The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  We heard nothing. No one came forward. That, to me, was Ezequiel’s most terrible legacy. The idea that someone could not only send this child to her death, but not claim her.

  Later that morning General Merino returned from the Palace.

  He had driven off at nine o’clock, flanked by two police motorcyclists. He sat upright in the middle of the back seat, clutching my report, rehearsing, not seeing the houses he once cherished, dreading the interview ahead.

  The room was almost pitch dark, he told me, just a light in a corner by a leather armchair. Calderón, in a black suit, finished writing something on a pad. He did not offer the General a seat. He stood up and sat, one leg dangling, on the edge of the desk. He wore black lace-up shoes, a tie of red and white horizontal stripes, round tortoiseshell glasses. His receding hairline was lavished neatly back, emphasizing the shape of its M.

  “One of those faces you see in the business pages, Tomcat, with a smile thinner than his shoelace.”

  Calderón had folded his arms. “Let us imagine that I am your superior.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “I would wish to know why this man, this delinquent . . . No. Let me put this another way. I want what you have on him. Everything. All records. Is that understood? Nothing kept back.”

  “No, Captain.”

  Merino had seen the goblin shark, and it was kinder.

  Without energy the General walked to the window and looked out towards the sea. He spoke rapidly, his hands behind his back, getting rid of the words as fast he could. “Calderón’s ordered a curfew. From ten o’clock tonight. He’s letting in the military. From now on it’s a joint operation. We furnish the army with copies of our files, help any way we can. He has no choice. Prado was their man. Lache feels he’s been made a fool of, especially after receiving Quesada’s televised congratulations. His blood is up. Its bad, Agustín, bad, bad, bad.”

  Already he’d had General Lache on the line. “A heap of underperforming blubber, that’s how he described us.”

  Behind his back, one hand twisted inside the other.

  “Let us imagine Calderón’s orders to Lache. ‘If you catch anybody who looks mean or looks like they once had a mean thought about the way things are here, slap him in gaol. Use any means. Screw due legal process. Plant drugs, torture them, keep them by force. If necessary, shoot them. You can’t treat these people like rose petals.’”

  He turned, looking at me. “You can see their point, Tomcat. We’ve been in charge of this for twelve years and what do we have to show for it? A girl from Lepe whom we haven’t yet charged because she won’t speak.” He brought one hand out from behind him, grimaced at his watch and made a calculation. “Well, forty-five minutes ago, four of General Lache’s men went careering into the basement to sort out that particular problem. God knows where they’ve taken her, what they’ll do.” He turned his head from one epaulette to the other. “I’m sorry, Colonel.”

  I was leaving when he called me back. Something he had overlooked. Calderón, to finance the army’s assistance in this joint-operation, had trimmed our budget.

  “It means no more overtime.”

  The cancellation of my overtime was a blow, I admit. The bank agreed to extend my overdraft for a short period. Regrettably, they could not increase the limit. Too many customers shared my predicament – those who hadn’t had the sense to transfer their money abroad.

  The need to discuss money with Sylvina had become more pressing than ever. But I dreaded the thought of her protestations. I knew what I meant to say, and quailed. She, not I, was in the right. She had been good about money. She had spent her mother’s inheritance on us. She took care to buy everything as cheaply as possible. Yet for twenty years she had been forced to endure the torture of her friends’ sympathy.

  It shames me to acknowledge this, but I found in Sylvina’s demoralization a further excuse to prevaricate. Her nerves had grown frailer in the phoenix days following Ezequiel’s reappearance. Two days after her literary dinner she had a noisy row with the couple in the flat above, newcomers from the coast who parked outside our garage. About to leave for work, I had asked the husband to move his car. He obliged, but then his wife started shouting from the window. This was everyone’s street. Just because we’d been here longer, it didn’t mean I had a right to tell people where to park. “We’re proud in Judio, too!” She withdrew her head then, as an afterthought, yelled “Poof!” I drove off, but unfortunately Sylvina, coming outside to see what the matter was, heard the insult. She stood in the middle of the street and raised her fist. “My husband is not a poof! Park your bloody car somewhere else!”

  Once more the woman stuck out her head. “Poof!”

  This was too much for Sylvina. She marched back inside and reemerged clasping a long screwdriver. In full view of the street and ignoring the woman’s anguished cries, she scraped and scratched at the offending bonnet. She stood back to reveal the words: “This street should not be lived in by people like us.”

  I agreed to meet the repair costs, but that, together with the blood money I had paid Coca-Cola cap, meant I was almost at the limit of my overdraft.

  The curfew lasted from ten o’clock at night until six in the morning. Any person stopped on the street between those hours without a permit risked arrest.

  Hungry for information, people started to pay attention to earlier reports from the provinces. As the press caught up with nine-year-old atrocities, mothers throughout the city could be heard telling their children not to accept parcels from strangers, no matter what they offered.

  Nothing retained its innocence. A group of schoolgirls on a sidewalk shimmered with menace. In the suburbs, schools broke up early.

  The curfew, introduced to defuse tension, exacerbated the panic. Ezequiel’s shadow had darkened us. Not a day would pass when we didn’t feel the draught of his wings.

  In the cathedral, minutes before a service due to be led by the Arch-Cardinal, a bomb constructed from mining gelignite was discovered under the altarcloth.

  The president of a television channel sympathetic to the government was shot in the chest outside a flower shop.

  Four civil servants died at a restaurant in Monterrico when a beercan, hurled through the window from a llama sling, landed hissing on their table.

  Car bombs exploded outside the Carnation Milk Factory, at a Miss Universe Pageant, and outside the American Ambassador’s residence.

  Criminals fed on the chaos. In the richer districts families prolonged their holidays, leaving their houses inadequately guarded. Sylvina’s friend Patricia returned from Paracas to discover the contents of her living room missing, down to the brass light switches.

  Soldiers patrolled the streets to meet the unseen threat. Tanks rolled into the square outside the Palace and took up positions from which they rarely moved. At night you saw the gun barrels aiming at the stars, the drivers watching the buildings through night-glasses. Somewhere, inextinguishable in that darkness, murkier than any vapour, lay Ezequiel. But the army hadn’t been trained to swat shadows. The soldiers couldn’t grasp what they were fighting. Desperate for a severed head to brandish to the crowd, they could produce no one except Hilda Cortado, the nineteen-year-old pamphleteer. She was executed – God knows how – keeping her silence to the last.

  Three weeks after the blackout at the Teatro de Paz, General Lache lost patience. In a crude parroting of Quesada’s assassination, he exacted his reprisal on a group of drama students.

  I have no doubt the Arguedas Players were innocent. I know that the man in the beret who booked the theatre for Blackout had mentioned the Catholic University. A student theatrical group, remembered the manager. But, crucially, no name. My men had three times interrogated members of the Arguedas Players, the university’s sole drama group, and absolved them of suspicion. Humiliated, dishonoured, furious, General Lache reopened their case.

  On the first Tuesday night in March, due to the director’s car running out of petrol,
the Arguedas Players started their audition for Mother Courage thirty-five minutes late.

  The group which assembled in a lecture room of the agronomy faculty comprised ten men and six women aged between eighteen and thirty, the number increasing to seventeen with the arrival of the director, an untidy, square-faced man. Apologizing energetically, he unpacked from his wife’s shopping basket five large bottles of Cristal beer and a pillar of paper cups.

  At seven forty-five the caretaker looked in to tell them he was locking up at nine. He had the drama group marked down until eleven o’clock, in fact, but the booking had been made before the curfew order. With little to do, he asked if he might watch from the back. The director saw no objection. The caretaker would be the only survivor.

  At seven fifty-five Vera, a nervous, striking-looking girl who hoped to play the lead, began reading from the text in a sing-song voice. She spoke a few lines and stopped. She stubbed out her cigarette and, after a cough, began from the top, less mechanically this time.

  She had read for perhaps a minute when there came a crash from the corridor. The door burst open and twenty men in black masks kicked their way through the chairs towards her.

  Vera, unsure whether to continue, sought the director’s cue. The script was slapped from her hand. An arm was clamped over her mouth, ripping her blouse at the collar. Someone forced a sweater over her head and, with her arms twisted behind her back, she was bundled outside.

  On his hands and knees under the table the director screamed for help until one of the masked men jerked him out backwards by the ankles, smashing his nose on the floor.

  Two minutes later, a post-graduate student ran down from the library into an empty room. Scattered about the floor he found women’s shoes, spectacles, pens, cigarettes and a script foamy with beer. At the back sat the caretaker, unhurt.

  Not one of the Players had been seen since.

  General Lache laid the kidnap at Ezequiel’s door. Few believed him. The press interviewed distraught relatives and lovers – in one article mentioning by name the officer believed to have led the squad. It made no difference. That was the terrible thing. Among Sylvina’s friends it was felt that the army wouldn’t have acted without a reason. Therefore, those drama students must have been guilty.

  “But, Sylvina, if we kidnap people without proof we’re no better than Ezequiel. Why choose us, rather than him?”

  She had come to equate me with the problem, not as part of the solution. “I don’t care. It shows something’s being done.”

  While the army retaliated – searching schools, arresting the innocents, filling prisons – I sat in a parked car and watched one or other of the three houses listed in the Filofax. About the addresses there could be no dispute. They were bricks and mortar. They existed.

  Title checks couldn’t tell me whether the houses belonged to friends or enemies. They were innocuous, well-kept buildings in the south and east of the city. They were lived in by a chiropodist, a professor of ethnology from the Catholic University, and an American in the fish business, recently married to a pretty girl from Cajamarca.

  Maybe these people were potential targets, people Ezequiel wanted to kill. Maybe they were his assassins. I had no idea. I just knew some violence was in store, some catastrophe, and I didn’t want to risk questioning anyone in case we scared off Ezequiel. For this reason I had not relinquished the Filofax to the army. I felt I couldn’t do anything for the time being except watch and wait for something to happen.

  So that’s what I did, day after day, night after night, collecting the rubbish bags, sitting in the car, looking for signs, watching.

  The driver’s seat became a sanctuary. I never used the same car twice in succession. I hung a dark blue suit against the window and leaned against it, pretending to sleep, or I read a newspaper as though I were waiting for someone. I knew the form of many racehorses. The Lova, On the Rocks, Last Dust, Petits Pois, Sweet Naggy, Without a Paddle, Zog, Nite Dancer.

  I had a lot of time to think. It upset me, the way my unit had been treated. We might on paper share responsibility with the army for Ezequiel’s case, but in reality we were not governed by compatible regulations. We had ceased to be the people’s guardians. To my counterpart in the military, a burly colonel who reminded me of the cadet at the Police Academy who led the bullies, we were indistinguishable from the mob.

  Calderón, by relying on the army, had marginalized us. Yet, pushed out to the edge, I found Ezequiel coming into a perspective that disarmed me.

  I remember, in one of the books I would find on his shelf, Ezequiel had underlined a saying of Mao: “People turn into their opposites.” It is curious, but if you have been looking obsessively for someone – if, as I had, you had been steeped in Ezequiel day and night – after a while you do start to assume the characteristics of the person you are hunting.

  Look at my hand. I can warn you I am about to touch this vase – and I do so. Or this book. But what if I told you of occasions when my hand didn’t respond, when I mimed a bodily memory independent of my self – and instead of turning a page I watched with a grinding horror as this hand glided over my chest, to the base of my neck, searching for an itch which I couldn’t feel but which my fingers desired, in spite of everything I might do to prevent them, to scratch?

  I don’t mean that I had moved any closer to finding Ezequiel. His character still seemed to me impenetrable – like the despair into which he cast us. But as I sat in that car I had the sensation that I stalked nearer to the rim of some understanding.

  Then, at the end of March, there was a swirl in the air – and I knew I’d disturbed him.

  I had been watching the house of the American. He’d made his fortune in the States from pond-raised catfish. Ten months earlier, he had come to this country to buy some Amazonian strains and to walk the Inca trail. At the travel agency in Cajamarca he met a very sexy, large-breasted girl, a model. They married, and in February flew down to the capital. A love story, he told his friends. He’d never left America before and within six weeks he was married! But it wasn’t a love story. You see – and I’m not sure how well I have conveyed this to you – Ezequiel’s assassins could be anyone. One day you might switch on the television and find the killer was your daughter. Another day, it might be your wife.

  I spoke with him a few hours after he had found out, a fat man in a yellow golf shirt and tight-fitting Sansabelt slacks. He had a straw-coloured beard and expensive glasses. Beneath his glasses his eyes were bloodshot.

  He leaned over Sucre’s desk, both hands flat on the desktop, talking uncontrollably. I was on my way to the basement when I heard him. Recognizing his clothes, I paused.

  He had reached a point in his story which caused him to rub his eyes. He was telling Sucre how he’d been making dinner. He’d taken his carrot soup out of the microwave. In the act of settling down to watch the television news, he’d looked up and gone through hot flushes because there on screen, smiling, chic, looking out from the latest Vogue, was his wife. She was a model, see. That’s how she paid her way. Then comes this news she’s been captured. Oh no, he thought. They’ve got her, she’s been caught in a car bomb, and they’ve got her. But it wasn’t that. It was crazy, it was totally crazy. They were saying she was a terrorist. A killer.

  He held Sucre by the shoulders, shaking him. “You’ve made a mistake, bud. She’s not one of them. She’s never voted in her goddamn life.” He questioned whether she knew the President from her ass. “You’ve gotta let me see her, pal.”

  “Sucre,” I intervened. “Let me.”

  Hearing my voice, he turned, his arms subsiding.

  “You’re American?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Where from?”

  “We’ve got houses in Jupiter, Florida and Lake Tahoe. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts.”

  “Didn’t William James come from there?” My father had been an admirer.

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  I took
him to the video room. He sat meekly down while I poured him coffee, added lots of sugar, and inserted a videotape.

  He was close to tears. His wife was innocent, he kept repeating. He was one hundred per cent certain. He believed all she told him. They had been married seven months, were so happy.

  The screen brightened, filling with jerky images filmed by Sucre through the windscreen of our car. A slim woman with long, stockinged legs was climbing into a black Suzuki jeep. With both hands she hefted a Puma bag, sliding it on to the passenger seat.

  “That’s our car!” He was childish in his recognition. “She’s going to her aerobics class.”

  I fast-forwarded the tape, chasing the jeep through the afternoon traffic.

  “She has this studio in San Isidro, Calle Castanos.”

  Out along the Malecón, past streets of substantial houses, their turrets rising over the walls, past Calle Castanos.

  “She’s picking up a friend. She does that sometimes. They take turns.”

  Out along the Pan-Americana, the dust bowl visible beneath the hoardings advertising Hush Puppies and swimming pools.

  “Some of them live as far out as La Molina.”

  Past rows of nondescript, squat brick houses with tin roofs.

  “I don’t know, maybe she’s going to the Inca Market.”

  Past derelict, window-shattered warehouses from the days when we were a country.

  “I guess she’s meeting someone at the airport.”

  Past featureless districts, as yet unnamed, through untidy grids of adobe hovels, without electricity, without water.

  Into more featureless districts, the hovels the same pigeon-grey as the dust, not adobe any longer but rush-matting, a family to each roofless hovel, five hundred new families a day, jumping down off the lorries, dazed by the journey, run out of their valleys, no one to turn to, terrified.