“Developing in yourself the conviction that you are capable of it.”
“You mean that if Alan isn’t convinced deep down that he is capable of getting something from his managers, he won’t get it, even if he conscientiously applies the best communication techniques in the world?”
“Exactly! When you are intimately convinced that you can influence other people’s decisions, you always succeed in the end, even if you’re slightly shaky at first. You find a way. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in your ability, you’re going to stop at the first obstacle, and you’ll interpret it as a proof of the pointlessness of what you’re doing.”
He lifted the cigar to his mouth.
“And so you asked him to amuse himself getting his bosses to say a specific word, just to get him to discover that he is capable of having an influence on them?”
“You’ve understood everything. I want him to believe in his ability to have an influence.”
“Interesting.”
Catherine suddenly looked up as an idea occurred to her. “You didn’t really select that word at random, did you? You chose
marionette
so that Alan would unconsciously project himself into the role of the person who holds the strings, isn’t that so?”
By way of an answer, Dubreuil just smiled.
“Very clever, Igor.”
He took a long puff on his cigar.
M
ARC
D
UNKER
, CEO of Dunker Consulting, was an imposing figure. Well over 6 feet tall and 210 pounds, he was a heavyweight in the recruitment world in France.
He came from a village in the provinces, in the heart of the Beaujolais region. Cattle dealers, the Dunkers were not well respected by the local inhabitants, who regarded their profession as a necessary evil. The family had more money than the farmers around them, many of whom felt that this money had been made at their expense, without the Dunkers having to suffer, like them, during the lean years when the price of beef fell.
Young Marc went to the local school. Proud to be the son of the richest man in the village, in other respects he felt excluded. He didn’t feel sorry for himself because of that; on the contrary, it fed his aggression. At the slightest remark from his schoolmates, he would pick a fight.
His mother suffered a lot more from being ostracized. While her husband enjoyed an envied position, she was merely subjected to its negative fallout, the subtly hostile looks and unspoken resentment of the women she passed in the village streets. After years of bitterness, she finally cracked, and breaking with the tradition established by generations of Dunkers, the family moved to Lyon, far from malicious village gossip. Marc’s father had to travel miles each day to return to the village. Marc viewed the move as a capitulation and despised his father for having given in to his wife’s unspoken demand.
Marc’s mother’s satisfaction with the move was only temporary. She became disillusioned the day she realized that she and her family were seen as inferior by their neighbors, who were largely white-collar workers. Preferring to be rejected out of jealousy rather than out of contempt, Marc, too, suffered from this new exclusion, and developed a desire for revenge.
He was an average student, earning a diploma from a technical school when he was 20. He worked for nearly ten years selling agricultural goods, using negotiating skills no doubt fixed in his genes. He changed companies three or four times, each time increasing his salary substantially. He used the same ploy every time—deceiving the recruitment consultant about the post he was leaving, claiming responsibilities that weren’t part of his job but that he had taken on himself.
He concluded from this that consultants knew nothing about their work and were easy to deceive. One day, Marc’s employer revealed the amount of the fee he had paid to recruit him. To Marc, it was an astronomical sum for a job that seemed to be very close to his father’s. He decided it was easier to convince a company of the supposed qualities of a candidate than to sell a farmer on the physical attributes of a cow—assets the farmer could easily check for himself.
Six months later, Marc went into business for himself. After completing a crash course in recruitment methods, he rented a one-room office in the center of Lyon and put up a sign:
Marc Dunker, Recruitment Consultant.
What he took away from the course was that his flair was worth more than any of their techniques for selecting a candidate. And the fact is, he seldom failed. He was a natural. He had an intuitive sense of people and companies, and which candidates were going to fit a post.
The first clients were the hardest to find. Without references, he wasn’t credible. When people pointed that out to him, he became strangely aggressive. He started lying, inventing prestigious clients for himself, tossing around the names of companies whose business he had supposedly turned down on the grounds that they were too small to be worthy of his services. This attitude paid off, and he got his first contracts, quickly followed by others.
Marc Dunker’s new trade fitted him like a glove. The middle-class people who had looked down on his family in the past now depended on him for jobs. He felt feared and respected. People were eating out of his hand. He would have liked to control the whole recruitment market in Lyon, just to increase their dependence on him.
All his success, however, was not enough to repair his wounded ego. Something inside him was always pushing him to do more to develop his business and to gain more power and authority in his field. Always a hard worker, he redoubled his efforts to establish his company.
By the end of the first year, Dunker already employed three consultants. But instead of being satisfied, he was driven to go even further. Six months later, Dunker opened an office in Paris and immediately moved to the capital. At that point, he renamed the company Dunker Consulting. After that, he opened a new office in a provincial town every three months on average.
Dunker measured his success by the number of his employees, his obsession being to increase his staff. He derived great satisfaction from “multiplying the flock,” as he liked to put it, not realizing that the colloquialisms he used revealed the provincial origins he otherwise carefully hid. His personal value seemed to be intimately linked to the number of people he had under his command, his power measured by the extent of his troops.
The meteoric rise of his company allowed Dunker to establish himself abroad, and when he opened his first office in another European capital, he felt he was conquering the world.
Two years later, in the supreme consecration, he decided to go public.
E
VERY DAY FOR
a week, I had arrived at the office with my copy of
Closer
under my arm. The sidelong glances of my colleagues, obvious to begin with, had given way to complete indifference. I had to admit that my relations with those around me hadn’t changed at all. Nonetheless, I still felt a certain embarrassment, even if it was diminishing. It would take me some time to be really free, according to Dubreuil’s definition.
In the apartment, I was making fewer efforts to be quiet than before. I had accepted that it was okay to make a
normal
amount of noise, which nonetheless didn’t fail to provoke almost daily visits from Madame Blanchard. I no longer sought to avoid her visits, but they still managed to annoy me prodigiously. It seemed as if nothing could stop her from harassing me. Having been very patient, I now openly expressed my exasperation, opening the door just a crack to show her that she was disturbing me. But she would come right up to the opening as if to force her way in. Frowning, with an accusatory expression on her face, she would harangue me in her shrill, moralizing voice.
The day after my most recent visit to Dubreuil I had just entered my office building and was waiting for the elevator with two colleagues from another department when I received a text message from Dubreuil: “
Have a cigarette right away.”
What was that about? He wanted me to have a cigarette?
The elevator doors opened. My colleagues dived in.
“Don’t wait for me,” I said.
Why was Dubreuil asking me to smoke when my goal was to stop? I went back out to the street and lit up. Was he going soft in the head? As I smoked, I was gazing at the passersby hurrying to work, when I saw a man who looked like Vladi standing motionless in the crowd. I leaned forward to try and get a better look, and he immediately turned around.
“Vladi! Vladi!” I called.
The man disappeared from sight.
I felt a certain unease. I was almost certain it was Vladi. Was he following me? But why? Surely Dubreuil wasn’t asking him to make sure I was keeping my promise? That would be insane. What did he care, after all. Or should I be seriously worried and try to find out why he was taking an interest in me?
I went back into the lobby, a knot in my stomach.
In the corridor on my floor, I passed Luc Fausteri’s office. He was already at work, which meant that he must have shortened his morning run. Most unusually, his door was open. Generally, he preferred to shut himself in, to isolate himself as far as possible from the members of his team.
This open door was an opportunity not to be missed. I had a mission to carry out.
Be brave,
I told myself. It would be all the harder to get Luc to say
marionette
because there was nobody in the world less chatty than him.
I said hello as I went in. He waited until I was less than a yard from him before looking up. We shook hands, but that didn’t elicit even the slightest smile.
I tried to strike up a conversation, reminding myself of Dubreuil’s famous secret. God, how hard it is to embrace a world you don’t like. “The share’s at one hundred and twenty-eight, this morning,” I said with false cheer. “It has gone up point two percent in just one day’s trading, and nearly one percent this week.”
“Yes.”
He was obviously in brilliant form. I must fuel the conversation, talk with enthusiasm, and show my keen interest in the subject. If he felt a meeting of minds, he would open up to me.
“What’s surprising is that it’s gone up fourteen percent since the beginning of the year, whereas our half-yearly results are up twenty-three percent. It’s not very logical.”
“No.”
“The stock is obviously underpriced …”
“Yes.”
“In fact, it’s not representative of the real value of the company.”
“No.”
This was uphill work. But I had to carry on, come what may. I couldn’t allow a break in the conversation.
“It’s a real shame. It would be better if the stock price followed our results since they’re good.”
Fausteri didn’t even take the trouble to reply but merely looked at me as if he didn’t understand how someone could spout such drivel.
I felt a hint of shame. Just a hint. After all, he already thought I was a faithful reader of
Closer
. There was no risk of disappointing him. On we go.
“It’s a good share. It ought to do brilliantly.”
He frowned. I went on, doubling my enthusiasm. “If I were a trader, I’d put everything on it.”
He began to look sorry, even distressed, shutting himself in behind his silence.
Right. Let’s change tactics.
Ask questions,
I thought. “How do you explain this gap between our results and the share price?”
A few seconds of silence, during which Fausteri remained perfectly motionless. He was probably gathering his strength and courage to communicate with the village idiot.
“There are several reasons,” he finally said. “First of all, the financial markets are less concerned with past results than with future prospects.”
“But our future prospects are good. Larcher tells us so every Monday morning!”
“Then, too, the stock exchange is affected by psychological factors,” he said with slight contempt.
“Psychological factors?”
He cast around for inspiration. He obviously derived no pleasure from being a teacher.
“Fears, rumors. And then there’s Fisherman.”
“Fisherman?”
“He’s the business columnist on
Les Echos”—
I knew enough to know that was a business daily, France’s answer to
The Wall Street Journal—“
who doesn’t believe in our development and says so day in, day out in his paper. That no doubt has an effect on our investors, because his opinions are influential. It makes you wonder why.”
“Suppose someone is pulling his strings? Suppose Fisherman is his … what’s the word?”
“I can’t see in whose interest that would be.”
For goodness’ sake, why couldn’t he just answer questions?
“But Fisherman has no personal interest in putting the brakes on the rise in our share price,” I suggested. “And if that’s not the case, there must be people pushing him to pan us in his paper. Fisherman is just their …”
I pretended to fish for the right word, accompanying my efforts with gestures to indicate my memory lapse.
“I’m no great fan of conspiracy theories,” Fausteri muttered.
“Oh! It’s so annoying,” I continued. “I hate not being able to find a word! What do you call someone who is manipulated by someone else? He’s his …”
“Look, Alan, I’ve got work to do.”
“Just answer this question! My day will be ruined if I can’t find the word.”
“Concentrate on your work, and everything will be fine.”
“The word’s on the tip of my tongue,” I insisted.
“All right, spit it out, but not in my office.”
On the one occasion he was trying to be funny, I didn’t feel like laughing. Quick, I had to make him reply.
“Give me the word, and I promise I’ll disappear at once.”
“
Puppet.
”
I looked at him, speechless.
“No, that’s not it … another word.”
“This is beginning to be annoying.”
“Give me a synonym,” I pleaded.
“
Pawn.
He’s his pawn. Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it either.”
“Anyhow, it will have to do.”
“Give me another synonym.”
“I’m busy, Alan.”