Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  I’m not tired.”

  —Ernst Toller

  As he moved into the fifth day of his investigation of the Costa family’s destruction, Héctor found himself out of sorts. Almost completely useless. What was next? He had Anita under cover in the hospital. Cautiously, he was getting back in touch with the city. He’d fixed his record player when he’d gotten home. And now, after struggling through a black night, he was at a dead end.

  He’d woken up soaked with sweat, wrapped inside his sheets like a mummy, the muscles of his left arm tight and cramped, his jaw tense, his breath irregular. He’d come back to the city of his worst nightmares and, like before, he was finding it hard to wake up, a thick sleep clinging to him, dragging him down into the depths of the public and private hell of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.

  He found some bottles of soda pop in the kitchen. He opened one and, trying to keep his unbuttoned pajamas from falling down, went back to bed to smoke and reconstruct his conversation with The Rat. Half an hour later he called his new friend the writer on the telephone.

  “Everything okay?”

  “To quote the guy who fell off a thirty-story building, when he was halfway down: so far, so good. I went out to the store and now I’m playing tic-tac-toe with my daughter. I still haven’t decided what to do.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “How’s your friend in the hospital?”

  “I’m going to go see her in a while.”

  “I think I’ll write for a couple of hours and then cook up some serious food.”

  “Sounds good. By the way, I liked the Mailer book.”

  “I told you you would.”

  ***

  He dove into downtown Mexico City like a scuba diver into the past, repeating the same questions in the three Costa furniture stores. He was looking for a connection between the deceased owner and someone, prior to August 1977. Maybe an old acquaintance, a friend or client. Someone who at some point had become the link that turned Costa into a personal banker for someone who wasn’t able to use the services of the Bank of Mexico. It wasn’t going to be the mob, because the mob had its own system. It would have to be someone in the government, someone in a position of power, who suddenly had a huge amount of cash on his hands and no way to move it, to hold onto it. Someone who had to bury his money deep enough so that his superiors, his friends, his co-workers, the press, wouldn’t know it was there. Someone who could pay an occasional visit to a downtown furniture store owner and pass him an envelope full of cash.

  That was his first objective. The second was an account book with a record of where the money had come from. According to Vallina it could be anything from a little five-by-five-inch notebook to three encyclopedia-sized volumes. And, while he had hopes of finding out something about Costa’s associates, the account book seemed like a hopeless proposition. The book had probably disappeared from Costa’s house on the day of his son’s murder. And it had probably been the book, and not the son, which the murderers had been after.

  Whatever the chances, he was determined to give it his best shot. Héctor talked with three store managers, seven salesmen, one errand boy, three chauffeurs, and came up with his hands empty. Ever the positive thinker, Héctor told himself that now he knew more than he had before about the furniture business, and he abandoned the city center.

  ***

  “I got this idea in the metro. And it’s like getting kissed by a sixteen-year-old, it’s got me all fired up. I just hope you can help me with it, Red, because I don’t know where else to turn.”

  Anita watched him, cheerful. El Horrores had set a vase of flowers on the night table. El Angel had found a guitar somewhere and was plucking out a few chords, murmuring boleros in a low, hoarse voice. Héctor asked the two wrestlers to leave them alone for a minute and then started in with his disjointed account.

  “I figure that what we’re looking for isn’t just some casual or business relationship. No one lets go of millions and millions just like that, no matter how much he trusts the other person, and without receipts or anything. The connection’s got to be something more solid than a simple friendship. Except for maybe some kind of lifelong friendship, something really tight, not just your occasional drinking buddy. It had to be family. A godfather to one of his kids, a brother, something like that…Who were your father-in-law’s closest relatives?”

  “He didn’t have any brothers or sisters. And I never met any cousins either. His wife died years ago. And friends, what you and I would call friends, no one I can remember. But the truth is that I’m not really the one to ask. I never liked the old man, I didn’t like to go to his house. Luis and I almost never went there. Now and then for a birthday party, a Christmas dinner. But almost never.”

  “Who else came to Christmas dinner?”

  “No one. Luis’s brothers, the maid, me, the old man. That’s all.”

  “What about presents? Think, Anita, did anybody send presents?”

  “Sure, I mean there was always a bunch of big gift baskets and stuff, probably from clients, people he knew from business, that sort of thing. There wasn’t anything personal that I can remember.”

  “Dammit, there’s got to be an opening somewhere.”

  “What have you found out, Héctor?” asked Anita.

  “Not much. I know that starting in August of ’76 he began acting as the under-the-table banker for someone or some group of someones. And apparently there’s two different groups who’re after the money now, The Rat’s people and someone else. At least that’s how The Rat tells it.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I talked to him. He says you should take your five million and get out, says to leave the rest to him, that the money doesn’t belong to you.”

  “And what about Luis?”

  “That’s what I asked him. He said that the dead are dead.”

  “Couldn’t we go to the police, to the newspapers? Make some noise?”

  “I don’t see how it would get us anywhere to go to the cops. El Negro Guzmán did a survey for France Press a while back, and it turned out that the police are behind something like seventy-six percent of the serious crime in Mexico City. The Rat is connected with a commander from the judiciales, a man named Saavedra. And who knows how many others. The men who raped you and beat you up could have been cops, who knows? As far as the newspapers are concerned, with the little we’ve got, I don’t think they’d go for it, and they probably wouldn’t even dare to print it anyway.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do in Mexico?” asked Anita. It wasn’t a bad question. Héctor thought about it before answering.

  “I can keep up the pressure, keep on pushing.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Well, I guess that even if you were to leave the country and drop the whole thing, I’d still stay on the case,” said the detective. “Out of stubbornness. You don’t play to win anymore, you just play to survive and to keep on fucking with the other guy.”

  Anita leaned back against her two pillows and sighed. The scar on her chin softened a little.

  “How do you like the company?”

  “They’re wonderful, real sweethearts. You’d never guess it from looking at them, would you?”

  “They’re a couple of super guys. And honest, too. They never won a fight that wasn’t rigged their way from the get-go. If pro wrestling was a serious sport they would have been two great wrestlers.”

  “I feel like a kid again with them around. They keep offering to bring me coffee, or to fix my pillow, or adjust the TV. And they’re incredibly modest and polite. At night they take turns in the bathroom, and put on these cute little purple and green pajamas that are a couple of sizes too small. Like flood pants. Their feet hang over the end of the bed. They’re real characters. And the doctors get all freaked out, they’re
afraid to even raise their voices.”

  “When are they going to let you out of here?”

  “They said that I can go tomorrow. But that I have to stay in bed for another week still. Have you seen Elisa? She was here yesterday asking about you. She told me to tell you that if you don’t call her she’s going to punch out your good eye.”

  “I’ll call her today, don’t worry,” said Héctor and, lighting a cigarette, he waved good-bye. “See you later, Red.”

  “See you later, Detective.”

  He was standing in front of the hospital’s main entrance when El Horrores ran up, out of breath.

  “Hey, Belas, she says that if the name you said was Saavedra…”

  “Saavedra, yeah.”

  “Then she says for you to get your ass back up there.”

  Anita was standing in a bathrobe by the bed when Héctor and El Horrores came in the room.

  “I’m sorry, Héctor, it won’t happen again. It’s just that I can’t think straight anymore, I’m not myself. Luis is… Luis’s full last name was Costa Saavedra. Saavedra is his mom’s name. His mom had a brother. I never met him, he never came around the house, or who knows, but I never met him. I remembered just now because of the name. Sorry I’m such an idiot.”

  ***

  He had lunch with Elisa in a Chinese restaurant on the corner of Insurgentes and Hamburgo. He had her bring him the keys to the Costas’ house in Polanco, and she balled him out for not having called her sooner, then wheedled a shortened version of the last few days out of him. Héctor, who was a poor enough storyteller to begin with, kept shifting his thoughts back and forth between what he hoped to find in the house in Polanco, the story so far, and his plate of beef strips in abalone sauce.

  “So how did your writer friend feel after all that?”

  “He was fine. I left him safe and sound in his apartment.”

  “I’ve read two of his books. One was a mystery novel, and the other one was a book about this strike of women workers at a garment factory in Monterrey.”

  “Any good?”

  “They were all right. I mean I don’t think he’ll win the Nobel Prize or anything, but I liked them,” said Elisa with a smile. Did he owe her anything? She’d gotten him into this. She’d taken him away from the beach and the palm trees and brought him back to the city. Should he thank her?

  “How do you think Anita’s doing? You know her better than I do,” said Héctor, to break the thread of his thoughts.

  “She’s coming around. Those two guys you left her with are something else.”

  “They’re buddies of mine. They’re quite a pair.”

  “Are they for real or do they just look the part?”

  “You mean do they hit for real or is it just for show?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Let’s just say that no one’d better try and get too close to Anita. One time El Horrores was horsing around and he gave me a backhand that broke one of my ribs.”

  “I made a point of being polite to them. They command respect.”

  “Why don’t you ask them for their autographs next time you see them? They’d be thrilled. You could start a collection. I get the feeling that El Horrores and El Angel are enjoying themselves, apart from what I’m paying them. When I left them just now El Angel made sure to tell me that Anita was doing fine and not to worry about a thing. Anita can bring out the paternal instinct even in a professional wrestler.”

  “Yeah, in everybody except the ones who raped her and nearly killed her.”

  ***

  He got down from the bus in front of the Hospital Español and bought the afternoon edition of Ultimas Noticias. He glanced at the headlines: new offshore oil field discovered in the Gulf of Mexico; strike broken at the government-run pawn shops. He stuck the paper in his pocket, then walked a couple of blocks through the side streets of Polanco, along Lamartine. It was threatening to rain again. The house he was looking for was wedged between two buildings. It was a big place with a tiny front yard, a driveway, and an old rusted swing set in the back, left over from the three brothers’ childhood, fifteen or twenty years ago. He tried the keys and got the right one on the first try. He wandered through the rooms looking for the scene of the murder. It wasn’t hard to find. The rug was stained dark. After that he looked for the old man’s bedroom. It was the third room he came to, after a room with Playboy pinups on the walls, and a bathroom with a sunken tub. So it had to be this one, with the bed with little ornate wooden feet that must have come straight from the Costa salesroom. He stopped in front of an old bureau and dug into the drawers until he found a wooden box full of old papers and photographs. He dumped the box out on top of the bed and looked through the pictures one by one until he found what he was looking for. A series of pictures from a wedding in the 1950s. The bride all in white, the furniture man in pearl gray. And standing to the couple’s right, a young man of about twenty with slicked-back hair and a brand new suit. That would have to be him, either that or another one who showed up several times, in his late twenties, an arid, unfriendly face; or the smiling man with glasses who appeared in almost all of the pictures, hugging the bride and slapping the groom on the back. He put the pictures in his pocket and went out into the street. It was raining. The sidewalks were empty, Polanco had been taken over by automobiles.

  ***

  On the bus on the way back he took out the newspaper again. And there, on page three, was a picture of The Rat, his head on his desk. The headline read: arturo melgar murdered in his office. The article gave a brief summary of The Rat’s public biography and went on to say that the woman who did the cleaning in the offices of National Consulting Services had found him early in the morning with a bullet in his forehead, fired at point-blank range. How had the killer gotten through The Rat’s strange security system, with its up and down staircases? They’d gotten to him only a few hours after his meeting with Héctor. Poor little Rat. He’d thought the system belonged to him and then the system had come and splattered his brains against the wall. So Mr. Z and his people existed after all. What was it The Rat had said? “The dead? Which ones, brother?” Well now he was one of them.

  ***

  “Take a look at these pictures and tell me if you recognize anyone,” said Héctor as soon as the door opened.

  “Hell, how old are these pictures, fifteen, twenty years?” said the writer.

  “Twenty-five,” said the detective.

  “Lemme see, Papi,” said his daughter.

  “Here, take a look, Flor, but be careful, they belong to my friend the detective.”

  “Is he a cop?”

  “No, more like a kind of democratic detective.”

  “Like on TV?”

  “Sure, on Albanian TV, maybe. Bring us a couple of Cokes, Flor, will you.…This one here, this one, put another twenty, twenty-five years on him and that’s Saavedra. Hell, I hardly recognize him. He couldn’t be more than eighteen or twenty here, just a kid, and now he’s forty-five, going bald, with a double chin, slackjawed. Take a look for yourself,” said the writer, and he pulled several magazines off a bookshelf, shuffled through them until he found a Por Esto with Saavedra’s picture in color on the cover.

  Héctor compared the pictures. It was the same man. The same and different, battered by the years, a lot worse.

  “Who’re the rest of the people in these pictures, detective?”

  “These are the wedding pictures of old man Costa and Miss Saavedra, twenty-five years ago.”

  “Well, whaddaya know.”

  The writer put on his glasses, sat down in front of his typewriter, and started to beat furiously on the keys.

  “Sorry, but you caught me in the middle of something.”

  Héctor watched the little girl come back into the room, precariously balancing a bottle of Co
ke and three glasses, including a big red plastic one.

  “Careful,” said Héctor.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got her trained,” said the girl’s father.

  “I’m trained,” she said, staring up at the democratic detective from Albanian television.

  “I’ve got more news,” said Héctor, holding out the damp copy of Ultimas Noticias. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Show him, Flor. Don’t let him get lost.”

  Héctor followed, the girl dancing down the hallway.

  “I’m going to be an Olympic gymnast,” she said, opening the bathroom door.

  “Me, too, but not until next year. This year they didn’t let in any one-eyed gymnasts,” Héctor told her. He took a towel and dried his rain-soaked head and neck.

  When Héctor returned, the writer was closing the newspaper. He got up and walked over to a low table between two armchairs and poured out three Cokes.

  “I was thinking about packing up and going off to Australia to write my novel. Now what do I do? Do I relax or do I start to worry for real?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose you could still go off to Australia to write. The Rat wasn’t the one who made the decisions, or at least not the big ones. They came down to him from above. And, anyway, if you’re going to go after a judicial commander, you already know what you’re up against there.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Beats me. Maybe whoever’s laying claim to Costa’s money, rightfully or otherwise. There’s a hell of a lot of money there and, if they start to fight over it, there’s going to be more than one dead man.”

  “How about you? What’ve you got now? A triangle that connects the now-departed Rat with my Commander Saavedra and the Costa family. I think your novel is better than mine.”

  “No, what I’ve got is better still. I’ve got a connection between a guy who could get his hands on that kind of money and another guy he could trust enough to hold on to it for him. I’ve got what I was looking for. Why Costa? Why some lousy two-bit furniture salesman? Because they were brothers-in-law, that’s why. Brothers-in-law! Give me a break.”