From the end of Chapter 3:
A ragged and unshaven cupwielding amputee leaned beside his one crutch against a smooth building wall within easy view of Virgil, the driver and the police. Rick hurried to him and thrust a generous contribution of colones into his hand and told him: "That guy in the black cap pushed her. That one in the white shirt - say it! Say it quick!" With his face shielded he pointed to Virgil, who seemed to be stepping up his access into the intersection, where stopped traffic responded to the sound of approaching sirens trying to make space for the inevitable ambulances and white vans of the Ministerio de Salud.
The amputee, with his cup obviously a beggar and obviously ready to do the bidding of whoever would come forward with a respectable contribution, called out: "He did it! He pushed her! In the black cap!" He pointed vaguely in the direction in which he had seen Rick, who darted into a shop behind them, point.
A small delegation of officers looked uncertainly about and converged hesitatingly on the beggar, failing to notice Virgil, who had heard the outcry, snatch off his cap and disappear into the crowd, among which he crossed and hurriedly made his way up to and along Avenida Central toward the Gran Hotel Costa Rica and finally just beyond the hotel into the edge of a larger crowd congregated at the edge of the Plaza de Cultura, where he was able to stand inside a multitude of onlookers watching a ceremony in the plaza wherein about two hundred little girls were commemorating traffic fatalities with songs and some trappings, including helium balloons, one of which was held by each little girl and which appeared to have separately fashioned and specific ribboning, scroll and/or other material of some slight volume and weight attached to it. Flyers were circulating through the crowd identifying these children as having converged at the plaza for the final components of a larger demonstration which had brought them from the Legislative Assembly to this site where they would release the balloons to be carried away bearing momentos of accident victims.
"These are the dead people."
A little girl had broken ranks and stood ahead of the lines of others, all of whom had placed hands on the artifacts attached to their individual balloons as she had proclaimed this representational designation.
Traffic continued to roar along the few dozen yards ahead of the throng on the teeming thoroughfare fronting the hotel and alongside Teatro Nacional but the crowd was silent as small hands released some two hundred balloons which soared upward along the path of the wind and transported their loads into the sky and began to disappear.
To disappear!
Virgil did not hear the song the little girls sang as the phaseout of the exhibition, nor see them falling out of formation and some joined and congratulated by fond families and friends. He was not aware of their eventual departure from the plaza.
But he was still standing where he had joined the other spectators long after the area surrounding him had cleared.
The balloons had carried objects up into the sky and disappeared.
Given they were light, almost weightless things. But there was just one balloon tied to each one. What if the stuff had been heavier and tied on a dozen balloons? A hundred?
"These... are.... the..... dead...... people........"
"These are the dead people!"
