“My mother is a difficult woman.” Giraut takes out his silver cigarette case embossed with the initials that he shares with his late father and offers his visitor a cigarette. There is a moment of silence as Bocanegra lights his cigarette with the lighter that Giraut extends to its tip before continuing. “Things tend to get complicated when she's involved.”
“God bless your mother.” Bocanegra takes a drag on his cigarette. His feminine coat, made of sable or Chinese otter or maybe astrakhan lamb, somehow manages to make his figure more threatening. Like some sort of cosmic provocation directed at no one in particular. “The truth is that I don't blame her for hating me. After all, your mother hates the entire human race. You should have seen the face I made when your father told me he was going to marry her. Why don't you just marry an electric eel, I told him.”
Lucas Giraut nods.
“Mr. Bocanegra.” He places both hands, palms open, on the surface of the cartonnier. “As you are well aware, I didn't get to know my father very well. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I get the impression that my father never made any effort to help me get to know him. Or, of course, to get to know me.” He shrugs his shoulders. “The circumstances of his life and his death are a mystery to me. And my mother has made sure that it remains that way. And nevertheless, I am pretty well versed in the professional aspects of his life. Some of his international dealings are still legendary in the antique business.” He gestures toward a pile of professional magazines on top of the cartonnier. “And of course, since when he died he left me at the helm of his corporation, I now have access to all company documents and records. Including those documents and records which, due to their nature, have never been examined by anyone outside of my father's intimate circle. And here is where you come in.”
Mr. Bocanegra seems to sprawl out even further in his chair. The way he superimposes his new position onto the original one is analogous to taking out a second mortgage on top of the one you already have. His new lounging position seems to suggest abundance in every sense of the word and a laxness bordering on defiance.
Lucas Giraut takes a file out of a drawer. He places it on the cartonnier's writing surface and opens it up to the first page.
“To give just one example.” Giraut examines the file's first page. Bocanegra's evident lack of any curiosity toward the file seems designed to cover up a certain degree of interest and curiosity. “Have you ever heard of the Isle of Guernsey? I confess that when I first came across that name I was a bit confused.” He turns a page of the file. “Well, it turns out that the Isle of Guernsey is a British protectorate located in the English Channel. Its total surface is thirty square miles, with a population of sixty thousand people. Typical animals are the donkey and a local type of cows. Its national color is green.”
Something has changed in Mr. Bocanegra's facial expression. The element of cruelty that lies beneath his features seems to have come to the surface without causing any tangible change in his facial expression. Except perhaps for a quasi-feline element of alertness. His enormous body now seems to withdraw into an alert, quasi-feline crouch.
“I'm sure you would agree,” continues Giraut, “that it doesn't seem like a place where my father would go to conduct business. And, yet, the Isle of Guernsey is the headquarters of Arnold Layne Experts. A company I haven't bothered to investigate for the simple fact that it's none of my business what the people of Guernsey do. And the name isn't the only curious thing about this company. For example.” He continues reading from the file he has open on the table. “The last names of the three principal shareholders are Wright, Waters and Mason. Now if one were to type those three last names into any Internet search engine, he would discover that they are the last names of the three founding members of the British rock band Pink Floyd. While 'Arnold Layne' is the title of the band's first single. Defined in musical encyclopedias as,” he reads, “'An optimistic and seminally psychedelic song about a cross-dresser that ends up in jail.' Okay”—he looks up and observes Bocanegra's facial expression—“I'm not a big fan of rock music. Although, as you already know, my father was. And, yet, the name Pink Floyd brings to my mind a series of memories. You can already imagine what kind of memories. That was the first detail that made me think. And then, of course, there's the date that Arnold Layne Experts was incorporated. The summer of 1978. Of course, it took me a little while to recall why that date was so familiar to me. I was only five years old. So”—he closes the file—“does any of this ring a bell with you?” Giraut raises his thin, pale brows over his namby-pamby eyes. “Are you, perhaps, a Pink Floyd fan?”
Bocanegra leans back and keeps smoking. His eyes squint too fleetingly to be registered as anything more than a vague sensation. In the same way that certain predators squint fleetingly while their brains take in the information necessary for their next predatory action.
“Mr. Bocanegra.” Lucas Giraut puts the file back in the drawer. “I have no intention of starting to dig around in cases that are already closed and which the law has no interest in.” He pauses to once again interlock his fingers in front of his face, his elbows resting on the table's surface. “However, I do have professional goals. And some of them coincide with those my father had. Did you know, for example, that while I was doing my doctorate in Dublin I visited the four St. Kieran Panels when they were on display in the Trinity College museum, and that I had the chance to study them privately for a week? And I don't know if you are aware that my father was arrested in 1978 just as he was taking steps to acquire those same four paintings on wood. I mean the same summer in which someone who was working closely with him sold him to the authorities.” He pauses. “And now those paintings are coming here. To Barcelona. They are going to be exhibited in this city. I don't know if you're following me, Mr. Bocanegra.”
Mr. Bocanegra smiles, very slightly at first. Barely a hint of teeth on an overall backdrop of facial cruelty. Then that hint widens, growing in all directions and revealing both rows of large, voracious teeth. The face of a predator baring his teeth threateningly, and then a bona fide cruel smile. Mr. Bocanegra's Genuinely Cruel Smile. Finally he lifts his eyebrows with an amused expression.
“Are you saying that you want those paintings?” He scrutinizes the round, hairless face of his host. “You called me so I would help you get them? So I would devise a plan of action and a strategy and use my experience and my international contacts?” He takes a last drag on his cigarette and crushes it in the ashtray. “After finding my number in your father's secret files or whatever? In other words, after realizing that I am the person that your father would have turned to if he wanted to do something that surpassed the normal bounds of an antique dealer's reach, et cetera and so on?”
Lucas Giraut stares for a second at the remains of the cigarette butt. Most of which seems to have disintegrated or at least no longer bears any resemblance to the typical remains of a cigarette butt.
“I can't explain it,” he says. “But those paintings have a special significance for me. A special value. That's all I can say.”
There is a moment of silence. The lights in Lucas Giraut's office on the mezzanine of the building that houses LORENZO GIRAUT, LTD., are distributed and calibrated in such a way that dusk prevails, all day long.
Mr. Bocanegra stands up suddenly. The way he stands up causes an emphatic lurching of various greasy areas of his face, neck and torso. The coat he is wearing over his shoulders is one of those long-haired fur coats that one associates with wealthy post-Soviet Russian women who smoke while waiting for their chauffeurs in front of some restaurant in Saint-Tropez. A second later, Giraut stands up as well. With a cautious expression.