Woes of the True Policeman

be him, sighed Padilla as the letter shook in Amalfitano’s hands. Not working for the publishing house was a fascinating feeling that he’d thought he’d lost. Living like a loafer again, I who was put on this earth solely to amuse myself. To amuse myself and make a nuisance of myself every once in a while.
    The Barcelona days were glorious. The Mediterranean shone. Padilla was writing from the terrace of a bar on the Ramblas. People stroll by, he said, and here I sit drinking a double whiskey and I’m happy.

12
    Near an assembly plant on the edge of town belonging to Don Gabriel Salazar, on a plot designated as a future industrial park, though it had yet to attract a tenant, another girl was found dead.
    She was seventeen, a year older than Edelmira Sánchez. Her name was Alejandra Rosales and she was the mother of an infant son. The cause of death was the same. Her throat had been cut with a large knife, though no trace of blood was found at the scene (as in Parque México), which meant that there was no question that the crime had been committed elsewhere.
    The body of Edelmira Sánchez had turned up on a Monday and her parents had reported her disappearance on Sunday morning. The last time she was seen was Saturday at dinnertime. The body of Alejandra Rosales turned up a week later, but the last time she was seen alive was on Saturday, just before Edelmira said goodbye to her parents. The only one who might have reported her disappearance was her mother-in-law, with whom she lived, but her mother-in-law thought that Alejandra had run off with a man and she had enough on her hands already taking care of her late son’s baby without trying to get to the police station to report the disappearance of a woman she hated and whom she wouldn’t have minded seeing dead.
    According to the medical examiner, both were raped multiple times, presenting slight lacerations to the legs and back, bruising around the wrists (leading to the conclusion that both women had at some point been bound), a fatal slash or two to the neck (severing the carotid artery; in Alejandra’s case the cut was so deep that it almost decapitated her), contusions to the chest and arms, light bruising about the face. No traces of semen were found in either case.
    In Chucho Peguero’s report it said that Alejandra occasionally worked as a prostitute and that on Saturday nights she often frequented La Hélice, a nightclub on Calle Amado Nervo. The night that she disappeared she was seen there by a witness, her friend Guadalupe Guillén. According to the latter, at about 8:00 p.m. Alejandra was on La Hélice’s dance floor, dancing a merengue. Guadalupe Guillén didn’t see her again for the rest of the night. No one saw her leave the club. Edelmira Sánchez, meanwhile, spent her Saturday nights at the New York, a club mainly for teenagers on Avenida Escandón, where she arrived at around 7:30 p.m. By midnight she was usually already on her way home with her boyfriend or her friends, because Edelmira didn’t have her own car. That Saturday night, Alejandra wasn’t seen at the New York, nor was Edelmira seen at La Hélice.
    Edelmira was almost certainly killed on Sunday, between noon and midnight. Alejandra, meanwhile, was held for longer: she was probably killed on Thursday or Friday, twenty-four hours before some children found her body near the assembly plant.

13
    Gumaro guided Pancho’s first steps on the Santa Teresa police force. When they ran into each other at the station in the morning, he would say: come with me, let your buddies pick up the slack, I want to talk to you. And Pancho would drop whatever he was doing and go with him. Gumaro was nondescript in appearance, neither very tall nor very big, and he had a small head, like a lizard. It was hard to guess his age and he might have been older than everyone thought. To some people, he came across as none too impressive, too small and thin to be a policeman, but if they looked him in the eyes they could tell that he was no ordinary man.
    Very late one night, at the bar La Estela, Pancho watched him closely for a while and discovered that he hardly ever blinked. He reported this to Gumaro and asked why he did things differently from ordinary mortals. Gumaro answered that when he closed his eyes it gave him a terrible pain in the head.
    “So how do you sleep?” asked Pancho.
    “I fall asleep with my eyes open and once I’m asleep I close them.”
    He had no fixed address. He