“Your two little dead men,” said Carlos.
“My first two,” continued Héctor. “And that was the start of a wild goose chase that finally brings me up against Captain Estrella and his subway goon squad. And the Zorak-Halcones connection. They tell me to keep my nose out of it, but they’re the ones who got me into it in the first place…It doesn’t make any sense. Then they kill this guy Captain Freshie, the last of Zorak’s assistants, and they’ve been trying to hunt me down ever since. I know who they are, but I don’t have the slightest idea what it’s all about.”
Héctor stood up.
“Got any more soda?”
Marina pointed to the refrigerator. He had to move a broom and a couple of buckets to open the refrigerator door. There were three Cokes and an Orange Crush. He picked the Orange Crush.
“What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? I’m going to keep on pushing.”
“How much longer?”
“As long as they let me.”
Marina and Carlos exchanged looks. Marina spoke.
“It’s crazy, Héctor…Take a good look at it. The government’s behind the whole thing. You’ve got to see the big picture. It would be like if you were trying to gather evidence to show that the president stole a bunch of money. Maybe you could prove it, but you’re never going to be able to take it to trial.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
Marina and Carlos were silent. Héctor took a long swallow of soda pop, lit a cigarette and savored the smoke.
“It seems kind of crazy to tell him to go underground. Where would we send him? Today, in the middle of the so-called political opening. Ha ha,” Marina said to Carlos. “A scandal this big, the opposition parties wouldn’t try to cover it up. Can you imagine what the CP could do with something like this?”
“But suppose you take your analysis a little further,” Carlos said, speaking to Marina. “All he’s got so far is the connection between the Halcones and subway cops. And evidence that they killed three nobodies who used to work for some crummy magician. Suppose you go public with it. The most you would get out of it would be to force the ex-Halcones out of the subway police. Where does that get you? The really important thing is to find out why they’re so eager to erase their connection with Zorak.”
Héctor looked from one to the other.
“Suppose you get rid of the forty in the subway. What are you going to do next? Go after the Judiciales? Then what? Are you going to take on the secret police? Then the army? You’d have to be nuts. You’re going to get yourself killed.”
Héctor nodded. “But I’d like to know why,” he said.
“Give me a fucking break, Héctor. Why? Because this is Mexico, that’s why,” said Marina.
The rest of the afternoon slipped away, full of talk of detective novels, the games they used to play together when they were kids, old grade school teachers. It was as if they had reached a momentary truce with Zorak’s killers. Marina reached out her hand from where she sat and opened the door that let out onto the roof, and the sun came in, bathing one corner of the rug with its light. A little while later a cat appeared and stretched out in the light’s warm triangle. Around six o’clock, Héctor finished the last Coke. The truce was over.
“Any ideas?”
“First off…” said Marina.
“Because the most…” said Carlos.
“More coffee, Carlangas?” asked Marina. Carlos nodded.
She stood up and walked two steps into the miniature kitchen. She looked funny, with her disproportionately big belly, for someone who used to be so skinny. She looked beautiful. Héctor was surprised to find himself smiling. He watched Carlos admiring Marina. At least whatever was bothering Carlos didn’t have anything to do with him and Marina, or with their future child. It was something else that brought the double lines of tension to Carlos’s forehead.
“They’re keeping them alive, that much is clear,” said Marina.
“Who?”
“The Halcones,” answered Carlos. “They weren’t just dumped there in the subway police as a way to get rid of them forever. Maybe there’s more of them waiting in other police units, or in other states. They’re alive, and they’re planning on using them again.”
“That’s got to be it. They’re holding them in reserve. If they weren’t planning on using them again, they wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of all of this,” said Marina.
“All right, suppose you guys are right. But all the same there’s got to be something that’s got them running scared right now. Something that would lead them to commit three murders and then come after me. Something connected to Zorak…I’d never seen the three of them before in my life, Leobardo, the guy who owned the cabaret, and Captain Freshie…But the Halcones think that whatever it was that made the three of them a threat, that somehow they passed it on to me. They think that I had something to do with Zorak’s three buddies. And whatever that is, it’s connected to the Halcones’ past, or to something that they’re planning, something in the future…”
“Makes sense to me,” said Carlos. “More the future than the past. The whole thing with the tenth of June is old news. I don’t think the system would have much trouble blowing off warmed-over accusations about something as old as that. How long ago was it that Heberto Castillo raised the whole issue again, and they just forced themselves to swallow a little more shit, and it didn’t end up going anywhere. What could Zorak’s people have known? I think it’s more likely to have something to do with something that’s going to happen, something they’re planning, the fact that the whole paramilitary group still exists and they’re going to revive it for some new operation.”
Héctor lit another cigarette and sat thinking in silence. The sun had gone away from the corner of the rug and the cat had followed it. Carlos and Marina held hands across the table cluttered with empty cups and glasses and soda bottles and wrinkled-up cigarette packs.
“By the way, I’m going to get married,” said Héctor.
Chapter Eleven
If we could get close enough to the tiger,
then we could put eyewash in his eyes to
counteract the effects of the tear gas.
—Kaliman, from the radio show
They shot at him from less than ten yards away, but the bullets sprayed out on either side of Héctor. One of them knocked a chunk out of the cement wall at his back, another ripped through the lining of his black leather jacket, and another one went through the stomach of a woman walking nearby, shattering her pelvis into half a dozen pieces.
Héctor looked straight into the face of the man who stepped toward him out of the idling car, an M1 rifle at his hip: he was approximately Héctor’s age, bug-eyed, his lips pressed tightly together, a lock of dark hair falling casually across his forehead.
The driver’s-side door opened and a man in a sport coat got out with a .45 automatic in his hand. Héctor pressed himself against the wall behind him and brought his hand to his gun. But the wall gave way under his weight and he found himself stumbling backward through the patio of a tenement block, backpedaling and half tripping over a tricycle. The echo of the shots still rang inside the closed space, and the wounded woman screamed outside in the street: “Madre Mía! Madre Mía!” Héctor gripped his gun in both hands and aimed at the opening made by the metal door through which he’d stumbled, swinging now softly back and forth on its hinges. The man with the M1 ran through the door, and Héctor pulled the trigger at a distance of less than ten feet. The man’s face disintegrated as the roar of the shot expanded in the patio air. The second man came in shooting, only to run into the falling body of his now-faceless partner. Two bullets strayed toward a second-floor window, exploding the glass and filling the patio with tiny splinters of light. Héctor fired again, the bullets entering the man’s chest and perforating his lung. The man spun around from the impact. Héctor crossed the space between them and put a bullet into the gunman’s stoma
ch at point-blank range. The man collapsed to the ground.
Héctor stepped over the body and peered out into the street, thinking clearly that he would never be able to forget that corner of Vertiz and Doctor Navarro, the dirty light at five in the afternoon, the smog, the car, its motor still running, both doors wide open, tires biting into the curb, the woman, moaning now, Madre mía. The sound of the shots that wouldn’t leave his ears, a pair of taco vendors standing over the wounded woman with the look of men accustomed to violence, accustomed to the oozing puss of everyday existence in Mexico City. He put his gun back into its shoulder holster and walked rapidly in the other direction, crossed the street just in front of a passing bus and lost himself in the Colonia Doctores. His hands shook, and the sound of the shots still rung inside his head, refusing to go away, stubbornly persistent, there to stay, forever. He tried not to think about the face he’d seen disintegrate in front of him under the impact of his bullet.
He was afraid, with a sticky, uncontrollable fear that left its mark plainly on his body. It started as a brutal tug at the corner of the scar over his eye, turned into an irresistible need to urinate, drifted away to become a suffocating pressure on his chest, came and went as a trembling in his hands, an acid putrefaction on the top of his mouth, a nausea in the pit of his stomach. No matter how much they tell you that the fear is all in your head, you know for a fact that it’s in your body, in the knowledge of death that you carry inside your own skin. Was everything going to be this way from now on?
***
He watched for half an hour outside the hospital until he had satisfied himself that there was no visible police presence. On the outside, at least—nothing interrupting the regular flow of new mothers with bouquets of flowers, worried relatives, crying women, the occasional ambulance driving up the ramp to the emergency entrance, an athlete with a broken ankle who came out for a brief walk around the garden, a half dozen children playing out front. If there was any special security it would be on the inside, on one particular floor, in one particular room.
With a white smock he’d picked up at El Tranvia Discount Uniform Supply, wearing a cardboard grin worthy of a toothpaste ad, Héctor walked into the hospital as Dr. Belascoarán. He lit a cigarette as he got off the elevator on the third floor, and walked with a doctor’s air (a little faster than normal, his gaze lost somewhere in the distance, a standard smile on his lips) toward room 316. Nothing. He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the metal of his gun, and pushed the door open. A man sat to one side of the bed watching TV, his right hand stroking the tip of his mustache. Melina slept in the soft bluish light from the window. The man looked at Dr. Belascoarán as he pushed the door closed behind him with the heel of his shoe. But by the time he reacted it was too late; Héctor had his gun pressed to the center of the man’s forehead, where it slowly formed a mark on his skin, “like a third eye,” thought Dr. Belascoarán behind the shining toothpaste ad grin. If he couldn’t escape his fear, at least he could play with it.
“Good afternoon,” said Héctor.
The man gripped the metal arms of his chair. Melina sat up in the bed.
“He’s got a gun,” she said.
With his gun still pressed against the forehead, Héctor stuck his hand inside the man’s jacket and pulled out a revolver.
“I’d like to have a talk with you…alone,” he told the showgirl, who was now sitting all the way up in bed with a rather idiotic smile on her face. He gestured for the man to stand up, then made him walk into the bathroom and pushed him down onto the toilet. There were no windows. Héctor smiled.
“Your clothes, pal.”
“What do you mean my clothes?”
“Let’s go. Strip.”
The gunman, submissive now, started to take off his clothes. Héctor took them from him and threw them onto the bed. The man had a long scar across his chest; his naked skin was grayish white.
Héctor stepped out of the bathroom, pushed a chair up against the door, and sat down on it.
“If you make any noise, I’ll come in and shut you up,” he said to the door.
Melina still wore her idiotic smile, so the detective gave her back his own toothpaste grin.
“How many are there?”
“Two, the other one comes at night…They’re cops. Or at least they have police ID.”
“They’re the same ones as before. The same ones that tried to kill you.”
He could see the tension in her face.
“I told them I don’t know anything.”
“If I hadn’t gotten there when I did…After Captain Freshie, you would’ve been next.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Héctor couldn’t figure out how to get the conversation going. He lit another cigarette.
“I told them I didn’t know who you were, I said I didn’t see anything. I told them how the two men had come in and that they killed Fernando…”
“Fernando?”
“Everybody called him Captain Freshie…I told them that the men had come and killed him, and that they hit me, and then there was all this shooting, but I said I didn’t see anything…”
There was silence.
Héctor rapped on the door behind him with his gun.
“How’re you doing in there? Are you going to answer, or do you want me to come in and find out?”
“I’m fine,” came the muffled voice of the gray-skinned man with the mustache.
“What do these sons of bitches want?” asked Melina, the stripper from the Fuente de Venus.
“That’s what I want to know. You knew Captain Freshie, and Don Agustín the owner of the nightclub, and the Roman.”
“What Roman?”
“The guy who dressed up like a Roman for your act at the club.”
“Don Leobardo.”
“Did you know that all three of them used to work for Zorak?”
“Sure, that’s all they ever talked about. Zorak this, and Zorak that, it was their glory days. Captain Freshie was his assistant, his bodyguard, really. Don Leobardo fixed up his props for him, coffins with fake panels, trick handcuffs, all that stuff, and Agustín Salas, the one who owned the Fuente de Venus, was his manager. They talked about it all the time.”
“Was there anything different about them lately?”
“They seemed kind of mysterious. They’d all get together in Don Augustín’s office and talk for hours, with the door closed.”
“Did Captain Freshie tell you anything about what was going on?”
“All he ever said to me was, ‘What a dish you are, babydoll.’ He was like a broken record. I broke up with him three times, and he still…”
Héctor smiled.
“Where did he live?”
“On Balbuena.”
Héctor wrote the address down on the back of a promotional card for a caterer for children’s parties that had somehow found its way into the pocket of his brand-new white doctor’s coat.
“How about you? How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right now. Aren’t you going to take my pulse?” The showgirl smiled again and sat up a little farther in bed, enough to reveal the beginnings of an ample bust beneath an embroidered purple nightgown.
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea. But then this fellow in the bathroom here might start to complain.”
“I suppose he would,” she said, sinking back down again under the covers and staring at the closed bathroom door.
Héctor crossed to the bed, raised her hand, which lay languidly on top of the sheet, and kissed it. Then he pushed the bed tight up against the chair that held the door shut.
“It’s been a pleasure. I hope I can catch your show sometime soon,” said Dr. Shayne, and, removing the white coat, he became just plain detective Belascoarán.
***
The men who had unleashed this madness were dead. The women, Melina, Márgara, knew nothing. Only they had an explanation. Only they could explain what the hell Zorak had to do with the Halcones, and why that co
nnection, severed long ago along with a broken helicopter cable, had risen again from the past. Only they could tell Héctor what he had to do with this whole story. And only they could kill him. Was it some kind of a race? To find the answers before they killed him? It was just a stupid, typical fucked-up case of unhealthy Mexican curiosity, the desire to know, to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong. He was afraid. He was scared shitless.
He’d gone into a barber shop so he could sit and think without having to watch his back. Outside, a massive downpour unloaded onto the passing traffic. He convinced the barber that he wanted a trim and not a crew cut, then tried to go back in his mind to the beginning of the whole story.
There were the three stupid conspirators, Zorak’s old buddies, who undoubtedly knew their former boss’s connection with the Halcones. The motive for their triple murder was hidden somewhere in a sleazy nightclub, a rooftop carpenter’s shop, and who knew where else (where did Captain Freshie work?). And then something had made them jump—until the others finally got the jump on them. Héctor came into the picture somewhere in between. Something connected him to them. Let’s suppose (supposed Héctor, as he lit a cigarette under the barber’s disapproving glare) that the three of them decided to hire a detective to look into something that they’d found out, to dig a little deeper than they could, to get some kind of proof, and they’d decide to hire a detective—me. One of them is designated to contact the detective, but another one goes and tells Zorak’s killers (that would be Captain Freshie, the last one to die, the one who ran away during their first, ephemeral encounter in the nightclub). And so they cut the two old guys’ throats and threaten Héctor, who they think has already become involved.
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 11