by Rolo Diez
I study law; I’m going to be a judge one day; I have almost two thousand books in my library. I stared at Rosario and resolved not to try to explain to her that being smart is for gypsies, it’s all that’s left to those of us who are really in the shit, whereas a chubby freckled little gringo who’s been brought up on a diet of proteins and computers doesn’t need to be smart at all. He’s the one who’ll always be the manager and owner of the factory, the one who employs whole teams of smart people like us to work for him.
“What time tomorrow can I see you?” I sighed.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here,” she said, flashing her teeth. “The gringo wants to take me to Taxco and Valle de Bravo.”
Not being a gringo, I frowned.
“As soon as you get back, come and find me,” I said, pointing at her. “I want to hear from you within two days.”
Rosario clung onto my arm, rubbed herself against me, purred:
“Don’t be angry, big guy. Everything will work out fine.”
How do they manage to change like that in just three years? I’ll never know.
I called home to make sure everything was all right. My kids were fighting over the next TV programme: they said they had eaten well, and I didn’t doubt it. Next I phoned Gloria to tell her I’d be with her in an hour.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Steak, guacamole and salad.”
“And beer?”
“A six-pack.”
Even though I hadn’t said a word, sleeping with her two nights running was a clear sign. Gloria was going to try all her tricks to soften me up. I couldn’t avoid it and didn’t want to even if I had been able to.
I had one more thing to do before my day was done.
Chapter eight
Cruz turned out to be a hard nut: tough and booze-sodden, one of those who refuse to cooperate. He opened the door four inches, enough for me to make out his furtive animal face and the mop of hair sprouting in thick swirls from just above his eyebrows.
Realizing there was a cop outside and trying to slam the door in my face combined in a single thought and action. I stuck my foot in the crack to stop him, and although my foot came out of it badly, I was stronger than he was, and managed to push my way in.
I showed him my badge with my left hand, keeping my other hand on the butt of my regulation pistol. Cruz collapsed into a chair and did nothing but grunt unintelligibly for a couple of minutes.
The place displayed all the charm of a typical bachelor’s apartment: bottles, clothes and newspapers strewn all over the floor; an inch of dust on any object an unwary visitor might touch; the stale smell of dirt, urine, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and fetid underwear. All of this protected from environmental pollution by firmly shut windows.
I didn’t think there was much possibility of getting anything out of this ape. If he hadn’t got such valuable information, I would have made do with giving him a good kick in the balls for his bad manners, and gone off to sleep with Gloria.
Instead, I took out Jones’s photo and said:
“You threatened this man and pretended to be an Interior Ministry agent in order to blackmail him.”
Cruz spat between my shoes and replied:
“Fucking gringo faggots! They think they’re God’s gift, but all they do is come down here to Mexico and steal our fucking dough!”
“Hmm. So you decided to give him a fright because he was mixed up in shady business.”
“Why don’t they all just go back to their own fucking country!”
“And make a bit of dough while you were at it.”
“No, whaddya . . . ”
Cruz was not someone it was easy or interesting to talk to. Unlike his associate, who was quick to seize what was going on, he behaved like a chimpanzee on the defensive. His replies consisted of a mixture of vague generalizations; empty phrases passed off as answers to specific questions; insults intended to demonstrate rejection, denial or disagreement; and monosyllables in a kind of primitive tribal language aimed at protecting the speaker and confusing the questioner.
I considered hauling him in and softening him up in solitary for the night, but it was already well past ten (I’d like to know who else works all day and is still working at ten at night . . . just so that the citizens of this fine country can hold the opinion that the police do not deserve the meagre wages we’re paid) and I was desperate to get back, eat, drink a couple of beers and go to bed. So I came straight to the point:
“Listen, asshole. You’re breaking the law, and that’s very bad. I’ve no intention of wasting the night on you. So either you tell me right now what you were up to and make me an offer, or I can throw you in the slammer and you can think it over as long as you like. We’ve got special holes for people like you. By the time you get out you’ll be so old you won’t even remember your name.”
It sounded good, but it didn’t work.
“You’re fucked, you son of a bitch!” the ape replied, even angrier than I had been. “I’m the brother-in-law of a four-star general, and the Under-secretary of the Interior Ministry is my godfather! Try anything with me, and you’re a dead man! It’s up to you . . . ”
Cruz was raising the stakes, and he knew it. I had no way of guessing whether this creep was simply friends with a patrolman, or if he dined every Friday in the Presidential Palace at Los Pinos. It’s a classic criminal ploy: if the shadow of a doubt arises, go for it. And if you do, the one who’s the toughest, the one with the most skill and powers of persuasion is likely to win out. Then again, however much you’d like to be somewhere else, staring at some other ugly mug, doing something else altogether, you’re in the game now, and there’s no quitting.
“Get dressed and bring your ID,” I said, seeing Cruz was wearing pyjama trousers and a filthy T-shirt. “You’re coming with me. Once you’re safely inside we’ll give your brother-in-law and your godfather a call.”
Cruz grunted and stared at me, itching for a fight. I moved my hand to my waist and lifted my gun an inch out of its holster. He stood up. I wanted to do the same, but I would have lost authority if I didn’t go on being calm. From the red mist in my host’s eyes and the way he bared his teeth at me, I could tell he might attack at any moment. I stayed put, because that’s the next move in the game.
“You’ll regret this for the rest of your life, you fucking clown!” Cruz threatened me.
“I’ll give you five seconds, then I’m going to get angry.”
Cro-Magnon man made for a chest of drawers. As he turned away from me, I quickly pulled out my gun and aimed at the middle of his back. He opened the top drawer, took out a crumpled shirt and laid it on top of the chest. He felt inside the drawer again, and a second later a hail of bullets flew over my head and crashed into the wall and furniture behind me. I put four shots into his chest and one in his forehead. I didn’t stop firing until he dropped his weapon.
Conclusion: apart from the penal code, self-defence and other legal justification, the truth is that nailing someone who is trying to kill you is very satisfying. I’m no sadist, and it’s not just me. I’ve asked several colleagues, and they all say the same. It’s a question of biology, some sort of memory from our jungle past: we’ve been challenged and we have come out on top; they tried to defeat us, but we defeated them. There’s also a psychological element to it: we have affirmed our personality, we’re not as useless as others would have us believe, or even as we ourselves think – that is, in those brief moments when we don’t consider ourselves sheer geniuses.
You feel alive, and that doesn’t happen every day. I feel it when a dame starts to groan with passion, or when I solve a case neatly, when I’m on holiday or, like now, when I send a son of a bitch who thought he could pull one over on me to the cemetery.
I was on the ground floor of a four-storey block. I could hear sounds and voices, see lights being switched on and off. Clear signs that the whole building was aware that something had happened in Osvaldo Cruz’s apartment.<
br />
There was nothing else for it, so I called the police. But before that I switched all the lights on and carried out a rapid search. I found a stash of money and a handful of jewels hidden at the bottom of a drawer. I chose a necklace for Lourdes and a pair of earrings for Gloria no one would notice. The main thing always is not to take anything that might affect the investigation. I stared at the rest of the jewels for a good while then picked out a bracelet about half an inch thick that looked as if it was made of gold. I put it in my pocket.
When the detectives arrived, I briefly explained what had happened. The ’tecs stared at the stash of jewels, stared at me as if they wanted to search me, then let me go after I swore I would give them a proper statement the next day.
Some days and nights never seem to end. I set off through Tlalpan, heading for the viaduct, but before I had gone two hundred yards I knew it was too late to go to Mixcoac. I stopped at an open store and bought a few tins of seafood, ham, cheese, sausages, bread, cigarettes and a bottle of “traditional Bacardi” rum. I decided I’d eat with my friend Rivas Alcantara, who lives in Colonia Viaducto Piedad. He’s someone everyone is scared of for the same reason they’re scared of spiders. He owes me a favour, and he’s in charge of an amazing archive, where there’s more information than a man can absorb without gossiping about it from time to time with a friend he can trust.
I cruised around the neighbourhood until I found his address. I saw several cops on the lookout in their cars with the lights out; and plenty of people who would look a lot better behind bars. When it comes to physiognomy, I’m with Lombrosio. Forgetting Quasimodo, who’s a friend of mine, in this city some of the drunken bums you see roaming around have mugs which immediately tell you that if they haven’t just killed a man or raped a woman or robbed a store, they’ll be doing so in the next quarter of an hour or so. That’s what happened with Cruz. My expert eye was not mistaken, and if I hadn’t been forewarned and had my gun trained on his midriff, I’d be the one dead right now, and the ’tecs would have shared out my watch and the few banknotes I had on me. I saw quite a few delinquents of around the same age as Carlos behaving stupidly and noisily under the yellow lights on street corners; and I saw young girls like Araceli who ought to have been at home rather than rubbing themselves up against some guy or other in dark doorways. I found a public phonebox and called San Pedro de Los Pinos. It was engaged, so I knew at least one of my kids was where they should be. Fifty per cent of my worries were over. I called Quasimodo’s apartment, and no one answered. I felt frustrated at seeing the place in darkness and my friend obviously not there. I called the Archive, and Quasimodo answered. That man works as if he were well paid, or didn’t want to go home. I told him I’d call in on him, and drove off again as if I too were paid to do so.
*
“This is interesting, Carlitos!” We were finishing our meal; I had managed to get through to my kids and tell Gloria that something unexpected had come up. A few men and women were walking along the aisles of the Archive, adding to the feeling of museum and eternity that is typical of temples to memory. “So the Jones case led you to Cruz . . . Let me tell you: we’re surrounded by useless cretins who don’t know their arse from their elbow.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t mean you.” Quasimodo waved his arm in the air, as if to fend off any protest on my part. “Do you want to know the secrets behind a proper investigation?”
I bit my tongue. At eleven-fifty at night, after a day working like a galley-slave, instead of being flat out on my bed with a glass of rum and a cigarette, reading a novel or watching a film on TV, here I was wasting my time on a guy with a face like a cockroach who was insisting on showing off. Quasimodo had carried on chewing the whole time as he listened to what had happened at the Portales building and now was using his home advantage to teach me lessons about police procedure.
“If you would be so kind as to explain . . . ”
“This is the first,” my friend said, patting the folders he had shoved to the side of his desk to make room for the ham, sausages and so on. “A good archive: proper files with reliable information. Get everything down on paper, because you never know what might come up. The second is knowing about the butterfly effect, and the concatenation of contradictions.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning that everything is related to everything else.”
The Quasimodo show. And Hernandez the patient spectator. What else could I do . . . ?
“So what?”
“So, Jones is in another file, related to another unsolved death.”
That was different. I almost forgot about being annoyed.
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because I don’t work as a fortune-teller any more. You only asked about Valadez.”
He was right.
“Tell me.”
My friend served two large glasses of rum, stood up and said: “I’ll go and fetch some ice.” He stopped off on the way to talk to a well-endowed black-haired woman. I passed the time contemplating a stack of archives that reached the ceiling and turned at a right angle out of his office, continued as far as the eye could see on through other offices, and possibly even reached out into the street or into a tunnel, perhaps even as far as the Interior Ministry or the Presidential Palace itself. When he came back with lots of ice and a black folder under his arm Quasimodo gave me a brief summary of the notes in the Jones file. It was a delicate matter, and the high-ups were keeping tabs on it, apparently at his embassy’s request.
I listened; filled the glasses; smoked my cigarette.
“What exactly your man has been up to isn’t clear,” Quasimodo concluded. “But it stinks to high heaven, I can tell you. Officially, his job is filming ruins and pre-Hispanic sites, but he spends his whole time looking for whores in all the agencies.”
Heavy stuff. I tried to bring it back to my own area.
“What have Cruz and Valadez got to do with it?”
“Valadez worked with him, he was supposed to be his representative for some deals. Cruz is from a very different world. It’s impossible to imagine him with Jones. However . . . ”
He pored over the black folder.
“Yes . . . ?”
“A little over a month ago they were together in the Royal Hotel. They had a meal and were arguing. They both got very heated.”
“Who supplied the information?”
“Someone.”
“Was Jones being watched?”
“What do you think?”
“Do you know anything about that blond transvestite who was with Jones the night he was killed?”
Quasimodo subjected me to another display of his ravaged smile.
“That’s your case, Carlitos. What I’ve said has to do with this one,” he said, tapping his file marked “Victoria Ledesma” with a coffee-coloured finger. “It’s all top secret. I can’t make any photocopies or give you information from it, or even let you take a peek at it. But now I’m off to get the ice cubes for my last drink. I’ll be back in exactly fifteen minutes.”
We synchronized our watches. Quasimodo left the file on the desk and walked out holding the Tupperware still full of ice.
Jose Miguel Rivas Alcantara may not be Kevin Costner, and now I come to think of it, I’ve no idea how he ever attracts any women, but he’s a good and grateful friend.
*
As I had thought, it was too late to visit Gloria. Despite feeling half dead, to have felt alive once that day was quite enough for me. So I arrived back at San Pedro de los Pinos after half past one, and found Carlos and Araceli stretched out on my bed, guzzling the mysterious contents of various bags of snacks while they watched a rock programme on TV. I reminded them that they would be spending the next day with their mother, that the next day had already begun and chased them out of my room.
I fell asleep covered in crumbs, content for one night at least not to be covered in kisses.
Chapte
r nine
I got up early to write some letters: I wrote five different ones to Lourdes. At around nine I had a look at the paper. I finished my beer and the can of snails in chilli sauce I hadn’t been able to resist buying in the supermarket. I’d never tasted snails, and when I saw the can within my reach I thought that, given their gastronomic prestige, the least I could do was to try some. Now I’ve done it: they’re nauseating. I ate all of them just to be sure I could say I had eaten snails.
I put the necklace in an envelope and handed it to Araceli.
“This is for your mother,” I said. “Give her this as a present.”
“Nothing else?” Araceli had seen me struggling with pen and paper and doubtless was expecting a sentimental missive from Papa to Mama.
“Give her a kiss from me,” I replied, convinced there are silences that triumph where words fail.
As my children were leaving, I picked up the phone. Maribel’s mocking voice again reminded me that she was really getting on my nerves. The boss wanted to talk to me.
“You’ve been on holiday for a week investigating that gringo’s death, and your reports are a load of bullshit,” the Commander barked. “Are you going soft in the head, or do you think I’m stupid?”
“No, boss, how can you think that? Give me a few more days – I’m on the right track. Oh, and I’ve got something for you,” I added, waving goodbye to the bracelet that looked as if it was made of gold.
“You’ve got till Friday. Not a day longer. And come and see me at the office today.”
“Yes, boss.”
It was half past nine. I called Jones’s accountant and made an appointment with him for eleven. Another beer gave me the strength to go and make my statement about Cruz’s death. Luckily, I had enough petrol, and it only took me the usual length of time to get across a city choked by demented traffic. There are a lot of hysterical drivers in the Mexican capital. And even though I have certain advantages, because if any asshole gets in my way I point my gun at his head and convince him to let me through, it’s always hard to get anywhere on time.