Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. I just remembered this little half-Filipino girl I know.”

  Héctor picked up the suitcase with one hand and held out his other hand to Anita, who took it with an inquisitive look. In the best tradition of late sixties’ romanticism, a redheaded girl in a green dress and a detective with a suitcase crossed the Parque España hand in hand on an afternoon threatening rain. The park was quiet and peaceful. Only they were aware of how they artfully dodged kamikaze kids on bikes; repressed rapists disguised as ice cream vendors; a man pushing a little wooden bus full of children around the park, who, if he’d been born in Las Vegas, would have grown up to be a professional dealer; a housewife returning from Mass, who, if Herminio had had the balls back in 1956, would have been Queen of the Whores in Tamaulipas today; two teenagers who were, without a doubt, the local dope and bubble gum pushers; a street cop from León, Guanajuato, who’d beaten his mother to death with a stone mortar; two city bureaucrats who took bribes from developers in exchange for additional water permits; and Sitting Bull’s mother, condemned by poverty to sell squash seeds in the park, but who prepared love potions and strange poisoned brews at night. They fled before murderous roller skaters who, for lack of money, hadn’t been able to buy the razor-sharp blades for the edges of their American-made skates. They passed a clump of peonies sheltering half a dozen African killer bees, and a self-absorbed guitarist scratching out the first notes of the anarchist hymn “Hijos del Pueblo” and dreaming of bombs in rainbow colors.

  They did all this without paying too much attention, limping a little from their wounds, feeling their hands touch, leaving behind the park and its horrors, its peace and tranquility, at five-thirty in the afternoon on a day threatening rain.

  ***

  Merlin the Magician had his head stuck into an old tube radio made before the Second World War, when he spotted Héctor entering the building hand in hand with a redhead.

  “Monsieur Belascoarán,” he said very properly.

  “Hey, Wiz…You never sent me the books you promised.”

  “How was I supposed to find anything in that mess of yours up there? When did you get back to town?”

  The Wizard was the best landlord in Mexico City, the most affectionate with his renters, the only one who actually slid their mail underneath their apartment doors, and a neglected genius in basic electronics.

  “I’ve been back a couple of days. I slept here last night. Who cleaned up the place, Wiz?”

  “I gave the place a once-over, Héctor, didn’t want it to lose value on me. Nothing to worry about.”

  The first drops started to fall on the flower pots by the front door.

  “It’s going to rain again. Wiz, this is my friend Anita.”

  “It’s a pleasure, miss. Merlin Gutiérrez at your service.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “It’s been raining for six days straight now. Yesterday there was flooding down on the south side, on the Periferico, car wrecks and everything. This town’s all screwed up. It’s not supposed to rain in February. There’s just no telling any more. Do you think it’s ever going to stop?”

  “No, Wiz. This is it. The Deluge. I hope you’ve got your life raft ready.”

  “How about an RCA Victor console with pontoons? That ought to do the trick, dammit.”

  Héctor and Anita started up the stairs as the fat, heavy drops of rain beat the patio.

  “Have you got someplace for me to hang up my X rays?” asked Anita, while Héctor puttered around in the kitchen, opening up a bottle of pop and putting on water to boil for tea.

  “In the bathroom, or by the bed. I always said that what this place was missing was a few good X rays and a Paul Klee poster.”

  “I was just asking because, well, if I’m going to be here a while…”

  “Hey,” said Héctor, poking his head out the kitchen door, “you’re serious about the X rays, aren’t you, Red?”

  “It was a metaphor, dummy.”

  “No, I mean, all of a sudden I remembered you were a doctor and all.”

  “A kidney specialist, almost. But you don’t drink, so I don’t think I’ll do you much good.”

  Héctor put the cup of lemon tea and the soda pop down in the middle of the floor, went over to the record player.

  “What do you want to hear? I just fixed this thing yesterday.”

  “You probably don’t have Forever Young by Joan Baez, do you? No, how could you?”

  “Not so fast,” said Héctor, hunting through the stack of records. The rain slapped across the windowpane, drawing pictures. The light was fading. Anita looked around for something to sit on, then went into the bedroom, came back with a pair of pillows, and settled herself on the floor. She sipped her tea slowly. Joan Baez’s warm, affectionate voice oozed from the speakers: May God bless and keep you always, may your wishes all come true…

  Héctor stood in the middle of the room looking at Anita.

  “I can’t really believe it. It’s like nothing ever happened. Joan Baez and a warm house and the rain outside. I already saw this movie.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, Red. They’ve probably got enough to keep them busy for the moment, with The Rat dead and war declared. But if we keep pushing from this end, you can be sure they’ll be coming after us again.”

  “All I want is one afternoon…just one. Who are they, Héctor?”

  “You’d better get comfortable. I’ll be right back,” said the detective, and he went into the kitchen to get his notebook from his jacket pocket. He came back with a bar stool and set it in the middle of the room.

  “I’m going to fill in the parts I’m still not sure about. This probably isn’t how it happened exactly, but the big picture’s what counts. Anyway, I’ll bet my left testicle that this is how it goes: In 1977, Manuel Reyes, an ex-police sergeant from the Mexico State Radio Patrol, became the country’s number-one bank robber. Who knows why? Maybe he got bored of nickle-and-diming it as a state cop. Maybe he was watching too much TV. Whatever the reason, he picked up a machine gun, put his police training to good use, and started holding up banks. He never wore a mask, so it seems pretty obvious that they knew who he was from the beginning. He always worked with one or two companions and a driver. The list is endless: the Comermex in Arboledas, a Banco Nacional in Satélite, a Banco Internacional in Naucalpan, the Banco de Comercio in Ciudad Azteca…He started out on the outskirts of Mexico City, in Mexico State, then worked his way into town: the Banco de Comercio on Nuevo León, a Banco Nacional in the Roma, and so on. He hit so many banks so fast, it’s like he was going for the world record. At least one a month. Always the same scenario, two or three armed men, with Reyes heading them up. And they didn’t worry their souls too much about having to knock off a few bank guards along the way, or a secretary who screamed, a few innocent bystanders. By August of ’77 the newspapers were calling Reyes public enemy number one, and Commander Saavedra, assistant chief of the judiciales for Mexico City, was put in charge of the manhunt. It’s not hard to figure out what happened next. And it didn’t take long for Reyes and Saavedra to reach an understanding. That’s where your father-in-law, Costa, comes in. One day Commander Saavedra, Costa’s dead wife’s brother, comes to visit him at the furniture store and asks him if he can hold on to some money for him. Take a look at this. On one side you’ve got a list of Reyes’s booty, and on the other you’ve got Costa’s investments. In December ’77 Reyes holds up a bank on Toluca Avenue, kills a guard on the way in, walks away with two and a half million pesos. On December 13 Costa buys two boutiques in the Zona Rosa and one in Monterrey, then deposits one hundred seventy-five thousand in a bank account, for a total of two million three hundred fifty thousand. Here’s another one: a bank robbery on Insurgentes, January 17, 1978, one and a half million. On the nineteenth, C
osta buys a million three hundred thousand pesos in gold centenarios and puts them in a safe deposit box. You’ve got Reyes making the hits on the one hand, Saavedra as middle man, and on the other hand there’s Costa playing banker. There’s about fifteen coincidences like this all together, and if it doesn’t work out just right, it’s probably because Costa didn’t always get the money right away, or the gang spent it on safe houses, guns, cars, whores, whatever, or because Costa was saving up a bunch to buy some business or something. If it wasn’t for that, and maybe because we’ve missed a few safe deposit boxes, it’d all add up to the last cent. So, everything was going along just fine, until last December, when two things happened.

  “First, Reyes was arrested during a botched holdup, when a wounded bank guard shot him in the leg and his buddies escaped without him. He’s still in jail now. Then Costa died of a heart attack. After that I can only speculate. With Reyes in jail, the rest of the gang decides to take their money and get out while they can. Saavedra doesn’t have access to Costa’s accounts and has to put the gang off. Remember we’re talking about nearly two hundred million pesos split five ways: Reyes in jail, Saavedra at police headquarters, and the rest of them on the run. Then somehow, Luis’s two brothers get mixed up in the story. Who killed them? Saavedra? Reyes’s gang? Obviously, they tried to get them to sign the money over. From what you told me about the older brother, maybe he thought he could deal with them, cut himself in. Whatever happened, he ended up dead, and the other brother was so flipped out he wasn’t much good to anyone any more. Think about how they feel, they’re desperate. Two years’ worth of robberies come off without a hitch, and then their banker dies on them and they can’t get to the money. That’s when Luis shows up. And I really don’t know what happened there, when he got killed in New York, if it was just an accident, an absurd coincidence, or if they hired someone to kill him. If that’s the case, then everything points to Saavedra, because I just can’t see the other ones playing gangster in New York. But it doesn’t make any sense, anyway, because they needed an heir in order to be able to get at the money. Saavedra couldn’t operate in the open, so he hired The Rat to put pressure on you and get at the money that way. But Reyes’s gang apparently didn’t feel like waiting around, so they came after you and had you sign the papers. Who knows what they thought they were going to do with them? It’s easier to rob a bank than to legally get the money from an inheritance that’s already changed hands three times in one month. Then they got desperate, killed The Rat…and that’s where we are now.”

  Héctor took a long drink from his soda pop.

  “There’s more. Your father-in-law had a hard time figuring out what to do with all that money, and what he did do with it is pretty confusing. Running three furniture stores is one thing, managing two hundred million pesos in assorted investments is something else. But there is a pattern. Part of the money went to Guadalajara, that’s where Saavedra and your husband’s mother are from. Another part went up to Monterrey and the northwest, and another part went to Puebla, where Reyes is from. You know what they say, there’s no place like home. The other thing is that I’ve got descriptions of two of Reyes’s cronies. All I’ve got is a nickname for one of them, they called him John Lennon, he’s blond, acne all over his face, about five-ten. The other one is another ex-cop named Luis Ramos. This is him in the picture.”

  “That’s the short one, the one who looked like Chelo.”

  “There it is, then. Now all that’s left to do is wrap it up, tie a ribbon around it, and figure out what to do with it.”

  “What can you do?” Anita asked. The automatic return still didn’t work on the record player, despite Héctor’s fix-it job, and the needle danced up and down on the last groove.

  “Protect us from Reyes’s friends and hope that Saavedra doesn’t know we know about his connection to the story. He’s the one I’m really worried about. I got Vallina to find a loophole in the will and set up a way to freeze the money. Of course, you could always just give it all away, and they wouldn’t have any reason to come after you any more.”

  “Who would I give all that money to?”

  “Beats me. Think about it a while.”

  “What happens if we go public with the whole thing?”

  “I’m not too sure it would do us any good. There’ve been accusations in the papers against nearly every top police officer in Mexico City, and nothing ever happens. There just isn’t that much the press can do for us. As far as going to the cops is concerned, I can just see the two of us filing charges at the public attorney’s office. They’d laugh us back out onto the street.”

  “Makes you want to push all the furniture against the door and crawl under the bed,” said the redhead.

  “We could do it on top of the bed just as easy,” said Héctor, regretting it almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, when he saw the surprise in Anita’s eyes.

  She got up without saying a word and went into the bathroom. Héctor stepped over and picked up the needle, flipped the record over, and Joan Baez returned to compete with the sound of the rain on the glass.

  What the fuck was he doing? Did he think he was doing himself some kind of favor? Or performing an act of redemption for Anita’s sake? Because they’d killed her husband and raped her and beat her nearly to death? Or was it for real, and was there something truly magical about this little redheaded woman that made him want to love her or that made him love her already? Héctor had read an Ecuadorian poet once who’d said that you could also kill “through loneliness, through fear, through fatigue.” He didn’t like what he’d just done. He walked toward the bathroom to apologize, and found Anita standing naked in front of the mirror. Or nearly naked, with a piece of adhesive tape still covering a spot on her left leg, and a two-inch strip of gauze wrapping itself around her torso just below her breasts.

  “I was just looking at myself. I don’t know if I’m ready yet,” she said, two big tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Come here. I’m an idiot,” said Héctor, and he hugged her gently, put his cheek against her hair, and rocked her with his arms. Anita squeezed herself against him. Héctor put a towel across her shoulders, decided against it, because the towel might be dirty, took it off, picked her up in his arms, and carried her to the bed where he tucked the sheet up under her chin. He started out, meaning to go and meditate on his stupidity alone in the other room, but Anita’s voice caught him at the door.

  “I’m not going to let you get away that easy. Come over here, silly. It was your idea.”

  The doorbell saved him, and he went to open up for the wrestlers, taking the opportunity to get away from the confusion inside his head. Anita let out a soft laugh that chased her tears.

  He opened the door with a big smile, but a fist to the mouth was all it took to tell him that, for the second time that afternoon, he’d made a mistake.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Oftentimes the persecuted lose the ability

  to recognize their own faults.”

  —Bertolt Brecht

  The blow sent him flying backward into the kitchen stool in the middle of the room. He went down and, spinning around, brought his hand to his gun, but the holster was empty; he’d left the gun with his jacket in the kitchen. The short, stocky one threw a kick at his ribs, and Belascoarán rolled to the side, shouting inside his head at Anita not to come out of the bedroom.

  “Don’t move, asshole,” said the blond one with the acne tattoo.

  A third man came in and shut the door. He wore a gray suit at least a size too big for him. He held a .45 automatic in his hand.

  “Where is she?”

  “I left her at her house.”

  “Look at that, the guy’s real quick. He already knows what we’re talking about and everything. So we don’t have to waste no time. What house?”

  While Héctor stared down the b
arrel of the automatic, Blondy caught him with the promised kick to the ribs. It doubled him over like a punching bag, but he held in the pain, the shout, only grunting softly.

  “What house, asshole?”

  “The one in Polanco.”

  “Bullshit. There’s nobody there. Where’d you stash her?”

  The dark, short one jerked Héctor up by the back of his sweater, punched him in the face, dropped him.

  “Shit, man, you poked his eye out.”

  Shorty grabbed Héctor’s face in one hand. He laughed.

  “It isn’t real. It’s all scarred over. Must be a glass eye.”

  “Give it back to him,” said the man by the door. “So he can see us better.”

  “What’d The Rat tell you about us?” Shorty asked, handing Héctor his glass eye, not wanting to hold on to it for very long. Héctor threw it to one side.

  “Who are you?” asked the detective to gain time.

  Blondy picked up the kitchen stool, set it on its legs, sat down, and kicked Héctor’s foot softly with the toe of his boot.

  “What’d The Rat tell you? Did he say the money wasn’t ours, did he tell you to give it to him?”

  Héctor yanked out a tuft of carpet. Without knowing where it came from, he held it in his clenched fist. If Anita could get from the bedroom into the kitchen where his gun was…but he’d have to distract them. He got up and stumbled toward the side of the room with the record player. Shorty stopped him.

  “There’s just two things. Where is she? And what’d The Rat tell you? That’s all we want to know. That isn’t too complicated, is it?”

  He hit Héctor twice, jackhammer style, in the stomach. Héctor felt the air leave his lungs. He dropped to the floor, gasping for breath. Anita would never make it to the kitchen.

  “Let’s burn the soles of his feet, like Cuauhtémoc,” laughed Blondy.