Roberto Bolaño places as his epigraph to The Insufferable Gaucho lines from the conclusion of "Josephine": "So perhaps we shall not lose too much after all" (translation modified). With the withdrawal of Josephine from the scene, Kafka's narrator says, the mouse folk have not lost "too much." Josephine's song will be retrieved through its conversion from language/art into national anthem, from historical event into myth, from singular intervention into conventional "song." The "too much" is saved, but as just enough. In other words, "after all," the saving of the excess (one that is also less than nothing, itself a loss) represents its departure, just as the recall of Josephine's act as song names the disappearance of the same act. The turning of Josephine into a subject, as well as her conversion into the policeman of "Police Rat" (her surviving blood relative), signals the appropriation of the event of language for balance and consensus. In "Police Rat," the event, which is the death of species, morphs into another representation of the same species (the rat-mouse new species), so no one even notices the difference. No one can read the distinction between the being (man) that passes, and the being that displaces it, since the difference is reading itself, or language, whose last vestige is still creativity, learning, waste, which is what slips away in the process. Héctor inherits the trace, which is the trace of Josephine. Pepe, the nephew, is also an inheritor, though he labors to erase the trace. Thus Héctor, a rat who kills rats, and Pepe, a rat who kills rats (kills Héctor, yet receives the immunity of the sovereign), are doubles. Their respective acts are responses to the elimination of every surplus, one work undoing the work of the other. "Police Rat," like other Bolaño narratives, and like "Josephine," is thereby a spin-off of the mystery or detective narrative in which the suicide--language, literature, learning, leisure--goes off in search of its killer.