“You talked with him about this?” Rose asked.
“Yes, I did indeed. He had Sleepy Joe in his sights.”
“Alright,” Rose said, “Sleepy Joe. But who are his accomplices?”
“If I may suggest something, it’s better to assume that others are innocent until proven otherwise. Proceed slowly; don’t let yourself become overwhelmed by the whole unmanageable package. The first thing you have to do is find María Paz. Do you want me to help you, Mr. Rose? I could arrange things here, find someone to feed my bettas, and . . .”
“No, Ming, this is something I need to take care of on my own. Thank you, it’s good to know I can count on you.”
“Promise me you’ll get in touch if things get ugly.”
“I think I’m going to need a gun. I don’t plan on killing anyone,” Rose said, more or less lying. “It’s just a precaution.”
“I have a few. But they are basically collector’s items,” Ming said, as he pulled out a small pistol from a cabinet, giving to Rose and identifying it as a Remington Model 95.
“It looks like a toy,” Rose said, making sure it fit in his pocket. “Does it work?”
“I doubt it,” Ming responded, pointing to the name engraved on the barrel, Claro Hurtado, one of Pancho Villa’s bodyguards. “It clearly didn’t work so well for Claro that July 23, 1923, when they gunned him down in Parral, Chihuahua, along with his big boss. I also have this,” he said, pulling out a katana that according to him was the Hattori Hanzo sword used by Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill.
“Is it real or a prop?” Rose asked.
“The edge has been shaved down, and it was manufactured to be ultralight so that Uma Thurman could wield it.”
“It feels like it’s made of fiberglass.”
“No more useful than a rat’s tail,” Ming said, as he placed other collector’s items on the table.
Rose noticed a solid, black piece, free of ornamentations or other frills, which inspired some confidence in him.
“And whose was this?” he asked.
“It doesn’t have much of a history, or it does, but a personal one, because I inherited it from my father, and my father in turn from his father, and so on into the mists of time. It’s a Glock 17 9 mm. A solid and serious gadget. With a hard trigger, but on the other hand you can load seventeen cartridges into it, and it fires quickly. I have ammunition for this one, half a box, and I can show you how to load it.”
Rose stored the Glock and the box of ammunition in the glove compartment of his Ford Fiesta and returned to his home in the mountains resolved to put Empera through an Inquisition-style round of questioning. He sat her in front of him and bombarded her with questions. As expected, Empera proved a tough nut to crack, and the more he pressed her, the dodgier she became. She had no idea what he was talking about and rolled her eyes every time he mentioned María Paz, responding in a haughty tone that she didn’t know anything about anything, and that, moreover, it was none of her business. Rose couldn’t get her to shift from that position, although he swore on his son’s grave that he was not trying to harm María Paz or turn her in to the authorities. On the contrary, in fact. It was only when he explained in detail to Empera the situation with the clamp in María Paz’s uterus that she seemed to soften and said she would do what she could.
“But I’m not promising anything,” she warned him, “and by the way, I should remind you that it has been sixteen months since my last raise.”
“We’ll fix that. Don’t worry about the raise. But can I count on you?”
“No guarantees, but I’ll see what I can do.”
Rose tells me that it became imperative to find María Paz, because of the clamp, sure, but above all because he was sure that sooner or later she would lead him to Sleepy Joe. And because something very strange and powerful began to grow inside him, something that was not so much the pain from the loss anymore, but instead, in a weird way, a substitute for the pain, a kind of consolation, perhaps the only one possible.
“I don’t know if I’ve told you that I’ve never been attracted to the idea of vengeance,” he says. “It has always seemed a distractive fallacy to me, one of the most pervasive misconceptions, a hateful and absurd national sport. Thousands of movies and television shows, heaps of novels, weapons sales and propaganda, a whole multibillion-dollar industry that feeds off the lust for vengeance that haunts Americans. But not me. It had never interested me before. Nevertheless, something inside me began to savor it the moment I put a face to the thug who had killed and tortured my son. It was then that I began to dream of making him pay for all his actions, one by one. I wanted to see him turned into a pile of shit, to kill him with my own two hands, watch him bleed and scream in agony, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to spit on him, shit on him, waste him.”
Night and day, it was always there: a shifting mass of lava that sketched and erased the incandescent image of his son, Cleve. Cleve bristling with thorns, like the Nazarene or like a porcupine. Cleve, the target in some macabre plot. Cleve, the sacrificial scapegoat in some disgusting ritual. His murderer had to be somewhere, this lunatic possessed by a terrible sense of the liturgy, this asshole with a mania for sacrifice that was one of the many manifestations of his mental illness. Wherever he was hiding, Rose would find him.
“You have to understand,” he tells me, “this is about one of those changes that strikes you as if a blow to the head. Cleve’s death had become a nameless torment that was eating me alive, a permanent guilt with no logic. But all of a sudden, it had a name, one name, and one name only: Sleepy Joe. Finally, there was something besides me to blame, someone aside from myself on which to take out the rage.
“Bringing Cleve back was not possible, but I could blow the fuck out of that Sleepy Joe. One thing followed the other. It was something as irrational as a physiological need, as pressing as eating or sleeping. At that moment I didn’t see it as such, but today I realize that past a certain point, no one would have stopped me from doing what I set out to do even if they had given me incontrovertible proof that Sleepy Joe had nothing to do with Cleve’s death. Do you understand? These facts would have been irrelevant to me. When the mechanism of revenge is triggered, nothing can stop it. Vengeance doesn’t have to be sure about what it does; it just needs a target, any target it can properly aim at. You’ve received a mortal blow, and to remain alive you need to deliver a similar blow. You’ve chosen your bull’s-eye and you go after it. Vengeance is not reflective or flexible; it’s implacable and blind. It has nothing to do with justice. Whoever believes that he is enforcing justice through vengeance is just lying to himself. It is about something much more primal, more bestial. You’ve become an enraged bull, and they’ve just waved a red cloth in front of you. In Colombia, there was a saying that once caught my attention: ‘kill and eat the dead.’ ‘He could kill and eat the dead,’ that’s how they described someone in a rage, just a popular saying, a hyperbole like any other. And at the same time, maybe not. That phrase gave me the chills because it seemed to contain some ancient wisdom from ancestral times in which cannibalistic vengeance was the supreme form of vengeance. I didn’t even remember the saying or think about it until I discovered someone had murdered Cleve in such a horrendous manner. From the moment I identified the perpetrator, that saying began to resonate in my memory: to kill and eat the dead, to kill and eat the dead.”
Rose had nightmares the night that Buttons slept on the sofa in the living room. He went to bed shaken with his revelations, terribly distressed, and awoke at dawn, feeling a bruised resentment all over, as if he had suffered a horrible beating. Rose thought he had dreamed of mutilated bodies. Amid the carnage, a woman let out an irritating harangue that he would have rather not heard, but that had some revelatory meaning. Who was she? Someone he knew, but not well, or well but not completely, simply someone who understood something amid the butchery. He fed Buttons breakfast and drove him to the
train station afterward, asking for a couple of days to take in all this new information and assuring him that as soon as he recovered from some of the shock induced by the details he would call him to start looking for María Paz.
He never called Buttons or responded to any of his e-mails and phone calls. He imagined that under orders from Pro Bono, Buttons would begin a parallel search using his own contacts.
“Better that way,” Rose tells me. “Each man in his home, and God in all of them.”
The dream still rattled around in his head. At first, he thought that the woman in the dream could have been Mandra X, but then he realized that it could also have been Edith, his ex-wife. He decided to call her, simply pick up the phone and call her, though he wasn’t sure why. At that point, Edith was still under the impression that Cleve’s death had been an accident, and Rose had no intention of changing that.
“Do you remember that album from the trip to Rome? Do you still have it, by any chance?” he asked her, and she knew immediately that he meant the one with the pictures from the trip to Italy some thirty-five years earlier when they were newlyweds and Cleve had not been born yet.
Edith said she must have had it somewhere in her house, and Rose asked her to send it to him as soon as she could. She agreed to send it without asking why, and that very night, a package from FedEx SameDay arrived at the house in the Catskills.
“Did the album have anything to do with the death of your son?” I ask Rose.
“Well, I was more than anything at that moment obsessed with the tools employed in the Passion of Christ. There was the crux of the matter, just as I had intuited from the first, when I found that old newspaper clipping of the murder of the ex-policeman, confirmed later with the nailing of the dog to the wall, and even more so when Buttons made clear how my son must have died. Yet, there was something missing, and I needed to know the exact list of objects aside from obvious ones, the cross, the nails, and the crown of thorns. Then I remembered our trip, those days with Edith in Rome, and of a specific place we had visited then, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that crossed the Tiber toward Castel Sant’Angelo, the antique mausoleum in Adriano. Along the sides of that bridge, on pedestals, there is a series of marble angels sculpted by Bernini and his workshop, and each of those angels holds one of the instruments of the Passion. Of course, I could’ve found the information I was looking for in many places, beginning with Google. Bernini’s representation of the Passion was one of thousands on the topic. But that one in particular was special to me. The Sant’Angelo bridge brought back many memories, both fond and troubling, but intense, perhaps too intense. I think that’s why I became obsessed with looking at that album.”
He thought he would put himself in the shoes of Sleepy Joe to understand how he worked. The first thing he needed to do was to stop hating him, cut off any hate, which is blinding. Rose couldn’t afford blindness, he had to remain vigilant and come to some conclusions. Based on the premise that even the most insane or evil of men has his reasons for doing what he does, Rose could come to know Sleepy Joe’s motivations. He wanted to switch minds with the victimizer, as he had seen Will Graham do with the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon. It sounded childish to put it that way, Rose realized, but he was up to his knees in this thing, completely out of his element, and using horror movies as a guide. He, who knew absolutely nothing of the criminal mind, and who was not a detective or investigator, just a father torn apart by the death of his son.
“And maybe everything was like a child’s game,” he tells me, “except one thing, my conviction to find the criminal. Whatever it was I had to do, I was going to find that man, and I was going to destroy him.”
I am Sleepy Joe, Rose began repeating to himself. He was upstairs, in Cleve’s attic, the place he thought most fitting. I am Sleepy Joe and I’m going to murder this man Cleve. Why? Why am I doing it? One, because I damn well feel like it. I am a thug and go through life doing as I please, or doing nothing, and if I kill someone, it is because I want to and I can. Two, I am going to kill him because he’s getting involved with my girlfriend María Paz. (Pro Bono had mentioned that Cleve and María Paz had been together, and if Pro Bono knew, Sleepy Joe could have known as well.) Cleve and María Paz love each other, or they like each other, or at the least, they’re after each other, and since I suffer from terrible jealousy, I’ll kill him and keep her. How should I kill him? Simple, I’m a trucker and he rides a motorcycle: I have the advantage. Cleve makes things easier when he takes a shortcut through a little-traveled road on the way to Chicago. I tail him, force him to accelerate, sideswipe him with the truck, and he runs off the road and kills himself. Done and over. Wipe off the rival and get away scot-free because there are no witnesses. Up to that point, everything seems rational. Then I put a crown of thorns on his head? That is, I get down from the truck even though it’s raining, run down the side of the road, find the body . . . and I perform this ritual. I have to do the ritual, that’s my thing, justifying my crimes with this mystical element, or the other way around, let the mystical elements lead me to my crimes. I notice the abundance of thorny acacia everywhere and break off a few branches, the ones heavy with thorns. There are nineteen thorns in total. Do I count them one by one, or do I even care? I count them; there are nineteen. Does that number mean anything? It reminds me of the acronym M-19, the name of the guerrilla movement in Colombia when I lived there. So what? I let go of nineteen, I’m interested in associations that Sleepy Joe can make. I’m losing focus; I have to remain in his shoes. I pick that branch of thorny acacia, handle it carefully, making sure the thick, long spines don’t harm me. What about if someone sees my truck? It’s worth the risk. I shape the branch like a crown for my victim. Do I hurt myself by mistake? No. I use gloves, to protect my hands and to not leave fingerprints. (There were, in fact, none, Buttons had confirmed.) I am Sleepy Joe, and I have powerful reasons for doing what I do. Do I punish my victim because I’m jealous? Is this vengeance? No, this is not about jealousy; it’s about something else. I’m not hesitant, that’s not my thing. What I am doing is not grotesque, or lunatic, or absurd. On the contrary, I am enormously pedantic and sure of myself, and my actions are full of transcendental meaning, although no one else may see this. They’re ignorant; I am enlightened. The moment is sublime; I’m the priest and have chosen this man as scapegoat. He’s the object of my ceremony, the Christ figure in this Passion play. The victim shines before my eyes with a sacred radiance that summons his sacrifice. Christ figures are meant to die. I tell myself that their mission is to clean this world that is dirty with sin with their deaths. (Concerning this last point, Rose rereads a portion of María Paz’s manuscript to confirm; she too knew that her brother-in-law was obsessive about ritual cleanliness.) I’m Sleepy Joe again and tremble with fervor; I even get somewhat excited, begin to get an erection. I’m transfixed and hard, the victim calling me, inviting me, he is there for me, offering a submissiveness and willingness that excites me. God’s calling tingles in my balls and demands the execution of the lamb. I obey because I am his prophet, his executor, his angel of death. Yahweh responds and lets me know that he counts on me. Divine punishment will be executed through me, and all the filth in the world will be purified. Shit, this is some big stuff I’m involved in here. I feel such fever that I need to put on the brakes; I can’t come till right at the point of consummation.
That’s it for the Sleepy Joe thing. Could the murder really have taken place like that? There seems to be a lot missing, Rose thought, I’m not getting this, too removed from the real heart of the thing, the blind conviction, a rapture so profound that leads me to torture and kill. This truck driver’s advantage over me is so enormous, in that he defeats me with the simple gift of his faith. He is the one endowed with belief: that makes a huge difference, and tips the scales in his favor. He is very adept at the ritual sequence, vibrantly engaged in each of the stages leading up to the summit of pain. His acts are based on a millennia
l tradition that is foreign to me. He thinks himself a prophet, while I’m a nobody. He counts on enlightenment, while I heed my hydraulic engineer’s logic. That’s why I’ll never understand him and continue to despise him. “Stay put,” Rose commands himself, “don’t get all scattered.” How does Sleepy Joe work, or I should say torture? In the first instance, knife wounds in the hands, feet, and side, the stigmata of the cross. He inflicts them on his own brother. The nails, much more vile, he reserves for the dog. For Cleve, he reserves the crown and the humiliation of the thorns. In a way he crowns Cleve king, thus must consider him his principal victim, his most significant victory, at least up to now. Or maybe not. Maybe he just improvises according to the circumstances and choses the thorns mainly because they were readily available. The sharp weapon, thorns, nails, all elements toward maximum suffering. Each of the victims has been sacrificed or purified with one of these weapons. Does Sleepy Joe hate his victims? Not necessarily. It could even be the opposite. It seemed that he liked his brother. How does he choose them then? What are the criteria? Maybe the deciding factor isn’t the victim but the act itself. Undoubtedly, the common denominator is María Paz. Unless, that is, the guy went around conducting similar ceremonies on victims that had nothing to do with this case. Buttons and Ming were convinced of his more universal sacrificial tendencies, and there was Corina, María Paz’s Salvadoran friend.
Rose returned to the manuscript, which was his guide, his map, and reread the passages about Corina.
“Open your eyes, María Paz. Open your eyes and be careful. That boy is sick. I know what I’m talking about.”
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