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“Don't worry about anything,” Jana said. “I'm sure Luz took some guy home with her.”

“No,” Paula replied. “Rule No. 1 is always to fuck at other people's places, never at your own. If the guy is a nutcase who wants to kill you, he'll have to get rid of the body, whereas at your place he can just leave and shut the door. No,” she repeated as if to convince herself, “Luz would never have done anything that stupid.”

Jana drove slowly under the flickering streetlights, peering into the shadows between abandoned warehouses and vacant lots. A steamboat in the last stages of decomposition was creaking against the broken-down dock, while farther on a couple of worn-out cranes and a sand barge completed the impression of neglect and decay. At dawn, the streets had emptied out: the trannies, the junkers of the prostitution game, had gone home.

“Except for sniffing dogs' hind ends, there's nothing to do here,” Jana said.

Paula, sitting beside her and clutching her fake zebra-skin purse on her knees, agreed.

“Let's have a look over by the stadium,” she said. “There are a couple of regular customers over there, you never know.”

The La Boca stadium was a cube of yellow and grayish-blue concrete painted with Coca-Cola signs: it was there that Maradona performed his first exploits before avenging a whole country for the Falkland Islands humiliation by beating England all by himself.

Dieguito was thinking about Maradona's sombreros, about the way he left the English team mystified, about the Goal of the Century, over and over.

“Whaaaa . . . ”

Dieguito was dribbling the stars. An effect of the
paco
, the dregs of the dregs of crystal meth he'd just sniffed after making the rounds of the neighborhood.

A hundred thousand
cartoneros
came down from the suburbs every day to collect and resell recyclable garbage: paper, metals, glass, plastic, cardboard, for forty-two centavos a kilo—a few cents. Among them were many children who knew each other from their neighborhoods or soccer clubs. Dieguito and his gang wore the jersey of the Boca Juniors, the club formed after the Río de la Plata team's departure to the wealthy neighborhoods—a betrayal that had never been pardoned. Naturally, number 10 was reserved for their leader.

“Whaaaa . . . ”

Dieguito was delirious. The rest of the gang was drinking a mixture of orange juice and 80-proof alcohol in plastic bottles, sprawling on the trampled flowerbeds at the north entrance: no one saw the Ford park in the shadow of the stadium.

Dieguito soon felt a presence over him, blinked his eyes to define its contours, and jumped back: a tranny was bending over him in a cream-colored coat with a stained collar and a dress below the knees . . . It took him a few seconds to come out of his trance and recognize Paula.

“What are you doing there,” the
cartonero
stammered.

“We're looking for Luz,” his guardian angel replied. “She was working the docks tonight: it's your sector, you must have seen her, no?”

Dieguito leaned back against the concrete pillar. There was an Indian with the tranny, whom the kid eyed with a disgusted air—she didn't even have any tits.

“Luz?” he said, his mouth feeling woolly. “Uh, no . . . ”

“You didn't see her because you were high or because she wasn't here?”

“Whoa!” the boy snorted. “We worked all night while you were getting fucked: you know where you can stick your comments?”

“Hey, do you want me to smash your face in with my purse?”

The rest of the gang slowly emerged, bandy-legged; they got up without enthusiasm.

Jana rephrased the question. “We're just asking you if you've seen Luz working tonight.”

“I don't know anything!” the kid yelped.

“You didn't see her all night?” Paula insisted.

“No! How many times do I have to say it?”

“Would it kill you to be friendly, Pinocchio?”

“Up yours! Yes!”

The gang started to form a circle around the trio.

“Is there a problem, Dieguito?” asked one of the
cartoneros
.

Paula shivered under her flounced dress: some of the kids bent down to pick up stones.

“Let's get out of here,” Jana whispered.

Followed by scruffy kids in shorts insulting them, they made their way back to the car and took off. Dark clouds weighed on the rising sun. The tranny's spirits were plummeting.

“Maybe Luz is sick,” Jana said, “and stayed home with the crud, she's probably sleeping like a stone. The thing she wanted to talk about may not be all that important . . . You're overreacting, honey.”

“She would have told me,” Paula said sullenly. “We had a date . . . ”

At the wheel of her old crate, Jana yawned.

“We'll find out tomorrow,” she said. “I'm dropping you off at your mother's house.”

“Can't I sleep with you?” her friend simpered, “just for tonight?”

“No, you kick too much.”

“That's because I run a lot in my dreams.”

“A cheetah with fingernail polish, sure.”

“I'm afraid I'll have an anxiety attack, Jana. Look,” she said, putting her hand on her fake breasts, “my heart is fluttering.”

“Yeah, sure.”

The Ford was moving down Don Pedro de Mendoza, an avenue that took them along the harbor on the way back downtown, when they saw the rotating light of a police car at the end of the docks.

 

*

 

The old car ferry was slouched in the brackish water of the Riachuelo, exhaling an odor of mud and decomposition. A few spindly bushes had grown up against the worm-eaten dock, and there were patches of reeds where oily trash accumulated, corks and plastic bottles. A big guy weighing around 250 pounds was bending over the murky water, flanked by a puny fellow who was running a flashlight beam over the metal structure.

“It doesn't smell good, boss,” the man said.

“Shine the light on it, you fool.”

Sergeant Andretti grumbled as his eyes followed the beam of trembling light: a body was floating among the jugs and greasy papers, half submerged in the dense mire. The pale body of a young boy, clearly naked, that somebody had thrown next to the ferry.

The policeman turned to look at the vehicle that was parked at the end of the docks: a strange couple soon emerged from it, a transvestite and a girl with black hair wearing an urban guerilla outfit.

“What are you doing there?”

Paula took a few steps toward the cops bending down in front of the bridge and saw the body swimming in the muck that was illuminated by the flashlight. She dug her nails into Jana's arm, her eyes popping out: it was Luz.

What's the matter?” Andretti asked. “Does she smell bad, your pal?”
Paula was throwing up her guts on the pavement, while two cops called in as backup were teetering at the foot of the ferry. Jana examined the policeman by the intermittent flashes of the revolving light.

“Does that amuse you?”

Fabio Andretti wore a boar-bristle mustache and carried a good fifty pounds too many. He shrugged in response. He was paid to get the parasites out of the neighborhood; he left the trannies to the social workers. His partner, Troncón, whom he'd had to kick in the ass to wake him up in a cell at the station so they could go on patrol, kept back. A pimply man in his twenties wearing a cap too big for him, Jesus Troncón was not feeling well: he'd never seen a naked body floating in shit. They were just now pulling it toward the docks.

Andretti hitched up the belt that supported his equipment and the inexorable bulge of his belly. The early morning sunlight was touching the tops of the gray low-cost housing towers—there were no witnesses other than these two clowns. He turned toward the Indian with her high cheekbones, her eyes still fixed on him.

“O.K.,” he sighed. “We'll start over from zero. What's her name?”

“Luz,” Jana answered.

“Luz what?”

“No idea.”

“I thought you knew her?”

“I only know her tranny name,” Jana explained.

“Sure. How about you, over there?” he asked the guy in a dress. “Do you know the stiff's real name?”

Paula was choked with sobs, perched on her stiletto heels, ridiculously small compared to the former butcher's boy. She didn't want to believe that this little monkey curled up below the ferry was Luz.

“Or . . . Orlando,” she finally said.

“That's all?”

Paula nodded, realizing bitterly that she didn't even know Luz's last name. She pulled a Kleenex out of her zebra-striped bag and wiped her mouth while Andretti scribbled the information in a notebook, his big, sausage-like fingers covering half the pen.

“What are you doing down here at this hour?” he asked again.

“Luz didn't show up for a date with my friend,” Jana said. “Since we knew she was working the docks, we went to see.”

The cop's smell washed over her, a kind of aftershave for the feet.

“See what?”

“Why she hadn't come. Luz and Paula work together, you must know that because you're from around here.”

Andretti looked at her shrunken breasts.

“And you, who are you?”

“Just a friend.”

“How about her,” he said, pointing to Paula. “Who's she, his aunt?”

Fabio Andretti had the bulk of an aging wrestler and a dark sense of humor.

“If it was a mother crying over her murdered kid, you wouldn't talk like that,” Jana remarked. “But a homo crying over a whore, that's really funny, isn't it?”

“Watch what you say, kid.”

“You too.”

Troncón stiffened as if he'd been stung. In Argentina, people often spoke informally but the
negrita
was playing with fire. The sergeant's bovine expression became sharper.

“You want me to take you in, you and your tranny friend?”

The colossus was putting his hand on the nightstick that hung from his belt—it would be a pleasure to smash in her ribs—when one of the cops behind him cursed.

“
La concha de tu madre!
Boss! Boss! Come have a look at this!”

“What's going on?”

“Boss . . . ”

Andretti looked at Luz's body, which had just been pulled up on the pavement, dripping with putrid water, and swallowed his indignation: the kid no longer had any genitals. His penis, testicles, and everything had been cut off from the pubic bone to the scrotum. All that was left was a black, festering wound, mixed with mud.

“Shit,” he mumbled through his mustache.

Terrified, her face ashen, Paula retched one last time and vomited a black liquid on Troncón's shoes. Andretti also paled on seeing the young man's emasculated body. The cops on the night squad remained silent, their hands crossed, in accord with their duty.

“Cordon this off,” Andretti panted, “now!”

People were starting to gather at the end of the docks. Andretti was still crouching over the body, the crack of his big buttocks showing between his shirt and his pants. It was against the rules, but he did it anyway: he put on a pair of plastic gloves and turned the body over. There was no sign that the boy had been shot in the back, but there was a deep wound under the left shoulder blade. A knife, maybe—it was difficult to tell with all the mud. Neither the head nor the abdomen seemed to have been injured. There were no clothes lying around, nor a purse. They'd search all the nearby trash bins; if they were lucky, the murderer would have thrown things away in a hurry. Then one detail attracted his attention. He shined his Maglite on the corpse's rectal area, which was in particularly bad shape: there was something shapeless there, a clump of flesh and hair. He swallowed. Was it a penis? What else could it be? What could it be but the kid's penis?

Andretti stood up rather heavily. His men had cordoned off the crime scene, the emergency services men were arriving, attracting crowds of onlookers.

“O.K.,” he said to his team. “Let's pack this up.”

Troncón stood nearby, his shoes covered with vomit.

“What do we do with the two whores, boss?”

The tranny was sitting on the pavement, trembling, supported by the Indian.

“We'll take 'em in,” Andretti growled.

 

*

 

“
Pelotudos
,” “
Cornudos
,” “
Soretes
,” “
Larvas
,” “
Culos rotos
,” “
Flor de san puta
”
2
: to judge by the graffiti that peppered the walls of the police station, opinion regarding La Boca's cops was unanimous.

Head of the night squad, Fabio Andretti had begun his career as a butcher's assistant in Colalao del Valle, a village in Tucumán, when a friend of his uncle suggested that he join the police, where he “knew some people.” Fabio had taken him up on the offer and very quickly understood what could be gotten out of this line of work. Working lousy jobs in shabby police stations, he had more than once fought with officers and their subordinates who supplemented their paychecks by robbing the local scum, thieves or drug dealers who were unlikely to file complaints. He received promotions for good and loyal service and was transferred. Fabio Andretti had joined the night squad in La Boca, Buenos Aires, where his rank of sergeant made him responsible to no one but the chief of police, who, between delivering official speeches referring to new directives that no one would follow, spent his time collecting bribes. A common and long-standing practice. At the end of the dictatorship, President Alfonsin had cut off a few too prominent heads, but since Menem closed his eyes to anything that did not involve money, most of the policemen had kept their jobs and still operated with near impunity. Murders, cases of “itchy trigger finger,” sequestrations, tortures or beatings, every year there were an enormous number of complaints concerning minors tortured or strangled in the police stations.