The Insufferable Gaucho

Police Rat

My name is José, though people call me Pepe, and some, usually those who don’t know me well, or with whom I’m not on familiar terms, call me Pepe the Cop. Pepe is a benign, well-meaning, genial diminutive, neither scornful nor flattering, and yet the appellation does imply, if I can put it this way, a certain affection, something more than detached respect. Then there’s the other name, the alias, the tail or the hump that I lug around cheerfully, without taking offense, partly because it’s never or almost never used in my presence. Pepe the Cop: it’s like tossing affection and fear, desire and abuse into the same dark bag. Where does the word cop come from? It comes from copper, he who cops or caps, that is captures, takes hold of, nabs, in other words, he who has the authority to arrest and hold, who doesn’t have to answer to anyone, who has impunity. And they call me Pepe the Cop because that’s exactly what I am; it’s a job like any other, but few people are prepared to take it on. If I’d known what I know now when I joined the force, I wouldn’t have been prepared to take it on either. What made me join the police force? That’s a question I’ve often asked myself, especially lately, and I can’t come up with a convincing answer.

I was probably dimmer than most in my youth. Maybe I was disappointed in love (though I can’t actually recall being in love at the time), or maybe it was fate; maybe I realized I was different, and looked for a solitary job, a job that would allow me to spend hour after hour in the most absolute solitude, but would, at the same time, be of some practical use, so I wouldn’t be a burden on anyone.

In any case, there was a vacancy for a police officer and I applied and the bosses took a look at me, and in less than half a minute the job was mine. One of them at least, and maybe the others as well, already knew that I was one of Josephine the Singer’s nephews, although they were careful not to go spreading it around. My brothers and cousins — the other nephews — were normal in every way, and happy. I was happy too in my way, but it was obvious that I was related to Josephine, that I belonged to her line. Maybe that influenced the bosses’ decision to give me the job. Or not — maybe I was just the first to apply. Maybe they thought no one else would, and if they made me wait, I’d change my mind. I really can’t say. All I know for sure is that I joined the force and from the very first day I spent my time wandering through the sewers, sometimes the main ones, where the water flows, sometimes the branch sewers, where we are constantly digging tunnels to gain access to new food sources or provide escape routes or link up with labyrinths that seem, at first glance, to serve no purpose, and yet all those byways go to make up the network in which our people circulate and survive.

Sometimes, partly because it was one of my duties and partly because I was bored, I’d leave the main sewers and the branch ones too and go into the dead sewers, conduits frequented only by our explorers and traders, usually on their own, but occasionally accompanied by their spouses and obedient offspring. There was nothing in there, as a rule, just terrifying noises, but sometimes, as I made my way cautiously through that hostile territory, I would come across the body of an explorer or the bodies of a trader and his young children. In the early days, when I was still raw, those discoveries terrified me; I would be so disturbed it was as if I became someone else. What I would do was carry the body out from the dead sewer to the police outpost, which was always deserted, and there I’d try to determine there the cause of death as well as I could with the means at my disposal. Then I would go to fetch the coroner and, if he was in the mood, he’d get dressed or change his clothes, grab his bag and accompany me to the outpost. Once we were there, I’d leave him alone with the corpse or the corpses and go out again. When our police officers discover a body, instead of returning to the scene of the crime, they generally make a vain effort to mix with civilians, working alongside them and participating in their conversations, but I’m different, I don’t mind going back to inspect the crime scene and look for details that might have escaped my notice, and retrace the poor victims’ steps or sniff my way, cautiously of course, back up the tunnel from which the attack had been launched.

After a few hours I’d return to the outpost and find the coroner’s note tacked to the wall. Causes of death: slit throats, loss of blood, broken necks; and there were often lacerations to the paws — our kind never give in without a fight, we struggle to the last. The killer was usually some carnivore that had strayed into the sewers, a snake, sometimes even a blind alligator. There was no point pursuing them; most died of hunger before long anyway.

When I took a break I’d seek out the company of other police officers. I met one who was very old and withered by age and work; he had known my aunt and liked to talk about her. Nobody understood Josephine, he said, but everyone loved her or pretended to, and she was happy — or pretended to be. Those words were Chinese to me, like a lot of what that old officer said. I’ve never understood music; it’s not an art that we practice, except on rare occasions. In fact, we don’t practice (and therefore don’t understand) any of the arts, really. Every now and then a rat who paints, for example, will appear in our midst, or a rat who writes poems and takes it into his head to recite them. As a general rule, we don’t make fun of those individuals. On the contrary, we pity them, because we know that they’re condemned to solitude. Why? Well, because creating works of art and contemplating them are activities in which our people as a rule are unable to take part, and the exceptions, the mavericks, are very few, so if, for example, a poet or even just a reciter of poetry comes along, it’s most unlikely that another poet or reciter will be born in the same generation, which means that the poet may never encounter the only individual capable of appreciating his efforts. Which is not to say that we won’t interrupt our daily occupations to listen to the poet or applaud him, or even move that the reciter be granted a pension. On the contrary, we do everything in our power — or rather what little we can — to provide the maverick with a simulation of understanding and affection, since we know that, fundamentally, affection is what he or she requires. Any simulation, however, collapses eventually, like a house of cards. We live in a collective, and what the collective depends on is, above all, the daily labor, the ceaseless activity of each of its members, working toward a goal that transcends our individual aspirations but is nevertheless the only guarantee of our existence as individuals.

Of all the artists we have known, or at least of those who remain in our memories like skeletal question marks, the greatest was, without a doubt, my aunt Josephine. Great in the sense that she made exceptional demands on us; incommensurably great in the sense that our community acquiesced or pretended to acquiesce to her whims.

The old police officer liked to talk about her, but his memories, I soon realized, were as flimsy as a cigarette paper. Sometimes he said that Josephine was fat and tyrannical, and that dealing with her required enormous patience or an enormous sense of sacrifice, two not unrelated virtues, both quite common among us. Sometimes, however, by contrast, he said that all he had glimpsed of Josephine — he’d have been an adolescent, just starting out in the force — was a shadow, a tremulous shadow, trailing a range of odd squeaking noises, which constituted, at the time, the entirety of her repertoire, yet could, if not transport her listeners, certainly plunge some of those in the front row into a state of extreme sadness. Those rats and mice, of whom we have no record now, are perhaps the only ones to have glimpsed something in my aunt’s musical art. But what? They probably didn’t know themselves. Something indefinite, a lake of emptiness. Something resembling the desire to eat, perhaps, or the need to fuck, or the longing for sleep that sometimes overtakes us, since those who work without respite must at least sleep from time to time, especially in winter, when the temperature falls, as they say the leaves fall from the trees in the outside world, and our chilled bodies yearn for a warm corner to share with our kind, a burrow full of hot fur and the familiar movements and sounds — such as they are, neither coarse nor gracious — of our everyday nocturnal life, or the life that we call nocturnal for the sake of convenience.

The difficulty of finding warm places to sleep is one of the main disadvantages of being a police officer. We generally sleep alone, in makeshift holes, sometimes in unfamiliar territory, although of course, whenever possible, we try to find an alternative. Sometimes, but not very often, we curl up in holes that we share with other police, all eyes shut, ears and noses on alert. And sometimes we go to the sleeping quarters of those who, for one reason or another, live along the perimeter. As you would expect, they are quite unperturbed by our presence. Sometimes we say goodnight before falling exhausted into a warm and restorative sleep. Sometimes we simply mumble our names; our hosts know who we are and know they have nothing to fear from us. They treat us well. They don’t make a fuss or show any sign of joy, but they don’t throw us out of their burrows. Occasionally someone will say, in a voice still thick with sleep, Pepe the Cop, and I will reply, Yes, yes, good night. After a few hours, however, while all the others are still sleeping, I get up and start again, because police work is never done, and our hours of sleep have to be fitted in around the incessant demands of the job. Patrolling the sewers is a task that requires the utmost concentration. Generally we don’t see or meet with anyone; we can do the rounds of the main and branch sewers, and go into the disused tunnels originally dug by our people, all without coming across a single living being.

We do, however, glimpse shadows, and hear noises — objects falling into the water, distant squeaking. At the begining, when you’re new to the job, you’re hypersensitive to those noises and you live in a state of perpetual fright. As time goes by, however, you grow accustomed to them, and although you try to stay alert, you lose the fear, or build it into the daily routine, which is the same as losing it, in the end. There are even police officers who have slept in the dead sewers. I have never met one personally, but the old guys often tell stories in which an officer, back in the old days, of course, overtaken by fatigue, would curl up and go to sleep in a dead sewer. How seriously should we take those stories? I don’t know. No police officer today would dare to do such a thing. The dead sewers are places that have been forgotten for one reason or another. When the tunnel-diggers reach a dead sewer, they block the tunnel. The water in them barely flows at all, so the putrefaction is almost unbearable. It is safe to say that our people only use the dead sewers to flee from one zone to another. The quickest way to get into them is by swimming, but swimming in such places involves greater risks than we are usually prepared to take.

It was in a dead sewer that my investigation began. A group of our pioneers who, over time, had multiplied and settled just beyond the perimeter came and told me that the daughter of one of the older rats had disappeared. While half the group worked, the other half went looking for this girl, who was called Elisa, and who, according to her relatives and friends, was very beautiful and strong, as well as possessing a lively intelligence. I wasn’t sure exactly what possessing a lively intelligence meant. I associated it vaguely with cheerfulness, but not curiosity. I was tired that day, and after examining the area in the company of one of the missing girl’s relatives, I conjectured that the unfortunate Elisa had been the victim of some predator roaming in the vicinity of the new colony. I looked for traces of the predator. All I found were old tracks, which showed that other creatures had passed that way, before the arrival of our pioneers.

Finally I discovered a trail of fresh blood. I told Elisa’s relative to go back to the burrow and I continued on my own. The trail of blood was curious: it kept stopping at the edge of a canal, but then reappearing a few yards further on (and sometimes many yards further), always on the same side, not the far side, as one might have expected. Whatever had left that trail clearly wasn’t trying to cross the canal, so why had it kept getting into the water? In any case, the trail itself was barely detectable, so the precautions taken by the predator, whatever it was, seemed, at first, to be excessive. After a while I came to a dead sewer.

I got into the water there, and swam toward a bank of accumulated rotting trash, and when I reached it I had to climb up a beach of filth. Beyond the bank, above water level, I could see the thick bars at the top of the sewer’s entrance. For a moment I was afraid I might find the predator huddled in some corner, feasting on the body of the hapless Elisa. But I could hear nothing, so I kept going.

A few minutes later, among cardboard boxes and old food cans, I found the girl’s body left in one of the few relatively dry parts of the sewer.

Elisa’s neck was torn open. Apart from that, I couldn’t see any other wound. In one of the cans I found the remains of a baby rat. I examined them: dead for at least a month. I searched the surroundings but couldn’t detect the slightest trace of the predator. The baby’s corpse was complete. The only wound on poor Elisa’s body was the one that had killed her. I began to think that perhaps it hadn’t been a predator. Then I put the girl on my back and picked up the baby in my mouth, trying not to damage his skin with my sharp teeth. I retreated from the dead sewer and returned to the pioneers’ burrow. Elisa’s mother was large and strong, one of those specimens who can face up to a cat, but when she saw the body of her daughter, she burst into long sobs that made her companions blush. I showed them the body of the baby and asked them if they knew anything about him. No one knew anything, no child had been lost. I said that I had to take both bodies to the station. I asked for help. The mother carried Elisa’s body. I carried the baby. When we left, the pioneers returned to work, digging tunnels, looking for food.

This time I went to fetch the coroner and stayed with him until he finished examining both bodies. Elisa’s mother, asleep beside us, was seized from time to time by dreams, which wrested incomprehensible and incoherent words from her. After three hours the coroner had decided what he was going to tell me; it was what I had been afraid to imagine. The baby had died of hunger; Elisa had died from the wound to her throat. I asked him if that wound could have been inflicted by a snake. I don’t think so, said the coroner, unless it’s a new kind of snake. I asked him if the wound could have been inflicted by a blind alligator. Impossible, said the coroner. Maybe a weasel, he said. Weasels have been seen in the sewers recently. Scared to death, I said. That’s true, replied the coroner. Most of them die of hunger. They get lost, they drown, they’re eaten by alligators. We can forget the weasels, said the coroner. Then I asked him if Elisa had struggled with her killer. The coroner looked at the girl’s corpse for a long time. No, he concluded. That’s what I thought, I said. While we were talking, another police officer appeared. His rounds, as opposed to mine, had been quite uneventful. We woke Elisa’s mother. The coroner said goodbye. Is it all over? asked the mother. It’s all over, I replied. She thanked us and left. I asked my colleague to help me get rid of Elisa’s corpse.

The two of us took it to a canal where the current was strong and threw it in. Why don’t you throw out the baby’s body too? asked my colleague. I don’t know, I said, I want to examine it, maybe we missed something. Then he went back to his beat and I went back to mine. I asked every rat I met the same question: Have you heard anything about a missing baby? I got all sorts of answers, but in general our people look after their young, and what they told me was all second-hand. My rounds took me back to the perimeter. The pioneers were working on a tunnel, all of them, including Elisa’s mother, whose bulky, greasy body could barely squeeze through the crack, but her teeth and claws were still the best for digging.

I decided to go back to the dead sewer and try to see what it was that I had missed. I looked for tracks but couldn’t find any. Signs of violence. Signs of life. The baby hadn’t made its own way into the sewer, that much was obvious. I looked for food scraps, traces of dried shit, a burrow, all in vain.

Suddenly I heard a faint splashing. I hid. After a while I saw a white snake break the surface of the water. It was thick and must have been a yard long. I saw it dive and resurface a couple of times. Then it emerged cautiously from the water and scaled the bank, making a hissing sound like a leaking gas pipe. For our people, that snake was as lethal as gas. It approached my hiding place. Coming from that direction, it couldn’t attack directly, which meant, in principle, that I had time to escape (but once in the water I would be easy prey) or sink my teeth into its neck. It was only when the snake went away without any sign of having seen me that I realized it was blind, a descendant of those pet snakes that humans flush down the toilet when they get tired of them. For a moment I felt sorry for it. And I celebrated my good luck in an indirect way. I imagined the snake’s parents or great-great-grandparents descending through the infinite network of sewer pipes; I imagined their bewilderment in the darkness of the sewers, not knowing what to do, resigned to death or suffering, and I imagined the few that survived, adapting themselves to an infernal diet, exercising their power, sleeping and dying in that endless winter.

Fear stimulates the imagination, it seems. When the snake was gone, I resumed my methodical search of the dead sewer. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The next day I talked with the coroner again. I asked him to take another look at the baby’s corpse. At first he looked at me as if I’d gone insane. Haven’t you got rid of it? he asked. No, I said, I want you to check it over one more time. Eventually he promised he would, as long as he didn’t have too much work that day. As I did my rounds, waiting for the coroner’s final report, I kept looking for a family that had lost a baby in the previous month. Unfortunately, the work we do, especially those who live near the perimeter, keeps us constantly on the move, and by then the mother of the dead baby could well have been digging tunnels or searching for food several miles away. Unsurprisingly, my inquiries didn’t yield any promising leads.

When I returned to the station I found a note from the coroner — and another from my commanding officer, asking me why I still hadn’t got rid of the baby’s corpse. The coroner’s note confirmed his earlier conclusion: there were no wounds; the cause of death had been hunger and possibly also exposure to the cold. The little ones are particularly vulnerable to harsh environmental conditions. I thought about it long and hard. The baby must have cried itself hoarse, as any baby would in a situation like that. Surely his cries would have attracted a predator? Why hadn’t they? The killer must have snatched the baby, then used back ways to reach the dead sewer. And there, he had left the baby alone and waited for him to die, of natural causes, as it were. Could it have been the baby-snatcher who later killed Elisa? Yes, that was the most likely scenario.

Then a question occurred to me, something I hadn’t asked the coroner, so I got up and went looking for him. On the way, I saw many rats who seemed carefree or playful or preoccupied with their own problems, scurrying in one direction or the other. Some of them greeted me warmly. Someone said, Look, there goes Pepe the Cop. The only thing I could feel was the sweat beginning to soak all through my fur, as if I’d just crawled out of the stagnant waters of a dead sewer.

I found the coroner sleeping alongside five or six other rats, all of them, to judge from their weariness, doctors or medical students. When I roused him from his sleep he looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. How many days did he take to die? I asked him. José, is that you? asked the coroner. What do you want? How many days does it take a baby to die of hunger? We left the burrow. Why did I ever become a pathologist? said the coroner. Then he thought for a while. It depends on the baby’s constitution. Two days or less in some cases, but a plump, well-nourished baby could last five days or more. And without drinking? I asked. A bit less, said the coroner. Then he added: I don’t know what you’re trying to get at. Did he die of hunger or thirst? I asked. Hunger. Are you sure? As sure as you can be in a case like this, said the coroner.

Back at the station I got to thinking: the baby had been taken a month ago and probably took three or four days to die. He must have been crying all that time. And yet the noise hadn’t attracted any predators. I returned to the dead sewer once again. This time I knew what I was looking for and it didn’t take me long to find it: a gag. All the time he was dying, the baby had been gagged. No, not all the time. Every now and then the killer had taken off the gag and given the baby a drink, or maybe left it on, but soaked the cloth with water. I picked up what was left of the gag and got out of that dead sewer.

The coroner was waiting for me at the station. What did you find there, Pepe? he asked when he saw me. The gag, I said, handing him the scrap of dirty cloth. The coroner examined it for a few seconds, without touching it. Is the baby’s body still here? he asked me. Get rid of it, he said, people are starting to talk about the way you’re behaving. Talk about or criticize? I asked. It comes to the same thing, said the coroner before he left. I didn’t feel up to working, but I pulled myself together and went out. Apart from the usual accidents, which can be relied upon to blight everything we undertake, it was a routine beat like any other. When I returned to the station, after hours of exhausting work, I got rid of the baby’s body. For days there were no new developments. There were attacks by predators, accidents, old tunnels collapsed, several of our number were killed by a poison before we could find a way to neutralize it. Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us. Routine and mettle. Recovering bodies and recording incidents. Identical, calm days. Until I found the bodies of two young rats, a female and a male.

I had heard they were missing on my rounds of the tunnels. The parents weren’t worried; they thought the young couple had probably decided to go and live together in a different burrow. But as I was leaving, not overly preoccupied by the double disappearance, someone who had been friends with them both told me that neither the young Eustaquio nor the young Marisa had ever expressed any such wish. They’re just friends, good friends, which is remarkable given Eustaquio’s peculiarity. And what kind of peculiarity is that? I asked. He composes and declaims verse, said the friend (so he was obviously unfit for work). And what about Marisa? Not her, said the friend. What do you mean, not her? I asked. She doesn’t have any peculiarity like that. To another police officer, these details would have seemed irrelevant. But my instincts were alerted. I asked if there was a dead sewer anywhere near the burrow. They told me that the closest one was a mile away, at a lower level. I set off in that direction. Along the way I came across an old rat followed by a group of youngsters. The old guy was warning them about weasels. We said hello. He was a teacher leading an excursion. The youngsters weren’t ready yet for work, but nearly. I asked them if they’d noticed anything strange in the course of their outing. Everything is strange, shouted the old guy, as we went off in opposite directions, strange is normal, fever is health, poison is food. Then he burst into cheerful laughter, which went on ringing in my ears, even when I turned into another passage.

After a while I came to the dead sewer. Sewers in which the water is stagnant are all pretty much the same, but I can usually tell, with a fair degree of certainty, whether or not I’ve been in a particular dead sewer before. That one was unfamiliar. I examined the entrance for a while, looking for a dry way in. Then I jumped into the water and swam. As I drew closer I thought I could see waves coming from an island of detritus. Naturally, I was worried about running into a snake, and I swam toward the island as quickly as I could. The ground there was soft; I sunk into a whitish mud up to my knees. The smell was the same as in all the dead sewers, not decomposing matter so much as the inner essence of decomposition. I made my way slowly from island to island. Occasionally I had the impression that something was clutching at my feet, but it was only trash. On the last island I found the bodies. There was only one wound on young Eustaquio’s body: his throat was torn open. It was clear that young Marisa, however, had put up a fight. Her skin was covered with bites. I found blood on her teeth and claws, from which it was simple to deduce that the killer had been wounded. I struggled with the bodies one at a time, and finally got them out of the sewer. Then I tried to transport them to the nearest settlement, carrying one for fifty yards, putting it down, going back for the other. At one point, as I was going back for young Marisa’s body, I saw a white snake that had come out of the canal and was heading toward her. I froze. The snake wrapped itself twice around her body, then crushed it. When it began to swallow her, I turned and ran to where I’d left Eustaquio. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t even let out a whimper.

From that day on, I intensified my investigations. I was no longer satisfied with routine police work: patrolling the perimeter and dealing with problems that anyone with a modicum of common sense could solve. Every day I went out to the furthest burrows. I engaged their inhabitants in the most trivial conversations. I discovered a colony of rat-moles living among us, performing the lowliest tasks. I met an old white mouse, a white mouse who couldn’t remember his age. In his youth he had been inoculated with a contagious disease, along with many of his kind, white mice who had been imprisoned and then released into the sewers in the hope of killing us all. Many died, said the white mouse, who could barely move, but the black rats and the white mice interbred, we fucked like crazy (as only those who are close to death can fuck) and in the end not only did the black rats become immune, but a new species also emerged: brown rats, resistant to any infection, any alien virus.

I liked that old white mouse who was born, so he said, in a laboratory on the surface. The light is blinding up there, he said, so bright that the surface dwellers don’t even appreciate it. Have you been to the sewer mouths, Pepe? Yes, once or twice, I replied. So you’ve seen the river that the sewers all flow into, you’ve seen the reeds, the pale sand? Yes, but always at night, I replied. So you’ve seen the moonlight shimmering on the river? I didn’t really notice the moonlight. What did you notice, then, Pepe? The barking of the dogs, the packs of dogs that live by the river. The moonlight too, I admitted, but I couldn’t really enjoy the view. The moon is exquisite, said the white mouse; if someone were to ask me where I’d like to live, I would reply without hesitation: the moon.

Like a moon-dweller I patrolled the sewers and underground drains. After a while I found another victim. As before, the killer had left the body in a dead sewer. I picked it up and carried it to the station. That night I spoke with the coroner again. I pointed out the similarity between the tear in the throat and the other victims’ wounds. It could be a coincidence, he said. And whatever’s doing this doesn’t eat them, I said. The coroner examined the body. Look at the wound, I said. Tell me what kind of teeth rip the skin like that. Any kind, any kind, said the coroner. No, not any kind, look carefully. What do you want me to say? said the coroner. The truth, I said. And what is the truth, in your opinion? I think these wounds were made by a rat, I said. But rats don’t kill rats, said the coroner, looking at the body again. This one does, I said. Then I went to work and when I returned to the station I found the coroner and the chief commissioner waiting for me. The commissioner didn’t beat around the bush. He asked me where I’d got the crazy idea that a rat had been responsible for the crimes. He wanted to know if I had shared my suspicions with anyone else. He warned me not to. Stop fantasizing, Pepe, he said, and concentrate on doing your job. Real life is complicated enough without inventing unreal things that are bound to throw it out of joint. I was dead tired; I asked him what he meant by out of joint. I mean, said the commissioner, looking at the coroner as if to seek his approval and adopting a deep and gentle tone of voice, that in life, especially if it’s short, as our lives unfortunately are, we should strive for order, not disorder, and especially not an imaginary disorder. The coroner looked at me gravely and nodded. I nodded too.

But I remained alert. For several days the killer seemed to have disappeared. Every time I went to the perimeter and made contact with a new colony, I asked about the first victim, the baby who had died of hunger. Finally an old explorer told me about a mother who had lost her baby. They thought it had fallen into the canal or been taken by a predator. But since there were many children in that group and only a few adults, they didn’t spend a long time looking for the baby. Shortly afterward, they moved to the northern sewers, near a big well, and the explorer lost touch with them. When I had some time to spare, I went looking for that group. I knew they would have multiplied since the baby’s disappearance; the children would have grown up, and perhaps they would have forgotten. But if I was lucky enough to find the baby’s mother, she would still be able to tell me something. The killer, meanwhile, was on the loose. One night I found a body in the morgue with the killer’s signature wound: the throat was torn open, almost neatly. I spoke with the police officer who had found the body. I asked him if he thought it had been a predator. What else could it be? he said. You think it was an accident, do you, Pepe? An accident, I thought. A permanent accident. I asked him where he had found the body. In a dead sewer down south, he replied. I suggested that he keep an eye on the dead sewers in that sector. Why? he wanted to know. Because you never know what you’ll find there. He looked at me as if I were crazy. You’re tired, he said, let’s get some sleep. We went to the station’s sleeping room. The air was warm. Another police rat was snoring in there. Good night, said my colleague. Good night, I said, but I couldn’t sleep. I started thinking about the killer’s movements, the way he sometimes struck in the north and sometimes in the south. After tossing and turning for a while I got up.

I headed north, stumbling along. On the way I came across some rats who were setting off to work in the dim

tunnels; they were confident and resolute. I heard some youngsters saying, Pepe the Cop, Pepe the Cop, then laughing, as if my nickname were the funniest joke in the world. Or maybe they were laughing for some other reason. In any case I didn’t stop.

Gradually the tunnels were all deserted. Only now and then did I encounter a pair of rats or hear them going about their business down other tunnels, or glimpse their shadows huddled around something that could have been food, or poison. After a while, the noises stopped and I could hear only the sound of my heart and the dripping that never ceases in our world. When I came to the big well, the reek of death made me tread even more warily. Half consumed by maggots, the carcasses of two average-size dogs lay there, rigid, paws sticking up.

The colony of rats I’d been looking for was also exploiting the canine remains, a little further on. They were living near the sewer mouth, with all the dangers that entails, but also the advantage of extra food, which is never scarce on the frontier. I found them gathered in a small open space. They were big and fat and their coats were glossy. They had the serious expression of those who live in constant danger. When I told them I was a police officer, a suspicious look came into their eyes. When I told them I was looking for a rat who had lost her baby, no one answered, but from their expressions I could tell straightaway that my search, or that part of it at least, was over. Then I described the baby, his age, the dead sewer where I had found him, the way he had died. One of the rats said that the baby was her son. What do you want? asked the others.

Justice, I said. I’m looking for the killer.

The oldest rat, with a scar-covered hide, asked me, puffing like a bellows, if I thought the killer was one of them. It could be, I said. A rat? she asked. It could be. The mother said her baby used to go out alone. But he couldn’t have got into a dead sewer alone, I replied. Maybe he was taken by a predator, said a young rat. A predator would have eaten the body. This baby was killed for pleasure, not food.

As I’d expected, they all shook their heads. It’s unthinkable, they said. There’s no way one of us, however crazy, could be capable of something like that. Still smarting from the police commissioner’s words, I judged it wiser not to contradict them. I nudged the mother to an out-of-the-way place and tried to console her, although the truth is that after three months — that was how long it had been — the pain of the loss had considerably diminished. She told me that she had other children, some grown up and hard for her to recognize, and some younger than the one who had died, who were already working and foraging successfully on their own. Nevertheless, I tried to get her to remember the day when the baby had disappeared. At first she was confused. She got the days mixed up; she even mixed up her babies. Alarmed by this, I asked her if she had lost more than one, but she reassured me, saying, No, babies do get lost, though usually only for a few hours, and they either come back to the burrow on their own, or are found when a member of the group hears them crying. Your son cried too, I said, slightly annoyed by her self-satisfied expression, but the killer kept him gagged most of the time.

She didn’t seem moved, so I went back to the day of the baby’s disappearance. We weren’t living here, she said, we were in a drain in the interior. A group of explorers was living nearby; they had been the first to settle in the area, and then another group came, a bigger one, and we decided to move; we had no alternative really, apart from wandering around the tunnels. I pointed out that in spite of all this, the children were well nourished. There wasn’t a shortage of food, but we had to go and search for it outside. The explorers had dug tunnels that led directly to the upper regions, and no poison or traps could stop us. All the groups went up to the surface twice a day, at least; there were rats who spent whole days up there, wandering through the old half-ruined buildings, using the cavities in the walls to get around, and there were some who never came back.

I asked her if they were outside the day her baby disappeared. We were working in the tunnels, some were sleeping, and there were probably some outside as well, she replied. I asked her if she’d noticed anything strange about anyone in the group. Strange? Abnormal behavior or attitudes; long, unexplained absences. No, she said, as you should know, the way we behave depends on the situation; we try to adapt to it as quickly and as fully as possible. Shortly after the baby’s disappearance, in any case, the group set off to find a safer area. I could tell I wouldn’t get anything more out of that simple, hard-working rat. I said goodbye to the group and left the drain they were using as their burrow.

But I didn’t return to the station that day. Halfway there, when I was sure no one had followed me, I doubled back and went looking for a dead sewer near the drain. After a while I found one. It was small and the stench wasn’t overpowering. I examined it thoroughly. The rat I was looking for didn’t seem to have used that place. Nor did I find signs of predators. Although there wasn’t a dry place anywhere, I decided to stay. In order to make myself a little more comfortable, I gathered what pieces of damp cardboard and plastic I could find and settled myself on them. I imagined the warmth of my fur against the damp materials producing little clouds of steam. The steam began to make me feel drowsy; then it seemed to be forming a dome within which I was invulnerable. I’d almost fallen asleep when I heard voices.

Before long they appeared in the distance: two young male rats, talking animatedly. I recognized one of them straightaway — he was from the group that I had just visited. The other one was completely unfamiliar; maybe he’d been working at the time of my visit, maybe he belonged to another group. The discussion they were having was heated, but without overstepping the bounds of civility. Their arguments were incomprehensible, partly because they were still a way off (though, splashing through the shallow water on their little paws, they were heading straight for my refuge), and partly because they were using words that belonged to another language, a language that rang false, that was alien to me, and instantly revolting: words like pictograms or ciphers, words that crawl on the underside of the word freedom, as fire is said to crawl into the tunnels, turning them into ovens.

I would have liked to scurry away discreetly. But my police instincts were telling me that unless I intervened, another murder was about to be committed. I jumped off the pile of cardboard. The two rats froze. Good evening, I said. I asked them if they belonged to the same group. They shook their heads.

You, I said, pointing to the rat I didn’t know with my paw, out of here. The young rat seemed to have a reputation to defend; he hesitated. Out of here, I’m a police officer, I said. I’m Pepe the Cop, I shouted. Then he glanced at his friend, turned and left. Watch out for predators, I said to him before he disappeared behind a mound of trash, there’s no one to help you if you get attacked by a predator in the dead sewers.

The other rat didn’t even bother to say goodbye to his friend. He stayed there with me, quietly, waiting until we were alone, with his thoughtful little eyes fixed on me, as I guess mine were studying him. I’ve got you, finally, I said when we were alone. He didn’t answer. What’s your name? I asked. Hector, he said. Now that he was speaking to me, his voice was no different from thousands I had heard. Why did you kill the baby? I asked softly. He didn’t answer. For a moment I was scared. Hector was strong, and probably bigger than me, and younger too, but I was a police officer.

Now I’m going to tie your paws and your snout and take you to the police station, I said. I think he smiled, but I’m not sure. You’re more scared than I am, he said, and I’m pretty scared. I don’t think so, I replied, you’re not scared — you’re sick, you’re a disgusting predatory bastard. Hector laughed. You’re scared, though, aren’t you, he said, much more than your aunt Josephine was. You’ve heard of Josephine? I asked. I’ve heard of her, he said, Who hasn’t? My aunt wasn’t scared, I said, she might have been a poor crazy dreamer, but she wasn’t scared.

You’re wrong there; she was scared to death, he said, glancing sideways distractedly, as if we were surrounded by ghostly presences and he were discreetly seeking their approval. The members of her audience were scared to death as well, although they didn’t know it. But she didn’t die once and for all: she died every day at the center of fear, and in fear she came back to life. Words, I spat. Now lie face down while I tie your snout, I said, taking out the cord I had brought for that purpose. Hector snorted.

You’ve got no idea, he said. Do you think the crimes will stop if you arrest me? Do you think your bosses will give me a fair trial? They’ll probably tear me to pieces in secret and dump my remains where predators will take them. You’re a damn predator, I said. I’m a free rat, he replied impudently. I’m at home in fear and I know perfectly well where our people are headed. His words were so presumptuous I chose not to dignify them with an answer. Instead I said, You’re young. Maybe there’s a way to cure you. We don’t kill our own kind. And who’s going to cure you, Pepe? he asked. And your bosses? Where are the doctors to cure them? Lie face down, I said. Hector stared at me; I dropped the cord. Our bodies locked in a fight to the death.

After ten eternal-seeming minutes, he lay beside me, lifeless, his neck crushed by a bite. As for me, my back was covered with wounds, my snout was torn open and I couldn’t see anything out of my left eye. I took his body back to the station. The few rats I encountered no doubt supposed that Hector had been the victim of a predator. I left his body in the morgue and went to find the coroner. It’s all solved now, were the first words I could articulate. Then I slumped to the ground and waited. The coroner examined my wounds and sewed up my snout and my eyelid. As he was attending to me, he asked how it had happened. I found the killer, I said. I stopped him; we fought. The coroner said he had to call the commissioner. He clicked his tongue and a thin, sleepy-looking adolescent emerged from the darkness. I assumed he was a medical student. The coroner told him to go the commissioner’s place and tell him that the coroner and Pepe the Cop were waiting for him at the station. The adolescent nodded and disappeared. Then the coroner and I went to the morgue.

Hector’s body was lying there and his coat was beginning to lose its gloss. It was just another body now, one among many. While the coroner was examining it, I took a nap in a corner. I was woken by the commissioner’s voice and a couple of shoves. Get up, Pepe, said the coroner. I followed them. The commissioner and the coroner scurried down tunnels that were unfamiliar to me. I followed them, half asleep, watching their tails, with an intense burning pain in my back. Soon we came to an empty burrow. There, on a kind of throne, or maybe it was a cradle, I saw a seething shadow. The commissioner and the coroner told me to go forward.

Tell me the story, said a voice that was many voices, emerging from the darkness. At first I was terrified and shrank away, but then I realized that it was a very old queen rat — several rats, that is, whose tails had become knotted in early childhood, which rendered them unfit for work, but endowed them, instead, with the requisite wisdom to advise our people in critical situations. So I told the story from beginning to end, and tried to make my words dispassionate and objective, as if I were writing a report. When I finished, the voice that was many voices emerging from the darkness asked me if I was the nephew of Josephine the Singer. That’s correct, I said. We were born when Josephine was still alive, said the queen rat, shifting herselves laboriously. I could just make out a huge dark ball dotted with little eyes dimmed by age. The queen rat, I conjectured, was fat, and a build-up of filth had immobilized her hind paws. An anomaly, she said. It took me a while to realize that she was referring to Hector. A poison that shall not spell the end of life for us, she said: a kind of lunatic, an individualist. There’s something I don’t understand, I said. The commissioner touched me on the shoulder with his paw, as if to stop me from speaking, but the queen rat asked me to explain what it was that I didn’t understand. Why did he let the baby die of hunger, instead of ripping his throat open, as he did with the other victims? For a few seconds all I could hear from the seething shadow was a sound of sighing.

Maybe, she said after a while, he wanted to witness the process of death from beginning to end, without intervening or intervening as little as possible. And, after another interminable silence, she added: We must remember that he was insane, that we are in the realm of the monstrous — rats do not kill rats.

I hung my head and stayed there, I don’t know for how long. I might even have fallen asleep. Suddenly I felt the commissioner’s paw on my shoulder again, and heard his voice ordering me to follow him. We went back the way we had come, in silence. Just as I had feared, Hector’s body had disappeared from the morgue. I asked where it was. In the belly of some predator, I hope, said the commissioner. Then I was told what I had already guessed. It was strictly forbidden to talk about Hector with anyone. The case was closed, and the best thing for me to do was to forget about him and get on with my life and my work.

I didn’t feel like sleeping at the station that night, so I found myself a place in a burrow full of tough, grimy rats, and when I woke up I was alone. That night I dreamed that an unknown virus had infected our people. Rats are capable of killing rats. The sentence echoed in my cranial cavity until I woke. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I knew it was only a question of time. Our capacity to adapt to the environment, our hard-working nature, our long collective march toward a happiness that, deep down, we knew to be illusory, but which had served as a pretext, a setting, a backdrop for our daily acts of heroism, all these were condemned to disappear, which meant that we, as a people, were condemned to disappear as well.

I went back to my daily rounds; there was nothing else I could do. A police officer was killed and torn to pieces by a predator; there were several fatalities as a result of more poisoning from the outside; a number of tunnels were flooded. One night, however, I yielded to the fever that was consuming my body and returned to the dead sewers.

I’m not sure whether that sewer was one of those in which I’d found a victim, or even if I’d been there before. All dead sewers are the same, in the end. I spent a long time in there, hiding, waiting. Nothing. Only distant noises, splashes: I couldn’t say what caused them. When I returned to the station, with red eyes from my long vigil, I found some rats who swore they’d seen a pair of weasels in the tunnels nearby. There was a new police officer with them. He looked at me, waiting for some kind of sign. The weasels had cornered three rats and several young in the end of a tunnel. If we wait for backup it’ll be too late, said the new officer.

Too late for what? I asked, yawning. For the young and their guardians, he replied. It’s already too late, I thought, for everything. I also thought: When did it become too late? Was it in the time of my aunt Josephine? Or a hundred years before that? Or a thousand, three thousand years before? Weren’t we damned right from the origin of our species? The officer was watching me, waiting for a cue. He was young and he couldn’t have been on the job for more than a week. Some of the rats around us were whispering, others were pressing their ears to the walls of the tunnel; most of them, it was all they could do to stop themselves from shaking and running away. What do you suggest? I asked. We do it by the book, replied the officer, we go into the tunnel and rescue the young.

Have you ever taken on a weasel? Are you ready to be torn apart by a weasel? I asked. I know how to fight, Pepe, he replied. There was nothing much left to say, so I got up and told him to stay behind me. The tunnel was black and stank of weasel, but I know how to move in the dark. Two rats came forward as volunteers and followed us.