‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘That’s right, I didn’t.’

  ‘Cristóbal,’ his mother chided. ‘Enough.’

  The silence resumed.

  Armando noticed how Celia’s eyes focused on her son, wary one moment, enraptured the next.

  ‘You know, Armando.’ She looked at him and smiled. ‘My Cristosito has an artistic streak. At the school’s parents’ evening, the art teacher told me that she thought Cristóbal showed “genuine promise”.’ Celia smiled, delighted by the memory.

  Cristóbal tucked his head down and played with his food.

  But Celia seemed rejuvenated. ‘And why not tell Armando about the stuff you do with your friends? The … anime stuff.’

  She looked at Armando, her eyes shining.

  ‘Do you know what anime is, Armando?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s art they do in Japan, like cartoons and stuff. Cristóbal has a group of friends, and they make anime comics. Some of the stuff he draws, you should see it. It’s pretty cool, isn’t it, Cristóbal?’

  ‘Whatever,’ the teenager muttered.

  He wouldn’t look at them.

  Suddenly, he slid his plate out across the table. ‘Finished. Going out.’

  Celia blinked. ‘But you haven’t had your dessert. I made a flan de tres leches, your favourite!’

  ‘Gotta go.’ He sauntered into the hallway without out a backwards glance.

  The door slammed.

  Celia flinched.

  Armando took the wine bottle and topped up her glass.

  She nodded and gave a weak smile. ‘He marches to the beat of his own drum, that’s what you have to understand. He’s very … independent minded.’

  Armando could think of some other words to describe him.

  ‘But hey, I guess we all want to go our own way as teenagers. Jesús Cristo – some of the stuff I put my parents through. I bet you were the same. I bet you were something of a hellraiser as a teenager, right?’

  There was a pleading look in her eyes.

  Armando nodded. ‘Sure.’

  At that moment, there was a cracking sound from outside, and the soft electric lights of the room dimmed into nothing. They were shrouded in gloom.

  ‘It’s the electrical box,’ Celia said in a flat voice. ‘It’s gone again.’

  He could see her looking at him, her eyes shadowed.

  ‘It wasn’t… I mean this evening … wasn’t supposed to be like this.’ Her voice caught in a sob.

  He stood up, walked over to her, and put his hand under her chin, gently turning her face up towards him. Her eyes seemed impossibly wide.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world, Celia. You got candles? And another bottle?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay, you sort out the candles and wine. I’ll pop back home and get my tools.’

  Minutes later he was on his back, underneath one of the kitchen cupboards, gazing up at the tangle of wires and circuits of the electric box. It was an old device, most likely late seventies; the bulky transformer was probably overheating because of an overloaded circuit board. Several circuit breakers had been fried to a black crisp, and a couple of the fuses had gone. Armando turned off the power and did basic emergency rewiring. The work was physically hard because of the odd position of the box; he had to raise his hands up and make fine adjustments with more delicate tools. But within a minute, he was absorbed.

  As a kid, he and his friends had scoured the local rubbish dump for ‘parts’ – their big childhood dream was to build a motorbike from scratch and use it to get to Mexico City. It never occurred to them that a motorbike could not transport all seven of them. Still, such stubborn facts couldn’t trump their sense of childhood exhilaration, the shared dream of building something themselves. Of course, they never managed it, but Armando never lost his fascination with mechanics. Over the years he had fixed cars, bikes, telephones, fridges, TVs, installed two kitchens, built cupboards and tables, fitted new windows, rewired whole apartments, and tons of other things.

  He supposed that since Cynthia had left, he hadn’t been as ‘handy’; there didn’t seem much point. But he found working, here and now, immensely satisfying. Whereas before, sitting at the table, he had felt rusty and awkward, not sure of what to say, now, the rhythm of the labour had somewhat steadied him.

  He slid out from underneath the skink and pushed himself up, panting a little.

  Celia was sitting with her back against the wall, half in shadow.

  ‘Almost done,’ Armando said.

  Celia raised her glass.

  Armando took his and drank.

  She was smiling, amused, intrigued, and he thought she looked beautiful in the soft gloom. It suddenly felt comfortable, and nice, like they were a couple; the familiar intimacy of just being in the same space and not saying all that much. He had missed that.

  A slight frown crossed his face. He spoke quietly, ‘Why do you let him do that?’

  She looked back at him quizzically.

  ‘Why do you let him talk to you like that?’

  Her face changed. ‘Tell me something, Armando.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’

  ‘No.’

  ’None? None whatsoever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what the fuck do you know?’ She’d said it softly, but her eyes flashed with determination.

  Armando smiled involuntarily and raised his hands. ‘Alright. Maybe I better get back under here for my own safety!’

  She looked away and patted his leg. ‘I’m sorry. This is probably not what you expected. Not the kind of fun evening for a first date. Or … whatever this is.’

  He caught her gaze again.

  ‘This is okay,’ he said sincerely. ‘This is good.’

  Five

  It was late morning as Armando drove through the city centre. His head was a little clearer. He’d had a couple of whiskies the night before, after he’d returned to his flat. Then, the heat had abated, and he’d fallen asleep. Looking back on it, Armando thought the ‘date’ had gone well. He’d got the power on. There hadn’t been any sex. They’d kissed, briefly. Nothing more. And that was okay. What had made him feel good was the sense of normality, the feeling of talking to someone in the late evening, of hearing someone’s voice while he worked indoors. He felt a sense of warmth rise in his belly.

  But then it was gone. Replaced by the image of Cynthia – her body withered, head bald, eyes large and reddened – staring out from the formless white of a hospital bed. Such images came to him at the strangest times. It was all in his mind, of course – he hadn’t even known she was ill at the time. And yet those images would come, and he would turn them over and over in his head.

  He felt his breathing become laboured. His heart rate climbed. Ribbons of bright shimmered across his vision.

  The car swerved, and he was revived by a blasting cacophony of beeps. His heart still thudding, he managed to pull over.

  He got out and took a few faltering steps forward. He walked half a block and stepped into one of the new commercial centres, which had opened up in the last few years. As his feet clapped against the pristine marble-coloured floor of the mall, he caught sight of the bright green neon lettering of ‘Comercial Mexicana’. Two private security men were at the door, machine guns draped at their sides. They regarded him balefully, but he paid them no mind, keeping his gaze towards the ground.

  He found the drinks aisle and took a small bottle of cheap whisky. He cashed it out, left the store, and stepped onto the street.

  His breathing relaxed. Just feeling the bottle, the hard-rimmed plastic, was enough to do that. He unscrewed the top and brought it to his mouth. He smelt the dusky odour of the rich dark liquid. He closed his eyes and inhaled. Paused momentarily. Then put the cap back on.

  Back at the car, he slipped the bottle into the glove compartment and started the engine.

  A few minutes later, he pulled up outside the building where he signed in before going downstairs and stepping into the mortuary.

  Arturo Herrera, the chief mortician, was mulling about on the ‘shop floor’. Herrera was held in light contempt by Armando’s colleagues. They called him ‘the penguin’ because he was short, tubby, middle-aged, and balding. He waddled around the lower echelons of the building in conditions of refrigerator-like cold. Yet, Armando found him to be useful and effective; he was clear, logical, and didn’t waste much time on small talk.

  ‘Ah, detective,’ he said when Armando entered. ‘It’s been a while. I trust that you are keeping well?’

  The mortician’s tone was as placid as ever, but his face crinkled in what might have been construed as an attempt at a smile. It was the most emotional Armando had ever seen him.

  ‘I take it you are here for your girl. I noted your badge number on the notes when she came in. A strange case, to say the least.’

  The phrasing ‘your girl’ offset Armando. He thought about Cynthia again, saw the brightness of her smile in his mind’s eye, and then imagined her in a place like this.

  ‘Well, this way …’

  Armando followed the mortician deeper into the chamber, the whole room cast in an austere silvery grey. He barely glanced at the cold naked bodies that had been laid out on the large metal tables, whose texture and hue seemed to meld with the clinical paleness of the chilled room.

  ‘Voila,’ the mortician said with a brief flourish of a pudgy arm.

  When Armando had first visited the morgue, some twenty years ago, nothing more than a beat cop, he’d vomited into a bag. Growing up, he’d known violence, but never dismemberment. But there had been lots of bodies since, so, gradually, his sensitivity and shock had become something else. Numbness perhaps. Now he was standing in front of the corpse he had come across at the church several days earlier. Despite everything he had seen, Armando knew the image of what had been done to her in that church would be with him for the rest of his life.

  Now, though, she looked different. Herrera had laid her out carefully and put a solvent in her eyes and across her labia. It had dissolved the hardened black material, which had been pasted across those openings. He’d also closed the gaping cavity in her chest. The wound, which ran across her belly and torso, had now been stitched up. Her hair had been clipped, combed, and pulled back. Her mouth had been closed, and the gashes that had been opened up from its corners, towards her ear on either side, had been wired and stuffed with cotton buds.

  Her face looked almost human again. Her skin had been washed. Her fingernails and her toenails had been cleanly cleaved away, and a soft, blue gel squeezed evenly into the rims. The mortician had attended to her meticulously. Armando even felt that there was something somehow gentle in his efforts. How strange that would be: a life which had probably known so little gentleness, to find something of it, at last, in death.

  ‘Well, as you can see, your girl has been through the wars. Murdered? Almost certainly.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘I’m covering my bases, detective. Her neck was crushed, but there were no fingerprints on it, nor the impression of someone’s knuckles or shoeprint. Therefore, it’s likely her windpipe was crushed by the ridge of someone’s arm, or the blow from an iron bar, or something similar. Though less likely, it is conceivable that her neck was crushed in some kind of accident. In such a scenario, her body was then … altered by whoever discovered her.’

  Armando scribbled down notes as the mortician went on.

  ‘It’s also possible that she was murdered by one person and then a second party mutilated the corpse. This, however, I find unlikely. In any event, a precise time of death is difficult to establish because of how the body has been treated. Her stomach was empty of food, and the level of acidity indicates she hadn’t eaten in some time. Along with the level of rigor mortis, and the relatively well-preserved state of the body, I’d say the likelihood is that your “VIC” was killed by someone four to five days ago, who kept the body for a while – in a cool place, preparing it – and then deposited it where you had the – ahem – misfortune of discovery.’

  ‘Is there evidence of sexual assault, secretion?’

  ‘No. This is difficult to establish definitively. But there were no traces of fluids in the places where you would expect to find them. There was no tearing or internal bleeding. It is quite possible that she was raped, but the specific nature of her injuries don’t attest to that. I found no biological trace of her assailant on her body: no hairs, no flesh under her fingernails, which might have indicated a struggle.

  ‘The black material – which had been smeared into her eye sockets, over her genitals, and into the chest cavity after her heart was removed – I dissolved and cleaned away, but took a sample. A cursory examination of the material revealed it to be some kind of mortar. I’d hazard the type of thing used on building sites and industrial equipment. I can investigate its origins more extensively if you wish, but only if the department signs off on it, detective.’

  Armando gave a brief nod.

  ‘If we knew who she was, if we had the context in which she was killed and a feasible suspect, then a more detailed examination might be justified. It might go some way to securing a conviction in court. But do you have any idea how many unidentified dead women are processed in any given month? Ninety per cent of them will never be identified, let alone have their assailants brought to justice. There simply isn’t the manpower. I have to log my hours, detective, and I have already spent more time on her than any other “Jane Doe” who has come through these doors for some time.’

  ‘There is something different about her, though,’ Armando cut in. ‘She’s not just another “Jane Doe”, is she?’

  ‘No… no, she isn’t.’

  ‘Why do you think someone would have done something like this?

  The mortician looked up at Armando, his grey eyes glinting in the dull light, his lips set in a small, rueful smile. ‘Come now, detective. You know better than that. My realm begins and ends with physical matter, that which can be tapped and drawn and observed under a microscope. Of the dark night of the soul, I know very little, and wouldn’t care to speculate. There’s also this …’

  The mortician walked away from the table and opened a metal cupboard. He took out the now-bagged wooden figurine that Armando had found placed by the corpse and handed it to the detective. Armando took it. He looked at the mortician, looked at ‘the penguin’. The small rotund man might have been a figure of fun among Armando’s colleagues, but the clarity of the way he saw things, and the scrupulous and logical nature of the way he worked, greatly appealed to Armando.

  ‘Can you tell me something? Anything? Even if it is not based on … complete concrete facts.’

  The other man stared back at him, and in as much as those grey eyes reflected anything, they seemed to hint at a gentle sorrow.

  ‘Only this, perhaps: I have seen women’s bodies come through those doors, bodies broken and damaged and destroyed in every way you might imagine. There is, I sometimes think, no limits to the variety and creativity of death. But I have never seen anything quite like this.’

  Armando left the morgue and stepped out into the warm evening.

  He sat in the car but didn’t turn the key in the ignition. Behind the sleek high buildings of the business district, he could see the waning sun – a shimmering haze of bloody red bleeding into the horizon, leaving in its wake a landscape of cloud fissured with deep purple and orange. From the east, he could see the vast climbing shadow of the Popocatépetl volcano in the distance, and beyond, the darkness of the oncoming night.

  He grabbed the whisky bottle from the glove compartment and took a long lingering drink, feeling the alcohol burn and sizzle in his throat, and then flow into his belly, provoking that sharp, acrid feeling before it melted into his blood. He felt his eyelids flutter – he hadn’t understood just how badly he had needed this drink until now. He breathed out, and all the tension and creakiness of his body seemed to seep away. He took another, smaller sip. He was off duty now, so this was okay. He deserved this.

  He thought it might be nice to knock on Celia’s door. Just turn up out of the blue, bottle of wine in hand. Hell, perhaps he might even make some headway with that brat of hers – the kid was clearly some kind of asocial freak. Perhaps Armando could set him straight, make some bawdy jokes, cuff his head – but in a friendly way. He imagined Celia’s eyes lighting up, delighted by the fact that Armando was showing an interest in her boy. Surely she would show him how grateful she was, later …

  But Armando knew that just knocking on the door wouldn’t work. They didn’t have that kind of relationship yet, and he sensed that Celia wouldn’t be rude exactly if he did something like that, but she wouldn’t appreciate it, either.

  She’d said of her son that ‘he marches to the beat of his own drum’, but Armando thought that was truer of Celia herself. She was a sexy independent woman. She had experienced life. That’s why sex with her would be so good. Armando pictured her on her hands and knees, her panties down, him entering her from behind, the sound of her sonorous moans. Making her his. Making her know it. After that, they would lie together, her head nestling against his chest, and he’d run a finger through her hair. Maybe he’d take Cristóbal out the next day. Watch a baseball game with him or something.

  That’s what people did, right?

  He blinked. The sun had almost set, the last residues of light fading behind the vast shape of the volcanic belt. The loneliness beckoned; soon he would return to his apartment, drink more whisky, and watch some documentaries, maybe.

  But it was a Friday, and every second Friday, he would go and make the collection. If he arrived early, he might have a better chance of missing Juan Carlos. He loathed the young man, but Armando knew he had to be careful because of Juan Carlos’s father and the money their organisation provided him with.

  Virtually every cop in Puebla City was on the take; however, this was not corruption, not in the truest sense of the word – at least not to Armando. For him, it was simply an issue of survival. The average beat cop made around 3,000 pesos a month, roughly the same salary as an unskilled labourer. As a detective, Armando made more, but the amount was still negligible. Cops in Puebla took money from certain criminal organisations that had been vetted; organisations that would, in return, comply with the police on certain issues and ensure that the violence on the street remained within ‘manageable’ levels. Many people complained about the connection between the police and criminal organisations, but they had no idea of the realities of crime in Mexico’s bigger cities.

 

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