And here begins the part I don’t understand and that, in the end, made me abandon the investigation. The part that made me renounce this case and my journalistic instinct, and made me suspect I was at the beginning of a story I didn’t want to know. Because what happened that day, and the next, is impossible.

I couldn’t find the house. I don’t mean that I got lost. I reached the intersection of 6 and 43, turned on 6 and looked for the house number, 147. The address was 147 6th Street. There was no question. I talked to some neighbors. They all knew Luis Peterson. An architect, they informed me. They knew Gaspar, too, and described him as a lovely young man. They all gave me the same directions, easy. But when I drove down 6th Street, the numbers didn’t coincide. I saw 451, 453, 455 . . . and then, when I turned around, I realized I had turned on to a different street. On to 7th, most of the time. Also on to 8th, 43rd, 44th. I tried with a taxi driver, but as soon as he turned the corner, he got sick and vomited all over the steering wheel. I thought he was drunk and I argued with him, but the man told me he never drank while working and that he’d felt a sudden headache that had frightened him, “like a stroke.”

I abandoned my attempts that day. There was something strange in the air or in my head: the swampy feeling of those nightmares where you can’t scream or walk, the dreams where you’re sure something else is lurking inside the house you can’t get out of.

I went back the next day, facing my fears.

On this second attempt, I tried asking a neighbor for help. I told him the truth, that I couldn’t find the house. The man offered to help and we went together. We got lost. Twice. The man got a little mad, frustrated: he felt, I think, that same dreamlike unreality. “Find it yourself, ma’am, I don’t have all day.” I tried a few more times, but I remembered what Beatriz Bradford had said. You won’t be able to find him. Juan marked him. You won’t be able to. I realized with the lucidity of the irrational that I was being kept from reaching the house at 6th and 43rd. I don’t know why. I spent a few hours on the corner: I thought that if I stayed long enough, I would see one of them. I never did, plus, I didn’t know what they looked like: the people I asked told me to just go to the house on 6th and 43rd. One of them gave me the phone number. I called from a public phone by the road. It was busy at first. Then I got an answering machine. When I went back to the corner, I felt afraid and impotent and I decided to go home. Next time, I told myself, I’d come back with a photographer to document that strange defeat, or to find, at last, the elusive house.