Yamil Corvalán’s body washed up a kilometer down from the bridge. At that point the Riachuelo has almost no current; it is calm and dead, with its oil and plastic scraps and heavy chemicals, the city’s great garbage can. The autopsy established that the boy had tried to swim through the black grease. He had drowned when his arms couldn’t move anymore. The police had tried for months to sustain the fiction that the teenager’s death was accidental, but a woman had heard his screams that night: “Please, please! Help! They pushed me in! I’m drowning!” the boy shouted. The woman hadn’t tried to help him. She knew it was impossible to get him out of the water except with a boat, and she didn’t have a boat. None of the neighbors did.
Emanuel’s body hadn’t surfaced. But his parents confirmed he had gone out with Yamil that night. And his running shoes had washed ashore, unmistakable because they were an expensive, imported brand. He’d surely stolen them, and he’d worn them that night to impress the girls at the dance club. His mother had recognized them immediately. She also said that Officers Cuesta and Suárez had been harassing her son, though she didn’t know why. The DA had questioned her in that very office the week the teenagers had disappeared. The woman had cried; she’d cried and said that her son was a good boy although yes, sometimes he stole and every once in a while he did drugs, but that was because his father had left them and they were very poor and the boy wanted things, shoes and an iPhone and all the stuff he saw on TV. And he didn’t deserve to die like that, drowned because some cops wanted to laugh at him, to laugh while he tried to swim in the polluted water.
No, of course he didn’t deserve it, she’d told the woman.
“Ma’am, I did not throw anyone in the river.” The cop leaned back in his chair. “And that’s all I’m saying.”
“As you wish. This was your chance to make a deal that could, maybe, lessen your sentence. We need to know where that body is, and if you give us that information, who knows, maybe you could go to a smaller jail or to the evangelist cell block. You know the evangelists would go easier on you.”
The cop laughed. He was laughing at her, and he was laughing at the dead boys.
“You think they’re gonna give me much time? For this?”
“I’m going to try to have you locked up for good.”
The DA was about to lose her cool. She squeezed her hands into fists. She looked into the cop’s eyes for a moment, and then he said very clearly, in a different, more serious voice, without a trace of irony:
“If only that whole slum would go up in flames. Or every last one of those people would drown. You don’t know what goes on there. You. You have no idea.”
—
She did have some idea. Marina Pinat had been DA for eight years. She’d visited the Villa Moreno slum several times even though it wasn’t required by her job—she could investigate from her desk like all her colleagues did, but she preferred to meet the people she read about in the files. Just months before, her investigation had helped a group of families win a case against a nearby tannery that had been dumping chromium and other toxic waste into the water for decades. It had been an extensive and complex civil suit she’d spent years working on. There were families who lived by the water and drank it, and though the mothers boiled it to try to get the poison out, their children got sick, consumed by cancer in three months, with horrible skin eruptions that ate away at their legs and arms. And some of them had been born with deformities. Extra arms (sometimes up to four), noses wide like felines, eyes blind and set close to their temples. She didn’t remember the name that the doctors, somewhat confused, had given that birth defect. She remembered one of them had called it “mutation.”
During that investigation she had met the slum’s cleric, Father Francisco, a young parish priest who didn’t even wear the white collar. No one came to church, he’d told her. He ran a soup kitchen for the children of the poorest families and he helped where he could, but he’d given up on any kind of pastoral work. There weren’t many faithful left, just a few old women. Most of the slum’s inhabitants were devotees of Afro-Brazilian cults, or they had adopted their own doctrines, worshipping personal saints like George or Expeditus, setting up shrines to them on corners. “It’s not bad,” he said, but he didn’t say mass anymore except when that handful of old women asked him to. It had seemed to Marina that, behind the smile, the beard, and the long hair—his look of a militant revolutionary from the seventies—the young and well-meaning priest was tired, burdened with a dark desperation.
When the cop left and slammed the door behind him, the DA’s secretary waited a few minutes before knocking on the door and announcing that someone else was waiting to see her.
“Not today, hon,” said Pinat. She’d been left exhausted and furious, as always when she had to talk with cops.
The secretary shook his head and his eyes implored her.
“Please, Marina, see her. You don’t know…“
“OK, OK. But this is the last one.”
The secretary nodded and thanked her with a look. Marina was already thinking about what to make for dinner that night, or if she felt like going out to a restaurant. Her car was at the mechanic’s but she could use the bike; the nights were cool and beautiful that time of year. She wanted to get out of the office, invite a friend out for a beer. She wanted that day to be over and the investigation too, and for the boy’s body to finally turn up once and for all.
While she was putting her keys, cigarettes, and some papers into her purse so she could leave quickly, a pregnant teenager came into her office; she was horribly skinny and didn’t want to give her name. Marina took a Coca-Cola from the small refrigerator she had under her desk and told her, “I’m listening.”
“Emanuel is in Villa Moreno,” said the girl between long gulps of soda.
“How far along are you?” Marina asked, indicating the girl’s belly.
“I dunno.”
Of course she didn’t know. Marina calculated the pregnancy was some six months along. The girl’s fingertips were burned, stained with the chemical yellow of the crack pipe. The baby, if it was born alive, would be sick, deformed, or addicted.
“How do you know Emanuel?”
“We all know him. Everyone in Moreno knows his family. I went to his funeral. Emanuel used to be kind of my sister’s boyfriend.”
“And your sister, where is she? Did she recognize him too?”
“No, my sister doesn’t live there anymore.”
“I’ll see. Go on.”
“People say Emanuel came out of the water.”
“The night they threw him in?”
“No. That’s why I’m here. He came out a couple of weeks ago. He’s only been back a little while.”
Marina felt a shiver. The girl had an addict’s dilated pupils, and in the half-light of the office, her eyes looked completely black, like a carrion insect’s.
“What do you mean he came back? Did he go somewhere?”
The girl looked at her like she was stupid and her voice became thicker as she held back laughter.
“No! He didn’t go anywhere. He came back from the water. He was in the water the whole time.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. I came to tell you because you need to know. Emanuel wants to meet you.”
She tried not to focus on the way the girl was moving her fingers, stained from the toxic pipe, interweaving them as if they didn’t have joints or were extraordinarily soft. Could she be one of the deformed children, the ones with birth defects from the polluted water? No, she was too old. But when had the mutations started? Anything was possible.