Some Clouds

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Héctor pulled in air, let out something between a shout and a groan, gasped, crawled toward the stool. Shorty grabbed him by the foot; the shoe came off in his hand.

  “The stupid son of a bitch has a hole in his sock.” He laughed.

  Héctor shot out his other foot and caught the leg of the stool. Blondy saw what was coming, stood halfway up, went over backward with the stool, knocking his head against the record player. Blood spilled from Blondy’s split lip, but Héctor barely had time to appreciate it, because Shorty, still holding on to his other foot, drove a fierce kick into his thigh.

  “Let’s get down to business, dammit,” said the man with the gray suit and the gun, just as the door started to open behind him. He turned around, but not quickly enough, because a hand appeared in the opening. The hand held a clothes iron, which slammed down on the man’s wrist. He yelped and dropped the gun.

  The Wiz materialized behind the iron. In his other hand he held a ring of keys. Shorty brought his hand to the gun in his belt, but he had to let go of Héctor’s foot, and the detective sent him with a kick toward the open door, and into the arms of El Angel, who had followed the landlord into the room.

  Héctor turned to see Blondy coming at him with a knife. An enormous hand settled softly on the detective’s shoulder and moved him to the side. El Horrores advanced on Blondy, who threw himself into reverse, drawing circles in the air with the knife. El Horrores gave him a flying kick, one foot crushing the knife arm, the other foot clipping Blondy on the chin. The apocryphal John Lennon crashed backward. Behind him, Héctor heard the crack of Shorty’s neck snapping under El Angel’s full Nelson. The Wiz stood warily by the door, the iron in one hand, the automatic in the other, the gray-suited man unconscious at his feet.

  “You want me to get rid of him, Héctor?” asked El Horrores, holding Blondy in the air and stepping toward the window.

  “Get rid of him.”

  Blondy kicked and sobbed uselessly as the wrestler held him by the belt and the back of the shirt.

  “Open it for me, willya, Héctor? This one’s too soft to break through on his own.”

  Héctor opened the window. His mouth tasted of blood.

  “I didn’t see anything,” said the Wiz from his post at the doorway.

  Blondy screamed hysterically through the open window. Héctor looked at him without hearing.

  “Leave him on the floor.”

  El Horrores threw the blond man against the wall like an old doll. Wall and body met with a dry thud, knocking a photograph of Héctor’s father’s boat off its hook. The detective took two steps and let himself fall into the wrestler’s arms. Then he stumbled past him into the hall that led to the bedroom. Anita held the pillow in her mouth to keep from screaming, her eyes bulging with terror. Héctor ran his hand softly along her naked shoulder and she started to shout.

  “I wanted to help you but I couldn’t! I swear, Héctor, I couldn’t! I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t move!”

  “It’s all over now, Anita. It’s time to get dressed.”

  ***

  When he heard the first sirens, Héctor picked up the phone and called Marciano Torres at Uno más uno. Torres arrived with a photographer five minutes after the two uniformed cops entered the apartment with their guns drawn. Anita had been quickly relocated to the Wiz’s apartment, and the three bank robbers occupied various positions on the floor. Blondy was crumbled against the wall, in shock, where El Horrores had thrown him. Shorty was dead, his neck broken. The one in the gray suit sprawled in a corner moaning, holding on to his broken wrist. The two cops called in a backup squad car, and the backup cops called in some more. The pulsing red and blue lights filled the street with party colors. Torres’s photographer moved around the room, his flash popping. Héctor washed his face and went into the bedroom to look for his eye patch. He was limping badly.

  “Get these two out of here and take the dead one down to the ambulance,” ordered a police sergeant, who’d taken control, directing the search of the room, collecting the guns and the knife from the floor. Héctor had explained to him how the men were members of the Reyes gang, how they’d come to kill him, and how, purely by coincidence…The sergeant left him in mid-sentence and went out to the street. He came back ten minutes later. Héctor stood in the kitchen, drinking a soda pop with the wrestlers, Torres, and the photographer.

  “Commander Saavedra wants to talk to you,” he said.

  “Don’t let me out of your sight, brother,” Héctor told the reporter. “I’ll fill you in on the details later.”

  He sat in the back of the squad car, siren wailing, followed by the reporter’s car, and another squad car with the two surviving bank robbers. The city, awash with rain, seemed more unreal than ever.

  Saavedra sat behind a metal desk. He was a nervous man, with a tic shuddering along the left side of his mouth. He was light-skinned, balding on top but with his hair longish down the sides, cold blue eyes, slightly overweight for his short five-foot-four-inch frame. He wore a deep red suit and a white shirt. When he turned, his open jacket revealed a glimpse of the gun at his hip.

  “I want to congratulate you,” he said, holding out a hand adorned with two gaudy rings. Héctor held back, holding his right arm with his left hand.

  “Sorry, I must have broken it in the fight,” he said, staring at Saavedra.

  “You should have said something to the sergeant. You could have had it taken care of before you came. There wasn’t any hurry. I only wanted to…”

  The detective dropped into a swivel chair, with Torres, the photographer, and the two wrestlers by his side. A few plainclothesmen stood around and watched. Two more photographers, probably from the judicial police PR office, flashed away at a smiling Commander Saavedra and an exhausted detective slumped in a swivel chair.

  “We’ve been tracking these men down for months, the last members of Reyes’s gang of bank robbers,” announced the commander, as if he were at a press conference. “And now this stroke of luck has brought them into custody. In the name of the department and the officers assigned to this case, I want to publicly thank these citizens and acknowledge their civic valor.”

  Torres pretended to take notes, the photographers clicked and flashed.

  “My men are waiting to take your statements,” said Saavedra. He eyed the detective coldly and left the room.

  “What the hell’s going on around here?” Torres asked Belascoarán.

  “He’s up to his ears in shit, that’s what.”

  “Who, Saavedra?”

  “Who else?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Man who eats his heart poisons himself.”

  —Sabu

  It was four in the morning when Héctor woke Elisa up at their parents’ old house in Coyoacán. It wasn’t Elisa he’d come to see, but the old .22 automatic that their father had left among the papers and books in the library when he died. It was the second time he’d made the sentimental journey back for the pistol. Elisa, in a white nightgown that brushed the floor, her hair standing out strangely around her head, followed him in silence to the library, which was dominated by an oil portrait of their father dressed in the uniform of the Spanish merchant marine.

  Héctor picked up the leather box, took out the gun, weighed it in his hand, then dropped into an armchair. He leaned back, winced, grunted sharply.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A couple of hours ago someone kicked me in the leg, punched me in the stomach, knocked out my glass eye, slapped me in the face, kicked in my ribs, and then this son of a bitch tried to shake my hand. Is that enough?” he said, almost immediately regretting having said so much.

  “I’m sorry, Héctor. I didn’t realize what it meant to get you involved in this.”

  “It’s okay. You’re not the one I’ve got to settle with. It’s…” and he sat thin
king about who, about what. With Saavedra, of course. He kept seeing the tic twisting at the corner of Saavedra’s mouth, over and over. The image was clear, almost cinematographic. But Saavedra wasn’t everything. He had a score to settle with the violence, the fear, Anita’s terror.

  “Can I get you something?” asked Elisa at his side, uncertain.

  “Two aspirins and a glass of milk, isn’t that what Mama always used to say?”

  The library was nearly dark. Elisa had turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the two softly illuminated lamps with their wide shades that the old man had kept on his desk. That’s how it had always been. Elisa remembered too.

  “He’s going to kill me. That son of a motherfucking bitch is going to kill me.”

  “Who, Héctor? What the hell did I get you into?” Elisa brought a hand to her head and nervously tried to smooth out her hair.

  “Forget it, Elisa. I can do without the waterworks.” The words sounded good there, in that room. It was something their father used to say. “If you hadn’t come for me I’d probably have been run over by a bicycle on the beach and died anyway.”

  “Ten days, that’s all it’s been. Ten days,” Elisa said in a tight voice.

  “Just leave me alone, Elisa. Let me be here for a while. I’m beat. I need to recharge. When I looked at Saavedra, I saw my death in his eyes.”

  “Where’s Anita?”

  “Anita’s all right. She’s with the Wiz, in his apartment, with the wrestlers. She’s not the one they want, anyway. They want me now. I could see it in the motherfucker’s eyes.”

  Elisa looked her brother over carefully. He was pale, with pain showing in his dull eyes, his feverish lips. She stood next to the leather armchair, not knowing what to do. As if watching over the dead.

  “Go back to sleep, Elisa, please. I’ve got to go this one alone. It’s inside me. I’ve got to figure out how to bust the whole thing open, how to break it all into so many pieces that there’s no way they could put it back together again. It can’t be that hard. He can’t sleep now, either. He’s rolling around in his bed, or sitting up in his office, thinking how everything’s about to come crashing down on top of him. How, if things start to break, his bosses’ll cut him loose, or, what’s worse, take it one step further, bust his head in with a stapler or something. They don’t give a shit about your crimes, it’s being stupid enough to get caught that they can’t stand for. That’s the rules they play by and he’s breaking the rules. So Commander Saavedra’s not getting any sleep either,” said Héctor, a smile spreading across his face. A smile that scared Elisa.

  ***

  “Can I get you something, Héctor? You want something?”

  “How about a Coke with lime,” said Héctor, his smile warmer now.

  Héctor laughed when he saw the searching way that his brother Carlos was looking at him. The two of them must have been talking about him. He stretched his legs and pulled off the plaid blanket Elisa had covered him with during the night. In the end it had been Héctor who slept, and not Elisa. From the bags under her eyes, she must have spent the whole night watching over him, blaming herself. Shit, I never should have come here. It’s not Elisa’s fault, thought the detective. And then, as if to defend himself from the load that Carlos was about to dump on him, he yawned.

  “You’ve got too much of a bourgeois attitude toward this whole thing, Héctor,” Carlos said seriously, after hearing his brother’s story. “The violence comes straight from the system, when are you going to figure that out?”

  ***

  Héctor was back in form now. He’d had a glass of orange juice and ham and eggs on the patio with his brother and sister, he’d called the Wiz to check on Anita, and he could feel the life flowing through his veins again.

  “The thing that really gets me is that the guy wanted to shake my hand, and I almost did it, I really almost did it,” he said. “That’s what pisses me off the most.”

  “You’re looking at it all wrong, Héctor. You make it sound like the city’s falling apart, like all of a sudden the gangsters are running the show. It’s true, but it didn’t start yesterday. Maybe you’re right, maybe they’ve got more room to move in than usual. There are more hired thugs going around than ever before, that’s for sure. Every two-bit bureaucrat’s got forty bodyguards waiting to run you off the road so their boss can get to work on time. Or like when they shut off four square blocks downtown so that the president’s sister can go out for churros and chocolate for breakfast. They get drunk and start horsing around and blow someone’s cousin away by accident. They run some guy off the Periferico for not getting out of the way fast enough. But that’s the way it is. The cops in this town are as big a cesspool as they are because there’s big money involved. You know what happens to the lowly motorcycle cop who puts the bite on you for three hundred pesos because you ran a stoplight? At the end of the day he has to kick back fifteen hundred or two grand to his sergeant for letting him work the good intersections, and if he doesn’t, he’ll be out sweeping streets or directing traffic, left to eat shit. The guy has to pay for the maintenance on his own bike, because if he takes it to the shop at the station they’ll steal everything down to the spark plugs and, boom, the guy’s back on the streets again, on foot. And he starts every day with eight liters of gas instead of the twelve he’s allotted, because his major and his chief skimmed off the other four. He pays into a pension plan that doesn’t exist, and a life insurance pool that doesn’t exist either. His sergeant kicks back twenty-five grand to the district chief, who runs hot license plates on the side and takes a bite out of the phony pension fund. You know how the commanders call roll at the start of each day at district headquarters? With an envelope in their hand. Officer so-and-so reporting for duty, and there goes the money into the envelope. The district commander must take in half a million pesos every day. He’s got two officers and all they do is collect money.… That’s the system, not a measly three hundred peso bribe.…You have to take a step back to be able to see the system.”

  “Enough, Carlos. The last thing I need right now is a consciousness-raising session. I believe everything you say, but either I figure out some way to stop Saavedra, or pretty soon you’re going to be lighting candles at my funeral.”

  “Try and look at it philosophically, brother,” said Carlos, brushing the hair out of his face and lighting up a cigarette. “All you’ve got to do is find the crack in the system. Saavedra belongs to a scumbag set, they own him, and if he starts to get in the way, they’ll throw him in the garbage can. All you have to do is make it so they throw him away.”

  “The only thing I’ve been able to think of isn’t any good. It’s the simplest way. To bring everything together and turn it over to the newspapers. Some of them would go for it. Torres said he’d get the foreign journalists on it, too, to turn up the pressure. The only problem is that the story I’ve got doesn’t hold together. I know it’s true. Torres knows it’s true. Saavedra knows it’s true. If the cops hadn’t arrived so soon I could have found out if those assholes had Costa’s account book or not. But if they did have it, it’s too late now, because Saavedra’ll have it stuck away safe in a desk drawer somewhere. So there’s nothing I can do there. Of course, I can still take away their main reason for wanting to come after Anita and me. That is, she can shut off the money, give it all to unicef, like Vallina said, or to the guerrillas in Honduras.”

  “El Salvador. If that’s what you want it won’t be hard.”

  “El Salvador, whatever. But that still leaves me with the same problem. Whatever happens, Saavedra’s going to want his revenge.”

  “Get on an airplane. We’ve still got the money Papa left us.”

  “Do it, Héctor, take a plane. And Anita too,” said Elisa, leaving off biting her fingernails for a moment. “Or if you want, we can get on my bike and I’ll take you back to that beach of yours.”
>
  “Sorry, little sister. There’s no going back anymore.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Upon what dead man do I live,

  his bones inside my own?”

  —Roberto Fernández Retamar

  He waited while the diminutive redhead disappeared up the escalator, then roamed around the airport until he could watch the KLM jet take off. Shiny, like a toy, splitting the air with its noise. Endings are so abrupt, Héctor thought, only beginnings have grace. Endings are short, unpleasant, without an overtime where you can object to the way things worked out.

  He walked toward the metro station. On his back he could feel the eyes of the men following him. He didn’t care enough to try and lose them. For now they only followed, keeping their distance, settling the weight of their stares on his back, eyes he wouldn’t see from straight on. He walked along Bucareli, dodging the bicycle acrobatics of the newspaper vendors. At the entrance to the building on Donato Guerra, where he had his office, he saw Don Gaspar getting into the elevator, and turned on his heel.

  He headed back to his apartment, following aimless detours, as if he wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

  The glass from the photo of his father’s boat still lay broken on the rug, by the fallen frame. He collected the bits of glass on a sheet of newspaper and rehung the picture on the wall. Then he threw himself onto his bed. What was he waiting for? The money was taken care of. Torres couldn’t risk breaking the story without more proof to link Saavedra with the bank robbers and Costa’s money. Anita was safe, thirty thousand feet up in the air. She’d given up her inheritance and no one could touch her now, except maybe the Cancer Society, to whom she’d donated the money.

  So what was Saavedra waiting for?

  Héctor took out his gun and played with the chamber. He removed the clip and took out the bullets one by one, replaced them again. The phone rang.

  “He’s dead, brother. Either he got himself killed or they killed him, in an accident out on the highway to Queretaro.”