The doorbell rang as they were drinking coffee, remembering afternoons spent in the old house in Coyoacán, and their father, old man Belascoarán, with his leftist-inspired stories of life in the Wild West, Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid.
“Jefe!” howled a blond, freckled shadow as it threw itself into the arms of a disconcerted, shy, but happy Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.
After Marina came their brother, Carlos Brian. Three or four years younger than Héctor, he had his mother’s Irish genes, a thick mop of red hair, and extraordinarily blue eyes. Extraordinarily blue and extraordinarily tired, thought Héctor, taking a second, closer look at his brother, while he tried to disentangle himself from Marina.
“Well if it isn’t my big brother,” said Carlos, patting him softly on the cheek.
“How long has it been, jefe?”
“A couple of years, Marina.”
The three of them went into the dining room, which doubled occasionally as a guest bedroom. Elisa had gone into the kitchen to make more coffee.
“What are you up to these days, brother?” asked Carlos.
“The worst part of it is I don’t even know myself.”
Héctor hesitated, caught between the urge to tell them about the dead Roman in the office bathroom and the dead man in the photograph—and the temptation to retreat into his habitual reticence.
“What about you guys?” he asked, opting to take himself out of the ring.
“We’re going to have a baby,” said Marina, placing her hand on a stomach just beginning to grow big.
“Seriously?” asked Elisa, returning with a steaming pot of coffee.
“Seriously,” said Carlos.
Héctor took out his pack of Delicado filters and lit one.
I’m going to be an uncle, he thought. He didn’t feel like getting involved in his brother’s life, he didn’t need any more problems. Suddenly he realized that he was tired too. Tired of what? he asked himself.
“I’m tired too,” he announced, as though someone there could tell him why.
“You and who else?” asked Carlos.
“You, apparently,” Elisa cut in.
“Wait a minute. If this is what you guys have in mind, then I’m out of here. If we’re going to play family Ping-Pong, I’m going to take my paddle and go.”
“Tell it to him straight, Elisa,” said Héctor, picking up his coffee cup and cradling it in his hands, avoiding his brother’s eyes.
“Me? I’m the subject of the family reunion?” asked Carlos with a laugh. “I thought it was you,” he said, pointing at Héctor.
Marina sat down on the rug in a corner of the room.
“I suppose it could just as easily be me,” said Elisa, with a warm smile in Marina’s direction.
“What’s wrong?” Marina asked.
“I guess we’re kind of a weird family,” said Héctor.
“What you are is a bunch of cowards,” said Marina.
They drank their coffee in silence. Out in the street, a child went by pulling a wagon, and the screech of the wheels came to them through the window.
“Something’s going on, though, isn’t it, Carlos?” asked Elisa. “Besides the baby, I mean.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell them already, dammit. You’re acting like you don’t trust them,” said Marina, looking Carlos in the eye.
“Some other time. I’m not having a very good day today.” He stood up. “Thanks for the coffee, Elisa. You coming?” he asked Marina on his way out the door.
Marina got up, kissed Elisa, and held Héctor’s hand for a moment.
“See you later, jefe. Let me know if you ever need a secretary again. I’ve got lots of free time on my hands.”
She went out, leaving the door open behind her. Héctor looked out into the empty hallway in silence, thinking about how he loved them both.
“So much for our family meeting,” said Elisa. “More coffee?”
“No thanks, I’ve got to get moving. I’m going to be an uncle. And you’re going to be an aunt. Can you believe it?”
***
Maybe because he understood that loneliness doesn’t kill, but that it’s lonely people who go off and die on their own, Héctor had learned to engage himself in an intense internal monologue while he moved through the city, glomming distractedly on to little fragments of the urban landscape as he went, Christmas decorations, faces, blotches of color, voices, noises, impressions.
Without knowing how he’d got there, he found himself back in the center of town. It was rush hour, all the shops were full, car horns sounded amidst lights and more lights. He felt insulated by the tumult, anonymous in the bustling crowd, and he concentrated his energy inward, inside his head. At Donceles he came to a café where an old man stood playing “Veracruz” on the clarinet. He drank a soda pop and listened to the wistful, romantic melody, observing the unhappy relationship between the musician and his audience. When the old man was done, the detective followed him into a bar, where he played the same song again, only to be met by the same impassive expression on the faces of his accidental listeners. As though the old man wasn’t even there, had never been there. He followed him into an oyster bar twenty paces down the street toward San Juan de Letran. And then to a juice bar after that.
For the fourth time, the blind old man passed the hat in front of Héctor, and for the fourth time, Héctor dropped a couple of peso coins inside, the last of his change.
“Excuse me, don’t you know how to play anything except ‘Veracruz’?”
“Sure I do. But I had a girlfriend from there once, and I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately,” said the old man.
Héctor quit following him. All he had left was a five-hundred-peso bill, and he didn’t want to keep on listening if he wasn’t going to give something in return. The old man raised his clarinet to his lips, blowing the first few notes of “Veracruz,” the song and the instrument both relics of a better time, better memories. No one in the juice bar paid him any attention, despite the fact that there was a long line of people waiting to buy haw-apple juice, the advertised special of the day.
“You learn something new every day,” Héctor told himself. He wasn’t even sure he knew what a haw-apple was, let alone that you could make juice out of it. He headed over to Artículo 123 and his office.
As he climbed the stairs, he could feel the fatigue come over him from so many hours of brisk walking on pavement.
“All’s quiet, neighbor,” said El Gallo Villareal, who sat hunched over his blueprints.
“They didn’t bring any new corpses dressed up like Nezahualcóyotl?”
“They must have the day off.”
Héctor collapsed into the big armchair. Its springs creaked with a delicious intimacy under his weight. I love this fucking chair, Héctor thought.
What the hell is going on?
Héctor sunk even deeper into the old leather. The air was full of smoke from El Gallo’s cigar. Outside, the sweet night. Here, the warm, familiar office, a couple of dead men hovering around out there somewhere. Too peaceful by far. Héctor didn’t want to think about any of it. His thoughts returned to the old blind man, the way he swayed back and forth on the tips of his toes, the out-of-tune, metallic sound of the clarinet in the midst of the traffic noise, the sweet, catchy melody.
“Tell me something. You’re a scientist…”
“I’m only a scientist when it comes to building sewers, neighbor. For the rest of it, I’ve just got a good eye, that’s all.”
“Me, I’m the opposite…I decided to become a detective because I didn’t like the color my wife picked for the new carpet. I got my license by mail for three hundred pesos, and I’ve never read a single British mystery novel. I don’t know a fingerprint from a finger sandwich. I can only shoot something if it doesn’t move very much. All that and I’m only thirty-three years old.”
“Well, let’s just hope you make it.”
“Make what?”
“To thi
rty-four.”
There was a long pause. Héctor lit a cigarette.
“I don’t understand a thing. Not one damn thing,” he said, throwing the match onto the floor and giving up on his officemate’s scientific opinion.
***
He was becoming quite a talker. He preferred his old style, the taciturn and enigmatic Belascoarán Shayne. The other face of the clueless, uneasy, perennially surprised Belascoarán Shayne. The public face. Because, when all is said and done, a man is a hunter after images. After his own image. Sometimes he’s successful in the hunt and he comes up with something consistent, warm, something close to reality. Other times he spends all night pursuing an illusion, clinging to shadows. And sometimes the shadow turns around and comes after him, and everything goes to hell. His only chance for survival was to accept the chaos and quietly become one with it. Take yourself lightly, but take the city seriously, the city, that inscrutable porcupine bristling with quills and soft wrinkles. Shit, he was in love with Mexico City. Another impossible love on his list. A city to love, to love with abandon. Passionately, wildly.
Héctor’s mind fed off all this and more (the cold air, the ranchera music drifting up from the record store, the roofs of buses passing before his eyes without really registering) as he watched the street from the roof of his office building, where he’d gone to smoke a cigarette, to pursue the night, watching from above, keeping his distance.
The best thing was to wait. The killers would show their faces sooner or later. He tossed his cigarette over the edge and watched the tiny spark’s descent with pleasure, a dot of light slowly dropping the seven floors to the street.
***
“His name is Rataplan,” said the woman with the ponytail.
Héctor, who’d just come from the kitchen with a knife in one hand and a pair of eggs in the other, didn’t know quite how to react to the small rabbit that was unceremoniously thrust between his arms.
Smiling and implacable, humming the theme from Casablanca, the woman with the ponytail held out the black rabbit.
“Boy or girl?” asked the detective, blocking the door with his body.
“It’s a boy, stupid. Obviously. I wouldn’t bring you a girl bunny.”
“I guess you can come in then.”
Héctor turned his back on her and retreated into the kitchen.
“Put on the record that’s on the record player. Start it on the second song.”
“What is it?”
“Gerry Mulligan.”
The oil smoked in the pan, the onion was starting to burn. He dumped some of the oil into the sink, then broke the eggs into the pan. So much for my omelette, he thought.
Failure alienates, fear destroys one’s willingness to try new things and attracts more fear, life runs away. There was a lot to think about, but Héctor wasn’t in the mood for licking at his wounds, so he just stood there instead, mumbling incoherently to himself, watching the eggs cook. In the living room, the woman with the ponytail finally figured out how to operate the dilapidated record player and Mulligan’s sax filled the air.
“Do you want me to go?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to go away?”
Héctor hesitated. “Yes.”
“I’m leaving you the rabbit,” she said, and disappeared.
Héctor listened to the door close, then hurried into the hallway to bring her back, to shout without shouting for her to not go away, fighting against the urge to take her by the arm and stop her. When he got back to the kitchen his omelette was burned beyond all salvation.
“You know what?” Héctor asked out loud.
The rabbit looked at him for a moment, then went back to nibbling on a stray boot lying in the middle of the floor.
“I’m never going to fall in love with a woman again.”
The rabbit raised its eyes at this macabre declaration, and tilted its ears forward.
“I’m never going to be able to have a stable relationship with anyone again.”
The rabbit directed an appropriately harsh stare in the detective’s direction.
“And the worst of it is that I knew it all along.”
The rabbit turned his back on Héctor and pissed on the rug.
Héctor smiled, laughed, and started to cry.
***
He had two dead men, one plastic ID card, an electric bill, a photograph, a possible lead in the messenger service that had brought him the photo, and a one-way ticket to New York. That was all. It wasn’t much, but it was better than standing around crying in a corner of the room while he waited for the smoke from the burned omelette to clear. If he got to work right now he’d gain a day, instead of waiting passively for who knows what to happen.
He turned the record player up all the way and tried to think. Mulligan’s music was like a soft, fuzzy caress. Like the rabbit, if it could play the saxophone.
The ID card bore the name Leobardo Martínez Reta, giving the aforementioned the right to the rather dubious discounts offered to state employees in the government-run stores of the social security system. Why carry it around in his sock? The card didn’t give any information about the man’s background or employment. He couldn’t even be sure that this Leobardo Martínez was actually the dead Roman. Who knows? Maybe he’d picked it up off the floor and stuck it in his sock. The electric bill came from a carpenter’s shop on Bolívar Street.
One question bothered him more than the rest. If they’d gone to all the trouble of carting the body away again, why hadn’t they thought to remove the ID card and the electric bill in the first place, after they killed him? The messenger service was bound to be a waste of time; he gave up on the hope of finding anything there. The plane ticket was for the next day, at twelve noon.
A good time to fly to New York. A good time not to fly to New York. Mulligan had the air all to himself; the rabbit had taken possession of the rug. What did rabbits eat? What did saxophonists eat? What did dead Romans eat? What could a detective eat, after burning his omelette all to hell?
Chapter Two
The blood never stops until it reaches the river.
—Alberto Hidalgo
This what you’re looking for?”
Héctor nodded. The bodies of the two dead men lay on the metal table, their throats cut.
“Have they been identified? Does anybody know anything about them?”
“Around here, the less you know the better. All we can do is try and make sure the stiffs don’t end up as taco meat,” the attendant said, laughing.
Héctor took out a hundred-peso bill and handed it to the man, who stashed it in his uniform pocket.
“They found ’em together, stripped naked just like you see ’em here. Out by El Molinito, on the Toluca highway. The cop who does the paperwork around here came down to have a look at ’em, and then one of the big cheeses showed up, a group commander, some guy I’d never seen around here before. I guess there must be something about it that’s got their attention…Take a look at the way the two of ’em had their throats cut. It’s almost the same. And one of ’em has marks on his wrists like they had him tied up…”
Héctor took a closer look at the two naked, bluish cadavers. Both men were about fifty years old, muscular but past their prime, dark complexion, dark hair going gray. There was something sad about them, as though they didn’t like being dead. Héctor knew them both. One he knew from a photograph. The other one he recognized even without his red-plumed Roman helmet.
“Who did you say was the commander in charge of the investigation?”
“The group commander…I think they called him Major Silva. A major idiot, if you ask me. He comes down, takes one quick look and says, Keep ’em on ice for me. He didn’t even take a good look at ’em, didn’t even examine ’em. Not like me.”
Héctor walked out of the morgue. He started to whistle a tune, then paused to think of something appropriate. Something to take away the sickly smell and the sight of the twin slashed throats. A b
ossa nova, perhaps, or a samba…He thought it over, decided on “Corcovado,” and went on his way.
***
The tenement house on Bolívar Street was surrounded by cantinas, a tiny rat’s nest of a watch shop, and a small wooden hanger factory—you could watch them sanding the hangers through the open shopfront. Across the street, in front of an ironwork shop where they made window gratings, a worker stood playing with a yo-yo and airing his stomach, away from the heat of the furnace. Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective, paused to check the lay of the land.
He wasn’t feeling particularly intelligent, particularly aggressive or bold. He needed to take a moment to sharpen his senses, to let the atmosphere of the place sink in, and to break through the sense of apathy that had been dogging him all day long.
He pushed off from the wall and approached the tenement, stepping inside over a pair of children playing marbles in the open doorway. He climbed up a dirty, creaking wooden stairway two floors to the roof, where a pair of women were washing clothes.
“Number B? The carpenter’s?”
One of the women pointed to a large door farther along the roof.
He followed the whine of a band saw to the shop, where two men, naked from the waist up, worked hurriedly in a storm of sawdust.
“Sorry, mister, we’re closing up,” one of them said when Héctor reached the open doorway.
“The boss kicked off and we’ve got to go to the wake,” said the other one, his face lit up by a broad grin under a backward baseball cap.
“Where’s the wake? In the old man’s house?”
“No, in La Numantina. Just for friends, that means me and him,” the man said, pointing a thumb at his partner.
“I knew the old man. Can I come along?”
“In that cantina, whoever pays, plays, jefe.”
***
No matter how much he insisted, they wouldn’t let Héctor switch from cheap Madero brandy to grapefruit soda, so somewhere around the third glass he suddenly found himself embarked on an uncertain path through the intricate labyrinth of his own self-reflection.
If life is that period of time that runs from the instant the doctor picks you up by your feet and waits for you to start crying, until the moment when your old friends raise a glass in memory of your passing, then the measure of a man’s life comes down to how many old and good friends he’s been able to make and hold on to over the years. It was a complicated equation, because it meant not only that your friends should be truly faithful, but that they should remain alive, in the best sense of the word. And for a man to have truly noble friends it was necessary for him to live on noble terms both with them and with his country. The carpenter who had owned the little rooftop shop on Bolívar Street had evidently failed this ultimate test, if he was to be judged by the pair of hardened alcoholics who today toasted his demise. But what about Héctor? How many lunatics would take the death of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne as an occasion for reunion, remembrance, and love? He asked for another Madero, knocking it back in a single shot before the hostile gaze of the bartender, who, no matter how hard Héctor tried to disguise it, saw him for the unrepentant teetotaler that he normally was. Then he started to count off on his fingers. There were his three officemates, Gilberto the plumber, Carlos Vargas the upholsterer, and the sewer engineer El Gallo Villareal. Over the last three years they’d built an intimate bond out of their diverse professions and attitudes toward life; but theirs was more than a simple friendship, it had to do with a way they had of maintaining a certain perspective toward the country as a whole, of isolating themselves from all the screwed-up shit it threw at them every day. Then there was his deejay friend, El Cuervo Valdivia; and Carlos and Elisa, his brother and sister, with whom he had formed a sort of familial redoubt of Mafia-like solidarity. There was Father Rosales, the priest from Culhuacán, with whom he’d gotten involved in that mess at the Basílica; and the singer Benigno Padilla, Benny the King, whose life he’d saved; and the Reyna brothers, union activists he’d worked with; Mendiola, the reporter, who’d reemerged from the forgotten past of his school days, just like El Cuervo had; and Maldonado too, a lawyer and heroin addict, permanently flirting with the abyss, with whom Héctor was united by a common faith in the constant, inevitable proximity of death. That was it. All of them were either new friends he’d met during the last three years of detective work, or old friends he’d recovered in that same time. He’d salvaged nothing else from the remote past. And what about all the women he’d loved, and who’d loved him, Belascoarán wondered. Could he also add them to the list?
No Happy Ending Page 2
