The Dancer Upstairs

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I heard a shout. “Here’s one!” As before, the boys gathered around it. The drop of blood held them in, then released them.

  “Here’s one!”

  “Here’s one!”

  They receded in the deepening dusk, drawing together then separating again, a monstrous anemone expanding and contracting in the dark.

  I tossed the ball to the girl with sand in her hair and set off after them, unfastening the holster on my belt.

  The drops of blood led into a labyrinth of pale brick houses. Rusted angle-iron entrails poked from the roofs and corrugated sheets leaned in bundles against the unpainted walls. I pictured the wretched group struggling this way. Had they known where to go? Was there a safe house in an emergency? Were they expected?

  The boys had assembled outside a single-storey house with low railings around it. They pointed to the steps, the concrete specked with blood. I drew my pistol. The boys stepped back a pace, all but for Coca-Cola Cap, who stood with his hands in his pockets, head at an angle, eyes missing nothing. I spoke again on the mobile. The nearest car was six kilometres away. I would have to act now, this minute.

  I opened the gate and walked up the path. I felt no terror. That would come later, in the car driving home, in bed with Sylvina.

  The door opened to my touch. I stepped into a narrow corridor. Ahead was a kitchen, to the right a glass door. Somebody flitted behind the glass. I pushed down the handle and kicked the door open, keeping back.

  A body faced me on the floor, half propped against a black vinyl sofa and covered to the neck with a blanket. The head had been clumsily wrapped in a pink bath towel. All that could be seen of the face was a mouth, open at an angle, as if the skull underneath had skewered round and no longer fitted the skin. From the mouth came a wheezing sound.

  Out of sight, a window rattled. I rushed into the room in time to see a flash of yellow hem disappearing over the sill. There was a loud report, and the body at my feet jerked. I threw myself to the floor, in the same motion firing twice at the window. I counted to five. When I ran to look there was no one there, and no one in the alley outside, and no noise.

  I hurried back to the sofa. Under the bullet’s impact the head had dropped to the floor and the blanket had slipped, revealing the brown and yellow uniform beneath. I peeled off the sodden towel. Still recognizable above the shattered jaw were the nose and eyes and hair of a young girl. Dead.

  My mobile bleeped. Sucre, by the Mercedes, needing directions.

  Outside the volleyball team waited for me. When they heard the door open, they jumped off the railings. Their leader advanced up the path. He held out his arm, opening his fist. He was even younger than the dead girl inside, younger than Laura.

  “Two hundred and forty-nine pesos.”

  That night, after the ambulance had removed the body to the police mortuary, we continued our search of the house. Sucre and I went through the front room while the forensic people completed work on the sofa. They had marked and tagged the towel and blanket and were tweezering the last fabric samples into a zippered plastic bag.

  Around us, the havoc of a dismantled room.

  “Hello.” Sucre had unscrewed the back of a stereo loudspeaker. Wedged inside, a black leather Filofax.

  I flicked through the pages. There were some words written in blue biro, making no sense.

  “I’ll look at this tomorrow.”

  I drove home.

  The kitchen clock said ten to midnight. Sylvina was washing up. Her guests had left half an hour earlier.

  “They killed Prado,” I said.

  She didn’t look up from the sink. “I know.” Consuelo, the last guest to arrive, had heard the announcement on her car radio.

  “How was your evening?”

  “It went well, thank you.”

  Her shoulders betrayed her. Last night she had looked beautiful when trying on the dress.

  “Sucre did call you?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” She was angry, but pretending she wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here.”

  “I know. I understand.” She might have lost her temper, but she understood.

  She stacked another bowl.

  “I’ve kept some food for you.” She fetched the plate from the oven. Looking up, about to say something, she saw my shirt. “Agustín! You’re covered in blood.”

  Fourteen years ago she had rushed towards me like this. It was my third week at the Police Academy. Then it hadn’t been blood, but dog shit.

  She made me take off the shirt, emptied the sink, filled it with hot water, dropped the shirt in it.

  I sat down and began to eat.

  “Probably it’s disgusting,” she said.

  “She was only eleven or twelve.”

  “Who was?”

  “The girl from the group who killed Prado.”

  “A street child?” She didn’t mean to sound bitter.

  “No.”

  You can tell a lot about a corpse. She’d come from a family like ours. Mixed blood; good dental care in the few teeth spared by the bullet; tidily dressed – the headband we later traced to a sports shop used by Sylvina; and little opal earrings concealed by the hair she must have washed only yesterday. This wasn’t a deprived child or an orphaned child or an illegitimate child abandoned to the streets. This was a well-tended child from a good home, and with parents who loved her.

  “This is the extent to which Ezequiel indoctrinates people.”

  I looked up. By the way Sylvina was pounding my shirt in the sink, I realized that I was behaving with no consideration for what my wife had been through. If you worry about something, you worry about it. She’d listened to me, but she had suffered her own miserable evening.

  “Tell me about your dinner. Were you terrific?”

  “Not here, Agustín. I’m tired.”

  In bed, naked together, she said, “Please don’t. I can’t. I don’t want to.”

  I rolled back, lying beside her in the dark.

  “Do you want to hear or don’t you?”

  “You know I do.”

  She spoke for half an hour, conducting her own post-mortem. She talked at random, remembering what someone had said, providing another person’s reaction. Until she drifted into sleep, one arm across her forehead, I was able to lose myself in another person’s wretchedness.

  I’d attended one of my wife’s dinners a year before. The vogue then was charity, not books. Within six months they’d stopped raising money.

  I conjured up her friends, braying women with their teeth in braces, tugging dogs into the hallway, plucking their shirts from their shoulders because of the heat. The images volleyed back and forth and sometimes they were mine.

  “But Sylvina, what a wonderful pied à terre.”

  She was too ashamed to invite these women home. I pictured them clinging to her in the gloom cast by the fluted Portuguese lamps, devouring with their degrading glances the tiny front room, the chairs in which they would sit before and after the meal, the lacquered dresser behind which Sylvina had tenderly arranged an incomplete set of green French coffee cups. From such inherited belongings she wove the mantles of her nostalgia.

  I saw Sylvina, elegant in her mother’s dress and bracelets, hastening to close the kitchen door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll just do this as an anti-cat measure,” before urging Patricia and Leonora to leave their dogs in Laura’s room, where I hear Patricia whisper, “She looks like she’s robbed the burial mound at Ur!” and I watch Leonora nod, indicating with a cruel uplift of her brow the tutu which Sylvina bought secondhand, and after they have shooed from the door their pets, a red setter and a dachshund, I follow them down the corridor, follow them past the mirror, observing their little flounce, follow them into the stifling room where, bounding up to their hostess, they say in unison, “What a dear little flat you have,” and Sylvina, blushing a little, starts to thank them when Marina interrupts, “Where’s Agustín?” and Sylvina replies, “He’s sorr
y, he has to work late,” and Marina says, “Consuelo’s just told us, isn’t it terrible? I mean, tonight Prado, Quesada on Monday – and weren’t we at school with his wife?’, this stimulating Leonora to admit through the braces on her teeth, “It’s awful, I always found her so difficult,” prompting from Patricia, “They tell me at the theatre it was a woman who shot them,” and Sylvina to react, “Oh, I think I can relate to that. We have a repressed internal violence. Don’t you think so?” which shocks Marina into saying, “But could you kill, Sylvina?” and Sylvina to answer, with her mind on me, on her smoked trout casserole, on the carnal adventures of a photographer cowboy, “I feel I could kill. I say that, but I don’t know why,” before leaping up, having spotted a tail under a chair, “Pussy! I thought I’d locked you away!” this provoking Bettina to apologize, it must have been her, she’d mistaken the kitchen for the bathroom, but gosh it looks good whatever it is, which reminds Marina to ask Bettina from the side of her mouth, “The bathroom, tell me, I’ve forgotten?” and Marina walks from the room trailing in her wake a silence which is filled by the sound of Consuelo’s electric fan – she’d brought it with her – and by Patricia who says, “Remind me, did Marina leave Marco or did he leave her?” to which Sylvina, getting up, replies diplomatically, “Oh, I think it was mutual,” as she prepares to offer each guest a monogrammed napkin and a plate arranged with slabs of veal paté and thick sausages of cheese which she encourages them to spread on squares of bread – “I’m sorry it’s so soft, but I can’t bear cheese that’s been in a fridge” – and so on round the room, all accepting save Amalia who declines with the words, “This man everyone’s talking about, Ezequiel, doesn’t he sound fascinating,” to which Sylvina says, “Amalia, how do you keep your skin looking like that?” causing the other women in the room to concentrate, first on the portrait above the electric fire of Sylvina’s great-uncle, for six months a Vice-President during the Bermudez dictatorship, and then, more respectfully, on themselves caught in the hallway mirror which, noting the direction of their glances, Sylvina explains she had erected for Laura who now has a marvellous teacher, “All thanks to Marina,” so releasing everyone to talk at once, even the taciturn Consuelo, the hostess of their last literary evening, a splendid affair on a lawn, who bursts out, “Don’t tell me! That’s wonderful,” this encouraging Sylvina, on her way to collect the casserole, to add in a raised voice, “She’s hoping for a scholarship at the Metropolitan,” leaving her guests to nod to one another as if to say, “That dumpy little girl!” while they wait for her to wheel out the trolley, “No, it’s quite all right, I can do this,” and out of politeness accept a small amount, “No, far too much, although it does look good. Really, I don’t know how you do this on your own,” as Sylvina resumes, “She’ll be able to dance in New York, London, Paris,” to which Leonora says, “Where our dogs come from,” and Amalia jokes, “And some of our second husbands, too!” and everyone laughs, before they coax the evening to its climax, the unavoidable moment when eight faces look up from their abandoned plates and forget the casserole and the heat and the absence of her anti-social husband and reassure Sylvina in a chorus warbling with anticipation, “Isn’t this delicious? Isn’t this fun?” and merge into a single creature, an oriental goddess with sixteen arms who pats her cat, her chair, her arm, and says, “Now, Sylvina, this book you’ve made us read . . .”

  In less than a week Ezequiel had scrambled from the unmarked grave prepared for him by Quesada. From now on he would seek to burn his name on hillsides which could be seen from China to Peru. Every Cabinet Minister daily expected death.

  We had no leads for Quesada’s murder. At least the assassination of the Defence Minister provided two solid clues. They survived the night and were there when I woke. There was the small body in the mortuary, which might be traceable. And there was the Filofax Sucre had discovered in the loudspeaker.

  The diary pages were blank save for two entries which read like assignations. “C.C. 9.30” (23 April) and “C.D. 6.00” (15 July). Maps of the capital and of Miami were inserted into the front, and a guide to phrases in English: Please give me Thousand Island Dressing – that sort of thing.

  The importance of Sucre’s find was limited to two unlined pages clipped into the Filofax immediately after the diary. These had been filled in arbitrarily, with the randomness of notes jotted down at different times. One page consisted of a crude diagram in the shape of a church door, four mathematical calculations, and a reference to page numbers twenty-seven to thirty-one of the medical journal, the Lancet. We would trace this eventually to an article, two years old, on a breakthrough in the treatment of erythremia. The sums might have been straightforward adding and subtracting; somebody balancing their cheque book or checking a grocery bill. Or they might have meant something else.

  Ten phrases were listed on the facing page. Some, obviously, were book titles, but it wasn’t clear if these were works someone had read, or books to be bought from a shop.

  Life of Mohammed, W.I.

  Rhetoric and dialectic in the speeches of Pausanias

  Revolution among the children

  Revolution No. 9

  To know nothing of oneself is to live

  There is always a philosophy for the lack of courage

  Arquebus

  Situationist Manifesto

  One invariably comes to resemble one’s enemies

  Kant and samba

  Most I couldn’t decipher. For all I knew, “Arquebus” was a racehorse – or was it some cold-blooded codeword? The few words or phrases I understood meant nothing. “Revolution No 9” is a song by The Beatles. “Pausanias” was a Greek traveller and a tedious character in Plato’s Symposium. I guessed “W. I.” to be Washington Irving – and this in fact I verified when Ezequiel, during my interrogation, began quoting a passage about how certain desert tribes, if their dedication were great enough, could gallop out of nowhere to conquer an empire.

  As for the other phrases, well, only last week I was sitting here, reading a book – Pessoa, it was – when that line about knowing nothing of oneself leapt out at me. It made me think that if I live long enough, perhaps I’ll come to understand the rest of them.

  Nothing on that list was as important as the three handwritten addresses on the reverse of the page. All were in the capital. One might be the house of the girl with the white headband.

  They didn’t let you smoke in the mortuary. The pathologist finished his cigarette in the corridor, then pushed open the door. He slid her from the refrigerator and with both hands drew back the sheet. He repeated the process with the Admiral and the Admiral’s driver until the three bodies lay side by side, as if members of the same family. The ammoniac smell reminded me of Sylvina’s sink.

  Two reddish mosquito bites pimpled the Admiral’s chin. Otherwise his face, frozen into its tired expression, had the bluish-white blush of ice. The skin wrinkles had stiffened and there were scabs of mucous about his nose. More disturbing than the fatal mess to his neck was the bloated angle of his penis. Resting against his stomach, it seemed cocked in the semi-arousal which sudden death, pathologists tell us, can bequeath.

  The eyelids had sprung open. The pathologist closed them.

  When you get down to it, a dead body isn’t something most of us can bear to talk about. We treat death by conventions. People are neatly removed by a single bullet. They drop to the ground in mid-stride. They die immediately.

  Except that they don’t die immediately. They keep moving. Breathing. Thinking. The Admiral died as instantaneously as it is possible for a man of sixty-five to die. Shot twice in the throat, he had suffocated to death. He had to have blood and he had to have oxygen, and both had been cut off by the girl’s bullets. He was three minutes from the end when the first round caught him, but three minutes is three minutes. Struck by the bullets he had passed into shock, yet his brain had continued working. For three minutes he would still have had his thoughts; confused and delirious, but thoughts nevertheles
s. He would have felt some pain, although not to the degree you might have imagined, since that part of his brain which enabled him to feel pain was dying.

  Certainly he wouldn’t have experienced the kind of torment his assassin suffered over the next two hours. She had had a much harder time. Until the moment she was fired at from the window, she could still breathe.

  It is not usual even for policemen to come across dead children. I forced my eyes from the calm forehead to the ruined face. The jaw was a frayed tangle of blackened flesh. Part of her tongue fell free, tasting the air where her chin should have been. The face was the same colour as mine, except at the back of the neck where the blood shone purplish through the skin. The upper teeth, intact and healthily white, formed the top half of an expression. Whether of pain or something else I couldn’t tell.

  What had she been trying to do, this girl? Had this been a game? When the bullet removed her jaw, did she see everything in a different light? Or, even then, was it worth it?

  For a few seconds she had been alive with me in that room in Lurigancho. Four feet away, that’s how far apart we’d been, the same distance as now divided her from the Admiral – and I had heard her breathing. After I kicked open the door her eyes blinked up at me, but because of the towel around her face it was impossible to read her expression. Did she know what was going on around her? What had that look meant? It had to mean something, from such a small creature in such extremity. Because the horrible thing about pain is that you’re alone. No one can help you. I might have been able to help her, a little. But then the people she had thought her friends had fired a bullet into her chest.

  The pathologist was speaking. “She had a nice little lunch beforehand. Lettuce, rice, meatballs, swallowed down with Inca-Kola, topped off with a Mars Bar.” He pulled back the sheet. “Before I tuck you away, little one, I’m going to put these up your nose.” He talked to her as though she lived: to cope, I suppose. When I arrived, he had just sawn apart her chest.

  It may sound silly, but in the days ahead I hoped someone would recognize her. To track down her parents, her grandparents, anyone who had known her, we circulated an artist’s impression to schools. For any person in the world there are hundreds of people who recognize their face. Think of those who would have come across this girl. She must have ridden on a bus wearing her yellow and brown uniform. From someone she must have bought her Mars Bars and her Inca-Kola. To someone she must have shown off her little opal earrings.