Thursday July the 24 ^th 2008
I quit the hotel early. Too much like hard work and my mind is firmly on Spain. My boss surprised me by pulling me to one side and asking if I fancied the role as his number two. I was a slightly at a loss for words. He told me he needed someone that had both smarts and was a grafter. His current number two was retiring in three months.
I declined but I think it is the first time I’ve been offered a legitimate job since my days on the factory floor. I was quite touched.
I now have an outline plan of action for Spain, but it is hard to pin down exactly what I’ll be doing. For a start I have three or four ideas as to how to get into the safety deposit box but I’m not even sure that there is a box — or, even if it exists that it contains anything — or if it does exist and does contain something that I will be able to get at it — or — or — or — or — you see the problem.
There is also no sign of the goons. Not even a whiff. That could be good or bad news. The good would be that Dupree considers me such a low level threat that he has reassigned his resources to better usage. The bad news is that I may now mean so little he could decide that getting rid of me might prevent a problem in the future.
I remember a lesson at school where we were discussing the Coliseum in Rome. Our teacher made the mistake of telling us that, although Nero had planned the building he had never given the famous ‘thumbs down’ sign in it because he died before it was completed. This opened the floodgates — ‘thumbs down’ — what did that mean. As soon as we found out it was a signal for the victor to kill the defeated, we were over it like a rash.
Playtime was spent ‘thumbing-down’ everyone in sight. That day I learned a small but valuable lesson. Even at playtime ‘thumbing-down’ a friend or someone you respected was far harder than ‘thumbing-down’ a nonentity. In fact the game showed quite a few people who their real friends were, as ‘thumbing-down’ often resulted in some painful punishment.
Dupree would think nothing of ‘thumbing-down’ me and I knew it and he probably knew that I knew and we probably both had the Kursal Flyers single ‘Little Does She Know’.
Martin seems cool, if not cold but he isn’t showing signs of throwing me out and, as far as I can tell, he’s not been back inside my luggage.
I fly out on the 1 st of August and I’m beginning to feel like a cross between a schoolboy going on his first trip abroad and someone looking at death row.