Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
Fairy Tales for Grown-ups
By Pico Iyer
A foreigner sits in a square in a border town, looking at the bright lights, the big hotels of the land across the bridge. He has been watching, as everyone in town has, a famous con man, in flight from his creditors, walking around the square with his dog, which he kicks daily. The foreigner feels a kind of kinship with the fugitive—he too, we sense, is in flight from something—and savors the fact that (this being Mexico) everyone in town knows the man is a criminal, except for the two foreign detectives sent to find him. When finally they do catch up with the stranger, the two quickly become his friends and the crook's safety seems guaranteed. Then, going across the bridge in search of his dog, the fugitive gets hit, by chance, by a passing car driven by one of the detectives:
Feature, 4539 words
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