An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “Never heard of her.”

  “She’s been kidnapped.”

  “Oh yeah?” said the fat man, smiling.

  “I’d like permission to search the premises.”

  “Wish I could help you, buddy. Only I can’t, so get lost.”

  “If that’s how you want it.” Héctor decided not to push it. He turned his back on the fat man and made his way slowly toward the exit. When he reached the door, he turned around again and traded stares with the fat man who sat serenely behind the cash register. After a while, the fat man raised his hand in the air and gave Héctor the finger. Héctor made a motion as if he were playing a violin, and walked out into the night.

  He was very, very tired.

  Chapter Six

  Later on I understood that the tangos lied,

  but by then it was much too late.

  —Mario Benedetti

  “…so we grabbed the Hunchback of Notre Dame and tried to chain him up…but then he really starts to wail on us, I mean like it wasn’t a game anymore.”

  “You remember Rosas? Short guy, kind of dark…with hair like a bird? He thought he was such a tough guy. Well, he’s walking along and then this hand comes right out of the wall at him…”

  “The hairy hand!”

  “He pissed in his pants, the little shit pissed right in his pants.”

  “You remember that guy Echenique? Well he comes down off that bridge they had there, this real funky, scary old bridge, he comes down off the bridge and this old lady jumps on him shouting all about how she’s La Llorona, and asking him if he was one of her kids. He flew out of there like a bat out of hell, you should have seen it, man. So then he comes over to us and he wants us to go back with him and cop a feel on the old bag, so we all run down there and La Llorona keeps screaming about how we’re all her long-lost children and all this shit, and so one of the guys gets his hand up her skirt…and it’s a guy!”

  “I was going around with some of the kids from my class, and we were feeling pretty cool, until this mummy pops out of his coffin and grabs one of our guys, and won’t let him go. ‘I didn’t do nothing, lemme go,’ the guy says, and the mummy tells him, ‘You broke into the pyramid and pillaged my tomb.’ ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me,’ the guy screams. Man, I was never so scared in my life. I mean, it seems pretty funny now, but back then I was scared shitless. What was it called? Just ‘The Haunted House,’ or something like that, I guess. In that construction site on Insurgentes.”

  “It was the scariest thing I ever saw.”

  “We loved it back then,” said Belascoarán.

  They sat together in a tiny room. Records lined the walls. Valdivia had a bottle of rum, and was drinking an improvised cuba libre from a paper cup. Héctor drank ginger ale, savoring the taste in his mouth.

  “So what are you doing now?” Valdivia asked at last.

  “I’m a detective.”

  “With the cops?”

  “No. Independent.” He didn’t like the sound of “private detective.” “Independent” had a much better ring to it.

  “I remember hearing that you got a degree in engineering.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  Instead of retelling the story he’d left behind, Héctor described the strange triangle of mysteries he was involved in now. With one corner in Delex Inc. and the dead engineer. One in the shining eyes and the myth of don Emiliano Zapata. And the other in the story of a scared teenage girl with her arm in a cast.

  Valdivia sat lost in thought.

  “I heard you on the radio the other night. I liked your show a lot. But, you know, sometimes I thought you were almost too nice to people, you pander to your audience too much. Almost like you’re trying to sell them something.”

  “What time were you listening?”

  “From about ten until twelve-thirty, something like that.”

  “That’s just when things are starting to heat up. Later on the listeners do it all.”

  There was another brief silence.

  “Do you want me to lend a hand?” asked the disc jockey.

  “With what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…Just if you get into any trouble you could give me a call. I’ll put it on the radio, and the folks out there’ll do what they can. You can’t imagine how many people are out there listening just waiting for the chance to help out, to be part of something. There’s so many people in this town who either want to help somebody else, or need help themselves.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Keep it in mind. I’ll give you our phone numbers. There’s six of them, use any one.” He held out a card.

  “It’s great seeing you again.”

  “It’s been a long time. Good luck.” They hugged and Héctor went out into the hall.

  Valdivia turned to look at him. He was extremely thin, balding, and with an enormous mustache and clear eyes.

  “Whatever you want, just let me know. Who knows, it might spark up the show a little bit.”

  Belascoarán headed out toward Camposanto’s house in Napoles. He turned on the radio.

  An old friend of mine came by to visit me tonight. Isn’t it unbelievable how easy it is to lose track of people in this town? The city just swallows them up. Well, I’ll tell you, it was a real pleasure seeing this guy again. These days he’s working as a detective, an independent investigator, you could say, and he promised to call in every once in a while and let us know how it’s going. We’ll see if we can’t give him a hand.

  Now I’m going to spin you all a tune by Cuco Sánchez. It’s called ‘Arrieros Somos,’ and if you think about it, it just might make a good theme song for this program, a good way to start out the long, hard night.

  You’re listening to the El Cuervo Show on XEFS. The lines are open, at 511-22-47, 511-31-19, 587-87-21, 566-45-65, 544-31-27, and 568-89-43. This is El Cuervo, your partner in the night, your bridge through the darkness. Mobilizing the city’s wasted resources, forging a road of solidarity for the denizens of the night, for all you vampires out there…Don’t be afraid, don’t be ashamed. Everybody has problems, and the easy answers are few and far between.

  The hoarse, melancholy voice of Cuco Sánchez burst from the stereo speakers:

  Arrieros somos

  y el el camino andamos…

  (We are mule drivers

  out on the open road…)

  Belascoarán parked fifty yards back from Camposanto’s building, on the same side of the street. He got out and walked up to the garage. The engineer’s car wasn’t there. More time wasted. He cursed his bad luck.

  The bright neon lights, even the traffic signals, hurt his eyes. He winced. His shirt collar had the consistency of wet cardboard, and his socks felt like a macaroni salad oozing around his toes. It seemed like a good time to call it quits, but with stubborn determination, Héctor pointed the car toward the south side of town. He stopped in a gas station, gassed up the car, and took a leak.

  The lights were out in The Florida Bowl. Héctor peered through the thick glass of the front door, but he couldn’t see a thing. He inspected the two apartment buildings that stood on either side, and then took a walk around the block. The streets were empty, except for a pair of lovers he passed on one corner, but they hadn’t even looked at him. Behind the bowling alley, on the other side of the block, was a grocery store. Héctor walked the block again, hoping to find some opening to slip through. Finally, he tried the garage of one of the adjacent apartment buildings.

  The door had been left unlocked, with its padlock fastened uselessly to a chain at the side. Héctor stepped in. After tripping over a garbage can and surprising a stray cat, he came across a low green door, about three feet high, that let into the wall on the bowling alley side. He pulled back the squeaky bolt and opened
the door to find four steps leading down into a lowceilinged basement. He ducked inside and made his way, stooping, among the junk cast off from the bowling alley, until he got to a stockpile of chipped and broken balls. He could feel the nicks in the otherwise perfect spheres. He continued on in the total darkness, guiding himself with one hand on the wall.

  He tripped twice over some wooden poles lying on the floor, then took out his lighter and lit it briefly to orient himself. At the opposite end from where he’d entered there was another rusty door. He approached it. It had no lock, but was held shut by a simple bolt on the other side.

  He checked his pockets for something he could use to slide the bolt back, knowing he didn’t have anything. He searched around with the lighter until it burned his fingers, but there was nothing among the wasted lumber and splintered pins, broken barrel slats and assorted garbage that covered the floor. He retraced his steps back to where he’d come in, tripping several times in the darkness. Each time it made him wish he’d gone into broadcasting, or maybe the priesthood instead. He emerged into the street rubbing his ankle where it had been attacked by the fender of one of the cars parked in the garage. What at first had seemed like a simple exercise was turning into an major expedition. But he was a craftsman, after all. Hadn’t he said it himself?

  In the glove compartment of the car, he found a long, thin screwdriver, and then returned to the garage. The street remained empty. He passed through the door once again and, remembering the path between the piles of discarded lumber, made his way to the door at the far end. He found the jamb and started to work on the bolt. On the third try he got it to slide back into its sleeve, and the door opened, creaking, into the darkness. Groping his way slowly, he climbed a set of stairs similar to the ones at the other end. But not anticipating the extra step, he tripped and fell, spraining his right wrist. At that point he distinguished a dim light ahead of him and dropped carefully to the ground.

  Very slowly, he reached for his gun, trying at the same time to suppress the rhythmic sound of the air escaping his lungs. He could hear a pair of voices, and receding footsteps.

  “…What’s he gonna do? Nothing. He doesn’t know a thing. He’s just shooting in the dark coming around here. But all the same, it’s better if you guys stay away for a few days, and take her with you. I don’t want her around here anymore. I’ve got a buddy who manages a hotel out on Zaragoza Boulevard. I gave Gerónimo the address. We can keep her there until this thing cools out a little…”

  Say the name of the hotel, say the name of the hotel, dammit.

  “Why don’t I just teach the dude a little lesson? I’ll wait for him out front the next time he comes around and…”

  The voices and the footsteps moved farther away. By tilting his head, Héctor tried to look through the grating at the bottom of the door that led into the bowling alley proper, but all he saw was a pair of black boots that clicked against the floor and disappeared. He tried to guess where he was. Were they walking in the direction of the kitchen?

  Carefully, he made his way back until he was sitting in his car once again. He lit a cigarette and tried to think.

  When he went in, there hadn’t been any cars with people in them in the street. The same three empty cars were still parked where he’d last seen them. But while he’d been in the basement, a car from somewhere had apparently come for Elena, who had presumably left with the man talking to the fellow in the black boots. Héctor got out of the car and walked across to the garage of the apartment building on the other side. They could have left from there. And if they’d been there when he first drove up, then they must have seen him. And so while he was crawling around in the basement, they’d gone and gotten the girl out of the bowling alley and put her in their car.

  It was too farfetched.

  Do you spell Gerónimo with a G or a J?

  How many hotels were there on Zaragoza Boulevard?

  No, it couldn’t be, it all seemed too easy. He was letting himself be fooled.

  For one thing, he’d dropped in on the conversation at exactly the right moment. He didn’t like easy answers. There was no such thing as a lucky break in a city of twelve million people. The only luck there was was bad luck.

  It could all be a trick they were laying for him, expecting him to fall for it, like a dummy.

  He started the car, and drove a couple of blocks away from The Florida Bowl, parking in front of a house where there was a party going on. The music, the smell of food, and the bright lights poured through the windows of the house.

  A strange idea suddenly popped into Héctor’s head: What if Elena hadn’t been kidnapped at all? Marisa Ferrer’s tears had given him the impression of someone letting water out of a tap.

  He had three possibilities to choose from: Go back and beat the answer out of the guy with the black boots; see if he could get any more information out of Marisa Ferrer; or try to check out the two-hundred-plus hotels there must be on Zaragoza Boulevard.

  A fourth alternative was to go home and get some sleep. The temptation was great, and growing rapidly by the minute. But prompted by a vague sense of duty, plus the thought of the girl with her arm in a cast, he decided to put off sleep a while longer. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, and lit another cigarette. The taste of the tobacco nauseated him, and he threw it out the window, sucking in the fresh night air. He started up the car, pulled out, and turned on the radio. The wind in his face made him feel better.

  If you’re not feeling too with it, brother, don’t let it get you down. It’s not your fault. After all, it’s two o’clock in the morning, and maybe you didn’t sleep so good.

  You’re listening to the El Cuervo Show, solidarity radio, going out to all the stray dogs and vampires roaming the nocturnal landscape of this desolate city. To all you folks out there working overtime, students cramming for tomorrow’s exam, late-night truckers, strikers on guard duty, hookers, luckless crooks, independent detectives, frustrated lovers, lonely hearts, recidivist loners, and other types of nocturnal fauna.

  Let El Cuervo be your guide and companion, the magical raven of the eternal night, ready to lend a hand where help is needed. Before we listen to a pair of sambas from Brazil, I want to give everybody this urgent message. Señor Valdez at one seventeen Gabino Barreda, apartment number three hundred and one, in San Rafael, called in to say that the pipes burst in the bathroom of his apartment and the place is filling up with water. He’s got a flood on his hands. Anybody who lives in the neighborhood, he needs buckets and people to help out.

  I hope that Señor Valdez gives us a call later on to let us know how it’s going and how many people show up to lend a hand.

  Now, a pair of Brazilian love songs from Joao Gilberto to keep you company in the night.

  The music flooded into the car. For five minutes Héctor had been driving around and around the block, unsure whether to stick with his earlier plan or to go out to San Rafael and help Señor Valdez.

  “Time to take the bull by the horns,” he told himself, trying to sound convincing. But the seriousness of his resolve was undercut by another yawn. If things kept up like this he was going to end up with a deformed jawbone.

  He headed for the actress’s house. The car seemed to drive itself, dropping him in front of the two-story building.

  He rang the bell repeatedly, until the maid finally opened the door a crack. Héctor pushed the door back and stepped inside. The maid didn’t move. An old robe hung over her shoulders, with a white cotton nightgown underneath. Then without a word, she stepped aside to let Héctor pass. He moved through the hallway, opening doors. What was he so angry for? What made him think the actress had tricked him?

  All of a sudden it occurred to him that Marisa Ferrer might have company in bed with her, and he stopped dead in front of the door he assumed led to her bedroom. He knocked lightly with his knuckles, there was
no answer, and he opened the door. A single lamp illuminated the room where the actress, who had climbed the hard road to the top, lay sleeping, face-down under the pearl-gray sheets, her bare shoulders showing, and her arms resting awkwardly at her sides. Belascoarán crossed to the bed and touched her, but the woman didn’t respond. She lay still, as the detective’s hand shook her gently.

  He glanced around at the maid who stood wordlessly in the doorway, watching him, pulling her robe firmly around her with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Has she been like this before?”

  The maid nodded.

  He opened the drawer of the nightstand. Inside were a syringe and an envelope of white powder. He threw them back into the drawer and slammed it shut violently, then stormed out of the house, with the maid following him to the door.

  The outside air cooled his anger, and he climbed back into the car, determined to break the impasse. The radio let out a rhythmic African beat.

  He stopped again in front of The Florida Bowl. There was always the possibility of turning a trap around to catch the ones who had set it. But how many hotels could there be on Zaragoza Boulevard? He could remember at least a dozen right off the bat, and that was without thinking very hard. There must be at least forty, minimum. And how to find the one the girl was being kept in? If they’d really been trying to lure him into a trap they would have said which hotel it was. The whole scheme was too elaborate otherwise.

  Héctor got out of the car and walked back through the door in the garage, following the route he’d pioneered a few hours earlier. There was a certain tenacity, a certain stubbornness that made him go on, forsaking sleep, placing one foot in front of the other on his long trek through the endless night.

  Once past the second door, with the humid air of the basement behind him, he tried to orient himself inside the open space of the bowling alley. The tables and lanes were to the right, the kitchen was at the back and to the left, and the living quarters were probably beyond that. He headed carefully in that direction, until he came to a door with a dim circle of light escaping around the jamb. Rubbing his sleepy eyes, he drew his gun, then kicked angrily at the door.