You don’t know him.

You've never seen his face. Should you pass him on the street, you wouldn’t remember him. He is not one of those men who sticks in the minds of those who meet him. On the contrary.

His name? You may have seen it in the pages of the Financial Times. Or in Le Figaro. It doesn’t matter anyway.

No really, you don’t know him.

Yet, you have probably all slept in his beds. According to the latest statistics, 92% of you have spent the night in one of his beds, at least once in your life.

Who is he? He is the Chairman of the second largest hospitality corporation in the world. He is the second largest hotel group worldwide. And the first French group. You sleep and sometimes have sex in his beds, you get a massage in his spas, you thrill to the taste of the minimalist dishes prepared by his chefs — most of them Michelin-starred rated — or, you try in vain to find sleep in a twenty-nine-bucks, noisy motel room, with toilets down the hall. Either way, he rakes in the cash.

His first name? That won’t help you either.

Fine. It’s Lucas.

See? It doesn’t ring a bell, now does it? Much to the group’s Communication and Press Officers’ chagrin, he has never agreed to be put in the limelight. He truly believes that in these service-oriented jobs, especially in the hotel business, be it low cost or high-end, the aim of any employee should be to remain invisible. Workers in the hospitality industry must excel at this delicate exercise that is the "transparent presence": you should feel that someone is there, nearby, ready to satisfy your every need and whim, but they should always remain hidden out of sight. No one worker matters, only your experience within the walls of his hotels matters. Names and faces are interchangeable. No one expects you to remember them anyway.

You don’t know him, and that’s perfectly normal.

To everyone’s surprise, he chose to study his craft in a hospitality school, like anyone who chooses this line of work. There, he learned the basics of his future career, specializing and preparing himself to work in a luxury hotel. He had felt ready and at the top of his game when taking his first job in a four-star Parisian hotel.

Despite the fact that the hotel business had run in his veins for two generations, nothing had prepared him for what is at the heart, the essence of the industry: chaos. The feeling one gets when working without a net, the unpleasant knowledge that this beautiful machine will jam at the slightest grain of sand, that any luxury hotel is perpetually about to implode. This delicate moment when everything seems unconnected, where problems pile on top of each other, one after another, in no particular order, without any relation to one another.

And yet — as experience showed him, time and again — this unbridled chaos is never a coincidence. In the midst of this inconceivable mess, there is always something linking cause and effect.

So, you don’t know him.

Lying on the taupe carpet in his office — interior decoration by George Yabu himself — and bathed in a red, indelible pool of his blood, Lucas was staring at the swirls of color projected by his lamps onto the ceiling. He wondered if it might not be time for you to get to know him.