“They’re fantastic!” she exclaims. She wants to know more. “Who are they? What happened to her? Raped?”

•

Next I pay a visit to Bibi, who’s busy ransacking a Polish magazine written in English. She’s the agency translator and for that reason, as well as for her unfailing and perfectly ordered memory, we call her Fichero—Card Catalogue.

I pull a chair over to the table where she’s sitting and do my best to appear friendly, starting with my face.

“May I trouble you for some assistance?”

Other people address her as tú, as if on intimate terms. But I use the formal usted when asking for her help. It’s not as if I’m currently “with” her. We don’t play the same sports, either, and I don’t spend all day kidding around, like the rest of them do.

“What’s this about?”

“Suicide.”

“Whose?”

“Wish I knew. . . Not mine, at least.”

“Ah sí.” Card Catalogue is off and running. “The Melanesian who threw himself out of a palm tree, and number 350 who jumped off the Eiffel Tower on March 12, 1967. Demosthenes and Marilyn Monroe, Stefan Zweig and his wife, Werther and Kirilov, Anna Karenina, Sappho, and the Mundugumor who sacrifices himself by going alone to the enemy island where the cannibal tribe will eat him. That kind of thing?”

“Exactly that kind of thing.”

“And also: 1963 in Vietnam, Buddhist monks in yellow robes, gasoline and a match; the unemployed warrior’s harakiri with a wooden sword—poor guy, there’s no war. And the gas oven for the housewife who doesn’t believe the doctor and knows that her stomachache is cancer. That too?”

“That too. And this.” I put the photos down in front of her.

Bibi takes a long look but it’s obvious she isn’t getting clear on much. I try to orient her with a quick summary so she can suggest where I should begin, at least as far as resolving the two cases goes. The Melanesia part will come in later.

Still, she’s working the problem, wants to know more about what we might glean from Forensics. I repeat that there’s no collaborating with them. “I have a friend,” Bibi tells me, and at that moment, Marcela enters silently and waits. Bibi makes a date with me. “Tomorrow night, at the bowling alley.”

I take the photos back from her, hand them to Marcela, and say “Vamos.”

•

I usher her downstairs to the café. While we’re in the elevator she’s studying the woman sprawled on her back.

We sit down and I place the photos on the table, facing me. She watches and waits, very serious. She has yet to greet me or say a single word.

I ask whether she knows what we’ve gotten ourselves into. A gesture: More or less.