Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  It was clear enough that the old man’s heart attack was a direct result of having to manage a bizarre mini-empire that included everything from a candy store in downtown Mexico City to fifteen million pesos in gold coins in a safe deposit box in Monterrey.

  “Where’s the master account book?” Vallina had written in one of the margins. He’d had to reconstruct everything from fragments, notarized contracts, sales receipts, scraps of paper.

  Another note at the end indicated that in 1977 and 1978 Costa had cheated the government out of millions of pesos in taxes.

  It was dirty money, that was obvious enough. But where had it come from? Whose was it? New money came in often enough, but without any regularity, and in amounts that varied from one to ten million pesos at a time. His choice of cities and states followed a clear pattern: Guadalajara, Monterrey, the northwestern states, Puebla. All eighteen of his businesses outside Mexico City fell into one of these four areas. And he’d pretty much divided the money equally between cash, business investments, and precious metals and jewels. That seemed to be the old man’s way of covering himself against losses.

  There was one last detail: money went in, but it didn’t go out. Whoever had used Costa as a banker hadn’t made any withdrawals.

  ***

  The trip to Cuernavaca was pointless; Héctor had known it before he even started out. He’d just wanted to see Alberto Costa’s face, and he’d seen it. The detective and the youngest of the three Costa brothers sat staring silently at each other for fifteen minutes. Héctor smoked a couple of cigarettes, chatted briefly with the doctor, and left the asylum. He took a taxi to the bus station and then took the hour-long bus ride back to the city. He hadn’t found anything he could bring back with him. Not even a feeling of sympathy, just a sense of emptiness, distances. Alberto was somewhere else and Héctor had no way of knowing whether that somewhere else was any better or any worse than the world the twenty-five-year-old boy had left behind.

  ***

  It was getting dark when he got back to Mexico City. He got in a cab and gave a couple of fake addresses before he worked himself up to asking the driver to leave him in front of a building in the Colonia Nápoles. He rang the bell several times and was just starting to think about where he was going to spend the night when the super, returning home with a bagful of fresh pastries, let him in, gave him a smile, and handed him a note with his name on it.

  “The young lady’s gone off to Tequesquitengo. Been there about a month now, water skiing. She left this note for you. You are Héctor, aren’t you? Why, of course you are, I just forget so easily,” she said.

  The note wasn’t much: “We’re even. Nobody’s there when you’re looking for them. You taught me that. Remember? Me.”

  On the other side of the piece of paper he wrote an even shorter reply: “Don’t even think that I came by. Me.” He put it back in the envelope and handed it to the super, who sensed his disappointment.

  But it wasn’t even really disappointment that he felt. It was just plain basic ugly loneliness. With a half-smile hovering around the edges, because that’s how the game was played. Sometimes there was a shoulder to cry on and sometimes there wasn’t. And if you weren’t around to offer your shoulder when it was your turn, the shoulder wouldn’t be there when you needed it, either. That’s just the way it was.

  Without realizing what he was doing, Héctor found himself on a minibus that left him off half a dozen blocks from his house. He ignored his own warnings to himself not to do anything stupid, and headed for home. The sky was black by the time he opened the door to his apartment.

  The layer of dust wasn’t all that thick. The place wasn’t as desolate as he’d imagined. He almost felt cheated. After seven months away his apartment should have been a complete wreck. But that’s not how it was, the place was a lot worse when he lived there. There weren’t any dirty clothes lying around on the floor, his books and records were more or less where they ought to be, the dust was evenly distributed—not piled up in anarchic clumps from ashtrays full of cigarette butts he’d spilled as he walked to the door half asleep to open up for the milkman or the garbage man. Even his bed was made. What the hell was going on? It had been four years since the last time his bed had been made.

  Feeling like a ghost, he picked up the telephone. A recording told him that his line had been disconnected. The phone company was getting friendlier all the time, informing their delinquent customers, and not just outside callers, that their service had been cut off. It was doubly considerate really, because it gave you the option of talking with the voice on the recording, if you were quick enough to get the words out in the right places.

  “We are sorry to inform you—Baby! How’s it going? It’s been a long—orarily out of service—Out of service your ass, sweetheart—(silence)…We are sorry—Never say you’re sorry, baby.…”

  He hung up. That’s not what craziness was all about. Craziness was more sophisticated than that, like fixing dinner for two when you live alone.

  He was setting the plates out on the table when the doorbell rang. And he was feeling so good that he opened the door for his potential murderers with a big smile on his face. They had the looks all right, but they didn’t shoot. They just grinned back and told him that an old acquaintance was waiting to see him.

  Chapter Six

  “It’s not your fault, it’s not anybody’s fault.

  It’s just the way the cards come out.”

  —Doc Holliday in Gunfight at the OK Corral,

  from the screenplay by Leon Uris

  There was nothing threatening about the faces of the two bodyguards as the car followed the Circuito Interior and turned off into the labyrinthine streets of San Miguel Chapultepec. They were just carrying out the routine job of messenger-driver-gofer. Héctor relaxed, his arm pressed tight against the gun at his side. The car pulled up in front of a vacant lot. The driver and his partner got out and waited for Héctor to crawl out of the back-seat. Then, without even looking back to see if he was following, they crossed the empty lot, under the light of a solitary lamppost, to a building with a metal staircase spiraling up the three stories to the roof. A man about fifty years old was waiting at the top of the stairs. He searched Héctor clumsily and took away his gun while the two thugs watched without interest.

  “I’ll hold onto this for you, sonny,” he said in a friendly voice and, tossing the gun onto a rain-rusted metal chair, erased Héctor from his mind. The driver guided Belascoarán past the empty cages for hanging out the wash, the tanks of gas, pushed open a metal door, and they went inside. They headed down a wooden stairway that widened out at the second floor, where bad reproductions of Modiglianis and van Goghs hung on the walls, and finally brought them to a large living room on the ground floor, all the furniture covered with white sheets and an abandoned smell in the air. A uniformed servant carrying a tray loaded with plates and glasses came out of a swinging door that seemed to lead to the kitchen. The driver pointed Héctor to an armchair.

  “Make yourself comfortable. The boss’ll see you in a minute.”

  Héctor settled into the sheet-covered chair and waited.

  “Come in, Mr. Belascoarán,” said The Rat’s voice from behind a sliding door. Héctor stood up and pushed the door open. The room was almost dark, with a metal desk in the center full of newspaper clippings, receipts, sheets of stationery with the PRI letterhead, scribbled on file cards, and behind it, in an executive-style leather swivel chair, The Rat. Oddly enough, there was no telephone on the desk.

  “Have a seat, bro. Please,” said The Rat, whose myopia had increased from what Héctor remembered to the point where his glasses were two dense lenses mounted in black plastic frames. His features had become more marked, his jaw hung slightly, his nose sloped forward, his uncombed hair spread out thinly on top of his head. He was clean-shaven, but he’d let his sideburns grow down
longer than was currently stylish. The overall impression was that of a sickly and childlike adult.

  “I’d pretty much forgotten all about you, you know. We were in the same class, weren’t we? In engineering.”

  Héctor nodded.

  “I knew it; that weird name of yours isn’t too easy to forget. And you finished, didn’t you? You graduated. Sure, of course you did, how were you going to drop out? You were always one of the good ones, the brains. Those were the days, weren’t they? But that’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it?”

  Héctor nodded again.

  “I had you sent for,” said The Rat, staring off in another direction, maybe imagining the street that must have been out there beyond the drawn curtain, “’cause I said to myself, this Belascoarán’s got to be my old buddy, my…But then I thought, no, that’d be too much of a coincidence. But now here you are. I think we’re going to understand each other real good. Aren’t we, bro?”

  Héctor nodded.

  The Rat stopped talking, waiting for an answer from Héctor, or from the inner voice that must have talked to him at night, scolding him for his sins, congratulating him for his successes, or just advising him on proper table manners, personal hygiene, and nutrition. The real sons of bitches always have an inner voice they can count on to give them a hand when they need it.

  Finally he said, “You just tell the girl that the money’s not hers. Tell her the money didn’t belong to the old guy or his kids either.…Tell her that he—how should I put it?—he was just holding on to it for safe keeping. You got that? Look at it this way, bro: if you’re a banker you don’t get to keep the money in the accounts, do you? That’s just basic economics. We gave her her share—more than her share if you ask me. We’ve been more than generous with her, but that’s okay, we’ll just call it service charges, like in a bank. Understand? We’ll just call it that, all right, bro?”

  “Call it whatever the hell you want. What happens now?”

  “Now? Nothing. That’s the end of the story. She keeps her share and leaves the rest alone. I’ll take care of it, she doesn’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll fix it all through her lawyer, no problems, no taxes, everything nice and clean.”

  “And the dead brothers?” said Héctor, looking straight at The Rat.

  “What’re you worried about, the money or the dead? Because here in Mexico, bro, it’s either one or the other—my money or my dear departed who I’ve got to avenge, who I’ve got to settle accounts for. They kill so many of mine, I kill so many of theirs, and I even up the score. And that’s that. But what do you care, anyway? These ones, they died stupid, see? The old man, he even died of natural causes.…I didn’t have anything to do with it, besides. They’re not my dead. I’m not going to take responsibility for them. You’ll have to go somewhere else if you want to settle that score.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere, to someone who thinks the money belongs to him. There’s always going to be someone who thinks that when a bank goes belly-up everyone’s got the right to dress in black and play the part of the poor little old widow with her crummy savings account.…” The Rat laughed. “Fucking little old widows…Look, bro, get yourself out of this, it doesn’t belong to you. It’s not your money, it’s not your old lady, it’s not your bank, they’re not your dead. And they’re not mine either. I’ll make sure the money gets taken care of, and the rest of it, too. That’s what the people whose money it is pay me for, so that it all comes out nice and clean and neat, got that?”

  “So who do I go to if I want to settle accounts?”

  “In Mexico, bro? To the Virgin of Guadalupe.” The Rat took a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose, very softly, as though he were afraid his body might come apart from the effort.

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Héctor, smiling. “Mr. Costa was playing banker for someone you work for who funneled Costa a shitload of dirty money. Let’s call him Mr. X. Now Mr. Costa dies, and Mr. X wants his money back. Then Mr. Costa’s kids die and Mr. X still wants his money, but before he can get to it Mr. Z’s gone and killed Mr. Costa’s kids because it turns out that Mr. X isn’t the only one who wants to get his hands on the money. And now, since you work for Mr. X, you want the widow of Mr. Costa’s last son to get out of Mexico and leave the money behind, but it also turns out that the people who work for Mr. Z want the widow to go away.…”

  “Cut the crap. Since we were old classmates I invited you over here to have a little talk. Now here’s the message: You get out, she gets out. She keeps her money. Everyone’s happy.”

  “And the dead?” said Héctor, standing up.

  “The dead? Which ones, bro, which ones?” said The Rat, looking at the curtains again.

  Héctor walked out and The Rat didn’t look back in his direction. The driver was sitting outside reading a stock-car magazine. He got up to take Héctor back the way they’d come.

  “Fernando!” shouted The Rat from inside the office.

  The driver excused himself with a nod and went in to see his boss. Héctor picked up the magazine and started to read the table of contents, but The Rat’s voice came clearly through the open door.

  “Drop off Mr. Belascoarán wherever he wants, and then go take care of the other job I gave you. You know the one I’m talking about. But take it easy, all right? Make it look like an accident. Like something fell on him when he was out for a walk, or like a hit-and-run, a mugging, something like that. Keep it simple. I don’t want you to get carried away and kill the dumbshit novelist, okay? I just want him out of circulation for a few days, a week, a month tops. Make sure you don’t kill him, and I don’t want it to look like someone was gunning for him either. It’s got to look like an accident. No fuck-ups.”

  Héctor wondered if The Rat had wanted him to hear his instructions on purpose, so that he’d know that he’d been forgiven, absolved by a man who had the power to kill, to destroy, a man who obeyed no law beyond the law of the jungle that this city had become.

  The driver reappeared in the doorway and smiled at Héctor.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  They retraced the strange route they’d taken on the way in, Héctor got his gun back, and they returned to the car where the other bodyguard waited. They got in the car and pulled away from the curb.

  “Where do you want us to take you?”

  “Wherever. Which way are you headed? You can just drop me off somewhere on the way.”

  “The boss said we were supposed to take you wherever you want,” the driver answered politely.

  “No, it’s just that I’m not ready to go home yet. I’ve got a lot on my mind and I thought I’d take a walk and think things over.”

  “It’s always that way when someone has a talk with the boss. He’s always got something interesting to say, if you’ll pardon my butting in,” said the driver, sharing a little gangster wisdom. “We’re headed over to near where we picked you up, near your house there, just one neighborhood over. In the Condesa, instead of the Roma this time.”

  “Hey, how about if we leave it for tomorrow, he’s not going to go out this time of night,” said the other gunman, ignoring Héctor.

  “Come on, let’s get it over with. If he doesn’t come out we’ll just stay and wait for him.”

  “You want to spend all night there? We can go for him in the morning just as easy. Don’t be a jerk.”

  The driver glanced back at Héctor. “What’ll it be, then?” he said over his shoulder. He drove the car along Benjamín Franklin, braking briefly at the red light at Saltillo and accelerating to try and make the light at Nuevo León.

  “Leave me here in front of the bakery on the corner.”

  They let him out and drove away. Héctor looked around desperately for a taxi. If they didn’t get too far ahead he could fo
llow in a taxi and warn their victim about what was waiting for him. But he was out of luck. When he lost sight of the car, he went into the bakery, thumbing through his address book until he found the phone number for Uno más uno.

  “Newsroom.”

  “Marciano Torres, please.”

  “Let me check; I think he went out.”

  Silence. The fluorescent streetlights glowed in the puddles outside the window, creating that phantasmagoric atmosphere that annoyed him so much. The city was unreal enough without special effects courtesy of city hall.

  “Torreeees.”

  “Héctor.”

  “Who?”

  “Héctor Belascoarán.”

  “What’s happening, guy? It’s been years. Somehow I thought you’d left us for good.”

  “I’m calling you because I need a favor, man, it’s important. I need to know which novelists live in the Condesa and could be messed up in problems with…well, in problems. From some digging around they’d been doing or something.”

  “Shit, man, where’d you come up with this one? What do you want a novelist for? You going to tell him your life story? You’d be better off telling me. You’re not exactly what I’d call novel material. You’d fit better in the crime sheet of a rag like this one. Although I don’t know if I could even get you in here, man, they’re kind of highbrow about that kind of stuff. You’re more La Prensa’s kind of thing.…But hold on a minute, let me talk to García Junco, he knows about that literary shit.…”

  Héctor sweated out the minutes. Whoever the guy was, whether or not he’d read one of his novels, he had to get to him before The Rat’s gunmen.

  “The resident egghead says there’re two novelists living in the Condesa, José Emilio Pacheco and Paco Ignacio, who lives on Etla. Sounds like the second one’s probably your man; I guess he writes mysteries or something. I told you this wasn’t your kind of thing.…García says he’s a buddy of your brother Carlos.”