Hot Sur (49 page)

In one of the subways she took that day, someone next to her was reading the
Daily News
, and she had been able to get a peek at the pictures and headlines. What an exposé, right in the middle of the paper. On the right page, a picture of a very young and handsome Greg in his police uniform, and on the left page, Greg’s crumpled body in a pool of blood. An emotionally moving picture of Greg with Hero. And one last picture, darker and much smaller, of María Paz herself. The mug shot from Manninpox, her hair a mess, looking like a lioness in heat, the placard with the serial number hanging on her chest. The visual was very obvious: the demented Colombian versus the good American cop. Pro Bono had always told her that juries were very susceptible to the whims of public opinion, and this kind of publicity must have exacerbated their patriotic spirit. It would not have been difficult for Pro Bono to put the pieces together, and she guessed that Pro Bono had grown certain about which way the verdict would go. He must have been very concerned about what he saw in the paper, enough so to give her the signal to go. At least that was her theory. After spending some time making herself scarce among the shelves of bargains in a secondhand store, she took another bus, and when she got off, she slipped into a movie theater. Near dusk, she was attracted by Andean music that was coming from a schoolyard. There was a cookout where traditional dishes were being served, and María Paz bought a ticket. She mingled among the lute and charango musicians, kabobs, ceviches, pisco sours, and Inca dancers late into the night. Right there, among the members of the Peruvian community, she met a family that believed she had recently arrived in New York and offered her a place for the night. As the band grew weary, the guests danced a few more short waltzes and drank a few more pisco sours, because the organizers were about to make last call. The musicians put away their instruments and left, and María Paz looked at her watch. It was 11:20 p.m. In ten minutes, she would have been a fugitive of justice for twelve hours.

At that same time, in another corner of the city, I was freaking out knowing nothing about what had happened to her. And it would be another seven weeks before my uncertainty was eased when I received a Facebook message from Juanita one Saturday morning. The message said, “Two little ducks in front of Dorita.” Shit, it was not an easy message to decode. Two little ducks in front of Dorita. That’s it. Could it be referring to the duck pond in Central Park? The offices of the Ugly Duckling Presse on 3rd Street in Brooklyn, because I had once told the class at Manninpox that I did some work for them? Or maybe the Peking Duck in Chinatown? Nothing made much sense until a bell went off. The “two ducks” could very well be Colombian slang for the number 22, the shape of which resembles two ducks waddling to the left. So maybe it was not code for a place but for the time, twenty-two hundred hours, or 10 p.m. “At Dorita’s” was much easier to figure out. There was only one Dorita who was known to us. María seemed to want to meet at 10 p.m. at Forbidden Planet, where I was going to take her the night of our reunion to show her the series of my graphic novels,
The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita
, before Sleepy Joe changed things. If it wasn’t that, then I had no clue what it could be. A date maybe? I started thinking maybe it made more sense that it was a date. The 22nd of this month? No, it had to be the time.
Forbidden Planet
at 10 p.m.? But then on what day? The next day, a Saturday, I waited for her there from 9:30 p.m. to midnight. She didn’t show up then, or on Sunday, or Monday. On Tuesday, I was running late, and when I arrived there at 10:20 p.m., I thought I saw her at the front door. But the woman was wearing a strange cap pulled down to her eyes and the rest of her face was under a scarf, so it was only when I was very close to her that I knew it was indeed her. I had already decided that I would hide her in the house in the mountains; it was, for the time being, the best option. I had to get her out of the city, because they would be looking for her with a magnifying glass in places where you needed your identification documents and were reported for the slightest suspicions. God forbid she had tried in desperation to check into a hotel. I didn’t even ask her. There was no time for debates. I simply signaled that she climb behind me on my bike and took off. I only revealed our destination when we were already on the way. Her response was to ask where it was, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I told her it was just down the road from Manninpox.

I’m not quite sure how to explain what’s happened since that night. Let’s just say we’re living as if in a dream, the two of us hidden in the attic, making do with things as if we are two kids in a tree house because we couldn’t care less about what is happening in the world below that is bristling with dangers. We shit on those dangers for now. And the dangers shit on us, stuck in that attic of the house like ants after a fumigation.

All the powers of the state are set against María Paz, and I’m still a little puzzled how this charming girl has become the bull’s-eye of so many pissed-off macho men—agents of the CIA and the DEA, migrant and bounty hunters, and a posse led by the vermin Sleepy Joe, who must have been howling in his cave because so many others were trying to snatch his prey. But María Paz has not wanted to talk about any of that. She does not bring up her past, much less her future. I think it is comforting to her to feel as if she is in a boat in the middle of a timeless sea. Once again, she and I are floating in the bliss of a period of “things go right.” Seven months ago we went through a similar ephemeral period that lasted only a couple of hours; then we passed through a very long and anguishing “things go wrong,” and now we have returned to the bliss of the good days.

Like any good graphic novel heroine, María Paz is complex; there are no predictable plots in her story. Everything is extraordinary, very intense, and at the same time so otherworldly and unreal, such as letting the days pass ignoring what has happened, purposely ignoring all the possible consequences, letting the world fall to pieces all around us. And that’s just a figure of speech. Symptoms are beginning to appear, a new phase of “things go wrong” has reared its ugly fucking head. Four days ago, a horrendous crime took place on this mountain. The victim was the man who brings us the bags of food for the dogs; it is something utterly indescribable, they didn’t only murder him, but they ripped off his face. The authorities are still searching for the suspects and have the area under twenty-four-hour patrol: a good thing on the one hand, because it reestablishes the sense of safety, and a bad thing on the other hand, because for us up here it make us recluses with much more claustrophobic force than before. Now it is clearer than ever that María Paz cannot as much as peek outside or the entire security operation would descend on the house. But I’ve decided not to tell her. What good would it do? For the moment, I see no reason to worry her. Up here, she is secure, free from any danger, ignorant of the mayhem outside that has everybody on edge. María Paz needs her rest. The important thing is that she recovers from the damage of what she has gone through, enjoys herself however she can, is pampered, eats a lot, sleeps as much as she needs to, and is left alone. So I keep the fears and conjectures to myself.

For now, I have no intention of letting this bubble of blind, deaf, exclusive, and self-sufficient happiness in which we both float burst. Because I’m on vacation, I don’t have to go anywhere. No one bothers us up in the attic and we are together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the exception of a couple of nights a week when I go down to have dinner with my father so as not to arouse suspicion. I return to the attic with a healthy portion of the meal. María Paz is effusive and generous when we make love, but I have not been able to get her to sleep in my arms. After we make love she turns the other way and curls in upon herself like a seashell, and I have to make do with the unconditional affection of Skunko, who has begun to sleep draped across both of us, and I resign myself to simply watch her for hours. I am astonished by her tendrils of black hair invading the pillows, and her long eyelashes silky as spider legs. I linger my gaze on the curve of her shoulder, on the protruding ears that she hates so much, on the soft splendor of her skin, the light hairs on her nape, the lapping waves of her breath, the white cotton panties that she wears, bigger than any other girl I have known—prison maxi panties, to be truthful, or more like orphanage maxi panties, that are far from sexy but still manage to turn me on, like everything about her. Now, I understand more profoundly what Boris Becker meant when he said that he only fully realized how dark-skinned his wife was when he saw her naked body on white sheets for the first time.

We never dare ask what is going to happen when we are brought down by force to face reality. When I asked her how she survived after fleeing from Bronx Criminal Division, she said that it was thanks to kind folks. She told me about the Peruvians she met at the cookout and a rich bachelor from Park Slope who allowed her to use his penthouse. She also recounted times when she panicked, lonely nights, times when she escaped just by a hair, about dangerous corners in some neighborhoods, and about a friend’s betrayal. There were also the two sisters who sold tamales from home and hired her to knead corn flour.

“I had never eaten so many tamales,” she said.

“Why didn’t you leave the country?” I asked the obvious question.

“Because of Violeta, my sister, Violeta, I can’t abandon her. I will not leave until I can take her with me.”

I found all this out during our first few nights together in the attic, when she spoke nonstop until the early hours of the morning, weaving together the disconnected episodes of her epic. On a particularly chilly night, she recounted to me the events around her husband Greg’s death. She spoke at length and candidly, and somehow we got into the Gothic scene about her friend Corina and the broomstick. She mentioned that event, but as with others was somewhat oblique around the topic of Sleepy Joe’s participation in it, as if she wanted to lessen his guilt, so I had to remain alert and insist that she make certain things clearer, that she couldn’t invent things because I knew more about all of this than she thought. I told her that I had taped together the manuscript she had ripped to pieces in Central Park, and so that I knew well the horrific actions that Sleepy Joe was capable of, like the abusive interrogation he had submitted her to and the death of her dog. María Paz’s response was to stop the story cold, and since then she has not told me about anything else in her past, as if the instinct had dried up, or she preferred to forget the content of those sections. We talk to each other a lot, but always sidestepping certain issues and keeping the conversation at surface level. She is allowed to ask me about heaven and earth, but I can’t ask her anything.

I see her floating in a state of grace and innocence, a nymph in the woods, or maybe more like a lily, a fawn, an odalisque. Too many things have happened to her, very serious things in a short span of time, so it’s understandable that she doesn’t want to torment herself by unraveling the treacherous twists of fate. It is almost as if she has gone into hibernation to regain her strengths and get ready for what is to come. Truth is I don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to think about it either. But at the same time, I am terrified of what she still may be keeping from me.

While she sleeps beside me, I remain awake thinking about it all, as fucking insomniac as they come. I sense her sweet breath and soft snoring, and I ask myself who this woman is who is so full of darkness and secrets. One night recently, I tapped her on the shoulder because I needed to know the answer to one question right then.

“Have you been lying to me?” I said.

“You have to believe me, Mr. Rose,” she said half-asleep.

“Why? Tell me why I have to . . .”

“Because when people tell you things, you should believe them,” she said, and curled herself up tighter than before and fell back asleep. I couldn’t help but think about her twisted relationship with her brother-in-law/lover. I have compiled a list of character traits and habits for him, such as sleeping during the day, visiting brothels, his obsession with María Paz, his taste for spicy candy, the useless purchases from infomercials, and, above all, the performance of bloody rituals. I have read that while bloodless rituals are at core symbolic or figurative, the bloody ones necessitate the spilling of blood of a sacrificial victim. With the exception of bullfights in Hispanic cultures, or of such things as fight clubs and ultimate fighting tournaments, this kind of bloodletting as spectacle is rare in the West, because people are horrified and disgusted by blood and can only deal with it on the screen, where it doesn’t hurt, stain, or infect. The peculiar thing about Sleepy Joe is the leap backward, the primitive, brutal ritual. And so, little by little I have begun to understand a few things. The problem is that my investigation is typically amateurish, and in reality it just follows a method I found in a blog that I came upon by chance in serial form called
Killing Me Softly
. That’s why I thought it would be better to get a more qualified opinion, so one day I left María Paz alone in the attic to head to New York, supposedly to hand in a manuscript to Ming, my editor, but in truth to ask him about Sleepy Joe, whom he didn’t know and hadn’t even heard of. But he asked how he could possibly help in gathering the information I required.

The fact is Ming collects everything and is an expert in a thousand things, the more bizarre the better. He’s an expert, for example, on the many varieties of caviar, ancient African bridal gear, and a sumptuous and fierce species of warriors called betta fish. But of all his obsessions, the one that he devotes the most time to is noir comics. Along with being an editor of one of them, Ming owns an astonishing collection of volumes on the occult that he has found all over the world. And folks who are expert on this subject are expert on the subject of murderers.