The Black Minutes (13 page)

He was about to resume walking but the voice of intuition stopped him. He knew Ramírez well enough to know he was hiding something.

“Do you know who it was?” Rangel guessed he did, judging by the forensic specialist’s hesitation.

“It was Jack Williams. He was with his secretary and four gringos.”

Son of a whore! An influential person. He didn’t like dealing with influential people, and the person who’d left without waiting for them was the son of the richest man in the port, owner of the local Cola Drinks bottling plant. Ramírez was sweating, and it wasn’t on account of the 103 degree in-the-shade heat.

“Where’s the body?”

“At the back, in the bathroom. The doctor is there.”

When he stepped through the doorway he had to wait a minute to get used to the dark. Three dark shapes approached him, with each step a little less blurry; the manager must be the one with the biggest potbelly. No need to pull out his badge—there never was, and much less now; nobody wanted to be in that place.

The manager’s name was Lucilo Rivas. Rangel recognized him immediately; he’d seen him many times at a distance, whenever he went to the bar as a customer. He always wore tight-fitting light-colored suits, at least one size too small. Seeing him, the manager made it obvious he recognized him as a regular customer. It was like he was saying: Well, damn, I didn’t know he was a detective. They called him La Cotorra, the Chatterbox, but today he was keeping his mouth shut. Oh, goddamnit, Rangel said to himself, this asshole is going to give us a hard time.

“Is everyone here?”

“If they’d left without paying, I would have noticed.”

“That’s what we’re going to find out. Do you have all of today’s receipts?”

The manager’s expression changed. There you go, thought Rangel, he didn’t like that one bit.

“We just opened.”

“Don’t dick me around. No way they took their checks with them. You must have some record.”

More taciturn than ever, the manager pulled opened a drawer and turned over the receipts. Rangel took the one on top and found what he was looking for. Junior had paid with a credit card:

Cola Drinks Group—Paracuán
John Williams, Jr.
Assistant General Manager

Rangel didn’t have a credit card. If he couldn’t even get to the end of the month with money in his pocket, how could he afford one? For him the cards were like titles of nobility, glimmers of an impossible country, a dream as remote as a Ford in your future.

“What?” The voice of the manager had broken his concentration.

“I said I let him go because he was in such a hurry. He was with some gringo investors, and he had to show them around the city.”

Rangel shook his head. “You and I are going to continue this conversation. What you did is enough for me to haul you in. . . . I’ll take this.” He took the receipts. “Who found her?”

The bartender gestured toward a young man who looked like a bureaucrat, seated at the bar, pale as a ghost. “Oh, man,” said Rangel, “he’s going to faint.”

As usual, Raúl Silva Santacruz had gone to have lunch at the Bar León at two on the dot. Every third day, he came with two colleagues during the hour when they gave away free food; he’d order one or two beers and in exchange they’d serve him a dried shrimp
caldo
, crab or pork tacos, or a
guisado
with rice. On the 17 of March, 1977, he finished his two beers, shared one last dumb joke with his friends, and went to urinate. It was 2:40. Although the bar had urinals in back, usually flooded miasmas, Silva Santacruz preferred to go through the door behind the bar and use the other, better-ventilated, bathroom. It was a room with white tiled walls about four meters high, a rectangular communal urinal, and two stalls, each with a toilet, illuminated by a large window. That day, as he stepped toward the urinal, Raúl Silva Santacruz noticed an object on the floor in front of one of the stalls. He remembered the homeless guys who hung around the plaza and thought, Fuckin’ bums, they just come in here to make a mess. It was normal for vagrants to come into the bar to use the bathrooms and then leave behind their soda bottles, french-fry cartons, and the needles they used to shoot up. He was about to lower his zipper when he noticed that the discarded object was a tiny shoe. He lifted his gaze a few inches and discovered, just inside the stall door, a little kid’s foot poking out.

What he found caused a nervous breakdown. Although the bartender served him a shot of liquor in a tequila glass, his movements remained slow and swaying, as if he were following the rhythms of a waltz. Rangel would have preferred that the witness not drink, but he couldn’t reprimand him: if he weren’t on duty he would have had a shot of rum, too. He didn’t like the job that lay ahead of him one bit, but there was no avoiding it.

A lightning flash illuminated the inside of the restaurant, and the agent knew the journalists had arrived: in this case El Albino,
the crime-beat photographer always first on the scene. For quite a while, Rangel had felt uncomfortable whenever he ran into El Albino, and every time he went to investigate a homicide, he knew he was going to find him. Fuckin’ vulture, who knows who tips him off? he thought. He must have an informer in the department, otherwise there’s no explanation for how he’s always the first one on the scene. It wasn’t that El Albino was a bad person, but it still perturbed Rangel to watch him at work: he was the silent type, with white hair and white eyebrows, always dressed all in white amid the sea of blood. If he’d just make some effort to be amiable, Rangel thought, but he only stirs things up. After him, it wasn’t long before La Chilanga turned up, a graduate of the Carlos Septién García School of Journalism, expelled from the Ibero for her leftist ideas. Whenever she was denied access to a crime scene, La Chilanga usually launched into a long and painful harangue, full of Marxist vocabulary that Rangel didn’t always understand. “Fourth-class materialists, shitty dogs, you’re the armed branch of the bourgeois government.” Rangel didn’t know how to treat her: she used the fact that she was a woman, beautiful, feminist, and educated. Fucking bitch, she’s got me all figured out; she ought to stay in her house. To Rangel it was obvious that reporters got in the way of police work. If it were up to him, he’d forbid them from getting mixed up in investigations, but not everybody thought the same. The chief liked to show off, and Crazyshot liked to show off, and El Travolta—don’t even talk about it, he was practically a
vedette
, a showgirl. And then El Albino tried to cross the security perimeter—in reality, just a pair of chairs in the entranceway to the bar, put there by Ramírez—“Listen,
cabrón!”
Rangel shouted at him, “get the hell outta here!” But El Albino stayed quiet, like he was playing
dead or like an animal who didn’t understand human language. Rangel gave the order to lower the blinds. A minute later, the waiters had shut out the light from the street and the detectives were enveloped in darkness, in the most literal manner.

From the moment he entered, the regulars had stared at him like he was a priest about to perform a secret rite. Fucking assholes, he thought, as if I have any idea how to solve this thing. He figured there were seventy people. Damn, he thought, I’m going to need backup; no way I can interview them all, I didn’t bring a pen, paper, nothing.

“Where is it?”

“There in back, behind the jukebox,” explained the manager, and led him to the main restroom.

The agent shoved aside the tables blocking his path and noticed Rivas paused in the doorway, letting him go by. In that instant he asked himself: What am I going to do when El Travolta gets here? He’s going to give me shit, for sure: What’s up, dude, stepping on my toes? No way,
cabrón
, this is just the way it happened; if you don’t believe me, ask Lolita. And if he gets pissed off, it’s his problem, fat fucking piece of shit; this is his case, not mine.

Rangel had been on the police force six years. He’d seen people killed by bullets, shot at close range, poisoned, drowned, strangled, and run over, heads smashed in with blunt objects, a suicide who’d jumped from a sixth floor, and even a man butted to death by a zebu. But he was completely unprepared for what he was about to find. What he saw before him was the worst thing
that had happened to the city since the nineteenth century. And it was just getting started.

Paracuán was the third oil port on the gulf. The only time it had been on the brink of fame was in 1946, when John Huston came through scouting locations for
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. According to the old guys, they were on the verge of filming in the port, but the cinematographer insisted that another city farther north was more photogenic, and the film crew took off for Tampico. That’s the story of Paracuán: everything good disappears right when it’s about to arrive. In its five-hundred-year existence, it’s suffered every kind of catastrophe. It was the center of indigenous commerce until the Spaniards destroyed it, it became a prosperous mercantile center until the invasion of the French, it had an important stock exchange until the Depression of 1929, and it had great oil fields until they shut down the Oil Workers’ Union. Being in an oil-producing region, it is plagued by the same curse as are the mining towns: great wealth is produced but little or nothing ends up benefiting its residents. Sensational bloody battles happen more or less constantly: when it’s not the sailors, it’s the ranchers, and when it’s not them it’s the unions or the smugglers. They’ve used switchblades, grappling hooks, harpoons, fishhooks, machetes, ropes, cords, frying pans, hydraulic jacks, car bumpers, and even freight cars—all to cause or to fake falls, crashes, work accidents, suicides, drunken deaths. At the political level, the only thing worth mentioning is the incipient opposition, both on the left and on the right. The left continues despite the infighting practically tearing them apart, and saying
right
in Paracuán is the equivalent of saying
far right
: ignorant people, racist and unaccustomed to actual thinking.

Another girl had been found in El Palmar a month before. Her name was Karla Cevallos. A pair of young lovers, whose names
were left out of the papers, were crossing the lagoon in a row-boat when it occurred to them to stop and get out on a reed-covered islet. The woman was the first person to find her. It smells awful here, she said, it really stinks. As she was exploring in the underbrush, her heel got caught on a plastic bag, and when she tried to pull her foot free, she discovered the girl’s remains.
El Mercurio
didn’t spare its readers any unpleasant details or photographs:
BODY FOUND AT LAGOON
. The article said she appeared to have been chopped up into pieces and that wild animals had started to gnaw on her flesh. Ten days before, her parents had reported her disappearance. The last time she was seen alive she was leaving Benito Juárez Public School.

As he stepped through the doorway, he recognized Dr. Ridaura’s white hair. Despite her seventy years, the old lady was on her knees, conducting an exhaustive examination of the stall. She’s even more cold-blooded than Ramírez, Rangel thought. She was from Spain, an immigrant. They said she’d left her country at the end of the civil war. How had a biology professor ended up doing autopsies? Rangel asked himself. For years, her husband had worked at headquarters as their forensic expert, but for the last five years she’d taken over. The day they hired her, the chief asked if she felt capable of taking on her husband’s job, if she thought it would be hard for her to work with corpses. She had replied: “I’ve been a physician for forty years. You let me know if there’s something that can still shock me.” Rangel wondered if she thought the same thing after five years on the force.

When she noticed him, the doctor turned around and lowered her mouth mask.

“Ah! I’m glad you came! I don’t know where to begin. How do you want to proceed?”

She got to her feet and walked toward the agent. The toilet stall door slammed shut before Rangel could get a glimpse of the corpse. Up close, the doctor no longer seemed so calm. She had a pair of tweezers in her right hand and a plastic bag in her left, which amplified her hands’ barely perceptible trembling.
Ay caray
, I can’t let her get me nervous, Rangel said to himself, so he answered her in his calmest voice.

“She hasn’t been moved, right?”

“No, God forbid.”

“Don’t move her until they’ve taken photographs. You have any opinion?”

“It’s too early,” she answered. “I was just getting started, studying the scene. At first glance, she wasn’t killed in situ, they just tossed her here.”

“You sure?”

“It would be impossible to do this without leaving blood all over the floor. And look, there are no stains, and the bag is intact, except for that little hole. . . . You be the judge.”

The doctor moved to one side to let him past. Rangel hesitated, as if avoiding having to look, but was dissuaded by the expressions on the faces of the woman and the manager, who’d come through the door. It was as if they were saying, Do something,
cabrón
; you’re the law, well, show us; you’re supposed to protect us, get moving, don’t be useless. What the hell, Rangel told himself, this is supposed to belong to El Travolta . . . and he decided to go ahead.

He pushed open the stall door with one hand, and the first thing he saw was a black trash bag . . . something that looked like hair . . . strips of a white blouse and a plaid skirt. . . . All of a sudden, he saw the head. How awful, he said to himself; he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He remembered the time
they sent him to the town of Altagracia to pick up the remains of a man devoured by a tiger. Ah,
cabrón
, he thought, who could’ve done this? He felt he hadn’t quite woken up yet, the forty-eight-hour shifts with no sleep had messed with his sense of reality. Oh, God, he said to himself, oh, God, I’m getting dizzy. But he had to get a hold of himself. He was the one conducting the investigation.