He waited for the boy to wake up in intensive care. Ten hours. He was sure there would be cerebral lesions—he’d explained to the parents, who didn’t seem to understand, just as they didn’t understand anything else; oh, but the older brother did understand, where did these little gringos get that intelligence?—he expected a coma, he expected another arrhythmia that would kill the boy once and for all. But Juan woke up around noon, and the encephalogram was normal and Bradford ordered that he not be allowed to suffer for a second, and then, since he couldn’t sleep and he had to talk to someone, he almost crashed his car driving home, and in that spirit he knocked on the door of his sister’s apartment, his somber sister who occupied two floors of the same building where he lived, one of the family’s Buenos Aires buildings—the most spacious, the most beautiful. Mercedes ruled over that apartment where her husband almost always left her alone—she’d married a man who was rich, fun, and unfaithful. And her daughter, Rosario, spent almost all her time at school and then in her room or with friends. Bradford loved his niece: she had the irrepressible joy of intellect. Bradford talked and Mercedes listened in a silence interrupted only by a spoon in a teacup and the enormous clock that presided over the room. Don’t rush it, she said. And that was why he’d turned to Mercedes: she was cold-blooded. He must be yours if what you say happened is true. He must be ours. But there can’t be any suspicious behavior. I can’t leave him with those brutes, Mercedes, those peasants. Of course not, but we need to be careful.