The guitarists and the chorus finished “Let It Be” and someone started singing a Benedetti poem. The police who were going to break up the strike never showed.
***
“Does life smile at you?” Héctor asked Gómez Letras a few hours later, while Gómez Letras toiled at installing a new bathtub in his house.
“Me, life fights me,” the plumber and officemate said indifferently.
“Do you object to philosophy?” Héctor asked, looking around and tearing because the cigarette smoke had gotten in his eye.
The plumber contemplated him carefully. He had his doubts, especially over these last few weeks, about the quality of the detective’s mental state. When he saw that the weeping was going no further and had to do with the puff of smoke, he calmed down but he didn’t feel obliged to answer.
“Do you believe in luck?” Héctor insisted, asking almost out of inertia, because he couldn’t think of anything better to do.
“I believe other people have luck.”
“Do you think women and men are equal?”
“It depends on how you arrange them.”
“Have you ever gotten laid by a Christian?”
“I think I was really drunk once and I screwed a Mormon. But I didn’t mean to, so it doesn’t count.”
“Do you already know who you’re going to vote for?”
“Shit yeah, Cárdenas.”
“But weren’t you an abstentionist?”
“That was before. Now, yes, we should screw the PRI.”
“Who’s we?”
“The Cárdenas people. Where have you been, boss?”
Héctor couldn’t think of any more questions, nor did he think it was worth the trouble to answer, and he went off smoking down the hall, leaving Gómez Letras to work on the bathtub. The afternoon light was waning.
“I’m leaving. Make yourself at home,” he yelled from the front door.
Gómez Letras peered out to watch him leave, still a little worried. Héctor almost tripped over the ducks.
“Stay in the shadows, boss, you’re acting pretty dopey.”
He hopped down the steps, thinking about the bathtub.
The bathtub was being installed for free, thanks to a bet. Héctor had wagered that the university team would score against Atlante and the plumber, momentarily weak, had allowed his populist whims to influence him. Now he was installing a bathtub, free of charge, in the detective’s house, even though it had cost him a little extra to buy the materials. Héctor wanted a bathtub. If the plumber was feeling nostalgic for the lower class and bet on the mangiest team in the first division of Mexican soccer, Héctor couldn’t give a shit. Since his earliest childhood, the scene of voluptuous Cleopatra soaking herself was fixed in his memory, and he dreamed shamefully of having gardenia salt baths. When death loomed very near, or the sensation of death came visiting, inhibitions were lost, fear of the ridiculous evaporated, the prudish barriers crumbled, and the silliest taboos managed to die, allowing the phantoms to peer out from under the bed. With gardenias, just like an Australian whore, he said to himself, smiling, mocking himself.
The afternoon light had vanished by the time he got down the stairs. Only neon and mercury lit his way to the taxi stand. It was only eight at night, but the street was surprisingly empty. Somewhere a record player replete with rancheras was howling at the moon like an urban coyote. It was a good night. Cold air you could almost taste. A wind from the south, from the eternal winter winds of El Ajusco, just enough to rouse the skin, briefly bristle the down, sensitizing the poorly shaved chin, clearing the color of the eyes (the eye). Héctor accelerated his pace, not straying outside the lit area, looking behind him every once in a while. He was less afraid now than other nights, but habits stick to the cerebral cortex of the brain, the rituals of fear repeat themselves and bring back terrors by doing so.
At Ínsurgentes Square, he went into the subway. The train had a few empty seats. He took a novel by Marc Behm out of his coat pocket and vanished inside it. He emerged from the pages of the book half a dozen stops later, at Isabel la Católica, and got off the orange train. He walked a dozen blocks to the Hotel Luna. Not many people on the streets. It was the Thursday before payday, people locked themselves in to share their economic woes with the television. It was cold.
He checked into the hotel under the name of Arturo Cane, travel agent, and they put him in Room 111. He took stock of the small bathroom, washed his hands, took off his coat, and fell onto the bed. He resumed his reading. Half an hour later he realized his eye hadn’t moved off the same line. What had he been thinking about? The revolver in the holster was making his ribs hurt a little, still he didn’t take it off; he closed his eyes and tried to convince himself he was sleeping. He managed.
The light woke him up gradually and this time he didn’t come out of a nightmare, just a gray cloud in which Chopin was playing. He remembered a particularly unpleasant flu from his childhood and the experiment of Chopin as a cure for the fever that his mother had devised. It hadn’t worked, but Chopin was incontrovertibly linked in his memory to a 104 degree temperature, muscle aches, and cold sweats.
He did not wake up wondering where he was. He was in a hotel room. He had done it again. As he hoisted himself out of bed, Héctor seriously considered the possibility of committing himself to a mental asylum, of buying a ticket to heaven with the family psychiatrist. What was this shit about sleeping in hotels, registering under false names? Who was the idiot inside his head toying with his fears?
He had read in a novel that a paranoid could be defined as a Mexico City citizen with an acute perception of reality and an abundance of common sense. It was a funny joke, but this was going a little far. Okay, fine, peeing during nightmares was good. Crying in the street upon seeing a beggar was even better: it was a healthier reaction than walking right by him pretending he didn’t exist. Packing two guns and a knife, fine, fucking fine, not a big deal, apart from the fact that he was carrying three pounds of excess equipment, looking over his shoulders even in the movies, hearing footsteps in the hallway, doubting the integrity of the milkman or the identity of the gas man, fine, perfect, very healthy. But sleeping in hotels under assumed names, calling a revolting aunt whom he hadn’t seen for twenty years to cry as he told her some tearful story just because she was the closest thing to a mother figure he could pull out of his memory, that was too much already. That was too much shit already. Who was ordering him to go into a hotel? When did he decide?
Héctor threw off the clothes he’d slept in. He made himself stand in front of the mirror, studied his naked body carefully, the tons of scars collected over his early years, the tremendous bags under his eyes, the grayish paleness, the fear in his healthy eye, the lamentable scar where his other eye should have been. He forced a smile, then another wider one.
For the next hour, Belascoarán Shayne, Mexican detective, tried out thousands of smiles in front of the mirror. Then he washed his face with cold water, put over his eye a black leather patch that matched his jacket and got dressed.
He would have to learn to live with himself.
***
The New York—Washington—Mexico City Pan Am flight had just landed. That gave him fifteen minutes while the passengers went through immigration and customs. The airport was strangely deserted. It wasn’t the time, maybe it was the day. Or maybe it was him, smelling like death and therefore repelling crowds. Or the city, which frightened tourists with those caved-in buildings from the earthquake that hid the bodies, and whose silhouettes surrounded by dust-filled air and by bare-chested, anonymous heroes had danced on the TV screens of a hundred thousand other cities, jerking brotherly tears here and there. But brotherly tears don’t do much for tourism, and the memory is short, Héctor said to himself. He quickly looked for one of the little shops and got himself a Coke in an aluminum can, the kind of can that after drinking you can squash, and can transport the actor of the deed to the paradise of Hollywood stuntmen. He looked at a fe
w boys who were porters playing hopscotch on the polished, shiny floor.
The electronic screen fascinated him for a couple of minutes. He was missing out on a lot of places, there were thousands of trips to take. And thousands of returns to the city of miracles, the city of horrors. Calling Mexico City “the monster” had become very vogue, but the nickname hid the better definition. He preferred to speak of his city as the cave of lies, the cavern of cannibals, the city of prostitutes on bicycles or in the black car of a cabinet minister, the cemetery of talking TVs, the city of men looking over their shoulders at their pursuers, the village occupied by label counterfeiters, the paradise of press conferences, the collapsed city, trembling, lovingly in ruins, its debris rummaged through the moles of God.
In his decalogue on mystery novels, Chandler forgot to prohibit detectives from getting metaphysical, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne—gun-carrying argonaut of Mexico City, the world’s biggest city at its own expense, the biggest cemetery of dreams—said to himself.
When he recognized Luke Estrella, a sensation of unreality invaded him. It is a lie that one recognizes people after having looked at their picture a hundred times. The illusion that the whole thing was a game vanished. The guy was there, dragging a black leather suitcase on wheels, sunglasses as dark as death, white patent leather shoes, black pants made from a synthetic nylon that shone with the reflections of the neon lights in the international wing of the airport. Shit, Héctor said to himself, almost regretting having spotted Luke Estrella, who, not knowing he’d been targeted by the astonished gaze of the detective, went on dodging two porters and two little blond girls who were hugging each other and crying under their mother’s long legs.
Estrella was like his photo, but aged, his curly hair was streaked with gray hairs, his lips were thicker and drooping, perhaps in a wince of exhaustion; a tropical sway probably learned in the prostitute bars of Miami, a partially dark grimace in the corner of his mouth, a walk without brushing against anyone, above and distanced from the sparse crowd waiting to divest the relative just in from New York of the booty from the gift shops of Manhattan.
Héctor didn’t know what to do, he had not anticipated Estrella’s materialization in spite of his previous good intentions, he couldn’t quite believe that the guy would appear so unruffled, so alive, in the middle of the night in Mexico City. Estrella dragged his suitcase toward the taxi stand door. Héctor saw him pass practically at his side, brushing against him. Then he reacted and ran out to the tower parking lot. With the first steps of the race the realization came: if he rented a car now, he would never be able to find the gusano. He turned around, reentered the terminal, used the same exit Estrella had. The Cuban was waiting in line. Héctor lined up two places behind him, with a fat German lady between them.
“How much to the Hotel Presidente, kiddo?” Estrella asked into the little window.
Héctor smiled. Detectives, like soccer goalies, have fifty-five percent luck and the rest natural talent to hurl themselves into the appropriate spot.
He entered a cab in his turn, rode calmly through the viaduct. The city was emptier than usual, lonelier, sadder. Passing through Monterrey and the neighborhood of Los Doctores, you could make out the ruins three hundred feet away. Héctor thought about the distance. He needed to back off. He’d approached Estrella twice. A one-eyed man is exceedingly visible, like a brand of cola on a television ad, you always get the feeling you’ve seen him before. The only thing he was missing was a fluorescent T-shirt and a couple of rumba dancers hanging off his arm. He would have to get the glass eye out of the dresser drawer, he would have to put on a no-man’s-face, he’d have to dress like a lamppost, anonymous, like an ad for something out of style, he would have to follow Estrella from a distance if he wanted to fuck him.
And he did.
Chapter Four
The most fascinating quality about things
is that they change so quickly that one keeps
thinking of them the way they were before.
Paco Ignacio Taibo I
Héctor knew from past experience that creatively tailing someone requires double the hours that the guy invests in getting around. Because you have to touch what the guy touches, you have to go back over his steps to find out what size shoe the man wears who crossed paths with him on the terrace; what he spoke about with the pale blonde, and who she sleeps with; the name of the waiter and how much the bill was. If you didn’t work like that, the whole thing turned into a silent movie, indecipherable, because the actors are usually bad, weak, always veering from the already incomprehensible script. It was either that, or technology: to close the distance with telephoto lenses and wireless microphones placed on the tail of a cat or the neckline of a trapeze artist swinging between the lamps.
Resolve the contradiction, he said to himself. Approach fully or back off and return two or three times over the guy’s tracks. Héctor was eclectic and didn’t have access to technology beyond a pair of rubber sandals that didn’t squeak.
That’s why the first day was a failure.
Luke Estrella moved through Mexico City without much hesitancy, including knowing a few codes that are usually reserved for natives and denied to tourists, like not hailing the taxi in front of the hotel, but walking a couple of blocks and stopping one as it passed, which would certainly be cheaper; like wrapping your big bills inside smaller ones; like you don’t need coins for the public phones because even though the instructions order you to insert one, after the earthquake the phone company disconnected the payment system due to the emergency situation and it’s still that way. Estrella hardly even paused before crossing the streets, he didn’t make unnecessary turns. This guy knew Mexico City; what’s more, he had been here within the last year. He didn’t look at the crumbled buildings from the earthquake with any particular interest, he wasn’t interested in the park plaza fire-eaters, he wasn’t surprised by the street booksellers.
After a peaceful, solitary night in the hotel (he even ate in his room, a suite on the sixteenth floor), Estrella had spent the day in a dance without much meaning around the streets in the center of Mexico City: a visit to Aurora Jewelry on Alameda, from which he exited without having bought a thing; a long walk up and down San Juan de Letrán, ending in the purchase of a couple of postcards in the post office, which he filled out right there, put the stamps on and deposited in one of the mailboxes (air mail/international); he went up to the top floor of the Latin American Tower and spent half an hour contemplating the artificial gray fog that covered the city from the southwest to the north. Later, another walk toward Mexico City’s minuscule Chinatown, down narrow Dolores Street. He ate there in a mediocre restaurant where even the waiters were Mandarin. The woman at the table next to him, a plain blonde about forty-five years old, made a little conversation with him, but Héctor, three tables away, couldn’t pick up anything of importance, beyond Estrella’s blowing her off, after a few polite smiles. The Cuban-American spent two hours in the afternoon in a shoe store buying boots. Three pairs, one of them very expensive crocodile leather, which he had sent to the hotel, and later he sat down to read the papers in the Alameda, his back to the statue of Benito Juárez. When it started getting dark, he went back to the hotel and did not reappear.
Estrella had spent his day blissfully and Héctor felt like an idiot.
Too innocent to be true. Either he was waiting for a contact, or someone was helping him figure out if he was being tailed; if that were the case, Héctor could have been easily identified; he had taken no precautions other than concealing himself from the Cuban.
Around twelve at night, Belascoarán dropped into the hardest armchair in his office, the one in which he couldn’t fall asleep due to the springs that stuck out and jutted into his butt, and he decided he didn’t like Luke Estrella one bit, but he didn’t like Héctor Belascoarán Shayne much either.
Estrella, if what Alicia had told him were true, was a son of a bitch. If he’d never heard the story, he would hav
e known it just from seeing the way he walked through the city without touching it, without letting it touch him, the way he looked at things with no affection; he smiled too much, he couldn’t spare a friendly look for the people selling single Kleenexes. Estrella was minding his own business, Estrella was waiting, Estrella was killing time. And Héctor, who knew a lot about death, felt betrayed after a day of useless pursuit.
If a detective orthodoxy happens to exist, a heterodoxy must also exist, a kind of heresy. That is why, after his tenth filtered Delicado, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne got up from the armchair with the popped springs, and at about three in the morning went back out again, stopped a taxi in front of the door to his office, and asked to be taken to the Hotel Presidente Chapultepec.
He registered as Manuel Lombadero, native of Barcelona, paying with American Express traveler’s checks that he had countersigned and that he couldn’t remember how had gotten into his coat pocket. Maybe he’d put them there during one of his many paranoid ravings and signed that strange name, which he recognized as the production assistant of a Spanish mystery movie. Life was already sufficiently bizarre and he was insisting on making it still more grotesque. The reception manager swallowed the tried-and-true excuse that he’d lost his luggage in the airport and Héctor let himself be led to a room on the sixteenth floor, three doors down from Estrella’s.
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