The 2084 Precept (60 page)

* * * * *

But I am digressing again. It was slower
than usual entering Barcelona, it being a Friday morning. Even so,
it was still only just after eleven as I drove down the ramp into
the underground car park near the Paseo de Gracia—Passeig de Gracia
is what it's called since they translated it into Catalan. I put my
shaving kit and a tube of toothpaste and a change of clothes into
my shoulder bag and took one of the suits and ties from the car and
headed up into the street. It was already hot, pushing 30˚
centigrade and very humid. That is a problem I have with Barcelona,
the frequent humidity. I can take 40˚ in Madrid any day. It is
usually a dry heat due to the fact that that city sits on a plateau
at around 650 meters above sea level. But Barcelona is the kind of
place with days when you can take a shower, walk for twenty meters,
and then need to take another one.

Knowing this, I put my plan into action.
Señor Pujol's offices were close by, just around the corner in fact
in the Calle—or Carrer as the Catalan has it—de Mallorca, and there
were two or three good hotels just down the road. I walked into the
first one and told them I wished to book a room for a week but that
I had to attend an important meeting in about half an hour's time
and was there anywhere I could change until whatever time it was
that a room would become available. Yes sir, there were
los
servicios
just down the corridor and if I would be so kind as
to leave my passport, they would prepare the reservation in the
meantime. My room would be available by 2 p.m. at the latest. Ah, I
said, my passport was unfortunately in the car but as I would be
taking my travelling clothes back there and picking up my suitcase,
I would bring the passport along then. The logic to this has some
tolerably large holes in it of course, but the reception guy said
yes sir, no problem at all sir.

I was on my own in the toilets and I gave
myself a very quick shave. A guy came in and peed and went out
again, and I took the risk of giving myself a lightning body
wash—or a half-body wash I should say. And then I went into one of
the cubicles and changed, I polished my shoes with the toilet
paper, I cleaned my teeth using a finger, and I bounced out into
the lobby feeling half-human again, a condition to which the
hotel's air-conditioning had also contributed. I waved at the
reception guy and gave him a smile and walked back to the car and
dumped the clothes.

I did not go back to the hotel. I will
accept any derogatory remarks about my fraudulent use of their
services. At the same time I would wish to point out that it had
cost them nothing and had done no harm. I went into an
air-conditioned cafeteria and had two cups of good Illy coffee
while flipping through the establishment's
Vanguardia
. One
hundred and twenty two conflict deaths yesterday. Merely another
dot on the landscape of human activity, given the fact that there
were also another 350,000 births yesterday, give or take a few and
depending on the day.

The offices of Industria y Transportes Pujol
S.A. were in one of those century-old elegant buildings which
abound in Barcelona and I arrived there at five minutes to two. The
reception area was modern and the air-conditioning was modern, but
everything else was…traditionally musty, is how I suppose you would
describe it.

But the girl at reception was not musty. The
girl at reception was one of those immediately forgettable members
of the female population, one of the ones your neurons immediately
bar from entry into any of their various memory compartments. She
had dyed blonde hair, she had huge breasts squashed into a blouse a
size too small, maybe two sizes too small, her lipstick and other
miscellaneous paints, powders and chemical products had been
applied in what one could only describe as genuine whorehouse
fashion, and her perfume was of the inexpensive type whose scent
bore a close resemblance to some kind of household cleaning
product. In addition, and unless I was mistaken, her deodorant was
not of the 24-hour kind. Basically, a Spanish slag.

Which didn't say much for her boss. And that
fitted perfectly with my first impression of him when I was shown
into his office. He sat behind a huge desk in an office large
enough for three American presidents (if you were to accuse me of
exaggerating, you would not be wrong, but the office dimensions
were verily huge, so I am forgiven), all wood-paneled, expensive
antique furniture, photographs of factories and ships and ancestral
business personages on the walls, and various photographs of
himself smiling and shaking hands with men who, one supposed, were
important ones, maybe elected birdbrains. He stood up to greet me
and I noticed that he was very small. He, for his part, noticed
that I was very tall. And never shall the twain get on with each
other, or seldom, and the problem tends to emanate from the smaller
ones. They have, absurdly, an inferiority complex based on their
size. Tall men have no such complex and tend to take people at
their face value.

There used to be an extremely large number
of small people in Spain, ongoing through General Franco's
dictatorship right into the mid-seventies. We must remember that
for many decades Spain was an extremely poor country. Europe
stopped at the Pyrenees and Spain was full of shanty towns,
hundreds of thousands of people lived in
chabolas,
they
didn't have enough to eat and, yes, they also used to eat chicken
feet. And they grew up small. Things have changed since then but
there are still some genetic survivors today and Sr. Pujol was one
of them. He must have been between fifty and sixty years of age,
although if excessive hair growth in the ears and nostrils is a
reliable indicator, sixty would be nearer the mark. And he had a
pencil moustache. A thin pencil moustache, and when he smiled, his
face resembled very closely that of a limbless predator regarding a
nearby mouse.

None of which bothered me. In my job you
meet all kinds and I have only two things on my plate, no matter
with whom I am dealing. The first is that I want to earn a lot of
good money and the second is that I am going to go all out to show
them how good I am and achieve, or preferably exceed, whatever
expectations they might have. Nothing else interests me except—I
don't need to mention it—any edible females who may happen to cross
my path and who might be worth pursuing at the end of the
contract.

Sr. Pujol had a written contract for me to
sign. Everything was in order: €500 per day until I said I could
fix things and would stay on to do so, and €1,200 per day after
that. Both parties had contract termination rights, without notice,
without cause and without penalties or indemnities of any kind. I
signed.

The meeting was a long one, mainly because
Sr. Pujol spent significant swathes of time describing his business
group's successes—exaggerated or otherwise—and taking me back
through the long, boring history of it. He finally got around to
Naviera Pujol, his Palma-based, loss-making container shipping
business. The losses had existed for some years and he and his
executives had initially wasted their time blaming the country's
economic crises, Europe's economic crises, then the competition and
then the market-place, and now the losses had ballooned to around
€10 million annually. And they didn't know who or what to blame (it
was somebody's fault but, as with the birdbrains, it clearly wasn’t
theirs). The banks wouldn't lend any more money, the shipping
subsidiary was eating up too much of the group's cash, they had
looked around for potential buyers but nobody was interested except
at a silly price, and he and his board members were at a loss. The
only alternative to closing the company, selling off the ships
cheaply, and writing off a fortune, was, he said, me. I had a very
powerful reputation, he said, I was strongly recommended by various
sources.

I told him not to get his hopes up. I told
him I hadn't the faintest idea as to whether I could fix his
company's problem or not. I might know in a week or two but the
answer might be no, I can't.

This deflated him alright and his face,
despite the absence of a nearby mouse, took on a more distinct
reptilian profile. A good thing too, maybe there
was
no
solution. And apart from anything else, I hadn't the faintest
knowledge of anything to do with the shipping industry. Having made
things clear, I then slipped in the positive factor, as I always
do, by telling him that if I decided I could fix it, I would stay
on and do just that. When I say I can see how to turn a company
around, I said, I always do. I told him that I was an action man,
that I did not write reports, that I was too busy
doing
things to be able to write reports, and that if he wanted to
receive any reports they would have to be verbal ones.

This re-inflated him somewhat and his face
took on a more jovial aspect. His reptilian grin was certainly a
repulsive sight, but at least it was a grin, it was the best he
could do.

He gave me a copy of last year's balance
sheet and profit & loss account, together with some supporting
documentation. And he babbled away about this and he waffled away
about that, managing only to demonstrate that he didn't have much
idea of what he was talking about. You find this sometimes, even at
this level of management.

I asked him for a copy of this year's
accounts and he said there weren't any, they only did them
annually. And you find that sometimes too, companies without
monthly financial statements, ships without a rudder, even in this
modern day and age. And so, even if you don’t know their business
and are therefore like a one-eyed man, a one-eyed man, as every
consultant knows, is still king among the blind.

The meeting had taken several hours. I was
parched—he had offered me nothing to drink, the guy was a pretty
useless guy overall—and I badly needed a cigarette. And so I was
more than pleased when he finally stood up, wished me a successful
assignment, told me the obvious, that time was of the essence, and
informed me that the general manager of the shipping company was
expecting my visit at 9 a.m. on the Monday. I should please hand in
my expense reports to the shipping company in Palma and the
invoices for my fees to him in Barcelona, and I should feel free to
call him personally at any time and on any issue whatsoever. Ah, he
said, and I almost forgot, here is a company mobile phone. Yours is
a German one and we don't need all those inflated international
charges every time you make a local call, do we?

I hit the street, lit a cigarette, stored
the mobile's cable in my pocket and checked out the phone's
function. Another small piece of flotsam, or jetsam if you prefer,
washed up gently onto my life's sandy beach. I could now call
Monika or anybody else without Delsey's troops being able to trace
me, from my end at least. I would also give the number to Roger and
Geoff at United Fasteners, they might want to contact me, tell them
to keep the number confidential.

It was early evening and still hot and
humid. I returned to the car and re-substituted my business gear
for my travelling gear, turned the air-conditioning on full blast
and drove the short distance down to the port and then turned south
and headed towards the industrial docks area. I checked the area
around the entrance to the dock enclosure used by Naviera Pujol for
its Palma-Barcelona-Palma traffic, and then turned back and headed
for one of the few long-term car parks.

Barcelona is an important city, the tenth
largest in Europe. It is also home to Europe's largest football
stadium and Europe's largest aquarium, and its port is the ninth
largest in Europe. This has recently been undergoing enlargement by
diverting the Llobregat river estuary and pushing back the
Llobregat Delta nature reserve. So what's new? Life on this planet
is tough, and nature—what is left of it—only has more suffering to
look forward to as the human being continues to savage remaining
habitats. But Barcelona is a city which falls short on parking.
Parking is rare and expensive and long-term parking facilities are
minimal. There are no such facilities in the port terminal area and
it is good if you happen to know about the nearby Litoral Port car
park in La Barceloneta, as I do, particularly if you happen to have
arrived by car to go on a long cruise ship holiday. You can park
here for as long as you want and the rates are, for Barcelona,
acceptable.

So that is where Monika's car ended up. I
squashed my suits and jacket into the suitcase and I had a decent
meal in a tapas bar nearby and then I took a taxi along to the
ferry terminals which are not far from the Columbus monument at the
bottom of La Rambla. The Palma ferry departs at eleven p.m. every
night of the week except for Saturdays—Saturdays only being
possible at the height of the holiday season.

I bought my ticket and I hung around in the
terminal, an area which could be mistaken for a cage of enraged
local gorillas conducting a civil war by loudspeaker, until we were
allowed to board.

The crossing to Palma is supposed to take
seven hours, but time in Mediterranean countries being subject to
an alternative measurement system, you need to translate this into
eight hours, and so indeed it was. Not that it troubled me.
Exhaustion hit me as soon as I reached my cabin and I collapsed
into the narrow bed, feet hanging way over the end as usual, and I
slept the whole way.

I had not bothered to reserve a room in my
hotel in Illetas. It is a very expensive hotel and it is for adults
only and it is often not full at this time of the year. Except that
on this occasion it was. And the two hotels I have a preference for
in the center of Palma were full as well. The whole island was full
it seemed. But there were no World Championships, there were no
European Championships, there were no Olympics. Was it the Russian
multi-millionaires and their families with their non-existent
education and pig-sty manners? Was it some of the billions of
Chinese who were finally being allowed to move more freely around
their planet? Or had there been a rise in the number of
professional social security manipulators for whose touristic
pleasures we taxpayers—thanks as always to our beloved elected
birdbrains—are so readily prepared to pay?