side before continuing, ‘They say she was the bishop’s lover.’
‘Isn’t she a bit old for the bishop’s tastes, Officer?’
‘Well… I don’t know, I’m not a reporter, you’d know better than me. But that’s what they say around here, and you never know, there’s an exception to every rule, isn’t there?’ the officer answered. ‘Besides, Cleopatra was young before she was old.’
‘And before she was Cleopatra…’, Daniel ventured and the cop chuckled, warming up and almost certainly thinking: ‘This is my kind of guy.’ Then he started talking nonstop. He’d worked this precinct for eight years, and although he hadn’t been at the station on the day of the miracle, he’d witnessed other ones. ‘The Sister forgave us all,’ he repeated over and over, shocked that a victim could forgive such terrible things as the ones he’d done. He was right that any self-respecting person would consider these violations unforgivable, but Cleopatra says I’m bitter and that if everyone thought like me we’d all end up killing each other. The officer continued with his story: ‘It’s unbelievable, but I saw the miracle too. Cleopatra used to have one leg shorter than the other from when her father had beaten her to a pulp. Just imagine, he was a police officer, Sergeant Ramón Lobos, though later he was sacked for keeping more than his share of a payoff. When his son turned out like that – different, let’s say – he wanted to kill him. There’s still a lot of prejudice in the force.’
I think it was a November morning, like I said, but I remember it being cold. We stepped inside John-John’s booth and he carried on serving mate and explaining the prejudices of the force: ‘In the academy they give us classes on human rights. In the test everyone writes that it’s bad to discriminate against the poor, the fags, the Jews, the Bolivians, and then, as soon as they can stick it to them, they stick it to them. But not here, not any more: we don’t even beat the poor anymore, we have to defend them from the Condors.’ And he wasn’t lying: it was common knowledge that the Condor Private Security Agency had taken all the illicit side businesses away from the cops, who then ended up defending the people in the slum because they needed them as human resources to go out and make the dirty money for them. The cops were desperate; they needed someone to go out and make the cash that was scarcer than it had ever been before, and someone had to stand up to their colleagues in private security, the Condors. ‘Led by that crazy arsehole the Beast,’ John-John declared. ‘He says God speaks to him too but no one’s ever seen him perform a single miracle, unless you count burning a hooker who doesn’t pay up and then keeping the money that’s supposed to go to everyone. That can’t be something our Lord Jesus Christ would tell him to do.’
The last thing he told us was that after Cleopatra’s first miracle even the police captain repented: he ended up sobbing, ‘like a baby, at the Sister’s feet’. Pretty much everyone does. Even I still do every once in a while, in my bunker in Miami. But way before all that ever happened and I ended up here, we left the security booth and went into the shantytown. And well before the shantytown meant anything more to me than a sad detail of the landscape alongside the motorway that took me to the Delta, I’d heard of the Beast, former cop, head of the Condors, the most ruthless private security agency in greater Buenos Aires. The Beast, lord of prostitution in the outskirts of the capital and right-hand man of El Jefe Juárez, the country’s most powerful businessman. I’d never spoken to the Beast. I’d just caught a glimpse of him now and then. But I’d had to finish one of his jobs once and that moment changed me. It pushed me onto the other side, the side of my sources, the people I used to interview. It also brought me closer to Daniel.
7. Quity: ‘I’d been working for hours and hours’
I’d been working for hours and hours that day, covering the kidnapping of a businessman in the town of Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires. I ended up having dinner with his future widow and his soon-to-be-fatherless children as they waited for the captors to call. They didn’t call and it got late, and it was around three in the morning when I set off home.
I drove slowly through the town centre because I’d had a bit to drink. I passed the first part of the slum that surrounded the motorway, going even slower then because there’s always the odd horse or drunk around there, and when I got to the last five hundred yards before the entrance ramp and was about to speed up again, everything went black. All the lights in the area went out, yellowish lights that blinked from the windows and holes in the shacks, hung from extension cords strung from ceiling to ceiling like pumpkins from a miserable Halloween or Christmas decorations from the holiday from hell. Everything went silent, too. The only sounds were the deep, muted roars of the cars on the motorway above, brightly lit and as tauntingly distant as the shore to a drowning man.
I turned off my headlights. They weren’t doing much anyway, and besides, as everyone knows, being the only visible thing is very similar to being the only target. I took my .38 Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment and put it on the passenger seat, not thinking it would really do any good. Although the motorway punctuated the blackness and added a touch of normality to the scene, there was a stillness and silence that seemed almost tangible, and more than a band of teenage thieves, I feared I’d be attacked by an army of zombies. My lungs and my brain felt squeezed and I was left with only one idea: to get the hell out of there. There wasn’t a soul on the street, you couldn’t even hear the cry of a baby or a cumbia beat or the rattle of a cart or the bark of a dog and the only thing that moved, dark and slow, was my car, as if I were the only thing that existed. But everyone was still there. Turning off the lights and holding your breath is the shantytown’s way of saying there are no witnesses, that no one wants to have anything to do with what’s happening or even see or hear it take place.
What was happening occurred a few seconds after the blackout, like thunder and lightning in reverse order: first the sound, a terrifying howl that sent me into the kind of animal alert mode that made my hair stand on end. All I managed to do was press the accelerator and grab the revolver, but that meant letting go of the wheel and I ended up on the curb, making a thunderous, metallic racket, the only noise besides the howling, as a lamppost crunched against the car’s back door. Everything else was black and still like an empty stage. Then came the light: a human flame running a kind of epileptic race, with movements that seemed impossible for a human body and a heart-rending shriek, running like someone falling, the torso plunging over the feet, contorting with the heat of the undulating flames that were burning the body alive.
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