Apocalypse Baby. Виржини Депант

boss looks daunted. Up against the wall, he covers for me. “Let me assure you that Lucie is one of our best agents, she’s got plenty of experience on the ground and . . .”

      “You think it’s normal to lose a girl of fifteen, on the journey she does every morning?”

      I had met Jacqueline Galtan when we opened the file, ten days or so earlier. Impeccable blonde bob, stiletto heels with red soles, she was a cold woman, well-preserved for her age, very precise with her instructions. I hadn’t guessed that as soon as she was crossed, she’d develop Tourette’s syndrome. In her anger, lines start to appear on her forehead. The Botox is fighting a losing battle. A drop of white froth appears at the corner of her lips. She’s marching around the office now, her bony shoulders shaking with rage.

      “So just how did you lose her, you bloody idiot, in the METRO?”

      The word seems to excite her. Facing her, Deucené cowers in his chair. I feel pleasure watching him shrink back, since he never loses a chance to act like a big man in front of others. Jacqueline Galtan improvises a monologue, delivered at machine-gun speed: it’s directed at my ugly mug, my scruffy clothes, my total inability to do my job, which heaven knows is not very difficult, and the lack of intelligence that marks every damn thing I do. I concentrate on Deucené’s bald head, speckled with obscene brown spots. Short and paunchy, the boss isn’t very sure of himself, which tends to make him ruthless toward his subordinates. Right now, he’s paralyzed with panic. I push forward a chair and sit down at the side of his desk.

      The client stops to draw a breath, and I seize the chance to join in the conversation.

      “It happened so fast . . . I had no idea Valentine was likely to disappear. You think she’s run away?”

      “Ah, how helpful, now we’re actually talking about it! It’s precisely because I’d like to know the answer that I’m paying you.”

      Deucené has spread out a number of photographs and reports on his desk. Jacqueline Galtan picks up a page of a report at random, between two fingers, as if it were a dead insect, glances quickly at it, and drops it again. Her nails are impeccable too, bright red polish.

      I try to justify myself. “You asked me to follow Valentine, to report on where she went. Who she met, what she was up to . . . But I wasn’t at all expecting anything would happen to her. It’s not the same kind of assignment, do you see what I mean?”

      Now she bursts into tears. That’s all we needed to put us totally at ease.

      “It’s just so awful, not knowing where she is.”

      Deucené, looking apologetic, avoids her eyes, and stammers, “We’ll do everything we can to help you find her . . . But I’m sure the police . . .”

      “The police! You think the police give a damn? All they’re interested in is getting the media involved. They just have one idea—talk to the press. You really think Valentine needs that sort of publicity? Think that’s a good way to begin her life?”

      Deucené turns to me. He’d like me to invent some line of inquiry. But I was the first to be surprised that morning, when I didn’t find her sitting in the café opposite the school. The client is off again.

      “Right, I’ll pay. We’ll do it my way, a special contract. Five thousand euros bonus if you bring her back in two weeks. But the other side of the bargain is, if you don’t find her, I’ll make your life a hell on earth. We have connections, and I imagine an agency like yours doesn’t want to have a lot of, let’s say, unwelcome inspections. Not to mention the bad publicity.”

      As she utters the last words, she raises her eyes to look straight at Deucené, quite slowly, a very elegant movement, like in a black-and-white film. She must have been practicing that gesture all her life. She looks again at the page from the report. The files on the table are all mine. Not just the ones I put together all day and all evening yesterday, but ones they must have gone to fetch themselves from my computer. They can do what they like to someone like me: obviously they’ve been checking to see I’ve brought everything out, and haven’t forgotten or hidden anything. I spent hours selecting the most important documents and sorting them into categories, and they’ve made a total mess of it, of course everything’s out there now: from the bill at the café where I waited to the least interesting photo I took of her, even the photos where all you can see is a bit of her arm . . . It’s their way of telling me that even if I spend twenty-four hours on a dossier making sure it’s cast iron when it’s asked for, I’m deemed incapable of judging what’s important and what isn’t. Why should they be deprived of the pleasure of being sadistic to someone, when I’m right there, available, at the bottom of the food chain? She’s right to call me a half-wit, the old hag. If it makes her feel better. Yes, I’m the half-wit, who gets paid peanuts, and has just been on duty for almost two weeks trailing a nymphomaniac teenager who’s hyper-active and coked up to the eyeballs. Just for a change. I’ve been working almost two years for Reldanch, and that’s the only kind of assignment I ever get: snooping on teenagers. I was doing it as efficiently as anyone else, up to the moment Valentine disappeared.

      That particular morning, yesterday, I was a few steps behind her, in the corridor of the metro. It wasn’t difficult to pass unnoticed in the crowd of commuters, because the kid hardly ever took her eyes off her iPod. As I made for the exit, an older woman, heavily built, suddenly collapsed in front of me. And my reflex was to stretch out my arms as she fell backward. Then, instead of just lowering her to the ground and hurrying on, so as not to lose my quarry, I stayed with her for a minute until some other people arrived. I’d been trailing Valentine for most of two weeks. I was sure I’d find her in the café next to this school she attended, stuffing her face with muffins and Coca-Cola, like she did every morning, with some of the other kids from the school, but sitting a little back from them, calmly keeping her distance. Except that day, Valentine disappeared. It’s always possible something has happened to her. Obviously, I wondered whether she’d spotted me and taken advantage of the accident to lose me. But I’d never felt she was suspicious. Still, after my long experience of trailing after teenagers, I’m beginning to understand what makes them tick.

      Jacqueline Galtan looks down at the photos on the desk. Valentine giving a boy a blow job on a park bench, hidden from passersby by a waist-high shrub. Valentine snorting a line from her exercise book at 8:00 a.m. Valentine jumping on the back of a scooter ridden by a perfect stranger she’d stopped at a traffic light, late at night . . . I didn’t have a colleague working with me on this job. So because of budgetary constraints, I’d been teamed up with a notorious crack addict, who’d work for any rate at all, as long as he was paid in cash every night. I suppose his dealer had let him down, but anyway he’d never turned up to relieve me, and his voicemail was full, I couldn’t reach him. Nobody thought it was a matter of urgency to replace him. You had to be under the kid’s window, in case she made a run for it, and at the school gates next morning as well. In fact, it was lucky I was actually there when she disappeared. Most of the time, I had no idea what she was up to.

      At the beginning of the assignment, I’d used classic tactics: I’d got another kid, who helps us out sometimes, to offer her an irresistible smartphone for a very good price, so-called “fallen off a truck.” Mostly when we’re dealing with teenagers, we just tell their parents how to fix their child’s phone. But Valentine didn’t have a cell phone, and she didn’t deign to switch on the one I’d sent her way. That didn’t help. I don’t often have to track a teenager without a good GPS installed.

      The ancestor lines up the photos, looking thoughtful, then swivels her gaze onto me. “And you wrote these reports, did you?” she says quite affably, as if we’d had plenty of time to digest her tirade. I stammer out a few words, she isn’t listening. “And you took the photos too? Well, you did a good job before you screwed up.” Blowing hot and cold, the way of all manipulative people: first the insult then the compliment, and I’ll be the judge of the tone of our exchanges, thank you very much. It works too; her recriminations were so unpleasant that the compliment is like a shot of morphine on an open wound. If I dared, I’d roll over and let her scratch my