Lucas Giraut's first childhood drawings of Apartment 13 included marks on the apartment's shifting internal geography indicating possible sightings of people. The sightings were never clear enough for him to be sure that they weren't just optical illusions. The most conducive places for those types of sightings were the mirrors and the doorways.
Holding the back end of the flashlight between his teeth, Giraut puts the photograph into his pocket. There is something about the Filial Investigation Operation that gives him an indescribable feeling of indecisiveness. Like the feeling of sitting in front of a magic desk for the first time. Contemplating the apparently normal knobs of its drawers and its apparently normal surfaces and mentally gauging the measurements in search of ghostly spaces. He looks up and examines the walls. The paint that camouflages the plaster that camouflages the concrete. The vents that are different from the other vents in the building, more like defiant mouths. Giraut stands up on the bed and works the vent above it until it comes loose. He places it carefully on the bed and sticks his arm through the ventilation shaft. Feeling around. With his gaze lost in the distance. In that way that people look out into the distance when they are blindly feeling around in something whose inside they can't see. Finally he pulls something out of the hole. Some kind of book. He pulls it out in a small cloud of dust and he stares at it. In that precise moment the cell phone in his pocket rings.
“Lucas?” says his mother's voice when he answers. In a tone that indicates she's in one of her Moods. A tone of voice like the crunch of a solid roof splitting beneath the weight of a hundred-year-old tree. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Behind her rhetorical pause, Lucas Giraut can feel her crackling fury in the form of an electric tingling that raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. “You're my son. What I am supposed to do with you?”
In Lucas Giraut's later childhood drawings of Apartment 13, its internal geography became even more complex. The apartment grew in size and for the first time the annotations suggested that it could have several levels, or at least one additional level, located between the ceiling of the apartment and the building's roof. That hypothetical space, based on certain differences between the measurements that Lucas had made on the outside and on the inside of the building, was dubbed the Highly Secret Level.
“Mom?” Lucas blows on the book to get the dust off and examines its black cover. He opens it and looks at the first few pages and recognizes his father's handwriting. The book consists of a succession of accounting entries, with their corresponding dates and amounts. The first dates are from the late seventies. “I'm the president of my father's company. I'm the primary stockholder. And that means I decide what the strategies are for the International Division.” He blinks while still turning the pages of the accounting ledger. “Or for any other division, of course.”
“Don't be stupid.” Estefanía Giraut's tone of voice during her Moods is powerfully reminiscent of the sound a hundred-year-old tree makes in splitting a solid roof in half and then splitting the floor of the house's upper story, causing the entire structure to collapse. “You're going to meet with Fonseca in your office on Tuesday. And neither of you is coming out of that damn office until you've signed the documents for the restructuring plan.”
“What about Christmas dinner?” Lucas Giraut turns the pages faster and faster. “You should let me arrange Christmas dinner, Mom. I think I can get fifty guests.”
Some of the transactions recorded in the accounting ledger he holds in his hands have the initials K.C. written beside them. The initials are repeated several times on each page and appear on every one of the pages. Some of the amounts that appear beside the initials K.C. are so high that Lucas Giraut feels a touch of vertigo, as if he were looking over the edge of a very deep well and watching as little bits of rubble fall to the bottom.
“I know exactly what you're doing,” says Estefanía Giraut. In a tone of voice that makes one think of pieces of broken jet fuselage cleanly splitting solid roofs. “You can't hide anything from me. And I warn you that things always turn out the way I want them to. It's never been any other way. So don't even bother trying,” she says conclusively, and the loud crash he hears right before the line is cut off allows Lucas to clearly visualize his mother violently slamming down her office phone.
In his later childhood drawings of Apartment 13, the map of its shifting internal geography began to include discoveries of a different nature. By that point the map took up many pages of childhood notebooks. According to the explanations accompanying the drawings, several movable wall panels, covered by curtains and various furnishing elements, hide secret doors that open onto a secondary system of tunnels located inside the walls. The secondary tunnels, according to the conclusions recorded at the end of that second phase, were the true means of transportation between the various levels and rooms of Apartment 13. A second map superimposed on the first. In none of young Lucas Giraut's dreams, according to the annotations, was there any sighting of Lorenzo Giraut inside Apartment 13. Signs of his presence, however, were extensively catalogued in the drawings, mainly in the form of cigar butts and coats hanging on the coatracks.
In his final drawings, which were much more complex and barely intelligible, it was suggested that the tunnels of Apartment 13 could lead far beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate headquarters of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD.
CHAPTER 14. Raymond Panakian
“You're a fat fuck and a retard,” says Juan de la Cruz Saudade from the door of the corner store in downtown Rome where Aníbal Manta is flipping through Marvel superhero comics translated into Italian. Looking closely at the panels and trying to decipher the accompanying dialogue. “What kind of forty-year-old man reads comic books? What does your wife think about you reading comic books all day?” Saudade pauses and eats a spoonful from the cup of vanilla and strawberry ice cream in his hands, leaning on the doorjamb of the store's door and blocking the entrance with his back. “And what does she think of that potbelly so big you can't even see your own cock? Doesn't she complain when you can't find it? But I guess it doesn't matter. She's probably busy screwing the neighbors while you read comic books. She still screwing the neighbors?” He makes a taunting face while brandishing the little ice cream spoon. “What kind of a man are you?”
Aníbal Manta continues turning pages at top speed. The reason he's gone into the store and is trying to speed-read all the latest issues of the Marvel superhero comic book collections is his casual discovery that the Italian Marvel collections are several months ahead of the Spanish Marvel collections. Spider-Man, X-Men, the Fantastic Four. In Italy they're doing all the things they'll be doing in Spain several months from now. The idea is almost too enormous. Aníbal Manta's gaze tries to capture all the information he can in the least possible time. How did Peter Parker get a new job at a television station? And how is it possible that the Incredible Hulk has managed to neutralize the radiation that makes him turn green in moments of emotional stress? As hard as he tries, Aníbal Manta can't understand a single line of the Italian dialogue. The owner of the store, a tiny sour-faced Chinese woman, watches Aníbal Manta and Saudade with the same expression she'd have if she were looking at a couple of giant rats that had come into her store and started chowing down on the magazines.