The 2084 Precept (69 page)

He nodded slowly, and I merely walked away
and back out into the heat of the afternoon. There was no point in
my wasting my time with pleasantries. Not that I had anything
against the turd. A turd, as I have said, is a turd and you find
them floating around here and there. But it’s not their fault, you
can’t hold them responsible; the responsibility lies with whoever
excreted them.

And to be fair, and we do try to be, he had
had a brainless customer permanently tied into a remunerative
contract and had exacted what he knew was the best he could obtain
for losing it. A year, of course, was what I was prepared to pay in
the first place. Otherwise we would have had to contractually pay
rent until the year-end anyway, plus court-mandated compensation
for not returning the pallets. But for less money than that, we
were now free of the contract and there would be no more wasted
expenditure in the future. I didn't think it was much of a bluff on
my part about seeing him in court. Neither he nor I would have
wanted to incur serious attorney costs. Nor did the Naviera have
any lawyers to review the termination document he was going to
send, nor did we want or need any. I would review that document
myself and if it was satisfactory, I would merely have it
notarized.

I walked along in the glaring sunshine to
the neighboring building which was a bathroom equipment showroom,
and asked the sales lady if she would mind calling a taxi for me. I
gave her my sexiest smile and it was no problem.

It was just after five o'clock when I got
back to the docks. Fernando was on the phone and I heard him trying
to arrange a meeting for me with someone on the other end. I called
Sr. Pujol to give him an update on my activities—not necessary, but
always good to give the right impression—and he said let's meet at
seven o'clock at your hotel and we can talk it over while enjoying
some aperitifs on their terrace bar.

A great idea. This is a great country to be
in from May through October. You can't talk business in the warm
sunny evenings on terrace bars in Germany or in the U.K. or, if one
wishes to be pedantic about it, very seldom. I waved goodbye to
Fernando. He stopped in the middle of a phone call to someone else
and said he would contact me later in the evening. That will be
fine, I said.

Back at the hotel I showered, changed, and
went down to the outdoor bar area. Sr. Pujol was already there. It
had given me pleasure to inform him of the hotel I was staying in,
he could see for himself how his expensive consultant was prepared
to suffer while fixing the shit he couldn't fix himself. Chapter
One in your book of '
The Cumulative Effects of Minor
Psychological Finesses in Consultancy'.

He was seated at a table and looking through
a menu. We shook hands, I sat down, a waiter appeared—quite a piece
of luck in this place—and I ordered a very cold sherry. I had
learned from the big bosses of a major sherry company in Jerez de
la Frontera, where I had been invited one evening while on a
project in that region a few years ago, that you should not drink
sherry cold. When I protested that that was how it was always
served to me, they smiled and said, yes, and that was the way they
wanted to keep it, it increased consumption volumes. But, as a
discerning person, they said, I should never drink it cold.

But I liked it cold, or at least decently
chilled. So I am clearly not a discerning person. Too early for
dinner, said Sr. Pujol, looking up from his menu, but how about
some calamari to pick at and a nice bottle of white wine to go with
it? I told him that that was a grand idea, except for the fact that
I didn't like calamari, or squid, or octopus—I can't tell the
difference—on account of my not particularly enjoying the taste of
hot India rubber. My preference would be for some
boquerones
, if he didn't mind. And at least he laughed,
albeit in his reptilian way, and ordered both.

"Close escape about an hour ago, don't you
think?" he said.

"Close escape?"

"Yes, that meteorite that smashed into the
Atlantic Ocean. A very big one, and it didn't completely burn up on
its way in through the atmosphere. A bit bigger, and half of us
wouldn't have been here in a few days' time. Makes you think."

A statement I could not agree with as my
neurons were
refusing
to think. There was no point. They had
decided that aliens were impossible, therefore Mr. Parker was an
unheard of astronomy scholar, among other things, and ahead of his
time by a long way. As were the Galileos, the da Vincis and the
Einsteins in their time.

"Or if it had landed somewhere in Europe,"
continued Sr. Pujol, "half of us wouldn't be here already. Just
imagine, no more Naviera problems. And no more
boquerones
and white wine." And he chuckled his reptilian chuckle. "Check it
out later on, Sr. O’Donoghue, the television channels are full of
it."

"I certainly will," I said. "And good to
hear you say that the Naviera's problems and the white wine are
preferable to the alternative."

"Too right," he said, "and anyway you are
going to solve those problems, correct?" Another of those gruesome
smiles of his. He probably eats grilled lizards for breakfast.
Iguana, maybe.

"I don't know yet. I am working very fast,
as I always do, but I won't have arrived at a conclusion until the
end of next week."

"Well, hopefully it will be a positive one.
Otherwise you will miss out on your company car."

"Company car?"

"Yes, it's a fairly decent BMW 5 Series
station wagon. I gave Alfonso two weeks to return it. It should be
back in about ten days' time."

Not bad. Perks are nice. More money for
spending or investing.

"But you were going to give me an update, I
believe," he continued.

"Yes," I said. "Some cost savings are under
way and there are a couple of ways in which we can increase
revenues. But those things will not get rid of the losses. I am
looking at some really major initiatives but I have no idea whether
they will turn out to be feasible. Certainly, it seems as if there
is nothing we can do about the dockworkers' costs. But one thing I
wanted to ask you about. If I can manage to free up one ship from
the Mallorca run, is there any reason from your end as to why I
shouldn't put it to work on another route?"

"You can do whatever you want," Sr. Pujol
replied. "That is why I have hired you. I honestly don't care what
you do, as long as you make the company viable again."

"O.K., well…thank you. Then we'll see how
things work out. I will be letting you know by the end of next week
whether I can fix things or not. But even if I can't, I would be
happy to run the company for you until you resolve the situation by
selling it or whatever."

That was already agreed, he said, and we
finished off the food and the wine and we shook hands and he
disappeared back into his own private world, inhabited no doubt by
other members of the cold-blooded, lung-breathing vertebrates of
the species Reptilia.

I smoked a cigarette, ordered a steak, and
was finishing my coffee and another cigarette when my phone rang.
It was Fernando. I have managed to fix four meetings for you
tomorrow, he said, and one for Wednesday. He was trying for more on
Wednesday, and he would text me the names, addresses and phone
numbers and the times fixed for the meetings within the next few
minutes. I thanked him for the good work and told him I wanted a
maximum of three meetings for Wednesday, as I planned to travel
back that evening on the
Mahon Star
. I'll fly back the week
after if necessary, I said, to continue the search.

I went up to my room and switched on the
television. It was full of the meteorite. There were also
explanations of just about everything, including the differences
between meteorites, asteroids and comets. They spoke about the
Earth having been hit an estimated 350 times in the last 10,000
years by asteroids as large as the one which wasted 2,000
km
²
of Siberia in the year 1908. And they cited the very
high odds of millions of us being killed by asteroids during the
next 10,000 years. And they talked about asteroids whose orbits we
could track and forecast, and about why there was no guarantee it
would stay that way because their trajectories were sometimes
affected by gravitational aberrations in space about which we as
yet had little knowledge.

And they talked about asteroid 2011 AG5,
discovered in 2011 by Mount Lemmon astronomers in Arizona, USA, a
high risk object which apparently could directly impact the Earth
the next time around, which would be in February 2040. And while
they were explaining that this particular matter had been on the
agenda of the 49
^th
. Session of the Scientific and
Technical Subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the
Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, something I judge to be a complete,
utter and entire waste of everybody's time, I fell asleep.

A low pressure belt had moved into Eastern
Spain overnight and I awoke to a cloudy and rainy day. It was close
to being cold out on my balcony and the ocean was reflecting the
dirty grey of the clouds above. But there you go, even these
latitudes are not perfect.

It was, however, appropriate weather for the
day I had. My first shipping agency meeting was at 9.30 a.m. and
the last one finished at around 5 p.m. and they were all the same
and they were all a dead loss. But they were interesting for me,
sure enough. I had my first kindergarten lessons in how these
things worked. I learned what the current tariffs were and how they
were calculated, and I even had one miserable offer of a single
voyage to Portugal which would have lost us a lot of money. There
was nothing doing, viable contracts for ships of our small tonnage
were rarities. Depressing, no two ways about it. My brilliant idea
was not so brilliant after all.

I picked up a newspaper and had a coffee on
my way back to the docks. Yesterday there had been 1,565 conflict
deaths, a reasonably high number which had prompted them to make a
small front page summary. Syria 890, Mali 25, Turkey 41 (of which
24 Kurds), Pakistan 168 (of which 124 Shiites), Iraq 86 (of which
40 Syrians), Lebanon 27, Afghanistan 43 (of which 35 the result of
a NATO attack, including 11 children), Algeria 42, Central African
Republic 18, South Sudan 17, Congo 76, Mexico 43, Northern Ireland
2, Nigeria 51 (of which 29 school children, more victims of the
Islamic crusade to prevent education for all), and Burma—or Myanmar
if you insist—36 (all victims of a Buddhist attack on a Muslim
school).

The accompanying article pointed out that
this excluded conflict deaths not yet reported. There was also a
brief mention of eight deaths in yet another U.S. madman massacre
yesterday morning. Intriguing numbers. More interesting on some
days than others. The good old human race.

Before returning to the hotel I watched the
Gerona Sol
leave the harbor in the rain on its overnight
trip back to Palma. Fernando was still there—he normally took long
lunch hours and worked until 8 p.m.—and he had managed to arrange
three more meetings for me for tomorrow and he gave me the details
for each one. When I told him about the humiliating results of my
day's work, he said—politely enough—that our ships were not of the
type and size which were much in demand these days. He could have
said 'I would have told you that for free', but he didn't, which I
appreciated. I was not in the most buoyant of moods.

Back at the hotel, I checked my emails and
my bank account. The €300,000 had arrived! This money thing was as
unbelievable as the asteroids. Except that they were both real,
extremely real. I would have to think about where to invest this
stuff, but I would leave that until next week; after all, another
€400,000 was due to arrive any day now. What to do with all the
filthy lucre assuming, of course, that I didn't want to put all my
eggs into that bear certificate basket? Life, as we have said
before, can occasionally be tough and full of dilemmas requiring
demanding decisions.

My non-buoyant mood had become a little less
waterlogged. I ate some fish in the hotel restaurant. I typed out
the invoice to Obrix Consultancy, attached it to an email to Jeremy
with the comment that if an original were required, I would hand it
to him on my next trip to London, and clicked on 'Send'.

I got through another two pages of
Platform
before I fell asleep.

My balcony inspection revealed a repeat of
yesterday's weather. But the good news was that there was very
little wind and if it remained that way, this fair weather sailor
would be spared the embarrassment, as he had been on the
Gerona
Sol
, of spewing a novice's vomit all over a captain's
cabin.

The first shipping agency meeting sounded
more than promising. An exporter was looking for a ship of more or
less our ships' capacity to contract permanently for a weekly run
from Barcelona to Morocco in North Africa. It would be carrying
containers loaded with anything from toothbrushes to televisions
and everything else that the Moroccans had begun to be able to
afford in recent decades. And the distance was adapted more or less
perfectly for a weekly timetable.

"Morocco," I said in my capacity as the
world's most ignorant ship owners' representative, "that would
involve export documentation and…"

"The documentation is not a problem," the
agency executive replied, "and in any case the destination ports
are either Ceuta or Melilla, depending on the week, and these
cities are part of Spain. Our little Gibraltars, if you will," he
giggled. "And there are no special ocean-going requirements to
comply with; in any case, the whole trajectory keeps you within a
hundred nautical miles of the coast."