Conversations at the Next Table

The tip wasn't reliable enough for me to be there. Not because my presence was out of place among the regulars at Tropezón, as I had frequented the place for years, but because I couldn't believe Pulpo was using that dive as the center of his current operations. But there he was, and I had it out for him.

Gutiérrez had warned me, an old dockworker who, after tearing his cruciate ligaments, spent his days driving a garbage truck. He got the tip from someone in the union: "Pulpo is back in the mud and hangs out at Club Unión."

The bar in question wasn't a nightclub but the buffet of a civil association that in its heyday had been the cradle of great basketball players and was now about to mark two decades as a haven for drunks and gamblers gathered around a bocce court. I had left at the beginning of that decline, more precisely when the fire happened. That's how it was. I caught the first bus heading to the Valley and took off.