by Rolo Diez
“Well, that’s the end of that adventure,” said the ugliest man in the world.
“It’s not over yet,” I replied.
“If we’re going to get killed,” insisted Quasimodo, with the same reluctance he had shown all morning, “we ought at least to know why. But we don’t even know what we’re looking for. We’re playing stupid blind man’s bluff. If either of you is interested, that’s quite enough for me.”
Despite the hammer-blow to the back of my head, I was still lucid and determined that reality should confirm my analysis.
“Look,” I said. “Edgar Hoover, the big chief of the FBI, ruthless persecutor of communists, blacks and Jews, homophobic guardian of Calvinist morality, the archetypal Wasp, was a homosexual. And if someone like him could destroy a myth like that, I’m willing to accept any transgression, whoever may be doing it.”
“What are you talking about, Carlitos?” Quasimodo was looking at me in exactly the same way Lourdes does when she thinks I’m lying or doesn’t believe a word.
“What’s a Wash?” Arganaraz asked, showing his education.
“A Wasp is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: the cream of gringo society. Such superior people they’re even more high-class than Nazis. I’m talking about people we don’t know who they are exactly, but we do know that nobody takes part in an orgy to be on their best behaviour: for that it’d be better to stay at home and perhaps get lucky with your wife. So I wouldn’t be surprised if in “El Porvenir” we find pictures of some honourable autocrat from one of our sacred institutions busy sucking the dick of a Senegalese sailor.”
Quasimodo produced a hipflask lined in green leather and full of rum. Arganaraz handed round unfiltered Pall Malls and sat down against a tree. We did the same, as there’s nothing better than feeling comfortable to help recapitulate. Someone didn’t want us poking around the ranch. The place had already been turned over without anyone finding the film of the president and the Senegalese sailor. But if there was nothing there, why didn’t they want us in the ranch? Because someone knew the film existed and didn’t like the idea of us finding it. They must be priceless images that would soon find a buyer. It was our business to find them. Someone wanted us dead. That was the risk. Too big a risk.
“Let’s get this straight.” Despite the sensation that I had a dagger plunged into my neck, I tried to be clear. “We’re real cops, not like the ones on TV. We do a job where we could be chopped to pieces any day. Our wages are enough to rent a cave in Nezahualcoyotl and buy a Beetle to pay off in twelve years, if we starve our families in the meantime. Why do we do it, rather than opening a café near a ministry or a contraband stall in Tepito? Is it because we believe in our mission, in the vocation of serving the public, of being the custodians of the law and justice?”
“Don’t de daft, Carlitos.”
“We get things out of it too.”
“I’m coming to that. I knew colleagues who found themselves appointed as customs officers on the northern border. Within a year they’d bought houses, cars even for their pet dogs, timeshares on the beach. They changed beyond recognition. A year later they were all dead, because there’s hot competition for jobs like that. But nobody took a peso from their families. Each to his own, and whoever gets the chance has to take it.”
“I’m not interested in being a corpse weighed down with gold.”
“And I don’t want to have to die so the parasites in my family can visit Paris.”
“I also know of people who struck it rich and then vanished. Nobody thought of killing them, because they were in another country. What I’m trying to say, and tell me if I’m wrong, is that we put up with all the shit because we’re sure that one day we’ll get lucky, and it will change into honey and champagne. The chance arises, and if you’re in the right place at the right time, you grab it. Yes or no?”
I could see them wavering, as fear and greed fought it out inside them. I was scared too. Scared for Lourdes, Gloria, for my kids and for myself. But if all three of us were scared, we’d never do anything. So in my capacity as ringleader I had to conceal my fear and prevent them from seeing the shortcomings in my plan.
“They already know we’re here,” Quasimodo said, lighting another cigarette. “We’d need time to search the ranch, and in that time they could come back and finish us off.”
“I could put my gun to the caretaker’s head and give him ten seconds to spill the beans.” Arganaraz drank the last of the rum and licked the hipflask.
“What if he doesn’t? We don’t even have an hour to put the fear of God into him properly.”
I don’t know why I say certain things. I’d like to be at home, with a couple of beers just the right temperature, a salami pizza and a good film to watch on the video. I sincerely think that if we go on with this comic strip we’re aiming headfirst for disaster, and I’m willing to swear that a low-ranking cop can only get somewhere if he tags along with his bosses. If it were otherwise, the world would be incomprehensible, and we’d all be in anarchy. What I need is something to relax me, a session with the Three Marias, three tongues slowly travelling up and down every inch of my body, or to get Lourdes and Gloria drunk and take them both to bed, or to lie in the sun getting a good tan and sniffing the salt sea air in Cancun. Anything not to be lying here in a gully with a bit of lead in the back of my neck, talking to a couple of losers about our chances of defying the rich and powerful and becoming millionaires. All of which means I’ve really no idea what made me say to them:
“I’ve got a better idea.”
“. . .”
“We don’t know what there is or where it is, but we know someone who does.”
Arganaraz, a clumsy double-crosser with a sneaky cowardly character, was torn between the dream of getting rich and panic at losing everything. Quasimodo was a different matter. An intelligent and wary bird, he had signed up for the ride because things looked good to start with, or perhaps because he felt he still owed me a favour. But both of them gave me a chance, both wanted to know what I meant.
“My Commander knows,” I said.
“What’s the plan, Carlitos?”
Chapter seventeen
It took me an hour to convince my colleagues of the merits of my plan: merits which, if the truth were told, I was not convinced of myself. Night was falling by the time I called the Commander.
If Plan A failed, I offered a Plan B, and it was this that persuaded Quasimodo and Arganaraz not to abandon me. When I stood up I felt dizzy. I needed to find a pharmacy and get some painkillers that would calm the throbbing discomfort in my neck. It must have been due to all the effort I had to make to overcome two people obstinately resisting me. I did it by showing them that we were already done for. “They know who we are, and they can finish us off whenever they want to.” At the same time, I tried to get into their thick skulls the idea that the music was still playing, so we had to go on dancing. “If we succeed, each of us comes out looking like Pedro Infante; if things don’t go so well, we turn to Plan B; and if everything is a disaster – and we’d have to be really unlucky for that to happen – we hide for a while, make use of our holidays to get new documents then we hold up a provincial bank and leave the country.” It was when they said “fine” that I stood up and almost fell over.
I asked them how my head looked, and they told me I’d been hit, as if I didn’t know. I wanted to see my car one last time, to say goodbye to my Atlantic. A car may be just a chunk of metal, but then again a house is nothing more than bricks and cement. It’s what we put into them that makes them important. Chunks of our lives, our memories. It didn’t seem right to walk away without having a last look. I wouldn’t leave a dying dog – I wouldn’t even leave Arganaraz to bleed to death. Perhaps it was just the pain in my head. Climbing the gully felt like it might be the last task I was asked to perform in this world. We had to do it anyway to get back on the road and walk back to the city. I was thinking of my family as I scrambled up. I couldn’t see anything exc
ept for a red mist in front of my eyes. I had to get my family out of harm’s way. As soon as I got to a phone I’d send Carlos and Araceli to stay with their mother. Nobody in my office or elsewhere in the police knew about Gloria’s apartment (at least, so I hoped), so I could hide there if necessary. When we got to the top of the gully – with me hanging on to the arms of my two colleagues, whose heads weren’t filled with lead – and reached the Atlantic, I became even more determined. They were going to pay for this. I’d put a bullet in each knee of every one of the sons of bitches who had destroyed my car. I was quite calm. I’ve known guys who’ve had a bullet enter the back of their head and come out through the mouth, and all that happened was they lost a couple of teeth, and others who only realized years later they had a piece of lead in their top storey.
It’s only natural that at first you feel a bit giddy, and things look rather blurred. But I didn’t need glasses to see as clear as day that more than one donkey with stripes on his arm seemed to think Carlos Hernandez had been put on this earth with the sole purpose of making their lives more comfortable and profitable. When they gave out tickets for this world, Hernandez was given second class, standing room only, the bleachers. And he was meant to be grateful he didn’t get one of the tickets reserved for Indians, dogs, blacks, or women. (Even though the proper way to remember Baudelaire is with a good few drinks inside you, it’s not bad to do it with a bullet in the head either.) They even allowed him to go to university so he could get an education and be more useful to them. Their faces. He’d just love to see their faces when he put a bullet in their knees.
Then again, three cops without a car between them aren’t much of a threat to anyone, especially on a side-road somewhere near Hidalgo. I saw some animals in the distance and think I may even have suggested that if it came to it we could ride them to the main road and try to get help or steal a car.
“We’ll have to walk,” Arganaraz said, and just hearing him exhausted me so much I had to lie down.
I remembered a dream I had had a few days earlier and stared up at the sky to see if the buzzards or crows were coming for me. The sky was a red sea, so the only birds in it must have been flamingos or parrots.
I was willing to do anything, so long as I did not have to get up, so I sent them off to the main road to find a car. “Don’t move,” they told me, which threatened to make me laugh so much it made my ribs ache just thinking about it. I laid my head on the ground and stayed like that until I heard the insistent sound of a horn. I sat up and dedicated a loving smile to Lourdes, who was bringing me my beer, except that it wasn’t Lourdes but a red Beetle, driven by a red terrified woman driver. Quasimodo and the other guy had turned red too. If Manitu had been there as well we could have had a nice game of dominoes. And if Lenin had happened along, we could have made up a basketball team and called ourselves the “Hidalgo Reds” or something similar.
I crawled over to the Beetle and sat in the back. To show my sense of humour I cracked a joke. “Kill the granny,” I said, and the red lady started to cry. “’She knows too much,” I went on, and she started swearing that never for any reason in her whole life would she say a word to anyone. “You’re a gossipy old cow,” I explained. “As soon as we let you go you’ll run around telling everyone about the great adventure you’ve had. So you can die now or be abused in ways you’ve never even imagined. Which is it to be?” The truth is I was talking simply not to faint again – and to have a bit of fun as well. I was dying, and I didn’t want them all to see it. “My last wish is for you to suck my dick,” I told her, making her sob even more loudly. “Drop her off,” I ordered the others. They stopped the car, and the old dear scuttled off. To give the game away to the first asshole she met.
My men were talking things over. I pretended to be asleep and listened to what they were saying. They both thought I had suffered concussion, that the blow to my head had knocked me witless, and that there was nothing to be done with me. Above all, it was impossible to storm the Commander’s house and persuade him to tell us who had been doing what to whom (man to man, because if it had been a woman, there wouldn’t be such a fuss) in the film or photo everyone was looking for, or to show him it would be better for him to talk than to find himself dead in the line of duty, with his family raped and murdered and his house consumed by flames. It wouldn’t even be possible to try Plan B, which consisted of burgling our host’s place, taking all his jewels, silverware and cash, and taking the Commander and all his credit cards along with us to get more cash out of the machines.
“Carlitos is done for,” Quasimodo complained.
“I’m out of here, Rivas,” said Arganaraz, showing just what a creep he was, because no one even halfway decent calls Quasimodo by his real name. Not to mention the bad luck it brings – one of the few times he’s been called that was the day before the ’85 earthquake.
“As soon as we get to the city, I’m off. Maybe no one saw me or even knows I was in the car. If I stay with this lunatic any longer I’ll wake up in the morgue tomorrow.”
“You’re dead already, Arganaraz. Both of you are.” I came round again and for the fourth time gave them my clinching argument. “The only chance you have of avoiding it is by sticking with me.”
This led to a long, tedious discussion revolving around children, the future, madness and what is or is not possible. What most impressed me was the way people can change, because neither of them was bright red anymore: they were both a sort of misty pink verging on deathly grey, which, thinking back, I should perhaps have seen as a bad sign. I eventually won out by employing a trick that works every time. When others are floundering in uncertainty, you have to seem completely sure of yourself. That makes you the person who knows what’s going on, whereas their doubts show their ignorance.
“Let me give him a call, then we’ll decide,” I told them. They agreed, so I got out and rang the Commander at home.
*
I adopted a tone somewhere between professional eagerness and sheer excitement:
“I’ve got important news on the gringo case, boss. There are some delicate matters I need to talk to you about. I can’t sort them out on my own, or discuss them on the phone.”
Nine o’clock at night. A good time to invade a house and turn into a burglar.
“Come and see me,” said the Commander.
“Let’s go and talk to him, then afterwards we’ll decide,” I told my companions, so they would realize there was no going back.
“Look,” I said. “It was that old bastard who had us shot at. If things go badly, we finish him off ourselves, then home to bed.” (Obviously I was planning to go into hiding, and would tell Quasimodo to do the same.) “Tomorrow we show up for work as usual, and that’s that. No one will link us to an armed burglary. There are gangs holding up families in their homes every night. In fact, there’s one operating right now in Copilco, and the Commander lives quite near there.
“He lives in San Angel, and that’s nowhere near.” Arganaraz, as argumentative as ever.
We were soon at the house. I presented myself on the interphone, and the door opened. Two minutes later I’d got my gun out and was holding it to the head of my boss, a man apparently unable to believe what was happening to him. Quasimodo and Arganaraz looked even more surprised than him, and the one who looked most surprised of all must have been me. No chance. This must be how things look when you jump out of a plane several thousand feet in the air and go into freefall without opening the parachute, because you know it’s there and because you want to enjoy the sense of adventure and terror for as long as they last.
This purple-faced man, with matching purple furniture, was stammering as he peered down the barrel of my gun. He was trembling faced by his inferior, Carlos Hernandez, Hernandezatyour-service, someone he thought he could count on who never seemed dangerous because his job was to say “Yes, boss” in the same way that this bastard stammered “Yes, boss” whenever he talked to a superior. All of which happened in the r
eal world but did not have to happen when reality turns into a nightmare. That man feared Carlos Hernandez because Carlos Hernandez had just ushered in chaos.
Sacred and cursed as only murderers and saints can be, Carlos Hernandez renounces normality and boredom, renounces TV and speeches, watches and calendars, rejects the idea of doing today what he did yesterday, refuses to look at the present with the eyes of the past, thumbs his nose at regulations and codes of behaviour in the DO and all the rest of the motherfucking police, forgets all his routines, casts off his lethargy, will not comb his hair or shave, tells his neighbours what he thinks of them whenever he meets them, and when meeting certain women neighbours caresses breasts and hips, laughs at the newspaper headlines, shows his collection of condoms to primary school teachers, suggests sex on the spot with young ladies selling religious tracts, believes that anyone who doesn’t lend a book is a numbskull, and anyone who doesn’t give it back is even more stupid, will never again say “at your service”, much less “at your orders”. A friend only to cats and drunks, condemned men and stray dogs, whores and homosexuals, communists and human rights defenders, guerrilleros and feminists, pariahs and gunmen, smokers and liberation theologists, an admirer of Zapata and Pancho Villa, but of no one who wears a suit and tie and carries a briefcase, scornful of Sanborns, postmodernism, the President’s opinions and Hollywood films, bored by men of maize and the idea of Mexico “race of bronze”, tired, overwhelmingly weary of being a policeman . . . Carlos Hernandez watches incredulously as the colours in the room swing towards blue, thinks it must be because night has fallen: all he knows is he enjoys feeling that the Commander is afraid of him.
That was all. I could kill him, and I was off my head – because you had to be crazy to force your way into his house, threaten him with a gun and demand he hand over a photo showing the Chief of Police fornicating with an iguana. And since I was lost to this world anyway, it was increasingly likely I might get it into my head to pull the trigger. I was the problem. Arganaraz – a loser who was going to betray me at the first opportunity – and Quasimodo – lost in his Archive, slave to an old debt – were simply obeying a superior will, a clearer vision, you might say, if it weren’t for that fact that I was seeing everything a very Proustian shade of turquoise at that precise moment. I decided for them. I freed them from the problem of having to think. Although perhaps they were regretting having a leader with a bullet in his skull that made him confuse lettuces with orchids and who seemed determined to lead them straight to prison or death.
