He stopped playing with his Zen rake and made a pyramid of interlocking fingers over the acrylic prism, his cigar smouldering at the summit like the crater of a volcano.
‘Part of the sum will be paid in advance. Twenty-five names,’ he specified, ‘will get you the rest. It doesn’t matter how you come by them. A single missing name could mean my son’s downfall and, in all probability, your own as well.’
With his silver guillotine he pruned an ombú leaf that had exceeded the limits of what was advisable. The healthy leaf fell onto the glass top of the desk. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger and twirled it round, a green flame bursting from the friction of his fingertips.
‘My first son was cut down in his prime. He had everything it would take to be my successor, to extend my dominion over these lands and prolong it in time. My other son, on the other hand, has nothing, as you’ll find out as soon as you meet him. He’s but a pale reflection of his brother, who had become a faithful reflection of myself, allowing for the imperfections that any act of copying entails. This other one’s the product of an inane whim of his mother’s, who insisted on having a plaything of her own while I was moulding my son and heir. A happy whim, a lesson in life that it’s always useful to have a spare handy — even if it isn’t the right one.’
He got up and crossed the resonant, reinforced-glass floors, standing with his back to me, his gaze lost in the shoreless river.
‘I won’t let the chain be broken at the second link.’ He went over to the window through which someone had fallen to their death and touched it as if his hands were touching heaven. ‘These walls, Sr Félix, were raised with human blood.’
‘Hundreds of labourers …’ I mumbled politely.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ he broke in. ‘We’re not in ancient Egypt. This place was built with cranes. No. I’m talking about mine. At the centre of this organism of mirrors and pipes and phone cables and optical fibres and computer networks beats a single heart: mine. The whole building is merely a multiplication of my own body. Every heartbeat sends out orders that are felt in its furthest reaches; every distant organ goes on functioning even when I’m asleep, because, even then, I am the heart that never stops beating. Problems of logic are your department: surely you’ve guessed what the guiding principle is.’
When I’d first walked in, I could only have suggested chaos and madness, but the longer I spent in there, the more I was persuaded that this madness was order run rampant, unfettered to reality, the mania of purely mental order yearning for the eternal perfection of the diamond.
‘It’s all mirrors,’ I stated. ‘There are no opaque walls.’
‘One-way mirrors,’ he came to my assistance. ‘Translucent glass for the bosses …’
‘… and mirrors for their subordinates,’ I concluded. ‘Clever.’
I looked down: here and there, meetings were being held; office workers were typing away, their eyes intent on their screens; a waiter was pouring coffee; a weary secretary had kicked off her high heels and was scratching the sole of her foot. On the level below that were more identical meeting rooms and offices and their occupants, and below that another, and another, until they were lost from sight in the depths.
‘There’s a certain loss of clarity,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s functional, of course. Wherever you stand, everything you can see below you or to the sides is under your command, and the clearer the image, the more direct that command is. Why do I need to see what’s happening on the tenth floor when I can see the people who can see the people who can see what’s happening on the tenth floor? Directly or indirectly, the boss’s eyes are everywhere.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to install television cameras?’
He smiled, and I realised it was just the kind of question he’d been expecting.
‘You’re confusing hierarchy with surveillance. There are cameras everywhere, but they’re only for effective control. They haven’t been with us very long.’ I looked left and right until I realised by ‘us’ he meant the human race. ‘Mirrors, on the other hand … They’ve had millennia to infiltrate our souls. They’re primitive, elemental … Their power isn’t delegated. A camera can generate discomfort, fear perhaps; but not terror. Mirrors can, and do. The more so when you know there’s always someone behind them, behind what you see in them. The master looking at us through our own eyes.’
‘Except up here.’
‘I am the lord of the mirrors,’ he said flatly. But what about that little annex his bodyguard was watching us from? I didn’t dare ask, so I tried something more trivial.
‘Who did your son kill?’
He looked at me in amazement as if I’d just landed in his lobster thermidor and was lying there buzzing away to myself.
‘Eh?’
‘Your s-s-son,’ I stammered. ‘You said he’d committed a murder. Who was the fortu— I mean … unfortunate soul?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Um …’ At first I’d thought the question was fairly logical, but now he made me wonder. ‘I thought it might help me to find the witnesses, to … Perhaps your son’s name isn’t in the files, sometimes when it’s someone influential they use codes, and it’ll be easier to trace the dead man,’ I blurted in conclusion, congratulating myself mentally on my cleverness. But he didn’t look impressed. He tutted once.
‘Nobody knows who it was. My son’s natural perversion led him to commit the crime in front of all those people,’ he said, pointing at the nearby windows of the other tower. ‘There’s no point looking in the police records. They don’t know who it was either. That, among other things, has allowed me to delay the investigation. But the body could come back to us any day now: swollen like a dead seal with river water, or half-decomposed in the garbage churned up by the bulldozers, but with those tell-tale cuts on its face and its broken bones and its organs ruptured from the fall. And then there are the anonymous letters, of course.’
He held out a sheet of paper. I took it. It was a piece of continuous feed, and the only thing on it was a short poem printed in the middle.
Give me a map, then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world,
That these, my boys, may finish all my wants.
‘The blackmailer — or blackmailers — left it on my desk. It isn’t the first. It appears to come from some poem or other, but my people haven’t been able to trace the author. They’re not exactly literary types, for sure.’
‘What makes you think it’s a blackmailer?’
‘Who else would leave a poem on my desk? I found it under my acrylic prism the morning after the crime. Whether they have access to the body or not, whoever wrote it clearly thinks they know enough to intimidate me. My people are already on the case: maybe, as well as neutralising the threat, they’ll find a clue that leads to the dead man. My son maintains that he came in with him from the street and that it never occurred to him to ask him his name. None of the witnesses, it seems, managed to get a clear view of him. Apparently he went through the glass backwards: a man, a well-dressed man, that’s all they can tell us. The strangest thing is that, when security arrived on the scene, the body wasn’t there anymore. Get the picture? Someone was waiting for him and took the body. Anyway, identity aside, you won’t win any prizes for guessing he was a fucking homo.’
‘Oh,’ I remarked, wondering where I’d missed the clue.
‘Like my son,’ he went on. ‘Must have brought him up here to get buggered. Likes doing it in my office for some reason. One night I came back up and found him dressed as a Mambo Queen. Something to do with humiliation, I suppose: it’s always more intense at the top. Masochists have always been a mystery to me, one I never tire of exploring.’