyes away from Amani Mutamba. Jo notices her desolate expression.

  “Looks like somebody had a rough morning.”