“Exactly. The appointment of an additional member of the department would bring down the department’s profitability,” Dunker said.
“On the contrary, I …”
Stop arguing. Ask questions.
“How would it bring down the profitability?”
“It would increase the overall salary expenditure for the department, of course.”
“But since the consultants would free up time to look after customers and do more canvassing for new clients, it would increase turnover. In the end, we’d be winners.”
“I don’t think it would increase turnover.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Everyone knows that the less work you have to do, the less work you do,” Dunker said.
Ask questions. Gently …
“Everybody? Who exactly?”
He searched for words for a few seconds, his eyes moving from left to right. “At any rate, I know.”
“How do you know that?” I pressed him.
The fly landed on his nose. He batted it away, with a gesture of profound annoyance. “That’s what always happens, of course!”
“Oh, you’ve already experienced this?” I asked.
“Yes … well … no, but I know what happens.”
So that he couldn’t blame me for being aggressive in any way, I made sure to seem very naïve, almost the village idiot.
“How can you know, if you haven’t experienced it?”
Unless it was imagination, those were beads of sweat on his forehead. At any rate, he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.
“Does that mean,” I went on, “that if
you
had less work to do, you’d start to do less and less?”
“I’m different,” he exploded, before getting a grip on himself. “Look, Alan, I’m beginning to find you rather arrogant!”
There we were at last. I took my time.
“Arrogant,” I mused, settling myself calmly in my armchair. “But the other day, you demonstrated in front of everyone that I was lacking in self-confidence.”
He froze. A cloud passed over the sun, and the office suddenly went darker. In the distance, an ambulance was speeding by, its siren screaming.
Finally, Dunker had a flash of inspiration. “Look, Greenmor, let’s get back to the subject. Concerning your request for reorganization: Let the department meet its targets, and then we’ll talk again about appointing an assistant!”
“Yes, of course, of course,” I replied. “But suppose that appointment is the thing that would allow us to meet our targets?”
“You’re taking a very limited view of the problem,” he said, his tone condescending. “I’ve got a strategic view of the company’s development. And that vision prohibits me from increasing the budget for wages. You don’t have all the information to make a judgment, so you can’t understand.”
“Indeed, it’s difficult for me to take a position on the company’s strategic development, since the employees don’t really know what it is. But you know, I’m a great believer in common sense. And it seems to me that every business needs the means to develop. Isn’t that essential?”
“You’re forgetting something, Alan. Something major. Our business is listed on the stock exchange. The markets are watching us. We can’t do just anything.”
“Taking on staff to allow us to expand—is that just anything?”
The fly was buzzing around us. Dunker grabbed a glass of water on the desk and poured its contents into a potted plant, keeping the empty glass in his hand.
“The market can only predict the future by examining present results,” he said. “Investors won’t wait to see if appointments produce a positive effect in the long term. If we pay more wages, the share will drop in price. It’s automatic. We are under the looking glass. He’s watching,” he said, pointing to a newspaper clipping. It showed a photo of Fisherman, the journalist who was Dunker’s
bête noire
. The headline on the article referred to our shares: “Potential, But Must Do Better.”
The fly landed on the desk. In one swift movement, Dunker turned the glass over and dropped it over the fly. A sadistic little smile crossed his face.
“It seems as if we’re really slaves to the share price,” I said. “But what does it matter to the company if the share price goes up or down? We couldn’t care less, could we?”
“You can say that because you don’t own any shares!” Dunker snapped.
I pressed on. “But what matters, even for you shareholders, is that the price goes up in the end. If the business grows, the share price will necessarily go up sooner or later.”
“Yes, but you can’t allow the share price to go down, even if it’s only over the short term.”
“Why?”
“Because it puts us at risk of a takeover. You ought to know. You studied economics, didn’t you? Only a high share price protects you from a takeover bid by another company, because if the price is high, it would cost too much to acquire the number of shares needed to gain a controlling interest in our firm. That’s why it’s vital to have a share price that constantly goes up—and goes up faster than that of our competitors.”
“If there is the risk of a takeover, why go public?”
“To develop fast,” Dunker said. “As you know, when a company goes public, it immediately gets the money of all the people who want to buy in. That finances projects.”
“Yes, but if it then prevents you from making decisions that allow the company to develop, just because you have to keep the share price going up, then the result will be the opposite of what you want.”
“Those are simply constraints that have to be managed,” he said.
“But we’re not free anymore!” I protested. “Fausteri was saying that we couldn’t open the Brussels office this year because last year’s profits had to be distributed as a dividend to the shareholders, and we didn’t want to reduce the results of the year to come.”
“Yes, but distribution of dividends isn’t linked to the share price. It’s just a demand from our shareholders. Dividends are the return from their investment in the company.”
“But we could reinvest this year’s profits in our development and and then make profits again next year, couldn’t we?”
“We have two large groups of shareholders who demand that we make a profit of twelve percent each year and that we pay most of it to them as dividends.”
“Yes, I know. But if their demand for a dividend prevents the growth of the business they’ve invested in, surely they can be patient for a year or two, can’t they?”
“No,” said Dunker, “our difficulties are none of their business. They’ve invested in our company but not necessarily for the long term. They want a rapid return on their investment, and that’s their right.”
“But if that forces us to make decisions that are harmful to us …”
“That’s the way it is,” said Dunker. “We have no choice. The real bosses are the shareholders.”
“If their goal is solely financial and short-term, with the intention of selling their shares before long, it makes a mockery of the company’s destiny over time.”
“That’s part of the game.”
“A game? But it isn’t a game,” I protested. “It’s reality! There are real people working here! Their lives and their families’ lives depend in part on the health of this company. You call that a game?”
Dunker shrugged. “What can I say?”
“So, let me get this straight: Not only are we slaves to the share price but we’re subject to the absurd demands of shareholders who won’t even be shareholders for long. Doesn’t it all feel a little upside down? I really can’t see the advantage of the stock exchange flotation. You could have developed the company without it, just by each year reinvesting the profits from the year before.”
“Yes, but we wouldn’t grow as quickly,” Dunker said.
I remained perplexed, never having grasped our culture’s obsession with speed. Why always going faster? Where does it lead? People in a hurry are already dead.
“What’s the point in developing quickly?” I asked him.
“You have to establish yourself quickly and dominate the market before your competitors can take up a long-term position.”
“Because if you don’t?”
“If you don’t, it will be harder to take market share from them so we can increase our turnover.”
“But if healthy, slow development improves the quality of what we’re offering—our services—that will bring in new customers, won’t it?”
Silence. Had Dunker never asked himself that question?
“It would be slower,” was all he said.
“Where’s the problem with that? What’s to stop us from taking time to do the job well?”
He rolled his eyes. “Speaking of time, Alan, you’re taking up mine at the moment. I haven’t got time to spend philosophizing.”
He started rearranging the files on his desk, no longer paying attention to me.
“It seems to me,” I said, searching for my words, “that it’s always useful to step back a bit. To ask questions about the meaning of our actions.”
Dunker looked up. “The meaning?”
“Yes, why we do what we do, what the point is.”
The fly was buzzing around in its bell jar.
“You mustn’t look for meaning where there isn’t any,” he said dismissively. “You think that life has a meaning? The strongest and the cleverest win, that’s all. They get the power and the money. And when you’ve got power and money, you can have anything you want in life. It’s no more complicated than that, Greenmor. The rest is intellectual masturbation.”
I looked at him pensively. How could he believe for a single second that being rich and powerful was enough for a successful life? Who could lie to himself enough to believe he was happy just because he was driving a Porsche?
“Poor Alan,” he went on. “You’ll probably never know just how great a feeling power is!”
His words left me feeling as though I was from another planet. They almost made me curious to find out. Besides, hadn’t Dubreuil told me to get inside the skin of people to try and understand what they’re feeling?
“When you do all this, you feel powerful?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“And if you didn’t, then you’d feel … ?”
Dunker blushed. I wanted to burst out laughing, although I hadn’t embarrassed him on purpose. But now my imagination was running a film of a businessman busying himself with his work to compensate for his sexual inadequacies.
“As far as the assistant is concerned,” Dunker said, “the answer is no. Did you have other requests?”
I presented my other ideas, but none got his okay. I wasn’t surprised, now that I understood how he worked and what the rules of his game were. All the same, I had one last request—for an explanation. “I’ve noticed that our firm is running a lot more ads in the press.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, visibly pleased with himself.
“But I’m not being given any more cases at the moment. Why’s that?”
“Trust me, I can guarantee you’re not being treated any differently than your colleagues. The work is being distributed fairly. Alan, I really must end this now. I have work to do.”
He underlined his words by picking up a file on the desk. I didn’t budge.
“But if the advertising is working, how can it be that I haven’t got more recruitment cases to work on? It’s not logical.”
“Oh, Alan, you always want to understand everything. You must realize that in a business the size of ours, there are some decisions you don’t shout from the rooftops. In this case, placing ads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are real vacancies to be filled.”
“You mean we’re placing false ads? False job openings?”
“
False, false,
big words!”
“But why?”
“Really, you’re totally lacking in strategic vision, Greenmor. I’ve been explaining to you for the last hour why it’s vital for the share price to go up day by day. You ought to know that the market doesn’t react just to objective results! There’s also an element of psychology, believe it or not. And seeing Dunker Consulting job openings in the papers is good for investors’ morale.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“But that’s dishonest!”
“We have to have an edge.”
“You publish false ads just to take care of the company’s image and make the share price go up? What about the candidates?”
“It makes absolutely no difference to them!”
“But they take the time to send their resumés, to fill out the application.”
He sighed by way of a reply.
I went on. “You’re not taking into consideration that the more they send applications that don’t get anywhere, the more their morale and self-confidence will drop!”
Dunker rolled his eyes. “Alan, have you ever considered going to work for a charity for the unemployed?”
I just stood there dumbstruck, flabbergasted by all I had just heard. How could anyone could be so uninterested in other people’s lives, even if they were strangers?
Finally, I got up and turned to go. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anything from him. His decisions obeyed a skewed logic that left no place for ideas based on a sincere desire to improve things.
I took two steps and then stopped. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could be satisfied with a vision of life as empty of meaning as the one Dunker had just described. I wanted to be quite clear about it.
“Monsieur Dunker, does all this … does it really make you a happy man?”
A strange expression crossed his face, but he didn’t answer, still staring at his document. Perhaps it was the first time in his life that anyone had asked him that. I looked at him with curiosity and even a certain pity, then silently crossed the room, the thick carpet absorbing the sound of my steps. As I turned to close the door behind me, Dunker was still staring at the file on his desk and had probably already forgotten me. But he had the same strange expression on his face, as if he were lost in thought. Then slowly he moved his hand over to the glass and lifted it.
The fly immediately flew off and escaped through the window.
T
HAT EVENING
, I took the bus to the château. I was of two minds: on the one hand, the strong desire to discover at last the contents of Dubreuil’s notebook, which I was convinced would tell me more about his motives; on the other, the fear of breaking into a place at night that had daunting security even in daytime and being caught red-handed.