“When I was your age, I wrote a novel, too.” Lucas Giraut looks at the promotional brochure under the courtyard's late-afternoon light. On the cover of the pamphlet it says “WONDERFUL WORLD, BY STEPHEN KING” and “WORLDWIDE RELEASE DECEMBER 22.” Giraut takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “It wasn't a novel like yours, or like Stephen King's. Really, it wasn't exactly a novel. It was about Apartment Thirteen. I don't know why it's called that. In my family they've always called it that. It's a room in the floor above the place where I work. My father used to go there to hide from my mother, I think. Anyway, I was obsessed with Apartment Thirteen. I dreamed about that place night after night. In my dreams it was much bigger than it really is. It had antique lamps and rooms filled with antiques. And endless hallways.” He looks up toward the Palau de la Mar Fosca. “I still have that novel in my files. I remember that it filled a lot of notebooks. That's how I spent all my time as a kid. Filling notebooks. With drawings and things I wrote. And in the notebooks I have all sorts of drawings of Apartment Thirteen. I mean, the way I imagined it then. Which is nothing like how it really is. I didn't actually get to see it until after my father died. And it turned out to be just a small, windowless room. Because of my father's illness, you remember. The problem he had with windows.”
Marcia Parini's voice is heard, slightly occluded by the smoke extractor, as it comes from the window of the kitchen of the lower level of the house.
“Lucas? Is she bothering you?” she asks in a distracted tone of voice. Above the double acoustic cushion created by the smoke extractor and the spluttering of the crêpes on the grill. “Would you like a crêpe?”
Valentina Parini rolls her eyes behind her child-sized eyeglasses with green plastic frames. You could say that Lucas Giraut is the only friend that Valentina Parini has ever had. In all her twelve years. Giraut folds the promotional brochure advertising Stephen King's new novel and returns it to her. The hammock Valentina is lying in is the same hammock that her father, Mr. Franco Parini, put up, perhaps as some sort of sick joke, the day before he left his wife Marcia and their daughter, never to return. The relationship between Mr. Franco Parini and Lucas Giraut was generally cordial. Once Mr. Parini called Giraut a “yacht club pussy” and a “fucking useless mama's boy” after Giraut leaned out onto his terrace during a conjugal dispute between the Parinis in the courtyard that included the throwing of several pieces of their domestic furnishings.
“I can't take it anymore.” Valentina drops her hands in an exasperated gesture onto the plaid blanket that covered her lap. “The crêpe thing. I'm twelve years old. I don't want to have to explain again that the things I liked when I was a little girl aren't the same things I like now. This all sucks. My mother made friends with my homeroom teacher. The same one who says I have psychosocial problems.” She makes a disgusted face that wrinkles up her tiny tree-monkey nose. “And the ophthalmologist says that I have to wear an eye patch. Only stupid little kids wear eye patches.”
“I never wore a patch,” says Lucas Giraut firmly.
The way he is sprawled out on his white plastic deck chair is slightly different from the way people usually sprawl out. His back, for example, is straight. His shoulders perfectly upright. His arms brought together in his lap with his fingers intertwined or resting carefully on the arms of the chair. The only thing that actually allows one to perceive that he's lounging is a certain barely discernible relaxation of the muscles in his face. Or, in extreme cases, the crossing of his legs at thigh height.
“Your father was a smart guy,” says Valentina. “About the windows. Keeping away from windows is smart. Anyone who knows how to defend themselves knows that.” She glances cautiously toward the kitchen window of the apartment on the first floor of the former ducal palace. Then she looks at Giraut. She adopts a vaguely confidential tone. “I've been perfecting a new mental attack. I call it the Attack of the Low-Flying Airplanes. It's better than the Machine Gun Attack and much better than the Hand Grenade Attack. It's the best attack I've invented yet. It's great at school, in class or when my homeroom teacher makes me do stupid stuff like go to her office or the school psychologist's office to fill out stupid multiple-choice tests. What you have to do is imagine that you're the pilot of a warplane. One of those old kinds that had a guy on top with aviator goggles that ran a machine gun. Then you imagine the people you want to eliminate. You see them from above, as if you were the guy in the airplane that runs the machine gun. And you plunge down in a nosedive.” Valentina places her hands in front of her torso as if she were operating the controls of an invisible machine gun. “You see them running in every direction, but, of course, they can't escape a warplane. And you get closer and you gun them down and then you make a signal to the pilot for him to rise and then nosedive down again to wipe out all the survivors. If there are any. It's an attack that works better outside, of course. It's perfect for when there's a basketball game. When all my stupid classmates put on their basketball uniforms and are happy and I have to say that I'm sick so they'll let me sit on the bench.”
Lucas Giraut raises the lapels of his Lino Rossi charcoal gray pinstripe suit. To protect himself against the cold of the December evening. Lucas Giraut is not only fond of Lino Rossi suits. He has also developed a habit of analyzing a man's psyche and the way he perceives his place in the world, all based on the suits he wears. The name he has given that discipline in his head is Suitology. The margin of error of his suitological analyses, according to his own calculations, is little or none.
“My father was full of strange things,” he says. “Like his window illness. He told me strange things all the time, and every time I asked him something he answered me in that mysterious tone of his, and then I would obsess over it. I'd get home and get in bed and I couldn't get those things out of my head.” He frowned, as if something in the process of remembering was difficult for him. “Once he told me that there was a man on our block who trained vultures on his roof. That he had ten vultures in a pigeon loft and he had trained them to attack people. And once in a while the guy waited until night fell and sent one of his trained vultures to kill someone. I spent weeks obsessing over that. Every time I left the house to go to school, I walked with my back flat against the buildings, looking up at the sky.”
“I signed up for the talent show at school.” Valentina Parini uses her index finger to readjust her glasses on her tiny nose and looks with her tree-dwelling features at Lucas Giraut, antiques dealer, son of an antiques dealer and supposed mama's boy according to the prevailing rumors in his extended circle of friends and family. “It's something they do every year for Christmas. My school psychologist still doesn't know. And I'm planning on reading my novel. Blood on the Basketball Court. I'm gonna read it in front of everybody. In the school auditorium. With my basketball coach right there. With my school psychologist and my homeroom teacher and all the stupid girls in my class listening.” Valentina Parini's words have what is usually referred to as A Vaguely Threatening Quality. Somehow, that quality seems to emphasize the wandering of her eye. “Maybe I'll invite my mother, too. I won't be able to read the whole thing, of course. Just some parts. The decapitation of the basketball coach. The bomb in the locker rooms. The Graduation Day Massacre.”