He opened the door and got out. His mind was made up. Getting wet was the least of his worries.
“Praise be to the Lord!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, so he could be heard over the thunder and the crashing of the rain.
“Praise be, brother.”
“Where is he?”
The Pastor stared at Cabezas open-mouthed, and since he was shorter and had to look up, his face was doused with water.
“Come on, where is he? They’re right behind us!”
“But who sent you?”
Of all the plausible replies, Cabezas chose the one that he could back up with something concrete and visible. And, by chance, he hit on just the thing to fool the Pastor:
“They brought me,” he said, pointing at the car. The Pastor bent down a little, and a flash of lightning revealed two pale faces looking at him. He recognized Vanessa.
“He’s in duckling, number seventeen,” he said with obvious relief. “But he’s fine. .”
Then Cabezas made his big mistake. It was understandable: Comissioner Cuá, the chief at Police Station Seventeen, had a surname that sounded like a duck’s quack. Thinking that the Pastor was referring to his colleague, Cabezas asked ingenuously:
“So how do we get the gear out of the station?”
Grasping the enormity of the misunderstanding, the Pastor took a step back and his expression morphed.
“You’re not the father! You’re a cop!”
Then it was his turn to make a fatal mistake. He put his hand in his pocket. He wasn’t reaching for anything. It was just a habit. Something he’d picked up from preaching: he’d learnt that the more absurd and unnecessary a gesture, the greater its effect on the audience. Cabezas, who thought the Pastor was reaching for a gun, whipped his out first and fired two shots into the young man’s chest. The Pastor toppled over backward, like a tree-trunk falling into the enormous puddle. Almost as soon as his victim’s head hit the water, Cabezas was back at the wheel of his car, accelerating wildly, ignoring the shrieks of his passengers and the hair-raising hissing of the lightning bolts, and the hammering of the rain on the hood, and the sirens of the police cars arriving at the scene of the crime. For the moment, all he wanted was to get out of there and if he’d been near the ultimate edge, the black rim of the universe, he would have aimed the snout of the car in that direction and driven off.
X
The floating corpse was not yet cold when an impressive squad of new-model patrol cars came tearing out of the narrow part of Bonorino in single file and pulled up on the esplanade, with their sirens blaring in a raucous ostinato and their lights flashing relentlessly. The cars at the rear rushed forward in a final spurt of acceleration while the front-runners were already braking. They ended up forming a large semi-circle all pointing at the body. For a moment nothing moved, except for the lights spinning on the roofs of the cars. The rain went on lashing this urban plateau. It seemed to be running off the great dome of light over the shantytown to swell the black floodwaters converging on the corpse.
The first thing to move was the door of the car that had ended up in the middle. A moment later, the doors of all the other cars opened too. But no one got out. The doors stayed open, swinging on their hinges in empty space. If the door of the middle car had closed again, perhaps all the others would have followed suit. But it didn’t. A leg emerged. It was the leg of a woman: fat, short, but shapely. A stocking with a pearly sheen, a red leather shoe with a stiletto heel at least six inches high. Legs emerged from all the other cars, one per door, but these were men’s legs, in trousers of regulation blue, with feet encased in impeccably polished boots. All of the feet, like the first to emerge, hesitated for a moment in the air, thrust out almost horizontally, as if to say: “Shall I take the plunge?” In any case, they were drenched already; not just wet, but pummeled and wrung by the rain.
The little red shoe plunged into the water, followed by the matching shoe, and then, in a single fluid movement (it only took a couple of seconds, and yet it had a certain choreographic grandeur), there was a woman standing beside the car. It was the implacable and widely feared Judge Plaza. The rain renewed its attack on her. Policemen had stepped from each of the cars, all looking respectfully in the same direction as the judge.
She was an extraordinarily short woman and obese, aged somewhere between forty and fifty, with dyed-blond hair (it was naturally dark), and Indian or perhaps partly African features. Very confident, well-groomed, commanding and decisive. She had earned her reputation. She inspired fear. The tabloid journalists loved her, and so did their huge audience, who felt it was time for a tough and energetic justice, unhampered by wigs and precedents, ready to take to the streets and fight crime on its own turf.
A few die-hard liberals criticized Judge Plaza — under their breath, mind you, and among themselves in their ivory towers — for being a “media celebrity.” But that wouldn’t have stopped them approving of her if she hadn’t been so vulgar, so in tune with the bloodthirsty instincts of the masses. In fact they had a very good reason to approve of her, which was that she always chose her prey among the masses that had made her a star. And once she had chosen and the hunt was on, she was as fierce as a wild cat: relentless, vengeful, truly bad, of that you could be sure. There was no escape. The public cheered and cried out for more. It’s odd that it never occurred to those citizens, not even for a moment, as they sat in front of their televisions following the judge’s exploits, that one day she might target them. After all, anyone can end up looking suspicious, given the complexity of modern life in a big city, and she was not the sort of judge to bother with gathering evidence, or comparing witness statements, or giving guarantees; her specialty was destruction, annihilation, and the slightest suspicion or rumor was enough for her to go on. She was a woman to be feared, yet none of her fans was afraid of her. Maybe it was because of her status as a media personality. The villains she was after were personalities too, at least as soon as she was on the case, and the whole operation remained within the kingdom of images. Why would the viewers feel that this spectacle had anything to do with their physical reality? They might as well have believed that someone from the TV was going to call them and give them a huge cash prize or a car or a trip to the Caribbean. Nobody really expects that to happen. It’s often said that television has changed people’s lives, but the truth is that life has maintained its autonomy.
The water was almost up to her knees, which were closer to the ground than those of ordinary mortals. She started walking forward. Her men gathered around her. The judicial police officers under her command were an elite group: experienced, incorruptible, bound together by a samurai mysticism and a blind obedience to the judge, who rewarded their loyalty by providing them with the latest, most sophisticated arms and granting them an autonomy that they exploited to the full. According to the legend, each of the judge’s men had a thousand revolvers.
The corpse was floating at the vortex of the group’s collective attention, the judge’s having magnetized that of all her men. It was something more than attention. They had never seen her like this before, although they weren’t actually looking at her. The floating point in the dark water reflected everything.
One of the judge’s most famous and frequently misunderstood declarations was that her only aim in life was to bequeath to the world, at the end of her brief sojourn, something it had not possessed before. It sounded like a throwaway line, the kind of thing that people trot out when they’re stuck for something to say, but it was more subtle than that. For a start, it’s not so simple to bring something new into the world: it’s a bit like bringing a rock back from the moon, except that these days the moon is really a part of the world. And she wasn’t referring to a combination of pre-existing elements or a rearrangement, but to something really new, a new element, which could enter into old combinations, if anyone so desired. This was a strange ambition for a judge: justice is like a zero-sum game; you could say that its mission, the essence of what it does, is to transform a situation without affecting the overall number of elements. Adding something new is more like what art does.