Street of Thieves

PERHAPS it was this long familiarity with corpses that facilitated things; those two months of death made the prospect of robbing Señor Cruz easier to imagine — he had returned as planned after three days, exhausted, he said, by the truck journey into the depths of Morocco. He seemed happy to see me again.

He told me about his trip, which had gone well, he had brought his five corpses to Beni Mellal, all by chance to the same place, it was both practical and horrible. As usual, the women had cried terribly, their wailing had bored into his ears, the men had dug the graves, and that was it. He had only enough time to stop in Casa for a night to pig out, he said these words with such sadness in his reedy voice, pig out, that it could just have easily have been referring to his last meal.

Cruz poured himself some whiskey.

He had me sit down across from him in an armchair, offered me a drink, which I refused.

He said nothing, the whole scene seemed to call for conversation, confidences, but he was silent; he drank his Cutty Sark, glancing at me from time to time, and I felt more and more nervous.

I tried to speak, to ask questions about his trip to Morocco, but when he replied his answers were monosyllabic.

He finished his drink and politely offered me another before helping himself again.

After an endless quarter of an hour of silence, which I spent looking in turn at my knees and at his impassive face, I left, asking him to excuse me, I had to feed the dogs; he motioned with his head, accompanied with a brief smile.

Once in the yard I breathed a sigh of relief, I was trembling like a frail thing. Through the window, I saw Cruz’s fat face, haloed by the electric blue of the computer screen, resume his stupefied contemplation of the forms of death.

I felt in danger; fear overcame me, powerful, irrational; I went to kneel down with the mutts, their muzzles nosed into my armpits, the softness of their fur and their clear gaze comforted me a little.

CRUZ always seemed to be hovering on the verge of speech.

I had never encountered madness before, if Cruz was mad — he didn’t launch into unreasonable diatribes, didn’t bang his head against the walls, didn’t eat his excrement, wasn’t overcome with delirium or visions; he lived in the screen, and in the screen, there were terrible images — old photos of Chinese tortures where men bled, attached to posts, their chests cut open, their limbs amputated by executioners with long knives; Afghan and Bosnian decapitations; stonings, stomachs ripped open, defenestrations, and countless war reports — strange, I thought, fiction is much better filmed, much more realistic than documentaries or the photos from the beginning of the century, and I wondered why, above all, Cruz always looked for the mention of “reality” in his pictures; he wanted the truth, but what difference could it make: he had his storage room full of corpses, he knew them intimately, he had frequented them for years, and I still wonder today what could have motivated this pathological virtual observation, he should have been cured of death yet he was gorging on miles of scenes of tortures and massacres. What was he looking for, an answer to his questions, to the questions the stiffs didn’t answer, a questioning about the moment of death, the instant of passage, perhaps? — or perhaps he had simply been engulfed by the image, the bodies had made him leave reality and so he was burrowing into cyber-reality to find there, in vain, something of life.

As the days went by, he frightened me more and more, for no reason — he was the most inoffensive of creatures; he was gentle with me, gentle with his dogs, respectful of the dead. Every day I thought about asking him for my passport and up and leaving, too bad about the cash, farewell Mr. Cruz, the drowned and the bluish light of tortures on YouTube, come what may — but every night, in my cubbyhole, reassured by the company of the dogs, by the softness of their fur, by their panting calm, I would resume my dreams of theft, of the two or three thousand euros that Cruz’s safe might deliver to me. I had sketched out a plan, one of those schemes that only work in books, until you try them: go into town to buy a similar key, it might be a common model, and substitute it on the key ring, which he often left in the entryway — of course the new key wouldn’t open the safe, but when he realized it, with a little luck I’d be far away.