In the hallway, Rafael Torres is awakened by a noise coming from Calderón’s den, a hard sound, like a piece of furniture falling over. He walks down the hall to the door of this room and listens. He hears odd liquid noises and a low growling. It is an embarrassing sort of noise, and Torres hesitates. On the other hand, maybe the guy is sick. He taps lightly on the door. He asks in Spanish, “Mr. Calderón-everything okay in there?” No answer. He sees that the light is on inside the room, so what could be wrong? He opens the door.

It takes him a second to understand what he is seeing; it takes him another second to pull out his pistol. Whatever it is that has killed Calderón is already moving toward him, impossibly fast, but he is a tough young man with the reflexes of youth. He manages to get one shot off before he goes down.

In the kitchen, Garcia heard the sound of the shot. With pistol in hand he rushed up the stairs. Victoria Calderón was awakened by the shot, too, but thought at first that it had been part of her dream. Her dreams were of war in a steaming land. Soldiers were attacking a village, and she was trying to gather up the children and take them to shelter among the trees, but the horror of it was that she always missed one or two of them and had to go back, and didn’t want to and tried to think up excuses while the people stared at her with dark, accusing eyes. Then she heard heavy steps outside her door, and as she comprehended that this was no dream, her heart started to pound. She threw a robe over her pajamas and ran out of her room. There was a big man standing with his back to her, one of the men her father called “a little security.” Victoria had led a somewhat sheltered life, but she was no fool, and she had understood at her first sight of them that these people did not come from Kroll or Wackenhut, that they were thugs of some kind and that her father was therefore in terrible trouble. The big man was talking into a cell phone in his dialect Spanish. She called out, “What happened?”

The man turned and held his palm up like a traffic cop. She stopped automatically, and this gave her time to see what was lying at the man’s feet. The floor here was tile, pale green, against which the scarlet blood made a vivid contrast. It was still crawling in little rivulets toward her along the channels of the grout. It took her a few seconds to make her throat work. “Where’s my father?” she demanded.

The man put his phone away. Victoria started forward, but the man blocked her path, shaking his head. She heard the front door open and steps on the stairs. The hallway was suddenly full of rough-looking dark men, some of them carrying weapons. One of them stood before her, his broad face grave and angry. She recognized him as Martínez, the one her father had called the head of the security detail.

“I want to see my father,” she said.

“That’s not a good idea, miss. You should go back to your room now. We’ll take care of this.”

“Is he hurt?”

“Mr. Calderón is deceased, miss,” said Martínez. “You have my profound condolences. Somehow the assassins got through to-”

Victoria Calderón struck him in the mouth. “Moron! Imbecile! How could you-” she began, and then to her immense surprise, Prudencio Martínez slapped her across the face hard enough to bounce her off the wall. Her vision went red and she slid down to a sitting position against the baseboard. She looked up and saw Prudencio Martínez waggling a finger at her, as at a naughty child. The counterblow was instinctive and without malice; he did not belong to a culture where a woman of whatever exalted rank could strike a man with impunity in front of his subordinates. And in any case the man was dead and she was no longer of any consequence. He left her where she lay, and shouted orders at his men.

It had not taken Martínez long to recover from the shock of the attack, not that he cared, or his boss cared, about the life of Yoiyo Calderón: the failure was less in preventing murder than in not apprehending the assassins. Therefore, the correct move was to quickly reinforce the guards at the other houses, in case there should be another attack. The Colombians left the house, carrying their dead comrade wrapped in a blanket.

When they were gone, Victoria struggled to her feet and leaned against the wall. Her head ached, and the side of her face felt hot and swollen. A slight breeze blew through the corridor, carrying with it a butcher shop smell. She felt her stomach heave and made herself take several deep breaths. She could not be sick now, because…

“Victoria? Victoria, what’s happening?”

Her mother, blinking in the doorway of her bedroom, looking decorative even in the middle of the night, even fuddled with sleep and the three regular scotches and the sleeping pills. Victoria moved toward her mother.

“It’s okay, Mom,” she said, “everything’s all right…we had a little break-in but it’s okay now. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“A break-in? Oh, my God! Where’s your father?”

“It’s fine, Mom, everything’s fine,” Victoria said in the most soothing tone she could manage, but Olivia Calderón, while a stupid woman, was not insensitive to the tone of her daughter’s voice, and so she stepped out into the hallway and looked wildly around for some sign of her husband, and saw the blood on the tiles and screamed shrilly and went running down the hallway to the study and there let out a noise that Victoria had never heard emerging from a human throat and fainted, landing facedown in the pool of clotting blood.

I am not, thought Victoria Calderón, going to collapse into hysterics or faint. This is why I can’t be sick or have any feelings. My father is dead, my mother is useless, my brother is an idiot and is in any case far away. I am in charge of this situation and I will do what’s necessary. That piece-of-shit thug punched me because he thought I was not a significant player, which means that if I don’t make the right moves in the next few days, we will lose everything my family has. She actually voiced these words under her breath, a habit she had acquired as a child when it had become clear to her that her best efforts were never going to make her either a boy or beautiful, and that she was thus fated to disappoint her father and her mother, respectively. It was her way of staying sane; if no one would really talk to her, she could at least talk to herself, and talk sense at that.

But that’s for tomorrow, she continued, right now the first thing I have to do is to call the police, and she did, calling 911 from the phone in her bedroom. She reported it as a homicide, although she had not yet seen her father’s body. She was going to take the word of Martínez for that. She also reported that her mother had fainted and asked the dispatcher to send an ambulance.

She hung up the phone and walked back to where her mother was lying. She noticed that there were footprints in the pools of blood and decided that these might be of interest to the police. She did manage to turn her mother onto her back, however, so that her mouth was clear of the blood. She wet a washcloth in the bathroom and wiped as much blood as she could off her mother’s face and hair. Then she stepped carefully over the puddles and into her father’s study.

She made herself look at the thing on the floor. It’s peculiar, she thought, that I don’t feel much. I’m nauseated by the sight and the smell, but I would be the same at a traffic accident or an explosion, if I were a survivor. Maybe it’s because it’s not recognizable, the way the head is all squashed, it could be anyone, even though Iknow it’s him. I always thought I loved my father and I should be devastated by this, but I’m not. I feel like my life is starting over by this death. I must, she thought, be the cold monster my family always claimed I was, why they said I could never hold a man, I wasn’t a real woman and so on. All right, I saw it, he’s dead, and now I have to-