Why the introspective horror? Why the somber pleasure? On these points we’ll offer some generalized conclusion to create more material for more articles, and for the whole series if we confirm the generalization. Yes: It can’t just be the story of these two deaths, which are old news at this point. We need fresh cases. We’ll have to wait. For what? For more of them to happen. To see. No, it can’t wait, we’ve got two months, maximum. There’s a circular prepared already, offering the series to the dailies. We can sell it to thirty evening papers and three magazines that do color. You want it sensationalized? No! Serious. Our agency doesn’t sensationalize. Well, you said the evening papers . . . That was off the top of my head. For the magazines, you need color slides. Why are we only selling to the glossies? For the blood, so the red is visible. Otherwise it has to be marked with an arrow, explained in the caption: It gets lost. You’re right. Work with Marcela. Why Marcela? Remember the piece on the plane crash in the mountains. She takes risks. There are no risks in this story, we’re dealing with dead bodies here. Aren’t there? Well, I hope not. Who knows.

I appeal: Pedro would be much better, I’d rather work with a man. No. Marcela. It’s an order.

I don’t say so, but I think of Marcela as something of an oddity. She’s ascetic, or appears to be. She’s new at the agency, I hardly know her. We don’t like each other. I don’t like her. I’ve let that be known. Someone asked why. I said “She’s thirty or thirty-two.” Years old, I meant.

I exit the building, relieved. Summer sunlight blinds me. It blinds me and soon leaves my whole body sticky.

Here, along the sidewalk, comes a blouse with a lot going on inside. I might have something to say to that. Here’s another, cut low. I don’t say anything this time, either, there’s no use trying to start anything, they pass me by. But I do stare, and who knows what I look like because a middle-aged housewife is glaring at me reprovingly, trying to put me in my place.

I think about the series. I’ll have to see people who are irrelevant to me because they’re not the ones who did it—people who are forewarned, uncooperative. (Maybe Marcela will help me get through to them. In her own way, she’s bait, thirty years old.)

I set my foot on the shoeshine block.

And I’ll have to talk. To talk about it.