The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “So, where do you get the Cokes in bottles? In my neighborhood all they have is plastic.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s this little kiosk down here and they’ve had them in stock for years,” Héctor answered.

  More silence.

  Monteverde produced another answering-machine tape and handed it over, shrugging as if apologizing. He blew a mouthful of smoke toward the ceiling and went into his own Alec Guinness.

  They spent the next few minutes just sitting there, smoking. The sound of a merengue crept up the walls of the building, entering into an uneasy blend with something vaguely Tex-Mex. The result was awful. Maybe that’s why Belascoarán broke the silence.

  “Does anyone else know about these messages?”

  “No! Of course not! I live alone and I wouldn’t dare talk about them at my job … They’d think I’ve flipped. Besides, I don’t even know what Alvarado is trying to tell me; I can’t figure out what he’s talking about.”

  “And is it Alvarado?”

  “Jesús María Alvarado, or whoever it is. Who cares? Maybe it’s his ghost. But why me? I mean, we did know each other, but that’s about all … and it was so long ago.”

  “So why you?”

  Monteverde stood up. He was tall, but he was also a little bent. Tobías the dog got up too and limped over to his master.

  “I swear, I’ve been going over this again and again, and I’ll be damned if I know.”

  “So why me?”

  Monteverde looked at him with a startled expression.

  “Well, isn’t this what you do?”

  Is this really what I do?

  He strolled along Victoria Street looking for a machine for his office that could play the little tapes from Monteverde. What I do. Dead people talking in a country where the living are either not allowed to talk a lot or they talk too much. What I do.

  When he ran into some vendors with statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe ringed with rose-colored light bulbs, he remembered that December 12 was drawing near. It was about a month to his birthday.

  This is a story told by Jesús María Alvarado, and you’re really going to like it. One day in Burbank, Juancho, the bin Laden guy, was told he had to stop screwing the actresses in the films they were shooting in the studio next door—actually, the motel next door—for what they said were security reasons. Now, whenever Juancho went next door, he always took off the fake beard they made him wear for the communiqués and dressed up like a professional wrestler, El Horrible, wearing a green mask with little horns and talking in grunts. But his bosses were not happy because the guys in the other motel had offered Juancho a steady job with Lux Cal XXX studios, although they didn’t like the fact that he came too fast, and this right in the middle of the Bush election … You see? Juancho was always up and down, taking screen tests, borrowing the Kalashnikov and giving it back, drinking tea, getting his eyebrows plucked, but his superiors wanted him full-time and they kept telling him, Mr. Juancho, no more fucky fucky, and he just grunted, but then he snapped to attention cause they paid cash money, very important for a taco vendor who gave no credit and didn’t believe in banks, not even numbered Swiss accounts, because after the Salinas administration, people in Mexico aren’t even sure that Switzerland even exists, so he had a suitcase under his bed full of hundreds, which he laid out every night on his bed. In any case, he only appeared to be following orders, cause the next morning the agent who was always stationed by his door brought him some hotcakes for breakfast and discovered that Juancho was gone, how do you like that? Bin Laden beat it. But this bin Laden actually thought he was making commercials for turbans and field tents. This was a goddamn bin Laden who didn’t even know who bin Laden was. So how do you like that? And he took the mask, the dumb fuck—

  Then a busy signal. Héctor turned off the recorder and ran his fingers through his hair. He had it cut short and some white ones were peeking through. And now he was about to get a whole lot more. He looked out the window and began to laugh softly, as if he didn’t dare make any loud sounds. Then he lit up, still chuckling.

  Héctor Belascoarán Shayne was Mexican, so absurdity was his daily bread. He was Mexican and had only one eye, so he could see only half of what other people saw, but more clearly. In recent years he had been living on the edge, on the borders between strange territories skirting incoherence, irrationality, and extravagance; this, along with tragedy, cowardice, collective insult, impunity, fear, and ridicule. These were territories that might be called anything but innocent, territories where you might suddenly lose an eye, have a friend die, or run into a shotgun blast as you come out from buying chocolate donuts. These territories were a challenge to rationality, but were full of dark reasons. The country was one big business, a territory being looted by phony, part-narco horsemen of the apocalypse, a supermarket run by a drunken Friedrich Nietzsche, but really drunk, where nothing was what it seemed. It was like a Venezuelan soap opera starring the forty thieves, with Ali Baba in a supporting role. But this? This was too much. Juancho—bin Laden was more than he could take. This was a planetary intrusion. It was like all of a sudden Mexico would run off with the World Cup, the Olympics, and the Davis Cup. It was like, without the like, a Mexican taco vendor had taken over CNN.

  The second narrative relayed by Alvarado on Monteverde’s answering machine seemed a little more within the bounds of reality, but totally disconnected from the stories he had told before.

  “Listen, brother, this is José María Alvarado,” the gravelly voice said, cutting directly to the chase.

  Do you know how Morales got rich? He hired himself seven judicial policemen who were out of work because they had tortured the wrong person, a rich merchant related to a PRI member of parliament, and he bought one of those long barricades that rich people use to close off their neighborhoods, and he took it up to a high pass along a country road that was all mud and loose dirt, but used a couple of months a year by the coffee growers to bring their harvests down into town, so he had the barricade and his hired guns, and when the farmers arrived with their sacks, he would stop them and buy their coffee, but at about half the already shitty price they were getting from the middlemen twenty or thirty kilometers downhill. That’s what he did for a couple of years—fucking everyone, but nothing crude, no sir, he had himself a steel barricade like the ones rich people use with signs that say Private. That’s what he did. It was the shittiest of all the neoliberal shit: He privatized the public road, closed a pass, and fucked the poorest of the poor.

  Héctor slowly dialed the eight numbers.

  “Hey, listen, Monteverde, do you really believe all that Juancho—bin Laden stuff?”

  “No way! Sounds completely crazy to me.”

  “Had you ever heard of this Morales character?”

  “Never.”

  “So what do you make of all this?”

  “I don’t even think about it anymore. I just receive these insanities and pass them on to you … You’re the one who’s supposed to make sense of it. What do you think?”

  “That if the deceased José María Alvarado wanted to leave us a message, he really picked a bizarre way to do it,” Belascoarán said.

  “That’s true, but if he wanted to get our attention, he has succeeded,” Monteverde noted.

  “The fact is that reality is getting very strange.”

  “Come again?”

  “No, nothing, just something a writer friend of mine likes to say,” the detective answered, then hung up.

  He was trying to imagine that road in the mountains—the pass, the steel barricade, the thugs with shotguns. Which mountains? Which state of the republic? Which coffee communities? What year? How did he get the barricade up the—

  The telephone interrupted his chain of questions and imagery. It was Fritz.

  “Listen, Belas, you want to talk to the Chinaman, to Fuang Chu? That right?”

  “The one who was Alvarado’s cell mate.”

  “Okay, if you go to Félix Cuevas’s G
ayosso funeral parlor, you’ll probably find him there in the evening, after 10. He’ll be attending Samuel’s funeral, most likely, that’s what they told me. I’ll talk to you tomorrow cause I’ve got a few things on Alvarado …”

  “Samuel who?” Belascoarán asked, but Fritz had already hung up.

  He ordered tacos at the stand across from his office, but they were too dry and the sauces didn’t help much. Back in the office, he proceeded to waste his time looking though the Mexico City telephone directory, trying to find one of the 12,000 Moraleses, as if merely looking at a name, address, or number was going to give him the clue he needed. He asked a friend of his, part-hacker and part—curiosity psychopath (which in the ’60s was called a nosy parker), who the Moraleses were with the most hits and who were the strangest, but half an hour later he lost heart when she called back.

  “Belascoaráncito, listen, Google had 3,700,000 hits for Morales. Can you be more specific? Poems by Lolo Morales? Cooking recipes by Lola Morales? Morales Undertakers?”

  “Could you try Morales Mexican?”

  “Okay, hold on a minute,” Cristina Adler replied, and he could hear her fingers on the keyboard.

  “We got it down to 870,000. The Morales Hacienda? Martirio Morales, aunt of someone who gave someone else a drawing.”

  “Can you tie it in with the year 1971?”

  “I can, Belascoruddy. I can …”

  Silence. Coughing.

  “Okay. We’re down to 64,000 hits. Is this guy Mexican?”

  “Yes!”

  “Let me limit this to news reports in Mexico.”

  Héctor waited, trying not to make any noise that might break Cristina’s concentration.

  “Great, we’re down to 9,510 and heading for a score … Hold on, I’m going to exclude a restaurant, the Morales Hacienda, all the Moraleses in lower-case text, auditors … Damn, Elba Esther’s full name is Elba Esther Gordillo Morales … a soccer player who wears the number 7 … a printer in Chihuahua—”

  “That’s no good,” Héctor interrupted. He still didn’t know what he was looking for.

  “Mexico City! Let me narrow it down to Mexico City … 815 hits. Now that’s a reasonable number … Let me get rid of the address on Insurgentes Sur, which appears lots of times. Okay.”

  “What’s okay?”

  “671 hits.”

  “Check the police,” Héctor said, growing desperate. Too much information was a lot like—too much like—too little information.

  “Okay,” Cristina mumbled into the phone, “171. Pretty decent. What did you say you were looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me read this to you: veterinary police, a photographer … There are a couple of Morales brothers in the Enforcer Brigade of Lucio Cabañas’s Party of the Poor. What is that, Belasco-man? I wasn’t born yet in ’71. Then there’s a deputy chief of Traffic Police whose second family name is Morales, a haute couture shop that makes uniforms for the cops …”

  Héctor sighed so hard he almost damaged his surfer’s eardrums.

  “That guy is just dumb, he’s a jerk, that’s all, and we’re condemned to be governed by crooks or idiots, one after another, and right now we have an idiot,” lectured Javier Villareal, an engineer also known as the Rooster, an expert in deep drainage and other subterrainities.

  “I’m closing on twos,” said Gilberto Gómez Letras, plumber by trade, as he slammed a domino tile on the table. “But the worst thing is when they’re idiots and crooks. I pass, of course.”

  “Buttocks!” announced Carlos Vargas, illustrious upholsterer, playing the two-four. “Haven’t we had two idiots in a row?”

  Héctor winked and gestured left with his arm. He passed. Gilberto should have stuck to his twos.

  “What’s so bad about this idiot?”

  “He’s always saying we’re growing, that the economy is growing, that we did seven percent, five percent, thirteen and a half. Where does he get those figures? They don’t jibe with anyone else’s. If that asshole were head of the national lottery, nobody would ever win. Whose economy is growing? His, probably, the prick,” said the Rooster, who wasn’t usually vehement about politics but knew a bit about mathematics.

  “We’re out of here, buddy,” Gilberto told Héctor, and then, turning to his opponents, “Count them up, gents,” playing his last two.

  The game of dominos is an exact science, just like the Marxism of Engels, Plekhanov, and Bukharin. There are twenty-eight tiles distributed around the table and seven rounds to play them. In theory, if you study the first plays and take into account the tiles in your own hand, it is relatively simple to deduce the tiles in anyone else’s hand. That, like Marxism, is the theory. But a social revolution did not take place in nineteenth-century England, despite the fact that it was crawling with horrible little factories and a hard-fighting, beer-drinking proletariat; the dictatorship of the proletariat never actually defended the proletariat, and sometimes quantitative leaps produced qualitative regressions. In dominos, as in life, the chance factor plays a role, sometimes the starring role, and if that isn’t enough, there’re four morons around a table trying to dupe one another.

  That Friday night, just like the past forty-five or fifty, in compliance with a New Year’s resolution, the Francisco Villa Club, made up of the four office mates, got together to play dominos and talk politics, the two main factors in the education of any Mexican worthy of the name.

  “How’re we doing?” the Rooster asked.

  “Badly! Didn’t you say you can’t even trust the numbers anymore?” answered Carlos Vargas. “It’s sixty-two to forty-two. Straight-up numbers with no presidential shuffling. We’re losing!”

  “Stop crying, engineer man, and shuffle the tiles.”

  Villareal began to move the tiles around the table in slow circular movements.

  “The trouble with you is that the free-trade agreement has no impact on plumbers.”

  “If you say so, but then how come I’ve been working half-time for the better part of a year? If those assholes out there get a leaky faucet, they don’t call a professional, they patch it up themselves with Durex and rubber bands.”

  “Damn, that’s why Bejerano wanted so many rubber bands—to repair his plumbing,” Belascoarán commented, referring to a high-profile corruption case where a leader of the PRD had been videotaped stealing thousands of dollars, and was later caught with rubber bands in his briefcase.

  They lost. Furthermore, in the last two games, Carlos and Villareal, the engineer, had murdered them, actually humiliated them. That was why he was almost happy that he had to go out into the chill night air of downtown Mexico City to find his Chinese guy. He caught a taxi to the Colonia del Valle funeral parlor. The sky was gray, the color of lead, and traffic was a bitch. He couldn’t really tell if there were more antennas, but he was certain that there were more cars. What the hell did the people of the capital do when they had nothing else to do? Les go, man, les go see what the traffic is like, or, as they say on the radio, what the vehicular congestion is like.

  Héctor tried it out on the taxi driver.

  “So tell me, what’s the vehicular congestion like?”

  “Vehicular congestion, my ass. It’s the friggen middle class in this friggen city who don’t have any money to go shopping in December, so they just pretend to go shopping. Before they used to go to the movies, but now they just go to the mall parking lot and then sneak back to their houses,” the driver replied, demonstrating remarkable sociological insight.

  “But they spend money on fuel and parking meters, tips for takecarofits, valet parking, and the keepercomins,” added Héctor, showing off his own sociological acumen regarding the new city fauna he had discovered.

  The takecarofits had appeared in the last few years. You would park your car on some lonely street and out of nowhere would appear a character with a flannel chamois over his shoulder and a broad smile, saying, Takecarofit for ya, boss, with the implicit threat that e
very malediction in the Talmud and every earthquake in Mexico would befall your car without his protection. Valet parking was not what the word suggests—Bolshoi dancers on strike—but private parking attendants at restaurants. The keepercomins were a lot like the takecarofits, but they were a lot younger and would appear when you started to back into a parking space. The kid, always smiling and wearing a baseball cap backwards, would stand by you and offer guidance: Keepercomin, chief, cut a little, now keepercomin.

  Héctor was more of a pedestrian and fervent user of public transportation, so he hadn’t had many professional dealings with these most recent offspring of Mexico City’s endemic economic crisis, but their appearance could not escape his trained eye.

  “Instead of the PRI fucking us with the gasoline money from PEMEX financing campaigns for their asshole candidates, I think it’s better for the PEMEX staff to steal it,” concluded the driver, who had presumably voted for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas the last few times around.

  The Gayosso funeral parlor was relatively empty. It was cold in the early evening. Mexico City is aggravating to bone aches when the sun doesn’t shine, Héctor reminded himself. He looked up and found a Samuel among the deceased, then walked over to one of the chapels. This Samuel didn’t appear to have very many friends, or else it was too early, since there were only half a dozen men and women, all over fifty, around the coffin and the tables littered with ashtrays. He approached the only Chinese person there, an extremely thin man, wrinkled and leathery, wearing a rust-colored suit and a black tie.

  “Fuang Chu?” Héctor asked as he neared the man.

  “Martínez, everyone calls me by my mother’s name. How can I help you?”

  “Would you know if José María Alvarado might still be alive?”

  Fuang Chu stared hard at Héctor. “And who might you be?”

  “Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective,” he answered, and getting his first good look at the man’s face, he was instantly sorry he had come.