Soon I was in the street, shivering, making my way through the crowd toward the Aschenplatz, where I would have to take the tram, for the streets downtown were closed to traffic because of the parades and celebrations; and to liven up my spirits in that multitude of strangers who were drinking and singing in the freezing dawn, and to chase away from my mind the ghost I had left behind in the bar, I shouted again and again at the top of my lungs, We all know who are the assassins!, a shout that fired up my passions and went wholly unnoticed in the midst of the hubbub of so-called Carnival, a shout I didn’t stop shouting even in the tram full of revelers, but that I couldn’t utter upon entering Cousin Quique’s apartment, as had been my intention, because a loud moan stopped me in my tracks, the moans of the Dutch girl who was taking it all in with her legs flung wide apart, man, the alcohol evaporated from my blood in an instant when I saw that, and I was forced to move with the utmost caution so that my presence wouldn’t undermine those moans that had a relatively high timbre, to tell the truth, for I felt them reverberating in my ear, even though I was shut up in the office where I slept, and that if I hadn’t been intent on turning on the computer to check my email would soon have allowed me to jack off with the greatest ease. And, in fact, there in my inbox was a message from my buddy Toto, which I proceeded to open with the utmost eagerness, and which wasn’t a letter so much as a kind of telegram that said, “Yesterday at noon the bishop presented the report in a bombastic ceremony in the cathedral; last night he was assassinated at the parish house, they smashed his head in with a brick. Everybody’s fucked. Be grateful you left.”