161
We listen and hear nothing. We're probably the only ones on the entire floor. It has grown dark. I've spent more than a full day here. Claudia says that everything is locked, that we'll definitely hear any intruders. Before sitting down, while bending her knees, she runs
both hands over her bottom and the backs of her legs to smooth out her skirts. The room is moonlit: long, unrecognizable shadows hang from the handbags. Claudia tells me I have to think. First and foremost, a guard must think. Unlike most people, he can't just go at things. She says that always thinking is a guard's best way of protecting himself. That's where it starts. This is, above all else, his first task. If he only half protects himself, how can he protect a client? A guard who's let himself be eliminated is no guard, he's just a dead body, incapable of doing anything more than making his murderer stumble. He's worthless. Her upper body sags toward the armrest; pensively she rests her chin on her hand. She asks if I wouldn't mind washing just this once, the room reeks of my stench. Mrs. Olano would show me the door, she loathes things that smell. No shortage of bathrooms. Even if the water's cut off, there will still be some left in the pipes, enough to run at least one bath.
162
She walks ahead of me, it's not far; it's already morning. A sarcophagus, that's what the block of granite most recalls. It's set into a deck of tropical hardwood in the middle of a room. A tub has been carved from the block, as rectangular as the stone itself. No taps anywhere. After Claudia presses the matte silver button, the water wells up quickly, then abruptly falls still, except for some quiet murmuring. She closes the glass door, which has no lock; the glass is only transparent at the top and bottom. She tells me I have to take off my uniform and removes my cap. My Flock moves from one hand to the other, back and forth, until I'm standing on the deck undressed. My stench is more pungent. Claudia looks me over from head to toe. After a while of not saying or doing anything, she touches my abdomen. She comes closer and joins me
in looking down at her hand on my white belly, which is almost completely motionless. I feel her other hand on my backside. She whispers that it's a test. She means Harry. He wants to see how far I'll go. Whether I'll freeze up with fear or be resolute and carry on. If I can find the resident by myself and bring him back to the basement. She says that Harry took off deliberately. As a test.
163
My clothes are lying in a heap at my feet. I see the dirt between my toes and under my long nails. I have to pick up my clothes. My jacket needs hanging up, my pants need folding. Claudia soothes me. She'll do it in a minute. Now I just have to lie back in the bath. It will refresh me. I'll feel reborn, a new man. She's fetched clothes out of Mr. Olano's wardrobe, we're the same size. Spotless clothes made of the finest fabrics. Smelling of dried flowers, they lie here next to a pile of towels waiting for me. But slowly my aversion to submerging myself in the dark water in the cold room grows insurmountable. Claudia says I have to relax. Look at the way I'm squeezing my pistol. Look at my eyes, there, in the mirror. Her hand descends over the curve of my buttocks, slipping between my legs, carefully enclosing what it meets on its way.
164
She says Harry didn't come back. Normally he would have returned to where we lost each other, just as I returned. He would have
waited there for a sign of life. But he didn't. He didn't send any signals either, not with his watch and not with the flashlight, even though he couldn't have been very far away. Claudia is sitting on the edge of the bath, leaning straight-armed on the granite, her heavy breasts raised miraculously by her high shoulders. She is, for a woman of her size, small and tight. She keeps looking down. She whispers that she wants to see it. On her tummy. When she sees it, she'll come too.
165
The bath drains without a sound. To me, it seems as if the mass of water is a solid object slowly sliding into the base of the sarcophagus. Maybe the pipes contain enough water for another bath; it doesn't matter. I pull my uniform back on. My stinking doesn't matter, it is my own stench. I don't want to be reborn. My name is Michel, I'm a guard. Mr. Olano's clothes don't suit me. Claudia does up my tie, she speaks hesitantly. She says that of course Harry doesn't want to go to the elite with someone he can't count on, someone who can't take care of himself. A partner he has to constantly watch over. You can't do that in the elite. He wants to be sure of things, which is understandable. Because the elite does its guarding much closer to the client. There is no room for mistakes or losing time or inattentiveness. A single incident can seriously compromise people's trust in the organization. And, as I know, everything depends on that trust. Without that trust, the organization has no authority, no power. Everything that has been built up by thousands of dedicated guards, over the whole world, could be undone by a single blunder. Claudia asks me if I understand. She brushes off the shoulders of my jacket, takes a step back and looks at me.
166
I don't really believe that, do I? She repeats her question. She's lying stretched out on the sofa under the handbags, her right leg raised indolently, she's touching herself. Her breasts have sunk into her armpits; nipples as dark as chocolate, as big as the palm of a hand. She is only wearing her shoes. Sometimes she gives little taps. One hand encloses, the other taps. Do I hear her? The twenty-ninth floor, she doesn't think so. No, she doesn't believe a word of it. Harry deliberately gave the wrong floor so that he could shake me off in the confusion and leave me in uncertainty. He thought it out far in advance, even before the decision to move the resident to the basement. He knows full well which floor the resident lives on. He had me barking up the wrong tree. He wants to know if I listened to him properly, if I learned anything in those hundreds and hundreds of days, if I'm primed, ready when necessary, and that's usually when it's completely unexpected. Claudia squints up at my member just above her forehead. She presses the top of her head back in the cushions, raises her chin in the air and opens her mouth a little. The deep folds in her neck open up as smooth white lines. Little by little the taps turn to blows.
167
I ask her to stay in the kitchen. She's distracting me. I'd rather not hear her. She doesn't even need to raise her voice: she talks as if I'm sitting at the table with her in the kitchen and that's enough. I roll my forehead over the cold window like a stamp and look down on the fossilized city. She tells me I have every reason to be disillusioned. After all, what did I do to deserve this? Haven't
I always done as he asked? Haven't I always shown my loyalty? How exactly does Harry expect me to fall short? Not once, Claudia says, has there been a serious incident. He and I were always one step ahead of trouble. What's more, I've spent hours and hours on guard duty alone, while Harry was asleep, when he, for all intents and purposes, wasn't there and the building was an undiminished forty luxury stories high with defenseless rich people asleep on every one. She says he could have foreseen me asking myself these questions. He should have foreseen that I would look beyond first impressions and, sooner or later, guess his motives. Doesn't he realize that this maneuver undermines everything we've achieved together? A test! What's he scared of?
168
I'm lying on the floor, rolled up in a ball, protecting myself. I have been reduced to eyes, nose and ears. I have become my face, a small animal living in the center of a dark muggy cave. Through a crack I see shiny leather shoes pointing in my direction. I move my head, my eyes rise up Mr. Olano's evening dress and skip over his bow tie to his face, spotlighted by the bright sun. The gleam on his rigorously parted black hair. He blinks as he tries to look into the cave. He pulls his left and right cuffs out from under the sleeves of his dinner jacket and steps toward me, kneeling, moving his mouth to the crack, breathing. I smell peat, whisky, single-malt. Quietly he says that the competition is murderous. He says that positions hardly ever come up. Who wouldn't want to guard a roomy villa in body armor with modern firearms? Patrolling magnificent gardens? Estates that are guarded so well and in such numbers that the chance of an attack is zero. A job for life. The twenty-ninth floor? No, he says. The last resident doesn't live on 29 and Harry knew that all along.
No, he wasn't mistaken. Harry will escort the resident to the basement and he'll do it alone. His achievement, his promotion.
169
Harry's dead. He's in a state of decomposition. It's as if I can't find anywhere in this immense building to put him down. I keep searching with his body slung over my shoulder; the reek of rotten potatoes. I try the stairs to a higher floor: head down, pulling his feet up and angling him across the steps, arms dramatically spread-eagled. A fatal fall. I leave him where he is for a moment. Yes, he's good there. When I come back, I don't like the look of those spread arms. I dislocate his shoulder and hide one arm under his torso. His shirt is bloodstained. He was dead before he hit the ground, he didn't feel any pain. I break his neck too, so that he's looking almost backward. I take off a shoe and lay his cap a few meters away, blue satin up. I take him in from different perspectives. He doesn't look bad, but the location is slightly contrived. Maybe I should keep searching.
170
I can't worry about Harry anymore. I have to keep going. Until he shows up, I have to act like he doesn't exist. Claudia begs me to stay, hanging off my arm as I try to reach one of the locked doors. I drag her over the parquet. I feel compelled to intervene but even after a firm slap in the faceâonce the moment's astonishment has
passedâshe persists in holding on tightly to my trouser leg with both hands. I kick her. First lightly, as an announcement of intent, then harder, with the toe. I tell her I'll kick her full in the face, but that doesn't scare her. Suddenly I swing my leg away from her, as if kicking for goal; I hear her fingernails breaking.
I slam the door behind me, turning the key in the lock.
After a few seconds in the hall, I am struck by something familiar. At first I don't know what it is. Claudia leans against the other side of the door. She says it's walnut, a hint of fresh walnut, just fallen from the tree, with a hard green hull. She says he's looking for me. He fell behind. He had trouble finding all of the stairs and has only just reached this floor. She says he wants to play it safe, he doesn't want to squander the opportunity. He's planned it all. We lost each other and then a terrible accident happened. In the confusion I, Michel, died, fatally wounded by friendly fire. Harry is inconsolable, but he keeps his back straight, his chin up. You can't turn back the clock. This is what his trusty partner would have wanted: him dedicating himself completely to his new task.
171
Claudia and Mr. Olano don't know Harry.
172
At the end of the hall I lie flat on my stomach. Am I imagining the smell I know so well? Am I imagining the smell because I hope it's
a way to track down Harry without his noticing? And if I really can smell it, am I tracking him or is he lying in wait for me?
173
I creep along on my elbows, the scabs break open, the familiar pain flares in my bones. The day is coming to an end, twilight has laid claim to the halls and rooms. I combat my thirst with memories of drinking the bathwater, scooping it up out of the sarcophagus with my hands before it disappeared completely down the drain. I no longer think about how hungry I am. Hunger has become a part of me. Just as I have two arms, two legs and one head, I am hungry. I crawl through a portal and enter an atrium. White Roman busts in niches around me, radiating light. A draft drifts over the smooth floor and as I, breathing half through my mouth, pick up the smell I would recognize from thousands, I see a leg moving beside the central ornament, a foot, a black shoe slipping out of sight.
I don't even flinch, but still feel everything within me move. His name is on my lips, I'm about to softly blow life into it.
I manage to swallow it just in time.
174
Sometimes I hear Harry. While creeping along, he sometimes slides his shoes over the ground. It's not so much the sliding I hear, as the slight drag when the sole catches on a groove or a join in the floor.
175
He grew up on a farm in the north of the province with two brothers, Jim and Bob, guards like Harry. A pioneer family. With a war veteran dad to boot. I wrack my brains, but can't remember anything else. After all that time in the basement, this is what I actually know about Harry. After all that time washing his underwear with my bare hands.
176
Why bother reacting? What kind of answer should he have given to the announcement that it was, for instance, Wednesday? He could hardly object. I was the one who studied the calendar. Every morning he relied on my calculation. Maybe he listened, maybe he didn't. Maybe it didn't make any difference to him whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. And he was right; it didn't make any difference. But maybe, for a few minutes after my announcement, he did let the day of the week sink in. It's even possible that he kept a record of the days too. That his silence was a sign of assent. And that he would have corrected me, immediately, if I had made a mistake.
177
“You and me.” He never said anything else, not once. He always said, “You and me.” He always dreamt about the elite for both of us. Us, Harry and me, sitting in a garden a hundred times the size of the basement, out of harm's way in the countryside, enjoying a blue sky
and eating juicy fruit. But nudging up the flush button in the toilet, the simplest of gestures, was too much for him, remembering to do that was beyond him, despite my repeated requests. Even though it was audible everywhere, enough to drive you crazy, Harry stayed deaf to the whistling in the pipes. It was too much trouble for him, even for
his
Michel, with whom he, in the near future, would be promoted and by whose side he would spend many more years as a guard. Harry with his gruff, handsome, square face, always one step ahead, ordering me time and time again to think, to just think, mostly when what I thought was different from what he thought. Harry, who was tempted to waste ammunition on a fly.