Ernesto Quiñonez - San Juan Noir

“Who’s there?” Angelito grunts.

Chin covers his mouth, as if that could cancel the sound. His feet have ignored the order from his brain to take off running; if he goes now, that madman will kill Prieto for sure. Instead, he holds his breath and prays, crouching down being the wall, barely three feet high.

“Come out, cabrón!” Angelito shouts, advancing.

Click .

A knife flicks open in Angelito’s right hand. Chin instinctively brings his hands to his pockets, searching for a weapon he knows doesn’t exist.

Something, something ... His right fist closes around an unexpected object: not the piece of satin he’s been caressing all day, but something else — the screwdriver that he used to install Gómez’s lightbulb.

Barrio Obrero seems bigger than it is. The connected buildings, the many little houses, the daytime activity, all the businesses and small shops bewilder those who don’t know the area, but you can walk its perimeter fairly quickly. From Angelito’s patio to Chin’s house is no more than ten minutes, although right now Chin feels that each step takes forever; he’ll never be able to get away from that damned patio. The scene repeats in his mind and he sees again how Angelito falls to the ground, with that skinhead smile turning bit by bit into an incredulous expression — so certain was he that Chin was harmless — with the screwdriver protruding from his neck. The move took him by surprise, he fell to the side and bled out from his throat. Before taking off, Chin let Prieto off his chain. The dog approached the man who until that moment had been his master, and, to check that he was dead, began to lick the bloodied ground.

The street is calm. Nobody has come out, no light has been turned on to signal an alarm, the evening is just like any other. Chin Fernández has gone unnoticed as always. And what isn’t seen here doesn’t exist , he tells himself, turning the corner onto his street.

“Here he comes!” someone announces.

There’s a mess of people in front of his house, and worse — two officers, one short and older, the other tall and young, waiting beside a patrol car that looks like a mobile dance club with all its spinning lights.

“Are you Adalberto Jesús Fernández?” asks the older officer.

Chin nods and the younger officer produces a piece of paper that he puts in front of his nose, apparently granting them permission to come inside.

How did they find out so fast?

He doesn’t understand. He just left Angelito’s patio, nobody saw him, and besides, the police are never that efficient.

He goes upstairs with the two officers, takes out his key to the front door, and looks at his hands. They’re clean — he’d found a spigot in the alley — and his old jumpsuit doesn’t have any stains that stand out among the others, from oil and paint.

“You take the living room and I’ll start in the kitchen,” one officer says to the other. Within minutes they go through the kitchen cabinets and the sofa and chair cushions; they take the Sacred Heart down from the wall, and even pull out the TV. They move quickly. They open the doors of the oven and refrigerator, where, of course, they don’t find anything of interest, but they leave everything wide open anyway.

Chin, prisoner of panic, covertly feels inside his pockets. God hasn’t forgotten me , he sighs with relief; only the panties there, he doesn’t have the screwdriver on him. He reviews his actions: he definitely removed it from Angelito’s neck and threw it away. The police weren’t going to find anything.

But meanwhile, they are emptying the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

“What’s all this?” shrieks Maritza, who has just come home from the service. She goes from one officer to the other, ignoring Chin, who wouldn’t have known what to tell her anyway. The older officer plants himself in front of her and silences her with a, “Señora, be quiet if you don’t want us to arrest you,” and that gives her the hiccups.

They move to the bedroom, where they remove all the clothes from the closets and unmake the bed, throwing everything on the floor. Chin, who has remained fixed like a post while the police do their thing, suddenly moves — reflexively, without thinking — to pick up one thing: his pillow. The young police officer sees him and, without giving him a chance to react, rips it away from him. Like a broken piñata, the pillow spits out white, blue, red, pink, black, and violet lace; small pieces of satin and silk, some with bows and little flowers, others with tiger stripes or leopard print.

The police officer bends down and collects the panties, one pair at a time, and starts handing them to his partner. Maritza hiccups and sobs quietly without interrupting the counting process: seven, eight, nine ... and Chin understands at last. Of course someone saw him, but not tonight and not in Angelito’s patio. More than anything he’s surprised that they view him as someone dangerous.

Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty. That’s why the police are there, for the eighty pairs of stolen panties hidden inside the pillow that he, Chin Fernández, has zealously sewn and unsewn for months. The pillow where he rests his head every night.

“Excuse me,” he interrupts, “you’re missing one.”

He takes the panties out of his pocket and, allowing himself the perverse pleasure of breaking the round sum of eighty, he hands them over, so they can be taken into evidence.

The short officer handcuffs him and escorts him, almost courteously, as if he hadn’t just destroyed the interior of his house, toward the patrol car, around which more onlookers have gathered. There are the neighbors — including the owner of the patio that Chin infiltrated that morning — the guy who runs the shop two streets down, the reverend, accompanied by some of the church’s congregants, and many people who Chin doesn’t know who must have come running, attracted by Maritza’s screams or by the presence of the patrol car. On the other side of the street, he sees the silhouette of a dog. Prieto? And also an individual with a skinhead’s smile who looks a lot like Angelito but who, of course, isn’t, because he’s wearing the official shirt of Channel 4 News.

“We’ve got the Barrio Obrero panty-snatcher,” the young officer says into his walkie-talkie. “Don’t let Rivera leave — we need him to open the file.”

And then Chin pictures the screwdriver again. He remembers it disappearing into the hedges surrounding Angelito’s patio. What he can’t remember is if he wiped off his prints before throwing it away.

Invisibility , he prays in silence, but his wish is immediately annulled by the blinding flash of a camera.

The first time I saw someone die was also the first time she and I came face-to-face. Her eyes met mine, then she turned around. She walked away to the rhythm of salsa in Taberna Los Vázquez; her footsteps and the old musicians’ cadence entranced me. In the distance, someone called her with a voice very similar to my own: “Mita, c’mon.” There, for an instant, we saw each other. She opened the door to another mirror. I was certain I was no longer alone.

It was December 28, Innocent’s Day, and that night I’d gone to the little plaza in Santurce to meet up with my friends Omar and Margarita, who were celebrating their honeymoon. They’d set me up with a blind date, which, as usual, was shit. The aforementioned Don Juan, named Beto — Bert in English, like the stupid Sesame Street character, of course, not like Beto, the gorgeous singer of La Ley — passed the time reading me high-minded poems: If Borges did this, if Che Meléndez did that ... I recalled another poet, who looked like a pigeon filled and about to burst with Vaseline. They found that bastard dead in the Plaza las Américas parking lot. I laughed to myself. My friends thought my blind date was making me nervous.