The spring of the murderers

My love for police intrigue has worn off over the years.

The genre that I liked so much has been filled in recent years with blood and viscera, due to that inclination towards baroque style and superfluous complications that is typical of the time.

But perhaps, more than the saturation of psychopaths and crazy special effects, what distances me from contemporary police fiction is the very short flight of the criminal exploits they invent, compared to the sinister luxury, with the unlimited excess of the great murderers. of reality.

The rules of the genre satisfy and tire: the appearance of a corpse in mysterious circumstances, the process of investigation, which is such a seductive metaphor for the search for knowledge, the discovery of the culprit, punishment.

They are sold out conventions.

The solitary murderer, the symmetrical shadow of the detective who searches for him, will not be able to collect, throughout a bloody career, even a tiny part of the corpses caused in a few seconds by one of those bombs with which the Israeli army attacks defenseless civilians, the easiest victims of all, the elderly, women, terrified children, the sick and the wounded who die trapped even under the ruins of the hospitals in which they vainly sought refuge.

The ancient murderers aspired to anonymity and tried to erase traces that would give them away.

Modern murderers do not need a detective to discover and unmask them, because they themselves, instead of hiding, make public their own crimes with the pride of slaughterers and the vanity of addicts to social networks, like those brainless people who record a rape or a beating while they are committing them.

The Hamas executioners who murdered more than 1,200 unarmed Israelis on October 7 of last year handled their cell phone cameras with the same skill with which they shot their victims, with the perverse euphoria of those who impose terror without any difficulty and death to other human beings.

In previous times of barbarism, technology was cruder, but vanity manifested the same strength: some of the photos that attested to the guilt of the German army in the extermination of the Jews were sent by soldiers as souvenirs to their families, using light Leicas. that they wore around their necks like tourists from hell.

One of the most famous of all, that of the soldier about to fire his rifle right into the temple of a woman who is carrying a child in her arms, had a loving dedication on the back.

A few weeks ago,

The New York Times

made public a huge number of photographs and videos uploaded to social networks by Israeli soldiers who happily celebrated the destruction they were wreaking in their path, raiding homes, machine-gunning recently abandoned school classrooms for pleasure, humiliating Palestinian civilians who were mistreated or detained without reason.

There is no literary intrigue possible when it is the criminal himself who makes his crime public, nor hope of punishment when governments form criminal organizations, and murderers are treated as heroes.

There are Israeli ministers who unabashedly proclaim the will to devastate Gaza and expel and even annihilate its population.

A few days after the death of Alexei Navalny, the top henchmen responsible for the prison where he was most likely murdered have received a promotion and a congratulation personally signed by Putin.

The old secrecy with which crimes were covered up has now become impudence: just in the days of the Munich Security Conference, where Western governments pathetically showed the fragility of their alliances, Putin threw Navalny's corpse at them like those mafia bosses who leave the body of a recently executed informer right at the door of the headquarters of an enemy gang.

There is never a mystery either, and the rise in tension always leads to a predicted outcome.

In this early spring, the murderers accelerate their tasks and finalize their killing plans in daylight: Putin, the fearsome offensive that is expected on Ukraine;

Netanyahu, the attack of an entire army against a million and a half human beings already decimated by destruction and hunger and trapped in the dead end of Gaza.

They kill industrially and blindly and they also kill one by one.

There is no place in the world where someone threatened with death can find refuge.

There is no escape that does not end in a dead end and a trap.

Until very recently, British governments and London financial institutions welcomed with open arms the oligarchs enriched by the plundering of Russia, offering them nationality, selling them football teams and even titles of nobility: meanwhile, in the In the same neighborhoods of what began to be called Londongrad, Russian dissidents who believed themselves protected by political asylum were poisoned one by one by professional executioners who acted with the same crude efficiency of the NKVD or the KGB.

Trotsky was wandering and harassed on several continents for just over ten years and even Ramón Mercader was able to infiltrate the crenellated fortress of his house in Coyoacán and thus carry out the death sentence issued by Stalin with a sharp blow from a climber's hammer.

Trotsky was an international celebrity.

Navalni's reckless rebellion was on the front pages and on the screens of the news channels.

Maxim Kuzminov was nobody.

No one outside of Russia and Ukraine had heard his name or seen his face until his murder became public.

Now we see it in the photos and retrospectively it is the face of a dead person.

Trotsky, Navalny, the journalist Anna Politkóvskaya, who was shot dead in the elevator of her house in 2006, consciously paid the price of attracting attention, denouncing the crimes and corruption of the Putin regime.

What Maxim Kuzminov aspired to was to become invisible.

He had deserted from the Russian army by helicopter across the border into Ukraine.

The Ukrainian secret services provided him with a false identity, enough money to start another life in another country, as far away as possible.

After he disappeared, a senior Russian government official said on a news program: “Of course we are going to find him.

“We have very long arms that reach everywhere.”

Something that literature has taught us is to imagine the life of a persecuted person who awaits.

I think of Hemingway's indelible story,

The Killers

, or another of Borges's,

The Wait

: what predominates in both is a feeling of fatality, of fatigue, of anguish inoculated in the details of everyday life, in that strange place that Now it is the unsafe haven.

In the photos and videos, Kuzminov is a very young man, who does not look his 28 years, with a fleshy face, shiny black hair, parted.

He didn't have time to get used to his new name and perhaps even less to the new exotic country, to that urbanization for vacationers near the sea, in Villajoyosa, Alicante, where he would imagine that no one was going to recognize him.

On a sidewalk, in front of a garage, a stage for tourists in swimsuits with umbrellas and plastic buckets, Maxim Kuzminov could perhaps recognize his executioners as soon as he saw them, before they pointed their weapons at him, with ultimate lucidity. from fear.

When the news was delivered to his ear, Putin's dead smile would lengthen a few millimeters.

There are great expectations for this spring.

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