For thirty years, in the Stygian gloom of his quarters, Shivarov has practiced his life’s work. He has honed it to perfection, understanding every bone, sinew, muscle, tendon of the human form, for that’s all part of his art. Without this knowledge he would not be sought after. He cannot make mistakes, and he never does. They call him the Cripple Maker. An apt moniker, because that is exactly what he is.
Along the streets of Favelada, by the riverbank in Agua Suja, under the bridges of Dieux Morts, in the roads of Sanguinosa and Blutig, cripples abound. They beg in the traffic, sell their wares with their one hand, sit in the streets with their amputated limbs uncovered for all to see. This is how they make a living for their families. But they weren’t born that way. They went to the Cripple Maker.
Some families send their youngest child to Shivarov. Others take it upon themselves. He accepts only cash paid in advance. He strips the client (“more hygienic”), gags them with a rag soaked in nitrous oxide, and places a hood over their head. All they hear is the creak and the crack of the box, and then their world changes forever.
And it is the box that he carries as he approaches the monolith. Stooped and spindly, he can barely walk with it strapped around his back. He stops to rest, looks furtively around him at children playing in the fading light. The sentries’ walkie-talkies crackle on the rim of the tower. An unlikely assassin, but here in Favelada anything is possible.
One of the guards on the fifteenth floor bites on a sunflower seed, spits out the shell, peers through his binoculars, and says, “Look what Hell dredged up.”
He hands the binoculars to his partner. “Then why’s he carrying a cross on his back?”
Shivarov limps toward the entrance of the tower, drawing stares from the children as the guards close ranks. He is about to enter their orbit when he collapses. It’s a gradual collapse, a staged pantomime in four parts. First his knees go, then his shoulders. He topples sideways and lands with a messy thud-crash-crunch on the ground, woodchips from his toolbox splintering into the dust.
Heads turn. Some of the children stare. Is it Jesus? The guards walk over to Shivarov. They remove the box from his shoulders and pick him up, two lifting his torso, a third gripping his ankles like a man maneuvering a wheelbarrow. He is light, all skin and bones. But when one of the guards sees Shivarov’s six-fingered hands, he jumps back with a shriek and drops the stranger’s legs.
“Look at his hands! Look at his hands!”
“What of it?” says one of the men gripping Shivarov’s shoulders. “I saw a wolf with two heads a few months ago.”
The jittery guard grips Shivarov by the ankles again, tries not to look at the hands, and carries him to the entrance. They kick open a door at the foot of the tower and lift him onto the Chinaman’s bed. Shivarov gives off such a subterranean aura that when Nacho enters he recoils instantly and his first thoughts are ‘this man cannot stay here’ while the guards drag the toolbox into the room and leave it by the bed.
“Well, what have we here?” says Nacho, standing above him. “A martyr? Or the bogeyman’s bogeyman.”
But he doesn’t yet know who Shivarov is.
After a minute or so, the Cripple Maker opens his eyes. The first thing he does is close his fists. Then he sees Nacho’s withered arm, and he thinks it is not his work. He cannot assemble a masterpiece like that because he only does amputations, regulation slicing and dicing. For a cripple like this, nature must have had its hand on the tiller—childhood polio or arteriosclerosis. His eyes dart around until they fix on his box. Once he has sighted it, and seen that it remains closed, he relaxes again.
“Do you speak English?” says Nacho.
“Yes,” whispers Shivarov. “Was fire. My house burn. I come here for to live.” His voice is a smoky rasp, a knife scratching on canvas.
“I’m Nacho Morales. What’s your name?”
“Dimitri,” he says, without a pause. “Dimitri Abramov. I have nothing. Everything burn.”
“You have this.” Nacho nods at the box.
“Yes. Some things old from my home. You are Nacho?”
“Yes.”
“I come here for to meet you. To ask for to stay here some days. They burn my house.”
“Who burned your house?”
“I don’t know. Smoke everywhere. Flames high.”
“Do you work?”
“I am doctor.”
“You work in a hospital?”
“No. Private practice. You have glass of water?”
“Yes. Wait.”
Nacho goes outside and asks one of the guards to get water. He returns to find Shivarov sitting up in the bed and the box moved under it. Shivarov’s hands are gripped together, hiding his fingers.
“I am doctor,” Shivarov repeats. “If I stay here, I help people free. No charge.”
His face is a daub of black grime, and his eyes puddles of water flecked with red like ink leaking in a pool. Shivarov doesn’t look Nacho in the eye and Nacho doesn’t trust him. Like an animal, Nacho has a sixth sense.
“What’s in the box?”
“Old things. Photos. Some medical equipment.”
“Can you show me?”
“Very tired. They burn my house today. I am lucky stay alive. Very tired. I show you box tomorrow please. Just old things. Equipment.”
Nacho figures that if Torres the Younger was sending someone with a bomb, it wouldn’t be an aging skeleton of a man covered in soot. And if he wanted to infiltrate the tower, why would he dispatch a ham actor with a fainting habit, unless he was an idiot?
“You can spend one night here, but you won’t be alone. The door stays open and the night guards will use this room to nap. They’ll go on the floor while you sleep. Do you understand?”
“Yes yes. Very good. Thank you.”
With that, Nacho shuffles back to his room, the muletas tapping lightly on the stone floor, while Shivarov ponders the asymmetry of Nacho’s body—truly a work of art—and thinks about where he can hide the tools of his trade.
CHAPTER 21
The Fourth Trash War—Fernanda the Garbage Sorter—Panning for gold—Fernanda gets her revenge
THE FOURTH TRASH WAR WASN’T A WAR AT ALL. SOME HISTORIANS CALLED IT A BATTLE, others a skirmish, and on the famous Zeffekat tapestry that shows all of the Trash Wars, it would later appear as a bloody raid. But the truth is, it was a massacre. Or rather two massacres. They involved a gang of child soldiers high on khat and methadone and armed with Chinese Kalashnikovs, a gold deal gone wrong, a grinning ghost, and a child prodigy in a pink tutu. When it was over it resembled a scene from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and anyone who hadn’t known it before surely knew it now: Favelada was cursed, the place of devils and demons.
It began with a six-year-old garbage sorter called Fernanda. She was born in garbage, lived in garbage, and all day every day walked through garbage.
When she started she could barely lift the sack, and would tag along behind her mother, also called Fernanda, her father having gone early to that great garbage tip in the sky, borne there on drink and carelessness. Her mother patiently taught Fernanda what to look for, and let her keep the dolls and the teddy bears and the trinkets she found. The latter included a musical box with a ballerina who twirled to the tinkling sound when you opened the box, and from the day she discovered it Fernanda wanted to be a dancer. Years later she would find a tutu and wear it whenever she wasn’t sorting garbage.
As Fernanda grew stronger, she began to heave sacks as competently as any of the boys, and because she had been taught well, she excelled at culling the junk from the jewels: the shining diadem, the functioning appliance, the gewgaw inlaid with platinum. By the time she was ten, she had become one of the greatest garbage sorters of them all—better than Deng the Dipper, who could spy a nugget of silver from two hundred yards, better than Rogerio the Rag Man, who once found a diamond-encrusted watch under a pile of newspapers and claimed it had glowed in front of him like a torch, better even t
han Ruby Kolakashiana, who could fill a gunnysack of recyclable metal in ten minutes, or so the legend goes.
Fernanda was fast. Not limb-swirling, arms-akimbo, sweat-inducing fast, but steady and consistent and with an economy of movement that meant she rarely touched discardables, rarely made a mistake. Others—the hares among them, who flipped over every pile in search of the jackpot—would be collapsed in the shade while she was crouched down or trudging up some garbage mountain, strong-thighed and resolute.
The value of substances rose and fell, so one month she might pick glass—scraping up cullet with a handmade trowel—and the next month it would be tin cans. When a furniture factory opened on the outskirts of Agua Suja, she picked plastic for a year, because it could be shredded to fill seat cushions or honed into cheap chairs. She was adaptable, quick on her feet, and knew the worth of everything.
Aged twelve, she diversified.
At Minhas they were digging for gold. The miners lived in barracks, a line of wooden shacks where they slept two to a bunk. At the end of every day the men showered in the street under a rigged up hose full of holes, and it was there that Fernanda, who was passing by on an errand for her mother, happened to notice flecks of gilt glistening in the runoff water flowing down the street. It was gold dust.
She found out everything she could about gold panning, doing her research by talking to elders and jewel hawkers and passing prospectors, and once, by chance, watching a TV program about it on a recycled black-and-white that her mother had rescued from a tip. She even went to a public library one time, drawing looks because she stank of trash. She was illiterate, but before they kicked her out, she had managed to commit to memory a number of diagrams on panning for gold. It took her two months to figure out how to do it.
Now thirteen, she would take the night bus to Minhas, ignoring the madmen and the muttering drunks, and climb over a fence, knapsack on her back, to get into the miners’ village. Silently, on all fours, she swept the street, now dry, where the men showered. This she did with a hand brush until she’d amassed a large pile of dust. All the while she would be listening to the assorted snores of the miners—great isolated honkings, leonine rumblings, and drill-like tremolos.
She panned the dust in water until it became silt. From out of her sack she then produced a bottle of nitric acid, which she poured into the pan. Sitting against the wall of the miners’ compound, she heated the pan over a low paraffin fire and then added mercury, mixing the acid and mercury with her hand. She would wipe her hand on the wall immediately after, but still the skin burned, though she knew it would grow back quickly. Ignoring the pain, she would watch the magic of her alchemy as the gold clung to the mercury in an amorphous lump. She picked it out and heated it, holding it in a pair of silicone-tipped tongs rescued from a trash pile. Once the mercury was burned off, she was left with a nugget of pure gold. She packed up her tools and scrambled back over the fence, the gold hidden in the safest place she could find—her mouth.
Every three weeks she would do the same thing, producing a nugget of gold from the dust that fell off the miners’ bodies, and she found a dealer who bought the gold at market price: an old man called Reuben, with a crocodile smile but a good heart, who never cheated her once, not even when his foolish son lost a fortune on a wager in a gambling house. Fernanda, meanwhile, gave most of the money to her mother.
Later, during the rainy season, she would break into the drains beside the miners’ compound, lower herself with a rope secured to the fence and tied to her waist, and dredge buckets of sludge which contained even more gold to be sorted. The process was different, but the result was the same. This went on for two years until one day her dealer dropped dead and was replaced by the unscrupulous son with a gambling habit. The young man, in Cuban heels and mud-brown Stetson, accused her of diluting the gold with tin.
“You rooked ma daddy for years,” he said. “So I’m gonna git me some recompense.”
He slapped her down, pocketed the gold, and took off on his moped, tossing behind him a fifty-libro note, a tenth of the value of the gold she had brought.
Fernanda dusted herself off and pondered her revenge.
A day later she visited a group of child soldiers living on the roof of an abandoned train station. War orphans themselves, they were killing machines brainwashed by warlords and other captors. They were the scions of narcotraficantes and murderers, thieves and sicarios, and they spent their days scavenging for food, robbing local bodegas, and chewing khat to stave off hunger.
The following Monday night, on a promise of a share of the gold, they raided the dealer’s premises. The episode was short, nasty, and brutish.
The refinery where the dealer and his employees worked and lived, a repurposed mansion now running to ground, was poorly guarded. Two sentries lay snoring in a hut, an overfed Doberman napping at their feet. The child soldiers simply walked in the front door, Kalashnikovs at their hips. They found no gold, but took everything and anything of value—lamps, a vase, a clock, a pair of shoes, knick-knacks. As they turned left to raid the working area of the refinery, they heard a shuffle. Leaping upon them was a group of men carrying spanners, hammers and knives. The refinery, it turned out, was open at night, and these men were in the middle of their shift.
The rat-a-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs and the screams of the wounded echoed in the halls. The dealer himself—Reuben Junior, an ass but not a coward—leaped out of bed and unleashed a two-handed volley of revolver fire until a bullet from a child soldier’s Kalashnikov pierced his arm and sent him spiraling back into his room. Shots ricocheted everywhere, destroying the last vestiges of the mansion as it had been. A glinting chandelier crashed to the floor, its icicles of crystal crunching on the carpet, and the glass front of a Georgian cupboard exploded, shellacking the crockery. Two of the boys were hit—one by Reuben Junior and another by a hammer blow—and went down like skittles, but the workers were annihilated. Driven back down the corridor into the refinery, they had nowhere to run, and the boy soldiers killed them gleefully.
The massacre ended only because on the second floor of the house, the ghost of the old dealer, Reuben Senior, tiptoed along the banister’s edge, cracked open his crocodile smile, and flew into the refinery, thus spooking the child soldiers enough to make them run.
Urns of molten gold mingled with blood, and the twitching corpses of the workers were draped along the rims of smelters like Dali soft watches. One man lay dead in a riot of glass beakers and flasks and Buchner funnels, and his mate was sprawled by the furnace, helmet still on, skin starting to bubble in the heat.
When Fernanda heard about what the boys had done, she wept for a week. She had told them to get her gold back, not kill everybody.
“That’s what happens when you set a wild dog loose,” said her mother. “And they didn’t even bring you any gold.”
The episode would not have been a Trash War if it wasn’t for what happened next. The child soldiers lay down their arms. Spooked by the ghost and the thought of their two dead friends, they moved to the dump and joined the garbage sorters. What they didn’t know was that Reuben Junior was still alive and after revenge. When he heard the boys were working in the Favelada garbage dump, he vowed to massacre them.
And thus did the Fourth Trash War play out: unarmed former child soldiers cut to ribbons by an army of mercenaries. Fernanda managed to escape by hiding in a drain (for Fernanda had become an expert at opening the covers and lowering herself in an instant), while her mother sat safely in the house she had bought with Fernanda’s gold, one mile away from the dump. Reuben Junior, gold dealer, lousy gambler, cowboy worshipper, conman and thief, had his vengeance, but before the day was done he too was dead, crushed by a garbage mountain that collapsed on him. And in it, not a single trace of gold.
When they found him, the garbage sorters took off his belt and boots and sold them for a fortune, pocketed his gun, purloined his father’s watch, and gave his Stetson to Fernanda the Elder. The rest they left f
or the buzzards.
CHAPTER 22
Nacho gets a haircut—Man in a cage—Trial at the five stone heads—Jeremiah—Emil and Nacho in a café
NACHO IS SITTING IN MARIAS BEAUTTY & HARE SALON IN FRONT OF A MIRROR. IT IS EARLY morning and the salon isn’t open yet, but this is a special assignment. Maria glides over in five-inch heels, white microskirt, and seamed stockings. Stands behind Nacho. Reaches for his hair the way a child might reach for a sleeping snake.
“When was the last time you had it cut?” she asks.
“I think I was about thirty. Maybe five years ago.”
“God almighty. Why does it stand up on end?”
“I don’t know. You’re the hairdresser.”
She almost-pats his hair gingerly, checking all the angles, without actually touching it, working up some ideal image of his head in her imagination, designing the architecture of the little lisiado that will (a) make him look more like a leader, and (b) secure him a good woman. But not in that order.
Outside, birds wheel and lark in a sky streaked with salmon pink.
“OK, here we go,” she says with a deep breath.
“You’re not defusing a bomb. Just cut it.”
“I’m an artist. It doesn’t work like that.”
She picks up a pair of scissors, puts them down, chooses a different pair, puts those down, gets a comb, and runs her inch-long red-painted fingernails along the teeth. Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrik.
“What are you doing?” asks Nacho.
Damnificados Page 19
