San Juan Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction by Mayra Santos-Febres

  PART I: FALLEN ANGELS

  Death on the Scaffold

  Janette Becerra

  Santa Rita

  Fish Food

  Manolo Núñez Negrón

  Callejón del Gámbaro

  The Infamy of Chin Fernández

  Tere Dávila

  Barrio Obrero

  Two Deaths for Ángela

  Ana María Fuster Lavín

  Plaza del Mercado

  Matchmaking

  Mayra Santos-Febres

  Buen Consejo

  PART II: CRAZY LOVE

  Dog Killer

  Luis Negrón

  Trastalleres

  Saint Michael’s Sword

  Wilfredo J. Burgos Matos

  Río Piedras

  A Killer Among Us

  Manuel A. Meléndez

  Hato Rey Norte

  Sweet Feline

  Alejandro Álvarez Nieves

  El Condado

  Things Told While Falling

  Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

  San José

  PART III: NEVER TRUST DESIRE

  Turistas

  Ernesto Quiñonez

  Dos Hermanos Bridge

  Y

  José Rabelo

  Santurce

  Inside and Outside

  Edmaris Carazo

  Old San Juan

  Death Angel of Santurce

  Charlie Vázquez

  Avenida Fernández Juncos

  About the Contributors

  Bonus Materials

  Excerpt from USA NOIR edited by Johnny Temple

  Also in Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Crimes of the Urban Caribbean

  Puerto Rico is often portrayed as sandy beaches, casinos, luxury hotels, relaxation, and never-ending pleasure—a place that satisfies all senses and appetites.

  Yet the city of San Juan is much more than that. The capital of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is the oldest Spanish settlement in all the territories and colonies of the United States. Since Puerto Rico is economically dependent on the US, the financial downturn of 2008 hit us hard. Many Puerto Ricans have left the island, looking for a better life. Crime has risen and the black market has thrived. As in many crises, art, music, and literature have also flourished. Never before has there been so much literary production. We have responded to our crisis with many stories to tell. And, especially in these times, many of those stories are noir.

  San Juan’s diverse districts include Hato Rey, with both residential and banking buildings; El Condado, with its luxury hotels; and the beautifully kept colonial district of Old San Juan. But between these first world neighborhoods lies an impoverished and dangerous city. The dilapidated streets of the once prosperous Río Piedras are filled with old Spanish Revival quintas that have been converted—some into bars, others into homeless shelters for immigrants and sex workers. Avenida Gándara and Avenida Ponce de León, major commercial arteries during the fifties and sixties, now act as gateways to this decaying area. Barrio Obrero, famously a hotbed for salsa music, is now controlled by the drug trade. If you follow Avenida Borinquen to Laguna San José, through Buen Consejo, Cantera, and Residencial las Margarita, you can watch as small boats loaded with drugs arrive, guided by former fishermen. Inland, nestled in lush, green hills, Caimito and other nearby barrios attempt to create distance from the violence of the city.

  This anthology gathers stories that take place all over San Juan, in both the poorest and richest neighborhoods. The first section, Fallen Angels, opens with “Death on the Scaffold.” Author Janette Becerra sets her story in Santa Rita, home of intellectuals, university professors, lawyers, and doctors, who live imprisoned in their high-rise buildings, trying to escape the dangers that surround them. Then we move to Callejón de Gámbaro in Old San Juan with Manolo Núñez Negrón in “Fish Food.” This is a tale of friendship between two boys—one poor, the other not so poor, but not rich either. Tere Dávila takes us outside of the gated colonial city and into Barrio Obrero; in “el barrio,” the humble, God-fearing janitor Chin Fernández is caught committing the petty crime of stealing women’s underwear. Yet this is not the worst of his sins. In “Two Deaths for Ángela,” a young woman fights disconnection and loneliness while roaming from Calle Loíza to Calle Canals to Plaza del Mercado de Santurce—all gathering places for salsa dancing, intimacy, and love. The protagonist’s perspective is vastly darker, filled with violence, attempted rape, and death. My own story, “Matchmaking,” portrays the life of El Koala Gutierréz, a hit man with a dispassionate life. In barrio Buen Consejo, he discovers desire, and it leads to his demise.

  Part II: Crazy Love opens with “Dog Killer,” a story by the 2014 Lambda Literary Award winner Luis Negrón, the first Puerto Rican to win this prestigious prize. We are guided through Parada 15–18 in Santurce, near Cajellón Colectora, an alley in Trastalleres. This barrio is known for being where salsa singer Andy Montañez grew up. Once prosperous, the factories have now closed, and the area is full of unemployed workers roaming the streets, searching for money. Outside the gates of a shut-down factory, a different kind of love emerges. In “Saint Michael’s Sword,” one of Puerto Rico’s most renowned noir writers, Wilfredo J. Burgos Matos, offers a bewildering story that takes place in Río Piedras, just a few streets away from Hato Rey. His hustler protagonist, Ángel, wakes up injured in the middle of the street and must figure out who attacked him. In “A Killer Among Us,” we travel back in space and time to a rural community on the outskirts of the city, where urban development meets the campo where the cane cutters lived. Many of these rural workers left the island and settled in the US, and Manuel A. Meléndez, the son of one of those original emigrants, imagines a life that could have been his. “Sweet Feline” is set in El Condado, the tourist district; Alejandro Álvarez Nieves depicts a hotel worker and call girl, and what goes on behind closed doors in one of the many extravagant hotels on the island. In “Things Told While Falling” by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, the murder of Violeta pulls a detective deep into the passionate love triangle between a husband, his young wife, and her best friend, a lesbian. As the cop delves further into the mystery, he learns that “found bodies make silent speeches.”

  Part III: Never Trust Desire comprises stories by Ernesto Quiñonez, an Ecuadorian–Puerto Rican writer living in New York; SM de Literatura Juvenil award winner José Rabelo; acclaimed author and digitial communications manager Edmaris Carazo; and poet and short story writer Charlie Vázquez. Quiñonez’s beautiful narrative brings the reader across the Don Hermanos Bridge as an expatriate returns in search of his father. His sentimental connection to the city leads him astray, and he is deceived as to his true origins. Next, Rabelo gets inside the head of a math teacher and his desire for Samira, an underprivileged student from the Manuel A. Pérez housing development in Río Piedras. One day Samira disappears, but the paths of the two protagonists eventually cross in the streets of Santurce, and the maestro’s forbidden love comes to fruition. Then we travel back across the city to Old San Juan with Edmaris Carazo. She tells of a hit-and-run provoked by drugs and alcohol, in which an ordinary young woman becomes an accessory to the crime: San Juan’s violence is pervasive, and can turn anyone into a killer. In the last story, “Death Angel of Santurce,” the body of a streetwalker is found on Avenida Fernández Juncos. The police insist that it’s an open-and-shut case that should be forgotten. But then the reader is taken back to the hours before the woman’s death, when she is desperately seeking
love and survival.

  These are the stories of San Juan Noir. I hope they spark your imagination, and reveal a side of Puerto Rico otherwise obscured by the tourist trade and preconceptions. Maybe it will also pique your curiosity, and you will come visit our “pearl of the Caribbean.”

  Mayra Santos-Febres

  San Juan, Puerto Rico

  July 2016

  PART I

  FALLEN ANGELS

  DEATH ON THE SCAFFOLD

  by Janette Becerra

  Santa Rita

  I was only interested in the incident because I ended up looking him in the eye. I had him up close, so I looked into his eyes. That little gesture, for someone familiar with my proclivities, makes a world of difference. You see, beyond the careful contemplation of what takes place inside my own apartment, I’m blessed not to see. From the height of my apartment, Río Piedras is just a mosaic of sepia tones, with a few tiles for garish contrast scattered here and there. Its grout, cracked and gray, is made up of avenues and alleyways of nervous trajectories, bustling with mechanical insects and organisms of unknown species, walking about day and night with purposes that—for me, at least—remain indecipherable. There, in the distance, the blur of San Juan: an impressionist painting of restless brushstrokes, silver streaks with white dots that I’ve never been able to identify, and beyond that, the sea. That stripe of cobalt blue they call the ocean, there in the distance. Here, above, none of that matters. I go down once a week to stock up on the essentials. There’s a shop on the first floor where I get what I need, which isn’t much. The rest of my life transpires between these four walls. Let’s call it my private command center. Perhaps the world is preparing for man’s return to the primordial cave, from where you can order and pay for everything, think of and resolve everything, win and lose everything—even your life—without ever going down.

  And so, at the beginning of this week (Monday, to be precise), I was startled by the presence of a man at my window. I had completely forgotten that they would be painting the condominium. Yes, an assembly had been called. Yes, overages had been approved. Yes, notices had been left under the door. I always consent to the nonsense that others occupy themselves with. Laissez-faire.

  I was sitting in my armchair, with my back to the window, which is what I generally do early in the morning. The living room reverberated with one of Haydn’s major quartets. It wasn’t quite nine yet and I was enjoying the iridescence that radiated on my orchids during their morning sunning. That’s why I was surprised by the sudden shadow. When I say sudden I should probably say unexpected, because to be honest, I clearly remember that it was gradual. It was a curious spectacle, more worthy of nature than of man: the rest of the apartment in shadows; a sphere of light, like a tracking bulb, on the flowers; and in the heart of the light, like an inverse sunrise or a celestial body entering an eclipse, a sliver of shadow rising little by little, until it projected itself across the cattleyas. I don’t know if you can appreciate the strangeness of that vision—a circle of the absence of light, in the middle of a circle of light, in the middle of half-light. I sat observing this phenomenon with that hypnotic attention we give to something that seems like a delusion or fruit of the imagination, when we know ourselves susceptible to such visions. And I wouldn’t have turned around if it hadn’t been for the head of the shadow, which at first appeared so perfect that it seemed celestial; as it ascended, it began to reveal a body made of flaps and adornments sprouting out of it. Then I did turn around, and I saw him. He saw me too.

  He was just a kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was wearing a T-shirt wrapped around his head like a Palestinian kaffiyeh, and over it the crown of earphones that—whatever they were transmitting—had him nodding frenetically, hyperbolically. He startled me—like I said, I admit it—but my reflexes are so slow that I didn’t even try to hide what was already, without a doubt, obvious to him, mostly because of the several seconds of advantage he had, watching me from behind.

  Then there were a few—I don’t know how many—seconds of a sustained and knowing look. He was climbing at the speed of a turtle on his motorized scaffold, and pressing the button that activated the mechanism, with nothing else to do as his vertical world slowly ascended. I remember that when he saw what I was holding in my hand (because his eyes did stray from mine for a moment, a fraction of an instant), he gave a hint of a smile. I suppose you understand what I’m referring to, right? That intention of a smile we sometimes see in the corners of someone’s mouth who’s definitely not smiling, no, but holding a smile back. Farther back than the lips, even farther inside, perhaps behind the teeth or on the cupola of the pallet, shaped like an arch, waiting for that solitary moment when at last it can peel itself off the roof of the mouth and be pushed out with the tongue, free now. So it was. He saw me and I saw him. It was done.

  Tuesday was another thing entirely because it was anticipated. I’ve never had curtains because at this height, frankly, privacy ceases to be a consideration. But now that for a brief time I’d been exposed to the gaze of an intruder, now that this foreign coexistence with the painter had been initiated, I had to stay shut in my bedroom. Since I don’t have stereo equipment in there, I was able to hear the soft screech of the pulleys as the scaffolding ascended. From the threshold of my bedroom’s half-open door, I saw him look inside, feigning disinterest at first and then, assuming no one could see him, scrutinizing the interior of my apartment with such intensity that he even made a visor of his hands and stuck his face against the glass—searching. This time he let himself grin, of course, because he thought he was alone. He made some gesture of sarcasm or criticism. And he kept ascending slowly, histrionically, as noon does.

  By Wednesday I had an itinerary of his ascents and descents: he went up initially at a quarter to nine; he came down at twelve like clockwork; he went back up after one; and at three, or maybe three thirty, he came down and didn’t return until the following day. I deduced that they painted condominiums from top to bottom, and he must have started with the penthouse on Monday, which is two floors above mine. So that day it was time for him to paint my floor. It was a long Wednesday, shut away in my room without music. I had to leave the door ajar, because the living room windows give a clear view to the back of the bedroom. I crossed into the kitchen a few times, of course. I passed by without looking at him and returned with my ice tray. At five after two (I remember because the digital clock on my stereo, which I contemplated nostalgically in its silence, showed the time) I perceived out of the corner of my eye that he was gesturing to me with his hand, like he was waving. I pretended not to have seen him and shut myself in again.

  At three o’clock, desperate for the workday to end so I could retake dominion over my house, I positioned myself at the crack in the door to spy on him. The platform of his scaffolding went way beyond the width of my apartment, so there were long periods when I couldn’t see his movements. I watched his torso cross in front of one of my windows and disappear behind the adjoining wall, then reemerge in my field of vision. It took him fifteen or twenty more minutes to complete the day’s work. Since he tended to place his equipment on a segment of the scaffold outside of my big living room window (the one out of which I had seen him the first time), I was able to observe when he started to get his things ready to go. He sealed the bucket of paint and began to clean his hands with a cloth from the back pocket of his overalls. Instead of focusing on what he was doing, he entertained himself by looking into my empty living room. He smiled through clenched teeth as if remembering, reliving that Monday morning, and peered into every corner his eyes could reach. It’d been like that since Monday: him, just a boy, inhabitant of a still vertical life; us, old residents of horizontal universes, where there was space for our vices to scatter themselves around. Maybe he was too young; now I’m not even sure he was twenty. He still had a desire to see, and that’s no longer of interest after a certain age.

  When he felt satisfied that he had devoured my slice
of the world, he returned to his hands. Then I saw him make an expression of disgust, curse, throw the cloth furiously down on the scaffold floor, and look with despair at the fronts and backs of his fingers, which, judging from his rage, had been left more covered in paint than before—probably because he’d used the same cloth too many times. Then, with his elbow he activated a switch that I’d not seen him use yet, and with the same elbow he pressed the button of the motor for a second and pulled back his arm. The scaffold began its automatic descent, while he rubbed his hands against his chest, butt, and thighs, as if determined to soil himself as much as possible.

  Not even ten seconds had passed—I barely had time to take three steps into the living room—when I again heard the screech of the pulleys and saw that the painter was returning. I scurried quickly back toward my room and I saw him pass by my floor on his way up. I was surprised, because he should’ve already finished painting the upper floor the day before. I slipped timidly into the living room and went up to the glass, but my vantage only revealed the bottom of the wooden platform. I opened a window—the windows here are sash windows—and stuck my head out as far as I could, but I didn’t see much. A swaying, nothing more. Observed from below, that platform was transformed into an iron curtain, perfect for concealing the intimacies committed by those on top of it (a real advantage over my apartment, I remember thinking). I noted how the mechanism was flanked by metal brackets, cables, cords, and pulleys that stuck out like tentacles from the condominium’s rooftop down to the first floor. I closed the window and returned to my observation point behind my cracked bedroom door, resolving not to enter my living room during the day until the scaffold had definitively descended.

  Time passed . . . I don’t know, maybe five minutes? It seemed like more to me, restless as I was. The unusual silence of my apartment, which was ordinarily submerged in music, heightened my senses. Maybe I imagined sounds. It was after three thirty. At that hour, the world becomes for me a kind of underwater concert, you know? Everything muffled, slow, majestic. I sensed a thumping in the ceiling: vibrations, like drowned thunderclaps, from the floor above me. One here, another there. It happens. It’s not rare in a condo, nor did it bother me. I turn on music, and that’s that. But that day, in the silence, combined with my anxious waiting, it attracted my attention. I looked around overhead, trying to find the origin of those sounds to decipher their pattern. They weren’t sounds that merited alarm, it was just a way to kill time. Eventually the thumps stopped, and yet I remained in suspense a few seconds more, my eyes lost in the smooth ceiling of my bedroom. Then I went back to the observation that mattered most to me: the scaffold’s descent. It came down one or two minutes later, and I felt freed from the prison of that day.