San Juan Noir

by Mayra Santos-Febres

  I got to Javi’s apartment in Ciudadela around two in the afternoon. We talked, drank vodka, and ate sushi. He played a piece from a Tchaikovski concerto. Really, before the flute player’s death, we’d only said hi to each other, talked about random things, had a drink. Tragedy often unites loneliness and desire. And yet I was truly captivated by this man’s sadness.

  When he finished the piece, I applauded and got undressed. Even at fifty, his expression was still that of a boy with a Christmas present, a gift we gave each other in his bed. We made love tenderly, caressing each other slowly. Oral first, then I let him enter me, the coming and going of his body against mine, the squeak of the bedsprings, our sweat, and his hoarse moans when he came. I didn’t have an orgasm, but I enjoyed it anyway.

  “Do you think it’s possible to have a double?” I asked him, naked on the bed, a postcoital purr.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “About how there’s another version of you in the world, that you can cross paths with that identical person.”

  “I get it. I saw it in a movie.”

  “Last night I felt like I was making love with my double.”

  “That can be remedied, mine has found its second life.”

  He put my hand on his hard cock and kissed my neck. After getting wet, I climbed on top of him and tried to think of nothing, riding him hard until I finally had an orgasm and he came between my thighs. He told me softly: “Someday you’re going to fall in love with me.”

  I was hypnotized, looking at a photo I saw on a shelf above his desk. It was Beto, but in Spanish military attire, and a woman with a familiar face. “Those are my parents,” he managed to tell me when the intercom started buzzing. Javi answered it, then looked at me, frightened. “It’s my ex-wife, we split up six months ago, she’s furious because the divorce papers came. Please, go down the stairs in the hallway. Forgive me, I love you, I’ll call you.”

  I said nothing. I got dressed quickly and went down the stairs. I heard them screaming at each other as I left Javi’s building. I crossed over to Libros Ac and bought a graphic novel. Then I ordered a craft beer and sat down at a little table in front of the window. I saw clothes and some women’s boots falling from Javi’s balcony. I thought I heard a gunshot. Samuel, the bookseller, looked at me with surprise, I stared at him uncomprehendingly and said goodbye.

  * * *

  The seventh time I ran into Mita, it was a few blocks away from there. I was smoking a cigarette, Margarita didn’t answer my calls, Mami neither. Just how you’re sometimes surprised by your own stupidity, it occurred to me to call Javi. His wife answered and said, “Fucking whore! If I find out who you are, I’ll shoot you too.” I sat down right there on Calle Canals and cried inconsolably. Mita stayed close to me; she was nervous, as if wanting me to pay attention to her, for us to get out of there.

  I looked up and I saw my other, Angelina, standing in front of me, handing me a handkerchief and a folded piece of paper. She turned around, and as she tried to cross Ponce de León, an AMA bus hit her; I heard the screech of the brakes already on top of her and the crunch of bones. When I stood up, there were two young men in front of me. One grabbed me, held a knife to my throat, and said in my ear, “You look prettier when you’re quiet, bitch. If you move or scream, you die.”

  Meanwhile, the other one put his hands in my pockets, took out my cell phone, my wallet, my iPad mini, lowered my zipper, and stuck his hand in. “If I could, I’d eat your pussy right here, and nobody would notice.” I kicked him in the face and his friend cut my throat, hard like a guillotine.

  I watched them run down Canals. I fell slowly to the sidewalk; I saw the folded paper flying through the air. I saw her, me, dead, I saw myself dying. Mita licked my forehead, meowed, and I watched her disappear down Calle Canals, across Ponce de León, losing her around the old Telégrafo building. A blank page floated through the air, landing in front of my face. I already felt nothing.

  MATCHMAKING

  by Mayra Santos-Febres

  Buen Consejo

  They called him Koala because even while executing his victims, he did not appear totally awake. He had a swollen face and belly, and Koala Gutiérrez often spent hours chomping on a little twig, a “chewing stick,” as it’s known in Nigeria. He’d served there, first as a soldier, later as a sergeant in his government’s peacekeeping forces. It wasn’t exactly his government, but the government of the island. His island floated in the middle of the Caribbean. They speak Spanish there, but it’s a territory of the US. And the army is operated by a government separate from but in control of his own, giving it an international presence on this planet. In other words, he left the island as a member of the peacekeeping forces of a country that occupies his own, with the goal of maintaining order in a country that had none. They hadn’t declared war on his country nor on the country that wasn’t his, but were internationally committed to maintaining a false peace. Or something like that.

  All of that happened in the eighties. After serving, it was easy for Koala Gutiérrez to obtain more work as a mercenary soldier. He lived in Africa for ten years, fighting in various wars. The one in Sierra Leone was the last—he got sick of it and went back to his homeland.

  Koala’s homeland wasn’t really the island. He only ever knew a slice of it before enlisting in the army when he was just eighteen. At that time, Koala was already an immensely fat kid who didn’t mess with anybody and was lethal in a fight. A well-placed punch, a chokehold around the neck, and boom. No enemy was a match for Koala. And in Las Margaritas almost everyone was an enemy.

  Koala was from Las Margaritas, an apartment project that the government (of his country? of the other country?) had built to provide shelter for the thousands of starving families living on the edge of Laguna San José. His was like all the other apartments: a square box made of concrete, with one bathroom, two bedrooms, and bars in all windows, where a family of six had to live. His parents were like many other parents, shadows of hunger and rage, who’d left the countryside and come to the city to look for work, finding it occasionally. One afternoon Koala’s father got lost in the labyrinths of little streets, pastures, and trash dumps that surrounded Las Margaritas, and never came back. His mother told him he went north, to that other country. To help out, his mother brought his grandmother from the country to live with them.

  Koala could spend incalculable hours sleeping. He ate, slept, and chewed on his little stick—or on a leaf or a plastic straw, anything he could shove in his mouth—and then he’d sleep some more. He was never good in school. He never showed any interest in anything that didn’t require the absolute minimum effort. And in fights. He never initiated any, but he won them all. So when he was old enough, he enlisted in the army. And afterward, he came back. He never had children, no regular lover, not even an irregular one. He never got into sleeping with ex-convicts, the ones who got out of prison and came back to Las Margaritas, after years spent surrounded by men, a new need in their bodies. Not with the sad little whores who sold themselves on the project streets for drugs, either. “This guy only uses what he’s got between his legs to piss,” heckled Chino, a distant cousin, who got him into the business and introduced him to the Boss. “Just like a koala bear. Hanging from his pole all day, snoring away without a care.” Koala stayed silent and stared at him with his dark, round eyes.

  But now he had to keep those eyes open. He was sitting next to Ballpoint in Café Violeta, waiting for his next victim: a woman. “La Pastora” had moved through the ranks and turned into a solid rival for the Boss in the interminable battle for domination of the drug trade. She had inherited control from her dead brother, and inexplicably emerged as a lethal power, a force from which it was necessary to be protected. That’s why the Boss contacted Koala. “Go with Ballpoint, he knows her movements. Get her out of my way. Nothing fancy, maybe a quick shot in the forehead.” He didn’t know why the Boss qualified it. That was Koala’s classic method. A shot to the head, infallible
, between the eyebrows. No bloody mess. No bodies full of holes. Clean and wholesome, Koala guaranteed a tranquil death, and he was famous for not even giving his victims time to scream.

  But he didn’t like killing women. He’d seen too many ruptured bellies in the war. Too many women raped by militia soldiers and then hacked up by machetes, bodies rotting in the savannah. Exposed flesh, just before exploding, had the consistency of plastic. The butchery of a woman’s body turned his stomach more than anything.

  When the Boss informed him about La Pastora, he thought about saying no. He was about to shake his head when something stopped him. What woman could be a boss in the drug trade? In other words, does she really count as a woman if she’s gotten her hands dirty—not with blood, which is easy (Koala knows it), but with terror transformed into blood in the eyes of her enemies? How many addict children—now corpses, because of some stupid drug debt—had she, personally, turned over to their mothers? Koala imagined La Pastora as a brutish woman, shapeless, with short hair and swollen hands. A broad back just like his. Or like a frigid whore, one of those skinny, painted women with plastic everything, who so many people like and who leave him wanting to stay eternally asleep.

  “I work alone,” he responded to the Boss.

  “I want you to take Ballpoint. He’ll point her out. The thing is, it has to be her.”

  He never could’ve imagined what he saw: a woman soft as velvet entered Café Violeta; she was full-figured, with a mature head of hair that smelled like cinnamon and eucalyptus—long, straight, and a little stiff, like a mane. All of her was brown, or really the color of honey. She half-closed her small, round eyes with the lust of someone who had just awakened from a long dream. Koala intuited that her very large breasts had dark nipples, enough in them to suckle for all eternity. Her thighs pressed against each other under her skirt, which fell to the middle of her calf—they were the thighs of a woman who’d known children. Firm hips, wide rump. Koala had to close his eyes after watching her pass by. He smelled her walk down Café Violeta’s central hallway; he heard her sit down at a table in the back. Three men stationed themselves around La Pastora, three men similar to him who were obviously her bodyguards.

  “That’s her,” Ballpoint whispered in his ear, and left.

  With eyes wide open, Koala Gutiérrez kept watch. He was also watching inside. Flesh, touch, an erection. The aroma of eucalyptus and cinnamon made him alert. He saw how La Pastora ordered a coffee with milk; how the owner of the place sat down to chat with her for a while; how she finished conversing with the owner of Café Violeta at the same time that she finished her coffee. His prey would soon be making a change of scene. Koala Gutiérrez asked for his bill and paid it, chewing on his stick. He’d wait for them in the car.

  * * *

  La Pastora left Café Violeta five minutes later. She and one of her henchmen got into a new SUV, subtle gold, like her. Koala prepared to follow her, his eyes lit up like two sparks in the night.

  They turned down Avenida Borinquen and took the road down to the boat launches. They crossed a new bridge heading toward Las Margaritas, turned around at the roundabout at San Juan Bosco Church, and entered the ramp that connected to the housing project. Koala followed them in silence. Suddenly, his sixth sense tingled. Along that route, most of the roads were closed down for repairs from the recent rains, when the laguna flooded the banks of Las Margaritas. Koala stepped on the accelerator.

  It smelled like a trap.

  He couldn’t explain where the car that hit his vehicle on the driver’s side came from. Koala lost control and struck a lightpost in a flat area near the entrance to Las Margaritas. The owner’s manual for the vehicle pressed against his chest. He felt like he was suffocating, but then two hands pulled him out.

  La Pastora was waiting for him. A single look and Koala Gutiérrez knew he’d never be able to shoot this woman in the head. He’d never be able to shoot her, period. He’d rather kiss her.

  The bodyguards held him by his hands and feet. Koala put up no resistance; he didn’t get desperate.

  He closed his eyes and imagined himself caressing that woman’s long hair, sinking his massive, clumsy hands into that flesh dressed in leaves and spices. He imagined La Pastora looking at him in the same way, savoring him. But in his imagination, he caught sight of a strange light in her gaze. It was a cold light, like that of a deranged animal. He wanted to look away. He kept imagining how his hands would slide along her soft belly; how he’d push them down to find the mound between her legs. Then he saw himself bending over and lifting La Pastora’s skirt, burying his face between her thick legs, licking them, opening them. Koala bit La Pastora, chewed on her slowly, drank her down in an instant, and for all eternity. At last, he opened his eyes.

  “You can kill me now,” he said.

  Two shots sounded.

  PART II

  CRAZY LOVE

  DOG KILLER

  by Luis Negrón

  Trastalleres

  Charo gives me a strange look when I tell her I’ll be right back. “It’s Monday,” she says.

  We never go out on Mondays. Sometimes Tuesday comes and we don’t go out either.

  “I’ll be back quick, baby.”

  I’m wearing shorts and sandals so she doesn’t say anything. Charo doesn’t look at me. She looks at the telenovela. I’m about to say something, but she grabs the remote and turns up the volume.

  Outside there is no one to be seen. All the streetlights are broken. I stop at the corner and see the light in the guardhouse at La Corona, two blocks down. That guy never comes out, not even when he hears gunshots. Three times people have gone in to rob the place and he stays inside. Later, he says he didn’t see anything or anyone. I don’t blame him.

  * * *

  Last night I left the bag near Bomberos, in an empty lot where Matatán says there used to be a racetrack for horses, but they demolished it. What Matatán doesn’t know he invents. Charo calls him Wikipedia. I enter as if to take a piss and I grab the bag. The bitch is heavy. I’m afraid it will drip blood, but I throw it over my shoulders. I hope it doesn’t move.

  Last night I dreamed about that fucking dog. I was little, and Mami was hanging up clothes behind a house that wasn’t our actual house, but in the dream it seemed to be. At some point, Mami lets out a shout and speaks to me in English, and I don’t understand but I answer her in English too, and she says: Look. When I look, Lazaro’s dog is above the septic tank and he’s big, the fucker. Like a house. Mami tries to cover him with a sheet that she’s hanging out, but the dog dodges, and she throws it over me without meaning to. It’s me, Mami, I say. And I feel the dog on top of me, and Mami stops talking, but I don’t remove the sheet so that the dog won’t see me—so I won’t see.

  * * *

  Charo hadn’t shown up. Ever since she came up with the Ecuador thing, she’s been spending more time on the street. Sometimes at 15th, in front of Levy’s, sometimes at Fernández Juncos. At eight she was already there. If I dropped by while making the rounds, she lost her shit.

  “What?” she’d say. “What’s up?”

  I’d say nothing and leave. The cars don’t stop if they see me. She’s going to kill herself. She’s going to fuck herself over.

  I turned on the TV so I’d forget the dream. I was pissing myself but was afraid to get up. Fucking dog, fucking Lázaro. I told myself that it’d be better to come clean to Charo. Look, Charo, I thought, listen to me, I was the one who took out your brother, the fucker. He had it coming. Because of the thing with Landi. But I knew better. Every time Lázaro did something, or stopped paying, or let something slip, and I told her about it, Charo would say: “My brother is sick. Only a piece of shit messes with a junkie.”

  That’s what she called him, My brother.

  But Landi had given him too many chances. When he found out about the most recent thing, he didn’t say anything. Charo went to square things with him, but he said, “Forget it.” I knew what was coming, but I did
n’t think he’d send me.

  “Your turn,” Landi said to me.

  Shit, shit, I thought. Fucking shit. I shit on Lázaro’s mother, that fucker. I tried to say something to Landi, but he looked at me the way he looks at you when he’s had it up to here and it’s better to just shut up.

  That was last Wednesday.

  * * *

  It was easy to find Lázaro. I saw the dog on the corner first, on Calle Las Palmas. Mami always said that dogs smell fear. If you’re passing by a stray, don’t get scared because they’ll know and that’s when they bite.

  “Cuñi, come here,” I said to Lázaro. “Get in, Charo wants to see you, she’s about to leave for Ecuador. Come find her with me, she wants to say goodbye to you. Get in.”

  “Give me something first, I’m jonesing, pai.”

  I had brought what Landi had given me and a Whopper. So he’d be happy.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  “Here, here,” I said to the dog, giving it the Whopper. Lázaro went behind the aqueduct so I wouldn’t see him doing his thing.

  Right away, the dog sunk its teeth into the hamburger and fries. It raised its head and stared at me, like it knew something.

  Charo said her brother was respectful. That he never fixed in front of anybody. Whenever he came home he wore long sleeves, for the marks.

  “He’s good like that, always so humble.” But the thing with Papi fucked him up. She never told me what the thing with Papi was. I asked her once and she just shrugged. Charo looked like a real woman, but people made fun of her shoulders. I didn’t like it when she wore a tube top to come out with me. People looked at us. They looked at her, because of her shoulders.