An Easy Thing

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “Do you see it as a defeat?” asked Héctor.

  “Well…the people have to learn from the struggle. That’s the only way to do it. It wasn’t a victory, that’s for sure, but in this town, it takes a lot of work…I don’t know what to say, exactly. It wasn’t a victory or a defeat…” explained Carlos. He handed Héctor a cup of steaming, strong coffee.

  “Not one or the other…” said Héctor.

  “Elisa put the money in the bank, under all three of our names. What do you want to do with it?”

  “I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it.”

  “What do you think if I take some of it to help the families of the men who lost their jobs?”

  “Fine with me. Did they let those guys out of jail?”

  “The day after they broke the strike.”

  “That’s something, at least,” said Héctor, burning his lips on the steaming coffee.

  “Did you ever figure out who killed the engineer?”

  “I know who, why, and how. It was no big deal, just a matter of putting all the facts together.”

  ***

  He got off the bus, balancing carefully on his cane, and walked toward the three-story building. Three men were pitching pennies in the street in front of an auto-parts shop.

  “Got room for one more?”

  They looked him over from head to toe, and smiled among themselves.

  “Sure. Why not.”

  Héctor went first, but his coin fell more than half a foot short of the line drawn across the pavement. He lost his first peso.

  The second time, Héctor’s coin took a bad roll and he lost again.

  On his third try, the coin fell right on the line and skipped barely half an inch. He gathered up the coins, thanked the men with a nod, and walked into the apartment building.

  “He’s not bad for a guy with only one eye,” observed one of the men.

  Héctor pushed the bell. The butler (from the way he looked he couldn’t have been anything else) opened the door.

  “Is Lord Kellog in?” Like cornflakes, Héctor thought. What a name.

  “Who should I say is calling?”

  “Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent investigator.”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  Through the half-open door Héctor could hear the tired footsteps of the old diplomat.

  “Sí?” he asked in a perfectly accented Spanish, with a slightly academic, impersonal tone to it.

  “I’d like you to come with me on a small piece of business. I’m going to break the law, and I want you and your butler here to be my witnesses.”

  “With pleasure,” he said excitedly in English, and called the butler: “Germinal!”

  The butler returned promptly. That was the good thing about the English; you didn’t need to waste a lot of time with useless explanations. The three of them went down together to the second floor. Héctor took out his gun, and shot a couple of times at the lock on the door; the flying splinters nearly tore his hand off. The lock gave way, and Héctor pushed the door open with his cane and stepped inside.

  The Englishman followed, with the butler close behind. The old man shuffled his feet, and his eyes gleamed mischievously behind thick glasses. Héctor pushed open the door to the bedroom. Inside there was a large bed, a chest of drawers, a bookshelf with stacks of old magazines instead of books, a table with a single drawer. Héctor hesitated, then slid the drawer open. The photograph of Alvarez Cerruli’s ex-wife smiled obligingly at him from inside its silver frame, as if she were proud of the detective’s triumph.

  “Now I want you to briefly write down what you’ve just seen, and sign it. Make a copy for yourselves.”

  “May I see some identification?”

  Héctor showed him his wrinkled license from the Mexican Academy. They’d probably send him a new one for ten bottle caps and a couple of pesos. He could have a new picture put on it, eye patch and all.

  The old Brit took out a gold fountain pen and sat down at the table. He wrote out his testimony in a large, regular script, included the date, and signed it at the bottom. The butler signed it as well.

  “Thanks very much. You’ve been a big help.”

  “Let me know if I can be of any further assistance, Señor…”

  “Belascoarán Shayne.”

  “Shayne?”

  “My mother was Irish.”

  “Ah…” said Lord Kellog.

  ***

  “I was sorry to hear about your…” began Rodríguez Cuesta in the comfortable shadowy dimness of his office. But Héctor interrupted him, waving the handle of his cane.

  “Here’s the proof that Commander Paniagua killed Alvarez Cerruli.”

  He tossed the files onto the president’s desk. Then he dropped the piece of paper with Camposanto’s bloodstained signature. It drifted lazily through the air. Finally, he slid the sheet of testimony from Lord Kellog and the butler across the desktop.

  I don’t know what to say, Señor Shayne. I thought…”

  “Señor Cuesta, you make me sick…” Héctor said. Standing up, the detective reached over and hit him as hard as he could in the jaw with his cane. He heard the jawbone break with a clean crack. The company president was thrown backward, his head bouncing off the back of his black leather chair. He spit blood. A tooth fell out of his mouth.

  “Tell them you tripped over the lamp cord…” said Héctor, using his cane to knock a picture of the Delex executive board off the desk.

  ***

  Because happy endings weren’t made for Mexico. And because he had a sort of juvenile love for pyrotechnics. Héctor was pushed by these, and other, more obscure motivations, toward the finale. There was his idea that everything ought to end under the sign of the bonfire. So the Belascoarán Tribe, with its one and only member, could dance around the flames. It was his way of collecting on a dead eye and a bum leg. It was the best end to so much garbage.

  He waited patiently outside the Florida Bowl, until the last of its customers had gone home for the night, discussing the strikes they could have had if that one last pin had gone down, or the lucky shot that cleared the two split pins for a spare.

  He kept his eyes on the salmon-colored Rambler station wagon with the stolen plates, and imagined the fat man sitting in his squalid little room at the back of the bowling alley. The fat man, Armgrabber, and Esteban Greenjacket, talking about how close they’d come to making their stake, to literally rolling in the dough, devalued or not, and how many women, cars, hotel rooms; how much good food, U.S.A., dope, rock ’n’ roll it could have bought them.

  He waited until the night had fully established its control over the scene, then got out of the car. The lonely glow of his cigarette stood out in the empty street. Lovingly, he placed the stick of dynamite underneath the Rambler and lit the fuse with the tip of his cigarette. He backed away slowly, accepting the risk, playing with it.

  He got back in his VW and started the engine.

  The explosion filled the street, lifting the station wagon high into the air and blowing it to pieces, and shattering the newly installed windows on the front of the Florida Bowl.

  A green Renault parked behind the Rambler was also destroyed in the blast. Héctor thought about it with a twinge of conscience as he drove away. He hoped that it belonged to the fat man or one of his buddies.

  “War is war,” he said, smiling broadly and with satisfaction.

  At a public phone, he pulled over and dialed the police.

  “Someone just blew up a stolen station wagon in front of the Florida Bowl. There’s a dangerous mob of car thieves inside the bowling alley, so hurry…” and he hung up.

  ***

  The address in the Pedregal neighborhood that Marisa Ferrer gave him on the night of the m
achine-gunning corresponded to a large feudal castle of cold stone on a lonely street. A tall iron fence surrounded the grounds, where trees dropped their dry leaves on the wide lawn. This is going to be a regular commando job, he thought, amused. He lit a cigarette, and stuck the two remaining sticks of dynamite under his belt. Unbuttoning his jacket, he undid the safety on his gun.

  “This is it!” he shouted.

  The first stick of dynamite twisted the iron fence as if it were made out of coat hangers.

  Héctor ran limping through the trees. A shadow emerged from the doorway, gun in hand, and the detective shot low without stopping to think. The man’s gun spit fire inches from Héctor’s head. Héctor ran past the man where he lay clutching his wounded leg, and kicked his revolver out of reach.

  This was a new kind of game, with a whole new set of rules. Now on to second base, he thought, firing a couple of warning shots into the air.

  He ran into a lamp, tripped and rolled to the floor. From there he watched a pair of naked women run past him and shut themselves in a bathroom.

  Héctor pounded on the bathroom door with his cane:

  “Open up!” he shouted, “I have to take a piss.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he ran through the house, dragging his leg, looking for the room the women had come out of. A man stood inside it, pulling on his pants, his back to the door.

  “Excuse me,” said Héctor.

  The man dropped to the floor.

  There it was, the round bed that had caused him so many sleepless nights in the hospital. And if the bed was there, the pictures must have been taken from…over there! A giant mirror filled the entire length of one wall.

  He looked for a second at his reflection and then fired three shots into the mirror, which crumbled into a million shining pieces. Behind it was an elaborate photographic studio, filled with cameras and strange gadgets, even a 16-millimeter movie camera mounted on a tripod. Burgos stood in his shirtsleeves, staring disconsolately at the detective.

  The man on the floor stared with eyes like saucers.

  “Better run,” warned Héctor, lighting the final stick of dynamite and lobbing it into the studio. “In twenty seconds this place is history.”

  The photographer and the naked gentleman, his pants still only half on, overtook Héctor in their rush to escape.

  The wounded guard in the doorway had dragged himself almost within reach of his gun, so Héctor gave it another kick as he raced by. Then all hell broke loose behind him. Bursts of flame licked at the trees closest to the house. The two women came running out the doorway, naked.

  “Hell of a party,” Héctor mumbled. His car waited for him in the street, with the engine still running.

  “Safe,” he called out, as he slid in and shut the door.

  ***

  He sipped a hot cup of weak coffee in a Doni-Donut Shop on Insurgentes, served by a melancholy and pimple-faced waiter who apologetically offered him a plate of shriveled doughnuts. The young man gladly accepted one of the detective’s cigarettes, and stood chatting for a minute about his favorite fighters.

  Héctor had to admit to himself that he wouldn’t play the same game again, not even for a million pesos. His heart beat wildly in his chest, and he could feel the fear inside his belly, more so now because he’d held it back before.

  What, after all, had he accomplished? Now the fat man and his buddies would have to carry their cases of soda pop by hand and ride the Metro until they could find themselves another set of wheels. And Burgos would have to retire temporarily from the world of artistic photography. Héctor could still see the young women’s rosy butts bobbing across the lawn. He wondered who the half-naked customer could have been.

  The waiter brought over a couple more wrinkled doughnuts to help celebrate the detective’s raucous laughter.

  Later on, Belascoarán walked over to the offices of Radio 1000.

  Inside the sound booth, behind the pane of glass, El Cuervo Valdivia was telling the story of the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, but with a strange personal twist. He winked at Héctor and signaled for him to wait.

  Héctor relaxed in an armchair in the hall and put the finishing touches on his plan.

  ***

  He walked into the police station with a portable radio under his arm, using his cane to clear a path before him. He limped more than before, with his leg feeling the effects of the previous night’s activities.

  “Commander Paniagua?”

  A uniformed officer pointed him toward the commander’s office.

  Héctor walked in without knocking. Seven or eight plainclothes cops sat at a round table drinking coffee and eating pastry.

  “Excuse me,” said the detective as he looked around for an outlet for the radio. He found the correct station and turned the volume all the way up.

  “What’s going on?” asked a man he recognized as Paniagua’s chauffeur.

  “Commander Paniagua?”

  “He’s in the can…Who the hell are you?”

  “An acquaintance. Tell him to hurry up, they’re going to talk about him on the radio.”

  As he was leaving the room Héctor bumped into the commander. They stood staring at each other momentarily. Héctor felt the fear crawling up his spine.

  “One question, Commander: Were you comfortable lying down in the backseat of Camposanto’s car when he sneaked you into the factory the day of the murder?”

  Héctor smiled and walked away.

  That was the moment Paniagua could have pulled his gun and shot him down. Héctor could feel the exact spot in his back where the bullet would enter. Behind him, in the room, the radio projected El Cuervo Valdivia’s slow, dry, penetrating voice.

  …It’s a story you might hear any day. The story of how Federico Paniagua, a commander of the Judicial Police in the State of Mexico, killed three men so that he could go on blackmailing a large corporation…

  He left the brown-paper package with the editor of Gent magazine.

  “Go ahead and print them if you dare,” he said as he left. “Or maybe you can sell them to a magazine in England or France. Or stick them up your ass…”

  When he thought about it, it seemed to Héctor that he’d gotten away with as much as any of the others. Hadn’t he thrown sticks of dynamite, shot down gunmen, blown up station wagons, without having anything happen to him in return?

  He was almost ready to accept the upholsterer’s dictum, heard over and over again in their shared office: “In Mexico nothing ever happens, and even if something does, still nothing happened.”

  Even if Paniagua went to jail in the midst of a colossal scandal, he’d still get out two years later once the dust settled. And Burgos would go back into business sooner or later because there would always be politicians who wanted a fancy piece of ass, and there would always be actresses willing to hop from bed to bed in the name of their careers. And the problem of the photographs would be solved with enough money. Really, all Héctor had done was to make another middleman a little richer. Rodríguez Cuesta would recover from his broken jaw and continue his smuggling operation. And more gay men would be driven undercover and forced to hide their identities in a society that wasn’t ready to accept them for who they were. And the dead men would always be just that, dead men rotting in lonely graves. And the strike was broken, and Zapata would always have died on the ranch in Chinameca.

  ***

  The cave had electric lights. A low green wooden railing propped up with stones stood at the cave’s mouth as a sort of doorway. A threadbare red curtain made a second door. Between the two, an empty bird cage hung from the stone.

  “May I come in?”

  “Come in, come in,” said a reedy old voice.

  “Buenas noches.”

  “Likewise,” answered the old man, le
aning back on his cot. He wore a tattered old army blanket over his shoulders. His boots were set to one side of the straw pallet.

  “I’m looking for a man,” began Héctor, trying to penetrate the shadows with his one good eye.

  “Could be you’ve found him.”

  “Folks around here say you go by the name of Sebastián Armenta.”

  “That’s me.”

  The old man’s eyes pierced him. Were these the damp, penetrating eyes of Emiliano Zapata? The same eyes sixty years later, stripped of their hopes and aspirations?

  “The man I’m looking for was driven out of Morelos back in 1919. They didn’t want him around anymore.”

  “There might be something in that…It was the government that didn’t want him around.”

  “Then he turned up in Tampico in ’26 with a young Nicaraguan named Sandino.”

  “He was a great man, General Sandino, a leader of free men,” said the old man.

  “During those years he smuggled guns for the Nicaraguans, on a boat called the Tropical.”

  “Actually they used three boats in all. There was the Superior, and the Foam, too. They were good little boats, they were…”

  “He called himself Zenón Enríquez and he was a captain in Sandino’s army.”

  “Captain Enríquez. They called him The Quiet One…that’s right.”

  “Then in ’thirty-four, he went through Costa Rica and registered for a Mexican passport under the name of Isaías Valdez.”

  “Isaías Valdez,” the old man repeated, as if in confirmation.

  “In ’forty-four he worked as a fruit seller in the Dos de Abril Market. He was called Eulalio Zaldívar, and was close friends with Rubén Jaramillo.”

  “A good friend to a great compañero, a real man of the people. Maybe one of the last…”

  “He left the market in ’forty-seven but came back fifteen years later in nineteen sixty-two, only to leave for good in ’sixty-six. In nineteen sixty-six he went back to Olivar de los Padres, took back his old name of Isaías Valdez, and lived off what he made braiding horse leads.”