Hot Sur

7. Interview with Ian Rose

Rose was still in the shower when the buzzer rang and had to get out wet and in a towel to open the door for Pro Bono, who had arrived earlier than agreed upon at the studio on St. Mark’s. “Maybe ‘agreed upon’ is not the right term,” Rose tells me. They had not actually agreed to anything yet. Rose had been asleep when he answered the phone at about four or five in the morning and heard Pro Bono give an order through the fog of his sleep. “That’s his style, giving orders. I hadn’t agreed to anything,” Rose clarifies. Pro Bono had told him to get ready because they had to leave in an hour. “Anyway, I got up,” Rose tells me, “I guess to see what would happen. Soon I was opening the door for him, with a towel wrapped around my waist, and he, of course, was looking like a million bucks.”

Even at that early hour, Pro Bono was more gussied up than on the previous day: his shirt impeccable, white and crispy; a heavy Hermès silk tie; a dark flannel, custom-tailored suit with chalk pinstripes; a touch of classic and clean Equipage cologne; Cartier Panthere watch, wedding band on his left ring finger, and a ring with the family shield on the pinkie of the same hand. A bit too fancy for Rose’s taste. In that, just that, it was clear that the hump had made a dent in Pro Bono’s personality, which was otherwise overwhelming. It was as if he had to use everything in his exclusive closet and barricade himself behind big brands to make up for his deformity.

Rose let Pro Bono in, offered him tea and, like the day before, immediately felt intimidated by the man. Pro Bono was overbearing, at once irritable and paternal, or patronizing — Rose wasn’t sure what to call it. In any case, it was a combination Rose did not like to deal with.

“It’s about María Paz,” Pro Bono told Rose, ignoring Rose’s greeting and glaring at him with yellow-hazel eyes.

“I figured,” Rose said.

“It’s serious.”

“How serious?”

“Serious.”

“Did something happen last night?”

“It’s been happening for a while, but just I found out about it last night.”

“What makes you think I can help you?”

“We have to be at Manninpox before 9:15. You know the way because you live right near it.”

“How do you know that?” Rose asked. The day before he had given Pro Bono the phone and address of the studio on St. Mark’s; he had not mentioned the house in the mountains.

“They know everything in my office.”

Rose tried to explain that he wasn’t going back to the Catskills yet because he had unfinished business in the city. But Pro Bono wasn’t one to take no for an answer, and simply pretended not to hear. He had assumed that Rose would go on this trip and that was the end of the discussion.

“He said it like that, ‘you have to leave early, my friend,’” Rose tells me, “that’s it, as if I were one of his employees — and then to top it off calling me friend whenever he wanted me to do something. That’s who Pro Bono was. It really threw me off when he called me friend. Why would he call me his friend if we weren’t friends? One day I told him to fuck off and the next day he was Paris Hiltoning me, making me his new BFF.” Rose decided that was how that kind of person — one who is used to maneuvering others to do his bidding — acts.

Pro Bono told him that he had received a call from Mandra X, and Rose knew right away who that was. María Paz had mentioned Mandra X in the manuscript, and the name had stuck in Rose’s mind. Was it some kind of homage to Malcolm X? A reference to mandrake? She was a terrifying creature for whom María nevertheless seemed to express only gratitude, even affection, one might say.

“Mandra X is not the type to just run her mouth,” Pro Bono said.

“What did she say?”

“She says it is urgent we find María Paz, or she will die.”

“We’re all going to die.”

“This is not a joke, my friend.”

“A matter of life and death, huh? And you want me to believe that you have no idea where María Paz is?” Rose asked.

“I lost track of her a while ago, that’s why I need you.”

“All I know is what I read in that manuscript that I brought to you yesterday.”

“Stop acting all innocent, Rose. María Paz spoke to me about you. Although I have to say the girl is a bit in la-la land. She made it seem to me that you were much younger.”

“And to me that you were much more handsome.”

“Help me be of use to her, Rose. The girl is your friend, and she must have gotten herself into a mess. A new mess, I should say. Don’t turn your back on her now. She trusts you, told me so herself various times.”

“She trusts me? She doesn’t even know me. Unless… wait, I think I get it now. You came here this morning looking for Cleve Rose.”

“That’s who you told me you were, Cleve Rose.”

“I never said I was Cleve Rose.”

“Cleve Rose, María’s writing instructor.”

“No, you don’t understand. Maybe your office doesn’t quite know everything, sir. Check into that when you get back. I told you my name was Rose, but not Cleve Rose.”

“I’m not following.”

“Cleve Rose was killed in an accident, sir. I am Ian Rose, his father.”

“Cleve Rose is dead?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“And you’re his father?”

“Like I said, I am not Cleve, I am Ian. And I have never met María Paz.”

Pro Bono seemed upset with that bit of news. It flustered him for a moment; he who was always so obnoxiously sure of himself was now a bit befuddled.

“Sorry to have to tell you,” Rose told him, “but my son can no longer help you.”

“Then you will have to do.”

“I can help you even less so, I’m afraid.”

“But you sought me out, asking all those questions about her, and besides you have that manuscript, those papers.”

“Only because the chain of mistaken identities is long. That manuscript was sent to Cleve, not me. But Cleve was already dead, so it came to me.”

Knowing there was no way to get out of the situation, Rose nevertheless tried to impose a few conditions before leaving for Manninpox with Pro Bono. For one, he needed to know what this was all about. For another, no more calling him “my friend.”

“About one, I can’t tell you because I myself don’t know,” Pro Bono said. “About the other, that’s fine, my friend, I’ll stop calling you my friend. I’ll be downstairs.”

On the road in Rose’s car, leaving Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, Rose asked why they were using his car and not Pro Bono’s.

“I’ve heard that you have a much finer car than this one,” Rose said, “a red sports car that makes you very popular with the ladies.”

“It’s black, not red.”

“Socorro said it was red. That woman from Staten Island, a friend of María Paz’s.”

“Socorro is a manipulating freak. Take anything she says with a grain of salt. My car is black, a black Lamborghini.”

“So what the hell are we doing in a blue Ford Fiesta?”

“Let’s just say they made me hang up my driving gloves, too many speeding tickets.”

“And that’s why you need me to take you to Manninpox? Couldn’t you just have hired a driver?”

“So you’re telling me that the renowned Mr. Rose who taught María Paz’s writing workshop was your son,” Pro Bono said, changing topics.

“He was.”

“And he was murdered?”

“I didn’t say that. I said he was killed.”

“Are you certain?”

“Only death is certain, as the saying goes.”

“How do you know he wasn’t murdered?”

“Murdered by whom? Cleve had no enemies. He was a good boy.”

“Everyone who deals with María Paz makes enemies.”

“Cleve was simply her teacher. He didn’t have any dealings with her.”

“Or so you would think. Look, Rose, maybe it’s best if you just keep your eyes on the road. Didn’t anybody teach you that when the line is solid you can’t cross over it?”

Rose lowered the windows to see if the cold air would help a bit. All this bossing around unsettled him, as did not knowing the purpose of their trip, and the cologne of this character, which filled the car with the aroma of something like horses. Pro Bono’s person, like his office, was infused with the supposedly aristocratic smell of horses, but not just the whiff of any old horse grazing in the field — more like the smell of a Thoroughbred’s riding saddle. Rose had a wealthy friend obsessed with equestrianism who had told him once how much money it took to develop and maintain a champion. Rose had thought it absurd; it was more than the friend spent on himself. Pro Bono smelled like that ilk of horses and could not stop himself from blurting out commands on how to drive: slow down, watch out for that car, light is about to turn red, start veering right, look out.

“Who’s the one without a license?” Rose protested. “Just let me drive.”

“You’re not very good.”

“You want to get out? I can still drop you off at the bus station and go back to sleep. If I’m not all that good, it’s because you’re driving me crazy with your tyrannical little orders.”

“Fine, I’ll shut up and you focus on the road.”

“How about this? You shut up and listen to me,” Rose said, taking an off-ramp and parking the car on the shoulder. He let go of the wheel and faced Pro Bono. “Look, I’m not quite sure what you want, but I can tell you what I’m looking for. The only thing I’m interested in is finding out what happened to my boy. Is that clear? You, María Paz, that Socorro woman, I couldn’t care less about any of you. I just want to know what happened to Cleve. I’m not sure what that has to do with María Paz. Maybe nothing. But for now, she is the only lead I have. Now if you can kindly tell me what made you change your mind about me from one day to the next, that would be a good start.”

“I realized I need you to find María Paz.”

“I’ll take you to Manninpox and our partnership ends there.”

They drove on in silence and a couple of hours later got off the main highway and took an old road that wound up the mountains through a forest of trees. Everything seemed wonderful out there at the end of fall. The flock of geese against the deep blue of the sky, the light breeze past the almost bare branches, the fiery colors of the landscape, the smell of wet earth. It’s the same every year, Cleve, exactly the same. And yet you should see it, son, it still startles one as if there had never been such a lustrous season, thought Rose. And since he couldn’t help but feel better, he tried to make peace with the character dozing beside him, painfully shrunken under his hump, yet peaceful, stripped at last of his armor of arrogance, reduced to his true state of an old man that for who knows how many years, eighty at least, had had to make his way in the world with that weight on his back.

“Do you need to lean the chair back a bit?” Rose asked when Pro Bono opened his eyes. “The lever is there on your right. You’ll be more comfortable.”

“I wasn’t made for comfort, my friend,” Pro Bono said, shutting his eyes again. But a bit later, more fully alert now, he asked Rose, “Do you know the great thing about my Lamborghini?”

“Everything,” Rose said, “everything must be great about your Lamborghini.”

“The best thing is the driver’s seat, custom made for my size out of carbon fiber fabric. La Casa del Toro ordered it especially for me. A full-fledged Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4, a relentless mechanical force, made expressly so that a cripple like me could drive it two hundred miles per hour. What do you think of that?”

“What else can I think? No wonder they suspended your damn license. But listen, I was thinking… Mandra X, or Mandrax. You know? Mandrax, the barbiturate. Those little blue-and-white capsules that were big in nightclubs moons ago. Do you remember them? No? Well, yeah, you’re not much a nightclub person, I take it.”

“Filicide with Mandrax? Could be. Good job, Rose! Maybe you’re brighter than you look.”

“Don’t expect any miracles from me, Señor Attorney. I am a man broken by sorrow, very simple.”

Mandra X, real name Magdalena Krueger, was serving life in Manninpox and was in fact German, as María Paz had guessed. She was born in a place where two rivers come together to form the Danube. As was the case with Jesus Christ, nothing is known about the first thirty years of her life. It was at that point that she made her entrance into the history books when she turned herself in to the Idaho authorities after murdering her three children in cold blood. The lead-up to the trial was a huge controversy and caused quite a scandal in the press. She was convicted by public opinion from the start, but there was a movement led by several human rights groups and pro-euthanasia organizations in her support. In the end, she was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, destined to remain behind bars throughout this lifetime and the next two. Pro Bono was silent about whatever legal intricacies led her from the judgment of an Idaho jury to a prison in upstate New York. All he confirmed was that Mandra X had been taken to Manninpox, and there she would remain forever and ever. She had been spared the death penalty because of a single mitigating detail: according to the record, the victims, the children who happened to be triplets, suffered from a debilitating combination of worsening birth defects that included blindness, deafness, and mental retardation. She had been fully devoted to them until they were thirteen years old, and at that time had decided to do them in with an overdose of narcotics, all three of them at once, making sure to take precautions so they would not suffer or realize what she was doing. “I just put them to sleep, put them to sleep forever,” she declared to the press with a measured calm that one reporter called breathtaking.

Mandra X told the judge that from the moment they were born she had known that there would come a time when life would become unlivable for them. She still had plenty of strength left and had up to that time relied on a family inheritance to be able to remain at home and care for them. But the children could not go to any type of school, and because they could not tell night from day, there was always one of them awake, demanding her attention. Caring for them was a Herculean undertaking. To make matters worse, the money from the inheritance was dwindling fast and they could not live on the welfare check from the state. On the day the children turned twelve, Mandra X had been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. It had gone into remission, but she became obsessed with the idea that soon it would return. The last thing she wanted was to die and leave them alone.

She made no attempt to cover up her crime or get rid of the bodies. On the contrary, she placed the duly shrouded children in their respective beds, and before turning herself in, made sure that the funeral and burial arrangements were paid. She foresaw any and all issues that could arise and managed to take care of everything beforehand: three coffins in just the right size, the hearse, wreaths and candles for the funeral service, cremation arrangements, and permission for the ashes to be taken to Germany and sprinkled on the Danube from a certain bridge in her hometown.

After she had been sentenced and taken to prison, Mandra X contacted Pro Bono and the organizations that had helped her, and, locked up in her cell, she began a strict exercise regimen and her studies of American penal law.

“Mandra X… Medea X,” Pro Bono told Rose. “The enraged, ferocious, fooled Medea. You know what Euripides has her say? She shouts, ‘Death unto you, my accursed children born of such a deathly mother.’ At first, my knees would tremble every time I had to be in her presence.”

“Like Clarice Starling when she goes to see Hannibal Lecter,” Rose said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Since then we have become partners in crime. We both speak the language of freaks, I suppose.”

“But, wait, there’s still something that I’m not getting, this friend of yours…”

“Hold on there, I didn’t say friend, I said partner,” Pro Bono corrected him. “Mandra X does not have any friends per se.”

“Fine. So this person, your partner, murdered her children because she was afraid that she herself would soon die, and they would be left with no one to care for them…”

“Yet that was twenty years ago and she’s still with us,” Pro Bono completed the thought. “Is that your objection?”

“Not an objection. Who am I to judge? I get her motivation, and I guess that ideally she should have died right after the trial so that the whole sensationalist story would have had an apt ending. But that’s not what happened. The cancer never came back. She misjudged the entire situation. Don’t you think that she should be retried and sentenced to death just for that?”

“Execute her because she didn’t die? Not very prudent.”

Mandra X had helped María Paz, shown her how to survive in prison. María Paz became an entirely new person after Mandra X allowed her into her group.

“Las Nolis,” Pro Bono added. “They were known as Las Nolis, but the real full name of the group, the sect, was in Latin: Noli me tangere.”

“Sounds a little outlandish, prisoners throwing around Latin,” Rose tells me, “but that was the name. And why not? They were trapped in a medieval castle, so shouldn’t they be using Latin? Anyway, noli me tangere means ‘don’t touch me,’ from somewhere in the Bible. It seems that at first Las Nolis had misjudged María Paz. She came across as a weakling, a stupid, pretty little thing. According to Pro Bono, she had to prove her steeliness.”

The members of Noli me tangere were unified by the guiding principles of survival and respect. Simple and direct as that. But Mandra X was a wily old fox, and she knew that for the enterprise to work she needed to add touches of mystery and mysticism to it, have it develop its own ceremonies and myths. In prison, as well as in the world outside, but particularly in prison, such a makeup is essential if any enterprise is to have a sense of purpose. Without theatrics, there would be no meaning; without rituals, no loyalty.

“Was it a kind of political rebellion or a religious cult?” Rose asked Pro Bono.

“Neither, nothing as complicated as that.”

Mandra X had come up with a way to bring together women of different ages, social classes, education levels, religions, skin colors, psychological and moral tendencies, and sexual preferences. She did it by focusing on the one thing they had in common: they were all prisoners. They were residents of the worst kind of ghetto. Basically, Mandra X offered them the opportunity to become her property so that they would not have to be treated as less than human in such inhumane conditions. It also helped that they were all Latinas, the other thing that they all had in common. Although she herself had an Aryan background, she had become the head of a Latino gang. Pro Bono wasn’t sure how Mandra X had ended up in such a position, but he knew that she had hacked her way there by force and charisma, and because she had lived many years in Latin America and was fluent in Spanish. On top of that, she was an old-timer. She had been at Manninpox almost longer than anyone had and had become a leader in the fight for prisoners’ human rights. Dark rumors circulated about her legendary crime, and about her philosophy and her methods.

“María Paz writes about group sacrifices in Manninpox,” Rose said. “About Las Nolis and orgies.”

“What does the pretty little María Paz know about any of that?” Pro Bono said.

“Blood sacrifices,” Rose insisted. “She says blood was spilled.”

According to Pro Bono, the whole situation was difficult to understand unless it was properly placed in the context of the powerlessness, confinement, and extreme deprivation that the women experienced. For them, their wounds were the only things they could call their own. They inflicted these wounds on themselves, and no one could stop them. Their scars were their marks, which they themselves had chosen and crafted, unlike the numbers they had been assigned, the cells in which they were locked up, and the uniforms they had to wear. There were some things, however, that no one could take from them: their blood, their sweat, their shit, their tears, their urine, their saliva, their vaginal fluids.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Rose quipped.

“The whole thing reminds me of this Dutch mystic from the fourteenth century, Saint Liduvina de Schiedam,” Pro Bono said.

“I don’t know who she is,” Rose said, thinking that Cleve would have surely known.

“A strange woman, half mystic, half insane. She delighted in her own decomposition, applying torments on her body and giving herself over to infections and disease until she had become a mere semblance of the thing she had been, the scraps of a creature. She transformed herself into living waste to discover her true identity. Reading about her has helped me to better understand Mandra X and her Nolis. Listen, Rose, things in there work on another level altogether,” Pro Bono said as Rose watched the low arch of the autumn light gild the landscape. “Look, my friend, if you are going to go in there with me, you’re going to have to change the way you think about things. It’s another world in there, and it forces you to think in different terms.”

“I’m not sure I’ll go that far with you… my friend. Why don’t you tell me a little about María Paz.”

“María Paz is another story. María Paz is a normal person, to the extent such a thing exists. Her time in Manninpox was an experience that without a doubt made her stronger and allowed her to mature in ways she would have never outside of prison. I personally witnessed the process, yet it did not change her into what I would call prison flesh.”

“So then María Paz is not like that mystic?” Rose asked.

“Neither are the others really, not completely, no need to force the comparison. Mandra X and her girls reclaim their pains, but also their joys. They want to feel alive through suffering and crying but also through singing, masturbating, writing, making love. In the end, Mandra X makes evident that in prison you can live a life that is on a fully human level of dignity if you fight for it stubbornly enough.”

“María Paz says that they slashed their skins and cut into their veins.”

“Fine, that too, if it’s done through their own free will.”

“She writes that they smeared the walls with their own shit.”

“They graffiti the walls with shit, or with blood. What else are they going to do it with? It’s not like they have spray paint on hand. I’m telling you, don’t judge the situation out of context. What might seem disgusting to you and me is something they experience quite differently. Look at serious artists like Sade and Pasolini; they talk about a circle of shit and a circle of blood.

“Circles of shit and blood, that’s what made sense to Las Nolis. They eschewed detergent and bleach, which washed away the human stains, turning them into ghosts. You have to begin by understanding that not even the clothes they wore or the sheets they slept on belonged to them. They were washed, disinfected, and handed over arbitrarily to whoever took them next. But Las Nolis were no Goody Two-shoes,” Pro Bono said. “They knew what they wanted and they got it. They could always cover some wall with their shit, smash their plates of food on the floor, or conduct a chilling chorus of screams at lights out. Or turn the prison into an inferno by setting mattresses on fire and destroying any motherfucker who got in their way.

“Read Jean Genet,” Pro Bono said. “He was a brilliant criminal and wrote about it like no else. He said lice were a ‘sign of our prosperity… they were precious. They were both our shame and our glory.’”

“I think I’m getting it,” Rose said. “So the lice. I’m going to read this Renet.”

“Genet,” Pro Bono corrected him, and then went on talking as if to himself, like an old man who retreats to the habit of just chattering away no matter who is listening; soon he was off on dozens of tangents, wandering all on his own, citing Sade, Sacher-Masoch, and Roudinesco, recounting anecdotes about Erzsebet Bathory the Bloody Countess, Gilles de Rais and Comte de Lautréamont, Saint Liduvina, Christian martyrs, the murderous cults of the Nizaries, black widows, the geniuses of the dark, the biographies of the auto-flagellants, and the princes of perversity.

From Cleve’s Notebook

Researching the history of American prisons, I came upon this little book reprinted in 1954 by Yale University and I read it in one sitting. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, a strange character and the architect who designed Manninpox and overlooked its construction between 1842 and 1847. It was one of the first big jails in the country, along with Sing, Auburn Prison, Cherry Hill Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and New Jersey State Prison, all of which were as impressive and bombastic on the outside as they were reviling on the inside. I read all 156 pages without even getting up for a cup of coffee. I needed to know what kind of cold-blooded person had so meticulously planned the most efficient manner to torture the two thousand women who would one day be imprisoned in Manninpox. I wanted to know more about the man who, with such professional zeal and artistic relish, had come up with every miserable detail of the place: the elongated slots that act as windows and were made to let in just a thread of light; the lack of ventilation, which forces the prisoners to live under the permanent sensation that they are suffocating; the horrible drainage and sewage system that makes the perennial stench of piss and shit accumulate in the air year after year; cells designed for two prisoners that are no bigger than closets; the genius of barred doors, which ensured any movement could be observed from outside and that the prisoners knew they were under constant scrutiny; solitary confinement cells when the behavior of the prisoners left something to be desired, and punishment quarters if they didn’t behave in the isolation cells; the sound of bars slamming shut, expressly designed to reverberate through the hallways as if telling everyone just how fucked they were and that they should forget the outside world because their imprisonment was eternal; or the bathrooms without doors or curtains so that everyone showering or doing their necessities would be completely exposed, to prevent, in the very words of Branly, “sexual assaults, acts of violence, or any other type of immoral behavior.” But the most peculiar aspect of the architect’s mindset, the most surprising one, has to do with the contrast between the outright perversity and gloom of the interior of the structure and the grandiosity of its exterior. Or in his own words, “the manifestation of a sublime aesthetic.” Using the word sublime to refer to a place of abandonment and suffering? What kind of a moron would think of a prison as sublime?

Although perhaps Edward Branly wasn’t such a moron. For designing Manninpox and overseeing its construction and with other connected commissions, he earned what today would be between twelve and thirteen million dollars; but if he wasn’t a moron, he must have been a sadist. You can imagine him growing up with an abusive father and a decent mother whom the drunk father beat until he knocked her senseless, or something equally horrifying. Or maybe the father forced the mother into prostitution to pay for his drink. Whatever the case, an abused child who as an adolescent enjoyed locking up the cat in a chest and who as an adult would become a torturer of women, but a timid one, incapable of doing so directly, so instead becomes the mind behind a thousand different ways to torture these women by locking them up, degrading them, reducing them to rags. It seems to me that only such a type of degenerate could conceive such a moral monstrosity as Manninpox. However, the little gray book proved me wrong. Edward Branly had been just the opposite, nothing short of a great man, respected and admired in his time and an exemplary citizen. One of those of whom it was said had impeccable manners, Branly was a champion of progress and reform in keeping with the just and liberal model. His prison was seen in his time as an outstanding accomplishment and a critical contribution to “upholding the dignity, worth, and empowerment of a society,” to quote the hagiographer of the book. That is, in that time, Manninpox was not seen as some monstrosity. On the contrary, although it was a penal institution, it was imagined it would play a reformist, even redemptive, role, a pillar in a society that metes out just punishment to those who deserve it. And in that sense, Manninpox was not unique, just one in a series of many monumental castles of horror, unforgettable and omnipresent in the conscience of the inhabitants of a country who should know what awaits them if they should veer down the wrong road. “This is progress, this is civilization. We have arrived!” so proclaimed the official who opened Manninpox, with Branly himself standing there, who took a bottle of champagne and smashed it against the foundation stone.

From the time I first went into Manninpox, and as I return to it weekly, I cannot stop thinking of that world of confinement that coexists in the shadow of ours, in which doors are open and the air is plenty, where the rest of us exist without truly knowing what it’s worth. Ever since meeting María Paz, I can’t help but wonder what twists of fate would have led a person like her to reside on that side of the bars, while a person like me resided on this side. It all seems so painfully arbitrary. For a moment, just for a moment, I can imagine that the separation and the walls vanish. The other day, she came to me with two pieces of paper torn from a legal pad in which she had completed an exercise I had assigned. When she handed them to me, our hands grazed, and an electrical charge coursed through my body. It seemed that the contact had been prolonged longer than strictly necessary, that the moment was paused in time and we were one, touching, feeling, and communicating with each other. Becoming aroused as well, I must admit, or at least I was. But the significant thing was that during the time that graze lasted, she and I were on the same side of the bars. Or maybe just together in a world in which bars did not exist. Just for a moment. I don’t know if she felt the same thing. Perhaps she didn’t even notice. But no, she did notice, of course she noticed. The little wily one must have caught my astonishment and made me into the laughingstock of the group when she talked about it.

“Oh, Mr. Rose, your lightning rod is blushing,” she said about the scar on my forehead but emphasizing the double entendre, in that flirty little voice that all the prisoners use, half giggling like schoolgirls if you say nail because they interpret it as fuck, or if you say blow because it means to suck dick, on and on in this way, till it becomes exhausting.

“Yes, it blushes,” I said, trying to make a quick exit, “and careful, because it burns, just like Harry Potter’s.”

Interview with Ian Rose

“You seem to have read everything. Have you heard of this?” Rose asked Pro Bono, taking out of the glove compartment a little book with a gray cover and handing it to him. “I found it among my son’s books. It’s a biography of Edward Branly, the man who—”

“Edward Branly, that sounds familiar,” Pro Bono interrupted him. “The inventor of the wireless telegraph?”

“Another Edward Branly, an inventor of new ways to torture women.”

“Why does this seem strange to you?” Pro Bono asked after perusing the book. “That’s the mentality that the America of that time was built on, the same mentality that holds together the America of today.”

“And it doesn’t repulse you?” Rose asked.

“Me? Yes it does. That’s why I’m a defense attorney and not a prosecutor.”

Manninpox was a very old prison, darker than the new ones, but also more difficult to run. That gave the inmates more room to protest and to come together around certain concepts. For example, whatever is filthy is human and belongs to us, whatever is clean is inhuman and the tool of our jailers. This was an old belief that rebels like those in Sinn Féin were able to reanimate, making their filthy hunger strikes into weapons. Pro Bono was the author of a good number of theories on the subject that he had published in various essays. According to him, so-called good people are terrified of filth, blood, and death. The “decent” folk play up the type of civilization that offers immortality as a utopia, and from this comes their obsession with security, both personal and national. From there also came their devotion to youth, dieting, keeping fit and active, plastic surgery, good health, extreme cleanliness, antibiotics, disinfectants, and antiseptics. They are convinced that America can make them immortal, and they conceal sickness, filthiness, old age, and death to deny their existence. But the American utopia according to Pro Bono would do nothing less than banish immortality. What kind of people have we become, he asked himself in his essays, that we pretend to live by ignoring death? It was common enough to hear the American dream described as living to possess. Wrong, according to Pro Bono. The equation needs to be inverted: possessing to live. Possessing in order not to die. Immortality was the true American utopia. Las Nolis, refusing to play along, incorporated death into all their rituals. That was their clarity, what gave them an advantage over others.

“So María Paz didn’t take part in that? The blood things?” Rose asked.

“María Paz was herself a living sacrifice. In an environment where self-mutilation is valued and even exalted, what better symbol than María Paz, innocence personified and submitted to a bloodletting?”

“That road goes to my house.” Rose gestured to the left when they came to an intersection in a narrow, steep road, darkened by thick plant growth. “That way, some fifteen minutes up the mountain, you come to a little lake called Silver Coin Pond. On the side of the road, there is a large boulder, and beside it a maple that is taller than the others are. Not long ago, the face of a man named John Eagles appeared on it. They had ripped it off him and nailed it to the trunk. That death has stuck to this mountain. It weighs on the people still. It will not be lifted.”

“Who did such a thing?” Pro Bono asked.

“Unsolved. The authorities claim it was outsiders in a drug frenzy, but the locals blamed escaped prisoners. Residents here think prisoners escape from Manninpox and roam in the woods committing atrocities. Every time something bad happens, the locals blame it on them. A missing chicken, a fire in a stable, a noise in the darkness, a stolen bicycle. You can try to reason with these people, explain to them that no one can escape from that windowless fortress. But they don’t buy it. They believe the prisoners escape and they are frightened.”

“When did that happen? The guy’s face ripped off?”

“A few days before the death of my son.”

Soon, the hulking mass of Manninpox appeared on the horizon, a place as undesirable as any, the nightmare of its good neighbors, the dark cloud of sunny days, a stain in the amazing scenery. Rose, who up to that point had not yet decided whether he would go in, realized that there would be no escaping it. If there were any answers to his questions about Cleve’s death, they were locked in that place. Pro Bono, who was a regular there and knew the procedures, got him a badge as a legal professional, his assistant, but told him he would not lie to Mandra X. He would let her know he was the father of Cleve Rose. This was not going to be a regular visit.

Mandra X enjoyed certain privileges. She could receive visitors during the week, including members of the press, in private and without the presence of guards, according to provisions made by the state assembly for prisoners with recognized leadership records on human rights issues. They were put in Conference Hall, a room with absurdly tall ceilings and five metallic tables with four chairs each, placed far enough from each other so that conversations would not be overheard. They were the only ones there, and Rose thought that there could not be a more desolate place. To ease his anxiety, he tried to figure out in what direction his house would be. But there were no windows in the room, making it impossible for him to orient himself. They must have been underground. At least Rose had the sense that they had been descending as they traversed an access ramp. He shivered and regretted having left his coat in the car. So he lifted the collar of his jacket and buttoned it up. It felt strange to feel a breeze in the air, which somehow snuck into that sealed place, making the solitude in there even more unbearable. The drafts made it in but not daylight, not a single ray of sunlight. The place was lit by fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, which emitted a grainy light that broke up the space into a million vibrating points. Rose tried to make out any human sound, a cough, steps, some sign of life in the distance, but heard nothing. On the other hand, he heard bells trilling like the voice of God and metallic noises that reached his ears from various angles repeatedly, dry, deafening noises of gates slamming shut — or was that just the echo of older noises? Good God, he thought, and stuck his frozen hands in his pockets to warm them up.

“I don’t know what got into me in that place,” Rose tells me. “Maybe claustrophobia. I felt my chest tightening. A horrible pain, and on my left side, so I thought it could be my heart. I just wanted to get out of there. Like I said, it was a huge room, but I felt as if all that empty and cold space was closing in on me. No one came; no one opened the door, no one. We remained there alone, under lock and key for what seemed like an eternity, although in truth it must have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I felt they had forgotten about us. Till finally Mandra X appeared with a guard on each side, although there was no physical contact.”

From what he had been told, Rose expected Mandra X to come in breathing fire and smashing things, an enraged bull trotting into the arena. But there was none of that. Mandra X walked in as patiently, coldly, and majestically as an ice queen, balancing her muscular bulk, scoping out the place, her mouth pursed and her arms bent slightly and separated from her body. Although Pro Bono had advised him to be cool and not stare with his mouth agape as people often did, Rose could not help but keep his eyes on her from the moment she walked in. She was a totemic figure, a being above the confines of nature, or below them. Hard to tell if she was goddess or demon, man or woman, a temple devoid of statues or a statue with no temple. That’s what she had been able to turn into after so many years of being locked up in a cell, with no other option but to metamorphose, cutting and painting and perforating herself with metal spikes and needles, becoming a contemporary version of Saint Liduvina. She had transformed herself in all the physical means possible. Tattoos covered every inch of her skin, not leaving a single spot blank, as if some child armed with a blue crayon had gone to war on her. Her elongated earlobes seemed detached from her head. The lack of eyelashes and eyebrows gave her an otherworldly appearance. Her hair was buzzed short and lined with razor cuts, so that her head seemed like a miniature ancient geoglyph. On top of this, her nose and upper lip were pierced and her tongue bifurcated, and her neck and arms adorned with scars. That’s just what you could see, what her uniform wasn’t concealing. Rose didn’t even want to imagine, but he couldn’t help remembering that according to María Paz, Mandra X had her nipples injected with ink and added a crown of rays around each, two dark suns in the middle of her chest. And the smell that came off her… Not exactly smelling like a saint, Rose thought, more so like homeless folk who pass by you pushing their clanging carts. She carried her theatrical bearing well, like a Delphic Sibyl, but a savage one, not lovely or green-eyed like Michelangelo portrays her in the Sistine Chapel, but a snake-like Sibyl, grotesque and somehow sublime as well, as the Sibyls must truly have been.

“Suffice it to say that she has had tattooed the phrase ‘I have a dream,’” Rose tells me. “Believe it or not. There in those dungeons lives a creature who dares to dream. To be truthful, I don’t know. It was creepy. In the outside world, people wear shirts that say, ‘Single and at your service,’ ‘I love NYC,’ ‘Fuck y’all,’ and ‘Ban nuclear now.’ But that monster tattooed ‘I have a dream’ across her forehead. It was no wonder Pro Bono had said that Manninpox seemed to exist simply to hold her in, Mandra X, the minotaur in that labyrinth of stone. And she wasn’t by herself. She came with another inmate of the same size, or maybe even bigger. But I swear I didn’t even notice. My eyes were glued to that… species of bull inked in blue. I didn’t even notice the other one until they were right beside us. In silence.

“Pro Bono had neglected to tell me that Mandra X does not talk directly to anyone from outside, only through an intermediary. Perhaps not to incriminate herself, I never knew the exact reason. I was never able to hear her speak but for a single phrase. At times, she would whisper something in the ear of the other inmate, who was the one who spoke with us. Afterward, Pro Bono told me the other inmate was known as Dummy. Maybe because that’s her role, she’s like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But out of Mandra X’s mouth, not a word. Not one. The minotaur was content just to look at us.

“She didn’t join us at the table, but sat a few feet away from it. And she looked at us. To start off, Dummy asked about me. ‘Can we trust this guy?’ Do you know what Pro Bono told them? He said he didn’t know me that well. Unbelievable, but that’s exactly what he said. There you have it, my new BFF, betraying in me in the company of this monster without a moment’s thought to the consequences. ‘If you like, I can go,’ I said absurdly, as if I could just walk out that huge, solid-steel door, and I started to get up, but then Pro Bono explained that I was Cleve Rose’s father, and with a whisper from Mandra X, Dummy gestured for me to sit.”

Rose imagined it had been some kind of test: Mandra X wanted to take a fresh look at him and he had to accept that. It was impossible not to anyway. It was clear that she was the alpha among the four of them, the dominant macho who said when and how and for how long things would transpire. Dummy began to talk about María Paz right away. About how when the other inmates first saw her, the first thing they said was, “That one ain’t gonna make it.” Two kinds of people ended up in Manninpox. The first group consisted of those who take responsibility for their actions, and they admit that they committed a crime and it has proven costly, and they throw it right back in your face: “I did it, so what? — and I’m paying for it now, and when I finish paying I’m outta here and you’ll never see my ass again.” The other type says, “I did nothing, this is an injustice and the fuckers who did it are going to pay.” This latter group remained active and alive out of pure indignation and the need for vengeance. But Dummy explained that María Paz belonged to a third category, those who condemned themselves, who did no wrong but still felt guilty. She was fucked before she could defend herself because she killed the defense attorney within her, a horrible handicap.

“You can always tell the victim type, something about them, as if they were marked or something,” Dummy said beside the watchful eyes of Mandra X, who observed the proceedings as if from a pedestal, making Rose’s blood cold with her utter silence.

“The more victim traits a person possesses, the more likely she will attract a bolt of lightning. But that’s not mine,” Pro Bono said. “I’m paraphrasing René Girard.”

Rose paid close attention to everything but said nothing. He didn’t dare look Mandra X in the eyes, but he could not stop looking at the blue lines that ran up and down her arms, and he wondered what they meant. Are they veins? he wondered. Veins tattooed over the real veins? But then he noticed that each of the blue veins was labeled with a name in minuscule letters running parallel to it, and although he wasn’t able to read them, he would have had to put on his glasses, he remembered that María Paz had recounted how the net of veins on Mandra X were a mapping of all the bodies of water of Germany.

“The theory about getting hit by lightning is correct. There are those with a lightning bolt on their foreheads,” Rose tells me. And while he doesn’t recount the story of his son’s scar yet, he tells me about Luigi, a boy from his neighborhood when he was growing up.

This Luigi, skinny and younger than him, was by all signs an evident victim, a poor shit, a sad little runt, whose mother screamed at him and beat him. And Rose did too, of course he did. All he had to do was hear Luigi cry and a committed cruelty arose in him like he had never experienced before — an exacerbation, an arousal even, that took over his person every time he heard Luigi wail. And Rose had never been a bully, the opposite in fact: the tough kids at school had abused and ridiculed him to no end. Rose could have said what Obama had said about the same type of experience: “I didn’t emerge unscathed.” Yet an almost sexual urge had led him to beat Luigi, make him howl, help fuck him up some more because he himself had been fucked up, and simply because Luigi’s mother, by beating Luigi, had passed him on and put him at the mercy of all his superiors. Luigi was a loser, and veritable sufferer, and Rose thought that abusing him was not only okay but also inevitable: his little whimpers were an invitation to mistreat him.

The other prisoners thought that María Paz attracted misery because of her tendency to lower her guard, to hide behind her favorite phrases: “I don’t know,” “I don’t remember,” “I don’t understand,” and with the modest habit she had of pulling down her shirt all the time, as if it were too short on her. The older inmates told themselves that María was a martyr for anyone to overtake, a value judgment about which they were almost never wrong. Manninpox exposed the weak, confused, and defeated ones, and chewed them up. It gulped down their blood. In María Paz’s case, all this wasn’t meant figuratively; her blood dripped warmly on the cold stones. At first, she appeared to live in the clouds, incapable of telling her story even to herself, incompetent when it came to putting together the pieces of the puzzle to make a whole. During her first weeks, she couldn’t even figure out what her downfall had been. She talked about things that had happened to her as if they had happened to someone else. The first time Mandra X talked with her in private, María Paz complained that they hadn’t given her panties. When she had arrived at the prison and traded her clothes for the uniform, they hadn’t given her panties. They left her without underwear and that upset her horribly. She complained about that as if it were her one and only problem, having to go without panties and feeling exposed and violated. Maybe if we get her panties this rag doll could become a person again, Mandra X had thought, and found two pairs, so she could wash one while wearing the other. That seemed to calm down the novice a bit. She had already been through a lot. After a confrontation, she had spent a few days in solitary, no one knew how many. She herself didn’t know, had lost count. It was understandable that she would be a little discombobulated after what had happened, but she was going to hit bottom if she didn’t react somehow.

“They didn’t even tell her about her husband’s murder, and if they had, it hadn’t registered,” Rose tells me. “Pro Bono had to tell her, more than a month after it had happened.”

“Sir, did you know María Paz was pregnant?” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “You didn’t know? Really? Pregnant, you know? Bun in the oven, little one inside. Does that shock you? Well, yes, she was fucking pregnant.”

“I had no idea,” Pro Bono said after a few seconds of silence, and Rose sensed that not having known about this truly upset him. “She never told me.”

Of course she didn’t tell him. María Paz never told anyone anything, especially if it was about her pain. But that’s how it was; she was pregnant. Although she hardly mentioned it, because she was incapable of admitting it, even to herself. According to the perception they had about her inside the prison, María Paz was a bramble of confusion, a goddamned bundle of nerves. Day by day less so, admittedly, and little by little she had been waking up, getting the hang of things, because whoever didn’t wake the fuck up wasn’t going to survive long at Manninpox, washed away by the current. But at first she was a babe in the woods, in utter denial of things and trembling all day.

“I take it you also don’t know that she lost the child after the beating that she took from the feds,” Dummy asked Pro Bono. “Not a clue, right? Or that this was the reason for hemorrhaging? No, you couldn’t know. The little princess never talked about those things because they hurt. Better just to remain quiet. Better not to say that the guards even refused to give her sanitary napkins, throwing it in her face that she had used up her tampon quota and the quota for the whole prison. But María Paz was one of those people who believed that if she didn’t talk about things it was as if they didn’t happen.”

“Foolish me for not having suspected it,” Rose says. “María Paz could have very well been pregnant, of course, with such a busy amorous life. And yes, of course, the beating they gave her when they arrested her must have caused her to miscarry. It must have really hurt her to lose the child in such a manner, who knows in what basement of what station at the hands of those sadists. And she was incapable of reasoning that the fault was theirs, those who beat her; I know the scene well, have lived through it myself. She created a completely new set of reasons to punish herself over that lost child, the same old beating on the chest with guilt: It’s my fault my child could not be born, my fault I was a bad mother, my fault the child wasn’t Greg’s but Joe’s, or the other way, my stupid fault it wasn’t Joe’s but Greg’s.”

Rose says he noticed something that was consistent throughout María Paz’s manuscript: she lingers in the present or dwells in the past, but leaves the reader hanging on the issues that are most pressing, that call most for resolution. But, of course, it could be that María Paz did talk about her pregnancy and that those passages are among the missing pages.

“Did you know, sir, that María Paz was sent to a hospital near Manninpox because the hemorrhaging wouldn’t stop?” Dummy continued to ask questions. “They scraped her insides. A curettage they called it, sir. No, you didn’t know. She didn’t tell you. She wasn’t capable of painting the whole picture. The way she sees her own life, it is full of holes, like a piece of fucking Swiss cheese. People think of things. People come up with ideas. Initiatives, as they say. The son of this man here, Professor Rose. He thought it would be a good idea for María Paz to write things down. So she would be more aware, as they say. Brilliant, your son, sir. A good person, but naive.”

“My son was an excellent teacher and he did what he could here,” Rose jumped in, leaving inhibitions aside when faced with the insulting of his boy.

María Paz’s problems hadn’t ended with that. According to Dummy, or according to Mandra X as related by Dummy, the medical care offered to the inmates at Manninpox, especially gynecological care, was shameful. The sick inmates were transferred to a special ward of a nearby public hospital, where, according to certain security regulations, they were kept in a separate wing and cuffed to their beds. They were forced to wait hours, sometimes days, then they were summarily attended, given a haphazard diagnosis, and treated accordingly. Nobody explained anything to them. What was wrong? What medication had they been given? The inmates remained ignorant of all details; they were simply acted upon as if objects. María Paz had not been an exception to this. They scraped her and she apparently recovered. The bleeding stopped, so they sent her back to her cell. But a couple of weeks later, the hemorrhaging started again, although not as bad as before. Every day little maroon spots appeared in her panties as a reminder that her insides were still damaged. Mandra X forced her to focus on the trial that she was waiting for, to prepare herself, to review the arguments in her defense, to make sure the chronology of events was clear in her head so that she wouldn’t contradict herself, wouldn’t lose hope. But María Paz wouldn’t come down from the clouds. She pretended to be out of it and got lost in dreams that had nothing to do with the facts, fantasies about that house with the garden she said she was going to buy.

Rose tells me he didn’t fully buy the picture of María Paz they painted of her in prison. He thought those women didn’t really understand her character. From what he had read, he knew the type of person she was. But, of course, when he was in Manninpox he didn’t say any of this. You don’t tease a pair of dragons when they’re sitting right in front of you. María Paz wasn’t one to be interpreted through ideologies, Rose thought, she need not be judged because she wasn’t aggressive, or proud, or forward like the rest of Mandra X’s militants. María Paz wasn’t of that brand; her style was more discreet, according to Rose, which didn’t mean it was any less effective. “Necessity has the face of a dog,” as she wrote in her manuscript, and Rose was beginning to understand that her personal code of conduct must have been guided by just such a maxim. He knew dogs well, their peculiar manner of slowly filling in the gaps with countless acts of humility and patience, and yet at the same time, with such guile and conviction that it made them by far the smartest of animals. That’s how María Paz went through life. She didn’t disgust anyone, and she didn’t bark or bite. No fuss or declarations, more or less going forward diagonally. Like a dog swimming. Rose had seen his dogs swimming. It wasn’t a crawl or a butterfly or a backstroke, but a freestyle paddling that was just enough to keep their heads above the water, yet so effective and persevering it would have allowed them to cross the English Channel if they had wanted.

Rose guessed María Paz’s character was the antithesis of a challenging and belligerent individual like Mandra X. He saw María Paz as pragmatic, measured, used to not asking for more than her share, to not exposing herself more than necessary, to moving efficiently below the surface, taking care of one thing at a time, without wasting her energies on causes or pointless issues. Mandra X was an agitator, a leader, a rebel with a cause. Not so María Paz. A survivor, as she herself had said about Bolivia, her mother, which suited her as well, Rose thought; she had become an expert at keeping her head above water without much ado, just like the dogs.

One day, the guards came to get María Paz in her cell to take her to court. The decisive moment of her trial had arrived. Mandra X had visited a few moments earlier and had seen her praying and pleading with all the saints to grant her freedom so she could find her sister, Violeta.

“To hell with the saints,” Mandra X told her, “and forget about Violeta for now. Worry about your own skin. Go fuck the asses of those sons of bitches who are keeping you locked up. The saints have nothing to do with this. You have to count on yourself.” And as María Paz walked down the hall heading for the bus that would take her to court, chained up like Houdini, Mandra X was able to yell one last thing: “You’re gonna get out of here because you’re innocent, Do you hear me? You’re innocent and you’re going to be free.” But that’s not how it turned out. María Paz had returned to her cell with a fifteen-year sentence.

A few weeks later, the shock of the tragedy lifted a bit when Pro Bono requested a mistrial from the supreme court because María had not been provided with a proper defense. In Pro Bono’s words, “the trial was shit, a sick joke, a series of fuckups.” And what happened? Pro Bono was successful with his petition, and the court ordered a retrial. A do-over. Back to the drawing board. Pro Bono petitioned that the defendant be freed in the meanwhile, but he was denied. She was considered a flight risk and remained in Manninpox.

It was during that time that María began to change. The other inmates noticed how some other person seemed to be emerging from the inside. They noted how she matured, getting stronger and distancing herself from the lost and defeated María Paz who had been at the first trial under those pitiable conditions and without any real defense. Pro Bono’s support and the solidarity with Mandra X, in combination with the hope of a new trial, animated and energized her in a way that she even developed a sense of humor. She went to bed at night with the hope that she would be found innocent and with the feeling that her freedom was just around the corner. She began to read everything she could and was excited about Cleve’s writing workshop. It was only sometime later that she got hit low again with what the Latina interns call the reckoning, especially after her sister, Violeta, refused to talk to her on the phone. Otherwise, María Paz remained active and in a good mood, consulting the dictionary to learn conjugations and grammatical rules, committed to improving her written English to leave behind some record of what she had lived through. But not everything was going as planned. The supreme court, which needed to set a date for the new trial, postponed it time and again. Why? Rose didn’t quite understand. Pro Bono explained it to him, but he was incapable of capturing the minutiae of it. Legal intricacies, asshole moves by the prosecutor, insufficient evidence, the give-and-take of Pro Bono’s negotiations with the prosecution. Months passed and the new trial started to become a mirage. And although María Paz’s mind apparently withstood the uncertainty and the accompanying stress, the same was not true of her body, and it began to falter again. María Paz internalized the issue and the hemorrhaging returned worse than ever, draining her of vital energy.

Mandra X and Las Nolis tried whatever they could to prevent this final breakdown, home remedies that were crude and insufficient to address chronic anemia, things like contraband fresh foods and supplements, eight to ten glasses of water daily, no coffee.

“A lot of the inmates thought this was bull,” Dummy told them. “They preferred other methods. I mean like spells, superstitions, and all that crap.”

Some leaned toward white magic, some toward the other kind. There was everything in there. Candomblé, voodoo, spells, palo mayombe, masses, and even exorcisms — a whole panoply of approaches, according to Dummy. Mandra X put up a fight against it because she despised the irrational, no prayers for her, or incense, or candles lit to virgins, she was at war against all that. But it was still everywhere. The prisoners had learned to appreciate María Paz. There was something about the girl that won people over, a natural seductive quality, and rumors spread that Mandra X was letting her die. According to Dummy herself, even Mandra X realized that this was true to an extent, for all she could do was apply hot compresses to deal with the sickness. Things were definitely not going well.

Among the Latinas, there was an old woman named Ismaela Ayé who considered herself the queen mother of sorcery in the place. She was the only one who had been at Manninpox longer than Mandra X, so the two were rivals for that title, and for every other title as well, sworn enemies from day one. Ismaela Ayé had been retired for years. According to her, her decline had started when the guard confiscated a pot of holy soil; it was dirt from Golgotha, she claimed, which had been her source of power.

“Bullshit,” Dummy said, “Ismaela Ayé had slowly been cornered by Mandra X, that’s what had happened, her and her trashy, third-world hucksterism, all that caveman Catholicism and crappy devotions — what jar? what dirt from Golgotha? — as if we all just fell off the truck. Mandra X had pushed Ismaela aside, convincing the others to become a little more aware, to act rationally, not to be fucked by authority or by their own ignorance.”

With María Paz’s health crisis, Ismaela experienced a renaissance in power, gaining power by spreading rumors about Mandra X, using her evil tongue to spread curses from her cell, like a murderer of her own children who does not understand the sacred value of blood. Ismaela Ayé started reciting passages from the books of Exodus and Hebrews to cast guilt on Mandra X, and took advantage of the situation to promote the glory of living blood, the blood of Cavalry that falls on the celestial chalice, and other such hyperboles that in the end caught the attention of the other prisoners and reverberated throughout Manninpox.

At the same time, Mandra X knew that she was in trouble, that María Paz’s health crisis made her limitations all too evident. The other inmates were judging her, doubting her methods, waiting for a breakup. Perhaps Mandra X could assume her previous position again only if she got rid of Ismaela Ayé. It wouldn’t have been hard; all it would have taken was one good whack. The old woman was nothing but a dry-skinned bag of bones. But such a thing would come back to bite Mandra X in the ass, so she opted for more conciliatory measures and tried to make peace with Ismaela: “Please understand, this María Paz is no Jesus Christ incarnate; she’s just a sick girl.” But the old woman didn’t let up; she knew she had Mandra X in hot water. Nothing else to do, Mandra X’s theories and the practices of Las Nolis regarding pain as redemption and wounds as badges sounded horrible in light of the reality that María Paz was dying. Mandra X was between Scylla and Charybdis, between the negligence of those who ran the prison and the fanaticism unleashed among the inmates. She had to soften to the point of prescribing herb teas, yoga exercises, and cold sitz baths, and this began to undermine her image and influence. On the other hand, the popularity of old woman Ayé continued to skyrocket, and the Latina inmates opened their ears to her sermons, which asserted that we all are Christ figures and that all blood is sacred, that Moses sprinkled the book with such blood, that Yemaya’s blood comes from these shadows, that the lamb so sealed the covenant, that such sacrifices to this or to that were beneficial. “A vulgar jambalaya,” Dummy told Pro Bono and Rose. Ismaela’s brain was sotted and she couldn’t remember anything in detail, so she just jumbled everything up, and what she couldn’t remember she made up. What she couldn’t make up, she dreamt up. And yet, overnight she was able to win over many inmates with her stories, dragging the women into a drunkenness of superstition and supernatural thinking.

“It set everything back decades around here,” Dummy said, “a return to the fucking Middle Ages, that’s what happened here. María Paz, half-conscious amid it, and Mandra X powerless, looking on as the girl was dying in her arms and not able to do a thing about it, because all her recourses had been exhausted, and each day María Paz was getting worse, physically and spiritually. Mandra X saw her as resigned, babbling without end about her sister, Violeta, with a drooly smile, as if she herself was the first to understand that it didn’t really matter, because at that stage not even the damned divinity could save her. At last the pressure forced Mandra X to give in, and she allowed Ismaela Ayé to take charge of the patient and work her sorcery.

“She let the old woman do her thing, you know,” Dummy said. “There was no other choice.” The first thing Ismaela ordered was for María Paz to be lowered from her cot to the floor, face up, her body stiff and extended, the arms perpendicular to the torso. A crucifixion is what the old woman pulled out of her sleeve, because according to her the cross is a passageway, a door, a crossing of paths, and before the power of the cross, bad luck takes a hike, goes the other way, and stops assaulting the victim. And did it work?

“Oh yeah, it worked, worked like a fucking charm,” Dummy said. “Half an hour after lying there, crucified on the floor, María Paz has a seizure and she passes out. She goes comatose, practically dead. Responding to nothing. And the old woman? Is she feeling bad about it? Admitting her ignorance? Her guilt?”

Not at all. Ismaela Ayé remained very calm, proud, proclaiming up and down that her method had begun to take effect, that the bad luck had been cut at the legs, and that from that moment María Paz would begin to improve.

Mandra X confronted her: “You just killed her, you rotted old woman!” But it had no effect on Ismaela, who insisted that this was how it had to be, first the patient had to hit bottom before arising and coming of the depths. She had to go down into the darkness before embracing the light of the Almighty. This is what she was blabbering, with María Paz good as dead.

As things happened, the management of the prison finally did something. They had no choice but to transfer her to the hospital again, this time in a coma. Five days later, María Paz came back to the prison on her own two feet. She had come out of the coma, and although she looked weary, she was alive, even cheerful, and she told the others they had pumped her with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories enough for a horse. And forty-eight hours after returning from the hospital, she was informed that the supreme court had granted her temporary freedom until the new trial. She could go home.

This privilege was something rarely granted except under very extraordinary circumstances, such as with a reputable prisoner with deep roots in the community or an individual with an impeccable record, above all one who is prepared to put up a considerable bond. María Paz did not meet any of these conditions. Her profile, in fact, was quite the opposite. Yet, she was free to go. To go. Go home. She could walk out of Manninpox, just like that? Just like that. She was offered conditional freedom and would be under close watch until her new trial. But she could go wherever she damned well felt like it. María Paz couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How was it possible that all of a sudden they came with such news? “Get your things together,” they ordered. It was seven at night, everyone in their cell already, when the guards came to hurry her out. She couldn’t do as she was told. She sat on her cot, her bare feet on the stone floor, and she couldn’t move, her eyes fixed on nothing, wrapping herself up in her blanket as if it were a shield.

“Get the fuck outta here,” Mandra X screamed from the cell across the way. “Are you deaf? You can go.”

“But how?” María Paz didn’t quite get it. She felt nothing. Or she did feel one thing: panic. She didn’t dare move, as if it were some kind of ruse so they could say she was fleeing when they shot her in the back.

“Don’t ask questions,” Mandra X told her. “Just go. Get out.”

María Paz dressed herself, put some things in the box they had given her, although she didn’t quite get everything in. She left behind the pictures she’d put up on the wall, and they didn’t really give her a chance to get things she had lent others, or say good-bye to anyone, hugs or such. They led her out through the hallway. She was stunned and kept on her feet by the ton of medications they had given her. She looked back as if to ask something, plead to someone, as if instead of leading her to freedom, they were taking her to some horrible punishment. On seeing her, her fellow prisoners came up to the bars of their respective cells and began to applaud as she passed. At first timidly, just a few of them. Soon, all of them — a standing ovation. “You made it!” they shouted. “You did it! You fucked them! You made it, kid!”

With respect to how María Paz must have lived that unexpected and decisive moment in her life, the sudden instant when they opened the door and said, off you go, Rose says he thinks only one word is apt: awakening. In her manuscript, she repeatedly said that the chapter of her imprisonment wasn’t real, more like a hallucination, an improbable period that would end with a return to normal life. Rose tells me that as far as he can figure that’s why when she was in prison she never called any of her friends, such as her coworkers in the cleaning company, whom she considered her most trusted friends. She didn’t even tell them of her situation, so as not to call attention to the episode that to her was so illusory and unreal. Day after day, hour after hour in Manninpox, María Paz waited for the nightmare to end. If they had so suddenly and without rhyme or reason ripped her away from her home and taken her prisoner, then just as suddenly and without rhyme or reason they told her she was free to go home. Even if the freedom they were offering her was a fragile one, because the new trial was still to come, she must have felt that moment was the end of her nightmare, the longed-for moment of awakening. Rose reminds me that’s how things happened in dreams, arbitrarily, out of nowhere, illogically, without cause or consequence. Just like that.

It was a few months after that day that Mandra X and Las Nolis heard anything about María Paz again. Until now; now they had news again, and it wasn’t good. That’s why they had summoned Pro Bono, and Pro Bono had recruited Ian Rose, or who he had thought was Cleve Rose but then had to settle for Ian. And there they were, with Mandra X telling them through Dummy that there was bad news. Dummy stressed once again that they never told the inmates what illness they were suffering from. They didn’t show them lab reports, if they even performed any tests, or inform them of their diagnoses, and forget about X-ray results or anything like that. So now, they got to the point of the story. A few days ago, they had left an inmate who was paralyzed from the waist down alone and unhandcuffed in the infirmary for a few minutes, long enough that she was able to look at her medical folder, which they had left within her reach. She grabbed the folder and put it under her ass in the wheelchair and snuck it out of the infirmary. In the folder, there were a few medical reports that belonged to other inmates, and the prisoner in the wheelchair sold one of them to Mandra X for twenty dollars because she knew it would be of interest to her. It was María Paz’s medical history, and Dummy now produced it from her breasts and handed it under the table to Pro Bono, who looked at it and passed it on to Rose.

“Wait. How did Dummy hide such a thing in her breasts if security was so tight?” I ask Rose.

“They say that the surface of Neptune is full of diamonds,” he responds. “Have you ever heard that?”

“As far as I know, the only thing on the surface of Neptune is the wind,” I respond.

“Well, now you know there are mountains of diamonds.”

“And?”

“Try and get one of those diamonds. See if you can. It’s the same with Dummy’s breasts, which are like a pair of mountains where you can’t find anything. She can hide whatever she wants between those mountains and no one will ever find it.”

According to the report, the medical procedure performed on the inmate, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, María Paz, that is, had not been completely successful, and consequently there had been an infection in the reproductive tract. An endometriosis caused by the unclean conditions under which the scraping was performed. The endometriosis had been so severe that María Paz had gone into septic shock. The decrease in blood flow along with lowered blood pressure had led to disrupted circulation, as a result of which the vital organs began to falter, and it was unlikely that the patient would ever be able to get pregnant again.

“But that’s not the worst part. With the report were the results of an X-ray. A dated X-ray. According to the date, it was taken the last time María Paz was at the hospital, a few days before she left. Look,” Dummy said, gesturing to use the pencil Pro Bono had in his hand and drawing something on the surface of the table. “What do you see?”

Rose tried to make out the drawing but couldn’t. Just a doodle, some kind of inverted vessel, with extensions on each side, which reminded him more than anything of the boa constrictor that swallowed a hat as drawn by Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince, Cleve’s favorite book as a child.

“What do you see there?” Dummy insisted.

“A butterfly?” Rose took a timid guess.

“No, not a butterfly. You, Mr. Attorney, what do you see?”

“A flower?” Pro Bono ventured.

“It’s a uterus, gentlemen,” Dummy said. “Here are the ovaries and here are the Fallopian tubes.”

“These two wouldn’t know the difference between the Fallopian tubes and the Eustachian tubes,” Mandra X said, laughing and startling Pro Bono and Rose, who jumped back in their chairs at the unexpected interruption that had ruptured the silence of the Sibyl, both of them shocked by the surprise because it hadn’t been much of a joke. According to Rose, it was the only thing Mandra X said throughout their entire visit, her only contribution, which had seemed so funny to her. It was when her mouth opened to laugh that Rose saw the bifurcated tongue fluttering in the depths of its cave.

“Can’t you tell?” Dummy continued. “It’s a uterus.”

“A uterus, of course,” Rose said, embarrassed at his obtuseness.

“If that’s a uterus, my grandmother is a bicycle,” Pro Bono said.

“If your grandmother is a bicycle then so is your mother, but what I’ve drawn here is a fucking uterus. The uterus of María Paz. Now look,” Dummy said, drawing a little mark in the center of the alleged uterus. “Look right here. What do you see now?”

“A fetus,” Pro Bono said.

“Not a fucking fetus.”

“A tumor?” asked Rose.

“Shit no, not a tumor. It’s a clamp. Believe it or not. In the X-ray you can see it perfectly. There, the fucking clamp is clear as the light of day. But we had to destroy the X-ray. The bosses don’t like anybody messing with crap from the infirmary. But right there in her uterus. A perfect silhouette, no room for error, a surgical clamp. One of the small types, a little nothing, like this in the shape of a U, a fucking metallic U, small but treasonous, murderous, hidden up her woohoo, sure to fuck her up. That’s why we got in touch with you, Mr. Attorney, so you can let her know. She can’t go on living with that thing inside because that’s what’s making her bleed.”

“How in the hell did it get in there?” Pro Bono asked.

“How in the hell indeed,” Dummy responded. “That is the question. How do you think? You, sir, you tell me,” she said to Rose, “how did that clamp end up in there? We didn’t get it at first either. It took us a while before we put things together, before Mandra X put the whole sequence together.”

According to the course of events as Dummy saw them, María Paz had a miscarriage when she first arrived, and the savages performed a curettage in the most negligent fashion. Hence, all those months of hemorrhaging, which kept getting worse until she went into a coma. Then they took her to the hospital again and sent her back a week later, not really having done much, apart from bombarding her with antibiotics to control the infection for the moment. Because although they didn’t tell her, they took an X-ray in which they found the clamp that they had left in there because of their own incompetence and carelessness. What would have been the right thing to do? Naturally, go into surgery and remove the thing that was going to kill her, the source of the sickness inside her because of their own stupidity. That would have been the logical and proper thing to do. But nothing is logical or proper in Manninpox, or if there is, it’s only so through some perverted means. María Paz was in such terrible shape that they must have figured she could die if she had surgery. How else can one justify what they did?

When they arrested her, they had beat her up so bad, she miscarried. Then they had botched the curettage and left a clamp inside, and then they figured she was going to die on the operating table. They didn’t want to risk such controversy. So what do they do? They fix it so she can go. She was given her freedom. That was their solution to the jam they were in. If she’s going to die, let it be outside where the guilt won’t fall on them.

“That’s why María Paz was set free,” Dummy said. “That’s why these sons of bitches let her go.”

“And here I was thinking it was a miracle from Ismaela’s cross,” Pro Bono said. But no one laughed.

“The miracle was performed by the cross, sir,” Dummy corrected.

“Clearly,” Pro Bono responded. “There’s no other explanation.”

“You have to find her,” Dummy said. “She has to know and get it taken care of right away.”

“That might be difficult.” Pro Bono sighed.

“You have to, sir. There’s not much we can do from in here. Her life is basically in your hands.”

With María Paz’s life in his hands, as Dummy had asserted, that’s the state in which Pro Bone and Rose left Manninpox on that day.

“It’s practically impossible,” Pro Bono said.

But impossible or not, they had no other choice but to get working on it right away, or at least think of how to begin, start discussing possible contacts, places to look. They had to get in touch somehow. But neither of them could think of anything better than contacting Socorro in Staten Island.

“We have no other option, even if the old woman is a pathological liar,” Rose said. “Maybe María Paz went to see her.” His hand still hurt from the crushing handshake with Dummy, and he brought it to his nose, that old habit of his that Edith had hated, smelling his hand after shaking it with someone. There had been no handshake with Mandra X, not even a cordial good-bye from her. Just as she hadn’t spoken but once, she made sure there was no physical contact at any time. When she realized the meeting was over, she got up and walked out of the room in the same fashion she had come in, unapproachable and stinking, like the Queen of Saba.

Rose was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and asked Pro Bono if they could stop by his house for a while to rest and eat something before returning to New York, and so he could check in on his dogs. Pro Bono preferred to have a coffee at Mis Errores.

“We don’t have time,” he said.

“What if we put an ad in the paper?” Rose suggested.

“An ad?” Pro Bono said somewhat mockingly. “Like what, ‘Girl, you have a clamp inside,’ in the New York Times classifieds.”

That’s the point when Rose decided he had had enough. If Pro Bono wanted his help, he was going to have to come clean about some things. What the devil had happened with María Paz? Why didn’t Pro Bono know where she was? Rose said he was not going to lift a finger until he was caught up. There was something strange going on here, something very weird and confusing, and he was not just going to play along anymore. He was going to be told everything or he was out.

“Of course, I’ll explain, of course,” Pro Bono assured him, tapping him on the shoulder. “You are absolutely correct. If you’re going to be involved in this, you have a right to know everything about it. I am going to make things clear to you. Well, at least to the extent that they are clear to me, which may not be saying much. Please, calm down, I’ll lay things out, but it has to be little by little. Let’s do it section by section, like a butcher. Don’t expect me to summarize in three sentences what is a deviously complicated situation. Clarification number one: if we are going to go looking for María Paz, it has to be done in an absolutely discreet fashion. If not, we may cause more problems than we prevent. Nothing public, no fanfare. We have to figure out a way so that she is the only one who receives the message.”

“That sounds more like a warning than a clarification,” Rose protested.

“Let’s try again. But let’s get our heads in place. Let’s remember what we’re dealing with. Let’s see, it’s only eleven. We still have time tonight. Do me a favor, Rose; can you take me somewhere? It’s near here,” Pro Bono asked, paying for the coffees.

“Right there, to the left,” Pro Bono said as they neared the place. “That hotel right there. Let’s see. I think that’s it. Yes, this has to be it. The Blue Oasis. I should have remembered a name like that. Blue Oasis, okay, that’s it.”

“Do you need to use the bathroom? Grab a bite? I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“I’m letting you in on everything. Isn’t that what you wanted? María Paz and I stopped at that hotel when she was released. I was the one who was waiting for her at the gate. By myself. No one else.”

It had been raining on the afternoon María Paz was released, and Pro Bono had been waiting in his car for a while. They had told him she would be released at five, and he had completed all the paperwork, but it was already dark with no sign of her. The guards at the gate wore black raincoats and ponchos and moved like ghosts between the beams of light that cast white figures on the wet pavement. Ensconced in his Lamborghini with a portable reading light, Pro Bono tried without success to read the latest novel by Paul Auster. He had never before been at Manninpox after three or four in the afternoon and was unaware of the otherworldly dimension the prison acquired after dark. The hooded figures became friars and the bulk of stone a macabre monastery. It was almost eight when he noticed a side door open, and then he saw her exit in that darkness whitened by the spotlights.

“It was an indelible moment,” he told Rose. “I saw her approach among the thousand drops of rain made visible by the watch lights as if silver confetti were falling on her.”

Inside the car, Pro Bono asked her if she wanted to go eat somewhere to celebrate her freedom. She didn’t hear him or look at him, as if all her senses were sealed off, except for touch, because she passed her fingers over the surface of things as if remembering the texture of the tender, lovely, warm world that she had erased from her memory. Pro Bono repeated the invitation and she nodded. But not like this. She didn’t want to get to New York all wet and smelling like prison. So he proposed stopping at a hotel on the way so she could bathe and fix herself up. It shouldn’t take long, and they could have a late dinner in the city. What she really wanted was to get under a long hot shower and wash away the nightmare, baptize herself anew, and rid herself of all the prison grime, so that there wasn’t one particle of Manninpox left on her, not even under her nails. And as if she had suddenly found her voice again, she soon started blabbing, giggling at herself for talking so much, “jabbering on like one just set free,” she said, remembering a saying from her country. She confessed to the lawyer that she could lock herself up in a bathroom for hours, that she had spent months showering in groups, and that she wanted nothing more than to lock herself up in a clean bathroom and stand under the hot water without feeling the eyes of the guards checking her out, and forget forever about that little drip of water that came out of those showers that she only had access to twice a week, with her back pressed to the cold wall. What joy, never again having to shower like some spider pressed to the cold wall. She wanted a hot shower, great clouds of steam, and then to dry herself with plush towels and be allowed to toss them on the floor when she was done — thick, dry, soft white towels with no holes, not damp, for she was not sure if such a thing as dry towels existed anymore. She also loved those little shampoos and conditioners in hotel rooms.

“So I stopped at one, the first one along the way.”

“The Blue Oasis…” Rose said. “It was important for you to remember the name, no?”

“Precisely. Illicit things happen in hotel rooms, my friend. Nabokov had Humbert take Lolita to one that is called Enchanted Hunters. Room number? 342. Memorable. And where does Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana take place? In the Costa Verde hotel.”

“What’s the hotel in that song by the Eagles?” Rose asked. “‘Hotel California’—‘this could be heaven or this could be hell.’ And in Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage locks himself up in a hotel room to drink himself to death. The Desert Song Motel. And this one is a softball for you, Mr. Attorney, in the bathroom of a certain hotel, a secretary is stabbed to death in Alfred Hitchcock’s—”

“The Bates Motel!”

“Exactly, the Bates Motel. Memory is funny that way; it remembers the Bates Motel but forgets the Blue Oasis…”

“I’m a married man, my friend.”

“I understand.”

“Although nothing worth concealing happened that night.”

“Except that you were in a motel room with a girl, a girl who was your client on top of everything.”

“I was with her and I wasn’t. I was with her, but not the way you’re thinking. I watched TV while she locked herself up in the bathroom. That’s it.”

“Where did you watch the TV from?”

“From the bed. It was a motel room.”

“Did she watch from the bed too?”

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t remember, maybe.”

“So you were both lying down on the bed at the same time?”

“Have you taken a good look at me? I could never really be lying down lying down. But maybe we were in the bed, maybe even under the blankets, and maybe I even held her.”

But still, Pro Bono kept his clothes on. He never takes them off in front of anyone, not even Gunnora, with whom he has been for forty-seven years. Truth be told, he never even sees himself naked anymore. As an old man, he avoids mirrors to avoid the disgust.

“So you want me to believe that you got into bed with your suit on, and your watch, and your fancy shoes.”

María Paz needed to talk, needed to be loved, needed to be listened to, to be told everything would be alright. She was delighted with the quality of the mattress. She opened and closed the curtains with the remote control, went barefoot on the plush carpet, stretched out on the king-size bed, kissed the clean sheets, hugged tight the fresh-smelling pillows. She told Pro Bono that in Manninpox she had to sleep with her arms as a pillow because, for months, they had failed to give her a pillow, and when she finally got one, it was so disgustingly greasy she preferred not to use it. Pro Bono wanted to take her for a good meal in the city, to celebrate those first hours of freedom with a fine bottle of champagne. But she said she was happy there, didn’t want to leave. Why should they go anywhere else with the rain outside, and it was so nice in there. “Please, sir, let’s just stay here.”

“I would wager that at just that moment you let her place her head on your shoulder,” Rose said.

“I don’t remember.”

“If you don’t remember that means that you did.”

“There was a rerun of one of her favorite shows on TV.”

“So she was the one who turned on the TV and not you.”

“That’s right, she was the one.”

“What did you watch? House?”

“I don’t know. Some show about doctors.”

“House. In her manuscript, she mentions how much she likes it. So she watched House and you passed your hand through her hair, which was wet, first because of that walk through the silver confetti and second because she had just washed it.”

“It was dry. She had used the hair dryer. If your next question is going to be if we had sex, the answer is no.”

“Yeah, Clinton said the same thing. ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.’”

“Let’s not go so deep into the gutter. I may have a hump like Richard III, but I am not a villain. And besides, I have my pride; I don’t put myself in situations in which I will appear more grotesque than I already am. I’m telling you things exactly as they happened, Rose. This is a voluntary confession, right? I suddenly felt like telling someone these things I have told no one before. What would be the point of lying? There was never the slightest indication that either of us were interested in what you’re thinking about.”

Pro Bono couldn’t relax inside that room. He felt guilty, couldn’t stop thinking about his wife, was annoyed at the smell of floral air deodorizer, terrified by the possibility of this pretty girl asking him for any kind of thing in bed for which he was not ready. In any case, he couldn’t get comfortable, so he told María Paz about Balthazar, the French bistro where he wanted to take her. The truth was that his handicap was making him more self-conscious than it ever had before, and he needed to find a way out of the situation. He had always been a man who distinguished himself more at a dining table than in bed, more a gourmet than a Don Juan. The name of the restaurant reminded her of the Three Wise Men. “What do you eat there?” she asked. And he told her that his favorite dish was filet mignon au poivre. She: What’s that? He: A big hunk of meat grilled and covered in pepper butter. She: Very spicy? I’m not into spicy food. As he explained to her she could order anything she wanted, the commercials ended, and she again became hypnotized by the program. When it ended, she announced that she was starving and couldn’t wait for the peppered meat: Why don’t they order room service instead? By then, Pro Bono had grown a little more at ease and considered the harm in staying. Examining it closely, it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment; the occasion called for what she desired, this young, beautiful, charming girl who had just come from hell itself and was now happy. Why not keep her so, when it was so easy? The whole scene was infused with a delightful candor, and it was in fact raining buckets outside. Hell, why not? “Room service it is,” he told María Paz, “order whatever you want.” Soon enough a cart with a white tablecloth appeared at the door packed with everything María Paz ordered, double portions of everything: chicken soup, club sandwiches with fries, caprese salads, and apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Pro Bono suggested she order wine but she preferred ice-cold Coke, so they toasted to her freedom with Cokes.

“Conditional freedom,” she specified with her mouth full of food. According to Pro Bono, that’s basically what transpired in that hotel room. She ate and he watched her eat.

“As if I had taken her to Maxim’s in Paris,” he explained to Rose. “She wolfed down that whole thing, her portion and mine — I barely had a bite. Then she burrowed down under the covers like a mole in its lair, and she went into a deep, quiet sleep that could have lasted a day, a week. I don’t know if you understand, my friend Rose, but given the circumstances, that’s as close to that thing called happiness as you’re going to get.”

Given that no happiness is everlasting, Pro Bono had to return home, where, likely, alarms had begun to go off. He was after all a married man with a daughter; he was even a grandfather. He called his Gunnora. “Hello, dear, I’ve run into a little trouble trying to get this prisoner out, but I’m fine, just letting you know, I’ll tell you the whole story when I get back, you know how these things go sometimes.” Before dawn, he and María Paz were in the Lamborghini on the way to New York. She was ecstatic and so was he.

“Did you talk a lot on the way?” Rose asked.

“Not really. It had stopped raining and she wanted to roll the windows down, and I did, though it was a bit cold for it.”

María Paz let her hair loose in the breeze and turned on the radio all the way up. “Let’s go, Thelma,” she told the lawyer, and because he didn’t get it, she told him about the movie. He was Thelma, she said, and she was Louise. Pro Bono drove her to Staten Island, and dropped her off at this woman Socorro’s place. “She’s like an aunt,” María Paz explained. And then came that difficult moment, the end of their celebration.

“When you said good-bye?” Rose asked.

“The rebirth. Leaving prison and returning to real life is a kind of birth for prisoners more difficult than their first one. Prison infantilizes, makes you dependent. It takes away everything but also takes care of everything for you.”

Still inside the car, María Paz gave Pro Bono a desperate look, one that said that she was terrified to be dropped off there in the middle of nowhere. But he had no choice but to ignore it. “You have to make do, my girl.” He was going to help her in the trial and do everything he could to help her avoid any more prison time, but that was as far as he could go for the moment. She had to understand that his relationship with her was a sideline thing for him. His real life was elsewhere, one he had built brick by brick and sheltered from all ills, a successful life in spite of his handicap, a good marriage, beautiful family, a brilliant career. It was clear that someone such as Pro Bono could not risk this all by pushing certain envelopes, not even for an innocent and beautiful girl such as María Paz. Before he drove off, he watched her walk toward the house. From the front door, María Paz waved good-bye. “Bye, Thelma,” she screamed, and he responded, “Bye, Louise.”

“Did you ever see her again?” Rose asked.

“Yes, of course, a few times. But never like that night in the Blue Oasis. I was her defense attorney and there was a trial coming up, my friend, of course I had to see her.

“Freedom suited her well. She looked radiant,” Pro Bono told Rose in hushed tones, as they remained parked in front of the Blue Oasis, as if they had nowhere to go. Rose still didn’t get the point of the story, the obnoxious old man suddenly confessing all his secrets to Rose like he was his old high-school pal. Didn’t they have somewhere to go? To begin their investigation, like in The Wire? There was a girl who was going to die because of the clamp inside her body. Pro Bono behaved as if there were nothing better to do than confess his sins inside the car, like he had set up shop there.

After she was released, María Paz religiously kept her appointments with the parole officer and then went to see her lawyer, always carrying her little dog in a handbag. Miraculously, she had been able to get him back: Hero had been given to an animal care organization and she found him there, alive and well, waiting for her. Since the thing couldn’t walk, she was hesitant to leave him alone again, given that she might not return and he would be abandoned again.

Pro Bono was not only representing her, but he kept his promise of accompanying her to buy new clothes so she would look like a princess in front of the judge and jury. He assured her that appearance was crucial in these types of trials. They got tired of listening to evidence and made their decisions based on a look, or even a smell. Pro Bono took her to Saks Fifth Avenue, but María Paz was not really sure. She thought that the store was too expensive and the clothes not really for younger women, and a little too upper class. “That’s what you have to appear as,” Pro Bono tried to tell her, “like a lady, a pretty, well-dressed lady. Specifically, an innocent lady; judges tend to believe innocent ladies wear expensive clothes.”

He finally managed to convince her, and he bought her an outfit made from a fine dark fabric, a white blouse, shoes with moderate heels, and a Gucci handbag that cost a pretty penny. According to him, the girl looked great. When she looked at herself in the mirror, front and sides, she said that since she was not going to a funeral, they should add a little color. “I can’t show up there like this,” she told Pro Bono, “look how I’m dressed, as if in mourning, as if we were going from the courthouse to the gallows.”

Pro Bono got a lump in his throat at hearing this.

“It wasn’t an easy case,” he told Rose. “It wasn’t a sure winner at all. I never said anything, bought her a pretty Ferragamo scarf. Guess the color.”

“Not a clue. Is it important?”

“The most important part of the whole story. It was a pink scarf. French pink, to be exact. She wrapped it around herself and looked gorgeous. Her skin was soft and dark against the light-colored silk, and her black hair was resplendent. She had been right, that little touch of color made a huge difference.”

Before they parted, Pro Bono gave María Paz enough money to get her hair done up in a bun at a nice hairdresser, because loose hair could be downright counterproductive. “Too showy,” he explained. He advised her not to put on too much makeup, not to wear red lipstick or nail polish, nothing. “Discretion is the better part,” he told her. “It’s not enough just to be innocent, you have to look it.

“But enough with these stories,” Pro Bono said suddenly, sitting up in his seat and looking at his watch, as if to regain the sense of time and shake himself out of his reverie.

“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Rose, “but get to the point, where is María Paz now?”

“I have to tell you something, Rose. I hope you won’t take it badly. You see, what happens, my friend Rose, is that in these two weeks coming up I’m not going to be in New York.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to go to Paris.”

“Paris? To Paris, now? What?”

“It… it’s our honeymoon.”

“Whose honeymoon?” Rose could not believe what he was hearing. “What are you talking about?”

“Actually, my second honeymoon. I’m going with Gunnora, my wife. It’s not my doing, believe me. She is set on this, wants me to take her to Paris for a second honeymoon.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“No, sadly it’s not.”

“Don’t we have to look for María Paz?”

“You’re going to have to do it, Rose. For the first two weeks. Just these two weeks. As soon as I return, I’ll come rejoin you. Don’t worry, I’ve set it up nicely, one of my people will be with you at all times, someone I trust to the death.”

“I’m sorry, I’m still not sure I’m getting this. You lure me right into this mess, and then you just leave me hanging? And you think I’ll just agree to it? Fuck you, my friend. Now I understand why you got in touch with me, now I get it. There’s no suspended driver’s license; that was a lie, you needed some jerk to fill in for you, so you could wash your hands and take off for Paris. I fell from the sky, didn’t I? I was just the idiot you needed. Fuck you, Pro Bono; I will not get more entangled in your trap.”

Rose was so outraged that he could feel the anger hammering in his chest and his veins throbbing at his temples. He tried to say more but tripped on his words. So he turned from the old man and glared out the window. He had to cool down, get a hand on this mess he had walked into. He had to think, think, but clear thoughts evaded him. Pro Bono’s words continued to do cartwheels in his head, enraging him even more.

“Believe me, going to Paris is the last thing I want to do right now,” Pro Bono said. “I care about María Paz. You see that, don’t you, Rose? I’m terrified about what may happen to her. But it’s only two weeks. Two weeks, that’s all I’m asking, then we can continue together. Please calm down. You’re right. I should have told you from the start. I apologize. I am very fond of María Paz. I respect her and have supported her without fail all this time. When everything seemed lost, I was the one there by her side. You’re new to this whole situation, Rose, but I’ve been there. I’ve risked a lot for that girl. And all I’m asking now is for a short two-week vacation.”

“Are you denying that the only reason you called me was because you needed a replacement? Knowing that I would get stuck with this?”

“Two weeks, Rose. Chances are María Paz won’t show up so soon. I think it will take a month or more to find her, if we do. But for the moment, I need to attend to my wife. I’ve been putting off doing this for her for two years. Two years is too long for a woman as old as me to wait. Gunnora has lived for this these past years. We have the plane tickets, hotel reservations in Paris, tickets one night for La nozze di Figaro, her favorite opera, she—”

“Is guilt eating you up that badly when it comes to your wife? What sins are you atoning for, sir? That night in the motel with María Paz? Or were there other nights like that one? What’s the story? Are you in love with María Paz? Is that it? Is that the reason for this trip to Paris?”

“Stop, Rose, you’re being absurd. You’re very upset, so it’s understandable. I wasn’t expecting any different. But it’s two weeks, that’s all I need.” Pro Bono left his cell phone number on a business card that he stashed on the dashboard. “Call me whenever you need to, day or night, I’ll be looking for it. And look, you won’t be alone. I leave you in the best of hands. William Guillermo White, the best investigator in my office, has been instructed to follow you twenty-four/seven.”

“Why do I have to be involved then? Why can’t this great investigator just do his thing on his own?”

“Because you’re the only one with certain information that can lead us to her.”

“Me? What do I know about María Paz?”

“You, nothing. But your son knew.”

Right at that moment, Rose heard the noise of a car engine and turned to look. There it was, like a hallucination. Powerful, sleek, and gleaming jet-black like his dog Dix: a sports car that had pulled up and parked right next to them. A Lamborghini. Was it Pro Bono’s? Another cold calculation by the fucking old man? A tall, overweight man got out of the Lamborghini. He was thirty or thirty-five, with appealing features, a five o’clock shadow at noon, unkempt hair down to his shoulders, and wires coming out of his ears that were connected to something in his pocket. He was a wearing a conventional business suit made of a fine dark cloth, no tie, a Nirvana T-shirt under an unbuttoned white shirt, and, half-hidden under the hem of his pants, a pair of thick-soled sneakers that put a bounce to his step and added a couple of inches to his height.

“William Guillermo White,” the man said, extending a hand to Rose.

“Who on earth?”

“William Guillermo White. I’m an assistant at the firm. Everybody calls me Buttons.”

Rose chatted for a moment with the newcomer, and before he realized it, Pro Bono had snuck out of the Ford and was off in his Lamborghini, racing away in a flash and leaving behind a wake of tremulous air.

“I… can’t… believe it,” Rose muttered, more to himself than to his new companion. “I can’t believe it. It was all lies, that son of a bitch… speeding tickets.”

“Speeding tickets?” Buttons laughs. “Don’t be stupid. Opera tickets, maybe, that’s more like my boss. Lesson number one: never trust a rich man with opera tickets.”

“Don’t fucking tell me that he made you drive up here, two and a half hours, just to bring him his car. Who’s the stupid kiss-ass now?” Rose growled, turning his anger toward Pro Bono on the poor assistant who had been nothing but cheerful up to that point.

“A little kissing ass, you got me there. But how often does one get the chance to drive a Lamborghini? Besides, I came to speak with you, Mr. Rose. At the behest of my boss, of course. So you’re right, I’m a kiss-ass, a brownnoser.”

“And they call you Buttons. Why the hell do you let them call you Buttons?”

“Because I’m always fidgeting with the buttons of my shirt, until I just pull them off. Little tick of mine. Among others, I hate to say. Then I suck on them. Like this.” Buttons pulled back his lips to reveal a white button clenched between his teeth. “It works for me. Calms the nerves. I also know a heap of button jokes. You want to hear one? This guy says to some other guy, ‘Why don’t you press for the elevator?’ And the guy presses the door of the elevator. ‘Not there, you idiot,’ the first guy says, ‘the button.’ So the second guy looks down at his shirt and presses one of the buttons.”

“That’s not a button joke, that’s a joke about autism.”

“Fair enough. Why don’t we grab a hamburger at the diner, I’m starving.”

They got the food to go and ate and had some beers at Rose’s house, surrounded by the dogs.

“Do you think your boss is a bit smitten with this María Paz?” Rose asked, unsure why he did but perhaps so he wouldn’t have to hear another button joke.

Too many contradictory things had happened, and his mind had short-circuited and gone blank.

“Smitten? No, I wouldn’t say that,” Buttons responded. “I would say he’s in love with her, at his age. There’s a kind of delightful love that is called what it is, a love that’s spoken and acted on. It’s not that kind of love. But there is another kind of love that is not really obvious, or spoken, or acted upon; it just is, without the lover even being aware of it or able to do much about it. That’s the kind of love I’m talking about.”

“And yet he’s leaving for Paris when she most needs him.”

“He wants to go to Paris, and so he goes, that’s what rich people do, Mr. Rose. They have certain priorities, you know. It’s in their DNA.”

“But doesn’t he stand up for the rights of the indigenous, those without water, and whatnot?”

“And for María Paz also. But Gunnora is Gunnora. Gunnora, his daughter, his granddaughter, his house in the suburbs, his library, Paris, his Lamborghini, his rose garden… all these things exist in a whole different reality for him. A reality that he gives priority.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. I was beginning to have another kind of image of him, even thinking he wasn’t like other lawyers…”

“And you weren’t wrong, sir, that’s a fact. Think about it, he’ll only be gone for two weeks. It’s not like he’s deserted his causes forever. He’ll be back in two weeks, leading the crusade for María Paz again. And we’ll lose him again for Gunnora’s birthday or whenever they perform The Marriage of Figaro at La Scala in Milan.”

“What happened in that trial, Buttons? That’s what I want to know.”

“As do I, Mr. Rose, but I don’t know, I can swear to you. I can tell you what I personally witnessed that day, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

The trial was set for 11:30 a.m. at the Bronx Criminal Division courthouse on East 161st Street, where Buttons arrived with his boss two hours beforehand. Pro Bono likes to be early; he’s not one to risk racing against the clock. Neither Pro Bono nor Buttons had eaten breakfast, so they went down to the cafeteria.

Pro Bono picked up copies of the daily papers on the way, and ordered coffee, a fruit bowl, and a muffin. Buttons had a slice of pizza and a soda. They sat at a table away from the others and ate in silence. The boss didn’t like to chat or be distracted in the hours before a trial. He needed to focus. They exchanged at most a few words, from what Buttons recalled. Pro Bono told him he had had a good night’s sleep, that he was refreshed and rested. He added that the duel that morning would be unto death, but that he was confident it was winnable. Buttons was somewhat more skeptical, but in general he agreed. The evidence against María Paz was very weak. And then they parted. Buttons had other things to take care of that morning, and he left Pro Bono there reading the newspapers. María Paz had not yet arrived at that point, but nothing to worry about. There was plenty of time.

“And that’s it,” Buttons said.

“Not much,” Rose responded.

“Not much at all, really. But that’s all I know about it. I saw the boss again that afternoon in the office. That’s when he told me that María Paz had never shown up. He was as befuddled about it as I was. We didn’t have a clue what had happened.”

“And you never saw her again?”

“To this day.”

“It’s so strange, her whole story. Unbelievable, even. You can say she actually escaped from Manninpox. Well, with the clamp and all, but still. In the end, she escaped…”

“True, you can say that,” Buttons said. “But, you know, from the moment she missed her trial she became a fugitive from justice, and that unleashed the state police, the FBI, Interpol because she’s a foreigner, the DEA because she’s Colombian, and the CIA to come after her. Not to mention the famished, unscrupulous packs of bounty hunters. And that’s supposing she was still alive, of course. Do you know how many prisoners have escaped from American prisons since 2001? A mere twenty-seven. That’s it. And of those twenty-seven, you know how many were recaptured?”

“No idea.”

“Take a guess.”

“Twelve?”

“Twenty-six. Out of twenty-seven. That means that during the entire decade, one prisoner successfully escaped.”

“Two with María Paz, if we count this as an escape,” Rose said, toasting with his beer.

“The boss asked me to conduct an investigation,” Buttons said, finishing his meal and tossing a last piece of burger to one of the dogs.

“No!” Rose screamed. “Don’t feed them human food. They’re trained to eat only from their dishes. You’ll spoil them.”

“Did you hear what I said? The boss asked me to conduct an investigation.”

“And?”

“I found out some things. Unpleasant. About the death of your son.”

“The authorities that investigated the incident said it was a traffic accident. Open-and-shut case.”

“They’re part of the bureaucracy, they don’t care. But I think I came across something.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” Rose said, even though he had been living the past few weeks unable to free himself from anything having to do with the death of Cleve, looking for any shred of evidence that would help him understand the unfathomable and irreversible fact of what had happened. Yet he shut his eyes tight and turned the other way, terrified, each time he came upon something concrete. “You have to understand. It’s just too much to take for one day. For the moment. I’m taking the dogs out. Make yourself at home, Buttons,” Rose said on his way out. He rested for a while on the porch, petting the dogs and trying not to think about anything. Skunko lay at his feet, Dix bit the hem of his jacket, and Otto scratched behind an ear. Why is this dog scratching himself so much? Rose thought. Not that ear infection again, I hope. He wondered if his desire to disconnect was the result of the Effexor he had just taken.

“When are we going to talk about the death of your son?” Buttons asked later that night as he built a fire. He didn’t have a car to drive back to the city, so he accepted Rose’s invitation to stay.

“I ran to the morgue when they called me to identify the body,” Rose said. “I prayed the whole way there. Let it not be him, let it not be him, still convinced it couldn’t be Cleve. And in a manner I had been right, that dead person wasn’t Cleve. He was so disfigured, so still. That couldn’t be my boy, my Cleve, my only son, that destroyed wounded body. But all it took was a second look to make clear that it was him, in spite of the grotesque, wounded face, almost unrecognizable, but there was the lightning-bolt scar in the middle of his forehead. That was all that was really left of him. Afterward, they couldn’t pull me away from him. They would have to shut the place down, or go home, or put away the bodies, whatever it took, but I wasn’t going to walk away from Cleve. At some point, Edith appeared, not exactly sure when. A few years before, she and Ned had returned from Sri Lanka and settled down in Chicago. That’s where he was going. He wanted to be at his mother and Ned’s anniversary celebration. I don’t know the years, not sure if they ever officially married, well, no, they couldn’t have, because Edith and I never got around to getting divorced. There he was right in front of me, Cleve, my son, covered in a shroud. Edith was on his right, and I was on his left. I should tell you this, Buttons, just to make it clear. There were three dead people in that room. You may notice that I walk, and work, and even enjoy a hamburger and a beer, just like a normal person, but it means nothing. It became very clear to me at the cemetery, when Edith and I were finally able to look into each other’s eyes; we both knew that three people were being buried. That was my last stop, what’s happened since is of no matter, it has become all about enduring and letting time pass. And taking care of my dogs, they need me. Actually, what followed afterward was the guilt, mountains of guilt, or remorse, of beating myself to a pulp for allowing it to happen. An insane guilt, you know. The shrink even prescribed some pills, so I wouldn’t go off the deep edge permanently.”

“Do you want to tell me about that?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have all night.”

Rose had no idea where to start. Maybe on the day Cleve, when he was ten, had leaped into an empty pool after his parents had lost him. Apparently, he had jumped even though he was fully aware it was empty. He dislocated his shoulder, broke an arm, and split his forehead open when it smashed into the floor of the pool. You couldn’t really say this was a child who had just tried to commit suicide; the pool wasn’t deep enough for that, even a kid his age would have known that. But it had been a call for attention that alerted his parents that they had a very sensitive child, one much more vulnerable than they had imagined. From that day, the Z on the child’s forehead was proof that in their dysfunctional family there was a weak link that would snap if too much force were applied. Years later, when Cleve, already an adult, made the decision to go live with his father in the Catskills, Rose was clear about the fact that he had taken on a humongous responsibility, which came to a climax with their feelings about the motorcycle. For Cleve’s generation, a motorcycle was simply a means of transportation, good times, hot women, and, with any luck, sex here and there. To Rose, on the other hand, the very word “motorcycle” spoke of extreme danger, risking one’s life, a guaranteed accident on wheels, or any such parental hysteria. And he warned and warned his son about all this till his breath ran out, and this led to huge fights and chilled relations between them, something that was constant from the day that Cleve showed up at the house with that Yamaha to the day he died, on that very day they had fought about it.

“It was a monster with four cylinders, four carburetors, and four cylinder heads,” Rose informed Buttons. “It guzzled gasoline like some rabid dog and it was unbeatable on the road but almost impossible to handle in an emergency situation because it was so long and heavy with a high center of gravity. Every single day I admonished him about it. But he would admit to none of these flaws, he worshipped the thing, was madly in love with it. That Yamaha had him under a spell. He was always cleaning it, hugging it, and structured his days around checking the air filter, carburetors, oil, gauges. He spent a fortune using only premium gasoline. It was blind love, a total understanding between man and machine. So put yourself in my position. My most important job in the world was to stop Cleve from repeating what he had attempted ten years before. A pool then, a motorcycle now. The only thing I had to do was prevent that. I failed. No other way to put it.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mr. Rose. You can’t torture yourself like that. If it were only so simple. Like I said, I did some investigating. Cleve died on a secondary road that ran parallel to I-80. It was raining that afternoon, and he was about an hour and a half away from Chica—”

“I’m very well aware of all that,” Rose cut him off. “It was raining and Cleve lost control of his bike and ran completely off the road.”

“I was told your son was a very experienced driver who would have known how to deal with water from the sky. The thing is that it’s not certain if the accident happened because the pavement was slick or because he was run off. Think about it, he could have even lost control of the bike as he was trying to lose a pursuer. He might have noticed that someone was following him,” Buttons said. “But it’s impossible to know for sure because there were no witnesses, no radar guns, no criminal investigation. The only two entities involved in the case after the accident were the highway patrol and the paramedics, and the autopsy concluded that it was an immediate death due to the blunt trauma caused after having lost control of the motorcycle because of a combination of the excessive speed and the wet road. It is well known that rain greatly increases the chances of a rider losing control of a motorcycle, so they don’t usually think twice about assigning blame in such cases, and they are almost always ruled accidents. In Cleve’s case, they didn’t tape off the area or preserve the integrity of the crime scene; they stepped all over the ground, littered it with cigarette butts, and decided to forgo tests without even considering connections… because it was never considered a criminal investigation.”

“There was no crime. And stop chewing on that button, it makes an irritating noise.”

“Not a problem,” Buttons said, spitting out the button. “They did not follow guidelines with regard to keeping the scene, but they took pictures, lots of pictures. I downloaded them to my Mac. Do you want to take a look? Maybe you should have a drink first. Are you ready? Look at this one. You can see the body exactly as it was found. There are cuts where he was struck by the thorns.”

“Of course he was cut by the thorns,” Rose said, barely looking at the images on the screen. “I’m going to beg something of you, Buttons, don’t make me relive these events if you don’t have something worthwhile to add.”

“Fair enough, so let’s move slowly. Look at this one; Cleve’s not wearing his helmet, it rolled somewhere below.”

“Why are you torturing me with this nonsense? He’s not wearing a helmet because it came off during the fall.”

“Or someone took it off.”

“For what purpose? Not to steal it, they left it right there. It came off; it’s not a very complicated mystery.”

“It’s a great helmet. A half helmet with a full face shield of excellent quality and double straps into double buckles. You can see that if I magnify the image. One of these helmets doesn’t just come off, and your son was not one to ride with it unstrapped, especially if it was raining. I think, after the accident, somebody took the helmet off.”

“He could have taken it off himself.” Rose clutched both hands to the side of his head. “If he didn’t die right away, he could have pulled it off. He always complained it was too tight.”

“Possibly; there’s a lot we don’t know, too many things. But let’s go back to the thorn cuts. Look at this, on his forehead, there are nineteen little cuts, almost equidistant and almost in a straight line. And now take a look at the acacia branch right next to his body. You see how it’s bent? If we increase the magnification to three hundred, we can see that at some point that branch had both ends tied together.”

“In a circle?”

“Or a crown. And now look what happens when we use Photoshop,” Buttons said, moving the piece of the branch and putting over Cleve’s forehead on the screen. “You see it? The thorns of the branch are a precise match with the cuts. If we had that branch here, there would be blood on it.”

“A crown of thorns,” Rose, who had grown very pale, said.

“Are you okay, sir? I’m sorry, breathe, lie down. Wait up, I think I should get you that drink after all,” Buttons said, and when he returned with two whiskeys, Rose had gotten up. He was no longer faint and the concerned expression on his face had vanished. Unlike before, he seemed frighteningly calm.

“Let me ask you just a couple of questions. Just respond yes or no. My son did not kill himself in that accident, he was murdered.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Yes or no, Buttons.”

“Yes.”

“And they tortured him.”

“I think they took off his helmet to press that crown of thorns on his head.”

“Was he still alive?”

“Impossible to know. But I would guess he wasn’t. The fall most likely killed him and the crown of thorns was later. A ritual or something, we’re still investigating. While you walked your dog, Mr. Rose, I took a walk around the property. I’m sorry for my intrusion, but I had to. I called Eagles’s widow. Her number was on the bags of dog food. She told me some things. And then I rummaged in the attic. The attic was Cleve’s room? That was pretty clear. I found some women’s clothes, some makeup.”

“So what if my son had girlfriends, or friends, who came to visit?”

“They had name tags on them that suggested they could have belonged to María Paz. But wait, that’s not all. Outside, in a clearing in the woods behind the house, there is a wooden cross. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you ever seen it? But maybe the point of it is to remain unseen, in fact, to go unnoticed, a makeshift cross. You could say that it is just two sticks tied together with twine. Well, I assumed it could be signaling a grave or something like that, and I dug around a bit. But all I found was this box, one of those that could be used for ashes, and also this.” Buttons reached out and handed Rose a bronze medal hanging from a ribbon soiled and eaten by fungus. “What I want you to be keenly aware of, Mr. Rose, is that danger is near, that it has been lurking right outside. Maybe it has even snuck into the house.”

Rose scrutinized the bronze medal on one side and the other.

“I think I know where we can find María Paz,” Rose said.