In Evil Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

his memories.
    When one o’clock sounded in the belfry, the secretary showed signs of impatience.
    “The soup’s getting cold,” he said.
    The judge wouldn’t let him get up. “A person doesn’t always come across a man of talent in towns like this,” he said, and the secretary thanked him, worn out by the heat, and shifted in his chair. It was an interminable Friday. Under the burning plates of the roof, the two men chatted a half hour more while the town cooked in its siesta stew. On the edge of exhaustion, the secretary then made a reference to the lampoons. Judge Arcadio shrugged his shoulders.
    “So you’re following that half-wit stuff too,” he said, using the familiar form for the first time.
    The secretary had no desire to go on chatting, debilitated by hunger and suffocation, but he didn’t think the lampoons were foolishness. “We’ve already had the first death,” he said. “If things go on like this we’re going to have a bad time of it.” And he told the story of a town that was wiped out in seven days by lampoons. The inhabitants ended up killing each other off. The survivors dug up the bones of their dead and carried them off to be sure they’d never come back.
    The judge listened with an amused expression, slowly unbuttoning his shirt while the other talked. He figured
that his secretary was a horror-story fan.
    “This is a very simple case out of a detective story,” he said.
    The underling shook his head. Judge Arcadio told how he’d belonged to an organization at the university that was dedicated to the solving of police enigmas. Each one of the members would read a mystery novel up to a predetermined clue, and they would get together on Saturdays to unravel the enigma. “I didn’t miss a single time,” he said. “Of course, I was favored by my knowledge of the classics, which had revealed a logic of life capable of penetrating any mystery.” He offered an enigma: a man registers at a hotel at ten at night, goes up to his room, and the next morning the waiter who brings him his coffee finds him dead and rotting in his bed. The autopsy shows that the guest who arrived the night before has been dead for a week.
    The secretary sat up with a long creaking of joints.
    “That means that when he got to the hotel he had already been dead for seven days,” the secretary said.
    “The story was written twelve years ago,” Judge Arcadio said, ignoring the interruption, “but the clue had been given by Heraclitus, five centuries before Christ.”
    He got ready to reveal it, but the secretary was exasperated. “Never, since the world has been the world, has anyone found out who’s putting up the lampoons,” he proclaimed with tense aggressiveness. Judge Arcadio contemplated him with twisted eyes.
    “I bet you I’ll discover him,” he said.
    “I accept your bet.”
    Rebeca Asís was suffocating in the hot bedroom of the house opposite, her head sunk in the pillow, trying to sleep an impossible siesta. She had smoked leaves stuck to her temples.
    “Roberto,” she said, addressing her husband, “if you
don’t open the window we’re going to die of the heat.”
    Roberto Asís opened the window at the moment in which Judge Arcadio was leaving his office.
    “Try to sleep,” he begged the exuberant woman who was lying with her arms open beneath the canopy of pink embroidery, completely naked under a light nylon nightgown. “I promise you I won’t remember anything again.”
    She let out a sigh.
    Roberto Asís, who had spent the night walking about the bedroom, lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, unable to sleep, had been on the point of catching the author of the lampoons that dawn. He’d heard the crackle of the paper in front of his house and the repeated rubbing of hands trying to smooth it on the wall. But he grasped it all too late and the lampoon had been posted. When he opened the window the square was deserted.
    From that moment until two in the afternoon,