Chapter 1
I could see the sun already rising through the window.
I hadn’t slept a wink but opened a browser to check the headlines on all the major news portals.
I wish I saw NEW KID ON THE BLOCK LAUNCHES MILLION-DOLLAR START-UP.
Or maybe RURAL PARANá WUNDERKIND SHAKES UP MARKETPLACE.
Or even DANTE’S PARADISE: brIGHT YOUNG TALENT BURSTS ONTO MARKET. But no.
On every page, the lead story was BODY TAKEN FROM RIO HOSPITAL, or SUSPECT brEAKS INTO PUBLIC HOSPITAL TO STEAL CADAVER, or my personal favorite, BODY SNATCHED: GRANDMA GOES MISSING!
I clicked the links and there was one really low-res still taken from CCTV footage outside the hospital.
You couldn’t make out my face, but I recognized myself in the lab coat in that blurry photo.
The beer belly, the scrawny legs, the way I leaned over the corpse in the wheelchair.
A body had been taken from a public hospital and people were curious, they wanted to understand, interact, gossip.
The comments section was a cesspool. People blamed aliens, the government, feminism.
Some alleged the body had never existed.
Technology has given man the freedom to fill cyberspace with whatever bullshit they please.
Stupid opinions, crazy conspiracy theories, fake news.
I felt even more frantic: All this media coverage would force the police to do a thorough investigation.
In the kitchen, I made chamomile tea to calm myself down.
I grabbed some cheese and ham from the fridge and made a sandwich.
I almost opened the freezer but remembered just in time that there was a dead body propped inside.
Piglet came into the kitchen with bed head and a puffy face creased from his pillow, yawning with drool clinging to the side of his mouth. He’d slept like a baby. He was wearing SpongeBob boxers and was holding a very big, very sharp knife. It was a jarring sight.
I showed him the headline from one of the websites.
“Hey, you’re famous,” he said.
“I’m screwed, is what I am! I’m going to jail!”
Piglet grinned, leaving the butcher knife on the kitchen table. He took four slices of bread and a spoon and helped himself to a jar of Nutella.
“You’re white, handsome, with a college degree. And it’s Brazil. You’re not going to jail.”
“This is no time for jokes, Piglet.”
“It’s not a joke. I think we just see things differently.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re scared as hell, sweating bullets with your panties in a twist. Meanwhile, I’m just happily eating my breakfast, thinking about how now there’s enough money in my account to pay off the back rent, enough meat to host four dinner parties, and all we have to worry about are Brazilian cops?
Not the FBI, not MI6, just the incredibly dysfunctional Rio de Janeiro state police force.
We’re in the same situation; we just have different ways of looking at it. ”
“Sure, easy for you to say when it’s not your fucking picture posted everywhere!”
“Nobody’s going to recognize you,” he said, his cheeks stuffed full of food.
“They’ll find us. Something always gets left behind.”
“I swapped out the plates. Relax.”
There was no point in arguing with him. Despite being a fuckup, he considered himself a genius. He went back to chewing, humming “Flowers” like he was Miley Cyrus. I cut open a passion fruit to make juice and turned on the blender, drowning him out.
Hugo came in wearing a bathrobe. He ignored the butcher knife and silently poured a glass of milk. He looked exhausted. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who’d been up all night. I showed him the news, and he scoffed.
“They won’t find us. We are professionals, Dante.”
“Tomorrow’s the big day,” Piglet said excitedly.
Half an hour later we opened the freezer door to take out the corpse, staring at it like some ominous version of the Three Stooges.
Small but plump, the woman had a round face, gray hair, and a scaly skin.
Her eyes had already taken on a crystalline, slightly yellowish hue.
News sites reported that she was sixty years old, but she looked at least seventy.
“Now that’s what I call aged meat,” Piglet laughed. “Or even better: matured!”
We carried the body to the living room and laid it between the two columns near the window, where Hugo had spread out a white sheet. I quickly closed the curtains, imagining some American tourist with his wife and children at their hotel window catching a glimpse of three guys and a dead grandma.
“Where’s Miguel? We need his help,” I said.
“He’s not back from his shift yet.”
Hugo crouched down and pressed the dead woman’s thighs. He did the same to her belly, then turned the body over and tested her buttocks. Piglet held the butcher knife up in the air, his eyes and mouth wide as he mimicked the music from the Psycho shower scene:
“Skrreee, skrreee, skrreee, skrreee!”
“Can you stop?” I yelled.
He let out a disappointed sigh and twirled the knife in the air like a samurai before placing it next to Hugo. “You’re the cook. The rest of the stuff you asked for is in the pantry.”
Hugo nodded, completely engrossed. His eyes wandered over the cold, flaccid, aged body: not at all inviting to the palate.
Using kitchen shears, he tore off her remaining clothes and set them aside.
I’ll never forget the image of that lady lying naked and dead on the living room floor.
Once out of the freezer, the skin on her shoulders and chest had taken on a marbled appearance.
Hugo massaged the woman’s chest and calves.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Finding the best place to cut. I’m a chef, not a butcher. There’s a whole art to it. A good cut should be made close to the bone. The meat needs to be tender, with some fat. I know how to do it on a cow, but not a woman.”
Piglet was enjoying the show, sitting back in the armchair, with his fingers interlaced over his belly.
“I’m sure it’s all the same. Just cut wherever.”
Hugo wiped his hands on the hem of the sheet. “Let’s turn it upside down.”
I looked in the pantry for the hooks he’d ordered. Inside the bag were also some smaller knives, a length of rope, and a bunch of garbage bags. I brought everything back to the living room, hoping Hugo wouldn’t ask for my help.
“Hey, give me a hand,” he said as he unraveled the thick rope beside the sheet.
Tentatively, I tied the rope around the dead woman’s feet and finished with a sailor’s knot that I’d learned on YouTube.
Piglet had screwed two hammock hooks into the columns and ran the rope through the rings, like he was getting ready to lift a bag of potting soil.
Hugo tried to hold the body up while we pulled on the end of the rope.
Steadying our feet, we tried two, three, four times.
You can’t imagine how hard it is to hoist a corpse up off the ground.
It was like the body had doubled, even tripled, in weight.
“That’s a heavy-ass seagull!” said Piglet.
He laughed, snorted, sweated, and pulled on the rope, all at the same time, without any respect for the dead woman.
My legs ached and my palms burned. The key turned in the lock; I was glad that Miguel had gotten home in time to help.
But when I looked at the door, it wasn’t him.
For a moment I thought I was imagining things.
I had to blink several times to make sure: Standing there, just a few feet away from us, with her hair down and wearing a black dress and stilettos, was Cora.
Silently, she stared at us—three clumsy fools and a dead old lady, swaying mere inches from the ground.