December Heat

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  PART 2

  He got to the station after the beginning of the morning shift and had to hear the news secondhand: a street kid, sleeping underneath the awning of a building in front of the restaurant where Vieira had gone with Magali, had been burned alive. The building’s garage attendant was washing the cars when he heard the screams; he reached the garage door in time to see the boy, in flames, take a few steps and fall onto the sidewalk; by the time the fire department’s ambulance got there, he looked like a charred doll. He died before the ambulance reached the hospital.

  The garage attendant couldn’t identify the boy. A group of beggars sleeping a hundred meters away hadn’t seen anything and didn’t know the boy. Espinosa knew that street kids and beggars were enemies; they must have been scared, because the boy had been killed the same way delinquents killed beggars. He waited for the restaurant to open before heading over there; maybe the parking attendant could help.

  “Sir, from what you’re telling me, I was long gone at the time it happened.”

  “I know. The garage attendant across the street told us what time the crime took place, so what I want to know is if you were still parking cars when the boy lay down to sleep underneath the awning.”

  “I was, and I saw him lie down. He talked to me; they almost always ask me to get my hands on something for them in the restaurant.”

  “Was it the same boy as when the other officer was here?”

  “No, sir. It was another one.”

  “Are you sure? He usually slept in that very same place.”

  “I know, but it wasn’t him, it was another one. I know the boys around here; I don’t know their names, but I can tell them apart.”

  “Let’s go to the Forensic Institute to—”

  “Sir, we don’t need to go to the Forensic Institute. I know it wasn’t the same kid. I got him some bread and sausage; when I ended my shift and went home he was already sleeping.”

  “While you were parking the cars, did you see anyone suspicious around?”

  “Sir, after a certain hour in Copacabana either everyone looks suspicious or no one does.” Espinosa provided the description the managers of the bars had given of the man posing as a police officer. “No, sir, I don’t remember anyone like that. And, if you’ll pardon my French, a son of a bitch who would do something like that—we ought to be able to tell when someone like that’s around.” Espinosa left thinking how wrong the parking attendant was on that last point.

  He was sure the two crimes were linked, which didn’t mean the same person was responsible for them, only that they were related events. Setting fire to a victim was the way urban predators worked—but that could be precisely the reason the murderer had used that method.

  The news of the boy’s death had raced through the streets of Copacabana long before it made its appearance on the evening news. What didn’t show up on the news, Espinosa reflected, was the fact that the murderer thought he had eliminated his target but had actually gotten the wrong person: the kid had died because he’d slept in the wrong place on the wrong night. The reporters discussed the extreme violence of the act. A sleeping person was completely helpless, incapable of self-defense; in the case of a child sleeping on a sidewalk, such helplessness was an expression of trust in the people around him. Someone who took advantage of that trust to throw gasoline on a child and set him on fire was a monster. Some channels interviewed psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists in search of an explanation.

  The event scared the kid but didn’t throw him off his investigation. He knew who had committed the crime, but the criminal didn’t know he’d killed the wrong boy. That was a big advantage. If he went to the police, no one would pay him any attention; the story was too extraordinary. Better to shut up and make the most of his supposed death. He’d have to become invisible, which wasn’t much of a problem for him. Now, more than ever, he needed a guarantee of safety. He thought about Clodoaldo’s suggestion again. He’d keep following the cop and would talk to him at the right time; he just didn’t know when the right time would be or what he would say. No story he came up with would make sense without allusion to the wallet episode, and if he talked about that he’d have to give back the money. He could forget about the whole thing, even forget about the man himself, and live his life the way he’d always lived it. But if he did that, he risked running into the man someday—and being killed for the second time.

  When he’d worked at the Praça Mauá, he’d usually—at the tensest moments, while trying to solve a problem—left the building and sat on one of the benches to watch the movements of the cranes at the docks. In Copacabana there was no port and no cranes, and the Peixoto district wasn’t on the beach. The only thing to watch there was the assemblage of four-story buildings built at the same time as the neighborhood itself, with doors and windows outlined in colors ranging from colonial green and blue to, more unusually, canary yellow or wine red. So it was that, on Thursday afternoon, as he was on his way home, Espinosa stopped in the square in front of his building, looked for an empty bench, and sat gazing at the dusky light on the hills surrounding the Peixoto district. He didn’t miss the cranes; the curiosity they elicited in him was nothing more than what he felt for prehistoric animals in fictional films. Kids ran screaming around him, which didn’t stop him from starting a little when he heard a voice close to his ear:

  “Officer.” A child’s voice, which calmed him down even before Espinosa turned his head. The child tried to smile, but his eyes examined Espinosa meticulously.

  “Hi. What’s your name?”

  The boy didn’t respond. He walked around the bench and stopped in front of it, watching, sizing him up. Espinosa could tell that he wasn’t a kid from the neighborhood.

  “Do you want to have a seat?” He wasn’t sure of the kid’s age, but he was certainly older than he looked. That much he could read in his eyes.

  “How do you know who I am?”

  “I followed you, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “The station.”

  “And how did you know to follow me?”

  “Clodoaldo told me.”

  “Clodoaldo?”

  The boy shook his head affirmatively as he sat down next to Espinosa.

  “And who is Clodoaldo?”

  The boy stretched his arms out to the seat of the bench, as if he was going to get up, a frightened look in his eyes. Espinosa thought he would run off.

  “Sorry, but I know a lot of people—which Clodoaldo are you talking about?”

  “The Clodoaldo from the beach.” And in a final, desperate gasp: “Clodoaldo, the street teacher, said we could trust you.” That was when the picture came together for Espinosa.

  “Of course! How stupid of me not to have thought of him right off the bat! So Clodoaldo told you to come find me? And why didn’t you go straight to the station instead of following me around?”

  “ ’Cause I was scared.”

  “Scared of the police?”

  “Scared of getting killed.”

  “And why did you think the police were going to kill you?”

  “Not the police, the man.”

  “What man?”

  “The one who burned up my friend.”

  Espinosa looked at the boy for a long time, glanced at the children playing, then looked back at the boy. He spoke slowly, as if trying to break a spell.

  “Listen. That luncheonette on the corner has great ham sandwiches. How about I order two for each of us, get us some soft drinks, and come back over here … and then you can tell me the story from the beginning.”

  With the living room in the dark, the lights from the street came through the Venetian blinds, projecting stripes onto the ceiling. The little red and green lights on his answering machine contrasted with the surrounding darkness. Espinosa didn’t always immediately answer their call; nor did he always turn on the lights as soon as he came in. While he was crossing the room, he threw an almost disdainful glance towa
rd the machine, contemptuous of its two-tone blinking. Without paying it any more attention, he went straight to his room and then to the bathroom before listening to the messages. For two days he’d felt compelled by purely external forces, emptied of desire, mechanically going through the motions at the station. The week was over and he really couldn’t think of any reason to be proud to have lived through it. It didn’t help that it was less than a month to Christmas, a time when he became sensitive; this susceptibility had nothing to do with his religiousness but with a story by O. Henry he had read as a child, and with Hollywood films. Ever since then, Christmas had always moved him, though he thought it would move him a lot more with snow.

  He had long since abandoned the fantasy that Friday night was the prelude to a weekend rich with worthy accomplishments. And he hadn’t needed many of these to realize that this night was different from other nights only because of the illusion that all tasks interrupted (or never even begun) during the week could be completed on Saturday. This included regluing loose floorboards or—one he had initiated over a year ago—constructing a bookshelf for all the loose books in the apartment or—on the intellectual level, one offering equal numbers of variations—embarking on a letter to a distant friend, even beginning the epic narrative of his adventuresome life. But he’d lost the friend’s address; as for the adventures, he knew they were more story than fact.

  This was his state of mind when he went out to look for a restaurant, tired of eating frozen spaghetti Bolognese. The shops of Copacabana had already been deeply infused by the Christmas spirit, staying open late, with music wafting out of the stores and so many trees for sale that it seemed someone must have emptied out Lapland. He walked a few blocks to a trattoria near the beach. The height of his adventures that night was a chocolate cake with cream on top.

  The emptiness of the previous night made him awake on Saturday like a demiurge, ready to instill order into chaos. A while before, in the spirit of entrepreneurship, he had, in lieu of a shelf, piled up the books he had accumulated—bought or inherited—over the last twenty years, arranging them vertically, like plates in a dish rack. Instead of shelves he laid books horizontally on top of the vertical row and, on top of them, began another vertical row. The result of this improvisation was a bookshelf-without-shelves that was already more than a meter and a half tall and occupied the entire length of one of the walls in the living room—without employing any wood. Espinosa was proud of this piece of domestic engineering, but it was time for a few remedies. The reason was twofold: the first, and most important, was that the housecleaner he had used for many years had subtly suggested that she and this arrangement were not compatible; the second, less important reason was that the shelving had reached a point of precarious balance. The situation required energetic action, and that usually implied lengthy reflection, even with that morning’s otherworldly inspiration. Once he was through with breakfast, he took some paper and a pencil and began the project of creating a proper set of shelves for the living room. The first step was to make a design and calculate the exact measurements for the wood he needed to buy; the second was to find a workman. The first part took up his whole Saturday, or almost all of it: he still had the night free.

  The TV movie was halfway over. The star seemed to think that acting consisted of making expressive faces, but there wasn’t much else in the guide. He was about to change the channel or turn the TV off entirely when the doorbell rang. As soon as he went out on the balcony to see who was there, the two figures moved away from the door and looked up, attracted by the noise of the blinds. The streetlamp illuminated a boy and a young woman. He immediately recognized the boy who had approached him in the square and to whom he’d given his address. He didn’t know who the girl was. He gestured for them to wait and went down. It was twenty minutes to midnight.

  As soon as he opened the door to the street both of them started talking at the same time. He asked them to calm down and tell him what had happened. The boy didn’t say anything; she started talking.

  “A man tried to kill him,” she said, looking at the boy and the street, as if the kid were there to confirm what she was saying.

  “Why don’t you come in and tell me the details?”

  “I can’t; I left my canvases in the street.”

  “Your canvases?”

  “I’m a painter. I sell my canvases on the sidewalk on the Avenida Atlantica—that’s where the man tried to kill him.”

  She said everything in one breath. Espinosa calculated that she must be about twenty-five and noted that she was very pretty, as angry as she was scared.

  “So let’s go get your canvases. On the way you can tell me what happened.”

  “Are you coming with us?”

  “I am. Don’t worry. He won’t be there anymore. Wait a second while I go lock up.”

  He took a little more than a minute to get his weapon, his wallet, and a jacket. He had his car parked in front of the building; besides concealing them from the eyes of the thug, it would give them more mobility. The boy sat in the back seat and the girl sat up front, next to Espinosa.

  “What’s your name?” asked Espinosa as soon as they drove off.

  “Kika. K-i-k-a. That’s how I sign my paintings and what everyone calls me. My real name is Cristina. The kid says your name is Espinosa.”

  “That’s right. What else did he tell you?”

  “That you’re a police officer and that we can trust you.”

  “Then tell me what happened.”

  “Okay.” She paused, as if organizing her thoughts, then began her story while the boy, leaning on his elbows, nodded his head affirmatively, underscoring certain points of the narrative. “Me and the other painters show our work on the island dividing the lanes of traffic on the Avenida Atlântica. It was after eleven and I was trying to get the attention of a group of tourists when I saw the man running after the boy on the sidewalk across the street. Suddenly the boy crossed the street, almost getting hit, and hid behind me, shouting that they were trying to kill him. The man stopped on the other side and folded up what looked like a switchblade or a penknife. He stared like he was photographing us, turned around, and went away. The boy told me afterward that that same man had burned another boy, thinking it was him. I asked someone I knew to watch my paintings; we went around the block in the opposite direction from the one the man had taken, and I was ready to go to the police when the boy told me about you. Since it was close, we decided to come here.”

  “You did the right thing. Let’s go get your pictures.”

  It took them less than ten minutes to get from the Peixoto district to the Avenida Atlântica, long enough to establish a climate of trust. While she was talking, Kika gestured and stretched her legs, occupying most of the car and almost reaching Espinosa. They managed to park two blocks from the place the two had indicated. They got out and walked past the kiosks selling all sorts of tourist junk. The boy walked between them, wary and attentive. The friend who had stayed behind to watch Kika’s canvases breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Kika coming; he had gathered up and wrapped all of his own pictures and was visibly yearning to get home. He made a quick comment about someone who’d seemed interested in one of her pictures. Then Kika thanked him for watching her things, they said their farewells, and he left. No questions about what happened; no interest in the boy; no curiosity, which Espinosa thought strange. Later, Kika made it clear that he wasn’t an artist or a painter. He just sold the pictures, a mixture of marchand and street hawker. Kika’s pictures were exhibited on an aluminum stand, where they were hung unframed. The colors suggested Matisse and the forms Gauguin. They looked nice to Espinosa, though his knowledge of painting was limited to reading books with titles like Masters of Painting.

  While taking the pictures down and disassembling her stand, Kika explained that she painted with acrylic, which dried quickly; at first she’d used oils, but since she didn’t have the patience to wait days on end for the colors to dry com
pletely, she had gone over to acrylic.

  “I’m hyperactive—I need my paint to correspond with my personality.”

  “Your paintings are really pretty, which corresponds with you.”

  It was a gallant thing to say. At least Espinosa hoped it would be received as such. Kika looked at him questioningly, as if hesitating between asking for a clarification and thanking him, but Espinosa had already turned to the boy, making an unimportant comment.

  While they were waiting for Kika to take down her stand, Espinosa made an effort to focus on the man, not on Kika; but no matter how intently he looked around for someone he’d never seen, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the girl for more than a couple of seconds. Next to him, the boy stayed alert, aware that he was being forgotten. Kika gathered up her paintings, rolling them with corrugated plastic and making a big but transportable package. The metal structure was taken apart and tied with a nylon rope. They crossed the street, Kika carrying the pictures and Espinosa the stand, which she stored in a garage in exchange for a weekly tip for the doorman. It was twelve-thirty in the morning. It was hot, and the bars on the sidewalk were packed. Men in shorts and women wearing next to nothing strolled in both directions down the avenue, enjoying the light sea breeze.

  After storing the metal stand, they walked two blocks toward the spot where they had parked the car, occasionally having to maneuver their way around the tables that were steadily taking over all the available sidewalk space. When they crossed the street, almost directly across from their parking place, Espinosa moved to grab Kika’s arm as he glanced toward the boy. But he wasn’t there. Espinosa looked around, holding his breath, his heart racing, his eyes trying to focus on an absent object. He studied the cars pulling out, glancing in every direction for a man grabbing a boy by the arm. Nothing. He retraced their steps, peering inside the restaurants, inside the doorways of buildings, inside passing cars and vacant lots, then returning to the other sidewalk, with Kika running behind him until they reached the car.