‘… turd.’
I turned without flinching, still holding it in my hand. I gazed at it admiringly. A truly impeccable piece of work. Not a bubble or a burr to interrupt the perfect union of crystalline and opaque matter. Smiling, I handed it to Sr Tamerlán.
‘An admirable piece.’
‘And a useful one,’ he replied. ‘Anyone that puts it back on the desk in disgust when they realise does little to earn my respect. It’s a detector. I read the language of the body, and the hand that holds the turd never lies.’
He held it aloft, turning it round and round in his deft fingers the better to appreciate its purity of form. Then, for the first time, he looked at me.
‘You’ve passed the test.’
‘What if I hadn’t?’
He put the ingot to his cheek to feel its coolness, and dreamily closed his eyes. They were as blue as the flame of an acetylene torch.
‘This isn’t any old turd, you understand.’ He put it back on the desk and leaned on it with his full bulk. ‘It’s of great sentimental value to me. You might say it’s worth its weight in gold, if it weren’t for the fact that its value is incalculably greater. Don’t bother putting a figure on it. Everything you see, my castle, was born from it as from a germinated seed. I should make it clear first of all that this is my turd, the product of my body, my blood, my cells, my bowels — that perfect and bafflingly complex machine. Not even your most state-of-the-art computer could come close to simulating the miracle our body performs silently, humbly, day in day out. But we’re not talking about any day or any turd. It is the indelible memory of the night that made me that’s preserved in here. This prism is the treasure chest of my most precious memories. As you can appreciate it, I shall open it for you. My partner — you’ve heard of him I take it. It took me years. It wasn’t simple, the way it is for you lot, altering reality by pressing a few keys without getting your hands dirty. No. It was long and gruelling and complicated. First, I had to get him out of the way for a while, so that the running of Tamerlán & Sons — it had another name in those days — would temporarily be in my hands. Then I had to bury myself up to my neck in papers and papers and more papers, and win over people and people and more people, selling cheap and buying dear, shelling out for favours I hadn’t received to people who deserved no better than a bullet in the head. Never had I stooped so low, never had I lived with the taste of humiliation for so many days and nights on end. But it was worth it — I relished it — because it was the last time. When I succeeded, when control of the company had, like barely tilting scales, shifted unquestionably and permanently into my hands, I celebrated with a huge feast, on my own. In the course of the meal — I was on dessert I think — the news of his death reached me. Then, and only then, did I call for the golden chalice. Gold, Sr Félix, was the source of our family fortune, which goes back only to my father. When we came to this country, just the two of us, fleeing from a devastated and hostile Europe, we brought it over with us, all of it. Most was spent immediately, establishing the roots of the empire you can now view from these heights, but we decided to keep a tiny amount as a souvenir, so as never to forget where we came from — in the chalice that I used, on that night of nights, to drink to my victory. The bottom of the chalice was full of … let’s call them gold nuggets, that had passed into my hands like a torch when an accident took my father’s life and delivered me defenceless into the hands of his partner — my own until that night — who took advantage of my grief and youth to lay his greedy hands on everything, including my body. The only thing he respected was my chalice. I drank its contents in one, washing them down with the most expensive champagne, and felt a pleasure inconceivable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it in the flesh, that of the polish and caress of pure gold nuggets sliding down my throat to my stomach as if borne on the crystal waters of a stream. A few hours later, and for the first time in years — all the years that I’d lived in that monster’s clutches — I loosened my bowels and shat, shat that magnificent, prolonged turd you now behold, instead of the timid, constipated little pellets that always used to drop into the toilet bowl with that pebbly plink that brought tears of humiliation to my eyes.’
He opened them to look at me.
‘My son’s killed someone,’ he said. ‘In this very room. Threw him out of that window.’ He pointed to the one immediately behind me. ‘Five nights ago. To explain what your job will be, you’ve been allowed a privilege reserved for a happy few: to penetrate to the heart of the diamond.’
I thought this would be the moment to show I was worthy of the honour.
‘You want me to erase all the data from the police files. Hold up the investigation. No big deal. There are lots of people who could do it.’
‘You are a piece of trash, aren’t you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You have the eyes of an insect. Dead eyes, only connected to your brain. The eyes of the living throb with the beating of their hearts, they light up, they die away. Yours don’t. They have a constant, mechanical frequency. A continuous hum. Like mine. That’s why I make my less fortunate employees wear mirrored sunglasses when speaking to an inferior. It makes them more ruthless.’
‘In the war …,’ I began.
‘I haven’t got time for cheap soaps,’ he interrupted, turning away. ‘Besides, that wasn’t a war. In a real war fortunes are won and lost. If it was so easy,’ he went on, without warning me we’d never dropped the original subject, ‘we’d already have done it ourselves. They aren’t connected to the Web. You have to go in person, do it on their machines. Getting the picture? Now, you tell me about your war and maybe I’ll listen to you. I know you haven’t lost your contacts.’
‘It’s been ten years since I …’
‘Two years ago there was an epidemic of money vanishing from cash dispensers. The work of some word-perfect digital thief. And the pockets of a mysterious patriotic fund miraculously began to bulge. But it was all sorted out behind closed doors and no one went to gaol.’
‘I was only carrying out orders,’ I explained.
But Sr Tamerlán wasn’t listening. He’d taken a cigar out of a transparent drawer and rested it on the acrylic prism in which his turd was embarked, like an insect in amber, on its centuries-long sleep. I tried to make out the secret presence of the gold nuggets in the suggestive twinkle of this or that irregularity, but on the outside it was indistinguishable from a pauper’s turd. Indifferent to my craning neck, Sr Tamerlán compared their lengths and trimmed the excess off his cigar with a silver guillotine, chewing on it before he lit it. Measuring his domains, he strode around and stopped in front of the window of the crime, silhouetted in photomontage against the metallised strip of the River Plate. The only things moving on the backcloth of the frozen landscape were a cargo boat chugging in from the sea and the yellow bulldozers shovelling mountains of refuse up to the edge of the Ecological Reserve.
‘The bulldozers,’ he said without explaining himself, and fell silent to watch them.
‘Are they yours?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, as if to someone else. He exhaled a puff of rich, blue smoke. Then he remembered my absurd presence. ‘Mine, yes. A childhood memory.’
‘A family of builders?’ I ventured.
He stared at me for a few seconds without saying anything. I understood what his top executives must have felt, accustomed as they were to hiding behind their mirrorshades, when they had to take them off in his presence.