“They were his helpers, his assistants. Leobardo made most of Zorak’s props in his shop. They helped him with his act, with the magic tricks and the escape stuff. He used to practice with us for hours and hours.”
“Zorak trained the Halcones, didn’t he?”
“Who?”
She knew, but she was afraid to say so.
“Who paid off the pilot to do the trick with the helicopter?”
“My husband had enemies.”
“Who were his enemies?”
“His competitors, they were jealous of his success. He was number one, and no one could come close to him—”
“That’s horseshit and you know it…Zorak was killed so that he wouldn’t tell what he knew about the tenth of June. He held a privileged position during the training of the Halcones, and he knew who the commanders were and who was behind it all.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
Héctor stood up.
“You know what, Señorita S? You can pay the bill.”
He walked out of the café without looking back.
***
He cut himself shaving and he stood in front of the mirror watching the thin trickle of blood run down his cheek. It was enough to make him decide to let his beard grow. He was in the middle of the jungle already, and if the vines opened up to let him pass, and the cannibals were on his trail, and the air was full of the smell of death, then the blood might as well run down his face, and he might as well let his beard grow.
Carlos entered the bathroom and bumped into Héctor, interrupting his thoughts. He took his toothbrush from the medicine cabinet and put some water in a glass.
“You’ve got to find somewhere to stay,” he said.
“I was thinking about going to a hotel. A different one every night,” said the detective, dabbing at the blood with a piece of toilet paper.
“Not a good idea. Cheap hotels are always full of cops. Secret police, state police, city police…it’s like a second home to them.”
Héctor threw the bloodied paper into the toilet and pushed the handle. Carlos brushed his teeth.
“What’s the best place to get some thinking done in Mexico City?” asked Héctor.
“The Pino Suárez subway station, behind a column, around seven at night, with thousands of people going by,” answered Marina, squeezing into the bathroom with them. Héctor leaned back to let her get to the medicine cabinet. She took out her toothbrush.
“The restaurant on the top floor of the Latino Tower,” said Carlos.
“The swings in the Parque España,” said Héctor.
***
First they’d gotten him involved in the murder of Zorak’s two assistants, without his ever having asked for the part. Then they’d cordially invited him to leave the country. Then, angered by his lack of cooperation, they’d set about hunting him down. And now they wanted to avenge their dead.
If anyone could make any sense out of this mess, it isn’t me, thought Héctor, as he swung softly back and forth.
Chapter Ten
A good detective never marries.
—Raymond Chandler
There was nothing in the newspapers. Commander Silva (When would he cease to be just a name?) wasn’t talking to the press; Melina was in the hospital; Zorak’s three buddies, with their throats slashed by the Chink, lay on slabs in the morgue, along with the Chink himself and three of his own friends, victims of Belascoarán’s .45 and El Gallo’s Wild West six-shooter. Nothing but peace and tranquility as far as the eye could see…He might as well take a vacation to Acapulco, change jobs, get married…
Suddenly he wasn’t joking anymore. If everything around him had gone crazy, like a radio play written by Porfirio Díaz or Cuauhtémoc doing detergent ads on TV; if the bad guys were eternally in power, if everything was going to remain the same, he might as well commit the ultimate madness and get married again.
Anything would be better than to continue this crazy dance through the city, not daring to go home, unable to relax in the old armchair in his office and watch the clouds float by, with no time to feel sadness or nostalgia, and with the weight of three dead men heavy in his blood.
But who could he marry?
The pang of love deferred hit him hard between the eyes. Too much loneliness these last few days, too much for a one-eyed independent detective.
He was eating a huge sundae, with three different kinds of ice cream, bananas, strawberries, whipped cream, and nuts, in an ice-cream parlor in the Colonia Santa María that he hadn’t been in since he was a teenager. It was there he decided to get married again.
He realized that he could sense death waiting for him in the midst of this strange story full of Romans and Halcones, and he didn’t want to die without having felt, one more time, that does of daily love. He wanted just one week of married life before leaving Mexico City forever.
He was about to laugh at himself, him and his crazy ideas, when he raised his eyes and saw his reflection in the mirror behind the counter.
It was him all right. The scarred, unmoving left eye, the sad puppy dog look that sometimes crept into his smile. Thirty-three stubborn, hallucinatory years behind him, and what was to come?
***
He studied the building with the eye of a medieval soldier about to lay siege to an enemy castle. He took off his jacket and dropped it on the ground. But that left his gun exposed, raw power in a leather holster. So he retrieved the jacket and put it back on. It was a four-story building, with balconies full of potted plants, its whitewashed front broken by a vine that wound down from the roof and into a small tree on the sidewalk. A parrot hung in a cage on one of the balconies. The sun reflected off the windows of the ground-floor apartment and into Héctor’s face. Without further prelude, the detective jumped up and grabbed one of the tree’s lower branches. He hung there briefly, then slowly hooked a leg around the branch. In Mexico City any public spectacle, no matter how insignificant, instantly draws a crowd, and no sooner was he sitting safely on the branch than a pair of middle-school students, dusty neckties askew and carrying worn-out miniature briefcases, took up position at the base of the tree.
“Bet you five pesos he falls and busts his head open,” said one.
Héctor hocked a gob of spit at the sinister prophet of doom, who jumped nimbly out of the way.
“Hey, I was only kidding.”
A second branch, a foot and a half higher up, put him within reach of the balcony with the parrot. A servant on her way home from the bakery and a man carrying a cylinder of gas on his shoulder joined the audience on the sidewalk.
“Hiya, good-looking,” said the parrot.
Héctor put one foot onto the balcony wall and, tearing his pants leg on a sharp branch, raised both hands over his head, reaching for a grip on the bottom of the third-floor balcony. For a second he teetered, off balance, and it looked as though he might fall. But his right hand found the concrete lip, and then his left hand grabbed hold. With one foot he searched for a purchase in the climbing vine, and he slowly raised himself up. His audience, which now included a very small girl with an even smaller doll under one arm, applauded his effort.
“Hiya, good-looking,” said the parrot again.
“Adiós, stupid parrot,” answered Héctor.
He held on tightly to the metal grate that fronted the balcony, and inched himself upward to where he could grab on to its upper edge.
Then he pulled himself over the top and brushed the dust off his trousers. Three floors below, the satisfied crowd dispersed, and Héctor stepped up to the balcony’s glass doors.
Through the glass he could see the living room, with its immaculate white rug and a single table in the middle. On one wall there was a giant map of Mexico City, full of colored pins and with drawings around
the edges.
She came out of the kitchen, wearing a long, full skirt that reached all the way down to the ground, and nothing else. She was barefoot,
and her breasts danced softly as she walked. She carried a glass of juice in one hand. Héctor tapped on the window with the tips of his fingers, and she dropped the glass and shouted something that never made it to the detective’s ears, blocked by the thick pane of glass. The detective pointed at the glass door, locked from inside. She covered her breasts with one arm and let out a laugh. Then she turned around and went back through the doorway she’d just come out of.
Héctor lit a cigarette. The woman with the ponytail came back into the room a couple of minutes later. She wore a white blouse, and carried a fresh glass of juice. Héctor pointed again at the locked door, but she only smiled, and sat down on the white rug in front of him. Héctor followed her lead and sat down on the concrete terrace.
They spent half an hour like that, face-to-face, separated by the glass, unspeaking, smoking, looking straight at each other, or with their gaze lost somewhere in the distance. Maybe because it’s necessary to let love rest before it can heat up again inside you, or maybe because these had been difficult times, or maybe because you can’t simply sweep a woman away no matter how many walls you climb, the two of them felt a sadness coming over them. She got up and walked over to a record player underneath the map of Mexico City, then came back and sat down in the same spot. She hesitated, then finally got up again and opened one of the windows that let onto the balcony. From where he sat, Héctor could hear the first guitar chords of a song by Cuco Sánchez. He smiled.
The afternoon light was fading, giving way to a soft, clear dusk, transparent but without brightness. Half an hour later, Héctor lit another cigarette. The woman with the ponytail reached behind her and unfastened the top button of her blouse, then the next one. She would have had to have been a contortionist to undo the third button. Next came the buttons on the sleeves. Héctor sat watching her sad, sweet striptease, overcome by a feeling of extreme loneliness. She pulled the blouse off over her head, once again exposing her breasts. The woman with the ponytail smiled.
It was almost dark now. There were no lights on in the apartment and the room and the balcony were sunk in the last feeble light of evening, augmented by the still-dim beams of the streetlights. Héctor took off his jacket, his shoulder holster, and his shirt, and piled them up at his side. Then he took his pants off. He sat back down and his bare buttocks scraped on the cold floor. He found his Delicado filters in the pile of clothes, lit one, and breathed the smoke deep into his lungs.
“Come on in, you miserable one-eyed detective. You’ll die of cold,” she said, opening the door.
***
“They won’t be satisfied until they see you dead and in your grave,” said El Gallo.
They were sitting on a bench in the middle of the Parque Hundido. A few small children ran past them, dressed in red-checked shirts and blue pants. They shouted a strange litany: “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg…”
“I’d like to know what started all this,” said Héctor. “I’ve got what’s called an unhealthy curiosity.”
“An unhealthy curiosity?”
“That’s what my ex-wife always said when I got interested in something I wasn’t supposed to be interested in.”
El Gallo took out a short cigar and rolled it around between his fingers.
“The whole thing stinks. They’re watching the office like vultures, they’re watching your apartment…”
El Gallo lit his cigar. They stood up together and started to walk.
“How about you, Gallo? How’re you holding up?”
“I couldn’t stop shaking for two days. It was this weird mixture of fear, revulsion, guilt…But then I told myself: What the hell. Yes, I killed a guy. But I had a good reason for doing it. I hid the gun, and that was that, life goes on. And besides, I’m not the one they’re after, they don’t even know who I am, just another guy who shares your office.”
“You know what, I’m getting married,” Héctor said all of a sudden.
“What worries me is that I don’t really see a way out of this thing for you. This story doesn’t have a happy ending,” said El Gallo. Héctor smiled as an avalanche of small children rushed past them.
“Who are they? How many are there? Who’s their protector?” asked El Gallo.
“They’re everywhere. It could be anyone.”
“But who are they?”
“Everyone. All of them, everywhere,” answered Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, including a good part of the city in a vague sweep of his hand.
“How’s it going to end?”
“When they finally catch up with me, I think,” said the detective, his voice serious.
“Maybe an experienced independent detective like yourself could get work in Africa, or in…somewhere far away I mean.”
“Who knows. I’m sure there’d be work for an engineer, though. That’s why I’m not going,” said Belascoarán.
They came out of the park onto Insurgentes. It was a sunny morning, the southbound lane was full of cars. They strolled along until they reached a sidewalk ice-cream cart.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to get married.”
“I mean, what else?”
“I’m going to find out as much as I can, and fuck them over as much as I can.”
“Yeah, but who’s them?”
“The bad guys,” said Héctor. He asked the ice cream vendor for a double scoop of chocolate and lemon.
“What the hell kind of combination is that?” said El Gallo Villareal.
***
It was one thing to have a pleasant stroll with El Gallo through the Parque Hundido and another thing altogether to walk alone through the city with the weight of three dead men on his back. This thing of “the bad guys” wasn’t enough. He had to give them names, faces, places, a context. Héctor, who had never exactly thought of himself as a man on a collision course with authority, saw the State as something akin to the witch’s castle in Snow White, from which emerged not only the Halcones, but other things too, like his own engineering degree, or the crap you saw on television. There were no gray areas there. It was all one big infernal machine that it was best to keep as far away from as possible. Other times he saw it all as a set of characters to be matched up in a series of epic duels. Both ideas appealed to him. In this corner, wearing the black trunks, the challenger, Mikhail Bakunin; in that corner, the State. Or Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty. In between the two extremes there was nothing, and maybe that was what lay at the source of his grudge match against the unidentified “bad guys.” In them, both of these visions came together.
He changed channels and hit upon a formula that was more manageable, although perhaps less exact. Los Halcones. The tenth of June. Zorak. The subway police, forty of them still operating as a group. Captain Estrella as the visible head.
If there were only just forty, thought Belascoarán. If there were just forty of them, there could be a limit, an end: the three that I killed, the one that El Gallo got, one more tied up naked in the Desierto de los Leones and out of action at least temporarily:
40 – 5 = 35
Having arrived at this encouraging conclusion, he set out to reconnoiter the streets.
***
Carlos had been drinking. It showed in his puffy lips, his narrow, bloodshot blue eyes. Marina didn’t exactly look like the model expectant mother herself, but she did make the effort to get up and put on water for coffee.
“What’s up, Héctor?” asked his brother.
“Why don’t you go wash your face in cold water and then we’ll sit down and tell each other our problems brother-to-brother,” said the detective, throwing his jacket over the back of one chair and slumping down into another.
“If he would only talk to somebody!” shouted Marina, as she put the teapot on to boil on the tiny stove.
“How cold does the water have to be?” asked Carlos.
“Freezing.”
Carlos left his pack of cigarettes on the table and went into the bathroom.
The diminutive size of the apartment gave the things inside it a human dimension. Everything was within reach, and nearly everything could be utilized with just a couple of economical movements. It was crowded, full of things, but not too full. Héctor liked it because it stood out in contrast with the useless abundance in which he himself had lived a few years ago, and with the chaos that surrounded him lately.
Marina placed two coffee cups on the table and put a soft drink out for Héctor. Her belly brushed the back of Héctor’s chair.
“What’s it going to be, a boy or a girl?” he asked.
“You’re the detective,” answered Marina.
Carlos emerged from the bathroom drying his face, his thick red hair falling across his eyes. He squeezed by Héctor and scooted the table out to make room to sit in the chair against the wall, then picked up a coffee cup and set it in front of him. Marina sat down and smiled.
Héctor finished off his soda and took out his pack of Delicado filters.
“Smoke?”
Carlos and Marina each took a cigarette.
Héctor breathed the smoke out through his mouth and nose, like he used to do in high school. A photograph of Ricardo Flores Magón stared at him from the wall. Underneath the picture was a quote that he’d previously come to think of in relation to his brother: “The cliff’s edge does not scare us, falling water is so much more beautiful.”
“So, the government forms the Halcones at the end of 1970 and puts them into action on the tenth of June ’71. Then it demobilizes them…”
“There was too much scandal, things were getting out of hand,” said Carlos.
“I don’t know if you can say they were actually demobilized…” said Marina.
“As a functioning unit…”
“If they never officially existed, then they couldn’t exactly be demobilized,” pointed out Carlos.
“Whatever you want to call it. But after they’re broken up they go on to become part of the subway police, and eight years later, they’re still there, at least a big chunk of them, forty or so, under a Captain Estrella—captain of what I don’t know. That’s one part of the story. The other part is that Zorak dies in a suspicious accident two years after the Halcones are demobilized. Who killed Zorak and what for? The Halcones? The cops? And why has the whole thing come to the surface again eight years later, when it seemed like it had all ended with Zorak’s death? First Don Leobardo shows up with his throat cut in the bathroom of my building, then they send me the photograph of Don Agustín. Both of them worked for Zorak.”
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 10
