Mexico City Noir

by Paco Ignacio II Taibo

  So when Manterola got to work, with his funeral suit on—in other words, the same old gray suit he wore every day—with new huevos a la Mexicana stains on the lapels and a black band on his sleeve, he wasn’t surprised to find the commander there staring at the map, waiting for him.

  And he wasn’t surprised by what he said either: “What do you think I, the commander, or the chief, or the head of government, thinks when he sees that fucking corner can’t take one more fucking pin?”

  Manterola knew he was going to have to pay for not taking better care of his partner, for letting him go ahead on the raid where he ran into that wacko with the machete in his hand.

  “What do you want me to do, boss?”

  “You tell me. And whatever it is, do it alone. I’m not assigning you a partner because they always get killed. But whatever you’re going to do, just do it. Silvita will deal with the paperwork.”

  Manterola gazed over at the map with the intensity of a Japanese tourist standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

  The cursed corner, focus of everything. The intersection of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde in a neighborhood of doctors, just two blocks from the Viaduct. A lower-middle-class neighborhood which had turned destitute and disenfranchised during the crisis in the ’70s, when auto-repair shops became stolen auto-parts dealers.

  There was no glamour here. It was a symbol of sleazy and desperate times. It had no relation to the great criminal corners, like the one behind Santa Veracruz in the ’50s, or Loneliness Square, where a homeless death-squad drank industrial-strength alcohol until they dropped, where it was said they’d steal your socks without touching your shoes. It had no relation to the edge of Ixtapalapa, very near Neza, where the Mexican state police committed their crimes in the ’80s. It was the kind of place that Leone would have filmed one of his Westerns.

  So for the novelist José Daniel Fierro, the call from the top dog in Mexico City’s government wasn’t a good thing, no matter how unusual it was, in spite of the fact that the only things he liked lately were unusual.

  “Fierro, what can we do with Mexico City’s worst corner, the most dangerous one, the one with the most crimes?”

  “Give it to Los Angeles. Aren’t we sister cities or something like that? Hollywood would love it.” José Daniel heard a chuckle on the other end of the line, then tried a couple of other proposals. “You could move there, rent an apartment. With your bodyguards you’d scare them off to the next corner … Or send all the cops on vacation to Acapulco and then watch the crime rate come down.”

  This time the chuckle wasn’t as hearty.

  “I’m serious,” said the government official. José Daniel had known Germán Núñez for years, since the dark days of the PRI when they’d been beaten up together at a political demonstration. He’d had his right eyebrow sliced by a blade and Germán had been kicked in the nuts so hard he’d had to stay in bed for a week putting up with his friends’ jokes.

  “And you called a novelist for this?”

  “Exactly. A writer of detective fiction. I’m sending you a dossier with a bike messenger. You’re going to love this story.”

  José Daniel Fierro, novelist, and Vicente Manterola, cop, analyzed the cursed corner for the reasons already stated. But they didn’t have the same data. Fierro reviewed a study with a statistical appendix. Manterola had a pile of files that went back a couple of years. Perhaps because they were notably different people, from different cities, with different skeletons in their closets and disparate personal histories, they reached different conclusions.

  “If I could fuck with two of these gangs of car thieves, I could take down half the damn robbery pins, easy, and maybe some of the assault ones, because when they don’t have cars to steal, that’s what they do, and maybe even some of the yellow pins too, because half the time they’re fighting each other,” Manterola said in a low voice to the head of the Ezcurdia squad, who stared at him with no love lost, since one of those gangs gave him a cut so that he’d always make himself scarce.

  “If you fuck with one gang, I’ll tell the other to go steal someplace else, to go rip off cars in Toluca for a month,” the squad leader said in response. “I don’t want any problems with the head of government.”

  “Let’s have a festival on that corner, a cultural festival,” José

  Daniel suggested to the head of government. “Do you want some meat, my royal sir?”

  “If I want meat, I’ll go to the supermarket, pendeja,” Manterola said to a transvestite, whose real name was undoubtedly something like Manolo—or Luis Jorge or Samuel Eduardo, because now, thanks to those fucking Venezuelan telenovelas, it had become fashionable to give babies two names. The guy didn’t actually look too bad: nice legs, even nicer ass, and no question that if he’d run into him in the dark, he’d have given him a whirl.

  Manterola knew all too well that more than one of his colleagues liked to be with queens, but always with their macho thing of who-fucked-who. If you did the fucking, you weren’t the fag in the picture. The puto was the other guy. Lord have mercy, what assholes his colleagues could be. Like the dude who said he was disgusted by the whole thing but that his body “asked for it” sometimes.

  It was getting dark. To get rid of the faggot, Manterola just ignored him and leaned up against a lamppost at the corner of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde, right in front of a grocery store called La Flor de Gijón which shone its neon through a swarm of flies. He watched the movements inside for a while: maids buying bread, two kids who went in for soda carrying a huge plastic bag. An s.o.b. with the face of an s.o.b. buying cigarettes. Some dude, Cuban or coastal—impossible to tell the difference in the dark—mouthing a cumbia and lazily picking up a six-pack of beer. The old man at the register looked like he’d opened the store after being left back from Cortés’s first expedition. Having absorbed all of this, Manterola entered.

  “Good evening.”

  “Fuck, that’s the first time in my life a cop has greeted me with a good evening,” said the old man—pale like a Spaniard—with a toothless smile.

  “How many times have you been robbed?”

  “None so far,” replied the old man, with an expression that made it clear he expected nothing good to come from a police visit.

  “Even though you’re on the most dangerous corner in all of Mexico City,” said Manterola.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re gonna gimme that story too?”

  “Who else told you that?”

  “A writer.”

  There’s going to be a cultural event of some sort on your corner. It’s a kind of party, a festival, but sponsored by the government. You have to speak with a man whose last name is Mechupas, said the note scribbled on the Post-it on his desk. Manterola put his hands on his head and discovered his hair was wet with sweat. He’d never heard of such a thing.

  He put his files in order, with the one for Fermín Huerta on top. That was the guy, El Mandarín. That was his Saint Peter at the gates of heaven. But what the fuck was this about a party?

  Mechupas was obviously the writer José Daniel Fierro.

  “Well, my esteemed officer, if you don’t like it, you can call Mexico City’s head of government yourself,” he said, offering a worn business card. “Here’s his number.”

  Manterola eyed the Boss of Bosses’ business card and read the message on it: This is the information we discussed.

  Later, he checked in again on the novelist. He was a big guy, with a mustache like Pancho Villa; it was probably best to just be straight with him.

  José Daniel, who knew a lot about shady characters, saw the doubt in the cop’s small eyes right away. Let’s see if this guy learns to respect those of us who don’t wear ties, he said to himself.

  Let’s see if I can learn to respect people who don’t wear ties, Manterola said to himself at that same moment, even if they’re a bunch of lazy pendejos.

  “So?”

  “We’re
going to have a festival, and you’re not going to arrest anybody, nor raid anything, nor insult anybody, nor shoot anybody, nor bother anybody, nor fuck with anybody on that corner, which I understand is under your jurisdiction.”

  “Señor Fierro, we have a very important investigation underway,” Manterola said ceremoniously.

  “Well, you can shove it up your ass,” said Fierro, who wasn’t much liked by the state police anyway, and who was seeing red because Manterola had come into his life asking what the fuck he was thinking throwing a party on his corner.

  “So what is my role here then?”

  “Work with me. And if you have any questions, call the head of government, or your boss, or the Boss of Bosses,” said Fierro while lighting a delicate filtered cigarette and smiling.

  Manterola surrendered for the moment. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Help me find El Mandarín,” said Fierro, who’d done his homework.

  He was called El Mandarín, not just because he was Chinese but also because he had dyed a red streak in his hair that made him look like a peeled mandarin orange. Manterola knew he wasn’t a car thief; the guy was a middle manager in the acquisitions department of a large and growing enterprise that included various parking lots, a half dozen garages, about a hundred employees, an office with multiple bookkeepers, connections with public officials in three different states who supplied fake papers, a customs chief in Veracruz and another in Coatzacoalcos, and even space on various marine freighters. What he did wasn’t even a crime—a crime is stealing from old women, beating up your wife, kicking a baby—this was business. El Mandarín knew that if all the cars stolen in one year in the Valley of Mexico were lined up, they would reach Cuernavaca, more than seventy kilometers away. That was why it was great business.

  El Mandarín was eighteen years old, the senior member of his gang, which was an immense responsibility, so he didn’t steal cars on Tuesdays or Thursdays because he was too busy studying Russian. He’d heard a few things: that Volkswagens sold well in North Africa because they were air-cooled instead of water-cooled; that small trucks did well in Guatemala; and that Dodge was all the rage in Eastern Europe, where everybody spoke Russian.

  Manterola and José Daniel found him at the entrance to his high school and he made no move to run. It would have been different in his own neighborhood, but he had no idea where he could run around here.

  “I guess I’m fucked,” he said, and resigned himself to a simple smile.

  You only go back at night when you want something. I return to the dark so that it’ll keep me from the day’s perverse routines, from the failures of love. José Daniel Fierro was writing on his keyboard when the doorbell got stuck. He bitched all the way to the door because one of his legs had fallen asleep. It was 4 in the morning.

  Manterola measured him with a killer gaze.

  “You want to have a charanga or a chimichurri or a chimiganga or whatever the fuck you call it—a masked ball on that corner? That’s all we need—you let them wear masks while they rob us, you give all those assholes an excuse to dress up as wrestlers so they can fuck with us.”

  Fierro sighed and pulled out a cigarette.

  The festival was one of the biggest successes in the history of the Neighborhood of Doctors. Years later people would still be talking about how well Tania Libertad sang, how delicious the carnitas were, how beautifully the kids read their poetry, and especially about the endless conga started by El Mastuerzo when he screamed out, “Viva Emiliano Zapata!”

  There were no problems with the police. Community members stopped two domestic disturbances, kept kids from drinking beer, and even caught a bike thief who’d come over from Buenos Aires.

  José Daniel Fierro gave the corner a leading role in the last few chapters of his novel; he even violated his own literary sensibilities and ended the story with an over-the-top kitschy description of two teens kissing at dusk at the intersection of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde.

  Agent Vicente Manterola was arrested in Puebla for raping a queen who was friendly with the local governor. While he was detained, a prisoner who didn’t like how Manterola was looking at him took one of his eyes out with a scrap from an empty soda can.

  El Mandarín ended up in North Africa, driving a gypsy cab in Casablanca.

  The corner was no longer cursed after the festival. The multicolored pins moved malevolently to other corners of Mexico City.

  The owner of the Flor de Gijón retired and, since he’d saved a small fortune, went to live in the country of his birth. The day he left Mexico, he nearly bumped into José Daniel Fierro at the airport, but the writer didn’t recognize him since he was too busy buying duty-free cigarettes.

  THE UNSMILING COMEDIAN

  BY F.G. HAGHENBECK

  Condesa

  I heard Andrea Rojas’s name the same day I met Cantinflas. She was nice, smart, and had a fine sense of humor. Not Cantinflas. He was like the other stars at Cinelandia:

  simply a star.

  While President Lyndon B. Johnson prepared to send a man to the moon, I decided to stay for a couple of months in Mexico City. I wanted to do pretty typical things: go to a wrestling match; bet on the bull in a bullfight at Plaza Mexico; drink a bottle of tequila at a bar in Tenampa; and enjoy a banana split at the Roxy. I also wanted to do an atypical thing: take care of my mother while she recovered from surgery. Her convalescence had yanked me out of my half-life as a beatnik bloodhound in Venice Beach. Nothing mattered much to me. Anyway, it’s always pleasant to spend time in the place where I was born. But not a lot of time, because the city is a treacherous lover. Those who love and live here only deal in pain.

  Knowing that I was hanging out on my old turf, my exboss recommended me for a local job. Ever since he’d retired, he parceled out work like Santa Claus. I supposed I’d been good that year: it brought me Cantinflas.

  The interview was outside the city, in a luxurious subdivision called Jardines del Pedregal de San Ángel, nestled in volcanic rock from an eruption as ancient as my Ford Woody. The house was great. It looked like a giant concrete sandwich with huge windows and austere furniture. The view was glorious; snow-covered volcanoes could be seen through a cactus garden.

  I was led to the waiting room. I think it had higher aspirations than just to wait. It could have been a soccer field or a national stadium. I sat in a chair next to several trophies. After reading the plaque on a statuette that said Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes, a.k.a. “Cantinflas,” had won the Golden Globe, I got bored. But a loud voice soon stirred me from my reverie.

  “I was told you’re good. But I’d like references, Mr. Sunny Pascal.” The voice came from behind a door and then the comedian entered. I found myself before Mexico’s most successful actor. He wasn’t much taller than me. That was something. (In Los Angeles, I was considered Snow White’s lost dwarf.) He was dressed in a loud wine-colored chamois jacket. White turtleneck and dark glasses as big as a windshield. He walked slowly. Carefully. As he got closer, I noticed he must have been about fifty years old, but that recent cosmetic surgery made him seem forty or so. He still had some bandages. His prim face had the look of money: gringo dollars.

  “I know you’ve won a lot of awards but, to me, that doesn’t make you an actor,” I responded. My insolence was gratuitous. He didn’t say anything. Instead, there was a pause that hung in the space between us.

  “I suppose you’ll need to be paid in dollars,” he pressed me as he sat down in one of the chairs. Somewhere in Denmark, somebody was surely opening a champagne bottle because Cantinflas had bought one of their designs.

  “Just like you got paid for Around the World in Eighty Days and Pepe,” I answered even more insolently. He didn’t smile. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor for a comedian.

  “Those films were failures. The gringos don’t understand my common man’s sense of humor. Here in Mexico I’m king,” he explained, as he opened a silver case and extracted a cigarette. He offered m
e one. I declined. I didn’t want to be a walking cliché. I’m the only detective I know who doesn’t smoke. “I will pay for your silence. Carmandy assures me you’re the type who can keep his mouth shut. That’s important because of my reputation.”

  “You can trust me. In fact, I knew Doris Day when she was a virgin.” I gave him my most ingenuous smile. He didn’t so much as blink. He was certainly greedy with his humor. He saved it all up for the camera.

  “I’ve received some letters. They want money … a lot of money. They say they have information that could hurt me,” he told me as he smoked. It was impossible to see his eyes behind the shades. I was starting to feel uncomfortable.

  “Is it true?”

  “That’s none of your business. You just follow orders,” he grunted. I stood up. I straightened my black guayabera and turned toward the door. He made a gesture with his hand to stop, so I sat back down. “I’m sorry. I’m used to the barbarians who run this city’s police department.”

  “Exactly what do you want me to do, Mr. Moreno?” I asked, trying to sound professional. The beatnik beard and my huaraches weren’t helping.

  “Andrea Rojas. Pay her off. Tell her it’s the only time I’ll pay for her silence. The press and the police have already cleared me of any wrongdoing in Myriam’s death,” he groused. He said her name as if he’d stepped in dog shit. Through his dark glasses, he could see from the expression on my face that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Myriam Roberts, an American model. She killed herself at the Alfer Hotel a couple of years ago. She left a suicide note for me.”

  Cantinflas took a piece of paper from his jacket and handed it to me. It was a simple note written in a fine feminine script. It could have been a love letter or a grocery list.