Death in the Andes Read Online Free PDF Page B

pishtaco. Lituma suspected that in addition to being a cook and a fortune-teller, she was something else at night as well.
    â€œDon’t tell me the witch turned out to be a terruca, Tomasito.”
    â€œDemetrio Chanca had her throw the coca leaves for him. I guess he didn’t like what she saw, because he wouldn’t pay her. They got into a shouting match. Doña Adriana was really mad and tried to scratch him. An eyewitness told me about it.”
    â€œAnd to get back at the cheapskate, the witch waved her magic wand and made him disappear.” Lituma sighed. “Have you questioned her?”
    â€œI made an appointment with her up here, Corporal.”
    Lituma didn’t think he knew who Demetrio Chanca was. He did have some vague knowledge of the albino because the face in the photograph left with them by the woman who made the complaint reminded him of someone he had once exchanged a few words with at Dionisio’s. But the first one, Pedrito Tinoco, had lived in the shack with them, and the corporal couldn’t get him out of his mind. Carreño had found him begging in the barrens, and brought him to work at the post for meals and tips. He had turned out to be very useful. He had helped them reinforce the roof beam, secure the corrugated sheets, nail up the partition that had collapsed, and erect the barricade of sacks as protection in the event of attack. Until one fine day they sent him down for beer and he disappeared without a trace. “That’s how this fucking thing began,” Lituma thought. How was it going to end?
    â€œHere comes Doña Adriana,” his adjutant informed him.
    At a distance her figure was partially dissolved by the white light. The sun, reverberating on the tin roofs below, made the camp look like a string of ponds, a broken mirror. Yes, it was the witch. She was panting slightly by the time she reached them, and responded to their greetings with an indifferent nod, not moving her lips. Her big maternal bosom rose and fell rhythmically, and her large eyes observed the corporal and the guard without blinking. There was no trace of uneasiness in that stare, whose intensity was troubling. For some reason she and her drunken husband always made Lituma uncomfortable.
    â€œThank you for coming, señora,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been a series of disappearances here in Naccos. Three men missing. That’s a lot, don’t you think?”
    She did not answer. Thickset, calm, swimming inside a darned sweater and a wide green skirt fastened by a large buckle, she seemed very sure of herself, or of her powers. Standing solidly in the man’s shoes she wore, she waited, her expression unchanging. Could she have been the great beauty they said? Difficult to imagine when you saw this awful-looking hag.
    â€œWe asked you to come so you could tell us about the fight you had the other night with Demetrio Chanca. The foreman who’s also disappeared.”
    The woman nodded. She had a round, sour face and a mouth like a scar. Her features were Indian but she had white skin and very light eyes, like the Arabic women Lituma had once seen in the interior of Ayacucho, galloping like the wind on the backs of small, shaggy horses. Did she really whore at night?
    â€œI didn’t have any fight with him,” she said categorically.
    â€œThere are witnesses, señora,” the guard Carreño interrupted. “You tried to scratch him, don’t deny it.”
    â€œI tried to take off his hat so I could get what he owed me,” she corrected him impassively. “He made me work for nothing, and I don’t let anybody get away with that.”
    She had a slow, guttural voice, as if gravel rose from the depths of her body to her tongue when she spoke. Back home in the north, in Piura and Talara, Lituma had never believed in witches or magic, but here in the sierra he was not so sure. Why did this woman make him feel