Return to the Same City

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “Can you see the label from here?”

  “No, man, I’m guessing.”

  Héctor took back the binoculars and focused his gaze on Estrella. After the initial clash with the owner of the house he’d kept quiet, watching and half smiling, as if this weren’t about him, eating abundantly and drinking all the wine poured into his glass. In that instant Dick left the detective, walked among the weeds toward the car, and came back with a Minolta endowed with an enormous telephoto lens. He started snapping the men dining on the terrace a hundred yards away. The smell of the sea was swept in by a gentle breeze.

  “I’m turning into a man without passion. A few years ago, curiosity would have forced me to creep in through the garden until I got under the terrace, to see if I could fish out some scrap of conversation,” Belascoarán said in Spanish.

  “What the hell are they talking about?” Dick asked, not having understood the detective’s spiel.

  “The weather, the natural beauty of Acapulco. It’s a group of amiable investors who want to launch a new travel agency. Are you sure the gringo is CIA?”

  “We’ve met,” Dick said, not going into the story.

  “The skinny guy they all treat with so much coddling, the one with the pointy nose. I don’t like the way he smiles one bit,” Héctor said.

  “Me neither.”

  “He arrived in a blue car, a Ford. With three gunmen. We could wait for him beyond the bend, on the side of the Diana statue.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait to see how this ends?”

  “Dessert was over a while ago.”

  ***

  The woman was dancing naked on the table. Every once in a while, her sex shook six inches away from the pointed nose of the man they had followed. The music was a tropical beat but the woman had lost it a good while ago and danced following who knows what internal sounds, possibly from indigestion. The cabaret was a democratic hovel in the center of the city, where two friendly cops searched the clients at the door (to disarm them) and the greatest spectacle was a couple of dogs screwing in the entrance. At least that seemed to interest the customers more than what was happening on the table. The cops in blue had given a military salute to the man with the pointy nose, who was now counting bills, the woman’s sex swinging close to his face not seeming to distract him. The bills did not come floating through the air to the table. Every so often, some timid gorilla approached the man, handed him a wad, as if apologizing for the affront, not daring to sit down with him.

  “Who is it?” Dick asked.

  “From his manners, he has to be the chief of the Judicial Police,” Héctor answered, feeling a long shiver run up his spine.

  “What shit are we getting mixed up in?” the gringo reporter asked, throwing back a swig of his double tequila.

  “I have no idea, but my good eye is starting to blink.”

  “Do you feel sick?”

  “No, I’m fine, I think it’s just fear,” the detective said, finishing his Pepsi in one long gulp.

  A sweaty fat man approached their table, put his hands between the empty glasses, and offered them a photo album.

  “You can choose, boss. They’re the best around. House calls, too. They come to your room with a bottle. Clean, they bring your condom, two condoms in case you’re a multiple screwer. They do everything. Everything, boss!”

  Héctor flipped through the pages of the photo album curiously. It could easily have been a family album with pictures of weddings and sweet sixteen parties, bachelor parties, and Grandma’s golden wedding anniversary. But they were sad photos of naked teenagers with looks and poses that hoped to evoke eroticism and rather seemed more like material for a book by Lévi-Strauss.

  “I’ve got machines, dogs, hags, boys, pregnant women. Everything, I’ve got everything, all you have to do is ask, boss.”

  Héctor passed the album to the gringo reporter, wanting nothing to do with the affair. The man with the pointy nose finished counting, looked around the joint, made a gesture and the music vanished. A busboy put a bottle of tequila in the hands of one of the assistants, who in turn brought it to the boss’ table. From a back room, through a curtain, came three guitarists, playing the tune of a bolero.

  The woman who was dancing naked came down off the table. The music of the guitars seemed to have muted all the other noises in the room. The fat man grabbed his album without insisting. Then the man with the pointy nose stood up, stuck the rolls of bills in his pants pockets, and motioned to the guitar players. They segued into “Nosotros,” and he started singing along. He was out of tune.

  ***

  You don’t ask too many questions in a city where you don’t have friends. You mull over each thing, you add up little facts, you don’t get big stories. Two days later, as he drank an iced coffee on the terrace of his hotel and contemplated the light in Estrella’s room and the sky of the Acapulco bay, full of dancing stars, the detective told the North American reporter the five names he had found in two days of snooping around. Two days, in fact, in which the gringo had disappeared on him. There wasn’t much, not much at all. The five guys who had been dining that evening.

  Estrella-Betancourt. Attorney Roberto Garduño, lawyer for transnational hotel companies; divorced two months earlier from a girl of golden youth, the daughter of the owner of a watch factory; jai alai player, local champion; owner of two discos. The skinny, long-nosed man was named Julio Reyes and he was not the commander, just the group chief of Acapulco’s Judicial Police; a fan of romantic music; winner of two or three radio contests; he was not from Guerrero, he was born in the south, in Chiapas, near the border; there was talk that he had once cut off a man’s head with a machete; prostitutes loved him, he didn’t give them a hard time, he didn’t touch them, once he’d been in love with one of them who fled for the border, they said he dedicated his best songs to her. A gringo from the CIA called Jerome. A retired admiral, Julio Pacheco, who was now the proprietor of a coconut farm for the manufacture of oil on the Costa Grande of Guerrero.

  “I was always afraid of riding a bike,” Dick said, sipping his coffee. “I went straight from crawling to cars. Very North American, that. Still, I would trade all the Pontiacs, Fords, and Chevrolets I have ever driven for a good bike ride. You long for what you’ve never had.”

  Héctor studied the reporter. When had he gotten drunk and with what?

  “I have a son I haven’t seen in a year and I’ve always wanted to buy him a bike, but his mother won’t let me. I think I owe my obsession with bicycles to that. See, I’m a father without a son. Psychiatrists don’t understand shit about all that. Mine tries to persuade me to lose weight instead of persuading me to just buy a bike once and for all.”

  Héctor walked to the bathroom, reconstructing the reporter’s movements, and found two empty gin bottles in the sink. Motherfucker, another lunatic. In the middle of a conversation, he went into the bathroom and drank gin straight from the bottle.

  “And now they make them with the handlebars in the shape of horns, but before…” He swung around to see Héctor carrying the cadaver of the gin. “You drink the same brand?”

  Héctor shook his head.

  “Do you know that joke about the guy who picked up a girl in the woods and she sat on the handlebars of the bike and when they got into town she thanked him for the ride on the handlebars of the bike and he said to her, ‘No, this bike doesn’t have handlebars’?”

  Dick didn’t wait for the detective to smile; he turned around, stumbling into the base of one of the beds, and rummaged through his carpetbag. He took out a new bottle, sparkling…The light in Estrella’s room went off. Héctor walked to the door.

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The hotel orchestra playing by the pool was engrossed in a nameless bossa nova. He walked along the beach, barely lit by the moon, toward the neighboring hotel. He went up the stairs leading to the pool, they were grilling lobster under a gazebo. A new orchestra was playing another bossa nova. Héctor pricked
up his ears, trying to hear the one they were playing back at his hotel; suddenly it seemed very important to know whether it was the same one. He couldn’t tell. Estrella was sitting by the side of the pool, dangling his toes in the water, frolicking. Héctor stayed close to where he could smell the lobsters cooking in their own juice. Estrella was a theatrical guy, with his white linen suits and his sky blue shirts, his dark glasses even on moonless nights, his curly hair with a few silver strands, his rhythmical gestures that made him seem like a retired rumba dancer.

  The whole thing was amusing. If he wanted to follow Alicia’s suggestions, all he had to do was reintroduce Estrella to his friend Julio Reyes, the group chief of the Judicial Police in Acapulco, and tell him that the Cuban had stuck his nose in some foul play. No, it wasn’t funny at all. In this country, all that remained was Apache justice. First he would have to know, then he would have to find the roads on which God’s justice would reach Luke Estrella and punish him for going around torturing a woman who liked Armando Manzanero’s boleros and all that, while evading another guy who sang José Feliciano boleros in brothels.

  A waiter approached the chair where Estrella was reclining and took his order. Shortly thereafter, he returned with two cocktails. Héctor walked, bordering the pool on the opposite side looking for a new place of observation; he found it on a few deck chairs near where they stored the towels. He reclined on one of them, still in the darkness. Estrella was toying with his cocktail now. A woman in a radiantly white evening gown passed beside him, it had an extraordinarily low back, closing the dress almost at the birth of her buttocks. She shot a look at Héctor, sitting in the darkness in his dark blue bathing suit and his black T-shirt, his left eye covered by the patch. The look was prolonged for an instant in a friendly, languid, complicitous smile. The woman circled the edge of the pool. When she approached Estrella, he stood up with the two cocktails in his hands. The woman stopped and started conversing with him. They knew each other. Héctor waited for the Cuban to besiege her with flattery. Nothing like that came to pass. Estrella didn’t even shoot a glance at the naked back when the woman looked for a chair to sit down next to him; he limited himself to pulling out a small book from one of the pockets of his white suit and took a few notes about what the woman was telling him. Héctor felt a sharp pang of fear. Why had the blonde with the low back smiled at him?

  Chapter Seven

  We now know that locking yourself in serves for nothing, any disaster takes death to the safest refuge.

  José Emilio Pacheco

  When he woke up he was lying on the rug and the gringo reporter was staring at him; a bottle of gin (a new one?) affectionately rocking in his arms.

  “You have nightmares,” Dick informed him.

  “I suppose I do, I never remember them,” Héctor said, standing up and walking with difficulty to the bathroom.

  “What’s your favorite song?”

  “‘La Bamba,’ the new version by Los Lobos, it’s much better than the original version by Trini Lopez; although the truth is, I feel affection for that one…”

  The detective stuck his face under the gush of water in the sink, not daring to look at it first. The water was cold. What the hell was he doing in Acapulco with a drunk gringo reporter for a roommate and pursuing a Cuban gusano who was a CIA agent? There were ten other equally exciting and idiotic possibilities. Start a bakery in the middle of Puebla, work as a peon in the new archaeological excavations of Teotihuacán, become a groupie of the Symphonic Orchestra of the State of Mexico and follow them to all their concerts. How wonderful! One day in Ocampo, another in Lerma, finally Toluca.

  Dick started talking, staring into space.

  “The heat drives me crazy. Not suddenly, slowly. I swear that when I got to Acapulco I had the most serious intention of lending you a hand with this story,” he said, moving his head from one side to another, as if saying no. “But I don’t know, it’s something superior to my strength. Strange stories start coming into my head. I remember a cousin of mine who takes care of dolphins at Sea World and I get jealous…”

  “What are we doing here?” Héctor asked.

  “Following my Gary Betancourt, the famous Sid Valdés-Vasco, in other words, your Luke Estrella,” the gringo said to the detective, flopping onto the bed and taking a good swig of gin. Neither his bed or Héctor’s was unmade; the detective had slept on the rug, the reporter had either spent the night standing up on the terrace or had gone out there before Héctor got back.

  “That’s what I thought,” the detective said, putting on a Coca-Cola T-shirt.

  “You wear imperialist T-shirts?” Dick asked.

  “It’s Coca-Cola Mexico, made by honest Mexican workers in bottling factories in cities as healthy, Mexican, and productive as Iguala or Jalapa, or in rancid suburbs like Tlanepantla,” Héctor responded, thinking that insanity might be contagious.

  “That bastard with the dolphins, he knows what life is,” Dick said before falling asleep, the bottle of gin miraculously safe in his clutch.

  Héctor approached him and took it away, then went out on the balcony. Estrella was on his hotel terrace. Héctor went back into the room and got his binoculars. Was he looking toward his room? Impossible. He was over a hundred yards away. Damned Cuban, son of a fucking bitch, with those dark glasses you could never know what he was watching.

  Maybe Dick was right, the dolphin guy lived a life straight out of the movies.

  Héctor drew his nose to the bottle of gin, he smelled it cautiously. The aroma was sickly sweet. Maybe he could throw it down the toilet, then refill it with water and sugar and Dick wouldn’t notice. He remembered something his friend René Cabrera said. They were sentences that suddenly came to his memory. René was the best poet of his generation, but he had insisted on being a scientist, and was running around out there in the state of Veracruz doing anthropology. He left the room with the sentence dancing in his head: “How lucky are dwarfs, who see the world so beautifully and from below.”

  ***

  Thumbing through brochures that offered love boat excursions, he waited patiently in the lobby of the neighboring hotel for Estrella to appear on the way to the dining room; when the Cuban did so, he took the elevator to the sixth floor. He sought out the woman who went around making up the rooms and approached her with a smile.

  “I left my key downstairs, señorita, could you just open the door to 604 for me?”

  The woman didn’t even look at him. Héctor blessed the rare honesty that still existed, and entered Estrella’s room without looking back. The notebook he was looking for was on the little night table. Before leafing through it, he noted the plane ticket in the open drawer of the bureau and the .45 sticking out of the half-open suitcase. The guy had five identical white suits, he discovered upon examining the closet. He must not believe in the virtues of Mexican laundry. The notebook was a small calendar, totally blank with the exception of one page toward the back on which three figures were written. He memorized them.

  In his hotel room, Dick was asleep. Héctor shook him a little and read the three figures to him.

  “What is this?”

  “The wholesale prices of a quarter ounce of cocaine in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami one week ago.”

  “Are you serious? Don’t tease.”

  “That’s what I think, let’s see, say them again. They could also be the price of the rates for one line of advertising in the New York Times, Miami Herald, and Los Angeles Times.”

  “Six hundred thirty-one, four hundred thirteen, five hundred eighteen.”

  “Shit, I was right. I’m more alert asleep,” Dick said and he reimmersed himself in the nightmare the detective had interrupted. Héctor looked at him with absolute distrust.

  ***

  Estrella met with two of the table companions of that night again in one of Garduño’s discos. A spot on the Costera, lit up by quartz reflectors that cast a “here I am” to the sky, and with music that deafened for a thousand feet aro
und. Observing the variety of cars pulling up and parked in the back, it was clear that the place called Cleopatra was quite fashionable. Jerome, Estrella, and Garduño met at a table full of champagne bottles facing the dance floor and they were the only three serious members of the panel of judges for Miss Bikini Acapulco ’88. Héctor thought that if there were something to be understood here, no one had shown him the synopsis. What the hell were three guys suspected of hatching dirty business on an international scale doing acting as the jury for a beauty contest?

  As the night progressed he consumed Coca-Colas at the bar like a desperate man, and Héctor hated them a little more. They were voting for the wrong one. In the first round, they disqualified his favorite, a girl from the Gulf with long, dark legs; in the second vote, they left the tiny blonde with elevated breasts in fifth place. They were a trio of bastards with bad taste who liked skinny Vogue cover girls.

  For a while, the detective put the contest aside and studied them attentively. They seemed like the best friends in the world, they elbowed one another, whispered things in one another’s ears, poured one another’s drinks. These guys really loved each other, they acted like they’d just come from a high school prom where they had been the three most mafioso pals, the three inseparable monsters. When the winner lifted the bouquet of red roses and let Garduño put a banner on her saying “Señorita Bikini Acapulco ’88,” Héctor thought that this little girl would never know in whose hands the decision that created her triumph had been. Had she known, instead of going around showing off her breasts, she might have devoted herself to selling lottery tickets.

  The detective decided to abandon the disco because he sensed that from the stage, as he embraced the winner, Garduño was watching him. Outside, the heat was sticky, it reeked, the trash was being picked up.

  Dick wasn’t in the hotel room. There was a new empty bottle of gin in the toilet bowl. Héctor removed it so he could pee. Then he fell on the bed and opened a Philip José Farmer science fiction novel he had bought in the hotel lobby. At some point while reading he fell asleep.