The Black Minutes

by Martin Solares

International: KISSINGER THREATENS ECONOMIC EMBARGO. ALARM IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

  Local news: “For four consecutive days, Paracuán PRI supporters distribute pamphlets condemning the stones thrown at President Echeverría at the National University.”

  Social news, airport: “John and Jack Williams travel to our sister city, San Antonio. Family and friends see them off.”

  Local news, blood and gore: QUINCEÑERA ENDS IN BESTIAL BRAWL; DISGRACEFUL MAN BEATS HIS OWN MOTHER; HUSBAND ABUSES WIFE FOR NO REASON; EPILEPTIC MAN RUN OVER BY BUS; SHADY CHARACTER WITH STUNTED MIND SPENDS FREEZING NIGHT IN THE SLAMMER.

  That was the situation in the progressive city of Paracuán, state of Tamaulipas, always interested in the more spiritual aspects of life (while at the same time condemning the more carnal side). But then the port’s two papers begin to take different tacks: in the following days, their coverage was almost identical, except for the tone of the articles and the style of the headlines.

  The first news related to the killer appeared on Thursday, January 12, as a small paid insert, along with the day’s television programming: DIFFICULT SEARCH: A GIRL IS MISSING. A photo was included, taken from a yearbook, and next to it appeared the following text:

  The young girl in the picture, Lucía Hernández Campillo, disappeared last Monday while on her way to Colegio Froebel. She was wearing a blue skirt and a white shirt with black shoes. Her distressed parents, Everardo and Fernanda, will provide a reward to anyone with information on her whereabouts.

  Twenty years later, the headlines from the following day actually seemed more like omens: LA SIERRA DE OCAMPO BURNS; DROUGHT CAUSES ANXIETY IN PORT; DAMAGE EXPANDS TO CENTER AND NORTH OF TAMAULIPAS.

  TWO SECRET AGENTS ACCUSED OF ROBBERY. Once again, agents Chávez and Taboada. Cabrera shook his head. El Desconocido premiered with Valentín Trujillo.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 17, there was a horrendous discovery at El Palmar. A couple rowing around the lagoon found the body of a little girl, Karla Cevallos. The body was badly hidden under branches and dead leaves on a little island, just a few yards away from the busiest avenue in the city.

  Ah, Cabrera concluded, so this is what it was. How could I forget? We were working forty-eight-hour shifts to find the killer; I’d just joined the police force. Unfortunately, all the work led nowhere, and the newspapers published a number of editorials about the first girl’s disappearance: LUCÍA STILL NOT FOUND: PARENTS DISMAYED.

  On March 17, thirty days after Karla Cevallos was found, El Mercurio noted, GRUESOME DISCOVERY DOWNTOWN. On his way into the bathroom at the Bar León, right in front of La Plaza de Armas, office worker Raúl Silva found the remains of a second girl. But it wasn’t Lucía, it was Julia Concepción González, who had disappeared just a few hours earlier. The resemblance between the two deaths was obvious, and the police had to accept the existence of just one killer. POLICE LOOK FOR INDIVIDUAL ACCUSED OF SERIOUS CRIMES.

  JACKAL STILL ON THE PROWL: Agents of the Secret Service focus all their resources on the difficult search for the person who carried out kidnappings and attacks on several young girls in the last few days.

  Newspapers speculated that the offender was passing through the city. It was said he was mentally ill. Both papers interviewed Dr. Margarita López Gasca, a psychiatrist from the health center in the nearby city of Tampico, and at their request she worked up a profile of the killer:

  We are dealing with a person unable to function socially, who lacks a moral conscience and who repeats the same acts compulsively, because his greatest satisfaction is to be found in the punishment awaiting him.

  She is credited with another comment, obviously inserted by the journalist at El Mercurio: “All evidence suggests he will attack again.”

  Collective hysteria unleashes in the harbor. Teachers warn their students about the danger, and surveillance is doubled.

  That same week in March, when the police announced they had a firm lead in the case, another singular fact occurred, but due to the horror of the crime it went by almost unnoticed: the French archaeologist René Leroux announced he had finally discovered the exact location of the legendary and mysterious pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell. Anyone who has lived in the harbor knows that the legendary pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell was located in the garden behind Mrs. Harris’s house. The mound was about thirteen feet tall and covered by a thick layer of grass. According to the French archaeologist, those thirteen feet were just the tip of the iceberg. According to the legends in the area, the pyramid was four thousand years old and over three hundred feet high and might be home to important treasures. To support his claim, he said all you had to do was ask the residents of the neighborhood how hard it was to build their houses’ foundations and have them show you the clay objects found during the construction work. The mound’s neighbors, including Mrs. Harris, didn’t want to hear a thing about it, so the pyramid stayed buried for more than twenty years.

  Just a few days apart, both papers published incendiary editorials, demanding that the killer be arrested and suggesting that if the offender were still free it was because he was a person with power. As popular resentment increased, the weather report augured that the situation would remain the same for the next few hours: “Threat of rain. Gale-force winds blow in from the northeast.”

  At the beginning of March, an anonymous donor had offered twenty-five thousand and then later fifty thousand dollars to anyone who helped find the jackal. Attracted by the reward, amateurs, ex-cops, and detectives had invaded the city. The race for the reward began.

  Popular anger had not subdued when, on March 20, a group of Boy Scouts, entering an abandoned construction site, found the bodies of Lucía Hernández Campillo and Inés Gómez Lobato. El Mercurio spared no details or unpleasant pictures, and general rage was unleashed: TWO MORE GIRLS FOUND; TODAY AT 5, PROTEST IN THE PORT.

  From Mexico City, the head of the National Professors’ Union announced that, if no one intervened in the matter, they would call a national strike. The union, with four hundred thousand professors, was one of the most powerful in the country. The governor intervened in the case, and finally, on March 21, the killer was arrested; he gave an immediate confession. Cabrera could only follow the story up to this point, because the files in the archives were incomplete. Judging by what he read, it was obvious that the trial was full of irregularities. The defense attorney insisted important evidence had been covered up, evidence that would have led the investigation in a different direction.

  A few days after the trial began, La Noticia stopped covering it, and El Mercurio did the same a day later. That weekend La Noticia published a photograph that had impressed Cabrera a great deal back then. It was the image of a bearded man, dressed in white like an ancient Christian, with a gigantic piece of fabric over an immense expanse of water: “Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff covers King’s Beach, Massachussetts, with over 40,000 square feet of white fabric.”

  From that moment on, the papers didn’t mention the subject again and the crime section went back to normal: JAWS OPENS; CONSTRUCTION WORKER’S DRAMATIC SUICIDE; THIEF NEVER GIVES UP; SKILLED SMUGGLER. On June 20, the minister of health, on a visit to the port city, confirmed that the region was no longer at risk of malaria. But looking through the crime section for the following months, it was clear that even though the killer was tried and locked up, the bodies of little girls kept turning up in the northern part of the state. Cabrera tried to get more information, but the files in the archives stopped there.

  12

  When Cabrera asked for the volume with the newspapers from May and June, the attendant came back empty-handed.

  “That’s strange! They’re not where they should be or anywhere in the stacks. It must be misplaced. I’m very sorry, but I have to go now. You should report it to the director, Don Rodrigo Montoya.”

  The director turned out to be one of the people from the funeral; he had been talking to Bernardo’s father. C
abrera’s request seemed to surprise him.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need to see the fourth volume from 1970, the book that has May and June.”

  “It wasn’t there?”

  “No. I read though March but they couldn’t find the next one.”

  “It’s very odd that it’s not where it should be. I’m obsessive about organization. It’s probably the social service people, they mess everything up.”

  He called the attendant in charge on an intercom and ordered her to look for it again. From his window, the lagoon was visible, surrounded by cranes and bulldozers.

  “They’re checking on it right now.”

  He was about to say something else when the attendant called back. “I already looked, Licenciado, and it’s not there.”

  “Keep looking, Claudina.” He looked out the window again at the bulldozers, and after thinking for a minute he turned to Cabrera. “Not many people come to the archives. Now that I think about it, only one other person ever asked me for that volume, and we buried him this morning.”

  Cabrera explained that he was in charge of the case, and the director looked at the bulldozers.

  “Look,” he said, “three months ago, Bernardo came for the first time. He said he was researching the economic history of the city. I warned him he wasn’t going to find much, because things here have never changed, but he came anyway to read in the archives every day for three weeks, and it took me a while to understand what he was looking for. He was very discreet. One afternoon I found him making copies of some pages that definitely had historical value but had nothing to do with the local economy, or at least not in an obvious way, so I stood next to him and said, ‘There are a lot of people who would be very angry if they found out you were poking around in that case; it’s a very delicate issue.’ And he asked me, ‘What would Dr. Quiroz Cuarón have said?’ That comment made me realize that Bernardo knew about my humble participation in the case when I worked for the police force more than twenty years ago, so I answered, ‘If you want to know what the doctor said, I have his testimony, and you can see it if you like . . . but if you want to get even more information on the case, there’s someone else who could tell you more interesting things, things that have been forgotten.’ I warned him it could be dangerous, because that person lives at the margins of the law. He was a cop back then, and he knew how everything went down. Bernardo made a note and told me, ‘I’ll think about it.’ He disappeared for several weeks, and then ten days ago he came looking for me to ask me the informant’s whereabouts. I got him an appointment and found out they met together. I thought that since this person had some unresolved problems with the law, they would pin Bernardo’s death on him, but as you know, that’s not how it happened: they blamed El Chincualillo. But I’m absolutely certain that the informant is innocent: I can vouch for him.”

  “I’d like to talk to that person,” Cabrera said.

  “I’ll do what I can. In the meantime”—he unlocked a drawer and took out a notebook that had a blue cover with psychedelic drawings all over it—“It’s my account of what happened twenty years ago. Bernardo read it, too.”

  He called the attendant and asked her to make a copy, and while they waited, they stared out the window. In the distance, the bulldozers worked incessantly. Then the secretary came in, handed back the original and the copy, and Cabrera left. He had a lot to do and only three days off.

  13

  The prison in Paracuán is on the road headed into the city, on a hill looking down on the river. Originally, the building belonged to a Spanish hacendado. Now its towers are used by eight armed gendarmes to watch over the inside of the penitentiary.

  To go in, all personal items must be left in an envelope; belts, shoelaces, and anything that can cut or be melted down must be removed. A sign written on a cardboard box warns that alcohol, food, sharp objects, bananas, mangos, or soursops are not allowed, since the inmates will ferment the fruit to make alcohol. At the entrance they ask you for an ID, they ask your relationship with the inmate, and then they let you in.

  René Luz de Dios López was not called the Jackal by many people anymore. Everybody just used his first and last name. When Cabrera asked for him, one of the guards said, “He’s the one over there with the guitar. Hurry up, they have to go eat dinner; it’s time for mess hall.”

  The man known as the Jackal was playing the guitar and singing a religious song with some other inmates. Cabrera didn’t want to attract any attention from the guards so he interrupted him discreetly. “René Luz de Dios?” And he explained why he was there.

  López wasn’t surprised. “Two interviews in two weeks. I’m getting famous.”

  And Cabrera knew he was getting closer.

  14

  The story of René Luz de Dios López is the story of a scapegoat. In 1975 he was a delivery driver for a processing plant that made cold cuts. When the first three girls were murdered, he was in Matamoros, a full day’s drive away. Every fifteen days, his boss sent him to the northern part of the state to supply the clients in that area. He even had a receipt from the hotel where he stayed, stamped and signed by the cashier, who remembered him well. Unluckily for him, the morning one of the little girls was found, he was in Paracuán. A random chain of events led the police, who were actively looking for someone to blame, to the conclusion that René Luz de Dios López was their ideal candidate. For the last twenty-five years, he’s been locked up for four murders he didn’t commit.

  When the State sets out to hurt somebody, nothing can be done to stop it. Eighty Jehovah’s witnesses—who by religious law cannot lie—were willing to declare with the vehemence of the converted that the day the second girl was murdered René Luz de Dios had been with them from ten in the morning until at least six. There was no way he could have left without their noticing, but the judge ignored their testimony. He didn’t take stamped and dated receipts into consideration either; these were provided by the owner of the plant and showed that René Luz de Dios was delivering merchandise in Matamoros and Reynosa on the days when the first three girls were murdered. The day the first victim disappeared, for example, he was on the border from the night before. When the second girl disappeared, he was working in Reynosa, and the day the third girl was killed he was shopping in McAllen for his wife’s birthday present, as his stamped passport showed. And yet the prosecutor suggested that the receipts were forgeries and that, if he had wanted to, the defendant could have traveled round-trip from the port to the other end of the state, just to murder the three girls without provoking any suspicion.

  The photos of the day his sentence was read show him to have been depressed and inconsolable. He was about to turn twenty-five when he went in. If he managed to get out alive, he would be a seventy-year-old man by the time he finished his sentence. He left behind two baby girls and, above all, his wife, to whom he’d been married almost three years. His public defender, a lawyer who was an activist in the opposition, appealed to the higher State courts and called a press conference to decry the handling of the case. A month later he published a book with his own funds, in which he laid out the injustices the driver suffered. The public defender kept making public statements until he had a car accident on the highway. He died five years later from his injuries.

  Inside the cellblock reserved for murderers, the ceiling was made of a thick metal mesh, on which the guards paraded, ready to shoot rubber bullets or throw tear-gas grenades; the inmates’ cells were concrete boxes, many of them with plastic curtains instead of doors. Ever since they sent him to the murderers’ block, the guards had warned René Luz to be careful. When a guy who murdered a woman, or a child rapist, arrived, the inmates would normally get together to kill him, while the guards pretended not to notice. Everything the guards said was dripping with cynicism, since if they did attack him, nobody would come to his rescue. The inmates could tolerate anyone, except for a rapist.

  René Luz wasn’t planning to sleep the first night. When he no
ticed how his neighbors were looking at him, he started to get worried, and when he saw his cell door was just a simple piece of fabric, he thought he was going to pass out. Even though he tried to convince the guard, pathetically appealing to him for help, the man who was in charge of keeping watch over the block from the ceiling not only didn’t answer him, but also moved away to a corner on the far side of the roof to sleep more comfortably. The guard watching the door at the end of the hall told him to go away. At nine, they turned the lights off.

  As soon as the moon was hidden, they went to see him. There were only three: one stayed by the door and never went in; the other two were thin, dark-skinned, and barefoot. Buenas, the thinner one said to him. He was a mulatto with a scar on his neck and a hard stare. René Luz de Dios López must have thought they were the eyes of the man who would kill him. So, you’re René Luz? The one who killed those three girls? About to pass out, the scapegoat, knowing he was on the verge of being sacrificed, tried to tell the inmates about the injustices committed against him. But it was useless. If the civilized people didn’t want to hear him out when he had all the evidence in hand, what was the point of telling the same story to three convicted murderers?

  As best as he could, with a voice as thin as a thread, he recounted the story of his trial. His account didn’t seem plausible to him. Compared with his testimony before the court and his family, this sounded terse and unbelievable. Occasionally, someone would stop him with a question or a monosyllable, to which René Luz would respond in his weak little voice. He could barely string two words together, and he felt his ears buzzing. When the moon shone through the metal grating, he noticed the thin guy was hiding the tip of a metal blade under his clothes.