“Ándale, Héctor,” came a woman’s voice from the other side of the blackness.
“I can’t,” Héctor confessed.
“Coffee?” suggested Carlos.
“I can’t open my eyes. I really can’t.”
“We brought the stuff from Papa. Come on, ándale, Héctor, time to wake up.”
Héctor finally managed to get his eyes open, and the vague shadows took shape in the light of the room. It all felt like part of a movie he’d seen several times before.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve-thirty,” answered his sister.
“How long were you sleeping?” asked his brother, Carlos.
The two of them sat together on the edge of his desk, next to a cardboard shoe box.
“Only an hour.”
Héctor tried to stand up.
“How long has it been since you got any real sleep?”
“Night before last I slept for a couple of hours.”
“You look kind of green,” observed Carlos.
“No, I’d say it’s more gray. A gray-green,” said Elisa.
“You don’t know how happy it makes me feel to have a couple of comedians come and wake me up. Can you get me a soda pop…Over there behind the filing cabinet, in the wall.”
Elisa jumped down lightly from the desk and went to find the secret compartment.
“What’s this? The office safe?”
The sweet taste of Orange Crush brought Héctor back to life.
“What’s going on?” asked Carlos. “You having a hard time with your work?”
“What do you keep it up for?” Elisa asked. “I can understand why you did it in the first place. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why you don’t move on and do something else now that your life has changed. You’re free now. So why not find something better to do?”
“Why should I? It’s a job like any other.”
“Now that’s a hell of a good reason.” Carlos laughed.
“Hand me my shoes, willya?”
Carlos tossed the shoes at Héctor. He was still waiting for the mist to clear completely; it lingered somewhere in the back of his brain and now and then sent waves of fog rolling across his field of vision. Rubbing his face energetically with the palms of his hands, he stretched himself and then jumped up.
“Aaahhhhggguuujj.”
“All right, now let’s get started.”
The phone rang.
“It’s for you,” said Carlos, and he passed him the receiver.
“Señor Shayne?” It was Marisa Ferrer. Héctor sensed the tension in her voice and for once he ignored the confusion caused by his double surname.
“Elena’s been kidnapped. They just called me from the school…”
“I’m on my way.”
He hung up and looked around for his coat.
“What’s up?”
“A girl’s been kidnapped. Do you guys mind putting this thing off for a while?”
“No problem,” answered Carlos. “Just let me know when you’ve got some time.”
The telephone rang again.
“No, the upholsterer’s not here right now…What’s that? A message? Sure, just a minute, let me find a pen…” Elisa put one in his hand. “Okay. Three meters of number one hundred seventeen BX, blue and black. Señora del Valle. Yes, of course. I’ll give him the message.”
“Can I give you a ride somewhere,” offered Elisa when he got off the phone.
“Do you have a car?”
“No, just the gardener’s motorcycle.”
“How about driving my rent-a-car?”
“What kind is it?”
“It’s a VW.” Héctor buttoned his coat.
Elisa held out her hand for the keys.
“I guess I’ll be going,” said Carlos, picking up the shoe box. “I’ll hold on to this for safe keeping.”
“Sorry about this, brother.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
As they were going out the door, the telephone rang again. Héctor hesitated, then went back.
“There were some shots and now they’re fighting at the gate. I called like you asked me to…” It was the woman from the lonchería. She hung up. So that’s how it was going to be…first nothing, and now everything all at once.
“What is it this time?”
“There were shots fired in the factory, or something like that.”
“I’m going over there,” said Carlos.
“Give me the box, then,” said Elisa.
“I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you, Héctor. Stay out of it. It’s between the union and the company…It’s not your problem.”
“I’ll be out there all the same,” Héctor insisted.
Carlos shrugged.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“What factory?” Elisa asked, as Héctor took her by the hand and pulled her toward the elevator.
“Everything at once and I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“What did I tell you?”
“What did you tell me about what?”
“About your job, it’s crazy…”
“I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
“I kind of guessed,” said Elisa as the elevator doors slid shut.
The phone started to ring again in the office, but this time there was no one there to answer it.
He made his way through the ranks of nuns until he got to the head sister’s office. He had dozed briefly, fitfully, in the backseat of the car, unable to get the picture of Elena, with her arm in a cast, out of his mind. And the image of the one girl brought him around again to the image of another woman thousands of miles away. Elisa pushed the pedal to the floor, but heavy midday traffic held them back.
Héctor remembered the upholsterer saying something about some mail for him…he felt in his coat pocket, there it was. Still, it would have to wait for a more opportune moment.
And the message for the upholsterer? He’d left it on the desk, scribbled in the margin of one of the old newspapers they used as stationary in their office. Héctor hoped he’d see it there.
“Who are you?” demanded the nun from behind a pair of glasses thick as Coke bottles. She was as stiff as her starched white habit.
“Detective Belascoarán Shayne, ma’am.” Elisa, standing behind him, couldn’t keep from smiling at the strange combination of the exotic profession and the familiar family name. She’d heard the name so many times, as a child in school, over and over again, almost always mispronounced. And now to think that her brother was a private detective… He’s crazy, she thought. Crazy like everybody else.
“I’m working for Señora Ferrer,” he explained, showing his license. The sister passed her hand over it like a blind woman reading Braille, with her eyes still on the detective.
“Where did it happen?”
“Out in the playground. She was in gym class.”
Héctor raced out of the office and down the stairs, heedless of the shouts that followed him from the principal’s office.
A couple of dozen girls in blue shorts and white shirts were scattered around the school yard, clustered into small groups, talking. The gym teacher, a thin, fibrous woman with the look of a retired British tennis pro, came over to talk with Héctor. Elisa followed a few yards behind him, cradling the shoe box in her arms.
“They came in over there,” the woman told him without waiting to be asked. “Elena wasn’t in the class, because of her arm, you understand? She was lying down on that table over there, in the sun.”
She pointed to a broken-down old desk. Héctor looked at it as if it were important.
“There were two of them, with guns…They were both so young. Both of them had black hair, and one of them was wearing dark sunglasses.”
“The other one was wearing a green sweatshirt,” volunteered a girl in the circle that had begun to form around them.
“They went straight for her and grabbed her and took her away. They pointed their guns right at me.”
“Me, too.”
“They were pointing at everybody.”
“The one in the sweatshirt grabbed her by the neck and made her walk really fast.”
“Did they say anything? Did Elena say anything?”
“She shouted when they pushed her. She said that her arm hurt.”
“What did she say exactly?”
“Leave me alone, you’re hurting me, something like that.”
“Did she seem very surprised?”
“Yes, very,” one girl told him.
“No, not very,” said another.
Héctor left them discussing the kidnapping among themselves and ran through the gate and out onto the street, glancing rapidly up and down the block. Across the street, the old tamale seller stood staring at him. Héctor crossed over, with Elisa following close behind.
“You saw them,” Héctor said. It was a statement, not a question.
“I don’t want any trouble, mister.”
“Look, I’m not with the cops.”
“I don’t want any trouble, mister.”
The conversation went on like that for about five minutes.
Finally, the old man handed him a small piece of paper.
“The bastards…They were driving that same Rambler station wagon. Here’s the license number. But you didn’t get it from me, okay?”
“I found it on the ground,” Héctor said. He dropped the slip of paper and stooped to pick it up again from the sidewalk.
The old man smiled.
***
“But what the hell’s the point? Where’s the challenge, what makes it all worthwhile?” he asked himself as he stretched out in the backseat of the northbound VW, his sister at the wheel. He dozed off as they drove along Ferrocarril Hidalgo past Villa de Guadalupe, but the question followed him into his dreams.
What bothered him wasn’t the peculiar, violent rhythm of the last few days, or the uncontrollable momentum that propelled him along, forcing him to choose, or better yet, forcing him to accept the choices that the course of events had already pushed him into. The thing that bothered Belascoarán was the “why” of it all, why he had gone ahead and gotten himself into such a mess. Which part of his confused mind was it that had set him off on this fiery road to glory, along these three parallel paths? The basic question seemed simple enough, but all he had were three different answers that each accounted only for their own part of the complicated story: (a) There was something he liked instinctively about the teenage Elena Ferrer, with her arm in a cast; there was something that attracted him in the role of silent protector. (b) He thought that by wading into the muck surrounding the murder of the two engineers, he’d find a way to repay the debt he’d incurred during all those years he’d worked as an engineer himself. It wasn’t that he owed anything to the profession. That wasn’t it at all. Rather, it was a debt that came out of his willing submission to the status quo, his disdain for the workers, all the times he’d driven through the working-class neighborhoods like a man traveling through a disaster zone. He needed to go back to where he’d started from and prove to himself that he had changed. And, of course, tied up with the rest of it was the problem of keeping the independent union from being framed for the murders. (c) He wanted to look into the living eyes of the real Emiliano Zapata, he wanted to know if the country the old revolutionary had once dreamed of was still possible, to see if the old man could somehow communicate some of the spirit and conviction that had inspired his crusade. Although he didn’t believe for a minute that Zapata was actually still alive, the simple act of delving into the past, searching for the clues of his fugitive existence, seemed to bring the old man that much closer to life.
That’s more or less how things settled out in the mind of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a detective by trade, thirty-one years old, with the good luck and the misfortune to be born and raised a Mexican. Divorced, without children, in love with a woman far away. The occupant of a grimy office on Artículo 123, and a minuscule apartment in the Roma Sur. With a master’s degree in industrial engineering from an American university, a certificate in detection from a Mexican correspondence school; a fan of private-eye novels and a connoisseur of Chinese food, a mediocre driver, lover of parks and forests, owner of a .38 revolver; a little rigid, fairly shy, mildly sarcastic, excessively self-critical; who one day, on his way out of a movie theater, broke with his past, and started his life all over again, until he found himself where he was now: crossing over Puente Negro in the backseat of a VW bug, dressed in a wrinkled trench coat, and overcome with a sleepiness that poured from his mouth with every yawn.
“Go straight along here then take the third right.”
“Yes, boss.”
“What’s going on with you these days?” he asked his sister.
Elisa smiled into the rearview mirror.
“Do you need a chauffeur or don’t you?”
Héctor didn’t answer.
“When I need an analyst I’ll let you know.”
“All right, all right. It’s just that lately you seem kind of, well, you know…”
Héctor rubbed his sister’s neck gently from behind. Without looking back, she tilted her head to squeeze his hand between her cheek and shoulder.
They could see the crowd gathered in front of the plant from two blocks away. A pair of patrol cars blocked the road.
Héctor got out of the car, showed his license, and they let them through.
“What’s going on?”
“They wouldn’t say. Drive over toward that lonchería.”
Some two hundred workers formed a compact mass behind the Delex gate. In front of the iron railing stood a squadron of armed policemen, and behind them, a few dozen scattered workers. Ten yards back from the gate there was another mass of workers brandishing sticks and pipes, with a bald man in a tan suit egging them on. Carlos stood near the gate, talking with the workers from The Vulture.
“Qué pasa?” Héctor asked him. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. That’s a bunch of scabs over there,” and he motioned with his chin toward the group of armed workers outside the gate, “who they tried to bring into the plant. But if we can hold out another hour until the guys from the swing shift get here, we’ll have them beat.”
“What happened before?”
“We were in the middle of the work stoppage,” answered a short worker with a piece of gauze taped across his cheekbone, “and one of these damn scabs up and hits Gustavo with a pipe, so like an idiot I go over there to see what’s the matter, and the son of a bitch nails me, too. Well, of course, the compañeros got pretty pissed when they saw what happened, and they went and chased this guy all over the factory, and when they came running out into the yard, the guards shot into the air to scare them off. Then the foreman showed up and he fired me. For aggression, he said, the lousy son of a bitch. But they had it all figured out beforehand, because when the guards pulled me out of the plant, they had these guys waiting here with that Uncle Tom from the pro-government union federation…They all come from around Santa Julia. I’ve seen one of them around before, they call him El Chicai, he lives over a pool hall behind the market…But anyway, they screwed up, because the boys all came out to the gate and here we are now…And then the cops showed up.”
The crowd of workers behind the gate started to chant: “Dogs! Dogs!” and then broke into a chorus of We Shall Not Be Moved. The other workers scattered around the yard joined in.
The security guards advanced on the gate and the gang of scabs pulled away.
A rumor of voices could be heard approaching in the distance.
“Who’s that?” Héctor asked.
A column of marching men broke through the police roadblock.
“Union workers from a rolling mill around the corner. It’s their lunch hour and they’ve come to lend a hand…Just wait and see if it doesn’t come to this now…” The short man gestured roughly with his hands.
There were about 200 of them and they walked arm in arm in rows of seven or eight. Most of the scabs started to drift away, leaving only a nucleus around the man in the tan suit, and even they retreated another twenty yards so as not to be caught between the approaching column and the workers behind the plant gate.
The men inside the yard saw what was happening and increased the volume of their chanting. They surged past the three guards blocking the gate, scaled the steel grating and greeted the arriving workers with shouts and hugs.
“Whew,” said Carlos, “that was close. The second shift’ll be here in another twenty minutes and that’ll be it for today. Now we have to find a way to get you men back inside.”
“Here I go,” said the short worker.
“Remember, they can’t fire you for what happened in there. You were attacked and didn’t retaliate. Go on in and return to your station,” said a tall man behind them.
The short one ran toward the gate and climbed over, evading a pair of guards who tried to stop him. His fellow workers welcomed him back with cheers.
“I’m going,” Héctor said.
“I told you it didn’t have anything to do with you,” answered Carlos.
“I was glad to be here.”
“I wonder if the boss man saw you.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
***
There was no one in the office. From the window he watched Elisa drive away on her motorcycle, and then went and picked up the telephone, hunting in the old newspapers on his desk for a name and a number. Sergeant García. He dialed the number of the traffic cop who sold him information at fifty pesos a shot and read him the license number from the green Rambler station wagon. After a few minutes García came back on the line.
An Easy Thing Page 9