The 2084 Precept

by Anthony David Thompson

  ***

  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 t
oo 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.

  DAY 30

  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?

  Who knows, but I was not going to spend a frustrating hour or so calling other hotels with which I was not acquainted. The method used for the allocation of stars to hotels in this country is strongly dependent upon the different phases of the moon in which the allocations are made. I approached a taxi and asked the driver if he knew of a decent hotel with a vacant room. He made one call and told me there were some vacancies at an absolutely superb hotel he knew of, and so I said 'bien hecho, hombre', heaved my suitcase into his vehicle and told him to take me there without delay. Much appreciated my good man.

  However, we headed east and passed Portixol and continued onwards in the direction of the airport. Which caused me to panic. I asked him where we were going to. We were going to Playa de Palma, he said.

  Oh no, oh no. Ganesha, save me from this most hideous of all fates, protect me please from the evils of the stinking swamp, deliver me unto the land of milk and honey, the goats and the bees won't bother me. Please.

  Ganesha, if you are interested and I appreciate you may not be, is arguably the most popular of the thirty-three Hindu gods. He is a male and he has the form of an elephant with a human stomach and he rides on a mouse. No, I am not trying to mislead you, that is the way it is, it is easy to check. Anyway, this is the god responsible for destroying all evils and, unbelievably incompetent though he has patently proven himself to be, who knows if he might not be willing to assist me on this occasion.

  "I am not," I told the driver, "under any circumstances going to stay in Arenal."

  Arenal, as you may know, is Ballermann country and the only people who go anywhere near there tend, among other things, to sport vast beer bellies or have razorblades hanging from their ears and not infrequently both. I would rather sleep elsewhere. For example, in a bus station in Albania, of which there are very few, as with most things in that repulsive niche of human destitution.

  Ah, said the driver cunningly, but this hotel is not exactly in Arenal, it is right at the beginning of the Playa de Palma, a hundred meters before you reach Arenal. A quiet area, a superb four-star hotel.

  Now the term 'quiet', for a Spaniard, possesses a significance violently divergent from the one you and I possess. It is as comparable in its divergence as would be an agreement to meet him somewhere at a pre-determined time. And four stars in Spain is a category not only dependent upon the moon, but also on the local birdbrain minion responsible for the decision, and in reality it denotes anything from one star upwards, while at the same time guaranteeing you three star guests and two star employees.

  This hotel was not quiet. Nor was the street behind it, nor the street in front of it. And the hotel swimming pool—three or four strokes would take you from one end to the other—received its non-stop entertainment from th
e screeching and screaming hordes of pre-pubescent juveniles enjoying themselves on the beach across the road. There were possibly pubescent ones there as well, but with brains that had not yet reached the puberty stage and maybe never would. Ganesha had once again demonstrated his pathetic and unequalled inadequacy as a god. Or maybe he simply doesn't give a shit. Could be.

  No matter, we swim with the tides and a squall is a squall and not a storm. The hotel only charged me an extra half-price for my early arrival and the room was comfortable and the air-conditioning was unusual in that it functioned in accordance with my adjustments.

  The first thing I did, I called the hotel in Illetas and booked a room for tomorrow for as long as I wished to stay. I told them I would pay for two weeks in advance; not necessary sir, they said, our custom is to charge at the end of each month. Falling asleep again was the second thing I did.

  I did nothing much else except lounge around the pool, if a pint-sized bucket permits the term, and, swimming not being feasible, cool off occasionally in the water. In the evening I went on the hunt for a restaurant. I walked past a fenced-in and firmly closed church in a square facing the beach—you can't go far in Spain without coming across a church, they hold the world record for churches per head of population—and then I was in Germany. I walked past a number of eating establishments, 'Oberbayern', 'Deutsches Eck', 'Wurstkönig', 'Grill Meister', 'Bavaria', 'Münchner Kindl' and so forth, you get the idea, and stepped onto the terrace of one which at least had a friendly name. 'Aber Hallo' it was called. I ignored the 'Sauerbraten', the 'Rotkohl', the 'Knödel' and other similar Teutonic offerings and ordered a chicken salad and a whole bottle of dry Riesling and both were very good.

  I walked back in the balmy night air to the hotel, passing, among other things, the 'Red Lips' Erotic Show Center, one of those places young males need to experience at least once in life in order to learn never to visit them again. Nowadays you pay between €30 and €100 per drink for whatever drinks are ordered, and this provides you with the dubious benefit of not being able to talk to any of the eastern European females who inhabit these holes in the wall, mainly because they are unable to converse in any of the world's major languages. Of course, if you speak Bulgarian or Rumanian or Russian, you don't have that problem, but conversation is not exactly the name of the game anyway. So you just get a hand-job if you are that way inclined and, if you're drunk enough, you lose your wallet and you don't find out about it until the next morning; or—if you're really lucky—they've taken all of your cash and maybe your credit cards and your debit cards, but you've still got your wallet.

  Had I been in the design center at the time they were working on Adam and Eve, I would have made it the other way round. We males would be the inhabitants of these places and young females would be the ones wandering in and paying us money to assist them in temporarily alleviating their lust. But I was unfortunately not around at the time.

  DAY 31

  Sunday morning. I woke up refreshed. I went out onto the balcony. The Spanish sun was shining and the Spanish sky was blue. There was also quite a strong wind as is often the case on Mallorca, one of the benefits of being an island. There are worse places to live for the price of having to turn your hearing aid down.

  I didn't stay on the balcony for long. The wing in which my room was located diagonally faced another of the hotel's wings and around half of the balconies over there had people sitting on them and a hefty percentage of those people were playing with their mobile phones. A fair number of them were actually talking into their phones or, to be more correct, shouting into them, the need for which has recently been fully analyzed and explained by, among others, child psychologists. And the air was consequently full of those grating consonants and jarring vowels which are the hallmark of this planet's harshest and most strident of languages, German, and that is the way it would presumably remain until they all cleared off to the beach or onto their bus for their visit to the cathedral or for their tour around the mountains.

  But it was a woman who finally drove me back inside. She was sitting opposite me on her balcony, fortyish or thereabouts and if not grossly fat, then at least disgustingly so. And as soon as she noticed me, she got up, went into her room and came back out wearing only a tanga, udders and belly hanging freely in accordance with the theories expounded by Galileo, Newton and others. She specifically avoided looking in my direction but pretended to be adjusting her sole piece of clothing in order to more properly cover that part of her which it was supposed to be covering and which, thank God, it was. My views on the requirement in certain parts of the Islamic world for the wearing of burkas took on a more positive hue. I bolted back into my room, metaphorically vomiting on the way, and reflecting on the fact that Jeremy Parker's delusions were nothing compared to those of human females such as these.

  But no big deal, it was a holiday hotel of a certain level, the adjective requiring no further elaboration, and I would be out of here in a few hours' time. I put on some shorts and a T-shirt. I avoided the hotel breakfast room, the coffee in these places is usually ghastly. I bought yesterday's IHT down the road and read it while drinking some decent coffee in a place facing the sea and revoltingly called 'Chez Hartmut'. There had been 243 conflict deaths planet-wide on Friday, including six car bombs and five suicide bombings. Not bad.

  Next to Hartmut's was a place renting bicycles and I picked one up for half a day and cycled along the beach path to Palma, past the docks and the naval station, past Porto Pí, and up the hill and out of the other side of the city. I sat on a rock and smoked a cigarette. I enjoyed watching the coastline and the ocean for a while, and I enjoyed a second cigarette.. And then I cycled back, stopping on the way for two cold beers in Cala Estancia. German beers of course, not your gaseous Spanish concoctions whose wafer-thin and short-lived foam is only possible thanks to the use of rice in the manufacturing process; or so I am told. About twenty-five kilometers in total, more than enough in this heat.

  I went out to the hotel bucket and splashed around a bit and relaxed in the sun. It was great, just great, to be away from the world of lunatics, aliens, policemen, ministers and birdbrains in general for a while, and to contemplate the piles of money and the return to normality which would be mine after a few more interviews with Jeremy.

  I checked out of the hotel at 2 p.m. and took a taxi to Illetas, a small town a few kilometers to the west of Palma. This is my kind of hotel. To be sure, it costs what it costs, but you get adults only, you get a luxurious room with a wide balcony overlooking the ocean, you get two pools, large pools, or—if you prefer—you walk down into the sea from a ladder fixed to the rocks, and you get service, you get well-trained waiters and you get personnel all over the place. And it's only twenty minutes or so from the center of Palma.

  And so for the rest of the afternoon it was just the sun and the water for me. And in the evening I called Monika. She sounded subdued. Her sister was to be operated on tomorrow morning but she didn't want to talk about it. She was in love with my car, and Mr. Brown had settled in and was enjoying life as he always did. She wished she could also be in Palma but she would certainly make up for it later on with that wonderful, exorbitant Corsica gift of mine. I asked her if she had the Mallorca hotel details I had given her and she said of course she did, she was not as young as she used to be but she hadn't got Alzheimer's yet. I told her I would be back with her car in three weeks' time, four at the latest and she said that would be great, she could thank me properly for her birthday, whatever she meant by that. In the meantime, she said, she had her friend Mr. Brown, he reminded her of me.

  Well, I thought to myself, she is definitely becoming too nest-like, I will have to take gentle steps to make it clear again that I am not, at this point in my life, interested in nests in any shape or form, with or without eggs.

  I had dinner in the hotel, a ruinously expensive filet mignon which was superb and a ruinously expensive Rioja which was not very good at all. I then spent some time on t
he Naviera's financial statements and made notes of the specific items I needed to find out more about tomorrow, and I went to bed and fell asleep over my book which, in case you're interested, was Platform, a translated version of an intellectually interesting novel written by a Frenchman who lives in Ireland. Recommended, despite his penchant for over-explicit sexual descriptions which tend to crop up here and there, and which you can simply ignore. Or, if you are like me, not.

  DAY 32

  I got up at seven o'clock. The sun was rising nicely, the ocean was blue and it was green and it was as calm as a pond, the balcony lounge chair was comfortable, and I had breakfast brought up and ate it while absorbing the scene, and the first cigarette of the day tasted as good as the coastline looked. Oh yes, there were worse locations in which to perform a consultancy assignment. Slough for example.

  I wore a suit and a tie and a short-sleeved white shirt for my first day. I pulled the switch and converted my brain into full Spanish language mode, a simple enough matter of neuron reprogramming similar to that of switching your driving to the left side of the road when arriving in the U.K. Or, come to that, in Japan or any of the other countries which do the same.

  I took a taxi to the docks entrance and was met there, a real slice of courtesy, by the general manager himself, Alfonso Orfila. I like that kind of thing as much as the next guy, it makes you feel important, even if you're not, and what is the harm in that? He fixed the security arrangements with the port policeman and I would be able to come and go as I wished. He took me to the office building, the first floor of which was occupied by the Naviera. He showed me the office I would be using, and then he introduced me to the staff and asked them to please cooperate with me for the duration of my 'review' assignment. There were only nine of them, six men and three women, two of whom were middle-aged and one of whom was in her early twenties, black hair, pretty face and good legs. She had an attractive name, María del Carmen.

  Carmen is one of those few operas, very few in fact, that I enjoy. The name derives from Our lady of Mount Carmel whose apparition was reported in—you only get one guess—the town of Fatima in Portugal during The Miracle of the Sun in the year 1917. During the miracle of the sun, our star behaved irrationally and, among other things, sped around on itself in a mad whirl and then took it upon itself to adopt a zigzag course in the direction of our planet, which scared the living daylights out of those who were watching. This event was interpreted as being a message from God for us to finally get our act together and stop sinning…or else. It took the Roman Catholic Church another thirteen years to do it, but they eventually confirmed this as an 'approved miracle' in the year 1930. And later on, in mid-century, the ‘Miracle of the Sun' was witnessed on three separate occasions in three different years by the pope himself in his Vatican gardens in Rome, Italy. These miracles were apparently not noticed by anyone else in any other part of the planet, Christian or otherwise—which, if you think about it, is a bit strange if your star was zigzagging about and heading straight for you—but who are we to judge? Maybe it will happen again and we will all be able to grab a look while trying to gain another millisecond of existence by heading for the nearest available underground shelter.

  None of which is here or there and my neurons merely recorded her name and filed it away in the immediate recall section.

  Alfonso and I sat down to coffee in his office. His office was large and overlooked the quays. It was decorated with a variety of maritime mementos, an old ship's bell was on a table next to his desk. Alfonso himself was what you would call plump rather than fat, he was in his sixties already, and he seemed to be one of those people who are always full of the joys of life, no matter what. In other words, he was a person who, although responsible for losing the considerable sum of €10 million of other people's money annually, was full of cheerful bonhomie. And consequently a pleasant enough person to be with.

  I asked him what, in his opinion, the major problems and issues were and what possible solutions and corrective action did he recommend. This question seemed to surprise him. He gave it some initial thought and then he launched into a long, jovial diatribe about the shipping industry, the rising fuel costs, the dockworkers' wage demands, the increase in competition and the price wars which had escalated to impossible levels in recent years.

  He was obviously clueless. There were no comments about any possible inefficiencies or problems within his own company, not a single word about potential improvements or solutions and nothing else of any use. But it didn't seem to worry him. As far as he was concerned, this was simply the way things were.

  I wanted to tell him that if you can keep your head, Alfonso, while all around you are losing theirs, it is just possible that you haven't fully grasped the nature of the situation. But I didn't. There was no point in my wasting my time attempting to modify the cerebral operations of a guy like this.

  I went to my office and asked María del Carmen to come in. She was the bookkeeper. I gave her the list of what I wanted to be informed on, and asked her about a minor item about which I was curious. Why did the year-end balance sheet indicate that we had €65,000 cash on site, and was that still the case, and irrespective of anything else, what was it for? Oh, she said, we need to make miscellaneous cash payments every month to transporters, the ships' captains always need petty cash for minor crew and ship expenses, and so on, and actually the balance was now over €70,000.

  This didn't wash with me. Unless there was something she hadn't explained, the amount was too big. I asked to see the cash and the cash book. Oh, no problem, she said with a smile, we'll update it for you and give it to you first thing tomorrow morning.

  That didn't wash with me either. If any cash was missing, not that I necessarily expected that, it could easily be replaced overnight and removed again after I had seen it. No, I said…now please. This caused her smile to transmute into a contentious frown of consternation but off she went and came back with a large metal box which was, I thought to myself, presumably and hopefully kept in a decent safe. I opened it with the key. I saw a few bills in there, maybe two thousand euros in cash, and I also saw many small pieces of paper in there which turned out to be I.O.U.s signed by Alfonso, €69,000 in total. Thank you María, I said, and handed the box back to her.

  I have always been good at sniffing out fraud, even if it's only petty cash fraud. The I.O.U.s should have been recorded as payments of course, and accounted for as an employee loan, which the supervisory board and the shareholders—in this case, Sr. Pujol and his finance people—would have been able to see in the balance sheet. Or if not explicitly so, at least in the external auditors' annual comments. But I was in a good mood, Alfonso was a pleasant guy, the amount involved was not exorbitant, and—most importantly—I was going to need Alfonso's help in dealing with the intricacies of an industry about which I knew absolutely nothing. So I would be dealing with this in a gentle and civilized manner.

  I went back to his office.

  "Alfonso," I said, "the I.O.U.s"

  "Yes," he said, smiling his permanent smile.

  "What are they for?"

  "Oh," he replied, "repairs and maintenance to a small motor launch I keep down in the yacht area. I've been a bit short on cash this past year, my daughter's wedding and so on, you know."

  "Uh, huh," I said. This really was a guy for whom the sun shone at all times. And there appeared to be little doubt that he thought that it shone out of his ass as well. "Well," I continued, "these amounts will need to be authorized by Sr. Pujol or his delegate of course, or else they will need to be repaid."

  "But of course," he said, "of course they will be repaid."

  "When?" I asked.

  "Well, over the next twelve months, definitely," he said.

  The guy obviously didn't have the money. How can you own a ‘small’ launch, probably it was an ocean-going one, and not have this kind of money? "Then it will all have to be authorized in the meantime," I said, "and recorded as a loan."
<
br />   This—no apologies for the phrase—took the wind out of his sails.

  "They won't do that," he said, "I requested a loan over two years ago and they rejected it. Employee loans are against group policy."

  "Well, then you will have to do a quick sale of the launch or whatever else you need to do to raise the money," I suggested.

  "Wouldn't work," he said, "a quick sale of the launch would mean my having to virtually give it away, and in any case I still have some debt to pay off on its purchase."

  How do these people do it? The guy earned a good salary, a very good salary, how could he not have any money? We sat there looking at each other for a while. His sails, as I have mentioned, had lost some of their wind, but he wasn't dejected or nervous in any way, the sun was still shining for him and would do no doubt continue to shine up until the moment he climbed into his coffin. You get people like that. They are always happy. The requisite for this is a total lack of a conscience. If you have a conscience, you just can't do it, you can't sleep at night with things like this going on. You worry, you have nightmares.

  "I will have to inform Sr. Pujol," I told him finally.

  "Yes, I can understand that," he said. He clearly knew that this was a serious matter but it did not affect his genial disposition, nor did he become at all discourteous. Amazing, I thought, he probably sang 'Don't worry, be happy' to himself in the shower every morning. An overdose of self-confidence, a guy who walks down the street holding his own hand.

  During the afternoon, María came into my office with some of the information I had requested. There were no problems with the customer receivables—her aging analysis showed no particularly long overdue balances—but an item of €3.4 million in the 'Other Receivables' account turned out to be an insurance claim pending from over three years ago. It seemed that one of the ships had been on an overnight run from Barcelona to Palma and the captain, who was dismissed soon afterwards, had missed the port and run straight into some cliffs on the island of Cabrera, only a few nautical miles away. He had apparently been drunk, although none of the crew members were prepared to ratify that in any formal manner.

  Cabrera is only 16 km2 and its name derives from the cabras montesas which used to live there until the human race arrived and carted them all away. The goats were eating everything that was green and making the island too unattractive for tourist excursion businesses to be successful. But the hideous human race had also been there before, and the island's history is home to a series of major horror stories—including the products of human wars such as the fate of the 10,000 French prisoners who were once incarcerated there. But there you go, what's new?

  I asked Alfonso about the situation, but he merely said that it was a 'complicated matter'. Well, no point in wasting time discussing it further with him. I asked María to fix an appointment for me with the responsible insurance executive in Barcelona on Monday of next week, in the morning if possible.

  The company had four ships, two of which—the Gerona Sol and the Mahon Star—sailed six nights a week to provide a fixed weekday Barcelona-Palma-Barcelona service. There was no longer any work for the two other ships which had been sitting idle for the past nine months, moored to the quay here in Palma. One of them required a major engine overhaul for which no money was available and the other one needed to comply with the law on its dry-dock inspection requirement, a costly affair lasting four days, and for which no money was available either. María's data also showed me that all four ships were relatively small, with capacities of between 50 and 75 standard containers on two levels, lower deck and top deck. Her cargo summary showed me that the loading for each of the two ships in use was on average only about 50% of capacity, and that an average of 30 transits were being lost each year, mainly due to bad weather.

  Food for thought indeed. Revenues could obviously be more than doubled if the ships were to travel full instead of only half-capacity and if we could get rid of all, or at least most, of the lost transits. That would solve the company's problems in one fell swoop. A pleasant theoretical daydream, worthy of some perusal, but don't ask me what needed undertaking or how to do it. I hadn't the faintest idea. Also, the daydream might quite simply turn out to be an unfeasible one.

  I decided that María was not my type, black hair and nice legs notwithstanding. She was too reticent, she was only supplying me with what I asked for, she offered no comments or suggestions and she was probably displeased about that check of mine on the petty cash. She had perhaps classified me as the enemy, you get that sometimes. And maybe she was into an affair with Alfonso, who knows? You get that as well sometimes, the adulation for the man with the authority and the power. Or maybe she wasn't. It didn't matter anyway. I thanked her for the information and decided to have a short meeting with Pedro, a young stringy-haired fellow in charge of operations, before leaving for the day.

  Pedro administered just about everything, the loading and unloading of the containers, the land transport, the ships' operations and the relationships with both the dockworkers and the customers. He was a positive young guy and he bombarded me with comprehensive information to all the questions I asked and to some I didn't. He told me that the dockworkers' union in Barcelona insisted on seventeen workers; if we didn't pay for this number each day, our ships would neither be loaded nor unloaded. He told me that in Palma they insisted on twelve workers. And he told me that only five were necessary including the crane operator. Therefore we had huge unnecessary costs, he said, which unfortunately could not be avoided. I asked him if our customers really needed a guaranteed daily shipping service, and he said that he was 99% sure they did, and that we would lose customers if we were to stop providing it.

  There we go again, that phrase I keep hearing wherever I go and the subject of my small gift to Geoff at United Fasteners. I told Pedro that in my experience the use of 99% as an adjunct to the word 'sure', a noun which speaks for itself in any dictionary and which requires no amplification of any kind, generally indicated that the speaker was in fact not sure. He smiled at this, and agreed one might interpret it that way. And at my prompting, he also agreed to circularize all of our customers with a questionnaire asking them to confirm this need, and at the same time asking them to suggest to us any improvements they would like to see in the way we handled their business.

  An interesting first day's work, I thought to myself, as the taxi took me back to the hotel. As soon as I got to my room, I called Pujol and told him the tale of the self-authorized employee loans and the fact that they could not, at the present point in time, be repaid. There was a long silence from his end and then he said he would be flying over tomorrow morning. He had decided it was a serious matter, as of course it was. The flight was less than an hour each way but he would be losing a minimum of five hours out of his day for the trip, including the time spent at the office. Not a happy man, nor did he sound it.

  I put on my swimming shorts and went down to the rocks and into the sea. Life was good, Céline was slowly moving further and further into the nebulous depths of the painful memory compartment; and as I floated up and down on the gentle Mediterranean waves, I lazily began to consider which of the blinking red lights I might attempt to activate, a holiday in one of Mallorca's élite hotels was bait of the finest quality. But not just yet of course. I had a lot of work to do first, I had to find out whether there were any solutions to the problems of Naviera Pujol, and I had to do it—as always—fast. Therefore, a few more days of celibacy were called for, keep the priorities right.

  I had dinner on the hotel terrace, a pleasant piece of fish and a pleasant half-bottle of dry white. There were some great-looking women at some of the tables but no single ones as far as I could see, only the ones who live their luxury lives on the monetary backs of their male counterparts. I don't blame them, the men supply the money and they supply…well, they supply something else. A fair barter, nobody forced into anything. Just as well in any case, my energies needed to remain focused on the shipping world
for the time being.

  I was at the coffee, cognac and cigarette stage when Jeremy's phone rang.

  "Peter," he said, "how are you, how is life treating you?"

  "Hello there yourself, Jeremy," I replied. "Hard work, you know how it is."

  "Yes, I have no doubt. You presumably heard the news about the asteroid?"

  "No."

  "Well, needless to say, it hit as planned. A sizeable one, it made another big dent in Mars' surface."

  "I don't know where you get the knowledge about these events, Jeremy. I have to say that you have my full admiration. You must be making yourself pretty famous in our scientific circles, would be my guess."

  "Yes…well…same as before, Peter. The event was not pre-ordained. We made it happen and my colleagues really enjoyed themselves this time."

  "They did?" I asked, although I wasn't particularly interested in the delusion's details.

  "Yes, they did. Apart from calculating the usual things, such as how many meters diameter, the space-time algorithms to get the timing right, the trajectory, the computations to preclude total pre-impact disintegration, and all the rest of it, they had to take care not to damage any of your property. And this involved them in some very interesting mathematical intricacies."

  "Our property?"

  "Yes. Apart from the many defunct mechanisms you have lying around up there—you failed to mention in our meeting that you are already polluting other planets with your junk—you currently have five functioning Mars spacecraft, three in orbit and two on the surface."

  "We do?"

  "Yes, and of course we needed to avoid them if it were possible to do so. And it was possible. My guys really enjoyed it. No unnecessary damage caused."

  I didn't know what to say and so I didn't say anything. But I had to marvel at his inexhaustible capacity for detailed back-up, this obsession with his entangled and complex fantasy world. I wouldn't bother to check up on our spacecraft. I am sure he was talking fact, he would have checked it all out himself.

  "Anyway, you will no doubt read about it tomorrow," he said. "But the main point is, a summit conference is confirmed for Wednesday in Geneva. I have agreed to attend and I will be providing them with some assistance regarding certain investigations in the biological field which they would do well to undertake. And you will be pleased to learn that your presence is not required, Peter, I can handle it on my own."

  "Biological investigations?"

  "Yes. Many of your scientists have completed a significant amount of research during the past few decades into the causes of human aggressiveness, and an extensive number of lengthy theses have been produced, including ones with titles such as 'Eliminating the Causes of War'. But most of these specialists have now virtually given up. There has been nothing even approaching a conclusion, I'm afraid, which is not surprising given the rudimentary levels of biology scholarship on your planet, and your unfortunate inability to agree with each other on anything in any case. I intend to give it a big push forward, but of course they will have to pursue it themselves. That is to say, they will have to agree to pursue it; and it will need funding, and I would really like to see them do that."

  "Can you explain to me something about this connection between human aggressiveness and biology, Jeremy?"

  "I can, Peter, but I don't have the time right now. Perhaps on our next call, let's say after the meeting on Wednesday."

  "O.K., Jeremy, then thank you for calling. And good luck on Wednesday."

  "Well, we'll see what happens on Wednesday. They still don't believe me. The prime minister told me that they want to meet 'my bosses', they want to see a bunch of aliens, more proof is what they're after. But they won't get that. They can't even envisage why 'proof' in a physical form is not possible anyway. And in any case, Peter, as I told your prime minister, they should totally forget about whether there are any aliens or not. Your species will find out soon enough what will happen to it if it doesn't take steps to change itself. You will not, believe me, be allowed to continue being as you are and doing what you are doing until such time as you eventually discover how to make your way out into the universe."

  "Yes, so you indicated previously."

  "And I told them that this meeting in Geneva would be my first and also my last attendance. After that, they—or I should say you, since you are one of them—will be on your own."

  "What about our interviews?" I asked.

  "I should learn about the subjects for those within the next few days," he replied. "In the meantime, the good news for you is that unless the Geneva meeting is abruptly cancelled, I shall be transferring the remaining extra €300,000 we agreed upon to your account on Thursday morning. Without your cooperation up front, this meeting would not be taking place and, as you say, a deal is a deal."

  I went back upstairs, sank into my balcony chair and smoked a cigarette. I was an extremely happy and relaxed member of my species. All of that money for doing next to nothing! And a whole lot more after a few more interviews!

  And the interviews were definitively going to be the end of my involvement. Whatever happened to Jeremy, whatever happened to his fantasy world and whatever the politicians decided to do or decided not to do, all of that would be of no interest to me whatsoever. My near-term future would consist entirely of the Naviera in Palma, Clark's in Slough, Monika and Mr. Brown in Okriftel, and whichever available blinking red light turned out to be the most exciting. Or erotic. Or even romantic, why not?

  DAY 33

  I got up at six o'clock and was down in the port by seven thirty. The captain of the Mahon Star was sitting in the bar opposite the entrance to the docks, as Pedro had told me he would be. He was drinking a carejillo and reading the newspaper, as Pedro had also told me he would be.

  I introduced myself. Yes, he said, Pedro had told him I would be wanting a chat with him. His name was Agustín and he was from Galicia. He was of medium height, I guess around fifty years of age, not much hair left but very strongly built, he had arms as thick as my thighs and could probably murder people such as myself any time he felt like doing it and with very little effort. But he was not of the kind who would feel like doing it. He gave me the impression of being a placid and companionable sort of fellow, one of those gentle and tranquil giants.

  The daytime was a quiet time for him while the ship was being unloaded and then re-loaded with the return freight. He also slept in his cabin for a couple of hours during the afternoon, he said, to add to the few hours' sleep he got during the night with one of his crew on the watch. I had only one question for him, and that was: did he have any problems and/or did he have any suggestions for improvement? Oh yes, he said straight away. He was a captain who would put to sea in any weather, there weren't too many like him in ships of this size and tonnage; but he wouldn't do it with the top deck container fixtures in the state they were in on his ship. What needs doing, I asked. The fixtures themselves are rusted through and need replacing and some professional welding is required, he said. The cost would be over €100,000. But cheap at the price, he continued, just think of the revenues from the additional sailings. And that is what I did, but not for long, there was no need for a cost/benefit analysis on this one. So why haven't we fixed it, I asked. No money, he said.

  I thanked him, paid for his brandy-laced coffee, purchased my IHT at the kiosk on the corner, and headed for the office. I said good morning to Pedro who was recording the unloading operation and contacting the various customers and haulage firms, and to three other staff members who were already at work. I poured myself a coffee and read the paper for a few minutes.

  The Mars story was front-page news, and two or three related articles were churning out facts and hypotheses such as what kind of asteroid risk existed for the planet Earth. On another tack, there had been 422 conflict fatalities yesterday, a disastrous day including for eight U.N. soldiers who had been blown up defending their countries' interests. Or what their birdbrain bosses had defined as their countries'
interests. Their elected birdbrains, let us not forget, elected in order to implement the electorate's wishes, haha. And who, if required to personally participate in the implementation of their decisions, might possibly have defined their countries' interests in a slightly different way. No, not possibly. Nor probably. Definitely.

  The remainder of the staff was in by nine o'clock except for María del Carmen who arrived at twenty past, and Alfonso who ambled in at twenty to ten. Not good at all. This has to be prevented, I'll have words with both of them later on in the day.

  At ten o'clock Sr. Pujol arrived and closeted himself with Alfonso in his office.

  María came into my office and handed me more of the information I had requested on my list. I thanked her for the fast work and told her that, starting today, I would like to receive each day's supplier invoices and that nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be processed for payment unless the invoice had my approval signature on it. This was to apply even if I was ill for a few days or away on business in Barcelona; everything would simply have to wait until I got back. Unless there was something of unavoidable urgency, in which case my approval could be obtained by telephone and I would sign retroactively upon my return.

  May I ask you, Sr. O'Donoghue, she said, why you wish to involve yourself in such detailed administrative work? Yes, I said, this is the best and easiest way for me to learn in detail about all of the company's costs and within a very short timeframe, just a few months. I can only do it in companies with low invoice volumes such as this one, and it only takes me between five and ten minutes each day, so I will not be causing any undesirable delays. And of course, María, if there happen to be any unnecessary or overpriced costs, I shall be eliminating them. But perhaps there aren't any, I said with my own home-made version of a reptilian grin, and she scuttled off back to the outer office, an unhappy lady, somebody was introducing some controls here.

  I flipped through her documentation and studied the details of two of the very large cost items. The ships' fuel was of course one of them. But I was puzzled about the large up and down swings in the fuel consumption from month to month. What could be the cause of that? No idea. The second item was the dockworker costs. Between Barcelona and Palma we were paying twenty nine dockworkers every day, six days a week. And a quick piece of mental arithmetic told me that this must represent over €1 million per year, and a check with last year's P&L number confirmed this number. Crazily overstaffed dock operations, now what to do about that? I had no idea on that one either.

  Shortly before twelve, Sr. Pujol came into my office and sat down.

  "I have fired Sr. Orfila," he said. "He has already left the premises and taken his personal possessions with him."

  I looked at him, said nothing.

  "I do not tolerate theft in any form," he said.

  I kept looking at him and I kept saying nothing. But I was thinking. I was thinking, shit, the guy with all the knowledge of this industry was no longer there, and that was going to cause me a lot of headaches.

  "And I have taken the decision to ask you if you would care to take over his position as general manager and ship-owner's representative. For a period of twelve months initially."

  Well, well, well. Life's ocean is back to its habit of tossing you up high when it wants to, very high on this occasion, onto the crests of some pretty risky and mountainous waves, no doubt about it. And my neurons needed a few seconds to react, to chew things over. But only a few seconds, because the only thing I needed to do was make sure it would pay me handsomely. A simple psychological ploy might do the trick.

  "I am grateful, Sr. Pujol," I said, "and honored by your offer. But I regret that I cannot accept it. It's not possible."

  "May I ask why?" he said.

  "Of course you may. There are two reasons mainly. The first is that I have neither the knowledge nor the experience to be able to take on the responsibility of running a shipping company. And the second one is that I am already performing a difficult, full-time consultancy assignment for you. If I find out how to turn this company around, I will have to stay on and do it. And that will not be easy. It will involve a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And it is extremely urgent as well; you are bleeding a lot of cash every single day."

  "I have considered all of that," he said, "and what you say is certainly true. I appreciate that your time would be split between two difficult roles and that this would make it an arduous task. Extremely arduous. Nevertheless, I think you are a very appropriate person for this particular job at this particular time. We have a very difficult time facing us during the upcoming months, and I would be grateful if you would consider helping us to get through it."

  "Again," I said, "I truly appreciate your confidence in my person, but…"

  "To adapt the terms to meet the demands on your person," he said, "I have decided to offer you a twelve-month contract at €350,000 per year with a substantial bonus in the event you achieve the hoped-for turnaround in results. And the contract would be renewable should both parties be so inclined. It could be confirmed to you in writing today and ready for your signature later on this week."

  He paused. He had—with apologies for another cliché—put his irons into the fire. And they were nice irons too, I had to admit that. He was making an effort.

  Decent money, great location, easy decision. "Sr. Pujol," I said. "The terms are more than satisfactory. I agree to accept your offer, but on the condition that you please note that I am doing so with a number of major reservations."

  He stood up, which didn't make him much taller, he smiled his unfortunate, treacherous smile, and he shook my hand. The contract and the official registrations of my person would be handled by his lawyers' office in Palma, he said. And I should please remember that he personally was contactable at any time of the day or night. And then he had María call for a taxi, and he left.

  I spent the remainder of the day thinking about ocean waves and the like, I wandered outside to watch some of the loading, I ate a sandwich and I drank a beer, I chatted to a couple of the ship's crew, I chatted to a couple of the communists—which is how I have always, justifiably or otherwise, viewed dockworkers in general—and then I took some of María's papers with me and took a taxi back to the hotel.

  I changed and went straight down to the pool. And after a light dinner—accompanied by a celebratory bottle of expensive and very pleasant Barolo—I went up to my room and did nothing at all except flip through María's information while continuing to ponder further the vagaries of ocean waves.

  DAY 34

  There were no ocean waves this morning. The sea was serene and unmoving and glinting softly in the early morning sunlight.

  Before leaving the hotel, I checked my emails and found two messages from Delsey. The first one explained that Jeremy Parker had indeed apparently devoted years and years of his incarceration to his favorite hobby. Astronomy. There were certain questions in this regard which they would like to discuss with me and would I please get back to him.

  The second one said that he had tried to reach me on my mobile, impossible to connect, was I still in Germany, and would I kindly contact him please.

  No, I wouldn't. It was between them and Jeremy now, at least until they located me. And I couldn't think why they should want to take the time and trouble to do that, nor could I imagine them being able to construct any legitimate justification to support a continued intervention in my private affairs. And even if they were to do so, it would be legally unsustainable; I would sue them for the illicit harassment of a citizen and his rights, you bet.

  No, I wasn't worried. I was more worried about whether I could find a way to save Naviera Pujol and that was what I was thinking about in the taxi all the way to the office. And when I arrived, I still had no worthwhile ideas, no theories, no concepts.

  Pedro congratulated me on my appointment in the corridor outside my new office—Alfonso's ex-office. Pedro seemed genuinely pleased about the appointment; perhaps he hadn't been e
njoying his working relationship with Alfonso very much, who knows? He told me that Sr. Pujol had announced Alfonso's departure—and my nomination as his replacement—to all of the company's employees including our dock manager in Barcelona and the ships' captains, who had already informed their respective crews. I also received polite congratulations from the other members of the office staff with the exception of María. She didn't say a word, just deposited the day's invoices on my desk. Well, it was up to her; if she wanted to create a problem, that was fine by me. Because it would be her problem, not mine.

  I went down onto the dock and up onto the ship—the Gerona Sol this morning—and introduced myself to the captain. He was short and stocky and he had sandy, tousled hair and his name was Antonio. He was an animated, jolly kind of fellow and he too congratulated me on my appointment as his new boss; but he had nothing much else to say to me, other than to mention the ridiculously high number of dockworkers in Barcelona. Half of them just stand around doing nothing, he said. He struck me as being a mariner's mariner, interested only in his ship and his crew and in ensuring that he fulfilled his responsibilities towards both as skillfully as possible, and not too concerned about very much else going on in the world. That was my impression anyway, and it suited me fine. That kind of employee tends to be one of the kind you can rely on completely.

  It is an iron-cast rule of mine to learn something about the products or services your client is selling, no matter what they are. So I told Antonio I would like to experience a voyage to Barcelona; would Friday night be convenient? No problem, he said, we will be sailing as usual at 7 p.m.

  I went back to the office and started sifting through the small pile of invoices. I paused when I came across one I didn't understand. It was for the monthly rental of thousands of pallets. What did we need pallets for? And why would we rent them for goodness' sake? I went into the outer office area and asked Pedro.

  "Well," he said, "they used to be needed for delivering split-load container cargo."

  "What is that exactly?" I asked.

  "It's when small volume shipments for different customers are all loaded into a single container. They need to be split on arrival for individual delivery."

  "You said 'used to be'?" I asked.

  "There may be one or two exceptions still," Pedro replied, "but we usually don't handle small volume freight anymore."

  "So where are all the pallets, Pedro?"

  "Well, Alfonso used to control that personally for some reason. They are spread all over the island, I think. I know of one large customer in Binissalem who should have a few hundred of them in or around his warehouse."

  "Let us go and take a look Pedro. Now."

  And so we did. It was only about half an hour away. And the customer’s supervisor showed us about forty old pallets lying around and half of them were broken. He was extremely assertive with regard to the fact that they had no more pallets.

  "Pedro," I said when we were back in the office, "we are not going to pay any more rent for these things. We shouldn't have rented them in the first place. It's stupid. If you want pallets, you buy them. Could you please contact the company we're paying the rent to, and find out what needs to be done?"

  He got back to me about ten minutes later. There was a rental contract and the only way out of it was an option at each year-end to return some or all of the pallets in pristine condition, or else to buy them. But we clearly couldn't return the pallets. Nobody knew where they were or even where they were supposed to be. Most had presumably disappeared over the years and of the few that we might possibly find, their condition would no doubt be similar to the ones in Binissalem. I asked Pedro to arrange a meeting for me with the hiring company in Barcelona. Next Monday, I said, in the afternoon.

  The crap you find in some companies when you start to scratch the surface has long since ceased to be a source of amazement to me. I mean, this pallet business is both asinine and downright pathetic, there is nothing else to say about it. But it is a minor item, it won't be saving the company, it is just an unnecessary cost which needs to be surgically removed.

  In the afternoon, I met with our chief communist and asked him what issues he and his dockworkers had, if any. They had one. The wharf crane was dangerous. It needed a complete overhaul and the 'corona', whatever that was, needed replacing. Very expensive, he said, he didn't know how much, but it would be well into six figures. A few months ago, the top part of the crane, including the operator's cabin, had started rocking back and forth when lifting containers and Alfonso had therefore decided to restrict container weights to a maximum of thirty tons instead of forty. "Instead of repairing the crane?" I asked. "Yes,” came the reply, “he said we had no money for that."

  So we were losing some business to our competition because we couldn't repair our crane. And the crane wouldn't remain as it was, it would get worse. In fact, I was surprised the dockworkers were continuing to work under these conditions. I didn't say so, but a bad accident, maybe even a fatal one, seemed a distinct possibility to me. And I was now the guy responsible, wide open to an ocean hurricane of annihilating legal consequences. And the more I learned about this and the more I learned about that, the more I started to think that this company was too far gone for me to be able to save it anyway. But in spite of that, I should really go and visit the company's bank tomorrow. Courtesy on the one hand, and also the need to check out the bank's mood with regard to our mountain of debt and the possibility of a bit more to at least fix the crane, if not the ship's deck. I asked María to fix the meeting for me.