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by one of the whores. Tiger Lily had come to the station to complain that her pimp was beating her up more than usual: “He leaves me so bruised I can’t turn any tricks. So I don’t bring him money and he beats me up again. Explain it to him, Lieutenant Silva. I try, but it’s like beating my head against a brick wall. I just can’t get through.”
    Lilly told them that, the night before, the lieutenant had turned up at the whorehouse all alone. He tied one on, drinking pisco as if it were orange juice. He wasn’t drinking to have a good time but to get blind drunk as quickly as possible. When he was drunk, he unzipped his fly and peed on all the whores, pimps, and customers he could reach. Then he jumped up on the bar and did a striptease until the Air Force MPs came and took him away. Liau, the Chinese who owned the place, kept everybody calm: “If somebody socks him, we all get screwed. They close me down and you’re on the street. They always win, remember that.”
    Lieutenant Silva didn’t seem to pay too much attention to Tiger Lily’s story. The next day, during lunch in Doña Adriana’s place, someone else told how the pilot had repeated his act of the night before. Only this time he’d supplemented it by breaking bottles, because, as he put it, he just loved to see the little chunks of glass flying through the air. The MPs had again turned up to take him away.
    By the third day, Liau himself appeared at the station, sniveling: “Last night he broke his own record. He pulled down his pants and tried to shit on the dance floor. Lieutenant, the guy’s crazy. He only comes to stir up trouble, as if he wanted to get killed. Do something, because if you don’t, someone’s going to do him in. And I don’t want that kind of trouble with the Air Force.”
    “Go take it up with Colonel Mindreau. It’s his problem, not mine.”
    “I wouldn’t go near Colonel Mindreau for anything in this world. I’m scared shitless of the guy. They say he goes strictly by the book.”
    “Well then, you’re screwed, because I have no authority when it comes to the Air Force. If the guy was a civilian, I’d be only too happy to do something for you.”
    Liau, flabbergasted, stared at Lituma and the lieutenant. “Are you saying you can’t do anything for me?”
    “We’ll pray for you,” said the lieutenant, ushering him out. “Bye-bye, Liau. Say hello to the ladies for me.”
    But when Liau had gone, Lieutenant Silva turned to Lituma, who was using his best two fingers to type out the daily report on the ancient office Remington, and whispered, in a voice that sent a chill down Lituma’s spine, “This business about the crazy pilot is hard to figure, don’t you think, Lituma?”
    “Yessir, Lieutenant.” He paused a minute, then asked: “What’s so hard to figure, sir?”
    “Nobody throws his weight around in the whorehouse like that just for laughs. It’s where all the toughest guys in Talara hang out. And three days in a row. Something smells fishy to me. Don’t you think so?”
    “Yessir,” replied Lituma automatically, though he had no idea what Lieutenant Silva was getting at. “What do you think we ought to do?”
    “We ought to go have a beer over at Liau’s, Lituma. On the house, of course.”
    Liau’s bordello had been chased from one end of Talara to the other by the parish priest. No sooner did Father Domingo catch wind of its reappearance than he demanded the mayor shut it down. A few days later, it would resurface in a shack three or four blocks away. Liau eventually won. His whorehouse was now located on the edge of town in a shed made of boards hammered together any which way. It was primitive and shaky, with a dirt floor Liau kept moist so there would be no dust and a tin roof that rattled in the wind because no one had ever bothered to nail it down. The walls of the rooms in back, where the girls worked, had so many holes that kids and drunks were always peeking in on the couples in