Ninety-three

Standing in her kitchen, Rosario stripped off her dress and washed her hands first with detergent, and then with diluted bleach.

The water pressure was much better than in the bathroom, and the lighting was brighter there too.

As she soaped her hands a second time, massaging the liquid between the fingers, she saw the face of her attacker leering at her.

It was everywhere she looked, like a twisted apparition.

Drying her hands, she padded through into the cluttered sitting-room, and poured herself half a mug of cognac.

Coccinelle watched her from the frame, her expression disapproving.

‘I had to do it, my darling,’ Rosario explained defensively. ‘He was going to kill me!’

She took a gulp of the liqueur, wiped the back of her hand over her mouth, and gulped again. The brandy having warmed her chest, she could breathe more easily.

The killer’s face was there again.

Lolling back on the couch, she studied the face – taking in the broken capillaries across the cheeks, and the small penetrating eyes. The thought that someone was prepared to kill her was distressing but, for Rosario, it wasn’t new.

She looked up at Coccinelle and, as she did so, she got a flash of Dr. Burou. He had altered the path of both their lives, turning menfolk into ladies with a knife.

The surgeon disappeared, swapped for a memory of the Cordobazo. It was during the ugly days of the civil unrest that the pianist had been forced to flee her homeland.

But all that was half a lifetime ago.

Rosario had been little more than a boy then. A boy called Héctor. Trained by the government to kill, he had turned his schooling against the men who had taught him the art of instant death.

For six months he targeted government officials, assassinating one after the next, until he was finally captured, tortured, and was himself left for dead.

He had only survived because of a remarkable stroke of luck.

The jailer had been a boyhood friend of his grandfather, and managed to smuggle him out on the condition that he leave Argentina and never return.

It had been while chained up in the infamous Caseros Prison that he had made himself a solemn vow. If he were ever to be freed, he would track down the doctor he had heard of in a far-off land, the doctor who offered men rebirth, as the women of their dreams.