by Rolo Diez
Rolo Diez, born in Argentina in 1940, was imprisoned for two years during the military dictatorship and forced into exile. He now lives in Mexico City, where he works as a novelist, screenwriter and journalist. A number of his novels have been published in Spain, France and Germany. Rolo Diez was awarded the Hammett prize for best crime novel in Spanish in 1985, and won the Umbriel Prize at the Semana Negra festival of crime fiction in Spain in 2003. This is the first time he has been published in English.
TEQUILA BLUE
Rolo Diez
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in Spanish as Mato y Voy by
Ediciones B, Mexico City, 1992
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England
© Rolo Diez, 1992
English translation © Nick Caistor, 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral right of Nick Caistor has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-9085-2419-5
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk
For Myriam
Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter one
Snow White looks eighteen going on fifteen, with her short skirt and plaits, breasts like apples and 110 pounds of a mixture of innocence and sensuality all wrapped in tissue paper. There are only four, not seven dwarfs, and they are not real dwarfs, just very short men. Half-hidden behind false white beards, their faces are vicious and disturbing. The opening scene shows them having a meal in a clearing in a wood. One of the dwarfs is serving wine. He offers it to Snow White but switches the bottle without her realizing it. The four freaks wink and make obscene gestures to one other. They watch lasciviously as the woman-child sips from her glass. As she finishes her drink, Snow White falls into what appears to be a catatonic trance. The dwarfs pull a mattress out from under the table. They lay Snow White down on it and start undressing her.
Chapter two
Lourdes woke me at eight with a beer and a sour look that I had no intention of responding to. I twisted and turned in the bed until I was more or less upright and could take the first swig.
“I went to bed at four,” I told her. “This beer is warm. I don’t want it frozen, but it should be cold. I’ve told you a thousand times.”
Lourdes is the only person in the world who can launch into four different topics at once:
“You told me you were leaving at eight; we haven’t paid the kids’ school fees; there’s nothing to eat; why do you have a family if you can’t be bothered to look after them?”
Lourdes is thin, the nervous type, her beauty ruined by her irritation. I contemplated a reply, but it sank without trace in my desire to go on sleeping.
“Put the beer in the freezer and call me again in fifteen minutes.”
Lourdes walked off complaining, but I wasn’t even listening any more. Cops like me can sleep standing up, when we’re on duty, covering some guy whose footsteps are bound to wake us up.
An hour later I was out of the house. The sun hurt my eyes, and the fumes from Avenida Revolucion clawed at my nose and throat.
I stopped off at a taco bar and had a quick breakfast. A soup with bread and lots of chilli in it – the perfect indigenous remedy to improve the way a hung-over guy sees the world, the human condition, and Mondays, to help persuade him he has to go to the office – then chopped steak and several coffees. The bar owner, Luis, wanted to know the price on .38 revolvers and 9mm pistols.
“I’ve got someone interested in buying,” he said with a wink. “I could order five or six, if there’s something in it for me.”
“I’ll look into it,” I told him. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
I was thinking of talking to Amaya, who can get rods cheap. If each of us made a hundred thousand on each gun, that would mean half a million for us and we could still sell them at a reasonable price. Not business for its own sake, but to fight the debts that insisted on piling up at the end of every month.
Red was not at the money exchange: he had a business breakfast. And the envelope for my boss wasn’t there either. That scumbag Red: the Commander wasn’t going to be pleased at having to wait. I’d left Red thirty thousand dollars on his behalf, first-class Colombian stuff that even the White House would accept. And he was supposed to pay up today. He knew that, but here he was, playing games with cops . . . as if we couldn’t screw his business completely if we felt like it.
“What time is he coming?” I asked.
“He won’t be long,” his secretary said.
A nymphette, a looker. Hot stuff, but not as hot as she thought she was.
Her office was all glass, wall-to-wall carpet, paintings and diplomas. I undid my jacket. I was sitting so that little miss pretty couldn’t see the grease stain on my trousers. I used to be able to sit with my jacket buttoned, but these days my stomach seems determined to put on a display of forty years of tacos and beer.
“Has he been in touch?” I said, putting on my stern policeman look. I know these dames. If you so much as let on you’ve noticed their attractions, there’s no end to their little games of seduction. Not because a tart like her gives a damn about someone like me, but simply because it’s their way of showing their power. The only power they’ve got: flesh and their shiny veneer.
“No,” with a flutter of rings and bangles. “But he usually comes in about now.”
“I need to talk to him urgently,” I said, handing her my card. “Please tell him to call me as soon as he gets here.”
“Yes, Mr Hernandez,” she said, looking at the card.
I buttoned my jacket and stood up. I leaned over to shake hands, and found myself staring down a plunging neckline. She saw my look and smiled.
*
When I got to the office they were serving coffee. The Commander was having breakfast in the Sheraton with a judge and a member of Congress. Convinced that public relations are all about having a full stomach and a full diary, the boss doesn’t stint on breakfast. He devotes his mornings to other people’s careers and tries to choose the right people.
Maribel brought me coffee. She stroked my hand and asked for my office contribution: fifty thousand pesos.
“You owe the last two payments,” she said, her voice as sweet and fake as her expression.
Maribel is as hot as her native Veracruz, and is battling against time. Her hair is dyed and teased at the salon. She has good legs, adolescent children she prefers to keep hidden, a baker husband, and the soul of a whore. Just because she’s the boss’s secretary she thinks she can intimidate and lay – or at least try to lay – all the males in the office. I think of her every time I hea
r a feminist banging on about the sexual harassment of women in the workplace.
Maribel put on her best tropical smile and slid out the tip of her tongue: a promise of fellatio that set my stomach tingling.
All I had in my pockets was a fifty-peso bill. All I had to face a long day, feed myself, and find another ten of the same to calm Lourdes’s nerves. Not to mention Gloria: I haven’t been to her place in four days, and although she’s patient enough and understands how difficult things can be, she’s got kids and all the rest to take care of just like in any family. If I hadn’t forbidden it, she’d be on the phone to me right now.
Maribel’s knees closed in on mine. Laura and the cleaning woman exchanged knowing smiles. I didn’t move.
“Wait till tomorrow, I’ll pay you then,” I said.
“Poor you! You’ve got so many problems.” When they come over all tender, tarantulas must look exactly as she did at that moment. “How about going out for a drink, then you can tell me all about it?”
“The boss might arrive,” I said half-heartedly.
“We’ve got an hour,” whispered Maribel, with all the naturalness of someone who behaves in a Mexican police office as if she were Marlene Dietrich in a Cairo cabaret. She accompanied her words with increased pressure of her knees against my left leg, which I had to push against the floor to steady myself.
Seeing that the whole office was having fun at my expense, and considering a gentleman should never disappoint a lady, especially if he doesn’t want to be thought of as a queer, I decided it would be less costly to have an early-morning fuck in a hotel at her expense than have to give her all I had left to pay my contribution.
In the elevator Maribel gave me a playful lipsticky bite that I returned as best I could.
“Beast!” she groaned with satisfaction.
“Don’t leave any marks!” I told her, imagining Lourdes’s face twisted with jealousy, and her mania for examining my neck and back for signs of someone else’s nails and teeth. Lourdes is a self-taught forensic expert, and I’m always the man in the dock. We’ve had real arguments over it, and it’s incredible how she spots these things!
On the way to the hotel in my hostess’s Caribe, I was suddenly worried my trouser tool might not be up to it, or might be up to it then duck out halfway through the performance, or I might come too soon, as occasionally happens, especially when I have to examine a new body that’s poring over mine. And even though Maribel was no stranger, I was worried about my size. I’m forty years old and see myself in the shower every day. Yet I’m still not sure whether I’m hung like a horse and make every woman swoon, as I sometimes think, or if what I’ve got is nothing more than the tiniest shrivelled up little bean in the world, not big enough to satisfy a cat on a diet.
At the hotel I ordered a rum and mineral water for my nerves and my thirst, both of which are par for the course in rooms like this. Exciting sounds were coming from the room next door, as if an Aztec virgin were being sacrificed on an altar. Interestingly, our bed was against the same wall: either a hippie or a communist idea that struck me as very clever. I soon changed my mind when it was obvious Maribel’s interest in my charms was transferred to the wall. She stuck to it like a limpet. Naked and as wrinkled as an accordion, I lit a cigarette. Groans and sighs accompanied me all the way to the bathroom, where I pissed with difficulty and found a glass. My professional training led me to take it back into the bedroom, place the top against the noisiest part of the wall and gesture for Maribel to come over and press her ear to it. Judging by the growing signs of ecstasy on her face, this had the desired effect. After I’d finished my cigarette, and given that a naked man can’t stand around with his hands in his pockets, I started to undress her. Far from the pressures of offices and marriages, she let me get on with it. I undid her blouse and her bra, nibbling at her neck as I did so. I was still holding the glass in one hand while with the other I stroked her underarms, aroused her nipples with my fingers, bit her shoulder blades, licked her spinal column and at the same time encouraged her clothes on their slow journey to the floor. I lifted her skirt over her head. I took my time at her waist, filled both hands with her buttocks then started to take down her undies. Maribel was groaning, purring, her ear still pressed to the glass. I slid her pants down the narrow part of her legs. Maribel lifted one red shoe and freed herself. That was the moment I realized the gods were rewarding me for being such an excellent cop: I was going to make love to a woman whose head was buried in her skirt; I was going to fornicate with a woman who was listening to another couple fornicating; I was about to fuck a woman who still had her stockings and high-heeled shoes on. Three sexual fantasies in a single fuck! My prick flew up like an acrobat. I couldn’t remember ever having seen it so big and strong. I pushed it between her buttocks and set about taking her from behind. Maribel turned towards me, smiled rapturously and whispered:
“My back’s incredibly itchy. You couldn’t scratch it for me, could you, love?”
For the next seven minutes I scratched her back, convinced no power on earth could ever make me erect again.
Afterwards, when we got round to sighing and then to silence after the sighs, she wanted the whole works. Disaster. I only just managed to get her to pay for the hotel and drinks. I’d been thinking of touching her for a loan, but it hardly seemed the right moment.
*
Back at the office, the boss had one of his “we’re going to get a few things straight” faces on. To rub it in, as usual, he kept on about what time it was and how I had gone off with his secretary. He wasn’t that bothered – in fact he was probably grateful, because if someone else didn’t do it, he would have to – but he was the boss, and had to show who was in charge. Then he quickly turned to what really interested him. No news from Red. Purple veins stood out in the bags round his eyes as he stared at me in a way I was well accustomed to: I was to blame for everything. And even though my role was simply as a go-between who had to appear and collect the money from someone who wasn’t there, we were talking about thirty thousand dollars, so there was no way the Commander was going to be reasonable about it.
“I’ll call him right now,” I said, playing the part of Officer Hernandez to perfection. “And he’d better have the money in his hand, or else!”
The boss’s wrinkles lost some of their creases. He began to lecture me on the need to take strict measures against traffickers whose only thought was to get all the dollars they could out of the country, who thought nothing of Mexico because money was the only homeland they believed in. He went on to describe Red himself, who, to judge by the thoughts he expressed, was so unworthy and unreliable he could not understand why he had ever entrusted any dollars to him.
With his exhortation to behave with all the firmness characteristic of the DO still ringing in my ears, I left the boss’s office. “Get a move on with that, because a gringo’s been killed in a row between queers, and I want you to be in charge of the case” were the last words I heard.
*
It was usually a case with a gringo or involving people who could not be tainted with even the slightest whiff of suspicion, the kind of thing that could not be left to illiterate uniformed cops.
That’s what we in the DO are here for, to operate with our sharp surgeon’s knife on the gangrenous social body, to give precision treatment to events which, left to inexpert hands, might produce negative, even uncontrollable results.
And even though our critics – there are always critics, because there’s more envy in this country than there are husbands whose wives have been fucking around – say our aims were drawn up by the comic Cantinflas, we know what we’re worth.
When the Directorate of Operations was set up, the old guard was up in arms. “All operations are secret. Only senators and undersecretaries could think of associating them with publicity.”
In private they said much harsher things.
Eighteen years on, they still think we’re a bunch of pseudo-intellectual politic
os on the make, and even though we have a smaller budget than any other department, none of the cops can forgive us for being able to write our own names.
As I left the office, Maribel did not even deign to look at me.
*
I called Lourdes from a payphone, and I have to say that she had only herself to blame for her foul mood. To calm her down, I told her I had the money in my pocket, and a desk groaning under piles of work; I suggested she get some things on credit from the store and promised I’d settle everything that evening. She asked me no less than three times if I really had the money, if I wasn’t just trying to pull the wool over her eyes, and if this wasn’t simply another of my stories. That woman’s ability to doubt everything defies belief. I reassured her as best I could, then I got angry and hung up.
I wanted to hear more pleasant sounds, so I rang Gloria. No sooner did she hear my voice than the tears started. She accused me of being cruel, of abandoning her, of starving her children to death. Although I know she can be a bit over the top, I was annoyed that she seemed to be blaming me for everything too. I can remember a time when she made do with nothing, always had a smile for me and was a quiet oasis where I could rest whenever my wife was displaying her talents as a harpy. Though they had never met, in five years Gloria had become so similar to Lourdes they were like sisters. I swore I’d call in at her apartment that evening and promised to take money and presents for the kids.
Red was still not in his office. The nymphette told me in a singsong voice: “Doctor Rosenthal has flown to Guanajuato, but he left a message for you: he’s very sorry and asks you to forgive the delay. He’s got your money, and he’ll settle everything first thing tomorrow.”
Chapter three
Up in the sky above me I can see clouds and crows sailing past. Bound hand and foot to a sacrificial altar on the platform of a low pyramid, I watch as a priest offers me extreme unction in a language I do not understand. The priest is wearing a dagger at his waist; a frothing green mist rises from the goblet in his hands. It must be an acid or poison that will dissolve my flesh like wax.