Finally I discovered a trail of fresh blood. I told Elisa’s relative to go back to the burrow and I continued on my own. The trail of blood was curious: it kept stopping at the edge of a canal, but then reappearing a few yards further on (and sometimes many yards further), always on the same side, not the far side, as one might have expected. Whatever had left that trail clearly wasn’t trying to cross the canal, so why had it kept getting into the water? In any case, the trail itself was barely detectable, so the precautions taken by the predator, whatever it was, seemed, at first, to be excessive. After a while I came to a dead sewer.
I got into the water there, and swam toward a bank of accumulated rotting trash, and when I reached it I had to climb up a beach of filth. Beyond the bank, above water level, I could see the thick bars at the top of the sewer’s entrance. For a moment I was afraid I might find the predator huddled in some corner, feasting on the body of the hapless Elisa. But I could hear nothing, so I kept going.
A few minutes later, among cardboard boxes and old food cans, I found the girl’s body left in one of the few relatively dry parts of the sewer.
Elisa’s neck was torn open. Apart from that, I couldn’t see any other wound. In one of the cans I found the remains of a baby rat. I examined them: dead for at least a month. I searched the surroundings but couldn’t detect the slightest trace of the predator. The baby’s corpse was complete. The only wound on poor Elisa’s body was the one that had killed her. I began to think that perhaps it hadn’t been a predator. Then I put the girl on my back and picked up the baby in my mouth, trying not to damage his skin with my sharp teeth. I retreated from the dead sewer and returned to the pioneers’ burrow. Elisa’s mother was large and strong, one of those specimens who can face up to a cat, but when she saw the body of her daughter, she burst into long sobs that made her companions blush. I showed them the body of the baby and asked them if they knew anything about him. No one knew anything, no child had been lost. I said that I had to take both bodies to the station. I asked for help. The mother carried Elisa’s body. I carried the baby. When we left, the pioneers returned to work, digging tunnels, looking for food.
This time I went to fetch the coroner and stayed with him until he finished examining both bodies. Elisa’s mother, asleep beside us, was seized from time to time by dreams, which wrested incomprehensible and incoherent words from her. After three hours the coroner had decided what he was going to tell me; it was what I had been afraid to imagine. The baby had died of hunger; Elisa had died from the wound to her throat. I asked him if that wound could have been inflicted by a snake. I don’t think so, said the coroner, unless it’s a new kind of snake. I asked him if the wound could have been inflicted by a blind alligator. Impossible, said the coroner. Maybe a weasel, he said. Weasels have been seen in the sewers recently. Scared to death, I said. That’s true, replied the coroner. Most of them die of hunger. They get lost, they drown, they’re eaten by alligators. We can forget the weasels, said the coroner. Then I asked him if Elisa had struggled with her killer. The coroner looked at the girl’s corpse for a long time. No, he concluded. That’s what I thought, I said. While we were talking, another police officer appeared. His rounds, as opposed to mine, had been quite uneventful. We woke Elisa’s mother. The coroner said goodbye. Is it all over? asked the mother. It’s all over, I replied. She thanked us and left. I asked my colleague to help me get rid of Elisa’s corpse.
The two of us took it to a canal where the current was strong and threw it in. Why don’t you throw out the baby’s body too? asked my colleague. I don’t know, I said, I want to examine it, maybe we missed something. Then he went back to his beat and I went back to mine. I asked every rat I met the same question: Have you heard anything about a missing baby? I got all sorts of answers, but in general our people look after their young, and what they told me was all second-hand. My rounds took me back to the perimeter. The pioneers were working on a tunnel, all of them, including Elisa’s mother, whose bulky, greasy body could barely squeeze through the crack, but her teeth and claws were still the best for digging.
I decided to go back to the dead sewer and try to see what it was that I had missed. I looked for tracks but couldn’t find any. Signs of violence. Signs of life. The baby hadn’t made its own way into the sewer, that much was obvious. I looked for food scraps, traces of dried shit, a burrow, all in vain.
Suddenly I heard a faint splashing. I hid. After a while I saw a white snake break the surface of the water. It was thick and must have been a yard long. I saw it dive and resurface a couple of times. Then it emerged cautiously from the water and scaled the bank, making a hissing sound like a leaking gas pipe. For our people, that snake was as lethal as gas. It approached my hiding place. Coming from that direction, it couldn’t attack directly, which meant, in principle, that I had time to escape (but once in the water I would be easy prey) or sink my teeth into its neck. It was only when the snake went away without any sign of having seen me that I realized it was blind, a descendant of those pet snakes that humans flush down the toilet when they get tired of them. For a moment I felt sorry for it. And I celebrated my good luck in an indirect way. I imagined the snake’s parents or great-great-grandparents descending through the infinite network of sewer pipes; I imagined their bewilderment in the darkness of the sewers, not knowing what to do, resigned to death or suffering, and I imagined the few that survived, adapting themselves to an infernal diet, exercising their power, sleeping and dying in that endless winter.
Fear stimulates the imagination, it seems. When the snake was gone, I resumed my methodical search of the dead sewer. I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The next day I talked with the coroner again. I asked him to take another look at the baby’s corpse. At first he looked at me as if I’d gone insane. Haven’t you got rid of it? he asked. No, I said, I want you to check it over one more time. Eventually he promised he would, as long as he didn’t have too much work that day. As I did my rounds, waiting for the coroner’s final report, I kept looking for a family that had lost a baby in the previous month. Unfortunately, the work we do, especially those who live near the perimeter, keeps us constantly on the move, and by then the mother of the dead baby could well have been digging tunnels or searching for food several miles away. Unsurprisingly, my inquiries didn’t yield any promising leads.
When I returned to the station I found a note from the coroner—and another from my commanding officer, asking me why I still hadn’t got rid of the baby’s corpse. The coroner’s note confirmed his earlier conclusion: there were no wounds; the cause of death had been hunger and possibly also exposure to the cold. The little ones are particularly vulnerable to harsh environmental conditions. I thought about it long and hard. The baby must have cried itself hoarse, as any baby would in a situation like that. Surely his cries would have attracted a predator? Why hadn’t they? The killer must have snatched the baby, then used back ways to reach the dead sewer. And there, he had left the baby alone and waited for him to die, of natural causes, as it were. Could it have been the baby-snatcher who later killed Elisa? Yes, that was the most likely scenario.
Then a question occurred to me, something I hadn’t asked the coroner, so I got up and went looking for him. On the way, I saw many rats who seemed carefree or playful or preoccupied with their own problems, scurrying in one direction or the other. Some of them greeted me warmly. Someone said, Look, there goes Pepe the Cop. The only thing I could feel was the sweat beginning to soak all through my fur, as if I’
d just crawled out of the stagnant waters of a dead sewer.
I found the coroner sleeping alongside five or six other rats, all of them, to judge from their weariness, doctors or medical students. When I roused him from his sleep he looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. How many days did he take to die? I asked him. José, is that you? asked the coroner. What do you want? How many days does it take a baby to die of hunger? We left the burrow. Why did I ever become a pathologist? said the coroner. Then he thought for a while. It depends on the baby’s constitution. Two days or less in some cases, but a plump, well-nourished baby could last five days or more. And without drinking? I asked. A bit less, said the coroner. Then he added: I don’t know what you’re trying to get at. Did he die of hunger or thirst? I asked. Hunger. Are you sure? As sure as you can be in a case like this, said the coroner.
Back at the station I got to thinking: the baby had been taken a month ago and probably took three or four days to die. He must have been crying all that time. And yet the noise hadn’t attracted any predators. I returned to the dead sewer once again. This time I knew what I was looking for and it didn’t take me long to find it: a gag. All the time he was dying, the baby had been gagged. No, not all the time. Every now and then the killer had taken off the gag and given the baby a drink, or maybe left it on, but soaked the cloth with water. I picked up what was left of the gag and got out of that dead sewer.
The coroner was waiting for me at the station. What did you find there, Pepe? he asked when he saw me. The gag, I said, handing him the scrap of dirty cloth. The coroner examined it for a few seconds, without touching it. Is the baby’s body still here? he asked me. Get rid of it, he said, people are starting to talk about the way you’re behaving. Talk about or criticize? I asked. It comes to the same thing, said the coroner before he left. I didn’t feel up to working, but I pulled myself together and went out. Apart from the usual accidents, which can be relied upon to blight everything we undertake, it was a routine beat like any other. When I returned to the station, after hours of exhausting work, I got rid of the baby’s body. For days there were no new developments. There were attacks by predators, accidents, old tunnels collapsed, several of our number were killed by a poison before we could find a way to neutralize it. Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us. Routine and mettle. Recovering bodies and recording incidents. Identical, calm days. Until I found the bodies of two young rats, a female and a male.
I had heard they were missing on my rounds of the tunnels. The parents weren’t worried; they thought the young couple had probably decided to go and live together in a different burrow. But as I was leaving, not overly preoccupied by the double disappearance, someone who had been friends with them both told me that neither the young Eustaquio nor the young Marisa had ever expressed any such wish. They’re just friends, good friends, which is remarkable given Eustaquio’s peculiarity. And what kind of peculiarity is that? I asked. He composes and declaims verse, said the friend (so he was obviously unfit for work). And what about Marisa? Not her, said the friend. What do you mean, not her? I asked. She doesn’t have any peculiarity like that. To another police officer, these details would have seemed irrelevant. But my instincts were alerted. I asked if there was a dead sewer anywhere near the burrow. They told me that the closest one was a mile away, at a lower level. I set off in that direction. Along the way I came across an old rat followed by a group of youngsters. The old guy was warning them about weasels. We said hello. He was a teacher leading an excursion. The youngsters weren’t ready yet for work, but nearly. I asked them if they’d noticed anything strange in the course of their outing. Everything is strange, shouted the old guy, as we went off in opposite directions, strange is normal, fever is health, poison is food. Then he burst into cheerful laughter, which went on ringing in my ears, even when I turned into another passage.
After a while I came to the dead sewer. Sewers in which the water is stagnant are all pretty much the same, but I can usually tell, with a fair degree of certainty, whether or not I’ve been in a particular dead sewer before. That one was unfamiliar. I examined the entrance for a while, looking for a dry way in. Then I jumped into the water and swam. As I drew closer I thought I could see waves coming from an island of detritus. Naturally, I was worried about running into a snake, and I swam toward the island as quickly as I could. The ground there was soft; I sunk into a whitish mud up to my knees. The smell was the same as in all the dead sewers, not decomposing matter so much as the inner essence of decomposition. I made my way slowly from island to island. Occasionally I had the impression that something was clutching at my feet, but it was only trash. On the last island I found the bodies. There was only one wound on young Eustaquio’s body: his throat was torn open. It was clear that young Marisa, however, had put up a fight. Her skin was covered with bites. I found blood on her teeth and claws, from which it was simple to deduce that the killer had been wounded. I struggled with the bodies one at a time, and finally got them out of the sewer. Then I tried to transport them to the nearest settlement, carrying one for fifty yards, putting it down, going back for the other. At one point, as I was going back for young Marisa’s body, I saw a white snake that had come out of the canal and was heading toward her. I froze. The snake wrapped itself twice around her body, then crushed it. When it began to swallow her, I turned and ran to where I’d left Eustaquio. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t even let out a whimper.
From that day on, I intensified my investigations. I was no longer satisfied with routine police work: patrolling the perimeter and dealing with problems that anyone with a modicum of common sense could solve. Every day I went out to the furthest burrows. I engaged their inhabitants in the most trivial conversations. I discovered a colony of rat-moles living among us, performing the lowliest tasks. I met an old white mouse, a white mouse who couldn’t remember his age. In his youth he had been inoculated with a contagious disease, along with many of his kind, white mice who had been imprisoned and then released into the sewers in the hope of killing us all. Many died, said the white mouse, who could barely move, but the black rats and the white mice interbred, we fucked like crazy (as only those who are close to death can fuck) and in the end not only did the black rats become immune, but a new species also emerged: brown rats, resistant to any infection, any alien virus.
I liked that old white mouse who was born, so he said, in a laboratory on the surface. The light is blinding up there, he said, so bright that the surface dwellers don’t even appreciate it. Have you been to the sewer mouths, Pepe? Yes, once or twice, I replied. So you’ve seen the river that the sewers all flow into, you’ve seen the reeds, the pale sand? Yes, but always at night, I replied. So you’ve seen the moonlight shimmering on the river? I didn’t really notice the moonlight. What did you notice, then, Pepe? The barking of the dogs, the packs of dogs that live by the river. The moonlight too, I admitted, but I couldn’t really enjoy the view. The moon is exquisite, said the white mouse; if someone were to ask me where I’d like to live, I would reply without hesitation: the moon.
Like a moon-dweller I patrolled the sewers and underground drains. After a while I found another victim. As before, the killer had left the body in a dead sewer. I picked it up and carried it to the station. That night I spoke with the coroner again. I pointed out the similarity between the tear in the throat and th
e other victims’ wounds. It could be a coincidence, he said. And whatever’s doing this doesn’t eat them, I said. The coroner examined the body. Look at the wound, I said. Tell me what kind of teeth rip the skin like that. Any kind, any kind, said the coroner. No, not any kind, look carefully. What do you want me to say? said the coroner. The truth, I said. And what is the truth, in your opinion? I think these wounds were made by a rat, I said. But rats don’t kill rats, said the coroner, looking at the body again. This one does, I said. Then I went to work and when I returned to the station I found the coroner and the chief commissioner waiting for me. The commissioner didn’t beat around the bush. He asked me where I’d got the crazy idea that a rat had been responsible for the crimes. He wanted to know if I had shared my suspicions with anyone else. He warned me not to. Stop fantasizing, Pepe, he said, and concentrate on doing your job. Real life is complicated enough without inventing unreal things that are bound to throw it out of joint. I was dead tired; I asked him what he meant by out of joint. I mean, said the commissioner, looking at the coroner as if to seek his approval and adopting a deep and gentle tone of voice, that in life, especially if it’s short, as our lives unfortunately are, we should strive for order, not disorder, and especially not an imaginary disorder. The coroner looked at me gravely and nodded. I nodded too.
But I remained alert. For several days the killer seemed to have disappeared. Every time I went to the perimeter and made contact with a new colony, I asked about the first victim, the baby who had died of hunger. Finally an old explorer told me about a mother who had lost her baby. They thought it had fallen into the canal or been taken by a predator. But since there were many children in that group and only a few adults, they didn’t spend a long time looking for the baby. Shortly afterward, they moved to the northern sewers, near a big well, and the explorer lost touch with them. When I had some time to spare, I went looking for that group. I knew they would have multiplied since the baby’s disappearance; the children would have grown up, and perhaps they would have forgotten. But if I was lucky enough to find the baby’s mother, she would still be able to tell me something. The killer, meanwhile, was on the loose. One night I found a body in the morgue with the killer’s signature wound: the throat was torn open, almost neatly. I spoke with the police officer who had found the body. I asked him if he thought it had been a predator. What else could it be? he said. You think it was an accident, do you, Pepe? An accident, I thought. A permanent accident. I asked him where he had found the body. In a dead sewer down south, he replied. I suggested that he keep an eye on the dead sewers in that sector. Why? he wanted to know. Because you never know what you’ll find there. He looked at me as if I were crazy. You’re tired, he said, let’s get some sleep. We went to the station’s sleeping room. The air was warm. Another police rat was snoring in there. Good night, said my colleague. Good night, I said, but I couldn’t sleep. I started thinking about the killer’s movements, the way he sometimes struck in the north and sometimes in the south. After tossing and turning for a while I got up.
The Insufferable Gaucho Page 5