“Excuse me,” the person behind Valentina Parini in line says to her. “The line is moving.”
Valentina Parini has once again begun to rock back and forth. The number of fans that look at her strangely and distance themselves has increased in the last few minutes. After a moment, Valentina leaves her place in the line. The Christmas noises seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. The canned corporate carols. Valentina walks toward the desk where smiling employees with two-tone vests are ringing up sales. She takes a copy from the desk and hugs it against her chest.
“Hey,” says a fan who's buying his copy right then. “Where are you going? Get back in line.”
Valentina Parini snatches the book out of his hands and then tries to do the same thing to another fan near her, but the second fan holds on tightly to his copy and pushes Valentina.
“Excuse me,” says one of the employees to Valentina. “You have to wait in line. You can't do that.”
Valentina looks at the fan that pushed her with a face filled with hate. One of the employees puts a hand on Valentina's shoulder, and she turns and pushes him so hard against the desk covered with Stephen King's new novel that he falls onto the table. Knocking down all the piles of copies. Shouts are heard.
“Get out,” screams Valentina. As the walls of the bookstore begin to spin around her. Or maybe she's the one who's spinning. “I'm the only one who can solve this. Leave me alone.”
Most of the Stephen King fans have opted for moving away from Valentina, who seems to be about to lose her balance. A security guard approaches the scene with his walkie-talkie in his hand. Pushing aside a giant rabbit that is actually a person in a full-body rabbit costume. Valentina kneels on the ground, still hugging the book against her chest. Someone approaches her and she hits them in the crotch with her copy of Wonderful World. The employees in charge of selling Stephen King's new novel are explaining what's going on to the security guard, who looks at Valentina with a frown. Some of the press photographers are taking photographs of the girl kneeling on the ground. Someone asks if all this is part of the launch of Stephen King's new novel.
“Fuck,” says the Stephen King fan who has the outmoded hairdo and the ears of a Vulcan. “A real nutcase.”
On her knees on the ground, hugging her book, Valentina Parini bares her teeth threateningly. And in that precise moment, as the clocks in the Plaza Catalunya mark twelve on the dot, the lights in the store begin to flicker. A moment later they go out. The book section where the launch of Stephen King's new book is taking place is completely in the dark. Someone screams. After a moment, most of the Stephen King fans gathered there start shouting in terror.
CHAPTER 28. Eclipse
Eric Yanel observes the upper part of the anonymous building uptown that houses the Hannah Linus Gallery with an anguished expression. Planted in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the building's fire escape. He is wearing tall rubber boots and a protective jumpsuit, the kind people wear when working with toxic materials. On his jumpsuit there's a silk-screened schematic drawing of a lightning bolt cutting an insect in half and the words “ARNOLD LAYNE, WOOD PARASITE SOLUTIONS.” Behind him is Aníbal Manta, disguised in an identical, but much bigger, jumpsuit. The biggest protective jumpsuit Yanel has ever seen in his life. They're both wearing backpacks and have gas masks hanging from their necks. They're both standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the first-floor fire exit, which is directly connected to the offices of Hannah Linus's gallery. A few minutes before midnight on the Night of the World Launch of Stephen King's New Novel, and the street is deserted. The building is dark. The gallery occupies the first three floors, and the rest of the building is all offices. A company that promotes Barcelonian cuisine in the Far East. A company that subcontracts telephone customer care companies for the sale of telephone services. And the offices of a board game distributor on the top floor. The entire building is empty. Each corporate space is protected by its own alarm system. And the winter moon floats lazily over them all.
“Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Aníbal Manta says finally. He looks at his colleague disapprovingly. “What's the point of us dressing like this if you're gonna show up with that face?” He shakes his head. “Why don't you just wear a sign that says 'I'm a criminal'?”
Eric Yanel doesn't look as if he's shaved in many days. The skin on his face has that crusty look of someone who's barely gotten out of bed for days. His traditional long blond wave of hair has turned into something closer to a twisted Mohawk. Rigid and greasy at the same time. His nose and eyes are red, like he's been crying. Now he sighs. He looks over his shoulder at Manta, who gives him a sign to wait. A pedestrian has just turned the corner and is now approaching along the sidewalk. Carrying a couple of department-store bags filled with Christmas gifts and walking with his head bowed, absorbed in the little clouds of steam of his own breath. Manta waits for him to get far enough away and lifts a thumb toward his partner in crime.
“Now,” he says. “And make sure your hands don't shake. I'm not in the mood to have you fall on me.”
Yanel grabs the lower end of the building's fire escape ladder. He climbs up to the first landing and drops onto the steel structure. Aníbal Manta crosses the street with that paradoxical gracefulness of his that makes you think of superheroes genetically altered by radiation. Yanel picks up the backpack his partner tosses to him and then releases the ladder. The entire steel structure trembles and clatters and threatens to collapse under Aníbal Manta's weight.
Yanel unfolds his case of small, shiny instruments in front of the fire exit. He chooses from the selection of rods and tiny tools that look like miniature dental equipment and spends a minute or two working on the lock. In spite of the cold, a drop of sweat slides down his cheek and falls onto the frost-covered steel of the fire escape. Followed by another. The infinitesimal little noises that his actions produce inside the lock are transformed into an electronic signal and monitored by a little digital device that Manta has stuck to the surface of the door next to the lock. Yanel moves his rods with his gaze fixed on the little device's screen and finally a click is heard, loud enough to cause Manta to let out a satisfied grunt. They both gather up all their vaguely dental equipment as fast as they can and push the door open. Yanel sniffs and Aníbal Manta realizes that what he had thought were drops of sweat were actually tears. Yanel dries his cheeks and takes a deep breath. Like a tormented actress regaining her composure just before going onstage to act in a comedy.
Inside the building, they both place bands with special nonreflective flashlights onto their heads. They have a dark hallway in front of them. From the building's blueprints they know that the hallway ends at the back exit of the gallery's office complex. And that is where they stop. In front of the door's security panel with its magnetic card reader. In front of the office's alarm system box that hangs above the door. Everything seems to converge at that door for an instant. An instant of cosmic respect. Of reverential fear. Aníbal Manta farts in the silence of the hallway.
Yanel runs the copy of Hannah Linus's magnetic card through the reader. A little green light turns on. Beneath the vaguely bluish glow of Yanel and Manta's nonreflective flashlights, Hannah Linus's complex of offices is somewhat like an underwater world. The switched-off computers are banks of coral. The photos of family members, stuffed toys, and other artifacts designed to humanize the desks are the remains of shipwrecks. The broom closets are dangerous underwater caves. On the other side of the office complex lies the door to the gallery. The real Treasure Cave. Yanel opens it with the copy of the card.