Some Clouds
Page 6
Héctor hung up without the obligatory “thanks, brother.” Carlos’s phone was busy. He dialed again.
“Carlos?”
“Do I sound like Carlos?”
“Marina!”
“Yeah. Who’s this? Héctor! What a surprise! Where’ve you been?”
“I’ll tell you later. Is Carlos there?”
“He’s asleep. But wait, I’ll wake him up. Lately he takes his siesta from seven to nine. Do you get to trade them in for another one if you make a mistake the first time?”
“I don’t know if you’d be any better off. There’s always me, and I’m even worse.”
“Forget it, then, I never said anything. Hold on.”
Carlos’s blurred voice came over the line. “Brother. What can I do you for?”
Chapter Seven
“I believed that people only thought about
these things in novels.”
—Nâzim Hikmet
“So you’re Carlos’s brother? Come in,” said the writer, holding out his hand to Héctor and then breaking the handshake almost immediately, as if something else had suddenly crossed his mind.
He was more or less the same age as the detective, although they shared little in the way of appearance. The writer weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and it annoyed him to have people tell him that he was fat, maybe because he wasn’t quite. He was a little under five-five, with thick hair he kept brushing back from one eye, gold-framed glasses set on top of a long nose that rested, in turn, on top of a thick, unruly mustache. When he opened the door he had a glass of Coke in one hand and in the other, a cigarette, which he had to put in his mouth to shake Héctor’s hand. The glass and the cigarette hovered eternally around him, like a physical extension of his hands, and that’s how Héctor would always remember him. That, and a skittish pair of eyes that were always on the move, as if they were more interested in following the thread of the writer’s thoughts than in focusing on his visitor’s face.
“Here, have a seat,” he said, walking into a room lined with bookshelves, and clearing an old sweater and a bunch of papers from a white armchair. “Carlos said you had something very important to tell me. That’s how he put it, and I suppose it must be true, since Carlos doesn’t usually exaggerate about that kind of thing.”
Héctor took a deep breath and dove directly into his story. He tried to repeat The Rat’s exact words.
When he was finished, the writer offered him a cigarette from a pack of Delicado filters and pushed an empty glass, of doubtful cleanliness, toward the detective so that he could pour himself some Coke from the economy-size bottle.
“Looks like I’m screwed,” he said.
“It’s not that bad. You know they’re after you and I know who they are. I can cover you until you can get away. Besides, The Rat made it clear that he didn’t want them to hurt you too much, just take you out of circulation for a while. So if you take yourself out, that ought to satisfy them.”
“Some comfort. I’m screwed either way. They obviously know what I’m on to and they’re not going to let me go any further with it. If I run away, I screw myself, and if I don’t, then they screw me.”
“If that’s the case, then we’re both screwed, because they know about me now, too,” said the detective with a grin. He ran his eyes over the walls full of books, trying to discover some order, some common themes, the erratic logic behind their arrangement.
“But you don’t have a six-year-old daughter.”
Héctor looked at him. The writer hid behind an ashtray heaped with butts.
“You mean she’s all yours? Where’s her mother?”
“In Lisbon, the bitch. You don’t write, do you? No, I didn’t think so, you’re more the protagonist type.…Well, one day I get the bright idea to fall in love with the wife of the Filipino ambassador, and, bam, I get her pregnant. The madame ambassadress—is that what you call her?—she stays holed up the whole time until she has the kid, then she leaves it with me and takes off with her cuckold husband who’s been conveniently transferred to Lisbon, one big happy family.”
“Does the kid live here with you? Do I get to meet her?” asked Héctor.
“Of course,” said the writer, and with the glass of Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he led Héctor along a labyrinthine hallway, lined with bookshelves like the rest of the house, to a white-painted bedroom where a girl slept in a nightgown with a teddy-bear print.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
“What’s her name?” Héctor asked, looking at the vaguely Asian face, the sleeping girl sucking on her thumb.
“Pearl Flower, like this character in a Salgari novel who was a guerrilla commander in the Philippine War. Her mother had a fit over that one. But that’s the way I wanted it and that’s the way it is. We call her Spider here, in the family.”
Héctor and the writer returned to the other room. The writer walked over to the record player, hesitated, and went back to his chair, where he sat with his back to his desk piled with folders, photographs, books, papers, colored pens.
“What year were you born?”
“Forty-nine. You?”
“Same. February.”
“Beat you. January 11; that makes me older,” said the writer. “Let’s have a little show of respect.”
“Yes, sir.” They both grinned. “Now would you mind telling me what you got yourself mixed up in that The Rat’d want to sic his dogs on you?”
“I’ll trade you, Héctor. You tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine.”
“How about some more Coke? I’ll warn you ahead of time, though, my story’s pretty dull. It wouldn’t make a very good novel. The whole plot was pretty obvious from the beginning.”
The writer went off to get another bottle of Coke and Héctor glanced around the room. On the wall over one end of the desk there was a sign that read, Never marry a woman who leaves the caps off your Magic Markers. There were the framed covers of three crime novels, and a photograph from the Spicer strike. The nearest bookshelf held everything by Mailer, Walrauff, Dos Passos, John Reed, Carleton Beals, Rodolfo Walsh, Guillermo Thorndyke, Jim Thompson. Some of the names were familiar, others were a mystery to him. Héctor promised himself to track them down someday when he had the time.
“A Coke for a story,” said the writer, returning.
“A Mr. Costa, the father of three sons and the owner of a few furniture stores, dies in his sleep one day…” began Héctor, who had the feeling he was retelling Little Red Riding Hood for the umpteenth time.
While Héctor talked, the writer sat quietly, hardly moving, forcing himself not to interrupt. He smoked two cigarettes, lighting one off the other, and occasionally scratched his head. The detective tried to concentrate on his story, but part of his mind was taken up with trying to decipher his listener. It was obvious, from the tension in the writer’s expression, from the way he fidgeted in his chair, that he could scarcely keep himself from interrupting.
“And that’s everything there is to tell.”
“Hell, it’s clear as a bell. Like you said, it’s dirty money, but good luck in figuring out who’s behind it. Maybe The Rat’s telling the truth. Maybe there’s more than one of them, whoever it is he’s working for and the others, the rapists and murderers. What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m going to have to talk it over with Anita, explain it to her from the beginning.”
“This country’s a fucking mess. Your average citizen’s naked out there in the street. There’s no way out.”
“What about your story?”
“No, mine’s more or less the same. It’s just that I’m an idiot. I started out following a terrible story: fourteen bodies show up in a sewage canal. Pumped full of bullets, in their underwear, with signs of torture. Not one or two, b
ut fourteen. The papers just print a bunch of bullshit. Then the labels in their underwear provide a clue: one of the men was wearing Venezuelan shorts. So I started to follow the story more closely. I don’t know what the hell for, since I had plenty of problems on my hands to begin with. No, sure, I know why. Curiosity. Because you can never quite believe that this kind of thing’s really true, even though you tell it to yourself out loud every single day. Instead of an “Our Father,” the atheists in this town start off their day with: Save me, brother, from this lousy sewer that I got stuck in, protect me from all the assholes that want to fuck me over, save me from the law and its enforcers.
“You just can’t quite really believe it all, no matter how much you read and how much you tell yourself, and when your luck’s against you, you see it and you live it and you eat it every day.…So finally the mother of one of the fourteen dead men turns up, a poor, ordinary woman, she could just as well have been the old lady who sells tacos over here around the corner. She says her son was a cab driver, that he’d never had anything to do with the rest of them, the other thirteen, that he was a hard worker. And who did your son work for, ma’am? For a nice bunch of boys who rented him the taxi by the hour. Foreigners? Well, they talked a little bit like they were from Veracruz, but no, they weren’t Mexican. Then the cops come out with a real doozy. They said that it was a settling of accounts between foreign guerrilla groups, Salvadorans, Colombians, in Mexico. And I say to myself, look sharp, because that’s a smoke screen if there ever was one. More like a bullshit screen or a smog screen around here. So, after that, I figure it’s got to be them, it’s got to be the cops that’re behind it all. The worst thing about it was that the dead didn’t belong to anyone, they didn’t even have any names. I went back over all the newspaper clippings until I found him, and said to myself: this is the one. A judicial police commander who showed up every other day piling it higher and deeper. This is the guy who killed them. All you have to do is look at his picture and you know it’s got to be him. This guy probably bottle-whipped his mother to death before he was two years old. The guy’s so rotten you can practically see the skin peeling off in front of your eyes. Commander Saavedra, with a ruby ring on one finger and an emerald ring on another.”
“How do you know that?”
“The rings? From the color pictures in Por Esto. With a look of contempt on his face for the human race in general and for the nearest Mexican in particular. All I was missing was a motive, but that wasn’t too hard. Colombians, drugs, coke, they were moving the stuff through Mexico to the United States. And my man finds out about it, murders them, and keeps the stuff for himself. How much could it have been worth? Two, ten, twenty million? Turning the drugs into cash isn’t going to be any problem for him, the judiciales have the whole thing wired, that’s clear as day. So I had all the pieces, all that was left to do was put them together and write my novel. Tell the story. But no, I couldn’t have it be that easy, I had to know more, get some verification, see the faces, the places. And since I’m on vacation from the university, and I had some time, I went and talked to the taxi driver’s mother. Then I went and checked all the cheap hotels in town, and then the not-so-cheap hotels, and then the sort of middle range hotels, until I found it. The hotel where they’d stayed. I went and tracked down a couple of prostitutes who’d been friends of the Colombians. I went to a friend in Foreign Relations to look for the names of Colombians who’d entered the country in the month before the killings. And I found them. I went to the Colombian embassy and spent ten days going through the Colombian newspapers. Shit, it’s as bad there as it is here. I found a couple of them again there. I went and found a rented car that some judicial had returned late with some dumb excuse a week after the murder, then I found a waiter who’d seen the commander talking with two of the Colombians in a restaurant out near the Toluca highway. As you can see, it was all too easy. And that’s as far as I’d gotten, when you walk in and tell me that either I can shove it all up my ass or wait for them to come and bust my head open.”
“Where’s The Rat fit in?”
“This is the first time he’s made an appearance. I know as much about him as you do. He’s a messenger. An irregular. Like the Baker Street kind. He works on the outside for the ones on the inside.”
“And your novel?”
“What novel? I’d pretty much forgotten about it by now.” The writer sat looking out through the window at the night. “Don’t you ever feel like getting the hell out of here? Running away? Before I got involved in this craziness I was writing an article about this buddy of mine and a couple of his friends who got burned real bad in this factory where they worked, and so the rest of the workers went on strike, demanding gloves and other safety gear, and they all ended up getting fired. It’s all the same, isn’t it?”
They smoked for a while in silence, each one withdrawing from the other’s story to submerge himself again in his own thoughts.
“So why don’t you get the hell out?”
“Why don’t you?”
“Me, because I’m stubborn. And anyway, violence freaks me out, but I don’t freeze up,” said Héctor, surprised by his own words.
“I’m not like you then, I freeze up. Everything but my asshole, that is. It gives me the runs,” said the writer, proud of his confession. “I’m one chicken-shit Mexican.”
“No, there isn’t anyone around here who isn’t scared.”
“Well I get real scared.…You think they’re out there?”
“Probably. They’re driving a black Datsun with Mexico State plates.”
The novelist kept his eyes fixed on the window.
“I like this street. We even get birds here in the morning.…There’s the Datsun.”
“You want to go have a little talk with them?”
“How’re you going to do that?”
“Just follow me, you’ll see. Have you got any gasoline?”
“What do I look like, a gas station?”
“Something that’ll burn, then.”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe about half a can of lighter fluid. What’re you going to do?”
“What’s that Kaliman says, on the radio show?”
“Serenity and patience, Solín. I’m the one who’s supposed to be thinking up that kind of thing, Detective.”
“Leave the lights on. As long as nothing changes, they won’t think anything’s wrong. They’re not paying any attention to people coming into the building. I walked right in behind a woman and her kid without any problem.”
“That’d be Mrs. Salgado, in number three.”
“But they’re going to be watching for people going out. Where’re they parked?”
“Just past the door, about ten or fifteen yards.”
“Is there any other way out of the building?”
“No…wait a minute. Elías has a window that lets out on Benjamín Hill.”
Belascoarán and the writer crawled through the ground-floor window of the writer’s surprised neighbor and crouched motionless for an instant on the dark sidewalk.
“Wait here. Once I get them out of the car, then you can come over,” said Héctor, and he slipped off between the parked cars. The street was dark enough, with one lamppost at either end of the block and the light from a few windows, and it was easy for Héctor to be a shadow among shadows, creeping up to the back of the Datsun. “Where’s a Datsun’s motor, in back or in front?” he wondered. It wouldn’t do to blow up the damn thing. “In front,” he decided, and, keeping out of sight of the dozing gunmen, he squirted the lighter fluid across the back of the car, more by squeezing the metal can than by dumping it out, which would have made it easier for them to see him. Then he took out his lighter and held it to a spot where he thought he’d left a good dose. The conflagration nearly blinded him for life. He fell backward from the surprise and pulled out his gun.
“Blow on it, maybe you can put it out,” said the detective, showing the two gunmen the black hole of his .38.
“Hell, mister, this isn’t fair. And I thought you were a gentleman.”
“This son of a bitch is gonna fuck up our wheels,” said his partner.
It made a pretty blaze, full of movement, the burning lighter fluid dripping down the car’s sides.
“Put your guns on the ground and blow, I wasn’t joking,” said Héctor. But they ignored him.
“Nice bonfire you’ve got there, Detective,” said the writer, approaching the car and watching the two thugs out of the corner of his eye while they laid their guns on the ground, holding them delicately with two fingers as if they were covered with shit.
Just the way it had flared up, the fire died back down. A few of the neighbors clapped from the safety of their windows.
“This here’s the writer you were looking for, and now he knows who you are and who you work for. So the fun’s over. You’d better go tell The Rat that this is as far as it goes.”
One of the rear tires started to go flat, letting out a soft hiss. Here and there the paint blistered and cracked.
“The boss isn’t going to like it.”
“Sorry, friend, that’s how it goes sometimes,” said Héctor and, collecting the guns from the ground, he passed one to the writer and started back toward the apartment building.
“How’d I do?” asked Héctor.
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like they do it in the novels, but I’d say it was pretty damn good. One hell of a fire. I’m going to buy a couple more cans of lighter fluid, to have them around just in case.”
“Buy me one, too,” said Héctor, grinning.
Chapter Eight
“I’m thirty years old, my hair’s going grey.