Red April (2 page)

“He's not waiting for anything anymore, Señor Prosecutor. But don't worry, I'm going to communicate to the captain that you appeared in person at our office with regard to the corresponding homicide.”

Without knowing exactly how, the Associate District Prosecutor was allowing himself to be led to the door by the subordinate's words. He tried to respond, but it was too late to speak. He was on the street. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away perspiration. He did not know exactly what to do, if he should forget procedure or wait for the captain. But Monday was too long to wait. They were going to demand a punctual report from him. He would go alone. And submit a complaint to the General Administration of Police, with a copy to the Office of the Provincial Prosecutor.

He thought again of the corpse, and that reminded him of his mother. He had not gone to see her. He would have to stop by his house on the way back from the hospital, to see if she was all right. He crossed the city in fifteen minutes, went into the Military Hospital, and looked for the burn unit or the morgue. He felt disoriented among the crippled, the beaten, the suffering. He decided to ask a nurse who, with an attitude of competent authority, had just dispatched two old men.

“Dr. Faustino Posadas, please?”

The nurse looked at him with contempt. Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar wondered if it would be necessary to show his official documents. The nurse entered an office and came out five minutes later.

“The doctor has gone out. Have a seat and wait for him.”

“I … I just came for a paper. I need a forensic report.”

“Generally I don't know anything about that. But have a seat, please.”

“I am the Associate Dist …”

It was useless. The nurse had gone out to restrain a woman who was screaming in pain. She was not hurt. She was simply screaming in pain. The prosecutor sat down between an ancient woman weeping in Quechua and a policeman with a bleeding cut on his hand. He opened his paper. The headline announced the government's fraudulent scheme for the elections in April. He began to read with annoyance, thinking that these kinds of suspicions ought to be brought to the Ministry of Justice for the appropriate decision before being published in the press and causing unfortunate misunderstandings.

As he scanned the page, it seemed that the recruit at the entrance was observing him. No. Not now. He had looked away. Perhaps he had not even looked at him. He continued reading. Every six minutes, more or less, a nurse would emerge from a door and call one of the people in the waiting room, an armless man or a child with polio who would leave his place with groans of pain and sighs of relief. On the third page, the prosecutor felt that the police officer beside him was trying to read over his shoulder. When he turned, the policeman was absorbed in looking at his wound. Chacaltana closed the paper and put it in his lap, drumming with his fingers on the paper to while away the time.

Dr. Posadas did not come. The prosecutor wanted to say something to the nurse but did not know what to say. He looked up. Across from him a young woman was sobbing. Her face was bruised and red, and one eye was swollen shut. She rested her battered face on her mother's shoulder. She looked unmarried.

Chacaltana wondered what to do about unmarried rape victims in the legal system. At first he had asked that rapists be imprisoned, according to the law. But the injured parties protested: if the attacker went to jail, the victim would not be able to marry
him and restore her lost honor. This imposed the need, then, to reform the penal code. Satisfied with his reasoning, the prosecutor decided to send the criminal tribunal in Huamanga another brief in this regard, attaching a communication pressing for a response at the earliest opportunity. A harsh voice with a northern accent pulled him out of his reflections:

“Prosecutor Chacaltana?”

A short man wearing glasses, badly shaven and with greasy hair, stood beside him eating chocolate. His medical jacket was stained with mustard, creole sauce, and something brown, but he kept his shoulders clean and white to conceal the dandruff that fell from his head like snow.

“I'm Faustino Posadas, the forensic pathologist.”

He held out a chocolate-smeared hand, which the prosecutor shook. Then he led him down a dark corridor filled with suffering. Some people approached, moaning, pleading for help, but the doctor pointed them to the first waiting room with the nurse, please, I only see dead people.

“I haven't seen you before,” said the doctor as they walked into a different pavilion, with another waiting room. “Are you from Lima?”

“I come from Ayacucho but lived in Lima since I was a boy. I was transferred here a year ago.”

The pathologist laughed.

“From Lima to Ayacucho? You must have behaved very badly, Señor Chacaltana …” Then he cleared his throat. “If … you'll permit me to say so.”

The Associate District Prosecutor had never misbehaved. He had done nothing bad, he had done nothing good, he had never done anything not stipulated in the statutes of his institution.

“I requested the transfer. My mother is here, and I had not been back in twenty years. But now that there is no terrorism, everything is quiet, isn't it?”

The pathologist stopped in front of a door across from a room filled with women in labor in the obstetrics wing. He transferred the chocolate to his other hand and took a key out of his pocket.

“Quiet, of course.”

He opened the door and they went in. Posadas turned on the white neon lights, which blinked for a while before they went on. One of the bulbs continued to flicker intermittently. In the office was a table covered with a sheet. And beneath the sheet was a shape. Chacaltana gave a start. He prayed it was nothing but a table.

“I … only came to receive the relevant docu …”

“The certificate, yes.”

Dr. Posadas closed the door and walked to a desk. He began to rummage through papers.

“I thought it would be here … Just a moment, please …”

He continued rummaging. Chacaltana could not take his eyes off the sheet. The doctor noticed and asked:

“Have you seen it?”

“No! I … took the statement of the officers in charge.”

“The police? They didn't even see it.”

“What?”

“They told the owner of the place to put the body in a bag before they went in. I don't know what they could have said.”

“Ah.”

Posadas stopped rummaging through his papers for a moment. He turned to the prosecutor.

“You should see it.”

Chacaltana thought the proceedings were taking too long.

“I only need the rep …”

But the doctor walked to the table and lifted the veil. The burned body looked at them. It had clenched teeth but little else in that black mass was recognizable as being of human origin. It did not smell like a dead body. It smelled like kerosene lamps. The light flickered.

“They didn't leave us much to work with, huh?” Posadas smiled.

Chacaltana thought again about going to see his mother. He tried to recover his concentration. He wiped away perspiration. It was not the same perspiration as before. It was cold.

“Why is it kept in obstetrics?”

“Lack of space. Besides, it doesn't matter. The morgue doesn't have a refrigerator anymore. It broke down in the blackouts.”

“The blackouts ended years ago.”

“Not in our morgue.”

Posadas went back to the papers on his desk. Chacaltana walked around the table, trying to look elsewhere. The burning was irregular. Although the face still had certain characteristics of a face, the two legs had become a single dark extension. Toward the top of the remaining side were some twisted protuberances, like branches of a fossilized bush. Chacaltana felt a wave of nausea but tried to disguise something so unprofessional. Posadas stared at him with slanted, suspicious little eyes, like the eyes of a rat.

“Are you going to carry out the investigation? What about the military cops?”

“The gentlemen of the armed forces,” the prosecutor corrected, “have no reason to intervene. This case does not fall under military jurisdiction.”

Posadas seemed surprised to hear it. He said dryly:

“All cases fall under military jurisdiction.”

There was something challenging in Posadas's tone. Chacaltana attempted to assert his authority.

“We still need to verify the facts in the case. Technically, this may even turn out to be an accident …”

“An accident?”

He gave a dry laugh that made him cough and looked at the corpse as if to share the joke with him. He tossed the chocolate wrapper on the floor and took out a pack of cigarettes. He offered
one to the prosecutor, who refused with a gesture. The pathologist lit a cigarette, exhaled the smoke with another cough, and said in a serious tone:

“A male apparently between forty and fifty years old. White—at least, whitish. Two days ago he was taller.”

The Associate District Prosecutor felt obliged to display professional distance. He felt cold. Tremulously he said:

“Any … clue as to the identity of the deceased?”

“There are no physical marks or personal effects left. If he was carrying his national ID, it must be in there.”

Chacaltana observed the body that seemed to dissolve as he looked at it. A black paste saturated his memory.

“Why do you discount an accident?”

Posadas seemed to be waiting for the question with indulgent pride, like a teacher with the dunce of the class. He left his desk, took up a position beside the table, and began to explain as he pointed at various parts of the body:

“First, he was doused with kerosene and set on fire. There are remains of fuel all over the body …”

“He might have perished in a fire. Someone was afraid to report it and hid the body. The campesinos tend to fear that the police …”

“But that wasn't enough,” Posadas continued, apparently not hearing him. “He was burned even more.”

He allowed the silence to heighten the dramatic effect of his words. His rat's eyes were waiting for Chacaltana's question:

“What do you mean more?”

“No one is left like this just because he's been set on fire, Señor Prosecutor. Tissues resist. Many people survive even total burns by fuel. Automobile accidents, forest fires … But this …”

He inhaled smoke and exhaled it over the table, at the height of the black face. The man lying there seemed to be smoking. The light flickered. The doctor concluded:

“I've never seen anybody so burned. I've never seen anything so burned.”

He went back to his papers without covering the deceased. The report he was looking for was under a lamp. He handed it to the prosecutor. It had chocolate smears at one corner of the page. Chacaltana glanced at it rapidly and verified that it did not have three copies, but he thought he could make them himself, it would not be a serious breach. He waved good-bye. He wanted to get out of there quickly.

“There's something else,” the pathologist stopped him. “Do you see this? These stubs like claws on the side? Those are fingers. They twist like that because of the heat. They're only on one side. In fact, if you observe carefully, the body looks unbalanced. At first glance it's difficult to see on a body in this condition, but the man was missing an arm.”

“A one-armed man.”

Chacaltana put the paper in his briefcase and closed it.

“No. He wasn't one-armed. At least not until Tuesday. There are traces of blood around the shoulder.”

“He was injured, perhaps?”

“Señor Prosecutor, his right arm was removed. They tore it out by the roots or cut it off with an ax, or maybe a saw. They went through bone and flesh from one side to the other. That isn't easy to do. It's as if a dragon attacked him.”

It was true. The part corresponding to the shoulder seemed sunken, as if there were no longer an articulation there, as if there were no longer anything to articulate. Chacaltana asked himself how they could have done it. Then he preferred not to ask himself more questions. The light flickered again. The prosecutor broke the silence:

“Well, I suppose all this is recorded in the report …”

“Everything. Including the matter of the forehead. Have you seen his forehead?”

Chacaltana tried to ask a question in order not to see the forehead. He tried to think of a subject. The physician did not take his eyes off him. Finally, he lied:

“Yes.”

“His head seems to have been farther away from the heat source, but not by accident. After burning him, the killer cut a cross on his forehead with a very large knife, perhaps a butcher's knife.”

“Very interesting …”

Chacaltana felt dizzy. He thought it was time to leave. He wanted to say good-bye with a professional, dignified gesture:

“One last question, Dr. Posadas. Where could a body be burned so severely? In a baker's oven … in a gas explosion?”

Posadas tossed his cigarette on the floor. He stepped on it and covered the body. Then he took out another chocolate. He bit into it before he replied:

“In hell, Señor Prosecutor.”

sometimes i talk to them. allways.

they remember me. and i remember them because i was won of them.

i still am.

but now they talk moor. they look for me. they ask me for things. they lick my ears with their hot tungues. they want to touch me. they hurt me.

its a signal.

its the moment. yes. its coming.

we will burn up time and the fire will make a new world.

a new time for them.

for us.

for everybody.

Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar left the hospital feeling out of sorts. He was pale. Terrorists, he thought. Only they were capable of something like this. They had come back. He did not know how to sound the alarm, or even if he should. He wiped away perspiration with the handkerchief his mother had given him. The dead man. His mother. He could not go to see her in this state. He had to calm down.

He walked aimlessly. In an automatic reaction, he returned to the Plaza de Armas. The image of the burned body flickered in his mind. He had to sit down and drink something. Yes. That would be the best thing. He walked toward his usual restaurant, El Huamanguino, to have a
mate
. He went in. In one corner, a television set was playing a black-and-white pirated copy of
Titanic
. A girl about twenty was behind the counter. He did not even see her. She was pretty. He sat down.