The Dancer Upstairs (15 page)

In less than a week Ezequiel had scrambled from the unmarked grave prepared for him by Quesada. From now on he would seek to burn his name on hillsides which could be seen from China to Peru. Every Cabinet Minister daily expected death.

We had no leads for Quesada's murder. At least the assassination of the Defence Minister provided two solid clues. They survived the night and were there when I woke. There was the small body in the mortuary, which might be traceable. And there was the Filofax Sucre had discovered in the loudspeaker.

The diary pages were blank save for two entries which read like assignations. “C.C. 9.30” (23 April) and “C.D. 6.00” (15 July). Maps of the capital and of Miami were inserted into the front, and a guide to phrases in English: Please give me Thousand Island Dressing – that sort of thing.

The importance of Sucre's find was limited to two unlined pages clipped into the Filofax immediately after the diary. These had been filled in arbitrarily, with the randomness of notes jotted down at different times. One page consisted of a crude diagram in the shape of a church door, four mathematical calculations, and a reference to page numbers twenty-seven to thirty-one of the medical journal, the Lancet. We would trace this eventually to an article, two years old, on a breakthrough in the treatment of erythremia. The sums might have been straightforward adding and subtracting; somebody balancing their cheque book or checking a grocery bill. Or they might have meant something else.

Ten phrases were listed on the facing page. Some, obviously, were book titles, but it wasn't clear if these were works someone had read, or books to be bought from a shop.

Most I couldn't decipher. For all I knew, “Arquebus” was a racehorse – or was it some cold-blooded codeword? The few words or phrases I understood meant nothing. “Revolution No 9” is a song by The Beatles. “Pausanias” was a Greek traveller and a tedious character in Plato's Symposium. I guessed “W. I.” to be Washington Irving – and this in fact I verified when Ezequiel, during my interrogation, began quoting a passage about how certain desert tribes, if their dedication were great enough, could gallop out of nowhere to conquer an empire.

As for the other phrases, well, only last week I was sitting here, reading a book – Pessoa, it was – when that line about knowing nothing of oneself leapt out at me. It made me think that if I live long enough, perhaps I'll come to understand the rest of them.

Nothing on that list was as important as the three handwritten addresses on the reverse of the page. All were in the capital. One might be the house of the girl with the white headband.

They didn't let you smoke in the mortuary. The pathologist finished his cigarette in the corridor, then pushed open the door. He slid her from the refrigerator and with both hands drew back the sheet. He repeated the process with the Admiral and the Admiral's driver until the three bodies lay side by side, as if members of the same family. The ammoniac smell reminded me of Sylvina's sink.

Two reddish mosquito bites pimpled the Admiral's chin. Otherwise his face, frozen into its tired expression, had the bluish-white blush of ice. The skin wrinkles had stiffened and there were scabs of mucous about his nose. More disturbing than the fatal mess to his neck was the bloated angle of his penis. Resting against his stomach, it seemed cocked in the semi-arousal which sudden death, pathologists tell us, can bequeath.

The eyelids had sprung open. The pathologist closed them.

When you get down to it, a dead body isn't something most of us can bear to talk about. We treat death by conventions. People are neatly removed by a single bullet. They drop to the ground in mid-stride. They die immediately.

Except that they don't die immediately. They keep moving. Breathing. Thinking. The Admiral died as instantaneously as it is possible for a man of sixty-five to die. Shot twice in the throat, he had suffocated to death. He had to have blood and he had to have oxygen, and both had been cut off by the girl's bullets. He was three minutes from the end when the first round caught him, but three minutes is three minutes. Struck by the bullets he had passed into shock, yet his brain had continued working. For three minutes he would still have had his thoughts; confused and delirious, but thoughts nevertheless. He would have felt some pain, although not to the degree you might have imagined, since that part of his brain which enabled him to feel pain was dying.

Certainly he wouldn't have experienced the kind of torment his assassin suffered over the next two hours. She had had a much harder time. Until the moment she was fired at from the window, she could still breathe.

It is not usual even for policemen to come across dead children. I forced my eyes from the calm forehead to the ruined face. The jaw was a frayed tangle of blackened flesh. Part of her tongue fell free, tasting the air where her chin should have been. The face was the same colour as mine, except at the back of the neck where the blood shone purplish through the skin. The upper teeth, intact and healthily white, formed the top half of an expression. Whether of pain or something else I couldn't tell.

What had she been trying to do, this girl? Had this been a game? When the bullet removed her jaw, did she see everything in a different light? Or, even then, was it worth it?

For a few seconds she had been alive with me in that room in Lurigancho. Four feet away, that's how far apart we'd been, the same distance as now divided her from the Admiral – and I had heard her breathing. After I kicked open the door her eyes blinked up at me, but because of the towel around her face it was impossible to read her expression. Did she know what was going on around her? What had that look meant? It had to mean something, from such a small creature in such extremity. Because the horrible thing about pain is that you're alone. No one can help you. I might have been able to help her, a little. But then the people she had thought her friends had fired a bullet into her chest.

The pathologist was speaking. “She had a nice little lunch beforehand. Lettuce, rice, meatballs, swallowed down with Inca-Kola, topped off with a Mars Bar.” He pulled back the sheet. “Before I tuck you away, little one, I'm going to put these up your nose.” He talked to her as though she lived: to cope, I suppose. When I arrived, he had just sawn apart her chest.

It may sound silly, but in the days ahead I hoped someone would recognize her. To track down her parents, her grandparents, anyone who had known her, we circulated an artist's impression to schools. For any person in the world there are hundreds of people who recognize their face. Think of those who would have come across this girl. She must have ridden on a bus wearing her yellow and brown uniform. From someone she must have bought her Mars Bars and her Inca-Kola. To someone she must have shown off her little opal earrings.

We heard nothing. No one came forward. That, to me, was Ezequiel's most terrible legacy. The idea that someone could not only send this child to her death, but not claim her.

Later that morning General Merino returned from the Palace.

He had driven off at nine o'clock, flanked by two police motorcyclists. He sat upright in the middle of the back seat, clutching my report, rehearsing, not seeing the houses he once cherished, dreading the interview ahead.

The room was almost pitch dark, he told me, just a light in a corner by a leather armchair. Calderón, in a black suit, finished writing something on a pad. He did not offer the General a seat. He stood up and sat, one leg dangling, on the edge of the desk. He wore black lace-up shoes, a tie of red and white horizontal stripes, round tortoiseshell glasses. His receding hairline was lavished neatly back, emphasizing the shape of its M.

“One of those faces you see in the business pages, Tomcat, with a smile thinner than his shoelace.”

Calderón had folded his arms. “Let us imagine that I am your superior.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I would wish to know why this man, this delinquent . . . No. Let me put this another way. I want what you have on him. Everything. All records. Is that understood? Nothing kept back.”

“No, Captain.”

Merino had seen the goblin shark, and it was kinder.

Without energy the General walked to the window and looked out towards the sea. He spoke rapidly, his hands behind his back, getting rid of the words as fast he could. “Calderón's ordered a curfew. From ten o'clock tonight. He's letting in the military. From now on it's a joint operation. We furnish the army with copies of our files, help any way we can. He has no choice. Prado was their man. Lache feels he's been made a fool of, especially after receiving Quesada's televised congratulations. His blood is up. Its bad, Agustín, bad, bad, bad.”

Already he'd had General Lache on the line. “A heap of underperforming blubber, that's how he described us.”

Behind his back, one hand twisted inside the other.

“Let us imagine Calderón's orders to Lache. ‘If you catch anybody who looks mean or looks like they once had a mean thought about the way things are here, slap him in gaol. Use any means. Screw due legal process. Plant drugs, torture them, keep them by force. If necessary, shoot them. You can't treat these people like rose petals.'”

He turned, looking at me. “You can see their point, Tomcat. We've been in charge of this for twelve years and what do we have to show for it? A girl from Lepe whom we haven't yet charged because she won't speak.” He brought one hand out from behind him, grimaced at his watch and made a calculation. “Well, forty-five minutes ago, four of General Lache's men went careering into the basement to sort out that particular problem. God knows where they've taken her, what they'll do.” He turned his head from one epaulette to the other. “I'm sorry, Colonel.”

I was leaving when he called me back. Something he had overlooked. Calderón, to finance the army's assistance in this joint-operation, had trimmed our budget.

“It means no more overtime.”

The cancellation of my overtime was a blow, I admit. The bank agreed to extend my overdraft for a short period. Regrettably, they could not increase the limit. Too many customers shared my predicament – those who hadn't had the sense to transfer their money abroad.

The need to discuss money with Sylvina had become more pressing than ever. But I dreaded the thought of her protestations. I knew what I meant to say, and quailed. She, not I, was in the right. She had been good about money. She had spent her mother's inheritance on us. She took care to buy everything as cheaply as possible. Yet for twenty years she had been forced to endure the torture of her friends' sympathy.

It shames me to acknowledge this, but I found in Sylvina's demoralization a further excuse to prevaricate. Her nerves had grown frailer in the phoenix days following Ezequiel's reappearance. Two days after her literary dinner she had a noisy row with the couple in the flat above, newcomers from the coast who parked outside our garage. About to leave for work, I had asked the husband to move his car. He obliged, but then his wife started shouting from the window. This was everyone's street. Just because we'd been here longer, it didn't mean I had a right to tell people where to park. “We're proud in Judio, too!” She withdrew her head then, as an afterthought, yelled “Poof!” I drove off, but unfortunately Sylvina, coming outside to see what the matter was, heard the insult. She stood in the middle of the street and raised her fist. “My husband is not a poof! Park your bloody car somewhere else!”

Once more the woman stuck out her head. “Poof!”

This was too much for Sylvina. She marched back inside and reemerged clasping a long screwdriver. In full view of the street and ignoring the woman's anguished cries, she scraped and scratched at the offending bonnet. She stood back to reveal the words: “This street should not be lived in by people like us.”

I agreed to meet the repair costs, but that, together with the blood money I had paid Coca-Cola cap, meant I was almost at the limit of my overdraft.

The curfew lasted from ten o'clock at night until six in the morning. Any person stopped on the street between those hours without a permit risked arrest.

Hungry for information, people started to pay attention to earlier reports from the provinces. As the press caught up with nine-year-old atrocities, mothers throughout the city could be heard telling their children not to accept parcels from strangers, no matter what they offered.

Nothing retained its innocence. A group of schoolgirls on a sidewalk shimmered with menace. In the suburbs, schools broke up early.

The curfew, introduced to defuse tension, exacerbated the panic. Ezequiel's shadow had darkened us. Not a day would pass when we didn't feel the draught of his wings.

In the cathedral, minutes before a service due to be led by the Arch-Cardinal, a bomb constructed from mining gelignite was discovered under the altarcloth.

The president of a television channel sympathetic to the government was shot in the chest outside a flower shop.

Four civil servants died at a restaurant in Monterrico when a beercan, hurled through the window from a llama sling, landed hissing on their table.

Car bombs exploded outside the Carnation Milk Factory, at a Miss Universe Pageant, and outside the American Ambassador's residence.