“Call him on his cell phone, darling, you’re going to be fine, don’t you worry.”
She hung up. Miguel’s cell phone had been turned off for hours. In situations like this she missed her father, a complicated and not very affectionate man, but clear and decisive, a man who would never have gotten scared or angry over such a small thing. She remembered how he had taken care of her mother, driven mad by a brain tumor that eventually killed her. When he’d heard her screams not a muscle in his face had moved, but he hadn’t told her that everything was fine. Because everything wasn’t fine and it was stupid to deny it.
Like now: something bad was going to happen and it was stupid to deny it.
She tried to call his phone one more time, but it was still off or out of range. Then she heard Elly, growling in anger and then meowing wildly. The cat’s cries were coming from the bedroom. Paula ran.
A boy was sitting on the bed with Elly on his lap. He looked at her, and his glaucous eyes were crisscrossed with red veins and his eyelids were gray and greasy like sardines. He stank, too. His stench filled the room. He was bald and so skinny it was amazing he was alive. He was stroking the cat brutally, blindly, with a hand that was too big for his body. His other hand was around Elly’s neck.
“Let go of her!” screamed Paula.
It was the boy from the neighbor’s house. He had marks from the chain on his ankle; in some places they were bleeding and in others they oozed with infection. When he heard her voice the boy smiled, and she saw his teeth. They’d been filed into triangular shapes, like arrowheads, or like a saw. The boy brought the cat to his mouth with a lightning-fast motion and clamped the saw into her belly. Elly yowled and Paula saw the agony in her eyes while the boy’s teeth delved farther into her stomach. He buried his face, nose and all, in her guts, he inhaled inside the cat, who died quickly, looking at her owner with angry and surprised eyes. Paula didn’t run. She didn’t do anything while the boy devoured the animal’s soft parts, until his teeth hit her spine and he tossed the cadaver into a corner.
“Why?” Paula asked him. “What are you?”
But the boy didn’t understand her. He stood up on legs of pure bone, his sex disproportionately large, his face covered in blood, in guts and Elly’s silky fur. He seemed to be looking for something on the bed; when he found it, he lifted it up toward the ceiling lamp, as if he wanted Paula to see the object clearly.
He had her front door keys. The boy made them jangle and he laughed and his laughter was accompanied by a bloody belch. Paula wanted to run, but her legs were heavy as if in a nightmare. Her body refused to turn around; something was holding her there in the bedroom doorway. But she wasn’t dreaming. You don’t feel pain in dreams.
Under the Black Water
The cop came in with his head high and proud, his wrists free of cuffs, wearing the ironic smile she knew so well; he oozed impunity and contempt. She’d seen many like him. She had managed to convict far too few.
“Have a seat, Officer,” she told him.
The district attorney’s office was on the first floor and her window looked out onto nothing, just a hollow between buildings. She’d been asking for a change in office and jurisdiction for a long time. She hated the darkness of that hundred-year-old building, and hated even more that her cases came from the impoverished slums on the city’s south side, cases where crime was always mixed with hardship.
The cop sat down, and she reluctantly asked her secretary to bring two cups of coffee.
“You know why you’re here. You also know you are under no obligation to tell me anything. Why didn’t you bring your lawyer?”
“I know how to defend myself. And anyway, I’m innocent.”
The district attorney sighed and toyed with her ring. How many times had she witnessed this exact scene? How many times had a cop like this one denied, to her face and against all evidence, that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what the cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to “work” for them—to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.
“Officer, we have your voice on tape. Would you like to hear the recording?”
“I don’t say anything on that tape.”
“You don’t say anything. Let’s have a listen, then.”
She had the audio file on her computer, and she opened it. The cop’s voice came through the speakers: “Problem solved. They learned to swim.”
The cop snorted. “What does that prove?” he asked.
“By the time stamp as well as your words, it proves that you at least knew that two young men had been thrown into the Ricachuelo.”
Pinat had been investigating the case for two months. After bribing police to talk, after threats and afternoons of rage brought on by the incompetence of the judge and the DAs who’d come before her, she had put together a version of events on which the few final and formally obtained statements agreed: Emanuel López and Yamil Corvalán, both fifteen, had gone dancing in Constitución and were returning home to Villa Moreno, a slum on the banks of the Riachuelo. They went on foot because they didn’t have money for the bus. They were intercepted by two cops from the thirty-fourth precinct who accused them of trying to rob a kiosk; Yamil had a knife on him, but that attempted robbery was never confirmed, since there was no police report. The cops were drunk. They beat the teens almost unconscious on the riverbank. Next, they kicked them up the cement stairs to the lookout on the bridge over the river, then pushed them into the water. “Problem solved, they learned to swim,” were the words that Officer Cuesta, the accused man who was now in her office, had said over the official radio. The idiot hadn’t had the conversation erased; all her years as DA had also accustomed her to that, to the impossible combination of brutality and stupidity she encountered in the cops she dealt with.