Location: Bonaparte family apartment, rue d'Assas (Paris 6th)
Date: February 1984
Point of view: Sliding Focus (Lazarus / Claire)
February 1984 froze Paris under a leaden sky, low and motionless, which seemed to reflect the atmosphere reigning in the apartment on the rue d'Assas.
Since the visit of the two DST officers and Auguste's hospitalization at the Val-de-Grâce, the heat had deserted the bourgeois walls of the Bonaparte family. The apartment, once governed by the silent authority of the father and the enveloping gentleness of the mother, threatened at every moment to collapse in on itself, like a dying star.
Madeleine was no more than a ghost.
The mother of the family, once so elegant, so quick to guess the sorrows of her children, had been emptied of her substance by her husband's prolonged coma. Every morning, she would get up at dawn, with a complexion of ashes, put on a heavy woollen coat over clothes chosen without care, and take the road to the military hospital. She spent her entire days there, sitting on an uncomfortable plastic chair, holding Auguste's inert hand, watching for the slightest twitch of an eyelid. She did not come home until late at night, exhausted, to lock herself in the master bedroom where the smell of Auguste's cologne faded day by day.
In any other family, this parental decay would have led to chaos. The bills would have piled up, the refrigerator would have emptied, the pack would have had to disperse.
But Lazarus had taken the reins.
At seventeen and a half, there had been no transition, no hesitation. He had confiscated the panic and replaced it with organization. With a gentle but firm hand, he had demanded that Madeleine sign a temporary power of attorney for him to relieve her of the worries of everyday life.
He was now the one who did the shopping. It was he who, in the evening, tied an apron around his waist to prepare dinner for Victor, Claire, and Camille. He didn't cook like a constrained and forced teenager, but with an almost paternal attention, making sure his seven-year-old little sister ate her vegetables well by telling her made-up stories to make her laugh. He checked homework, signed correspondence books in perfect imitation of his mother's signature, and tucked in the girls in the evenings. Augustus' absence left a gaping hole in their hearts, but materially, Lazarus had erected a protective wall around them. The ship was not taking on water.
In the midst of this strange new routine, a person was watching him with special attention.
Claire Bonaparte had just celebrated her tenth birthday.
She was a diaphanous little girl, with large grey eyes inherited from her father. Unlike Camille, who often mourned the absence of her parents, or Victor, who locked himself in the silence of a wounded teenager, Claire was a silent investigator. Sitting in the nooks and crannies of the apartment, her knees tucked under her chin, she studied her older brother.
She had a small black spiral notebook, hidden under the floor of her room. On the cover, she had written in marker, with a child's calligraphy applied: DOSSIER L.
One Wednesday afternoon, while it was pouring rain on Paris, Claire was sitting cross-legged on her bed. She was chewing on the tip of her pencil, rereading her notes for the week. His observations were small astonished observations:
Monday: Lazare repaired the leak under the sink all by himself. He whistled an old song while he was tinkering, like a grandfather. Tuesday: He made a roast. He didn't even taste the sauce, he knew it was ready just by looking at the time. It's magical. Wednesday: I found some large papers on his desk with "Society" written on them. Why does he play the merchant with such complicated papers?
But what troubled little Claire most was her brother's sleep. The girl's room was adjacent to Auguste's study, which Lazarus now occupied half the night. Often, when she woke up to drink a glass of water, she saw the yellow light stripe under the door. Lazarus seemed never to sleep. He never yawned.
That evening, Claire decided to conduct her investigation in the field.
It was two o'clock in the morning. The apartment was plunged into silence. Madeleine was sleeping her heavy chemical sleep.
Claire pushed her duvet away. She put on her little bunny-shaped slippers so as not to make the old parquet floor creak, and her pink bathrobe over her pajamas. She strode through the long corridor plunged into darkness.
As expected, the office door was ajar.
The little girl approached, holding her breath, and stuck her head in the doorway.
Lazarus was seated behind the large oak desk. The banker's lamp illuminated his hands and large sheets of translucent tracing paper on which he drew very straight lines with a ruler. On the corner of the desk, a cup of coffee was smoking slightly.
Claire looked at him for a moment.
"You're going to turn into a bat eventually," the little girl suddenly whispered in the silence of the night.
Lazarus stopped. He didn't start, for he had heard her coming from the hallway, but a soft, tender, and genuinely amused smile lit up his tired face. He put down his pen, turned to the door and opened his arms wide.
"Come here, my little detective in the rabbit slippers," he said in a warm, low voice so as not to wake anyone.
Claire trotted into the office and threw herself into her big brother's arms. Lazarus lifted her up with disconcerting ease and sat her down on his knees. He wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on the top of the girl's head. She smelled of the soft laundry and the smell of new paper.
"It's a little cold to walk in the halls, don't you think?" he asked her, gently rubbing his little arms to warm her up.
"You're the weird one," Claire retorted, sulking a little for the sake of form, but snuggling comfortably against his chest. "You never sleep, Lazarus. Are you a vampire? »
Lazarus let out a small stifled laugh.
"A vampire? No. Vampires drink blood. I only drink very black coffee. It's much less scary. And then, look at me: I don't have sharp teeth. He made an exaggerated face as he bared his teeth, drawing a small chuckle from Claire.
She turned to the desk and pointed her finger at the large tracing papers covered with lines.
"What do you draw? Is it a maze for mice? »
Lazarus looked at his routing diagrams for the future Volta-1 map. In front of an adult, he would have talked about hardware architecture and data buses. Faced with his ten-year-old little sister, the sixty-year-old man who inhabited this adolescent body rediscovered the reflexes of an affectionate grandfather.
"That's exactly it. A magical labyrinth," he explained softly, guiding Claire's pinky finger over the drawn copper lines. "Inside, we're going to run very small electric sparks. Very, very quickly. And if we draw the maze perfectly well, these sparks will help us build a large shield. »
"A shield against what?" asked Claire, her big gray eyes fixed on him, full of intelligent curiosity.
"Against people who would bother us," replied Lazarus, stroking his hair. "It's like building a Lego castle, but much more complicated, and invisible. This is to make sure that you, Camille, Victor and Mom are always safe. Even when dad isn't there to stand guard. »
At the mention of their father, Claire's face darkens slightly. She lowered her head, playing with one of the buttons of Lazarus's shirt.
"Lazarus... she murmured. "Are you ever sad for dad? Mom cries all the time. Victor breaks things in his room. But you never cry. You cook, you make your mazes, you talk loudly to the doctors on the phone... Don't you have any sorrows? »
The question, asked with the disarming candor of childhood, pierced Lazarus' armor. He could have given her a cold answer about the uselessness of emotions, but as he looked at this little girl in teddy bear pajamas, he felt his own heart sink.
He tightened his grip around her and placed a long kiss on her cheek.
"Yes, sweetie. Of course I am sad. I've got a big, heavy rock right there," he said, gently patting his own chest. "But do you know how it works, on a boat, when there's a big storm?"
Claire shook her head from left to right, her pigtails sweeping Lazarus' arm.
"If the captain is injured and the storm is blowing very hard, the chief officer of the boat is not allowed to sit in a corner and cry, otherwise the boat sinks and everyone falls into the water," he explained in a soft, reassuring voice. "Mom has the right to cry, because her heart of love hurts very much. You have the right to be afraid, because you are the sailors. But I'm the big brother. I have to hold the helm very hard while waiting for the storm to subside. So that you don't have the impression that the house is rocking too much. »
Claire listened to this metaphor carefully. She put her little hand on Lazarus' chest, right where he had said there was a big heavy rock.
"You are a good substitute captain," she decreed with a papal seriousness that melted Lazarus.
"Thank you, Miss Inspector," he smiled tenderly.
She snuggled up against him for a moment, listening to the slow and steady beating of his heart.
"You know, Lazarus," she whispered, her eyes half-closed by the sleep that was beginning to overtake her, lulled by her brother's warmth. "Sometimes it looks like you're a big adult dressed up in my brother's body. You know how to make roast sauces, you know how hospitals work, and you're not afraid of anything. »
Lazarus' heart skipped a beat, stunned by the frightening accuracy of the ten-year-old's intuition. An adult in disguise. That was exactly it. But instead of stiffening, he chooses to laugh softly.
"Well, if I'm an adult in costume, I hope my disguise is successful," he joked, gently tickling her ribs, triggering a crystalline chuckle in the girl. "But no matter who's hiding inside, it's always your big brother who loves you. And a big brother tells the little girls walking around in bunny shoes at two in the morning that it's high time to go back to bed. »
He got up from the chair, holding her in his arms. Claire yawned until her jaw dropped and wrapped her arms around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder.
Lazarus crossed the dark corridor and entered the little girl's room. He gently placed it on his mattress, covered it with his big warm duvet, and tucked up the sides so that drafts wouldn't get through.
"Good night, Captain Lazare," she whispered, her eyes already almost closed.
"Good night, little weasel ," he replied with a huge smile, placing a last kiss on her forehead. "Sweet dreams."
He closed the door without making a sound and returned to his office.
In her room, before falling completely asleep, Claire slipped her hand under her pillow. She thought of her little black notebook hidden under the plinth. She didn't even have to write in it tonight. She had solved her investigation.
He may have been an adult in disguise, he may never sleep, but his arms were warm, and his magical labyrinths would protect them. The usurper loved him. And for a ten-year-old girl whose world had just fallen apart, that was the only truth that really mattered.
Lazare sat down at his desk, his heart lightened by this moment of tenderness stolen from winter. He took a sip of his chilled coffee and resumed his ruler. The family held on. The inner shield was solid.
But the surrogate Patriarch did not know that at the same time, in the back room, Victor, his fifteen-year-old little brother, was not sleeping. Lying on his back, Victor stared at the ceiling, his fists clenched, his stomach knotted by an anguish that had nothing to do with their father's coma. The family fortress was watertight, yes, but the outside world was infiltrating the younger brother's daily life in another, much crueler way. And Lazarus would soon have to close his silicon plans to remember that a wolf, even disguised as a protective brother, always keeps sharp fangs when you attack its pack.
Location: Apartment on rue d'Assas / Surroundings of the Collège Stanislas (Paris 6th) Date: March 1984 Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Focus on Victor
The arrival of the month of March brought no clemency to the heavens of Paris. The cold had set in, dry and sharp, rushing into the main avenues of the 6th arrondissement as if to test the solidity of the fortress that Lazare had erected on rue d'Assas.
Since Auguste's accident, Lazare had managed daily life with an ease that began to frighten the few witnesses of his private life. But what no one understood — neither his prostrate mother, nor the admiring notary — was that this efficiency was not a gift from birth. It was not the "instinct of the Bonapartes" or the genetic heritage of a colonel of the DST.
It was pure method. A method acquired in the blood, sweat and sleepless nights of a first life of sixty years.
Where a normal teenager would have been overwhelmed by emotion, Lazarus saw flows. Financial flows, food flows, security flows. His brain as a senior engineer and former Service Action operator treated the apartment as an area of operation. You can't improvise the management of a clan when you've already led crisis units and designed complex hardware architectures.
It was this same "vision" that allowed him to detect the anomaly concerning Victor.
One evening in March, while Lazarus was serving a leek soup whose cooking time he had precisely calculated to preserve the vitamins, he observed his younger brother. Victor was fourteen years old. He was a boy built for action, usually loud and proud of his orange judo belt.
But that evening, Victor was a shadow.
He was sitting on the edge of his chair, his back hunched. His hands trembled slightly as he held his spoon. Lazarus immediately noticed the yellow-bluish mark on his right temple, partially hidden by his brown hair. A three-day hematoma. And above all, there was this "signature": the evasive gaze, the head tucked into the shoulders, the systematic refusal of eye contact.
Madeleine, lost in her thoughts for Auguste, saw nothing. But Lazarus read Victor as an intelligence report.
Psychological trauma of the harassment type, Lazare analyzed with surgical coldness. Avoidance postures. Signs of probable racketeering. The target is isolated and refuses to compromise the safety of the home by asking for help.
Lazarus did not feel immediate anger. Anger was a parasitic noise that was detrimental to the resolution of the problem. He felt a technical necessity. The clan was threatened by outside infiltration; The disturbing agent had to be identified and neutralized.
About twenty-two o'clock, after making sure that Madeleine was asleep and that the girls were tucked in, Lazare slipped into Victor's room. He made no noise. He did not use light.
In his first life, he had learned the art of clandestine excavation in Beirut hotels and embassies in East Africa. He approached his brother's school bag. His fingers, long and agile, searched the pockets with the speed of a magician. He did not move anything important, left no trace.
He found the paper in the lining of the pencil case.
He returned to his office to read it under the banker's lamp. The message was short, vulgar, written with the anger of those who believe they are invulnerable because their parents are influential. A request for money. Threats to his father's health. Insults about his mother.
Lazarus put the paper down. His dark eyes fixed on the wall of books.
He could have gone to see the prefect of studies in Stanislas. He could have told Madeleine about it. But he knew that civil institutions never solve the problem of harassment; they only displace or aggravate it. And her mother no longer had the strength to carry an extra gram of pain.
The Patriarch had to act alone.
He wasn't going to use physical violence. It was too risky for his cover, and too primitive for his intelligence. He was going to use the tools of his old life: profiling, social engineering, and psychological terror.
The next day, Lazarus did not go to Louis-le-Grand for his Special Mathematics class. He spent his morning in a telephone booth and in front of the professional directories of the neighborhood. At noon, he knew everything about his brother's three attackers.
Their names: Leroy, Vaugirard and Masson. Their weaknesses: ambitious fathers, mothers concerned about their image, and bank accounts whose transparency left something to be desired.
At four-thirty Lazare was standing at the corner of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
He had swapped his student sweater for a long dark coat that gave him the look of an urban predator. He waited. He saw Victor come out, his head down, heading for the metro. And he saw the three playground wolves break away from the crowd to surround it near a parking entrance.
Lazarus stepped forward. He didn't run. His step was regular, implacable.
When he was three meters from them, he stopped. Victor, surprised, looked up. The fear he saw in the eyes of his attackers disconcerted him. The three boys had turned around, ready to insult the intruder, but the words died in their throats.
Lazare Bonaparte did not look like a high school student. He didn't even look like an angry protective brother. It looked like a file classified as "Secret Defense". His face was as immobile as a corpse, and his gaze... his gaze seemed to know every sin of their respective bloodlines.
"Victor, go wait for me on the subway platform," Lazare ordered. Her voice was not loud, but she carried an authority that brooked no discussion.
Victor hesitated, looked at the three brutes, then at his brother's face. He obeyed and walked away, driven by a survival instinct that whispered to him that what was going to happen here was not for his eyes.
Lazare found himself alone with the three teenagers in the third grade.
"Who is this guy?" tried Masson, the strongest, trying to regain his superbness. "Who do you think you are, big one?"
Lazarus took a step forward. Masson drew back suddenly, as if he had just hit an invisible wall.
"I am the one who knows that your father, Monsieur Masson, embezzles the funds of his brokerage firm to pay for his bachelor in Boulogne," whispered Lazare.
The silence that followed was more violent than a blow of the fist. The boy turned pale instantly.
"Leroy," continued Lazare, turning his gaze to the second. "Your mother is very proud of her reputation at Saint-Sulpice Parish. She would probably like to know that her eldest son spends his Wednesday afternoons stealing records and clothes from Le Bon Marché. I have the dates. I have the place. »
He ended with the leader, Vaugirard, the one who had written the note. Lazare came so close to him that the boy smelled the cold coffee and Marseille soap emanating from the young man.
"You spoke of my father, Vaugirard. You said it was a "vegetable". »
Lazarus' voice descended in a tone. It was the voice he used in his other life, just before breaking the will of an informant.
"My father is a senior officer of the state. And even in a coma, he has more power than your three families combined. If I see a single mark on my brother's face, or if a single franc is missing from his pocket, I will not strike you. I will do much worse. I will destroy your fathers. I will ruin your mothers. I will make sure that your names are synonymous with shame throughout Paris. I know every flaw in your homes. I am a ghost, and ghosts can burn everything without a trace. »
Lazarus did not cry out. He was exposing facts. This was the real terror: the mathematical certainty of ruin.
"Now disappear," Lazare concluded. "And if you ever meet Victor's eyes, change the sidewalk. Because the next time I travel, it will be to sign your parents' social death certificate. »
The three teenagers did not ask for their rest. They fled, almost stumbling on their own feet, overcome by a fear they did not understand. They had just met not a vigilante, but a sovereign of the shadows.
Lazarus stood still for a moment, catching his breath. He smoothed his coat. The "old man" in him was satisfied. The threat was neutralized at the source, without bloodshed, by the simple management of information.
He joined Victor on the subway platform. The younger was trembling, sitting on a wooden bench.
Lazarus sat down beside him. He did not preach to him. He did not ask him why he had not defended himself. He knew that judo is useless against a pack when your heart is broken by family tragedy.
"It's over, Victor," said Lazarus, placing a firm hand on his brother's shoulder.
"What did you tell them?" asked Victor, his voice still unsteady. "They looked like they had seen a demon."
"I reminded them who we were," Lazarus replied with a small enigmatic smile. "We are the Bonapartes, Victor. No one steps on us. Never. »
He looked his brother straight in the eye.
"We don't say anything to mom. She is in enough trouble. That's our secret. But if someone else ever tries to touch you, you don't hide. You come to see me. The clan is sacred, Victor. I'm here to deliver the blows for you until you're strong enough to return them. »
Victor nodded, a glimmer of immense relief and admiration shining in his eyes. He had just understood that his brother was not only a genius of mathematics. It was a shield.
They took the metro together to the rue d'Assas.
As Lazarus watched the black tunnels pass through the glass, he watched his reflection. He saw that seventeen-year-old face, but behind his eyes, he saw the sixty-year-old man. This man had no useless emotions, no remorse. He had a mission.
He managed the family as he was going to manage his business. With flawless observation, an intimate knowledge of human weaknesses and an iron will. His capacity for observation did not come from Augustus; She came from decades spent decoding the intentions of men in the dark areas of the world.
The winter of 1984 was coming to an end. The family fortress was secure. The Patriarch of the Shadows had proven himself. He could now focus on the next step: turning his genius and money into an empire capable of shaking the giants of Silicon Valley.
The birth of Volta S.A. was only a matter of weeks. And the world was soon to discover that the young Lazare Bonaparte did not only know how to protect his brother; he knew how to conquer the future.