“What a bizarre massacre,” Víctor, the driver says, as he adjusts the dial on the walkie-talkie. There’s always interference in this part of the city.
Roger is her partner, a Frenchman in love with the tropics, with whom she’s lived for six months. A leftist who can cook and fuck wonderfully, but who’s stubborn and domineering, qualities he showed again last night when he went to bed angry that she refused to believe there could be political motives behind the snake attacks. “A destabilizing factor,” he called it. Even that’s possible now.
“They say the narcotics team murder is related to the doctor’s death,” Víctor says. He’s one of those people who always seem to know what’s going on, even though they don’t write anything. “I’ve got a buddy in the department. He told me Pineda and his guys were investigating some bankers who were involved in money laundering,” he adds.
“Were they investigating Ferracuti?” Rita asks, incredulous.
“No, Miss Rita, the doctor was collaborating with the investigation and his sister may have been, too. You know they were a banking family. That’s what my buddy told me.”
It’s five after nine when she climbs the stairs to the office, anxious and getting tangled up in her summer skirt, her curly hair shining.
She walks by her desk and leaves the walkie-talkie and tape recorder there. Then she goes to the washroom. She always feels like she has to pee before a meeting with the news editor. She phones Roger right away, before she forgets, to tell him that with all the work she has to do, they’ll have to skip lunch together.
Matías Cano is waiting for her in his office. He’s fat and bald, with thick lips and little round glasses.
“There’s an emergency cabinet meeting at the Presidential Palace. It’s scheduled for eleven o’clock. Don’t you tell anyone about it, all right? They’ve supposedly only leaked it to us.”
He smokes and drinks coffee compulsively. His office reeks of tobacco. He’s wearing a white guayabera shirt and dark pants.
Rita tells him the driver’s story, that the murder of the DICA agents and the Ferracutis are connected.
“Could be,” Matías says. “The way things are going now, we can’t rule anything out.”
He gets up and paces around the office. He goes back to his chair, takes a sip of coffee, looks at his computer screen, edits a paragraph, and suddenly turns back to Rita.
“Have you figured out the connection between the Bustillos and the DICA agents?”
She says her source has only confirmed that Jacinto Bustillo is the man in the yellow Chevrolet, but he refused to tell her why he attacked the narcotics agents.
“What’s your angle?”
She’d like to wait until the early afternoon to discuss any angles, after the meeting at the Presidential Palace. For now, she can think of two possibilities: the first is a lunatic getting revenge on his wife and causing chaos all over the city while he’s at it; the second, that the crimes were planned by a drug cartel to stop the investigation that threatened to expose their local financial advisors.
“But only Mrs. Bustillo was stabbed to death,” Matías says. “That’s important. It’s the only crime. The snakes can’t be tried for anything.”
Rita feels an urgent need to pee again.
“You need to be here by two,” he tells her, “so we can have one last meeting. I want this article by seven at the latest. Understood?”
It’s always the same story. Early in the morning, you can’t even smell Matías’s breath, but late at night, by the time the office closes, his mouth is like a sewer.
She’s about to leave when he says, “and don’t forget the third possibility — an attempt to destabilize the government. The party moderates all agreed on Ferracuti.”
The same stubborn theory as Roger’s. Shit!
It’s possible that Deputy Commissioner Handal and Chele Pedro are at odds on this case, she thinks while she runs to the washroom. But it’s going to be hard to find sources willing to talk about Ferracuti. Upper-class people tend to run from reporters in these kinds of situations.
She goes back to her desk. She looks through her agenda. She wasn’t able to get an interview with Mrs. Bustillo’s daughter yesterday — a profile of her father would have been a major journalistic coup, even though the case is beginning to look political. She also needs to track down someone from Agent Raúl Pineda’s family. They must have killed him at home for a reason.
She picks up the phone.
She asks to speak to Detective Villalta.
“It’s his sister Mirna,” she says.
He comes on the line.
“I need a big favour,” she says. “I’m trying to find a relative of Agent Pineda’s.”
He suggests she call the DICA.
But those guys are a bunch of arrogant thugs, that’s why she prefers dealing with Deputy Commissioner Handal and his people. He isn’t so bad really, and sometimes he even gives her a few leads.
So Villalta says he’s going to tell her something that would have been an absolute gift last night, but the way things are turning out, is probably less significant now than it had seemed: Pineda’s wife, who was killed a few years ago, was Jacinto Bustillo’s mistress.
He hangs up.
She stands, dazed, the receiver stuck to her ear. She runs to Matías’s office.
“So where do the deaths of the Ferracutis fit in?” he mumbles, shocked by the news.
“There’s got to be an explanation, a link somewhere,” she says.
Yeah, that it’s got nothing to do with drug trafficking or Ferracuti’s possible candidacy, she thinks to herself. She says nothing because, like Roger, her boss is overly obsessed with politics. She tends to look for the human side of the story.
El Zompopo, Jonás and Arturo burst in.
“I got inside,” El Zompopo says, grinning.
“It was gruesome,” Jonás murmurs.
“And the pictures?”
The only one they wouldn’t let him take was of the naked girl, El Zompopo explains, and brags that Epaminondas, from El Gráfico, didn’t even see him go in through the kitchen door.
Matías tells El Zompopo and Jonás to go find Conejo Arango, the government party President, and some opposition party leaders to get their reactions to Ferracuti’s death. Arturo will go to police headquarters and report any strange goings-on.
Jonás strokes his moustache and turns to look at El Zompopo as if he isn’t too sure about his new assignment, but Matías tells them to hurry up, what are they waiting for.
“Get down to the Presidential Palace right now,” he tells her when the others have left the office, a cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth. “It looks like they pushed up the meeting. And stay alert — the snakes could attack again.”
Rita goes to her desk, puts on the navy blue jacket she always keeps on the back of her chair, and hurries to the parking lot. She’ll find something out, even if it’s just confirmation that the emergency cabinet meeting really is taking place and a list of who’s there.
Víctor is waiting for her in the Volkswagen.
It’s beginning to get warmer. She can feel a kind of tension in the air. There are fearful faces on street corners and at bus stops, as if people are expecting an old yellow car loaded with snakes to pull up any minute.
“All the big bosses are going to meet, right?” says Víctor, as though what goes on at the Presidential Palace were public knowledge.
“Who told you?” Rita asks.
“Everyone knows, Miss. I’ve got a buddy who works there. He says he wouldn’t be surprised if they call a state of emergency. The president is really worried.”