An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  He felt like a member of an esoteric sect dedicated to the preservation of ghosts. Maybe that was the problem: he was going at the whole thing more like a historian or a journalist than a detective. He decided to lay aside any preconceptions and simply focus his energies on tracking down a man named Emiliano Zapata, as if millions of words had never been written about him, streets baptized with his name, or statues dedicated to his memory. The Zapata he was looking for was now a ninety-seven-year-old man who had disappeared back in 1916. It was Héctor’s job to find him, sixty years later.

  How did people get to Mexico from Central America in the 1930s?

  By boat, of course. Through Veracruz or Acapulco. And a man like Zapata, trying to conceal his true identity, would probably have chosen Veracruz, as the port farthest from his native Morelos. At the office of the Navy, Héctor asked to see the records from the port of Veracruz for the years 1934 and ’35. They laughed in his face.

  There was always the possibility, if he wanted to stick to the story of the old man in the cantina, of exploring a connection with the campesino leader Rubén Jaramillo.

  Héctor reread Jaramillo’s excellent autobiography, but came up with nothing. Not the slighest hint of any kind of relationship with a still-living Zapata, which certainly would have had a tremendous impact on Jaramillo, who was Zapata’s ideological heir. Of course, the connection might have occurred during one of the periods not covered in the book. Possibly during one of the less eventful periods of his life, such as when Jaramillo worked as the director of the market in Santa Julia, or, on the other hand, during the tumultuous period of the second uprising, which lasted until Jaramillo’s murder. Another couple of ideas occurred to him. He jotted them down on a small piece of paper which he stuffed into his pocket, and then, like a man putting on a different jacket, he crossed over into another story.

  There was a question he wanted to ask Marisa Ferrer: Where did she get the smack? But just then the afternoon headlines caught his eye, and he had to change stories again: union agitators arrested in engineer’s murder.

  War had broken out at Delex.

  The accused murderers were taken into custody today as they were leaving the Delex factory. Arrested were: Gustavo Fuentes, Leonardo Ibáñez, and Jesús Contreras. The police action was carried out by Commander Paniagua, head of the Sixth Squadron of the Judicial Police for the State of Mexico. The police were met with resistance from the accused’s co-workers, who tried to prevent the arrests from taking place. However, the men were finally removed from the factory and handed over to agents of the public prosecutor…

  The article continued with a description of the murder.

  Héctor drove to his office and found the list of possible suspects that Delex had originally supplied him. It turned out that two of the accused men weren’t even on the company’s own list, meaning either that they hadn’t been at the factory that day, or that they worked a different shift from the one during which the crime was committed. That’s how crude the frame-up was.

  He phoned Delex and asked to speak with Rodríguez Cuesta.

  “It’s obviously ridiculous, Señor Belascoarán,” Rodríguez began. “But Commander Paniagua insisted. Certainly you understand…By all means, I want you to continue with your investigation…Although Paniagua’s likely to give you trouble if you get in his way…One last thing. From now on, I want you to deliver your reports to me personally. There should be no extra copies made, not even for your own files. I will be the only one with access to the information, and you and I alone will decide how to proceed.”

  What had he meant when he said Paniagua was likely to give him trouble?

  Try as he might, he couldn’t stop the gears from turning. A sudden, massive headache forced Belascoarán to squeeze his eyes shut. It was time to get some sleep. Things would clear up as time went by, and if they went according to the jumbled plans slowly taking shape in his head, he was going to have a long night ahead of him.

  As he was leaving, the telephone rang.

  “She ran out on me. I went up to the counter to pay the bill, and when I came back…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Elisa. It’s not your fault.”

  He left his car parked in front of the office and rode the subway home instead.

  His head throbbed stubbornly with pain as he walked slowly up to the door of his apartment and fit the key into the lock. He headed straight for the bathroom, opened up both taps, and pushed his head under the running water. Dropping his coat on the floor, he unbuttoned his shirt, pushed his hand through his hair, and staggered in the direction of his bed. He was surprised to find it already occupied.

  “When I saw you this morning I had the idea you’d be going to bed before too long,” said the girl with her arm in a cast, hiding under the sheets in the soft shadows.

  The room was in its customary state of disarray: clothes on the floor, books, newspapers lying here and there, dirty dishes, half-empty glasses tucked into the most unlikely places. Héctor took in the disaster zone, thinking that no matter how much he cleaned up, it always looked the same. As a matter of fact, it was just the other day that he’d gone through and picked up a few things. At least he’d washed the ashtrays and the room didn’t smell like stale cigarettes.

  “I usually sleep at the office when…” he started to say, but stopped himself. What the hell was he doing giving explanations no one had asked for?

  “I hope you don’t mind my coming over here like this.”

  “I…” he said, and stopped again.

  He lit a cigarette.

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?” asked the girl.

  “I believe in confusion,” he answered, quoting Paul Newman, from a movie he’d seen on television a couple of months back.

  “Who is she?” asked the girl, pointing to a picture of the woman with the ponytail, taken a year earlier as she followed him along San Juan de Letrán.

  “A woman.”

  “I could tell…Just a woman…that’s all?”

  “A woman I’m in love with, or something like that,” he said, feeling defeated.

  Possibility #1: I go to bed with her and to hell with the rest. If this damn headache gets worse, it’ll be the least I deserve.

  Possibility #2: I interrogate her until I find out what the hell’s going on and what she’s hiding that’s worth fifty thousand pesos.

  Possibility #3: I get a blanket and sleep on the floor.

  He chose number three.

  Elena watched him unhappily. Slowly, she got up from the bed.

  She had pretty legs, and small, pointed breasts. The arm in its cast gave her a boyish appearance that was immediately dispelled by the lovely “V” of her loins. Her hair fell to one side of her face.

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “Look, it’s not that simple…I’ll tell you what, why don’t you just slide over and give me half of the bed, and let me go to sleep. When I wake up I’ll try to explain it to you.”

  She did as she was told.

  And in part because it takes a lot of effort to ignore a bedful of woman, in part because it wasn’t for nothing he’d spent so many months in the clutches of loneliness and celibacy, and a little bit because his fatigue nudged him toward those open arms…and a lot because he was attracted to the girl’s warmth and vitality. For all these things, and others that he’d never be able to put into words, six hours later Héctor found himself making love. He was careful not to bump into the broken arm in its cast.

  “I always thought that guardian angels were sexless.”

  “I always thought that Catholic school girls kept their virginity locked in a little box.”

  “Sure, but when the box is at the pawnshop, what’s it matter? That’s the whole secret. In Sister María’s class, she’s probably the only virgin there, and
that’s because she’s a lesbian.”

  Héctor’s headache was almost gone, leaving him with only the slightest feeling of discomfort.

  The room was completely dark. Héctor tried to guess the time, but the days and nights all blended together in his mind, and the brief hours of sleep he’d managed to steal over the past week seemed like mere accidents, momentary interruptions in an otherwise endless succession of events.

  He dressed in full view of the girl, to make it clear he regretted nothing. His clothes were scattered on the floor around the bed, where they’d been thrown in the heat of battle.

  “Can you get back to my sister’s house from here on your own?”

  “Can’t I stay here?”

  “Look, the only reason you left your own house to begin with was to go someplace safe. You’re not safe here.”

  She got out of the bed reluctantly, and got dressed, moving her injured arm with some difficulty. She asked Héctor to help her button up her shirt.

  He caressed her cheek, and she kissed his hand.

  “I’m ready to tell you the story…”

  “We’ll have breakfast tomorrow at Elisa’s. You can tell me then.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  Her words hung in the air as Héctor stood at the window and watched her head down the street. When he saw her turn toward Insurgentes, he went out. He had an appointment to keep with someone who wasn’t waiting for him.

  ***

  “Tell me, Camposanto, what’s Rodríguez Cuesta afraid of?”

  He felt as though he’d stumbled into a life-size dollhouse by mistake, in a mistaken dream he couldn’t find his way out of. There was a place for everything and everything was set meticulously, obsessively in its place. A Siamese cat strolled across the floor.

  Camposanto, wrapped in a gray robe and holding a glass of cognac in his hand, was starting to show signs of discomfort. Up until that point, their conversation had traveled the route of the standard courtesies, like the small train chugging around the zoo in Chapultepec park.

  “Why ask me? Why not talk to Haro, or Guzmán Vera?”

  “Because you’re a homosexual, just like Alvarez Cerruli was, just like Bravo Osorio, the other engineer murdered two months earlier at another factory in Santa Clara. Now don’t get me wrong, Engineer, I don’t mean any offense…Or am I mistaken?”

  Camposanto bit his lip at the sound of the word homosexual. Then he turned to stare angrily at he detective. “So I’m gay. What’s it to you?” he demanded.

  “My guess is there’s some kind of connection there…But that’s not what I wanted to know about just yet. What I came to find out is what your boss is afraid of.”

  “You really think he’s afraid of something?”

  “I want an answer, not another question.”

  “He’s probably afraid there’d be a scandal.”

  “No, that’s not it. He wouldn’t need me for that. The cops are perfectly capable of tying the whole thing up neatly enough. He needs me for something the cops can’t do for him, to find out who the real murderer is. That’s who he’s afraid of, the real murderer. Rodríguez already knows who it is, but he wants proof.”

  Surprise showed in Camposanto’s eyes. Héctor had his answer.

  “Thanks for your help, Engineer.” Héctor got to his feet.

  ***

  He went back to the beginning, to the place of questions and answers, to the place where the whole thing started from, with the three separate bundles of paper. Now at least one of the mysteries was starting to take some shape.

  He went back to stare at the three photos tacked up on the wall, the point of departure for his quest. He’d carried up a case of soda pop, stashing it in the office “safe,” and had been sitting at his desk for half an hour, writing notes. Now he flipped back through his notebook and thought:

  The president of a large corporation, who has interests in an unknown number of other companies, and a great deal of financial power besides (find out how many, which ones, and how much), hires a detective to find the murderer of a homosexual engineer (the second in two months).

  Publicly, what he wants to do is frame the union for the murder.

  But he also wants the evidence against the real murderer for himself.

  Assumption: He knows who the murderer is, and he’s afraid of him.

  What does he need the proof for? Simple curiosity? No, curiosity isn’t worth the cost of the investigation, or letting someone else in on the information.

  He wants the evidence in order to put some kind of pressure on the guilty party. This seems to indicate that he already has some connection with the murderer.

  One question leads to the other…Who is it, and why should Rodríguez Cuesta be afraid of him?

  Why kill a pair of homosexual engineers? Are the two murders really connected?

  Why would X want to kill a homosexual engineer?

  Is X also a homosexual? Were they involved in some kind of trouble together?

  Is Alvarez Cerruli the link between X and Rodríguez Cuesta, or vice versa? Or is that a two-way street?

  What other connections are there between X and R.C.?

  Guilt by association, blackmail?

  The thing to do is find X.

  Jesus, what a mess. He crossed out X and wrote WW in its place. That made it sound even more exotic.

  All the same, there was an appealing coherence to the whole thing.

  “Care for some coffee, neighbor?” asked the sewer expert, buried once again in his maps, with their strange cabalistic symbols.

  “No thanks. I think I’ll have a soda instead.”

  “I brought you what we talked about…It’s in the ‘safe.’”

  Héctor inspected the three sticks of dynamite. They had short braided fuses made from a reddish string.

  “They’ve got twenty-second fuses. You can light them with a cigarette. If you bury them, or cover them with some heavy material, they’ll do more damage. If they’re detonated in an open space, they’ll kill anything within a radius of about eight yards. I’d treat them with respect if I were you. They might surprise you.”

  Héctor nodded. He looked at the dynamite with enormous respect.

  ***

  “This is it,” said Elisa, as she untied the cord around the shoe box.

  They sat together in an old oak-paneled booth in the back of a restaurant.

  “Wait a second, Elisa.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was just thinking the old man’s got something bizarre in store for us, and I don’t know where I’m going to find the time to deal with anything else right now,” said Héctor.

  “It won’t hurt just to find out what he wants,” said Carlos.

  Elisa pulled off the last of the string and opened the box. Inside there was a gray notebook with two rubber bands around it, a nautical map folded sixteen times, and a small folder. At the bottom, a blank envelope. Elisa took each item out of the box and set them in a row on the table.

  “I suppose we ought to start with the letter.”

  Chapter Eight

  A Notebook, a Map, a Folder,and a Letter

  And he thought that he should be one of these men, one of these who work outside in the sun, not those who seek pleasure in the shade.

  —Pio Barroja

  “No, try the notebook first,” said Carlos.

  Elisa pulled off the rubber bands and opened the cover.

  ***

  My story is a story of struggle, a product of the times I lived in. Were it up to me, I would have preferred not to have stained my hands with the blood of other men.

  But it couldn’t have been otherwise. I have killed with my own hands for an ideal. And the ideal only got furth
er from my reach.

  I became a socialist when I was thirteen, and I suppose I’m still a socialist today. I came to socialism through the hunger of my people, and my own desire for justice. I worked as a fireman on a small ship, carrying pharmaceuticals to various ports on the Cantabrian coast, at a time when it was easier to ship goods by boat than by train in the north of Spain. We were never averse to taking on other jobs, and frequently we worked as smugglers or fishermen. I’m still very proud to have been, at the age of fourteen, one of the founders of the Seaman’s Union of San Sebastián, bringing together more than a thousand longshoremen, sailors, fishermen, and dockers in the Basque region.

  I had a reputation for being stubborn and headstrong, and I’m sure I earned it. But I was also known as a man of my word.

  My youthful brashness often got me into trouble, and there were many times when I wasn’t able to get work and had to return home empty-handed. We lived very humbly, since my father’s starvation wages as a municipal employee were never enough to make ends meet or improve our family’s desperate situation.

  We went hungry often enough.

  This all happened a long time ago, and for that reason I never told you about it before. In the same way, I’ve never talked much about the other things I’ve done in my life. I always believed that each of you had your own life to live, and that an old man’s stories would get in the way more than they would help.

  The revolution broke out in October 1934. At that time I was in the beautiful Asturian port of Aviles, in command of a worm-eaten sailboat. We were smuggling arms under orders from the Socialist Party, which was preparing itself to fight against the fascist attempt to take power. As a result of my small contribution to the events of that period, and our subsequent defeat, I was compelled to spend more than a year working out of the south of Spain as a sailor on ships bound for Morocco. I took a false name, and was completely cut off from my family, who thought I’d escaped to France. After a while I renewed my contacts with the party, and collaborated in writing and distributing The Southern Seaman. We reorganized the cadre of the long-shore union, and helped comrades escaping to Africa. During this time I came to know the Moroccan and Tunisian coastline like the back of my hand, or perhaps better, if that’s possible, as well as the untamed coast around Spanish Sahara, Guinea, and Sidi Ifni. I made many good friends, and I found out that the white man’s world isn’t the only one there is. It was an amazing revelation for a twenty-five-year-old Basque. I’ll tell you, I would have liked to have been born Basque-African. My Basque heritage is something I’ll never turn my back on, ever. It’s something I’ll always be proud of. During those hard times, in the port of Tunis, I knew my first woman, and I became a man.