“Years ago I arrived at the most disgusting crime scene I’ve ever witnessed,” I begin, recalling more for myself than for Aguiar. “Someone had quartered a middle-aged bachelor with a large knife, the kind butchers use, and a pair of shears for cutting up poultry. Any butcher or surgeon was a priori excluded from the list of suspects. The job had been really sloppy, a shitload of blows that ignored the body’s joints and practically sought out the hardest bones to sever. That kitchen on Soares Cabral... Jesus Christ, not a single tile that wasn’t stained with blood. Or something more foul-smelling.”
Aguiar emits a muffled laugh. QED.
“The dead man had soiled and pissed himself, probably when he took the first hack to the back of the neck,” I continue. “There were three. And he probably didn’t die until the third one, which finally separated his head from his body. Afterward, the murderer made cuts more or less at random until he tired of the game, sometimes using the shears to cut a more resistant tendon. It’s likely he ate pieces of the body. Neither your team nor the morgue’s could locate certain basic items like the kidneys. Nobody can live without at least one kidney, can they?”
Aguiar shook his head.
“To confirm the thesis, floating in butter in a frying pan, browned but still intact, were the victim’s dick and balls. I backed away to keep from vomiting, but your colleagues on the scene, Ramiro and the late Fontes, were having a filthy punning contest involving sausage and eggs. They sounded like they were recording the laugh track for some American TV sitcom. The next day, the editor of a tabloid topped them both. He zapped them with the headline ‘Fried Food Causes Impotence.’ Genius.”
“Genius.”
“Genius.” I paused. “We never discovered who the killer was. I was sure it was a man. You needed strength to cut a femur in half with a single blow. The neighbors had never seen a woman visiting the victim, a loser named Oswaldo who’d lived there for ten years. And they hadn’t seen any male visitors either, but then the guy wasn’t dumb enough to make a show of the uglies he brought home, was he? If there weren’t women, there had to be a man involved, sneaking up the stairs. Besides which, women like money and romance. It’s queers who like dick. I concluded that anyone who hated dick that much had to be a fag. And a powerfully built fag. Am I wrong?”
Aguiar remains silent. I prolong the pause.
“Nothing was stolen as far as we could tell. No postmortem withdrawal on his bank card, no heirloom porcelain dishes in the hands of a fence. This was some three, four years ago.”
Aguiar turns and leans against the wall, looking upward at the statue. At that moment, his ugliness is completely exposed. I continue gazing at the great milky emptiness below. When the blonde finally reappears, I nudge Aguiar. He agrees: definitely a woman. We contemplate the body until one of the last sheets of mist covers it, respectfully. When this happens, we remain standing there, smelling the fog. At times it’s possible to hear the traffic sounds down below, which render the monument even more silent. Tourists won’t be allowed to come up until the corpse is removed. The official excuse is “operational problems with the train.” It always is. They would prefer that people waiting in line think maintenance is even crappier than it actually is to having them find out that somebody jumped headfirst. And glimpse the solution for whatever afflicts them: drug debts, betrayal in love, incurable disease... the Werther effect, I read about it in college. Death by imitation. Kind of crazy shit. It’s enough for someone to demonstrate, through action, that life isn’t worth living and someone else, not necessarily related to that first someone, reflects and says, That’s it, he’s right, it’s not worth it, I’m going to kill myself too.
I light a cigarette and offer one to Aguiar.
He shakes his head. “That stuff’ll kill you.”
All I had done was come down hard without any real consequences on three shitheel potheads caught with a trifling amount of grass by cops with nothing better to do. I gave a speech about how cigarettes get you hooked, I think I even used the expression “the devil’s weed,” and let the kids go before they peed on my carpet. Other than that, boredom. It was shortly after midnight when the Special Ops patrol brought in the cute little couple. The guy was fat, wore glasses with dark green rims, had reddish skin, and, despite the cold of August, was soaked in sweat. He looked like an accountant wrestling with a particularly deceptive tax form, trying to make the numbers work. The other guy was much larger than him and wore red shoes with high heels — along with a blond wig, a tight black dress, and two hundred milliliters of silicone in each breast. In spite of the broad shoulders and muscular legs, he appeared feminine. After all, the concept of what’s feminine has changed a lot in this city.
There was a tribe of ripped women, like girlfriends of country singers and soccer players, pumping iron and taking steroids to resemble strong men. This, in fact, would be the predictable defense of the guy in the glasses. He thought he was renting the services of a very buff woman, on the cutting edge of style, and had changed his mind when he felt that business underneath the skirt. Perfectly plausible. I thought, but didn’t say, that nowadays the bulge under the skirt doesn’t prove anything. The male hormones they take increase the size of the clit tremendously. There are samba school dancers who need to cut off a slice to be able to put on the cache-sexe without looking like they are on the rag or, worse, that they have a shlong. Many heterosexuals get turned on by those baby wee-wees and midfielder legs. That’s why they go for a cross-dresser...
The citizen before me didn’t understand that the question wasn’t exactly that. I couldn’t care less if he got off on women, men, or canned sardines. I didn’t give a damn about prostitution by either sex. Fighting prostitution in this city is more or less like asking the scorpion not to sting the frog in the middle of a river. It would be going against its nature. No, the question there was quite different. Public decorum. Apparently the two had started arguing over a longstanding relationship far from the drag queen’s work, which was in the Glória district. Normally it’s best not to mix things. Except that the imbeciles had gone to Guinle Park, an upper-middle-class residential area just below the governor’s mansion and, a worse fuck-up still, the road leading to BOPE, the Special Operations Battalion of the military police.
For whatever reason — I don’t want to take it in the ass anymore, I just want to screw, I want to get an operation and become a tranny, blah-blah-blah, those fag dramas — the pair started a fight and began trading blows just as a Special Operations patrol was returning from an action in one of the poor people districts in the outskirts, an action in which they had sent two more underfed but well-armed blacks to the boneyard. The soldiers in the truck were exhausted but couldn’t pretend they weren’t witnessing that love scene. Duty first, then rest. They banged on the side of the vehicle for the driver to stop. Before the two lovebirds realized it, they were surrounded by seven unpleasant-looking guys in black uniforms with skull patches on the shoulder. That was when the fake blonde produced a razor blade from inside her painted mouth and made an ugly gash in the accountant’s right hand. Then a certain lack of control set in. The corporal leading the patrol aimed his HK at the drag queen’s forehead and shouted, “Drop that shit! Drop that shit!”
By then half the neighborhood was at their windows, enjoying the circus. Antônio Sérgio Lemos de Alcântara — that was the name on his ID card — was strong, but he wasn’t crazy. He dropped the razor blade and was put in a chokehold by a soldier. Another soldier applied a bandage to the hand of the accountant — Felipe Krauss Barreto, according to his ID — and the patrol brought everybody in, along with the crime weapon in a small plastic bag. When the group came into the precinct I guessed the nature of the shit, but what I said, smiling, was: “How can I help you?”