The Dancer Upstairs (16 page)

Criminals fed on the chaos. In the richer districts families prolonged their holidays, leaving their houses inadequately guarded. Sylvina's friend Patricia returned from Paracas to discover the contents of her living room missing, down to the brass light switches.

Soldiers patrolled the streets to meet the unseen threat. Tanks rolled into the square outside the Palace and took up positions from which they rarely moved. At night you saw the gun barrels aiming at the stars, the drivers watching the buildings through night-glasses. Somewhere, inextinguishable in that darkness, murkier than any vapour, lay Ezequiel. But the army hadn't been trained to swat shadows. The soldiers couldn't grasp what they were fighting. Desperate for a severed head to brandish to the crowd, they could produce no one except Hilda Cortado, the nineteen-year-old pamphleteer. She was executed – God knows how – keeping her silence to the last.

Three weeks after the blackout at the Teatro de Paz, General Lache lost patience. In a crude parroting of Quesada's assassination, he exacted his reprisal on a group of drama students.

I have no doubt the Arguedas Players were innocent. I know that the man in the beret who booked the theatre for Blackout had mentioned the Catholic University. A student theatrical group, remembered the manager. But, crucially, no name. My men had three times interrogated members of the Arguedas Players, the university's sole drama group, and absolved them of suspicion. Humiliated, dishonoured, furious, General Lache reopened their case.

On the first Tuesday night in March, due to the director's car running out of petrol, the Arguedas Players started their audition for Mother Courage thirty-five minutes late.

The group which assembled in a lecture room of the agronomy faculty comprised ten men and six women aged between eighteen and thirty, the number increasing to seventeen with the arrival of the director, an untidy, square-faced man. Apologizing energetically, he unpacked from his wife's shopping basket five large bottles of Cristal beer and a pillar of paper cups.

At seven forty-five the caretaker looked in to tell them he was locking up at nine. He had the drama group marked down until eleven o'clock, in fact, but the booking had been made before the curfew order. With little to do, he asked if he might watch from the back. The director saw no objection. The caretaker would be the only survivor.

At seven fifty-five Vera, a nervous, striking-looking girl who hoped to play the lead, began reading from the text in a sing-song voice. She spoke a few lines and stopped. She stubbed out her cigarette and, after a cough, began from the top, less mechanically this time.

She had read for perhaps a minute when there came a crash from the corridor. The door burst open and twenty men in black masks kicked their way through the chairs towards her.

Vera, unsure whether to continue, sought the director's cue. The script was slapped from her hand. An arm was clamped over her mouth, ripping her blouse at the collar. Someone forced a sweater over her head and, with her arms twisted behind her back, she was bundled outside.

On his hands and knees under the table the director screamed for help until one of the masked men jerked him out backwards by the ankles, smashing his nose on the floor.

Two minutes later, a post-graduate student ran down from the library into an empty room. Scattered about the floor he found women's shoes, spectacles, pens, cigarettes and a script foamy with beer. At the back sat the caretaker, unhurt.

Not one of the Players had been seen since.

General Lache laid the kidnap at Ezequiel's door. Few believed him. The press interviewed distraught relatives and lovers – in one article mentioning by name the officer believed to have led the squad. It made no difference. That was the terrible thing. Among Sylvina's friends it was felt that the army wouldn't have acted without a reason. Therefore, those drama students must have been guilty.

“But, Sylvina, if we kidnap people without proof we're no better than Ezequiel. Why choose us, rather than him?”

She had come to equate me with the problem, not as part of the solution. “I don't care. It shows something's being done.”

While the army retaliated – searching schools, arresting the innocents, filling prisons – I sat in a parked car and watched one or other of the three houses listed in the Filofax. About the addresses there could be no dispute. They were bricks and mortar. They existed.

Title checks couldn't tell me whether the houses belonged to friends or enemies. They were innocuous, well-kept buildings in the south and east of the city. They were lived in by a chiropodist, a professor of ethnology from the Catholic University, and an American in the fish business, recently married to a pretty girl from Cajamarca.

Maybe these people were potential targets, people Ezequiel wanted to kill. Maybe they were his assassins. I had no idea. I just knew some violence was in store, some catastrophe, and I didn't want to risk questioning anyone in case we scared off Ezequiel. For this reason I had not relinquished the Filofax to the army. I felt I couldn't do anything for the time being except watch and wait for something to happen.

So that's what I did, day after day, night after night, collecting the rubbish bags, sitting in the car, looking for signs, watching.

The driver's seat became a sanctuary. I never used the same car twice in succession. I hung a dark blue suit against the window and leaned against it, pretending to sleep, or I read a newspaper as though I were waiting for someone. I knew the form of many racehorses. The Lova, On the Rocks, Last Dust, Petits Pois, Sweet Naggy, Without a Paddle, Zog, Nite Dancer.

I had a lot of time to think. It upset me, the way my unit had been treated. We might on paper share responsibility with the army for Ezequiel's case, but in reality we were not governed by compatible regulations. We had ceased to be the people's guardians. To my counterpart in the military, a burly colonel who reminded me of the cadet at the Police Academy who led the bullies, we were indistinguishable from the mob.

Calderón, by relying on the army, had marginalized us. Yet, pushed out to the edge, I found Ezequiel coming into a perspective that disarmed me.

I remember, in one of the books I would find on his shelf, Ezequiel had underlined a saying of Mao: “People turn into their opposites.” It is curious, but if you have been looking obsessively for someone – if, as I had, you had been steeped in Ezequiel day and night – after a while you do start to assume the characteristics of the person you are hunting.

Look at my hand. I can warn you I am about to touch this vase – and I do so. Or this book. But what if I told you of occasions when my hand didn't respond, when I mimed a bodily memory independent of my self – and instead of turning a page I watched with a grinding horror as this hand glided over my chest, to the base of my neck, searching for an itch which I couldn't feel but which my fingers desired, in spite of everything I might do to prevent them, to scratch?

I don't mean that I had moved any closer to finding Ezequiel. His character still seemed to me impenetrable – like the despair into which he cast us. But as I sat in that car I had the sensation that I stalked nearer to the rim of some understanding.

Then, at the end of March, there was a swirl in the air – and I knew I'd disturbed him.

I had been watching the house of the American. He'd made his fortune in the States from pond-raised catfish. Ten months earlier, he had come to this country to buy some Amazonian strains and to walk the Inca trail. At the travel agency in Cajamarca he met a very sexy, large-breasted girl, a model. They married, and in February flew down to the capital. A love story, he told his friends. He'd never left America before and within six weeks he was married! But it wasn't a love story. You see – and I'm not sure how well I have conveyed this to you – Ezequiel's assassins could be anyone. One day you might switch on the television and find the killer was your daughter. Another day, it might be your wife.

I spoke with him a few hours after he had found out, a fat man in a yellow golf shirt and tight-fitting Sansabelt slacks. He had a straw-coloured beard and expensive glasses. Beneath his glasses his eyes were bloodshot.

He leaned over Sucre's desk, both hands flat on the desktop, talking uncontrollably. I was on my way to the basement when I heard him. Recognizing his clothes, I paused.

He had reached a point in his story which caused him to rub his eyes. He was telling Sucre how he'd been making dinner. He'd taken his carrot soup out of the microwave. In the act of settling down to watch the television news, he'd looked up and gone through hot flushes because there on screen, smiling, chic, looking out from the latest Vogue, was his wife. She was a model, see. That's how she paid her way. Then comes this news she's been captured. Oh no, he thought. They've got her, she's been caught in a car bomb, and they've got her. But it wasn't that. It was crazy, it was totally crazy. They were saying she was a terrorist. A killer.

He held Sucre by the shoulders, shaking him. “You've made a mistake, bud. She's not one of them. She's never voted in her goddamn life.” He questioned whether she knew the President from her ass. “You've gotta let me see her, pal.”

“Sucre,” I intervened. “Let me.”

Hearing my voice, he turned, his arms subsiding.

“You're American?”

“I reckon so.”

“Where from?”

“We've got houses in Jupiter, Florida and Lake Tahoe. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Didn't William James come from there?” My father had been an admirer.

“I have no fucking idea.”

I took him to the video room. He sat meekly down while I poured him coffee, added lots of sugar, and inserted a videotape.

He was close to tears. His wife was innocent, he kept repeating. He was one hundred per cent certain. He believed all she told him. They had been married seven months, were so happy.

The screen brightened, filling with jerky images filmed by Sucre through the windscreen of our car. A slim woman with long, stockinged legs was climbing into a black Suzuki jeep. With both hands she hefted a Puma bag, sliding it on to the passenger seat.

“That's our car!” He was childish in his recognition. “She's going to her aerobics class.”

I fast-forwarded the tape, chasing the jeep through the afternoon traffic.

“She has this studio in San Isidro, Calle Castanos.”

Out along the Malecón, past streets of substantial houses, their turrets rising over the walls, past Calle Castanos.

“She's picking up a friend. She does that sometimes. They take turns.”

Out along the Pan-Americana, the dust bowl visible beneath the hoardings advertising Hush Puppies and swimming pools.

“Some of them live as far out as La Molina.”

Past rows of nondescript, squat brick houses with tin roofs.

“I don't know, maybe she's going to the Inca Market.”

Past derelict, window-shattered warehouses from the days when we were a country.

“I guess she's meeting someone at the airport.”

Past featureless districts, as yet unnamed, through untidy grids of adobe hovels, without electricity, without water.

Into more featureless districts, the hovels the same pigeon-grey as the dust, not adobe any longer but rush-matting, a family to each roofless hovel, five hundred new families a day, jumping down off the lorries, dazed by the journey, run out of their valleys, no one to turn to, terrified.

By now we've slipped back so she doesn't see us. We've got her in the zoom. She bounces off the road, trailing a dust-devil through a bank of rush-mat shacks, stopping outside a low white shed, one of the few concrete buildings in sight.

“Sometimes she does charity work.” The words could hardly be heard. His face was shrinking. I could see the wide pores in his nose.

She looks round, hauls the bag off the seat, and without knocking enters the building.

I fast-forwarded again. We'd waited a minute before going inside.

The tape wasn't well filmed and once or twice crossing a slippery tiled floor Sucre lost focus. But no one could mistake the look of the woman kneeling there as she jerked round to see us, nor the bag from which she had begun to unpack three sub-machine guns.

“Paulita,” he said, a hand over his mouth, not believing it.

I had been on my way to the basement to interrogate her further. It was time I returned there. There was no point in telling the American, but this evening we would have to turn Paulita over to the military.

Already I'd spent six hours with his wife. So far she'd said only four words, repeated over and over again.

“Viva El Presidente Ezequiel!”

8

On the next day my bank refused me credit.

Have you been in that situation? I notice you use a Mastercard to pay Emilio. But supposing tonight he came over and said, “Sorry, señor, can't take this” – think how you'd feel.

The cash dispenser was near my office. When it refused to return my card I stood absorbing the flashing message, the cramps of impotence. Behind me concerned voices asked, “What's wrong? Is it out of cash?” Shamed, I walked down Calle Irigoyen. A couple, smartly dressed, entered a restaurant. What would the meal cost them? A hundred pesos? Across the road a man inserted his tip through a taxi's window. Inside a shop, a woman decided on a dishwasher. Everywhere my eyes settled on people spending money. How could they afford it?

I counted my change. Three pesos. Enough for a pair of underpants.

Perhaps I could cash a cheque. Or request an advance on my salary. I saw myself reduced to telling Sucre I'd left my wallet behind, and might I borrow twenty pesos to tide me over?