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Pancho was silently thankful to have only one eye and to have the scene play out on his blind side. Discreetly, Bwana turned his gaze to the door.
    When the woman in the chair saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably.
    THE CORNER
    BY P ACO I GNACIO T AIBO II
    Doctores
    D on’t even think you’re making me happy, okay? Don’t even think it. Don’t say a word, just shut up, puto. Don’t even open your fucking mouth or I’ll shut it myself … Everything is your fucking fault.”
    The last two words didn’t actually come out like that, but more like “foshin foolt,” because of all the blood in his mouth. Then he spit, half vomiting, half choking. And then he died. Of course he had to die like that, like a pendejo, trying to blame somebody else.
    Agent Manterola approached the dead guy and took his car keys, his wallet, and the pair of very big, very dark sunglasses off his head that made him look like a Mayan mummy. Then, after thinking about it, he dropped them back on the ground near the body. Manterola grabbed the guy’s nose and pulled on it. Dead guys aren’t so scary. He took off one of the guy’s shoes, just for the hell of it, and put it on his belly. He didn’t even glance at the other body, that stupid fucking corpse, because it had been that one’s fault that the whole mess started in the first place.
    Now it was the fault of the fucking pins with the multicolored heads. Fucking diaper pins , Manterola muttered to himself. And he was right. Modernity had arrived at the Office of Urban Crimes, but only in the form of two old computers, though they had somehow managed to get their hands on a huge map of Mexico City, where they marked crime scenes with the multicolored pins. Red for murder, pink for sex crimes, yellow for altercations, green for assaults, blue for kidnappings, lavender for robberies in taxis, orange for carjackings. The Boss of Bosses had passed through the office earlier in the day and had been furious when he saw that that fucking corner couldn’t take one more fucking pin.
    So when Manterola got to work, with his funeral suit on—in other words, the same old gray suit he wore every day—with new huevos a la Mexicana stains on the lapels and a black band on his sleeve, he wasn’t surprised to find the commander there staring at the map, waiting for him.
    And he wasn’t surprised by what he said either: “What do you think I, the commander, or the chief, or the head of government, thinks when he sees that fucking corner can’t take one more fucking pin?”
    Manterola knew he was going to have to pay for not taking better care of his partner, for letting him go ahead on the raid where he ran into that wacko with the machete in his hand.
    “What do you want me to do, boss?”
    “You tell me. And whatever it is, do it alone. I’m not assigning you a partner because they always get killed. But whatever you’re going to do, just do it. Silvita will deal with the paperwork.”
    Manterola gazed over at the map with the intensity of a Japanese tourist standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.
    The cursed corner, focus of everything. The intersection of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde in a neighborhood of doctors, just two blocks from the Viaduct. A lower-middle-class neighborhood which had turned destitute and disenfranchised during the crisis in the ’70s, when auto-repair shops became stolen auto-parts dealers.
    There was no glamour here. It was a symbol of sleazy and desperate times. It had no relation to the great criminal corners, like the one behind Santa Veracruz in the ’50s, or Loneliness Square, where a homeless death-squad drank industrial-strength alcohol until they dropped, where it was said they’d steal your socks without touching your shoes. It had no relation to the edge of Ixtapalapa, very near Neza, where the Mexican state police committed their crimes in the ’80s. It was the kind of place that Leone would have filmed one of