An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  G. says 35 grand. Maybe I’d better ask someone else.

  I think I just don’t know how to fall in love.

  Books I want to read: Justine, The Misadventures of a Stewardess, Desire and Destiny.

  Gisela says she has a copy. Remember to tell Carolina and Bustamante.

  G. is adamant. Just to see his reaction I told him sixty. He didn’t seem surprised.

  I want to live somewhere else. Have a different room. I don’t like the same things I used to. I don’t like rum raisin ice cream. I don’t like Arturo’s kisses. I don’t like cars, I don’t like to go to the movies. It’s just something about me, it doesn’t have anything to do with all these other things.

  And in the middle of this mess, what do I do? Start reading a biography of Van Gogh.

  G.’s putting on the pressure. He introduced me to Es. I didn’t like him at all, he gave me the creeps.

  Ay, Mama, Mama, what’s wrong with you? How come you don’t notice what’s going on? There was almost a fight between Bustamante’s boyfriend, another friend of his, and Es. They saw him threaten me when I came out of school. But I told them to stay out of it.

  There’s no point in saying anything to them. It’s true, they acted like good boys, but I still don’t trust them. They’re a couple of fools, really. Afterwards they went around like big heroes, telling everyone they saved my life.

  There’s no one I can turn to.

  I guess the days of bobby sox and miniskirts are over. Maybe they can help me get a gun.

  I’m afraid.

  I’m flunking English and sociology.

  Mama, I swear to you that I’m trying to stay alive, to do everything I’m supposed to. You don’t understand what’s going on. I want everything to be OK. But it’s all happening too fast, Mama. It’s like in that movie we saw a few months ago, with the guy who says, “Life is too big for me.”

  I flunked history. That asshole!

  I’ve been crying all afternoon. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’ve got to find a way to stand up to them. I’ve got to do something. Maybe I could run away. Where would I go? Who could I go with? With all of the friends I’ve had over the last couple of years, who do I have left now? Nobody. Nobody.

  What can I do? As if I knew how to do anything.

  They say they’ll give me 40 thousand pesos. But I know they’re lying. They’re trying to trick me.

  Arturo broke up with me. When I told Mama she yelled at me like she’s never done before. At school everybody stares at me. They’ve all seen G.’s friends waiting for me outside.

  I spend all my time shut up here in my room. I hate it here.

  If I get out of this mess, I’m going to paint my room a different color. But I’m not going to get out of it. They’re going to get me.

  And I’m only seventeen years old.

  They’re going to kill me. I wish I’d never started this thing.

  That was all. Belascoarán wished the mother had given him the diary in its entirety. He felt an enormous compassion for the girl smiling at him from the photo, with her arm in a cast. If he had kept a diary himself he would have written something like: “Paternal instincts aroused. They need me. I feel useful. I can help them. Leave off eating shit for a while, and go save the maiden in distress. Life is good when you can help someone. Time to sharpen your .45, noble knight. Belascoarán to the rescue!”

  But since he wasn’t prone to that sort of thing, he limited himself to a few notes in the margins of the diary.

  Then he pulled the rubber band from the small bundle of newspaper clippings. They all told the same story, illustrated with photographs, of the near-disastrous failure of an apartment building elevator.

  The springs in the basement and a lucky stop at the third floor miraculously saved the life of the elevator’s only occupant. “After two hours of rescue efforts the young woman emerged from the wreckage shaken but unharmed.” “Company experts are now investigating the failure of the safety mechanisms.”

  Who would try to commit suicide by sabotaging an elevator?

  Across the room, the engineer shuffled his maps, then relit a candle extinguished by the sudden movement of air.

  “How’s it going?”

  “So so,” answered the detective, declining the cigar El Gallo offered him. He took out his pack of Delicado filters and lit a cigarette. He could feel his shell softening and the long-forgotten anxieties of adolescence pulsing again through his veins. It was the strangest feeling. Maybe it would have seemed more normal a few years ago. But by now, he would have thought that he was far enough from adolescence to preserve some kind of distance. Not so.

  What a profession, he thought. What a wonderful job this is. But he was ashamed to think of the poor girl, unable to sleep, all alone, just seventeen and already mixed up in who knows what kind of trouble.

  He yawned. What next? he wondered. Nothing to do but forge ahead, dive on into the two other worlds still waiting for his attention. New and totally different. Separate. In your typical mystery novel everything always fits so neatly together. But what in the hell could a confused teenager possibly have in common with the Santa Clara Industrial Council, and the ghost of Emiliano Zapata? A lot of nothing, that’s what.

  “You a soccer fan?” asked his office mate.

  “No, why?”

  “Oh, no reason, I just wondered.”

  Héctor opened the packet the lawyer, Señor Duelas, had sent him.

  It consisted of a series of documents from the public prosecutor’s office, police reports, and newspaper clippings. At the end were seven pages of signed testimony, each one typed on a different machine and a different kind of paper. All together, they told the story of a murder.

  What does a detective do when he needs to change gears? Is it enough to just turn the page and go on?

  Héctor considered it for a moment and then went out to take a piss. The bathroom was at the end of the hall. He groped his way through the darkened building, past doorways, stairwell, the service elevator, the passenger elevator, and finally the door to the men’s room. He pushed it, but it was locked. And of course, he never had his keys when he needed them. So he used the women’s bathroom instead. It was uncharted territory in the dark, and he walked smack into one of the sinks.

  Guiding himself by the sound of the piss in the bowl, he adjusted his aim until the stream fell directly into the water at the center. When he finished, he shook it off, sprinkling the last drops onto his pants in the darkness.

  He retraced his steps through the blackened hallway to the candlelit office, where the open file waited for him on his desk. He looked at his watch: 3:17 in the morning.

  The old chair complained under his weight.

  “Tired, neighbor?” asked El Gallo.

  “No, just getting my second wind. It’s been a while.”

  Héctor sank his gaze into the papers on his desk. As he read, he pieced the information together into a kind of Mexican police story, the sort of thing you could read in the newspaper any day of the week.

  radio car got the call at 6:20 p.m.

  Patrol cars 118 and 76 of the Tlanepantla Police Department reported to the corner of Avenida Morelos and Carlos B. Zetina, where the head office and factory of the Delex Steel Corporation are located. They were met by plant supervisor Zenón Calzada, who directed them to the office where the body was found.

  i saw the body through the open door.

  The janitor, Gerónimo Barrientos, discovered the body twenty minutes earlier. The office would normally have been empty at that time.

  the body lay sprawled across the desk.

  Black leather shoes, black socks. A light gray suit of good quality, tailor-made. Red tie, with gray stripes, soaked with blood. He fell so that his face lay in the cigarette butts in a heav
y metal ashtray, cast in the shape of a foundry mold, on his desk. The window was open. His feet were suspended a few inches above the floor in an unnatural position. His hands appeared open and relaxed, palms facing outward, arms at his sides. His broken glasses were found under the body.

  according to his secretary:

  Nothing was out of place. Everything in order. “Just like always.”

  she left the office at 4:30:

  Half an hour earlier than usual, but only because her boss told her she could go early, and that he was expecting someone, and yes, it’s true, she always stayed at least until five o’clock, and usually later because she was normally the one who locked up the office at the end of the day, but this time she left early because her boss told her to, and if they want to ask someone just talk to Guzmán Vera, the accountant, who was sitting right on her desk eating a doughnut when the engineer called her on the intercom.

  What was that? Who was he waiting for? No, he didn’t say.

  Who knows who it was? she said.

  the third blow pierced the heart:

  Two other deep incisions were made with the same sharp, pointed object; the first punctured his left lung, the second also struck the heart.

  Death was instantaneous. Within two or three seconds, at the most.

  something is always missing:

  It’s the picture of his ex-wife that he always kept there on his desk. Where he fell he would have been lying right on top of it, and so I didn’t notice until later that it was gone.

  The murder weapon—kitchen knife? dagger? bayonet? letter opener?—was also missing.

  fingerprints?

  “We could spend months sorting through the fingerprints of all the different people that have been inside this office. Forget it,” said the lab specialist.

  And finally, the photograph. Héctor picked it up and studied it carefully. The body seemed somehow to be hiding, as though it were actually fading away under the influence of death. He found it disconcerting, the way it lay there in that strange position, slumped over the desk, arms at its sides and the palms of the hands facing outward. It lacked a certain seriousness appropriate to death. But who said death had to be serious?

  There were three pictures in all. The second one showed the face of a man about forty years old, with a few gray hairs creeping in at the sides, a faint mustache, and a penetrating, humorless expression.

  The other picture showed the same man inside a factory, gesturing toward an enormous industrial oven as he spoke to a small group of people, among whom Héctor recognized the governor of the state of Mexico.

  After thinking about it for several minutes, he chose the photo of the dead body, and went over to steal four more tacks from the upholsterer’s toolbox. Zapata and the girl with her arm in the cast watched as he added the new arrival to the small photo gallery on the wall.

  “Aren’t you going to put up a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, too?” asked El Gallo, without looking up from his maps.

  “The deceased was a colleague of yours, Gallo.”

  “My colleagues can go fuck themselves,” the engineer answered dryly. Putting down his pencil, he looked up at the detective and smiled broadly from under his big mustache.

  The very least that could be said about Héctor’s corner of the room was that it was taking on a surrealistic character. The detective turned back to the papers in front of him.

  profile of a dead engineer.

  Gaspar Alvarez Cerruli was born in Guadalajara in 1936. He received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from Jalisco Tech, and a master’s in personnel management at Iowa State University. From 1966 to 1969 he worked in the maquiladoras, or sweatshops, for various Mexican-American companies in Mexicali and Tijuana. In 1970 he became the personnel manager for the Delex consortium, and in 1974, he was made assistant manager of their Santa Clara plant.

  He also held a 42-percent share in the Trinidad Mattress Company, which was managed by his brother. Married in 1973, divorced in 1975, no children.

  the police interrogated the company employees:

  But nobody knew anything. The shifts were changing in the factory, and the office workers had gone home at least an hour before. Everyone was milling around the yard, or in the locker rooms. The two shift supervisors, Fernández from personnel and engineer Camposanto, were inside the plant drinking coffee. They preferred the coffee from Fernández’s thermos to the brew from the office vending machine, which was only a few yards from the door to the room where the murder took place. “Just imagine if we had gone to get some coffee from the machine…”

  all the same, no one unusual was seen going in or out.

  Reported gatekeeper and security guard Rubio, badge number 6453. There were two trucks from Eagle Scrap Iron and a bill collector from Electra earlier in the day, but they all left before 4:30. Everyone else is listed here in the register, and they’re all company employees. There’s no possibility of any mistake. Everybody punches in and out, except, of course, Señor Rodríguez Cuesta, the company president, but I specifically remember when he left because he asked me to have his car jack fixed for him.

  that limits the possible suspects to:

  The three hundred twenty seven workers on this list.

  for your eyes only, from señor duelas:

  “Señor Belascoarán, it should be noted that the deceased was not a popular man. He was reserved, and prone to violent outbursts. Although very professional in his work, he did not get along well with people. I am including a list of the workers who are still employed by Delex, and who had serious run-ins with the deceased during his tenure as personnel manager for the company. (There followed a list with sixty-one names, of whom twenty-seven were in the factory at the time of the murder.)

  “In case you’re interested, I have also included some information about the corporation, its directors, and its financial standing. The information is quite general, but I doubt you’ll need to probe any deeper.”

  random details of potential significance:

  a) No one attended the funeral.

  b) The ex-wife’s address: Number 57 Cerro dos Aguas, in the Pedregal neighborhood.

  c) The dead man’s salary: thirty two thousand pesos per month.

  d) The investigation is to be made under the auspices of the Industrial Council; it was requested by Rodríguez Cuesta, president of Delex, who will cover the costs personally.

  e) A similar murder occurred two months earlier at the Nalgion-Reyes chemical plant. The victim was an engineer named Osorio Barba.

  f) The Delex factory in Santa Clara is currently targeted for a strike by the Independent Union of Iron and Steel Workers and Related Trades of the Republic of Mexico. There is a second, nominal union operating at the plant, which the company characterizes as “very cooperative.”

  g) The deceased’s maid can still be found at his home: 2012 Luz Saviñón. She has instructions to let the detective inside. The house is assumed to be the property of the dead man’s brother, at least for the time being.

  h) Parents are dead. He didn’t belong to any club or professional association. He didn’t subscribe to any newspaper.

  Getting up from his desk, Héctor crossed to the window and lit a cigarette. Nothing moved in the darkened street below.

  “How long’s it been since the lights went out?”

  El Gallo checked his watch in the candlelight. “A little over two hours.”

  Héctor opened the window, and the candle flames danced in the breeze. The heavy scent of the city and the interminable night rushed into the room. Yawning, Héctor stared out at the buildings, the parked cars, the darkened lampposts, the black windows.

  He felt a certain uneasiness. The old inertia had taken hold of him once again, throwing him full force into other people’s lives. Like a ghost
, he walked through strange worlds. Wasn’t that, after all, what being a detective was all about? Too afraid to really live his own life, to commit himself once and for all, unequivocally, to a life inside the skin that he was born into? Living for others was an excuse, a vicarious life. And now, the inertia following his mama’s death. And the emptiness of living in a country that he didn’t understand, but that he longed to experience with intensity. Together these things propelled him into the strange chaos where he found himself now. Was it going to go on like that forever? No, it wasn’t possible. Someday he’d find himself standing in front of a door with his own name on it.

  But in the meantime, he greeted his clients with an impassive stare, an impenetrable mask that occasionally showed signs of intelligence, moments of humor, or strength, hiding, all the while, an overwhelming sense of surprise, of astonishment at the world around him.

  “What a mess,” he complained. Reserving his right as a Mexican to bitch as a last resort. It was the solution par excellence for all of life’s problems.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” agreed the sewer engineer. “What a mess.”

  Belascoarán returned to his desk and opened the third bundle, a folder, a pair of books, and several photocopied pages.

  The information his friend Ana had sent him was clear and concise, and Héctor quickly distilled a brief summary of the relevant facts.

  The story that Zapata had not died on the ranch in Chinameca was an old one. It held a great deal of currency in the years following his assassination, and despite its many versions always contained some element of apparent fact to give it greater legitimacy. Some of the most common versions were:

  a) The real Zapata had once lost a finger when a pistol exploded in his hand. The body at Chinameca had all ten fingers.

  b) The version Héctor had already heard, that Zapata had a compaño who looked a lot like him.