Rex by José Manuel Prieto

Author:José Manuel Prieto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

7

Or how about has keen judgment, is clear-thinking and circumspect when he couldn’t stop admiring the ingenuity of the men who wanted to hunt him down, and was shouting, “Mother! Are you listening, Mother?” to Nelly (wasn’t it absurd, that way he had of calling your mother “Mother”?). “But which is better? Huh?”

Explaining how there was once some Vanya somewhere, a man in Russia, coming back from an important meeting, walking with the quick steps of a young mafioso to the distant black point of his car (also a Mercedes), pulled up on a patch of lawn. Not on the sidewalk, not on the asphalt of a parking lot—why would he park it on asphalt, between the yellow stripes that frame a normal car? And he saw, drawing closer, that someone, that something was hanging from the handle of the door—a plastic bag, tied around the handle by some idiot. Easy to see it now: a plastic supermarket shopping bag.

Tied or left there by some mechanic from the nearby garage or some TV repairman, a man walking to his shop in the morning or on his way home from the night shift, unable to keep his envy of that car parked on the grass from making him tie up that bag there, in passing, as a stupid and out of place reminder: Hey! There are still workers coming in or going out at these hours, while you, bourgeois thief, and not even bourgeois thief, big mafia strongman, go around robbing and thieving, leaving your car on the grass.

The man standing at the car door saw all that, imagined the mechanic’s gray overalls disappearing down the alley, leaving his stupid and inappropriate declaration hanging there, and thought of the many things he’d like to explain: how, for example, he himself had worked in one of those repair shops until not very long ago, but without time to argue or any desire to do so, very irritated and full of rage.

And he went to swipe the bag away with his hand and be rid of this impertinence, and it was a bomb—wasn’t it, Mother?—a bomb that exploded the moment his hand ripped it furiously away. “Low tech, huh, Mother?”

As if, during a production meeting, some young fellow, a killer newly arrived at the Technical Solutions Lab, had listened to his older colleagues’ meanderings about limpet bombs, motion-activated detonators, resins set off by remote control from beneath manhole covers (and how? with the car on the lawn?) and had modestly raised his hand and suggested this: low tech. A degree of acquaintance, a precise calibration of the sequence of thoughts triggered by a plastic bag left hanging from a car door. The final thought sequence of the man who ripped the bag away while still talking on his cell phone. “Russians! Huh, Mother? Russians!” Vasily grew animated as he told her about it, then lowered his eyes, defeated by the evidence of a multiform ingenuity that would hunt him down in the end, wherever he ran, wherever he hid.

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