An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  She offered Héctor a cigarette from a music-box case that chimed out three notes from a polonaise. He took out his own pack of Delicados, and then lit his hostess’s cigarette.

  “I want to thank you for what you did for my daughter this morning. They called me from the school, and even though Elena won’t say anything about it, I realized it must have been you who came to her rescue.”

  Héctor nodded, thankful for the girl’s silence. He hadn’t been born to save cats caught on rooftops. He played cleanly, expecting the same in return. Of course, he was more interested in the girl than in her mother. Putting aside Señora Ferrer’s undeniable charm. Why should she be interested in him, after all? Did she just flirt automatically, as if by instinct, with whatever man she found in front of her? It was obvious she could have almost any man she wanted.

  “It’s time to eat,” she said.

  Héctor set his coat down, and Elena took it and hung it on a hook on the wall.

  “You don’t look like a detective anymore,” she told him. “I hate to say it, but now you look like an architect’s assistant who spends all day sitting at a drafting table.”

  As soon as they took their seats, a maid in a white apron appeared to serve the dinner.

  “Elena, I hired Señor Belascoarán to help us out. Since you won’t tell me anything, and since I know that you’re in some kind of trouble…”

  The girl interrupted the journey of spoon from plate to mouth. She stood up, and the napkin slid off her lap onto the floor.

  “I liked you better as my guardian angel than as my mother’s flunky,” she said, and turning, walked slowly out of the room.

  Héctor stood up.

  “I’ll be right back,” he told the mother.

  “So much for our peaceful little dinner,” she said, smiling.

  Héctor followed the girl’s shadow down the hall, past a pair of bathrooms to the door of her room.

  There were books along the walls, a sky-blue comforter, orange cushions on the floor, dolls from several years ago, still looking like new, a soft shag rug.

  She kicked her shoes off and jumped onto the bed, snuggling up at the head of the bed near the pillows, and curling her legs up underneath her. Héctor stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. He thought about it for a moment, then sat down on the floor, leaning his back against the wall.

  “Got an ashtray?”

  The girl tossed him a brass ashtray from her bedside table.

  “Let’s be on the level, Elena. I’m not going to work for you if you don’t want me to. I’m happy to just walk away if you don’t want me around to lend a hand. It’s you that’s got the problems, not me. Those boys this morning were serious, whatever it was they wanted. It’s up to you. You decide, it’s that simple.”

  The girl watched him in silence.

  Héctor hesitated. Then he decided it was best not to risk alienating the girl by hiding something from her. A clean hand was the best.

  “I read a scrapbook of your mother’s, a few newspaper clippings about your accident, and several pages out of your diary.”

  “My diary?”

  “A few pages. Photocopies.”

  “What an idiot I am.”

  “I tell myself that every day. For all the good it does me. Is it a deal, or isn’t it?”

  “I don’t even know anything about you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “It’s a long story, Elena. It’s a very long story and I don’t know that if I told it to you you’d understand, because I don’t even understand it very well myself. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “If you want to know my story, you’ll have to tell me yours, too.”

  “The problem is I don’t keep a diary.”

  “I’ll bet you laughed when you read it.”

  “I don’t laugh very often.”

  “Let me think for a minute…You seem honest enough, and you seem like you really want to help…Shit. I guess I could use some help, after all.”

  “They teach you to talk like that in Catholic school?”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “It’s been over ten years now since I finished high school.”

  “The public school kids aren’t half as tough as we are.”

  “Tomorrow, after school?”

  The girl nodded, and Héctor left the room.

  Her mother was waiting for him in the living room. She had company.

  “Señor Belascoarán, I’d like you to meet Señor Burgos, an old friend of the family.”

  Héctor shook the man’s hand, it was sweaty, and squeezed his tightly. Behind the hand was a dark man, about forty years old, curly black hair, wearing a leather jacket, and a silk scarf around his neck.

  Burgos, thought Héctor. Another name on the list. He had cold, teary eyes. Snake’s eyes. All right, enough already, it was starting to sound like a Graham Greene novel.

  He’s an ugly motherfucker. So what?

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “Same as before. I’ll let you know how it’s going.”

  Marisa Ferrer accompanied Héctor to the door, after a brief “Just a minute, Eduardo.”

  Once at the door, she put her hand in Héctor’s, but he quickly pulled away and lit a cigarette.

  “Just one thing, Señora, I don’t want anybody to know that I’m working for you. No one.” He gestured toward the other room.

  “Nobody knows, don’t worry. Did she tell you anything?”

  Héctor shook his head.

  “I want to thank you again for what you did today. Not just because you saved Elena from those thugs. She suddenly seems to feel safer now, more confident. She spent all afternoon joking about how much fun it was to have a guardian angel.”

  “Guardian angel my ass,” muttered Héctor when he was back out in the street, with the cold air against his face. A frigid wind blew down from the mountains. “Who’s going to look after me?”

  ***

  The rented VW had a radio with rear-mounted stereo speakers, and a light on the rearview mirror. Héctor turned them both on and ran through the list of Delex employees while he listened to some rhythmic, melancholy blues.

  Camposanto—680 Insurgentes South, Apartment L.

  He headed down Insurgentes toward Napoles, with the windows open, so as to get the most out of the cold mountain air.

  The night is a man’s best friend. A woman’s, too. Believe it, because it’s true. Is your heart beating faster than normal? Do you feel strange? Don’t worry. El Cuervo is here to keep you company.

  He was startled by the voice on the radio. A little bell started ringing in his head.

  Atahualpa Yupanqui sang it best when he said: God made the night for man to conquer.

  Ain’t it the truth? Don’t despair. Don’t feel lonely. We may be alone, but we still have each other. Solidarity out of the solitude, that’s our motto. This is El Cuervo, coming to you on radio Station XEFS, Mexico City. Right now I want to send out a big hello to the workers at the Vidriera Mexico glassworks. Vidriera Mexico has been holding back overtime pay, and we all know that’s not right. Everybody deserves a fair wage for their labor.

  Animo, my friends, good luck in your struggle. I’m going to dedicate this next song to you, it’s a song of struggle from the campesinos of Peru. The group Tupac Amaru, with “Tierra Libre.”

  The music filled the car. Héctor stopped at a red light, and a distant face surfaced out of his memory: Valdivia, skinny little Valdivia. With that voice it had to be him. It was the same voice he remembered from grade school, winning recital contests: “Ten cannons on a side, a strong stern wind, full sail flying…”

  The little car responded to the accelerator, and leapt forward down Insurgentes.

 
; It must have been around ten o’clock. He checked his watch, stifling a yawn: 10:25.

  Probably too late to catch Camposanto at home.

  You’re tuned to XEFS, Mexico City, and the El Cuervo Show. The master of the night. From now until the exact moment when the sun rears its bald head over the horizon and spoils everything. The only program that ends when Count Dracula closes the lid on his coffin. Free from the absurd limits of the clock, and tied to the even more absurd limits imposed on us by the rotation of the earth…I’ve got a guy on line one who says he’s going to run away from home and wants to talk about it with us first. Lines two and three are open, just call fifty-one twelve two forty-seven, or fifty-one thirteen one-nineteen. Your direct connection to El Cuervo.

  Héctor pulled up in front of 680 Insurgentes, and divided the next ten minutes between yawns, vague speculation as to the location of Apartment L, the story of the kid who wanted to run away from home, and a feeling of desperation caused by his own lack of foresight, the result being that he had only six cigarettes left to last him the rest of the night. The building had a large garage, with a heavy mesh door across it. There were four cars parked inside, two Ramblers, a Datsun, and a Renault station wagon. Which one would it be? He tried to remember if he’d seen one of them that morning in the factory parking lot.

  And now, some more music to please your soul during these dark hours when the life force is strongest.

  Of course, I’m assuming that you’re all awake because you want to be. If that’s not the case, if you’re slaving away the night at some dead-end job, just remember, the night time is the right time. It’s the best time to be alive. Transfer to the swing shift, and sleep in the morning.

  Not a bad idea, thought Héctor. Shit, El Cuervo, who would have guessed it.

  The night is a time of solitude, it’s the time when the mind works most clearly, when the ego diminishes, and melancholy reigns. A time when we feel the urgent need for a helping hand, a friendly voice, when we feel most able to do our share and lend a hand where help is needed.

  You’re listening to the El Cuervo Show, with your friend and host, El Cuervo Valdivia, your bridge to the cosmos, a link between brothers from the depths of the darkness.

  I have here a card from a young woman named Delia. Delia says she wants to fall in love again.

  It seems that things haven’t gone too well for her in the past. She says she’s been divorced twice and now she’s eating her heart out with loneliness. Is there anyone out there who wants to lend a hand?

  After ten minutes there were six volunteers who were willing to help Delia give it another try.

  Delia was followed by a poem by Cesar Vallejo, songs from the Spanish Civil War, a set of songs by Leonard Cohen, a call for blood donors, type AB negative, and a request for food for some strikers in the Escandon neighborhood, which was answered by the offer of three breakfasts at the Guadarrama Cafe and a pot of hot chocolate prepared by some people in the neighborhood. Next came several cryptic personal messages: “Lauro, don’t forget to buy it,” “Anastasia is waiting for her friends on her birthday,” “For anyone in the experimental physics class at CCH, call Gustavo at such and such a number, there’s an exam tomorrow and he can’t find his notes,” et cetera.

  A middle-aged couple drove away in the red Rambler. A young man drove two elderly men away in the Datsun and then returned alone.

  At twelve-thirty, with El Cuervo coming on stronger than ever, and as Héctor was counting his last three cigarettes, engineer Camposanto emerged from the house, dressed in a finely tailored gray suit and a red tie. Héctor followed him.

  A helping hand on the airwaves. The El Cuervo Show. A friendly voice to help all of you caught in the clutches of cold, insomnia, fear, and despair. And especially for all you wage slaves out there.

  Your compañero of the airwaves.

  The city sleeps. Or so they say. But you and I know different. Suppose it was true, then let her sleep, the ungrateful bitch. We are the sentinels of darkness, watching over the nightmare sleep of this old whore who calls herself Mexico City. While she sleeps, we live, ever ready to offer a cloak of solidarity in the middle of the darkness.

  Now listen to me, this is a message to the two traffic cops at the corner of Michoacan and Nuevo Leon: put the traffic light back to automatic already. People aren’t going to keep dishing out your little bribes forever. For more information, you can talk to the officers themselves. They’re parked in car number 126 in front of a diner at the intersection.

  Camposanto left his vehicle parked at the corner of Niza and Hamburgo. Héctor hated having to leave El Cuervo behind. His intuition told him that he was going to spend another sleepless night for nothing, that the engineer was going to go have a couple of drinks alone in a bar, and that no one would approach him, no one would speak to him. Another wasted night.

  And that’s how it turned out.

  If you’re the kind of person who thinks the night is a reign of terror, if you wake up in a cold sweat, if it scares you when you hear the siren of an ambulance, if your children have nightmares, if this is the worst moment of your life, if you’ve got to make some terrible decision… Don’t forget. El Cuervo’s waiting for your call…Brothers and sisters, the night is long…

  Chapter Five

  If you were to ask me why he’s a private detective, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Obviously there are times when he would rather not be, just like I have moments in which I would rather be anything but a writer.

  —Raymond Chandler

  In February 1977, Isabelita Peron, resembling more than anything else a character from an old vampire movie, made it known through the press that she was willing to confine herself to the seclusion of a convent immediately upon her release by military authorities. The sinister Argentine dictator General Videla miraculously escaped unharmed from the third recent attempt to blow his ass to smithereens; and the Mexican plumber Gilberto Gómez Letras, taking advantage of the fact that his office mate had let his subscription to Excelsior expire, signed him up instead for the next six months of Sporting World. Holland was shaken by a general strike. There were one hundred seven suicides reported for the month in Los Angeles. Graft was exposed in the manufacture of traffic lights in Mexico City. Marisa Ferrer, actress and cabaret star, was invited to attend the Chihuahua Film Festival. The radio show with the best ratings was the El Cuervo Show on XEFS. And Héctor Belascoarán Shayne logged a total of fifty-one hours without reaching the state technically known as “deep sleep.” Even so, at 6:45 in the morning, yawning, with heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes, and an unidentified pain in his back, he watched from the lonchería as the workers entered the Delex plant across the street. Even at a distance he could tell that engineer Camposanto wasn’t in such great shape himself, having stayed out drinking alone until 3:30 a.m. in a Zona Rosa dive called El Elefante. He saw the tall unionist from the day before, and his two companions, waving their arms dramatically as they talked, escorted in by a group of their fellow workers. He watched Rodríguez Cuesta drive up in his Cadillac, and thought again that the company president was hiding something behind that facade of self-assurance and power. What was he afraid of? Héctor left fifty pesos and his phone number with the woman at the lonchería, his new field headquarters, and asked her to phone him if something happened. He smiled at the little girl playing on the floor, and went out.

  The walls had been hit again during the night, and now they were covered with bright red letters calling for a work stoppage at 11.

  ***

  Héctor couldn’t help but see similarities in the festive arrival of the girls for morning classes at the Catholic school. Both events shared a party atmosphere flavored with defiance. From his post inside a candy store he watched Elena’s arrival, thinking he ought to either follow her or accompany her all the way from home. Otherwise his absurd strategy of waiting for her at t
he school yard might turn out to be nothing more than an inoffensive hobby, while her enemies intercepted her somewhere on her way to school.

  It depressed him to think how much he was a creature of habit, motivated more by rituals than the need for effective action. He spent the rest of the morning in the office of an old school friend who worked in the Foreign Service.

  A 1500 peso mordida gave him access to an old coffer that served as the last resting place for the dust-covered files of the Mexican Embassy in Costa Rica in the nineteen thirties. In the end, when it felt as if he’d never be able to wash the fine dust off his fingertips, he came away with three names and three faded photographs.

  Isaías Valdez. Mexico City.

  Eladio Huerta Pérez. La Tolvanera, Oaxaca.

  Valentín Trejo. Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.

  ***

  Their ages corresponded, the dim pictures offered the suggestion of a likeness. He wrote down their Mexican addresses, and went out into the hall where he bought a soda pop from a machine to cool his parched throat.

  Then he headed back to his office, falling asleep a couple of times on the Metro, standing up, like a horse.

  The upholsterer was reading the want ads in Excelsior. The plumber hadn’t arrived yet.

  “Anything for me?”

  “Na. Just a couple of letters. You owe me the tip for the mailman.”

  “You know what, Señora Concha called you the other day, I forgot to tell you about it. She wanted you to come by and pick up some…”

  “Some slipcovers…Dammit, as little work as there is and you forget to give me the message.”

  Héctor stared at the floor in embarrassment.

  He dropped into the armchair without bothering to take off his coat, loosen his belt, or remove his shoulder holster. He leaned back in the squeaky chair, his old leather-covered friend, kicked off his shoes, and stretched until his body felt as though it was going to fall apart. The distant rumble of traffic lulled him to sleep.

  “Órale pues,” called a voice out of the shadows.