In Evil Hour Read Online Free Page B

inscription:
Peace and Justice
. The lithograph was the only new thing in the office.
    The secretary wrapped a handkerchief around his face and began to clean the desks with a duster. “If you don’t cover your nose, you’ll get a coughing attack,” he said. The advice wasn’t taken. Judge Arcadio leaned back in the swivel chair, stretching out his legs to test the springs.
    “Will it fall over?” he asked.
    The secretary said no with his head. “When they killed Judge Vitela,” he said, “the springs broke, but they’ve been fixed.” Without taking off the kerchief, he went on:
    “The mayor himself ordered it fixed when the government changed and special investigators began to appear from all sides.”
    “The mayor wants this office to function,” the judge said.
    He opened the center drawer, took out a bunch of keys, and went on opening the drawers one by one. They were full of papers. He examined them superficially, picking them up with his forefinger to be sure that there was nothing to attract his attention, and then he closed the drawers and put the items on the desk in order: a glass inkwell with one red and one blue receptacle, and a fountain pen for each receptacle, of the respective color. The ink had dried up.
    “The mayor likes you,” the secretary said.
    Rocking in his chair, the judge followed him with a somber look as he cleaned the railing. The secretary contemplated him as if he never meant to forget him under that light, at that instant, and in that position, and he said, pointing at him with his finger:
    “Just the way you are now, exactly, was how Judge Vitela was when they shot him up.”
    The judge touched the pronounced veins on his temples. The headache was coming back.
    “I was there,” the secretary went on, pointing to the typewriter, as he went to the other side of the railing. Without interrupting his tale, he leaned on the railing with the duster aimed at Judge Arcadio like a rifle. He looked like a mail robber in a cowboy movie.
    “The three policemen stood like this,” he said. “Judge Vitela just managed to see them and raise his hands, saying very slowly: ‘Don’t kill me.’ But right away the chair went in one direction and he in the other, riddled with lead.”
    Judge Arcadio squeezed his skull with his hands. He felt his brain throbbing. The secretary took off his mask and hung the duster behind the door. “And all because when he was drunk he said he was here to guarantee the sanctity of the ballot,” he said. He remained suspended, looking at Judge Arcadio, who doubled over the desk with his hands on his stomach.
    “Are you having trouble?”
    The judge said he was. He told him about the night before and asked him to go to the poolroom and get an aspirin and two cold beers. When he finished the first beer, Judge Arcadio couldn’t find the slightest trace of remorse in his heart. He was lucid.
    The secretary sat in front of the typewriter.
    “What do we do now?” he asked.
    “Nothing,” the judge said.
    “Then if you’ll allow me, I’ll go find María and help her pluck the chickens.”
    The judge was against it. “This is an office for the administration of justice and not the plucking of chickens,” he said. He examined his underling from top to bottom with an air of pity and added:
    “Furthermore, you’ve got to get rid of those slippers and come to the office with shoes on.”
    The heat became more intense with the approach of
noon. When twelve o’clock struck, Judge Arcadio had consumed a dozen beers. He was floating in memories. With a dreamy anxiety he was talking about a past without privations, with long Sundays of sea and insatiable mulatto women who made love standing up behind the doors of entranceways. “That’s what life was like then,” he said, snapping his thumb against his forefinger at the clamlike stupor of the secretary, who listened without speaking, approving with his head. Judge Arcadio felt dull, but ever more alive in