Laura Restrepo - Hot Sur

“You want to know the only thing that I found on the Internet about María Paz’s crime?” he asks me. “It appeared months earlier in the NY Daily News ; I Googled it. I printed it here if you want to read it; it refers to her as ‘the wife of the deceased,’ and she’s directly accused of the murder of her husband. Here you go. Make a copy if you want. I only ask that if you make it public, change the names. I know they’re on the Internet already, but I just don’t want them to become public because of me. Cleve would never have forgiven me. Just replace the names with XXXX .”

Retired Ex-Cop Murdered, Victim of a Hate Crime

On Wednesday night, at the corner of XXXX and XXXX, the lifeless body of retired police officer XXXX was found, apparently gunned down by gang members in a hate crime. According to forensic reports the victim, who was white, was struck by seven bullets, one of which fatally pierced his left ventricle. Upon the removal of the body, five other wounds were discovered, apparently inflicted postmortem with a blade instrument, one in the belly, on each hand, and on each foot. The ex-police officer, 57, had been retired from public service for eight years and been recently employed as a manager in a market polling organization. He was unarmed and wearing slippers on the night of the murder. Before fleeing, the assailants scrawled the phrase “Racist pig” on a wall at the crime scene.

XXXX, wife of the deceased, was arrested hours later in the apartment the couple shared a few blocks away, where a Blackhawk Garra II knife with which the deceased had been wounded was found and is now being held as physical evidence by the authorities. The knife had been wrapped in gift paper and was accompanied by a birthday card addressed to the deceased. The woman, 24, is Colombian-born, and worked as a pollster in the same company in which the victim was a manager. They had met there years before, and almost immediately afterward had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It has been confirmed that because XXXX was undocumented, she had obtained her job at the market research company using false papers and that she had afterward gained citizenship through her marriage with the retired police officer, who was an American citizen.

Shit, slippers, Rose had thought on reading the article the first time. What most stayed with him was that “human detail,” as the owner of Mis Errores would have put it. An old cop who goes out in slippers to meet death. Rose asked himself if Cleve had known, or at least suspected, that his little kitten was a cold-blooded murderer. Because at the least, the victim should have been afforded the dignity of being dressed properly and wearing a pair of shoes. That human detail. Not to mention the spine-chilling gesture of gift-wrapping the murder weapon for the victim on the very day of his birthday. What kind of a monster was this María Paz?

“My, my, your Colombian was a deranged knife-wielder. What did you get into, boy? Who were you dealing with?” Rose asked the memory of his son, before going back to Googling the Blackhawk Garra II knives, like the one they had found gift-wrapped in María Paz’s house. As always, Googling revealed something, and according to the pictures in a catalog, it was a loathsome thing with a curved blade, a folding knife that was shaped like a claw as its name indicated, a claw to claw, a nail that pricks and penetrates. Made of black steel, the disgusting thing, sharpened so fine it was almost blue, with dips in the handle for the perfect grip, was a sadistic little toy that in the blink of an eye must have sliced through the cop’s flesh, as if through butter.

It was quite conceivable how a pretty girl would have grown bored of her old husband, how she’d have used him to make her situation legal and grown to hate the price she had to pay for it, such as the need for Viagra and other such limitations. Up to that point, there was a certain logic to the whole thing. But to go from that to knifing him when he was in his slippers? To get together with her friends, dark-skinned and young like her, salsa dancers all, to stab the fat husband to death with a Blackhawk Garra II? Rose began to feel uneasy in his own room, that friendly cavern in which he sought refuge since Edith had abandoned him, and where he wasn’t always disappointed, if the truth be told, because sleeping alone had its advantages. He was the kind of person who snored, hacked, and farted at night; and it was much easier to do it without anyone else there. But that night, not even his bedroom could bring him peace of mind, and he fell asleep troubled by that sinister story of a cop massacred by his own wife; he was distressed by the horror that his son, Cleve, could have had anything to do with that, even if indirectly.

He awoke at midnight thinking that Emperatriz, the Dominican cleaning lady, could hate him the way that Colombian woman had hated her ex-husband, the white ex-cop, that Emperatriz was friendly and helpful only to his face, that she brought him his slippers hiding nefarious intentions, that behind his back she muttered all the reasons for her contempt, that white man who treated her as a slave for a fistful of dollars, or something like that. And then a graver doubt struck him. Had Edith been right, all that time ago, to flee with the child from Bogotá? Had all the servants there hated them, the little white rich folks for whom they had to drive the car and mop the floor and go to the market and cook and clean the bathrooms and make flower arrangements? Had Rose and his family provoked in them a hidden anger, a shameful urge for violence, just as Edith had suspected? One thing was certain, guerrillas had infiltrated the group of workers in his company, and they were more than willing to kidnap the first gringo boss who got careless. It had not been easy for the Roses to live with that sword of Damocles hanging over them, and that is why Ian had not tried to dissuade Edith when she announced that she had had enough. And now, so many years later, in the Catskills Mountains around two in the morning, amid the sleeplessness and the jumble of sheets, the Latino conspiracy was growing at an exponential rate in Rose’s feverish brain. María Paz, Emperatriz, and the servants from Bogotá conspired with workers and guerrillas to attack the Anglos, whom they planned to assault and stab to death as soon as they were careless and put on their slippers or whenever they fell asleep.

There was no defending oneself, Western civilization was being overcome by the whole of the Sur, the volatile and backward Sur, the wild and awful Sur, with its thousands of gringo haters who were rising in hordes following María Paz and Emperatriz, the leaders of the great invasion that surged up from Panama, crossed Nicaragua, grew into a tsunami in Guatemala and Mexico, and the Sur was unstoppable as it poured through the holes in the vulnerable American border. The North was already flooded by the black tide of the Sur; it was within, cleaning its houses, serving food in restaurants, filling cars with gasoline, harvesting pumpkins in Virginia and strawberries in Michigan, day after day repeating “have a nice day” with a terrible accent and a sly smile… hiding Blackhawk Garra IIs in their pockets, envious of the gringos’ democratic systems and ready to seize their property. The good guys, who had already lost Texas, California, and Florida, now would lose Arizona and Colorado. New Mexico and Nevada were already strongholds of the enemy, and one by one, the other states would fall into the hands of the bad guys. Unless, of course, Ian Rose managed to react and hold back the onslaught of this anxiety crisis. That’s what the doctor had told him he was going through, an anxiety crisis that had its origins in the death of his son, and to control it, he was prescribed Effexor XR, which Rose didn’t like because it made him dopey and because he held on to the hope that with time things would get better on their own.