Little by little, he rose up through the underground of small-time punks, establishing contacts with the ultimate source of power, the physical manifestation of the Mexican state, nebulous as it was before his myopic eyes: Federal District functionaries, a top university official, south side party bosses, police commanders.
He stuck to what he’d learned: serve everyone but depend on no one. His dope sales brought in the cash he needed to assert his control over the university gangs. And the authorities turned a blind eye in exchange for services rendered.
The rise of the university Left after 1966 gave The Rat plenty to do: disrupting student elections, crashing movie showings, breaking strikes, selling information, inciting riots, playing one group off against another, kidnapping professors. And along the way he managed to find the time for a little free-lancing, stealing a hundred typewriters from the university storeroom, setting up a whorehouse near the Desierto de los Leones.
The Rat achieved an ephemeral glory during the student movement of ’68. After a private meeting with the mayor of Mexico City he became the channel through which enormous quantities of money were distributed to the different gangs hired to break the first wave of student protests. But, good intentions aside, there was little The Rat could do against a movement that brought hundreds of thousands of students out into the streets. He broke up one student assembly, vandalized a parking lot full of cars during a demonstration, and fed information to the police, who already had more than they knew what to do with. The Rat got desperate. In September he tried to break up a demonstration at the Polytechnic. But somebody shot him as he forced his way up to the microphone with a piece of re-bar in his hand.
Abandoned by friends and enemies alike, The Rat sat out the final months of the movement in a private hospital in Toluca. He was twenty-eight years old and alone. But by the time the student gangs surfaced again in 1969, The Rat had moved on. He’d been given a special mission by the federal police: to organize an urban guerrilla cell. The Rat had hit the big time and he kissed his student days good-bye. Now he had money to burn. Especially after pulling off a pair of bank robberies as part of his cover. He had an arsenal of machine guns and small-caliber weapons, safe houses, and a newly acquired leftist vocabulary that helped him recruit a handful of lost souls. They carried out three operations in all (the two bank robberies and the kidnapping of a politician, all with the blessings of the police). He recruited sixteen men, eleven of whom he sent out on a suicide mission from which they never returned. But then there was a change of policy in the upper echelons of the police department, and The Rat’s guerrilla cell was crushed by the same people who had created it. A surprise attack, lots of press coverage, hundreds of policemen and soldiers. For one brief moment The Rat forgot who he was working for, but all his stubbornness got him was a rifle butt to the mouth. He spent six months in Lecumberri prison, during which his salary was faithfully deposited in his bank account, and he walked out of jail with a lot less noise than when he went in.
It was 1972 and the profit had gone out of the university racket. The Rat scrounged around in the garbage dump of his memory, trying to remember where he’d seen the gold shining through. He got together with a few of his old friends and set up a bodyguard service for lower-level politicians and bureaucrats. He invested some money in condominiums and dabbled briefly in the sale of hard drugs, but he got out fast. He was infringing on the big boys’ territory and he could see that if he kept it up he was going to get his fingers burned. Then it came time for elections and a new administration in Mexico City and The Rat wormed his way back into the game. To his credit, he specialized in working inside the system while always keeping one foot on the outside. It was both a little more lucrative and a little more risky.
In the mid-seventies, The Rat found his gold mine. And he started to empty it.
Chapter Five
“It’s not often you get to hear
what you want on the radio.
You just turn it on and take what comes.
That’s what this business is like.”
—Luis Hernández
“How do I look? Do I look all right? Well, I’m not. It’s all a front. I’m scared shitless. Pardon the expression. I’ve barely slept in a week. Everywhere I go, I’m always looking over my shoulder to see if anyone’s following me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this in the first place. I don’t want to know anymore. I was Mr. Costa’s lawyer. As far as I knew, all the old guy ever had was a couple of crummy furniture stores. I never knew anything about the rest of that shit, and I don’t want to know anything about it now. I did what I had to do. I made sure that all the money that was supposed to got into his daughter-in-law’s bank account. That’s as far as it goes. I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”
Héctor stared the lawyer in the face. The lawyer fidgeted around in his chair while he talked, his hands shook, his eyebrows twitched, he kept shifting his feet, scratching his armpits.
“I don’t think we understand each other,” said Héctor. “I’m not asking you to do anything new. I don’t want to make any trouble for you. All I want is for you to tell me who gave you the message, and exactly what they said. Exactly, so that I can be sure.”
“Look, I already told the girl. Now they’re going to think I told you.…” His words floated in the air. A diploma hung on the wall, vintage 1960, with a picture of a younger version of the same lawyer trying to hide the shit he already was behind the infantile grin of the recent graduate.
“Just tell me what they told you,” said Héctor. “Who it was, and what they said. That’s all I want to know and you never have to see me again.”
“I don’t remember,” said the lawyer, scratching his chin.
Héctor cleared his throat and launched a big gob of spit across the desk. He aimed for the middle of the lawyer’s tie, but the man jerked back at the last second, the spit landing on the left side of his vest.
“What the fuck!”
“The message. Just tell me who it was, what they said, exactly, and how come you’re so scared.”
“There were two of them, a couple of punks. They stuck a gun in my face and said: ‘The Rat says the money doesn’t belong to the girl. Mr. Costa was just holding on to it for a while. Give her the message. Put five million in her account and leave the rest alone.’ That’s what they said, and that’s what I told her. What the hell more do you want?”
“You no longer represent the Costa family, is that correct? Then just put all the documents in a box and send them to Vallina and Associates,” said Héctor, passing a small piece of paper across the desk with the accountant’s address on it. He left the lawyer wiping off his vest with an expression of distaste.
***
After his first encounter with the city, Héctor went about reintegrating himself into its rhythm in his usual way. The city moves into your body through your feet and through your eyes. So Héctor walked and watched. It was the same city as always. A little more worn out maybe, a little more beat up, a little more corrupt, but still the same. He walked the boulevards, the parks, down back streets heaped with trash, he jumped fences, stopped into corner grocery stores for cigarettes and soda pop, ate tacos standing up at sidewalk stands, went into a book store and came out again with a pair of Chester Himes novels, The History of the Conquest of the Nile, and all the Alfred Bester books he could find. He went to the supermarket and bought two thousand pesos’ worth of canned goods; wandered through Tacubaya, Colonia Escandón, Mixcoac, submerging himself in the mass of people, hallucinating with the strange combination of traffic sounds and record stores broadcasting cumbias into the street. He walked and watched until his feet cooked inside his shoes and his good eye started to tear. By the time he gave up, he figured the city had taken him back in as one of its own. Mexico City, it wasn’t the most hospitable place in the world but, if there was anyplace he could call home
, this was it.
His reentry complete, the nostalgia he felt for the last lonely palm tree on the beach evaporated into the dirty air. He was ready.
***
When he got to the office he kicked off his shoes and stretched out in the worn-out old armchair. It looked like Carlos the upholsterer had decided that the lilac love seat wasn’t worth the effort; he’d left it there to decay with time, an absurd ruin, its guts running over the sides and the springs popping out at strange angles.
He lit a cigarette; it started to rain. The wind shook the window, accompanying the rumble of his thoughts.
It all seemed simple enough. It was dirty money, bad money, and The Rat had some kind of stake in it.
So it seemed pretty obvious that The Rat was behind the murder of the Costa brothers, to keep them from getting their hands on the money, undoubtedly amassed without honest sweat, accumulated through bribes, scams, double-dealing, corruption, and blood. According to the rules of the game the money belonged to The Rat…to him, or to one of his many employers sunk in the sewers of power.…So why get involved? To protect Anita, to get her out of the mess she was in, to get her the hell away from all that trash. For the first time in a long time his curiosity wasn’t there to push him along. He didn’t feel that thirst for vengeance either, for vengeance in the name of the dead, in the name of the living, for the sake of what he thought this country ought to be, something he’d felt so many times before. The most he felt was a desire to destroy the men who’d raped Anita, pawns in someone else’s game, rotten pieces in a putrid machine. If he wanted to, he could dive in, dig around in the crap, stir things up, uncover who knows how much fraud, corruption, bad deals, piles of money. But where was it going to get him? Chances were he was going to end up sacrificing a good piece of flesh somewhere along the line, or all of it, down to the bone; chances were he was going to get turned from the hunter into the hunted so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him. Sooner or later some big fat finger would point him out in the crowd. Was that what he wanted? He knew that when he got to the end, if he even made it that far, he’d come up against a wall standing between himself and justice. A wall of situations, alibis, connections, guns, desks, brute force, habits, and complicities that stretched from the deepest corner of the criminal underground to the heights of power. Carlos, his brother, could have told him the same thing. Only, if Carlos were saying it, Héctor would have come to another set of conclusions, he’d have found other answers, or the absence of answers, and an inertia that would carry him on to the end. And then Carlos would explain to him that it wasn’t really the end, that all he’d done was dig a little bit of dirt out from under the fingernails of power. Héctor felt tired. You can’t start a war you know you’re going to lose. But what else could Héctor do? There was nowhere for him to go, no place, no thing, no home sweet home, no habits to lose himself in. So he walked in his stocking feet across the splintery trash-covered floor and picked up the telephone. He’d get Anita her pair of bodyguards, then make the other couple of calls that were sure to propel him on into this story that, without wanting to, he was going to make his own.
***
“What do you think about your new baby-sitters?” he asked the woman sunk down under the covers, holding the door open for El Angel II and El Horrores. The big men had seen better days, their faces scarred, their professional wrestlers’ reflexes dulled, their step now slack. There wasn’t any ring that would take them anymore but, even so, their gigantic bulk, their hardened faces, the muscles bulging through their jackets, their enormous hands, compelled respect.
“Anita, I want you to meet a couple of friends of mine, El Angel II and El Horrores. El Angel was heavyweight wrestling champ for six months back in 1962 …”
“It was only five months, miss.”
“…and El Horrores once beat Blue Demon with his patented spinecruncher hold.” El Horrores and El Angel put on their best smiles. Anita didn’t know whether to hide herself under the sheets or ask the two wrestlers—they must have weighed nearly five hundred pounds between them—to sing her a lullaby.
“With these two here, nobody’s going to get through this door unless you say so. Take my word for it,” said Héctor. He was amused by the contrast between the fragile, diminutive redhead and his two towering friends, who, feeling a little bit intimidated, edged into a corner of the room and tried their best to become invisible.
“And besides, they can play cards and dominoes, and El Angel’s not a bad chess player.” The big man grinned at Anita, chunks of gold and silver showing where his teeth used to be. Anita tried a weak smile.
“Mr. Angel, Mister …”
“Just call me Horrores, miss.”
“I guess I only know how to play canasta, and I’m not very good at it, either.…”
“We’ll learn, miss, don’t you worry,” said El Horrores. Things were already turning out better than he’d hoped.
Héctor leveled an appraising glance at his team of caretakers and nodded with pride. If he ever had the chance, he could put together the most original cast of characters that any detective novel ever had.
***
He had to move fast, make up for the time he’d wasted. Half an hour later he stepped into the main offices of Vallina and Associates, Accountants, stared in greeting at Vallina-and-Associates-Accountants (which, like God, was merely a single individual with a triple identity), and asked if he’d finished his review of the Costa family’s financial records.
Vallina handed a folder across his desk. The elbows of his suit shone with wear. There was a photograph on the office wall showing him standing next to the Queen of England (while the Queen was real enough, the man in the photo was only somebody who looked like him).
“I whipped it off for you in two hours, Héctor. That makes us six to four.”
“In your favor or mine?”
“Who are you kidding, Héctor? Mine, of course.”
“I guess I owe you two, then.”
Vallina nodded, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose enthusiastically. Little bits of snot hung onto his mustache. Despite his best efforts, Vallina had never quite grasped the secrets of success in the capitalist system. All he could do now was wait for the revolution for his chance to get ahead in this world.
“How about if I collect them both at once?” he asked. “I’ve got a couple of things I need you to look into for me.”
Héctor walked over to a small refrigerator in a corner of the room.
“How about if we make it another time? This case I’m working on now has me full up. And I’ve already got another one. I can’t exactly go around like some amateur trying to cover six jobs all at once.”
The light in the refrigerator was burned out. There was half a chorizo and an open bottle of flat soda pop. Héctor shook the bottle to test its age and took a cautious sip.
Vallina made a noise in his throat. “As if this job wasn’t crazy enough for you,” he said. He undid one of the buttons of his dress shirt and scratched his belly through the T-shirt underneath.
“This other one’s just your kind of thing, too. The case of the colored underwear. Speaking of which, is that a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt you’re wearing?”
“How’d you know?”
Héctor tucked the envelope Vallina had given him under his arm. Despite his outward sloppiness, the accountant’s work was careful and precise, accurate down to the minutest detail.
“I owe you two,” said Héctor, and he went out the office door.
***
Belascoarán found a seat in the back row of a lecture by the lawyer Héctor Mercado about “The Origins of Article 123 of the Constitution” at the Reforma Cultural Center. Ignoring the lawyer’s talk, he read through Vallina’s cramped three-page typed report. His choice of a substitute office space was no accident. Once he got started on a case i
t was essential that he break with his routines, to keep himself from being turned into a sitting duck. If he was going to become somebody’s target—which, under the circumstances, wasn’t at all unlikely—he was going to be a moving target, like the character in a Ross Macdonald novel he’d once read. A moving target, weaving and bobbing, unpredictable as only an inhabitant of this huge city could be with a little bit of imagination.
While the lawyer rattled on about the Constitutional Convention of 1917, Héctor lost himself in Vallina’s account of Old Man Costa’s finances. The pages were full of question marks where the accountant had lacked sufficient data to back up his conclusions, but the story held together well enough.
Starting in August 1977 the already well-to-do furniture merchant had begun to move quantities of cash ten to twenty times the amount he’d dealt in before, investing the money in the most varied places. It almost seemed like his biggest problem was just figuring out what to do with it all. According to Vallina, there was no real pattern, no strategy, in the crazy hodgepodge of investments. The old man had started out thinking like a furniture merchant, investing the money in stores and boutiques, small businesses with small profits, nothing very exciting. Later on he went into gold, silver, jewels. He bought up part of a small commercial airline, two fishing boats, a bottling plant. He always worked alone, never took on partners. And he reinvested the profits from this growing network of investments almost immediately. Pretty soon he’d accumulated over two hundred million pesos in cash, gold, silver, jewels, and business investments.
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