Hadn’t Captain Félix Madueño, the one who came for her in Five Corners and took her to the morgue in the patrol car, called her “Julieta Leguizamón”? Well, he was very well informed. Yes, Julieta was her name, but very few people knew that her last name was Leguizamón. It had sounded very strange to hear herself named that way, because everybody used her nickname: Shorty. Or, at most, Julieta. That’s how she signed her articles, with her nickname or her first name. The patrol car that brought her back to Teniente Arancibia Alleyway didn’t carry the officer or the civilian, just the civil guards. During the trip neither the driver nor his companion said a word to her, and again she noted that they were perfectly familiar with the narrow potholed alley in Barrios Altos where she lived.
When she arrived home, Shorty went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, and got into bed in her clothes, removing only her shoes. She was very cold. And then she felt grief, a deep, tearing grief, as she recalled what she had seen in the morgue: what remained of Rolando Garro. She didn’t usually cry, but now she felt that her eyes were wet and fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. How perverse, how cruel, they had crushed his face with a stone and riddled his body with stab wounds. That wasn’t the work of an ordinary rat, one of those poor devils who snatched purses or watches. That had been an act of vengeance. A well-planned and, surely, very well-paid murder. A murder by assassins, by professional criminals.
She shuddered from head to toe. And who could have planned that act of revenge but Enrique Cárdenas, the millionaire whose naked photographs in an orgy with whores Rolando Garro had published, photographs by Ceferino Argüello. Motherfucker, damn, son of a bitch. It would put the fear of God into poor Ceferino when he found out what they had done to the editor of Exposed. It was to be expected, because if his boss had been destroyed like that, what would they do to the creator of those photos? She’d better let him know so he could disappear for a while, certain they were looking for him. But she didn’t even know Ceferino’s address, and she didn’t have his cell phone number so she could warn him. As for the rest, Shorty didn’t intend to show up tomorrow at the offices of Exposed. She wasn’t crazy. She wouldn’t set foot there for a long time. Besides, who knew whether the magazine would survive; of course not, it would disappear just like poor Garro. Was she in danger, too? She tried to reason coldly. Yes, no doubt about it. Everybody knew that for a long time she’d been the boss’s right arm, that Shorty was the star reporter of Exposed. And though Rolando himself had written the article that accompanied the photographs of the naked millionaire, she had obtained a good part of the information and her signature was right next to the chief’s, so she was compromised as well.
“What kind of mess have you gotten me into, boss?” she said aloud. She was afraid. She had always expected those complications, that revealing the intimate dirt of well-known, famous people would put her at risk one day, perhaps even the risk of jail or death. Had her time come? Day and night her life had been a balancing act: Didn’t she live in Five Corners, one of the most violent neighborhoods in Lima, with assaults, fights, and beatings all around her? She and her boss had often joked about what they were risking with their expert scandalous disclosures. “One day they’ll put a bullet in us, Shorty, but cheer up, we’ll be two martyrs to journalism and they’ll put up a statue to us.” And her boss would let out that laugh that was like stones falling in his throat. He didn’t believe what he was saying, of course. And now he was a stinking corpse.
Poor man. The world seemed empty without Rolando Garro. Her boss. Her teacher. Her inspiration. Her only family. You’re all alone now, Shorty. And her secret love. But nobody knew that, only she did, and she kept it buried deep in her heart. She had never let him even suspect she was in love with him. One night she heard him say: “Two people who work together shouldn’t go to bed; love and work are incompatible, ‘go to bed with’ almost rhymes with ‘contend with.’ So now you know, Shorty. If you ever notice me making advances, instead of paying attention to me break a bottle over my head.” “Better if I stab you in the heart with this, boss,” Shorty replied, showing him the small knife she carried in her purse, in addition to the needle in her hair or belt in case of emergency. She closed her eyes and remembered once again the bloody corpse and destroyed face of Rolando Garro. Grief froze her from her head down to her feet. She remembered that, a few months ago, her boss had gone too far. The only time. At the opening of that club that didn’t last very long, El Pingüino, in a basement on Tacna Avenue, to which Rolando had been invited. And he took her. There were a good number of people when they arrived at the club, small, filled with smells and smoke, chilcanos, or pisco and ginger ale, and pisco sours, which was what they were offering to drink. Trays of small glasses were being passed around, and some people were already drunk. They turned down the lights. The show began. Half-naked black girls came out to dance to the rhythms of a small band playing tropical music. Suddenly, Shorty noticed that her boss, standing behind her, was touching her breasts. With anyone else she would have reacted with her usual ferocity and stuck him with the needle in her hair or made his face swell up with a hard slap. But not Rolando Garro. She stood motionless, feeling something strange, a pleasure mixed with displeasure, something dark and pleasing, those small hands indelicately groping her breasts made her quiet and docile. She turned to look at him and saw in the semidarkness that her boss’s eyes were glassy with alcohol, for he’d already had several chilcanos. Rolando Garro, immediately after they looked at each other, let her go. “Forgive me, Shorty,” she heard him say. “I didn’t realize it was you.” Never again did he even allude to that episode. As if it had never happened. And now he was in the morgue, his face smashed in by stones and his body riddled with stab wounds. The policeman said they had found him in Five Corners. What could Rolando Garro have been doing in this neighborhood? Had he come looking for her? Impossible, he’d never set foot in this house. Some woman, maybe. Not her in any case, because her boss had no idea where she lived. In spite of working with him and seeing him every day for years, Shorty knew nothing about her boss’s private life. Did he have a wife? Children? Probably not, because he never mentioned them. And he spent all day and all night preparing issues of Exposed. He was always as alone as she was and had no life except his work.
She slept very badly. She fell asleep and the nightmare was immediately reborn; with a background of catastrophes, fires, earthquakes, she was rolling down a steep slope, a bus was bearing down on her, and, paralyzed by terror, she could not move away, and when it was about to run over her, she awoke. Finally, when the gray light of dawn appeared at the windows, she dozed off, disturbed by the bad night.
She had showered and was getting dried when she heard someone knocking at the door. Frightened, she gave a start. “Who is it?” she asked, raising her voice a good deal. “Ceferino Argüello,” the photographer said. “Did I wake you? I’m really sorry, Shorty. It’s urgent that I speak to you.”
“Wait a minute, I’m getting dressed,” she shouted. “I’ll be right there.”
She dressed and let the photographer in. Ceferino’s face was devastated with worry and his eyes were irritated and red, as if he had been rubbing them very hard. He was wearing wrinkled trousers, sneakers without socks, and a black polo shirt decorated with a red lightning flash. His voice sounded different, he spoke as if it was very difficult for him to articulate each word.
“Forgive me for bothering you so early, Shorty,” he said, standing in the doorway. “They’ve killed the boss, I didn’t know whether you knew.”
“Come in, Ceferino, sit down.” She pointed to one of the chairs that emerged from among the piles of newspapers in the living room. “Yes, yes, I know. The police came to see me last night. They took me to the morgue to identify the body. It was horrible, Ceferino. I’d better not tell you about it.”
He had dropped into the chair and looked at her, very pale, eyes staring, mouth open with a thread of saliva hanging from it, waiting. Shorty knew very well what was passing through Ceferino’s head and she felt fear again, a fear as great as the one reflected in the photographer’s face.
“They found him up here in Five Corners, it seems,” she explained. “With his body full of knife wounds. And those sons of bitches destroyed his face with stones.”
She saw that Ceferino Argüello was nodding. His hair was on end, like a porcupine. His pockmarked face was livid.
“It’s what the papers and the radio stations are saying. That they were very brutal with him.”
“Yes, yes, real butchery. Something that sadists, that savages would do, Ceferino.”
“And now it’ll happen to us, Shorty.” The photographer’s voice broke. She thought that if he started to cry she’d insult him, call him a “damn faggot,” and throw him out of her house.
But Ceferino didn’t cry, his voice just broke, and he sat looking at her as if hypnotized.
“I don’t know what can happen to us.” Shorty shrugged and decided to put on the finishing touches. “They might decide to kill us, too, Ceferino. Especially you, you’re the one who took those pictures.”
The photographer stood up and spoke with troubled solemnity, raising his voice with each sentence that he said:
“I knew this was very dangerous, damn it, and I told you, and I told the boss.” He was shouting now, beside himself. “And they can kill us for goddamn greed, to get money out of that millionaire, damn it. You’re guilty too, because I trusted you and you betrayed me.”
He dropped into the chair, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.
Shorty, seeing him like that, so defenseless and drowning in panic, felt sorry for him.
“Make an effort and try to think clearly, Ceferino,” she said gently. “You and I need to have cool heads if we want to get out of this safe and sound. Don’t waste your time looking for the person who’s to blame for what’s happened. Do you know who’s to blame? Not you and not me, not even the boss. It’s the work we do. And that’s enough.”
Ceferino took his hands away from his face and nodded. His eyes weren’t crying but they were very irritated and shining; a stupid grimace distorted his face.
“When I told you I had those photographs, it was only to ask your advice, Julieta,” he said in a quiet voice. “That’s the only thing I wanted to remind you of.”
“You’re lying, Ceferino,” she replied, not raising her voice either, as if she were advising him. “You told me you’d held on to them for two years because you wanted to see whether you could get anything out of them. I mean, publishing them and making a little money with them.”
“No, no, I swear that’s not true, Shorty,” Ceferino protested. “I didn’t want them published. I knew something very ugly could happen, like what’s happened now, exactly like this. I guessed this would happen, I swear.”
“If you didn’t want them published, you would have burned them, Ceferino.” Shorty was becoming angry. “I mean, cut the bullshit. I told you that the person who’d make the most out of them was the boss. And you authorized me to tell him everything. Didn’t you take those photos to see what he could do with them? Don’t you remember that now?”
“Okay, okay, let’s not argue about what can’t be helped.” The photographer softened, again putting on his usual face of a whipped dog. “Now we have to decide what to do. Do you think the police will call us to testify?”
“I’m afraid they will, Ceferino. And the judge, too. There’s been a murder. We worked with the victim. It’s logical that they’d call us to testify.”
“And what am I going to tell them, Julieta?” Suddenly the photographer seemed desperate again. His eyes were sunken, and his voice, hoarse now, was quavering.
“Don’t be stupid enough to admit that you took those pictures,” said Shorty. “That’s all we’d need.”
“Then what am I going to tell them?”
“That you don’t know anything about anything. You didn’t take those pictures and the boss didn’t tell you who did.”
“And what are you going to say when they call you to testify?”
Julieta shrugged.
“I don’t know anything either,” she declared. “I wasn’t at that orgy, I didn’t know about it until we prepared the information for Exposed. Isn’t that the truth?”
Julieta advised Ceferino not to go to the offices of the weekly; she wouldn’t either. If Engineer Cárdenas had hired killers, that’s the first place they’d look. And it would also be prudent if he didn’t sleep at home for a few days.
“I have a wife and three children, Shorty. And not a cent in my pocket. Because they haven’t even paid us this month.”
“And they won’t pay us, Ceferino,” she interrupted. “With the boss’s death, Exposed will pass on to a better life. You can be sure of that. So now you can begin to look for another job. So will I, of course.”
“So you think we won’t even get paid for this month, Julieta? This is a tragedy for me, don’t forget I always live paycheck to paycheck.”
“For me, too, Ceferino. I don’t have any money either. But since I don’t like the idea of one of Engineer Cárdenas’s hired killers coming after me, I’m not setting foot in Exposed again. I advise you to do the same. I’m saying this for your own good. Explain the problem to your wife, she’ll understand. Stay out of sight with someone you trust. At least until the situation becomes clearer. That’s the only advice I can give you. Because it’s what I’m going to do myself.”
Ceferino stayed a while longer in Julieta’s house. From time to time he’d say goodbye, but as if an irresistible force kept him from leaving, he would sit down again among the pyramids of newspapers and magazines, complain again about his bad luck, and curse the Chosica photographs, whose negatives he had kept, not to try to make any money—he swore to God!—but in the hope that the gentleman who hired him to take the pictures would reappear and pay him the amount they’d agreed on. He’d been stupid—yes, stupid—and he’d regret it the rest of his life.
Finally, after sniveling for a long time and complaining about his bad luck, he left. Shorty dropped into the easy chair among mountains of newspapers. She was exhausted and, worst of all, Ceferino Argüello had infected her with his confusion and panic.
She looked at her knees and saw they were trembling. It was a small movement, from right to left and left to right, almost imperceptible, rhythmic and cold. When she raised a foot, the trembling stopped, but only in that knee; it continued in the other one. She felt invaded by fear, from the roots of her hair to the soles of her feet. Ceferino Argüello’s cowardice was contagious. She tried to calm down, to think objectively. She had to do what she had recommended to the photographer: leave her house immediately, stay with someone she trusted, until the storm let up. Who? She reviewed the people she knew. There were a lot of them, of course, but no one close enough to ask that they put her up. She had no relatives or hadn’t seen them for years. Her friends were journalists, radio and television people with whom she had very superficial and occasional relationships. In reality, the only person whom she trusted enough for a matter like this was Rolando Garro. This murder had deprived her of the only real friend she had.
A small hotel or a boardinghouse, then. Nobody would know where she was. But how much would that cost? From a bureau she took the notebook where she carefully recorded her expenses and income. The amount at her disposal was ridiculous: less than three hundred soles. She would have to borrow the money. She knew very well that, with the boss’s death, it would be very difficult this month for her to receive her salary at Exposed. The magazine’s funds were probably in the possession of Garro himself or had been placed under judicial sequestration because of his death. The manager of the weekly always said it was about to fall into insolvency, which perhaps was true now. In other words, there was nothing to hope for from that quarter.
Then what are you going to do, Shorty? She felt depressed, cornered, paralyzed. She knew very well that it was dangerous to remain in the house, where they’d look for her first if they wanted to do her harm. She knew that sooner or later she’d find another position with no difficulty: wasn’t she good at her job? Of course she was, but now wasn’t the best time to visit newspapers, radio stations, or television channels looking for work. Now was the time to hide, to save her skin, to not let anyone know where she was. Until things calmed down and returned to normal. Where, damn it, where could she hide?
And then, at first in a confused, remote way, but then gradually taking shape, consistency, reality, the idea came to her. It was risky, no doubt about it. But wasn’t that something her teacher had taught her, something he had often practiced in his life, that great ills require great remedies? And what could be worse than feeling threatened in the practice of her vocation? That was the wager that had finished off Rolando Garro, wasn’t it, Shorty? He had lost his life, in such an awful way, for practicing investigative journalism and bringing to light the obscenities that the wealthy in this country without laws or morality could allow themselves.
It was risky, of course. But if it worked out, she would not only be protected, she might also gain some professional advantage.
Suddenly, Shorty felt that her knees had stopped trembling. And she was smiling.