Chapter One — Jon — estudio256

The smell told him.

He had worked in this reception for almost a year in his twenties, under a supervisor his father had put above him so he wouldn't be the boss's son. The supervisor had been a good one. Jon had bought a coffee at the kiosk on the corner every morning and finished the day at the coffee machine upstairs. Between those two cups had been print ink and cleaning solvent and the perfume of the woman on the fifth floor, who wore too much of it. That smell had been the working day.

Still that smell. The recession had not taken it. Neither had the cuts. Three summers, three reorganisations: the smell was the only thing that had survived all of them.

The directory at reception was printed on a board behind the desk. He had not been in this room in almost four years. He stood for a second and read the names. More than half of them had been taped over with white paper, by someone who had meant to come back and reprint the board and had never gotten round to it. The paper had gone yellow. Some of it was already coming off at the corners, and the names underneath were the names he remembered. Delgado. Molina. Pérez, F. Pérez, J. — one of the Pérezes had covered the other one. The whole left column of the fourth floor was paper.

He did not ask the girl at reception whether she was new. He already knew.

He took the lift.

The fourth floor was less than he remembered, which is to say more. Desks had been moved together into a smaller footprint against the window; the rest of the floor was still carpeted and still had the old plaster walls of the cubicle bays, but the cubicles themselves had been removed and the floor, where they had been, was two shades darker than the rest. There had been maybe eight people there when he left. There were three now. He did not recognise any of them. One of them — a man in shirtsleeves, maybe forty, eating yoghurt — looked up and said, without quite smiling, Señor Jon.

The man said it the way people in this building had always said it — the short Basque Jon, flat on the vowel, no h. It was the name his mother had written on the hospital form the morning he was born, because her own father had been Jon and his father before him, and that was the end of the discussion. Suppliers in Taipei and clients in Frankfurt had, over the years, anglicised it into the English John; Jon had let it slide, because John was sometimes a quicker door to open. Nobody in this building had ever made that mistake. The yoghurt man had grown up here. He knew what to call him.

Jon nodded as if he remembered the man. He did not.

He did not go into his father's office straight away. He walked down the corridor to the kitchenette. The coffee machine was the same coffee machine. The magnet that held the cleaning rota to the fridge door was the same magnet, a promotional item from a supplier who, according to the magnet, had been giving away magnets for over twenty years. Jon pressed the button for a small coffee. The machine beeped at him. He pressed the button again. The machine beeped again and then, resentfully, produced a coffee.

He drank half of it standing at the window. Madrid had gone on being Madrid below him, on an afternoon where the shadows were already short for the year and the sky was a blue no camera caught. He did not know what he was going to do next.

He had come back from Hong Kong two weeks ago, with his cousin — who was on the kind of long summer visit a man takes once in his forties and is still, by September, going to fly back from — two suitcases, and an import-export ledger that was either the beginning of a company or the end of a hobby. He had told his father he would come by. He had not come by. His cousin had gone straight up to the family place outside the city and was, as of this morning, trying to teach his seven-year-old niece how to hold a tennis racquet. Jon had stayed in the family flat near the park, and he had walked, and he had eaten at bars without being alone, and he had slept heavily and without remembering anything.

Six years earlier, a woman he had been with for six years — a doctor, at a hospital three streets from his grandmother's flat — had stopped him in a café corridor one afternoon and said she'd wanted children for a while and had finally understood he was never going to give them to her, and she was sorry. He had said he was sorry too, and she had known he meant something else, and she had let him off that hook with a kindness he never forgot. He was on a plane within the month. He stayed on planes for most of five years. He was thirty-four now.

He had come back for reasons he could not have defended over dinner. Hong Kong had felt small. His office above the market in Kowloon — the one every supplier from Taipei to Shenzhen had wanted to visit, and had visited — had felt, on the last Thursday, like a waiting room. And there was the thing about the receptionists. He had been very good at hiring them. It had taken him five years to notice that hiring them was the part of the job he had been best at. He had begun, in the final week, to think about that. He had not told anyone.

He finished the coffee. He threw the cup in the bin.

He walked down the corridor to his father's office.

The door was open. Jesus was on the phone. He had the receiver tucked under his chin in the way of men who had learned to use telephones in rooms where the cord mattered, even though the cord, now, was wireless, and there was no reason to tuck anything. He was saying, No, hombre, no, into the phone with the cheerful certainty of someone who had been saying no to this person on and off for a decade. He saw Jon in the doorway. His face did exactly what Jon had been flying home to see.

He said into the phone, I have to go. My son is here. He hung up.

Jesus stood up from the desk. He stood up in stages, the way a man who had been told not to do sports since he was twelve stood up. He came around the desk and put his arms around Jon and held him for longer than was customary in the family, and he said, into Jon's shoulder, You've lost weight.

"I haven't," Jon said. "You've gotten worse at noticing."

"No," Jesus said. "You have."

He stepped back and held Jon at the shoulders for another beat. His grandfather used to hold Jesus the same way. There was a photograph of it on the desk — or had been, twenty years ago; Jon didn't look for it now.

"Come on," Jesus said. "Lunch."

They took the lift down together. Jesus did not mention the directory or the fourth floor. He told a story, instead, about a supplier from León who had been cheating him for two years and whom he had fired the previous Monday, and about a new girl on the sixth floor whom he did not trust, and about the car, always about the car. Jon laughed in the right places. It was a familiar floor; he was walking on it again.

At the restaurant — a place a few streets away that had been old when Jon was a child and was still being held up, as far as he could tell, by the same four regulars at the bar — they ate lamb. Jesus drank one glass of wine, which had been his recent compromise with his heart. Jon drank two. Around them the din of Madrid at one-thirty was what it had always been, which was enough noise to say anything in.

"So," Jesus said. "What are you doing."

Jon said: I have an idea.

"An idea," Jesus said, leaning back.

Jon told him. He told him about a small Taiwanese company he had visited three months ago, with actuators in the hands that were not ready for the market, about the way one of the engineers had walked the robot across the showroom floor as if the robot were a child, about the quiet that had come over the whole group — six serious men in ties — when the robot had stopped at the end of the room and turned around. He told him about the gap the European universities were leaving open. He told him about the money. He did not tell him about the money he thought he could lose.

Jesus listened. Jesus was a man who, most of his life, had filled silences; when he listened to his son he went still, not quiet. Jon had always known when his father was really hearing him by the stillness.

When Jon had stopped, Jesus said, Robots that walk.

"Robots that walk," Jon said. "Like people."

"Hijo," Jesus said, and smiled. "You are going to need money."

"I know."

Jesus waved the waiter for the bill.

On the way out, in the doorway, Jesus paused. He had his hand on Jon's arm. He was holding Jon back from the street, from the afternoon, from the next thing.

"Friday," he said. "Come to dinner on Friday. I want you to meet someone."

"Who?"

Jesus smiled. It was the smile Jon had been watching for forty years — the one that came before anything his father was going to hand him that mattered.

"Friday," Jesus said.