The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Then Belascoarán could tell we was all looking at the lady on the wall with nothing on instead of the Morales feller. So that’s when he said how we shouldn’t be such dummies and how he was talking about the Bad, about Morales, not the lady, who was really pretty. Then he turns to me and asks: “Is there one Morales or are there several?”

  We all started thinking, and finally I said, “The Evil is really big, so there have to be several Bad guys.”

  Then we got to checking out how many Morales people there could be, whether there were several. And we decided that yes, there could be several Moraleses. And so Belascoarán said that we couldn’t investigate and grab them all, cause we were just a few, he said, and I said that what we had to do was we had to pick ourselves just one or two of them, cause we weren’t gonna be able to grab them all, not cause we didn’t want to, but cause we was shorthanded. Then Belascoarán said how one line of investigation was in the Monster, and that there was another line of investigation that led directly to Chiapas. So we could get together and both of us start off for Chiapas and grab the sonovabitch that was screwing people over there, which is over here, or we could both team up in Mexico City, the Monster, to grab the bastard that was doing his dirty business here, or over there. The other way was that each could take off in his own direction and operate in his own territory—that would be Belascoarán in the Monster and me in Chiapas—but helping each other with constant information exchanges.

  So that’s what we agreed—that is, each one to his own thing—that is, Belascoarán in the Monster and me, Elías Contreras, in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. Belascoarán gave me all the information he had that could help me in my investigation work up here in Chiapas, and I gave him all the information I had that could help him with his detectivating in the Monster. Well, right then we were all real happy and we did a lot of laughing with the jokes about the lady with no clothes.

  I told Belascoarán how El Sup had asked me if there was enough time to ask him, Belascoarán, to teach me how to play the thing called dominos. And Belascoarán said, “The time is now,” which meant that he was going to teach me right there and then. Course, I don’t hardly remember the class or the game. Probably Belascoarán could tell you about it, but what I can tell you is that I have a felt marker in my backpack, just in case I need it, cause I remembered what the Russian told me about how you could put dots on the tiles if you needed to.

  I got to saying how we were all on the same boat, and then Belascoarán said how you can’t say on the same boat but in the same boat, and I says how none of the boats I ever saw had anywhere to get in them and you couldn’t even hardly get on them. They all asked me why I was saying that, and I explained that the way I saw it, we did the kind of job where if you did it right, nobody noticed cause everything went smooth, but if we did it wrong, then we were sunk cause it would be a tragedy, and when you were sunk it didn’t matter if you were in or on the boat.

  Then I said how since Mr. Gómez Letras was a plumber, he has to see to it that the water comes out where it ought to. If he does his job right—if the hot water comes out of the hot faucet and the cold out of the cold—then no one notices anything, and if you pull the lever and all the poop and pee goes south, then no one notices. But if Mr. Gómez Letras does his job wrong, well sir, then there’s all hell to pay, cause if someone turns on the faucet and he gets piss instead of hot water, well now, and even if he only gets hot water where there should be cold, people aren’t gonna be very happy and everybody’s gonna say, Damn Gómez Letras didn’t do his job right.

  Then I went on about Mr. Vargas, the upholsterer, the one who guts and fixes chairs and sofas so none of the stuffing shows and so nobody gets a loose spring into his privates, and so’s they’ll be soft and pretty. If he does his job right, nobody says anything cause they’re there real comfortable having some coffee or watching the game or something. But if he does it wrong, well, you can just imagine the feller sitting there and the home team is about to score, and all of a sudden, boing, old needle-dick pokes your boo-tocks, or you hear a riiiip, and they can’t get you out of there even with a plowhorse, or it’s so hard that after a few minutes you start looking to confess something, and then everybody says, Damn Vargas didn’t do his job right.

  Then there’s Mr. Villareal. He’s a drainage engineer and it’s his job to make certain all the shit and piss in the city goes where it’s sposed to go. So when he does his job right, people walking down the street don’t go, Hey, isn’t this great, no shit in the streets. They don’t do that cause all the Villareals do their job right, mostly, but if he goes and gets it wrong and some of them drainage things get clogged up, well, then one fine morning the people of the city might wake up to a shit-and-piss tsunami and then they won’t care if they live up on the fourth floor and there’s no elevator, cause the people downstairs will be swimming in shit, and you know what they’ll say: Damn villareal didn’t do his job right.

  Then I said how Belascoarán and me, we were Investigation Commissions, detectives, which means that we search around for the Bad and the Evil and we see to it that they face up to their evildoings. If we do our job right, then no one notices cause the bad guys are where they have to be—that is, where they’re not out fucking with the good people who just want to do their work and live their lives. But if Belascoarán and me do our jobs wrong, well, it’s a problem, cause the Bad and the Evil will be out and about doing bad and evil things, and then everybody says, Damn Belascoarán and damn Elías didn’t do their jobs right.

  Then everybody sat there silent, thinking about if it’s true that we were all on the same boat or what. But real soon they brought out those little tiles they use for dominos and started talking about everything else until the dominos were over and we all said goodbye to each other and Belascoarán and me hugged each other like brothers and I left, and I think they all left too cause it was getting kinda late.

  After that I sent my report to El Sup and I told him how our plenary had gone—that is, the meeting in Belascoarán’s workplace—and about the agreements we reached all together.

  Then I remember how the moon was real full, just hanging there over the Monster, right there in the middle of the night over Mexico City, when I got a return message from El Sup:

  Copy agreements reached. According to our reports, this Morales is somewhere up here, so you come back. When we talk, you can give me all the details and we can make plans. Be careful and make sure you don’t have a tail on you. I’ll be expecting you because what’s missing is missing. Until then, best regards.

  From the mountains of Southeast Mexico,

  Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos

  January 2005

  CHAPTER 10

  THE PRESENT DISAPPEARS

  He doesn’t call me anymore. Jesús María Alvarado doesn’t call me anymore,” said the progressive official, with a certain sadness. The dog seemed to confirm it, but with an even sadder countenance.

  “No. Now he’s calling me,” Belascoarán said, handing the tape over to him.

  The guy had turned up in the wee hours of the night with the lame excuse of, “I saw your light on and decided to come up,” completely oblivious to the fact that he had roused the detective from the deepest sleep he’d had in weeks. Now the official and the dog were polishing off the last of the Cokes while sitting on Héctor Belascoarán’s living room floor, even though Héctor had offered them the easy chair.

  “It makes me kind of sad; I was enjoying this thing about being caught up in a secret affair, an investigation. I admit that it’s a little bit morbid … it’s just that my life gets kind of boring sometimes,” Monteverde said.

  “Well, I like it when my life gets kinda boring; I sleep a lot … hours and hours, days and days even; I read all the books I never have time to read and I watch movies by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy,” Héctor said.

  The dog appeared to like the idea because he suddenly took on Ollie’s expression when Stan didn’t understan
d what he was saying, and proceeded to eat up the rest of an old sausage Héctor had given him.

  “You know, I’m happy that Alvarado is still talking, even if it’s only to you. Are you any closer to finding out anything about that Morales person?”

  “Found out there’s more than one,” Héctor said cryptically, like the parish priest explaining the Holy Trinity.

  “Well, even if he doesn’t send me any more messages, I’ll still be financing your investigation,” Monteverde declared with convincing resolve, as he rose to his feet and handed Héctor an envelope.

  “And what is it I’m supposed to investigate? Who is this Alvarado that’s been calling us? Or who and where is this Morales that once murdered him?”

  “You tell me. You’re the detective.”

  “The second. I mean, I couldn’t accept your money if I had to devote all my time to finding out who this new Alvarado is.”

  “Me, I couldn’t care less … although, actually, I was beginning to think of him as a friend trying to tell us things … Yeah, sure, okay … keep me in the loop.”

  The dog limped over to Héctor and started licking his naked feet. Héctor took it as a sign of solidarity and lit a cigarette.

  He opened an eye, the eye, and said out loud, “The dog’s name is Tobías.”

  He didn’t know why he always spoke out loud in the morning. Maybe because he needed to hear something, even if it was his own pasty voice, to convince himself that he had to stay awake. Glorious winter sunshine was streaming in through the windows and flashing off the white walls of his room. He lit a cigarette and jumped out of the bed, tripping over a stack of thick, hardcover, historical novels that promised days of interesting reading.

  On the way to the bathroom he asked himself, again out loud, “Which one is my Morales? Who is my goddamn Morales?”

  Then, limping more than ever, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent Mexican detective, looked at his reflection in the mirror and told himself that the time had come to move from planning to action. But what action? He decided that things might clear up a bit if he splashed his face with really cold water.

  Héctor stared down the enormous cellblock. This had been one of the medical sections of the prison, but now there was a counter with cells behind it. He was standing by some tables. A couple of students lifted their eyes from their dusty tomes to check him out. They must not have been very impressed with the one-eyed dick because they were back in their books in no time.

  Fritz signaled to follow him into a little atrium on one side of the cellblock. There were a couple of sad-looking trees, a fountain with no water, and a pair of those mutant birds, the ones that Mexico City pollution had turned extremely intelligent.

  “Nicotine pause,” he said, offering Héctor one of his filtered Delicados.

  Belascoarán rattled off everything he had so far, which he had put together on the way to the prison-turned-archive.

  “I think I can tie the man who was Alvarado’s cellmate and later his murderer to the White Brigade, but I’m drawing a blank after 1980. If the guy had gone for a career with one of the political police agencies in this country, you would have to have heard of him. Morales. These are the kind of people who move up in the world. One Morales, the one in the photo with the sharp nose, very skinny, and with thick glasses, well, if this Morales was about twenty-five in 1971, then he would be just shy of sixty today. Does this character exist publicly now? Does the name tell you anything at all?”

  “No,” Fritz said, “and I swear I’ve been through my notes and my photo albums a hundred times and I’ve talked to a hundred people and I’ve shown them the picture we saw the other day. Nothing! Now you see him, now you don’t. Disappeared! But that’s nothing new in the chronicles of the Dirty War. There are all sorts of characters who turn up out of nowhere, do their shit, strike it rich, pull off some big job, do somebody a big favor, and then go up in smoke. They have to be around somewhere: a prosperous furniture-chain owner in San Antonio, Texas; maybe a drug trafficker killed anonymously in Ecuador, thought to be Mexican; an upright president of the PTA at a Catholic school…”

  “You’ve got something,” Belascoarán said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because you’re from Puebla, and when Puebla people have a secret, they do like the people from Pénjamo—they smile and rock from side to side,” the detective said.

  “Yeah, I do have something. Jesús María Alvarado had a son. Remember what I told you the first time? About that kid I recalled seeing with an older lady? Well, the older lady was Alvarado’s mother and the kid was his son.”

  “How old would he be now?”

  “About my age, maybe a couple of years younger, something like that.”

  Over forty, Héctor made a mental note.

  “His name is Ángel Alvarado Alvarado.”

  “Why the double last name?”

  “Go figure! Maybe Alvarado was a single father.”

  One Alvarado speaking for the first Alvarado, for his father? Could he have dug up his father’s voice from the past because he discovered his killer in the present? The Morales he remembers from when he was a child? Héctor threw out the cigarette he was smoking and lit another.

  “And he’s got a telephone, so you can call him …”

  Héctor took the slip of paper from the hand of the smiling Fritz.

  “And he’s got a job you’re going to love. He does the voice dubbing for monsters and things in the cartoons on TV. He does bears, dragons, reindeer. He’s the voice of Scooby-Doo and Barney.

  “Barney?”

  “According to my nieces, Barney’s a purple dinosaur.”

  “Sounds like he could be a minister in the present administration.

  “Probably is. We’ve seen stranger things lately.”

  In the office, Gilberto Gómez Letras and Carlos Vargas were looking very busy. Héctor walked in, grunted something like hello, and went directly to his desk to phone Alvarado’s son. He let the home phone ring about six times, then the office phone, and finally the lunch place. Nothing. He went back to his stack of papers in a green folder entitled Morales and set himself the task of individualizing the different Morales characters, or at least the three distinct Moraleses who had taken some sort of shape after the conversations he’d had with Elías Contreras. Alvarado’s murderer, the Zapatista traitor, and the hand behind the killing and dealing in Chiapas. Once he turned them back into distinct entities, he could begin to pick up the separate threads and work his way in any direction he chose. There is always a trail, so there’s always a thread to be followed.

  It was a matter of coherence: You had to follow the right thread. Was it coherent for a turncoat guerrilla fighter to become a mole, infiltrate Lecumberri to pump information out of political prisoners, and then wait to kill Alvarado on the outside? Yes, it was coherent! It was also coherent for this same character to have been a member of the White Brigade and one of its torturers; that would make him the one who absconded with the records in ’83. Now he could rule out the one involved in the dirty dealings in connection with the earthquake—that one had a different physical description and might just be the Chiapas Morales who was now the responsibility of Elías Contreras. And this led to a connection between that other Morales—the one who ceased to exist for twenty years—and the madness of the Juancho—bin Laden Morales who was brought into the story by the voice of the talking corpse.

  That was his Morales. To the accompaniment of Carlos’s hammering and Gómez Letras’s cursing as he whacked a rusty fitting with an old pipe, Héctor tried to change his perspective. He decided that he would take anything that looked obvious and consider it to be true: Many, many years after the events, a child discovers (runs into, accidentally finds, remembers) his father’s murderer, and not knowing what to do with the information, begins to make phone calls.

  Héctor’s look of certainty did not get past his office mates, who had been watching him on the sly for hours.


  “So, are you very cultured?” Gómez Letras blurted out of the clear blue sky.

  “Who me?” Belascoarán answered, caught off guard.

  “Yes, you!”

  “Naah, I’m an engineer. For all the really important stuff, I have to rely on my own efforts by listening, watching, walking around, and, particularly, reading. But the most important things are what I’ve learned from you guys.”

  “I told you, popular wisdom is what it is,” Gómez Letras said as he tossed a nut at Carlos Vargas, who caught it on the back of his head.

  “You want to play games, you dumb bastard?” Vargas growled as he advanced on the plumber, rubbing his head and holding his upholsterer’s hammer in the attack position. “Popular wisdom, my ass! You spend half your life with your nose in those books of yours. It’s all that damn reading you do.”

  Gómez Letras ran for cover behind Héctor’s desk. “Save me, chief, the man’s possessed by a homicidal rage.”

  “Doctor Vargas, if you intend to kill him, please do it cleanly; do not spoil my work with the blood of this pipe-sucking plumber,” Héctor said, holding his arms in the air to protect himself from the imminent Attack of the Mad Plumber.

  “You stupid sonovabitch, I’ll give you some homicidal rage, you moron. But I’ll forgive your nut attack if you scratch my nuts.”

  Just then, the phone stepped in to save the day. Carlos Vargas left his hammer aside, picked up the phone with his right hand, and continued rubbing his head with his left. He listened for a second, then said, “Some guy name Blitz or Spritz says he has an important message for Detective Belascoarán.”

  Héctor took a deep breath, lit up, and took the phone.

  “You want to talk to one of them? He set conditions,” Fritz said.

  “One of them?”

  “One of them.”

  “What are the conditions?”

  “I can’t say who he is and you can’t ask. It’s not to talk about him, only about your Morales. And you can’t record the conversation.”