- Yes. And I am grateful. But I don’t have ten thousand dollars. And I will need half an hour with the taxista.
- For what? You are very big, very strong.
- One is never big or strong enough.
- Nine thousand, and fifteen minutes.
- Five thousand for twenty-five.
- Seven thousand for twenty minutes, or we are done. The risks to me are—
- Yes. Yes. I’ll be right back.
Again Reátegui smiles.
Seven thousand dollars is four times what a policeman here earns in a year. It is most of what I have saved. Sweat runs from my face, drips onto the front of my shirt. The line is not long and for a moment I wish it were longer.
Now the clerk. He asks if I am feeling unwell. Then he asks if perhaps I would prefer to conduct such a transaction in one of the back offices. I tell him that it does not matter, and watch as he runs the stacks of bills through the electronic counter. A second time, and the same amount results. A large envelope, and I borrow a pen to sign for the withdrawal, and the taxista, he needs to say it. I need to hear him say it.
A mototaxi back to the police station. In and in and in. Reátegui waits alone in the small room. I hand him the envelope, and he takes it, counts quickly and nods.
- Will you be needing anything? he asks. We have everything you might require.
So many imagined encounters, so many places and weapons, so many angles of light, and in fact there is nothing I need. Reátegui nods, leads out to the lobby and deeper into the station. We pass the unnamed office, and it is empty, and the television is off. Other offices, identical or nearly so. Through a double door, and out into a large open area: the heart of the compound, the center of the block. In the middle is a fulbito court, perfectly swept. A stretch of grass to either side. To the far right a large building, and to the far left a series of tiny cells.
I veer toward the cells and Reátegui catches my arm, points instead to the building. I nod and again follow. Inside it smells of blood and mildew and sweat. He unlocks a door, leads me downstairs, unlocks another door, and down again.
There is yet another door, this one steel instead of wood. Reátegui peers through the peephole, then looks at me, takes a deep breath as if encouraging me to do the same. I nod, and he slides back the bolt.
Inside, a thin dark black-haired man is sitting in a metal chair. His hands are cuffed to the sides of the chair, and his ankles are bound to a crossbar. Reátegui leans toward me, whispers that my time started running the moment we entered the building, that he will be waiting outside. He pats me on the shoulder, wishes me luck.
As he closes the door, the air in the room goes tight. The taxista and I both flinch at the sound of the steel bolt shot home. There is a bit of dried blood at the corner of his mouth, and one of his eyes is swollen. I walk in circles around him. As far as I can see he is not afraid. I wish that I had requested a chair of my own, wish that I was dressed all in green.
I look at him, come closer, look again. Shallow pockmarks scattered high on his cheeks. Thinning hair, weak chin. His left ear slightly damaged or deformed, its lobe scarred, a skewed star of whitish tissue and I remember none of this. My memory of course less than perfect. The sky darkening the one time I saw him, too long ago.
- It was you, wasn’t it?
- Mister?
His voice, too, not exactly as I have carried it in my mind: raspier, and slightly higher in pitch. I smile and ask which soccer team he supports. He says that he is a fan of Universitario. What a shame, I say.
He tells me to go fuck myself.
An advance of sorts.
There is a soft knock at the door. I ignore it, ask him about his father. He looks in my eyes, says that his father is fine. I nod, agree that the question was absurd, turn to evidence and crime.
Yes, the taxista says, he took the most recent victim to the market as she’d requested. No, he has no alibis for the nights of any of the murders—he was simply driving. No, he doesn’t know anything about blood in his taxi. No, he did not kill any of the four women. No, he has never killed anyone.
Then he smiles. There is no reason for him to smile. I look at my watch. Nine of my minutes have expired. I ask him if he knew that the evidence the police have in hand will ensure that the rest of his life will be spent somewhere small and dark and damp. He says that in that case there is no reason for him to discuss anything at all with a fat foreign fuck like me.
I congratulate him, and say that he is exactly right. Then I hit him not as hard as I could but hard enough and his cheekbone disintegrates against my fist and the chair upends. I grab him by the shoulders and drag him upright.
- Daniela Rocío Espinoza Farfán, I say. And Isabel Teresa Otero Manrique. And Beatriz Silvana Cordero Huarcay. Do you know what those three young women meant to me?
There is another knock, louder. Thirteen minutes gone. The taxista shrugs.
- Nothing, I say. Absolutely nothing. But the first victim, Pilar Seminario de Segovia—I would like to know what happened to her. I would like you to tell me. Now, please.
He stares at me. I come closer, lean down, stroke his thinning black hair.
- Tell me, I say.
He shakes his head. I lift his chin.
- Did you kill my wife?
He shakes his head again. I take him by the nape of the neck.
- Last chance, I say.
Again he smiles and I vault onto him, the chair collapses beneath us and he retches, strains to breathe and I stand and lift him and the chair, hurl them against the wall. He lands on his face and I am on him again swinging him and releasing and watching how he flies and crumples and falls and I have his head between my hands and press, not so hard at first and then harder and harder, and his eyes his mouth the wreck of his face and behind me noise and crashing and then weight and arms a mass of bodies and pulling but his skull I hear it begin to crack, my left arm wrenched back but my right arm free and I bring the knife from my pocket flick its blade open and reach but my legs fail and we fall, the taxista and I the men on top of us the knife twisting in my hand closing across my fingers blood spraying now hands at my throat and darkness.
I WAIT BEFORE OPENING MY EYES. There is a furrowed silence: our lungs pulling at the thin air. The wind is cold against my face. The stone beneath my back is still colder.
Looking now, and the sky is so bright and so blue, richer and richer as it climbs. The closest ridge is a slow gray surge of shadowed limestone. The wind ripples through the ichu grass to the far edge of this highland plain.
The highway is a hundred yards below us. Beyond it lies the Mantaro River, swift and gray, silent at this distance. Mariángel shifts on my chest, returns to sleep. Karina, stretched out on this same flat rock, also asleep. Armando’s eyes are closed but I believe he is awake and listening.
We are still fifteen or twenty miles from Jauja. An hour ago the driver said that the parts needed to repair the bus would be arriving at any moment. Most of the other passengers are huddled in groups on the turnout. A few have walked down to watch the water move.
I close my eyes again. Surely there are ways not to break what one touches. The stone begins to float, and it is not only here that this happens. The world expands in the dark, then contracts, tightens around me, I open my eyes and the man I beat nearly to death had nothing to do with the murders.
The scar around the base of my right index finger is bright red, and thick as a wedding band. I woke in the back of a police car with one hand wrapped in bandages and a plastic bag in my lap. The bag was full of ice, and contained another, smaller bag, which held my finger. Reátegui was driving. He turned when he heard me move, said that the doctor would not have any questions, that if anyone else asked I was to invent an accident in the kitchen.
We drove across the bridge into Castilla, skirted the airport, passed a small clinic. Reátegui stopped the car in the darkness half a block farther along. He said that he was sorry for what had happened, and that for both our sakes I was never to contact him again. He got out, walked around, and opened my door.
A tetanus shot, an IV, surgery. I looked from time to time and immediately looked away. First the bone. Then the tendons. Arteries and veins, nerves, a final flap of skin. Half a dozen medications and I took them precisely as indicated and last week I removed the plaster splint myself.
The finger is slightly shorter than before, often grows stiff, has not yet regained much feeling and perhaps never will. I rub at the scar, bend the finger back and forth. Cold weather will not be kind to it, but the winter is nearing its end.
There is a single cloud at the horizon, a shocking white above and varied grays beneath. I watch as the wind pushes it out of sight, and the seven weeks it took my hand to heal were spent mainly in my house. At first I watched television and listened to the radio and read the newspaper each day, searched for word of the man I had attacked: of his confession or denial, his apology or alibi, his rage at the foreigner who tried to murder him.
Early in the second week a police officer came to my door. He was no one I had ever seen. My new knife was tucked into the back of my waistband, its blade locked in place. He asked me to accompany him to his car. I said that regrettably I could neither leave my house nor invite him in. He said that a conversation needed to take place, and that his car was the only secure location. I said that I would like nothing more than to be of service but sadly could not accede to his request. He stared at me, and I stared back. I waited for him to reach for his pistol or nightstick but then he shrugged, apologized for disturbing my morning, said that as I had surely guessed he had come because of the streetlight.
For a time I could not reply. The neighbors had complained, he said. He grew angry when I asked if the complaints were recent, but the matter was settled with thirty soles. I thanked him for his vigilance and closed the door and fell.
The man I all but killed was never referenced in any article or newscast, never mentioned in conjunction with any crime. Instead two other men were arrested. The first was the stepfather of Daniela Rocío Espinoza Farfán. The second had attempted an abduction, had been too slow, had given the woman time enough to scream.
This second man had a fruit stand at the outdoor market. He is young and thin and dark, has long flowing hair and the lips of a magazine model. News anchors say that each night he stayed open a few minutes longer than the other vendors, and every so often, if the final person to visit his stand met certain criteria, he would offer her a ride. If she accepted, he would close his stand, and lift her bags, and most often nothing would happen: the women arrived safely home. Except for Isabel Teresa Otero Manrique. Except for Beatriz Silvana Cordero Huarcay. Microscopic shreds of their skin were found in crevices in the rear of his station wagon.
The police say that he has admitted to those murders, and his confession was sincere or coerced, there is no way to know. He claims to have had nothing to do with Pilar, and even if this is true I now wonder at how simply I chose to look only for the taxista, to triangulate from points not yet fixed.
Regardless of whether the police charge the vendor with killing my wife, he will almost certainly be convicted of the other two rapes and murders. He will be sentenced to life in prison, and there is a fair chance he will serve his time at Sarita Colonia Penitentiary in El Callao. Of course she was his patron saint as well.
He is too beautiful to last for very long.
There have been no more murders in Piura.
- Inca Kola?
Standing before me is a girl perhaps ten years old. Bronze skin and bright red cheeks. Long straight black hair in braids. White blouse, loaded carry-cloth knotted at her collarbone, black skirt and white underskirts billowing, black rubber sandals. It is not clear where she has come from or how she knew that we were here—there are no buildings visible in any direction.
- Inca Kola? Pepsi-Cola? Sprite?
She swivels the load around to her front, balances it on a stone, removes one bottle after another. Armando opens his eyes, buys a Sprite. Karina wakes, sees what has been offered, thanks the girl and goes back to sleep. The girl swings the bundle onto her back and makes her way down the hill.
It is rumored that soon Inca Kola will cease to be the Peruvian national beverage, that the company will be bought by Coca-Cola and ruined. I told Karina that more probably nothing would change after the purchase, that Inca Kola would still be the color of urine, would still taste like bubble gum. She said that if I hated it so much I should probably drink less of it, and she is right.
Another cloud, longer and thinner. On the day I first learned of the vendor’s arrest, I asked Socorro to call the police station. The officer who answered said that Reátegui was on vacation, would not speculate as to when he might return, declined to discuss the murders as such but confirmed that in regard to this particular case, there had been no previous arrests.
It seems most likely that the man I all but killed works or worked with Reátegui, that the two of them used my desire for revenge to defraud me, that Reátegui had meant to stop me sooner, and I wonder why they bothered with my surgery. Were they afraid that the loss of a finger would make me unstable, perhaps problematically so? Such a fear would not have been unreasonable.
It is also possible that the man was simply a taxista, innocent of all crimes, that Reátegui arrested him for no reason other than to give me someone plausible to hurt. If this is the case, the man cannot hope for the police to bring him justice. It will be very easy for him to learn my name, to find me, and now Mariángel wakes. I take her from the carrier, set her beside me on the great flat stone. She blinks, smiles. She pokes at my stomach. She stands, grabs at my chin, wags it up and down, kisses it. She backs away and begins turning in slow circles, her arms outstretched.