The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,192

the first time, the detective dropped his guard and grinned. “Didn’t know where to start looking for them.”

“Brandon also mentioned something about time travel. In a train.”

“Yes.”

“Able to verify that?”

“We punted on the time travel, ma’am.”

From her chair, Araceli felt the mood in the courtroom turning light, inconsequential. The judge rolled his eyes—twice! My Ruthy is winning! The prosecutor was starting to look ill, he was grabbing the table before him with two hands, as if the building were shifting, very slowly, and the floor of the courtroom were suddenly afloat and tossed about by rough seas. “Brandon said his brother had been, quote, ‘holding fire,’ unquote. Did you find any burns on Keenan Torres-Thompson’s hands?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did you find any fires burning underneath the surface of the earth?”

“Excuse me.”

“It’s in the statement. Brandon says he saw a fire burning in the ground.”

“There was a pig cooked, apparently. At the home in Huntington Park.”

“And what about the, quote, superhero? Mr. Ray Forma?”

“We were able to ascertain, to a high degree of certainty, that there have been no sightings of any such man.”

On the bench, the judge gave a bemused smirk that matched the one on the face of the detective.

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

Ray Forma sounded like a stage name to Araceli. There was a student she knew in art school who worked as a clown for children’s parties and called himself Re-Gacho. “Really Uncool” was a typical Mexico City clown who amused and annoyed in equal measures, harassing the moms with double entendres that their kids didn’t understand. Yes, Re-Gacho would fit perfectly in this courtroom, where even the bailiff looked grateful for the brief levity of superheroes and time machines at the end of a day of slogging through the calendar. Cover the oak with red and yellow streamers, bring out the balloons, and put a big top hat on the judge. Qué divertido.

“The People rest, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, causing the judge’s face to come alive again with a sparkle of astonishment. The judge was a balding man with a sallow complexion and a fringe of white hair: up until that moment, he had maintained a temperament of studied evenness and congeniality. The judge considered the seated prosecutor for an instant, and then his face collapsed into a mask of disapproval, as if the exit doors had been thrown open inside a darkened theater, interrupting a bad movie and revealing the sticky, trash-strewn aisles.

“That’s it?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Bacalan. I see you have one witness,” the judge said after a pause. “Is he here, by any chance?”

“No, Your Honor. I didn’t anticipate the prosecutor cutting short his witness list.”

“Right. So, tomorrow at nine a.m.?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Ruthy and the prosecutor said in unison.

Sitting in the last row of the gallery with his legs crossed, Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller fixed a dagger stare at Madame Weirdness, the Mexican woman who could make his life easier by making the rational choice and taking the plea bargain. In his desire to avoid defeat he had assembled a squad of attorneys and investigators dedicated to keeping alive the machinery of case AB5387516, in the hope that he would eventually pressure this stubborn woman to accept the inevitable. But as he watched the defendant leaving the courtroom behind her attorney, Ian Goller realized she would not give up. Araceli Ramirez was a Mexican national with nothing going for her but a strong work ethic, apparently, and lived unaware of her powerlessness relative to your average American-born resident of Orange County. She owned no property and had no social security number or credit rating, but walked past him like an exiled empress in denim and sneakers because she inhabited another, Spanish-speaking reality where those things didn’t matter, a world of people happy with the plebeian pleasures of hurdy-gurdy music and pickup trucks. The assistant district attorney knew, in fact, that there was a pickup with a driver waiting for the defendant in the parking lot. Goller had that information thanks to the investigator he’d assigned to track her movements—an egregious misuse of scarce resources—but the assistant district attorney only now realized how unhealthy his obsession with this case had become. Could it ever be a bad thing to want to win, Goller wondered, when the side you were on was called the People? He wanted this woman to make the rational calculation of a defeated American criminal, but of course she would not. His experience with the Mexicans that crossed his path was