The woman stops on the other side of the desk and sends deceptive facial messages of surprise while her mouth twists in an expression of disgust. She leans her body over the desk and rests her palms on its surface. Her rhythmically convulsive facial features could be found attractive by someone attracted to features that convey permanent dissatisfaction mixed with potentially explosive fury. The locks of hair that escape from her ponytail and fall over her face give her a certain air of matricidal heroine in a Greek tragedy.
“I'm Saudade's wife,” says the woman.
Hannah Linus lifts a hand to her mouth and begins to chew on a cuticle while inside her the feeling that she could indeed be in a potentially dangerous situation grows. The door that connects the gallery with the office area is not locked, and the woman must have gotten in when the guard was distracted. Her hand tries to surreptitiously approach the intercom on her desk, but before she has a chance to reach it the woman grabs the device with both hands and pulls on it with all her strength, trying to rip it from its network of different colored wires. She doesn't manage it on the first try, or the second, and the woman continues wrestling with the intercom in her hands. Pulling furiously and fruitlessly on the network of wires. Hannah Linus looks past the woman. Past the office's reinforced glass wall. Toward the security guard who has just become aware of the situation that is going on and is now running through the empty gallery toward the reinforced glass door.
“I don't deny this is a delicate situation.” Hannah Linus looks at the security guard. He has just arrived at the door and is now struggling with the door handle, not yet realizing that it's bolted from inside. “This is all very unpleasant.”
The woman with the nervous tic opens her eyes very wide in a gesture that paradoxically does not emphasize the elements of compulsive surprise already present on her facial landscape.
“You're a whore,” she says. “If you ever see my husband again I'll kill you.”
She pauses and seems to realize that she's still holding up Hannah Linus's desk intercom. She looks at it for a moment as if someone had just put it in her hand as an annoying joke and she places it back on the desk.
Hannah closes her eyes and raises her hands the way people raise their hands when asking for a moment to think. The security guard's struggle with the door is now clearly audible as the glass door beats against its metal support structure, causing a weak vibration of the other glass walls. The woman continues to lean slightly over the desk and observes Hannah Linus with an expression in which surprise seems to have completely disappeared in favor of rage. A rage that's present in all of her features as small seismic tremors.
“I'm not going to see your husband again.” Hannah makes small pacifying movements with her hands. “I swear. Step back a bit. This is making me quite nervous.”
The security guard has stopped struggling with the door and is now talking on his walkie-talkie while making a series of hand gestures in Hannah's direction through the glass door of her office. The security guard's gestures seem to be both asking her to wait a few seconds and assuring her that everything is going to be resolved in a satisfactory fashion. The woman in sportswear with the nervous tic and not very flattering styling that was probably created without the help of a professional stylist takes a step back. Her mouth still gathered in an irritated expression.
“I'll kill you.” The woman backs up slowly toward the door and stops to point at Hannah with her index finger and thumb extended upward. With that universal threat usually known as the Finger Pistol. “You understand?”
Hannah Linus rolls her executive chair a couple of inches back and picks up a pen from her desk. She holds the pen by the end opposite the point and makes a series of taps on the desk with the cap end. It is a gesture that she has been perfecting over hundreds of executive meetings. Meant to both attract the attention of whomever she is talking to as well as dramatically underscore her words.
“Talk to your husband.” Hannah Linus looks at the woman with some sort of renewed confidence. In the background of her visual field, her administrative assistant, Raquel, is running a bunch of keys over to the place where the security guard is waiting. The security guard is now looking at Hannah Linus with a reassuring smile whose main message seems to be that the situation of imminent danger to Hannah Linus's personal safety is already in the process of being defused. “This type of situation can be solved. Contrary to what they say.”
What happens next takes Hannah Linus by surprise. Probably because she was already anticipating an uncomplicated conclusion. So that she is unable to interpret the movement of her adversary. Nor does she manage to get out of the way when the woman comes around the desk and attacks her. Causing the chair and its occupant to fall over onto the carpeted floor. The two women are rolling around on the ground with several locks of Hannah Linus's hair tightly grasped in the other woman's hands when Raquel finally manages to open the glass door. With the fourth key that she tries in the lock.
CHAPTER 25. A Momentary Lapse of Reason
“On one hand you've got Gilmour.” Mr. Bocanegra takes a drag on his enormous cigar and looks through the windshield of his two-seater convertible Jaguar, stopping at the stoplight on the corner of Pelayo and Ramblas. “Gilmour is, basically, a numbskull. And on the other hand there's Waters. The guy who wrote Dark Side of the Moon. The Wall. Wish You Were Here. I mean, he's a genius. With one of those strange minds. His music is strange, I won't deny that. Waters is the guy that Gilmour kicked out of the group.”
This afternoon it is not Mr. Bocanegra at the wheel of his brand-new convertible Jaguar, which now turns the corner of Pelayo and Ramblas and heads down the Ramblas. It is Aníbal Manta that's driving. With his wrist resting on the open window and his enormous hand hanging outside the vehicle. And with two pieces of cotton stuffed into the nostrils of his nose, which was broken last night by Mr. Bocanegra. After he confirmed that Raymond Panakian had escaped the headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. A nose that in its present state no longer looks like a nose. It isn't very clear what exactly it looks like now, but it definitely bears some resemblance to a swollen, irregular meteorite that crossed the stratosphere and crashed violently into the middle of Aníbal Manta's face.
“It's as if Watson fired Sherlock Holmes,” continues Bocanegra. Drumming with his fingers on the glove compartment to the beat of the Pink Floyd compact disc that's playing on the Jaguar's compact disc player. “As if that Indian that went around with the Lone Ranger one day just up and handed the Lone Ranger a pink slip and started trying to do everything the Lone Ranger did. Which would be absurd.” He shows his teeth in a cruel smile. “Because the Lone Ranger can only do what he does because he is the Lone Ranger.”
The Ramblas are as congested as they are every evening. The center walkway is mostly filled with groups of British citizens singing and drinking beer from enormous plastic cups that they then throw at each other or simply let drop to the ground between heaves. The image makes one think of hordes of native British Islanders before the arrival of the Romans. There are also groups of drunk girls that stagger up the main lane of the Ramblas and seem to be celebrating something undefined. Hugging each other. Raising swaying arms to halt taxis and struggling to remain vertical.