One of the hinges broke, sending splinters flying, and leaving the door to hang crazily askew on the bottom hinge.
A single lamp lit the room, where the fat man lay on his bed reading a fotonovela. His boots stood nearby, freshly shined. There were a couple of glasses on a night table, along with a half-empty bottle of Pepsi and a package of cough drops. On a chair, a wrinkled pair of pants and a switchblade. There was a bookshelf with a bundle of old newspapers tied with string, and two packs of Philip Morris that reminded him of the conference room at Delex. A soccer poster and a pair of Lin May pinups hung on the wall.
The fat man dropped his comic book and retreated to the farthest corner of the bed.
“Buenas noches,” Héctor deadpanned.
The fat man didn’t make a sound.
Héctor took another glance around the squalid little room. What the hell was he supposed to do now? It had all seemed so simple: take out your gun, kick the door down, rush into the room. Now, according to the script, he ought to either beat the shit out of the fat man until he gave the name of the hotel on Zaragoza Boulevard, or lure him into a conversation and trick him into spilling the beans that way.
Héctor didn’t feel capable of either one, so he simply stood there in silence.
They remained like that for a couple of minutes while Héctor tried to think of a way out. What if he tied the guy up, waited outside for him to free himself, and then followed him? Or what if he allowed him to make a phone call, and intercepted the call? That one made him smile. How the hell do you intercept a phone call in Mexico City?
The fat man returned Héctor’s smile.
“What’s so funny?” Héctor demanded. He was feeling more uncomfortable by the minute.
“Nothing.”
They spent another couple of minutes without speaking, and the fat man started to grow visibly more nervous.
Héctor couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he jumped up onto the bed. The mattress sank under his weight, and he gracefully jumped back to where he’d been standing a moment before. Horrified, the fat man rolled off onto the floor.
Héctor turned his back on the fat man and left the room.
***
There were one hundred seventeen hotels and motels on Zaragoza Boulevard listed in the directory. Héctor felt like crying. But instead, he gathered his dirty clothes to send them out to be washed, piled his dirty dishes in the sink, emptied and washed the ashtrays, opened the windows, and dropped, fully dressed, onto his bed. “Life sucks,” he mumbled. But in spite of his fatigue he couldn’t sleep. At five a.m. he jumped out of bed, stuck his head under the cold-water tap, and held it there for several minutes. He was overwhelmed by a tremendous feeling of defeat.
***
la tolvanera, read the weatherbeaten sign by the roadside. Héctor stowed his book in his jacket pocket and walked toward the village’s deserted streets. He’d been traveling for fifteen straight hours, combining sleep with the restful contemplation of the broken and eroded plains beyond Huajapan de León.
The town was made up of four dusty, windblown streets. It looked dead. The detective walked into a lonchería, La Rosita—pepsi cola es mejor, their sign said—to escape the wind. He paused to let his eyes grow accustomed to the shadowy interior. An old man stood behind the counter.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where I could find don Eladio Huerta?”
“He passed away.”
“Did he leave any family?”
“Didn’t have any.”
“How long ago did he die?”
“Three years. The cemetery’s on up the road another hundred yards or so.”
Belascoarán went back outside. There was a parts house at the outer edge of town, where a couple of men worked in the dust kicked up by an old cattle truck.
“Buen día.”
“Buenos días.” That was one of the nice things about a small town. People still said hello to one another.
Past the parts house was a wrecking yard, and past that, the open plain where the cemetery sat: fifty graves with their worm-eaten crosses, and the dry grass growing all around.
eladio huerta 1882–1973.
There was a yellowed photograph under the name.
That was it, another dead end. Now there was nothing to do but go back and face the city again. Go back and spend another night in front of the engineer’s house, and search 117 hotels for a kidnapped girl. The whole trip had been a wild-goose chase.
He walked back out to the highway and stood for a couple of hours, fighting against the brutal wind that swept across the isthmus from the Pacific to the Atlantic. A second-class bus picked him up and continued lamely on its way toward Oaxaca.
The bus from Oaxaca got into Mexico City at 2:10 in the morning, and a battered detective climbed down after thirty-five hours of continuous travel. He found his car where he had left it parked in front of the terminal, and headed down Insurgentes. The radio kept him company.
Whatever you’ve been waiting for, wait no more. And if you’ve already given up hope that what you’re waiting for will ever come, then rest assured you did the right thing. Consider yourself the absolute master over the days and hours ahead of you. Quit crying in front of the mirror, make yourself a strong cup of coffee and smile. Don’t ask questions.
The night is your friend…
A Peter, Paul and Mary song came over the radio, reminding Héctor of earlier days, when each week was spent in anticipation of Saturday night.
He stopped in front of The Florida Bowl, and looked around until he found what he was looking for in a construction site farther down the street: chunks of broken brick. He lugged about twenty pounds of projectiles over to the bowling alley, and started to hurl them rapid-fire at the windows, under the neon glow of the streetlights. The glass burst into a million pieces in front of his eyes, and all of a sudden he discovered he was having fun. He tossed the last few bricks, glanced quickly over his handiwork, jumped back into his car, and was gone before the lights started to come on in the neighboring apartments.
***
“He just laughed. I felt like such an idiot. I swear, the kind of things you find for me to do…”
Elisa dedicated herself to the plate of spaghetti in front of her. She ate voraciously, but with style.
“He asked me if I thought that two months after the guy died they could still stick a light up his asshole and figure out his sexual preferences. He laughed at me.”
Héctor couldn’t keep from smiling.
“What’d you do then?”
“I told him to go to hell and left. It’s a terrible place there…Ay nanita…they’ve got the bodies stacked up like cases of beer in a truck.”
“Well, thanks, all the same.”
Elisa renewed her attack on the plate of spaghetti, while Héctor, who wasn’t hungry, watched her eat. They were sitting in a sidewalk cafe in the Zona Rosa on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.
“But wait, there’s more…”
“More?” asked Héctor, pleasantly distracted by a pair of slender dark legs two tables away. The brilliant sunshine warmed his bones.
“Since you weren’t around, I decided to go ahead on my own.” She paused for another mouthful.
“Do they eat a lot of Italian food in Canada?”
“Plenty,” she said with her mouth full.
“It’s pretty popular?”
“Uh-huh.”
The black woman at the other table glanced over at Héctor, and then turned her attention back to the menu.
“What’d you say about doing something on your own?” he asked.
Elisa mopped her plate with a piece of bread, then let the waiter take it away. In its place he left a double order of squid in its ink, with rice.
“I’m so hungry
I could eat…”
“What’d you find out?”
“This guy Osorio Barba was a real loner. No family, very self-seeking, just a gray guy with a reputation as an experienced engineer. There wasn’t anyone in his building who had more than a couple of words to say about him. Until I talked to the doorman.”
Enjoying the rhythm of their conversation, she turned her attention to the plate of squid. She was a thin, broad-shouldered woman, who inherited her freckles and red hair from the Irish side of the family. Recovering from an early marriage to a Canadian journalist who turned out to be a paranoid alcoholic, she was just now starting to get her feet back on the ground after four years away from home. She and Héctor shared a love of the unexpected, and for staying up all night. She played the guitar passably well, and wrote poetry she never showed to anyone else. “I’m a train on a dead-end line,” she said about herself.
“How is it?”
“Buenísimo, buenísimo. Do you want to try some?”
Héctor shook his head, and then, as always, changed his mind. He took his fork and fished a giant piece of squid off Elisa’s plate.
“The doorman sold me a box of papers from the dead man’s apartment. It cost me a hundred pesos, but the only thing worth-while was a piece of paper with three names and addresses stuck inside a folder full of invoices from the factory.”
“And then?”
“I went and checked them out. They’re all middle-class boys, between about twenty and twenty-five years old, two of them are students, one’s an accountant at the Banco de Commercio. I’ll cut my eyelashes if they’re not all gay.”
“Let me see the names.”
“First pay me the hundred pesos they cost me.”
Héctor took a bill out of his pocket.
“Come on, Héctor, lighten up. I was only kidding.”
Héctor smiled.
“Is it going to help you any?”
“I don’t know, not really. All it does, is it seems to show that now there’s two dead gay engineers instead of one.”
“Just imagine what the tabloids could do with that one: ‘Homicidal Den of Queer Executives Exposed in Santa Clara!’”
The waiter approached their table.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“How about a piece of strawberry pie?”
***
He brought a papaya licuado up from the juice bar downstairs and was sipping at it slowly while he gazed out the window toward the gray office buildings across the street, their own dirty windows masking whatever went on inside. A few lights started to come on.
Belascoarán picked up the phone book and looked for the number for The Florida Bowl. He dialed the seven digits.
“Hello. Florida Bowl.”
He let a few seconds pass by.
“Listen here, fatty, I’ve got this funny idea about burning down a little hotel on Zaragoza Boulevard, and then tossing a few sticks of dynamite into that lousy dump of yours.”
He could hear the sound of balls striking pins in the background.
“Tell your buddies to tune into radio station XEFS to-night.”
He hung up.
“What’s going on, neighbor?”
“Don Gilberto. How’s it going?”
“Where’ve you been lately? I did that job you asked me to do.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“The old man who lived in Olivar de los Padres was a real quiet guy who used to keep pretty much to himself. He braided horse leads and sold them for a living. Sometimes the kids from the local soccer team would visit him, and they’d sit around and talk. He got a veteran’s pension, fought with Zapata in the Revolution. Had a reputation for being a feisty old guy. Ten years ago, when the granaderos came in to boot the squatters out of the neighborhood, he comes out of his house with an old carbine and lets go with a few rounds. He split for good in 1970. Didn’t leave a forwarding address. They say he went away once a long time ago, too, but after a while he came back. There’s no one living in
the house now, the squatters use it as a place to store construction materials.”
He waited for Héctor’s response, but the detective just listened in silence, doodling flowers on an old newspaper on his desk.
“That’s all she wrote. I’ve got to be going now. Got a real sweet little job waiting for me.”
“Whose plumbing are you going to play with tonight?” Héctor smiled.
“Professional secrets, old buddy, professional secrets. Want me to turn on the light for you?”
Héctor shook his head.
He took the bunch of letters he’d been carrying around in his coat pocket for the last few days and added them to the stack of mail piling up on his desk. Then he sat down in the old swivel chair and propped his feet up on the desktop. Despite the lengthening shadows, he could still see the three photos tacked to the wall.
Don Emiliano, the corpse sprawled across the desk, and the girl with her arm wrapped in plaster. Who was pursuing whom? The night dropped vertically over the city.
He stood up and turned his attention back to the list of hotels on Zaragoza Boulevard. Now it was just a question of patience.
“Give me the manager. That’s right, the manager…Listen, mister, tell your buddies they’ve got until midnight tonight to free the girl, otherwise I’m going to blow your hotel to smithereens.”
He hung up.
It was going to take a hell of a long time to get through the whole list. And what if they’d been talking about a hotel near the boulevard, and not directly on it?
After an hour and a half he’d managed to make about seventy-five calls. Each one brought the same response: Who is it? Who’s calling? Curses or wisecracks. It could be the first one he’d called, or it could be the last. He kept on doggedly. His mouth was getting dry.
“I want to talk to the manager…with the night clerk, then…Hello? Tell your friends they’ve got until midnight tonight to let the girl go or I’m going to blow up the hotel. Don’t give me any of that shit.”
He hung up.
“What’s this about blowing up hotels? And whatcha doin’ in here with the lights out?” asked the sewer expert, arriving for the start of his night’s work.
“I want to talk to the manager…Hello? Tell your buddies they’ve got until midnight tonight to let the girl go, if not I’ll blow your fucking hotel into a million pieces.”
He crossed the Hotel del Peregrino off the list. Next: Hotel del Monte.
“Temporary insanity. I’m prone to these attacks every now and then. Didn’t you know?”
“You’re hoarse. You been doing this a long time?”
“A couple of hours.”
“I’ll spell you awhile. What do I have to say?”
Héctor told him the rap and handed him the telephone, pointing to the place on the list where he’d left off. Then he went over to the secret compartment and took out a soda pop. The last one. Dammit, he’d been ragging on the plumber and now he’d forgotten himself. They would give him hell for that one.
“I want to talk to the manager right away, it’s very important,” El Gallo spoke into the telephone. “Listen, asshole, tell your buddies they’ve got until midnight tonight to let the girl go, ’cause if they don’t I’m going to wipe your lousy flophouse off the map. I’ve got the dynamite right here.”
He hung up.
“How’d I do?”
“Not so hot. Better let me do it.”
“Let me do it awhile, will ya? I kind of get a kick out of it.”
Héctor slumped into the armchair.
“The only thing is, neighbor, I can’t see worth shit here in the dark. Do you think we could turn the lights on?”
“Sorry, Gallo, I’ve got a headache, that’s
all.”
He got up, turned on the lights, and went back to his armchair.
“Give me the manager…Listen, you damn son of a bitch, you and your friends have until exactly midnight tonight to give up the girl. If not, I’m going to blow your lousy hotel to kingdom come.”
The engineer looked absolutely radiant.
Héctor turned his attention to the mail on his desk. The first piece was a telegram:
address supplied corresponds to house demolished 16 years ago. owner killed in traffic accident. garza hernández agency. monterrey.
That took care of the three passports issued in San José, Costa Rica.
“…your lousy hotel to smithereens.”
A note for a registered package of books mailed from Guadalajara. He put it aside.
A letter from the Mexican Academy of Criminal Investigation, inviting him to give a course on whatever topic he wanted. He threw it away.
A letter from the Kai Feng School of Karate and Martial Arts, with an illustrated folder detailing courses and fees. A letter to Gilberto from a Señora Saenz de Mier, complaining that, thanks to him, her shower now leaked rusty water and the toilet filled with soap bubbles when she flushed it.
He put it aside as a keepsake. All that was left was for her to hear the French National Anthem when she took a piss, he mused.
“…two sticks of dynamite and your hotel’s gonna be history, buddy. Ha ha ha!” El Gallo had made some distinct improvements on Héctor’s original message.
Two more pieces of junk mail, one from a toy store, the other for an art show.
A special mail-order offer for a complete set of “Seventh Circle” mystery novels, 215 volumes, 2000 pesos.
Not a bad price, he thought.
“Hello? I want to talk to the manager…”
At the bottom of the pile, as if waiting for the less important things to be cleared away first, lay a pair of letters covered with strange stamps and postmarks. He considered whether to open them then and there, or to relegate them once again to his coat pocket, until the affair of the 117 hotels was satisfactorily completed.
An Easy Thing Page 12
