The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa

Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

15

Shorty Is Afraid

Hadn’t Captain Félix Madueño, the one who came for her in Five Corners and took her to the morgue in the patrol car, called her “Julieta Leguizamón”? Well, he was very well informed. Yes, Julieta was her name, but very few people knew that her last name was Leguizamón. It had sounded very strange to hear herself named that way, because everybody used her nickname: Shorty. Or, at most, Julieta. That’s how she signed her articles, with her nickname or her first name. The patrol car that brought her back to Teniente Arancibia Alleyway didn’t carry the officer or the civilian, just the civil guards. During the trip neither the driver nor his companion said a word to her, and again she noted that they were perfectly familiar with the narrow potholed alley in Barrios Altos where she lived.

When she arrived home, Shorty went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water, and got into bed in her clothes, removing only her shoes. She was very cold. And then she felt grief, a deep, tearing grief, as she recalled what she had seen in the morgue: what remained of Rolando Garro. She didn’t usually cry, but now she felt that her eyes were wet and fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. How perverse, how cruel, they had crushed his face with a stone and riddled his body with stab wounds. That wasn’t the work of an ordinary rat, one of those poor devils who snatched purses or watches. That had been an act of vengeance. A well-planned and, surely, very well-paid murder. A murder by assassins, by professional criminals.

She shuddered from head to toe. And who could have planned that act of revenge but Enrique Cárdenas, the millionaire whose naked photographs in an orgy with whores Rolando Garro had published, photographs by Ceferino Argüello. Motherfucker, damn, son of a bitch. It would put the fear of God into poor Ceferino when he found out what they had done to the editor of Exposed. It was to be expected, because if his boss had been destroyed like that, what would they do to the creator of those photos? She’d better let him know so he could disappear for a while, certain they were looking for him. But she didn’t even know Ceferino’s address, and she didn’t have his cell phone number so she could warn him. As for the rest, Shorty didn’t intend to show up tomorrow at the offices of Exposed. She wasn’t crazy. She wouldn’t set foot there for a long time. Besides, who knew whether the magazine would survive; of course not, it would disappear just like poor Garro. Was she in danger, too? She tried to reason coldly. Yes, no doubt about it. Everybody knew that for a long time she’d been the boss’s right arm, that Shorty was the star reporter of Exposed. And though Rolando himself had written the article that accompanied the photographs of the naked millionaire, she had obtained a

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