Hot Sur

9. Interview with Ian Rose

“In the woods near the house, Buttons dug up a box with a medal and ash remains,” Rose tells me.

“Whose ashes were they?”

“Not a human’s but an animal’s: Hero, María Paz’s dog. Who knows why it had been awarded the medal, some heroic deeds in Alaska, apparently.”

Rose learned from Buttons who had killed that dog and how, and the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place in Rose’s head. It was becoming evident he was involved in a horror story unleashed by a lunatic. Cleve had been murdered, and it had not been an isolated deed. Rose had to accept this. He couldn’t let the pain cloud his judgment. He had to do something, and do it on his own. “It’s too personal a matter,” he tells me, “not the police’s, not Pro Bono’s, not anyone’s but mine, my issue, because Cleve was my son and I owe him at least that.” Buttons had offered to help, but it just didn’t seem right to Rose, and he began to shake him off. When it came down to it, he didn’t know who any of these people really were — Pro Bono, his assistant — or what they really wanted. He trusted no one and saw ulterior motives everywhere.

The unearthed medal made one thing very clear: María Paz had been in the house at least once without Rose having known about it. It had been at some point between the death of the dog and Cleve’s death. She may still have been there, for all he knew. Rose began to look for her everywhere on his property. He became obsessed with her presence, which he sensed here and there as if she were a ghost. He checked the same places again and again, although it was evident that the trail had gone cold. But she had to have been there, God knows how long, and with Cleve’s blessing. Of course, it was too late to give him the third degree, and the dogs kept whatever they knew to themselves. María Paz needed another accomplice, someone who surely must have known she was there, because that someone had her antennae tuned to every nook and cranny of the house.

“Emperatriz, the cleaning lady,” I say to Rose.

“I knew Empera must have met María Paz. When I saw that medal, I became convinced that there was some connection there. It would have been impossible for María Paz to have been there, stayed there, and eaten there, without Empera knowing. It was different with me. I never wanted to meddle into Cleve’s affairs; the attic was liberated territory and I never went up there. Empera, however, has always been a little bit nosy. And I don’t have to tell you how things are among you Latinos; not to be offensive, but when you live in a foreign country you behave like a big clan, everyone is treated as part of the same group, you hug, kiss, and are instant blood relations the first time you meet. You establish a solidarity pact with anyone from the homeland, even if the homeland extends from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, correct me if I’m wrong. Empera must have known something about María Paz’s stay with us. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, and whatever she knew I had to coax it out of her. I had to be tactful, like I said, because I had no idea who was involved in the death of my son, directly or as an accomplice. It could have been anyone from María Paz to Empera. It was also possible that I was on the hit list, and not just me but my dogs as well. Remember this maniac killed people and dogs, so I couldn’t decide whether to leave the house for their safety or to remain in the house to deal with things head-on. Finally, I decided to stay. I felt as if I could handle anything except letting someone who had hurt my boy so badly escape.”

For years, Rose had not given much thought to Empera’s presence in his house, having hardly any substantial interaction with her or noticing her much as she went about her business. He heard her going in and out of rooms accompanied by the slapping of her plastic sandals and jingle-jangle of her ostentatious earrings. He had no idea what Empera thought about life, whether she was forty or sixty, married or single, or how many children she had. The only thing that concerned him about her was that she was responsible, did her job, and fed Otto, Dix, and Skunko when he was away. He was impressed by how detailed she was when it came to cleaning. Empera spotted grime everywhere, even in places where no one would think to look, and she did not rest until she eradicated the last particle of dirt. She made this challenge a personal one, as if she did not want to be defeated by the dirtiness of the world, and was always asking Rose for money for more cleaning supplies. She knew the commercials on television by heart, put a blind faith in them, and if Rose was not careful she would recite them to him word for word to convince him that she just had to run out and buy them — this liquid to wash, that bleach for the whites, Mr. Clean, Tide, Cottonelle toilet paper. One time, she had shown up with a product that was specifically for removing blackberry stains, because one of Rose’s white shirts had blackberry stains.

“Empera,” Rose had said, “I must have been twenty-five years old the last time I ate blackberries.”

“Well, then that’s how long those stains have been on your shirt.”

Rose tells me that the enforced distance between him and his employee had to do with her nagging about the dogs. She complained all day long about how they made a mess and shed hair everywhere, let out toxic farts, ruined the furniture with their drooling, and, to top it all off, carried parasites in their stomachs that made humans go blind.

“Even if I go blind, I won’t get rid of them,” Rose warned her without even looking at her.

Empera had likely read whatever letters she found in her boss’s storage boxes, and she kept track of his expenses and debts. She must have also known every morning how much bourbon he had drank the night before by keeping track of the level in the bottle. By the stains on his bed, she knew he was up-to-date on his nocturnal privacies, and she was informed about his medical conditions by the prescriptions in the cabinet. It would not be surprising to him if she knew his e-mail password. Neither his mother nor Edith, and sometimes not even Rose himself knew more about him than Empera did. But who was she really? Could he trust her?

“I remember that Empera tried to warn me of the presence of someone strange in the house, or had come to me with some story that Cleve had a girlfriend up in the attic,” Rose tells me. “And I remember also that at the time I told her to mind her business, which exonerated her somewhat, but I remained suspicious and didn’t want to take one false step.” There was only one person beyond all suspicion, who moreover was attached to the family in an emotional way, and whom Rose could consult: Ming, the editor.

“Don’t tangle yourself up in too many theories, Mr. Rose,” Ming said when Rose paid a visit to the editor’s apartment in Chelsea for the second time since Cleve’s death, this time to give the editor an idea of the anguished and somewhat confusing framework of his speculations. “This is a simple but revolting story, with a clear-cut murderer named Sleepy Joe. Cleve and I agreed on this point.”

“You talked with him about this?” Rose asked.

“Yes, I did indeed. He had Sleepy Joe in his sights.”

“Alright,” Rose said, “Sleepy Joe. But who are his accomplices?”

“If I may suggest something, it’s better to assume that others are innocent until proven otherwise. Proceed slowly; don’t let yourself become overwhelmed by the whole unmanageable package. The first thing you have to do is find María Paz. Do you want me to help you, Mr. Rose? I could arrange things here, find someone to feed my bettas, and…”

“No, Ming, this is something I need to take care of on my own. Thank you, it’s good to know I can count on you.”

“Promise me you’ll get in touch if things get ugly.”

“I think I’m going to need a gun. I don’t plan on killing anyone,” Rose said, more or less lying. “It’s just a precaution.”

“I have a few. But they are basically collector’s items,” Ming said, as he pulled out a small pistol from a cabinet, giving to Rose and identifying it as a Remington Model 95.

“It looks like a toy,” Rose said, making sure it fit in his pocket. “Does it work?”

“I doubt it,” Ming responded, pointing to the name engraved on the barrel, Claro Hurtado, one of Pancho Villa’s bodyguards. “It clearly didn’t work so well for Claro that July 23, 1923, when they gunned him down in Parral, Chihuahua, along with his big boss. I also have this,” he said, pulling out a katana that according to him was the Hattori Hanzo sword used by Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill.

“Is it real or a prop?” Rose asked.

“The edge has been shaved down, and it was manufactured to be ultralight so that Uma Thurman could wield it.”

“It feels like it’s made of fiberglass.”

“No more useful than a rat’s tail,” Ming said, as he placed other collector’s items on the table.

Rose noticed a solid, black piece, free of ornamentations or other frills, which inspired some confidence in him.

“And whose was this?” he asked.

“It doesn’t have much of a history, or it does, but a personal one, because I inherited it from my father, and my father in turn from his father, and so on into the mists of time. It’s a Glock 17 9 mm. A solid and serious gadget. With a hard trigger, but on the other hand you can load seventeen cartridges into it, and it fires quickly. I have ammunition for this one, half a box, and I can show you how to load it.”

Rose stored the Glock and the box of ammunition in the glove compartment of his Ford Fiesta and returned to his home in the mountains resolved to put Empera through an Inquisition-style round of questioning. He sat her in front of him and bombarded her with questions. As expected, Empera proved a tough nut to crack, and the more he pressed her, the dodgier she became. She had no idea what he was talking about and rolled her eyes every time he mentioned María Paz, responding in a haughty tone that she didn’t know anything about anything, and that, moreover, it was none of her business. Rose couldn’t get her to shift from that position, although he swore on his son’s grave that he was not trying to harm María Paz or turn her in to the authorities. On the contrary, in fact. It was only when he explained in detail to Empera the situation with the clamp in María Paz’s uterus that she seemed to soften and said she would do what she could.

“But I’m not promising anything,” she warned him, “and by the way, I should remind you that it has been sixteen months since my last raise.”

“We’ll fix that. Don’t worry about the raise. But can I count on you?”

“No guarantees, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Rose tells me that it became imperative to find María Paz, because of the clamp, sure, but above all because he was sure that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. And because something very strange and powerful began to grow inside him, something that was not so much the pain from the loss anymore, but instead, in a weird way, a substitute for the pain, a kind of consolation, perhaps the only one possible.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you that I’ve never been attracted to the idea of vengeance,” he says. “It has always seemed a distractive fallacy to me, one of the most pervasive misconceptions, a hateful and absurd national sport. Thousands of movies and television shows, heaps of novels, weapons sales and propaganda, a whole multibillion-dollar industry that feeds off the lust for vengeance that haunts Americans. But not me. It had never interested me before. Nevertheless, something inside me began to savor it the moment I put a face to the thug who had killed and tortured my son. It was then that I began to dream of making him pay for all his actions, one by one. I wanted to see him turned into a pile of shit, to kill him with my own two hands, watch him bleed and scream in agony, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to spit on him, shit on him, waste him.”

Night and day, it was always there: a shifting mass of lava that sketched and erased the incandescent image of his son, Cleve. Cleve bristling with thorns, like the Nazarene or like a porcupine. Cleve, the target in some macabre plot. Cleve, the sacrificial scapegoat in some disgusting ritual. His murderer had to be somewhere, this lunatic possessed by a terrible sense of the liturgy, this asshole with a mania for sacrifice that was one of the many manifestations of his mental illness. Wherever he was hiding, Rose would find him.

“You have to understand,” he tells me, “this is about one of those changes that strikes you as if a blow to the head. Cleve’s death had become a nameless torment that was eating me alive, a permanent guilt with no logic. But all of a sudden, it had a name, one name, and one name only: Sleepy Joe. Finally, there was something besides me to blame, someone aside from myself on which to take out the rage.

“Bringing Cleve back was not possible, but I could blow the fuck out of that Sleepy Joe. One thing followed the other. It was something as irrational as a physiological need, as pressing as eating or sleeping. At that moment I didn’t see it as such, but today I realize that past a certain point, no one would have stopped me from doing what I set out to do even if they had given me incontrovertible proof that Sleepy Joe had nothing to do with Cleve’s death. Do you understand? These facts would have been irrelevant to me. When the mechanism of revenge is triggered, nothing can stop it. Vengeance doesn’t have to be sure about what it does; it just needs a target, any target it can properly aim at. You’ve received a mortal blow, and to remain alive you need to deliver a similar blow. You’ve chosen your bull’s-eye and you go after it. Vengeance is not reflective or flexible; it’s implacable and blind. It has nothing to do with justice. Whoever believes that he is enforcing justice through vengeance is just lying to himself. It is about something much more primal, more bestial. You’ve become an enraged bull, and they’ve just waved a red cloth in front of you. In Colombia, there was a saying that once caught my attention: ‘kill and eat the dead.’ ‘He could kill and eat the dead,’ that’s how they described someone in a rage, just a popular saying, a hyperbole like any other. And at the same time, maybe not. That phrase gave me the chills because it seemed to contain some ancient wisdom from ancestral times in which cannibalistic vengeance was the supreme form of vengeance. I didn’t even remember the saying or think about it until I discovered someone had murdered Cleve in such a horrendous manner. From the moment I identified the perpetrator, that saying began to resonate in my memory: to kill and eat the dead, to kill and eat the dead.”

Rose had nightmares the night that Buttons slept on the sofa in the living room. He went to bed shaken with his revelations, terribly distressed, and awoke at dawn, feeling a bruised resentment all over, as if he had suffered a horrible beating. Rose thought he had dreamed of mutilated bodies. Amid the carnage, a woman let out an irritating harangue that he would have rather not heard, but that had some revelatory meaning. Who was she? Someone he knew, but not well, or well but not completely, simply someone who understood something amid the butchery. He fed Buttons breakfast and drove him to the train station afterward, asking for a couple of days to take in all this new information and assuring him that as soon as he recovered from some of the shock induced by the details he would call him to start looking for María Paz.

He never called Buttons or responded to any of his e-mails and phone calls. He imagined that under orders from Pro Bono, Buttons would begin a parallel search using his own contacts.

“Better that way,” Rose tells me. “Each man in his home, and God in all of them.”

The dream still rattled around in his head. At first, he thought that the woman in the dream could have been Mandra X, but then he realized that it could also have been Edith, his ex-wife. He decided to call her, simply pick up the phone and call her, though he wasn’t sure why. At that point, Edith was still under the impression that Cleve’s death had been an accident, and Rose had no intention of changing that.

“Do you remember that album from the trip to Rome? Do you still have it, by any chance?” he asked her, and she knew immediately that he meant the one with the pictures from the trip to Italy some thirty-five years earlier when they were newlyweds and Cleve had not been born yet.

Edith said she must have had it somewhere in her house, and Rose asked her to send it to him as soon as she could. She agreed to send it without asking why, and that very night, a package from FedEx SameDay arrived at the house in the Catskills.

“Did the album have anything to do with the death of your son?” I ask Rose.

“Well, I was more than anything at that moment obsessed with the tools employed in the Passion of Christ. There was the crux of the matter, just as I had intuited from the first, when I found that old newspaper clipping of the murder of the ex-policeman, confirmed later with the nailing of the dog to the wall, and even more so when Buttons made clear how my son must have died. Yet, there was something missing, and I needed to know the exact list of objects aside from obvious ones, the cross, the nails, and the crown of thorns. Then I remembered our trip, those days with Edith in Rome, and of a specific place we had visited then, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crossed the Tiber toward Castel Sant’Angelo, the antique mausoleum in Adriano. Along the sides of that bridge, on pedestals, there is a series of marble angels sculpted by Bernini and his workshop, and each of those angels holds one of the instruments of the Passion. Of course, I could’ve found the information I was looking for in many places, beginning with Google. Bernini’s representation of the Passion was one of thousands on the topic. But that one in particular was special to me. The Sant’Angelo bridge brought back many memories, both fond and troubling, but intense, perhaps too intense. I think that’s why I became obsessed with looking at that album.”

He thought he would put himself in the shoes of Sleepy Joe to understand how he worked. The first thing he needed to do was to stop hating him, cut off any hate, which is blinding. Rose couldn’t afford blindness, he had to remain vigilant and come to some conclusions. Based on the premise that even the most insane or evil of men has his reasons for doing what he does, Rose could come to know Sleepy Joe’s motivations. He wanted to switch minds with the victimizer, as he had seen Will Graham do with the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon. It sounded childish to put it that way, Rose realized, but he was up to his knees in this thing, completely out of his element, and using horror movies as a guide. He, who knew absolutely nothing of the criminal mind, and who was not a detective or investigator, just a father torn apart by the death of his son.

“And maybe everything was like a child’s game,” he tells me, “except one thing, my conviction to find the criminal. Whatever it was I had to do, I was going to find that man, and I was going to destroy him.”

I am Sleepy Joe, Rose began repeating to himself. He was upstairs, in Cleve’s attic, the place he thought most fitting. I am Sleepy Joe and I’m going to murder this man Cleve. Why? Why am I doing it? One, because I damn well feel like it. I am a thug and go through life doing as I please, or doing nothing, and if I kill someone, it is because I want to and I can. Two, I am going to kill him because he’s getting involved with my girlfriend María Paz. (Pro Bono had mentioned that Cleve and María Paz had been together, and if Pro Bono knew, Sleepy Joe could have known as well.) Cleve and María Paz love each other, or they like each other, or at the least, they’re after each other, and since I suffer from terrible jealousy, I’ll kill him and keep her. How should I kill him? Simple, I’m a trucker and he rides a motorcycle: I have the advantage. Cleve makes things easier when he takes a shortcut through a little-traveled road on the way to Chicago. I tail him, force him to accelerate, sideswipe him with the truck, and he runs off the road and kills himself. Done and over. Wipe off the rival and get away scot-free because there are no witnesses. Up to that point, everything seems rational. Then I put a crown of thorns on his head? That is, I get down from the truck even though it’s raining, run down the side of the road, find the body… and I perform this ritual. I have to do the ritual, that’s my thing, justifying my crimes with this mystical element, or the other way around, let the mystical elements lead me to my crimes. I notice the abundance of thorny acacia everywhere and break off a few branches, the ones heavy with thorns. There are nineteen thorns in total. Do I count them one by one, or do I even care? I count them; there are nineteen. Does that number mean anything? It reminds me of the acronym M-19, the name of the guerrilla movement in Colombia when I lived there. So what? I let go of nineteen, I’m interested in associations that Sleepy Joe can make. I’m losing focus; I have to remain in his shoes. I pick that branch of thorny acacia, handle it carefully, making sure the thick, long spines don’t harm me. What about if someone sees my truck? It’s worth the risk. I shape the branch like a crown for my victim. Do I hurt myself by mistake? No. I use gloves, to protect my hands and to not leave fingerprints. (There were, in fact, none, Buttons had confirmed.) I am Sleepy Joe, and I have powerful reasons for doing what I do. Do I punish my victim because I’m jealous? Is this vengeance? No, this is not about jealousy; it’s about something else. I’m not hesitant, that’s not my thing. What I am doing is not grotesque, or lunatic, or absurd. On the contrary, I am enormously pedantic and sure of myself, and my actions are full of transcendental meaning, although no one else may see this. They’re ignorant; I am enlightened. The moment is sublime; I’m the priest and have chosen this man as scapegoat. He’s the object of my ceremony, the Christ figure in this Passion play. The victim shines before my eyes with a sacred radiance that summons his sacrifice. Christ figures are meant to die. I tell myself that their mission is to clean this world that is dirty with sin with their deaths. (Concerning this last point, Rose rereads a portion of María Paz’s manuscript to confirm; she too knew that her brother-in-law was obsessive about ritual cleanliness.) I’m Sleepy Joe again and tremble with fervor; I even get somewhat excited, begin to get an erection. I’m transfixed and hard, the victim calling me, inviting me, he is there for me, offering a submissiveness and willingness that excites me. God’s calling tingles in my balls and demands the execution of the lamb. I obey because I am his prophet, his executor, his angel of death. Yahweh responds and lets me know that he counts on me. Divine punishment will be executed through me, and all the filth in the world will be purified. Shit, this is some big stuff I’m involved in here. I feel such fever that I need to put on the brakes; I can’t come till right at the point of consummation.

That’s it for the Sleepy Joe thing. Could the murder really have taken place like that? There seems to be a lot missing, Rose thought, I’m not getting this, too removed from the real heart of the thing, the blind conviction, a rapture so profound that leads me to torture and kill. This truck driver’s advantage over me is so enormous, in that he defeats me with the simple gift of his faith. He is the one endowed with belief: that makes a huge difference, and tips the scales in his favor. He is very adept at the ritual sequence, vibrantly engaged in each of the stages leading up to the summit of pain. His acts are based on a millennial tradition that is foreign to me. He thinks himself a prophet, while I’m a nobody. He counts on enlightenment, while I heed my hydraulic engineer’s logic. That’s why I’ll never understand him and continue to despise him. “Stay put,” Rose commands himself, “don’t get all scattered.” How does Sleepy Joe work, or I should say torture? In the first instance, knife wounds in the hands, feet, and side, the stigmata of the cross. He inflicts them on his own brother. The nails, much more vile, he reserves for the dog. For Cleve, he reserves the crown and the humiliation of the thorns. In a way he crowns Cleve king, thus must consider him his principal victim, his most significant victory, at least up to now. Or maybe not. Maybe he just improvises according to the circumstances and choses the thorns mainly because they were readily available. The sharp weapon, thorns, nails, all elements toward maximum suffering. Each of the victims has been sacrificed or purified with one of these weapons. Does Sleepy Joe hate his victims? Not necessarily. It could even be the opposite. It seemed that he liked his brother. How does he choose them then? What are the criteria? Maybe the deciding factor isn’t the victim but the act itself. Undoubtedly, the common denominator is María Paz. Unless, that is, the guy went around conducting similar ceremonies on victims that had nothing to do with this case. Buttons and Ming were convinced of his more universal sacrificial tendencies, and there was Corina, María Paz’s Salvadoran friend.

Rose returned to the manuscript, which was his guide, his map, and reread the passages about Corina.

“Open your eyes, María Paz. Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.”

And this:

“‘I think he was praying,’ she told me one of those days.

“‘Praying? Who was praying?’

“‘Your brother-in-law.’

“‘You mean he prayed that night in your house? Before he did what he did, or after?’

“‘During… like in a ceremony.’”

But what exactly was it that Sleepy Joe did to Corina, why did he violate her with a broomstick? Rose went down the kitchen to look for a broom. Once in the attic again, he brandished it against an invisible enemy. He worked up a sweat. Or was it a fever? He felt his head burning, as if he had made it through some threshold, and was about to completely break through.

If I were Sleepy Joe, what damage could I do with this? Strike or wield, or even rape, as I did with Corina? I could stick the head of an enemy on a broomstick as if it were a stake. Or pierce it through the victim. A sharp stick. A spear? A long, penetrating spear, prehistoric, frightful. The spear, the mother of all weapons for the Chinese, the blazon of Pallas Athena, the sharpened head made of steel, amber, bronze, and obsidian. Wasn’t Christ’s side pierced with such a spear? Lance, spear, Britney Spears? If I were Sleepy Joe, would I not have penetrated, pierced, violated Britney, Athena, or Corina with this lance, spear, broom? It is an elaborate scheme, but it holds together. If it was really like this, what next? What other techniques of martyrdom did Sleepy Joe’s imagination resort to? Which ones had he employed yet, or not?

Rose didn’t know. That is, what could the next victims expect, or what had he done to other anonymous victims? For one, the cross was missing, the final and most drastic torment, the zenith of the expiation. And he must employ others as well; Christ had to endure all sorts of horrors on the way to Cavalry. This is where the album that Edith sent came in.

Rome, a summer twilight, years before. Edith and Rose are holding hands and in love, or at least Rose is in love with Edith, who wears a light-colored, low-cut dress, from which her tanned cleavage peeks out. They are crossing the Sant’Angelo Bridge, and the impressive vision of Bernini’s angels greatly affects them: their violent, androgynous, dark beauty; their unlikely wings, which seem useless for flight; their anguished compassion before the suffering of the Son of God. They are less agents of glory than provocateurs in a cosmic duel, and each one holds in its hands one of the initiation props, or deadly weapons, depending on how you look at it. In the duty-free shop at the airport, Rose had bought a Canon AE-1, and in his enthusiasm to try it out took many pictures of Edith, including on that day, nine of which survive in that album, one in front of each angel, not counting a tenth that must have come loose, leaving behind only little sticker slots where the photograph had been. Looking at those pictures, some many years later, was dizzying, transporting in some fashion for Rose. He recounts to me how he simultaneously relived his wife’s abandonment and the death of his son, and that the brutal grip of that twin loss dragged him against his will, threatening to break him. So he decided to let go of the reins and be taken, release the resistance and go with it, submissively, in a hallucinatory journey propelled by a torrent of violent images.

Looking back on it now, he feels it was a deep plunge that almost drowned him. He began to look at the pictures one by one, trying to focus on the angels and letting the figure of his wife fade into abstraction. “Get out of the way, Edith,” he murmured to her, “this has nothing to do with you.” In her handwriting, written on the back of each of the pictures were details of the date the picture was taken, the name of the place, and any other pertinent facts. “That’s how she is,” Rose tells me, “she has to document and classify everything; her books are full of marginalia.” The first angel holds up a small pillar, more like a miniature version of one with a corresponding caption, Tronus meus in columna, my throne on a pillar, according to Edith’s footnoted translations.

“Bravo, Edith,” Rose told her, “you were always so systematic and organized, with everything except our marriage; you put me away like some old apparatus and you couldn’t even remember where. But focus, focus.” It’s the pillar used during the whipping. Rose remembered it well. During that trip to Rome, they had seen the original, the very pillar, in Santa Prassede, just a few steps away from the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Just like the replica held up by the angel, the original is short and stout, as if the Christ bound there had been a pygmy. Tronus, Rose wrote over the head of the angel, Tronus meus in columna. “Your name is Tronus, and you did wrong, extremely wrong, by binding that pygmy.”

The following angel holds up a whip, and the inscription reads, In flagella paratum, ready for the whip. “Flagella will be your name,” Rose told the angel. “Break down the Christ Almighty with a lacerating whip of seven tails, because that’s your task: whip the chosen one until he bursts.” The next angel has two heavy large nails in his hand. Quem confixerunt, the things that perforated me. Rose wrote a name above the angel: Clavus. “Cleave and nail the angel with this name. Nail the victim to the wall, pierce it, perforate, like a dog: leave it crucified until it dies. Take a poor dog and transform it into a god, or take a god and deal with him as if he were a dog.” The angel on the next page in the album holds a cross. A sanguinis lingo, from the tree that bleeds. Cross, crossed, crossing, cruising, cruiser. Rose’s thoughts dashed to the cruise he had taken with Edith to the Greek islands. Did you love me, Edith, that night in Santorini? Did you even love me then? But he immediately caught himself and abandoned that memory. “Focus, focus,” he told himself. “Stay with this thing.” This powerful angel with barely a squint in his eyes is holding a cross, this is his fragmenta passionis, or at least that’s what Edith noted, good old Edith throwing around those Latin phrases. The great winged squinter holds up the cross as if it were nothing, as if it were weightless, as if the cross itself were also winged, the wood of death that curiously enough is also the tree of life, the conflux of the four cardinal points, the compass rose, rosa rosa rosam rosae rosae, of course, a rose is a rose is a rose, and that’s his name, Rose, Rosicrucian, the rose that hugs the cross, at the intersection, the crossroads, fingers crossed for good luck. The cross, object of danger and risk, doorway to other worlds, a dizzying reality of conflicting realities, life and death, heaven and hell, man and God. The point where the boundary between the zenith and the abyss vanishes. Wasn’t that more or less what old Ismaela Ayé wailed about behind the walls of Manninpox? If Ismaela Ayé could conceive it, so could Rose, who took up his pen and christened that angel Crux. “Hi, Crux,” he told him. “So you will be known.” The inscription on the angel who holds the spear with which they stabbed Christ on the side reads Vulnerasti cor meum, you have wounded my heart. A powerful phrase; the Lord Christ wasn’t a bad poet, or the credit would actually have to go to Bernini. Rose decided that angel would be called Cor, the angel revealed its own name, cor, cordis, the core; besides, the letters look perfect, C, O, R, spaced on the photograph, somewhat humorous to Rose because the O just happened to encircle Edith’s face as she stands on a pedestal in the picture. Let’s see you escape that and fly away with Ned to Sri Lanka. “Dismissed, Cor!” Rose ordered the angel. “I leave you with Edith, a very bad girl. You’re in charge of her. And let’s go on, everything marches on, I have pulled one string and now the whole skein is coming undone at full speed.” Cor: the name is also connected to Corina. “They drove that spear through your heart, Cori? No, he drove it through your pussy, the axis mundi, the heart of hearts.”

The next picture is a difficult one, because the angel is holding a sponge. Very strange, a sponge, something so common and removed from the sublime. What harm can you do with a sponge? Aside from tickling someone under the armpits with it, Rose couldn’t think of anything. “Read, idiot,” he told himself. The inscription says it all. Portaverunt me aceto, they gave me vinegar. How methodical of Edith, how precise, everything translated perfectly. “I see, I see,” Rose said. “The anguished Christ was thirsty and must have asked for water, and they gave him vinegar. Gross. Twisted, like they say. They dunked that sponge in vinegar and burned his lips with it, scorched his throat and laughed at him. Bad, bad, bad angel. You deserve a spanking, and as punishment you will be known as Sponge Bob.” Of course, Edith believed something else, as always, going against the current. At the bottom of the picture Edith had written Posca, a term Rose had never heard, but which Edith thankfully defined, “Posca, a popular drink in ancient Rome, a blend of water, vinegar, and aromatic herbs.” Can this be true? Could some charitable being have dunked the sponge in posca and reached it up on a stick to the parched mouth of the dying man? “Fine, Edith, we’ll call this angel Posca. Sponge Posca.” But this didn’t end there, something else. “That’s not you in the picture, Edith. Who is that standing at the foot of Posca but me, Ian Rose, wearing a T-shirt that bears the face of James Dean, a very clear impression of that famous face? However, the face of the angel has been cut off. You decapitated Posca with the Canon AE-1. It doesn’t matter. Decapitated angel, you will no longer be known as Sponge Bob or Posca; you have some luck. You will from here on be known as James Dean.”

“Picture after picture, and my fever kept rising,” Rose tells me, “as if my brain were on fire. Look, I’m a simple person; I don’t know anything about these altered states. But that night I was flying. And at the same time, everything seemed so real, I mean the angels, Edith, Edith’s absence, Cleve, Cleve’s death, his murderer, the shadow of his murderer, myself, Rome, the Catskills, they all took on the same kind of harsh reality, the same intensity, everything existed equally and at the same time, the fever brought everything together before my eyes, within reach.”

Next was the angel Rose most feared, the one he had been waiting for, the one that truly anguished him, the one holding the crown of thorns. This is Cleve’s angel, Rose thought, and shuddered. He found the inscription appalling: Dum configitur spina, as the thorns stab. Edith, not knowing that one day her son would suffer the thorns; Edith, not even knowing that one day she would have a son, noted that this angel enjoyed the privilege of being sculpted by Bernini himself, who left the creation of the other angels to his apprentices. “Thank you for the clarification, Edith,” Rose said. “You were always so studious.” This angel ensnared Rose like none of the other ones; he couldn’t stop looking at it, or maybe the other way around, the thing couldn’t stop looking at him. It is a terrible angel, Rose realized. “Cleve, my son, what kind of a father am I who was not there to protect you from this assault?” This was also the most anguished of all the angels. Bernini had made it easy to perceive the trapped scream behind his parted lips. That, and the threatening torment in the depth of its eyes, made it into a macabre figure. “You will be called Thorn,” Rose said with an unfathomable rage and scribbled the name various times, Thorn, Thorn, Thorn, stabbed the angel with the name, scratched it and scratched it and scratched it until the only thing visible in the picture were the scratches. The bridge had disappeared, leaving behind only scratches. The Tiber had disappeared — Rome, the angel, the crown, and above all Edith, all disappeared. All that was left were scratches from top to bottom; Rose had stabbed Thorn with a million sharp scratches, with thorns, that is.

The following page revealed an almost feminine figure gently holding up a cloth: Respice facie, look at the face. “What should I call this angel?” Rose asked himself, less frenzied, less aggressive, catching his breath. “Facies, of course. That’s what you will be called, look how I delicately write your new name in a corner of the picture.” This is the angel holding Veronica’s cloth, the handkerchief on which the face of Jesus remained engraved when the woman named Veronica went to wipe away the blood and sweat. But Edith’s note made something very clear: it was enough just to consider the etymology of the name to realize that this Veronica had never existed, that she was no more than Vero Icon, the true image of Christ engraved in Veronica’s cloth, that is, the cloth of the true icon. “Damn, Edith, you are a smart one!” But that wasn’t all with this angel either; on the contrary, things were just getting started. One: with a rag or a piece of cloth, someone cleans the face of a man. Two: the face of the man remains impressed there, like in a photograph. A face. The face. A face on a rag. On a rag? A red rag? John Eagles, the dog-food deliveryman, with his face ripped off and stuck to a rag? Did this finally explain the mysterious murder of John Eagles? But John Eagles had nothing to do with Sleepy Joe, didn’t know him, had never crossed him. Or had he?

Rose was exhausted, his overheated brain could not go on and demanded some rest, but he wasn’t done, the task not completed, one more angel remaining. The last angel in the album holds in one hand the tunic that they ripped off Christ before crucifying him and in the other hand the dice with which the Roman soldiers gambled for it among themselves. Miserunt sortem, they tried their luck. Fucking centurions, gambling for God’s clothes. “You will be called Alea,” Rose said. The whole scene has never really made any sense to Rose. The Robe, a movie Rose saw as a teenager, played up the incongruity by changing the coarse tunic for a more presentable, obviously expensive purple cloth, and Richard Burton, the lucky centurion who won at dice, walked away satisfied wearing the flamboyant robe. But you don’t have to be Richard Burton to know that purple is the imperial color, exclusive and sumptuous. That’s all well and good. But to gamble for a pitiful cloth woven by a poor artisan from Galilee, and then be dragged up the mountain, torn by stones and whipping, a thing of misery, all muddy and stained? It made no sense. But for Rose, it couldn’t matter now. No point getting lost in theological debates; that’s not what’s important. What mattered was to tie up loose ends, put two and two together, follow the scent. The scales tilted toward Maraya, Sleepy Joe’s other mistress. Rose, drunken with revelations, consulted María Paz’s manuscript. He wanted to find out what María Paz had said about Maraya, the table dancer at Chikki Charmers, who was boiled in a hot tub till the flesh fell off her bones; poor Maraya, who as a corpse had a die placed on each of her eyes while her friends fought over her clothes, a victim of the mania and obsessiveness of Sleepy Joe, a miserable fuck with some strange fixations. Too obvious, Rose thought. All this was all too easy. “Disgusting,” he muttered, and he felt his bile rise against the murderer so predictable in all his shit. “Motherfucker, Sleepy Joe,” Rose grumbled, “your shoddy puzzles are straight out of Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown, some shoddy mystic, how disgustingly you follow the pattern to the letter, that’s your bravery, your audacity, you kill with the instruments of the Passion of Christ, one after another, rising up those bloody steps. That’s your great invention. But you’re just a routine murderer at the end of the day.”

Rose went from hallucination to boredom, from shock to disappointment, from fire to ice. It was over, he had figured out the case, at least roughly, forcing a detail here and there, filling in the gaps where needed, admittedly, but in any case getting an overview, assembling enough support in reality to feel that he had basically succeeded in untangling the mess. The fever had subsided and with it the state of exaltation. He had given birth, and now he felt he was sinking into postpartum depression, the maternity blues. Fleeing from this mood, he went to the kitchen to make tea, but could not find milk and had to resign himself to drink the tea without its cloud. “Sorry, Mother.” He looked for the bottle of Effexor and was about to down a couple with a sip of tea to put an end to crisis, but relented. “No more pills,” he said to the demon Effexor. From here on, he needed all his tools and faculties, including pain, anxiety, and panic, everything that was part of his system of alerts. He buried the antianxiety pills in the soil of a potted fern, climbed back up to the attic, and dropped, exhausted, on his son’s bed.

“I am the detective, I am the avenger, I play victim and the executioner… Forgive me, son, playing all these stupid games to make sense of the senselessness of your death,” he said aloud not so much to Cleve but to Cleve’s things surrounding him in the attic.

Two days later, winter descended suddenly upon the area. It had not stopped snowing in the past twenty-four hours and Rose was overcome by a sense of lethargic weightlessness, looking out the window at the snow falling with the slow grace of silk. Perceived as such, with the heat of the fireplace and through the windows, it seemed beautiful and harmless, something even warm about it. Yet Rose knew it well enough to be sure that this time it was not going to stop until it enveloped people, animals, and things, vanquishing all sounds, erasing all color, leveling all shapes, and leaving the land converted into a white ball, inhuman and bright as the moon, a static frozen landscape of serenity. Rose pressed his hands against the warmth of his teacup when Empera burst in like a whirlwind and handed him her cell phone.

“You want to take this,” she said.

“I’m calling about the grates,” a female voice declared.

“What grates?” Rose, who had still not come fully down from his hallucinatory state, asked.

“You know the grates, the ones you ordered.”

“I haven’t ordered any grates,” Rose said, annoyed with the insistence, but Empera shot him a look that made him realize that this could be important, something to do with María Paz, maybe “grates” was a kind of jail code. For what? Rose was speechless and there followed a tense silence that he didn’t know how to break. He couldn’t very well blurt out, Is that you, María Paz? This could very well be a clandestine contact through phones that were tapped, or using recorders and things like that.

“The grates, you know,” the voice said.

“Are you a friend of the grates?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“Have you been in touch with her?”

“That’s why I’m calling, to tell you that she has the catalog.”

“The catalog of the grates for the garden?”

“Exactly, the grates for the garden.”

“And when can I see it?”

“She wanted to know if you could meet today if possible, about three in the afternoon in the food court at the mall. Your housekeeper says she knows the one. If you can’t today, we can talk later to make an appointment for tomorrow or…”

“Tell her I’ll be there, drinking a Diet Coke,” Rose said, emphasizing the Diet Coke because it seemed an apt detail. How else would María Paz recognize him among the crowd?

“You shouldn’t.”

“I shouldn’t what?”

“Drink Diet Coke. If you have to drink Coca-Cola, at least don’t drink the diet one; it’s pure poison,” the voice said, and Rose had no idea if they were still talking in code, or if the caller was just concerned for his health.

“Alright, tell her that I will be drinking regular Coke.”

“Like everyone else there.”

“You’re right. Tell her I will be drinking three cans of regular Coke. Three cans placed in a triangle on the table,” he said, and felt ridiculous, as if he were playing a game of spies.

“Then what do you prefer?”

“The regular Coke,” Rose said.

“I mean the appointment, for today or later.”

“Sure, sorry, I misunderstood. Tell her today. And to bring samples.”

“Samples?”

“Samples of the grates, tell her to bring them. Tell her it’s important, very important,” Rose said and was going to add that it was a matter of life or death, but he refrained so that those who might be listening in on the call would not mistake him for a terrorist. Life or death, fatherland or death, victory or death, death to the infidels: it was best to avoid any kind of language that sounded like extremist talk.

By noon, Rose was busy putting the chains on the tires of his car, and then began shoveling the driveway. He was soon out of breath with the exertion and stopped halfway through, stiff and sweaty, feeling like a Santa Claus under many layers of clothing. From a distance, the three dogs watched, resigned and still, sitting in a row from biggest to the smallest, as they always did right before he was about to leave for anywhere. When Rose finished shoveling, he said good-bye to them very affectionately, as always, maybe not as always, this time more so than ever, giving each a Scheiner’s sausage and a tight hug, with a finality to each gesture, as if he were going on a journey with no return. Empera had filled him in on the details that he had not received by phone: the meeting would be at the Roosevelt Field mall in Garden City, accessible by the Meadowbrook Parkway. Empera was helping after all, perhaps grateful for the salary increase. She also agreed to stay in the house until Rose returned, to look after the place and watch the dogs.

When he turned on the engine of his Ford Fiesta, Rose admitted to himself that he would have preferred a thousand times over to go to the food court with Ming at his side and now regretted not having accepted his offer. The idea of María Paz pursued by the law, bounty hunters, and her criminal brother-in-law was not an appealing one and certainly made Rose skeptical of getting into trouble with so many people. After all, he was no epic hero, or to put it how Cleve phrased it, the epic wind did not blow at Rose’s back. But there was nothing to do. He could not pass this up, because it was unlikely there would be another chance. There was a frustrating bottleneck on the parkway and Rose was so nervous that he took the wrong exit twice, but he still managed to get to Roosevelt Field with plenty of time to spare.

The food court was crammed with people, with ornaments and twinkling lights, with music and smells: humanity preparing for Christmas. Rose, who had been locked up for months in the shadows of his grief, was taken by surprise with this crowded bazaar that surrounded him with all its agitation and clamor. Strange, he thought, how now we celebrate the birth of Jesus in a manger, but come spring we commemorate his death on a cross. Poor puzzled mankind, inventing so much silliness to hide the fact that it understands nothing. But what does my Cleve have to do with all this? Who the hell tries to make these things clearer by confusing Cleve with that king born to die crowned with thorns?

All around Rose there were dozens of young women moving about with coffee-colored eyes and hair, and judging by the photo of record, any of them could be her. With fifteen minutes still to the appointed time, Rose bought three regular Cola-Colas. It was hard to get a table but one finally opened, and the next step was to sit down and arrange the three cans in a triangle. How stupid to use such a sign, he realized as he was doing it. It is impossible to arrange three cans in anything other but a triangle. It may have been relevant to specify what type of triangle, an equilateral, isosceles, or scalene one, depending on the length of its sides, or a right, obtuse, or acute one, according to the degrees of angles. He put down the three cans in whatever manner, as if it mattered, those three cans of Coke were invisible in the sea of the products that crowded the place. How stupid, really, when it would have been much more practical and sensible to specify other details, to have said, for example, that he would be wearing a gray coat and a black scarf. In the end, it wasn’t entirely his fault; no one had yet had the sense to publish Conspiracy Tactics for Dummies. It was already a quarter past three and no sign of the girl with the grates. If she had come, it would have been very difficult to find him in the middle of that zoo. Rose began to sense that he had somehow failed and did not know what to do but wait and tap the table with one of the cans. What if this was nothing more than a trap, and he was going to end up thrown in a Manninpox for men? The noise of the place disoriented him, and the loud ambient music thundered in his ears: Pavarotti howling “Silent Night” and “White Christmas” from the loudspeakers. It did make Rose smile, remembering that Cleve used to call Pavarotti Ravioloti. “I really like Ravioloti’s records,” he used to say, as if it the great singer were an overstuffed pasta dish.

While he waited, Rose thought about something he had heard many times before, that Plácido Domingo was the greater tenor of the two, that in Milan, Pavarotti always failed to hit the high notes during the second act of Don Carlo. “Maybe you blew it at La Scala,” Rose told Pavarotti, “but here in this food court, the victory is all yours, rest in peace, you marvelous fatso, here you out-howl all of us together.” It was already half past three and not a sign of María Paz.

Rose stood to become more visible, and surreptitiously scrutinized the women milling about, loaded with children and packages. Could María Paz be that that melancholy skinny one, waiting for something, or someone, sitting alone at her table in front of a disposable cup? She was brown, more or less pretty, had the long dark hair, but just then her beau arrived, kissed her, and sat beside her. So no, not that one. Did María Paz dye her hair blonde to evade her pursuers? Was she that blonde who was so engrossed with her cell phone, punching the little keys with a demonic agility? Wrong again. Without pausing from her texting, the blonde stood up and left. Wait, someone approached. It was an old woman in winter getup, with a pink coat, white boots, and too much makeup that adhered to her face like a mask. The old woman just wanted to know if the coupons that she was holding in her hand were good for the sale at Macy’s. Rose apologized and said he didn’t know, not even bothering to ask about the garden grates. Clearly, this was not the girl.

At half-past four, he gave up. He had been waiting for ninety minutes; at that point, he deduced that the meeting had been thwarted. Or Empera somehow had gotten the information incorrect, and he had gone to the wrong place. Or something had happened to María Paz and she could not make it. Maktub, as she herself said. What could he do? Rose began to go, more relieved than upset, almost running away from the food court and resolving for the time being to relax and disconnect from the situation. He had had enough clandestine activity for the day. Ciao, María Paz, see you later, for now you’re on your own. Sorry, I did what I could; I can’t do any more for you. The situation brought with it a ferocious appetite. Rose realized it was already dark outside and he had not had lunch yet, so he asked for the whereabouts of a real restaurant. No food court, no junk food; since Cleve’s death months before he had been eating terribly and sparingly, but suddenly he felt like eating a hearty meal, and doing it slowly. Someone directed him to a place called Legal Sea Foods, and he went and had clam chowder and an order of shrimp wontons. Now he could return home; the dogs would be waiting. He paid his check and went back to the central area, where Ravioloti was still hitting all those high notes that his detractors claimed he could not hit. A few minutes later, Rose noticed a heavily pregnant woman moving rapidly toward him. She wore a ridiculous multicolored hat and scarf, a crazy matchy-match. Rose made to get out of the way, fearing that if the girl crashed into him, she would give birth on the spot. But she walked right up to him, arms akimbo.

“Are you the father of Mr. Rose?”

“And you… you’re here about the grates?”

“I suppose so.” She took half a step back to look at him. “You’re the other Mr. Rose. The father of Mr. Rose.”

“How did you know?”

“Oh, good God, I’ve known you for a while,” María Paz said.

“As have I known you, more than you think,” Rose said, and then realized how truthfully he had spoken, that from reading her manuscript, reading it so many times in the solitude of night, he was more intimately connected to her than he had allowed himself to believe. Now she was there, in the flesh, and he not only felt he knew her, but more than that, he felt a certain closeness to her. There was also something nice about her that made him let his guard down, her guileless smile, perhaps, or her cheerful look. Or maybe it was compassion he felt for her, with that huge protruding belly pushing out from under her coat, a kind of compassion tinged with discomfort at the extravagant knit cap and scarf, and the self-confidence with which the girl carried herself, flashy and out of place as she seemed. But the jumble of feelings suddenly gave way to a more powerful emotion, and Rose’s heart soared at the insane delusion that had taken over his mind. Could it be Cleve’s child? Was this woman bearing the child of his child?

“Is it my grandchild?” he asked, his voice overcome with emotion.

“But how, Mr. Rose; it would have been very nice, but the dates don’t quite match up.” María Paz laughed.

“Then that clamp inside you must be huge,” Rose said, trying to conceal the interplanetary sentimental journey from which he just landed with a joke and hastening to dry his tears with the sleeves of his coat.

“You mean the pregnancy?” asked María Paz, for whom the word “clamp” had little meaning. “This pregnancy is as real as a three-dollar bill.”

“A disguise,” Rose sighed. “But you went too far, dear, it looks as if you are about burst at any moment, and the ambulance will come for you.”

She asked him to wait and excused herself to use the ladies’ room, went into a stall, got rid of some of the filling, and returned a couple of months less pregnant. Rose asked if she had been followed and she replied that she hadn’t, and had taken precautions.

“We have to get out of here, right now,” he said. “I have the car in the parking lot, we need to talk, a matter of a clamp.”

“A clamp?”

“It’s complicated.”

“What if I’d rather go to the movies?”

“The movies? Are you nuts?”

“It’s been a long time since I went to the movies, I’d really like to. There are a bunch of theaters here.”

“You don’t understand; you have the entire police force after you and a clamp inside you. You have to have the clamp removed, it is very important. Your friend Mandra X told us about it, she saw the X-ray—”

“There’s too much noise here, I can’t really understand what you’re saying. Come on, Mr. Rose, let’s go to the movies, nothing will happen.”

Rose suddenly thought he saw enemies walking around everywhere, his paranoia in full force, but she insisted on going to the movies with such naive teenage-like enthusiasm that he began to give way, not sure why, perhaps because he had no other choice. At least during the movie, they would be more hidden, anything better than to remain there, exposed, in this very busy place.

“But what movie do you…?” It was the dumbest question.

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever is showing. Come on.”

So off they went, crossing from one end of the huge mall to the other looking for a movie theater, and she took him by the arm. She did it as naturally as a daughter would with her father, and that gesture just smoothed away any feelings of distance or distrust that may have lingered in him. He was very nervous, but he was there, holding on, somehow feeling supported, accompanied for the first time in months. He even managed to smile despite the tremendous tension, calibrating how suspicious they may have looked, checking out their reflection in the windows, the image that they must have presented to others. And what was it that he saw? He tells me he saw himself with a young woman, more or less his son’s age, a girl who could be his daughter, well, if Edith had been another ethnicity. There would have to have been some uncommon ethnic pairing to get a father so fair-skinned and a daughter so dark-skinned. That part was strange. In any case, she could have been adopted, the father an engineer working in Colombia who had adopted a baby orphan and brought her back. Rose supposed he looked like a father with his daughter in the mall taking advantage of the last days of her pregnancy to do some holiday shopping.

“Anyone who saw us must have thought we were out buying clothes for the baby,” Rose tells me. “I remember thinking if it was a boy, it would be called Jesús, because it would be born on the twenty-fifth, like the child in the manger, and you know how Latinos do things like that, christen the son with the name of God; it’s like the Greeks would name a child Zeus, or Muslims with Mohammed.”

“We should get at least one bag,” Rose suggested. “Everyone is carrying bags except us.”

“Good idea,” she said. “If you want, you can buy me a Christmas gift.”

“What about some chocolates? Look at those chocolates?”

“Alright, stuffed cherry bonbons. To eat at the movies.”

It was all so stunningly normal, in fact, amid the rampant abnormality, amid the unhinged situation, all so amazingly standard, Rose really her father, she really his daughter, and the baby about to be born fully his grandson, a scene to inspire tenderness even. That could someday have been my life if they hadn’t taken Cleve from me, thought Rose.

Because the rest of the movies were sold out, they went to see a horror movie, The Rite, with Anthony Hopkins and several demons, and there, in the dark and nearly empty theater, Rose tried to convince María Paz that she needed to have the operation to remove the clamp. She was more interested in the movie, screaming whenever Asmodeus or Beelzebub possessed Hopkins, who was playing Father Lucas. There was no way to get through to her. To María Paz the whole mess with the clamp sounded like a story. She just would not believe it, it was not the right time for it, and she would not hear of an operation that was going to put her on a spit like a dead cow right in the middle of her great escape. She had designed the plan and put it in motion, and she was ready to fulfill its purpose at any cost. She whispered to Rose that she’d just about had it with the hiding, and that all she wanted to do was to pick up her sister, Violeta, fly out of the United States together to Seville, and get there in time to see the orange blossoms bloom. For María Paz, it was a given that she would not see Mr. Rose again once they left the mall, because at any time after that night, she and her sister would take off on their own and go for broke.

“The die has been cast, Mr. Rose,” she said.

“I know. Maktub.”

“That’s right, completely maktub.”

“But where are you going?” Rose asked. He could not imagine what kind of country would receive a creature like her, without money and without papers, on the contrary, being pursued by as many problems as enemies, and to top it with a troubled sister. Not to mention the clamp.

“I’m going to get the hell out of here, Mr. Rose. So much for my American dream,” she said, and told him that she had made contact with a coyote who was going to help her cross the northern border, to get them out on the other side.

“Which other side, María Paz?”

“Across the world. To the Promised Land, milk and honey on the other side. I’m talking about that kind of other side.”

“One assumes that’s America…”

“Not anymore, I think.”

“And who is this Charon?”

“Who?”

“This thug who is guaranteeing your passage?”

“A coyote I hired, Mr. Rose, a professional who’s super into the whole racket. I could tell he was cyber-coyote because all his contacts were on a Blackberry.”

“This is crazy, María Paz.”

“As crazy and full of dreams as when my beautiful mommy came from Colombia to here.”

“You can’t go just like that. First you need surgery to get that clamp out, and when you recover, you have to help me find Sleepy Joe.”

“Sleepy Joe! Why Sleepy Joe? Sleepy Joe is an asshole, Mr. Rose, vile, heinous; that type is best forgotten. And I have no idea where he might be, I’m running away from him also.”

“We’ll talk about that later. First, you have to get that operation.”

“Forget it, Mr. Rose, no operation,” María Paz said bluntly.

The cyber-coyote had not given a fixed date, but she had been told they could take off for Canada at any time and she must be available at the drop of a hat, the five senses alert, with everything needed ready: backpack, snow boots, thermal underwear, thick socks, snowboard, lined gloves, and North Face ski jackets, as well as the $3,500 dollars per head she would have to give him personally for his services.

“Do you have the money?” Rose asked.

“I have everything. My friends have been generous. I borrowed money for the fee, clothing, and gear. I’ll see how I pay them after I get out of trouble. I just need to go to the school to get my sister, take her, and take off, dressed as for the Winter Olympics.” María Paz laughed. “I have set up two of everything, for her and for me. So I have to say good-bye to you soon, Mr. Rose, I can’t stay longer. I would love to stay. But this is all very complicated, very exhausting, you know, life-and-death circumstances. The good news is that Violeta will like Seville; it was she, after all, my sister, Violeta, who said Seville in spring smells like orange blossoms. And don’t tell me that I shouldn’t get my hopes up, sir, I know I shouldn’t, I know it won’t be easy, I’m very clear about that. Between here and that spring there’s a whole fucking winter in the way. ‘Winter is coming,’ so says the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones. Have you seen it? Isn’t it the best? ‘Winter is coming.’ I guess that’s my motto too. Things are going to be fucked. I know that. Very cold, very scary, I know, with a whole bunch of motherfuckers breathing down our necks. Anyway, I wanted to come to say thank you, Mr. Rose, and tell you that the death of your son caused me a lot of pain. Your son was the sweetest, most beautiful person I have ever met. I came just to tell you that.”

“How did you find out about his death?”

“I was in your home when the accident happened, Mr. Rose, and I figured it out because of the dogs. They began acting very strange, running up and down those stairs like crazy, and I thought, what’s going on with these animals, why are they suddenly so unhinged? Then I took off the headphones, because it was nine or ten at night, and I was watching TV with the headphones and couldn’t really hear what was going on. I was up there, hiding in your son’s attic, hiding from you too, Mr. Rose, a detail for which I owe you a belated apology, because we did it behind your back and should have consulted you. I’m sorry. Your son had left for Chicago around four in the afternoon, but now it was well into the night, and I was just lying around watching TV with the headphones on. Your son had set it up for me so that you wouldn’t hear the TV when you were home and then have to come upstairs to turn it off. In any case, I took off the headphones, and I heard your screams. You, Mr. Rose, yours. Out of nowhere, you had started wailing, and I knew immediately that something horrible had happened. It was the most pitiful sound that I’ve ever heard. I peeked down the stairs to see what was happening, because you know, if you were hurting him, I was going to have to go down to help him, even if it was just scaring you to death with my appearance. I went down the stairs slowly, slowly, my heart pounding, and I could hear that you were on the phone with your ex-wife. Then I knew what had happened to your son, and I felt the world had been pulled out from under me. I sat on the steps and wanted to die. I thought, if I stop breathing, I’ll just die right here, and this hellish journey will be over. I was ready for anything, anything but that, that they would take him from me, Mr. Rose, my salvation, my only true friend. I swear that night I wanted to die, right there in the attic, to be found mummified one day. I almost came down to give you a hug, Mr. Rose, to ask you how such a fucking tragedy is possible, to cry with you. Of course, in the end, I didn’t dare. You had no idea who I was or what I was doing in your damn house. The following day, Empera came upstairs and told me what had happened. She said you were going insane because your son had been killed in a motorcycle accident not far from Chicago. She asked me what I planned to do, and I told her I was getting out of there. She made me some chamomile tea to calm me down and instructed me to wait until half past three, because she finished work at that time. When she was off, Empera pulled her car into the garage, hid me well in the backseat under a pile of blankets, and that’s how we slipped out without a hitch through that ring of patrol cars and police vans.

“I’ll never forget the horror within that car, Mr. Rose. After the death of my mother, that was the saddest and most desperate moment of my life, Empera crying while driving and me crying while huddled under those blankets, waiting for the car to stop where I would get out on who knows what corner of what town or what stretch of road, again no better than a stray dog, cast off by fate and unprotected. In the days that followed, I did nothing but mourn, terribly missing both your son and the dogs, especially the baby, Skunko, what a loving little dog. You should have seen how we hit it off because he reminded me a lot of Hero. Sometimes I even forgot that he wasn’t Hero and was surprised to see him run off without his cart. I called Skunko Hero and he kind of got used to that name, because he came running when I called him.

“I even missed you, Mr. Rose; although you may not believe it, I had grown fond of you even though you had never even met me. I watched you out the window when you went down to the garden to play with the dogs, or take them out for a walk, and it inspired me tenderly. I saw this and I thought, a man who cares for his dogs so much has to be a good man. How I wished I had a father like that. Now once again, Mr. Rose, the time of parting again, so goes life, one good-bye then another. What can we do?”

“For now, there will be no good-byes, María Paz. You can’t go,” Rose told her, the ring of command in his voice. “Don’t go before you take out the clamp. Then you have to help me find Cleve’s murderer. Tell me who killed Cleve.”

“Nobody killed him, sir.” Surprised at the undesirable twist that the conversation had begun to take, María Paz took a few steps backward, away from Rose. “Cleve was killed in an accident, sir. His bike killed him… Good-bye, Mr. Rose. Maybe someday we’ll see each other again.”

“You need some money?” Rose asked as a last attempt to keep her from leaving. “I can give you money, if you need…”

“No, Mr. Rose, thank you very much, I don’t need anything,” she started to say, moving farther away, but still facing him and holding his gaze.

Just at that moment, the air seemed to crackle in the mall and people moved to one side, sensing an approaching commotion ahead.

At first, it was just a rough perception without details: it filled the place with the acrid smell of stampede and violence in the making, still undefined. Seconds later, María Paz saw several policemen rushing toward her in a flash, pushing their way through. Were they coming for her? It unleashed a mad drumming in her chest. Yes, they were coming after her and this time she was trapped. How many times in recent months had she experienced the same feeling of having reached the end of the road? After so much forced immobility while locked up in Manninpox, she had not stopped running ever since she was released. Now the police were on top of her. Fear paralyzed her, and for a moment, the image of Violeta crossed her mind. She would not get to see her sister, Violeta. Things had to go to shit with only a few days to go. But were they really coming for her? María Paz was not going to wait around to find out. She overcame the momentary panic and set her mind to not surrender. Her survival mechanisms kicked into gear and within seconds her body became a type of getaway vehicle, strengthening its cardiac capacity, increasing blood pressure, intensifying metabolism, accelerating her mental activity, and increasing the blood glucose, which flows into the large muscles, particularly the legs, fueled and ready to run. María Paz was about to do it when something stopped her, a hand that grabbed her forcefully by the arm, like a vice that immobilized her.

“Do not run. That’s the last thing you should do,” she heard Rose telling her, his body pressed against hers. In that fashion, holding her, protecting her, Rose led her to a spot in the front row among the crowd that gathered to witness the police action as if it were live television, a little Sunday show for a mob thirsty for some excitement, everyone looking around trying to figure out who the cops were after — a shoplifter? a child molester? a credit card thief? — who would soon be smacked with a club across the head, or shot in the leg to be brought down, then handcuffed and humiliated before the eyes of all, with cell phones and security cameras catching every second of the shame. In the first row, as if part of an audience, Rose and María Paz stood with the rest of the spectators ready to enjoy the show. It hadn’t been since Greg, or Cleve, that she had felt protected in the arms of a white man, arms that lifted her from the risk zone and put her on the safe side of society.

“Take off that hat,” Rose whispered, without loosening his grip on her, “it’s too showy.”

As soon as she obeyed, he regretted having asked: from under the cap sprung her untamed mane of hair, even more eye-catching than the motley cap.

“You’ll have to cut it,” Rose whispered in her ear. “Or dye it.”

“Never,” she said. “Over my dead body.”

The policemen ran past and soon were out of sight. With the show disrupted, the crowd dispersed. After realizing that the cops had not been after her, María Paz suffered from a crash of adrenaline that left her limp and docile as a rag doll, and Rose took advantage of this to guide her toward the parking lot.

“From now on you’ll be better off with me,” he told her once they were in his Ford Fiesta.

“I was scared shitless when I saw the cops running toward us,” Rose admits to me. “But I found the courage somewhere to take María Paz into my arms to protect her, knowing that in the eyes of the law this gesture could send me to die. Not that she was very grateful later, hardly said anything about it, but things changed after that. From that moment on, she accepted me as an ally. I just had to show her what I was willing to do for her.”

As they fled Garden City, María Paz said she was starving and they stopped in a nondescript, out-of-the-way restaurant in Deer Park, one of those “all you can eat” places, where Rose only had a coffee, because he had eaten lunch shortly before, and she had a plate of fried eggs with bacon, a green salad, and potatoes with melted cheese, plus a slice of obscenely rich chocolate cake, with two Diet Cokes.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you were famished,” Rose told her as they cleared the table.

“You have to take advantage when it’s offered; you never know when the next big meal will come.”

“Are you full?”

“About to burst.”

“So let’s talk seriously. You have to understand. They left a clamp inside you, that’s the cause of the bleeding.”

“Don’t worry about the bleeding; it’s gone down a lot. Maybe because there is no more blood inside. I’ll put the clamp thing on hold until Seville.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Rose pulled out a pen and drew on the paper tablecloth — a drawing similar to the one Dummy had sketched on the table in the conference hall, back in Manninpox. “There you go. This is your uterus, and this is the clamp. Look at it. It’s metallic, and it can be very dangerous.”

“But it’s soooo tiny,” María Paz said. “A little shit clamp. The truth is, Mr. Rose, of all the problems that I have, those little tweezers seem like the least of them.”

“But it’s not, and we’ll remove it. Don’t worry about anything, I’ve got it all planned out. You’ll need a week to recover. Your cyber-coyote can wait; call his Blackberry from the pay phone here and tell him things need to be postponed. Did you pay him all the money?”

“Only half.”

“Then no problem. Money makes the dog dance.”

María Paz went to the pay phone by the bathrooms, and from the table, Rose watched her call and then talk and gesticulate wildly.

“He says he gives me eight days,” María Paz told Rose when she came back to the table. “Eight days, Mr. Rose, and after that, come what may, I’m out.”

Good. Rose had it all planned. He had his ex-wife’s ID in the car and her health insurance documents that he kept updated, never a month late with payments, not really sure why. An unhealthy fixation, if you will, paying health insurance premiums year after year for a woman who abandoned him, perhaps because he still believed that when he least expected it, she would return and would need health insurance. Maybe that was the reason, or even simpler, the act of not paying the fees anymore would have been like a permanent separation, as if he were burying Edith. Whatever the explanation was, the futile effort now could prove useful; it would help with María Paz’s operation. Edith was young when the ID picture was taken; both women had dark hair and eyes, Edith a more pronounced nose, María a rounder, brown face, but smudge the date of birth with a coffee stain and force things a bit, and they could be the same person. Not that Rose didn’t want to pay for the operation; he would have done so willingly; it was more for reasons of security. Shielded by Edith’s identity, who would imagine María Paz in the operating room of a good private hospital?

Rose told her of his master plan, and she fiercely refused to participate. She said it was a crazy and absurd idea, a risk they shouldn’t take under any circumstances. Someone would catch them and turn them in. She didn’t look like the woman in the picture, at all; there was no chance.

“You’ll see, Mr. Rose. I know a better way. Have you ever wondered how the thousands of illegals in this country go to the doctor?” she asked Rose, and he admitted that he hadn’t. “Do you think we don’t get sick?”

“I guess you do.”

The following day, after spending the night in the studio on St. Mark’s, María Paz and Rose went to a building in Queens. Nothing too unseemly about the place, a couple of dour-faced porters not wearing uniforms, people coming in and out, the smell of air-conditioning with a tinge of bleach and vinegar. Rose looked around and noticed that everyone looked like immigrants; perhaps the only discordant note was an occasional white person in the mix of dark people coming in and out. In the badly lit lobby, there was an ATM, vending machines, bathrooms for men and women — nothing that would draw attention.

“Comadre!” María Paz told the receptionist. The two embraced effusively, bemoaning how long it had been since they last saw each other. And how is your sister? And your husband, still unemployed? And remember Rosa, from Veracruz, what a tragedy, and this and that and that and this, until the receptionist passed María Paz off to another comadre, who also hugged her excitedly and made her fill out a questionnaire. What happened to you? And María Paz explained about the clamp, carefully avoiding any mention of Manninpox. Can you imagine it was just a simple curettage and such and such? Who’s the gringo with you? Two other nurses, or assistants, or just gossips flitting about wanted to know. He’s like a father to me, María Paz informed them. Ah, well, okay, he can be trusted then. Yes, no worries, very nice people, helped me with everything, no drama there. Ah, well, good, then the coast is clear.

María Paz was eventually whisked off by the gang of comadres, and Rose was directed to a waiting room with a dingy gray carpet and an old TV with a fuzzy image. “Everything has been arranged, sir,” they assured him, “don’t worry about a thing, they’re going to treat her like a queen, she’s like family, like a sister. Relax, relax, María Paz. Everything is good, mija. Good ol’ Dr. Huidobro will do that procedure in the blink of an eye. Who is Dr. Huidobro? Oh, you don’t know him? An Uruguayan — new, marvelous. You’ll see what a doll he is.”

“Let’s get out of here before it’s too late,” Rose managed to tell María Paz when he checked on her, or rather he begged her. The whole thing made him horribly uneasy. What kind of place was this anyway, a clandestine clinic in the middle of New York? They should just go; she was adding one more illegal act to the many hanging over her head. But she had already changed into the green robe tied in the back that left her butt exposed, and they were taking her to radiology.

Rose went back to the waiting room, uncomfortable and frightened, staring at the carpet stains, not knowing where they stood and feeling as if his apprehensions were multiplying like rabbits.

Never in his life had he been in such a suspicious place. Holy God, he thought, this really is the third world in all its glory. He was mulling over all this when he saw María Paz in the hallway, accompanied by a tall, sharp-looking guy, a telenovela hunk, in coat and tie and wearing a white surgeon’s cap. He spoke Spanish to Rose, introducing himself as Dr. Huidobro when Rose joined them. Judging by the accent, he was from the Southern Cone.

“Are you from Argentina?” Rose asked, and María Paz opened her eyes wide to indicate that he was committing a faux pas, that those kinds of questions were not asked in this place.

“More or less,” the man said. He held on to one of María Paz’s hands with his left hand, and with the right held up an X-ray.

Not letting go of María Paz’s hand, this Huidobro pointed to the clamp on the X-ray, on the right side just as Dummy had indicated. He informed them that the operation would be performed the following morning at 7:30 a.m. It had to be done as soon as possible, but it was a simple procedure. It would be done under local anesthesia and María Paz would be released the same day.

“Will you perform the operation?” Rose asked in a somewhat aggressive tone, because what he really wanted to say was Let go of her hand, motherfucker, who the hell do you think you are?

“I’ll perform the operation, of course, not to worry, me personally,” Huidobro assured them, and immediately afterward presented him with a bill of $2,500, which Rose ran to the nearest bank to withdraw. Without providing a receipt, Huidobro grabbed the wad and in the blink of an eye, it disappeared into the pocket of his pants.

A pig, thought Rose, nothing but a pig, I hope he washes those dirty money-grubbing hands before operating, and that he is as handy with the scalpel as with the cash. Rose didn’t trust him at all, with the look of a tango singer or a soccer player more than a surgeon. But there was nothing Rose could do. María Paz had already decided to put herself unconditionally in his hands and behave with the docility of cows to the slaughter.

“You’ll be fine, we’ll take good care of you,” Huidobro told her, holding her hand again, and explained that they would take her blood pressure, draw some blood, and put in her IV.

“Don’t be worried, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told Mr. Rose when they were alone again. “Dr. Huidobro is very good.”

“Very good? That soccer player with a baker’s cap? Listen, María Paz, this is a dive. There isn’t the least of sterile procedures that I see; no appropriate medical equipment. You are making a serious mistake. Staphylococcus aureus must be rampant around here. You’ll get an infection that will kill you. This so-called doctor, this Huidobro, is an impostor, an abuser of women. I’m asking for the last time that we go to a decent hospital, a place where they will care for you as a human being, attended by professionals.”

“Dr. Huidobro has all the qualifications and specializations he needs. Don’t worry, Mr. Rose. What happens is that because he’s South American, they don’t give him a license to practice in this country. Don’t be insulting, Mr. Rose, I’m telling you, a lot of gringos come here too, full American citizens, to have surgery, more than you suspect, just as white as you, only without insurance or money to pay for a regular doctor.”

Rose didn’t dare go back to the East Village for the night. He had to remain nearby, just in case. So he stayed in a hotel not far from the hospital. He didn’t sleep a wink, hour after hour tossing and turning, disturbed by all kinds of dark musings. What if the police were tipped off and they rounded everybody up, including him? What if María Paz died on the operating table, which was actually nothing more than a kitchen table, probably? What would they do in such a case with the body? What guarantees could they offer in that hole, what insurance or permits? Rose couldn’t understand how he had come to accept all this, how he had allowed them to stoop so low, and the worst was going to come if something happened to her. He and the tango singer would be jointly responsible for her death, and he already saw himself sharing the death row with the Uruguayan impostor and Sleepy Joe.

Early the next morning, he dressed without showering and showed up at the place determined to get her out of there, his alleged daughter, or wife, or daughter-in-law, whatever she was, though he didn’t really have any way to prove his relationship to her or to assert any authority over her.

“You can go in and see her. The operation went well. She’s stable and already in recovery,” one of the comadres from the previous day told him. Rose followed her down a narrow corridor, still full of misgivings, bringing María Paz a macchiato and cookies from Starbucks.

After going through the back door, the offices, desks, and gray carpet vanished. The dividing walls also vanished, and suddenly Rose found himself in a wide-open space — clean, white, and well lit, with a row of hospital beds behind screens. An entire secret hospital in the heart of New York. Good God, thought Rose. Who would believe the country had grown into a gigantic strudel cake with layers hidden upon layers beneath the surface? All you had to do was dig a little bit to discover the most unexpected realities. How had it come to this? American society, solid and unquestionable until yesterday, was now an empty bread crust eaten by weevils. Rose approached María Paz, who was resting in one of the beds, still wearing the disposable green robe and a bit pale, but smiling.

“Look at it, Mr. Rose! Here it is!” she said, making a noise with the jar that held the little clamp they had just extracted and displaying it proudly, like a child showing off some strange bug.

Rose tells me that he took María Paz to the mountains to recover from the operation, and that when they got there, Empera greeted her with a hug, and the dogs leaped all around her as if she were an old friend; of course they did, since they knew her so well from before. “That’s life,” Rose tells me. “All that time I was looking for her, and she had already found me. I was searching for her all over the place, unaware that she had been in my own home. As soon as we entered, she wanted to look around the ground floor and wanted me to start a fire. She said that during the week she had been hiding in the attic she could tell when I lit a fire by the smell of pine burning. Then I walked with her, taking little baby convalescent steps, to the place where Cleve had buried the ashes of her dog Hero, and I confessed that they had been dug up but quickly agreed that we should bury them again in the same place, and we did. So that she did not have to walk up and down the stairs, I suggested that she stay in my room, and I’d move to Cleve’s room, but she said no. She preferred to stay upstairs, because there were so many treasured memories.”

Together, they spent some time without mishaps, Rose taking care of her and María Paz allowing him to do so, alone in the house with the dogs, because Empera had gone on her annual pilgrimage to Santo Domingo to spend the holidays with family, trusting she could return to the United States in late January, probably violating for the umpteenth time in her life the rigid border controls against undocumented immigrants. On top of that, there was a heavy snowfall in the region that almost completely isolated them; no one could come into or leave that area of the Catskills without running the risk of encountering some dangerous road conditions. In that sense, María Paz felt safe and could relax; it helped her to calm down and recover. For Christmas she wanted to make a Colombian ajiaco and was pleased to find out that Rose had already tried the dish during his family’s stay in her country, and he had liked it enough to dare to brave the elements and go get the ingredients, insofar as it was possible, because the local corn was too sweet, and forget about finding the three kinds of Andean potatoes, which had to be replaced by Chieftain, Dakota Rose, and pale Idaho potatoes. There was also no way to get the herb called guascas, so they used marijuana leaves instead as she had when she made the ajiaco for Greg, which they plucked from the emaciated and yellow plants Cleve had grown in the garage and that since his death nobody had cared for.

“For some reason, making that soup was very important to her,” Rose tells me. “It wasn’t like the original in Bogota, only remotely similar, but it didn’t matter to María Paz. She was really happy when we set up the Christmas Eve table.”

They were very easygoing days for the most part, Rose tells me, even enjoyable, because the girl was really smart and charming, and they had a common topic that brought them together, Cleve. The admiration and affection with which María Paz spoke about Cleve brought Rose to tears. But there was another topic that set them against each other, with each standing at opposite ends and neither of them ever completely lowering his or her guard, generating between them a kind of double-sided game, never fully resolved, and leading them to constantly oscillate between familiarity and mistrust. That other topic was Sleepy Joe. Any hint about his criminal nature turned the tide against Rose. María Paz was closed to such discussions, defending her brother-in-law with an irrational stubbornness that he couldn’t understand. He tried to make her see that Sleepy Joe was responsible for Cleve’s death, but he had no hard evidence, and she refused to accept even the possibility. At the most, she called him the bastard brother-in-law, or a bully and thug, euphemisms that hurt and wounded Rose, because they suggested a solidarity that was intact between María Paz and Sleepy Joe, and this was too much like a betrayal.

Rose realized she contacted other people with a lot of whispering and mystery, in the rare and brief calls she made from one of those prepaid cell phones. Rose was watching, it could be said spying, and through those calls he learned that although she had postponed her trip in no way was it canceled, and she remained in contact with the cyber-coyote who would help her escape the country through the Canadian border. Rose didn’t ask her too much; he let her be, but occasionally she let some of the specifics seep out, and they sounded to him like details of a delusional and crazy plan, crossing the forests of Indian territory in the middle of winter, traveling by boat on the lakes, with the native people of the area guiding them and providing them with food and accommodation. Regardless, Rose remained vigilant, hoping that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. He was sure the guy was following them systematically. He could sense his closeness and imagine his stalking.

“During all this, Pro Bono came back from Paris,” Rose informs me, “and he started calling me to see if I had news about María Paz. I dismissed his inquiries, making believe I was disgusted by his desertion. I told him I didn’t know anything about María Paz and didn’t want to know anything about her. You see, I had my own plans in mind. I was following my own game plan, an uncertain one, of course, but I was very stubborn about sticking to it, and I did not need Pro Bono getting in the way. Better to mislead him and keep him away. In one of those calls, Pro Bono told me that several days before, a former New York police officer had been killed in Queens, on 188th Street and Union Turnpike. Interestingly, according to Pro Bono, the deceased had belonged to the same unit as María Paz’s husband and was being investigated for alleged involvement in a string of arms trafficking within the institution. There must have been something there connected to Greg’s murder. That was more than evident, but Pro Bono did not know exactly what. I asked him about the crime, particular details about it, that is, if it looked like a ritual thing. He said he didn’t think so. The report spoke of two shots to the head fired from a motorcycle, nothing that sounded very peculiar.

“I didn’t say anything to María Paz about the reappearance of Pro Bono and his calls, especially that last one, not a thing. I don’t know if you get what I mean, but every day I grew more and more fond of the girl, and I was sure she was growing more fond of me. Still I couldn’t trust her completely. She did not quite feel like an accomplice.”

The appointed day of departure arrived quickly, and María Paz seemed as if she was fully recovered by then, or that’s what the pirate surgeon Huidobro told them when they went for a checkup. But before leaving the United States, she had to go to Vermont to pick up her sister, and asked Rose for one favor, the last one, she assured him: to take her to Vermont. After that, the two sisters would continue on their own, under the aegis of the cyber-coyote, and Rose could return home. Those were her plans. They didn’t quite match Rose’s plans. If he stayed with her, he thought there was always the possibility that they would find Sleepy Joe. He wanted to find the bastard at any cost. He needed to settle accounts with him. Yet, something told him that this was not the time to undertake such a mission, just now, when he had started to feel calm and make peace with his memories. The pain of the death of his child, that hurtful little blade of burnished metal that had been stabbing at his flesh and cutting his bones, was losing its sharpness.

Instead, a new presence had been surging, less intense but in some ways more real: the memory of Cleve when Cleve was alive. Every day, Rose cried a little less and remembered Cleve a little more, as if he were finally recovering his son: Cleve at eight wearing one of Edith’s sweaters, enormous on him; Cleve at fifteen riding a camel during a walk along the Nile Valley; Cleve going to his first school dance with Ana Clara, the Portuguese girl next door; Cleve reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a hammock on a hot day; Cleve very small, playing in a corner of the room with his dolls Skeletor and He-Man; Cleve in early adolescence, his face dotted with Clearasil acne cream; Cleve at three, emerging miraculously unscathed after a cabinet toppled on him; Cleve going down the slopes in Aspen on a snowboard; Cleve fleeing his mother’s house after a fight with Ned. And especially Cleve asleep in his bed with his dog, and what Edith had said when she saw them: “This boy will never be as happy as he is right now.” These and other memories from the life of his son returned in droves and with a decisive element in common: in all of them Cleve was free of his own death; Cleve’s death still had nothing to do with Cleve.

Even the incident of the jump into the empty pool had begun to be seen in more positive light by Rose, the tragedy that could have been but was not. No, definitely not a good time, this was not a good time to go with María Paz on this crazy adventure, even if she was the only path toward the retaliation that Rose believed was necessary.

“What he had done to my son made my blood boil and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the culprit. At the same time not so much, not so much, if you know what I mean. It just wasn’t me, chasing a murderer with a pistol that had belonged to the bodyguard of Pancho Villa, or whatever other pistol I had chosen. Every day that passed I saw just how contradictory the whole scenario was, and certainly I was not a professional avenger, no matter what ups and downs I had suffered. I have to admit all this to you, even though I’m afraid that’s not what you’re looking for. Perhaps you were hoping to get this spectacular story about serial murderers and superdetectives, like those that run for five seasons on television, where everyone is clear about their roles and the rest is pure action. Maybe that’s what you expect, so sorry to disappoint. This is a true story about ordinary people, full of doubts, mistakes, improvisations. There are dates that do not square and loose ends that may never be tied up, a poor father and a poor murderer: not much more than that, actually. This is not one of those heartless stories; those who have lived through it have left behind a little bit of our lives at every step.”

Rose mentioned to María Paz an insurmountable obstacle regarding the proposed trip to Vermont: the three dogs. They could not be left at home because Empera was on vacation in her country and there was no one to care for them.

“Not a problem,” María Paz said, “we’ll take them with us. A little trip with everyone.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Rose said. “In the middle of winter?”

“It’ll be wonderful, with all the snow.”

“How the hell are you supposed to fit three animals in a Ford Fiesta?”

“Good Lord, Mr. Rose, it’s like you create a problem for every solution. We won’t fit in the little car, but we’ll fit in the Toyota.”

“The Toyota? No! The Toyota belongs to Edith.”

“It used to belong to Edith. Anyway, it’s perfect for us.”

“But that car is practically an antique.”

“The dogs don’t care about that.”

There was no winning against the stubbornness of this woman. Rose ended up bringing the car to the mechanic for a new battery and tires, and to check the brake fluid and change the oil. They took off on a Saturday morning, packing a bundle of Eukanuba, a few jugs of water, and thick blankets on which Otto, Dix, and Skunko could sleep in the back. Ming’s grandfather’s Glock 17 was hidden among Rose’s clothes inside a suitcase. Violeta’s school was almost on the border with Canada, near Montpelier, Vermont, and although María Paz was anxious to arrive, Rose was more than willing to go slow. He took the chance to drive her through the forests of the Adirondacks, a northbound journey through snow country, through the high mountain terrain and lakes of a landscape that the mist turned blue, stopping from time to time to contemplate the wonder, getting out here and there to let the dogs run loose as if they were wild horses on their native land.

Impossible not to talk, not to let the tongue loosen and fall into the confessional mode, with María Paz and Rose sitting close to each other, protected from the icy expanses by the warm and fragrant condensation of humans and dogs packed inside the car, motivating María Paz to trace something on the foggy window with her index finger.

“What? What was she writing?” I ask Rose, too tempting a question to pass up.

“Well, there were three letters forming a word, or so she told me, because I asked. I remember because I noticed and became curious. Like you just did. The letters were AIX. María Paz said that it had to do with something between her and Cleve, a kind of inside thing between them. But she left it at that.”

Rose wanted to know what she expected when she crossed the Canadian border. “They are frightening, the Canadians,” he said. “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are famous for being real bastards, more animals than the horses they ride.” María Paz said she wasn’t worried, that for them Canada would be just a stopping place, the important thing was to get through the border completely undocumented, with no trace of her identity or her history in the United States. So no one would know that Violeta was crazy and that she herself was a bail jumper.

“What if you get caught?” Rose asked.

“The idea is to get caught, but in Toronto or Ottawa, only when we have crossed and are rid of the past. But not before that, no way. Look, Canada has signed treaties and conventions in which they adhere to UN policies. The coyote explained everything to me in detail, and according to these conventions, refugees are provided protection, shelter, and food.”

“And if they don’t do it?” Rose asked.

“Even better, because then we’ll be deported. Let them deport us, not a bad thing, wherever we end up is not important, it’s just a stop on the road to Seville. Because if I stay here, it’s to die.”

“What if they find out who you really are?”

“They won’t. We’ll put on the poor Latina act that we don’t speak English and just dream of sneaking into the US. It’ll be easy. They are convinced that all Latinos will give their lives for that. They can’t imagine the opposite. They go hunting for people desperate to get in, not determined to get out.”

Once parked outside the school, María Paz gave Rose some directions. He should be the one to go in and ask for Violeta. She couldn’t, afraid that the school may have heard about her troubles with the law and alert someone, or prevent her from seeing her sister; who knew what could happen. It was better not to risk it. It was a semi-open confinement, anyway; those who lived there were considered guests and not patients, and as guests, they were free to have any visitor they wanted, and even go out for a walk to the neighboring village. They managed their own spending money and could buy things at the local drugstore or 7-Eleven, or have lunch at one of the restaurants. They could leave to spend weekends and holidays with their families, provided they notified the school first. All Rose had to do was ask for Violeta at the reception desk and bring her outside.

“But she doesn’t even know me,” Rose objected. “It’s a crazy idea, like all the rest of them. She won’t come with me.”

“Show her this,” María Paz said, removing the necklace with the one-third-coin pendant and giving it to Rose. “It’s like a password. She knows what it is. She has a third of the coin also. Tell her that I’m waiting outside.”

“I won’t even know how to deal with her; you said she was a little weird…”

“Not a little, she’s weirder than a square-headed dog. But you have people skills. Just don’t talk much, and especially don’t touch her. Sometimes she bites when people touch her.”

“Same as Dix. That I can deal with. But just tell me specifically what she suffers from.”

“Some kind of autism, but I don’t really know. No one knows, not even her. If she does know, she hides things from the doctors. She’s always playing games to see how she can confuse them, so it’s not their fault if they can’t hit upon a precise diagnosis. What mental disorder does my sister suffer from? All of them and none of them.

“What do you want to know? Let’s see, Violeta likes to make her bed perfectly, smoothing it out and leaving not even a little wrinkle in the sheets, as if she were in the army, and at night, she barely moves so not to mess the sheets up. She has very sensitive skin, and hates when clothes scratch her or are too tight. She only eats white food — milk, pasta, bread, and stuff like that — and will vomit if she tries food of any other color. She speaks gently and prefers not to raise her voice, and she is also hypersensitive to noise. She calls me Big Sis and I call her Little Sis. Let’s see… What else is there? Don’t try to be sympathetic with her, or make any jokes, because she never understands. She likes to exaggerate, like she says she’s dying of hunger because she thinks she really is dying. Definitely do not ask her what she has done lately, because she will feel compelled to tell you everything she has done from morning to night during recent months. If it is small talk, do not ask her to shut up, or tell her, for example, that she’s talking up a storm, because she will become very frustrated and confused, trying to understand how someone can start a storm just by talking. One time, our mother was calling her to come and eat, and Violeta just ignored her. Our mother kept calling her but nothing, so she said, ‘This little girl is deaf as a post.’ Violeta was very offended because she said posts didn’t have ears. You know what I mean?”

“Sort of. I think I know what I have to do.”

“Just don’t do much; that’s the best way with her. Just show her the pendant and tell her I’m waiting outside.”

Rose reluctantly agreed to comply with the assigned task, or at least try, but when he was about to get out of the car, María Paz grabbed his arm.

“Wait, Mr. Rose. Wait a minute,” she begged him. “Let me take a breath. You have to realize, I haven’t seen Violeta in a long time. Since before Manninpox. My heart is pounding. Let me settle down a bit. Wait, I need some water. That’s better. Help me, Mami. Help me, Bolivia, up there in heaven, let everything go well today, I beg, I beg you, for God’s sake I beg you. Okay, I’ll be fine now.” She closed her eyes for a few minutes, then she sighed and said, “I’m ready. Go, Mr. Rose. Go and bring her to me.”

Rose was surprised with the look of the school. He had imagined something depressing and gray, but it was a Georgian house in the middle of a forest of maples and conifers; it had a Dutch roof crowned with a brick chimney, white pine siding, a double row of sash windows, and a central front entrance. There was no one outside, as to be expected because of the harsh cold, but Rose could imagine that when the weather was milder, visitors could relax outside with the kids. The interior was spacious and clean, rather empty except for what was necessary: function over form. Alright, thought Rose. Definitely a good place. Must cost a pretty penny to keep someone in here, though. Everything seemed great. Or maybe not everything. Something seemed off, as if the promise of the exterior was not fulfilled within, where the air was muggy with the breath of frustrated expectations. Every detail of the place seemed an attempt to convey the appearance of familiarity and normalcy, but for some reason this aim was never quite achieved. In spite of the marvelous house, inside there was an emptiness reminiscent of the halls of public school during after-school hours, giving rise to the feeling that the world went on ceaselessly outside while the hours remained stagnant within.

He was greeted immediately and cordially, and then offered a chair and some brochures so he could sit and read while waiting for Violeta. Thus he learned about the different types of rehabilitation programs, winter and summer therapy sessions, and special courses for families of autistic children. All this seemed very sophisticated, thought Rose. And yet, none of it stopped it from seeming like a sort of imprisonment. A benign Manninpox. A ghetto, an orphanage, a sanatorium. The Colombian sisters did not seem destined to enjoy the privilege of free and open spaces, at least not in America. While in the waiting area, Rose made an effort to stay focused on reading the pamphlets and not looking up, to avoid seeming nosy or rudely curious, but he could not help but sense the tension surrounding the troubled youngsters who happened to walk by, the feeling of misdirection and broken harmony, the impersonal metallic ring of their voices, the sour smell of their fears. Rose sat straight and stiff in his chair, as intimidated as one who had entered a temple of alien religion, and he startled when the receptionist announced Violeta’s arrival.

“Something utterly striking about that girl,” Rose tells me. “I don’t think she even noticed me. She definitely didn’t look at me, avoiding eye contact even after I said hello, which she completely ignored. Yet, when I showed her the pendant, the broken coin, she immediately realized that I somehow was connected to her sister. She became certain and assured, and walked out to the car with me, without me having to ask twice. She didn’t even put on a coat; despite the cold, she went outside with what she had on, jeans and a wool sweater. She showed very little emotion one way or the other about the fact that María Paz had come looking for her. Or I should say, she showed none at all. Never in my life have I seen such a beautiful face as expressionless as hers.”

“Can you describe her?” I ask Rose. “Violeta. What was she like that first time you saw her?”

“María Paz had told me about her long hair that fell almost to her waist. But that was gone. Her hair was the opposite, in fact, defiantly short, almost buzzed, at the most half an inch long, like a private in the army. It actually didn’t look bad on her. On the contrary, it helped call attention to the perfection of her features, especially her eyes. Huge eyes, intensely green, like a big cat’s, or in any case not very human. Humongous and green but shallow. I’m not sure how to describe it. Her whole face had a flat overall expression, as if there were some final connection missing. An expression that had no resonance. That’s it. No feedback, no echo. I couldn’t tell you anything about her nose or her mouth, because I’m not sure I even noticed them, lost as I was in her eyes. She was definitely tall and slender, and not dark-skinned like María Paz, but fair. By just glancing at them, you would never guess they were sisters. It’s only after interacting with them for a while that you begin to grasp a resemblance. If you want, I can tell you more about her eyes, because I focused almost entirely on them. The whites were clean, pure, liquid, and the irises were made of concentric circles of revolving lemon green and green gold, a pair of psychedelic, painfully expressionless buttons and yet very beautiful, like those of an antique doll. I’d say she’s a girl of disturbing beauty, but also a bit disturbed herself. Also very sensual, yes. I noticed that even though at first I could only look into her averted eyes. A lustful virgin, perhaps, or rather a young fairy, a somewhat mischievous one. And something told me that this was a lost child for the world, but more lucid and intelligent than other mortals.”

Rose kept his distance from the sisters when they first saw each other again. It seemed too intimate and too emotional to intrude. It was clear that at that moment María Paz was putting it all on the line, double or nothing, that she was making a definitive decision even as she took part in the exchange that Rose observed from a discreet distance, the figures blurred by the viscosity of the cold air. He tells me that there were no hugs or any other physical contact. Violeta would not look directly even at her own sister, and María Paz seemed wary of not slipping up and getting too close, even when she pulled a blanket out of the car because Violeta was so underdressed for the cold. She tried to hand her sister the blanket, Rose says, but Violeta didn’t take it. Instead, she pulled down the sleeves of her sweater, stretching them to cover her hands, which must have been freezing. María Paz cried. That part of it Rose was able to figure out later. Violeta seemed hypnotized by the dogs; all her attention was focused on the three animals. Then María Paz gave her a bag with some gifts, quite wrongheaded it turned out, because the gifts were a few sets of barrettes for her hair, the kind you can get at any drugstore. But what hair? Violeta put them back in the bag after she looked at them and handed them back to her sister.

“Look, Violeta, this is Mr. Rose,” María Paz said, gesturing for Rose to come closer. “He is a very dear friend who’s going to help us with everything. Say hello, tell him your name.”

“He’s your boyfriend,” Violeta said.

“No, he’s not my boyfriend, not at all. He’s a good friend but he’s not going to live with us; no worries, Violeta. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Your old boyfriend. Like Greg, old.”

“No, Violeta,” Rose said, “I can assure you. I’m leaving in a little while, and you will stay with your sister, just the two of you.”

Violeta finally seemed to understand the situation, and she let out a little speech that seemed memorized, addressing Rose, but still not looking at him.

“I’m autistic,” she said. “Sometimes I seem rude, but only because I’m autistic. I don’t kick or spit on people. I just have autism. Autism. At school, they are teaching me to manage my disease. To laugh when I’m touched. They also teach us music and math. Music and mathematics.”

“Go get your things and come back,” María Paz said. The moment had come.

“Go get your things and come back,” Violeta repeated.

“Just pack a small suitcase, very small, but you have to be quick.”

“Have to be quick.”

“Go, love, don’t you see? I’m taking you with me. Just like I promised. Together! Just us, without Greg, without this man, no one. You and me, no one else: Big Sis and Little Sis. Then we’ll no longer be alone. Do you understand me, Violeta?”

“I can’t fit my stuff in a tiny suitcase.”

“Bring only what you like the most. I brought clothes for you. New clothes, you’ll see. It’ll be great.”

“I don’t think the new clothes will fit me very well.”

“Come on, Violeta, we don’t have time for this. Bring your things. I’ll wait here.”

“It was all very strange,” Rose tells me. “A difficult moment, surreal, very tense, and there I was, right in the middle of it.”

Violeta was gone for roughly fifteen minutes. When she returned, it was without a bag or suitcase, just a stuffed animal. A giraffe. María Paz later told Rose that it was the same giraffe Violeta had brought on the plane to America when their mother had sent for them.

“Good job, Little Sis!” María Paz congratulated her. “You brought your giraffe! Now hop in, we’re going on a trip with the dogs.”

“With the dogs,” Violeta repeated, but she did not move.

“Come on, Little Sis,” an anxious María Paz said. “Come, we’ll be together from now on. I promise. Always together.”

“Always together.”

“Didn’t you miss me all this time?”

“All this time.”

“Listen to me, Violeta, I beg you.”

“Listen to me, Violeta, I beg you.”

“I came all the way here for you, Violeta! Come, get in the car so we can go.”

“Big Sis goes,” said the girl. “Little Sis stays.”

“Don’t you want to go to Seville?”

“Go to Seville?

“We’ll go together, my sweet, together forever. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Big Sis is going to Seville. Big Sis is going to Seville. Little Sis stays here. Little Sis is fine here,” she said with a tremulous, metallic voice that sounded like the clatter of a typewriter. Then she handed the giraffe to her sister, ran toward the school, and disappeared through the door, without even looking back.

“I had never seen María Paz as defeated as she was that day,” Rose informs me. “It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to her head, as if all the lights had been shut off. I tried to comfort her, saying that the next day was Sunday, also a visiting day, and we could try again. But she said there was no point, that Violeta was the most stubborn creature on the face of the earth. Once she got something into her head, no one could get it out of there. She had made her decision and there was no turning back, María Paz insisted, and I knew she was right. Then I tried to tell her what I had been thinking all along, what to me was more than obvious. I talked honestly with María Paz and told her that I thought Violeta was right. It would without a doubt be better for her there, at that school, an appropriate place for her, where she was clearly nurtured and protected and made to feel good about herself. Much better than scampering around the world with a fugitive sister whose fate was as unpredictable as the winds. I asked her if the pension that paid for the school was secure, because it had to be expensive as hell, and she said it was, that Socorro was in charge of that. Socorro had promised their mother that she would serve as executor of the trust and so far had remained true to her word. I promised María Paz that if at some point Socorro could no longer perform her duties, I would take over. Pro Bono could help me set this up. I’d make payments to the school on time every month, so María Paz shouldn’t worry. I insisted on how much good such an institution did for her sister: it protected her from the constant change that so negatively affects people with her condition, and built confidence with good routines, free from the anxiety and loss of control brought about by new and unforeseen events.”

“Fuck,” María Paz said, “where are you pulling all that from, Mr. Rose? This morning you didn’t know a thing about such conditions…”

“True, but I read the pamphlets they gave me at the reception desk. I even brought one. Take it,” Rose told her, handing her a booklet with a yellow cover titled Interested in Learning and Sharing About Autism? And then he repeated that when it came to the execution of the trust, she had nothing to worry about.

“It can’t be, thanks, but no,” María Paz said flatly. “I can’t leave my sister behind, because Sleepy Joe will hurt her.”

So then they went back into their endless and wary conversation about Sleepy Joe, who he really was and how much harm he could do to Violeta.

“You’re the one who told me he was harmless,” Rose pressed.

“I never said he was harmless. I said he was no murderer; it’s different. But he is pissed because he thinks I stole his money. Why is that so hard for you to understand, Mr. Rose? Sleepy Joe is frantic, and he’s going to get even more nuts when he finds out I took off, according to him, with his money. If he can’t get to me, he’ll get even by hurting Violeta. You can bet the house on that. Today, I knew as soon as I saw her that things weren’t going to work as planned. I realized right away that I could not count on Violeta. She has to make a scene about everything. Do you know what I mean? Always. A fucking scene, that’s what she does, throws tantrums whenever she doesn’t get what she wants or if she feels as if she is being forced to do something. Not so bad this time, actually, she remained calm. She didn’t whine, didn’t cry, didn’t let loose with a list of maddening questions like she always does, sometimes the same question, over and over and over again, until you think that your head is going to explode. But there was none of that this time because her mind was made up. And like I said, no one in this world is as stubborn as she is. Just gave me the giraffe. The giraffe, her dearest possession, the thing that keeps her sane. Like Linus and the blanket he can’t part with, that’s the giraffe for my sister. Yet she gave it to me, and that means she was serious. She knew exactly what she was doing. A willful act, Violeta condemning herself forever by deciding not to come with me. I get it — all the other stuff — I’m not blind. It’s true what they say in the brochures, Mr. Rose. She is terrified of the unknown, takes refuge in her routines, and I was offering the most uncertain and risky adventure. The worst thing for her. I thought she would be excited just to be with me. I thought the best thing for Violeta was always to be with me, by my side. Until today, that’s what I felt and believed. From the time Violeta was a baby, she was fine if she was with her older sister, Big Sis. Apparently that’s not the case anymore. But I can’t leave her here; you have to understand that, Mr. Rose. I have to take her with me, even if I have to kidnap her.”

Rose tried to suggest that wasn’t the greatest idea, but María Paz’s despair was a solid wall that common sense could not penetrate. At least he was able to convince her to go to a little motel hidden in the woods, where they were able to reserve a couple of rooms without questions about the dogs or having to present IDs.

Despite its plainness, the place had a cosmic name that Rose remembers well: North Star Shine Lodge. He had learned from Pro Bono about the importance of the names of the motels. They had something to eat at the motel cafeteria, drawing the unwanted attention of the few other diners because of the three dogs sprawled under the table, and because María Paz couldn’t stop crying as she clutched the stuffed giraffe. Rose tells me that everybody there was just as suspicious. He was sure they were in the operations center of who knows what types of illegal activities. At the other end of the room sat three Asian men dressed in black, wearing sunglasses and thin, shiny ties. On the table in front of the men, in plain sight, there were stacks of bills wrapped in plastic.

“They must be Yakuza,” María Paz whispered, but she had no head for anything but her own tragedy, the unexpected and insurmountable obstacle casting an ominous cloud on her survival mission.

Fortunately, they were in agreement about one thing, Rose tells me. Violeta would be toast if she were left behind. Sleepy Joe had pounced on Cleve and he would pounce on the girl; that was as clear as daylight. But Rose could think of no solution for the impasse and didn’t have the means to comfort María Paz. It would be best to let her rest so he could calm down and brainstorm. At that point, they were approached by the motel clerk, a fat lonesome figure in a baseball cap, who invited him to a game of miniature golf, the only entertainment in those parts, other than a bar with a pool table in a neighboring town.

“No, thanks,” said Rose after María Paz went to her room, “I’m going to take the dogs outside, set them up for the night.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the man said. “They’ll freeze their asses off, won’t last ten minutes, noses turned to ice and throats freezing inside. Come on, a little miniature golf, my friend, it’s indoors. Have you ever played it? Much more fun than it sounds. You’ll go nuts in these parts just staying in your room.”

“He insisted so much that I finally said yes,” Rose tells me. “Better than being locked in my room staring at the TV. So I stumbled down a long hallway behind the fat man, brandishing my toy putter. This was no mini golf course, though, maybe mini-mini golf. The fat man said we could do half a course, nine holes.

“There’s only three,” Rose said.

“We do it three times,” the fat man responded.

The guy was very chatty, so after a while Rose asked him about the three Asian men in the cafeteria.

“What about them?” said the fat man, removing his cap to wipe the sweat from his head and face.

“Are they Yakuza?” Rose asked.

“Why don’t you ask them? And keep an eye on that pretty girl you got with you. I play the fool: see no evil, hear no evil, but you can tell she’s illegal from a mile away. Careful the Yazuka don’t snag her.”

“A lot of weird business around here?”

From hole to hole, one, two, three, and around again, the motel keeper explained to Rose that trafficking of migrants was one of the most lucrative types of global businesses. He told Rose about the Onondaga and the Iroquois League, as well as about other important figures who were capable of moving anything illegally across the border, even a herd of elephants if they had to. The Onondaga went through the Saint Lawrence River by boat — during the wee hours in the dead of winter. That’s when it was best to leave, because the weather was usually the most clear. They were strong rowers, so the Onondaga avoided the noise of motorized boats, but that did not mean that they were not technically advanced, equipped with night-vision binoculars and every other kind of useful gadget. In the bottom of the boat, they crammed illegal Chinese, Pakistanis, and even Muslims who kissed the ground when they arrived. People came from everywhere to cross the border, and there were the Onondaga, waiting, their lands overlapping the frontier, thirty acres of islands and coves hidden in the woods. They were capos of the leather trade in previous generations, then cigarette smuggling, and now they used the same routes for human trafficking.

“Just watch closely and you’ll see,” the motel keeper said to Rose. “Two thousand US dollars per head, and they can get six heads across in a single trip. One of them always stopped by the North Star for drinks. His name was, or he called himself, Elijah, and he was so ingenious that he had built a false bottom on his aunt’s Buick LeSabre with enough room to accommodate up to six humans.”

“You can’t fit six humans in the false bottom of a Buick LeSabre or any car,” Rose said.

“You can if they are Asian.”

“And how does the Buick handle the roads, with all the snow?”

“If there is a lot of snow, they use a snowmobile. That’s a big part of the problem, the cold. Most of the clients come from warm climates, cotton dresses. Elijah wraps them in blankets, so they don’t die on him. Once they’re on the US side of the border, he literally leaves them out in the cold to fend for his own. He is a hell of a snakehead.”

“Snakehead?”

“Those on this side are called coyotes; the other side, snakeheads.”

“Cyber-snakeheads,” Rose said.

“If you could see all the little people that sneak into this country. They pass under the McDonald’s arches and touch the sky with their hands.”

Rose soon grew weary, as bored with miniature golf as he was with tales about the Onondaga, and there were still a few holes to go to complete the nine. Rose didn’t know how to get out of his commitment with the sweaty, fat man, who sweated so much in winter that he must have caused floods in the summer. Add to it his mouth: now there was someone who could talk up a storm. It was at that point that María Paz came running, waving the stuffed giraffe.

“Come, Mr. Rose! Come see!” she shouted.

“Shhhh!” Rose tried to signal her to be a little more discreet, but she was too worked up to notice, in a frenzy almost. “Come on, Mr. Rose! To the room, come, come, quickly, sir, don’t drag your feet!”

A few hours earlier, María Paz, disconsolate, had gone to bed still dressed, hugging the stuffed giraffe her sister had given her in the front of the school. Her life had suddenly become impossible, the crossroads not crossable. So much waiting, holding on, pedaling in place, just to get to this. If she didn’t get out of the country very soon, they would catch her. If she left, she would be leaving her sister at the mercy of Sleepy Joe. Neither option was acceptable, and no other choices seemed possible. María Paz couldn’t even cry. She didn’t even have that consolation, because crying comes from a broken heart, but here there was nothing, not even that, just a dry heart, lack of responses and hopelessness. In the dark, because she didn’t even have the energy to turn the light on, she curled up like a snail in the motel bed, the bed that so many had passed through, at once such a beautiful and sad thought, that transitory bed. She pressed her chest against the giraffe, which, by the way, smelled horrible, like it had soaked in piss, making it clear that Violeta was still peeing anywhere she chose and using the giraffe as a sponge. María Paz hated that her life had just been going around in circles, that she was chasing her own tail, sticking it in front of her face every time she was ready to take a new course so that it just kept her going round and round. Once again, she was clutching the giraffe, just as she had years before on the flight to America, when she had snatched it from Violeta because the girl had just peed on it. Only the giraffe wasn’t that cute, faded toy anymore, but a filthy and disgusting lump, amorphous, eyeless, earless, looking more like some prehistoric bug, half the stitching undone, missing a leg, but just as smelly as before.

It was an amazing coincidence, or rather terrifying: the stuffed animal that marked that long-ago trip they took together, the arrival, loomed again now, on the eve of another journey, the farewell one. A sudden fear of that object that somehow had appeared and reappeared at these critical moments struck María Paz: Was it just a simple fetish or something more like magic? María Paz thought all this had to mean something. But what? There was some message from destiny, but she couldn’t figure it out. It could not be that she would trip up right before the finish line, all the escape planning, the heartache, just to fuck it all up a few steps from Canada. And there was nothing she could do because she had tripped up almost within reach of her goal, and there was no going forward or backward, no going alone or accompanied, no going north nor south, so it was best just to be there, quiet and in the dark, hugging the stinking giraffe.

And to think that Violeta had given her the thing she most treasured, which she had lugged around with her since she was a baby, her strongest emotional anchor, so much so that she would become nauseated whenever someone took it from her, as happened to Linus when his sister Lucy wrestled his blanket away. But despite all this, Violeta had willfully handed the giraffe over. It was a selfless gesture of love that María Paz had never before experienced from her sister. Then had come their parting without hugs, because Violeta did not tolerate any kind of physical contact, and the way she said good-bye sounded so final and definitive that she may as well have said good riddance.

Outside it was completely dark, and the room was still dark, when María Paz, unable to withstand the smell of the giraffe anymore, got up to go to the bathroom, thinking that she would give it a good wash and scrub. If this whole episode was indeed proving to be some kind of ritual, if Violeta had wanted to suggest that their lives were indeed circular, and if she did say through this gift what she couldn’t express in words, if all that was so, then María Paz was going to make an effort to show respect to the love she had been shown. The North Star was a shoddy motel that offered no amenities such as shampoo, and the bathroom was equipped instead with a previously used chunk of pink soap that was stingy about creating foam. But there was warm water from the tap and María Paz filled the sink to dunk the giraffe and give it a good scrubbing.

“I abandoned the fat man in the middle of our game and ran after María Paz, expecting the worst,” Rose tells me. “Now I’m going to try to describe my shock, there in the room of that fourth-rate motel, during one of the harshest nights of the coldest winter of the last five years, well beyond a hundred miles from Montreal and more than three hundred miles from New York City. It was dark inside, except for the glow of one bulb coming from the bathroom. I mean, the light was off in the room itself when María Paz led me in, and when I tried to turn it on, she stopped me. It was the first thing that occurred to me: turn on the light — what anyone would do upon entering a dark room. But she wouldn’t let me. And there was something inside that room that glowed like a will-o’-the-wisp; it emitted the kind of halo of brilliance that have shone from other treasures — the Amber Room of Catherine the Great, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cave of Ali Baba. What I saw there with my own eyes on María Paz’s bed had a mythical luminance. It sparkled, I’m telling you, like a nest of salamanders or a stack of gold coins. At least that’s how I remember it.”

“How much is there?” María Paz asked Rose, ensuring that the blinds of the room were completely drawn and that she locked the door. “How much?”

It was impossible to calculate, Rose tells me. How could he add all those hundred-dollar bills strewn on the bed, some wrinkled, others bound into stacks, others tied into larger bricks? All wet, though. Rose could not say a word, not even a murmur. The shock had left him speechless. But María Paz responded to her own question.

“There’s one hundred and fifty thousand,” she said softly. “Can you believe it? One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Rose. One hundred and fifty thousand. I counted every single bill. They were inside Violeta’s giraffe, all stuffed tightly in. I found the bills when I wanted to wash it.”

“One hundred and fifty thousand, eh?” Rose managed to say.

“It has to be something connected to the people looking for Sleepy Joe,” María Paz said.

“Well, the figure matches, but how did it end up here?”

“Violeta found it, no other explanation. She digs through everything. Rummages through drawers and discovers hidden things. There were a lot of fights about that. Greg got enraged because she hid things or took them. Sleepy Joe swore to me that he had hidden one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in my house, and she found the stash and took it. Found the loot and hid it inside her giraffe. No other explanation.”

“They say that women are unpredictable,” Rose tells me, “that men can’t follow their logic. Not sure if that’s true overall, but I can attest to one thing, nothing is as maddeningly simple as María Paz’s logic. When she took me to the room to show me the pile of bills, she had everything perfectly figured out, in that gray labyrinth of her head. It was like reinforced concrete; that’s what it felt like when she made up her mind. Even God would have trouble changing her mind.

“You know what a syllogism is, right?” Rose asks me, and responds himself. “Of course you know, you’re a writer. Well, I’m not exactly sure of the nature of the damn syllogism that María Paz had come up with before she came to get me, but it was all very clear in her head. It’s been a while since my college philosophy courses, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t sound quite Aristotelian. It’s her syllogism, not mine:

“First premise: If Sleepy Joe is going to kill anyone, he will only kill to get his money.

“Second premise: If María Paz has his money, she can give it to Sleepy Joe.

“Conclusion: If Sleepy Joe has his money, he will not harm Violeta.

“And from that conclusion there most elegantly emerged, as if she were dancing a waltz in the labyrinth now, another series of equally absurd conclusions, namely: If Sleepy Joe was not going to hurt Violeta, then María Paz could go to Canada, assured that Violeta would be cared for and safe in her school, where she would rather be, as she herself had made very clear. The finale, the mother of all conclusions? All we had to do was get the money to Sleepy Joe, and the problems of humanity would be solved.”

Rose tells me that the events that followed the discovery of the loot were crazy. There they were, the two of them in that dark in that hotel room, huddled beside the bed, whispering so that the Yakuza wouldn’t burst in with their pistols for the money. They locked themselves in for the night, using a hair dryer to dry the money, counting it and counting it again, then stuffing it into María Paz’s Gucci bag, which fortunately was roomy, all the while mired again in their eternal debate about whether Sleepy Joe was a murderer or had just spun out of control because of his lost loot.

“Listen to me, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told him. “You’re very annoying about this, stubborn as a mule. I know Sleepy Joe, you don’t. I know more about this than you do. Sleepy Joe is not a murderer. He’s a bad guy, but he is not a murderer. Sick in the head, that’s for sure, very sick in the head, I won’t argue that. But not a murderer.”

“He murdered my son, Cleve.”

“That’s just a guess.”

“Are you saying he didn’t kill your dog, María Paz?” The bubbling outrage and indignation was evident in Rose’s voice. “Do you not know for a fact that he killed your dog? Or is that just another assumption?

“Shhhh, please,” she told him, “don’t get all riled up. Yes, yes, he killed my dog. And I loved my dog. And I know you love your dogs, Mr. Rose, but forgive me, a dog is not a person. Killing a dog is a fucking terrible thing that you pay for in hell, but killing a dog is not the same as killing a person.”

“Alright. So if the dog is not enough, here is something more serious for you. I think Sleepy Joe had something to do with the death of his brother, Greg. I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure he had something to do with it. And why would he do such a thing, if he adored his brother? Well, why do you think he would, María Paz? To get rid of him. So he could keep the money and incidentally also keep you. Can’t you see it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure about what, that it was him?”

“Who knows, maybe it was.”

“Are you saying that you think he was involved?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. He told me he had nothing to do with it.”

“Who told you?”

“Sleepy Joe himself.”

“And you believed him?”

“People have to believe people, Mr. Rose.”

It was impossible, Rose tells me. Reasoning with María Paz was downright impossible. She did not show any interest in whatever his opinion was about the matter. She had created a narrative in her head to which she clung with everything she had, and Rose was not going to move her from there. The only thing that worried her at the time was not knowing where Sleepy Joe was, and because she didn’t know, she couldn’t give him the money.

Rose tells me that before this he had always suspected she was lying about her knowledge of his whereabouts. That she knew exactly where he was.

“But at that moment, I realized she really didn’t know,” Rose tells me. “It became clear that she was not lying, at least not on that point. So what did she want to do, what was her master plan? We would find Sleepy Joe, deliver the money, and neutralize the situation. That was her plan. It seemed to me like the stupidest thing in the world, but that’s what she believed was best. And when you think about it, rather curiously, we were finally doing what I had been hoping for: we were set directly on Sleepy Joe’s trail.”

The next day, Rose got up early and went out into the field. He wanted to take in the vast solitude of those lands not owned by anyone to let his dogs run around for a while, and he especially wanted to practice some target shooting, there in the woods, where nobody could hear. “This is for you, Claro Hurtado. This will be your revenge!” Rose screamed into the air and let off a few shots into the trees. “A good weapon, this Glock, excellent! Clearly, my friend, you need not worry. Your Remington was rubbish but my Glock is top of the line. Let’s give the motherfucker his due.” Now, Rose was set for some payback on the murderer of his son. Now, the adrenaline shot through every inch of him, and a vengeful euphoria took hold of him, arousal at the smell of gunpowder, so he pumped a round of lead into a poor tree, pretending it was Sleepy Joe. “Right there, right where I want you, you fucking little punk, you loser playboy, now it’s your turn to grow pale! Right there, you son of a bitch.” And pum, pum, pum, Rose emptied the Glock on the tree.

“After I did this, I had to go searching for the dogs, because Otto, Dix, and Skunko had stampeded out of there, every dog for himself, terrified by the shots,” Rose tells me.

That same morning, a few hours later, Rose, María Paz, and the three dogs crossed from Vermont into Upstate New York. They had a prize with them in the red Toyota: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“This car is like Napoleon’s famous horse carriage,” Rose commented to María Paz and immediately regretted it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that he could mention to her without unleashing a barrage of questions. In that, she was a lot like Violeta, which even María Paz herself acknowledged. What horse carriage? Why Napoleon? Who won at Waterloo? And so on, not letting up until Rose was in full teaching mode, telling the story of how, in the Prussian offensive, Napoleon had to retreat on horseback, abandoning the carriage in which he always traveled, which moments later was seized and looted by the Prussians, who found a most precious treasure trove, Napoleon’s mythical cocked hat, his trademark gray cloak, the silverware he ate with, and his many awards, which were made of gold and embedded with precious stones.

“So a humongous treasure in the carriage,” María Paz sighed, “just like in this Toyota. What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Mr. Rose, running around with an escaped fugitive and a stolen treasure.”

“It was comical to an extent,” Rose tells me. “When we wanted to brush our teeth, we had to find the toothpaste under the bundle of bills.”

“Were you going back to the Catskills?” I ask.

“No. With María Paz directing, we were heading for a roadside bar called Chikki Charmers, where one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends had worked. The one who had drowned in the Jacuzzi.”

“Maraya,” I say. “The one who was skinny in all the right places and full where it was best to be full.”

“Yeah, well, that was a while before, as I came to learn. Near the end of her life, she was as emaciated as an old alley cat, skinny all over from her addiction.”

“Cocaine?” I ask.

“Heroin. She was overcome with these itching attacks that could only be relieved by submerging herself in the Jacuzzi.”

“Like Marat.”

“María Paz thought that Maraya’s coworkers may have known the whereabouts of Sleepy Joe. So we headed down there. Seeking information, you know. She intended to give the man his money. I wanted to burst his liver with a kick to the gut.”

Meanwhile, her relationship with the cyber-coyote had begun to deteriorate. Whenever María Paz postponed departure, the guy delivered a whole sermon about time schedules and agreements and tacked on four hundred additional dollars for each modification of the original plan. Every so often, on the highway, María Paz asked Rose to pull over and stepped out of the car to try to find a signal for her cell phone. Rose watched her arguing into the phone while walking up and down and up and down the shoulder of the road, and coming back either enraged or depressed because she had had another nasty fight with the guy.

“It must be true what they say about coyotes,” grumbled María Paz, “mysterious but stupid creatures.”

“What if he’s not so stupid? What if your cyber-coyote has turned into a bounty hunter?” Rose asked. “What if he already found out who you are, and is simply helping them capture you?”

“It may be,” she sighed. “I don’t know if he’s become a bounty hunter, but I know for sure he’s a thief. Can you believe it? Now he wants another four hundred dollars.”

“There’s more than enough in that bag for that.”

“No, what are you saying? That money is Sleepy Joe’s.”

“Sleepy Joe’s, my ass. That money is now yours, and before that it was your sister’s, and even before that your husband’s, and before that the police’s, and before that the state’s, and ultimately before that it belonged to the taxpayers, that money belonged to me and millions of other idiots like me. Sleepy Joe? Fuck him. I don’t see how he belongs in this chain at all. Your loyalty to him sickens me, María Paz, makes me suspect your own value scales.”

“Value scales! My value scales! I have plenty on my scales. Well, who would have thought it, Mr. Rose? That you begin to lecture me as if you were my father.”

“In some ways, I am.”

Chikki Charmers was supposedly located about twelve miles north of Ithaca. Rose had gotten the information online, and María Paz said she had memorized it. But heated as they were by their arguments, they passed it more than once without noticing, and before finding it they must have driven the same stretch of twenty miles for over an hour, arguing this way and arguing back that way too.

Judging by its outward appearance, the place was a bar for truckers, a dingy spot with a parking lot out front that was four times the area as the spot the structure took up. Since it was early afternoon, the place was closed and deserted, and they could not interview the employees. Instead, they contented themselves with making out the information on the neon billboard that was turned off, where the silhouettes of a couple of naked women in a frozen dance and wearing only boots, announced the following:

CHIKKI CHARMERS, EXOTIC BODIES IN MOTION.

OPEN 8PM-3AM.

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH THE DANCERS.

NO ALCOHOL. NO SMOKING. NO CELL PHONES, CAMERAS, OR VIDEO.

MANDATORY GRATUITY FOR STAGE SEAT.

IF NUDITY OFFENDS YOU OR YOU DISAGREE WITH OUR RULES DO NOT ENTER.

VIOLATORS WILL BE REPORTED OR KICKED OUT OR BOTH.

THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

There wasn’t much to do but wait until Chikki Charmers opened. Then they might be able to get some information from someone who had known Maraya, or more specifically Maraya’s boyfriend, a certain Sleepy Joe, a tall, handsome blond, although a little weary looking. He chewed on spicy candies, and often wore a retro nylon satin jacket with Castrol and Pennzoil patches on the sleeves. That’s how María Paz would put it, feigning complete ignorance to elicit information. And if they asked what she wanted with him, she would say she wanted to make good on some money she owed him. The message would get to him, and Sleepy Joe would be motivated to come out of his hole.

They were no longer in a forested area, though the surroundings were still very rural, with barely any trees, trailers half-buried in the snow, impoverished fields, fallen fences, miserable-looking farms abandoned to the harsh winter. They passed a rotted wood barn with some signs of flaking red paint. Rose told María Paz that a long time ago, barns were painted with animal blood, and she grimaced in disgust. They spotted a café and decided to stop there for something to eat, but Rose wanted to sit back and observe so he could figure out what kind of enemy territory they had crossed into. From the moment he noticed the beat-up pickups parked near the entrance, heard country music coming from the jukebox, and saw cheap paintings of hunting scenes decorating the interior of the premises, Rose considered himself warned. Then he felt the tactile stress that María Paz unleashed among the cluster of rednecks seated inside, making them shoot jets of racist adrenaline even to the tips of their ears. They were typical poor white field workers with necks permanently blazed by hours working in the sun, and ultraconservative, immigrant haters. Rose knew this class of individuals well. It was not the first time he had associated with them, the type of people who did not look you in the eyes when you talked to them, but rather stared at an area somewhere around the mouth as a silent warning that you should watch how you talk. Any of the men who congregated there, silently bent over mugs of beer, sausage dishes, and oat porridges, any one of them, thought Rose, would more than willing to denounce an illegal alien, beaner, wetback, brown fucking bitch to the authorities. If they decided not to go with direct aggression, which could also happen, all it would take was one spark to unleash a hellfire. Hence, Rose suggested that María Paz return to the car to avoid trouble; he would get hot dogs to go and they would eat where the winds blew cooler. Besides, no one was watching the Gucci bag; it hadn’t been wise to leave that kind of money within the reach of the white rabble.

“Prussian rabble,” she said.

“I did bring the dogs with me, though,” Rose tells me, “placed them by the entrance, and gave them the order to stay. Just in case. The presence of my dogs is very intimidating. They have that mean appearance of hang dogs, especially Dix, who can be very friendly, but also can put on a dark disposition, and is strong and black, crisscrossed with scars, the trophies of old battles. They can play it ugly, that’s for sure, and if someone ever tries to threaten or hurt me, they will tear him apart. These rednecks were no fools. They quickly got the message, or were not interested in pursuing any litigation. Maybe it was just my anxiety playing tricks on me. I really don’t know what may have been the reason, but they didn’t mess with us, and we walked away without an incident.”

They took a room at a Budget Inn. Rose had insisted that they get two separate rooms, as in the previous motel, but María Paz thought it was a waste of money and suggested it would more practical to get one room with two single beds; they were a team on a mission and should adopt a more agile and warlike attitude. They holed themselves up in the motel against the afternoon snowstorm, which according to the Weather Channel was a bad one, lashing the roads with high winds and creating zero visibility conditions. María Paz washed her hair and made use of the hair dryer. The dogs sniffed every nook and corner of the room, and Rose set up shop at a desk with cigarette burns at the edges. There he painstakingly set his notes in order, the articles he had printed after various Google searches, an issue of a magazine called Very Interesting that he had just bought at a drugstore, a Bible, and other texts. He wanted to try to tie in all his previous elucidations on the criminal behavior of Sleepy Joe to reach some general conclusions. He devoted the afternoon to it, ignoring the noise of the hair dryer and the bustle of the dogs, who had begun to bark.

In neat letters and using an impeccable script, attempting to remain objective, and with a little dash of hard-learned wisdom and a stack of criminology manuals, Rose had managed to land that first insight using the photos of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, until his discussion turned into a technical report on the strength of materials. He had written his observations on a yellow legal pad, which he lent me so I could transcribe it.

First constant: How does Sleepy Joe kill? He follows a strict canon. For X reasons, he needs his victims to know that he is in control of the Stations of the Cross, and that they are on their way to martyrdom. He chose this ritual process, but he may as well have chosen any other, from training Mesoamerican peoples for the Florida wars to the symbolic acts of Helter Skelter with Charles Manson and the Family. Any preset structure would have worked as long as it meant a sequential progress that would allow him to undertake the ascent of what might be called the conductor’s steps. Sleepy Joe must see himself as the executor of a directive that leads him to kill. Now, that didn’t mean he always killed. Sometimes he just mortified the victim, like in the Corina case. Occasionally, as in the case of my son, Cleve, the victim will die before he completes the ritual. Sometimes the torture gets out of hand, and the victim dies prematurely. Second constant: He chooses his victims. When he feels he needs to kill, or offer up sacrifice, he looks around and chooses the weakest link in the chain: disabled (Hero), abused (Corina), insignificant individuals (John Eagles), drug addicts (Maraya). The disabled and the weak become his favorite targets, because they exacerbate his criminal instincts and sharpen his perversions. But we have to be careful, here there’s a jump, a parallel plane has to be considered, because the victims need to meet dual requirements. Aside from the characteristics mentioned above, the victims are all connected in one way or another to María Paz. It can be said that they are people who stand in his way to reach her, and therefore he needs to eliminate them. So he combines the sacrifice prerequisite with the extermination of an opponent. That is, an adversary, as my son, Cleve, must have been — a rival male who stirred his jealousy. Third constant: What weapons does he use? Several, as suggested by the Via Crucis, but he gives himself freedom to improvise. He is creative, resourceful, as he has shown. Take into account: daggers (Greg), nails (Hero), broomstick (Corina), thorns (Cleve), drowning in a Jacuzzi (Maraya). Fourth constant: Why do it? Possible answer: To feel God. That’s how Edward Norton puts it in Red Dragon.

That’s as far as Rose had gone with his notes on the yellow legal pad. He tells me that afternoon he wanted to focus particularly on Maraya, one of the first victims, who, according to the scheme Rose had uncovered, would have been involved in the ritual of the gambling for the tunic. He needed to learn more about this relic before they went to Chikki Charmers that night, but other than the controversy over the authenticity of the item, in the end, he found nothing about it he didn’t already know, except for the full quote from the Gospel of John, which he had been ignorant of: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his tunic, which was seamless. Then they said among themselves, ‘Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, to decide whose it shall be.’”

When the time came to go that night, Rose shook María Paz’s shoulder. She had done her hair and then dropped on the bed like a rock, surrendering to exhaustion from not having slept a wink the night before. Her head drooped when she responded, not yet fully awake, so it was easy for Rose to convince her that he would take care of the investigations at Chikki Charmers on his own.

“You know what the crowd will be like at that place?” he warned her. “Just like the one we saw today at the café, either those same people or others identical to them, only now they’ll be rowdy and drunk. Besides, I don’t think women go there unless they are working. You’ll attract too much attention, the last thing we need.”

Ignoring the recommendation of local newscasts to avoid driving during the storm, Rose steered the Toyota into a road painted with ice. But the motel was near the bar, so it was only a few minutes before he sighted, somewhere just beyond the curtain of fog, the neon sign for Chikki Charmers, the letters illuminated in pink and green, and the pair of dancers, who before had been static, now brought to life with electricity, and they flapped their arms and hips spasmodically. Three hours later, Rose returned to the room at the Budget Inn, opened the door, and complained that the dog smell was getting unbearably thick inside.

“What do you expect?” María Paz asked. She was watching Doctor Zhivago, the scene in which Pasha gets cut in the face by a saber. “Did you want me to let the dogs out so they froze to death? Look at poor Omar Sharif, how frost clings even to his eyelashes. Anyway, the whiff of drink on you could light a torch, so don’t be talking about smells.”

“Tonight’s theme was Oriental Night,” Rose said from the bathroom, furiously rinsing out his mouth and washing his hands.

“Mother of God,” she said without taking her eyes off the screen. “Oriental Night? Is that at the place, the Chikki Charmers? And what did they do to bring out the charmers, the dance of the seven veils?”

“Yes, exactly. The seven veils. There were five women, each wrapped in seven veils. I had to cough up a dollar for each veil that hit the floor, plus the five table dances I ordered later to get close enough to the girls.”

“Jesus Christ, our life is full of strippers.”

“You know, one table dance for each girl. To get a chance to speak with them, have a little face-to-face time.”

“You mean cunt to face.”

“I wasn’t worried about the money, but they gave me a senior discount, twenty percent. Can you believe it? Very humiliating.”

“So? Did you get directions to Sleepy Joe’s place? Phone number?”

“Basically, they danced on me; that was it. None of them knew anything of Sleepy Joe’s whereabouts. Of the five, only three had met Maraya. The staff has a lot of turnover, not many of the same dancers as before. Of those three who knew Maraya, only two had ever seen Sleepy Joe. Of those two, one told me that she was not there to chat with old men, and the other told me some things.”

“What things?”

“Her name is Olga, Russian, I think. On Saturdays she comes out as a Cossack.”

“But tonight was Oriental Night?”

“Yes, tonight Olga went on stage wearing the veils like the others. The Cossack thing is only Saturdays. She did know Sleepy Joe, and believed he was crazy. A bastard, mad as a fucking goat. I told her she was right. She saw him after Maraya’s death, but swears she has no idea where he is now. I believe her, because it is clear that she detests him. I asked her about the clothes raffle, you know, the dead woman’s clothes, and the issue of the dice on the eyes, all that crap organized by Sleepy Joe during the wake. Olga said it was a fiasco. First, because nobody wanted the clothing, those old-fashioned things in Lycra and spandex, which didn’t fit anybody well because Maraya had become a skeleton. And second, because there was no longer a seventies night at Chikki Charmers. It was canceled for lack of interest and because the recession forced management to cut down on costumes.

“Olga said Sleepy Joe insisted on the weird ceremony very much against their will, or at least against the will of Olga, who just wanted to show some respect for the deceased, and particularly against the will of the owner of Chikki Charmers, who just wanted to bury Maraya as quickly as possible, because the poor man had been in a state thinking of the Jacuzzi boiling Marya. The whole thing was a mess. All the owner wanted was to wrap things up and leave the whole disturbing episode behind, which of course was already affecting his business and starting a lot of gossip. But he couldn’t stop Sleepy Joe from getting his way. In the end, Sleepy Joe was the only family member or close friend who had immediately shown up at the morgue after hearing the news. I asked Olga if she believed Sleepy Joe had anything to do with what had happened, I mean, with the death.”

“What’re you asking me, Papi, if he killed her?” Olga said. She stood on the table in heels and snuggled up to Rose so his face was against her navel as the fluttering veils began to come off. “No, at all, Grandpa, not at all involved. Her vice killed her, my love, a cocktail of tecata, boozy fried heroin. Smack, Grandpa, smack, see if you can pinch yourself, right? Horse, my good horse. Giddyap, horsey, giddyap. That was a Sunday morning. Sunday night she didn’t show up for her shift, and because this place is closed on Monday, it wasn’t until Tuesday night that her absence became suspicious. It wasn’t until midday Wednesday that we found out what had happened, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that the police came to remove the body, or I should say came to get Maraya out of the Jacuzzi. No, Granpapi, Maraya’s boyfriend is a flea-bitten dirtbag of the worst kind, a cockroach with a tyrannical streak, what they call a dark spirit. He dropped by here every so often, each time with a different truck, hitting Maraya up for money. As it is common with these players. Until he was no longer able to compete. I don’t mean because of another man, I mean the horse. Giddyap, horse; you understand, old man? I mean the tecata, the white lady, lover, she of the long fangs that she plunges into your neck. Pleasures you have no idea about, Grandpa, my little old man. And that’s when things went really awry: Maraya’s boyfriend not only hated the white lady, he had forbidden Maraya from going near it, not because he was a puritan, not that, or moralistic, but because the horse was stealing his money, you know? She was spending all her money on the drug. When she tried to come back, the owner had to tell her they didn’t touch or deal with leftovers. That woman was killed by her vice, and that detonation took place deep within her. The contribution of the groom was only the slapstick at the end, the gambling of the clothes, the dice in the eye sockets, and the desecration of the corpse. He didn’t kill her. But who are you, Granpapi, a cop? Why do you ask so many questions?”

“Didn’t I try to tell you, Mr. Rose?” María Paz told him later that night in the motel room. “He’s not a murderer.”

“How long ago was that with Maraya, two years, three?” Rose continued their old argument as a response.

“Three… around.”

“That’s right, then, three. Sleepy Joe was just beginning. Barely warming up. Today the situation is totally different.”

“It looks that way, Mr. Rose. It looks that way,” María Paz said with a dismissive wave of her hand, as she stared at the television screen. “In the end, we solved nothing by coming here.”

“Well, Olga says that if we want she can take us to Maraya’s grave tomorrow.”

“Incredible — is it true that someone can commit suicide swallowing iodine?”

“What?”

“Lara’s mother,” María Paz said, pointing to the television. “Watch, she is supposedly going to commit suicide taking iodine because her daughter became Komachosky’s lover, or Komarovsky, whatever his name is, the lawyer…”

“It’s impossible to talk like this. It’s just an old film, some melodrama without any scientific accuracy. Turn that off, María Paz, and let’s talk.”

“I can’t turn it off; it’s pay-per-view. It cost seven dollars. It’s a medical drama.”

“I wish you would tell me what’s next. I mean, I’m just wondering what awaits us. You and me, and three dogs. Is there any way you can inform me?”

“Wendy Mellons. Another one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends. Maybe she knows where he is. We should find her and ask her. The only bad thing is she lives in Colorado.”

“Colorado? Are you nuts? Do you know where Colorado is? On the whole other side of the fucking country! This is not Monaco, Princess Grace. You can’t circle the kingdom in a couple of hours.”