The Black Minutes

by Martin Solares

  2

  There’s a moment in every man’s life when he begins to turn to stone. In the case of Chief Taboada, this development began twenty-five years ago, when he took the reins of the police force in Paracuán. He remembered an afternoon in 1977 when they still called him El Travolta. He was going back to the office to write the report of an uneventful day when Cruz Treviño stopped him at the main entrance. It seemed like he was waiting for him.

  “You heard what’s going on in Madera?” Treviño asked.

  “They’re gonna fuck Barbosa over. They made him quit.”

  “That’s fucking great,” Taboada responded. “As far as I’m concerned, they should fuck him over, fucking communist asshole. I don’t know how they ever let him be mayor.”

  “Wait, wait, it’s not just that,” Cruz remarked. “We’ve also got an inspection.”

  “Oh, man. The chief know about it?”

  “The chief isn’t back yet, he’s still in the capital.”

  “And what’s he doing there?”

  “I was gonna ask you the same thing, man. What? You don’t have a clean conscience?”

  El Chicote interrupted them. “Mr. Taboada, they’re looking for you up there.”

  They’d turned the chief’s office upside down. Six guys were digging through Chief García’s papers, and Lolita was with them, handing over files. An incredibly tall guy tried to keep El Travolta out but El Travolta tried to push his way in. The rest of the agents noticed the tussle and pulled their guns. Lolita barely had time to interrupt.

  “That’s him, that’s Mr. Taboada.”

  “Relax, relax,” ordered a dark-skinned guy wearing a suit and tie, who looked like he had more authority than the others.

  “Oh, Mr. Joaquín Taboada.” A heavy-set man about fifty years old, with a double chin and wearing dark sunglasses, walked over to him. “We wanted to speak with you, sir.”

  El Travolta smiled.

  “Licenciado Pedro García González has some problems in the state capital. That’s why the president asked us to come look over the books and make an assessment. If we have to pay off a debt, we’ll pay it; if there’s an account open, we’ll close it and that’s it.”

  “May I ask who you are?”

  The badge said FSA: Federal Safety Administration, the personal police force of President Echavarreta. And above it, in italics, José Carlos Durazo, Managing Director. Taboada had heard of him over the years: Durazo, the scourge of the cellblock. One of the most violent people in the country.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Durazo put his arm around El Travolta’s shoulders, like they were old friends. “Come with me; let’s walk. Walking is good for the knees, isn’t it? How old are you, buddy?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Twenty-nine years old. You’re very young, very young. If you just clear up a few questions I have, you’re going to be young and very lucky.”

  El Travolta didn’t know what was going on. He got the drift though, that’s for sure. This large man had to be extremely powerful, just going by how submissive his assistants were.

  “Tell me, Javier.”

  “Joaquín.”

  “Tell me, Joaquín, do you think you’re prepared to lead this office?”

  “What about Chief García?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. The chief just turned in his resignation. It’s better that way, right? He was already very old, he was sixty-five, and what we need around here is a changing of the guards, don’t you think?”

  The impact of this news made El Travolta stop, but Agent Durazo took him by the neck and they continued on down the hallway.

  “Look, Javier—”

  “Joaquín.”

  “Look, Joaquín, people much more important than you or I would like for you to take over the chief’s office. People very high up. I don’t know if you understand.”

  Taboada’s jaw dropped. The dark-skinned guy, who had been following them, broke the silence. “He probably had other plans, Licenciado.”

  “Of course, he probably had other plans. But the people who sent me want him to be the one to do us this favor and accept. What would you do in his place, Negro?”

  “No question about it, Licenciado, I’d take it. It’s a favor for a favor,” said El Negro.

  “That’s it. A favor for a favor. What do you think, Joaquín . . . or Javier, either one, right? Doing favors is good for a friendship, right?”

  Taboada swallowed saliva before he answered. “Yes, Licenciado.”

  “That’s it! Good work, boy, you’re the person I’m looking for. Now we need to talk about serious matters. I’d like to know about your deductive abilities. In your opinion, who killed the girls?”

  Taboada took a step back. Oh, he said to himself, that’s why these guys are here; I got it now. He thought about it for a minute.

  “Up until a few hours ago, I was sure it was a guy named René Luz de Dios López.”

  “René Luz, good. Bring me that guy if you think it was him.”

  “No, hold on, sir.”

  “No, you hold on. If you think it was him, that works for us.”

  “The thing is there’s no proof—”

  “Oh, well, Javier. . . . Look, buddy, in this job you have to learn to trust in your intuition and in your deductive abilities. Right, Moreno?”

  “Yes, Licenciado. A favor for a favor.”

  “That’s it: a favor for a favor. Bring me René Luz and we’ll talk some more. Got it, buddy?”

  By then, they had made it back to the chief’s office. Durazo patted Taboada on the back and ended that part of the conversation.

  “So,” Durazo said to Lolita. “There’s nothing to drink around here? Go get some bottles and some ice, I can’t deal with this heat. We should make a toast to our colleague’s future. We’ve got a long night ahead of us, and we’re just getting started.”

  That night, once they were drunk, they celebrated El Travolta’s good luck, so young and so lucky, for sure they had a lot to talk about. “Just one thing, once they’ve promoted you, don’t forget about all of us.” “No, of course not!” “’Cause we’re coming back, buddy, we’re gonna come back so you can take us to the beach with some girls. You know girls, right?” “Yes, sir.” “Oh, that’s good news, I expected no less from you.” Once they’d finished off the second bottle, one of the bodyguards said to him: “You, me, us, we’re all just skeletons with flesh on the bones, skeletons with flesh on top, skeletons in motion.” And another guy interrupted him: “You’re already drunk, Luján, you need something to pick you up.” “Your sister, I need your sister. Skeletons with flesh on the bones,” he insisted, and pointed at Taboada.

  “Our colleagues just got here.” El Negro cut them off; he had a walkie-talkie in his hand. “Barrios, Gutiérrez, and Fernández are waiting for you at the entrance. One of them is knocking on the door, with the subject. The other guy is waiting in the car.”

  “Good,” said Licenciado Durazo, “you and you, take Mr. Clemente Morales to his brother’s house so he can rest. Explain the situation to him and stay there to take care of him until the union people get there. Take the idiot who arrested him to solitary. Joaquín, you have good cells for solitary, right? I mean an isolated area, comfortable, preferably with running water, where sound doesn’t get out. . . . Do you have a place like that?”

  Taboada nodded. “There’s the concrete room, but it’s not used very much.”

  “Let’s go there. That room’s finally gonna be used.”

  “And the other guy, sir?” asked El Negro.

  “What other guy?”

  “The one who stayed in the car.”

  “Handle him like I explained earlier.”

  When they went into the concrete room, two bodyguards were holding Romero up. His eye was purple and his nose was bleeding.

  “Taboada,” he begged, “for the love of God.”

  “Shut up already, shut up.” One of the bodyguards shook h
im by the arm. “The licenciado came to pay you a visit.”

  El Negro stood in front of the lackey and lifted his arm to punch him, but before hitting him he stopped and gave his boss the opportunity.

  “Licenciado . . . would you do the honors?”

  Durazo put on his brass knuckles, took two steps forward, and boom! Romero doubled over from the punch. Then he motioned to El Negro and they took turns hitting him: Durazo, Durazo, El Negro, El Negro, Durazo, El Negro again, Durazo. . . . When Durazo started to sweat, he took off the knuckles and motioned to his bodyguards:

  “Now it’s your turn, friends. He’s all yours.” He turned to El Travolta, “How far are you willing to go?” And he held out the brass knuckles.

  Taboada remembered what his colleague said: We’re skeletons with flesh on the bones.

  When Romero saw him come up, he twisted in the assistants’ grip “Not again, please, not my eye”—but El Travolta went after him and beat him mercilessly.

  “Do you think that’s enough?” Durazo egged him on. “Do you think that’s enough, after what he did to us?”

  That had been his first truly violent act on this earth.

  Now, twenty-five years later, he remembered: We’re skeletons with flesh on the bones, skeletons in motion. And he had a lot of things to do.

  3

  The day got off to a bad start: the congressmen were mad, the attorney general was upset, and the governor was furious. The situation with the journalist was posing a lot of problems. Taboada made a list of issues: the governor, the attorney general, the journalist’s family members, my partner. . . . He examined each one of them, and in the end he decided to start with the most complicated.

  He called Agent Chávez. The phone rang and rang but Chávez never answered. How strange, he said to himself, he never turns off his cell phone. After considering his options, he called Agent Cabrera’s house, with the same result. Fucking Macetón, where’d he go? Then he called his secretary, Sandrita, at home, even though it wasn’t seven o’clock yet. It was clear he had woken her up; she took a while to react. He asked her what she knew about El Chaneque.

  “Nothing, sir. The last time I saw him was when he talked with you, yesterday morning.”

  “Go look for him at his house and tell him to report to me. I’ll see you in an hour at the office.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after bathing and putting his clothes on, he opened the door to his car. He grabbed the latest edition of El Mercurio— the paper guy put it on his windshield—to find out that the dead guy’s relatives had published an advertisement against him. Just what I need, he thought. They must have offered a lot of cash to the paper’s editor to get him to publish that letter.

  He got to his office at 7:30. The first thing he did was review the journalist’s boxes. He found a small manila envelope with his property-tax receipt: Mile 31, Las Conchas subdivision. He saw the property was near the beach and asked himself what this journalist was up to. A little while later, he heard an old man’s footsteps dragging down the hallway. It must be El Chicote, the old man is always the first one to get here.

  “Good morning.” The old man stuck his head in. “Can I get you anything?”

  He had an intuition, so he sent the old man to buy all the newspapers, including the ones from the U.S. side of the border. As he suspected, Mr. Blanco’s parents had put an insert in a newspaper in Mexico City and another one in the main newspaper in south Texas, in which they condemned his performance and demanded speedy justice. As if he didn’t have anything else to do.

  Sandrita arrived at eight o’clock on the dot.

  “Where’s Chávez?”

  “I couldn’t find him, Chief. I went to look for him at his house and he wasn’t there.”

  “Cabrera hasn’t come in either?”

  “No, sir, he’s not here yet.”

  “As soon as either one of them shows up, send him to me.”

  A few minutes later, the girl transferred a call from Licenciado Campillo, the governor’s personal secretary. He was short and to the point.

  “Turn on Channel Seventy. We’ll talk in a minute.”

  He turned on the cable box and looked for the channel. A TV anchor in San Antonio, Texas, was talking about the state of affairs in the port. He condemned the death of the young journalist, Bernardo Blanco, and then criticized the shoddy way they were carrying out the investigations. The anchor, a young guy with a blond mustache, was asking ironically if the local police, who were known to have ties to the Paracuán cartel, would resolve the situation. Damn, Taboada said to himself, where’d he get that one from? Fucking dumb-ass reporters. Everyone expected great things from Bernardo Blanco. Just problems, he said to himself, the only thing he had accomplished was creating problems, like the one that for sure was ringing his phone right now.

  “Chief, its Cruz Treviño on the line.”

  “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  Ever since they put Cruz Treviño in charge of the judicial police, Taboada hadn’t had a good relationship with his colleague. Taboada didn’t like it when someone beneath him got any power that made him look less important. He passed by the glass case where he kept his high-caliber firearms and stopped at his trophies hanging on the back wall: three deer heads and the head of a bear he killed in a nature reserve. I need to take it to get fixed, the stuffing is coming out.

  At 8:15 Agent Camarena walked in.

  “Have you seen Chávez?”

  “No, sir. Not since yesterday morning.”

  Camarena was a very hard-working young man, but in El Travolta’s opinion he wasn’t mean enough or smart enough to do interrogations. He’d have to start learning how.

  “Find Chávez for me.”

  When Camarena went out, the secretary came in. “Licenciado, they called you back from the state capital—”

  “And why didn’t you give me the call?”

  “Because you told me not to. If you want, I’ll call him back.”

  The chief shook his head and lamented the fact that Lolita had retired, his old secretary who knew all the criminals by name and nickname. Sometimes she could say who was guilty of a crime before the detectives had even left to investigate. But she had retired at the end of the eighties.

  Taboada sighed deeply and told her to get him in touch with the state government.

  “They say Mr. Campillo isn’t available, he can’t take the call.”

  Now he’s the one refusing the call. Just my fucking luck.

  He looked over the property-tax receipt again: Mile 31, Las Conchas subdivision. He was sure he had heard of that neighborhood, but he didn’t remember the context.

  Sandrita knocked on the door at nine on the dot and walked into his office. “Mr. Cabrera’s wife called. She said her husband was run over last night. He’s unconscious at the state hospital.”

  “Wait, wait. Which Cabrera? El Macetón?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  What was Cabrera up to? And before the girl could give it to him, he noticed a telegram in her hands. The envelope was from Customs Agency Number Five, but he knew who had sent it before he even opened it. Only one person sent him telegrams, an impatient person. He worriedly read the contents. No fucking way, cabrón, there’s a misunderstanding, and he fed the document into the paper shredder. Quite an invention, the paper shredder.

  He looked around the back of the room and noted that the bear was still deflating. Everything’s fucked, he thought. He was going to have to go in person. Chávez was normally the mediator for issues having to do with customs, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “Sandrita, call the restaurant at the Customs House and make a reservation in my name.”

  Five minutes later, she told him, “Sir, they say they’re all booked up for the day.”

  What the fuck, he thought, they’ve never told me that before. The situation had gotten out of control. He couldn’t request backup and he couldn’t go without protection, so he opened the display case where he
kept the firearms and took out a .357.

  4

  The place to meet about customs issues was the restaurant Mogambo, the most ostentatious and expensive restaurant in any city in the region.

  As soon as he parked, he noticed a woman waiting at the door. Instead of the normal bodyguards, a girl of incredible proportions was receiving the clientele. He was saying to himself that the lack of security was suspicious, when he noticed that two people working behind the counter in the store next door were watching him. In the parking lot, two pickups were idling, a man inside each one. Taboada noticed that all of them (every single one of them) was monitoring him. It wouldn’t surprise him if one of them right at that moment were to point a high-powered gun at him. What have I got myself into? This place is perfect for a massacre, he said to himself. Against his better judgment, he left his gun under the seat in the car, so they wouldn’t get violent, and headed to the front door of the restaurant. The hostess smiled at him.

  “Good afternoon, sir, do you have a reservation?”

  “I’m not here to eat. I’d like to speak with Mr. Obregón.”

  “If you’ll just wait one moment, sir, what was your name?”

  This girl must be new, he thought; for sure she’s from somewhere else. The girl left and came back with Vivar, Mr. Obregón’s attorney.

  “It’s not a good time, Licenciado Taboada, the boss has a really tight schedule.” And he pointed inside the restaurant.

  Vivar was almost six and a half feet tall and was wearing a dark blue suit that rippled as he walked. As they crossed the threshold, Taboada saw Mr. Obregon at the far end of the room, in front of several plates of goat meat. At the table, three stunning girls in low-cut dresses and an effeminate young man laughed at his jokes. Taboada started to walk toward them, but the bodyguard cut him off.

  “Over here, please. Licenciado . . . please.”