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beard and hats and cloaks and the furtive expression of someone who wishes he could make himself invisible. I tried to strike up conversations with the men who seemed most harmless, but it was hard to trust anyone. A Portuguese man who kept talking about his poor mother stabbed some unlucky guy who had dared to correct him when he mispronounced the name of a ship; a shy, calm dwarf, with a scar across his forehead, ripped into the stomach of a drunk who made fun of his condition. No one punished these crimes. I continued to see the Portuguese guy, and the dwarf too, which made me think that they all must have a fewmurders under their belts, but since they were in some sort of international territory, no one cared.
    I had trouble getting away from the sailors’ unintelligible conversations, the greedy women who went through my pockets, and the police spies who looked at me suspiciously. But two weeks later, when I had gotten used to getting drunk every night, I heard a rumor about a French captain who was winning a fortune at cards.
    He played in a gambling den that was above a grocery warehouse. Through the dirty windows movement could be seen, but there was no way I could get in, as two formidable ruffians guarded the entrance. I waited in the drizzle for the fake French captain to finish gathering his winnings and head home. He finally came out, sunken into his cloak and beardless. What distinguished him from Kalidán the magician wasn’t his disguise but some sort of inner confidence that he couldn’t be seen, as if all he had to do was concentrate and he would become invisible. I followed from a distance, carefully, imitating drunken zigzags. He didn’t turn to look at me; he walked with sure steps, immune to the effects of alcohol or fear. He was stopped only by a black cat, which he didn’t want to cross his path. Then he went into a dilapidated house that looked like it was about to collapse.
    In the morning, so early that my father wouldn’t even have been in his workshop, I went to visit Craig. It didn’t matter what time I stopped by; he was always awake. I told him of my discovery and described the building’s slow collapse; I warned him that in the world of the port nothing lasted long.
    â€œYou’ve done a good job. But now it’s my turn. I sent one boy to his death and I don’t want to send another.”
    Before the door closed completely, I thought I saw Craig smile, for the first time in weeks.

9
    F ive days later Craig brought together in the Green Room the journalists who had defamed him. There was the reporter from The Nation , pale and freckled, who was never without a pad and pencil, as if at any moment the perfect sentence was going to jump out and surprise him. The journalist from The Tribune was a man about thirty years old, indigenous looking, who affected gentlemanly manners but it was said that when he got some good information, he sold it to the highest bidder. Another journalist, so tall that he spent his life bent like a question mark, worked for a newspaper in Montevideo, where the case had been followed with interest. There were also three people I had never seen before; I imagined they’d been sent by the Alarcón family.
    â€œAs I promised, the case has been solved. As we feared, Gabriel Alarcón is dead. His corpse was found in the basement of the Victoria Theater. The police are taking it away as we speak. The body was covered in lime to hasten the decomposition process.”
    â€œHow did you find it?”
    â€œI cannot explain methods that would forewarn criminals and teach them how to proceed in the future so as not to leave clues. But I can tell you that Kalidán, as you know him, or Jean Baptiste Cral, hisreal name, was an epileptoid criminal who suffered morbid attacks, with a pathological fear of growing old. He believed that drinking human blood would keep him young forever. He was so sure that his crimes would go