And sure enough, there they were, painted a dull grayish blue, taking up positions around the Politécnico campus at the Casco de Santo Tomás. And backed by two battalions of riot police, revitalized over the last three years (after the massive desertions of ’68) with new recruits from the countryside: landless peasants from Puebla, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, who had survived the brutality of training camp and were just beginning to enjoy the petty powers, the impunity, conferred on them by their uniform. They’d been indoctrinated to see themselves as the last bulwark of the fatherland, arrayed against the godless, communistic students, who, so they were told, hated the Virgin of Guadalupe and sought to destroy Mexico itself. They hid their fear behind our own.
But they were only there to scare us, really. Anyone who pisses his pants over a couple of thousand riot police hasn’t lived. If they were really going to clamp down, they wouldn’t be so obvious about it. So we marched right past them, looking them in the eye, accepting the challenge, staring down the prodigious technicians of evil.
There was a rumor going around that if you jammed a potato up the exhaust pipe of one of the new antiriot vehicles it would blow up like a squashed toad. We tried to guess the diameter of the exhaust pipes as we walked by, and to estimate the required density of the potato, which we’d forgotten to bring anyway, because who really believed…
We marched along Melchor Ocampo, San Cosme, Avenida de los Gallos. Watch out ahead, there’s a break in the line to the west, at the iron fence that runs around the Teachers College and the Politécnico, but all the same we started to file into the esplanade of the Casco de Santo Tomás, where our new demands were to be announced: hands off the University of Nuevo León; union democracy; freedom for political prisoners. We had all come to more or less the same conclusions by then, that the government needed to consolidate the present opening, that it couldn’t afford a new wave of repression, and that the public statements of President Echevarría were practically an invitation to take to the streets. It was a chance for us to recuperate some of the power we’d lost, and an opportunity for him to demonstrate clearly that the barbaric Mexico of his predecessor, Díaz Ordaz, no longer existed, that the center could be widened to include more of the fringe. So there we were, all decked out in blue jeans and red, blue, tan shirts, corduroy trousers, bandanas around our necks, khaki jackets despite the heat, and the girls in their brightly colored pants, and the white dress shirts of the students from the provinces, who finally had their chance now, having been too young for the Movement in ’68 (the Movement with a capital M, the starting point, the line drawn in the sand of our lives, our point of reference as human beings in this country, in this life).
Surprisingly, even with the heavy police presence, ten thousand people turned out to demonstrate. More, maybe as many as fifteen thousand, and we took our collective fear and we turned it around to show that fear couldn’t stop us. And then out came the red banners, carefully at first, out from the jackets under which they’d been lovingly concealed, unfurled now, and other banners too, with the familiar slogans under new acronyms. It was pure euphoria, a euphoria tinged by the bittersweet taste of a fear defeated but still close by.
There was barely time to greet friends, identify organizations, recognize faces. Ah, how the palms slapped, the hands gripped, with the thumb pointing at the other’s heart, the fingers closing, the feel of your friend’s rough skin. The Econ students from the National University led off the march, followed by the Politécnico’s own School of Economics, complete with the familiar faces of students recently released from prison or returned from exile. The march followed the Avenida de los Gallos, then turned along Avenida de los Maestros, with the first songs ringing through the air. By the time the last marchers had left the Casco, the head of the line had already reached the Calzada México-Tacuba.
That was when it happened. They came out of side streets, shouting “Viva Che Guevara!” The riot police opened spaces for them to pass, and then their picket signs turned into clubs, and they attacked the crowd. The “Viva Che Guevara” became a surprising “Viva el presidente, cabrones!” They came in through Sor Juana, Amado Nervo, Alzate. At one spot they clashed head on with a group of teenagers from the Preparatoria Popular, who recovered from the initial surprise, regrouped, and fought back, while the police held up the march at the front of the line. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the street, people were running everywhere, the line of marchers was broken.
Then the first shots were heard. The riot police had pulled back, the marchers had started to move again toward the Cosmos Cinema, and it seemed as though the intruders had been defeated. There were only about three hundred of them, after all, even if they did carry clubs and knew kendo and shouted at the top of their lungs when they charged, and seemed to be well trained and organized. Even with all that, they were no match for the purely Mexican joy, the alegría, of an entire generation of students who, despite their university education, had grown up in the streets, had known the day-to-day struggle of survival, and had been brought together in the movement of ’68. That’s when the first shots could be heard, a burst of machine-gun fire over the heads of the marchers, fired from a passing car, and then they returned in force, armed with M1 rifles, and pistols, and automatic weapons, and more clubs, and the police opened up again to let them pass.
And some of us, those who could still hear, those who were listening, heard the attackers’ strange war cry: Halcones! Falcons! Halcones!
The afternoon ended in terror, more than forty people killed, Red Cross workers attacked when they tried to carry away the wounded, the Halcones shooting blindly into the crowd, the police cordon, followed by the arrival of the army, massive arrests, house-to-house searches, the line of marchers shattered, the rooftop chases, random sniper fire that lasted until dark, the impassive riot police, watching, occasionally lobbing a few tear gas canisters at stray groups of demonstrators who couldn’t quite bring themselves to flee the horror and stayed on to roam aimlessly through the streets as though they had a debt of honor that impelled them to remain as witnesses to the massacre.
Around seven-thirty it started to rain, and the puddles of blood were washed from the sidewalks. The fence around the Teachers College had been pulled down under the weight of students climbing over it to escape. An ambulance with its tires shot out sat abandoned at the intersection of México-Tacuba and Avenida de los Maestros, the red light still spinning around on top as the last few shots echoed in the twilight. By eight o’clock, the army had established control and tanks rolled down the abandoned streets.
The official explanation wrote the whole thing off as an unfortunate clash between antagonistic student groups. But then there were the photographs of the army-issue M1 rifles, and the riot police allowing the armed men to pass unopposed, and the tape recordings from the police radio frequency, over which police officers directed the Halcones’ attack. And the discovery by Guillermo Jordan, a reporter for Ultimas Noticias, of the trucks in which the Halcones had been transported, property of the Mexico City government, the city emblem carefully painted over in gray. And the training camps near the airport and in the Colonia Aragon, and the recruitment of the Halcones from within the army, and the involvement of high-ranking army and police officers in their training. But the dead remained dead, despite all the scandal and the outrage…And no one was ever brought to trial, and when an investigation was finally called for, eight years later, all the records had disappeared.
Chapter Nine
One breathes easier in the middle of the storm.
—Mikhail Bakunin
It was around three in the morning when Héctor, stifling a yawn, turned the ignition key in the VW. The stripper emerged from the Fuente de Venus, her hips swinging, a fire red scarf wrapped around her head. A waiter accompanied her to a Mustang parked on the street.
The woman drove slowly, and Héctor had no problem following in the car he’d borrowed from his sister. They went straight down Reforma to the Ángel,
where the woman left the avenue, drove for a few more minutes, then parked on one of the side streets of the Colonia Cuauhtémoc. A few minutes later, the lights went on in a third-floor apartment. Héctor drove past the building, turned his car around, and parked in a spot where he could keep an eye on the front door. He thought it over, then lit a cigarette and settled down to wait. He preferred to wait now and act later, in the light of day. The woman could lead him to Captain Freshie; the question was how to go about it. He stretched out as best he could and prepared to wait out the rest of the night.
He catnapped restlessly, an unhappy, superficial sleep, his muscles cramped, little birds filling his head. At six in the morning a Red Cross ambulance raced by at top speed and the city seemed to come back to life: a school bus, a paper vendor on a bicycle, three or four maids walking to work.
He crawled out of the car, trying unsuccessfully to locate the source of the diffuse pain in his back. He decided to grab a bite to eat before beginning his interrogation of Miss Melina, with tango soundtrack. He had taken only a few steps away from the car, in the opposite direction from the showgirl’s apartment, when he instinctively turned his head. A red car had pulled up in front of the building. Two men got out. It was the same thing all over again, dark glasses, cheap blue and gray suits. He walked halfway down the block and hid behind a newspaper kiosk. The two men exchanged a few words with the driver of their car, who remained behind the wheel, and entered the building.
There they were, the forces of evil.
Héctor put his hand on his gun, caressed the butt.
He had to think fast. It was getting lighter, and more and more cars could be seen passing at the corner on Reforma. A shiver went through him. To wait or to act? Maybe he was just paranoid. He was paralyzed by doubt. If the two men who had gone inside came out while he was taking care of the driver, he’d be screwed. If he waited…
He walked toward the waiting car, trying to keep out of the line of sight of the rear-view mirror. The street was empty. He took out his gun. The driver was picking his nose when Héctor pushed the barrel of the gun up against his temple.
“Hands on the wheel, pal.”
“You sure you know how to work that thing?”
“When I pull the trigger, lead comes out. Pretty nifty.”
Slowly, the man brought his hands to the wheel, but before he could finish, Héctor hit him as hard as he could with the gun barrel across the temple. The man let out a sigh and collapsed across the steering wheel. Héctor opened the door and pushed. The guy’s ass pointed out at the street. Héctor pushed again. There was blood on the seat. Maybe I went too far, Héctor thought. Maybe the guy doesn’t have anything to do with the forces of evil after all. He laughed. The forces of evil. It sounded too grandiose for this stupid, blood-smeared monkey. Keeping an eye on the door to Melina’s building, he got into the car and turned the key, then drove toward Reforma. He stopped at the corner and searched the motionless heap next to him. A few drops of blood oozed from the man’s temple. A .38 revolver, a subway police ID card in the name of Augustín Porfirio Olvera, a small stack of porno pictures held together with a rubber band, some money. He dumped it all onto the seat, drove around the block, and parked in front of an empty lot. He pocketed the man’s gun and ID and walked quickly back to his own car. Nothing. The street was as empty as before. It would be a good place to stage a duel. The set for an urban Western. An empty street in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc at seven-thirty in the morning. What came next?
He crossed over to the apartment building and started up the stairs. There were two apartments on the third floor. Number 302 was the one facing the street where the light had shone the night before. The door was closed. Did the building have an inner patio? Could he get to the apartment from the roof? He continued upstairs. The third floor was the last one, and the staircase ended at a gray door. He went out onto the roof and crossed to the central airshaft, looking down on the windows of number 302: the bathroom window, and another one covered with a red curtain. It was at least twelve feet from the roof down to the bathroom window. Maybe it would be easier to get in from the patio, using the ladder that leaned against one corner. The patio was empty. But he could only get to it through one of the ground-floor apartments. He started down again. As he went past number 302, the door opened, and Héctor found himself face-to-face with a man about thirty-five years old, with very dark, straight hair, a thin mustache over thick lips, dressed in a suit, his necktie loose and crooked under the collar of a white shirt. That’s all he had time to notice. The man’s left hand went to the gun at his waist. Héctor pushed past him, pulling his gun from his shoulder holster as he ran headlong down the stairs. The first shot exploded from behind him and chunks of plaster flew from the wall over his head. At the landing, Héctor turned, raised his gun, waited for the man to cross his line of sight, and squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot and the smell of cordite filled the stairway. The man tumbled, raising his hands to his throat, and landed facedown at Héctor’s feet. One down, one to go. He picked up the dead man, shielding himself behind the body while he kept his gun pointed up the vacant stairway. The dead man was heavy, and slippery with blood. A pair of shots rang out as the other man fired from the doorway at his partner’s corpse. Héctor felt the impact as a bullet smashed into the dead man’s chest. He dropped the body and aimed at the shooter as he was turning to duck back inside. He shot twice. One bullet caught the man in the shoulder and spun him around, the other one hit him in the base of the skull, exploding his head like a rotten melon.
Héctor only had a few seconds to work. The stripper sat in her living room, perched on the edge of an orange armchair, staring at the ceiling, strangely immobile. A thin line of blood ran down from bruised lips. But she was alive. A few yards away, Captain Freshie had gone on to join his old friends Leobardo the Roman and Don Agustín, the owner of the Fuente de Venus. He lay in a heap on the rug with his throat slashed. Héctor tried to get the woman to stand up. She was deadweight. Her glassy eyes stared out at nothing. He dropped her arm and ran down the stairs, without taking another look at the dead men sprawled in the hallway.
When he got to the street he slowed to a walk and looked up at the apartment building as though he were a casual passerby. A few windows opened up, and a woman in a bathrobe appeared in the door of a neighboring building.
“Did you hear shots?”
Héctor had his back to her, and he didn’t want to turn around where she would see the blood on his shirt, only partly covered by his jacket.
“I think so. Better be careful, you never know around here.”
By the time he turned the corner, his heart was jumping like a maddened acrobat. He had trouble drawing breath, and he felt a pain in his chest. He turned up his jacket collar, buried his hands in his pockets. He felt cold, a terrible cold. He’d killed two more men.
***
The blood had dried on his shirt, and the cold feeling was replaced by a sharp, very intense headache. Half an hour later he went over it all in his head and realized that they’d almost killed him twice. If the first man had only aimed a little lower as he was running down the stairs, if the other one had aimed for his head instead of at his dead partner’s torso. Two chances. Two misses. He drove the red car around again—what was it, eight or nine times now?—along the oval street that circumnavigated the Parque México. He’d transferred the unconscious driver to the trunk in a parking lot in the Zona Rosa. Now he needed to figure out his next move. If this were a mystery novel, it would have all become clear to him; even when the detective was uncertain, at least his uncertainty was always clear. It was nothing like this. His hands still shook, and at regular intervals he would break out in a cold sweat. He smiled at the rear-view mirror. Is that how another man’s death felt? Was that it?
He had to feel hate. His fear and his sad smile weren’t going to be enough to keep his hunters from killing him. He’d been lucky so far. But that wouldn’t last forever. He had to hate. And
there were things he had to know. He pointed the car toward his house in the Colonia Roma.
Merlín, the semiretired electrician who was also his landlord, stood out in front of his building when Héctor pulled up.
“Detective. It’s a damn good thing you weren’t at home last night.”
“What’s up, Merlín?”
“There were two or three unsavory characters nosing around here last night. I caught them waiting for you on the landing. I didn’t like their looks. They finally left around six this morning.”
“Will you do me a favor?”
“Whatever you want, friend. And if the State’s the enemy, then so much the better.”
“I don’t know if it’s the State, or just a piece of the State. The problem is I’ve got this son of a bitch unconscious here in the trunk. Will you keep an eye on him, while I run upstairs? I don’t want him to get away.”
“Let me get a hammer and I’ll be right back.”
The electrician disappeared into his street-front repair shop and came out a moment later armed with a hammer. They came looking for me here before they went to the stripper’s place, thought Héctor. He got out of the car and took the steps two at a time.
The door to his apartment had been forced, and he pushed it open with two fingers. The rabbit lay dead in the middle of the rug. They’d cut its throat.
Héctor went into his bedroom and grabbed two clean pairs of socks, a shirt, and switched his brown jacket for a black one with bigger pockets, into which he threw two clips for his .45 automatic. He loaded a fresh clip into the gun. As he turned to go, he picked up the book he’d been reading and shoved it into another pocket. He closed the door softly and said a mental good-bye to the rabbit.
Merlín kept watch out front, sitting on the trunk of the car.
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 8
