Hot Sur (15 page)

“Good Lord, Cleve, what a creature,” he said aloud, looking at the picture. “What a don’t-mess-with-me look your little friend has. This is a caged animal that has just realized that the fight is to the death.”

Rose had found out the true identity of the girl, had seen her picture, knew what she looked like, and now he needed to know more. He had to learn what her crime had been. He found nothing on the Internet under her real name, but he kept looking.

“I’m not saying that I was looking to blame her for Cleve’s death,” he tells me. “That couldn’t be, since she was in prison at the time of the bike accident. No, that couldn’t be. I was simply being guided by a scent, and everything seemed to indicate I was on to something.

“You want to know the only thing that I found on the Internet about María Paz’s crime?” he asks me. “It appeared months earlier in the
NY Daily News
; I Googled it. I printed it here if you want to read it; it refers to her as ‘the wife of the deceased,’ and she’s directly accused of the murder of her husband. Here you go. Make a copy if you want. I only ask that if you make it public, change the names. I know they’re on the Internet already, but I just don’t want them to become public because of me. Cleve would never have forgiven me. Just replace the names with
XXXX
.”

Retired Ex-Cop Murdered, Victim of a Hate Crime

On Wednesday night, at the corner of XXXX and XXXX, the lifeless body of retired police officer XXXX was found, apparently gunned down by gang members in a hate crime. According to forensic reports the victim, who was white, was struck by seven bullets, one of which fatally pierced his left ventricle. Upon the removal of the body, five other wounds were discovered, apparently inflicted postmortem with a blade instrument, one in the belly, on each hand, and on each foot. The ex-police officer, 57, had been retired from public service for eight years and been recently employed as a manager in a market polling organization. He was unarmed and wearing slippers on the night of the murder. Before fleeing, the assailants scrawled the phrase “Racist pig” on a wall at the crime scene.

XXXX, wife of the deceased, was arrested hours later in the apartment the couple shared a few blocks away, where a Blackhawk Garra II knife with which the deceased had been wounded was found and is now being held as physical evidence by the authorities. The knife had been wrapped in gift paper and was accompanied by a birthday card addressed to the deceased. The woman, 24, is Colombian-born, and worked as a pollster in the same company in which the victim was a manager. They had met there years before, and almost immediately afterward had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It has been confirmed that because XXXX was undocumented, she had obtained her job at the market research company using false papers and that she had afterward gained citizenship through her marriage with the retired police officer, who was an American citizen.

Shit, slippers,
Rose had thought on reading the article the first time. What most stayed with him was that “human detail,” as the owner of Mis Errores would have put it. An old cop who goes out in slippers to meet death. Rose asked himself if Cleve had known, or at least suspected, that his little kitten was a cold-blooded murderer. Because at the least, the victim should have been afforded the dignity of being dressed properly and wearing a pair of shoes. That human detail. Not to mention the spine-chilling gesture of gift-wrapping the murder weapon for the victim on the very day of his birthday. What kind of a monster was this María Paz?

“My, my, your Colombian was a deranged knife-wielder. What did you get into, boy? Who were you dealing with?” Rose asked the memory of his son, before going back to Googling the Blackhawk Garra II knives, like the one they had found gift-wrapped in María Paz’s house. As always, Googling revealed something, and according to the pictures in a catalog, it was a loathsome thing with a curved blade, a folding knife that was shaped like a claw as its name indicated, a claw to claw, a nail that pricks and penetrates. Made of black steel, the disgusting thing, sharpened so fine it was almost blue, with dips in the handle for the perfect grip, was a sadistic little toy that in the blink of an eye must have sliced through the cop’s flesh, as if through butter.

It was quite conceivable how a pretty girl would have grown bored of her old husband, how she’d have used him to make her situation legal and grown to hate the price she had to pay for it, such as the need for Viagra and other such limitations. Up to that point, there was a certain logic to the whole thing. But to go from that to knifing him when he was in his slippers? To get together with her friends, dark-skinned and young like her, salsa dancers all, to stab the fat husband to death with a Blackhawk Garra II? Rose began to feel uneasy in his own room, that friendly cavern in which he sought refuge since Edith had abandoned him, and where he wasn’t always disappointed, if the truth be told, because sleeping alone had its advantages. He was the kind of person who snored, hacked, and farted at night; and it was much easier to do it without anyone else there. But that night, not even his bedroom could bring him peace of mind, and he fell asleep troubled by that sinister story of a cop massacred by his own wife; he was distressed by the horror that his son, Cleve, could have had anything to do with that, even if indirectly.

He awoke at midnight thinking that Emperatriz, the Dominican cleaning lady, could hate him the way that Colombian woman had hated her ex-husband, the white ex-cop, that Emperatriz was friendly and helpful only to his face, that she brought him his slippers hiding nefarious intentions, that behind his back she muttered all the reasons for her contempt, that white man who treated her as a slave for a fistful of dollars, or something like that. And then a graver doubt struck him. Had Edith been right, all that time ago, to flee with the child from Bogotá? Had all the servants there hated them, the little white rich folks for whom they had to drive the car and mop the floor and go to the market and cook and clean the bathrooms and make flower arrangements? Had Rose and his family provoked in them a hidden anger, a shameful urge for violence, just as Edith had suspected? One thing was certain, guerrillas had infiltrated the group of workers in his company, and they were more than willing to kidnap the first gringo boss who got careless. It had not been easy for the Roses to live with that sword of Damocles hanging over them, and that is why Ian had not tried to dissuade Edith when she announced that she had had enough. And now, so many years later, in the Catskills Mountains around two in the morning, amid the sleeplessness and the jumble of sheets, the Latino conspiracy was growing at an exponential rate in Rose’s feverish brain. María Paz, Emperatriz, and the servants from Bogotá conspired with workers and guerrillas to attack the Anglos, whom they planned to assault and stab to death as soon as they were careless and put on their slippers or whenever they fell asleep.

There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile . . . hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.

I’m so hot,
he thought, as he changed his pajamas drenched in sweat. He needed to calm down, find his point of balance again. Best if he left the bedroom, the scene of his nightmare, and went into the kitchen, which was always cooler, with bare feet on the cold tiles, open some windows, refill the dogs’ water dishes, have a nice glass of apple juice with lots of ice. By the time he went back to bed, he was afraid to fall asleep lest the hallucinations begin again, so he put on the television and for the thousandth time watched
An American in Paris
with Gene Kelly. He fought sleep for another reason as well: he feared that if he fell asleep he’d return to Manninpox, that place that he despised but that was beginning to ensnare him as it had ensnared Cleve. Awake, he could escape its influence, but if he fell asleep, who knows? He’d run the risk of being transported there, as if sleepwalking through the woods, hypnotized, betrayed by his own steps that led toward those porous walls and forced him through them against his will, past the secluded courtyards and through the gloomy hallways that smelled like the circus, a bad combination of urine and disinfectant, as his until recently loyal Taylor & Son boots, in a sudden display of insolence, led him to the very entrails of the place, to its feverish heart, the tight rows of cells, where the feminine breath stuck to the walls like water stains, and where the pride of caged lionesses would be waiting for him, him, Ian Rose, to lick his face and destroy it with one blow. In spite of the apple juice, the nightmares continued, and Rose had no choice but to take the Effexor he had avoided taking that day. He began dozing off around dawn and was sound asleep halfway through
Some Like It Hot
, another movie he knew by heart. In the end, he did not know how he had been able to defend himself, or what masthead he had held onto to withstand the siren songs of the inmates of Manninpox; but as it was, he awoke late that morning safe in his own bed, or rather he was awakened by the hounding of his dogs, who did not understand why at that hour of the day they had not gone out or been fed breakfast.

Later, while taking a shower, Rose got an idea. Although “idea” isn’t exactly the word, more like the flash of an image that assaulted him along with renewed uneasiness about his years in South America, the solitary figure of a man nailed to a cross. That was it: he knew it immediately. The murder of the policeman had not been a hate crime as the press had asserted. That phrase “racist pig” could have well been on the wall before the murder; such graffiti was likely common in a multiracial and troubled neighborhood like the one in which María Paz lived. It was no wonder the neighbors had been complaining. But the thing with the ex-cop was about something else. It had been a crucifixion without a cross. The wounds on the body were the same as the ones on the crucified Jesus, one on each hand, one on each foot, and one on the side of the torso. Rose knew what the stigmata was because he had learned about it in Bogotá. Rose wasn’t a religious man and had never been interested in such things, but the issue had become a priority the moment that his son, Cleve, then seven years old and likely because of the influence of school lessons in Bogotá, announced that he wasn’t only going to become a Catholic but also a priest. Edith was horrified, one more reason for her to hate Bogotá. But Ian had taken it as a joke. “Do it if you want, son,” he had told Cleve. “It’s your choice. You can be a Catholic if that’s what you want, as long as you don’t become pope.” But when the boy began to swear that he saw the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the bark of trees, Ian Rose realized that the issue was serious and decided to look into it seriously. The Christ that he came to know in the Baroque churches of the colonial center of Bogotá had nothing to do with the fair and incorporeal bourgeois of his Protestant family. This South American Christ was a man of the people, a working-class hero who attracted crowds with his melodramatic confrontations, a poor man who suffered and bled with them, a Lord of the Wounds, a Master of Sorrow, who fascinated crowds with his masochistic displays. Rose grew frightened that his son had been influenced by such mentality, which according to him was extremely twisted, and that was another reason that he did not prevent Edith from taking the child out of Colombia. And now, there in the shower of his house in the Catskills, Ian Rose thought he understood all of a sudden that Greg, the ex-cop, had been murdered by crucifixion, or something like it. The crime had been a ritual murder, that was the essence of it, and not a hate crime as the papers asserted. Why should Rose believe the newspapers anyway? Since when did they know anything? María Paz offered a different version of events, so in a towel and still soaking wet, Rose went to his desk, took out the manuscript, and reread that part a few times. She maintained she was innocent, and her argument was quite convincing. But if that was the case, who the hell had crucified her husband? A gang of wrathful white haters, as the
NY Daily News
assumed, or some religious fanatics? And what about that gift-wrapped Blackhawk they found in her apartment?

From Cleve’s Notebook

Paz—that’s what María Paz wants to be called. Paz. “Mi Paz,” I wrote the other day. I don’t know why I used the possessive when referring to her, given she’s her own person and no one else’s. “Mi paz os dejo, mi paz os doy,” recited the Colombian priest, and I thought he was saying, “Mis pasos dejo, mis pasos doy,” confusing “peace” with “steps,” but so I repeated at the top of my voice along with the others, feeling as Catholic as any of them. And then there was a very meaningful liturgical chant that was my favorite, dealing with the anxiety of souls, and that in its high notes exclaimed, “Yo tengo sed ardiente, yo tengo sed de Dios.” And the neo-Catholic I was becoming, a zealot like any convert, sang, “Yo tengo seda ardiente.” So I had burning silk instead of a burning thirst, that’s what it sounded like to me, and that’s how I repeated it, kneeling with my eyes closed, racked with emotion, in a complete mystical state, so much so that one day I confronted my parents, who are Protestants, I think, I’m not sure, maybe they’re nothing, but in any case I told them I personally would be a full-fledged Catholic. My mother grew very concerned, but my father simply laughed. And although I never became a Catholic—or, for that matter, a Protestant—I’m still somewhat possessed by the burning thirst and I struggle against the universal tendency to replace the gods of Olympus with the stars of Hollywood. A bad habit, that tendency to demystify. A bad habit for me, I mean, who is a novelist and convinced that the heart of any good novel is nothing more than a camouflaged ritual whose only great concern is forgiveness or condemnation. And all you have to do is dig a little to find the victim and victimizer, the crucified and the crucifier. I also think that its central theme, however varied it may be, always deals more or less with the same thing: guilt and expiation. Just ask Fyodor.