The driver sounded frightened, genuinely frightened. She told him yes. Certainly, she’d tried to convince the dead boys’ lawyer to come with her, but he had plans he couldn’t change. “You’re crazy, Marina,” he’d told her. “I’ll go with you tomorrow, but today I can’t.” But she’d been single-minded. And what was she worried about, after all? She’d gone to Moreno several times before. It was the middle of the day. A lot of people knew her; no one would touch her.
She threatened to complain about the driver’s behavior to the owners of the taxi service; what a scandal to leave a judiciary official on foot in that area. She couldn’t move the man an inch, which was the reaction she expected. No one went near the slum around Moreno Bridge unless it was unavoidable. It was a dangerous place. She herself had left behind her little tailored suits she always wore in the office and in court, opting instead for jeans, a dark shirt, and nothing in her pockets except money to get home and her telephone, both so she could communicate with her contacts in the Villa and so she’d have something valuable to hand over if she was mugged. And of course her gun, which she had a license to use, was discreetly hidden under her shirt. Not so hidden, though, that the outline of its butt and barrel couldn’t be seen on her back.
She could enter the Villa by walking down the embankment to the left of the bridge alongside an abandoned building that, strangely, no one had decided to occupy. It was rotting away, corroded by damp, sporting ancient signs advertising massages, tarot readings, accountants, loans. But first she decided to go up onto the bridge; she wanted to see and touch the last place Emanuel and Yamil had seen before they were murdered by police.
The cement stairs were dirty and reeked of urine and rotten food, but she headed up them at a trot. At forty years old, Marina Pinat was in good shape; she went jogging every morning and the court employees whispered that she was “well-preserved” for her age. She detested those murmurings; she wasn’t flattered, they offended her. She didn’t want to be beautiful, she wanted to be strong and razor sharp.
She reached the platform the boys had been thrown from. She looked down at the stagnant black river and couldn’t imagine falling from up there toward that still water, couldn’t fathom how the drivers of the cars passing intermittently behind her hadn’t seen a thing.
—
She left the bridge and walked down the embankment by the abandoned building. As soon as she set foot on the street that led into the Villa, she was disconcerted by the silence. It was terribly quiet. That silence was impossible. The neighborhood—any slum, even this one, where only the most idealistic or na?ve social workers dared to tread, even in this dangerous and shunned place—should have been full of varied and pleasant sounds. That was how it always was. The different rhythms of music mixing together: the slow, sensual cumbia villera; that shrill mix of reggae with a Caribbean beat; the always-present cumbia santafesina, with its romantic and sometimes violent lyrics; the motorcycles with their exhaust pipes cut, roaring as they got going; all the people who came and bought and walked and talked. The sizzling grills with their chorizos and chickens, their skewers of meat. The slums always teemed with people, with running kids, with teenagers in baseball caps drinking beers with dogs.
The Moreno Bridge slum, however, was now as dead and silent as the water in the Riachuelo.
As she took her phone from her back pocket, she had the feeling she was being watched from the alleyways that were darkened by electrical wires and clothes drying on lines. All the blinds were drawn, at least along that street that edged the water. It had rained, and she tried not to step in the puddles so she wouldn’t get muddy as she walked—she could never stand still when she talked on the phone.
Father Francisco didn’t answer. Nor did Emanuel’s mother. She thought she could find the small church without a guide; she remembered the way. It was near the entrance to the Villa, like most parish churches. In the short walk there she was surprised at the utter absence of shrines to popular saints—the Gauchito Gils, the Yemojas, even some virgins who usually had a few offerings. She recognized a small yellow-painted house on one of the villa’s corners and was comforted to know she wasn’t lost. But before she turned that corner, she heard faint steps that squelched—someone was running behind her. She turned around. It was one of the deformed children. She realized it immediately—how could she not? Over time, the face that was ugly on babies had become more horrible: the very wide nose, like a cat’s, the eyes wide apart, close to the temples. He opened his mouth, perhaps to call her; he had no teeth.
His body was eight or ten years old, and he didn’t have a single tooth.
The boy came up to her, and when he was beside her she could see how the rest of his defects had developed; the fingers had suckers and were thin like squid tails (or were they legs? She never knew what to call them). The boy didn’t stop when he reached her. He kept walking toward the church as if guiding her.
The church looked deserted. It had always been a modest house, painted white, and the only indication it was a religious building had been the metal cross on the roof. It was still there, but now it was painted yellow, and someone had decorated it with a crown of yellow and white flowers; from afar they looked like daisies. But the walls of the church were no longer clean. They were covered in graffiti. From up close Marina could see that they were letters, but they didn’t form words: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. The order of the letters, she noticed, was always the same, but it still made no sense to her. The deformed boy opened the church door; Marina shifted her gun to her side and went in.
The building was no longer a church. It had never had wooden pews or a formal altar, just chairs facing a table where Father Francisco gave his sporadic masses. But now it was completely empty, the walls covered in graffiti that copied the letters outside: YAINGNGAHYOGSOTHOTHHEELGEBFAITHRODOG. The crucifix had disappeared, as had the images of the sacred heart of Jesus and Our Lady of Luján.
In place of the altar there was a wooden pole stuck into a common metal flowerpot. And impaled on the pole was a cow’s head. The idol—because that’s what it was, Marina realized—had to have been recently made, because there was no smell of rotting meat in the church. The head was fresh.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she heard the priest say. He had entered the building behind her. When she saw him she was even more convinced that something was horribly wrong. The priest was emaciated and dirty, his beard was overgrown and his hair was so greasy it looked wet. But the most startling thing was that he was drunk, and the stench of alcohol oozed from his pores. When he came into the church it was as if he’d poured a bottle of whiskey over the filthy floor.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he repeated, and then he slipped. Marina noticed the trailed drops of fresh blood that led from the door to the cow’s head.
“What is this, Francisco?”
It took the priest a while to answer. But the deformed child, who had stayed in a corner of what had once been the church, said: