Wonderful World: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

Pavel goes around the three-story house with his backpack on his shoulder until he finds what he is looking for. French windows that open onto some sort of interior sunroom on the lower floor with a glass door beside them. Pavel cuts the glass around the lock and pushes the door, which opens docilely. A pleasant wave of dry heat from the central heating system welcomes him into the house.

Pavel is exaggeratedly tall in that way in which certain people are so exaggeratedly tall and thin that they almost never manage to stand up completely straight. An essentially gawky way of being exaggeratedly tall. When indoors, Pavel is one of those people that usually have no problem touching the ceiling with an outstretched arm. Now Pavel takes a black ski mask out of his backpack with his exaggeratedly long arms and puts it on his head. He moves his neck from one side to the other to adjust the ski mask so that his mouth and eyes coincide with the openings in the mask. Then he takes an automatic pistol out of his backpack. He puts a silencer on it and checks the chamber before cocking it. He leaves his backpack on the floor and heads up the stairs. With the ski mask on and the gun held high.

Pavel now moves stealthily under the pale, vaguely orangish light that enters through the windows of the three-story house, which smells clean and like something else that it takes Pavel a moment to identify. Marijuana. The herbal and slightly acrid smell of marijuana. Pavel stops suddenly on the second-floor landing. With his heart beating in that controlled, accelerated way that hearts beat in the middle of a job in Pavel's line of work. There is a line of white light beneath a door located on one side of the landing. Only about six feet away from the place where Pavel remains stock-still. Pavel's heartbeat speeds up a bit, while remaining controlled. It doesn't seem possible that anyone has heard him from the other side of the door. Pavel crosses the landing stealthily and puts a hand on the doorknob and raises the pistol with his other hand and opens the door abruptly.

The room on the other side of the door turns out to be a very large bathroom with sky blue wall-to-wall carpeting and tiles. Pavel isn't sure if he's ever seen a sky blue carpet before. On one of the bathroom walls there is a framed poster that reads “PINK FLOYD: THE FINAL CUT.” Pavel looks to one side. Seated on the toilet, looking at him with a stunned face, is a young woman. Of course, Bocanegra, that idiot, hadn't told him there was going to be a woman in the house. He hadn't even mentioned the possibility of there being a woman in the house. The young woman has an elastic band tied around the upper part of her elbow and a hypodermic needle stuck in the inner part of her elbow and is sitting next to a sink with a teaspoon and a lighter and a square of aluminum foil with traces of heroin on it. The only clothes she has on are a promotional T-shirt for the Costa Dorada Biosphere Park theme park and lace panties around her ankles. The young woman lifts up her arms slowly. With a shocked expression. The needle falls to the floor. Pavel immediately identifies the young woman as being of the painfully attractive type. One of those young women with painful sex appeal. Pavel puts his finger in front of the part of the ski mask where his lips are and makes the sign for “silence” in international sign language. Then he grabs her brusquely by an arm and forces her to get up off the toilet. The young woman's pubis is completely shaved except for a tiny unshaved area in the shape of a heart.

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.

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 balloon 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.