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strange at all; it was actually to be expected with the secretary. The only pertinent fact, which did not really say much, was their shared perception that Fortunata had been very agitated in recent days and had acted aggressively on more than one occasion—even unintentionally biting a client’s lips.
    The expert also spoke with Miroslav Zmuda himself, but he did not make much headway on that front. On the contrary, he almost had a run-in with the doctor because he insisted on a list of Fortunata’s principal clients.
    â€œShould I include your name, too?”
    The expert laughed, easing the tension. He had met the prostitute under unusual circumstances. It was in the famous “darkroom,” one of Madame Brigitte’s inventions. Once a month, always on a Monday, the Madame would gather all of the nurses on the right wing of the upper floor and block out all of the light. The clients would then be permitted to enter. The most fascinating perversions would ensue.
    He was unaware that Fortunata was the name of the woman who had attracted him that night. Seated casually beside her on a cushioned rosewood settee, he sensed her presence by her perfume and the warmth of her skin, and moved in on the mystery woman.
    He pulled back in disgust, though, when he noticed there was someone else there, a third person, a man seated on her other side, touching the same parts, disputing the same spaces. But she was irresistible, the texture of her skin, her flesh, and Baeta tried again, wanting her to choose him. But Fortunata did not, and the two men shared her.
    Insecure, jealous, suspicious, the expert felt a sense of failure, because the mysterious partner had climaxed with the other man. When he left, he knew he would come back—as he in fact did—to find out who she was, to be with her again, because he could not accept a secondary role for himself.
    ï¿¼He concluded that that woman—capable of taking a man like him to such extremes, so compliant and yet so perfectly in charge—did not need to kill to get what she wanted.
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    In the early morning hours of Friday, June 27th, the caretaker at the English Cemetery made his rounds with lime paint and a brush. He cleaned gravestones and pruned the trees, and was a kind of chief gravedigger. On his way to give a coat of lime to the wall of the memorial chapel, he was shocked when he saw a low-flying vulture preparing to land near the jambul tree to the rear of the cemetery.
    Still attempting to grasp what was happening, he followed the bird. He could not believe his eyes: one of his shovels was resting on a mound of earth, near the sailors’ mass grave.
    The stench, the sound of beating wings, led him quickly to deduce what he would see moments later at the edge of the hole: partially exposed bodies in advanced stages of putrefaction serving as a meal for the throng of black butchers.
    He immediately grabbed his shovel and began to refill the grave, which did not have the intended effect of scaring away the birds, which is when he realized that this might be a case for the police, and decided to alert the authorities.
    It was a great embarrassment to the cemetery administrators, who had resisted the presence of the forensic experts so vehemently just two weeks earlier. Now there was no doubt: the cemetery had been violated in exactly the same location that had aroused suspicion the first time.
    To sift through that rotten matter again, after so little time had elapsed, was essential. With a mask that barely held back the odor, Sebastião Baeta personally oversaw the inspection this time, along with one of the lieutenants from the First District.
    If, days earlier, the goal of the examination had been to discover the body of Fortunata—possibly murdered and thrown into this ditch by the murderer—now the main question was whether any cadavers had been stolen by whoever had done this.
    Baeta thought to consult the cemetery’s