The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “It was the only idea that I could think of.”

  Héctor smiled. He liked this Alvarado character. “It wasn’t a bad idea,” he said.

  “Do you really think so? It’s just that talking into a microphone is what I do. What else could I do, shoot the bastard? No, right? Go to the police? No way! What would I tell them? Hey, listen, I ran into a prick on the street and I’m sure he’s the one who killed my father thirty years ago. He’s a certain Morales whose name is not Morales. Oh, by the way, he’s a policeman too, like you, or was, or maybe you worked under him, or maybe not. No, right?”

  “So why were you calling Monteverde?”

  “Who’s Monteverde?”

  “The one who was a friend of your father in ’68, the one with a dog named Tobías, the one who got me into this.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. He was just one of the people I called. I found one of my father’s address books and decided to call them all. Most of his friends from the ’60s were no longer at those old numbers; some had died, others had moved away from Mexico City. I left messages for many of them, the answering-machine messages.”

  “So why did you call me?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Héctor Belascoarán.”

  “The detective?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, that was funny. I was calling this one guy and leaving the message on his machine, when suddenly he picked up and yelled, ‘Stop breaking my balls, buddy! You should call a detective named Belascoarán. I ran into that guy in the National Archives and he was looking for a picture of you.’”

  “So?”

  “Well…”

  “And what about Morales?”

  “That bastard?”

  “Exactly.”

  “A week ago, I was walking down the Lázaro Cárdenas Central Axis, along a street called San Juan de Letrán, looking to buy some of those pirate videos that go for fifteen pesos and work great, and also to have some chocolate and donuts, and out of nowhere, fuck if I don’t see this guy! Just from looking at him I got a bad feeling, a kind of chill. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Some I do, some I don’t,” Belascoarán said, not meaning to be enigmatic or anything, just trying to establish the difference between Hollywood and the Holocaust.

  “Then I took a good look at him, and there was no doubt about it. It was Morales. It was the man I remember from Lecumberri. The same one who once gave me his yo-yo collection, all friendly like, the prick. The same one who killed my father. And my whole body started shaking, but I calmed down and watched him enter the Latinoamericana Tower and get in the elevator. That was about where I ran out of steam, but I did see that the elevator stopped on 7, 17, and 41.”

  “And then?”

  “I went home and didn’t say a word to my daughter. And I spent the whole night awake with cold sweats. In the morning, I took my father’s address book and started making phone calls.”

  “What about the story you tell about how Morales set up a metal barricade on one of the roads to rob coffee from the farmers?”

  “Well, that’s one they told me.”

  “And all that stuff about a secret amnesty in this country and how Morales benefited from it?”

  “Well, isn’t it the truth? Isn’t it the pure fucking truth? Aren’t the murderers all free and in good health?”

  Héctor nodded. “What about the shot in the back of the head?”

  “I was seven years old and my father had just gotten out of jail. He was lying in bed reading the The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara. I’ll never forget that, and I still have the book, the Siglo XXI edition, the binding all broken, but I still have it. He got a telephone call, then put on his shoes and left the house. My grandmother always said that it was Morales who called him … And he never came back. They found him in the Tlatelolco gardens, sitting on a bench with a bullet in the back of his head.”

  Alvarado-Barney’s last words were, “Can I keep calling you?”

  Héctor was about to answer with an emphatic no, but the guy had such a sad expression on his face that he found himself nodding instead. He remained in the park awhile tying up loose ends. None of the furniture places on his list had offices in the Latinoamericana Tower. Well, the guy could have been there on an errand. When Héctor ran out of cigarettes, he realized that he hadn’t asked Barney about bin Laden.

  He went to look for the taxi he had taken from the failed mugger, almost certain that someone else must have stolen it, but no, there it was, all rusty and powerful.

  Winding his way through traffic that was getting heavier as the morning wore on, he visited the addresses on his list. The Prieto furniture places belonged to three brothers, all very young, who had inherited them from their father two years earlier. The used-furniture dealer called Lerdo, in the Doctores district, was actually a Lebanese immigrant who had bought the business from the original Lerdo in the ’50s. On one leg of his trip, Héctor’s vehicle was hailed by a couple of young newlyweds who wanted a ride to the Toluca terminal. When he refused to charge them, they attributed it to young love and good luck, and Héctor didn’t really want to set them straight by telling them that it was a pirate taxi stolen from a mugger, and that he, Héctor, was not a professional driver.

  It was getting close to lunchtime. Héctor could tell because his sense of smell was growing sharper and sharper. Ever since he had lost his eye, he could smell things better and at a greater distance. He let the smells guide him and wound up in a Michoacán taco stand that sold meat skewers; it was over in the Escandón district, near the area where he would later look for the Degollado warehouse.

  One hour and thirteen campeche tacos later, Héctor Belascoarán pulled over on Prosperidad Street, a surprising name in a district that had wallowed in decadence ever since the Revolution seized the estate from Mr. Escandón.

  The entrance to the warehouse was a large metal door secured on the outside with a padlock. Héctor knocked three times without really expecting a reply.

  A young boy stopped his soccer practice long enough to tell Héctor, “Sometimes he doesn’t hear; the man is half deaf. You can go around the back,” he added, pointing to the alley beside the neighboring tenement.

  When he got around to the back, Héctor found a courtyard full of rubble and a second door, one that didn’t even rate a lock, just some twisted wires. He knocked again, and based on the wisdom that he had never known of any cats actually killed by curiosity, he untwisted the wires and walked in.

  When the door closed behind him, Héctor found himself in absolute darkness. In the absence of windows or skylights, he couldn’t even guess at the size of the place. Obviously, he had not brought a flashlight with him, so he used his tiny Bic as a sort of proletarian Statue of Liberty to blaze a trail of light in the darkness. He bumped into something he guessed might be a crate and moved off to try and find a wall. When he finally located one, he made his way along it to where he thought another door would be. He found a light switch by pure chance, as it was much lower than it should have been. When he turned on the light—a few old mercury vapor lamps—they revealed a phantasmagoric cemetery of old furniture distributed around the space by category and type: here the metal-frame kitchen tables, over there the archaic console record players, along with a phalanx of about fifty refrigerators that had probably been new thirty years earlier, and all sorts of chairs: dining room chairs, garden chairs, rustic chairs, and a dozen bar stools. In one corner of the warehouse, which must have been close to fifty meters long by another fifty meters wide, there were open crates full of toys.

  Once upon a time, in a curiously philosophical aside, a historian friend had told him that it was important to distinguish between antiques and old junk. At the time, Héctor thought it was foolishness, but what he saw here was something different; this wasn’t just old furniture, these were the mortal remains of the Mexican middle class that had only made it halfway, the glorious middle class of the ’60s that was crushed in
the ’80s and dead and gone in the new millennium. Or was it? Who knows …

  In another corner of the old warehouse, a single desk bore witness to what might have once been an office. He found a piece of pipe to break into the drawers, but he didn’t have to use it; the drawer was open … open and empty. There were no lists, no records, not even a filthy old inventory. There was merely a single box of old business cards with two telephone numbers and addresses—one for the Escandón warehouse, which is where he was, and another for an office on the forty-first floor of the Latinoamericana Tower—both in the name of Juvencio Degollado, Manager.

  For many years, the Latinoamericana Tower had been the center of Mexico City. The Zócalo was the ceremonial center, the symbolic center, but the place to have an unforgettable tryst was at the foot of the Latinoamericana, on the corner of Madero and San Juan de Letrán. There, in the shadow of the tallest building in Mexico, people intending to commit suicide would congregate, so much so that they wound up fencing in the scenic observation deck. But the place was also frequented by young couples visiting the sky bar, from where you could see almost to the edge of the known world. By now, however, the Latinoamericana Tower was no longer the tallest building in the biggest city in the world. And some people were saying that it was not even the biggest city in the world anymore, that Tokyo and Buenos Aires were bigger In any case, with all the pollution there were precious few days when you could see anything at all from the observation deck. And in the final rat-shit analysis, just to finish fucking it completely, Mexico City had lost its center … there was no center at all—what had been the center was now a collection of neighborhoods whose inhabitants didn’t know their neighbors and rarely even went outside to contemplate the dangerous splendor of the urban world.

  The office had a little sign to one side of the entrance: Degollado Furniture. There was no lock on the door, so Héctor just turned the knob. There was a single room with a desk at the end on a dirty green rug, and Morales, sitting on an executive chair with a very high back, his hands on the curiously bare desktop, just staring at him.

  “You’re the one who’s been following me. I knew it.”

  “No. I’m a friend of the one who’s been following you.”

  Héctor looked around for another chair to sit on, but there was nothing. Just a refrigerator, an old umbrella stand, and two horrendous Velasco reproductions—his Valley of Mexico and a landscape from the Porfirio Díaz period—hanging on the wall.

  Morales wore very thick glasses and his nearsighted gaze followed Belascoarán’s eye as it explored the room.

  “Piece of shit of an office, isn’t it?”

  Héctor nodded.

  “Years ago, the elegant thing was to have an office in the Latinoamericana Tower. There were the big-time lawyers, the money lenders, the dentists who made gold fillings, agents for German machinery companies.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Héctor said, resting on his good leg. He could walk for hours on end, but standing around really hurt a lot. In about half an hour, the pain in his lower back would be murder.

  “Would you like a soda?” Morales asked, pointing to the broken-down 5’10” Westinghouse. Héctor opened the refrigerator and found it almost empty. There was a single Coke and half a dozen Sol beers.

  “I never left. I stuck it out in this stinking city. And every once in a while, someone would stop and stare at me, kind of recognizing me, but nothing would happen. They were all afraid, so they turned around and went the other way. Sometimes it was me who chickened out; I’d rush into the nearest metro station and spend the next hour with my ass dripping sweat, looking over my shoulder”

  Morales was wearing a blue suit that needed cleaning and a red tie on a light blue shirt. He had no one to iron for him and he had never learned to do it himself. Héctor opened the soda with the end of a stapler he found on top of the refrigerator and took a long swig. It tasted awful. Was Morales trying to poison him? He spit it out on the table. Morales, shocked by Héctor’s behavior, jumped back and reached into a drawer. He would have brought out his old gun if Belascoarán had not whipped around and stomped the drawer shut, crushing his hand. Over the din of Morales’s unintelligible obscenities, Héctor couldn’t help feeling a little proud of the ballet step that had swept him to the drawer in time to kick it shut with his bad leg. Not bad for a one-eyed gimp. Though now he was going to have a sore back for the rest of the day. He pulled out his own gun and showed it to this character, who was trying simultaneously to dry his soda-spattered shirt and rub life back into his mangled hand.

  “What did you put in the Coca-Cola?” Héctor figured it was about a dozen Valiums. Morales didn’t look like the arsenic type. Maybe a hundred grams of rat poison. Did they still sell that shit?

  “What the holy fucking hell do you think I put in it?”

  “It tasted like shit,” Héctor said, a bit apologetic for the commotion he had started.

  “It must have been stale.”

  Héctor motioned toward the huge window in the corner of the room. Now that was a great window. And forty stories down, there was the city. Morales moved over to the window and Belascoarán, wasting no time, flopped into his chair. Not bad at all.

  “You are Morales,” Héctor said into open space, not even acknowledging the man holding a hand attached to a wrist that was rapidly turning purple. He took Morales’s pistol from the drawer and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “You killed Jesús María Alvarado.”

  “No way. I was just tailing him. I swear by Our Lady of Guadalupe. I was merely the finger-man. It was Ramírez who killed him.”

  “No! You were there and you killed him!”

  “I swear I didn’t. I was there, and I fingered him, but I wasn’t even carrying a gun that day. I said, Look, there’s Alvarado, and that’s all. I fingered him, but fingers don’t kill. I didn’t even know they were out to kill him.”

  “You were a torturer in the ’70s.”

  “Is that what they told you? Is that what those pricks said?”

  “You ratted out your own wife, and because of you they almost killed her.”

  “We had already separated. We were no longer together and she was suing me over some paintings and jewelry belonging to her grandmother, which she claimed I stole from her.”

  “You were in the White Brigade.”

  “Yeah, I was into that, but I wasn’t giving the orders. The orders were coming from the real pricks. Whenever an operation got interesting, they’d send me out for sodas.”

  Morales began to sob. He pulled off his glasses and threw them on the floor. Then he wept two huge tears.

  “I’m just a poor jerk. I’m nothing. Do you know how I made a little money? The shittiest way you can imagine: by stealing refrigerators and stoves from the homes of the people we kidnapped and later disappeared. It was easy; we were going to kill them anyway. What the fuck would you want a stove for if you were going to be tortured for three months, and if you didn’t die from the torture you were going to spend years in the cooler? What? Was I supposed to leave them for the supers? Or the landlords? Because none of those people ever dared return to a house we had taken. There was a smell of death in them. They were burned. So here I am, selling ranges and fucking Formica dining room tables and easy chairs with cigarette burns on the arms. That’s how I made money. But not much.”

  He was a poor slob, a minor scumbag. Héctor had no doubt that in the torture sessions, he was the pinch hitter, or that he stole records, or that every once in a while he did pull the trigger or push the dagger, or pour the bottle of Tehuacán water up a prisoner’s nose to suffocate him, or that he occasionally kicked a naked and bleeding detainee lying on a floor.

  What was he supposed to do with this character? Who was he supposed to turn him over to? In Mexico?

  “Let’s go down to the street,” Héctor blurted out.

  The hallway was empty. Héctor pointed to the stairs: forty-one floors. Not a bad punishment at all—punishm
ent for his bad leg.

  “So where are you taking me?” Morales asked with half a smile. “Where are we going?”

  “You are going to fuck your mother!” Belascoarán barked, with all the rage evoked by the memory of a certain Jesús María Alvarado—whom he had never met, but whose ghost kept talking to him on the phone—as he stuck his foot in front of Morales’s, clipping him with his shoulder and watching the man tumble head over heels, down and down, probably all forty-one stories of the Latinoamericana Tower, right out into San Juan de Letrán, also known as Lázaro Cárdenas, and known to some as the Central Axis. Down to the very end. Down into the bowels of hell.

  THE END

  EPILOGUE

  On his way home, Héctor Belascoarán thought he saw two or three Moraleses. One of them was getting out of a car in front of a hotel on Reforma Avenue. He tried to get rid of this paranoid syndrome, to shake it loose like you do with a bad thought accompanied by chills, but he only managed to make it worse.

  He walked by a woman who was crying silently, without a fuss, and trying to cover her face with a bluish Kleenex.

  He talked about soccer with a lottery vendor.

  He ran across a couple of peasants who were lost and guided them to the bus stop by the Chapultepec metro station. The man was carrying a saxophone and the woman a bag of stale bread.

  The city had a peaceful ambience today, but Héctor was unable to tune in to that peace. Moraleses kept turning up in the most unlikely places: in the middle of the stolen kiss of two adolescents parting at the trolley stop, in the doorway of a jewelry shop that was closing its curtains …

  Was he going crazy? Or was he more lucid and sharper than ever? Was he living with ghosts from the past because he was lonelier than a dog?

  The thought of the dog reminded him that he had to call Monteverde and tell him the end of the story. He also had to bring the dog a present. Tobías had liked the chorizo. A pound of Toluca sausage? The poor dog would die, but what a way to go! He decided that old Tobías could get along fine on half a pound of Toluca sausage; that would leave the other half a pound for his own breakfast, with a few scrambled eggs.