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“Our duty isn’t to approve of the order but to carry it out,” the sergeant said in a faint voice. And then, after a pause, speaking even more slowly: “You’re right, of course. I don’t approve of it either. I’m obeying because it’s necessary to obey.”

At that moment they came to the end of the pavement, the avenue, the streetlights, and began to walk through the pitch-black shadows on soft ground. A thick, almost solid stench enveloped them. They were in the garbage dump along the banks of the Rímac, very close to the sea, in the rectangular area between the beach, the riverbed, and the avenue, where every morning, beginning at seven, the Sanitation Department trucks came to dump the refuse from Bellavista, La Perla, and El Callao and where, beginning around about the same hour, a horde of kids, grown men and women, and oldsters began to paw through the piles of filth in search of objects of value, and to fight with the seabirds, the buzzards, the stray dogs for the edible remains of food mixed in with the garbage. They were very close to that wasteland now, heading toward Ventanilla, toward Ancón, and the long line of El Callao fish-meal factories.

“This is the best place,” Lituma said. “All the garbage trucks pass this way.”

The sound of the sea was very loud now. Manzanita stopped and the black stopped too. The Guardias had turned their flashlights on and were examining, in the flickering light, the face crisscrossed with tiny scars, imperturbably chewing.

“The worst of it is that he doesn’t have any reflexes or intuitions about things,” Lituma murmured. “Anybody else would realize what’s about to happen and be terrified, try to escape. What gets me is how calm he is, how much he trusts us.”

“I’ve got an idea, sergeant.” Arévalo’s teeth were chattering as though he were freezing. “Let’s allow him to escape. We’ll say we killed him and then, well, think up some sort of story to explain how come there’s no corpse…”

Lituma had drawn his revolver and was removing the safety catch.

“Are you daring to suggest to me that I disobey my superior’s orders and then lie to them on top of it?” the sergeant boomed, his voice shaking. His right hand pointed the gun barrel at the black’s temple.

But two, three, several seconds went by and he didn’t shoot. Would he do so? Would he obey? Would the shot ring out? Would the dead body of the mysterious immigrant roll over onto the heap of unidentifiable rotting garbage? Or would his life be spared, would he flee, blindly, wildly, along the beaches beyond the city, as an irreproachable sergeant stood there, amid the putrid stench and the surge of the waves, confused and sad at heart at having failed to do his duty? How would this tragedy of El Callao end?

Five.

Lucho Gatica’s visit to Lima was described by Pascual in our news bulletins as “an unforgettable artistic occasion and a four-star event in the history of Peruvian radio broadcasting.” His appearance on the airwaves of Panamericana cost me a story and an almost new shirt and tie, and caused me to stand Aunt Julia up for the second time. Before the Chilean bolero singer arrived in town, I’d seen countless photographs and laudatory articles about him in the papers (“Unpaid publicity, the very best kind,” Genaro Jr. said), but I didn’t really realize how famous he was till I noticed the huge crowd of women lined up in the Calle Belén hoping to get passes to the broadcast. Since the auditorium of the station was small—a hundred seats or so—only a few lucky women managed to get the precious passes. On the night of the broadcast there was such a big crowd outside the doors of Panamericana that Pascual and I had to get up to our shack by way of the building next door, which opened onto the same rooftop terrace as our building. We prepared the seven o’clock bulletin, but there was no way of getting it down to the second floor.

“There’s a whole shitload of women blocking the stairway, the door, and the elevator,” Pascual told me. “I tried to get through, but they took