Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Pavel goes back downstairs, preceded by the young woman. Once on the lower floor, he indicates through gestures that she should lie on the sofa and open her legs. The young woman obeys with some sort of lazy resignation. Pavel drops his pants. He manipulates his genitals to the point of a satisfactory erection and penetrates her on the sofa. Then he leans over her. And in that moment he sees something. Something familiar in the young woman's face. Something familiar and at the same time completely improbable. Something that makes him take his penis out of the young woman suddenly and take a few steps back, spooked. He snatches off his ski mask.

  “Anya?” he says. In an incredulous tone. Looking at the young woman's face with a frown beneath the tenuous orangish light. “Is that you?”

  The young woman now looks at him with the same incredulous expression. With an amplified version of the same incredulous expression. Which quickly transforms into a disgusted expression.

  “Pavel?” says the young woman. Sitting up with a start.

  Every trace of lazy resignation or shock seems to have evaporated from her face. She lifts a trembling arm and hits him in the face with a smack that echoes throughout the entire lower floor of the three-story house bathed in orangish light. Pavel is paralyzed, the pistol still in his hand. He raises a hand to his face and looks at his bloodstained fingertips.

  The moment, thinks Pavel, is one of those moments that makes him lose all his faith in any of the teachings of the Rastafarian philosophy related to spreading the Rastafarian message of spiritual redemption. One of those moments that fills him with a paralyzing contempt for the civilized Western society that surrounds him. One of those moments that intensify his displeasure toward everything that surrounds his life and makes him want to fill bathtubs to the brim and immerse himself in them. Until he is capable of satisfactorily forgetting where he is. Until the bathtub ceases to be a bathtub.

  “What a pig!” she shrieks in Russian, her Moscow inflections painfully familiar. “What the fuck are you doing here?” She pauses. Her eyes cross slightly. “And what the fuck happened to your hair?”

  “What am I doing here?” Pavel wields his pistol. “What are you doing here? What a whore. You've always been a little whore.” He points toward the stairs with the barrel of his pistol. “Do you have any idea of what kind of guy's fucking you?”

  “I'm no whore, idiot.” She lifts a hand with diamonds on the ring finger and puts it in Pavel's face. A diamond ring that looks too big to be worn on any kind of finger without causing muscular injuries. “I'm engaged. And of course I know what kind of guy is fucking me. A rich man. That's the kind of guy he is.”

  Pavel stares at her. With an expression of intense despondency and intense lack of faith in the teaching of the Rastafarian philosophy and intense contempt for the world that surrounds him. He pulls up his pants without letting go of the pistol in his hand. He buckles his belt.

  “Put down the pistol,” says a voice in Spanish from behind Pavel's back. A masculine and imperious voice. A voice that feels completely at ease ordering people around. “And you can start explaining what's going on here. Because I don't have any desire to learn Russian. For example, you could start explaining why you don't have any panties on.”

  Pavel turns slowly and takes a look at the person who has just spoken. At first he doesn't even manage to comprehend what it is that he's looking at. And not exactly because of poor lighting. He's forced to look again. And what he sees does indeed seem to be a man. Although at first glance that's not entirely clear. Pavel squints to see better in the orangish half-light. The man has a very large head and a mat of white curly hair and a patch that covers one eye. And something that looks like a sheet of metal where his right temple once was. A substantial part of the right side of his face no longer seems to be where it once was. The man, by the way, is aiming a double-barrel shotgun at Pavel. Pavel throws his pistol to the floor. Now it seems an absurd, laughable and not very masculine object compared to the man's double-barrel shotgun.

  “I'm a light sleeper,” says the man. In a perfectly calm tone. “Unfortunately for you. And luckily for me. That's to be expected after a bomb explodes in your house while you're sleeping.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Doesn't matter that it was thirty years ago.”

  The painfully attractive young woman dressed only in a T-shirt advertising the Biosphere Park theme park stands between the two barrels of the shotgun and Pavel's exaggeratedly tall and gawky figure.

  “Don't kill him,” she says in Spanish to the man that seems to be missing a substantial part of the right side of his face.

  The man stares at her with a weary face.

  “And would you mind telling me why I shouldn't kill him?” he says.

  There is a moment of silence. Finally the young woman sighs. With a put-out expression.

  “Because he's my brother,” she says.

  Now the man stares at Pavel curiously.

  “Your brother?” he says. “I didn't know you had a brother.”

  Pavel's face now reflects infinite despondency and infinite contempt for the world he was born into and the role he was given to play in that world. From the front of his T-shirt, Bob Marley raises his eyes up to heaven in a look of musical ecstasy.

  Wonderful World

  CHAPTER 9

  A Masterpiece of Planning

  Standing in front of the large window of the Upper Level of The Dark Side of the Moon, Mr. Bocanegra contemplates the hordes of shoppers that cross Diagonal Avenue with their bags from the big department stores. There is something vaguely regal, or perhaps even Shakespearean, in the act of smoking a cigar pensively in front of a large window located several stories above a commercial avenue filled with people. Or at least that's Bocanegra's impression. The self-confessed fan of his nieces and nephews and of seventies-era British rock takes a meditative pull on his cigar and observes the unmarked car parked across the street. Inside which Commissioner Farina's two lackeys are watching, as usual, with their state-of-the-art photographic equipment.

  “We're in the business of fantasy,” he says. And shakes his cigar absentmindedly in the direction of the police car. “It doesn't matter that they say we're criminals. We're just not like other people. We have fantasies. We have dreams. We haven't given up that part of our lives. That's why we steal. And once in a while we bust up a face or we shoot someone in the kneecap. There're always kneecaps that are screaming out, begging for us to shoot them, of course. Because we're people with positive energy. Ambition. That thing that gets lost when you work in an office and turn into a drab, colorless kind of guy.” He looks, with something bordering on commiseration, at the hordes of people crossing Diagonal at intervals set by the municipal streetlight system. “Which is why I'm glad that we're getting back into action. These have been a few very lovely months of rest and all that. Some of you have had fun and others have used the time to get into trouble. Which is fine.” He sighs and gazes into the large window at the indistinct reflection of the four men seated behind him. His audience for the night. The Repositories of his Wisdom. The panes of the glazed Upper Level of The Dark Side of the Moon are reflective on the outside and semi-reflective on the inside. So that someone situated where Bocanegra is now can't be seen from the outside but can see both what's going on outside and the reflection of what's going on behind his back. “Now it's back to work. The fun is over. Mr. Giraut will give you the basic details of our job. He even brought a slide projector. Mr. Giraut, by the way, is my new partner. In other words, your new boss.”

  Mr. Bocanegra turns around and looks at the four other inhabitants of the room. With the regal calm of someone who knows that the members of his audience have no other choice but to remain obediently seated and wait until he decides to continue speaking. The three men seated at the long table filled with small bottles of mineral water in the meeting room of the Upper Level of The Dark Side of the Moon look at him with blank faces. Aníbal Manta is seated with his giant arms crossed over his hot air balloo
n of a belly. With his crew cut and his incongruent hoop earring. Due to the size of his belly, his crossed arms almost touch his chin. Saudade is seated a bit farther on, apparently concentrating on getting something out from between his teeth with a finger bent into a hook. At the end of the table, Eric Yanel smokes with a desperate expression next to an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts.

  Mr. Bocanegra gives Lucas Giraut a sign to turn on his slide projector. Giraut pushes a button on some sort of little switch he has in his hand, which is connected to the slide projector. The machine makes a click similar to the sound of someone cocking a pistol and the three seated men look up, startled.

  On one of the white walls the image of a business property appears.

  “This is Hannah Linus's gallery,” says Giraut. “The most important gallerist in the country for Renaissance and Baroque art. I myself have lost some important clients to her.” He presses the little switch in his hand again, causing the same vaguely ballistic sound, and on the wall the image of a young blond woman walking down a street with a cell phone at her ear appears. “Miss Linus is a woman with an impressive career. She worked at Sotheby's until some people got upset by how quickly she was getting promoted and then she left to set up her own business. Taking with her one of the world's most important group of collectors.”

  The three men seated at the table look at the image of the woman with feigned disinterest. Although it is hard to tell because of the cloud of cigarette smoke that surrounds his head, it seems that Eric Yanel could have a long dark bruise on one side of his face. Right below the idiosyncratically French wave of his blond hair. Standing in front of the large window in a somewhat Shakespearean stance, Bocanegra observes how one of the windows of the unmarked police car lowers and a hand throws a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk.

  “In two weeks,” continues Giraut, “Miss Linus will display in her Barcelona gallery a batch of objects that come from Celtic monasteries in Ireland. Nothing of great value, except for four paintings on wood from St. Kieran's church in County Limerick. Experts call them the St. Kieran Panels, and their value stems from their history and their rare subject matter. They are depictions of the Black Sun. A subject associated with the book of the Apocalypse. They are usually attributed to Brother Samhael Finnegan, nicknamed the Crazy Monk of Limerick.”

  Several vaguely ballistic clicks punctuate the silence of the room. Images of paintings parade across the wall, and the assembled contemplate them with expressions ranging from skepticism to uncertainty. The various images are very dark and most appear to depict scenes associated with natural disasters. Some are so dark that it's hard to see what's going on in them. In general it seems to be fires and hordes of demons invading the Earth. The sky is invariably black. The human figures in the paintings seem to always be fleeing with their arms held high and their faces shaken with fear. After a minute, Giraut stops the slide show on an image that's slightly different from the rest. It's also a dark scene filled with terrified people, but at the same time it's somehow simpler and more impressive. Its simplicity somehow makes it more disheartening. And at the same time more appealing. A mountainous landscape collapsing into hundreds of cracks and bottomless abysses. As if the entire world were experiencing an earthquake of apocalyptic dimensions.

  “This is the first of the St. Kieran Panels,” says Giraut. “The only one that I was able to find a slide of. The title by which it is traditionally known is a Latin phrase that means 'And, behold, there was a great earthquake.' Which is a verse from the Book of the Apocalypse. The expressiveness of the forms is stunning,” he adds, pointing with his head to the human figures in the painting, most of which are falling through the cracks in the ground and going over rocky cliffs. Frozen by the magic of art in free fall toward the center of the Earth.

  There is a moment of silence as they all look at the painting. Saudade turns his head to look at a part of the image that's upside down. Aníbal Manta raises a hand.

  “What does it mean?” he says. Fondling his hoop earring absentmindedly. “I don't much get art. Though I do like comic books.”

  Lucas Giraut half turns so he can look at the slide of the painting. With a surprised expression. As if he had never thought of the question.

  “I don't know exactly,” he says finally. “But I guess it means that everything is going wrong.”

  “It's like that movie,” says Saudade. He starts snapping the fingers of one hand. “I don't remember the name.”

  Bocanegra takes a pensive pull on his cigar while watching as an employee of the billboard rental company equipped with a harness and climbing gear hangs over one of the gigantic billboards on Diagonal Avenue. Changing the advertising message on the billboard. The new message that the employee with the harness is pasting onto the billboard of Diagonal Avenue, sector by sector, says the following: “ONLY SEVENTEEN DAYS UNTIL THE WORLDWIDE RELEASE OF STEPHEN KING'S NEW NOVEL.”

  “Our plan is a masterpiece of planning, of course.” Bocanegra puts his hands on his hips and grabs the cigar with his teeth in a toothy grimace that momentarily intensifies the elements of cruelty in his already cruel facial expression. “As usual. As usually happens when I'm in charge. We have a three-week window of operations while the paintings are in the gallery. There will be a team of experts that will inspect them when they arrive, to reassure the buyers and all that. But no one is going to inspect them when the three weeks are over. And that's where we come in.” He makes a broad gesture toward the Meeting Room. Which, just like the rest of the Upper Level of The Dark Side of the Moon, is decorated with Persian rugs and fine wood and has special niches in the walls for statues. “Because the sucker who takes those paintings home and hangs them in his living room will be hanging the copies that we've had made and switched with the real paintings. Oh, they'll figure it out, sure. As soon as that sucker has them appraised or whatever. But by then we'll already have taken the real paintings out of the country, and we'll have sold them, and we'll have the money well stashed underneath our mattresses.”

  There is a sudden noise at the end of the long table covered with small bottles of water. Similar to the sound of someone punching the table, followed by the damp, snotty sounds of someone bursting into tears inconsolably. Bocanegra turns toward the sound. Several faces now study the origin of the sound. Eric Yanel's ashtray brimming with smashed cigarette butts is now on the carpet. Eric Yanel is sobbing with his face buried in his arms. Amid his own cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “Of course,” continues Bocanegra with a frown, “the plan wouldn't be a masterpiece of planning without someone able to make copies perfect enough to hang in the gallery for the necessary time without raising any suspicion. And I have to say that we have nothing to worry about in that arena. Because we have the best specialist in the field. Better than the best. We have the master. The guy who's taught everything to the current generation. The guy that's tricked half the experts at Sotheby's and Christie's. So good at what he does and so absolutely legendary that he's on Interpol's list of the hundred most wanted men. Well.” He shrugs his shoulders. His gesture introduces an element of uncertainty that's unable to completely superimpose itself over the backdrop of cruelty. “We don't exactly have him. He isn't the kind of person who advertises in the yellow pages. We know that he lives under various false identities and moves constantly among several European capitals. Where he has people who hide him. And I can't say that he's exactly agreed to work with us. But I can say”—his smile seems to make his mustache come to life—“that we know where he'll be in a few days. Thanks to certain contacts that have supplied me with an address and a couple of dates on the calendar. In exchange for certain past favors. His name is Raymond Panakian. Or at least that's what the people who sometimes need his services usually call him. And you”—he points with the incandescent end of the cigar toward the three men seated at the table. One of which continues crying with his head sunk between his arms and irregular columns of smoke rising around him—“you are going to
have to convince him to come work with us. That it's worth it to come and work with us because we are fabulous people who are worth working with.”

  Lucas Giraut still has the slide projector switch in his hand, but now it seems that the focus of his attention has moved elsewhere. Now he seems to be watching something located on the other side of the large windows. Far below the Meeting Room where the meeting is taking place. With a slight frown.

  “I'm good at convincing people,” says Saudade in a tone completely devoid of irony. While he examines the residue beneath one fingernail with his brow gathered. All his fingers seem to have the same uniform amount of dark residual material beneath the nails. “I always end up completely convincing 'em.”