An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  The link between Alvarez Cerruli and the company president, the link of fear, could just possibly be a commander of the Judicial Police…Was that the answer?

  ***

  In Alameda Park, in front of Bellas Artes, a man was swallowing gasoline and spitting fire. The city was overrun by Indian women selling nuts. The newspapers announced the resignation of the governor of Oaxaca.

  Belascoarán drained his café con leche, and stepped out of the little restaurant. A few seconds earlier, the man he was following had carefully placed his tip on the table and stood up to go.

  He was a heavyset man, big without being fat, dressed in a light-colored suit with a bright blue tie. His hair was very black and he wore a pair of dark glasses over a bulbous nose. Belascoarán imagined the revolver strapped to his hip, the revolver that compelled him to keep his jacket buttoned down low, and to spread a little Nivea on his left thigh every now and then where the muzzle rubbed uncomfortably. The gun at his belt, a habit that came from watching too many TV westerns, and a throwback to his days as a small-time, small-town gunman flashing his second member where everyone could see it.

  Offering a hundred pesos here, a hundred pesos there, making the rounds of the small cafes in Bucareli where the news hounds hung out, Belascoarán had put together a sketchy but intriguing portrait of the man he was following:

  He was born in Puebla, but grew up in Los Altos de Jalisco. Twice he had stood trial for murder, cooling his heels miserably in a Guadalajara jail. And even though he was found innocent, his hands and his gun were forever stained with blood. Later on, he worked as a hired gun for the mayor of Atotonilco, commander of the Judicial Police in Lagos de Moreno. In 1952 he became deputy chief of the Judicial Police in Coahuila, participating actively in the repression of the miners of Nueva Rosita. In 1960 he went into business as the owner of an ice factory in Guanajuato. In ’68 he reappeared as a member of the Judicial Police in the State of Mexico, where he climbed the ladder rapidly. Three years ago he was promoted to commander.

  The man walked with a slow step, in the way of an old buzzard stalking a partner in the village dance. Passing out from under the shadow of the Latin America Tower, he turned onto Calle Madero, stopping twice, once in front of a men’s clothing store to admire a vest in the window, and later at a camera shop where he gazed attentively at a pair of binoculars.

  He had a reputation as a closemouthed man with an iron fist. The word on the street was that he was involved in breaking the strikes in Naucalpan in ’75, and that he had personally beaten jailed students from the School of Sciences and Humanities. The rest of his activities were cloaked in silence.

  When the man stopped for a third time to gaze into a store window, Héctor started to wonder if he wasn’t aware he was being followed. The detective halted in front of the Americana Bookstore, and peeled off his trench coat.

  A pair of strange characters stepped past him at this predetermined signal. One of them was crowned with a Sherwin Williams painter’s cap, and the other, a bearded man, carried an upholsterer’s fabric sampler under his arm.

  “…Of course he’s going to pay us overtime. What else can he do? Otherwise we can drop the chase whenever we want…” Héctor overheard Gilberto saying as they passed by.

  He smiled, then waited a couple of minutes before stepping back into the street. The big man with the dark glasses was out of sight, and Héctor’s two accomplices were just turning left at the corner of Isabel la Católica. Elisa waited on her motorcycle at the curb.

  “Coming for a ride?”

  “Sure, let’s go. Be sure to keep your distance.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I left it off at Juárez when he stopped at that cafe.”

  ***

  Time was running out, and he was starting to hate the city for the twelve-million-headed monster it was. Night invaded the office through the window. If sleeplessness and fatigue were the symbols for the first half of the story, now the labyrinth dominated the scene. And a labyrinth, by definition, contains a way out, but that was the hardest thing of all about the impasse the three mysteries had each run into. There was a way out, he knew it, he could almost feel it, almost smell it…And yet he could just as easily walk right past it and never know.

  Héctor pasted a piece of paper under Zapata’s picture, picked up a pen, and wrote:

  1924: Tampico.

  1926: in Nicaragua with Sandino—Captain Zenón Enríquez.

  1934: issued passport in Costa Rica.

  1944: works in the Dos de Abril Market, until ’47.

  Eulalio Zaldívar. Returns from ’62 until ’66.

  Lives in Olivar de los Padres as Isaías Valdez.

  ??

  He thought for a second and crossed out the question marks. It was better just to leave it blank. He stuck a second piece of paper under the picture of the dead engineer. This time he wrote:

  Alvarez Cerruli. Murdered. Homosexual.

  The company president: Rodríguez Cuesta. Afraid of something. Blackmail?

  A previous murder: also a homosexual.

  A cop.

  Classically speaking: show opportunity, motive, and method. Commander Paniagua.

  “What’re you writing over there, neighbor?” asked the nocturnal sewer expert at Héctor’s back.

  “Maybe you can help me, Engineer. You’re used to moving in these circles…”

  “Sometimes it feels like I spend all my time running around in circles, but…”

  “No, I mean industrial circles.”

  “You and me both, neighbor.”

  “What sort of smuggling operation could an upstanding industrialist get himself involved in that might open him up to blackmail?”

  “Like what kind of industrialist?”

  “Like the President of Delex Steel.”

  Without knowing more about Rodríguez Cuesta, there was no way to find the connection between the source of the blackmail and the person doing the blackmailing, much less the link with the two murdered engineers.

  What Rodríguez Cuesta wanted was the final link in the chain: Judicial Police Commander Paniagua. Wasn’t it Rodríguez Cuesta, after all, who had made the call putting Héctor onto Paniagua’s trail?

  But Rodríguez Cuesta was after the whole chain, not just the individual links. If Héctor wanted to cut a deal on behalf of the independent union, he was going to need a bargaining chip. He added to his list:

  The world of a company president. Smuggling?

  Other possibilities? Women, drugs, is R.C. a homosexual, too?

  Suddenly it occurred to him that he didn’t know a damn thing about homosexuals. They lived a supposedly dark, underground existence that other people never talked about. Hell, he didn’t even have the faintest idea how they made love. The closest he’d ever come to their world was once in high school when a man in his thirties had winked at him on a bus. All the same, Héctor liked to think of himself as being tolerant when it came to other people’s sexuality. As long as they didn’t bother the normal people, they could fuck whomever and however they wanted.

  And what was that supposed to mean? Who the hell were the normal people? Was Héctor normal? After having broken his two months of abstinence (not counting the two or three times he’d jerked off, and a pair of wet dreams) by making love with a teenager with a broken arm?

  Belascoarán felt his horizons expanding. One thing he’d learned over the last few months was that nobody’s problems were all that different from his own.

  He moved on to the third photograph where Elena smiled warmly.

  He posted a third sheet of paper, and wrote:

  You’ve got something worth 50,000 pesos.

  You told the fat man’s friends and they tried to make you give it to them.

  Someone tried
to kill you. (Not the fat man’s friends. Someone else.)

  To kill you, or to scare you?

  Whatever it is you’ve got, it implicates your mother in some way.

  Your mother’s a junkie.

  I’ve got a bad feeling about a guy named Burgos.

  Héctor leaned back from the wall and gazed at the three pictures with their three pieces of paper, like someone contemplating a painting by Van Gogh. A mystery-novel detective would have shouted, “Eureka!” and everything would have fallen into place.

  But appearances were often deceiving, especially when the clues were no more than bits and pieces of disconnected information pointing in no clear direction. There was, for instance, the fact that Marisa Ferrer shot smack, yet Elena’s secret whatever-it-was could be anything from a set of KGB microfilms to a collection of rare postage stamps, or the key to a safe-deposit box in the Banco de Mexico with evidence implicating a cabal of bankers in a coup attempt against the previous administration.

  And Burgos, in spite of the fact that he was ugly as sin and rubbed Héctor the wrong way, could turn out to be no more than a peace-loving and harmless filmmaker. By the same token, Commander Paniagua of the Judicial Police might be just another gangster dedicated to the preservation of law and order. Wasn’t that the great virtue of reality over fiction, that it was significantly more complex?

  Héctor yawned loudly, and the engineer smiled at him.

  “Tired, huh? Seems like you’ve been dragging a little lately…If you keep spending your nights drawing on the wall under your pictures and your days chasing murderers, you’re going to wear yourself out.”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  Héctor walked across to where the broken-down armchair waited for him like a lover.

  No doubt about it, life’s greatest virtue was its complexity.

  “Will you wake me up before you go?”

  “I’ll be done around five-thirty, when I finish with this mess,” answered the engineer, examining a set of sewer maps that looked more like a series of drawings by Paul Klee. He lit one of his thin cigars, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you, before you came in someone called on the phone and threatened to kill you.”

  “What’d you tell him?” asked Héctor as he made a pillow out of his jacket and tucked his gun between his body and the back of the chair.

  “Oh, I gave him a piece of my mind.”

  “And what’d he say to that?”

  “That it was none of my business and to wait and see if they didn’t come after me, too.”

  “See what you get for getting involved?”

  Héctor took off his shoes, and El Gallo Villareal went to open the window. A gust of cold air cleared the stuffiness from the room. The engineer flicked the ash of his cigar out the window, and Héctor imagined it tumbling the four stories down to the street.

  “Sometimes a guy gets tired of these lousy maps,” remarked the engineer, pulling a large revolver out of his jacket pocket and setting it underneath his drawing table.

  “Careful now…Is the safety on? Next thing you know it’ll go off and Gilberto and Carlos’ll say it’s my fault.” The detective smiled.

  “You’re the one that needs to think about being careful, neighbor…”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after working at this job for a year, it’s that you don’t run away when the threats start coming in.”

  “Did it ever occur to you, Belascoarán, that they might not be bluffing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why don’t you find yourself another line of work?”

  “I guess I like this one…Yeah, I guess I must like it,” he said, and shut his eyes.

  ***

  The road to the factory was blocked again by police cars. Workers from other nearby factories milled around the gate, unsure whether to get involved or to go back to work.

  Héctor got out of the VW and flashed his license at the cop who stopped him. The gray, dusty morning was charged with electricity. A pair of policemen sat inside each patrol car, with riot helmets and machine guns. He could hear the whinnying of horses. Almost five hundred striking workers stood in irregular rows inside the gate, sticks and stones in their hands. Behind them, the red-and-black banners. Some twenty yards away, there was a detachment of mounted police brandishing drawn swords, flanked by three patrol cars on either side. The company president sat in his car behind the squadron of horses, his engineers swarming around him.

  Engineer Camposanto sat in his own car, with the door open. Héctor walked past him and approached Rodríguez Cuesta.

  “I can’t talk to you now. Come back tomorrow,” said the company president when Héctor was still six feet away.

  Héctor went on past him and through the line of horses. One of the animals was taking a shit, another beat its hoofs on the ground, raising a cloud of dust. Héctor kept his gaze away from the mounted officers, afraid of breaking the spell that opened a path before him. Finally, a sergeant thrust the flat of his sword against Héctor’s chest.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m going through.”

  “Reporter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’d better stay out of the way,” he said, and shoved Héctor back with his sword.

  Héctor retreated. He headed across to the lonchería, where it sat in a sort of no-man’s-land. A low, pent-up murmur started to rise from the crowd, growing in strength: “free the delex three, free the delex three, cops out of delex, cops out of delex.” A horse whinnied.

  “Are you the detective?”

  Héctor nodded at his questioner, a young man about twenty years old, dressed in a factory uniform.

  “What are you doing over here?” Héctor asked.

  “If it gets ugly I’m supposed to call our lawyer,” said the young man. He held his right fist in his left hand, squeezing it as if he were squeezing the juice from an orange.

  “Is there some way I can get in there?” asked the detective.

  “There’s a vacant lot behind the factory where you can get through…But you’d better leave well enough alone, this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “According to who?”

  “The committee…Someone said you were a friend, but you can’t ever be too sure.”

  Héctor looked at him for a moment.

  “What’s going to happen here?”

  “Pretty soon the people from the neighborhood will turn out, and some of the students, too, from the Polytechnic. The cops’ll probably back off then. They’re just waiting for their orders. From the governor, most likely. You’d better go.”

  But something held him there, in the door to the lonchería.

  “What’s the strike about, anyway?”

  “So that they’ll recognize the independent union, and let our compañeros out of jail. And to keep out any more scabs.”

  A pair of uniformed policemen left the pack of horses and approached the mass of strikers. A crowd gathered around them, and then let out a raucous shout, followed by chants and applause. The mounted police began to file away in an orderly fashion, and the president’s car lurched into reverse and roared away.

  “What’s going on?” asked Héctor.

  “They’re going away. They can’t beat us yet. They’ll ask to negotiate, wait and see.”

  The young worker headed off toward the factory and Héctor slipped into the lonchería for a soda. It seemed his mouth was almost always dry these days. The dark interior of the restaurant soothed his tired eyes. Outside, it was a dirty, sunless morning. He took a seat, and the woman set a bright red soda on the table in front of him.

  “I called your office, but no one answered.”


  “Thanks,” Héctor said, handing her a twenty-peso note.

  “What’s up, shamus? Packin’ a rod? Which side were you planning to use it on?” asked the fat worker, entering with his friends to celebrate their victory. He walked by Héctor and sat down at a nearby table.

  Héctor tried to think of something to say, but after a while, he just gave up.

  ***

  Commander Federico Paniagua, it turned out, kept a rather flexible schedule. He had a house in the Lechería neighborhood, where his old lady lived with their two grown children. The wife was fiftyish and fat, and an excellent cook (a conclusion arrived at after two hours of smelling the delicious odors wafting out of her kitchen onto the street). The commander also kept a room in an old hotel, whose green wooden doors opened onto an inner courtyard with a fountain. There he was known as Ernesto Fuentes, a traveling salesman.

  He had another place as well, an apartment in a modern building in the Irrigación district, around the corner from the Mundet Country Club. No one there seemed to know anything about him. An insurance agency occupied the ground floor, and in the two apartments above the commander’s there lived an old, retired British bachelor, an ex-functionary of his government’s consulate in Guadalajara; and a pair of newlyweds. There was no doorman, only a woman who cleaned the stairs every other day, and a rent collector who came around once a month.

  Paniagua stopped in once or twice each week at police headquarters in Tlanepantla, and made several weekly trips to Toluca.

  When he was working, he was always accompanied by two men: one, his chauffeur, was always the same; and the other changed depending on the vehicle the commander used.

  If Héctor were in charge of an agency with sixteen operatives at his disposal, he would have sent one to watch the apartment in Irrigación, and another to take a room in the Hotel Doncelas. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and he decided to spend the night keeping an eye on one or the other himself. In the meantime, he left the north end of town and drove the twenty tiring kilometers south to Marisa Ferrer’s house, only to be greeted by a silent maid who shut the door in his face.