Stripped of Iris Gonzalvo, the group playing darts has regained their truly profane nature. Men involved in a competitive activity with no purpose beyond itself. One of the most truly profane rituals of humanity. Without any more peculiar elements than the contrast between Pavel's exaggeratedly tall and pale figure and his Jamaican-inspired hair and clothing.
“I still keep thinking I've seen you somewhere,” growls Mr. Bocanegra. With a slight shaking of the head. With a slight furrowing of the brow. With a small, suspicious system of gestures. “I could almost swear I've seen you dance here. I don't like to be lied to.”
The clientele of The Dark Side of the Moon is the type of clientele that have made the place what it is over the past thirty years. Local politicians. International businessmen. With their ties festively loosened. Industry magnates with loosened ties and shoes kicked under the table. Sitting on velvet sofas with their arms around two young women dressed in G-strings and high heels. Entire armies of women with their corporate uniforms of G-strings and high heels.
“I do very nasty things to people who lie to me,” says Bocanegra. “Even when they're girls like you.”
Iris Gonzalvo smiles. The elevator in the middle of the circular bar opens its doors and a couple of waitresses in G-strings and high heels emerge, each holding high trays filled with drinks.
CHAPTER 39. Saudade's Finger Pistol
Koldo Cruz finishes spreading shaving cream on his face, his only eye looking alternately at the mirror and at the portable television on a shelf of the bathroom. In the upper floor of his house. The fact that he only has one eye forces him to make lateral head movements in order to shave and not miss anything on TV. The patch that usually covers his eyeless socket is on the bathroom shelf, next to the television and other personal hygiene objects. The images on television have supposedly been recorded by an amateur videographer on vacation in Indonesia. There are people running in terror. In what could be a coastal tourist complex. Then a gigantic wave appears and drags off all the people that were running in terror.
Cruz picks up his razor and turns on the faucet to wet the blades. Since surviving the bombing he has learned to feel his way through shaving so he doesn't have to look at his face without the eye, or at the steel plate that replaces his right temple. That was before he started lifting up the patch and showing his eyeless socket to satisfy the requests of his friends' nieces and nephews. Beside the television and the patch there are a couple of bongs and a bag with thirty grams of marijuana brought specially from Mexico. On the television, the guy filming the gigantic Indonesian wave realizes that the wave is coming at him faster than he can run and drops his camera. Cruz proceeds to shave his face according to his daily strategy: first the cheeks, then the neck and finally the mustache and chin.
He leaves the bathroom, shaved and with his patch back in place, dressed in a wifebeater and long johns, with his towel over his right shoulder. He greets the two workers that are installing the new electrified steel bars into the upper-floor windows and he reminds them that there are practically limitless supplies of beer available to them in the refrigerator downstairs. A refrigerator that looks more like a cold store. Koldo Cruz likes to show signs of largesse with people who lack his personal fortune. And the genius needed to amass a personal fortune like his. He passes in front of his young Russian fiancée's private bathroom where, like every morning, she's locked inside for at least an hour. Koldo Cruz likes to pretend, to her, that he doesn't know she shoots up heroin in the bathroom each morning. At the same time, he calls her dealer every other day to check up on her consumption levels. Standing in front of his bedroom's full-length mirror, he dresses and ties his tie as the workers sporadically walk around lugging steel structures at the back of the mirror's surface. Koldo Cruz would never admit that he's bored. In his opinion, it's a question of balance. Everything in life is about balance. And it simply happens that sometimes his inner demand for emotional balance leads him to do things that other people would find atrocious. Now he checks his Cartier watch with inlaid diamonds. Three minutes until his daily meeting at the Caipirinha café-bar, located exactly one and a half blocks from the electrified perimeter of his house.
The morning is sunny in a lackluster way. A lazy, lackluster sky floats over Pedralbes. Koldo Cruz buys La Vanguardia from a newspaper stand on the way to the café and folds it meticulously three times along its transversal axis. Forty seconds later, he pushes open the glass door of the Caipirinha café-bar and waits a moment in the doorway for the entire morning staff to greet him. Cruz started buying his own copy of La Vanguardia at the newspaper stand instead of reading the copy the café has available for customers after one morning a customer, who was not a regular, insisted on holding on to it for more than thirty-five minutes. Forcing a heated discussion that ended with threats of physical violence. Since that day, the entire morning staff of the Caipirinha café-bar has treated Cruz with awkward friendliness.
Cruz crosses the café with jovial strides and takes his regular spot at the bar. The waiter puts a Macallan with ice in front of him, meticulously prepared the way Mr. Cruz likes it, with a lot of Macallan and a little ice. Beside the whiskey a small plate of olives appears.
The pages of today's La Vanguardia are filled with photographs of gigantic waves in the Pacific. Koldo Cruz pays particular attention to the Business and Sports sections, which usually occupy the final pages in most of the world's newspapers. Every once in a while he looks up to inspect the people that come in and out. Due to the nature of his line of work, Koldo Cruz is always on the alert for the presence of strangers in his immediate personal surroundings. Especially since the bombing. And since that guy snuck into his house less than a month ago. There is a young guy with a basketball cap and sunglasses that he's never seen in the café before. Reading a book at an out-of-the-way table. Cruz is reading the Sports and Business sections and looking up once in a while to check him out above the upper edge of the newspaper. Something about the young man is familiar. Familiar in a strange way. As if his face were a face that came floating back from Koldo Cruz's youth. A mostly hairless face, from what Cruz can see from his bar stool. A soft face with big cheeks and blond, somewhat long hair sticking out from beneath his basketball cap. And who the hell wears a basketball cap with a ten-thousand-euro Lino Rossi suit?
Ten minutes later, Koldo Cruz eats his last olive, takes a last sip of his Macallan and makes his daily call to the foreman of his group of Russian employees. On his way to the door of the Caipirinha café-bar, he twists his head a bit to get a better look at the young man with the cap and sunglasses. Now that he's closer he can see that the novel the young man is reading is a Stephen King novel. And that he's reading it with an expression of intense concentration behind his sunglasses.
Lucas Giraut lets five minutes pass before closing his copy of Wonderful World and leaving it on the table. Koldo Cruz's daily activities are so firmly dictated by tradition that he barely had to look up to be sure he had him in front of him. Ensconced as always on his bar stool as if he owned the bar, exercising his authority over the stool and over the rest of the place. Then Lucas leans over to rummage through his bag located beneath the table and takes out the Highly Secret Accounting Ledger he found in Apartment 13. He pages through it distractedly and tears out a page completely filled with his father's small, neat handwriting. Then he takes out a blank sheet of paper and writes down the note he has been mentally preparing for a couple of days. The note is succinct and has no exact instructions. Both the vocabulary and the tone have been conscientiously chosen to not sound too threatening, yet at the same time transmit an air of absolute confidence. Lastly he sticks the note and the page from the Highly Secret Ledger into an envelope and seals it after peeling off the paper covering the self-adhesive strip. On the front of the envelope he simply writes Koldo Cruz's name.