But when he got there, he found Lienore lying dead against the stairs, her arms flung up over her head, blood still draining from the wound in her neck.
Ramon ran to her, knelt next to her, cradled her corpse in his arms. Her blood ran onto his hands and down his neck. He started to howl like a baby. One of the men who worked in the steakhouse heard his cries and found him, holding Lienore tightly to his chest. The man left and returned a few moments later with a policeman.
The police decided that Lienore had been the victim of a burglar. And when, later that day, they found Maria’s body in a changing booth at the beach, they dismissed it as the work of a sex criminal. These were the kind of random tragedies that happened every day; that it had happened to two members of the same family in a single day seemed to the disinterested police merely an odd twist of fate. They offered Ramon their condolences, but not their protection or their further assistance.
Ramon numbly accepted all they told him and said not a word about the Jomon. He barely heard the policemen’s explanations or his own account, which he repeated three times, of how he had found his wife’s body. His mind was filled with the picture of his wife’s blood pouring onto his palms and running between his fingers, of his daughter’s bruised throat and lifeless eyes, and of the Jomon’s threat that they would kill him, too, should he fail to cooperate. His ears burned with the words of his daughter’s friends, who had told him (but not the police) that they had seen Maria last in the company of a long-haired blond who had asked them, before leading Maria away, to give his regards to her father.
Ramon ran, first thing the next morning, to his safety-deposit box in the bank. He took the papers of ownership for the steakhouse and the cantina to the house of the Jomon and begged to be let in. Then, with tears streaming down his face, he handed the papers over into the hands that had murdered his daughter, felt those hands clasp his and clap his back and then push him once more out into the street, where he lay down in the dark mouth of an alley and wept.
The door closed behind the Jomon; the noises from outside grew quiet once more. The man in the mask picked up the telephone on the desk.
He dialed the police.
“Tonight, at eight-thirty, a man will be killed on Pescador Street by the Jomon. I suggest you have men on hand to apprehend them.”
Then, as the tiny voice started squeaking questions at him through the earpiece, the man in the mask hung up.
The police, in masks of gold brocade and beaded ponchos and feather headdresses, filter onto the street and mix with the crowd. It is not yet eight o’clock and the sun has just set.
The revelry begins slowly tonight — the army of marchers is farther uptown, at the start of the grand parade, and though the parade will pass along Pescador Street on its way to the beach, it begins in a more prosperous area, at the request of that area’s merchants, barmen, and restaurateurs. The crowd on Pescador Street as the hour changes is all native: dressed madly, gaily, beating tambours and stamping its feet, but not in stagey fashion, not, this time, for the benefit of American television.
A pair of drunks stagger around the entrance to El Cantoria, unaware that they do so in front of a dozen policemen. On another night they might be taken in, but tonight they are let be. The police communicate with silent glances and small gestures. Thirty minutes remain.
In his bodega, Ramon Madradas tallies the day’s receipts and makes a note of the amount in a log he keeps on the shelf under the register. He strips off his apron, balls it up, and leaves it lying on the counter. He moves with short, quick steps around the store, checking each aisle, pushing cans of food back into place, restacking a fallen pile of newspapers. He fears the foot-stamping outside and ticks off in his mind the minutes before the parade will reach Pescador Street. There is just enough time to close the shop. Normally he would then climb upstairs to the apartment he once shared with his wife and daughter, but tonight — tonight is the anniversary of their death and of his capitulation, and tonight will be different.
Ramon turns face down a photograph of himself and his family that he keeps beside the register. He lays it down gently, careful not to scratch the delicate frame. Today, Maria would have been nineteen. Lienore would have been forty-six. If Ramon had died when they died, he would never have aged past fifty. But he is fifty-one now and they are dead, the buildings next door and across the street are in the hands of their killers, and Ramon feels pressing down upon him as though it were a physical weight the wrongness of it all, the enormity of the injustice.
Atone! a voice from deep inside him cries. For cowardice and weakness, atone! And Ramon, knowing it for the voice of his soul, shies away, nervously wrings his hands, searches around the bodega for anything to do rather than step outside into the street.
In the back room of El Cantoria, the Jomon arrange their costumes. They are dressed as oriental kings, with spangled vests and bright turbans and made-up faces. Each carries a revolver in the pocket of his sash. The blond checks his wristwatch and looks out through the slats of the front door. It is almost eight-thirty; the parade is coming closer every minute.
At the edge of the sidewalk, the captain of police, who is dressed as a gaucho, glances around at every face he can scan, looking for a sign. All are strained with anticipation — the music and carousing of the parade is almost here. But which face, the captain asks himself, is that of a man about to die? Which is the face of the killer? And where, among all the painted faces and papier-mâché masks, is the man who called in the tip? There is no way to tell. And as the darkness deepens, it becomes more and more difficult to keep everything in view. Faces emerge from shadow and then disappear once more as people dance past streetlights. Lanterns on the walls create as many shadows as they dispel.
The numbers on the captain’s watch dial glow green with faint luminescence. 8:26. Four more minutes. He walks across the street toward the Madradas bodega, whose lights are still on. Perhaps from there he will be able to see something that will help him.
Ramon paces just inside the door. He remembers, all of a sudden, the last look Maria gave him on the day she died. She was leaving in the morning to walk on the beach and with her goodbye kiss she gave him a look of fervent anticipation that seemed to say that she expected something good to happen that day. It was a look he’d seen often in Maria’s eyes; he had taken no special notice of it and no special pleasure. Had he known he would never see it again, he might have held her longer, might have drunk deeper of the moment. Now the memory of it flits before him, teasing him. Already it is gone. He cannot get it back, though he tries. Now he can only picture her dead eyes and Lienore’s blood on the stairs and his own tears as he knelt cringing before the Jomon and begging for his own life to be spared.
The memory hardens him. He flicks off the lights in the store and steps outside.
The lights in the bodega go off. The police captain moves off toward the well-lit comer where he sees two of his lieutenants standing. Maybe they have seen something from there.
The Jomon watch as Ramon emerges from his bodega. They swing open the cantina’s doors and step out into the street. The parade still has not arrived. But it will any minute. Everyone in the street seems to be holding his breath. The Jomon walk slowly across the street.