The Dancer Upstairs (14 page)

The driver hooted. Indifferently, they stood aside. The girl in the white headband rummaged in her satchel, tilting it towards the rear window, as if searching for a crayon.

The driver spotted the aimed satchels and delved inside his jacket.

The Admiral, his smiling face flattened to the glass, was shot twice in the neck. According to the Admiral's maid, who had run to the window at the first two shots, there was then a single explosion. In fact three more bullets were fired.

Two rounds struck the driver. The car jerked forward and stalled in the road. The third hit the Admiral's assassin, who fell to the pavement, her jaw blown away.

Somehow the two unwounded schoolgirls managed to tug Prado and his driver from the car and lift their injured companion inside. The maid saw the dark blue Mercedes driving southwards.

I turned my car round and headed for the house in La Molina. Five minutes later Sucre rang back. A teacher had contacted police headquarters.

“There's a car abandoned near her school in Lurigancho. It sounds like the Mercedes.”

It was. I found it sideways in a ditch on the edge of the road to the airport, two wheels in the air. A tracery of blood covered the windscreen, and more dampened the back and front seats. Flies buzzed between the sticky surfaces. In the heat, the blood had begun to smell.

A hundred yards from the car a group of children volleyed an orange ball over a rope strung between lampposts. It was growing dark, but the ball remained bright, as if drawing to itself the fading light. I left my car beside the Mercedes and walked over.

The children – five girls, five boys – continued thumping their ball, not looking at me. I waited until the ball came near, then caught it.

“That car,” I said to the girl who ran up. “Who drove it?”

She squinted at the Mercedes.

“Never seen it before, chief.” A boy with a peaked Coca Cola cap sauntered over with the other boys. They looked from the car to me, hands on hips, panting.

I ignored them, and I asked the girl, “How long have you been playing here?” She drew an arm across her nose, sniffing.

I walked between the boys to a little girl at the back.

“You? How long have you been here?”

Her black hair was matted with sand where she had fallen.

“Ten minutes,” she whispered. They had started late. It was too hot to play earlier.

“You saw nothing?”

She shook her head, concentrating on her toe as it scraped a meaningless doodle in the dust.

Kneeling before her, I'm thinking I ought not to be here. Sylvina expects me at home. Six-thirty. Her friends would be arriving soon.

“What's the score?”

At this, the girl smiled. “Three-one. To us.”

“They would have come this way – the people from the car.” I bounced the ball. The boy with the peaked cap made a grab for it, but I was too quick.

In houses around us the lights snapped on. A shadow moved, drawing my attention to a girl I hadn't noticed. She bent over, transfixed by a patch of ground at her feet. I walked along the shadow towards her.

“What have you seen, little one?” I squatted on my haunches beside her, but she didn't answer. She didn't have to, because as soon as I touched a fingertip to the dark spot on the sand I realized it was blood.

I ran back to the car to radio Sucre for help.

“Here's another!”

I replaced the mike and saw in the distance the boys gathering in a huddle. They strode back across the pitch in a group, led by Coca-Cola Cap.

“Chief, what will you pay us for every drop of blood we find?”

“If we find what I'm looking for, I'll give you something.”

“No.”

My men wouldn't arrive for another ten minutes. There wasn't time to barter. “One peso.”

Two boys nudged each other.

“Five,” Coca-Cola Cap insisted.

“Two.” I wouldn't be able to claim it on expenses.

He looked at me, weighing up my offer, old eyes in a young face.

“Three.”

“OK, three.”

His lips came together in an awful smile. He half-turned and, inserting into that smile a dirty forefinger and thumb, he whistled.

I watched his acolytes haring up the bank. The girls didn't follow. They remained on the pitch, picking up their jackets, reluctant to take part.

I heard a shout. “Here's one!” As before, the boys gathered around it. The drop of blood held them in, then released them.

“Here's one!”

“Here's one!”

They receded in the deepening dusk, drawing together then separating again, a monstrous anemone expanding and contracting in the dark.

I tossed the ball to the girl with sand in her hair and set off after them, unfastening the holster on my belt.

The drops of blood led into a labyrinth of pale brick houses. Rusted angle-iron entrails poked from the roofs and corrugated sheets leaned in bundles against the unpainted walls. I pictured the wretched group struggling this way. Had they known where to go? Was there a safe house in an emergency? Were they expected?

The boys had assembled outside a single-storey house with low railings around it. They pointed to the steps, the concrete specked with blood. I drew my pistol. The boys stepped back a pace, all but for Coca-Cola Cap, who stood with his hands in his pockets, head at an angle, eyes missing nothing. I spoke again on the mobile. The nearest car was six kilometres away. I would have to act now, this minute.

I opened the gate and walked up the path. I felt no terror. That would come later, in the car driving home, in bed with Sylvina.

The door opened to my touch. I stepped into a narrow corridor. Ahead was a kitchen, to the right a glass door. Somebody flitted behind the glass. I pushed down the handle and kicked the door open, keeping back.

A body faced me on the floor, half propped against a black vinyl sofa and covered to the neck with a blanket. The head had been clumsily wrapped in a pink bath towel. All that could be seen of the face was a mouth, open at an angle, as if the skull underneath had skewered round and no longer fitted the skin. From the mouth came a wheezing sound.

Out of sight, a window rattled. I rushed into the room in time to see a flash of yellow hem disappearing over the sill. There was a loud report, and the body at my feet jerked. I threw myself to the floor, in the same motion firing twice at the window. I counted to five. When I ran to look there was no one there, and no one in the alley outside, and no noise.

I hurried back to the sofa. Under the bullet's impact the head had dropped to the floor and the blanket had slipped, revealing the brown and yellow uniform beneath. I peeled off the sodden towel. Still recognizable above the shattered jaw were the nose and eyes and hair of a young girl. Dead.

My mobile bleeped. Sucre, by the Mercedes, needing directions.

Outside the volleyball team waited for me. When they heard the door open, they jumped off the railings. Their leader advanced up the path. He held out his arm, opening his fist. He was even younger than the dead girl inside, younger than Laura.

“Two hundred and forty-nine pesos.”

That night, after the ambulance had removed the body to the police mortuary, we continued our search of the house. Sucre and I went through the front room while the forensic people completed work on the sofa. They had marked and tagged the towel and blanket and were tweezering the last fabric samples into a zippered plastic bag.

Around us, the havoc of a dismantled room.

“Hello.” Sucre had unscrewed the back of a stereo loudspeaker. Wedged inside, a black leather Filofax.

I flicked through the pages. There were some words written in blue biro, making no sense.

“I'll look at this tomorrow.”

I drove home.

The kitchen clock said ten to midnight. Sylvina was washing up. Her guests had left half an hour earlier.

“They killed Prado,” I said.

She didn't look up from the sink. “I know.” Consuelo, the last guest to arrive, had heard the announcement on her car radio.

“How was your evening?”

“It went well, thank you.”

Her shoulders betrayed her. Last night she had looked beautiful when trying on the dress.

“Sucre did call you?”

“Yes. Thanks.” She was angry, but pretending she wasn't.

“I'm sorry I couldn't be here.”

“I know. I understand.” She might have lost her temper, but she understood.

She stacked another bowl.

“I've kept some food for you.” She fetched the plate from the oven. Looking up, about to say something, she saw my shirt. “Agustín! You're covered in blood.”

Fourteen years ago she had rushed towards me like this. It was my third week at the Police Academy. Then it hadn't been blood, but dog shit.

She made me take off the shirt, emptied the sink, filled it with hot water, dropped the shirt in it.

I sat down and began to eat.

“Probably it's disgusting,” she said.

“She was only eleven or twelve.”

“Who was?”

“The girl from the group who killed Prado.”

“A street child?” She didn't mean to sound bitter.

“No.”

You can tell a lot about a corpse. She'd come from a family like ours. Mixed blood; good dental care in the few teeth spared by the bullet; tidily dressed – the headband we later traced to a sports shop used by Sylvina; and little opal earrings concealed by the hair she must have washed only yesterday. This wasn't a deprived child or an orphaned child or an illegitimate child abandoned to the streets. This was a well-tended child from a good home, and with parents who loved her.

“This is the extent to which Ezequiel indoctrinates people.”

I looked up. By the way Sylvina was pounding my shirt in the sink, I realized that I was behaving with no consideration for what my wife had been through. If you worry about something, you worry about it. She'd listened to me, but she had suffered her own miserable evening.

“Tell me about your dinner. Were you terrific?”

“Not here, Agustín. I'm tired.”

In bed, naked together, she said, “Please don't. I can't. I don't want to.”

I rolled back, lying beside her in the dark.

“Do you want to hear or don't you?”

“You know I do.”

She spoke for half an hour, conducting her own post-mortem. She talked at random, remembering what someone had said, providing another person's reaction. Until she drifted into sleep, one arm across her forehead, I was able to lose myself in another person's wretchedness.

I'd attended one of my wife's dinners a year before. The vogue then was charity, not books. Within six months they'd stopped raising money.

I conjured up her friends, braying women with their teeth in braces, tugging dogs into the hallway, plucking their shirts from their shoulders because of the heat. The images volleyed back and forth and sometimes they were mine.

“But Sylvina, what a wonderful pied à terre.”

She was too ashamed to invite these women home. I pictured them clinging to her in the gloom cast by the fluted Portuguese lamps, devouring with their degrading glances the tiny front room, the chairs in which they would sit before and after the meal, the lacquered dresser behind which Sylvina had tenderly arranged an incomplete set of green French coffee cups. From such inherited belongings she wove the mantles of her nostalgia.

I saw Sylvina, elegant in her mother's dress and bracelets, hastening to close the kitchen door, calling over her shoulder, “I'll just do this as an anti-cat measure,” before urging Patricia and Leonora to leave their dogs in Laura's room, where I hear Patricia whisper, “She looks like she's robbed the burial mound at Ur!” and I watch Leonora nod, indicating with a cruel uplift of her brow the tutu which Sylvina bought secondhand, and after they have shooed from the door their pets, a red setter and a dachshund, I follow them down the corridor, follow them past the mirror, observing their little flounce, follow them into the stifling room where, bounding up to their hostess, they say in unison, “What a dear little flat you have,” and Sylvina, blushing a little, starts to thank them when Marina interrupts, “Where's Agustín?” and Sylvina replies, “He's sorry, he has to work late,” and Marina says, “Consuelo's just told us, isn't it terrible? I mean, tonight Prado, Quesada on Monday – and weren't we at school with his wife?', this stimulating Leonora to admit through the braces on her teeth, “It's awful, I always found her so difficult,” prompting from Patricia, “They tell me at the theatre it was a woman who shot them,” and Sylvina to react, “Oh, I think I can relate to that. We have a repressed internal violence. Don't you think so?” which shocks Marina into saying, “But could you kill, Sylvina?” and Sylvina to answer, with her mind on me, on her smoked trout casserole, on the carnal adventures of a photographer cowboy, “I feel I could kill. I say that, but I don't know why,” before leaping up, having spotted a tail under a chair, “Pussy! I thought I'd locked you away!” this provoking Bettina to apologize, it must have been her, she'd mistaken the kitchen for the bathroom, but gosh it looks good whatever it is, which reminds Marina to ask Bettina from the side of her mouth, “The bathroom, tell me, I've forgotten?” and Marina walks from the room trailing in her wake a silence which is filled by the sound of Consuelo's electric fan – she'd brought it with her – and by Patricia who says, “Remind me, did Marina leave Marco or did he leave her?” to which Sylvina, getting up, replies diplomatically, “Oh, I think it was mutual,” as she prepares to offer each guest a monogrammed napkin and a plate arranged with slabs of veal paté and thick sausages of cheese which she encourages them to spread on squares of bread – “I'm sorry it's so soft, but I can't bear cheese that's been in a fridge” – and so on round the room, all accepting save Amalia who declines with the words, “This man everyone's talking about, Ezequiel, doesn't he sound fascinating,” to which Sylvina says, “Amalia, how do you keep your skin looking like that?” causing the other women in the room to concentrate, first on the portrait above the electric fire of Sylvina's great-uncle, for six months a Vice-President during the Bermudez dictatorship, and then, more respectfully, on themselves caught in the hallway mirror which, noting the direction of their glances, Sylvina explains she had erected for Laura who now has a marvellous teacher, “All thanks to Marina,” so releasing everyone to talk at once, even the taciturn Consuelo, the hostess of their last literary evening, a splendid affair on a lawn, who bursts out, “Don't tell me! That's wonderful,” this encouraging Sylvina, on her way to collect the casserole, to add in a raised voice, “She's hoping for a scholarship at the Metropolitan,” leaving her guests to nod to one another as if to say, “That dumpy little girl!” while they wait for her to wheel out the trolley, “No, it's quite all right, I can do this,” and out of politeness accept a small amount, “No, far too much, although it does look good. Really, I don't know how you do this on your own,” as Sylvina resumes, “She'll be able to dance in New York, London, Paris,” to which Leonora says, “Where our dogs come from,” and Amalia jokes, “And some of our second husbands, too!” and everyone laughs, before they coax the evening to its climax, the unavoidable moment when eight faces look up from their abandoned plates and forget the casserole and the heat and the absence of her anti-social husband and reassure Sylvina in a chorus warbling with anticipation, “Isn't this delicious? Isn't this fun?” and merge into a single creature, an oriental goddess with sixteen arms who pats her cat, her chair, her arm, and says, “Now, Sylvina, this book you've made us read . . .”