Hot Sur

10. Interview with Ian Rose

“The whole Colorado chapter was completely insane,” Rose says after three hours of talking. “Miles and miles of road, going round and round to the last circle of Hell, with snow falling diagonally, the flakes striking the windshield like coins. The three dogs in the back, drunken with so much sleep, and me at the helm following the instructions of María Paz, who in turn was guided by the stories she had heard about Sleepy Joe’s other loves.”

They were sometimes gruesome secrets and sometimes pornographic ones, some likely real, others undoubtedly invented, and they snared María Paz in a spiral of jealousy and of wanting to know more. One of the recurring characters in these tall tales was Wendy Mellons, owner of a tavern called The Terrible Espinosas. Looking for that woman, Rose and María Paz had gone from bar to bar in the hunting lodges of the hamlets in Cangilones on the old bed of the Huerfano River: Animas, Santo Acacio, Ojito de Caballo, Purgatorio, and Garcia Mesa — little more than ghost villages bathed in the dust of the dry river to reach the ravine where once the legendary Chavez Town had stood.

In Chavez Town, they found only ashes, pieces of broken pottery, and a chilly silence. It was a cold but sonorous silence, according to María Paz, who immediately sensed that something was resonating, and although she could not tell exactly what it was, it most clearly made her break out in goose bumps, and her eyes welled with tears. Echoes? she thought. Rather a thread of smoke far in the distance that clutched her heart.

“Makes one feel like praying,” she said.

“Can’t hurt,” Rose responded.

The few people who had crossed their path had warned them that in those parts it would be difficult to find someone, because the dead were the only ones who had not gone off at some point. Along with the dead, the shadows of the Penitent Brothers haunted the place, they who once had flayed their own backs with whips in their own Via Crucis, climbing the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo, those mountains studded with sharp boulders that they had christened themselves after. María Paz let out a long sigh. She mentioned how much she loved all those old Hispanic place names: Alamosa, how pretty, and Bonanza, like on TV, Candelaria, Lejanías, Animas, Perdidas, and Culebra Creek. She blurted out that when she had a son, she would name him Íñigo or Blas. Rose listened and remembered what Dummy had told them — that María Paz would never have children because of damage they had done to her insides in the prison hospital. Every cloud has a silver lining, Rose thought. At least no child would have to suffer the name of some ancient swashbuckler.

“This is where Sleepy Joe is from,” said María Paz, standing on a promontory overlooking the vast emptiness. Her hair flowing in the breeze caught a cluster of snowflakes and made her seem like a cherry blossoming in the wrong season. “This is his land,” she said. “Born and raised here. It’s no wonder he’s like that.”

“Like what?” Rose responded sharply, the harsh tone he used whenever she talked about her brother-in-law with a nostalgic air. “Like what?”

“Like he is, always chasing echoes.”

Night was beginning to fall over the Sangre de Cristo, and they began searching for a motel that would take them and the dogs — although it would be wrong to say that night fell, as if in a single stroke of a guillotine; rather the darkness appeared early and made headway slowly, almost moment by moment. According to Sleepy Joe, the fame of The Terrible Espinosas was so widespread that it reached New Mexico. It was the most amazing and jubilant tavern, no better party around the San Luis Valley, with live music by Los Tigres del Desierto and at dawn, a serenade by the trio from yesteryear, Los Inolvidables. Relying on these stories, María Paz encouraged Rose not to give up. Such a famed place couldn’t escape them. All they had to do was keep asking until someone gave them a clue.

“A most exclusive brothel, according to María Paz, but no one had heard of it,” Rose tells me. “As it was, we caught up with Wendy Mellons in the office of a Reiki practitioner, where she waited among other patients to be attended. She told us later that she visited the place every two weeks for an energy alignment and hands-on therapy for her swollen legs.”

She must have been pretty in her youth, but old age had snuck up on her, and she was wrapped in a thick winter coat, making it impossible to guess at her physical appearance, if not to say it was a bulky package that still may have been consistent with someone who in her heyday had wreaked havoc. It was no accident that her fighting name was Wendy Mellons. But the years had passed, the law of gravity prevailed, and when things had started to collapse, Wendy Mellons had abandoned that nickname, apparently abandoning her old ways also. She quit her job and moved to Cañon City, where she had lived for years working as a teller at the box office of the Rex Theatre. Rose could see plainly why Sleepy Joe would cling to that woman, who must have been for him like a second mother. The second mother, the coveted breast, the homeland, childhood, days gone by, memories, the first landscape, possibly first intercourse, ultimately, the only roots. In fact, Wendy Mellons told them that she was exactly the same age as Sleepy Joe’s mother, who had died young. She received them in her current home in the outskirts of the village of Santo Acacio, which itself was on the outskirts of everything.

“I thought it would be more like the boudoir of a madam, but the place was rather like a cemetery of tires,” Rose tells me.

Past the stacks of tires, they came to a habitable room with an attached shed, in which the snow came through a crack in the roof. Past this, there was a backyard with a small melting furnace, disposable pieces of junk chucked here and there, and a pair of skinny dogs scurrying around like rats. Wendy Mellons lived with a son, Bubba, a drug addict and thief of manhole covers that he hammered, pounded, tossed in ashes, and sold as antique iron pots to tourists. A wood-burning stove heated the habitable part of the structure. Clothing was piled on a rickety rocking chair, dishes with crusted leftover food were stacked on a table, and a bolt-action rifle hung at the head of a bronze cot. A variety of other objects covered with smoke and grease lingered in the corners of the room, including a pair of deer traps, a tricycle, a washing machine without a door, a box full of used windshield wipers, a blacksmith’s bench, and other tools.

Wendy Mellons wore a camisole, so now Rose could examine her in detail: her eyes were rimmed with kohl like some Babylonian whore; her rings were so embedded in her fingers they could probably never be pulled off, even with heavy greasing; she had chipped red nails, olive skin, and what could only be described as a heavy-duty body. There was no sense that anything about her had dried up from lack of use, but rather as if everything had been steeped in oil, smelling of incense and reminiscent of a sacred Mass. Rose could not take his eyes off the ripples of her skin, which created folds where moss could germinate. Impossible not to be reminded of Mandra X. According to Rose, both were heavyweights, each in her own style, and if placed face-to-face in the ring, you would have to bet on a draw.

The walls of the house were coated in newspaper, presumably to conserve heat, and few pictures hung from nails.

“The family of my comadre,” Wendy Mellons said pointing to a small photograph faded by age and sunlight.

“It was Sleepy Joe’s Slovak clan,” Rose tells me. “And there in the family portrait, in that old photograph, there he was, Sleepy Joe, the guy who killed my son. It was the first time I had seen a photograph of him. It’s a kick to the gut, let me tell you, to finally see the face of the man who killed your son. But there was something off; the person in that picture was not a man but a child. In fact, he was the smallest of the seven siblings. Don’t ask me why, but the image of that child got all jumbled in my mind with the memory of Cleve as a child. A very emotional fusion that completely upset me. I couldn’t channel all the hatred and urgency for vengeance toward the child in that photograph. I can’t really explain it. My hatred bounced off that child and boomeranged right back to me, forcing me to swallow mouthfuls of my own bile. So I stopped looking at the child and focused on the father, who was behind him, a gloomy man with drunken eyes and a cauliflower nose. I was able to hate him right away, wanted him dead. On this man, I could unleash my rage, perhaps because I saw Sleepy Joe as an adult in him. Moreover, at that moment, I could also wish for the death of the child Sleepy Joe, for the sole purpose of hurting his father. I had been robbed of my son, and from the depths of my soul, I wanted to rob him of his.”

When María Paz and Wendy Mellons chatted with their backs to him, Rose took a photograph of that picture, and now he hands me a copy. I hold it in my hand and scrutinize it, knowing that in it are encased the seeds of everything that would happen later: the germ of this story. In the picture of the picture, there is a large peasant family, Caucasian, mired in poverty and foreigners to joy. The father dominates the image of the group, with his broad shoulders and stony expression. He wears a turtleneck and has a biblical beard, looking like a middle-aged Tolstoy, but rattier. The mother is sitting in the foreground. The dark scarf that conceals her hair and neck makes her seem an almost monastic figure. Surrounding the couple and not counting Sleepy Joe, there are six children, all of them hardened by work. They’re not really children but short adults — have never known childhood. They have golden hair parted in the middle, the girls with braids and the boys with bowl cuts. Two people seem out of place in the group, the mother and the youngest son. Both seem separated, isolated, as if enclosed in an invisible bubble.

There is something beautiful about them, both in the woman and child, and that also sets them apart from the rest. But what’s different about them? Almost nothing, some minor detail, a slightly higher arch of the eyebrows maybe, or cheekbones that are an iota more pronounced, the brow a few millimeters wider, the chin a few less. Or perhaps what is perceived as beauty is only a matter of contrast. There was something lacking in the flat humorless faces of the others that failed to mask a general vacuity, the larger fossil of the angry father, the smaller fossils of the resigned children.

There was another suggestive detail, similarly revealing. To be able to fit everyone in the photo, members of the family had bunched together. Yet none of them touched another; instead they were separated by tiny spaces that signaled the harsh loneliness of each figure. The exception again was the boy Joe, resting confidently on his mother’s knees. That child was not afraid of his mother; on the contrary, it would seem he took refuge in her against the others.

“No doubt there was something lovely about the woman,” Rose tells me. “A battered loveliness, almost destroyed by the husband’s merciless beatings, the marks evident on the children as well.”

According to María Paz, the woman was just someone who lived murmuring prayers and rarely bathed, but her character gained some depth with the details supplied by Wendy Mellons. Her name was Danika Draha, and she wore her hair in a braid tight and stout as a rope. She was perennially pining for the mountain country she had left behind in her homeland, because she was convinced that it was through those forests that one reached heaven. There were no signs that she missed her parents or her siblings, but the longing for those mountains often made her weep, and it was impossible for her to adjust to the landscape of Colorado. Since coming to the New World, everything in her life had been vulgar, sad, and ugly. Everything except her youngest son, the bright and beautiful boy whom she had not named Joe (that nickname came later, and she had never approved of it) but Jaromil, which in their language meant spring. In that creature, she invested all her affections, and she lived to please him. According to Wendy Mellons, little Jaromil was the only green branch in the withered tree that Danika Draha had become.

“Jaromil. That was Sleepy Joe’s real name,” Rose tells me. “And no doubt how he must be listed as such in his official documents.”

Mother and son prayed together, visited the church daily, fasted, painted Easter eggs, in December put up the Nativity scene, and during Holy Week were always in the first row for the reenactment of the Crucifixion that the Latinos in town put on every year. Liturgy by liturgy, they forged a religion in common as a sort of homeland in common, apart from the rest of the tribe — a world of its own made of candles, silicon, cassocks, confessionals, prodigious saints, sacrifice and redemption, blood, miracles, alms, and chanting. The mother was so attached to the child that she breastfed him until he was nine years old. “You’re sucking the life out of her,” the father said to his youngest every time he saw the boy latched on to the breast, and beat him away. On the death of the mother, the father laid the entire blame on the coddled child, the favorite, the spoiled one. The youngest. “He sucked the life right out,” he told anyone who would listen, “this dastardly child sucked and sucked on my wife till there was no life left in her.”

“The tragedy for Jaromil began with her death,” Wendy Mellons told Rose. “Imagine the loneliness of that child who went from being the light of his mother’s eyes to the most insignificant one in the home, which was no longer a home, because no one ever again provided or cared for the children or hardly fed them. One by one, the sons soon disappeared to find work and a life in the world. None of them could tolerate the drunkenness and anger of the father for long. The daughters also left as they quickly married, which wasn’t hard since white healthy flesh was coveted and in demand. Greg, the oldest, stayed behind to watch over the youngest, until he too eventually left. He went off to become a cop and did not reappear till years later. And Jaromil? Under the bed, in a ditch, in the top of a tree. He learned to hide every time the father came home, to avoid the ridiculing and the beatings.”

At some point in his childhood, Sleepy Joe understood that he could use the mystical to protect himself, or maybe he immersed himself in the mystical traditions learned from his mother. He went into a trance every time the priest raised the Host at Mass. His eyes rolled back in his head during these outbursts of love for God. He remained in the trance for minutes; no one could shake him or pinch him out of it, hence the nickname he acquired about this time: Sleepy Joe, in tandem with the reputation that came after a handful of these episodes. His looks didn’t hurt. From the time he was a little boy, he was pretty and alluring, like a little Jesus, people said, especially because of the blond curls cascading on his shoulders. His father, however, was not moved by his curls, and he made Sleepy Joe’s life impossible, telling him he was nothing but a prissy little girl. The townspeople’s reactions were very different, though. A few of them began to whisper that he was a holy child, others that he was suffering from some mysterious illness. Eventually most of them began isolating themselves from him, because they believed he was an instrument of bad luck.

“One thing is for sure,” Wendy Mellons told Rose, “if they had not ruined that boy’s religious career, he would have become the pope, because he did not lack fervor and dedication, which he still has to this day. But they blocked him from his destiny and messed everything up. When the whites cast him aside, he sought to ingratiate himself with the Latinos, but they too rejected him. In the end, the only ones who remained true to him were us, the whores, and he grew up among us.”

The brothel became his refuge. There he could be king again. Because he was so pretty, the girls fought over who would tend to him, comb his hair, hand feed him. They didn’t charge him when he was old enough to have sex with them and even provided him with spending money, because he was their pet, their precious doll, their pretty little boyfriend. And what else could come of such coddling? Joe got used to living off them, sweet-talked them to get what he wanted, threw temper tantrums if they denied him something, always knowing that in the end anything he did would be tolerated. Wendy Mellons explained that Sleepy Joe’s gift was to take from others as if every day was his last day on earth. Eventually things got complicated. The girls started to complain about his brutality and the cruel names he called them; they tired of hearing that they were nothing but sows and scavengers and evil bitches. He accused them of living in sin, and hated them for making him sin. He adored them and loathed them, and could only resolve this contradiction by resorting to threats and violence. The last straw came when he put a match to the translucent and highly flammable nightgown of one of the girls named Tinker Bell, who wasn’t burned alive, by the grace of God, but it left her with permanent scars.

“He’s a horrible man but at the same time always very repentant about his actions,” Wendy Mellons tried to explain to Rose. “He didn’t want to sin — not out of love for his neighbor, but because he was terrified of the eternal punishment. Always very angry, that’s for sure, at everything and everyone. There is a very sick side in him. Disturbed since childhood. And yet, I still love him like a son.”

“So are you still close to him?” Rose ventured, intuiting that this woman could serve as bridge to him.

“Close? Yes,” she said. “As close as he allows anyone to get to him.”

“Are you in touch with him? Do you see him?” María Paz blurted out, perhaps out of jealousy.

“Do I see him in person, you mean?” Wendy Mellons countered, and to prove her case without having to answer these questions, she pulled out a photograph from a drawer. “Taken very recently,” she said.

It had been taken with a Polaroid and, as she said, had to be somewhat recent, because Wendy Mellons did not seem any older than she was that day, even if in the picture she wore a sunhat festooned in flowers as if she were British royalty. It was a full-body shot, and she had her arms around a drifter type in jeans and a tank top, his face half hidden under Ray-Ban Aviators and a ten-gallon hat. The exposed portion of his face showed bruised lips and an imposing square chin. Rose could not connect the little Sleepy Joe in the first photograph they had seen with this moron in sunglasses with the brim of his hat pulled low. But María Paz said in an assured voice, “That’s him.” The couple in the picture leaned on the hood of a medium-size yellow truck, maybe a Dodge Fargo or a Chevrolet Apache. On the top part of the windshield, there was a transparent sticker with a message in iridescent letters. It read “Gift from God.”

It was just the kind of clue that Rose and María Paz needed. Rose still had not confessed to Wendy Mellons the purpose of their visit, wanting to go slowly, not rush. Since they were throwing away that much money, the least they could do was make sure it arrived in the hands of Sleepy Joe. For the moment, they observed the woman and asked questions, letting her tell them about the life and work, address, real name and surname, and any other pertinent data about her surrogate son. They needed some time to discuss things among themselves, so they excused themselves and promised they’d return the next day.

“You couldn’t invent a more absurd situation,” Rose tells me. “I never would have imagined I’d end up there. Amazing woman, María Paz. I think that’s when I really started to admire her. Her clarity of purpose, delusional in my opinion, but maniacally persecuted. She was convinced that this would ensure the safety of her sister, and nothing was going to stop her. And we’re not talking about some millionaire. Imagine the situation: a fugitive from justice, about to cross one of the most guarded borders in the world, launching into the unknown without a penny in her pocket. Admirable in some ways.”

On the way to town to get something to eat, María Paz stopped to read a poster on a wall. “Concert: Molotov, tonight in Monte Vista,” she read. “Great. Not that far away,” she said.

They drove into the desert toward Monte Vista, Colorado, and parked in front of a large tent that had been assembled for the event. “From the moment that we got out of the car,” Rose tells me, “we didn’t see another white person or hear anyone speak English.”

It was as if clusters of brown people had crawled out from under the stones, what is known as the bronze race in spades, mostly men, almost all of them taking up a lot of space, robust, tattooed, with their hair nice and stiff and shiny black with hair gel, workers, gamblers, some in denim jackets and others in shirtsleeves in spite of the motherfucking cold, Aztecs, Nahuatl, Tepehuans, Mayans, from Mexico City, from the mountains, that is, what is better known as la raza, Benito Juárez’s raza, Cuauhtémoc raza, the whole damned raza, as if meeting up for a general conference, the big showing of the little bronze race, a hundred percent chicanos, truckers, Macheteros, mestiza chicas, chicos with straight hair, wetbacks, hombres, dudes, indigenous, maquila workers, mariachis, youth bands, Comanches, from one mother, from all mothers, druggies, fathers, pissed-off, shit-upon, dudes, suckers, field hands, evangelists, and beautiful nobodies. The raza, then, all of it, there in that tent. Long live the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe and long live Mexico, you fuckers!

María Paz and Rose buy their tickets and push their way into the expectant crowd, as restless and charged with energy as caged tigers, and watch your back because now begins the tug of war of everyone against everyone else, an all-out tugfest, shoulder to shoulder, and everyone cracking up, till the catcalls build up in an unstoppable wave aimed at the stage, summoning the band of the hour, the kings of albura dance and scourging humor, the bad guys of the border, with their expansive explosive alterlatino rock, cumbia, rap, funk fusion, and everything in between, and now, Molotov! The group appears under a barrage of applause and lasers, and to start things off, the leader lets loose with a merry greeting: “What’s up, you horde of illegals!” And the raza roars. The response to the greeting is a symphony of pure howls: the horde rises. And the tent reverberates with the heat and tension, and a thundering noise that could burst eardrums and unleash libidos till they become wounded, full-throated cries, and up there on stage there is El Gringo Loco at the drums and Miky Huidobro at bass guitar and Paco Ayala at the other bass, with lead singer Tito Fuentes, and now it begins, here comes the national anthem: “Yo ya estoy hasta la madre de que me pongan sombrero. No me digas frijolero pinche gringo puñetero.” And then, “Don’t call me gringo, you fucking beaner, stay on your side of that goddamned river.” María Paz fuses with that mass that is now all raw nerves, marinated in adrenaline, stewed in want, the shit happens and then more shit happens, and she rocks the Mexican power. Feel it! Feel it! All one as brothers! And Rose does not get it, and he can hardly believe his eyes. María Paz, who could tell he is a little freaked, elbows him and yells in his ear, “Easy, my mister, no need to panic, you’re not the only white one here. Look at the drummer!” And he’s up on stage, blond and rosy-skinned, born in Houston, Texas, and nicknamed El Gringo Loco, author of the famous anthem “Guacala que rica,” and the Latino fans love him. Now things begin to warm up and this mishmash comes together into a grand ritual of lowlifes, a baptism of wetbacks, those who had to put up with everything out there and hang their heads, in here are possessed by the will to rave and riot, “Dame dame dame todo el power para que te demos en la madre, gimi gimi gimi todo el poder.” On the stage, Tito Fuentes grabs the mic and screams in jest, “Fuck, hit the ground, someone called Immigration!” And the crowd hits the floor, laughing riotously, hiding under the chairs like children at play, because here la raza is an insurgent, mocking, and powerful race. This is free territory, blue skies! For no one can stop this devilish mass, and there is no better mantra than those frightening words, and here many who had never amounted to anything would climb mountains, here they reach for things higher than the Alien Registration Number. Immigration Control, the Border Patrol, the Minutemen, and all the other racist mobs could go straight to hell, and bring with them the treacle of political correctness. Bring down the walls: as Pink Floyd said. The Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the wall in Palestine, and the wall of Tijuana. “And down with the walls of Manninpox!” María Paz screams, though no one can hear her amid all that commotion, and as she rattles and shakes, she lets out a tear for Mandra X and all her other fellow captives. “Yes, yes, this is life, girls, and tonight you are all with me!”

Outside, the desert glowed under a full moon.

“Imagine the Three Stooges planning a coup d’état,” Rose tells me, “and that should give you a good sense of how María Paz, Wendy Mellons, and I spent the two days fumbling with ideas about how to get the money to Sleepy Joe. If yes this, then not that, not here but then where is here, and who can we and how.”

Not that it was a complicated operation, more like a lottery: they were calling a guy to give him one hundred and fifty thousand dollars and asking nothing in return. But as Rose asserted, there was only one deck of cards and everyone was playing a different game, and betting accordingly. After the night of the concert, Wendy Mellons was finally able to get in touch with Sleepy Joe, and she made arrangements for María Paz to call him from a pay phone and make plans to give him the money, with the tacit understanding — very well understood by everyone — that he would not harm her sister, Violeta. Sleepy Joe, who had never had the desire to understand things that are well understood by everyone, immediately suspected it was a trap and thus insisted on his own conditions, principally, he wanted to see María Paz alone: he wanted the money and the girl. Twice, María Paz was forced to finish the call without having reached an agreement. The conversation that followed this one was short and sharp, and she gave him an ultimatum in regard to how the money would be transferred to him: “It’s like the lentils in the soup,” she told him, “you take it as it is or you leave it.” He’d take it, he said, he was no fool. He had succumbed to the jingle of coins: down the hatch with the lentils. If he had to drop his demand to see María Paz, then so be it; Wendy Mellons would hand over the money. “No problem,” he said. “I would trust her with my life, Wendy Mellons is my soulmate.” Hearing that, María Paz felt a pang of despair. But she kept her composure, she wasn’t there to be lovey-dovey, too much was at stake. There was one final condition: Sleepy Joe had to scan and e-mail to María Paz a receipt with his signature, stating and confirming that Wendy Mellons had completed the delivery of the full amount.

“What is going to be the name of your e-mail address?” Rose wanted to know.

“What name?”

“The address you have to set up so he can write you, somethingorother at gmail dot com.”

“That’s perfect.”

“What’s perfect?”

“What you said, somethingorother at gmail dot com,” she said, not giving it a second thought, because she was hurrying to town to buy something.

“You’re kidding me,” Rose said flustered. “Do you need to go shopping at this moment? What the hell do you need?”

“Just this thing.”

“And you need it now? Are you nuts? This is no time for shopping.”

But she insisted, got her way, and took the Toyota to do her errands, leaving Rose time to return to Wendy Mellons, which didn’t turn out to be a horrible thing, after all, because he learned a few things that would come to be very helpful soon.

“It was an intense experience,” Rose tells me during our interview. “This getting closer and closer to the murderer of my son. Very hard, getting to know the people who were part of his life, seeing him in photographs, knowing he was on the other end of the telephone line, almost within reach.”

When they were alone in the car again, Rose asked María Paz what the big deal was, what the hell she had to buy so urgently at such a moment.

“A cheap backpack or something like that. And look, I found just what I needed, a red knapsack. You didn’t think I was going to hand over my Gucci bag to that old woman. No way! I put the money in the red knapsack, I’m keeping the Gucci.”

What did Wendy Mellons hope to get from all this? Basically, she would do a favor for a close friend, and maybe get a tip as gratitude for her services. As for Rose, his shameless purpose was to use the money as bait to get close enough to Sleepy Joe and bombard him with bullets. Up to that point, he had meekly gone along and approved whatever María Paz wanted, ceding the reins to her and playing dumb, the “ignorant old gringo” of the Molotov. But he had grown wary of that role. Now he needed to break out on his own and take firm steps. To begin, they snuck out of Wendy Mellons’s place, and he took María Paz to Monarch Mountain, a safe distance away. Their lodging was a ski resort that he had visited in the past with Edith and Cleve.

“I chose Monarch Mountain for a few reasons,” Rose explains to me. “First, I was sick and tired of driving all day and spending the nights in lousy motels. The plight of undocumented immigrants and the lower classes was no doubt interesting and very sad, but I had had enough. I wanted to sleep well, relax, eat well, and enjoy beautiful views from a hotel window. I was seized with a desire to spend my money liberally those last days, as simple as that.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You were about to murder a man…”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Let me finish breaking it down for you. You asked me why I chose Monarch Mountain, and I told you the first reason. Second reason: I needed to keep María Paz distracted and clueless while I did my thing. More than once, she had told me she had always dreamed of going skiing, and I wanted to make sure that such a dream was fulfilled — so she would have at least one good memory of America before she left. Third reason: a guest is much safer and better protected in a five-star hotel than in some fleabag place by the side of the road.”

They checked into the best chalet available at the San Luis Ski Resort, a large Alpine hotel complete with cheese fondue and cuckoo clocks, fireplaces in the individual chalets, and yodeling and accordion performances on Saturday nights. A minibus shuttled guests to the slopes, which were fifteen minutes away. Lying on the bed of their room, there was a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and of the surrounding forest crisscrossed by paths, on which they could take strolls with Otto, Dix, and Skunko. So there, in that ersatz Alpine hideaway, María Paz and Rose bided their time and waited for the handover of money, which would take place at some unspecified time whenever Sleepy Joe arrived in Colorado from wherever he was coming.

“The hotel offered dog care,” Rose tells me. “A crucial detail because it allowed me to leave the dogs in good hands while I took care of my business.”

Rose rented a full set of ski gear, clothing, and accessories for María Paz, reserved a whole set of private classes with a personal instructor, and while she took her first tentative steps on the magical white carpet, surrounded by the children also learning, he watched from the deck of Los Amigos Bar, seated under the outdoor heater, sipping on a frosty mug of beer, and picking at a plate of chorizo quesadillas with red sauce, because although the hotel was Swiss, the cuisine of choice at the food lounges was purely American-Mex. (“How fake can you get?” Cleve would have snipped.)

“I had never seen María Paz so happy,” Rose tells me. “Those endless expanses, with her hair blowing in the wind, must have felt like the opposite side of the world compared to Manninpox.”

“And were you also feeling good?” I ask. “Had you abandoned plans to off Sleepy Joe?”

“No, I never said that. What happened was that once I had dealt with the practical technicalities of the situation, it was simply a matter of waiting.”

“But you must have been twisting yourself into knots with fears and scruples and doubts.”

“None of that. Not even a little bit, actually. More like an astonishing sense of peace, quite astonishing, as the editorials said after Mandra X had told reporters about experiencing a similar feeling right before she murdered her children.”

Rose is careful to stress that those days were quite peaceful for him. He read the papers, was endlessly amused by the antics of María Paz on the small hill with the other beginners, enjoyed every sip of his frosty beers. Today, a couple of years later, as I interview him in the dining room of the Washington Square Hotel in New York City, I ask him to elaborate on why he thinks he was overcome by this astonishing sense of peace, as he calls it, because it is both a general and hyperbolic assertion that I’m just not buying. He replies that it was simple: Sleepy Joe had to die, he would die, and Rose did not feel there was anything wrong with that at all. He felt only relief, as if the air had become milder. He even came to the conclusion that the most burdensome aspect of committing such an act was physical and not moral at all. When it came down to it, it was almost natural to kill another person, something that was almost inconsequential: a few days before, he would never have suspected this, so he felt it was some sort of revelation. Despite the cold, the Colorado skies were radiant. A splendid dome of the purest blue was suspended above him, and he says he remembers thinking, there on the deck facing the slopes, that if all people had to do was push a red button to eliminate anyone who annoyed them, the human race would have perished.

I try to follow his reasoning, transcribing every sentence in my notebook word for word, so as not to distort what he is saying. I’m paying a heavy price for acceding to his request not to use a recorder; my hand is numb and swelled from all the frantic scribbling. But I can’t stop now; I don’t want to miss a single word, not at this stage. We are moving into delicate ground with damning revelations, and although Rose knows that I will not use real names or compromising details in my book, he begins to grow more evasive and restless. His responses, which up to this point were plentiful and flowing, suddenly seem to come as if carefully measured from a dropper. I have to extract them from him with my journalistic forceps. It is almost as if we have decided to switch roles, because now he is asking questions and I am responding — a technique we settle upon so that he can say what he has to say without saying it.

“Let’s see,” I say, veering the conversation back to the proper topic. “You had decided kill a man, had found a method that you thought would be most effective, and it was as if your conscience had completely divorced itself from this matter. Is that a fair way to put it? But let’s leave that and move on to this method that you had settled upon as the most efficacious.

“I’m guessing you intended to shoot him at close range as soon as he showed up for the handover.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that. Like I said, the physical part is what can trip a person up. How in the world was I supposed to figure out where and when Wendy Mellons would meet Sleepy Joe? And even if I did figure it out, how would I get there without being noticed?”

“What about hidden in the trunk of her car…”

“I fantasized about that possibility at first. I played flawlessly edited films inside my head in which I surreptitiously snuck into her car, or I lay camouflaged among the piles of trash in Wendy Mellons’s backyard, until I leaped out like a superhero, Ming’s gun in hand, professionally spraying my target with bullets. I imagined dozens of variations of this, all equally infantile. Until I stopped messing around and settled on the safe bet, which in this case also happened to be the easiest option.”

“I would wager that you found a red button,” I say. “That’s clearly where this thing is heading? But don’t tell me… You bribed Wendy Mellons!”

“Your words, not mine,” he responds.

“But am I right? Wendy Mellons does not seem like the type with impeccable principles. So a simple bribe would not have seemed far-fetched at all.”

“No, it didn’t seem far-fetched in the slightest.”

“You could easily have gone behind María Paz’s back and had a little chat with Wendy Mellons. ‘Listen, Wendy, just forget about this guy and keep the money, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars all for you.’”

“Well, there was not quite one hundred and fifty thousand left in the stack anymore,” Rose corrects me. “María Paz had put only about one hundred and thirty-three thousand in the red backpack.”

Of the seventeen thousand or so she had taken out, only a small fraction was for her to keep; the bulk of it was to pay the coyote. She had already postponed her departure date a few times, and now she annoyingly insisted on abandoning the crossing into Canada and trying to cross into Mexico instead, so the guy was justifiably pissed off and charging her additional penalties for anything he could come up with. Six thousand dollars was to compensate Rose for all the money he had spent out of his own pocket to help her, but he refused to accept any of it.

“Okay,” I tell Rose. “So I was wrong about the one hundred and fifty thousand, but still one hundred thirty-three thousand and whatever was not something to sneeze at. Wendy Mellons could not have refused such an offer…”

“Well, that’s where you’re mistaken. Wendy Mellons was actually very levelheaded. And she would indeed have refused such an offer.”

“At first, perhaps. Maybe she would have even been outraged at first, and would have yelled at you. How you can think such things? That she would help you murder Sleepy Joe? Were you crazy? This boy who yearned to be her son! Am I right, Mr. Rose?”

“You should know,” he tells me, “you’re the novelist.”

“So I’ll go on. You have suggested to Wendy Mellons that she not be so rash, at least to give it some thought and not refuse the offer outright. Look, Wendy, you would have said, your real son is this boy Bubba. Sleepy Joe is your lover, let’s not mince words and instead call things what they are. And how many manhole covers would Bubba have to steal to make anywhere near such an amount of money, and how many pots would he have to forge? Not to mention that sooner or later your little Bubba will be nabbed and sentenced to jail for stealing and destroying.”

“There is no doubt that Wendy Mellons would have been receptive to such an argument,” Rose admitted.

“It’s amazing what people may be receptive to when money falls out of the sky like that. But I haven’t resolved one problematic detail, Mr. Rose, the receipt that María Paz demanded as proof of delivery. If Wendy Mellons became your accomplice in killing Sleepy Joe, how could you produce the receipt?”

“Good point.”

“I would say you gave Ming’s Glock to Wendy Mellons and said, here, take this, Wendy, and do what you have to do with it, but first make sure that you get a signature. And then bring me back the receipt and the gun, but please, not a word to María Paz about our little agreement.”

“Do you want to see it?” Rose asks, and hands me a sheet.

“What?” I ask.

“The receipt. Well, it’s actually more than just a receipt. Read it, if you can decipher the writing. It’s worth it. It’ll clear up a lot of things before we go on.”

The following is the transcript of the famous receipt. To make it understandable, spelling has been corrected, some punctuation has been added for clarity, and lines that were downright impossible to make out were omitted. Hot Ass is Sleepy Joe’s nickname for María Paz, and Cuchi-Cuchi the nickname he uses for himself.

My Beloved Hot Ass, I didn’t want to kill your puny, sickly dog, although he deserved to die, I really had no intention of killing him. I just wanted to make him wail and howl a little bit so you would confess where in the hell you were hiding that money that today you have so kindly sent my way through the help of our mutual friend Wendy Mellons, but that before you had arbitrarily refused to share with me for no good reason without realizing that there was enough for both us and that with it we could have lived together in a safe place if you had not been so vicious and resentful. How happy we could have been if you had known how to forgive instead of being such a treacherous bitch, you preferred to be with others instead of accepting the proposal I made to you to live together as we knew how and love would wait for us, maybe not tomorrow or the next day because I had some pending cases on the side. This would have been possible only if you forgave me, and you had to accept the fact that I did not kill my brother, you of all people knew best how much I loved him and was in his debt because he was the only one who could be bothered to care for me during my difficult childhood with a dead mother and a father who never knew how to love me. I saw Greg’s murderers, saw them with these very eyes that God gave me, and you have to believe and have faith in me because I recognized them. They were former police officers like Greg, his partners in the arms sales business who learned God knows how that he was going to rat them out, and it was very possible that the FBI itself had passed on this information to them, because it goes without saying that those fuckers are loyal to no one, not even their own mothers, in other words, motherfuckers through and through. What I mean is that when Greg’s partners learned that Greg was turning on them, they pounced immediately and resolved the issue right then and there and I saw them, Hot Ass, I saw them kill him because that night I was on my way to meet him, the night of his birthday, remember, and he went out to meet up with me, and I had even brought him a gift, a Blackhawk Garra II knife that I had gotten secondhand but looked new. I was carrying the gift with me, and when I saw that those guys were going to shoot my brother, I immediately tried to stop them, I was not going to let a vile murder be committed against my own blood, especially against an unarmed man like Greg was at that time, that’s the kind of person I am, as you well know better than anyone. But they overpowered me. They were armed and it was three against one, and all I had was the Blackhawk Garra II knife that was no more useful than a butter knife in a situation like that. Or I could say I didn’t stop them, I failed miserably, and those bastards killed my brother right in front of me, which is why I waited around until they left, and came out of the hiding place I had found after they tossed me aside and I went to my brother, at least I wanted to prevent that he die right there on the street like a dog, but he was already dead and the only thing I could do was honor his death and let him die with Christ as he would have wanted. I shut his eyes and performed the last rites in the tradition of our culture before I got out of there. I wanted to tell you all this the night after our reunion after you got out of prison, so that you would have all the facts and not blame me for his death. I wanted to tell you everything on that night that started off so beautiful, a night of love that unfortunately ended in the unnecessary death of the doggie. It was all because of your stubbornness, Hot Ass, because when I ask you to do something, you do exactly the opposite, and that just brings out the worst of me and I lose my patience and it is impossible for things to get done properly, on the contrary, everything goes to hell simply because I respectfully ask you to watch how you act with me. The fuckers who killed my brother Greg owed me, they would shed tears of blood, and maybe you have heard that two of them have already paid dearly. But there are still critters scattering about, hiding in holes like cowards, meaning that I still have certain commitments I must keep before we run off together with this money, you and me together to wherever we end up, if you still love me, that is. But I should tell you that this dream life isn’t possible yet, because like I said, I still have some unfinished business to take care of. I knew you had found the money there in the nook between the bricks of the grill on the roof where Greg and I had hidden it. Hot Ass, do you remember when my brother and I told you that we needed to enlarge the old brick grill on the roof so that we could grill more burgers and corn for the Sunday family dinner? But the truth is that we only wanted to build an extension for the grill to create a perfect nook to hide our stash. I still remember and laugh about how you wanted us to grill this huge roast and we nearly burned our stash to a crisp. We thought that it all had been an innocent coincidence on your part, since you could not have known about the stash, but now I realize this wasn’t the case, you had figured out where we hid the money and you wanted to make us sweat, you cunning little fox. On the night of Greg’s murder I wanted to grab the stash of money from the grill for us to live the beautiful life we had dreamed about together, but you had beat me to it, you bitch, you had already betrayed me and the hundred and fifty thousand was gone, and you had already set all the bricks back in place as if nothing had happened, you fucking bitch, and then the FBI burst in and everything went to hell. Fortunately you have repented for your misconduct and ingratitude toward me and I hereby acknowledge receipt of the sum of one hundred thirty-three thousand and five hundred dollars ($133,500) that I just received from Wendy Mellons. This is a very generous gesture on your part, Hot Ass, but I nevertheless will not ignore the fact nor fail to always keep in mind always that you skimmed the missing $16,500 from the top. All this does not mean I have forgotten about you, my beloved Hot Ass, nor about the beautiful moments that in spite of everything we shared, some of the most beautiful of my life, although I admit that there were other times that were not so beautiful and if I made you suffer you should forgive me and I apologize for any such actions, sometimes we just have to accept that life can be as sweet as it can be bitter. Again, I thank you for this gesture, but don’t forget that money is not everything in life and love comes first. I will continue to pursue what I need to finish settling accounts with those that did me harm, teach them a lesson they will never forget, already they are falling one by one leaving nothing but birds flying above them. They say even in hell you end up chasing memories and I swear by my mother, Hot Ass, that even there they will suffer eternal torment as consequence of their actions. And as far as you’re concerned, you know what happens if you do not come with me, Hot Ass, don’t shatter all my dreams and hopes, I have given my heart and you will not be able to simply walk away and neglect it, if there’s something I simply abhor it is treason, you know that, Hot Ass, you’ve experienced some of the repercussions, remember that I know both your weak points and your not so weak points very well. I yearn for your kisses and all your other womanly delights in bed. Consider yourself warned, do not deny the love that awaits you in my arms. Yours forever, Cuchi-Cuchi P.S. Sorry again about the dog, Hot Ass, I really did not intend to let it go so far, but when we’re finally together wherever we end up, I promise to buy you a better and prettier pet that will be yours forever. I would have preferred to tell you all this in person but because of your ingratitude this has not been possible.

“There’s definitely a problem with my theory,” I say to Rose, after reading that novella masquerading as a receipt. “There was no complicity from Wendy Mellons, clearly. Nobody writes such a document with a gun to his temple. So I’m completely lost. I need some hints.”

“Wendy Mellons does not live alone.”

“Bubba! How could I have forgotten about Bubba? At some point, Bubba peeks out from the hovel. Or tucks himself between the stacks of towers, to prick himself with syringes. You see him out there, and tell yourself, that is my ticket.”

“Not bad,” Rose encourages me.

“You need to know when and where Wendy Mellons plans to meet Sleepy Joe. So you approach Bubba and offer him cash in exchange for information. Two hundred dollars. Maybe five hundred. Bubba knows who Sleepy Joe is because he always comes back to that house that is like his mother’s house. And an easy task for Bubba. You arrange a method of communicating with him, a daily appointment, or every other day, at a certain time in a certain pool hall, or bar, or even street corner.”

Two days later, Rose is there at the pool hall, or bar, or street corner. Bubba also gets there on time, but has nothing to report. He knows nothing about Sleepy Joe or his mother, who has left home and has not returned. Perfect, Wendy Mellons and Sleepy Joe are already together, Rose deduces. The beast approaches, and its breath is heard.

“Don’t underestimate Bubba,” Rose warns me. “He may be a junkie, but he’s not daft.”

“Bubba is not daft? Well, that means that he is perceptive. He notices things. What would Bubba notice? Let me think. I got it. He puts two and two together, and he realizes that you aim to kill Sleepy Joe. It’s the only thing that makes sense from the way you have relentlessly and secretly engaged his services.”

“Bubba is insightful, but he is also a drug addict.”

“Precisely, and he would do almost anything for a few bills. So during that first meeting, Bubba just comes right out with it. Save yourself a few steps, mister, for X amount of dollars, I’ll take care of the deed. You don’t hesitate for a moment about taking that offer, and leave the dirty work to Bubba. Maybe you lend him Ming’s pistol to move things along… No, wait, that’s wrong. Rewind. You don’t lend him Ming’s gun, that would be a blunder, and why would you, there is no need. Bubba lives among tools that may be used for murder, at least one carbine, two deer traps, a steel deck, a heap of dangerous tools…”

“Bubba turned manhole covers into pots,” Rose reminds me.

“That’s right, so he owned a collection of blacksmith tongs. A blow from Bubba using one of those things would have devastating consequences. This satisfies you enough to pass on the responsibility for the doing of the deed to him, and you sit back and enjoy your cold ones.”

Enjoy them, sure, but not for long. Rose must also man the second surveillance center, the business office of the hotel, where he checks the e-mail address that he and María Paz had created for the sole purpose of receiving proof of the receipt that Sleepy Joe had agreed to send, and eventually did send: the famous epistle to Hot Ass, which Rose printed and brought back to the chalet for her to read. First goal met. Sleepy Joe had the money, and María Paz had the receipt. Now two things needed to happen: the cyber-coyote had to give the green light for the border crossing, and Bubba had to put those heavy tongs to good use. Rose started making a trip to the pool hall, anxious to know the outcome and carrying in his pocket the six thousand dollars that he had promised his partner when the job was completed. But a week went by, and there was no sign of Bubba. A week and a half, and nothing.

Meanwhile, María Paz was making great progress in her skiing classes. She had passed all the tests and graduated from the beginner’s level, which came as a surprise to Rose, and now fearlessly hit the green trails from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, when the chairlift stopped. With a rather inelegant and suicidal audacity, she plummeted down the slopes over and over again, like Atom Ant, or as if she were desperately fleeing from something. She did in fact ski with that kind of frenetic style of those who are fleeing everything and everyone. As night began to fall, she returned to the hotel, radiant and exhausted, pulled her gloves off, took off one boot, then the other, took off her sweater, her thermal underwear, and left all her stuff, neatly piled up in a corner. Then she quickly drank the hot chocolate that Rose brought her, took an oceanic shower, applied liniment to the bruises all over her body caused by the blows from her spills, took two aspirin, slumped into bed, and fell into a dreamless sleep until the next day, just in time to be on the slopes again at nine.

“How nice, María Paz, you really love skiing!” Rose ventured, suspecting that her hyperactivity was just a camouflage for the riptides that were forcefully flowing inside her. “Really, congratulations, it’s amazing how fast you have learned.”

“Yes,” she responded. “I have the whole shit down.”

The cyber-coyote, meanwhile, has come to the conclusion that this María Paz was a quarrelsome, unbearable, and unpredictable client, more annoying than a poorly tuned piano. He retaliated by charging her exorbitant fees every time he had to change the details of the border crossing, and let her know that he was gathering his current group somewhere near Sunland Park, New Mexico, en route to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She would need to go there very soon, as soon as she got the signal from him. She would make the crossing along with other outlaws and fugitives like her, and like almost anyone else who was smuggled across the border not from south to north, but from north to south.

“What do you really know about this guy the cyber-coyote?” Rose asked María Paz.

“Really know?” she replied. “Almost nothing. That he is an evangelist and owns a Blackberry.”

“But yet you are putting your fate in his hands.”

You had to be a good deal two-faced to say that last sentence aloud. What did Rose know about Bubba, on whom he had placed his complete trust? Nothing, or worse than nothing: he knew all the bad parts, that he was a devious and timorous scoundrel who would do anything for money. And that he had not shown up for any of their recent meetings. Something very weird must be happening. Deeply concerned, Rose began to lose sleep and his appetite, became sullen, silent, and irritable. Because she had thrown herself headlong into the physical aspects of her new sport, María Paz did not register the subtle changes in his mood, but the dogs noticed, and they grew restless. They scrutinized their master with long looks and licked his hands as if to console him: they also sniffed that something was horribly wrong. Rose returned to the pool hall, and again nothing. The following morning, after hours of insomnia, he remembered that he had not erased Sleepy Joe’s e-mail message. This was an unforgivable mistake, to leave such incriminating evidence floating in cyberspace. How could he have been so neglectful? Without even waiting for the sun to come up, he threw on some clothes over his pajamas and hurried to the business office, to remove the body of the crime-to-be with a tap of a key. After logging in to the account, he found there was a second message from Sleepy Joe. He hesitated a few seconds, letting his heart quiet down, finally daring to look. This time it was only an image. In a fuzzy snapshot, a stack of tires around a post is aflame. The fire is just a little flash of light, the flames leaning left from the wind, but the smoke that rises from it is thick and black and distorts most of the rest of the picture, forcing Rose to put on his reading glasses and move closer to the screen. Tied to the stake and in the middle of the tires, Rose discerned the figure of a naked man, half-burned, perhaps still alive.

Rose managed to figure out the mouse well enough to enlarge the image. The blackened and blistered skin had disfigured the features of the face, but there was no doubt that this was Bubba. The ritual had taken place in the backyard of his house. On a piece of wood nailed to the post about one quarter of the way up above the head of the figure, the initials INRI are visible.

A rush of fever bathed Rose in sweat. Sleepy Joe was alive. Not only was he alive, now he was very well informed about who was trying to kill him. Just thinking about the magnitude of the disaster that he himself had unleashed, Rose sank inside his own body. His eyes clouded over, the blood dropped from his brain, and his whole body weakened. I’m going to die, he thought, and that feeling flooded him with lethargy, a momentary sense of relief. But he did not die; he remained suspended and conscious in that intolerable moment. The extreme suffering of the dying man became an alarm that Rose felt would burst his ears. Rose sensed Bubba burning like mustard gas on every one of his nerve endings. The guilt overpowered him. Any logical thought escaped him, knowing he was responsible for the horror that occurred, and the horror to come. Blinded by stupidity, naive as a child, he had been waving a red cloth at the beast, gibing it, and now the beast responded. Rose covered his face with his hands not to see: he needed to save himself from his own anguish. But the martyrdom of Bubba had made its way inside and now took the form of others — those in line waiting their turn. That girl Violeta would be next. And María Paz. And Rose himself, although this last possibility did not bother him.

It’s the others. The girls. Because of Rose, they had been exposed, and now he needed to make a superhuman effort to think, to think well and thoroughly, and then act, trying to prevent the chain of atrocities he had set off. But how, when he couldn’t even regain control of himself? He couldn’t even get up from that chair. He could not even digest and expel that calcified being inside him that radiated with an unbearable intensity, forcing Rose to cross the limits of his own endurance. The sacrificial victim was raw, in the flesh, poisonous and contagious. And it wasn’t the wretched Bubba incarnated inside him. Now it was Cleve, crowned with thorns, stuck to the inner membrane of Rose’s eyelids, preventing him from opening them. A fog blanketed his thoughts before they could rise.

“I have to think,” he said aloud, and the phrase reached him from afar, as if an echo. “I have to think,” he said again, but he was sure he was falling asleep.

He wasn’t quite sure how he managed, but he was at the door of his chalet, holding the key in his hand. He was about to go on, but didn’t have the strength. The dogs soon sensed his presence and started going crazy, scraping the door. They wanted to go for a walk, but Rose didn’t dare. He had to warn María Paz, but wasn’t sure how. It’s my fault, he thought. That’s all he could think about, the fault he bore. What happened had happened because of him. Not just that, also what would happen. He had to prevent it, go back to Vermont right now to protect the girl. But before this, he had to face María Paz, show her the picture of the man burned, confess everything; she needed to know. But how could Rose confess something as unmentionable as his plot to murder Sleepy Joe behind her back? And to cap it off, relate to her how the murderer failed? He would have to admit his mistakes in pursuing the plot, his systematic deception, his selfish machinations, his grand stupidity, his poor old fool’s ignorance, his despicable uselessness, his pulp fiction avenger charade woefully mocked.

Sleepy Joe did not know the whereabouts of María Paz; as ardently as he searched for her to kill her, it would be a while before he found her, if he found her at all. But Violeta was a fish in a barrel within easy reach of his claws. They should be leaving for Vermont at that very moment, but Rose’s legs were leaden, his will deadened, his soul entombed. The dogs were going to destroy the door with their clawing, and Rose pushed it ajar. They stampeded out and jumped up to greet him. Then they stopped, all three at the same time, dazzled by the sheer whiteness that had blanketed the countryside. Then, slowly, they moved away, each on his own, sniffing and peeing here and there. Rose closed the door without going inside. He leaned against the wall, took in the divergent lines of the paw prints left behind in the snow as the dogs moved away from each other, then crossed.

“Sometimes you do things,” Rose tells me. “When you’re at a loss, you do funny things. I remember overhearing María Paz inside the chalet finishing in the shower. Then I heard her moving around on the creaky wooden floor. I should have gone in and faced her. And yet I walked away. I took refuge in the laundry room, practically hid between machines. I sat on the floor next to a running dryer. I still remember feeling the heat and vibration against my forearm. I thought of nothing, or only of Effexor pills. I had stopped taking them a long time ago, but at that moment I would have taken two, three, the whole bottle.”

Rose managed to emerge out of his well of anguish and return to the chalet, but there was no one there. The dog-care service left a note informing him that it had the dogs, and María Paz had left with all her ski gear. Already on the slopes? It couldn’t be; they weren’t even open yet. He went searching in the dining room and found her there, but she was having breakfast with some friends she had made, and Rose did not dare interrupt. As much of a hurry as there was, it wasn’t smart to make a fuss. Stay under the radar, and keep the police at bay. Rose decided to wait for María Paz to come out of the dining room. He would take her by the arm, and tell her what had happened, or maybe not everything, not now. Only the essentials: he would inform her that something very serious had happened and explain the details later. For the moment, they had to fly out of there. They had ten minutes to gather all their things, pay the hotel bill, and hit the road.

At the far end of the dining room, María Paz laughed with her new friends, ignorant of everything. Rose observed how she drank her orange juice, smeared butter on her bread, and brought the fork to her mouth. Suddenly she stood and walked toward the buffet. This is it, Rose thought, and prepared to move, but her friends followed her and were with her at once. María Paz served herself a bowl of granola and milk and returned to the table. This is taking way too long, thought Rose. Jesus Christ, the horrors that could unfold while this woman finished a bowl of granola. He could make better use of this time, he decided, and went looking for the concierge to ask about his dogs.

“Not to worry, sir, they’ll have them back by noon,” he was told. “Today they were taken mushing.”

“Taken what?”

“Mushing, sir.”

“Mushing?”

“It’s a sled sport, sir.”

“They make my dogs pull sleds.”

“No sir, how you can say such a thing? They go running alongside.”

While Rose was trying to find out where his dogs were, María Paz finished breakfast and left the dining room with her new friends, catching the shuttle that took them to the slopes. Rose got there just as it left and chased it in vain: the minibus moving up the road and out of sight.

Rose returned to the chalet. He was not concerned at all about his unshaven face, his putrid breath, or the fact that his pajamas were poking out from under his clothes. He just needed to switch his shoes for boots, get his wallet, car keys, identification documents, and fill their bags with their things. He bolted to the reception desk. He wanted to check out, he begged a methodical receptionist. An urgent matter had come up and it was imperative that he settled his account, he told her. “Please, miss, if you can hurry, this is urgent.” Because he didn’t cancel in advance, she charged an extra day. He paid without protest and returned the keys. He loaded the Toyota with the suitcases, stacking them in whichever way, and was about to take off when he remembered Ming’s gun. He had hidden it in the chalet, on top of one of the rafters in the ceiling. He went back to the reception desk, asked for the key, waited an eternity for it, got the gun, and then headed for the slopes lost in thought. He would pick up María Paz, do a drive-by to get the dogs, then retrace the marathon journey that got them here, but in reverse. The only difference would be that before they had the luxury of devoting five days to the trip, and now the days were numbered minutes.

Rose hurried to Los Amigos Bar and got a table on the deck. From there, he had an ample view of the slopes, and he would be able to locate María Paz. But the minutes passed and she was nowhere to be seen. The one who appeared was the waiter, brandishing a menu.

“Nothing, thank you,” Rose said, trying to dismiss him.

“Sorry, sir, if you don’t order something, you can’t sit at these tables.”

“Then a coffee.” The waiter was standing in front of him, blocking his view.

“Would you like something to eat with that?”

“Anything.”

“The chorizo quesadilla like before?”

“Fine.”

“With red sauce?”

“Perfect.”

The ribbon of skiers glided down the mountain rhythmically, weightless and silent, a gentle, lunar undulation. Then they sat in the chairlift, went up in the air, and came back down, because it was not a linear ribbon but a Mobius strip, and they all advanced within it in an eternal procession. All but María Paz, who at some point had exited the circuit and did not appear. Soon it was ten thirty.

“I was dehydrated with anguish,” Rose tells me. “I felt I was losing weight every minute. I rejected any plan to contact the authorities or to go out and search for her with dogs, and paramedics on snowmobiles, because I didn’t want to draw any attention to her. So far, we had slipped by completely clean, no evidence or even suspicion that we were being trailed, and it was essential that it remain that way. On the other hand, every hour that I let pass could be fatal.”

Rose decided to figure out how long it took to go up in the chairlift and ski back down. He zeroed in on one specific lady, clearly a beginner, wearing a particularly bright orange suit. He would time her and use her to set parameters. The woman in orange passed by him, turned at the end of the slope, took the chairlift, disappeared at the top, and in exactly twelve minutes came into Rose’s view again. She went back up, this time reappearing in less time than before. Rose averaged the times and estimated that in the time he had been waiting, María Paz should have passed by him five or six times. Yet nothing. There must have been an explanation, and Rose could only imagine the worst. What if she had broken a leg and been taken to the hospital? What if she had smashed against a tree and cracked her skull? Or if the police had found her and stopped her! Take it easy, Rose told himself, or at least breathe, and try to keep a smidgen of calm. First of all, he couldn’t despair, even if the situation was pretty desperate.

To quiet the machine inside his head that predicted disasters, he spread open a napkin, took out a pen, and sketched a makeshift map as he tried to concentrate on planning a whirlwind trip to reach Violeta. They were about two thousand miles from Montpelier, Vermont: thirty-six hours behind the wheel. María Paz was a horrible driver, as Rose had already seen, and if the highway patrol stopped them and asked for a driver’s license, they were fucked. But they would have to take turns. Eight hours each, while the other rested and slept. He had to schedule in stops for going to the bathroom, refueling, grabbing a few strong shots of espresso, and letting the dogs stretch out a bit. Rose plotted pit stops of one or two hours, in such places as Winona, Kansas; Topeka, Kansas; Caseyville, Illinois; Dayton, Ohio; Harborcreek, Pennsylvania. And one last one in Wells, New York. And yet, pushing it to the limits, assuming no problems arose, it would take them two days and nights. Or three, if at any time they were overcome with exhaustion. He didn’t even want to think of all that could happen to Violeta in two or three days and long nights. They couldn’t take such a risk. What if María Paz took a plane? She would have to present documents to fly. What if Rose just went ahead? No good either, he couldn’t abandon María Paz and his dogs like that.

Because María Paz was still nowhere to be seen, Rose made a decision. It was reckless, but at least it was a decision: he would call the police, notify them of the danger, and say that a serial killer was headed for Montpelier. He would ask them to put the school under surveillance around the clock and tell them about Violeta, a sick and very vulnerable girl who was in mortal danger. Violeta who? That’s the first thing they would want to know. And Rose didn’t even know her last name, not to mention everything he would have to remain quiet about, or justify, if they were to interrogate him. But above all, who was going to listen? Why would they believe him? And if they did believe him, it would be even worse, the area swarming with police, so María Paz could not even get close to her sister.

Have you not learned your lesson, you fuck? Rose chided himself. Under no circumstance should he continue to make decisions on his own, at his own discretion, veering this way and that without consulting her. That’s just how he had been doing it, and the result had been disastrous, criminal, unforgivable. No, he decided he could not make such a move behind María Paz’s back, particularly one on this scale, which could save them, but could also just as likely doom them. At that moment, the waiter approached the table again. He butted into the scene so often, Rose thought, that by this point he had earned a supporting actor role. This time, he brought Rose a copy of the New York Times, which he knew Rose liked to read, although in that area of Colorado, the editions were always a day behind. Rose, who was certainly in no mood to read anything, pretended to peruse the outdated paper, more than anything as a gesture of good will to the good man who was insistent on offering top-notch service, and who now asked if Rose would like some more coffee.

“No,” Rose said. “I’m good, nothing else.”

And that’s when he saw one of the headlines. “Prominent Lawyer Brutally Slain in Brooklyn.” From a picture spread across two columns, Pro Bono looked him straight in the eyes, still very much alive and with a dandyish air. It was not a crime-scene picture, but a studio shot, taken years before, cropped so he appeared only from the neck up. Nobody would guess that he was a hunchback, Rose thought as he gazed at a white, empty point in the distance and the woman in orange passed by once, then a second time, and a third, and perhaps a fourth time before Rose emerged from the depth, breaking the ice that sealed him in his reverie, and dried his tears with the napkin on which he had drawn the map. Good-bye, my elegant friend.

After talking with Buttons on the pay phone, Rose returned methodically to his table on the terrace and sat down again. “And where the hell have you been?” Buttons admonished him, and Rose had to lie: “I took off to get as far as I could get away from everything.” The waiter approached to ask if he was okay. He nodded his head, but he knew that he was showing fifty years on his face that hadn’t been there fifty minutes earlier. Suddenly the still air stirred, and a pair of gloved hands grabbed him from behind.

“I wasn’t surprised or frightened,” he tells me. “I just thought my time had arrived as well. It seemed only logical.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you for ages.” It was María Paz’s voice. She had playfully snuck up behind him and covered his eyes with her mittens. She plopped down into the chair beside him; took off her hat, scarf, and mittens; unzipped her coat down to her waist; and shook loose her long hair. With a radiant face and a high voice full of pure joy, she asked the waiter for one Cola-Cola with a lot of ice, and started babbling about the new runs she and her friends had been exploring that morning.

“Can you believe it, Mr. Rose!” she said, tugging on his sleeve. “I went down a blue, me, María Paz, Ms. Troublemaker. Did you hear what I said? What’s wrong with you today? Why’re you so out of it? I just went down a blue run, and you’re like nothing? Do you know how stupid steep that is? That’s suicide on sticks, Rose.”

Rose stared off into the distance.

“Hey, Earth to Mr. Rose. What happened, you’ve been drugged or something?”

Rose left some money on the table and started walking toward the parking area. They had to leave Colorado immediately was all that he told María Paz, without turning to look at her, he would explain later.

“Hey, silly.” She ran after him, not understanding an iota of what was going on and carrying her skis, her boots, and her ski poles. “Don’t we have to return all this stuff? And the jumpsuit? Wait for me, hey, help me with this…”

They picked up the dogs, who were exhausted after running all morning behind a sled, and headed northward with Rose at the wheel, and at such absurd speeds that María Paz held on for dear life; Otto, Dix, and Skunko tumbled over each other at every steep curve; and the old Toyota trembled to the very edge of disintegration.

“Let’s stop, Rose,” she asked him. “Stop and tell me what’s happening, why we’re driving off like crazy.”

“Not now, later.”

“Tell me where we’re going…”

“To Vermont, to get your sister, before the beast of your boyfriend kills her,” exploded Rose, without making excuses or trying to soften the blow, showing María Paz the photograph of Bubba in his pyre and the New York Times with the news of the murder of Pro Bono.

He was glad it came out that way. It felt good: the death of Pro Bono had melted his mountain of guilt, transforming it into pure anger, and he was not affected by the horror of her astonishment, nor the deathly pallor of her face, nor her crying fits, because all Rose felt then was rage. Rage against her.

“The death of Pro Bono was the appalling proof that I had been right, that her boyfriend was a monster, a filthy murderer, something I had always known,” he tells me. “But not her, she insisted that no, that deep down the guy was harmless. My God, how could she have been so blind, and the death of Pro Bono had done me in, really done me in, and what I felt inside was anger.”

“Anger as the opposite of guilt,” I ask. “Or you had to stop hating yourself in order to hate her?”

“Either one,” he tells me, “but I was especially eager to hammer her with an ‘I told you so’ the size of the world.”

“There you go. Take a good look. Open your eyes for once,” Rose told María Paz, tapping his index finger on the papers he had just handed her. “Come down from the clouds. This is your boyfriend, so you know. This is your Sleepy Joe. The wolf that doesn’t bite, the poor little boy who’s so good we have to send him money. Are you looking? Burned one alive, and whipped the other one to death. Your lawyer. Whipped that poor old man who helped you so much to death. And my son, Cleve, knocked him off his bike and crowned him with thorns. Do you see anything in common between them, eh? I’m talking, María Paz, answer me. Do you see something in common among these poor people? You, girl. You. You are the only thing these people have in common, besides having been tortured to death by your beau. So he doesn’t kill, your macho asshole? Doesn’t kill, eh?”

“Who is the one burned, what does he have to do with me?” María Paz tried to protest.

But Rose did not even hear her; he was so busy trying to hurt her. He was aware of the pain he was causing with his words, but he could not stop himself. They had been stored for too long, and they now emerged from him with a rancor and ease that surprised him.

“A justified revenge?” I ask Rose.

“It’s possible, yes,” he responds. “Maybe I was making her pay for having loved that monster more than my son. Or who knows. All I can say is that I spoke to her like that to punish her. I noticed that her mouth had gone dry, saw the throbbing in her temples, and she shook as if it had suddenly become very cold, yet I continued, as if enjoying it.”

“So Sleepy Joe was abusive just because of money, is that still your theory?” Rose screamed at María Paz. “Well, he murdered Pro Bono three days ago, woman, three days ago, more than a week after he was handed the money that you sent him. Actually, maybe with the money you sent him, maybe that’s what he used it for.”

“Sleepy Joe did that?” María Paz asked in barely a whisper, enraging Rose even more.

“Oh, my God, girl, are you still defending him? Get out of the car, damn it. Now, get out, I can’t stand to look at you.”

Eventually, things calmed down a bit. Rose knew such a brawl between them made little sense when Violeta’s life was at stake. It would do little good for them to kill each other, when the real murderer was loose.

“Who is this man?” asked María Paz again, now more forcefully. “The burned one. Why was he burned?”

“That man is Bubba, Wendy Mellons’s son. Do you recognize him? No, of course not, he’s burned beyond recognition. Do you know of any fucked-up pyromaniacs who may have been responsible?

“Sleepy Joe did this?” María Paz insisted on asking. “How do you know that?”

“How do I know? Don’t start with that again. What are you, stupid? Sleepy Joe burned him and sent that picture to your e-mail address. A message for you to know what he’s going to do to your sister. And to me, of course. Why did he burn him alive? Is that what you’re asking? Why did he whip Pro Bono to death? Why did he murder Cleve? Why did he crucify your dog? I have no idea, but surely you do.”

“Calm down, Rose, and answer me,” she said.

“Sleepy Joe burned that man because that man was going to kill Sleepy Joe. And that man was going to kill Sleepy Joe because I paid him to do it. But things went wrong. The only bad thing was that, how I screwed up, and Sleepy Joe walked away a man possessed instead of being dead. Let’s just stop talking about it, alright? No more arguing, no more questions. Stop crying and clutching that bag. Concentrate on the map, and I’ll concentrate on driving. All we have to do is reach Vermont before him.”

Pro Bono had been murdered at night, around eleven, the lawyer still looking very formal, as usual, even though he was alone at home. He had been about to brush his teeth: a fact known because they had found his toothbrush on the bathroom countertop. Apparently, Pro Bono wore a velvet robe with a lace cord at the waist, white pajamas with a monogram on the breast pocket, a silk scarf around his neck, maybe even a carnation on the lapel: such bombastic elegance, à la Oscar Wilde, through which he always concealed his birth defect.

Buttons had told Rose how Sleepy Joe had snuck into the apartment at that time.

“Do you want to know how?” Rose asked María Paz, a rash of anger again burning in his throat. “You’re not going to want to hear it, because it very much has to do with you. Buttons told me Pro Bono had been looking for you for a while. The trip to Paris had not gone well. The Marriage of Figaro fizzled because Pro Bono was in no mood for Mozart and had spent his second and final honeymoon making long-distance calls asking about you. He wanted to know if someone had been able to warn you about the clamp. And when he got to New York, he went right back to looking for you. So steeped was he in the task that, being told the visitor was connected to you, he had no qualms about letting a stranger into his house late at night.”

Afterward, the doorman said he had been suspicious. It was late, no time to be bugging residents, especially a guy like that, very shady, demanding to see the lawyer, all arrogant, telling him he needed to see Pro Bono, “I’m Paz’s cousin, he knows what it’s about.” Very strange, the whole thing. But the doorman had learned to be discreet, had mastered his trade for years, and knew that sometimes the residents of the building had contact with unusual people, drug dealers, for example, or prostitutes even, and who was he to butt in? So he rang Pro Bono. “Excuse me, sir,” he said quietly, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Tell him to come up to my office,” Pro Bono had ordered. “Better yet. Hold on.”

For some reason, Pro Bono changed his mind about receiving the visitor in his office, although it was just a floor above. Maybe he didn’t deem it appropriate to do so in robe and slippers, a matter of principle, because the offices were empty, the last worker having left hours before. Or maybe Pro Bono didn’t want to catch a cold, or couldn’t find the key: one of those simple twists of fates, minor in and of themselves, but of great consequence. Whatever the reason, Pro Bono did not want to go up to the office. He must have thought it better to attend to the man at the door of his apartment. It would be a matter of a few minutes, and he could ask about María Paz. That’s what the man must be here for, with news about her.

“Send him up to my apartment,” Pro Bono directed the doorman.

If the visitor had gone up to the office and not the apartment, the doorman would have been required to ask for identification, which would have confirmed his suspicions. But since it had become a private visit, he let the visitor in without asking anything of him. The image of Sleepy Joe was there in security cameras, and despite the winter gear, his face registered clearly: a white male, young, about six feet tall. The time stamp on the security camera video showed him entering the building at 23:05 and leaving twenty-eight minutes later.

During that time, Sleepy Joe sealed Pro Bono’s mouth with duct tape and forced him to strip — to expose what he never exposed, not even to himself. He robbed the old man of his shell, leaving him as naked as the day he was born, forcing him to look at himself in the great antique mirror with a silver frame hanging in the foyer. Or maybe not. There was likely no mirror in that foyer. Pro Bono would not have wanted to undergo the daily tyranny of that object waiting for his arrival, dismissing him as he left — like a black hole, pulling him into the void to confront the naked truth of his pink and twisted anatomy, thus vanquishing the perfect image he had managed to build of himself as a defender of just causes, a loving husband, an admired, rich, elegant, and cosmopolitan man.

The ceremony must have taken place then in Gunnora’s bathroom, where there were plenty of mirrors, yes, and which, facing each other, must have endlessly multiplied the derision. And that, not what came later, had to be the worst part for Pro Bono: this presentation of the evidence, that his monstrosity was not in the distortion of the mirror or in the eyes of the observer, but painfully embedded in his very nature from the day he was born and until that night, which would be his last. That was the real knockout punch. In the truth of his nakedness, Pro Bono succumbed to the perpetrator. So it could be said that Sleepy Joe lacked subtlety in his cruelty. He did not realize that Pro Bono was suddenly no longer Pro Bono but just a shadow of the man whom Sleepy Joe bent over and tied to a column. He made fun of his hump and mocked his luxuries, put the silk scarf around his neck, hobbling and crouching like an ape, and when he grew tired of monkeying around, he pulled out the whip he had hidden under his coat.

The rest was predictable: the procedure of flogging a poor old man is routine, harder and harder, over and over again, taking it beyond pain toward death. The true sacred flash, the epiphany, the mystical spark was in the whip itself, this fetish with a life of its own that whistled like a bird when it shattered the air with its crack, being, as it was, the first object created by man to break the sound barrier. Ian Rose knew something from Wendy Mellons that the investigators of the case would never hit upon: for years the murderer had been exploring the infinite ritualistic possibilities of the instrument that he had used for the first time in the Morada of the Penitent Brothers on himself. To officiate over the person of Pro Bono, Sleepy Joe did not just use any old whip, but the quintessential one, the so-called Roman flagrum, which had been used in Judea, in the palace of Pontius Pilate, to whip the Son of God. The Roman flagrum has three straps with metal nails embedded at the tips that break off the skin with each stroke, that is, opening it into wedges, creating furrows, a fact that became more common knowledge because of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ.

The body of Pro Bono, still gagged and tied to the column, but long bloodless, was found the following day by the cleaning lady.

“Stop at the first service area we come to,” María Paz asked Rose, only an hour into their journey to Vermont.

Rose protested: they couldn’t stop, that rest time had not been programmed into their plan. They couldn’t go stopping every minute. They would have to wait at least until Kansas. “Do you have to pee? Can’t you hold it, María Paz?”

“There, a mile away, stop at the service area,” she ordered. “Keep an eye on the signs, Rose. There must be a phone there somewhere. We have to call Violeta to warn her.”

In the Food Mart, they read through the daily newspapers and listened to the TV news broadcasts. Everywhere there were bursts, like wildfire, of the commotion created by the felon of the moment, whom journalists had poetically christened The Passion Killer. And not passion as in love, not love for María Paz, who apparently had not surfaced in the investigations. Nor love for Maraya, or Wendy Mellons, or anyone. Rather Passion with a capital P. And while Rose let the dogs out to pee, and María Paz did the same in the bathroom, the world was shocked at the sight of Sleepy Joe, this serial killer who was so beautiful. Amazing, how could someone so pretty and so blond be so evil?

“Look, María Paz,” Rose said pointing to one of the newspapers, “looks like your Hero was not alone.”

“Don’t tell me the bastard killed other dogs.”

“None that are known, but he crucified other people.”

The Passion Killer had been linked to at least nine serial murders committed in different parts of the country but employing similar methods, and most of the victims were people that neither Rose nor María Paz knew. Two of them had been crucified over the past year, one nailed to a door and the other to an armoire, with all the trappings of incense and candles that were considered the trademarks of the killer.

From a pay phone, María Paz called her sister’s school. She knew it would be a difficult, short exchange, but a crucial one on which the girl’s life could depend. María Paz would have to say the right words, so Violeta would act accordingly. She could not scare her with generalities, or create abstract fears, or pretend she could clearly explain the whole thing. Each sentence had to be short and to the point. And there was Violeta, on the line.

“Little Sis, it’s me, Big Sis,” María Paz told her.

“Not Big Sis, it’s the voice of Big Sis.”

“Listen to me, Violeta.”

“Listen to me, Violeta. I saw Sleepy Joe and I got scared. Sleepy Joe. If he comes near me, I’ll bite him.”

“Don’t leave your school, baby!” María Paz felt the blood empty from her head. “Do not go to Sleepy Joe. Do you hear me, Violeta? With Sleepy Joe, no. Sleepy Joe does bad things, very bad, and Violeta should not go with him.”

“Sleepy Joe was on the news.”

“Think hard, Little Sis. Think hard about what you’re telling me. Did you see Sleepy Joe, or did you see a picture of Sleepy Joe on the news?”

“On the news.”

“Good, Violeta, good.” María Paz felt as if her soul had returned to her body. Sleepy Joe was still not there, and Violeta was somewhat aware of what was going on, so it wasn’t necessary to go into endless explanations that would do nothing but lead to terrible confusion. “You heard about the bad things that Sleepy Joe has been doing. So you should not leave the school. Do not leave the school. Wait there, Little Sis, I’m coming for you.”

“Don’t come, Big Sis. The police came asking about you. I said nothing to the police. The director didn’t let them speak to me.”

Shit, María Paz thought. Shit, shit, shit. That’s all they needed.

“Now, just stay by the phone,” she told Violeta, after carefully weighing what to do. “Don’t go far from the phone. Big Sis will call you in five minutes.”

“Why twice?”

“Just listen to me. Stay by the phone, I’ll call back.”

María Paz hung up, and then started quizzing Rose in the same tone she had used with Violeta, uttering short and precise instructions and queries, emphasizing each syllable.

“Listen, Rose. Do you know anyone in New York or nearby whom you can trust absolutely?” she asked.

“What?”

“You heard me. A friend, a smart, clever, and good person you would trust with your life.”

“Let me think… hold on. Yes, there’s someone.”

“Good. Do you have your friend’s number here?”

Rose told her it was Ming, and María Paz already knew more or less who he was through Cleve, who had mentioned him a few times.

“Will Ming be able to deal with Violeta?” she asked.

“Ming deals with himself, so he can deal with anyone.”

“Great.” María Paz gave her approval. “Then call him. Call him immediately. He must have heard the news as well, so you don’t need to go into long explanations with him either. Tell him to go to Violeta’s school today. Give him the address of the school and directions. Today is Saturday, visiting day, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Where does Ming live?”

“New York.”

“How long does it take to get from New York to Montpelier?

“About five hours.”

“It’s one now. Five hours, it’ll be about six thirty. Perfect. Tell Ming that he has to be there by six thirty. Have him ask for Violeta at the receptionist. Tell him to take her out of there right away, and wait two or three days, whatever it takes, in that motel where you and I stayed when we were in Vermont, North something…”

“The North Star Shine Lodge,” Rose said. Since he had befriended Pro Bono, he made sure he remembered the names of all hotels and motels where he and María Paz stayed.

“Yes, that one. Can you tell Ming where it is?”

“Right off I-89, about fifteen minutes before Montpelier. He’ll see it advertised on a large billboard, indicating the exit. From there, he just has to follow the signs.”

“Good, Rose!” María Paz hugged him. “And I did love your son, do you hear me? I loved him very much. And I love you too, when you don’t scream at me. Now, call Ming. Give him directions, and be very concise.”

“Ming is not autistic, María Paz, and neither am I.”

“We are all a little autistic. Tell your friend to speak softly to Violeta, keep his distance, don’t put any music on in the car because she is very sensitive to noise, don’t make any jokes because she won’t get them, but definitely laugh at the jokes she makes. Warn him to be careful, because the girl bites. And very important: he must introduce himself very simply. ‘I am Ming.’ Very clearly, ‘I am Ming.’ Advise him that he should not seem anxious or in a hurry, because she freezes up. Go on, call your friend.”

Rose made the call and Ming accepted the assignment without hesitation, glad to know that Ian Rose was alive. Then María Paz called the school again.

“It’s one in the afternoon, Violeta,” she told her.

“No, it’s one and ten minutes.”

“You’re right. At six-thirty today, a man named Ming will pick you up in his car.”

“A man named Ming.”

“Good. What’s the name?”

“My name is Violeta.”

“Listen, Violeta, this is not a joke. The man who’s going to pick you up. What is his name?

“His name is Ming.”

“Very good, Little Sis. Ming is a good person. You go with him. Ming will pick you up at six thirty. Ming will take care of you.”

“What a nag you are, stop repeating things. Ming will take care of Violeta, Ming will take care of Violeta, I know, I know.”

“Alright, sorry, Little Sis. Sorry to repeat. Just one last time: Ming take care of Violeta, Violeta leave with Ming.”

“Yeah, María Paz, please don’t talk like Tarzan. And if Sleepy Joe comes, I don’t go with him.”

“No! Not with Sleepy Joe, no, for God’s sake, Violeta!”

“I said that, not with Sleepy Joe.”

“Not with Sleepy Joe, no, Violeta. Sleepy Joe does bad things. Who are you going with?”

“With Sleepy Joe,” Violeta said and laughed.

“You’re playing, right? You’re teasing your sister. You go with Ming. At half past six. And don’t bite.”

“No more, Big Sis. I get it,” Violeta said, and hung up.

Toward the end of the third day of their trip, María Paz and Rose finally arrived at North Star Shine Lodge and found that despite the general chaos of things, everything was more or less under control. Ming had done his job to the letter; Sleepy Joe had not attacked, not even a sign of him; and Violeta had behaved herself, as far as things went. And now everything was on hold.

There, in that motel, the threads of this story come more or less to a dead end, or at least a neutral end, with everything quiet, perhaps falsely quiet, just like this winter of their discontent they are traversing. María Paz, Ming, and Rose entertained themselves by playing endless rounds of miniature golf, tapping the ball with the putter to make it roll on the dirty green felt. While Violeta ran after hers, picking it up and placing it in the hole. Then they ate Kentucky Fried Chicken. What else could they do? It wasn’t as if the range of possibilities was wide open. Outside the cold roared and cops were everywhere. They heard the wail of sirens; although the motel was out of the way and hidden, it was in the same area of the school, but on the opposite side of the mountain. And they didn’t know exactly what all the hullaballoo was about, or who the authorities were after. Whether it was Sleepy Joe, whom everybody was looking for, or María Paz, the fugitive, or even the girl, who had left the school without telling anyone she would be spending some nights away.

It seemed that life had pushed them to the limit, without leaving them anything other than their little golf games, old episodes of Friends, and fried chicken. Ming was worried about Wan-Sow, his prima donna finned dancer with piranha teeth, who got very agitated if it was not fed mosquito larvae every twelve hours. And yet, how could he return to his noir comics and his betta, and leave his friend’s dad in such a bind? Violeta, meanwhile, had become very obsessive-compulsive about miniature golf, breaking down every time anyone dared to suggest it would be appropriate to end the game. And the three dogs were simply happy to be dogs and to be there, or at least ignorant of the fact they could be anywhere else.

Ian Rose thought about the pipes in his house in the Catskills, which had likely frozen and burst, as had happened during other winters, and meanwhile he was stuck, far away and unable to do anything about it. But there was no abandoning these women, who in the end were the only thing he had left aside from his dogs.

María Paz seemed disoriented and perplexed to him, sandwiched between nothing and nothingness, unable to stay in the United States, unable to call for a new cyber-coyote to change her escape plan again. Because how could she just take off forever, leaving Violeta in that school she was so fond of, at the mercy of the murderer? And at the same time, what could Rose do about him, The Passion Killer, given that after the fiasco of his role as a vigilante, he no longer had any hopes of sneaking up on him commando style with Ming’s Glock?

In fact, they could describe their current situation with the same words that Pancho Villa uttered to Claro Hurtado, on that night in Parral, Chihuahua: “We’re cornered.”

María Paz got to thinking about Cleve, about how terribly she missed him, and even laughed, remembering the advice he had given as her creative-writing teacher, when she asked how to end a story she was writing, one almost as tangled as the one they were living now. “Write ‘And everyone died,’” Cleve had said. “That should solve everything.” In short, this was a sublimely dramatic moment, while stagnant; they were neck-deep in water, suspended in the eye of the hurricane, as they say, or floating in a dead calm, while all around them the murderous winds howled. It seemed as if nothing they had done had done any good, and now there was nothing else to do. So they did nothing.

They decided not to decide. Soak in a good bath, remove their watches, leave things to fate, with the brightness of North Star shining. They just were. There. Keeping each other company, trying to pass the time, this time, what was left of it, as best they could.

“The next day, I rose at dawn, still dark, to take the dogs out,” Rose tells me.

They had been trapped like sardines in the car for days. The three dogs endured the journey bravely, and it was time to give them the reward they deserved. Whatever happened, Rose was not going to deprive them of their walk in the woods. María Paz, Violeta, and Ming were still asleep in the North Star, and Rose figured he would return in time to have breakfast with them and make some decisions. Although who knew what kind of decisions — that was not so clear. Just then he decided it was best not to overthink the situation, and he took off toward the same uninhabited area he had gone to weeks earlier when he had emptied the Glock on the tree trunks. The temperature had risen a few degrees and the air was tolerable. Some of the snow had melted and an otherworldly blue glow surrounded the mountain. He could smell the fresh pine from the dripping stalactites on the branches, and Rose felt at home in the silence of his newly recovered solitude — that is, until he heard the faraway wail of a siren, reminding him that things were not so idyllic. Quite the contrary, there was an intense police presence all around and this time all hell would break loose if Rose were to shoot the Glock. Which reminded him, he had the gun with him in his backpack, a big mistake under these circumstances, and he thought about returning to the motel to put it away. But the dogs were already way uphill, happy and liberated, and Rose decided to follow them. In the end, all the bustle was down below and no one was going to wander up here.

They took about an hour climbing a little quiet road, their lungs heaving, their breaths steam, the four old friends, the clan, and Rose estimated that it was high time to start back when he came upon it: the Gift from God.

“Or gift from the devil, maybe,” he tells me. “I swear, all I thought was, oh, no, please, no!”

It was a yellow truck, old model, parked on the right shoulder, with no one inside. Nothing striking, and it would have gone completely unnoticed by anyone but Rose, who recently had seen a photo of an old prostitute hugging her pimp, as they leaned against the trunk of a yellow truck exactly like this one with the same sticker in iridescent letters on the windshield: Gift from God.

“It had to be the same one,” Rose tells me. “When I saw it, I accepted the fact that fate comes to meet you wherever you are.”

There were footprints in the snow, large boot prints through the barren undergrowth. It didn’t take a basset hound to track down the owner of the truck, and Otto, Dix, Skunko tore off quickly, zigzagging, noses to the ground, in a pattern tight as violin strings.

“I did not want to follow,” Rose tells me. “Didn’t want any part of it. My failure as an avenger had already been confirmed, and at that moment, my legs grew wobbly at the mere possibility of a face-to-face encounter with this man. At the same time, a spark of anger against this vermin suddenly flared again, and I followed the dogs. Revenge is like a hormone, which irritates you and emboldens you and makes you believe that you have cojones as big as a house. That’s what I discovered that day.”

The footprints went along the hillside, vanished for a bit, reappeared on the other side of a stream, meandered, deeper and deeper into a thicket of branches, reaching a peak that crowned the surrounding area, and then descended into a ravine, where the forest came to a clearing. The dogs had stopped at the top of the peak, and they remained alert beside Rose. From this vantage point, Rose had a clear view of the man below. It had to be him. The man was nearly naked amidst all that snow, wearing only underwear and a pair of yellow boots. His back was to Rose and he knelt on some rags or cloths, likely the clothing he had taken off.

“A humongous guy, actually,” Rose tells me.

A grifter, as they called them. And very white too. More so a slight shade of blue, like the snow that day. Rose immediately recognized him. He knew it was Sleepy Joe, although he could not see his face. Who else could it be, with that truck and in that trance? And it wasn’t really as if Rose knew the face. He had only seen pictures of him as a child, or hidden behind sunglasses. It seemed that Sleepy Joe had been there for some time, in the clearing, preparing his mise-en-scène. He had carved a notch high in the trunk of a large tree, and on that notch had placed a thinner trunk, binding it tightly with rope. He had painted the whole thing white, giving it a grotesque air. Rose remembered María Paz’s story about the Slovakian child and the insomniac nights because of a picture of another child, the Nazarene, who bore a white cross, sized especially for him. Shit, thought Rose, who is this animal going to crucify now? The cross was white, as if for a boy, or a girl. For Violeta? That would be the logical conclusion. He had constructed the whole set away from it all, camouflaged among the thickets, though right behind her school. But other than the fact that it was pristine white, like the cross of the child in the portrait, this cross was sturdy and big, and could easily bear the weight and height of an adult. Even Jaromil’s huge frame.

Sleepy Joe remained with his back to them, submitting himself to a rocking back and forth that slowly grew more intense, as if on the verge of a revelation. Something like the aura that precedes an epileptic fit with the spine bent backward at an impossible angle, the eyes raised to the heavens, body trembling with love for God, or perhaps from the cold. Rose tries to explain to me that it was worse, a more impressive scene than he had imagined from María Paz’s descriptions, because it was so unapologetically grotesque, more grotesque than frightening, actually, or in any case a good mix of both.

So finally, this was Sleepy Joe. Jaromil. The Passion Killer. The man who tortured and killed Cleve. And Pro Bono, and many more. A lone and naked giant, with yellow boots, blue with cold, shaken by hysterical mimicry in the middle of the forest. Rose did not know whether to laugh or weep. Cleve, my lovely son, think how much damage this clown has done to us.

Sleepy Joe prayed. Or at least he muttered things, repeated phrases, perhaps in Latin, or in an invented gibberish. To Rose’s ears it sounded like a litany of the names of demons: Canthon, Canthon, Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Scarabaeus, Scarabaeus — muttering names like that in pairs, the first time very serious and the second more shrill, all very theatrical.

Astonishing, really, but as Rose heard other names, he realized they were not the names of demons but of species of beetles.

“What followed all happened very fast,” Rose tells me. “Don’t expect some grand choreographed finale, because in fact the whole thing was very chaotic and arbitrary. Chaotic, no doubt. Although arbitrary, who knows, maybe not. Don’t think I was unmoved by this spectacle Sleepy Joe was putting on. There was a force behind it that made it almost impossible for me to bear. Remember that this makeshift priest, this motherfucker, had killed my son, in a ritual probably very similar to the one I was watching. And I was not immune. My mourning, my attachment to my own flesh, forced me to connect with that. I’m saying that I was very much aware that this dark ceremony involved me. Ultimately, it was me that man was waiting for, me who had been summoned, and perhaps I had only just beckoned his call.”

Once Rose was able to accept that, he was there of his own will and with a definite purpose. He opened his backpack and pulled out the Glock. Not before that, only then. “Sacrifice is sacrifice,” he said half aloud. “If the thing is killing you, then you have to kill it.” The gun was loaded and the target a gift, yes, there was his Gift from God, distracted, his back to him, practically naked, as if begging for a clean shot in the back of the head. But Rose’s hand began to tremble, and his conviction faltered. Not because he feared the consequences of such an act in the sense of electric chair or such.

“There are things that a man should not live through,” he tells me. “The death of a child is one of them. You might survive, but you’re no longer alive. So that day on the mountain, I couldn’t have cared less about what would happen to me. This was about something else.”

If Rose’s hand trembled, it was because it was one thing to make the decision to kill another human being and another to do it. That was the complicated thing. This wasn’t the first time that Rose’s inability to execute had prevented him from doing away with Sleepy Joe. He just could not pull the trigger. It was beyond his strength; his finger did not obey the order sent from his head. Should he just turn around, go back to where he came from? Have forgiveness? Or pretend none of this had happened and try to forget? Maybe that’s how things would have turned out, given human limitations. But dogs are different kinds of creatures. Rose was seriously considering backing out just at the moment his dogs made a completely different decision, and raced down the hillside as a pack, encircling the kneeling man. Rose, who saw what was happening from above, referred to it as “a vicious hunting scene.” His exact words.

The three beasts fell on the unsuspecting prey and corralled him, cold and contained, in the splendor of their rage. Their teeth were peeled back to the base of their gums, their eyes fixed on the victim, as if reading his thoughts, their ears pricked, registering even the slightest gesture; more wolves than dogs, more wolves than gods, not one false move, no fussing, no barking: the single lethal threat a low growl, sustained, coming from deep inside.

“What I’m about to tell you may sound weird,” Rose warns me. “But the dogs may have saved Sleepy Joe for the moment, definitely forcing me to lower my weapon. With my shitty aim, if I had happened to shoot, I could have missed him and hit one of the dogs instead.”

Sleepy Joe’s next move was a mistake, a dreadful mistake. He tried to run. He had been terrified of animals since he was a child and, faced with this pack ready to maul him, Sleepy Joe thought it best to run. And the dogs, which until that moment simply surrounded him without touching him, fully set on him with the worst intentions. Bare as he was, the man offered all that white meat on a platter. It very soon became a massacre, especially because of Dix, the bitch. While Otto pinned him to the ground and Skunko locked his jaw on Sleepy Joe’s neck, Dix clamped on a calf and twisted his leg this way and that as if trying to yank it off. There are dog bites and then there are dog bites. Some dogs are just biters; other are butchers, merciless, and they don’t stop until the victim is carved up. Dix belonged to this second category, and within minutes the leg was reduced to shreds. Rose believed he heard crunching of bones and cartilage, and could swear he could even smell the fear that paralyzed Sleepy Joe, making him pee on himself. So this is what it comes to, Rose thought. If they could see you now, Sleepy Joe, fucked by the rules of your own game, the same mindfuck you played with your victims, making the pain of body, torn flesh, gore, nothing compared with that inward cry of utter panic.

It was an almost mythical scene of superhuman violence and infernal beauty, as memorable as Actaeon devoured by his raging hounds, the heads of Cerberus spewing fire, or the saga of Nastagio degli Onesti as interpreted by Botticelli.

From his box of honor, like Caesar at the circus, Rose noted some revelations from human sacrifice, the clairvoyant terror emanating from the truth that is hidden in death, or something similar, the monstrous lucidity brought about by pain. He understood what Sleepy Joe had been looking for by opening such disgusting doors into the sacred, or the other way around, opening doors to the profane through the sacred. And what had been incomprehensible for Rose took on another color, as if suddenly and for a moment he looked at the situation from within, or crossed a threshold to be able to perceive certain things.

“Don’t ask me what things, because they have no names,” he says. “Things that passed though me like an electric shock and then dissolved, like the images of a dream.”

I ask Rose if he ordered his dogs to stop, for the release of the man he was about to kill. He is evasive in his response. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I doubt that after a certain time they would have obeyed.” I repeat the question, and then he admits that no, he never tried to stop them. They stopped themselves when the man gave up the struggle and froze. Then Rose, who had been standing at some distance, approached, the gun aimed at Sleepy Joe’s head.

“You may say I’m a coward,” he tells me, “and I won’t argue with that. But still, wounded and torn apart as he was, the guy was still a threat. He still inspired fear, perhaps even more than before, bloody as he was, with that bone hanging out of his leg.”

The dogs were done with their prey and took a few steps back, not breaking the circle or hiding their fangs, and something like a gurgle came out of Sleepy Joe’s throat. Was he asking for something? Mercy, or perhaps water? Rose thought it over. Give water to this vermin? He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Wasn’t vinegar customary in such cases?

“I have coffee,” he said, and threw him the thermos.

Sleepy Joe took a couple of sips and turned to look at Rose, his eyes staring as he tried to say something, but at that point the dogs’ growling drowned his words. Rose did not know how long this exchange was supposed to be, what, if any, things were supposed to be said. Drivel, really, while the blood ran out of Sleepy Joe’s leg and the dogs surrounded him and he stared up into the barrel of the gun. But Rose couldn’t quite finish it: he dared not kill the enemy, and that was extending this situation longer than necessary. Sleepy Joe there, wounded but alive, and the minutes passing, and Rose killing time because he did not dare kill Sleepy Joe. At one point, he was about to tell him that he was Cleve’s father, had the words on the tip of his tongue, but ultimately he didn’t. It disgusted him. Why stoop low with such a claim; the name of his son was untouchable, and to say it in front of his murderer would be to soil it. Best just to give this piece of garbage the coup de grâce and put an end to it. But Rose couldn’t do it.

The silence of the mountain, until then absolute, was suddenly shattered by the blare of sirens. They were far away but they made Rose shudder, because he was forced to face the reality of the situation. A shot would be heard clearly down below, drawing the attention of the police.

“As if my natural cowardice were not reason enough,” he tells me, “I had a new reason not to shoot: I did not want to attract the police. But then I realized that this factor was both against me and in my favor. And I made a decision, to set things up so others could finish off Sleepy Joe.”

Rose would take a few shots in the air, and from there, the key would be in the timing: with the Glock and the help of the dogs, he would keep Sleepy Joe immobilized until the police were almost there, and then step aside to let things proceed. Not too far-fetched a plan, so he shot once, twice, three times in the air.

And from that point began the surprises and necessary improvisations. First off, with the gunshots, the dogs scattered. Otto, Dix, and Skunko were good fighters, but unlike María Paz’s crippled doggie, these three would not qualify as war heroes. Secondly, Rose forgot a very important detail. Something he had neglected to do before the dogs fled.

Rose forced himself to get closer to Sleepy Joe, the Glock held tightly in his right hand and pointed at the forehead. He felt horribly insecure without the support of his dogs, but at least he had the Glock. One step closer, another, jumping back every time the fallen man as much as stirred, and then forward again. The sirens were getting closer, and Rose hesitated, but then he made the risky move anyway, stretching his left hand out, with the finesse with which he would use chopsticks. A little closer and he could almost touch the guy, and then he rushed through the hardest part of the maneuver, which was bending over without giving Sleepy Joe an opening to strike him. A couple of inches more, and Rose’s hand dug into the clothes Sleepy Joe had left on the floor. The winter coat was pinned under the man’s weight. “Turn over, you fuck,” he yelled, feinting to shoot, and as Sleepy Joe stirred, Rose managed to kick the coat out of the way. And then he glimpsed a piece of what he was looking for: red canvas. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him in one swift move.

It was the red backpack María Paz had bought at the last minute in Colorado.

“And you remembered such a thing, just at that moment?” I ask.

“Well, it was not like Sleepy Joe was in any position to have invested in stocks,” he tells me, “or to deposit it in the bank. So he had to have the money on him… And there it was, or the red backpack was there anyway. And judging by the weight, he had not spent much.”

And then it was time to retreat without turning his back on the man even for a moment, undeterred by the sirens closing in. Alright. So far so good, as well as could be expected from someone who has leaped out of the seventeenth floor and was passing by the fifth floor or so. One step, pat pat, another little step, pat pat, back and away. Already at a safe distance, Rose started wiping the Glock with his shirt hem, a tricky maneuver, because at the same time he had to continue pointing it. And then, a moment later, at a safer distance, he threw the Glock as far as possible into the thicket so the cops wouldn’t find him armed and think he was the bad guy.

Again the sirens, this time more than one, right on them almost: the cars must have come upon the Gift from God. Rose knew that in a few minutes he was going to have to take off and run. That was the trick; he would count to a hundred, then run for his life.

But he did not count on the third and most grievously unexpected matter: a serious error in characterization. Rose had not counted on Sleepy Joe retaliating, given the sorry state he was in. But he did. He got up and started moving toward him, as if possessed, like the Incredible Hulk: a giant tortoise in his underwear, upright and wounded, his massive arms floating up as if separate from the body, the rather elfish head rising from his thick neck and coming out of the shell, meaning the shell of his torso bulging at the muscles on his chest and shoulders. It wasn’t hyperbole; this beast did indeed look like the Hulk, only not green but blue. Torturously dragging his shattered leg, but despite this handicap and the fact that he was unarmed, the age difference, the size, the weight training, and his newly invigorated state all played in his favor. And Rose, who was no longer twenty, and no longer had his dogs or the gun, began to fear the worst.

“Jaromil!” he yelled as a desperate last resort.

Hearing his real name, Sleepy Joe shrunk and squirmed like a slug sprinkled with salt. Who knows how many years it had been since someone had called him that?

“Where is Danika Draha, Jaromil? You dried her up, Jaromil, you, such a big little baby sucking on your mommy’s tit.”

An uppercut by Rose, not terminal but lethal, like David’s stone hitting Goliath. He won several seconds with the stupefaction that overcame Sleepy Joe, who until that moment must have wondered who this insignificant homunculus that set his dogs on him was, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was a gnome or a park ranger. But now he was suddenly stunned by this mysterious being who knew the name of his sainted mother.

“He must have thought that he was dead and that I was God,” Rose tells me.

But then Rose realized that his relative advantage was only momentary, because Sleepy Joe put two and two together and recognized him.

“I know who you are,” he wailed. “You are the old asshole from the Catskills with the dogs.”

A posteriori, Rose had made sense of things. He thought that ultimately it was not him who Sleepy Joe recognized, but the dogs, just as his dogs must have recognized Sleepy Joe, who during the days before killing Cleve must have prowled around the house in the Catskills, maybe unable to make it inside precisely because of the dogs, and hence nabbed John Eagles, who happened to be nearby, and ripped off his face. Then he waited for Cleve to go far from the house on his motorcycle to kill him.

“It makes sense,” he tells me. “But back to the Hulk. I heard male voices getting closer and closer. Sleepy Joe advanced, staggering, arms akimbo, blinded by the blood that dripped from his forehead, but advancing, advancing toward me. The cops were coming down, I could see them, and I ran toward them, shouting, ‘He’s armed! He’s armed!’ And the cops signaled for me to get out of the way and safe from the crossfire. And they moved in, shooting from all different directions. Sleepy Joe continued to advance, but surprise, surprise, not toward me; apparently I was not his goal because he passed right by me, stumbling, blinded and lame, as if drunk, suicidal, arms open and chest exposed, right into the endless volley of gunfire.”

And that’s it. Sleepy Joe fell, and nothing happened. The sky did not darken, torrential rain did not suddenly fall, the earth did not flinch nor stars cry. Nothing.

The police noted the white cross, of course, impossible to miss, and they realized they had come upon the fugitive they had been after for days, the celebrated Passion Killer, the biggest catch in all the US of A.

Ten or twenty minutes later, Rose, again surrounded by his dogs, played the part of the innocent neighbor who had gone for a walk on the mountain and been shot at by this man, and his dogs had jumped to the defense of their master. He answered a few routine questions from the lieutenant, who was friendly, euphoric even. There were several inconsistencies in Rose’s version of events that would have become known through a more thorough investigation, but the police were too excited about their own role in the case to worry about such things. “Thank you, lieutenant,” Rose said, squeezing his hand, “you saved me, thanks.”

“I would have wanted to say more,” Rose admits. “To say, for example, not to boast, ‘Lieutenant, you brought down the man, but my dogs defeated the god.’ But I squeezed his hand, and said that other thing instead, which I’m pretty sure is why he let me go just like that. At the end of the day, things came out well because I stuck to my script, as if I were a minor character in CSI.”

“Things could have turned out a lot worse,” I tell him.

“True.” He laughs. “Fatally so. But there was a good turn in the end, you know. A string of mistakes that led to a final success.”

Throughout that week and the following one, the news cycle focused almost solely on the end of The Passion Killer and the brave men and women in uniform who brought him down in a masterful operation. The Glock turned up in the bushes, and witnesses attested to hearing three shots, and inside the yellow truck the Gift from God the authorities found countless gadgets of death, crucifixion, and martyrdom, so they did not hesitate to claim self-defense and had no problem justifying leaving the body of the super serial killer with more holes than a colander.

“It was nearly noon when I finally returned to North Star,” Rose tells me, “and I almost didn’t find anyone there.”

Ming had stayed back to wait for him, his nerves frayed because the old man had taken so long. “But what happened, Mr. Rose?” Ming came out to greet him fussing and complaining. “I was going nuts, sir. I figured the worst. Where have you been? The police came by; everything is super tense. The owner of the motel started shitting on himself, panicked about harboring so many strange people. He asked us to please return the keys and practically threw us out into the street, not in a bad way, but kicking our asses out anyway.”

María Paz and Violeta had set off to avoid any more risks, and were waiting in some camp trailers on Lake Champlain, near Tinconderoga, about an hour away.

“They got out of here just in time,” Ming told Rose. “María Paz and Violeta. Ten more minutes and they would have been fucked. Just as they’re leaving, the cops burst in asking all kinds of questions at the reception desk. Everything is on high alert, Mr. Rose. Pro Bono’s murder has stirred the wasp’s nest and unleashed the state and federal agencies, all chasing The Passion Killer. It seems he had been followed from Brooklyn, and they are convinced that he is here in Vermont.”

“Makes sense,” Rose said. “But I don’t understand, Ming. How could the girls just leave… who are they with?”

“We’re going to see them in a bit,” Ming said, “I’ll explain everything, but not now, especially not here.”

“Wait, Ming, I have to apologize for one thing…”

“Later, Mr. Rose,” Ming said, dragging him toward the Toyota.

“I must tell you at once, I lost your grandfather’s gun.”

“You lost it? Well, what’re we going to do? It’s not important, Mr. Rose. But let’s go, let’s go!”

“Can I have some breakfast at least?” Rose protested. “I could use a shower too, but let me grab some breakfast and feed the dogs.”

“Later,” Ming said. “I’ll take my car, follow me.”

“Let’s just go in mine,” Rose said. “We’ll come back to get yours later.”

“Please do what I say, Mr. Rose, follow behind me.”

The winds, which began to rage as they neared their destination, pushed the Toyota sideways, and Rose had to struggle to keep it on the road. He was so tired. He would have preferred if Ming had driven. After all, Ming knew where they were going and he didn’t. Rose didn’t know where or why, but above all else he was simply exhausted, almost medically in need of rest at home for a week, or a whole month. He couldn’t wait to escape this winter at the end of the world, and observe the season instead from his window next to the crackling fireplace, a nice cup of Earl Grey with a cloud in hand, and his three dogs spread beneath him. He felt truly exhausted, and particularly old. I am already an old man, he thought, as he struggled to keep the car on the road. Now there is nothing else to do but to keep getting older. In the back, dogs slept like rocks, very worn out themselves: in the end, they were the veterans of a tremendous battle. And nobody knew, or was going to know, except themselves and Rose.

“Damn it, Mr. Rose, you almost didn’t make it. My heart was in my mouth, thinking you were so irresponsible to get lost at the worst time!” María Paz yelled, coming toward him on the shores of Lake Champlain, trying to keep her balance in the gale winds that made her shiver and buckle. “But what a face, Mr. Rose, as if you’ve just come home from a war…”

“Well, sort of. And Violeta?”

“I’m sorry?”

Conversation was almost impossible. The wind whipped their faces and made the skin on their cheeks flutter, got into their mouths and pilfered their words, and every step forward they tried to take was followed by two steps backward. María Paz was all wrapped up in her hard-shell outfit, ready and dressed for the journey through the realms of ice, everything covered except for her eyes and a few locks of hair, very black, which whipped madly in the wind like a pirate flag.

“Where’s Violeta?” Rose asked again, screaming this time.

María Paz was beside him now, clinging to his arm, but such was the violence of the wind bursts that despite their proximity they could only hear each other if they screamed.

“It’s the Boreas,” Rose said.

“Who?”

“The Boreas, the north wind, blowing like a fucking mini hurricane!”

“Listen, Mr. Rose, we have to move it along. Violeta is waiting for us just ahead, in a four-by-four,” María Paz screamed. “She’s coming with us! What do you think, Mr. Rose! She said she wanted to come. She decided all on her own, without even me asking. I swear, I didn’t have to press or anything, she alone decided. She didn’t want to return to school. So I brought her with me. I’m taking her!”

“So you arranged things with the coyote?”

“What?

“The coyote! You talked to the coyote?”

“What coyote, no, I didn’t talk to any coyote, he sent me to hell. Insulted my mom, even called me a bitch. I offered to pay twice the fee, counting on your generosity, of course, Mr. Rose, sorry about that. But no, even then. I begged and begged until he told me to go fuck myself and hung up.”

“And so?”

“Elijah is taking us!

“Who?”

“Elijah, from the motel…”

“How did that come up?”

“The man wearing the cap put me in contact, the motel manager. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose, everything is arranged. Good people, this Elijah!”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know he’s good people?”

“You can tell by his face! But hurry, Rose, Elijah says we can’t wait long.”

“And where do you think you’re going with all this wind?”

“Elijah says it’ll stop soon.”

“At least you got rid of the cyber-coyote.”

“What?”

“What about Violeta? She’s not going to leave stuffed into the false floor of a Buick LeSabre.”

“Buick? What? Wait, Mr. Rose, my scarf is flying away. What about Violeta?”

“How are you going to get her across?”

“Very easy, see, Violeta is a gringa! She has a valid passport, so no problem there. And you too, so I’ll go hidden in the four-by-four with Elijah, and Violeta leaves with you.”

“With me?”

“With you, silly, who else!”

“With me? To where?”

“First to Canada, then to Seville.”

“You’re crazy, María Paz, I can’t go anywhere.”

“You’re the crazy one; do you think I’m going leave her here for Sleepy Joe to make mincemeat of her?”

“Sleepy Joe no longer exists.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Sleepy Joe: kaput, fini.”

“What’re you saying?”

“He was gunned down by the police.”

“Really? Unbelievable… And how do you know, did you hear it on the radio?

“More or less.”

“A shoot-out? But that man is immune to lead. Are they sure he is dead?”

“Deader than John F. Kennedy.”

“Son of a bitch. Even better. But let’s go, Rose, tell me about it later. So let’s see, you in the Toyota with Violeta and the dogs, following Elijah.”

“I’m staying, María Paz. I can’t go.”

“No. Why not?”

“I’m tired, I want to go home.”

“What home, what’s there? Well, you have the dogs. But we’re your family now. Come with us, Mr. Rose, I’ll take care you from now on, like you’ve taken care of me. Don’t stay, don’t be afraid, come with us, we make a very good team.”

“I’ll be in touch, María Paz. I swear. I’ll look for you, you and your sister, wherever you end up.”

“You swear. Swear for me.”

“I swear by Cleve.”

“So be it, amen. So this is good-bye, Mr. Rose, until very soon. I love you, don’t ever forget that, and thank you very much for everything, absolutely everything. You have been my blessing. Are you sure you don’t want to come? Everything is arranged. Elijah has no problem taking all three of us, with the dogs… Cheer up, man, a little bit more and we’re on the other side, look at these trees, syrup trees. That means we are almost in Canada.”

“Go, María Paz, go.”

“Wait, I have to say good-bye to Ming, and to Otto, Dix, and Skunko. And to a few others before I leave here.”

The north wind is born in the lake, skating on the water, dancing on the surface as it pushes the waves against the shore, where they break in white foamy fans. After rising from the lake skyward, it becomes a planetary wind, reaching clouds, chasing them, swirling back down, wrapped in fog.

María Paz took a few steps away from Rose, stood with her back to him, facing the lake and the strong gale so that her hair shot back and her eyes became slits. “Good-bye, my dead,” she said. “Good-bye, Bolivia, my pretty Mami. I leave you here. Take care of yourself alone, because I can’t come back. Ciao, Mami, you see how things turned out, both a dream and a nightmare, and now, good-bye, Mami, good-bye. I’m taking Violeta, and I’ll always take care of her, like I promised you. So don’t worry, rest in peace. And good-bye, my Greg, you were a good person in spite of everything, and I know you are up there where you should be, feasting on your kapustnica with the Virgin of Medjugorje. And good-bye, my beautiful Pro Bono, the greatest of men and the most handsome among the angels. And good-bye, my creative-writing professor, Mr. Rose of my soul, my friend, and my love, I better not say good-bye to you because I won’t stop crying. Well, then. That’s it. Oh, wait! I’m forgetting to say good-bye to Holly, Holly, my fascination, my Holly with her beautiful black dress, as lost in the world as I was. Maybe someday our paths will cross, Holly Golightly, but for now, bye! Oh, dear God of mine, and I need to say good-bye to Sleepy Joe. How am I going to say good-bye to that? I would like to say good-bye forever and ever and ever, to the very point I never would have met you or seen you. But I can’t do that. That would be a lie, an impossibility, because Sleepy Joe, you are my nightmare, which I’ll always carry inside me. Even dead as you are and against my will, I’ll take you with me, what can I do, not everything is victory. So now. Since I have said good-bye to almost all my ghosts, I now say good-bye to the living. Good-bye, my coworkers, farewell, friends, I wish a good life for all of you. Good-bye, Mandra and my sisters of Manninpox, I wish you nothing less than freedom. And good-bye to America. Ciao, America, I won’t be coming back. I have no idea, really, if I’m leaving or if I never really got here.”

María Paz now turned to Rose.

“I won’t say good-bye to you, sir,” she told him, “because we will meet up soon, you promised me and I believe you, because you have to believe people. But I’ll leave you with a gift to keep you company. Take it, Mr. Rose, I’ve been taking good care of it to this very day, from now on it’s your turn to care for it.”

“What is it?”

“Cleve’s notebook. What he wrote here is how he lived his last days. You’ve been wanting to know for a long time, Mr. Rose. Take it, read it, let your son be the one to tell you himself.”

Rose took the notebook, stroked the cover gently, and put it in his pocket. He bundled himself tightly inside his coat to protect his skin from the wind, and passed a hand through his white hair in a vain attempt to keep it in place.

“I have something for you also,” he said.

And as Perseus offered Athena the freshly severed head of Medusa, old Ian Rose, ceremonious and overcome with emotion, handed María Paz the red backpack.