by Tom Epperson
The phone rings. He goes over to his desk and looks at the number. It’s the city police department.
“I have to take this,” he says to Clara and then he picks up. “Hello?”
“Roberto?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Lieutenant Matallana. We need to talk.”
Roberto glances at Clara. She’s walking back to the couch and picking up her jacket. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”
“We need to talk in person. It’s very important.”
“All right. Do you want me to come to your office?”
“No. Can you meet me at the London Billiard Club? It’s downtown, on Ninth Street, near Avenue Two.”
“Yes, I know it. What time?”
“In one hour?”
He looks at his watch. “Okay, I’ll be there.”
“Thank you, Roberto. I’ll see you soon.”
He hangs up. Clara is looking at him.
“I should go,” she says. “You’ve obviously very busy.”
“Yes, there’s a lot to do.”
He walks her to the door. Trying unsuccessfully to think of something to say.
“Well, I suppose you think I’m a terrible person now,” she says. “Like everyone else does.”
“You know better than that, Clara. You know I think the world of you.”
She smiles. “Travel safely. Don’t forget me.”
“I won’t.”
He opens the door. She turns and looks at him.
“And Roberto?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not stopping me from kissing you good-bye,” and she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. He kisses her back. Her lips and her tongue and her soft warm body pressing against him make him nearly dizzy with desire. Now she steps back, to observe the effect she’s had on him. She brushes the bulge in his jeans with the tips of her fingers, and is gone.
* * *
Roberto eyes a guy on a motorcycle in his rearview mirror. He’s been behind him for several blocks. His features are hidden by his helmet and visor; the sun gleams on their hard surfaces, giving him an insect-like, implacable look. Like all motorcycle riders, he’s wearing an orange vest bearing the license plate number of his bike; a law was passed requiring this because so many people were being killed by assassins on motorcycles.
The guy suddenly whips into the lane on Roberto’s left. As he comes up alongside him, Roberto’s hoping he’s not some dead-eyed killer with a phony number on his vest, but he doesn’t look at Roberto and keeps going and roars away.
Roberto wonders what Lieutenant Matallana wants. He can understand him not wanting to talk about it on the phone but he cannot understand why he would want to meet him at some pool hall instead of the police station. He’s concerned it’s a set-up and Matallana won’t be there but somebody else will. So many have died in just this way: a phone call, meet so-and-so at such-and-such a place. Sometimes the killer is a stranger, sometimes it’s your best friend.
The traffic slows, then stops. The air is bad today and stinks of gasoline and burns his eyes. Up ahead at the intersection, a black man is standing on the shoulders of a partner. He has two batons that are on fire. He twirls them and throws them in the air and catches them then throws them up again in the most amazingly skillful way and never for an instant doesn’t smile.
* * *
Roberto walks through the shadows of aging plasterwork buildings down a sidewalk crowded with poor people. In front of him, in the newer part of downtown, great glass and metal skyscrapers shoot up into the sunlight. They’re only a few blocks away, but they seem celestial and out of reach, not part of the same city.
An Indian woman is sitting on the sidewalk on a colorful blanket with three small children climbing all over her. She’s wearing a straw hat, and her shiny black hair is in a long braid. She is tiny. She’s probably only in her twenties but her face is disconcertingly old, it’s like the head of a forty-five-year-old woman has been put on the body of a little girl. The city is filled with people like her; violent men have come to visit their villages and they have fled. Roberto has seen tall, well-dressed, light-complexioned residents of this city curse and spit on and one time even kick people like her, calling them filthy vermin and urging them to go elsewhere.
A plastic soda cup sits on the blanket with a few coins and bills in its bottom. He drops some money in and she mumbles thank you without looking at him. He asks where she’s from. She probably doesn’t speak much Spanish and she says, “What?” He repeats the question, and she says, “Tulcán.”
He turns into a wide doorway and climbs a curving flight of bright-red stairs and enters the London Billiard Club. It’s been here since the 1930s, when an Englishman on vacation fell in love with a local girl and decided to stay and open up his own business. It was a popular place at first, customers flocking to play billiards and drink beer and eat exotic English dishes like shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash and every night at midnight boisterously sing in English “God Save the King” as they stood at attention and faced an oil portrait of King George V but it all ended wretchedly for the Englishman. He had a drinking problem, which caused his wife to leave him and take their two young children with her, so the Englishman swallowed poison and crawled underneath one of his billiard tables and died.
The first thing Roberto sees as he reaches the top of the stairs is the smoke-dimmed portrait of King George V, looking impossibly self-important in a black uniform and red and white robes, right hand cocked on his hip, left hand resting on the hilt of a sword; he reminds Roberto a little with his beard and his solemn gaze of his great uncle, Adrián. The floor is cracked linoleum in a pattern of red and white squares. Bronze lamps hang over the green tables, all empty except for one, where two tattooed young toughs are playing a listless game of eight ball. Now he sees Lieutenant Matallana. He’s sitting at a table near the bar, head bent, absorbed in his iPhone.
He smiles and stands up when he sees Roberto coming. “Hello, Roberto. Glad you could make it on such short notice.”
“Hello, lieutenant.”
Roberto shakes hands with him and sits down.
“I’ve already eaten,” he says, “but please order something if you’re hungry. The food here’s not half bad.”
“Your juice looks good, I think I’ll just have that.”
“Lupe,” the lieutenant calls out to the guy behind the bar, “another tangerine juice please!”
He’s dressed more casually than yesterday: a light jacket, khaki pants, a navy-blue polo shirt. Roberto still thinks he resembles Roberto, and wonders if he thinks the same. But it would be an odd question to ask. Do you think you look like me?
“How’s the rabbit?” asks Matallana.
“It’s fine. I left it with a friend, she’ll take good care of it.”
Lupe brings over the tangerine juice. It’s warm today and Roberto’s very thirsty and he takes a big gulp of it.
“You’ve been here before?” asks Matallana.
“A few times, over the years.” Including one particularly noteworthy night with Daniel. It’s not easy getting thrown out of a seedy joint like the London Billiards Club for being excessively drunk and obnoxious but Daniel managed it. Then he tripped going down the stairs and took a horrific tumble all the way to the bottom. Roberto screamed out his name, certain he must have killed himself or at the very least be paralyzed, and clattered down the stairs after him, but by the time he reached him Daniel was already rising to his feet, swaying, giggling, bleeding profusely from a cut on the bridge of his nose, and then, loudly singing in English “Strawberry Fields Forever,” he staggered out into the night.
“I grew up around here,” says Matallana,” and this was my hangout. See those guys?” Roberto looks at the two guys playing pool. “I was one of them.”
“That’s hard to picture. How’d you wind up a cop?”
The lieutenant laughs. “Well, it’s like this. The cops were always hassling us, but I wasn’t like
my friends, they hated the cops, but I was always fascinated with them. Their uniforms and their guns and the way they talked, they seemed so tough and confidant, not like us, we were just pretending. So I started hanging around them, pestering them with questions about police work. A couple of them took an interest in me. They saved me from the streets, really,” and he laughs again. “So here I am.” He’s quiet for a moment, looking at Roberto. “Still leaving on Wednesday?”
“Yes. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“I have good news, Roberto. I think I know who killed your friends.”
Roberto is cautious. He wants to hear what Matallana has to say before he gets too excited. “Yes?”
“In fact, I’m quite sure of it. It’s just a matter of proving it.”
“Okay. Who?”
“Before we go any further,” and then he stops as two men come in. Roberto and Matallana look them over as they sit down at a nearby table. They’re wearing baseball caps and clothes spattered with dried paint. They light cigarettes and order beers. They’re paying no attention to Roberto and Matallana. Now Matallana continues, but in a softer voice. “Before we go any further . . . you have to promise me something.”
“What?”
“If this case goes to trial, you have to promise me you’ll return to the country and testify. The case will fall apart without you.”
“Yes, absolutely. I’ll come back.”
“It will be dangerous. They won’t want you to testify.”
“Lieutenant, don’t worry, I’ll come back, I promise. Now tell me who did it.”
Matallana takes a photograph out of a manila envelope. Slides it over the table to Roberto.
“Recognize him?”
It’s a mug shot of a red-faced man with a black moustache and cold, inert eyes.
“It’s the guy that was following me. In the green Renault. He did it?”
“He was at Manuel’s house yesterday, along with two other men. His name’s Toño González. He’s been a killer-for-hire since he was fourteen. A guy that lives across the street peeked out his window and recognized him. Neighbors usually clam up, but this guy has a grudge against Toño, he killed somebody close to him. He was arrested for it, but then the charges were dropped. You know how it goes. So the question is, who is Toño working for?”
“I’ve been thinking it was the military. Because they’re pissed off about the article I wrote about Manuel.”
“Good guess. But wrong.” Matallana is smiling, pleased with himself. “I found out this morning Toño’s been doing a lot of work recently for the CPN.” The Committee to Protect the Nation. “That story you wrote about the jugglers and the beggars is causing them a lot of trouble. The district attorney’s investigating, Congress is investigating, it looks like they’re extorting the street people in other cities as well. There’s a whole string of murders and assaults they might be connected to, they’re going to have to pay off people like crazy to stay out of prison. On top of everything else, they’ve been embarrassed. They talk about honor and virtue, but they’ve been revealed as thugs. It’s a bad idea to embarrass certain people if you want to have a long life and die in your bed.”
“So you’re confidant the CPN’s behind this.”
“Two and two still make four, Roberto. Even in this country.”
“Are you going to arrest Toño?”
“Not yet. The neighbor’s scared to death, he was willing to finger Toño to me but that’s all he’ll do. We haven’t found any physical evidence connecting Toño to the crime scene. And so I’ve got a lot of work to do. And the goal of course isn’t just to get Toño and the other two guys but the guys that gave the orders. Which probably means the top leadership of the CPN.”
Roberto drinks some tangerine juice, and looks across the table at Matallana. It’s as if he’s reading Roberto’s mind.
“We’re not all on the take.”
“Why are we meeting here, lieutenant? And not at the police station.”
Matallana plucks a paper napkin from a metal dispenser, takes his glasses off, and begins to clean them. “Let me put it this way. I need to be discreet in how I carry out my investigation if I don’t want to be interfered with.”
He puts his glasses back on, then waves away some cigarette smoke that’s drifting over from the guys in the baseball caps.
“Let’s get out of here. This is bad for my asthma.”
* * *
“I’ve known a lot of cops,” says Roberto, “and you don’t particularly seem like one.”
Matallana laughs. “Is that good or bad?”
“Neither. Just an observation.”
“Well, you seem exactly like a journalist to me.”
They’re walking along Ninth Street. The sun’s shining down and it’s very warm, and Matallana pulls his jacket off.
“How long have you had asthma?” asks Roberto.
“Since I was a kid.”
“I had it when I was a kid too, but I outgrew it.”
“I wish I’d outgrow it. The worst thing for me is horses. If I even think about a horse, I start to wheeze.”
“Do you have a good doctor?”
“He’s okay, I guess. Nothing special.”
They make their way through the throngs of people. Vendors are selling food, drinks, jewelry, sunglasses, wristwatches. A blind woman is hawking pirated DVDs of recent American movies. A guy is waving his cellphone in the air, selling time on it, 200 pesos a minute. A shrunken, hobbling man with a face like a rodent grabs Roberto’s arm.
“You’re looking lucky today, my friend, how about buying a lottery ticket?”
Roberto jerks his arm away.
“Beat it,” says Matallana, in a firm but calm cop voice.
But the man keeps limping after them.
“You too,” he says to Matallana. “You got that lucky look!”
“I’m not telling you again.”
“Okay, boss, relax,” and then as he drops back he yells, “My tickets are the luckiest in town, ask anybody! They’re blessed by a priest!”
“They’re like pigeons in a park,” Matallana says, “fighting over some birdseed. Whenever I feel down, I come here and walk around and I think: well at least I don’t live here with the pigeons anymore.”
“I was lucky,” says Roberto. “My father’s a doctor. My life was easy when I was growing up.”
“Did you always want to be a journalist?”
“No, it never even occurred to me till I got out of college. My grandmother said to me one day, ‘Roberto, there are two worlds, the real world and the world of dreams. It’s time you stopped living in the world of dreams.’ So I started thinking seriously about what I wanted to do with my life. One of my best friends was a photographer, and he was working for a small weekly newspaper. He got me an interview with the editor. He turned out to be a real asshole. He said there weren’t any job openings, and it was unlikely there would ever be any job openings, and I should just forget it. I wasn’t even sure I wanted a job with his crummy paper until he told me I couldn’t have one. I said what if I could get an interview with Memo Soto, would he give me a job then?”
Matallana smiles. “The Chess Master.”
Memo Soto was a drug trafficker who a dozen years ago retaliated against efforts to extradite him to America by terrorizing the country with assassinations and bombings. He was called the Chess Master because of his tactical brilliance in planning the attacks and his uncanny ability to outwit the forces trying to capture or kill him.
“Soto had never given an interview because he hated the press,” says Roberto. “He felt they always told lies about him. So the editor just laughed and said, ‘Son, if you get an interview with Memo Soto, I’ll resign and make you the editor.’ What he didn’t know was that I was good friends with Soto’s daughter, Lucero.”
A dog with a bad case of mange trots by, carrying a dead rat in his jaws. He looks very pleased with himself.
“She was at the N
ational University at the same time I was. I remember she was always surrounded by bodyguards, and she seemed very lonely. We had a couple of classes together, and we hit it off.”
“Was she pretty?” asks Matallana.
“Yes, very.”
“Did you have a romantic relationship?” and then the lieutenant smiles apologetically. “Sorry to ask so many questions, it’s what I do all day.”
“Yeah, me too. No, we were just friends. For one thing, I already had a girlfriend. Also, you have to be careful about getting involved with someone like Lucero. She told me that when she was fifteen, she was staying at their cattle ranch in Espinar. She got a crush on an older boy who worked with the horses. They were in the barn one day making out, when Memo Soto walked in. He saw the boy’s hand on Lucero’s boob, and he just went nuts. He grabbed the boy and hauled him over to a wooden block where the cook chopped the heads off chickens. He forced the boy’s arm down on the block. Lucero was screaming at him to stop, but the hand that had been touching his daughter’s boob? He chopped it right off.”
Matallana winces, and laughs. “I guess he was lucky he wasn’t kissing her boob, or he would have got his head chopped off.”
“Memo Soto was a bad guy, no doubt about it, but he did really love Lucero. He would have done anything for her. So I told her what I wanted. I said it was an opportunity for her father to tell his side of the story to the public, I promised I wouldn’t change a word. And she got in touch with him and told him I could be trusted and he agreed. I was blindfolded and taken to one of his hideaways in the mountains.”
Matallana shakes his head. “Man, Roberto, that must’ve been scary.”
“Actually it wasn’t. I felt like I was the safest man in South America, because Memo Soto would never allow any harm to come to his daughter’s friend.”
“As long as his daughter’s friend didn’t touch her boob.”
Roberto laughs. “Right.”
“What was he like? Soto?”
“Funny, warm, smart, intense. He asked me a lot of questions about myself and seemed interested in my replies. He said he was just a businessman who had made a lot of money but he was using it to help the common people. He said it was his dream to be the president of the country someday. He just seemed like the greatest guy ever.”