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the traitors,” says Bértola, hazarding a guess.
    â€œWow! That’s a record time for a psychoanalyst. I thought it took them years to arrive at the truth.”
    â€œThat was before the digital revolution. Now we have to give instant replies on line, or the gurus of this third millennium steal our clients. I understand now why Miss Bolivia was in such a hurry to vanish into thin air.”
    The entry phone buzzes. Bértola’s first patient. His clients arrive ontime; they are predictable. There are answers for everything that happens to them in the textbooks. Verónica’s clients on the other hand come and go at all hours, or get stuck in the revolving doors of violence.
    And if they are killed, they do not pay.

6
    Occasionally, very occasionally, Verónica wishes she had been in jail. In order to understand why thieves and murderers steal and kill again when they come out after so many years inside; why they cry out for someone to rescue them from a world they cannot bear any more.
    She knows she is not living in a kindergarten. Two men buried below ground constitute a graduation diploma that bears much more weight than her law degree from Buenos Aires University. It is not fate, or chance, or karma, or any of the other excuses people invent when they mess things up, dream of their future, buy life insurance, abandon their partner or trade in their car for a brand-new one. It is something else, a monster as confused as she is, a hunchback begging for love who is rewarded only with a few coins when he is not given a kick in the pants or has the door slammed in his face. Loose change given out of astonishment, barely enough to pay the fare on a bus that leaves you in some corner of an alien city.
    The lawyer lady does not ask much. All she wants is to understand. And she suspects that freedom is a hindrance, that roaming around aimlessly is bound to lead her nowhere.
    Yet she has to keep going. She has to shield herself against all the frustrations and fight back when pain lies in ambush, attack first if theopportunity arises, go on in the absurd belief that from here on in she will not allow anything to surprise her, react to every death she meets by clambering to her feet, creating a new skeleton out of her own ashes.
    â€œWhere are you calling from?”
    The voice on the other end sounds impersonal, labored. It takes her a while to realize it is Ana on the line, the very same Miss Bolivia who disappeared the day before with the Bersa .38 that had belonged to the first man she lost.
    â€œDon’t come looking for me,
doctora
. I’m fine, but don’t look for me.”
    â€œI didn’t come looking for you. If you remember, it was you who came to me. All I ask is that you don’t kill anyone.”
    Now that it is too late, she regrets having given Ana the gun. The call is from a public telephone; she could not trace it even if she had her own satellite. But the dethroned queen does not sound frightened, only agitated, perhaps from excitement. Perhaps she’s in the arms of a man who’s caressing her breasts at that very moment, Verónica imagines wildly.
    â€œI’ll contact you tomorrow or the day after,
doctora
, to see if that skirt-chasing magistrate is back from his holidays yet.”
    With that she hangs up. Veronica curses the fact that she is a lawyer for thieves and their women, that she has to splash around in the polluted mud of this city periphery, is clawing her way through garbage the whole time. She envies Bértola: the refuse he deals with doesn’t stink to high heaven. It is an abstract filth in which client and therapist can roll around without getting dirty and it only lasts fifty minutes a session. Like someone watching a talk show about their own life, knowing they can switch it off if it gets boring or too intense.
    The no-longer young man’s arm does in fact stretch out toward Ana Torrente’s young body. His hands play with