Crocodile Tears

by mercedes Rosende

  “I don’t want to die,” she had shouted just a few minutes earlier, and Ursula had heard her from outside, had opened the door and gone in, had seen the nurse take the woman’s pale sick hand, put it back gently on the white bedspread, had seen the nurse turn to her father and to her.

  Between the two velvet curtains she could just see the lights of the cathedral coming on, lights appearing in windows, on street corners, in the row of buildings along the waterfront. The traffic of the ending day, the voices of people fleeing homeward; all the noises of the world sounded distant, muffled, fragmented behind the wooden shutters and the velvet curtains. The world was so far away that inside the bedroom you could even hear the furniture creaking.

  Auntie Irene entered just then with a basin of water scented with lavender and English cologne, and soft music was playing somewhere, perhaps a folk song on the transistor radio in the kitchen. The universe stopped and the scene was fixed in her memory like a photograph: the nurse sweltering in her starched uniform, her glasses hanging from a chain, resting on her chest; Ursula’s father standing in front of her, his blue summer jacket with gold buttons, astonishment in the angle of his eyebrows; Auntie Irene’s hand bejewelled with bracelets and rings, grasping the basin of water that would never be used; and her, Ursula, a sad girl who can smell the fear and the starch and the death. A photo, a painting, a watercolour in pale tones which disintegrates when the nurse clears her voice and makes the announcement that brings an end to the macabre silence.

  These remnants from the past are hers, they are her memory, the part of her mother that Ursula carries inside her. Not the photos her father rushed to place around the house or the anecdotes her sister Luz tells; they are the trace that remains in her memory, only hers, because she is sure nobody else recalls all these smells.

  And here she is, much later, in this same house and surrounded by all the same old things, with the memories that come to her mind, wishing she could sleep all night long, wishing for dreams shorn of the past, of memories, of the future.

  Before she started killing, she thought her victims would smell of lavender and starch, that they would look into her eyes to get the measure of their own fear, and those nights she was unable to sleep despite the Somnium, lying on her back in a cold sweat.

  XII

  Imagine the waiting room of the Criminal Court.

  No, it’s not one of those court waiting rooms you see in American television series, painted in subtle colours and austerely decorated, furnished in dark polished wood, with thick carpets that silence the footsteps of grey-suited lawyers and prosecutors and judges, those neatly combed and clean-shaven agents of the law. There are no wide corridors or sunlit rooms here, no burgundy curtains or libraries with hundreds of volumes bound in green English leather. No, none of that.

  In here, the first thing to hit your nose, even before you are inside, is the smell of caged animals. Before you see the row of red or orange plastic chairs – the colours have faded and the difference no longer matters – before you see the walls with six layers of bubbly paint, pale blue and beige and green, before you walk past the brownish damp stains, before you even come out of the iron elevator lined with Formica and then with plastic, the smell knocks you flat. The place reeks of humidity and unwashed bodies. It’s the smell supermarkets hide at the back, in the part of the store protected by no entry signs: the smell of abandoned houses. The outside world would wrinkle its nose if it entered this place, where prisoners wait for hours and days for their turn to listen to questions, for somebody to write down their answers, to be informed of their sentence, to hear the word that represents the frontier between being outside and being inside.

  There are no windows, no skylights, no transoms, no reference to the light of the outside world, no contact with the street other than the dark arrogant chill that rises up the stairwell. The tiled floor has been partially torn up, exposing blobs of cement beneath; cobwebs and cigarette smoke stain the aqua-green tones of the ceiling; and the metal door of the elevator, once brown, displays the names of hundreds of suspects, carved into it with the tip of a key or painted on with nail polish.

  If we walk down the narrow, poorly lit corridor, if we enter the waiting room of Criminal Court Number 4, we will see Diego, his elbows on his knees, his head resting on the palms of his hands and, just like in the patrol car, a policeman sitting at either side. At least he is no longer being tortured by cumbia – no music is allowed here, regardless of the style – and the guards, just for a change, are captivated by their phones, their eyes glued to the screen, sending and receiving messages, notifications going off, shooting down Martians and eating dots with their Pac-Man. Every now and then they take turns to go out and smoke, returning with another smell that mixes with all the other odours.

  They don’t talk to him or even look at him; they scarcely communicate with each other.

  Pay attention to the elevator door. Just now it is opening and two more policemen emerge, in their custody a grim dishevelled man. Diego recognizes the walk. The group enters the room and the policemen nod at their colleagues then tell their prisoner where to sit. The Hobo obeys, dragging his feet, his head bowed, collapses into the chair, falling so the row of red-or-orange seats shifts backwards with the impact. The cops sit at either side, as the regulations no doubt stipulate. For a moment, the man looks at Diego, their eyes meet, there’s a spark, scarcely a glimmer, and then they lose themselves again, each attending to his own business. Within a few minutes, the new arrival seems to have fainted or to have fallen asleep. Observe the arms which emerge from his rolled-up sleeves, arms covered in black tattoos: letters forming names, skulls with gleaming eyes, red bloodstains gushing across his skin. Beneath the tattoos the muscles are knotty, like those of a featherweight boxer. Diego, who has learned more about tattoos these last few days than in the rest of his life, knows the skull is San La Muerte, the saint of death, and that the guy who seems to be asleep made him a promise that he will keep, whatever the price, even if it costs him his life. Let’s be careful. Better not look too long at the Hobo; if he wakes up we don’t want to be looking into those eyes, filled with enough fury to give you nightmares, as Diego knows so well.

  Diego forces himself to look away, focusing on random details in the room, a single broken chair abandoned in the corner, the dull uneven tiles, the locked brown wooden door which leads to the offices. He is unaware of it, but his face has gradually turned grey in the last few minutes as if due to some lethal alchemy; the bags beneath his eyes look larger, darker. We don’t know what he’s thinking about just now – maybe today’s hearing with Ursula, more than a month after that meeting at Bar Tasende. Or maybe he’s trying to think about nothing.

  The door that leads to the offices opens, a threshold to the outside world. Diego looks up to see a woman with a document in her hand, her mouth red and greasy with cheap lipstick; he hears her say his name and surname with her open rounded lips. She waits for him to get up, shows him through, then closes the door. The policemen, who looked up for a moment in case they were about to receive orders, go back to chasing dots with Pac-Man.

  The woman leads Diego down a corridor, a dozen yards or so, closed brown doors to the left and right, the passageway illuminated by cold, low-energy bulbs, the sad lighting of a public restroom or a butcher’s shop. They halt in front of the last door; the woman opens it, signals to him to go through. Diego obeys. Let’s not ignore this fact: based on what we’ve seen so far, Diego always obeys.

  Inside, Antinucci is waiting for him, sitting in front of a man who Diego assumes must be the judge. The office is small and the surface of the desk is messy and chaotic; sitting on top of a pile of objects and papers is an open file that is no doubt his. A young woman, maybe the secretary, distributes coloured prisms on the screen of a computer which disproves the notion of planned obsolescence. She doesn’t take her eyes off the image, she hits the keys frantically, seeking to block, accommodate or turn the falling prisms and, as sh
e performs this impossible mission, the woman shifts left and right, forward and back, as if she were just one more rectangle in the game.

  Diego hesitates, unsure whether to walk forward or remain standing, and neither the judge nor Antinucci have looked at him or given any sign they are aware of his presence. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand; he’s nervous and dazed, anxious and confused, as if he were hungover and had tried to remedy it with too much caffeine.

  He remains motionless until the woman who brought him here applies the lightest of touches and points to a chair, whispers some words to the judge, answers a couple of the judge’s questions, picks up a piece of paper and leaves.

  “Well, look who we have here. Your Honour, let me introduce Diego Palacios, Santiago Losada’s kidnapper.”

  Diego finds Antinucci’s familiarity even more inhibiting than the judge’s forbidding expression. He expected to find himself talking to somebody unremarkable, your typical pen-pusher, a meticulous and unimaginative administrator of justice, but this man has hard, round features, intelligent eyes, the kind of presence that arouses love or hatred. The desk is lit up by rays of sun and Diego catches a glimpse of a document, on the cover of which Statement of Ursula López is written in large letters.

  “Please sit down.”

  The judge looks at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows, closes a file and allows the hint of a smile to appear on his face, then turns back to the lawyer and picks up the conversation, the interruption of which Diego is apparently to blame for, a conversation full of references to laws and verdicts and prison terms. Diego sits down, kneads his fingers one by one, looking at them as if trying to memorize their every detail.

  From outside comes a discordant noise, a racket, voices getting louder until they become shouts, the sound of metal furniture being dragged along and falling to the floor, doors slamming. Everyone has looked up: there’s an attentive expectant silence.

  The judge stands up behind his desk, hesitating. The door opens and the woman who brought Diego here comes in again, still holding the piece of paper she was carrying when she left. The judge looks at her and drops back into his chair. She slams the door shut behind her, takes four strides across the room, and leans forward over Judge Lancia. She whispers nervously, leans away, observes the judge’s face to see the impact of her words, and the judge looks at her, whispers words of his own which, from afar, sound like questions, and she doesn’t reply, she just shrugs. They carry on looking at each other for a few more seconds. Judge Lancia is no longer whispering; he sits up straight in his chair, then stands up, almost leaping out of his seat, looks at the woman and appears to be restraining a desire to grab her by the arms and shake her.

  “What did you say?” he shouts.

  The woman is silent for a few seconds; she knows it creates a theatrical effect. The tension rises like a spiral of smoke, wafting up like the smell of incense – or shit.

  “Ricardo Prieto, who had been brought here to make a statement, has just escaped from the waiting room.”

  Antinucci, who until now has been sitting still, his right leg crossed over his left, both hands resting on the judge’s desk, takes his phone out of his jacket and looks at the screen, puts it away, looks for the packet of cigarettes, extracts a cigarette and holds it, unlit, between his fingers.

  Judge Lancia exhales through closed teeth, scratches his cheek with his middle finger, looks at the woman and waits, stonily, his face like a mask. She shakes her head, she has nothing more to add. The judge makes for the door.

  By the look of how this hearing is shaping up, there seems to be no way of avoiding disaster. From the door the judge looks at Diego.

  “Ursula López informed us she is unable to attend today, so the hearing is suspended until further notice. I’ve already signed your release papers.”

  XIII

  El Reportero

  RICARDO PRIETO,

  ALIAS THE HOBO, ESCAPES!

  hoodlum houdini on the run

  A felon came up with an escape plan worthy of the best crime novel. The murder he committed several months ago made the front pages of the press, and his disappearance from the Criminal Court is no less newsworthy.

  After evading the guards who had escorted him to the bathroom, the prisoner managed to disappear from the waiting room at the court, where he was due to be questioned in connection with a homicide. The alarm was sounded seconds later and a search of Calle Rincón and the surrounding area was undertaken, but the dangerous criminal had vanished into thin air.

  The police continued to look for the fugitive late into the night, undertaking an exhaustive search of the entire neighbourhood before finally admitting defeat. Prieto, no doubt with the help of numerous accomplices and a getaway vehicle, must already have been spirited away to a safe house, far from the scene of his disappearance.

  Before the end of the day, with Montevideo’s Old Town still reeling from the search for the hoodlum Houdini, the chief of police, Inspector Darío Clemen, arrested one of Prieto’s escorts after he confessed to having facilitated the escape in return for the sum of 10,000 pesos, which was found concealed beneath the seat of his moped, parked on prison property.

  XIV

  Hey, Skinflint, long time no see. Have a good time in the slammer? And now you’re out again? I’m delighted for you. How long you going to last on the outside this time? Pray to the Virgin, to Oshun, to any other saint you can think of. You’re going to need them all if you want to keep the cops off your back. I’ve got what we talked about: one, two, three, four, five. Go on, count it. The five grand you asked me for, it’s all there, okay? No, I can’t get you a motorbike. I’ve kept my word, now it’s your turn. No, no, no. None of this Chichi stuff. I’m not one of your lazy-ass girlfriends, you call me Captain Lima, you got that? Or Madam, if there’s anyone else around. But who’s going to hear us in this shithole? Not even the rats come out here at this time of night. So go on, spit it out. What news have you got about our fugitive, the Hobo? I’m in charge of this investigation now because Captain Borda’s been under the knife, so whatever you’ve got had better be worth the dough I’ve just handed over. And dragging me all the way out here, Chrissake! Couldn’t you have found somewhere better for us to meet? I already told you not to call me Chichi. It’s Captain Lima. Or don’t you understand Spanish? Fine, let’s get started. So, the Hobo’s plotting something in the barrio? I thought as much. And where’s he holed up? I need an exact location, that’s what I’m paying you for. Of course. I didn’t think he’d be in the same place the whole time. His mother’s place? Not exactly original. I know, I know. He always comes and goes at night so we can’t pick him up, even with a court order. You lot know all the tricks. But what’s new? I could have worked that out for myself. Don’t try my patience, I don’t have all night to listen to you. And what do you know about the murder of the Candyman? Yes, kid, that’s my case too. Was it him? Was it Ricardo Prieto? The Hobo, I mean. That’s what everyone suspects. You don’t know? So tell me, Skinflint. Do you really not know anything? Quit messing me around. What the hell did you bring me out here for? Make an effort, think, use your damn brain. The Hobo. We’re talking about the Hobo, about Ricardo Prieto. And about the murder that happened a few days ago, when you were still inside. You only got out a couple of days ago, on parole, remember, and you could be back inside tomorrow. Yeah, you don’t know a thing, but let’s just imagine it was him. He must have had some help on the inside, because someone managed to get rid of the shiv he used to kill the Candyman. Who do you think got rid of the blade? On the phone, you told me you knew something. Have you forgotten? Speak up, you slacker, I can’t hear you. What? You reckon there’s a lawyer protecting him? Are you sure? That’s not the answer I was expecting. Well, there’s never much to choose between defence lawyers and their clients. You got a name for me? Antiruchi or Anticruchi, something like that. Fine, check this guy’s name, but remember I’m depending on you and you owe me. Or have you
forgotten already? I’ll wait for you to confirm the information, and if you don’t then I’ll come looking for you in a car with the sirens blaring and in five minutes every cop in Montevideo will be on your ass. Now, what about this juicy tip I’ve paid so much for? Otherwise they’ll put me through the mincer for pouring police money down the drain. Yeah, you told me the Hobo’s planning a big heist. Out with it. This is what I want to hear about. A big hit. How big? An armoured truck. Jesus Christ! He doesn’t mess around, this Prieto guy. And he’s looking for people? What kind of people? I’m guessing he won’t recruit just anyone; taking out an armoured truck is no kids’ game. A cash truck, full of dough – and with guards armed to the teeth. You should see the weapons those guys pack. Nobody wants to mess around with one of those things.

  Let’s see. And if you sign up, Skinflint? Don’t be chicken. Of course we’d give you guarantees. What else do you want? No, you won’t get hurt, kid. Just join the crew and pass me the info, that’s all. No, I don’t have a cigarette, I don’t smoke. A kiosk, around here? Why on earth would there be a kiosk? There’s nothing here. I told you, I want you there at the heist, you sign up and as soon as you’ve got the info you get in touch: where, when and how they’re going to do it. Yeah, I know it won’t be easy. How much do you need? I’ll have to ask, but I’m sure I can get twenty grand. Forty?! Are you out of your mind? I might even get you a second-hand bike, let me speak to my boss. We’ll be in touch. Yes, you deal with the Hobo. Get him to put you on the crew; you’re not short of experience. And as soon as you know anything, call me on this number. I’ll be waiting, so don’t mess me around.

  Every jewel has its value. Let’s go.

  XV

  The woman enters her home and closes the door. The voice behind her is so quiet she’s not sure if she’s dreaming.