That same morning, a few hours later, Rose, María Paz, and the three dogs crossed from Vermont into Upstate New York. They had a prize with them in the red Toyota: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
“This car is like Napoleon’s famous horse carriage,” Rose commented to María Paz and immediately regretted it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that he could mention to her without unleashing a barrage of questions. In that, she was a lot like Violeta, which even María Paz herself acknowledged. What horse carriage? Why Napoleon? Who won at Waterloo? And so on, not letting up until Rose was in full teaching mode, telling the story of how, in the Prussian offensive, Napoleon had to retreat on horseback, abandoning the carriage in which he always traveled, which moments later was seized and looted by the Prussians, who found a most precious treasure trove, Napoleon’s mythical cocked hat, his trademark gray cloak, the silverware he ate with, and his many awards, which were made of gold and embedded with precious stones.
“So a humongous treasure in the carriage,” María Paz sighed, “just like in this Toyota. What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Mr. Rose, running around with an escaped fugitive and a stolen treasure.”
“It was comical to an extent,” Rose tells me. “When we wanted to brush our teeth, we had to find the toothpaste under the bundle of bills.”
“Were you going back to the Catskills?” I ask.
“No. With María Paz directing, we were heading for a roadside bar called Chikki Charmers, where one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends had worked. The one who had drowned in the Jacuzzi.”
“Maraya,” I say. “The one who was skinny in all the right places and full where it was best to be full.”
“Yeah, well, that was a while before, as I came to learn. Near the end of her life, she was as emaciated as an old alley cat, skinny all over from her addiction.”
“Cocaine?” I ask.
“Heroin. She was overcome with these itching attacks that could only be relieved by submerging herself in the Jacuzzi.”
“Like Marat.”
“María Paz thought that Maraya’s coworkers may have known the whereabouts of Sleepy Joe. So we headed down there. Seeking information, you know. She intended to give the man his money. I wanted to burst his liver with a kick to the gut.”
Meanwhile, her relationship with the cyber-coyote had begun to deteriorate. Whenever María Paz postponed departure, the guy delivered a whole sermon about time schedules and agreements and tacked on four hundred additional dollars for each modification of the original plan. Every so often, on the highway, María Paz asked Rose to pull over and stepped out of the car to try to find a signal for her cell phone. Rose watched her arguing into the phone while walking up and down and up and down the shoulder of the road, and coming back either enraged or depressed because she had had another nasty fight with the guy.
“It must be true what they say about coyotes,” grumbled María Paz, “mysterious but stupid creatures.”
“What if he’s not so stupid? What if your cyber-coyote has turned into a bounty hunter?” Rose asked. “What if he already found out who you are, and is simply helping them capture you?”
“It may be,” she sighed. “I don’t know if he’s become a bounty hunter, but I know for sure he’s a thief. Can you believe it? Now he wants another four hundred dollars.”
“There’s more than enough in that bag for that.”
“No, what are you saying? That money is Sleepy Joe’s.”
“Sleepy Joe’s, my ass. That money is now yours, and before that it was your sister’s, and even before that your husband’s, and before that the police’s, and before that the state’s, and ultimately before that it belonged to the taxpayers, that money belonged to me and millions of other idiots like me. Sleepy Joe? Fuck him. I don’t see how he belongs in this chain at all. Your loyalty to him sickens me, María Paz, makes me suspect your own value scales.”
“Value scales! My value scales! I have plenty on my scales. Well, who would have thought it, Mr. Rose? That you begin to lecture me as if you were my father.”
“In some ways, I am.”
Chikki Charmers was supposedly located about twelve miles north of Ithaca. Rose had gotten the information online, and María Paz said she had memorized it. But heated as they were by their arguments, they passed it more than once without noticing, and before finding it they must have driven the same stretch of twenty miles for over an hour, arguing this way and arguing back that way too.
Judging by its outward appearance, the place was a bar for truckers, a dingy spot with a parking lot out front that was four times the area as the spot the structure took up. Since it was early afternoon, the place was closed and deserted, and they could not interview the employees. Instead, they contented themselves with making out the information on the neon billboard that was turned off, where the silhouettes of a couple of naked women in a frozen dance and wearing only boots, announced the following:
CHIKKI CHARMERS, EXOTIC BODIES IN MOTION.
OPEN 8PM-3AM.
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH THE DANCERS.
NO ALCOHOL. NO SMOKING. NO CELL PHONES, CAMERAS, OR VIDEO.
MANDATORY GRATUITY FOR STAGE SEAT.
IF NUDITY OFFENDS YOU OR YOU DISAGREE WITH OUR RULES DO NOT ENTER.
VIOLATORS WILL BE REPORTED OR KICKED OUT OR BOTH.
THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT.
There wasn’t much to do but wait until Chikki Charmers opened. Then they might be able to get some information from someone who had known Maraya, or more specifically Maraya’s boyfriend, a certain Sleepy Joe, a tall, handsome blond, although a little weary looking. He chewed on spicy candies, and often wore a retro nylon satin jacket with Castrol and Pennzoil patches on the sleeves. That’s how María Paz would put it, feigning complete ignorance to elicit information. And if they asked what she wanted with him, she would say she wanted to make good on some money she owed him. The message would get to him, and Sleepy Joe would be motivated to come out of his hole.
They were no longer in a forested area, though the surroundings were still very rural, with barely any trees, trailers half-buried in the snow, impoverished fields, fallen fences, miserable-looking farms abandoned to the harsh winter. They passed a rotted wood barn with some signs of flaking red paint. Rose told María Paz that a long time ago, barns were painted with animal blood, and she grimaced in disgust. They spotted a café and decided to stop there for something to eat, but Rose wanted to sit back and observe so he could figure out what kind of enemy territory they had crossed into. From the moment he noticed the beat-up pickups parked near the entrance, heard country music coming from the jukebox, and saw cheap paintings of hunting scenes decorating the interior of the premises, Rose considered himself warned. Then he felt the tactile stress that María Paz unleashed among the cluster of rednecks seated inside, making them shoot jets of racist adrenaline even to the tips of their ears. They were typical poor white field workers with necks permanently blazed by hours working in the sun, and ultraconservative, immigrant haters. Rose knew this class of individuals well. It was not the first time he had associated with them, the type of people who did not look you in the eyes when you talked to them, but rather stared at an area somewhere around the mouth as a silent warning that you should watch how you talk. Any of the men who congregated there, silently bent over mugs of beer, sausage dishes, and oat porridges, any one of them, thought Rose, would more than willing to denounce an illegal alien, beaner, wetback, brown fucking bitch to the authorities. If they decided not to go with direct aggression, which could also happen, all it would take was one spark to unleash a hellfire. Hence, Rose suggested that María Paz return to the car to avoid trouble; he would get hot dogs to go and they would eat where the winds blew cooler. Besides, no one was watching the Gucci bag; it hadn’t been wise to leave that kind of money within the reach of the white rabble.
“Prussian rabble,” she said.
They took a room at a Budget Inn. Rose had insisted that they get two separate rooms, as in the previous motel, but María Paz thought it was a waste of money and suggested it would more practical to get one room with two single beds; they were a team on a mission and should adopt a more agile and warlike attitude. They holed themselves up in the motel against the afternoon snowstorm, which according to the Weather Channel was a bad one, lashing the roads with high winds and creating zero visibility conditions. María Paz washed her hair and made use of the hair dryer. The dogs sniffed every nook and corner of the room, and Rose set up shop at a desk with cigarette burns at the edges. There he painstakingly set his notes in order, the articles he had printed after various Google searches, an issue of a magazine called Very Interesting that he had just bought at a drugstore, a Bible, and other texts. He wanted to try to tie in all his previous elucidations on the criminal behavior of Sleepy Joe to reach some general conclusions. He devoted the afternoon to it, ignoring the noise of the hair dryer and the bustle of the dogs, who had begun to bark.
In neat letters and using an impeccable script, attempting to remain objective, and with a little dash of hard-learned wisdom and a stack of criminology manuals, Rose had managed to land that first insight using the photos of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, until his discussion turned into a technical report on the strength of materials. He had written his observations on a yellow legal pad, which he lent me so I could transcribe it.
First constant: How does Sleepy Joe kill? He follows a strict canon. For X reasons, he needs his victims to know that he is in control of the Stations of the Cross, and that they are on their way to martyrdom. He chose this ritual process, but he may as well have chosen any other, from training Mesoamerican peoples for the Florida wars to the symbolic acts of Helter Skelter with Charles Manson and the Family. Any preset structure would have worked as long as it meant a sequential progress that would allow him to undertake the ascent of what might be called the conductor’s steps. Sleepy Joe must see himself as the executor of a directive that leads him to kill. Now, that didn’t mean he always killed. Sometimes he just mortified the victim, like in the Corina case. Occasionally, as in the case of my son, Cleve, the victim will die before he completes the ritual. Sometimes the torture gets out of hand, and the victim dies prematurely.
Second constant: He chooses his victims. When he feels he needs to kill, or offer up sacrifice, he looks around and chooses the weakest link in the chain: disabled (Hero), abused (Corina), insignificant individuals (John Eagles), drug addicts (Maraya). The disabled and the weak become his favorite targets, because they exacerbate his criminal instincts and sharpen his perversions.
But we have to be careful, here there’s a jump, a parallel plane has to be considered, because the victims need to meet dual requirements. Aside from the characteristics mentioned above, the victims are all connected in one way or another to María Paz. It can be said that they are people who stand in his way to reach her, and therefore he needs to eliminate them. So he combines the sacrifice prerequisite with the extermination of an opponent. That is, an adversary, as my son, Cleve, must have been—a rival male who stirred his jealousy.
Third constant: What weapons does he use? Several, as suggested by the Via Crucis, but he gives himself freedom to improvise. He is creative, resourceful, as he has shown. Take into account: daggers (Greg), nails (Hero), broomstick (Corina), thorns (Cleve), drowning in a Jacuzzi (Maraya).
Fourth constant: Why do it? Possible answer: To feel God. That’s how Edward Norton puts it in Red Dragon.
That’s as far as Rose had gone with his notes on the yellow legal pad. He tells me that afternoon he wanted to focus particularly on Maraya, one of the first victims, who, according to the scheme Rose had uncovered, would have been involved in the ritual of the gambling for the tunic. He needed to learn more about this relic before they went to Chikki Charmers that night, but other than the controversy over the authenticity of the item, in the end, he found nothing about it he didn’t already know, except for the full quote from the Gospel of John, which he had been ignorant of: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his tunic, which was seamless. Then they said among themselves, ‘Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, to decide whose it shall be.’”
When the time came to go that night, Rose shook María Paz’s shoulder. She had done her hair and then dropped on the bed like a rock, surrendering to exhaustion from not having slept a wink the night before. Her head drooped when she responded, not yet fully awake, so it was easy for Rose to convince her that he would take care of the investigations at Chikki Charmers on his own.
“You know what the crowd will be like at that place?” he warned her. “Just like the one we saw today at the café, either those same people or others identical to them, only now they’ll be rowdy and drunk. Besides, I don’t think women go there unless they are working. You’ll attract too much attention, the last thing we need.”
Ignoring the recommendation of local newscasts to avoid driving during the storm, Rose steered the Toyota into a road painted with ice. But the motel was near the bar, so it was only a few minutes before he sighted, somewhere just beyond the curtain of fog, the neon sign for Chikki Charmers, the letters illuminated in pink and green, and the pair of dancers, who before had been static, now brought to life with electricity, and they flapped their arms and hips spasmodically. Three hours later, Rose returned to the room at the Budget Inn, opened the door, and complained that the dog smell was getting unbearably thick inside.
“What do you expect?” María Paz asked. She was watching Doctor Zhivago, the scene in which Pasha gets cut in the face by a saber. “Did you want me to let the dogs out so they froze to death? Look at poor Omar Sharif, how frost clings even to his eyelashes. Anyway, the whiff of drink on you could light a torch, so don’t be talking about smells.”
“Tonight’s theme was Oriental Night,” Rose said from the bathroom, furiously rinsing out his mouth and washing his hands.
“Mother of God,” she said without taking her eyes off the screen. “Oriental Night? Is that at the place, the Chikki Charmers? And what did they do to bring out the charmers, the dance of the seven veils?”
“Yes, exactly. The seven veils. There were five women, each wrapped in seven veils. I had to cough up a dollar for each veil that hit the floor, plus the five table dances I ordered later to get close enough to the girls.”
“Jesus Christ, our life is full of strippers.”
“You know, one table dance for each girl. To get a chance to speak with them, have a little face-to-face time.”
“You mean cunt to face.”
“I wasn’t worried about the money, but they gave me a senior discount, twenty percent. Can you believe it? Very humiliating.”
“So? Did you get directions to Sleepy Joe’s place? Phone number?”
“Basically, they danced on me; that was it. None of them knew anything of Sleepy Joe’s whereabouts. Of the five, only three had met Maraya. The staff has a lot of turnover, not many of the same dancers as before. Of those three who knew Maraya, only two had ever seen Sleepy Joe. Of those two, one told
me that she was not there to chat with old men, and the other told me some things.”
“What things?”
“Her name is Olga, Russian, I think. On Saturdays she comes out as a Cossack.”
“But tonight was Oriental Night?”
“Yes, tonight Olga went on stage wearing the veils like the others. The Cossack thing is only Saturdays. She did know Sleepy Joe, and believed he was crazy. A bastard, mad as a fucking goat. I told her she was right. She saw him after Maraya’s death, but swears she has no idea where he is now. I believe her, because it is clear that she detests him. I asked her about the clothes raffle, you know, the dead woman’s clothes, and the issue of the dice on the eyes, all that crap organized by Sleepy Joe during the wake. Olga said it was a fiasco. First, because nobody wanted the clothing, those old-fashioned things in Lycra and spandex, which didn’t fit anybody well because Maraya had become a skeleton. And second, because there was no longer a seventies night at Chikki Charmers. It was canceled for lack of interest and because the recession forced management to cut down on costumes.
“Olga said Sleepy Joe insisted on the weird ceremony very much against their will, or at least against the will of Olga, who just wanted to show some respect for the deceased, and particularly against the will of the owner of Chikki Charmers, who just wanted to bury Maraya as quickly as possible, because the poor man had been in a state thinking of the Jacuzzi boiling Marya. The whole thing was a mess. All the owner wanted was to wrap things up and leave the whole disturbing episode behind, which of course was already affecting his business and starting a lot of gossip. But he couldn’t stop Sleepy Joe from getting his way. In the end, Sleepy Joe was the only family member or close friend who had immediately shown up at the morgue after hearing the news. I asked Olga if she believed Sleepy Joe had anything to do with what had happened, I mean, with the death.”
“What’re you asking me, Papi, if he killed her?” Olga said. She stood on the table in heels and snuggled up to Rose so his face was against her navel as the fluttering veils began to come off. “No, at all, Grandpa, not at all involved. Her vice killed her, my love, a cocktail of tecata, boozy fried heroin. Smack, Grandpa, smack, see if you can pinch yourself, right? Horse, my good horse. Giddyap, horsey, giddyap. That was a Sunday morning. Sunday night she didn’t show up for her shift, and because this place is closed on Monday, it wasn’t until Tuesday night that her absence became suspicious. It wasn’t until midday Wednesday that we found out what had happened, and it wasn’t until later that afternoon that the police came to remove the body, or I should say came to get Maraya out of the Jacuzzi. No, Granpapi, Maraya’s boyfriend is a flea-bitten dirtbag of the worst kind, a cockroach with a tyrannical streak, what they call a dark spirit. He dropped by here every so often, each time with a different truck, hitting Maraya up for money. As it is common with these players. Until he was no longer able to compete. I don’t mean because of another man, I mean the horse. Giddyap, horse; you understand, old man? I mean the tecata, the white lady, lover, she of the long fangs that she plunges into your neck. Pleasures you have no idea about, Grandpa, my little old man. And that’s when things went really awry: Maraya’s boyfriend not only hated the white lady, he had forbidden Maraya from going near it, not because he was a puritan, not that, or moralistic, but because the horse was stealing his money, you know? She was spending all her money on the drug. When she tried to come back, the owner had to tell her they didn’t touch or deal with leftovers. That woman was killed by her vice, and that detonation took place deep within her. The contribution of the groom was only the slapstick at the end, the gambling of the clothes, the dice in the eye sockets, and the desecration of the corpse. He didn’t kill her. But who are you, Granpapi, a cop? Why do you ask so many questions?”
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