THE DARK ROOMS under the Palace of Justice were empty again and more or less clean. Policemen took the same fire hoses that they were sometimes forced to train on difficult prisoners and used them to scour down the walls and the hard concrete floors until the blood came off and the smell of terrified incontinence was washed away. The round iron grilles sunk in every floor gurgled with clean water and the grille in Cell 7 trapped a glittering golden tooth.

Upstairs in his office at the very back of the Detectives’ Hall Commandante Camillo was on his second cigar of the day and his fifth coffee, and it was beginning to affect his digestion. All through the bomb investigation there had been calls from the capital sometimes three a day, then one a day, then a couple of times a week and now, nothing. There was no reason to be alarmed. Nobody had called to ask why there was no progress on the bombing. Commandante Camillo found that the most disturbing thing of all. There were so many reasons why they might not call for answers. Maybe they already knew. Maybe it was just a little bomb in a little town far away up the Merino. Commandante Camillo saw all the reasons and his mind danced in the gaps between them. Maybe it wasn’t important. Maybe they just didn’t care, and that was very, very worrying.

Commandante Camillo wanted to find the answer—not that he cared about the answer. He just wanted to prove that it could be found and that he could find it.

The boy Miralles was mad, the Commandante was sure about that, but not so mad that he couldn’t make a bomb and plaster himself all over Plaza Universidad. And he got the bomb from somewhere. Somebody gave him the bomb; either handed the whole thing over and told him which switch to press or gave him the parts and taught him how to screw them together. But there was nothing to show either way. After all the long hours of questioning, nothing. One of the boy’s cousins had admitted that he didn’t like girls—another one, they were everywhere now—and his Aunt Laura turned in Uncle Arturo for screwing his tax return, but that was it. Five minutes in the cell with their arms up their backs and the whole family was queuing to confess, but that was the best they could come up with. Nobody even mentioned the oppression of the peasants. Nobody mentioned a bomb. Nothing. Nothing to show whether Miralles was a single, independent lunatic with enough cash to fund a spectacular suicide, or part of something bigger, something more interesting, something that would interest even the capital, make them sit up and take notice, make them see the sort of person they were dealing with, someone to be respected, someone to be regarded, not a man to be dismissed and forgotten halfway up the Merino.

On Camillo’s desk, beside his brimming ashtray, there was a brown cardboard box, and inside that the diary of Oscar Miralles. Camillo put down his cigar and opened the box. The same book, the same tight, mad scrawl. There wasn’t a page of it that he hadn’t read a dozen times, straining over the jagged, angry letters until they scratched at his eyes. It was horrible stuff—like being cornered on the street by some stinking madman, but this one you couldn’t push aside, this one you couldn’t slap down into the gutter. This one sat you down in the padded cell, buttoned up your straitjacket and made you share his nightmare all the way to the last page.

The Commandante tore a sheet of paper from his pad, squeezed it into a tight ball and flung it at the glass in his door. The thud of it made the detectives look up from their desks and one of them, the one whose face he had wiped so tenderly on the day of the bombing, pushed back his chair and came forward.

Camillo waved him in to the room: “Come on, come on. You don’t have to knock—I called you in here.”

The man closed the door and stood with his hands folded in front of himself, as if he had been on parade.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake sit down.”

The man obeyed. He said nothing. That was expected of him.

Camillo dropped the diary on the desk in front of him. “Remember that?”

“I did exactly as you said, boss.”

“And what did you get?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“I did what you said, boss. I did exactly what you said.”

“Who did you speak to?”

“I spoke to everybody in that book.”

“Everybody?”

“Everybody except the ones you told me to stay away from. Those three.”

“And you got nothing.”

“Boss, they’re a bunch of university kids. They dress like revolutionaries and they talk like revolutionaries but their daddies are all accountants. There’s nobody mentioned in that diary who gives a stuff about the peasants except …”

“Except those three.”

“Well, I don’t know that, boss. You wouldn’t let me ask them.”

Commandante Camillo took a long drag on his cigar and blew the smoke out toward the roof. He said: “I like the old man for this. I really, really like him. He makes my palms itchy. He goes way back. He liked the old Colonel—never made any secret of it. At one time liking the old Colonel was the smart thing to do, but it’s not smart now. We never got anything on him or he’d have been hanging off a meat hook, but I like him for this. And Valdez goes way back too. He’s got bad blood. I knew his father. He looks like he’s kept his nose clean but why does he turn up in the diary if he’s not connected? And the girl. She’s perfect for it.”

“Boss,” the policeman hesitated before he dared to offer a theory of his own, “you know what I think?” Camillo waved his cigar, signaling permission to speak. “I think there’s nothing to it. Cochrane is in the book because he was Bomb Boy’s teacher, the girl’s in the book because she was in the same class and Bomb Boy fancied her and Valdez is in the book because he muscled in. That’s all. It’s a love triangle. The kid blew himself up to impress a girl. He was showing off.”

After what Father Gonzalez had told him, Camillo knew that might be true but he chose not to acknowledge it. “You mean: ‘You may have gone off with the international best-selling author while I was trying to get my hands in your knickers but, look at me, darling, I can magically transform myself into soup,’ that kinda thing?”

The policeman shrugged. “It’s a theory,” he said. “It makes as much sense as anything else. And he wasn’t planning on blowing himself up. Maybe he was trying to kill her or Valdez.”

“Those three, where were they when the bomb went off?”

“Boss, I don’t know. You told me not to ask.”

Camillo said nothing.

“Do you want me to ask, boss? I can go and find them right now.”

“No. Forget it. I’ll do it. I need to do it.”

“You getting heat from upstairs?”

“Son, there’s nobody anywhere in this building can give me heat.” He paused to draw on his cigar again. He paused a little longer to let that sound important.

“Higher up than that?”

“I’ve got nothing to say.”

Do you see what a beautiful lie that was? Do you see how a frightened man who feared that he was unimportant, a man who feared he was being ignored, by saying nothing at all, just by rolling his tongue around his cigar for a few moments, made himself important?

“I’ve got nothing to say to you but I have a few words to say to Mr. L.H. Valdez and I know exactly where to find him.”