No Happy Ending

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  And, of course, you did the thousand push-ups.

  But it wasn’t all easy street. Following that first taste of glory, which earned you six thousand pesos, after you’d paid the cross-eyed assistant and the four torch bearers (next time there’d only be two), you couldn’t get any more work. You had nothing more to offer and not even Raúl Velasco was interested in bringing you on again for a thousand deep knee bends.

  So you took refuge in a fleabag hotel in the Colonia Guerrero to meditate on your situation—this time for real. And there, watching TV all day long, day after day, you began to understand what show business was all about.

  A month later you struck a deal with the producers of The Marathon Show.

  Your cross-eyed assistant became Señorita S, and you embroidered a scarlet Z on the pocket of your Mao jacket, on the turban, and the cape.

  The S was originally supposed to be for Soraida, but by the time someone told you that it was actually spelled with a Z, it was too late; you’d already had an S sewn onto her black uniform. There was no turning back, S it was.

  This time you escaped from a locked trunk, and the five thousand pesos they paid you all went to the carpenter who made the special trunk for you, and who would make the gadgets for your subsequent performances. That’s why you went a week without eating, and not, as one idiot reporter wrote, to prepare yourself mentally for your next feat of magic.

  This was the beginning of a career marked by both glory and accident. Second-degree burns suffered while driving a motorcycle through a brick wall covered with burning gasoline; a broken arm during your escape from a locked safe. But this had a special appeal to an audience fed up with untouchable heroes. A hero who came through at the end a little worse for the wear gave the act a sense of real danger, it Mexicanized the spectacle, made the magic more real.

  So there you were, wasting your imagination and your balls (more of the latter than the former) on increasingly spectacular feats.

  You were stronger, better coordinated, and more confident than ever.

  You tempted fate on the high wire, through acts of daring escape, motorcycle jumping, feats of physical resistance (remaining six minutes underwater), fakirism (a forty-day hunger strike, with weekly in-depth televised updates and daily news flashes).

  After the hunger strike you married Señorita S. She’d finally decided that her career as a pantyhose model was going nowhere, and that your future could be hers to share.

  By 1971 you’d reached the top. You earned good money, and your only worry was to think of some appropriately daring spectacle for next week’s performance. You read Houdini and Max Reinbach, Lilibal and Dr. Lao Feng. You added an esoteric touch to your old spiel, derived from the pseudo-Buddhist drivel that Señorita S (whose real name was Márgara) was so fond of. So you called a meeting with Raúl Velasco, and announced that you planned to walk blindfolded across a high wire a hundred and fifty feet above the ground, and that you intended to use that opportunity to speak, in your own voice, for the first time to the television audience.

  Of course, he loved the high wire idea, and he loved the blindfold even better. He wasn’t too happy about your speaking in public, but he owed it to you, so there wasn’t much he could do. And that was how Dr. Zorak broke his vow of silence.

  The performance was the ne plus ultra in the life of an ex-milkman from Durango. Before the cameras and the nation, you revealed that you were actually Mexican (you didn’t reveal your former name, by now you had only one name, crowned with glory: Zorak); and you dedicated the performance to the young people of Mexico, in the hope that they would turn away from drugs, left-wing politics, alcohol, and dancing. You explained that what the country needed was healthy young bodies—and that was the path that you could offer them by your example. Señorita S took the microphone briefly to add that you were the world’s number one daredevil and magician, and that you regularly received telegrams from all over the United States (not one) and Europe (one, an offer to perform in a night-club in Madrid).

  Two years later you were dead, killed while performing a stunt for the opening of a new housing subdivision. You were hanging suspended in midair below a helicopter when the cable broke and sent you falling to your death. A two-hundred-foot plunge, and your days of glory came to an abrupt end.

  You left behind you a pair of innovative daredevil stunts, a name that was briefly commercialized in a new, but never successful, brand of coconut-and-almond cookies, and a comic book series that reached a total of thirty-two issues.

  That was your story.

  Chapter Four

  An exalted mind, a happy heart,

  the workday begins, life in the balance.

  —Roy Brown

  The subway’s violent motion finally cut through Belascoarán’s high, leaving him instead with a dull, persistent headache. At Hidalgo the train was assaulted by an unruly mob of ordinarily peaceful citizens. The horde pushed and squeezed the passengers already inside the car, until Héctor was lifted off the floor, pressed between a pair of office workers and a football player, who lost his helmet and his gym bag in the crush. When they pulled into the Bellas Artes station, the whole thing degenerated into a mass of pushing and shoving bodies, knees and elbows trying to force a gap in the immovable human wall that blocked the car doors. A woman police officer on the platform was pawed by a hundred hands while she shouted repeatedly: Let the people off before you board!

  This is all the exercise a private detective would ever need, riding the subway a dozen times a day, thought Héctor. It seemed to him that it might not be a bad idea if the national soccer team were to train in the subway a couple of times a week in preparation for the Central American Games.

  He walked through the traffic and the neon along San Juan de Letran, enjoying the soft night breeze. The city cast its spell over him even now, despite his headache and the bad taste in his mouth.

  La Fuente de Venus hadn’t opened yet. Two showgirls, Suzane and Melina, flashed tits and ass from the dozen or so photographs in the glass by the door. One of them was dressed as Cleopatra and surrounded by a group of Roman soldiers (!!). In one picture—to the left and behind a smiling Melina slipping out of a tiny skirt made of little pieces of metal—stood Don Leobardo, complete with toga and helmet, breastplate and spear. Well, that was one mystery solved.

  “Real good-lookers, eh boss?” said a man entering the club with a hand truck loaded with soft drink cases.

  “Is the owner around? I want to talk to him,” said Héctor.

  “You looking for someone to set you up with one of the girls? I can’t do it for you myself, but I’ll tell you what…it’s no problem, a thousand pesos gets you whatever you want…They’ll even do it dressed up like Cleopatra and everything.”

  “I’ve got some business with the owner.”

  “Salas, Don Agustín? You’re too late. He’s dead. Somebody killed him.”

  Héctor crossed the street and set off in the direction of his office. The club would be open in another couple of hours, and right now he needed his chair to do some thinking.

  There was a light on in the office. El Gallo sat at his drawing table, deciphering a pile of maps and diagrams. The window was open, and the light from the street fell across the desk and its wrinkled papers.

  “What’s up, detective?”

  “Howya doin’?”

  “Carlos the upholsterer asked me to give you a message. He went home a couple of hours ago, when I got here. He said there were these two guys hanging around here all day. Young guys with dark glasses. They came in once and asked for you. You’d better be careful.”

  Héctor crossed the room slowly and dropped into his chair. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, trying to get his headache to go away.

  “What’s going on? It all seems pretty confusing to me.”

  “That about sums it up, Gallo.”

  Now he had the names of the two dead men, but he didn’t know what his connection was to either of them. Why had
they sent him the dead body and the photograph of the other one? Better yet, why had they killed them in the first place?

  He pushed it all around a few times inside his head:

  1. It was a trap, bait. For what? Why?

  2. There was some connection between the dead men and himself that he was unaware of.

  3. It was all a big mistake.

  Maybe there was some connection from the past. It could be…In the middle of his mental haze, an idea started to come together. Perhaps. The two carpenters had mentioned a third man, Zorak’s bodyguard. If he wasn’t dead by now, like the rest of them, maybe he’d know what was going on. And Zorak, who seemed to be at the crux of the whole bizarre story, had left a widow, Señorita S. That was another loose thread that he could pull on. And then there was the unused airplane ticket. Somebody had paid for it. And whether or not he could find out who, he’d decided to cash it in for the money. It would be a good joke, a little bit of justice.

  “Gallo, I’m going to a strip club on San Juan de Letran. I’ll be back. If you see anything out of the ordinary, light the lamp on my desk, where I can see it from the street.”

  “Whatever you say. Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

  “You never know. I wouldn’t want to take a chance and have someone mistake me for a Roman soldier.”

  El Gallo laughed and Héctor went back down to the street.

  ***

  “The one and only Melina! She can make men drool until they slip and fall in the puddle at their feet. One look at her and you’ll know what I mean, gentlemen. I bring you the swishing, swaying queen of the night: Melina!”

  Héctor applauded wildly, taking his cue from the men at the next table. The dimly lit club was filled suddenly by the brash flash of a spotlight. Glasses clinked, a drum rolled.

  Melina made her entrance dressed as Cleopatra and escorted by three (not four) Romans. When the enthusiastic cheers of the thirty or forty regulars sitting around the stage died down, the drumroll stopped and Melina took a few steps forward.

  “I want to ask for your patience for just a minute, my dear friends—” She was cut off by a new round of cheering. “I need to say something very serious. Something truly serious, and something that has been a terrible shock to us here at La Fuente de Venus. Agustín Salas, the owner of the Fuente, the man who cared so much and helped us in our artistic careers, Don Agustín has passed away.” She paused to lick away a tear, then went on, “Don Agustín has passed on to a better life, along with his good friend Don Leobardo, who used to play one of my Romans, just for the simple pleasure of being with us in the show, sharing our joy.” She pointed to the three surviving and undoubtedly disconsolate Romans. “And our sorrows. But that’s show business, folks. Friends come and go, some find success and others fail, and I’m sure that Don Agustín would have wanted the show to go on.” She raised her arms, which brought a renewed cheer from the audience. “So here we go!” There was another drumroll and the Romans took their places.

  The lights went down and Héctor took a moment to look around at his fellow revelers. The three men with crooked ties and wavy black hair at the next table over. The two men with briefcases competing for the attention of the miniskirted woman who sat coyly between them. Who were they? Bureaucrats? Cops? And if they were cops, were they from the secret police, the auxiliary police, the judicial police, the special, the bank, the preventive, the traffic, the federal? Merchants from the Merced? Loan sharks? Upholsterers, butchers, auto parts dealers? Grocers? Small-time drug dealers? Grifters? Mechanics? Chauffeurs?

  At the end of her Cleopatra routine, Melina removed her jeweled crown and threw it into the audience. She’d taken off the rest of her costume sometime earlier. The lights came up again, and a trio of waiters attacked the tables with fresh bottles of watered-down whiskey, watered-down black market cognac, cheap Mexican brandy, and rum.

  “Who owns the place now?” Héctor asked one of the waiters.

  “Who knows? Maybe one of Don Agustín’s cousins. Nobody’s told us anything. They just said to keep working, that’s it…”

  “What about the other guy who was friends with Don Agustín and Leobardo, their pal from their old Zorak days?” Héctor insisted, holding on to the waiter’s sleeve to keep him from getting away.

  “You mean Captain Freshie? He hasn’t shown his face around here in days.”

  “What’s Captain Freshie’s real name?”

  The waiter jerked his arm free. “Ask Melina. He used to be after her ass.”

  In the meantime, the stripper had started a new routine. Dressed in a long, low-cut dress, with an enormous yo-yo in her hand, she led the audience in singing along: “Melina, let me play with your yo-yo-yo, Melina let me play with your yo-yo-yo.”

  The audience picked up the refrain. Melina tried to get the giant yo-yo to go up and down while she marked out a few awkward dance steps.

  “It’ll cost you a hundred,” said the waiter, returning to Héctor’s side.

  The detective put down his bottle of soda. “What will?”

  “Captain Freshie just showed up.”

  Héctor pulled two wrinkled fifty-peso notes from his pocket and passed them to the waiter, who turned his back to Héctor and said in a low voice, “That’s him, over there, by the door with the red light.”

  Héctor looked in the direction the waiter indicated. Illuminated by a soft red bulb, a man of about forty leaned against the backstage door, his eyes on the stripper. He had a thick mustache and wore a black suit with a white necktie. He lit a cigarette. Héctor stood up and called the waiter over to pay his bill. Melina finished her number, teasing the men seated in front of the stage with the bobbing yo-yo. Captain Freshie glanced distractedly around the room, and his eyes met Héctor’s. His face changed, a line of tension deepening around his mouth. He threw his cigarette to the floor and went through the door behind him, glancing quickly over his shoulder at the detective. Héctor picked up his change and started to push his way across the crowded floor.

  The door gave onto a long, poorly lit hallway, a pair of doors on either side and a gray-metal door at the far end. One of the side doors opened and the club’s other stripper came out into the hallway. She was naked except for a tall peacock feather headdress. She stared at Héctor.

  “Have you seen Captain Freshie?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Héctor squeezed by her. She lowered her head and shook her feathers in his face.

  The gray-metal door opened on an empty parking lot. The air was warm, at least as warm as inside the club. A drunk was trying to ride a bicycle. He would kick at the pedal a couple of times and fall over. Then get up and do it again. There was no one else. Captain Freshie had disappeared.

  Héctor yawned, lit a cigarette, decided to go back to his office and get some sleep.

  It must have been after two A.M. The street, strangely empty, glowed under the neon lights. A couple of cars stopped at the light, and he crossed placidly in front of them. He was out for a walk. Just a little stroll at two in the morning through a hot, deserted city. He tried in vain to keep his mind blank, open to the impressions of the night, but two images hemmed him in: the dark body of the woman with the peacock feather headdress, and the rabbit pissing on his rug at home. He’d better bring him something to eat first thing in the morning.

  Chapter Five

  …we are time and in time we exist like

  smoke in the air, like the fleeting air itself.

  —Roberto Fernández Retamar

  After wading through the obligatory red tape, he was finally able to cash in the plane ticket to New York for a wad of thousand-peso bills, which he held tightly in his hand inside his jacket pocket. Now the joke was on them. He could keep the money as a sort of advance toward his search for Don Agustín’s and Don Leobardo’s killers. Or he could simply give it away to the first person he saw on the street. Like that guy there…Héctor stopped to watch a street vendor walking along under the
weight of three heavy wooden ladders; the man stared hopefully back at the detective, more interested in the possibility of actually getting rid of one of the ladders than in the money the sale would bring him. Or how about that one: a secretary quickened her pace to keep up with her busy schedule.

  He walked across the tree-lined Alameda, a light breeze cooling his skin and kicking up puffs of dirt here and there as it picked up force. He stopped in front of a hand-lettered sign announcing a campaign to collect a kilometer of coins for the literacy campaign in the new Nicaragua, and laid down his several thousand pesos in bills before the astonished high school student who stood guard over one end of the chain of money.

  Then the detective turned and fled, running from his own embarrassment at the look of admiration on the student’s face.

  ***

  “Just because you’ve got a gun and you call yourself a detective, that doesn’t mean you get to drink the last soda pop. Not around here. No way,” said Gilberto Gómez Letras.

  “We believe in democracy,” said Carlos the upholsterer.

  Héctor crossed his arms and smiled. “So what do you want to do, flip a coin?”

  It was pouring rain. Dark clouds scudded over the city, tree limbs blew down, the puddles were choked with dead leaves. A cold wind threw the rain against the window. Scattered splotches of light shone through the wet glass from the first lights coming on in the office building across the street.

  “I’ll tell you what. If you guys make the run, I’ll treat you to a couple of cafés con leche in exchange for the soda pop,” proposed the detective.

  “And go out in this fucking weather? You’re off your rocker.”

  “It’s raining like a son of a bitch,” said the upholsterer.

  “Who you calling a son of a bitch?” asked the plumber.