The Latin American Society was here on this block, pretty sure in one of these two adjacent brownstones, but it’s hard to tell at this nearly 2:00 a.m. hour, with every shop, restaurant, and business on the block shut, windows darkened. There’s a realtor’s sign now in the parlor-floor window of one, and next door, in a building that has been renovated so that its front window is almost at sidewalk level, there’s an upscale optometrist and eyeglass shop. As I stand staring into my faint reflection in the somewhat fogged glass of that window, I see transparent hands rising from behind me to place a pair of designer specs over my eyes. They fit perfectly, and in the reflection I look transformed, even my smile looks urbane, intelligent, rakish. Over my shoulder, the transparent optometrist nods approvingly, a flirtatious curl to her smile, and she whispers: These are like the glasses Marcello Mastroianni wore in 8½. They make you look a little bit like him. And I chortle and say, Oh yeah, just a little like Marcello, and that’s when I realize who she is—Carlota Sánchez Motta—and now her eyes widen and her lips part in surprised recognition too. Ay, Carlota, long-lost adoración, of course this is what you turned out to be, a spectral Boston optometrist.
Lulú likes to say that all the young white dudes in New York look the same to her, that she can’t tell one from the other. That’s pretty funny, Lulú, I tell her, because I bet that’s what they say about you and all the other pelicanitas, and we share a laugh over that. Let it go, man. You promised to let Lulú go. Somewhere around here, too, though on what street I also don’t know, was the more comfortable rooming house for single working women that Bert convinced Mamita to leave Our Lady’s Guild House for.
Heading down Exeter Street, I look down a public alley running behind businesses and residences and see a door opening. It must be connected to the TGIF on the corner, which probably closed for business about an hour ago, and a man with a short, compact build in kitchen whites comes out, dragging garbage bags that he hoists one at a time into a dumpster. Then he goes back inside without closing the door and comes out again with more garbage bags. This time I get a better look as he passes through the snow-blitzed light radiating through the door: black curly or bushy hair and maybe that’s the long half-isosceles triangle of a male Maya nose. The Witness—if that’s who the restaurant worker in the alley is, or wherever else he might be in the world—is thirty-three now, because it’s been nine years since the night in 1998 that the bishop was murdered. He’s that old if he’s still alive, that is. The prosecutor in Guatemala who has the case now told me over a year ago that he and his assistants had lost all track of the Witness and that the UN refugee commission in Mexico had too. They had to accept the possibility that through their own negligence, General Cara de Culo and Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s assassin, or assassins, had finally tracked the Witness down. The prosecutor said it was also possible that the Witness had crossed the border into the United States, like so many others running for their lives. For once, I’m hoping the prosecutors are hiding the truth, that they’ve moved the Witness to some secret place and are getting ready to launch the next round of arrests and don’t want him talking to a journalist. But I’ve been looking out for him ever since I moved back to New York anyway. Whenever I see but don’t really get a good look at any man who could be Central American, who has that same build and thick curly hair as the Witness, a kitchen worker, a guy selling flowers in the stall affixed to a Korean deli, that kid pushing a peanut cart up ahead of me in Central Park who when I caught up to him turned out to be Chilean—I bought a bag of peanuts—or even that man I saw walking along Lower Broadway in a too-long, black winter coat and carrying a briefcase who, despite eyeglasses, clearly possessed those features until I drew even on the sidewalk and saw that he didn’t, every time I see someone like that I get excited and think that maybe he’s the Witness.
It was the Witness’s testimony that led to the conviction of the three military men including Capitán Psycho-Sadist and trained suspicion on Cara de Culo. Later he became a refugee in Mexico because no other country would grant him asylum. That was because the Witness, testifying, had had to admit to having a role, however minor, in the crime, and then to have kept secret what he knew until finally, three years later, when the case was going to trial, he didn’t. It was his confessed complicity, not just his being a poor indio who’d lived on the streets, that made him ineligible for asylum in the United States or Canada or Sweden or anywhere else. He was a homeless ex-soldier living in the park outside the bishop’s church, supporting himself washing parked cars, when he was first informally hired by army intelligence operatives to
