Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th)
Date: November 1985
Point of view: Focus on Madeleine Bonaparte
The month of November had fallen on Paris with an early harshness. Outside, icy gusts swept away the dead leaves of the Jardin du Luxembourg, pressing them against the high wrought iron gates. The sky was a heavy grey, typical of those autumn Sundays when the whole city seems to want to stay under the duvet.
But inside the vast apartment on the rue d'Assas, there floated a softness that the dawning winter could not dampen. It was an invisible rampart, built of bricks of normality and reassuring rituals.
In the large kitchen with its old terracotta tiles, the air was saturated with the round, buttery smell of roast veal with chanterelle mushrooms that was slowly browning in the oven, mixed with that of beeswax that had been rubbed on the floor of the living room the day before. Madeleine Bonaparte wiped her hands, reddened by the hot water, on a linen cloth. She pushed away a lock of her chestnut hair that was escaping from her bun, and allowed herself a moment's respite by leaning against the worktop.
She closed her eyes to listen to the discreet symphony of her house.
Since the previous winter, since that cursed phone call had announced the attack in Beirut, the silence of the apartment had often been an enemy. A clinical silence, heavy with the anguish of medical prognoses and the fear of the next day.
Today, the silence had disappeared. It was replaced by the background noise of life that stubbornly reasserted itself.
The most beautiful of these sounds was undoubtedly the dull and regular clash of a walnut cane striking the Persian carpet in the drawing-room.
Madeleine walked into the corridor and stuck her head through the crack in the double door. Auguste was there. The great colonel of the DST, the iron man of French intelligence, had returned home after months in hospital and in a rehabilitation center. Physically, the explosion had scarred him. He had lost about ten kilos, his once imperious face had hollowed out, and his right leg, crushed by the shrapnel, still refused to carry its full weight. His gestures were slower, sometimes betrayed by a slight tremor.
Yet, propped up in his old leather club chair, he read Le Monde and Le Figaro with the same ferocious concentration as before. His mind had lost none of its sharpness. From time to time, he cursed in a low voice against a political decision or a badly written article. For Madeleine, seeing her husband railing against the government was the most wonderful miracle. It was proof that he was alive, that he was him.
She returned to the dining room to finish setting the large table. She took particular care of it. The embroidered white tablecloth, the crystal glasses that clinked softly, the solid silver cutlery of the Dufresne family, perfectly aligned. It was not a festive meal, it was simply Sunday. But after having come close to death, each Sunday together took on the dimension of a sacred celebration.
Yet, as she smoothed the tablecloth, his gaze fell on the empty plate at the end of the table, near the window.
The seat of the eldest.
Suddenly, the familiar crackle of small, hurried steps echoed through the hallway. Two tornadoes burst into the dining room, gliding in woollen socks onto the waxed parquet floor in perfect timing.
"Mommy!" exclaimed Claire, stopping her run by grabbing onto the back of a chair.
At thirteen, Claire Marguerite Bonaparte was a lively, slender young girl, whose ever-efferving intelligence translated into a constant need to analyze the world around her. Behind her trotted Camille, eleven years old, the youngest. Smaller, quieter and deeply observant, Camille clutched a large magnificently illustrated astronomical book to her chest.
"Lazarus is still not here," Claire observed with the severity of a bailiff, pointing an accusing finger at the great Comtoise clock in the corridor. "He said he would be there at half past twelve sharp. It is ten minutes past thirteen. I have calculated: it is forty minutes late. »
"The subway may be broken," Camille tried softly, though she didn't believe it for a second. Lazare was never late. Chance had no hold on him.
Madeleine smiled at her daughters, trying to hide the little touch of anguish that invariably squeezed her stomach as soon as she thought of her eldest son.
"Your brother is working a lot at the moment, girls. You know very well that he took this small apartment near Ivry to avoid travel time and to be closer to his workshop. »
"But it's Sunday!" protested Claire, visibly indignant at this notion of Sunday work. "Victor has gone to play his rugby match in the mud, Dad reads his boring newspapers, and Lazarus is never there! It's not fair. Before, when Dad was in the hospital, Lazarus was always with us. He was the one who made us recite our Latin declensions. »
"He didn't just recite us," Camille added with a knowing little smile. "He taught us how to cheat at chess, and he showed us how to pick the lock on the living room sideboard with two bobby pins to pick up the orange cookies."
Madeleine stopped short, a carafe of water in her hand, widening her eyes.
"What did he teach you?!"
Camille blushed brutally, realizing her blunder, and nudged her older sister to come to her rescue.
"Oh, nothing, Mom..." Claire stammered, staring at the tips of her socks. "It was ... applied physics. An experiment on levers and fluid mechanics." »
Madeleine put down the decanter, half amused, half exasperated.
Lazare's influence over his siblings was total and absolute. During the long nightmarish months when Auguste was in a coma, Lazarus had, without a word, taken the place of the patriarch. At barely eighteen years old, he had become the keystone of the house. He had managed Victor's mute anxieties, channeled Claire's boundless energy through improbable intellectual challenges, and reassured Camille with a quiet strength that compelled Madeleine's admiration. He had protected them from despair.
But this dazzling maturity, this way he had transformed himself into a middle-aged man overnight, secretly terrified his mother.
And then, at the beginning of the summer, the protective big brother had packed his bags.
He had announced, in a tone that did not admit of any discussion, that he was moving into a modest apartment in the southern suburbs with his friend from university, Karim Belkacem. He had vaguely mentioned the creation of a "small computer repair and security company".
Madeleine, like a large part of France in 1985, did not understand much about computers. She was unaware of the existence of contracts stamped "Secret Defense". She was unaware of the terrifying hearing in the basement of the DST, the surrender of the general staff, and the contract for a billion francs. She knew nothing of the two hundred and fifty workers who, at that precise moment, a few kilometers away, were working in three-shifts under the barking of a ruthless production manager.
In the reassuring imagination of the mother, her genius son was tinkering with old electronic cards in a dark garage with his friend Karim, selling software to a few small shopkeepers in the neighborhood, eating exclusively sandwiches and cold coffee.
What gnawed at her deeply was not the obscure nature of his work, but what that work made of him.
During her increasingly rare and expeditious visits to the house, Madeleine had the impression of seeing a specter. A young man with features drawn by a chronic lack of sleep, whose dark and hardened gaze seemed fixed on threats inaccessible to mortals. He radiated a metallic tension, a concentrated coldness. He was nineteen, the age of carefreeness, of first student loves, of parties and nonsense, but he lived and breathed with the gravity of a head of state in wartime.
"Come on, go and wait for him in the entrance hall, girls," Madeleine said softly, smoothing Camille's hair. "Stick your noses to the window. He promised to be there for lunch, and Lazarus always keeps his promises. Especially when I'm the one cooking." »
The two sisters did not need to be told twice and ran to the entrance of the apartment.
Madeleine returned to her stove. She opened the heavy oven door to drizzle her roast with her own juices. The comforting warmth gilded her face.
She closed her eyes for a moment. She saw Lazarus again as a child, that boy so serious, so secretive. She remembered his unexplained tears in the night, when he was twelve years old, and that ancient, heavy look he sometimes looked at her, as if he knew the end of all things. She knew, with that absolute, almost animal intuition shared by mothers, that her son's "little business" was only a screen. Lazarus was fleeing from something immense, or building a fortress against an enemy she could not see.
"Come back to us, big boy," Madeleine prayed silently in the bubbling whisper of chanterelle sauce. "Leave your machines, your equations, and your grown-up stuff for a day. Put down your suitcases. Just be a boy again. Let us take care of you. Let me be your mother."
In the hall of the old Haussmannian building, three floors below, the heavy entrance door made of solid oak and wrought iron pivoted with a slight creaking.
The sanctuary on the rue d'Assas was getting ready to welcome its Builder. The Titan of industry, the keeper of the secrets of the Republic, had just arrived at the foot of the steps, and he was going to have to accomplish the most difficult task of his week: to hide his empire under the doormat to feign, for the space of a meal, the lightness of youth.
Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas
Date: November 1985
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus from Lazarus to Augustus)
In the Rue d'Assas the icy wind rushed under the porches, but Lazare Bonaparte paid no attention to it. He walked with a slow, measured step, purposely to slow down the frenetic pace that had been beating in his temples for weeks.
He had ordered his driver to park the black BMW two blocks away, out of sight of the apartment's windows. He had also left his cold-wool double-breasted suit at the factory, replacing it with corduroy pants and a thick, shapeless Irish chunky knit sweater that he had unearthed from his old student belongings.
Before walking through the heavy door of the building, Lazare plunged his hand into his coat pocket. His fingers brushed against the black case of his professional beeper , the device that connected him twenty-four hours a day to the Ivry factory, to Karim, and to the emergency room of the Ministry of Defense. With a firm pressure of his thumb, he turned off the device.
Digital silence fell.
Lazarus climbed the three flights of stairs on foot, feeling the colossal weight of his empire weighing on his spine with each step. The sixty-year-old engineer, locked up in this nineteen-year-old corps, struggled against absolute exhaustion. Managing two hundred and fifty workers in three-shifts, taming the arrogance of the bankers, launching the recruitment of the Praetorian Guard for VoltaOS... his brain never stopped. He slept three hours a night, and his dreams were populated by equations, DST corridors and lines of code.
When he reached the landing, he closed his eyes, took a long, deep breath, and visualized a mental safe. He locked the CEO in it, the ruthless strategist, the Builder. He turned the key.
He opened his eyes again. He was nothing but Lazarus. The son, and the big brother.
He pressed the brass doorbell.
He didn't have to wait three seconds. The door opened on the fly, nearly hitting the wall of the entrance.
"LAZARE!"
Claire and Camille literally jumped on him. The violence of the impact made him take a step back, but he immediately released his guard posture to catch them, crouching on the entrance floor to hug them.
"Well, it looks like you missed me, monsters," he laughed softly, sitting on the floor, surrounded by the two girls who clung to his neck.
Far from being cold or distant, Lazare let himself be invaded by their energy. He inhaled the smell of Camille's apple shampoo, wrote mentally how much Claire had grown in a few months. This childish chaos, these high-pitched voices that cut each other off to tell him about their week, it was his oxygen. It was to preserve this absolute innocence that he confronted the generals and plundered the banks.
"You're way late!" Claire scolded him, as she rummaged through the pockets of his coat to see if he had brought anything.
"I had to negotiate peace with the local baker," Lazare pleaded with professorial seriousness, holding out a large white box held in place by a golden string. "It was a terrible battle, but I managed to secure a Saint-Honoré and a raspberry pie."
"Mom! He brought dessert!" Camille yelled as she ran to the kitchen with the box.
Lazarus stood up, leaning against the wall, a slight grimace of fatigue running across his face before he masked her. He removed his cloak and stepped into the golden light of the dining room.
The meal was a haven of peace. Lazarus ate with the appetite of a castaway, savoring his mother's roast veal with silent gratitude. At the factory, he fed on cold meal trays and caffeine. Here, every bite tasted like home. He made his sisters laugh, invented incredible (and totally redacted) anecdotes about "stubborn computers" and "impossible repairs," and listened religiously to the account of Augustus' week.
But, sitting opposite him, Madeleine laughed only half-heartedly.
When the meal was over, while the girls were fighting for the last cabbage of the Saint-Honoré, Madeleine placed her hands on her son's hands, placed on either side of his plate.
"Look at me, Lazarus," she whispered.
He raised his eyes. The perfect illusion he thought he had woven collided with the infallible scanner of maternal love. Madeleine saw the deep, purplish dark circles that hollowed out the underside of her eyes. She saw the tension of the muscles of her jaws, that fixity of the gaze that belonged to a hunted man.
"Your little business..." she began, her voice vibrating with worried sweetness. "It's eating you, big boy. You're nineteen. You've got your life ahead of you. You don't need to run like this, to kill yourself for a few repairs. If you and Karim need help paying your rent, with your father's pension, we can help you. But I beg you, stop overexerting yourself. Take a vacation. Sleep. »
Lazare felt a lump form in his throat. His mother's naivety was both disarming and heartbreaking. She wanted to advance him the money for the rent of a studio, when he had just received a deposit of two hundred and fifty million francs from the French state. He could have bought the whole neighborhood from her.
But the truth would terrify her. The truth would plunge her into a world of paranoia, spooks and state blackmail. To protect her, he had to lie.
He pressed Madeleine's hands with infinite gentleness, and offered her a smile of disarming tenderness.
"Don't worry, Mom. It's just a bad patch," he whispered, forcing his voice into a youthful, deceptively casual intonation. "Karim and I landed a big client. An insurance firm that asked us to redo their entire network. The machines are capricious, we have to spend our nights there. But it's over soon. I promise. As soon as the contract is fulfilled, we give ourselves a vacation. We'll go skiing. »
Madeleine sighed, half reassured, her thumbs caressing the back of her son's hands.
"Promise me, Lazarus. Health comes first. »
"I promise you."
The afternoon stretched on. The rain began to beat against the panes of the living room. Lazarus helped Auguste get up from the table to his large club chair. The old man leaned heavily on his son's arm, his cane pounding the floor.
Madeleine and the girls had gone into the kitchen to do the dishes in a great joyful hubbub. The two men found themselves alone, on the other side of the large living room, enveloped by the fading light of day and the smell of cold tobacco.
Once Augustus was seated, Lazarus sat down on the small low stool, next to the armchair, where he had sat as a child to listen to his father tell stories of war.
Auguste, his hands crossed on the pommel of his cane, turned his head towards his elder brother. The colonel of the DST did not have Madeleine's blinded gaze. He knew. He remembered perfectly the red binder and the bundle of documents from the Kbis that he had signed months before, when he had just left the hospital. The starting capital of Volta S.A., the four hundred and seventeen thousand francs extorted from the bank.
The ex-intelligence officer did not need to read the confidential newspapers to understand. The fury of General de Saint-Hubert and the rumour of a state contract had filtered through to the company's elders. No one made the connection with the young son Bonaparte, but Auguste had done the bill.
The father looked at his son's hands. They didn't tremble. But the aura that emanated from the boy was that of a general in the middle of a winter campaign.
"How big is the monster, Lazarus?" asked Augustus softly, his gravelly voice almost imperceptible, drowned out by the sound of the rain.
Lazarus did not feign incomprehension. With Augustus, the Builder did not need to hide.
"A billion francs with La Défense and the Quai d'Orsay, to begin with," replied Lazare, in the same matter-of-fact tone, his eyes fixed on the cold ashes of the chimney. "I broke the banks last week. The Tolbiac factory runs with three full shifts. We occupy half the street. »
Auguste closed his eyes for a second. The immensity of the answer exceeded anything he could have imagined. His son, the boy who was studying for his baccalaureate less than a year ago, was keeping the Republic on a leash.
"You're carrying too much, Lazarus," the father whispered, unspeakable pride mingled with dull terror. "The state is a wild beast. You think you have it by the collar, but it's a colossus with no memory. It will eventually try to swallow you." »
"I'm building the cage at the same time as I'm feeding him," Lazarus replied with steely calmness, the sixty-year-old engineer's lucidity briefly taking over. "They won't be able to swallow me, because I'm already in their bloodstream."
Auguste nodded slowly. He placed his large hand, gnarled and marked by the scars of Beirut, on his son's shoulder. A strong, masculine pressure, charged with a gratitude that did not need long speeches. Lazarus had saved this family from ruin, he had washed away the affront of the attack by taking power.
"Your mother is worried," said Augustus simply. "She does not see the emperor. She sees the son who no longer sleeps. »
Lazare turned his head towards the living room door. He could hear Claire's laughter echoing from the kitchen, followed by Madeleine's soft voice. A bulwark of normalcy that he had built with his own hands.
"As long as this living room is at peace, Dad, everything else is of absolutely no importance," Lazare said.
It was an absolute truth. The sacrifice of his humanity, his sleepless nights, the paranoia, the coldness he had to show to the outside world... all this was just the price to pay for the smell of Sunday roast and the laughter of his sisters.
At five o'clock darkness had invaded the streets of Paris. It was time to leave.
Lazarus embraced his mother, who made him promise a thousand times to buy himself fruit and to rest, allowed himself to be suffocated by the hugs of Claire and Camille, and shook hands with Auguste.
When he closed the door of the apartment behind him, the silence of the stairwell enveloped him.
Lazarus remained motionless on the landing for ten seconds. Then he plunged his hand into his coat pocket and turned on his beeper again.
The device immediately emitted three long, aggressive vibrations. An emergency code from Karim or Castella. The factory was calling him. The outside world was crying out for his master.
The young man expired slowly. The loving big brother had just evaporated. Lazare Bonaparte's gaze became black, polar again, emptied of all tenderness. The invisible armor covered his shoulders. He descended the steps in the darkness, ready to face his empire.