by Mark Hebden
The Mexican grinned. ‘Jefe de Policía Barribal. Plutarco Jacinto Barribal. I’ve been attached to you because I speak English and I was told you did, too.’
Pel had an older sister who had married a British soldier after the war and, after several visits to her home, his command of the language was reasonably good. He answered in the same tongue and introduced De Troq’.
‘He speak English, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I speak it good. I was educated in the States. People mistake me for a Norteamericano. It gets me lots of American girls. We get lots of Norteamericano girls down here. I’m to take you to headquarters. You won’t want a car. We use mine.’
The hire operator protested that he was losing money but Barribal shut him up quickly and they got their money back and left him muttering as they climbed into the police car. Leaning over the front seat, Barribal kept up a running commentary as they passed through the city streets.
‘You’ll find it different here,’ he said. ‘Things don’t work as well. So you might as well get what you can out of it.’ He jerked a hand. ‘That’s the National Palace. The Presidente lives there. Soon you’ll be in the Paseo de la Reforma and see the statue of Cristóbal Colón – Christopher Columbus to you – and Cuautomoc, who’s some guy out of the past. Some people like to see him. To me, he don’t mean a thing.’
The police car slipped through crowded streets, wide ones full of traffic, hotels and big stores, and narrow ones where the shops were mere holes in the wall surrounded by fruit carts and lounging men. Here and there were cleared gaps as if a bomb had struck.
‘Earthquake,’ Barribal said. ‘Mexico has many sorrows. Not all of them of her own making.’
Police headquarters, Pel was surprised to see, were modern. Barribal gestured to the police driver and led the way inside. A lift carried them through several floors and they were led into an office where a stout grey-haired man with a Spanish face rose from behind an enormous desk.
‘Comisario Ramón García Granados,’ Barribal introduced. ‘Chief of Police.’
The introductions accomplished, Pel sat blank-faced, holding the glass of brandy which had been offered while Barribal did the talking.
After a while the man behind the desk rose. Since Barribal and De Troq’ rose also, Pel rose with them. A minute later he was in a much smaller and far less grand office that he recognised at once as that of a working policeman. It seemed to have the same files on the desk as the ones on his own, and the same furniture. The only difference was a crucifix on the wall over the desk.
‘Now,’ Barribal said, ‘we speak English. It’s as easy as Spanish for me and many Mexicans speak English because we have much American tourists. They come because it’s cheap in Mexico and I think they hope they might be lucky enough to see something violent.’
He explained that they had been informed that Pel –‘the famous Jefe Pel,’ he called him – was arriving with an assistant and, in an effort to make him feel that every attempt was being made to be helpful, he, Barribal, had been told to remain with him at all times.
‘Sit, Don Evaristo.’
Opening a file, Barribal looked at Pel with a wide smile that showed teeth quite as splendid as Darcy’s.
‘We have your friend–’ Barribal studied the file for a moment ‘–Marc Donck, safely tucked away. That’s not the name he gave, of course. He calls himself Pierre Alaba when he is picked up for the hold-up of the Banco de Atlantico, in the Avenida 16 Septiembre.’
Pel sat up sharply. ‘He held up a bank?’
Barribal smiled.
‘He hold up the bank and get away with half a million pesos. But, as he make his escape, he hit a car and was knocked unconscious. By the time he’d recovered we’d found out who he was.’
The wide smile came again. ‘We also found the bag containing the pesos in the car. So we lock him up for safety. He’s now at La Cantera, la Penitenciaría de Estado. The State Penitentiary. It’s fixed. He’s yours. You will be able to see him and take him away.’
‘Was he on his own?’ Pel was thinking of Navarro’s ex-mistress, Jacqueline Hervé.
‘One other,’ Barribal said. ‘The guy who drove the car. Name of Esteván Borillas. Known to us. He’s got a record.’
Pel listened carefully. He was thinking that, having bolted from France so fast he was short of funds, Donck had held up the bank in an effort to raise money for something else he had had in mind – the thing that had brought him in Mexico. It wasn’t unknown for crooks with big ideas to hold up a bank to fund them.
‘You’ll be interested in the gaol,’ Barribal went on cheerfully. ‘Especially Mexican. Inefficient, naturally. Special kind of prison. The guy’s not a murderer, of course.’
‘He is, in France,’ Pel said shortly.
‘Seguramente. Of course. But you will see him. Then he will be brought back here and handed over to you. He will be placed on the aircraft and after that he will be your concern. I hope he will not escape and do the hijack to Libya.’
‘I hope he won’t, either,’ Pel said.
Having got him, Pel was prepared to handcuff Donck to his seat. But for the wet sort of people who might have objected, he might even have lashed him with strong rope, so thoroughly only his eyes would have been visible above the coils across his chest. Pel wasn’t a mean-spirited man. He just didn’t like criminals.
‘When will this be?’ he asked.
‘Tomorrow I’ll take you to see him. The next day we’ll study the documents. Perhaps the day after he will be yours. Or the day after that.’
‘Why can’t we do it all in one day?’
Barribal smiled. ‘Because this is Mexico,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And we believe in mañana. Tonight, I suggest you enjoy yourselves. There are places to visit. Restaurants. Nightclubs. If you would like a dame even–’
Since he was in Mexico City, it seemed to Pel that perhaps they ought at least to see the place so he could talk about it later to his wife.
Already the sky was dark, the lights were coming on and the glow on the trees reminded him of the Champs Elysées in Paris or the Cours Général de Gaulle in his own city.
‘I’d like to buy a little gold for my wife,’ he said to De Troq’. ‘Something to wear. I’m told gold’s cheap in Mexico. I might be glad of your assistance.’
Feeling dusty after the journeying, and scruffy after sitting so long, he decided on a bath and a change of clothes. Afterwards, he helped himself to a drink from the refrigerator in the bedroom, and sat with his feet up on the bed to drink it.
When he woke he had what felt like a broken neck because he’d been lying with his head at an awkward angle. The glass was empty and on the bedside table but he couldn’t remember placing it there.
Then he saw it was daylight. In a panic, he looked at his watch and discovered it was seven a.m. At first he thought he was dreaming, but then he realised that jet lag had caught up on him and he had slept through the night. There had been no sightseeing, no theatres, no restaurants. Nothing.
Shaving and dressing, he went in search of De Troq’, but his room was empty and he finally found him downstairs in the bar drinking chocolate and eating rolls.
‘I fell asleep,’ he said.
De Troq’ grinned. ‘So I noticed, patron.’
‘We missed seeing the city. Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I tried, patron. But I couldn’t.’
Pel stared accusingly. ‘What did you do? Did you see the sights?’
‘Barribal turned up. He tried to wake you, too, and couldn’t. We had a meal and he drove me round for a while.’
Pel scowled, deciding he must be growing old, had obviously passed his peak and was now on the downward slope. Any moment now – he stopped dead before he had himself in a senile old age, and instead ordered coffee and rolls.
‘Did Barribal say what time he was coming for us?’
De Troq’ looked at his watch. ‘Nine o’clock, he said.’
<
br /> As he spoke, Barribal appeared at their table. He had on a pink shirt and orange tie and was wearing a lightweight suit of pale green. His boots matched his tie. He sat down and gestured to the waiter who arrived with more coffee and rolls. His face showed no smiles and somehow it seemed ominous.
‘I have news for you, mí jefe.’ Barribal frowned. ‘And I guess it is not good.’
‘Your wife’s ill? You can’t go with us to the penitentiary?’
‘Worse than that,’ Barribal said. ‘Your guy has escaped.’
Seven
‘What!’
Pel was on his feet, and almost dancing with fury. He’d been imagining arriving back in France with his criminal lashed to the seat and the triumphant cries of the welcoming police in his ears. ‘Escaped! How in the name of God did that happen?’
Barribal waved a hand. ‘I don’ know. Santa María Purísima, I go to the office this morning to make sure all is in order and I am told.’
‘Who let him go?’
‘Again I don’ know, I know I tear a strip or two off a few people. I have only the report. All I know is that somehow the guy Borillas get hold of a gun and hold up a guard. They steal his clothes and start to walk out, carrying his rifle. Is very bad, but these goddamn Mexes are sloppy. Fortunately, the guy Borillas don’ make it.’
‘He didn’t make it? Why not?’
‘They are spotted and some guy shoot Borillas in the arm.’
‘What about Donck? He could be dangerous.’
‘He get away. And he has the gun. We got to pick him up. There might be some shooting. Somebody could get killed.’
Pel glared. Not only had they allowed his man to escape, now they were telling him he might get shot. Pel didn’t like being shot at and he certainly wasn’t used to being killed.
Barribal was gesturing angrily. ‘But I don’ know the answers, really, mí jefe,’ he said. ‘Not until we arrive at the penitentiary and find out. Let’s go.’
The drive south out of the city was hair-raising. Barribal instructed his driver to put on speed and they swung round lorries, trolley cars, carts and pedestrians. They seemed to hurtle past garages, factories, housing estates, all bare and bleak and devoid of any sort of beauty. Pel had always imagined Mexico to be lazy and colourful, with strumming guitars and wide-sombreroed, smiling people. What he saw was a land struggling to reach modernity through the ugliness of too-hasty development.
Eventually, the traffic began to thin and they turned off the main road on to a dusty track lined with maguey cactus plants. They drove for a while into the sun, finally coming to a standstill in a wide circle at full speed that threw up dust and grit. They climbed out in a space crowded mostly with women with babies and straw bags and packages wrapped in newspaper. One or two of them were obvious prostitutes and there were dozens of children dashing among the honking cars that drew up and parked. Guards were obvious everywhere, in American-style high-heeled boots and Dallas hats. Boys were shouting.
‘Twenty cents, señor! I find any man you want. Fifteen cents to you, señor. Special favour, eh? I have intimate knowledge of the whereabouts of Salazar, Eufemio, and the gangiter Alamara, Raul-Juan.’
His face grim, Barribal pushed through the crowd to the gate. There was a long argument with an Indian-faced guard carrying a carbine but Barribal started to shout and gesticulate with papers and eventually the guard allowed them to pass through.
‘It’s the goddamn system,’ Barribal growled. ‘Liberal-minded guys inflict it on us. They say a goddamn prisoner has the right to see his wife and family. He has the right to his dignity, they say. Even to the point of sex. In bed, too. Me, I’d cut it off, then there’d be no trouble of this sort. There might even not be any crime in the next generation because there wouldn’t be a next generation.’
Pel was inclined to agree but at that moment his fury didn’t allow him to listen.
Inside, the prisoners were meeting the visitors to hawk pottery, leatherware, novelties, food, drink, home-made toys, hand-tooled purses and belts, balloons, madonnas and bracelets. Several of them, holding begging bowls, grouped together to sing:
Rayando el sol,
Me despedí
Bajo la brisa,
Y ahí me accordé de ti…
‘They have to learn a trade,’ Barribal said. ‘That’s the idea behind it. So they’ll be useful citizens when they are free.’ He scowled. ‘By the time they come out, Mexico will be full of nothing but gifts for tourists. Everybody in the goddamn country’ll know how to make leather belts and purses and sing love songs.’
The whole place was full of the odours of garlic, sweat, motorcar exhaust fumes, wine and disinfectant. There were men and women in the same gaol, even in neighbouring cells.
‘It is better in the old days,’ Barribal said. ‘Then they stand them up and shoot them. Three-deep to save bullets. Now you have to pay the kids to stop the hubcaps and the windscreen wipers of your car being stolen. Let’s go see the governor.’
The prison governor was a small man with a mandarin moustache and spectacles. Though, like every Mexican Pel had so far seen, he looked like a bandit, he also managed to look like a very mild-mannered bandit. Barribal leapt at him, red in the face, and he backed away against his desk as if he expected to fend off blows. The shouting went on for several minutes at the end of which the chastened governor gestured and explained.
‘He say he has Borillas in safe custody,’ Barribal said.
‘A pity he doesn’t have Donck,’ Pel growled. ‘We might have been on our way home tonight.’ He could just imagine what the Chief would have to say, what Paris would have to say, when he cabled that the journey, the preparations, the expense, all the work that had gone into the preparation of the documents, had all been for nothing.
Borrillas was in a single dark cell in the main block. There were no other men near him, no sign here of the free-and-easy atmosphere of the rest of the prison, and no concessions for his wound.
‘We can be as cruel as the next guy when we want to be,’ Barribal explained.
Borillas, a gorilla of a man wearing his arm in a sling, was still indignant and understandably bitter that Donck had escaped and he had not.
‘Who produced the gun?’ Barribal asked. ‘Donck’s girlfriend?’
‘No. Mine.’
This was unexpected because they had been convinced, since Donck had escaped, that Jacqueline Hervé had smuggled the gun in.
‘My girlfriend visited me,’ Borillas said. ‘The next time she came, she slipped me a gun, and we got out. But some bastard took a shot at me as we went over the wall and got me in the arm. So I’m here and the other guy got away.’
‘Did his woman ever come to see him here?’
‘You mean the woman who helped set up the bank robbery?’ Borillas frowned. ‘No, she never came. He was mad about that. He said she was cheating him. Something to do with her getting away with some money of his or something like that. Something valuable, anyway. He said if she hadn’t visited him, that was the only explanation. She’d bolted.’
‘Did he mention her name?’
‘Sí. He called her Jacquelina. Something like that. Her other name was Hervo or something.’
‘Why did he set up the bank job?’ De Troq’ asked.
‘To get money, I suppose. That’s why I robbed it.’
‘Did they say why they wanted the money?’
‘To spend.’ Borrillas looked at them as if they were stupid.
‘Did they mention any project they had in mind? Were they simply raising funds for something else bigger?’
‘Bigger?’ Borillas frowned. ‘What’s bigger than a bank job?’
Pel looked at De Troq’. It seemed to him that, since Donck and Hervé had bolted from France at full speed, the hold-up was either to supply them with the money they needed to carry out whatever it was that had resulted from the Navarro-Martin meeting, or else to buy airline tickets to somewhere like Brazil where there was no extrad
ition arrangement.
‘They’d either got something planned, or else they’d carried out something they’d planned,’ he said. ‘Did you know what it was?’
Borillas frowned. ‘They didn’t tell me. Some treasure they’d found maybe? They didn’t tell me anything at all. Whenever I appeared they always stopped talking. I think it was something that had been hidden. I think it was old.’
‘Old?’
‘Sí. Old.’
‘So where will they have gone, peon?’ Barribal snapped.
‘I think they were aiming north. Maybe the American border. They mentioned going to Querétaro. They also mentioned San Miguel de Allende.’
‘What’s that?’ Pel asked.
‘It’s a place near Querétaro,’ Barribal explained. ‘Not far north of Mexico City. Just off the main road. Old colonial town popular with tourists.’
‘Why would they go there?’
‘They mentioned some guy who was going there,’ Borillas said. ‘Some book-writing type.’
‘A professor?’
‘They mentioned a professor.’
Even Pel’s limited knowledge of Spanish had enabled him to pick up the word. ‘Professor, did he say? Which professor? Ask him, De Troq’.’
There was a short jabbered conversation in hurried Spanish then De Troq’ turned.
‘He says he wasn’t Mexican. He was asking questions.’
‘When?’
‘When they met him.’
‘Did he see him?’
‘Once, briefly. With Donck and the woman. Borillas was there but he doesn’t know what they were up to because he couldn’t speak their language. He thinks it was Portuguese but I expect it was French.’
‘Where’s this professor now?’
There was another long exchange of words, and De Troq’ turned again.
‘He doesn’t know but he had a bag with him and he saw the hotel label. It was called the Tepentitla.’
‘I know it.’ Barribal was recovering his spirits now that they were making progress again. Somehow he seemed to feel that the questioning of Borillas was redeeming the mistake of the prison authorities. ‘It’s near the Alameda Gardens in Mexico City.’