“Well, you didn’t,” said Bocanegra, the words escaping from his mouth like steam.

 

“Pero, seguramente—“

 

“Keep your voice down,” he hissed, to them both.

 

He thought again of the police, tried to imagine which set of stairs, front or back, they would use, and what his last words could be. Or should be. Last words. Though then, he was thinking, no, if the police had seen him, they would have already come in. He thought of the cops, now, uniform-less, the so-called “disbanded police,” out there, in the darkening night, in great numbers and with large guns and ingenious methods of torture. They had appeared the moment Carondele quietly pointed to his pistol: “It was I who killed the mayor.” (Had that been real?) The cops would have already come in if they had followed him. Who would have stopped them, after all? The cops?

 

The sweat poured from him.

 

“Tell me, comrade,” said Bocanegra, in so strange a way that Carondele stopped studying the ceiling to look at him, “how did you plan to leave here?”

 

The other didn’t respond and a little too much time passed.

 

“Were you going to move in here?” asked Bocanegra. “We were going to get married?” Again in his mind he remembered Carondele with his fist clenched in the air, his flapping lips and his buck teeth and his hunched shoulders. That was called a revolutionary.  The boy on the bed began, again, to cry.

 

It was a little different this time: the first time he’d only felt contempt and this time Bocanegra pitied him. Bocanegra saw for the first time someone crying about what they were about to lose: their life and everything along with it, all of the other lives wound up in a life like lengths of colored twine around a spool, all of those disappearing somewhere. When they kill Carondele, he thought, and they will, something else will have died a little, too. Bits of aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters. A father.  

 

Bocanegra stood watching him from where he stood by the window and, feeling like he was witnessing some small and intimate act, fit his wiry hands into his pants pockets. Finally, slowly, Carondele stopped crying, and simply lay on the bed with his eyes shut tight.

 

“A cab?” suggested Bocanegra in a soft tone.

 

Bocanegra, who’d never known his parents, who’d heard only rumors of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, was seeing in Carondele for the first time what it might have been like. And what he assumed to be the only memory of his family he possessed came to him at that moment: Bocanegra saw an old woman in a gray chair by a hearth surrounded in blue tiles; she whispers, “Cuidate.” The strange mix of resentment and fear that he had felt all night slowly melted away, and in its place was something like understanding. But not really.

 

Suddenly, Carondele’s eyes flashed open.

 

“A cab!” he almost yelled. “Exactly! The cab!” Bocanegra, who had thought his suggestion wasn’t a very good one, was surprised at the man’s enthusiasm. Carondele sat up on the bed and looked intently at Bocanegra.

 

“Get me a cab,” he said, now standing up. “One in particular.”

 

He explained: down the road, near the bus terminus, was a big, orange building, the cab dispatch station. A man would be there, a very pale man, tall-ish. His name was Hérnan.

Ask for him, he told his comrade Bocanegra, as his wife’s cousin.

 

“His wife’s cousin?” Bocanegra repeated, vaguely.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Hérnan?”

 

“Yes. Tell Hérnan that his wife’s cousin will meet him on Avenida Ninos Heroes. By the groceria. Midnight—er—“ he glanced at his watch — “Midnight. Yeah. His wife’s cousin. Midnight.” He paused, “Don’t worry, Bocanegra. Hérnan’s a comrade, too.”

 

Carondele walked over to Bocanegra, so that Bocanegra could pick the boy’s smell from the staleness of the room itself; their eyes looked curiously into one another’s, and so they stood there expressing the situation’s awesome complexity.

 

“Comrade,” said Carondele, awkwardly. He embraced Bocanegra, who felt first afraid, then confused, and then disgusted. Or disappointed. The other turned from him, walked quickly to the door, made for the second time that night to grasp the handle, and turned again.

 

“I’m sorry about punching you,” Bocanegra said from the doorway of his apartment. “I’m sorry about everything.”

 

*          *          *          *

 

It was strange how quickly the next few hours passed, because the moments that composed those hours passed each one like an incurable disease. A bus had been hijacked that morning, so the buses weren’t running; Bocanegra had run the entire way to the dispatch station, a 15-minute sprint without a break and without a look behind him. The city was as quiet as a bird-less field, the streets were pale under the moon, and empty, the windows shuttered.

 

When he’d finally made it to the taxi dispatch, it took Bocanegra another fifteen minutes to determine something very unfortunate: Hérnan didn’t work on Tuesdays.

 

The man at the front desk wouldn’t give Bocanegra, who was panting and swearing and staring beady-eyed, the cabbie’s phone number. The revolution — everything — these were strange days, he explained, and you couldn’t trust just anybody, after all. The mayor, of course, earlier that afternoon.

 

Even when time itself didn’t seem to be passing, it was in fact passing. Bocanegra stood under the awning of the taxi dispatch, in the quiet, and he decided on his next step. He saw for the first time, really saw, the walls covered in their spray-painted hammers and sickles, saw the bonfires of the strikers at the far end of the avenue, heard the curious pop of cahotes, and the corrugated zinc piled up along the avenues; he saw the black beggar across the street at a stoplight, a woman shifting the baby she carried on her back, her shawl like red wine in the light from a gas lamp, slipping quickly into an alleyway. Like welts, the markings of a revolution had appeared across Abaixado—things were fit to burst, and you could hear it.

 

He turned west on Ninos Heroes, headed for the college, not knowing the time.

 

*          *          *          *

 

Sanjurju didn’t take much convincing. He knew Carondele somehow (“The son of a friend of my wife’s—how unfortunate.”), and what he knew of him made Bocanegra’s story seem very plausible. Not, Sanjurju conceded, that he knew very much. For a while, Sanjurju and Bocanegra thought things over quietly in the office, Bocanegra feeling a numb kind of sick and the president folding and re-folding his hands together and fiddling with his stupid moustache.

 

Until, not one to beat around the bush, Bocanegra asked Sanjurju whether he knew the secret police and how to get in touch with them.

 

“There isn’t a secret police,” said the president after a meaningful pause; Bocanegra nodded his assent. “They are the ‘disbanded police.’” They sat nodding at each other, in perfect comprehension.

 

“Well,” continued Sanjurju, “I do. I do know the police.”

 

“Do you think we ought to call them? Senor?”

 

“Speaking of which,” said Sanjurju, maybe not having heard, “wasn’t it a little stupid to be running around on the night of the governor’s assassination?”

 

Bocanegra nodded, remembering, though, how he had taken a few precautions: he had followed a footpath that ran along the unlit side of his dormitory, and he’d disposed of the weather-beaten haracci sandals as he loped along the gravel path leading from the western edge of campus to the president’s office on the Northeastern side. His feet had been chewed to aching redness when he came to the window, where he found the president sitting in front of his gilded fireplace in deep meditation of something. Bocanegra had tapped, light and urgent. And in the great forgiving obscurity of a foggy night in Ciudad Abaixado, they had a secret meeting — the dumpy little secretary had left hours ago.

 

“Well,” said President Sanjurju, “I know who to call.”

 

A half hour later, the man was entering the president’s office without any guards, in a brown, well-pressed, ugly suit, a red rose smooshed and wilting between the edge of the jacket’s collar and the slit of its breast pocket. His form—really big, extremely big, in a kind of perverse way—filled the room with that arsenic green aura Bocanegra was getting to know so well. He had lips and a face like a bottom-feeding fish, thick hands that Bocanegra knew would be moist before shaking one of them. Had he not recognized him from his photos, Bocanegra would have guessed at his profession: he was the former Chief of Police of Ciudad Abaixado. Xavier Franco, named after the saint.

 

“Sr. Franco is in charge of the security of the city,” began Sanjurju, as Franco narrowed his round eyes and brought them to bear on Bocanegra.

 

Franco began to say, “So, your friend—“, but he must have decided against such a direct approach. He paused and put the tips of his fingers in a mouth that operated under the same mechanics as a draw-bridge.

 

“The killer in your room,” Franco said, finally.

 

“Yes.”

 

“How did he get there?”

 

“We’re classmates.”

 

“He came to your house? Why?”

 

“He thought he recognized me from somewhere.”

 

“From where?”

 

“From a rally. One of the unionists’ rallies.”

 

“And did he?”

 

“He did?”

 

“He did? He recognized you from a rally?”

 

“No. I’m not a unionist.”

 

“Did he recognize you from a rally?” said Franco, now pressing the tips of his fingers together and tenting them in front of his chest. Bocanegra, who was now a suspected dissident, chose his words carefully.

 

 “He made a mistake about me. I guess you could say he didn’t know me as well as he thought that he might.”

 

“He thought you were a ‘comrade?’” For Bocanegra, it was an act of will not to let his jaw drop — had they been listening somehow?

 

“A comrade. He called me that, I think, once or twice,” Bocanegra said, casually. He was quiet for a while, then said, thoughtfully, “He didn’t understand I had no interest in the modalities of violent revolution.” He surprised himself by this sentence; he was fairly confident, too, that he knew what “modalities” meant.

 

“Only peaceful revolution?” asked the Chief of Police, very pleasantly.

 

“What’s the need for revolution?” asked Bocanegra, very pleasantly. He came suddenly to terms with something he had grasped about Franco from the moment he saw him: Franco had become the Chief of Police thanks to an innate genius for bullying people and bossing them around.

 

The Chief of Police swept a wisp of black hair from the glistening flesh above his eyes as he said, “So—you’re a centrist?”  The president of the college, whom Bocanegra had forgotten as he stood in a poorly-lit corner of the office, opened his mouth a little and breathed loudly—it must have been a kind of protest.

 

“I’m a skeptic,” said Bocanegra.  The president nodded approvingly, his eyes darting between the general and Bocanegra, but remained mum. Things got so quiet in the room that the quiet from outside began to seep in under the door and through the windows.

 

“You know,” said the Chief of Police after a while, “I don’t like people. I just don’t like them very much.” Again, he put the tips of his fingers in his mouth and stood there, chewing something over. For the first time that night, some veneer had crumbled away and he stood before Bocanegra and Sanjurju as himself. After a while, he turned to the president and, sighing, asked, “Well, where does Bocanegra live?”

 

“I’m not sure, honestly,” said Sanjurju. “Where, Bocanegra? Where did you come from?”

 

Bocanegra was suddenly red hot, probably, he figured, sweating again. Bocanegra couldn’t look at the two men in the room, so he looked at his feet, which shook in his shoes: “Down the road a little bit.”

 

With a guffaw, the policeman asked, “In which direction?” And not knowing what else to do, he explained Carondele’s plan to meet a taxi on Ninos Heroes by the groceria, at midnight, which was somehow only another half hour away. The president nodded with a very blank and detached look on his face.  The Chief of Police, in charge of the security of Ciudad Abaixado, put his fingers in his mouth, frowning. Then, snapping his fingers and pronouncing each syllable with care, he said, “Retribution.” He flashed a hooked grin briefly at Bocanegra and walked to the telephone.

 

“I need to call someone,” he said casually as he stared out the president’s broad window. “You can go now, comrade.”

 

So, like a thief in the night, Bocanegra left.

 

*          *          *

 

Carondele hadn’t moved from the bed, except now instead of staring up at the ceiling he lay with his face pressed into the pillow. He didn’t even look up when Bocanegra entered the room and said with a sigh that everything was taken care of. The room was a coffin they were sharing.

 

“Thank you,” said Carondele, slowly, into his pillow.

 

Bocanegra, joints now aching, walked to the window and stared out at the city where it had sprawled across the horizon. There, he thought, it’s done. His eyes, no longer seeking out the men in the darkness, rested on a Coca-Cola billboard framed against the strangely still lights of Abaixado. The absurdity of things, generally, hit him with an almost physical weight.

 

And then the clock down the road at Eglisa Santo Domingo struck midnight. He turned: Carondele had stood, was looking at him.

 

“Bocanegra,” he said from in front of the door. Had he guessed at the truth? What was written on his face? Again, red hot. He watched as Carondele opened the door and, like a thief in the night, left him.

 Bocanegra heard his name echoing through the room, which was suddenly no longer his room, and he collapsed on his bed and fell asleep.

 

*          *          *