A Sweet Scent of Death

by Guillermo Arriaga

  ‘I don’t have any left; the Nestlé truck took what little there was,’ said Prudencia in all honesty. Nestlé’s buyer had come very early for the twelve liters produced by the woman’s five cows.

  Discreetly, Anita pointed out to Astrid a drum oozing milk.

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Astrid.

  Prudencia turned to look at the drum and smiled. ‘It’s useless, curdled milk from an infected cow; if you want it, it’s yours,’ she said, taking a few unsteady steps and extracting a glass jar from the cupboard. ‘I’ve got this half-liter of fresh cream; want it?’

  Astrid shook her head but Anita accepted the jar.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she said. ‘How much?’

  Prudencia did some arithmetic on the fingers of her left hand.

  ‘Give me three pesos,’ she answered and went on talking to Astrid: ‘You know, you can reserve the milk; just pay me beforehand.’

  ‘OK, keep ten liters for me,’ said Astrid and handed her a twenty-peso note.

  ‘Let me see if I have any change,’ said Prudencia, turning into the house to look for it.

  Anita and Astrid heard a ‘Good day’ and turned to find the widow Castaños coming to buy milk. The woman was obviously worried.

  ‘Where’s Prudencia?’ she asked.

  ‘She’ll be right back,’ answered Anita.

  The three women fell silent, wishing to avoid the subject hanging over them: the widow because of the anguish it caused her; Astrid, so as not to show how much she knew; and Anita, not wishing to get involved in something that had nothing to do with her.

  Prudencia came out with the twenty-peso note still in her hand.

  ‘I don’t have any change,’ she said, stopping short in front of the widow as if she had seen a ghost.

  ‘Hello,’ said the widow.

  ‘What’s new, Pancha?’ responded Prudencia, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘Have you any milk?’

  ‘No, it’s all gone.’

  The widow looked down and stood, undecided. It seemed that the lack of milk had made her particularly sad. Astrid felt a desire to reveal the truth, but she didn’t, deciding to leave her in peace.

  From where she was standing, Prudencia recognized the rural police crossing the highway at top speed.

  ‘Here come the rangers,’ she said. The widow turned and saw the pick-ups park in front of Justino Téllez’ house.

  5

  Justino had barely heard the motors being turned off when he discovered Carmelo Lozano peering at him through the window.

  ‘What’s up, beast with claws?’ shouted the captain.

  Justino leaned back lazily in his breakfast chair. ‘Just hanging out, beast with hoofs,’ he answered dully, bored with their old formula.

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer me some?’ asked Carmelo.

  Justino spread his arms. ‘Do I have a choice?’ he answered without looking at him.

  The captain lifted a long leg over the window sill and entered the house.

  ‘There’s a door for that,’ complained Justino.

  Carmelo gave him a mocking grin. ‘I know, but that’s how I remember the steaming nights I visited your sister.’

  Since Justino had no sisters, the policeman’s crude joke made no impression.

  Carmelo pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. ‘What are you going to give me for breakfast?’

  Justino didn’t answer, but uncovered a pot containing three fried mojarras.

  ‘They’ll make a good taco,’ said Carmelo. ‘Pass me a tortilla.’

  Justino shoved the tortilla basket toward him. Carmelo carefully stripped one of the fish from its bones, put the flesh in a tortilla, squeezed lemon juice onto it, salted it and put it away in four bites.

  With the same care, the captain made himself three more tacos and then asked Justino for two bananas, which he devoured instantly. Finally, he asked if Justino knew when the baseball game would be broadcast from Tampico.

  ‘At eight tonight,’ answered Justino, for something to say.

  Carmelo listened attentively, repeated ‘At eight tonight,’ stood up and thanked his friend for the breakfast.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ answered Justino, knowing that Carmelo would not be long in bringing up his professional insight.

  Wiping the residue of oil and fish from his mouth with a piece of toilet paper, the captain rolled up his sleeves, threw back his head and sighed: ‘You and I know, partner,’ he said, ‘that you know a lot about what happened here on Sunday, understand?’

  ‘I don’t understand a damned thing,’ answered Justino, annoyed.

  Carmelo put his hands to his forehead. ‘I’ll try again,’ he said. Taking his hand from his head he traced an oval in the air and continued, ‘Look, partner, I’ll make it clear: if I find out there’s one more corpse in this village because of that girl that was murdered, you’ll be the first I’ll go after. One mistake and I’ll lock you up.’

  Justino well knew Carmelo’s style of feigned and provocative threats, but he decided to play along.

  ‘Go after the troublemakers, why me?’

  Lozano smiled. ‘Because you’re fat and old and easy to catch. The others run fast. Furthermore, didn’t you say you’re the law around here?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Who besides you is going to be responsible?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ argued Justino; ‘let me handle things here my way. You go back to Ciudad Mante and later I’ll let you know how it all turned out.’

  Carmelo took Justino by the arm and feinted a hook to the liver. Justino pretended to dodge it.

  ‘You never change, friend; you’re just as pig-headed as ever,’ said the captain, adding, ‘OK, I won’t give you a hard time.’

  Carmelo opened the door to go out and was met by a wave of hot air in his face. Shading his eyes from the glaring light with the palm of his hand, he said, ‘What a scorcher. You could broil a chicken in it.’

  Justino walked to the door and raised his eyes to a cloudless sky. Lowering them again, he found Carmelo’s eight men roasting in the heat while they waited for their boss. Justino looked at them with a touch of pity.

  ‘It’s your boys that are broiling,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘That’s why they’re here,’ said Carmelo indifferently. ‘Anyway, they needed some sun.’

  He turned to his subordinates and with a finger motioned one of them over. The man jumped out of the truck and stood to attention in front of Carmelo.

  ‘Yes, sir, Captain.’

  Carmelo looked the cop up and down.

  ‘Sergeant Garcés, do you like baseball?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  With a smack of the tongue, Carmelo drew Justino’s attention. ‘You heard that? He likes baseball.’

  Irritated, Justino nodded.

  ‘What’s your favorite team, Sergeant?’ continued Carmelo.

  ‘The Tampico Stevedores.’

  ‘Are they good?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what do you do when you can’t go to the game?’

  ‘I listen to it on the radio.’

  ‘Great, are they playing today?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘At six in the afternoon.’

  ‘At six, not at eight?’

  ‘No, sir, at six.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant. Dismissed.’

  The policeman turned back to his pick-up and Carmelo reproached Justino.

  ‘You’re either a liar or live on the moon.’

  ‘Or I don’t like baseball,’ corrected Justino.

  ‘So, why invent a broadcast at eight?’

  Justino shrugged.

  ‘That’s why you want me to trust you?’ asked the captain sarcastically.

  ‘Just like that.’

  Carmelo put an arm over Justino’s shoulders and pulled him with him toward
s the vehicle.

  ‘When it turns cold, we’ll go duck-shooting, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Justino. They had gone hunting together before, at the expense of the rural police, who provided ammunition and sawed-off shotguns.

  Carmelo opened the door, rolled down the window and climbed into the seat. ‘See you, partner,’ he said. ‘Don’t let this turn into a massacre.’

  Sergeant Garcés climbed out of the back and got behind the wheel. The other policemen got into either vehicle.

  ‘When you’ve made up your mind, let me know who killed the girl. Meantime, keep an eye on Ramón, in case he loses his head and wants to take revenge.’

  The captain and his men took off. Justino had no doubt that Carmelo Lozano could smell blood at any distance.

  Chapter XIII

  A Double-barreled .25-caliber Davis Derringer

  1

  On Sunday night, he bought a batch of twenty portable tape recorders he had negotiated with Lorenzo Marquez, the smuggler, and by Monday afternoon he had sold eighteen of them at two hundred pesos apiece, having paid seventy-five. They were bought by a team of reaperoperators who, that very Monday morning, had finished their contract for ninety hectares of sorghum. The Gypsy was lucky enough to find them, half drunk and loaded with money, where the railroad crossed the highway. They were waiting in a nearby truck stop, while repairs were made to the engine that was to haul away their gigantic reapers. It was an easy sale for the Gypsy because, as soon as one of them bought a tape recorder, the rest felt obliged to do the same so as to keep up appearances.

  That night, he slept on the flatcars along with the operators. He was awakened by the locomotive jerking the string of flatcars into motion. Dropping quickly to the ground, he watched the train head south toward Abasolo. As day broke, he walked to the truck stop, which had already been open for some time. He ordered coffee with milk and scrambled eggs with dried beef. He had earned two thousand pesos in one day, enough to keep him comfortably for the rest of the month, and decided not to work for at least a week.

  The waitress who brought his breakfast was slim and attractive, with fine features and round buttocks. Had he not been busy, thinking about what he would do for the next few days, he would have made a pass at her. As it was, he paid no attention.

  With all that money in hand, his plans changed. He had intended to visit the settlements around Casas, even visit Las Menonas, where more than one modernized Mennonite liked to buy his electronic gadgets and now and then even some fake jewelry. After that, he was going down to Ciudad Mante, stopping to sell in the villages along the highway, so as to return to Loma Grande in two or three weeks. But now he had more than enough time and didn’t know what to do, or where to go.

  He ordered some sweet buns to dunk in his coffee, but the girl told him there were none, and he had to settle for some Wonder pound cakes. They tasted good but quickly fell apart in the coffee, so he had eventually to spoon them out.

  Pushing aside his empty cup, he put his elbows on the table and pondered which way to go. He could continue toward Soto La Marina to spend a few days in the Laguna Madre, or to Cadereyta for a rodeo or a bullfight, or head for Tampico to see relatives and friends, and a whore or two in the brothel of his youth. After considering several options, he decided on Los Aztecas.

  This was the most developed of the villages around the Las Animas reservoir. It boasted four hundred inhabitants and electricity, cement-block houses, a telephone booth, three paved streets and a gas station. He had chosen Los Aztecas for two basic reasons: first, it was there that cotton-dealing generated sporadic but substantial operations in which he could invest his money; and, second and decisively, it was only twenty kilometers from Loma Grande.

  He asked for the check, paid for his breakfast and bought a cheap paper, published in San Fernando, from a kid outside. The headlines reported a round-up of satanic homosexuals in Nuevo Laredo and the waste and excess of a local official. The Gypsy flipped the four printed pages, crumpled them into a ball and threw it away.

  ‘The same as always,’ he thought.

  The kid picked up the paper, smoothed the pages and put it back with the rest of his newspapers to be sold again.

  2

  By ten o’clock in the morning, they were already installed in Ramón’s shop. Sitting on metal chairs painted in the colors and logo of Pepsi Cola, Torcuato Garduño, Pascual Ortega and Macedonio Macedo were drinking beer, avid for news of how things were going, for every detail of how Ramón intended to eliminate his enemy. After the usual round of nonsense, Pascual decided to ask Ramón straight out: ‘Have you decided how you’re going to kill him?’

  ‘No,’ answered Ramón.

  Torcuato got up from his chair and stood next to him. ‘Well, think about it,’ he said, ‘because you’re not going to get the Gypsy just like that.’

  It would be a few weeks before the Gypsy came back to Loma Grande, if he came back at all. It was his habit to show up in the village on the first Friday of each month. There was plenty of time to plan the killing, as Macedonio pointed out.

  ‘What if he shows up right now?’ asked Torcuato. ‘Are we going to let him find out and get away alive and well? No sir, this has to be decided right now. Ramón has to be ready for whenever the son of a bitch comes back.’

  They agreed and, among the four of them, planned countless ways to carry out the murder, discarding them one after the other. To bushwhack him in the gullies was difficult, not only because the Gypsy was always on the look-out, but because to carry it out they would need a shotgun, and only two people in Loma Grande owned one: Omar Carrillo, who had a flintlock which sometimes fired and sometimes didn’t, a risky weapon for this kind of business; and Ranulfo Quirarte—Old Friendly—who wouldn’t lend anyone his 16-gauge single shot. To attack the man with a machete was no good either: since they had carved up his back, the Gypsy never let anyone armed with a machete get within three meters of him.

  After discarding a number of alternatives, the four decided the best way for Ramón to kill him was with a pistol, a small weapon that could be easily handled. However, there was one matter that would have to be solved: the army had recently carried out a surprise and very effective campaign against handguns throughout the area. Only a lucky few had been able to hide theirs and escape confiscation. Among the latter, the only one who was trustworthy was Juan Prieto, Ramón’s best friend. All that remained was to find out if he had ammunition and, most important, if he would lend the weapon.

  3

  Juan Prieto was the same age as Ramón but looked older. At fifteen, he had emigrated as a wetback and been lucky enough to get as far as Portland, Oregon, where the arrest of illegals by immigration agents was almost unknown. He had got a job washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant. After four months, he switched to cleaning bathrooms for an insurance company and from there went back to dishwashing at a dive called Suzie’s Bar, run by an immense woman who changed the color of her hair every week. Juan Prieto had lasted there only three months, because Susan Blackwell, the fat lady, turned him in to immigration so as not to have to pay him his back wages.

  Juan remembered his arrest as a nightmare: four men, three in civilian clothes, and one in an unrecognizable uniform, came into the bar and jumped him as soon as they saw him. Juan immediately realized what was happening and tried to flee between the tables. A customer stuck out his foot and Juan fell on his face. The man in the uniform clubbed him on the floor. Juan tried to protect his head with his arms, but couldn’t prevent a blow to his head, a cracked rib and a splintered elbow.

  He was cuffed, his feet tied, gagged and thrown into the trunk of a car. In that condition, he was taken on a ride that lasted hours to a village he did not recognize. There, he was taken out and handed over to men in other uniforms. They put him into a van, still cuffed, but minus the gag and the ropes on his feet and took him to a building in San Francisco. In a glass-walled office, a translator informed him that he was under arrest for illegal
residence in the country, resisting arrest, striking an officer and robbery. He was further informed that the district attorney would withdraw the charges if he signed papers undertaking never to return to the United States. Juan signed. They fingerprinted, photographed and booked him, and five days later, deported him to Tijuana in another van.

  In Tijuana, other wetbacks explained that his lightning deportation was typical of denunciations by crooked employers. Accusations of robbery were frequent in such cases. Infuriated by the trick, Juan found a way to return to Portland and get even with the fat lady, and by the way collect his belongings from the rooming house where he had lived.

  He had crossed the border again, hidden in a loaded trailer. In San Diego, he picked up some money by rolling a Portuguese sailor he found lying blind-drunk on a sidewalk. It paid for a Greyhound ticket to Sacramento; but it took him two months more to get to Portland.

  There, he picked up his belongings, including eight hundred dollars he had saved, sewing them into the seams of a pair of trousers. The manager was an old black alcoholic, whose memories of past glory had to do with the time he played bass in B. B. King’s first band.

  The afternoon of his arrival, Juan carefully cased Susan Blackwell’s bar. It was her habit to leave the place at four in the morning, after closing up and clearing accounts. That morning she made no change in her routine. As she was getting into her car, Juan clubbed her on the head, and then again and again.

  She fell to the pavement, her green hair soaked in blood. Thinking she was dead, Juan grabbed her bag and ran through the still city streets.

  He returned to Mexico full of fear, regretting his violent behavior. On his way, he bought a pocket pistol offered to him in a bus terminal. It was a double-barreled .25 caliber Davis Derringer, which cost him fifty dollars. He taped it into the lining of his hat, ready for use on the first cop who tried to arrest him. There was no need. He reached the border at Eagle Pass, opposite Piedras Negras, changing buses from time to time, and there crossed the river on an inflated tractor inner-tube.