The Black Minutes

by Martin Solares

  The article was by a new columnist, Johnny Guerrero, a guy from Chihuahua. Rangel didn’t like his style. From the first day, he was writing articles attacking the chief, like he was on the mayor’s payroll. He interspersed his opinion with the facts and he exaggerated things, but more than that he seasoned his writing with flowery words: he made a bum into a derelict, a prostitute into a strumpet. For him, an autopsy was the legal necropsy and he wrote mean-spirited captions under photos: This is the miserable construction worker; Here we find the despicable ranch hand. The first time Johnny tried to interview him on the phone, Rangel took an immediate dislike to him. He imagined him as crippled, fat, squat, and greasy-faced. And he didn’t get the reporter’s sense of humor, which seemed to require that someone else be humiliated.

  Rangel read this article quickly, because he already knew what it would say: Efforts in vain, murderer on the loose, defenseless public, incredibly slow, disgraceful investigation, police incompetence. Incompetence? He said to himself, Fuck him! I’d like to see him in my shoes, the piece-of-shit reporter. The article was cut off abruptly: Continued on page 28. He set the main section of the paper aside and looked through the rest until he found, in the section with the horoscopes and comics (Continued from page 1): because we can’t expect anything from this system. A lead could stare them in the face, and they wouldn’t even notice it.

  Fucking jerk! The column was an attack on his boss, but for a second Rangel took it personally. Of course. Johnny was in complicity with the mayor.

  He was brooding unhappily, about to close the paper, when he noticed an unusual headline on the opposite page: UFO’S IN PARACUáN. Damn, what’s this about? Above the head, there was a note in italics explaining that, thanks to an agreement with the AP, El Mercurio finally had access to the most interesting column to come out in the last few years, straight from the ranks of the FBI: ALL ABOUT UFO’s by Professor Cormac McCormick. Oh, man, what’s up with this?

  In today’s installment, the daring investigator was reporting on the strange case in the town of Yuca in Wyoming, where Martians were believed to be taking possession of the bodies of earth-lings. They arrived at nighttime, witnesses said, hid their ship, and entered houses. They took over their hosts’ minds and bodies. The only thing that stopped them was the presence of a mineral called Mobdolite. The professor quoted a woman named Stark: “They have Bob.”

  Mobdolite, thought Rangel, that stone is going to sell like hotcakes.

  He threw the newspaper onto the desk next to him and walked to the end of the hallway to get some coffee. He thought he saw someone watching him from behind the window. Ah, cabrón, who’s that? He was so tired that his own reflection surprised him: long hair, a Sergeant Pepper mustache, thick sideburns, and a white shirt—always a white shirt—brown boots with white stitching, and blue jeans. Why didn’t I recognize myself, maybe because I don’t have on my dark glasses? Someone needs to tell the chief to buy a new coffeemaker. This one doesn’t work; it spews the coffee out of the pot.

  Whenever the conditions allowed for it, Rangel wore his dark glasses, to hide the fact that he had one brown eye and one green one. One for each side of reality, like Mr. Torsvan had told him.

  Once he was at his desk, he picked up El Travolta’s report on the body found in El Palmar and read it through quickly. Then he reviewed his own notes: A fracture of the pelvis . . . legs separated from the body with a serrated object . . . white fuzz . . . a cigarette. All of a sudden, he said to himself, What a coincidence, the other girl also died on the seventeenth! But he didn’t find this detail important and filed the random fact deep in his subconscious.

  If he didn’t solve this problem soon, the reporters were going to get even more aggressive. Why I am doing this? I shouldn’t be here, he said to himself, my back hurts. As usually happened at this hour, his body began to mirror his tension. The proof came when he tried to pick up a pencil and it slipped through his fingers. Whenever he was under extreme pressure, unavoidably, his hands would sweat for hours, and a moment would come when they would start to bleed. He couldn’t stop it, not even by taking a tranquilizer or wrapping his hands in a handkerchief. First, his hands would start to itch all over; a few hours later, he would have to dry the sweat off his hands every few minutes, and then soon he wouldn’t be able to feel the texture of things. The worst came after that, because he couldn’t touch things that were very hot or cold without pain, he was unable to touch certain things at all, and even something as simple as reading became complicated: to drink coffee he had to wrap the mug in a handkerchief, to read he would wet the tips of his fingers with saliva. A moment would come when his hands would finally dry out, but this false sense of relief just told him he was in the eye of the hurricane. If his worrying continued, from that point on, there was no cream or oil that could prevent the arrival of cracks and slits, and when his hands dried out completely, they started to bleed: sometimes at his fingertips, sometimes in the middle of his palm.

  The last time his hands bled was in September, when he was investigating a bank robbery, a suspicious attack on the governor’s own bank. A really wild case that caused me a lot of problems, he thought, and he rubbed his eyes. What am I doing here? I’m not trained for this, what they need is a real expert in sex crimes, not a dozen people making it all up. As had happened before, Rangel told himself it was time to throw in the towel and do something else for a living. Even though he was hearing good things about his work, the way he tracked down criminals, Rangel knew it was all based on misinformation: he didn’t have an infallible sense of intuition, he wasn’t particularly cunning, and he didn’t know anything about martial arts. It had been more than a year since he’d been in an actual fight. The truth was he was a musician, or at least he thought so; how had he allowed things to go this far? And if El Travolta hadn’t been able to solve the case, how was he going to do it?

  4

  It was his uncle’s fault he got to this point. When no one would give him a hand, when even people who said they were his closest friends turned their back on him, the only one who provided him with a way to make a living was his uncle, Miguel Rivera, whom the family had practically disowned. Rangel had called him to ask for work and his uncle arranged for them to meet: “Of course, Vicente, come over tomorrow and we’ll talk.” He met him at his desk next to the chief’s office. He drank a cola drink, as he talked with a guy who was about twenty-three years old and a woman in her forties.

  “Young people, I’d like to introduce you to my nephew, Vicente Rangel. Nephew, this is Lolita and this is Joaquín Taboada, a promising young man in the investigative unit.”

  The woman turned out to be the chief’s secretary. At the time, she was thinner and sexier. The second guy was tall and chubby; he wasn’t particularly well-built but one punch from those hands would be enough to knock anybody to the ground. Rangel’s first impression was of a violent, insecure fat guy. Before he could come to a final conclusion, his uncle called him to one side and they went to the restaurant at the corner, Klein’s, a legendary eatery.

  “It’s the best there is around here.”

  They ordered two coffees that ended up being watered down.

  “I read in the newspaper that things were going well for you with your band,” his uncle said. “You’re not going to play anymore?”

  Rangel explained in very general terms that he had fought with the band leader, he was going through a transitional period, and he wanted to stop playing for a while.

  “That’s a shame,” his uncle said. “I think you have real skill.” Without another comment, he offered him a job.

  “Doing what?”

  “The same thing as me, Vicente.”

  “Well, thanks a lot, but I was thinking I’d look for office work.”

  “No, no, no, we already have an accountant, and one is enough. Come with me and I’ll show you how to work.”

  “But I don’t think police work is my calling.”

  “That’s the same t
hing I said thirty-seven years ago. Look, Vicente: you’re not going to find anybody here who dreamed about being a police officer; we all got here some other way. You’ll start tomorrow morning, early. I’ll see you at six right here.”

  And that’s how Rangel became a police officer. The first few weeks were incredible. His uncle had him look through the files on terrorists and bank robbers, so he would recognize them if he ran into them on the street, and let him read the latest folder they had sent him from Mexico City with the stamp reading STATE DEPARTMENT, a report about a group called the September 23rd Terrorist League, and at the bottom it mentioned the names of two people in the port suspected of belonging to the group. No shit, he said to himself, I never thought I’d jump from the art scene to the crime scene.

  For the next three weeks, Rangel went with his uncle on all his assignments. He made arrests, inquiries, followed up on crime reports, and started to get to know the city. Since he was the type of person who had never left the bars and music stores, he had to change his ways. People told him their problems and Rangel listened to them, went inside houses that had seemed impenetrable, and talked with people he never thought he would meet. All without having to be violent, because that was his uncle’s style. He told him, “There’s one golden rule, nephew, and it’s this: If you’re going to pull out your gun, it’s because you’re going to use it.” His uncle acted like he went everywhere unarmed, but Vicente noticed that he carried a .38 caliber, sometimes stuck in his belt, other times in his shoulder holster.

  The first days were the most dangerous. As that universe was completely foreign to him, several times he was on the edge of causing an accident and even someone’s death, because he didn’t know how to react yet. One Monday, after the weekly meeting with the chief, his uncle asked him to go with him to the Coralillo to make an arrest.

  “Ay, cabrón,” Rangel answered, “I’ve never been there, they say it’s really dangerous.”

  “It’s not so bad, it was worse at the end of the forties, after World War Two; then, you really did have to watch out for the unsavory types that came in from overseas: Turks, Chinese, Koreans, you’d even run into Italian mafiosos.”

  “Listen, uncle, I’m not armed.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re going to arrest the Petrolera thief.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The jerk who’s robbing from the neighborhood where the oil workers live, don’t tell me you haven’t heard about it.”

  “And who is it?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I’ve got a hunch.”

  “And are we going to go to the Coralillo because of a hunch?”

  “Nephew,” his uncle said to him, “in this job, you’ve got to go on your intuition. If you wait to find conclusive proof, or if you think they’ll just turn in the guy who did it, you should look for another line of work. To stay alive you have to use your intuition.” And since he saw that Rangel was interested, he added, “There are times when you just know, without anyone having to tell you. You’re deep in the worst case ever, you have no idea how to tackle it, and suddenly, boom! You hear a voice saying, Over here, cabrón, there’s no other way. You have to drop whatever you’re doing and follow it wherever it leads you. It might seem strange, but your intuition is never wrong. Now you’re going to see the proof.”

  As they got closer to the Colonia Coralillo, Rangel’s nerves came back and he began to feel his hands itching. “Listen, Uncle, they say the last police officer to go in that neighborhood almost left feet first.”

  “No. You don’t say? And what else do they say?”

  “They say like twenty people attacked him, and when they were about to let him go one of them cut him with a knife, and the bastard ran out of there with his intestines in his hands.”

  “And they’re right,” said his uncle, and he lifted up his shirt. He had a scar that ran the length of his stomach. “Damn, what a stupid nephew I have! You got everything you know secondhand.”

  They left the last paved alleyway behind and drove down a steep gravel gully. There weren’t a lot of cars around. When he saw his uncle’s furrowed brow, Rangel knew that despite his jokes, the idea of wandering around this area made his relative nervous. As soon as the vehicle appeared, the people moved away from them distrustfully and it was obvious they were being watched from behind the curtains of the buildings.

  As he turned a corner, his uncle said, “OK, now for real. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  “Is there going to be shooting?”

  “No way, don’t get ahead of yourself; we won’t have any problem. The Coralillo is a crucial area in this line of work; they know me, and it’s about time I presented you to the bigwigs around here.”

  They parked in front of a butcher’s shop and his uncle got out of the car with a huge smile on his face.

  “Juanito!” He waved to a man in his fifties wearing a bloody apron, cutting steaks behind the counter.

  “How you doin’, boss? What can I do for you? You come for some round steak?”

  “No,” said his uncle, “I actually came for your assistant there.”

  Rangel turned to look at the guy he was talking about, a rough-looking man who was taller and thicker than his uncle and him combined. The giant didn’t bat an eyelid. He had an ax in his right arm, resting on the cutting board, and on each side of him there was a big segment of beef ribs, recently broken into pieces. Does my uncle really think he’s going to arrest him? Don Miguel at seventy years old and Vicente at twenty-four, even working together, couldn’t subdue this gorilla. If he could split cow ribs into pieces with one single blow, how could my uncle think we could catch him?

  The owner must have known his uncle for a long time, because he came out from behind the counter with the knife in his hand and walked over to the old man to turn the heat up on him.

  “Hold on, let me see here.” He made like he was examining him. “You’re fatter and older. And your partner here doesn’t look so tough. You should have brought a different lackey, because this one isn’t going to last long against my assistant.”

  His uncle just stood there, exposing himself completely to the butcher’s knife like he was hanging out with friends.

  “Not so fast. They call him Jackie Chan, just so you have an idea. Besides, he’s not my lackey, he’s my nephew.”

  “Ah,” said the butcher, studying his face. “Nice to meet you.”

  Rangel nodded.

  “So, what then? You going to tell your assistant there to get in the car?”

  “He’s all grown up; you tell him. Or tell Jackie Chan to get him. Let’s see if he can handle him.”

  The giant stared at him. Damn, thought Rangel, is he for real? And he looked at the giant with the ax in his hand. He hadn’t moved since they got there, but Rangel knew he was sizing them up. He’d just need a little push to jump over the counter and attack them both.

  “What do you say?” his uncle asked the giant. “You wanna mess around with my nephew?”

  But the giant didn’t answer.

  “Well,” said the owner, “he doesn’t want to go. You’ll have to carry him, lieutenant, but I don’t think you could. He moves washing machines for fun in his spare time.”

  “That’s why I came to see you, Gaptooth.” His uncle got in the butcher’s face, and the butcher did the same, like two bulls sizing each other up. “I’m not going to take him with me, just as long as you give the stuff back. Why are you breaking into my friends’ houses?”

  Gaptooth opened his huge mouth and smiled broadly, and Rangel understood where the nickname came from.

  “Damn, I can’t believe you, boss! Every time you come around here it turns out you’re trying to help out your friends.”

  “It’s not my fault I have so many friends. You already know how I work. You probably just don’t like my car. You want me to come back here in La Julia?”

  “No, that truck’s damned ugly and it doesn’t have air-conditioning.” “Don�
��t worry about it, just imagine you’re in a sauna.”

  “And what will my neighbors say?”

  “That you went on vacation up north.”

  The Nagual Prison was up north, built on a hill of the same name.

  Gaptooth laughed again, but he didn’t say anything, and Rangel noticed that the giant was discreetly trying to slip out the back door. Rangel’s uncle also noticed and shot a look at Vicente.

  They were standing right in front of the butchers, and Gaptooth hadn’t put his sharp knife down. All he has to do is lift up his hand to cut my uncle’s guts out again, he thought. But even though he was at a disadvantage, his uncle was the one who accelerated the situation. Without moving an inch, without deflecting his body despite the danger he was facing, he broke the tension with an impatient remark.

  “Look, Gaptooth, you know I was always straight with you. It’s not in your interest to lose this relationship. The ones coming into power aren’t as patient as I am.”

  The butcher considered his options. Finally, he nodded.

  “All right, Shorty, tell the lieutenant here where you put those things you found in the trash.”

  The giant had a deep voice. “At Teobaldo’s shop.”

  “With the Spaniard?”

  “Yep, there.”