Visitors at Three

Our domestic tranquility endured until the night two amateur burglars made the grave error of scaling the balcony balustrades on Defensa Street, assuming the second-floor flat lay vacant. It was half past three on a rain-slicked Tuesday morning. I was dead asleep when the sharp metallic groan of wrought iron jolted me awake with my pulse pounding in my ears.

Padding into the corridor in my boxers, I spotted two figures in tracksuits and baseball caps prying open the French casement latch with a rusted crowbar and a flick-knife gleaming in the streetlights.

—Stay quiet and don't shout, kid —the one with the blade hissed, slipping inside over the pine planks—. Hand over the laptops, the cash, and nobody gets hurt.

The summer squall hammered violently against the tall French casements, filling the salon with the damp fragrance of soaked brickwork and cold chimney soot. The silhouettes of the two young men stood sharply framed against the sodium streetlamps of Defensa Street, shivering in their rain-soaked jackets and breathing with the ragged adrenaline of people realizing too late they have invaded sovereign territory.

Before I could raise my hands, the ambient temperature in the salon plummeted to the chill of an unsealed crypt. The vintage ceiling pendants flickered twice and died, plunging the room into the murky half-light filtering from the streetlamps below.

From the shadow beside a seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry, Valente emerged. He did not walk: he seemed to glide an inch above the floorboards without inducing a single groan from the timber. His white linen shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, his eyes burned with a carmine luminosity visible in the gloom, and his fangs were fully distended, white and lethal as an arctic wolf's.

—Gentlemen —Valente murmured, and his voice did not sound human: it resonated simultaneously from every corner of the ceiling, heavy and hollow as a funeral bell—. You have entered this residence lacking formal epistolary introduction and trodden upon an Oriental rug imported from Smyrna in 1888.

The burglar holding the crowbar dropped the tool; it clattered loudly against the floor. He glanced downward, hunting for Valente's shadow under the window glow, found only empty floorboards, and his kneecaps began to chatter in rhythmic terror.

—What the hell are you? —the knife-wielder stammered, backing toward the balcony rail with wild eyes.

—I am the legitimate co-proprietor of this functional unit —Valente answered, materializing an inch from the youth's nose without a whisper of movement—. And I possess a formidable appetite that bottled beet extract has failed to satisfy since the administration of President Avellaneda.

Valente never laid a finger on them. He merely parted his lips, exhaled a low hiss that turned the falling raindrops into mid-air frost, and displayed the talons of his porcelain hands.

The intruders did not bother with the stairs: they leaped clean off the second-story balustrade onto the hood of a passing taxi on Defensa Street, shrieking in primal panic that echoed all the way to Lezama Park.

Valente brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his cuff, scooped up the rusted crowbar from the rug, and handed it to me with a courteous nod.

—Serviceable wrought iron, Julián. Store it in the kitchen; it may prove useful for recalcitrant marmalade jars. Modern latches are frail, but the territorial sovereignty of a historic manor is never up for negotiation.

I stood in the corridor with the cold crowbar in my hand, staring at the empty rain-drenched balcony, and then burst into sudden, breathless laughter that bounced off the mahogany bookshelves. For the first time since moving to the capital, I felt completely and unequivocally secure in my own home.

Valente bowed with courtly grace, scooped up the flick-knife the second burglar had dropped upon the floorboards, and depressed the brass release catch to retract the stainless steel blade. He inspected the cheap hardware under the flash of distant lightning with the refined disdain of an antique collector appraising modern plastic trinkets.

He laid the weapon casually on the marble side table beside a stack of art journals, not bothering to wipe the droplets from his sleeves. 'A remarkably vulgar tool,' he noted dryly. 'Modern metallurgy has lost all sense of weight, balance, and artistic decency.'

I remained standing in the drafty hall holding the cold wrought-iron crowbar with both hands, my pulse gradually settling back into harmony with the grandfather clock. Any other tenant in this frantic city would have dialed emergency dispatch in hysterical terror; I possessed the unshakable certainty that no petty neighborhood thief would ever cast his gaze upon our balcony again.

We heard the screech of taxi brakes down at the corner of San Lorenzo and the furious shouts of the driver as both intruders slammed onto the front fender before bolting headlong toward Lezama Park like men chased by the devil himself. Within the salon settled that deep, unyielding stillness that only sixteen-foot ceilings and two-foot-thick colonial brick walls can preserve against the noise of the living world.

What we didn't know was that the two burglars were not going to keep quiet. Or that the next morning, in every café in San Telmo, someone would be asking who lived on the second floor on Defensa Street.