It was his legs that sent the command to his head to climb the next flight of stairs and figure out, no matter the consequences, what the cause of these shots was, even if it meant putting himself at risk. Who else these days, not limiting ourselves to police officers (and not counting rural schoolteachers) actually worked ex officio, as they say, and put themselves at risk? The closest example Lichi could think of to actually doing what should be done, without anybody demanding it of you or threatening you, was the slogan and strategy Work by rule, used by the union of drivers (by which they exaggeratedly followed all the rules, down to the most minute regulation) as a protest when they wanted a salary increase. Completing basic obligations in this country had, paradoxically, become a way to go on strike.
On the third floor, the hall light certainly wasn’t working by the rules. The only light at all was leaking out through the peepholes. Everything seemed to be dark, even, Lichi noticed, inside the door that was partially open in front of him. He leaned in and pushed it slightly, and then when he glanced down he saw a trace of blood on the floor. Following the blood back into the hallway he saw that the trail turned from a line into sparse drops down the hallway, which must have been the direction the shot person took after trying to staunch their wound.
The path went right back to the staircase, not from the stairs Lichi had just walked up, but the stairs continuing to the next floor. It was terra incognita for Lichi, who had never gone up past the second floor, but who tended to take the stairs instead of the elevator. He ascended them, surprised once again at not meeting another soul, making it all the way to the roof, where recently hung laundry was swaying from a line. Following the same impulse that made him bound up the three flights, he searched every inch of the roof, which wasn’t much to speak of—the combined space of all six apartments on a floor, plus the hallway, equaled about the size of a single apartment in a better neighborhood, which would be almost any other neighborhood in the entire city.
He leaned against the railing to rest, pulled out a cigarette, looked in vain for a lighter, put the cigarette to his lips, and inhaled, imagining the smoke hitting his lungs. But it was mere imagination, as was looking for the owner of the clothes—as if hanging them to dry on the roof were a crime. (Which it was, in the strict sense, or at least members of the building’s committee had discussed the possibility of closing the roof off after it had been revealed that women had been walking on it in heels, which was puncturing the membrane, though, in this case, he couldn’t really justify working ex officio.) And he couldn’t justify anything by the trail of blood either, as, in the daylight, he could now see that it was just drops of dirty water—probably darkened by some badly dyed piece of clothing.
As if actually smoking his cigarette, Lichi paused another moment to look down at the street, so much more desolate and gray compared to the colorful chaos of traffic, markets, vendors, and strollers that brought the city to life during the week. The workday bustle was so vibrant that it reverberated in the graffiti of the rolltop security doors, in the nameplates of the businesses screaming on the walls, and in the dirty and broken sidewalks. The streets weren’t simply empty, but were rather full of emptiness—tumultuous solitude—like a theater hours before or after a show. The street was an unlit cigarette! Or a knockoff electronic cigarette, exactly what was sold on these streets.
In that thick silence, Lichi was a bird’s-eye witness to an armed robbery. A girl walking down the street was surprised by two delinquents who appeared out of thin air (for all the similarities in this country between the police and thieves, in this, Lichi thought, they are exact opposites—the law announces itself from far away by its lights and sirens, chasing away any danger, thus never catching it). As one of the young delinquents pointed a fake-looking .22 at the girl—even from this distance it looked like one of the toy guns they sold in the shops on this very street—the other snagged her handbag, flipped through it with the alacrity of a customs agent who doesn’t like his job, and found what he was looking for. Fifteen seconds later the two had already evaporated and the girl, her mouth open to let loose a scream that never came, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and almost fell into the street. But not even that perilous tumble awoke in Lichi the impulse to go to her aid, perhaps because it all happened in complete silence, as if a scene from a silent movie. He saw the woman walk away as if nothing had happened, and then Lichi flicked the cigarette off the side of the roof as if he’d actually smoked it.
He went back down the stairs, feeling with each step more and more surprise by his passivity about a crime committed before his very eyes, especially when he was looking for a more illusory crime, a crime he knew only by sound. The materiality of what he had just seen influenced his interpretation of the third shot that he heard that Sunday, just as he was rounding the bend of the staircase on the fifth floor. He rang the bell of the apartment the sound had come from, knowing now that the noise wasn’t from a gun, but from someone who was trying to imitate the noise of a gun. The door opened right away, as if somebody had been expecting him.
“Are you coming about the gunshots?” an enthused young man wearing an oversized Colombian national jersey asked. “You don’t know how happy you’re making me. I’m doing a series of YouTube tutorials on how to make homemade sounds, I mean completely homemade, with nothing but things lying around your place. I’ve made rain, thunder, shoe squeaks, a spaceship, but I couldn’t figure out how to do a gunshot. Because, you know, popping a balloon or smacking a belt against the table doesn’t work. Not even a Zippo or a stapler sounds much like the cocking of a gun. And who even actually keeps balloons in their house, right? After looking hard, though, I finally found a good recipe. But I wasn’t going to be satisfied until a neighbor got scared and came to see who I was killing.”
Lichi, ears ringing with the Caribbean chatter (for him, the Caribbean started anywhere north of Rio), put on his best fool face (his usual face, as many would say) took out a pack of cigarettes, and told the kid that he didn’t come about any noises, but was just looking for a light.
“I didn’t realize until I got up to the roof that I didn’t bring my lighter,” he said, enjoying his small triumph that someone else would feel more like a fool than he did.
Surprised, but not doubting for a moment that he was hearing the truth, the YouTuber stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out a Zippo. As he flicked the lighter a few times before getting a flame, both men noticed that the noise was nearly identical to the cocking of a gun. Weren’t these, Lichi thought to himself, the lighters American soldiers used in Vietnam? With the pretext of making a lighter that would stay lit even on windy days, they had designed them to make prisoners of war extra nervous during torture sessions. He thought of mentioning this piece of trivia to the kid, but opted for something more relevant.
“The best way to reproduce the noise of a pistol is to make noise with a pistol, and in this part of town, everyone already has one in his home,” he shared, as a way of thanking the kid, and as a way of imparting a lesson in Argentinian civility—in the end, he figured, everybody finds the teacher he or she deserves.
Instead of going back up, he went down the steps deliberately, slowly, doing his best to enjoy the tobacco before returning to his apartment, where his dad wouldn’t let him smoke. He wouldn’t let him do anything, really, except of course fulfilling his filial duties and taking care of him, which he seemed, intentionally, to make difficult. Which is why Lichi—tired of searching for and tossing out the bottles of sake his dad snuck into the house—let him get drunk again last night.
The slow descent let Lichi think again about, and even solve, the case of the light-shaft mystery. When he passed by the floor with the young woman in the wheelchair, he understood that what she had wanted was the earring hanging from her ear, which had left it as swollen as a tomato. Lichi preferred not to even imagine what they had used to do the piercing, but it was clear to him now that whatever it was had provoked the scream that he hear
d, and then the scream had provoked the gag. When he passed by the apartment of the Peruvians he realized that the package he had restored was surely what had fallen after the scream, and after the gunshot. Which is how the crime must have occurred, and the crime scene, he realized, was none other than the interior patio of his own brain. He was the perpetrator and the detective, and, come to think of it, even the victim.
In front of his own apartment’s door he stopped for a moment to look into his peephole, not so much to check if it was inverted, and it was, but to finish his cigarette. What he saw was terrifying: his father had fallen out of bed and seemingly knocked his head against the iron chair that served as his nightstand. He was bleeding abundantly, staining the carpet red. Given the position of his arm, it could be deduced that his last effort was in reaching for his son’s phone, though who knows who he’d been planning to call.
Lichi, preparing to drop his cigarette and snub it out, decided instead to light himself another and continue walking toward the street. He suddenly remembered that he needed to buy a few things, and figured that the Chinese mart on the corner was probably open (his countrymen were the only ones who worked hard in Argentina). But then he thought that he’d better go into the office and file a report about the crime he’d witnessed from the roof. And he could even tell them about the crime he solved in his apartment building—surely his colleagues would get a kick out of it, and tell him he’d acted the fool (they were already calling him Lichi, as if he were a fruit, so how much worse could it get?). What mattered was delaying, for as long as possible, returning to his apartment, so that everybody would know that the only reason he had been absent for so long was because he was fulfilling his duty.
Fury of the Worm
by Alejandro Parisi
Mataderos
Translated by John Washington
The merry-go-round spun with the same laziness that seemed to seep out of the miserable tin-and-brick shacks, the dying grass, the scattered trash, and out of all the people and dogs living in the barrio. The ride spun and spun, slave to its brief orbit, its constant twist: the horsies rising and dipping, squeaking sharply; a paint-chipped sleigh reflecting the sun from its metallic incrustations; and a little airplane, unmoving, without propeller, trembling as the children jumped into it. From its depths, the same song sang out loudly, with an almost exaggerated stridence.
Leaning his shoulder against a post, Ángel Camaño watched the young mothers who stood at the side of the ride, helping, smacking, caressing, or nudging their children along. It was hot. Ángel Camaño wiped his forehead with a swatch of orange cloth. His clear eyes, an almost translucent turquoise, gazed at the brown, smiling faces of the children, who were reaching up and lunging at the ring he swung down at them. Camaño smiled, proud of himself for his work, for his dedication.
For years he had been a schoolteacher, until he had to leave the Mission. After living for a decade as a nomad, he settled in Los Perales and bought the merry-go-round, even taking on the debts the previous owner couldn’t pay. Now he was the darling and master of the ride.
Slowly, the ride stopped spinning. When it made its last turn, Ángel Camaño offered candy to the kids, who gobbled them up and let him pinch their cheeks. Looking happily at the cluster of smiles, Camaño announced that the next ride would be free for everyone. There was an explosion of screams and laughter. The young mothers, however, were already gathering up their kids and starting to walk away.
Confused, Camaño hung the ring on the hook nailed into the black and green–painted post—the same color theme of the entire merry-go-round—and stepped out of the shady refuge of the ride. That was when he saw, curiously, the motorcycles zooming toward him across the barren landscape. When the four bikes skidded to a stop just outside the ring of the merry-go-round, Camaño opened his arms into the shape of a cross to give the men a warm welcome.
“Hello, fellas,” he said with a smile.
One of the young men got off his bike, looked both ways, and then stepped forward. Obese, dressed in basketball shorts and a jersey, the man known as Shrek pointed a short-muzzled revolver at Camaño. “You’re screwed, Ángelito,” he said.
Camaño looked at his watch. Four fifteen in the afternoon. Not a bad time to die: all across the country little kids were playing in the sun. He glanced around, but all he could see was the flat gray of the shuttered hospital, about two hundred yards away. His destiny, like that of everybody else in the neighborhood, had set on its course in that building.
The other three men got off their bikes and took out their guns. They all aimed at Camaño. With his eyes closed, he awaited the gunshots. But nobody pulled the trigger. The young men surrounded him. Shrek tied his hands with a cable that one of the others hooked to the back of a motorcycle. That was when Ángel Camaño felt the fear, more fear than all the fear he had ever felt in his life.
The bikes started up. He tried to follow behind, but he couldn’t keep up. He caught sight of the merry-go-round, now far behind him. The rocks and ground tore at his back and body as the men dragged him to Worm’s hideout, high, high, high up in Los Perales.
* * *
Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, leaning his elbows out the window, which was without a frame or glass, Worm peered out at the immensity before him. Ever since he could remember, this view was the most beautiful he could imagine. Years ago, when he was just an orphan living in a shack with his grandpa, he would sneak into that huge ramshackle building—originally meant to be one of the best hospitals in Latin America, but which had started falling apart as soon as it was built—scamper up the first floor past the doctors, and climb all the way up ten flights. They hadn’t ever really finished with the initial construction, which would make him, even today, have to duck loose sprigs of steel that had oxidized after half a century of abandonment, before he reached the window and was able to look out onto the city. It was simultaneously so close and so far from him, so far from Luchito, as he used to be known—the young man who had once been so small and so lost.
But that was years ago, and now he didn’t look at the city in fear. On the contrary: he knew that the houses, the neighborhood, and everything he could see from that window was his. He didn’t get it easily. If there was something Luchito learned as he converted into Worm, it was that you paid the price of rising to power in blood, and he had seen many of his boys bleed themselves out on those streets below him. Now he had an army of fifty. They called themselves the Renegade Boys. Thieves, dealers, killers, chieftains, soccer hooligans, government pawns . . . sometimes he could even surprise himself with all the different work they did.
Worm slowly exhaled the smoke from his lungs, and then let out a cough.
Scattered across the room behind him, a handful of Renegades killed time on their phones, smoking, snorting, or sitting in front of a soccer game being played on the sixty-four inch screen on the wall. From another room came the methodical noise of the three Renegades tasked with prepping and packing kilo bags of coke they needed to deliver to a downtown barrio that night. Worm looked at all his men, feeling pride at the heights he had achieved—so tall, so high, towering over all of Los Perales.
In one corner, Marco Antonio Cuellar was wringing his hands, unable to hide his fear. Maybe it was the fact that he was surrounded by so many Argentinians. That neighborhood was a Russian doll, full of all sorts of distinct people who hardly ever mixed. Which is why Worm was so surprised to receive Cuellar’s request. The Bolivians worked and lived on the margins, going in and out of the central market, loaded up with vegetables, trailed by their children, or cooped up in hidden workshops where they sewed clothes they would sell downtown. Worm had taken note of their work ethic, their unfaltering obedience, as if toiling all day could slip them out of the poverty that had been dragging them down for centuries.
Which is why, with Cuellar’s request, Worm saw an opportunity. After all, he wouldn’t deny a favor to anybody. Especially to somebody who ruled the area of the
neighborhood that the Renegades didn’t have control over, but were looking to gain access to. Worm had learned that things always got complicated, which is why it was always good to have a loaded gun and a safe place to hide.
He took another drag off his joint and approached Cuellar. “You want a hit?”
“No thanks,” the Bolivian said, eyes locked on the butt of the gun Worm had tucked into the waistband of his Nueva Chicago shorts.
“Relax, Bolivia.”
“Did you already take care of it?”
“Don’t be nervous. You’ll see.” Worm put a hand on Cuellar’s back.
“But you told me—”
Worm raised a hand up and Cuellar, startled, stopped midsentence. “You came,” Worm said, “because the cops wouldn’t do shit for you. That’s where the Bolivians and the Argentinians come together. And now you want justice, so you’re going to have to trust in the Worm.”
He coughed again, cleared his throat, inhaled, and went to the window to spit. He could see the bikes on their way. He took another hit, coughed, and then turned around and said, “Here they are.”
They pulled Camaño in still tied up, covered in blood and bruises. Shrek attached the cable that bound Camaño’s hands together to a column. Ángel Camaño tried to stand up, but one of the Renegades kicked him in the knee, and he fell back to the ground.
Everybody was silent, wondering why Worm had gone to so much effort when they could have killed the guy with a simple shot to the head.
“Worm,” Camaño muttered, “I work for you.”
“Quiet,” Worm responded. He turned away to look for Cuellar, who wasn’t in sight. “Mamani, Bolivia, come here, damnit!”
Behind the Renegades, Cuellar was paralyzed, his eyes fixed on the floor.
“Is that him?” Worm asked, motioning to Camaño.
Buenos Aires Noir Page 5
