Panakian stares at the two strangers that are respectively bleeding and stroking their hand in his living room. The two strangers stare at him. The two bags of groceries that Panakian is carrying fall to the floor. The sound of breaking eggs is heard. Manta and Saudade take out their pistols at exactly the same time and point them at him. Panakian raises his hands.
CHAPTER 15. Venus with Mirror
Hannah Linus's commercial gallery is located on an anonymous street uptown, stuck between office blocks, bank headquarters, and corporate buildings. Hannah Linus couldn't care less about the contemporary role of artists and galleries as inner-city colonists and rejuvenators. Just as she couldn't care less about any other fads and trends in the art world. In fact, she is rather proud of the profits that not ever paying attention to trends has yielded her. As she sees it, it is one of those liberating acts that have allowed her to assume control of her life and gradually become more the person that she knows she wants to be. Like when she dumped her first and only boyfriend in high school. Or when, at ten years old, she decided to renounce her parents' religion and wrote a six-page letter to the Bishop of Uppsala detailing the reasons for her decision. Offering arguments against the existence of God and declaring her disappointment with all the hours that she had wasted up to that point in her parish.
Besides her contempt for life's distractions, Hannah Linus considers thoroughness to be another of her talents. In a normal morning of work, she devotes five hours to running the gallery with an hour-long break to do her training exercises. Her glassed-in office on the upper floor of the gallery was designed to optimize productivity. It has the appropriate amount of light. The temperature remains constant. There are no sources of distraction. All the calls are screened, including those of a personal nature. Or they would be if Hannah Linus received any personal calls. But the one feature of her modus operandi that Hannah Linus would single out as essential is the fact that no one interrupts her. All of the workings of Hannah Linus's gallery are designed around the employees not disrupting her except in unavoidable situations.
Which is why that morning, when she hears someone knocking on the glass door of her glassed-in office and she looks up from her computer, she only has to see Raquel's worried face to realize that something is going to interrupt the proper functioning of things. That something is going to violate her sacred precept of not being disrupted.
Hannah Linus signals for Raquel to enter. Raquel is her assistant, whom she holds in as low a professional regard as she does the rest of her local staff. Hannah Linus considers local employees to be unreliable, lacking in initiative and prone to distraction. If it weren't for the technical difficulties inherent in the process, she wouldn't mind importing all of her employees from Sweden.
Raquel enters her office and looks at Hannah Linus, terrified. Instilling respect through fear seems to be one of the few tactics that has worked with the gallery's local staff.
“Yes?”
Hannah Linus begins to tap rhythmically with her pen on the surface of her desk. The way she looks at her assistant not only transmits her irritation at being disturbed, but also her absolute conviction that whatever reason there is behind the interruption is not a valid one. She also decides to look her up and down with a slight expression of disapproval. That's another way that Hannah has of maintaining control over her female employees: choosing employees that are less sexually attractive than she is. Hannah Linus is tall and slim and blond, while Raquel is not very attractive in that way that Hannah Linus finds Spanish women not very attractive: as if someone not terribly proficient had made them, trying to imitate a model of proper beauty. Like failed sketches of moderately pretty women. Topped off with cheap clothes.
“Sorry for the interruption.” Raquel twists a curl of chestnut brown hair around her index finger as she speaks. “But there's a man downstairs. In the gallery, I mean. It's not that he's doing anything wrong, but he doesn't seem normal to me. Or to the security guard. He's a little weird, to be honest.”
Hannah Linus stares at her fixedly.
“I'm not sure I understand,” she says.
Raquel keeps twisting the curl around her finger. It could be a nervous gesture. In any case, Hannah Linus feels an urgent desire to smack her and tell her to stop doing it.
“Well,” says the assistant. “Remember last month when that guy slipped in and sat in the middle of the gallery and said he was an artist and that his sitting there was an artistic action and I don't know what else, and in the end we had to call the police?” She shrugs her shoulders. “We're not sure what's going on with this guy. Maybe nothing. But he's a bit suspicious.”
Hannah Linus sighs. She looks at her watch. Six minutes to her break. She supposes she could stop now, solve the situation, do her exercises and recoup the six minutes after closing. She takes a last disapproving glance at Raquel's body and attire, and stands up.
Juan de la Cruz Saudade is in the gallery, standing in front of an oil painting from the Bellini school. Holding up his chin on one hand and his elbow with the other. With a frown. Like one of those clichéd depictions of art gallery visitors that one finds in Sunday magazine comic strips. He even wears glasses hanging from a little chain around his neck.
Hannah Linus meets Raquel and the security guard at the foot of the stairs. She looks first at her assistant, then at the guard and finally at Saudade.
“So?” She crosses her arms in an irritable gesture. “What's the problem? I don't see anything strange. He's not doing anything.”
“That's the problem,” says the guard. “He's been like that for almost thirty-five minutes. In front of the same painting. In the same position. I swear he hasn't moved a muscle.” The guard shakes his head. “I think that he's some other moron like the one last month. He's waiting for us to call the police so he can be in the newspaper.”
Hannah Linus has never been afraid of complicated or uncomfortable situations. Even in her student years in Sweden one could see her strength of character reflected in other people's faces. In their respectful and uncertain expressions. And in the vaguely stammering way that people addressed her. Those reactions never made her uncomfortable. Although they meant she was condemned to exclusion from the circles of friendship and camaraderie she saw around her. But that was the price to pay for being who she was, she said to herself. For getting the best grades. For being the perfect daughter and the employee of the month, every month. And it was in complicated situations where others withdrew that she could take a proud step forward and shine in all her magnificence. Hannah Linus from Uppsala. The absolute queen of the World of Hannah Linus.
Now she uncrosses her arms and walks across the gallery. Under the gaze of the paintings that make up the exhibition of sixteenth-century oil paintings. Some of the court members and peasants and mythological figures that populate the oil paintings seem to look at her with terrified expressions as she crosses her own gallery with a frown.