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acted on him like a laxative, but Ana still does not open the door. Instead, she shrinks back to the corner of the bathroom behind the toilet, presses herself against the tiles and waits for the man’s desperation to give him the strength to break open the door, which just at that moment gives way with a sharp crack.
    As sharp as the cracking sound from the Bersa that Ana, this time accompanied by Miss Bolivia on her side of the mirror, uses to shoot him and watch him collapse in his own pile of shit.

7
    â€œForeign millionaires aground in Buenos Aires” is the headline of the evening newspaper that has survived the takeovers of the media groups in Argentina. It is a sensationalist rag bought by those workers who still have a job.
    â€œFive-star hotel on the rocks” is how the news is put by the free paper handed out to the middle-class employees, secretaries and the unemployed who cram into trains and buses as they travel home after another exhausting day looking for work, or keeping it by pushing and shoving others out of the way.
    The rest of the front pages of both papers are full of photographs of weary tourists and on-the-spot interviews with some of the 3,340 passengers from the
Queen of Storms
, who tonight should be sailing south to spot whales off Puerto Madryn, poor creatures who, like monkeys in a zoo, only come close to the coast so they can be seen by tourists.
    The Río de la Plata is an estuary where the average depth of the water fluctuates between one meter and one meter ninety centimeters, depending on the winds. All vessels calling at the port of Buenos Aires have to follow narrow channels that are constantly being dredged—unless the crews of the dredgers are working to rule because they have not been paid the bonuses they were promised. This was what happened a couple of days earlier, although no-one was told about it; neither the travel agencies nor the officers on board the
Queen of Storms
, men trained to grapple with the wild seas of the Magellan Strait or to avoid the Antarctic icebergs that global warming increasinglyplaces in their path, but helpless when faced with a measure decreed by the powerful unions that control the port, the tugboats and dredgers.
    The reporter in the middle-class free sheet speculates that no-one said a word because the invasion of tourists stuffed with euros and dollars is a bonanza for Buenos Aires hotel owners. They claim to be unable to cope, but they have already divvied up the spoils they are likely to enjoy, if as expected it takes a week to repair the liner’s hull. Two hundred dollars for the privilege of spending the night in a corridor, however well appointed, is a price the passengers pay only under protest, but it is immediately salted away in the hoteliers’ black books, minus the percentage slipped to the tax inspectors whose frowns suddenly disappear as they count the notes in the equally well-appointed hotel toilets.
    Pacogoya is not worried about the delay. His apartment looking out on the illustrious dead is far more comfortable than the bunk the travel agency allots him when they take him on as a guide. He is not complaining; the pay is good and he does not spend much time in his bunk: he comes and goes between cabins every night, and often strikes it lucky if the person succumbing to his charms is a young, uninhibited tourist. Swedish and German girls are his favorites; he does not understand a word they speak and they do not understand him. The entire cultural exchange is restricted to laughter and sighs, or gestures the other person interprets as they see fit. Sometimes the results are surprising; usually they are pleasant, except for the night when a German man in his fifties, one meter ninety tall and with a body honed in the gyms of the former East Germany, mistook his intentions and threw him face down on the bed with a quick judo move. Pacogoya had seen something similar with the cattlehands at San Antonio de