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Now you know why you couldn’t get that black’s face out of your mind, Lituma thought.

“You want to take one of these guys with you to give you a hand?” he heard the lieutenant saying.

Lituma could feel Camacho and Arévalo sitting there petrified. A polar silence descended on the commissariat as the sergeant looked at the two Guardias and deliberately took his time choosing between them so as to make them squirm a little. Apple Dumpling, his fingers shaking, continued to look through the pile of traffic tickets, and Snotnose had bent over his desk to hide his face.

“I’ll take him,” Lituma said, pointing to Arévalo. He heard Camacho let out a deep breath and saw a sudden gleam of utter hatred appear in Apple Dumpling’s eyes that immediately told him the latter was mentally cursing his sergeant’s whore of a mother.

“I’ve got a terrible cold and I was just about to ask permission to stay inside tonight, lieutenant,” Arévalo stammered, trying to play dumb.

“Stop acting like an idiot and get your coat on,” Lituma broke in, walking past him without looking at him. “We’re leaving this minute.”

He went to the cell and unlocked the door. For the first time that day, he took a look at the black. They’d dressed him in a ragged pair of pants that just barely reached his knees, and covered his chest and back with a burlap bag with a hole cut out of it for his head. He was barefoot and calm; he looked Lituma in the eye, with neither fear nor joy. He was sitting on the floor, chewing something; instead of handcuffs, he had a rope tied around his wrists, long enough for him to be able to scratch himself or to eat. The sergeant made signs to him to stand up, but the black didn’t seem to understand. Lituma walked over to him, took him by the arm, and the man obediently got to his feet. He walked down the corridor ahead of Lituma, with the same indifference. Apple Dumpling Arévalo already had his greatcoat on and his scarf wound around his neck. Lieutenant Concha didn’t even turn around to watch them leave: he had his face buried in a Donald Duck (But he doesn’t realize he’s holding it upside down, Lituma thought). Camacho, on the other hand, gave them a smile of commiseration.

Once out on the street, the sergeant placed himself on the curb side, leaving the wall to Arévalo. The black walked along between the two of them, at the same pace, in long steady strides, still chewing.

“He’s been gnawing on that hunk of bread for almost two hours now,” Arévalo said. “When they brought him back from Lima tonight, we gave him all the stale rolls in the pantry, the ones that had gotten as hard as rocks. And he’s eaten every last one of them. Chewing like a grinder. He must be half starved to death, don’t you imagine?”

Duty first and sentiments later, Lituma was thinking. He mapped out the itinerary in his mind: up the Calle Carlos Concha to Contralmirante Mora and then down the avenue to the banks of the Rímac and along the river to the ocean. He calculated: three quarters of an hour to get there and back, an hour at most.

“It’s all your fault, sergeant,” Arévalo grumbled. “Who asked you to capture him anyway? When you realized he wasn’t a thief, you should have let him go. And now look at all the trouble you’ve gotten us into. Tell me something: do you go along with what the brass hats think? That this guy came here as a stowaway on a boat?”

“That’s what Pedralbes thinks, too,” Lituma said. “It’s possible. Otherwise, how the devil do you explain how an outlandish-looking character like this, with that hair and those scars and naked as a jaybird and talking that gibberish of his, happens to pop up all of a sudden in the port of El Callao? They must be right.”

The echo of the Guardias’ two pair of boots resounded in the dark street; the sambo’s bare feet made no sound at all.

“If it were up to me, I’d have left him in prison,” Arévalo went on. “Because a savage from Africa isn’t to blame if he’s a savage from Africa, sergeant.”

“But it’s for that very reason that he can’t stay in prison,