That could explain how the whole thing started. But what was it the three men knew?
A new fear awoke inside him. The fear of not knowing, the fear of dying stupid.
***
Captain Freshie had worked as a pharmaceuticals salesman, and he’d lived in a drafty, run-down second-story apartment that the forces of evil apparently hadn’t bothered to keep an eye on. By the time Héctor left the building night had fallen, and he didn’t know any more than when he’d gone inside an hour earlier. Unless it helped to know that Captain Freshie’s real name was Fernando Durero Martínez, and that he’d earned his nickname back in college when he’d led his freshman engineering class in a counterattack against the ferocious hazing of the upperclassmen. That was in 1965. Héctor hurried his step, looking for the entrance to the subway. Now he had another problem; he had to find some place to sleep. And he became aware of an altogether new sensation, as though a bird were flying just behind him, over his shoulder, a bird like a shadow, like a cloud, a barely perceptible beating of wings that made itself felt in the nerve endings just below the surface of his skin and around his spine. He felt cold. He had a fever and a strange feeling of discomfort all over, and the three chocolate bars that he’d gobbled down in a candy shop at the entrance to the subway didn’t make him feel any better.
He could forget about his brother’s apartment, or his sister’s place, the office, the woman with the ponytail. He wasn’t about to lead the bird of death to his own people.
He went down into the Zócalo station and wandered around awhile, looking at the pictures on the walls and the scale models of the old city center. Then he went back up and out again, into the neon night, the street decorated for Christmas. Everyone’s in a hurry, we’re all in a hurry, Héctor told himself, and started walking nowhere in particular.
The basic problem for a man trying to evade his pursuers is the gradual displacement of common sense by instinct, an instinct that becomes duller and duller until it’s reduced to a clumsy reflex stubbornly pushing him to place one foot after another in an endless movement across the urban landscape. So Héctor was forced to make a double effort, to recoup what he felt slipping away and to get his head back in working order. It wasn’t simply a matter of escape; he had to evade the enemy, and he had to evade his own fear as well. In a city of fourteen million people, his would-be assassins—no matter how many there were, no matter how many resources they had at their disposal—could never find him if he wasn’t himself. He could become an insurance salesman walking through the Zócalo, for instance, or…
That’s when the light went on. Inspiration, the old magic. He had to turn the tables on them, take the hunt into his own hands. If they were going to end up killing him anyway the thing to do was to play hard, stir things up, take the fear back to them and throw it in their faces. Once he’d made the decision, right there, under the lights of the National Palace and the Cathedral, and with the cold, lonely flagstones of the Zócalo as his only witnesses, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne went on the offensive. Now the last thing he cared about was where he would spend the night. He spent it keeping watch, like a knight waiting for his dragon, walking, vigilant, through the solitary side streets, the avenues, past the all-night taquerías, the VIP’s and Sanborn’s, the taxis lined up in front of the big hotels, the menudo stands on Mixcoac where drunks went to cure their hangovers, the red-light district behind San Juan de Letran, the run-down nightclubs of the Colonia Obrera. Walking, keeping watch, ever vigilant, depositing his fatigue and drowsiness in a far corner of his mind, while he schemed and figured and plotted out the coming offensive.
***
They always came and went through the rear office door on Pedro Antonio de los Santos, probably because it was easier to park there. After two days of constant observation, using a pair of Zeiss binoculars bought at a pawnshop for an outrageous price, he’d more or less been able to make out their routines. The majority of the ex-Halcones arrived in the early morning (between 9:30 and 10:30), in groups of two or three, then went out again and didn’t report back until six P.M. Commander Sánchez was most likely the gray-haired man in his fifties with the large black car. But it was Captain Estrella who really interested him. Estrella rode in a red Ford Falcon, accompanied constantly by two or three bodyguards, one of whom kept a shotgun, wrapped in a piece of cloth, stowed under the front passenger seat.
The attitude of his subordinates, the second-floor office—into which Héctor could occasionally see through the dirty windows—his carefully guarded movements in the red Ford, all set him apart. He was Héctor’s man.
“How’s it going, man? See anything?” asked his host.
Over the last two days, Héctor had become a shadow of himself. His chin was covered with stubble, his dirty clothes made a noise like crushed cardboard every time he moved, his butt itched, and a tic shivered once every sixty seconds through his good eye.
“Same as always.”
“Must be some real babes.”
“Not bad.”
He’d had the good fortune to find himself an ideal observation post, with almost no effort. He’d simply gone into one of the buildings on the other side of the avenue and knocked on the first apartment he came to on the third floor overlooking the street. The door was opened by a dirty, bedraggled young man, a semipermanent architecture student at the National University, who was supported by his family (the family was from Coahuila, and the money they sent was obviously intended to keep him at a distance). This strange character invited him in, and Héctor introduced himself, smiled, and explained that he needed to use the apartment for an important surveillance job. The man asked him how long it would last, Héctor told him at least two days, they exchanged smiles, and that was that.
There was the smell of marijuana everywhere, exuding from the walls; and the repeated offer of grapes (it seemed that the family back in Coahuila had convinced their offspring that he’d be better off spending his Christmas vacation studying for exams, rather than going home for a visit, and they’d bribed him with a couple of boxes of grapes from the family vineyard). Héctor’s host assumed that his surveillance had something to do with a marital dispute, because the only time he showed any interest and took a look through the detective’s binoculars (like way cool, man) he’d zoomed in on the ass of a secretary filing folders in the subway office. Mostly, he spent his time getting stoned, playing The Doors’ “The End” over and over on the stereo, and studying for his exams, now and then asking Héctor for small amounts of money to cover the most mundane expenses (hey, man, I need ten pesos to buy bread; check it out, man, can you let me have 131 pesos and 86 centavos for my electric bill; hey, man, check it out, it’s 11 pesos for your soda pop and 6 more for mine). Héctor was more than happy to help out.
Héctor finished his notes and shut his notebook. There was only one thing missing from his plan: the escape. It was growing dark on the second full day of surveillance and his eyes watered; half from the tension, half from the smog that rose up from the avenue at all hours of day and night.
“Hey, man, I meant to tell you. There’s going to be a party here tonight. A big blowout.”
“What’s the celebration?”
“The end of exams.”
“They’re over already?”
“No. I just don’t feel like taking any more.”
“What about the water?”
“No, still no water.”
The water had been shut off in the apartment for several weeks, but, by now, Héctor was beyond questions of water or personal hygiene. He’d even finally broken down and tasted a few of the sticky Coahuila grapes. But now he needed to solve the problem of his getaway.
“I wonder if I could get you to invite someone to your party for me?”
“No problem, man, glad to do it. But I could use twenty centavos for the phone call, eighty pesos for booze, and ten for some bread. What do you say, man? That’d be great.”
Héctor handed him ninety pesos and twenty centavos. Then
he gave him the phone number of the woman with the ponytail and a cryptic message. It wasn’t very likely they’d have her phone tapped, but you could never be too careful.
***
At eight in the morning thousands of commuters stormed the entrance to the Juanacatlán subway station, while waves of traffic swept by on the avenue, leaving behind a dirty spume of gray smoke, discarded papers, squash seed husks, dust, and dirt. With his dead eye concealed behind dark glasses, Héctor crossed the street, walked one block north, and waited at the corner. Less than five minutes later, the red Ford Falcon drove by and parked in front of the subway offices. Héctor boarded a bus, looked around quickly at the other passengers, and took out his gun. He pressed it to the driver’s temple and said:
“Do me a favor, pal. Give that red car that’s parked over there a little push, willya?”
The bus hit it full on. One of the Falcon’s doors caved in like a piece of tin. The bus driver had followed Héctor’s instructions with apparent enthusiasm, maybe because of the gun at his head, maybe out of the pure pleasure of being able to crash without having to take responsibility.
Héctor jumped out of the bus. The Falcon’s back door opened and one of the bodyguards jumped out, shotgun in hand. Héctor fired without aiming, missed, and paid for his mistake by having to throw himself to the ground as the double-barreled charge of shot scattered above him, peppering a sidewalk hotdog stand and killing its owner. He shot twice more, hitting the man with the shotgun once in the leg. Captain Estrella and another of his bodyguards dragged themselves out of the far side of the Falcon. Héctor retreated back into the street. A Renault screeched to a halt at his side and the door flew open. Héctor dove into the back seat as the car peeled away from the curb, and the door swung shut.
“I thought you’d never get here,” the detective told the woman with the ponytail.
At this point speed was everything. They went south on Avenida Revolución at over sixty, while Héctor glanced through the back window at the chaos he’d left behind. It would take them at least ten minutes to figure out what had happened. Fortunately there wasn’t much southbound traffic. The girl dropped him off at Tacubaya station and smiled. As she was about to drive off, Héctor asked her:
“Do you want to get married?”
She looked at him without answering. Héctor took a subway ticket out of his back pocket and went down into the subterranean abyss. Luck was with him. A northbound train pulled in a few seconds after he got to the platform. In this way he returned to the Juanacatlán station, underground, a bare seven minutes after he’d left it. He went straight up to the station office. The confusion continued outside in the street, and the only people he saw as he climbed the stairs to the second floor were a pair of secretaries who rushed past him in the opposite direction, without a second look. Once there, he went straight to Captain Estrella’s office, went inside, took out his gun, pulled a chair up behind the door, and sat down to wait.
Chapter Twelve
The morning light shone like the light of a great desert.
—Guillermo Prieto
But the truth is that death is always
the most current of phenomena.
—Tomás Meabe
Héctor pushed hard and Estrella fell forward onto his chair, dragging papers across the desk with him. By the time he recovered, Héctor had closed the door softly and stood pointing his automatic at a target half an inch above Estrella’s nose.
“Good morning, Captain.”
Estrella half closed his eyes to the point where they were two thin, incandescent slits. He didn’t show any surprise; his only motion was to rub his shoulder where he’d hit it on the desk.
“I suppose there’s something you want to know. Go ahead, ask me whatever you want. It doesn’t matter, you’re a dead man any way you look at it.”
“That makes two of us, then. Now we can have a nice little chat, dead man to dead man.”
Estrella didn’t respond. The morning light flooded into the office, like in an enormous desert. Héctor scratched the scar over his dead eye with his left index finger. They stood in silence for a few seconds. He had a tremendous urge to turn around and walk out of the office, go away and never come back.
“Why have you been trying to kill me?”
“Because, unfortunately for you, those idiots got you into this mess.”
“You mean Zorak’s friends?”
“Don’t tell me that this has all been a misunderstanding. Don’t tell me that,” said Estrella. The tiny, porcine eyes opened slightly, and his mouth made a shape that wanted to be a smile. It occurred to Héctor that he’d made a mistake. He had the man with the answers in front of him, only he didn’t know what questions to ask, he didn’t know how to get the answers he needed. And as always when he didn’t know what to do, he took out a cigarette, lit it, held the smoke in as long as he could, then exhaled softly through his nose.
“Captain Freshie told me that the old guys had hired you and I believed him. No, Estrella, that’s not the way things are done,” the captain spoke to himself, shaking his head slowly. “Just look at how many of my men you’ve killed, and all over a stupid misunderstanding. I was beginning to wonder why you weren’t aiming higher up.”
Héctor started to think that the best thing he could possibly do was pull the trigger and then run out, shooting at all of them, at everything.
“Zorak was a two-bit circus magician, my friend, and his three helpers were three poor imbeciles who found themselves out of a job one day when a cable broke on a helicopter. So they started to think and think and think and dig and dig until they finally thought they’d uncovered a bone. Except that bone belonged to me, and no dog’s going to bite me and get away with it. Too bad they had to go and get you mixed up in it. I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble if I’d just checked things out first…”
Héctor stood up and walked toward Estrella. The captain’s face changed slowly and fear showed in his eyes. Héctor hit him hard against the temple with the muzzle of his gun, and a thin line of red appeared on the side of his head.
“You don’t talk about people that way, Captain,” said the detective.
“Calm down,” said Estrella, touching the small wound and looking at the drops of blood on his fingertips.
Héctor hit him again in the same place, and Estrella stifled a cry. Keeping his gun pointed at Estrella, Héctor went over to the window. The traffic rushed by as usual, but in silence; there was no noise of horns and engines and tires on pavement.
The sound of a drawer opening made Héctor turn around. Estrella held a gun in his hand. They both fired at almost the same instant. Héctor’s bullet hit Estrella square in the middle of his forehead, while Estrella’s bullet grazed Héctor’s face and crashed through the window behind him.
Blood covered his good eye. Héctor tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand. He grabbed a chair and broke the window. The noises from the street mixed with the shouts coming now from the outer office. He got out on the ledge and lowered himself down, cutting his left hand on a piece of broken glass. He hung for an instant in midair, then thudded onto the ground ten feet below. He got up, with a dull pain in his leg. Limping, he tried to run toward the sound of a nearby motorcycle, gunned to life by the woman with the ponytail. He couldn’t see; the blood covered his good eye. Two gunshots sounded behind him and he felt a bullet send off sparks from the ground to one side. Commuters about to enter the subway station ran terrified for cover. In the shadows, a friendly hand took him by the shoulder, fingers digging into his collarbone, and helped him onto the motorcycle. He held tight to the familiar body and felt himself thrown back as the bike accelerated. For a dozen elongated seconds his spinal column waited for the impact of the bullet that never came. Then he finally let his head fall against the woman’s back, staining her white nylon windbreaker with his blood.
She weaved through traffic, going south along Revolución. With the back of his hand Héctor
tried again to clean the blood out of his good eye. His hair was matted down around the wound, which stung like a burn, only more. As the motorcycle lost itself in the side streets of Mixcoac, he realized that he was still holding his gun in his hand. He put the gun away and kissed the girl behind the ear.
“Are you okay? You scared me,” she shouted.
“I’m fine. I’m all right. I’m just a misunderstanding,” Héctor shouted over the noise of the bike.
“You’re a what?”
“A fucking misunderstanding.”
She had intended to take him home with her, but the detective had a preference for corner drugstores that went back to his childhood, and they ended up in the back of a small pharmacy in the Colonia Santa Fe. Claiming to have been in an accident, Héctor cleaned himself up and covered the superficial wound with gauze and adhesive tape. They left the motorbike chained to a streetlight and walked to a dusty sliver of park of the kind common to working-class neighborhoods: short on water, trees, and city gardeners. Héctor limped.
“You see what’s going on here? Suppose now I was to go and find the guy who was flying the helicopter when Zorak got killed. And suppose he just happens to have a job with the new governor of Puebla or Durango or wherever, who it turns out is the guy who put together the Halcones in the first place. And he’s going to do whatever he has to keep the story from getting out…Or suppose that Estrella turns out to be the cousin of some big union honcho, and the two of them were reorganizing the Halcones to be his personal security force…Or suppose they’ve been working secretly for the next president…”
“Or maybe they just had an offer to star in next season’s Saturday morning kid’s show on Channel 13, and they didn’t want anybody to know about their ugly past,” she said with a smile.
“Whatever. You see what’s going on here? Estrella said that if I had only known to aim higher up…There’s always a higher up. It’s all the same, they’re everywhere. It could be anyone, everyone.”
No Happy Ending: A Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novel (Héctor Belascoarán Shayne Detective Novels) Page 12
