Cut to the helicopters, which had reached the shantytown and were circling over it. The view was dizzying because of the height, the movement and the darkness. It had been a feat, as the commentators were quick to point out, to fly there in that weather, defying the rain, the headwinds and the lightning. The blades were spinning in a mass of almost solid water. The uncontrollable lurching resulted in shots of the nightbound city in which the horizon was vertical or sloping, sometimes even upside down. You could also see the other helicopters battling with the elements, and gauge what the storm was doing to them. SUICIDE MISSION TO BRING YOU THE NEWS, said the lettering on the screen, leaving nothing to the imagination.
Nevertheless, the airborne cameras kept aiming downward, and were able to provide vertical views of the shantytown from about seven hundred feet directly above its center. You could see the whole circle traced out in those famous, over-abundant lights, each little bulb a twinkling signal fixed in the rain-drenched darkness.
Quite apart from the unusual circumstances, the spectacle was interesting from an intellectual and aesthetic point of view. No one had ever seen the shantytown like that, in its entirety. It was a ring of light, with clearly marked lines going in at an angle of 45 degrees to the circumference, none of them leading to the center, which was dark, like a void. These “geometrical” shots were brief because of the buffeting, but also because they were interrupted by images from the ground, where, like amphibious creatures, the patrol cars were speeding along, followed by the news trucks, and taking up positions all around the shantytown. Nevertheless, the shots from overhead kept getting clearer. The ring was not evenly bright, but composed of ribbons and twirls: a profusion of tiny figures that, given more time and tranquility, the eye might have been able to decipher.
Suddenly, Cabezas let out a startled cry. He had been visited by a sudden “illumination” and not just metaphorically. A complete and convincing solution to the enigma that had resisted him for years was swimming into view. It was all thanks to the aerial shots, the “electrical map” — and, of course, the corresponding synapses in his brain. The broadcast that he was watching had also played its modest part: the style of the news channels, superposing images and text, favored or rather maximized redundancy. Once the picture was complete, it all seemed so clear, so utterly self-evident. When you tuned into that frequency, titles began to appear over your own mental images, and that was enough to throw a powerful light on the old mysteries. In this case, the caption that lit up in Cabezas’s brain said: THE PATTERNS OF LIGHTS ARE USED TO IDENTIFY THE STREETS OF THE SHANTYTOWN. Those quirky garlands of bulbs — no two the same — at the entrance to each oblique street were “names” in a code that the dealers had been using, quite openly, to guide their clients. The system was foolproof: they used names that were easy to remember (like “the square,” “the triangle,” “the parallel lines,” or “the hair”), changed the location every night, or several times a night, and waited until the buyers were already circling the shantytown before calling them on their cell phones to tell them where to go.
But it was like the Nazca lines: the inspector had been able to discover the pattern only by seeing the whole thing from the air, as no one had ever seen it before. Most of the dealers in the shantytown were from Peru or Bolivia, and they may have drawn inspiration from that Pre-Colombian land art, adding electricity to bring it up to date, or maybe they were using an ancestral communication technique whose secrets had been handed down from generation to generation.
Not only was the system as a whole revealed to him in its abstract form; thanks to the Pastor’s fatal mistake, Cabezas also knew where the proxidine had been stashed that night. “Seventeen duckling”. . the “duckling” was obviously a configuration of lights at the entrance to a street, and “seventeen” referred to a particular shack. He had seen the roughly painted numbers and he even thought he remembered, somewhere on the perimeter, a string of lights that looked like a duck in profile. It wouldn’t be hard to find, anyhow. And the Pastor had died before he could tell anyone that Cabezas knew the address. So the proxidine would still be there. .
By association, this insight led to memories of the magical drug whose benefits he had so liberally enjoyed. And that was when the last pieces of the puzzle fell into place. As well as kicking himself about the street signs — “Why didn’t I see it before?” — now he was thinking, “How could I have forgotten the proxidine!” This was yet another confirmation of the method on which he had based his police career, which consisted of keeping all the relevant data in play at once. It was the only way to solve a case, and if on this occasion he had abandoned it momentarily, and as a consequence lost heart, he did at least have an excuse: the situation was truly exceptional; he was staking his fate on a single card. In fact, he hadn’t altogether forgotten about the proxidine but he had only been considering its exchange value. Now, remembering its intrinsic value, he realized, finally, that it held the key. Because the drug’s much-touted effect, which was to increase the proximity of things, applied above all to the elements of a problem: by bringing them into sudden contiguity, it brought them closer to the solution.
Of course! The proxidine! What was he thinking? And suddenly it was there, within reach. . Although it wouldn’t be quite that easy. He still had to go and get it. He had a vague hunch that it wasn’t just the regular stash they needed for a night of dealing. There was a reason why they had all decided to launch a final offensive, in spite of the rain: himself, the judge, those two brats, and the Pastor. . True, some were following others (he had followed the girls, for example), but it wasn’t a vicious circle. The Pastor wouldn’t have been standing there on the esplanade in the rain unless something special was happening. And to have reached the scene of the crime two minutes after her son’s death, the judge must have set out well in advance, with all her men, too, armed for battle. The Pastor must have been waiting to tell her about the location of the shipment — and instead he had told Cabezas. Even the television crews must have been tipped off. . They had their own contacts, as well as being big consumers (a while back one of the networks had been accused of running a subliminal ad campaign for proxidine because of its slogan: “the news up close”).
A big shipment. . or something better: the mother of all drugs. Cabezas had heard of “super-pure proxidine”; people were always talking about it, but he’d never really stopped to think about what it might mean. Perhaps it was unthinkable. The expression itself was hyper-redundant. But the thing to which those senseless words referred was his talisman, the only thing left that could free him from the judge’s fatal embrace.
By going back to the shantytown, he would, of course, be putting his head in the lion’s mouth. He did, however, have the advantage of knowing exactly where to go, and with the confusion produced by the manhunt as well as the rain, his chances of slipping in under the radar were, paradoxically, better than ever.
He had made up his mind. He got to his feet, then noticed the two girls sitting at the table. That pair of airheads still hadn’t run away! Just as welclass="underline" he could use them to create a diversion. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and put it on the table: