“What’s next?”
“Find out whose money it was. Where it came from. Who killed the Costa brothers.”
“Why don’t you ask Saavedra?”
“Why don’t you ask him for me?”
“What I’m thinking is that if we don’t play our cards just right, they’re going to kill us both,” said the writer.
They sat together by the table next to the window and watched the rain.
“This country’ll kill you, Héctor,” said the writer, rubbing the tip of his nose for the hundredth time. “It’ll kill you in a lot of different ways. It’ll kill you with corruption, out of boredom, out of meanness, it’ll kill you with hunger, unemployment, with cold, with bullets, it’ll beat you to death. I don’t mind the idea of taking a few licks at the system myself. But not like this, not like Shane, the loner, not like the wild west. Not all alone, dammit. I’ve spent the last thirteen years fighting the system. I was in the student movement in ’68, I was active for a while in leftist politics, I worked with the unions, with factory workers, organizing, putting out magazines, pamphlets. I can’t tell you how many good jobs I’ve left behind. I’ve never been interested in just making myself a bunch of money. I never worked for the PRI, I don’t owe anything, or almost nothing, when I fucked up I never got anybody killed, and if I fucked somebody over it was out of ineptitude and stupidity and not because I’d sold out or was an asshole, no one ever paid me not to do what I believed in, I worked at a lot of stupid jobs but I always did things the best that I knew how. I don’t want to die like this. Probably I don’t want to die at all. Probably when it comes right down to it, I’ll break like any other poor son of a bitch. I don’t want to give in like some chump, Héctor, but I’m not ready to go to war all by myself. Who am I supposed to be, Jane Fonda or something? You can’t win this kind of a war, you can’t even fight it. The hotshot writer and his faithful typewriter against the judicial commander and a thousand asshole gangsters with guns, rifles, machine guns, artillery, and bazookas. What’s the deal? If the guy from the cleaners here on the corner comes to me, and says that his kid got fired from some job and they won’t pay him his severance pay like the law says, then maybe I can lend a hand, and if I can write the truth and find someone to print it, then okay. But this…?”
They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.
“Listen, Paco, dammit,” said Héctor, crushing out his last Delicado in the metal ashtray. “Me detective, me big shit. Me, all I can say is that I don’t know how to write my own novels, so I stick my nose into other people’s. Me, all alone against the system. I’ve spent five years working on my style, understand? Because I’m a lousy shot. I couldn’t hit an elephant at ten yards with a .38. I’ve got one good eye, my leg gimps up on me when it rains, yesterday I realized that my hair’s going gray. I’m lonelier than a dog walking in the street and, if it wasn’t for my brother and sister, I wouldn’t have anybody to cry for. What’s it matter? I never cry anyway. I hate it as much as you do: I can’t tell you how pissed off I get watching them carve up this country, turning everything into a pile of shit. I’m as Mexican as the next guy. That’s probably why all I believe in anymore is to keep on keeping on, and in fucking with them before they fuck with me. I missed ’68 altogether and when I finally figured out what was going on, the tanks were already rolling into the university. I didn’t read Ché until I was thirty, and then only because I was locked inside a house where there was nothing else to read. I studied engineering so that I could build bridges, cathedrals, sewers, stadiums, and I ended up as just another asshole working for General Electric. So what’re you saying to me? I’m a detective because I like people.”
“Turn down the TV, Flor,” shouted the writer, and then asked, “Don’t you want some lemon in your Coke? It tastes even better that way.”
Chapter Nine
The Story of Commander Jacinto Saavedra as Only He Knew It
“I don’t believe in the evil nature of man;
I believe that his aberrations are due to a lack of
imagination and a laziness of the heart.”
—Ernst Toller
“A son of a bitch is a son of a bitch,
and don’t you forget it.”
—Carlos López
When Jacinto Saavedra was twenty-two years old he sold used cars, combed his hair back with Polainds brilliantine, wore a suit to work and after hours, and took a liking to the whores in Guadalajara. That’s how he ended up agreeing to front stolen cars behind his boss’s back for two judiciales from Jalisco. He fixed them up with plates from wrecked cars which he then sold for scrap. He worked the switch, paid off his friends, and there were always five or ten thousand pesos left over at the end of every month to burn up in Tequila City.
It’s not a very complicated story. One day he went along with his friends to go beat up a guy who owed another guy some money. And he liked it. He liked seeing the guy, all bloody and drooling on the ground, asking them to forgive him, to leave him alone. The only bad part about that first time were the bloodstains on his suit that not even the dry cleaners could get out. Gradually he took on more and more jobs and Jacinto Saavedra made a rep for himself as a sharp young man with balls of steel who hit good and hard for a reasonable fee. One time two judiciales took him up to Durango to look for three men who’d kidnapped a local cattle rancher. When they got there the rancher was already dead, and the kidnappers offered to split the ransom with them. But Saavedra and his friends decided that half wasn’t good enough. Saavedra had a shotgun. He pointed it at the balls of one of the kidnappers and pulled the trigger. It was six hours before the guy bled to death. After that there was no way back, although Saavedra wouldn’t have been able to see it if it had been staring him in the eyes. He worked as a bodyguard for a governor, made some money, opened up a home appliance store that went broke for lack of attention, he joined the judiciales, bought himself a pair of racehorses for the country fair circuit, and he ran black market stereos with some buddies on the Tijuana police force. It was an interesting life, as they say. Mostly it was a way to pass the time, while he waited for his “big chance,” for his “stepping stone,” for a “godfather” who would take him away from this “backwater racket,” the bush leagues, and land him in the big time. It was either that or an early retirement. He married a girl from a family of Spanish shopkeepers, so he’d have someone to keep house and give him a pair of sons, and he went right on patronizing the whorehouses on the outskirts of Guadalajara. He got his chance to cash in when the federal judiciales recruited him to hunt down urban guerrilla groups based in Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City. They put him in charge of his own unit, and he set to work torturing suspects, murdering women, children, and close and distant relatives, ripping off refrigerators from guerrilla safe houses, and requisitioning the take from guerrilla bank robberies—half of which was handed over to his superiors at press conferences full of photographers, while the other half went to his friends and superiors behind closed doors. Then one day he walked into a Mexico City apartment looking for the brothers of a student from Jalisco by the name of Ruiz, and they dropped him with a shot from an M16. He spent two months in the hospital with a punctured lung, sweating out the lonely nights scared half to death. Following his release he liberated himself from his fear by blowing off the head of Ruiz’s sixteen-year-old sister. It was then that fortune smiled on him. They sent him and his unit to guard the entrance to a Guadalajara hotel as part of a cocaine sting operation. But the story was a little more involved than that. A pair of gringo drug runners had refused to pay the standard fee to the judiciales’ top man in Michoacán, who passed the word on to his buddies in Jalisco, who worked out their own arrangement with the gringos, which would have been just fine, except that the gringos had picked up a tail of federales from Sinaloa who were completely outside of the deal. The Jalisco judiciales had set
tled with the gringos for the sale of a third of the coke to two Guadalajara dealers who wanted to open up operations on another gang’s turf, it being this gang that was meant to take the rap, although they’d done what they could to cover themselves through a banker friend who was in close with the mayor, setting the state judiciales up for a shoot-out with the local cops. So they agreed to float half of the third on the open market, and agreed that one of the gang members’ cousins would be the only one to take the fall, along with a waiter in the hotel restaurant who was dealing for himself on the side, a major sin under the circumstances. All very simple. Except for the fact that all of this wheeling and dealing had left the operation’s other participants with a rather excessive amount of free time on their hands, which they proceeded to drink away in a whorehouse three blocks from the hotel that had been designated as the scene of the action. The result was that, when things finally got under way, the shots started coming from all directions, and only Saavedra’s unit knew what it was doing, if not what was happening. In the end, the right cops fired their assault weapons into the wrong room, and arrested the cousin who wasn’t with the coke that wasn’t, and Saavedra suddenly found himself alone in the middle of the night with three kilos of coke and no one the wiser. It wasn’t long before he discovered that the coke had the power to open doors and windows. That and his already impressive resumé brought him to Mexico City, closely associated with the new chief of the federal judiciales at the start of a new administration. In the catalog of calamities that the ex-used car salesman had compiled throughout his career, the rules of the game were deliciously clear: Be servile with those above you and an asshole with those below; don’t stick your nose in until you know whose ass it is; make a lot of friends and a lot of acquaintances; hit them when they’re looking the other way; hit hard and do it twice; always be on the alert; sell out your best friend; talk like you know what’s going on; don’t fuck up, and when you do, rearrange the scenery enough so that they’ll think it must have been somewhere else; be as smart as the smartest, but don’t show off; keep your pants buttoned up around other men’s wives; share your profits; don’t worry what you’ve got to step on to survive—balls, skulls, hands, blood. By 1977 he’d finally arrived, and he decided he wanted to stay on top. It was time to embark upon a venture all his own, where he’d have to share less of what came in. After all, in the business of the Colombian traffickers he was only going to end up with a quarter share, since half of everything had to go up the ladder and then half of the other half had to trickle down. That’s where Reyes and the bank jobs came in: he could hold on to everything for himself. Once he figured out how it worked, he had a mauve carpet laid in his office, he attended a course in law enforcement in Indianapolis, and he bought himself a fine selection of Italian neckties.
Chapter Ten
“My heart sank.”
—John Reed
There were the gravediggers, Héctor, and an old man in a wheelchair with a black umbrella. The whole thing took all of ten minutes. The Rat in his gray metal coffin surrounded by damp earth. Héctor wheeled the old man back to the cemetery gate. He turned out to be The Rat’s uncle, the only living relative, a solitary old man whose nephew had sent him money every month.
That was all. Belascoarán hadn’t expected any more. No sense of hatred, nothing, just the simple routine. The Rat had passed on the same way he’d come in. If what the Buddhists said was true, he’d come back again to live the same way, and they’d shoot him through the head again, writing his name in blood on the wall behind his desk.
Héctor wasn’t interested in risking a return visit to the office in San Miguel Chapultepec where they’d taken him two days before, or in hunting up the obsequious driver and his bodyguard buddy. Overhead the sky spat out a fine misty rain. A sure sign that the deluge wasn’t merely some bullshit prediction of Aztec sorcerers, but rather Mexico City’s just and true destiny.
***
“Well, is she or isn’t she?”
“Don Gaspar comes home every night, goes straight to bed, and sleeps like a log until about five or six in the morning, when he wakes up and then, yeah, he wants it. Hell, if I had to put up with that, I’d go looking for it somewhere else, too.”
“How’d you find all this out?” Héctor asked the baggy-eyed upholsterer.
“Oh, you know, just kind of investigating. Detective work, like they say.”
“What about the fancy underwear?”
“Great stuff, chief. She’s got these little lilac-colored panties with frilly garters and a bra with these little holes in it where her nipples stick through.…”
“More detective work, I assume? Or…let’s see…you checked the clothesline, right?”
“That’s it…the clothesline.”
“The way I see it, there’s a couple of things we can do. Either we give Don Gaspar his money back, or we make up a little white lie, or we find him a good lawyer and a bodyguard for the missus.…You’re not married, are you?”
“Thank God.”
“Well maybe this is your chance.”
The upholsterer made a quick move for the door, but Héctor shouted after him, “Hold on a minute! I want that money back. Not only do you take a roll in the hay with the old lady, but you think you can go ahead and keep the money too.”
“Look, I did what I said I’d do. I went and figured out if she was whoring around or not.”
“And?”
“She’s not. She doesn’t take any money for it.”
“You’ve got a point there.”
The telephone rang and Carlos Vargas took the opportunity to make his escape.
“Belascoarán.”
“Vallina here. I did what you wanted. I found you a way to block it off and a way to unblock it if you want. But I need the court papers and some money to persuade a judge. I don’t like it too much, Héctor. Once this thing goes into motion there isn’t anyone who’s going to be able to get their hands on that money for the next fifty years. My phone here’s already started to ring off the hook. I just tell everyone who wants to know that I’m working for unicef and that shuts them up pretty good. This is ugly money, Héctor. It smells bad.”
“Then let’s go through with it. You’re pretty good at this stuff, Vallina. You’d better watch out or somebody’s going to think that it’s your job.”
“Yeah, I’m good at it; the problem is I got bad luck. Yesterday these gringo hotshots took me out to dinner to offer me a job with one of these multinationals here. So what do I do? I get so drunk halfway through the thing that I end up puking all over the boss’s wife. It’s some Aztec curse.”
Héctor hung up. After leaving the cemetery he’d spent the rest of the morning in the library going through the newspaper stacks, trying to draw a connection between the deposits in Costa’s private banking operation, the erratic movements of fresh cash, and some kind of regular source, and he’d come away with a drawerful of notes that fit together like a German jigsaw puzzle, one of those perfect Ravensburger ones. It made him feel like a real detective, just like the upholsterer had said. In a city where “what’s the difference” was the all too common answer in the face of the absolute pointlessness of trying to do something right; a city dominated by the primacy of appearances over actions, where “I don’t give a damn” was the everyday answer to corruption and exploitation, doing something well was enormously gratifying. Either that, or he’d quit believing in his own good luck.
***
Wearing his most wrinkled jacket and his best smile, Héctor met Anita at the hospital entrance, watched over by El Angel and El Horrores.
“She’s all yours, boss. Whaddaya want us to do now? We still got five full days paid in advance,” asked El Angel.
“Why don’t you go on home, get some rest and a change of clothes, say hi to your wives, check your kids’ grades, read the last issue of
Batallas en el Ring, and we’ll see each other tonight at my place.
“And as for you, Red, if you can find somewhere to stow that suitcase, I’ll make good on that dance I promised you,” said the detective. There was a spark in Anita’s eyes.
“I still can’t believe you really know how to dance. I don’t know why, but somehow I remember that you never knew how. And seeing how you walk, I’m pretty sure you never learned.”
“And how do you know how I walk?”
“Because I’ve watched you walk across this street from my window.”
Anita was dressed in green, the redhead’s uniform, and the marks left from her beating were almost gone. At least on the outside.
“Where am I going to stay?”
“For now, at my place. We need to have a long talk and figure out what we’re going to do: plan A, plan B, or nothing at all. You’re the boss, you know, I just work here.”
“Yeah, but you don’t get paid, so that means I can’t tell you what to do.”
“Would you feel better if you were paying me?”
“Yes.”
“Fine by me.”
“How’s a million pesos sound?”
“You’re crazy, Red.”
“A million when it’s over, plus expenses.”
“All right. But tonight’s dinner and dance are on me.”
“I get dinner, too?”
“Yep. I think I’ll splurge and take you out to the taquería around the corner from my apartment. After we dance, that is.”
“You’re serious about this dance thing, aren’t you?”
“You bet. I may be a total disaster but I keep my promises.”
“And I suppose it doesn’t matter if my leg still hurts and I’ve got a couple of broken ribs and that if we dance cheek to cheek I’ll probably end up with a dislocated jaw again?”
“What of it? I’ve only got one eye, I’ve got a bum leg, and they’ll never let me on the Olympic gymnastics team.”
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