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of the little finger, and it burned. He picked little bits of grit out of the wound with the longest nail on his left hand. It would have been nice to pour cold water on it. In fact, imagining it was almost as good as doing it. The leg was okay. The blood was already drying. It looked like a shiny brown spiderweb.
    The light had switched from natural to electric. The day had gone. He had to get home. It was extremely important that he was not late, because of the girls. He was about five subway stops from the Triangle. If he could beg an unexpired day ticket, he could still be home in quarter of an hour. Actually, in his head, he did not use the word home. He used the word there.
    He went down the steps and picked a spot where he would only gently interrupt the flow of travelers. He used his sad smile.
    “Finished with your ticket, señora? Señor? Finished with your ticket, señora?”

D ESPITE ITS NAME, the Triangle was a roughly rectangular section of the old part of the city, narrower at one end than the other. Its eastern and northern limits were formed by a section of the Avenida Buendía, the channel of ceaseless traffic that ran from the Centro out to the northern suburbs. Bush had no idea where it ended, if it ended at all. He had never been north of the Carrer Circular, which crossed Buendía in a jumble of traffic lights and tortuous overpasses. The Triangle’s other long flank was more vague; there, its undisciplined maze of streets washed up against new office buildings and high-rise apartments. The southern side of the Triangle was an interzone of struggling trees and threadbare grass that marked the beginning of the university campus.
    The Triangle was a district in limbo. It was almost a slum, but not quite. It was scheduled for redevelopment, but not yet. It was old, but not in a way that attracted gringo tourists. The twisted streets had names, but there were no signs that announced them, because only the locals used them. On a street known as Trinidad, there was a bar called La Prensa. The Press. Many years ago it had been one. Books and leaflets, fliers and posters, local newsletters, and — believe it or not — church magazines had been printed there. And also, for a brief intoxicated month or two, thirty years ago, revolutionary pamphlets that preached freedom and democracy, sometimes illustrated by pictures of angry and attractive young women clearly not wearing brassieres. One of the printing presses, an ancient litho machine with fancy cast-iron legs, was a feature of the bar.
    Next to La Prensa was a building that would look like an old colonial house if you drove past it in the dark. In fact, only the facade, punctuated by empty windows and adorned by opportunistic plants, remained. If, as Bush and the girls did every day, you went through the gap where its front door had been, you would discover that this wall was propped up by huge timbers grown gray with age.
    Behind it, at the back of a cat-haunted yard that had once been a garden, was a lean-to, a ramshackle tumbledown shed with splitting wooden walls, a small window with white paper pasted on the cracked glass, and a rusty tin roof. It had once been a store for the press. Great spools of paper half the height of a man had been kept in there; so had the wooden pallets that tubs of ink had been brought in on. And failures: blurred or unsold books, bad test runs, uncollected christening cards, election posters with the wrong name under the photograph, advertising brochures with the wrong phone number, pamphlets with a section printed upside down. When Fidel and Nina Ramirez had bought the press and turned it into a bar, they’d cleared out most of this stuff and burned it in the yard. At the time, they’d probably imagined they would use the shed for something or other. Not as a home for feral kids, of course. There hadn’t been so many of those in the neighborhood back then.
    The fourth side of the yard was the wall of a building that had