13

My last puff on the cigarette coincided with an easing of the storm. The rain fell more gently now. Crickets began to strike up their music.

I got out of the car and clambered through the wire fence onto the property. The torch and the .38 in my hand belonged to Isabel. I could not imagine her with a weapon, and wondered if she knew how to use it, where she had learned to shoot and who had taught her. Edmundo was not someone who favored guns: he was an old-school type, said they were the devil’s work. I am not a great fan of them, either; that is why I have not used one for years. Besides, you do not need a .45 to sell toilets to the middle classes.

I walked toward the only light I could see. I had to watch my feet on the uneven, slippery ground. Despite the darkness it was obvious the land had not been worked for years, like so many small farms on the fertile pampas that were created by the subdivision of big estates, generations of inheritances wasted by the descendants of decadent oligarchs, then dismembered by the miserable ambitions of bureaucrats who had never smelled damp earth or cow dung in their lives.

By the time I arrived at the source of the light I was covered in mud and exhausted. Before me stood a big, square old house with a veranda. It was here that my guiding star was hanging. A 4×4 was backed onto the veranda. There was not enough light for me to be able to tell whether or not it was red.

The estate agent would have been surprised if we had gone out there that afternoon, because lights were on inside the house and there was the steady hum of a generator from the back.

I felt for the snub-nosed .38 in my jacket pocket. I was not even sure the gun worked: women who carry weapons never seem to bother to maintain them, and see no reason to dismantle them from time to time to clean them. I also guessed that whoever was inside would probably have as much firepower as the Israeli army. I was not going to survive a shoot-out; my only chance was to remain unnoticed until I could learn something of what was going on.

The mud plastered all over me was useful camouflage. Besides, they say it does wonders for old, dry skin. It nutrifies all the molecules, and for a while at least you are as soft as a baby’s bottom. I crawled along like a lizard, going past a drinking trough and finally stopping to get my breath back next to the wind-pump tank.

Bank employees moan because policemen can retire ten years before they do, but I would like to see them up to their ears in mud, on either side of their fiftieth birthday, or being bashed on the head or shot from behind by an accomplice of the thug they have just caught red-handed. When I left the Buenos Aires police I swore that I had done my last of these pentathlon events, and yet here I was. And the rain was pouring down again.

Image

I sheltered under the eaves, next to a small window that turned out to be the bathroom vent. The electrical storm lit the vast empty pampas once more. I peered round the corner of the house and confirmed what I had suspected: the 4×4 was red.

There was no sound from inside the house, not even voices. They were probably asleep, or sitting there in silence because they had nothing to say to each other. I crouched down and was backing away from the wall when I felt hot breath on my right cheek. I froze, expecting a blow or a challenge, but all I heard was a low growl. Cautiously, I turned my face as slowly as possible. I found myself staring into the muzzle of an enormous farmyard dog.

How can I describe what I mean by a farmyard dog? They have all kinds of genes, from the most aggressive to the most docile. They have pedigree or mongrel blood, and can, of course, be of any size. The only thing they all have in common is that they hang around farmhouses, which they are never allowed to enter, hoping to snaffle a few scraps and perhaps even a friendly look from some human being—although only very rarely a pat or a stroke.

I decided to sit down and relax, to allow the dog to sniff my clothes and stick its nose into all parts of my muddy body. He cannot have found anything untoward, because at the end of his inspection he began to wag his tail and nuzzle me. I started stroking him, at first apprehensively and then determined to make sure he would be on my side. The dog soon rolled over and waved his legs in the air like an upturned cockroach. I tickled his belly. I could feel the warmth of his affection, and this made me happy in a way I had not felt for a long time. If I had been taken by surprise and killed there and then, I would have died with a silly grin on my face.

A blinding flash followed a few moments later by a crack of thunder jolted me out of my beatific state, and brought an abrupt end to the dog’s pleasure. We were both back on the alert. I went up to the only proper window in the house, followed closely by the dog, by now my firm friend.

The light on the veranda which had been my guide suddenly began to flicker. The generator was on the blink or was running out of fuel. Inside the house, a voice asked what the fuck was going on, so I sneaked back as best I could to my hiding place next to the wind-pump. I was just in time to see two men emerge from the house, presumably the muscular but polite gentlemen the bus driver had told me about. Surprised by my retreat into the shadows, the dog hesitated midway between me and the house, staring toward my hiding place.

“What’s wrong with that dog?” one of the men said.

“How the fuck should I know!” the other said gruffly. He set off round the back of the house, cursing the generator: “I told you to buy a decent one, not some cheap Oriental crap.”

They had a brief argument, with one of them defending his decision because it had saved them a stack of money, the other one still going on about Chinese products: “This heap of shit is going to leave us in the dark any moment now,” he said. His words proved prophetic. The generator suddenly died without so much as a sigh.

The weak, flickering light from the bulb was replaced by intermittent blinding flashes of lightning. The dog took advantage of all the confusion to come over to the wind-pump and sprawl at my feet. He wanted more stroking: he must have been autistic.

“Can you see anything?” the man who had been concerned about the dog asked his companion.

“That’s why I brought the torch, asshole,” replied the other.

The first man, who must have had some mastiff in his blood, still seemed more interested in the dog’s behavior than the electricity problem. He started toward me. He might not have a torch, but I was willing to bet he had a gun on him. The dog must have recognized him because when he was only two meters away from me, he roused himself and set off to greet him, wagging his tail.

Two or three seconds at most must have passed between the flash and roar of the gun and the brief, heartrending yelp of pain. I flattened myself against the ground as the second man came running frantically toward where his colleague had fired the shot. The circle of light from his torch illuminated the massacre.

“You killed the dog, you idiot.”

“Something moved in the darkness and came for me,” the other man said.

“You killed the dog … you bought that Chinese crap, and now you killed a dog whose only fault was to wag its tail at everyone.”

“What did you expect me to do? You had the torch. I thought someone was attacking me.”

“Who’s going to attack you? Who else is out here? We’re in the middle of nowhere. You’re just paranoid, and I don’t want someone who’s trigger-happy alongside me. Next time you’ll take a pop at me. Get a transfer to headquarters, find a desk job and run the numbers game. Poor dog, look what you did to it!”

The dog-killer tried to defend himself: “Don’t insult me like that or I’ll beat your brains out. I’m going back to town tomorrow, you can stay here doing this crappy job, and see where it gets you.” He was still protesting as the two of them headed back toward the darkened house.

I lay flat on the ground for a while longer, covered in mud and with the rain beating down. If I stayed like that, in a couple of hours I would be putting down roots. As soon as I thought the danger was over, I stood up stiffly.

At least I had learned something. The muscular but polite gentlemen were either police or army, and they did not seem to be on an official mission. And one of them was so jumpy he was ready to fire on anything that moved without identifying itself.

I edged back toward the house, this time heading straight for the small bathroom window. It was big enough for me to wriggle through if I could remember the Houdini tricks I learned long ago in the circus run by my uncle, a wandering artist and unforgettable magician. For me he was like a human porthole who allowed me a glimpse of other worlds, even though I did not choose to explore them when I grew up.

I jumped up at the window and hung from the sill for what seemed like an endless minute. My muscles were no longer used to this kind of exercise, and I was afraid I would slide off, but instead I discovered that inside each one of us there exist, like veins of mineral in a gold mine, reserves of energy that we only need sufficient conviction to summon up.

At the age of seventy, my uncle could not only still free himself from a mass of chains in under five minutes, to the delight and applause of his public, but was also capable of making love twice in a fortnight, as his fourth wife told me. She was thirty years younger than him and a trapeze artist.

I thought of my uncle and hauled myself silently and easily into the bathroom.

Image

It would be simpler getting out—unless I was discovered, that is. The floor of the bathroom was higher than the ground outside, so jumping out in an emergency would not take so much effort, especially as I would probably be impelled by the desire to save my skin.

I opened the bathroom door stealthily, and slipped into a corridor. The only light was a feeble glow at the far end of the passageway. I edged my way down until I came to a small living room where the gentleman who had killed the dog was yawning like a hippopotamus and scratching at his crotch ostentatiously. Perhaps he had crab lice. There was not much light, but even if there had been, I was sure his face would have shown no sign of remorse for his stupid, senseless act.

I crept back halfway down the corridor, where another, wider passage led to more rooms. I finally decided to switch on the torch.

The first room I went into had no roof. A fine drizzle fell onto a sideboard that was the only piece of furniture. Portraits of somebody or other’s ancestors hung on the walls. I looked in the sideboard drawers, but they were empty. The next room I went into was similarly rundown, but had more furniture: a bed with the frame leaning against the headboard, a bedside table, another, smaller sideboard. It was raining in here, too, and the sideboard was also empty.

I thought I could hear voices, so switched the torch off before making my way toward the third room. I held my breath as I stepped inside, worried that one of the floorboards might creak and give me away. This room did have a roof over it, so there was no drizzle inside. I could not hear voices now, only two people breathing at a steadily increasing rhythm.

I stepped back out of the room. I hate being a peeping Tom, even if in this case I could not see a thing. Pornographic spectacles have never excited me. Pathetic exhibitionists, if you ask me.

Instead, I went down the corridor and into the last room. This was another living room, bigger than the others, with an oval table and chairs, and a glass-fronted dresser with enough crockery for a decent dinner service. What a strange place, I thought: half the roof missing, some of it tumbled down, and yet with plates and cutlery to hold a dinner party and stage a pleasant social occasion.

The light from my torch, which I was shading with my hand, showed there were papers spread out on the table. They looked like maps: somebody must have been studying them when the lights went out.

I could not make them out clearly because I did not have my glasses with me. Besides, it was so dark. They seemed to be diagrams of a military barracks. There were blockhouses and big open spaces; it could also have been a hospital, if an arsenal had some medical purpose, as there was an arrow pointing to one of the oblongs with a list of weapons written in the margin. These were not weapons like Isabel’s .38. They were the latest rifles with infrared sights, and helmets with cameras built into them, like the ones the Yanks and the Israelis use when they go on their tourist trips to the Arab world. Each category had its own column listing the technical details and quantities—hundreds in the case of the rifles, tens when it came to missiles, which were also listed.

I was startled by what I took to be a cry of terror. It was like being at the local flea-pit as a child when the vampire appeared and, before sinking his teeth into the damsel in distress, turned to the camera licking his lips as if to say: watch out, kids, you’re next.

The cry, which had nothing to do with terror, came from the bedroom with the roof. It was a woman, but almost at the same time a man’s groan raised the noise level to that of an operatic soprano’s vibrato. A thunderclap outside was like a roll of drums, and the crockery in the sideboard crashed like cymbals.

I never discovered whether what shook the house to its foundations was the storm or the orgasm.