“This not possible.” Pavel rubs his temples. “It is not good you, not good me. Why would you want them shoot me right here?” He points to the back of his neck. “You profit nothing. You put me out there, okay, you already know who's waiting for me. I went a step too far. Well, I made a mistake.” He slaps both palms simultaneously on his knees in an exasperated gesture. “Let me stay here. I confess everything. I spend twenty years here. The food is bad, that's okay. What you want me confess to? I'm dangerous criminal. Carjacking. Jewelry stores. Whatever you want. I did it all.”
Commissioner Farina stares at him for a moment. Then he gives him a chubby-cheeked smile.
“That was funny, wasn't it?” he says. “You're a funny guy.”
“Bob Marley's a funny guy,” corroborates the lackey. “And they say Russians don't have any sense of humor.”
Ten minutes later, dressed in his street clothes and with a look of absolute desperation on his face, Pavel leaves through the disappointingly small metallic back door for inmates who've completed their sentences. The traffic on the highway is light but continuous. Pavel walks as fast as he can under the blazing midday sun, feeling annoyingly conspicuous in his black clothes, to a phone booth in front of the gas station attached to the prison complex. When he enters the booth, he stares at the numbers on the phone with a perplexed face. When he really thinks about it, any number he could dial means vast risks to his personal safety. He spends a couple of minutes slamming the receiver against the phone's casing with a rage that is not Rastafarian in the least. Until the receiver is nothing more than a twisted broken piece of plastic in his hand. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and decides that this would probably be the most appropriate moment to pick up where he left off with his old life plans, ones having to do with one-way tickets to legendary islands in the Caribbean.
CHAPTER 17. Fonseca
Lucas Giraut's office on the mezzanine of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., is dark except for the circle of vanilla-colored light that the only lamp projects on the rosewood surface of his Louis XV cartonnier. The darkness hides the fact that there have been recent changes to the furnishings in the unilluminated areas. Although there is something ineffable in the office's atmosphere that produces the sensation that changes have in fact been made. The lighting, in any case, is clearly inappropriate for the business meeting now taking place in the office between Lucas Giraut and his mother's lawyer. Clearly inappropriate for any type of meeting. The rigid, hard-looking armchair where Fonseca is seated also seems clearly inappropriate. Especially for someone Fonseca's age.
Lucas Giraut is sitting at his desk. Drawing something with his fountain pen beneath the lamp's insufficient light. One of those distracted doodles people make while having a conversation. Fonseca leans over the cartonnier and makes a vaguely threatening gesture with an extraordinarily light and firm hand that resembles the extremities of certain birds.
“You need to sign these documents as much as we do,” he says. “Probably more. That's what I am trying to make you see. And you have to believe me. Without the restructuring plan you're left alone. And in a delicate position. How do you plan on running this company? You have no experience. You know nothing about business. You can't do anything with what you have, son. You have the majority of the stock shares, but your mother has the rest. The money. The houses. The boats. And you can't even do anything with those shares. Put your feet on the floor, son. We're doing this because we appreciate you. Step aside and let the adults take care of adult matters.” He leans his body back again and reclines against the rigid armchair. As if to show that the bottom line of his speech had already been delivered. Then he softens his tone. “Listen. Your mother wants you to know that she appreciates your effort to stand up to her. Contrary to what you may think, your mother knows how to appreciate these kinds of things, things that another kind of person could find irritating. Your mother is a person that appreciates insolence. Like your attempts to sabotage the International Division. Like raising Chicote's salary and giving him all those stock shares. Or generally doing everything that upsets your mother and is bad for our international campaign. What the hell.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Who understands you better than your own mother?”
“My mother has never understood me.” Lucas Giraut runs a hand through his straight blond hair and admires the drawing that he is making under the lamp's insufficient light. “She doesn't even know me,” he continues. “The only reason she speaks to me is because my father named me primary stockholder. Before that she hadn't called me in six years. And she'll stop talking to me when she manages to get me out of the way. I know that she makes fun of me all the time. And that she doesn't care about what I want. She never has. It's like when I was a kid. She never did anything to make me feel good. She always gave me birthday presents I didn't like. It was almost as if she gave them to me because she knew I wouldn't like them. They were usually fishing-related.” The drawing Lucas Giraut is scribbling with his fountain pen on the top page of a block of notes depicts a vaguely human and vaguely female figure whose most striking element is a very flat oval face that transmits no emotion whatsoever. “Fishing rods. Fishing vests. Hats. Things like that.”
“For the love of God.” Fonseca rolls his eyes. In the margin of the beam of light, his hands seem extraordinarily strong and firm in spite of the lightness of his limbs. Giraut thinks he has seen the same phenomenon in certain birds. “What the hell does that have to do with it? And what are you trying to pull by making me sit here in the dark? And in this chair? I'm sixty-five years old. Do you think any of this is going to do you any good?”
“I was a kid,” says Giraut. “I don't think my mother understood what that means.”
The suitological analysis of Fonseca's gray Armani suit offers the following results: corporate discretion, a firmness impervious to obstacles and an absolute acceptance of his place in history. Just as Lucas Giraut has a chance to prove once again, still doodling on the top page of his note block, Fonseca is completely immune to any suitological criticism. He is also immune to all the different Attack Strategies thought up by Lucas Giraut and Valentina Parini in the courtyard of their house. With his face reduced to a network of gnarled tendons and treelike veins. With whole parts of his face sunken in, giving the impression that his face is nothing more than a layer of skin and nerves and tendons stretched over a bird's skull. Seated in a rigid chair that is absolutely inappropriate for any type of interpersonal business meeting, Fonseca is the second most immune person to any type of mental attack strategy that Lucas Giraut knows.
“Listen to me, son.” Fonseca keeps his face out of the lamp's conical beam of light. “We don't have much time. Your mother is not going to let me leave this office without you signing those papers. You know how she is. I figured you would have realized it by this point, but now I'm going to tell you even more clearly. It is not in your best interests to get in her way. Even though you're her son. So let's quit dancing around the subject. Tell me what it is that you want. If it's reasonable, you'll get it. And this”—he lifts a skinny but powerful finger—“is not a negotiation. It's a gift. A small gift to show you our goodwill.”
Lucas Giraut slowly tears out the page he's been drawing on and balls it up, without looking at his mother's lawyer. He throws it in the wastebasket.