“I should have hired a professional.” Fanny Giraut's surgically taut cheeks withdraw to each side. Her white gums have a texture inexplicably similar to enamel. Her bruised lips plunge into the glass once again, and emerge a moment later. “I've never seen you do anything well. And I doubt you're going to change now.”
“The audiovisual material for the party is ready,” continues Lucas. “The old videotapes have been transferred to digital. The photographs have been adapted for digital projection.”
The most important fishing trophies in the Fishing Trophy Room, those Trophies That Justify a Fishing Life, are on the mantelpiece. Among them is a blowfish stuffed in attack mode. Attacking an invisible enemy with its spines. There is a red tuna six feet and nine inches long. The largest ever fished out of the Mediterranean. There are various gold and silver trophies. Many of them have figures of fishermen or figures of fish and other objects related to the world of fishing.
“My son never learned to fish.” Fanny Giraut makes a vague gesture with her hand around the Fishing Trophy Room. “He's even clumsier than his father, and his father was the worst fisherman I've ever seen with a pole in his hands. Remember when we went out in the boat to fish tuna? Those were the few times that idiot Lorenzo ever made me laugh. The poor bastard was so scared that when they were tying up the chair's belts his face looked like he was being strapped into an electric chair. My husband was gutless.” She pauses and her features come as close as they can to an evocative expression. “Not even jail gave him the guts he never had. In fact, he came out even more ridiculous and gutless. A ridiculous old man clinging to his stupid store and his ridiculous old friends. It would have been fitting if he'd dropped dead in that horrible place, amid all that junk and spiderwebs.” The three-story building and its attached warehouse in uptown Barcelona that houses the commercial activities of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., is simply known in the Giraut family as The Store. “Getting rid of him was the best thing I ever did in my life. But it seems getting rid of a son isn't so easy.”
The main discovery that Lucas Giraut made as a child while spying on his father from his window in the North Wing had to do with his father's facial expression. Which was, in essence, an expression of terror. Pure terror. And somehow that terror seemed to be connected to the fact that he was standing in front of the large window. Somehow the terror seemed to derive from the large window itself. Standing in front of the large window with his glass of Macallan in one hand and his cigarette in the other, Lorenzo Giraut's face was a grimace of intense, painful terror. The discovery was described in detail in Lucas's childhood notebooks.
“The band has already been hired,” says Lucas Giraut. “For your birthday party.”
And he arches his eyebrows as if what he has just said gives him some sort of secret gratification.
CHAPTER 4. The Beginning, Strictly Speaking, of the Story
Lucas Giraut rests his chin on the intertwined fingers of his hands and examines, his eyes slightly squinted, the image of Mr. Bocanegra, Show Business Impresario, in the monochrome monitor connected to the surveillance camera in the lobby of the building that houses LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD. Searching for familiar elements in his appearance. Elements that could awaken some childhood memory. Perhaps the coat. Over his shoulders Mr. Bocanegra is wearing a fox, or sable, or perhaps Chinese otter coat, whose cut and overall appearance is strikingly feminine. The image of a man with a strikingly feminine coat definitely seems to awaken some type of memory in the nooks and crannies of Lucas's childhood mind. The images on the monochrome monitor that watches over the lobby are a color halfway between electric blue and the gray scale. Lucas Giraut realizes that Mr. Bocanegra has looked up and is now staring into the lobby camera with an impatient look on his wide, mustachioed face.
“Send him up,” Lucas says to the intern who occupies the lowest rung of LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD.'s hierarchical pyramid.
The intern goes down the stairs that lead from Lucas Giraut's office on the mezzanine to the antique store itself. Giraut looks at the monitor again, sprawled out in his office chair in that rigid way of his. The office that Lucas Giraut now occupies, and which used to be his father's, has one side that overlooks the public sales and showroom. The only furnishing element that has arrived since Lorenzo Giraut's death is the Italian Louis XV — style cartonnier that Lucas uses as his desk. A cream-colored cartonnier with ebony accents and four leather drawers above the writing surface separated by a decorative alcove, the type with compartments that can only be opened by triggering secret inner mechanisms that is technically known in the antiques world as a magic desk. According to most professional opinions, Giraut is the most important collector of magic desks in the country.
Bocanegra's arrival is announced by the thundering sound of his steps on the wooden stairs and a slight trembling of the floor. A moment later, he reaches the top of the stairs, wrenching an anguished creak from the floorboards. The Show Business Impresario and Reputed Best Friend of the late Lorenzo Giraut shows his teeth in a ferocious grin. Over six feet of flabby flesh with an impossibly shiny bald head crowning his wide, mustachioed face. Giraut looks Bocanegra up and down and carries out a quick suitological analysis of his beige Prada suit, with the following results: indifference; sumptuousness that becomes disdainful without ever being classy; contained violence and respectability strictly based on negative personality elements.
Bocanegra energetically extends his flaccid hand to his host. The smile on his wide, mustachioed face is cruel for some reason that's hard to discern. There's something intrinsically cruel in Bocanegra's features. Something that doesn't seem to depend on the specific configuration of said features at any given moment.
“I can't explain how much this means to me.” Mr. Bocanegra raises a hand to his chest and wrinkles his large soft face into an expression of emotional pain. Then he makes a gesture with his large hairy mitts that includes the entire office. “Being here. That you called me. I don't need to say that your father was more than a brother to me. Fuck, I'd fit most of my real brothers with cement shoes and dump them in the sea. But that's another story.” He frowns. “Your father was the most significant person in my life. I know it's strange for me to say that when most likely you don't even remember me. How old were you the last time I saw you? Four? Five? But what can you do.” He gives a resigned shrug. “Your mother never liked me. Let's just say that she never wanted me to set foot in her house. Which is why you've never seen me, and why your father never told you about me. Fuck, I don't even want to think about what would have happened if she'd suspected that I worked so closely with your father.”
Lucas makes a sign for his guest to sit down in the armchair on the other side of the Louis XV cartonnier. Mr. Bocanegra drops himself heavily into the armchair and leans back against the wide back with his arms extended. There is certainly something familiar about him. It's not his wide, mustachioed and slightly sweaty face, or the way he talks. It's more the way his features adjust to his different emotional states without losing a constant trace of underlying cruelty. Some sort of background trace. A trace that evokes large predators in ecosystems not dominated by human beings.