An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “Welcome to Delex, Señor Shayne,” began Rodríguez Cuesta. The other three men nodded their heads, as if the manager’s greeting suddenly made him worthy of their esteem.

  “Belascoarán Shayne,” corrected Héctor.

  Rodríguez Cuesta nodded.

  Beyond the seated figures in the conference room, Héctor conjured up the image of the factory yard, the ovens inside the plant, the din of heavy machinery, the sweating workers.

  He sat down without waiting to be asked, and Duelas took a seat by his side.

  “The problem is a simple one,” began the attorney. He seemed to be the designated spokesperson.

  “The situation in the whole Santa Clara area right now is very delicate, and here at Delex, in particular, we are experiencing some very serious labor problems. As you know, this has not been a good year for business in general. And now with two men murdered in the last two months…The police have not been much help to us so far. Frankly, their work does not inspire confidence. What it boils down to is, we want the murders solved and the persons responsible brought to justice.”

  “Let me add,” said Rodríguez Cuesta, “and I believe this information was not included in the report we sent you…but you should know that we have an interest in both of the firms involved, and that both companies have had problems with this same independent union.”

  “If you’re looking to have the union take the fall for the murders, I don’t see why you came to me. The cops ought to be more than willing to set that one up for you.”

  “That’s probably what we’ll end up doing…But in the meantime, we want to know who’s really responsible, and what their motive was,” answered the general manager.

  What’s it all about? What do they want? Héctor wondered.

  “You can arrange for payment of your fee with Señor Guzmán Vera.”

  The accountant nodded.

  “May I ask why you chose me for the job?”

  “We know that you’re an experienced engineer, with a master’s from a university in the United States…It doesn’t matter to us why you abandoned your career…We’d simply like to think that…how should I say it…that you’re a member of the family. You already have a good understanding of how an industrial facility operates, you know what the problems are, and, in general, you’re more likely to understand the way we think.”

  Loyalty among thieves, thought Héctor.

  “Okay, it’s a deal,” he said, and regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. What kind of mess was he getting himself into?

  The five others smiled blandly, waiting for Héctor to leave.

  Finally he stood up and left the room without saying another word. Guzmán the accountant followed him.

  He kicked himself for having accepted. What the hell did he think he was doing? He remembered seeing two packs of fancy cigarettes on the table in the conference room: Philip Morris and Benson and Hedges. There were no proletarian pretenses there. Couldn’t he ever escape, forget his past? Was he condemned to live forever on the same side of the fence? Marked forever with that same Masonic-style stamp that he had unknowingly acquired on the very first day he entered the school of engineering, branding him as a foreman-accomplice to The Bossman for the rest of his life? Would it never be erased?

  He was about to curse the day he decided to attend his first class instead of going to check out the girls in the School of Architecture cafeteria. But Guzmán Vera wisely took the initiative, and, with a superficial smile etched across his face, guided Héctor through the labyrinth of hallways to a tiny office, where he unlocked the door, took a seat behind his desk, and motioned Héctor toward an empty chair.

  Héctor took special care to let the ash from his cigarette fall onto the carpet.

  “How about a thousand pesos per day for the first fifteen days, plus expenses?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to charge you,” Héctor told him. “Let me think about it for a minute.”

  The accountant stared at him in surprise.

  “All right, I thought about it, of course I’m going to charge you. It’ll be fifteen hundred a day for ten days, no expenses, I travel by bus. If after ten days I don’t know who did it, I’ll drop the case.”

  He got up.

  “You can pay me at the end, don’t worry about it.”

  Héctor closed the door behind him, and made his way back through the maze.

  “What time do they break for lunch in the factory?” he asked the guard at the gate.

  “One-thirty, boss. A bunch of them eat at that lonchería over there, or out here on the sidewalk, or at those stands down the block.”

  “Isn’t there a workers’ cafeteria inside the plant?”

  “Sure there is, it’s just that these days, nobody uses it anymore.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Ever since they first threatened to go on strike, they’ve been coming here to eat. This is where they used to come for their meetings, anyway…”

  Héctor walked slowly over from the Delex gate and sat wearily at one of the tables covered with a torn plastic tablecloth. He drank a red soda pop, one of those strange, brightly colored soft drinks he had come to love so much, both for their sweetness and because they were so uniquely Mexican.

  “I heard that the workers stopped eating over at Delex so they could talk more freely during their lunch break…” he said to the woman at the lonchería.

  “You heard from who…?” asked the woman, chasing after a little girl to wipe the snot from her nose. When she finished with the girl, she faced Héctor, put her hands on her hips, and asked him directly:

  “Are you working for the company?”

  “Well, yes, Señora…But I’m not a company spy, it’s about something else. I was hoping I could talk to the boys from the union.”

  “That should be easy enough. You can find them at their lunch break.” Turning away, the woman busied herself in the kitchen.

  Héctor settled into his chair and scribbled some notes onto a worn pad:

  Why do they call Zenón a dog?

  The Sandinistas traveled through Costa Rica. Maybe some document issued there in 1932 would give me some clue about don Emiliano.

  Why was there a whole case of soda pop in the back of the station wagon?

  What does Rodríguez Cuesta really want from me? What are they afraid of besides the union?

  He paused and considered.

  In Mexico, competing companies weren’t generally in the habit of bumping off each other’s executives. Or if they were, Héctor hadn’t heard about it. The ruling class had become too civilized for that.

  The state had taken responsibility for that sort of violence instead. The state, or the corrupt pro-government unions.

  He’d come away from his brief meeting with the Delex management with the distinct impression there was something they were afraid of. For one thing, they were far too willing to talk about their problems with the independent union. If that was all it was, the police would be more than happy to wrap the two murders and the union up together into one neat Christmas present for Rodríguez and his associates.

  Héctor prided himself on his ability to look frankly into his own past, and, though it had not been easy to make the sudden break with job, wife, the only life he had ever known, he had gone ahead and started his new career as a private detective in a country where such a thing was unheard of, though anything was considered possible. As time passed, he managed to rationalize the new path he had taken, and the initially intuitive rejection of his earlier life as an engineer and efficiency expert with a nice house and a salary of 22,000 pesos a month. But for all its newfound rationality, his conviction was no less impassioned.

  He knew that a big and powerful corporation didn’t often have much to fear, beyond a
confrontation with the government, or a massive wave of competition. And violence was normally connected only with the first alternative, not the second one. On the other hand, in recent years management had confronted the phenomenon of independent unionism from a thoroughly feudal perspective.

  He couldn’t say exactly why, but he had a sneaking feeling that the key to the mystery lay somewhere else altogether.

  With two and a half empty hours ahead of him, he decided on a change of plans.

  “Excuse me, Señora, when’s the shift end?”

  “The shift…three-thirty, young man.”

  He left four pesos on the table and went out, but not without first smiling warmly at the little girl crawling around nearby. To his surprise, and maybe only because no one had told her that he was still a stranger, she smiled back at him.

  ***

  “Hi there, neighbor, what’s happening?” asked the upholsterer as Héctor threw his coat at the coatrack.

  “Just passing through.”

  With a red pen in hand, the upholsterer, perpetual hunter of odd jobs and seeker after sub-employment, continued his careful scanning of the want ads.

  “Find anything?” asked Héctor, dropping into his armchair.

  “Na…the guy next door with the stationery store wants me to do a job on an armchair for him, but the cheap son of a bitch says he won’t pay any more than materials plus a hundred pesos.”

  Carlos Vargas, the upholsterer who sublet the plumber’s half of the office in the mornings, was always in a good mood; and it seemed as though he was always looking for work. If they’d asked Héctor for a description he would have said: short, bearded, cheerful, spends all his time reading the want ads.

  “There’s a message from your brother on your desk.”

  Downtown, the sun was shining; the rain had stayed behind in Santa Clara.

  “I’ll be at the Havana Cafe until 12:30,” said the note.

  Héctor slipped back into his trench coat and headed for the door.

  “You look tired, maestro,” remarked the upholsterer.

  “Yeah, I guess I am…Good luck finding some work.”

  When he opened the door he came face-to-face with Gilberto the plumber, his office mate since the good old days.

  “Watch where you’re going, pal,” said the plumber.

  “The super says you owe her for the cleaning,” answered Héctor, unperturbed.

  “I owe her for wiping my ass,” countered Gilberto, more imperturbable still, dropping a heavy brown bag full of old pieces of pipe onto a desktop.

  “Whatever you say, old buddy, just pay her and don’t be an ass,” said Héctor.

  “Have her wash your balls next time and see if she charges you for that, too,” said Carlos Vargas.

  “Forget it, it’d take her an hour to dry ’em off. Yours, on the other hand…” but Héctor was out the door and crossing quickly toward the elevator before he got sucked into the verbal melee.

  He walked along Artículo 123 in the direction of Bucareli. Boys were hawking papers on the street. There was a soccer game in front of the strange church that fronted the avenue, and a fistfight another twenty yards farther on. His eyes watered from the combined effects of fatigue and smog as he strolled along with his coat under one arm, thinking about his office. He wouldn’t change it for the world. His frequent contact with the two master craftsmen and the strange nocturnal sewer expert kept him in touch with the real Mexico. Héctor himself completed the foursome; he was a craftsman as well, only with less skill and experience in his chosen profession. He was just another mexicano trying to make it in the Mexican jungle. It was up to him to defend himself against the myth of the super-detective, with its cosmopolitan and exotic delusions, to keep it from eating him alive. The puns, the dirty jokes, the gutter humor, gave him a daily dose of mexicanidad, Mexican-ness, which was reaffirmed again and again by the recurrent discussions of the rise in the price of soda pop and cigarettes, and the general and notorious cheapskatedness of hardware store owners, especially those of Basque-Spanish origin, and the post-weekend reports on the circus, or the latest TV comedian. And from a purely practical perspective, Héctor had three very efficient secretaries who took or conveyed messages without complaint, and kept his files. In return, Héctor was obliged to take job orders for the upholsterer and the plumber, quote prices on the repair of Naugahyde love seats or broken faucets, and every now and then, take a message from the engineer’s girlfriend.

  If he were to go on listing positive factors he would have to include the fact that the office somehow fostered a remarkable climate of mental agility that sharpened his own ability to think. And that it offered a particular version of the city, with its view of the teeming and clamorous downtown streets, that Héctor was hopelessly in love with.

  Arriving at Bucareli, he took a short detour to stop at a place that sold the best strawberry popsicles in the whole damn city.

  His brother Carlos sat in front of an espresso and a Howard Fast novel.

  “Qué pasa?” Héctor asked, tossing his coat onto a chair.

  Héctor asked the waitress for a cup of coffee and some doughnuts, then waited for Carlos to open fire.

  “Can you come over to my place tonight?”

  “What time?”

  “Nine or so.”

  “How about earlier.”

  “Eight all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “It’ll give the three of us a chance to talk about the famous inheritance.”

  “It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it sure is.”

  “Say, what do you know about the Delex Steel Company?”

  “What are you doing mixed up with them?”

  “You first.”

  “They’ve got three plants in Mexico City and two more in Guadalajara. The company’s got a bad reputation even in the business world. People say it’s full of crooks and shady deals. It throws a lot of financial weight, though. I don’t know exactly who’s behind it.”

  “You know anything about the union?”

  “Which one, theirs or ours?”

  “Yours.”

  “Well, a little…”

  “Come on, Carlos, loosen up, I’m not a company spy.”

  “Yeah, I know…” He raised his hand to signal the waitress, and pointed to his empty cup.

  “They’re trying to break the union. They want to frame it for the murder of one of their engineers,” Héctor said.

  “We had an idea something like that was coming.”

  “Can you put me in contact with someone there?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “How about today?”

  “I’ve never actually met any of the compañeros out there.”

  “Do you think you could come out with me?”

  “What are you trying to do?” asked Carlos. Héctor sipped thoughtfully at his coffee before answering.

  “I’ve just been hired by Delex to find the murderer.”

  “That doesn’t sound too good. You know the union’s about to go out on strike?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve got to take some proofs that I corrected yesterday back to the printer. And I could use some cash.” Carlos smiled.

  “Three-thirty, in the diner in front of the factory…Just five minutes, okay?”

  “Okay. Isn’t it going to get you in trouble if they see you hanging around with us?”

  “Do I look like I care?”

  “All right, I’ll see you there. You can pay for the coffee,” Carlos said, getting up from the table. “Ever hear anything from your girlfriend with the ponytail?”

  Héctor shrugged. “I get a letter every now and then.”


  “Tough luck, old man,” Carlos said, putting his hand on the back of Héctor’s neck in a half-brotherly, half-fatherly gesture.

  Héctor yawned. Surrounded by the noisy hubbub of the cafe, he sat thinking about how, in some inexplicable way, the roles had become reversed between him and his younger brother, and now Héctor was the baby of the family.

  ***

  When she saw him approaching, she left the shelter of the school doorway and came out to meet him. Her gray book bag hung from the same shoulder as the sling that held her arm.

  Fascinated, Héctor took in the jumbled chatter of the white-bloused, plaid-skirted girls that fanned out across the street like a plague. The old man selling tamales recognized Héctor and smiled.

  “Helluva fight, partner.”

  Héctor nodded.

  “It’s my guardian angel…” the girl greeted him. She curtsied slightly.

  “Hello,” said Héctor, for lack of anything else to say.

  Together, they walked as far as Insurgentes. The sun threw bright sparks off the store windows. Three times it seemed as though Héctor was about to speak, but he only sucked more furiously on his cigarette. Somewhat uneasily, the girl watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she asked, with one foot up on the bus.

  “Another time. Right now I’ve got too much to do.”

  Planted on the corner, he watched her walk to the back of the bus, take the last seat, and turn to look out the window behind her.

  He didn’t know what to say, or how to begin, and it occurred to him that what he liked to call his professional demeanor was no more than a reflection of the confused state of his own life. He wondered what some detective out of a mystery novel would have said.

  He probably would have done the same thing Héctor had, saying nothing, silently protecting the girl. The difference was that he wouldn’t have done it out of shyness.

  Yawning, Héctor boarded another bus heading north.

  ***

  Uneven lines of workers filed out of the plant gate. Several groups headed straight for the lonchería, and the tables filled up rapidly.