21
Since I returned from the island, I had been spending two nights a week uptown, in the social clubs of Washington Heights, looking for El Jabalí. It was a helpless kind of orbit, because I had nothing but the nickname to go by, and a nickname is an ineffective way to summon a man who I imagined, like others of his type, did not want to be summoned. Without quite realizing it, I pictured him as Nico, my contact in Buenos Aires. They were both men who dispensed and called in favors, a venerable line of business.
The clubs opened for dancing at night, but during the day they hosted every kind of group activity, from table tennis to boxing, from dominoes and chess to weight lifting and wrestling. They were huge rooms that had been put to other uses before the wave of Dominicans had come t
