by Rodolfo Peña
Lombardo had been told by the forensic medics that that’s where it was going to be taken but with the Fat Man out of the way Lombardo could make a certain request of the Security Manager.
When they were outside, Lombardo lit a Delicado and said to the security man, “What I would like is for you to look through the recordings made by those cameras.” He pointed to the two white boxes perched above the Computer Center’s main entrance. “I would appreciate it if you could get me the bit that shows when Victor Delgado left the building.”
“Of course, Captain,” said the security man.
“Also,” said Lombardo while spitting out bits of tobacco that the unfiltered cigarette had deposited on his tongue, “any recordings that show people unconnected to the Computer Center—you know, suspicious characters.”
The security man looked at Lombardo as if trying to decide if this last was meant as a joke or sarcasm, but Lombardo was looking straight ahead with a serious look on his face.
“Yes, Captain—suspicious activity. I’ll order copies for you.”
Lombardo extended a hand; the security man mistook the gesture for a handshake until he saw that Lombardo was holding a calling card.
“Here is my phone number. Let me know when the copies are ready and I will send someone over to pick them up.”
“Don’t worry about that, Captain. I will have them delivered to you.”
Lombardo said good-bye and walked over to the car where the Fat Man was busily talking on the radio.
“Let’s go, Gonzalez. Stop snitching to your boss because we have another stop to make,” he said loudly to the Fat Man so the Director could hear over the radio.
As Lombardo walked toward his car, he saw that the security man was still standing there on the steps to the Computer Center, looking at his card, and talking into his phone. “Probably checking to see if he should do what I asked him,” Lombardo said. “Everyone’s a bureaucrat; they’re all afraid of losing their jobs.”
Gonzalez was huffing and puffing again as he tried to keep up with Lombardo. “Captain, that interview was something one could not describe even as routine. You were so tame with them, you put me to sleep.”
“Look, Gonzalez,” said Lombardo stopping suddenly in the middle of the parking lot, “these bureaucrats are not going to tell us anything they don’t want us to know. I’m sure your boss called to warn them I was coming so they knew beforehand what they were going to say. I would bet that they are probably relieved that my questioning was very brief. Everybody is happy, you see?”
“No, I don’t see,” said Gonzalez, “but I’m glad that there was nothing much to report to the Director. No one got upset, no feathers ruffled, eh? I think I’ll go have lunch now and then have a nap at home and then I’ll go to the station sometime in the late afternoon.”
He whistled to his driver and the white cruiser rushed to pick him up.
“Where are you going now?” asked the Fat Man.
“I thought I would go down to the Public Ministry and read the report your buddies wrote. Don’t you want to come along?”
“Listen, Lombardo,” he said, “I know you’re just lying to hide what you are really going to do. You consider yourself a better man than me but as you can see I am more honest than you. I could have said I had some urgent business back at the Department but I told you I was going home for lunch,” said Gonzalez. “I am not a shining example of honesty, Lombardo, but at least I don’t mistrust the whole world.”
Lombardo shrugged. “It’s in my nature, said the scorpion when he stung the poor frog in the middle of the pond.”
The Fat Man shook his head, got in his car, and drove away.
Lombardo smiled and said, “The fat, lazy bastard has a heart.”
On his way to his rambling wreck of a car, Lombardo saw an old man sweeping the gutter of the parking lot’s sidewalk. Lombardo looked at the pile of rubbish the old man had collected and was about to scoop up with a makeshift scoop cut from an oil can. There were a lot of cigarette butts among the trash—some of them unusual.
“Señor,” he said to the old man, “Buenos días.”
The old man turned—his mouth opened and his eyes widened as if startled that someone would speak to him.
“The students smoke a lot, eh?” said Lombardo nodding toward the pile of trash that held a large number of cigarette butts. What had attracted Lombardo’s attention were the long, thin cigarette filters with a gold band. He had seen those before, somewhere, although he couldn’t remember exactly where.
The old man smiled and agreed, “Oh, yes, they smoke a lot. That’s all they do when they sit in the cars out here.”
“And they like to smoke the expensive kind,” said Lombardo while hunkering down to look at the cigarette butts.
The old man shrugged. He probably did not know a cheap cigarette from an expensive one, as these obviously were. “English,” said Lombardo to himself.
“Pardon me,” he said to the old man as he started to pick some of the cigarette butts up by the tobacco end and putting them into his clean handkerchief.
He asked the old man where the cigarette butts had come from and the old man pointed to a spot in the parking lot a few car spaces away.
He asked him if he swept the parking lot every day. He said he did.
“Were there a lot of these on the ground yesterday?”
“No, there were not. I swept the lot clean yesterday morning, too. I sweep it every day. That’s my job.”
Lombardo thanked the old man and went to the place the old man had pointed out. Lombardo stood on the sidewalk and looked down at the space between the two white lines. It was clean, freshly swept, as the old man had said. There was nothing unusual about the spot nor was it any different from the hundreds of other spots in the parking lot, but Lombardo stood staring down at it as if he had seen something.
He turned to look at the Computer Center building—the entrance was plainly visible from the spot. He moved to stand at the place where a driver might have sat if a car had backed up into the parking space. Then, he looked down: “If the man who had smoked the English cigarettes had been sitting in a car about here,” he whispered, “then he would have thrown down his cigarette butts about there.” Lombardo hunkered down and looked into the loose gravel of the parking lot floor.
Lombardo had only two friends. He met with them occasionally in a bar and sometimes during those long bouts of drinking he talked about his wartime experiences. He said that war had changed how his senses reacted to things. He often said that he had survived the many patrols he had been on because he would come to a spot in the jungle and something, a broken twig, the unusual stillness, the too obvious normalcy, had told him the enemy was there, waiting in ambush.
Now, like a hunting dog that stiffens to point, he stood motionless looking down. He trembled a bit as if a slight chill had cursed through his body. He could feel the danger. His senses told him that someone had been here waiting in ambush.
The wind kicked up and gray clouds rushed overhead. Lombardo put his hands into his overcoat’s pockets. A northerner was blowing in—his scarred shoulder told him so.
Chapter 7: Lombardo Visits a Laboratory
Everything was white—the floor, the walls, the counters, the machines, the stools. Everything was clean, spotless, and immaculate. One could have expected the smell of formaldehyde or antiseptic but even the air was neutral, as if it too had been scoured clean.
It was lunchtime so everyone had gone, but the person he was looking for was still sitting on a properly white stool at the far end of the laboratory in a space enclosed by glass walls. His white lab coat hung down nearly to the floor in a perfectly unwrinkled line. The only color on him, and in the entire place, was the light blue of his shirt’s cuffs and collar, and the light brown of his hair. His face was as pale as the counter on which sat the large, bulky microscope into which he was peering.
Lombardo stood by the glass pane for a moment and then, wh
ile tapping on it, said the man’s name: “Casimiro.”
“Ah, Captain Lombardo,” said Casimiro without looking up, his voice muffled by the partition. “Your cigarette scorched voice is unmistakable. To what do I owe this disagreeable visit?”
“I need you to look at these,” said Lombardo holding up his handkerchief.
Casimiro pulled his head away from the microscope and stared at the handkerchief in Lombardo’s hand. He got up and came through the pressurized door into the corridor. Without a word, he stopped in front of Lombardo and took a brief look at what Lombardo was holding.
“In my expert opinion, they are cigarette butts,” he said dryly.
Lombardo ignored the sarcasm. “Casimiro, I need to know who has been smoking them.”
“Obviously not you, my friend. You only smoke the best.”
“Do I need to remind you…?”
“No, you don’t need to remind me. I know I still owe you. Leave them and I’ll see what I can do for you.”
Casimiro had often told Lombardo that in his highly disciplined life, he only had one bad habit—he liked to gamble. On Saturday afternoons, as the football games were starting in Mexico, he would arrive at the Caliente betting parlor on Garza Sada Avenue, impeccably dressed in a blue blazer, gold and blue stripped silk tie, and gray trousers. He would stay there, sipping whiskey and sodas, eating very little or nothing at all, and betting heavily on every single game. During the American football season, he would do the same thing on Sundays.
As he had admitted to Lombardo, he won and lost small fortunes each weekend.
During a particularly bad losing streak, Casimiro had not gone to the Caliente betting parlor but rather to independent bookies and had bet large sums on the horse races in Tijuana in an effort to recover from his losing streak. He had gotten into an even deeper hole.
When the bookie’s bill collectors had come looking for him, Lombardo had called on some of the thugs that owed him favors to get them to back off. Casimiro had paid off his debt to the bookies but he was grateful to Lombardo for having avoided the beating Casimiro would have surely gotten.
When Casimiro offered him half the money he had won in a football pool, Lombardo refused it and said that he only wanted three favors in return. He always put a number on the amount of favors he asked of someone because he believed that an open-ended obligation was comparable to blackmail or extortion.
Lombardo handed Casimiro the handkerchief.
“Where do they come from?” asked Casimiro.
“Casimiro, don’t tell anyone you are doing this for me, OK? In fact, don’t tell anyone you are doing this, period.”
“Of course not. I would be fired if I did.”
“I’m not worried about your boss, I’m worried about the floosies you hang around with,” said Lombardo dryly.
Casimiro laughed. “But seriously,” Lombardo continued, “I have a feeling that if the thugs who smoked these found out what you are doing for me, it might do you worse harm than getting you fired.”
“Hmm, it’s that bad, huh?”
“Yeah, because if my hunch is right the heavies that left those around wouldn’t like me to know what you’re going to tell me, you see? And they are pretty dangerous folk.”
Casimiro looked at Lombardo. The Captain was not a man to warn you about inconsequential things or imagined threats.
“OK,” Casimiro said quietly.
“Let me know when you have something. Don’t use voice on your cell phone and don’t leave voice messages on my cell phone. Send a text message saying my laundry is ready. Got it?”
“Your laundry is ready, right,” repeated Casimiro. “By the way, why didn’t you take this to your people in the forensic lab?”
“I want to know right away who I am dealing with; the forensics people have a lot of other cases; I would just get put in the back of the line because I haven’t saved any one of them from thugs, you see?”
“I’m beginning to think I should have taken the beating.”
“Aw, that would have spoiled your beauty, Casimiro.”
“I would’ve recovered, which is something I can’t say about our ‘friendship,’” said Casimiro. “By the way, how old are these things and where did you get them?”
“Whatever’s on them can’t be more than a day old. There’ll be a lot of dust and stuff on them because they were on the ground, in a parking lot.”
“Hmm, properly contaminated with all sorts of junk from cars, I suppose.”
“You tell me, Casimiro. I have to go now. Let me know as soon as you’ve got something.”
Lombardo turned around and left the laboratory.
“Yes, you are welcome, Captain,” shouted Casimiro at the retreating Lombardo who did not go out the front of the building but rather through the back door.
There was a small parking lot for the laboratory’s personnel in the back of the building that opened onto a side street.
Like a lot of the streets in the Obispado section of Monterrey, the little side street was steep and narrow. During the thirties, forties, and fifties, this section of the city had been the place to build a mansion—if you were rich and wanted to be in high society. In those days, there were three things that were indispensable if you wanted to be part of Monterrey’s elite: a mansion in the Obispado, a membership in the Country Club, and a membership in the Casino.
The Casino was still an exclusive place for the wealthier classes, although it was now mostly where the young and rich went to get drunk during the afternoon “soirés” or for “quinceañeras,” the coming-out parties for 15-year-old girls. The Country Club was, well, the Country Club where, if you could find someone to sell you a membership, it cost around three hundred thousand dollars just to join. But in terms of places where to live, the very rich had created other, more exclusive sections in the farthest corners of the city. The growing insecurity and appalling rate of kidnappings had driven them to gated communities with homes protected by security people hired in the United States or Europe. Now, most of the mansions in the Obispado, which had been built during the time when the rich could live in a house surrounded by huge lawns and open spaces that looked like private forest reserves, were now abandoned or had been turned into offices for computer-related businesses, or clinics, or worse, insurance companies.
Only those very stubborn or old-fashioned, or those whose fortunes had dwindled to the point that they were of no interest to kidnappers, had stayed. Their mansions, like old elephants walking to their graveyard, slowly slipped into that state of decay from which they would not or could not be recovered. One by one, after their owners died, they were being razed and replaced by yet another clinic, or a convenience store, or just simply a parking lot.
Lombardo reached the street where he had left his car. As he opened the door, he noticed it had a flat tire. “Damn!” he said as he slammed the door shut. He was forced to go back down the street to Hidalgo Avenue to hail a cab. As the cab started off, he remembered he had not locked the car so he said aloud, “I hope someone steals the damned thing.”
“What’s that, sir?” asked the cab driver.
“Nothing, nothing—just talking to myself.”
Lombardo looked at his watch; it was one thirty in the afternoon. He might as well as go home and have something to eat, and like the Fat Man, have a little nap.
Chapter 8: A Home Like a Hole in the Ground
Lombardo was glad to be home. He liked the quiet, cool darkness of the house. They had called him very early to inform him of the body that had been found so he had not slept much. The nap he would have after eating something would be welcomed.
As he took off his coat and unholstered his gun, he stared at the photographs on the wall. There were still many things in the house that were reminders of a time when it had been less quiet and much more full of life. In the small living room there were pictures of the boys and of his former wife; some had been taken when they had gone on a skiing holiday, others in so
me beach resort when on summer vacation. Lined up on another wall were the school photos, one for each year his children had been in primary and secondary school. He stared at them longingly. It was almost like seeing them grow up again.
On the wall opposite the one with the vacation photos there were formal studio portraits of Lombardo and of his former wife, and one that had been taken on their wedding day. A young man, dressed in a tuxedo and black tie, with a thin beard and long hair stood by a beautiful, dark-haired girl dressed in white. He often looked at the picture and wondered aloud, “What happened to those two people? Where did they go?”
He went to the fridge and got a beer; he opened a can of sardines and got a couple of packets of crackers. He doled out a dozen of the delicious Spanish olives stuffed with peppery pimento and sat on his easy chair. He turned on the TV to watch to the news.