by Rolo Diez
“Up you get, sleepyhead!” she said with a smile, as though it wasn’t her who was waking me up.
“I should be at work by this time,” I complained, showing her the alarm clock. “I asked you to wake me at eight.”
“I did call you at eight. You answered that only spastics get up early, turned over the other way and carried on snoring.”
“This beer is too cold.”
“It was better at eight.” Gloria wasn’t smiling any more.
I drank in silence, pondering on how fickle women can be. How they can adore the man who loves them, then the next morning treat him like garbage. I watched Gloria coming and going. I know that manoeuvre. Gloria was putting on the performance known as “I at least work”. I could feel myself getting annoyed the way I always do when I see a woman feeling so superior because they think the stupidest of tasks is important.
“Do you want something to eat?” she said, as if she were talking to one of her children, as if somehow everything goes better when you eat.
I looked at her patiently. There was no doubt that Gloria was fine to visit once a week.
“I’m going to the hairdresser’s today. Would you like me to keep it straight like it is, or should I have a perm?”
“I want it as curly as wool, lots of curls falling into your eyes so I can pull them back and see your face when you’re making mad passionate love to me.”
“Do you love me?”
“No, I hate you, because you’re a cheap whore and have a face like a sick giraffe.”
Ah, these indispensable morning bedroom farces. We continued our philosophical debate, lulled by the sound of the vacuum cleaner, until it was half past nine and I decided to get washed and dressed.
As soon as I got out of the bathroom I phoned the office. Maribel wanted to chat, but I didn’t. Silver Bullet hadn’t arrived yet.
I called the widow’s house and the maid from Oaxaca replied. I would have loved to do my dirty call trick on her. I would have done if Gloria hadn’t been around.
“The mistress hasn’t got up yet,” the maid told me.
“Fine, I’ll be straight round,” I said. “It’s a quarter to ten now. I’ll be there at around eleven. Tell your mistress when she wakes up.”
“Yes, sir. Atyourservice.”
“Are you coming this evening?” Gloria asked, looking the other way as she did so.
“I don’t know, woman,” I said, stealing up behind her. “I’ve got a lot of work, and Carlos and Araceli are due back today. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to come.”
I kissed her on the neck. Gloria stiffened and turned her face away. I realized I had hurt her feelings and felt terrible. I had a sudden revelation: the world was a mess; I was a brute to force such a loving good woman to be no more than a mistress to me. I would have kneeled to ask her forgiveness, except that my sense of the ridiculous would not allow me to. I stroked her hair as she tried to pull away. I promised that if Lourdes did not return, nobody would be able to budge me from Mixcoac. I’d make our two families one. I wanted to grow old by her side.
Gloria laughed:
“I want you young,” she said. “When you’re old I’m going to put you in a home.”
She has a sense of humour and what’s what, the cow. That’s why I love her, among other things. Seeing I still wasn’t dressed, I decided to take her back to bed and make it up to her. Sometimes I wonder what on earth will become of me in ten years’ time.
*
“The mistress is not up yet,” the maid repeated mechanically. Above and behind her, the curtains twitched at a first floor window. Someone was spying on us. But since the Commander wants the case closed as quickly as possible, I needed to get something out of the widow – she might or might not be the murderer, but she was definitely hiding things. Some of which I already knew about.
The maid from Oaxaca looked at me dismissively. I stood staring up at the window until the curtains opened properly, and I could see Estela Lopez de Jones staring down.
“The mistress has got up,” I found myself saying.
And found myself entering the house.
Estela Lopez de Jones was wearing another of her elegant gowns and a discreet amount of makeup. She was polite in the manner of someone who has slept well, is not forced to go out to earn a living, and is receiving a visit from the law, with whom it’s never a good idea to fall out.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll have breakfast while we talk,” she said, smiling warmly at me again as if she were my sister rather than an adulterous murderer. “I’m having coffee and cakes. Would you like some, or would you prefer something else?”
I preferred beer, but I accepted coffee.
We made small talk until the breakfast had been served, and the widow had sent the maid off to put a load of washing in the machine.
It was up to me to make the opening move, and since I had no idea what I should or should not mention, I decided to be brutal and reveal that I knew all about the four-handed game of billiards she and her deceased husband used to play with Mr and Mrs Accountant. I soon confirmed that what the accountant had said was true, because in my trade you can tell the answer just by looking at people’s faces. I could tell she was hesitating, wondering how much I knew, calculating what she ought to tell me, what she should keep to herself. I knew I was going to be served stuff well past its sell-by date, and that’s what I got. Nothing fresh. A crime is a conflict of interests resolved by force, and no one should expect honesty where a conflict of interests is involved. Fortunately for him, Sherlock Holmes could go around with his magnifying glass, spot a mouldy red shirt button and from it deduce that its owner had escaped from a clinic in the East and suffered from dreadful headaches due to a hereditary disease. But, of course, in Mexico Shirley would never even have got a licence, thanks to our laws on the possession and consumption of drugs. Be that as it may, a Mexican policeman at least has the consolation that he is one of the cleanest men in the world. The proof lies in the fact that after he has taken a statement from anyone who is part of a conflict of interests. the said policeman has to have a bath, so great is the amount of garbage thrown at him.
Estela Lopez de Jones told me about Jones’s inclination to betray her with any woman he happened to meet, about the life of a twenty-year-old girl with a drug addict thirty years older than her, of his love affairs with the models he hired. She gave her own version of the explosions, the abuse, the fights, the times Jones treated her in the same way as any of his maids or model-whores, or threatened to throw her out onto the street without a penny, thousands of miles from her home in Bogota. She said the story with the accountant’s wife was the last straw, creating a humiliating situation all the time, sometimes even in her own house. It was her story, so she told me how she decided to get revenge in the most obvious way, with the cuckolded accountant himself, someone so dreary that no pleasure, no emotion could possibly contaminate her vengeance. All this drama coincided in Estela’s mouth (small and round; selfish and perverse) with slices of toast covered in jam that she had no problem forcing down. She told me – it was her story – about Jones’s fury when he discovered her revenge, his shouted threat to kill the accountant and leave her at the first bus terminal. She mentioned secret conversations between the accountant and her dead husband. Then each returned to their original couple. Some time afterwards, Jones organized a kiss-and-make-up party for the four of them. From then on it was pandemonium, everyone and no one in charge, sex swapped and drunken sessions until the early hours. She spoke of her determination to get out, to leave him, to return to Bogota. Of her fears, the cowardice which paralysed her and brought on terrible depression. Of how she had got used to an easy life, her panic at the thought of becoming a shop assistant again, of going back to Colombia a failure, carrying a single suitcase of clothes and having to start from scratch once more.
My head ached from listening to all this. I asked:
“Who brought the drugs?”
; “What drugs?” She looked at me warily, halfway through eating a doughnut.
“Cocaine,” I said. “The accountant tells a good story too.”
Tears trickled down Estela Lopez de Jones’s cheeks. I took advantage of the two minutes she spent crying to press my knees against hers under the table. She accepted them, withdrew hers slowly, repeated the same movement a second time. A trickster, a cheat. Carlos Hernandez is a good judge of women.
She used several handkerchiefs to blow her nose then admitted:
“My husband supplied it. There were a lot of drugs in his circle. Jones made all four of us snort it.”
“Was that in your orgies?”
“What orgies?” she asked, apparently genuinely surprised that anyone should use such a grandiose term for what went on in their parties. She shook her head at unfortunate memories, lowered her eyelashes to emphasize her embarrassment. She was facing something women always find difficult and unpleasant. (I’ve known women who have tortured their own children and always, absolutely always, what has been most difficult for them has not been the fact of doing it but having to admit it, to realize other people know it, to feel themselves condemned. Something similar happens with men, of course; perhaps there is a difference in the hypersensitive nature of women, their greater dependence on other people’s opinion.) Without looking up at me, she said:
“Yes.”
“Did Jones film the orgies?” Now I’d got the word accepted, I wasn’t going to let go of it.
“No . . . yes . . . sometimes.”
That’s the way. My next step would be to ask her to take me to where all this fucking went on; then of course I’d try to get a peek at the films. After that I could suggest we might take our clothes off and reconstruct some of the scenes, the ones with fellatio for example, or with whipped or penetrated backside. If I guaranteed her protection, perhaps the widow would go for it. The down side was that since in addition to being a widow she was a murderer – a self-made widow, as they call it in Bucareli – she could decide at any moment to get rid of me as well. She might even use the fellatio to bite it off. This thought raced down from my brain to the centre of my body, instantly deflating my jack-in-the-box. If that was the case, I’d better forget about her mouth, stay well away from those piranha teeth of hers. Whatever I did would have to be behind her back, and with her hands in cuffs as well. I imagined the scene and perked up at once.
When the widow had finally finished with her buns and cakes I asked to see the rest of the house. She stood up and led me along corridors that smelled of money, antiquities, signed paintings, plants, pieces of furniture that were new and expensive rather than tasteful, a darkroom whose walls were plastered with photos of attractive young women posing against parks, waterfalls, monuments and ruins. A lot of them were of Estela Lopez de Jones herself: in a bikini by the sea, in a T-shirt and jeans in the garden, in evening gowns and so on. I was able to confirm her appetizing charms and asked if any of the other women was Victoria Ledesma. The widow put on a perfect look of not knowing what I was talking about. We went upstairs, and there it was, together with desks, chests of drawers, mirrors, that round thing women sit on to do their makeup, and a king-size bed large enough to offer more than enough room for four bodies in motion. There was the altar with its huge, plump, welcoming surface. Welcoming yes, because I had come up there to fuck on it, that’s what I was there for. Now all I had to do was strip the murderer, use my darting tongue between her legs until she was melting for me, turn her on all fours on top of the tortoise, then position myself behind her so we could make the three-headed monster my fantasy had been sketching ever since the first morning I saw it.
“Nice tortoise,” I said, to set the ball rolling.
“A present from my husband,” the Aztec virgin replied, strangely serious all of a sudden.
“It’s big enough to use as a mattress,” I said, giving her one of my looks.
Estela Lopez de Jones turned on her heel and walked out of the room. I was left on my own with the tortoise. I thought of following her and dragging her back by the hair to show her who was boss. To teach her that an Aztec virgin chosen for sacrifice cannot escape her destiny.
A minute later I followed her downstairs. She was sitting in a chair in the living room. The look she gave me showed there had been one of those abrupt role changes that women are so fond of: now she was the Virgin of Guadalupe and I was the ragged beggar Juan Diego. I wasn’t going to stand for it. Not me.
“Who was Victoria Ledesma?” I became the grand inquisitor, turning her into one of the witches of Salem.
“Who?”
“Victoria Ledesma.”
“I don’t know her.”
“You should. She worked with your husband on a film about Teotihuacan. A short while later they found her dead body.”
“So?”
“Your husband was investigated over her death.” Once again, fear flashed in her eyes, and a scarcely contained anger.
“I refuse to speak to you any more. Or tell me if I should have a lawyer to defend myself against a policeman investigating my husband’s death who treats him more like a criminal than the victim of a crime.”
Like I said: an expert at switching decks. I wouldn’t like to have her as a mistress. I began to remember a phrase of Schopenhauer’s, so I repeated it:
“You won’t need lawyers, if you tell me the truth. If you lie, you’ll definitely need them.”
“I don’t know anything about that woman. I’ve never even heard her name.”
A fruitless morning. I was wasting my time, and I was no longer interested in this tramp with her outraged expression; I was sick of her.
Before I left I heard that someone had tried to burgle the house a few days earlier. Apparently a gang had been doing robberies all over Copilco in recent weeks. Talking to their neighbours, Estela and the maid from Oaxaca – who was back from doing the washing and had joined in our conversation as naturally as if we were three Zapotec Indians talking about the prices for mats in Juchitan market – had heard of several break-ins.
The previous Thursday, shortly before two in the morning, Estela Lopez de Jones had heard noises at the fence and in the garden. Frightened, she got out of bed, switched on all the lights on the top floor and looked out of a window. She shouted for the Indian maid and caught sight of two or three men jumping down into the street from the garden fence. She didn’t want to buy a dog, because she was going back to Colombia in a week.
I congratulated her on being so brave, thanked her for all her valuable information and for the two watered-down coffees she had offered me, calculated that in a week the Jones case would be either solved or archived and left, the tortoise having completely slipped from my mind.
Chapter thirteen
I called Lourdes and what I could sense from her voice was a good omen. I know that woman the way you know someone after eighteen years of sharing life’s ups and downs with them. We talked about the kids, about work, about the house. I didn’t ask her to come back – there was no need, because that’s what I had been doing from the moment she crossed the threshold on her way out. I invited her for a coffee that evening, and she accepted. I told her I’d pick her up at seven. We said a fond goodbye.
I dialled the office number and was in luck: Silver Bullet answered the phone. He started speaking, and that was the end of my luck.
“I went to the Buenos Aires,” he said. “Everything went fine. But that might be the last time, because they’re closing down.”
“All right. We’ll talk about it later,” I replied. I didn’t have a lot to say, it’s not the sort of thing to talk about, especially given the number of microphones there are waving about everywhere, just waiting to pick up some audible indiscretion.
“I didn’t have the same success with the other business,” James Bond went on.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t find him. I got tired of phoning, so I went to his apartment. He�
��s not there any more. He’s gone.”
“Who did you talk to?”
“A woman neighbour saw him leaving with two suitcases and getting into a taxi.”
“Aha . . . and what about the caretaker?”
“He wasn’t there either. I only found two young children. When I questioned them they stated that their mother would be back in half an hour, but I couldn’t wait, and the kids didn’t know anything anyway.”
“OK,” I said, and just as I do whenever I say that word, I felt a cretin. “Give me his number and his address.”
I called Valadez’s apartment. Nobody answered. He’d flown the coop. With my holiday bookings for Cancun.
*
I rang the bell at the Rio Atoyac apartment several times. No reply. A Spaniard with bushy eyebrows came out of the caretaker’s cubbyhole. He told me: “Senor Valadez left on a trip yesterday morning.” I showed him my credentials and learned that the trip was to Miami and that the declared reason for it was business. Clever son of a bitch! Who could find a democratic Mafioso Cuban in a city where nearly all the foreigners are Mafiosi and democratic! I asked when he would be back, and the Spaniard said: “Senor Valadez will be gone three or four weeks.” The apartment was empty, and Senor Olmedo – that was Bushybrows’ name – was to collect any mail. That was all. The caretaker did not get mixed up in the lives of people living in the building. He did his job and was paid his wages. He was so full of the importance of his job that I felt like teaching him a lesson or two, but then I thought I might well be back in a month. Not to mention the fact that to a policeman we’re all equal before the law, even Spanish caretakers with bushy eyebrows.