The Black Minutes (36 page)

Jack wanted to dance but he didn’t; at heart, he was a shy guy.

“Do you know how to dance to this?” he asked.

“For sure,” I said, “it’s totally easy: you point one hand down, then up into the sky, and you move your hips. What’s the deal, dude? Tough guys don’t dance, or what?” Jack was upset because his girl had broken up with him, the prettiest
güerita
in the port. “They say that I’m the Jackal; that goddamn rumor is messing up my life.”

I was an upstanding agent, but I also had feelings, and I said that it was really wrong for her to break up with him so quick.

That’s when I had a revelation, a real vision that hit me all of a sudden: these folks were going to die without ever having lived, life was going to fuck them up, just like my family does to the Christmas turkey, slice by slice, and they were going to die without finding out why or for what they had come into the world. It was enough just to see how they were all standing there, staring at the empty dance floor. I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of sadness.

Right then, they put on “Bring It On Home,” but nobody had it in them to dance, the people were fired up, shaking their feet, there were even a few people moving in their seats, but nobody would start dancing. Then they put on “I Can’t Leave You Alone” by George McRae, and I realized that my mission on earth was something more dangerous than writing a thesis. I said to myself, This is a dangerous mission, but someone’s gotta do it. It takes a real warrior to deal with this situation.

I went out to the center of the dance floor and started to dance in a ritualistic kind of way; I don’t know if you understand that. They shouted at me; “What’s wrong with you, dude? You’re acting stupid,” but I told myself,
Who cares?
I just danced, totally focused on that song; I showed them how it’s done. I danced like it was my last night on earth; like I’d had to travel all around the country to figure out that stuff about the turkey. I danced with my whole body, and suddenly what do you think happened? Everybody started to get up and dance with me; not one or two or three girls, everybody in there stood up all of a sudden, they joined me, and we danced like the primitive cavemen must have danced in the caverns in Altamira; the girls would
come up in front of me, one by one, then they’d move on and leave their place to the next girl; I was so moved watching them, I had tears in my eyes, but I didn’t miss a disco beat, one hand down, one hand raised, pointing up into the infinite sky.
Can’t leave you! No! Can’t leave you alone. Can’t leave you! No! Can’t leave you alone
.

And then, can you dig it? The prettiest girl in the party came up and stopped in front of me, that incredible redhead, goddamn, I mean really incredible, the redhead from Canada; I guessed she was like seventeen years old but I wasn’t really sure. The girl came and smiled at me like no one had ever smiled at me before, and the volume of the music went down a little, enough for me to ask her, “What’s up, girl, where’d you come from?” And her eyes sparkled. I moved closer, it was an intuition, bro, the first intuition of my life, and I moved closer.

We were in the middle of that when El Freaky decided to put on a slow song, and everybody booed. Everyone fled the dance floor and the girl signaled to me to follow her. Like I already said, there were guest rooms, and she took me in that direction. She gave me a long, wet kiss, as we held each other just inside the door; then she went into the room.

Damn, I said to myself, what do I do now? I knew I had to investigate the case, that I had a really important mission, but what could I do? I tried to resist with all my strength, I even grabbed the doorframe, but she kept calling me and I just said over and over again: No, I shouldn’t, I’m a warrior, not just the puppet of my desires. My brain controls my body, not my pelvis. So she did something I didn’t expect: she started to take off her clothes without looking at me and walked toward the bed.

From my point of view, I saw her walk away from me, showing me her back, as she tied up her hair. When she got beside the
bed, she turned—she had the most delicious breasts—and smiled. So I closed the door and pulled the curtains shut. As I took off my clothes, I understood that I wasn’t going to be the one to resolve this case, because already my consciousness was being submerged in nirvana, and my identity and my name were dissolving into infinity. That was the last of the undercover agent.

We were drinking coffee when the phone rang. My sister Consuelo answered and then hung up. It was another case, she told me, they want your help with another case, but you need to rest; remember what the doctor said. And it was the truth, the cardiologist said I needed to take a vacation, preferably at sea level. As soon as Consuelo left, I asked myself if it wasn’t time to retire, and the dusk light seemed to confirm my fears. It would be a pity to stop now, I told myself; at this rate I’ll soon have enough material to finish the book, and to do that I’ll need more cases. I was telling myself this when I looked out at the street and oh, what a surprise! There he was: the man in black, as I’d taken to calling him.

Of all the guys who have followed me, this one is the least discreet. Who knows who’s monitoring me now? I’ve been followed by the Chinese Mafia, the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs, Batista’s police, a certain faction of the CIA, that French guy with the knife, and three dozen fellow detectives; it’s part of the job. I must have done something, I thought, to make this boy stand there outside. In my head, I went over the cases I was working on: the bank fraud, the counterfeit stamps, the businessman’s
disappearance, but none of them seemed important enough to justify the sentry out there.

It could be the government, I said to myself. Since I quit, the president has been keeping close tabs on me. When he or one of his friends is interested in a case I have, one or more agents from the Federal Safety Administration take shifts to follow me, agents that sometimes I myself trained. Of them all, the easiest to notice is this stubborn young man who spends hours in front of my house. He peers inside, making no attempt to conceal his interest, waiting for the moment that I head out into the street. Well, now he’s fucked, I said to myself, it’s going to start raining and I have no plans to leave the house.

I was looking outside when another phone call came in. A voice that I seemed to recognize identified himself as a police officer from Paracuán, Tamaulipas: Vicente Rangel, at your service. The voice reminded me of someone and I couldn’t remember who. Paracuán, Tamaulipas? I asked, “Does Miguel Rivera still work there?” He was my uncle, said the young man, he was my uncle, but he passed away. “How is that possible? When did he die?” The young man said: Three years ago. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I had a lot of feeling for Miguel Rivera.” Yeah, he’s really missed, the young man said to me, we could really use his experience right about now—and I understood that the young man’s voice sounded familiar because he had the same voice as Miguel: a firm, friendly voice. “Believe me, I’m very sorry,” I told him, “your uncle was an amazing individual . . . how can I help you?” Quite the opposite of what I’d expected, Miguel Rivera’s nephew had not only inherited his uncle’s kind voice, but also his vocation, and he had read my books. He was calling on behalf of the mayor of Paracuán, who wanted me to assist his agents in the course of an investigation. Rangel summarized the case: two little
girls dead, both killed in the same excessively violent way, two murders without witnesses or leads. “Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “When dealing with a perfect crime, the only way to find the perpetrator is if someone calls in a tip. Look for someone else because I’m already retired.” It’s important, he said to me. “I know it’s important, but a man my age simply doesn’t have the same strength.” Rangel insisted and I said to him, “Look, I’ll think about it. Call me back in one hour.”

Two voices battled in my head. One told me: Don’t do this, Alfonso, you have to relax, and the other insisted: You have a responsibility, damnit, do it for Miguel Rivera, your friend, who helped you so much. A guy who murders girls, I thought. From what I’ve heard, the case reminds me of what happened in Mexico City with Gregorio Cárdenas, the guy who strangled women. The case in the port would be a difficult one to solve. Although, on the other hand, if organized well, it would undoubtedly be a leap forward for criminology. I could even prove the system I propose in my book, the criminal equation. Why not? I said to myself. I know the port and I could find the perpetrator. If all goes well, I will contribute something and also confirm my theories; besides, Consuelo can’t get upset: I’m just following my doctor’s advice, I’m going to the beach. Little by little, that line of thought won out in my head, so when the officer called again, I accepted and prepared my bags to travel that afternoon. I only insisted on one condition, the same one as always since I retired: that I would investigate at my own expense, independently, and that I would continue the investigation to its full extent, without considering the interests that might be affected. Rangel accepted and I set out on my trip.

I reviewed the notes from my book in process,
The Criminal Equation
, without a doubt my most important work since I wrote
the
Treatise on Criminology
; I packed three shirts and left out the back door in order to evade detection by the lookout. I’m more than seventy years old, but I can still avoid the watchmen if I set out to do so. Over the years, I’ve developed a flawless technique.

Nothing notable happened during the flight, but when I got to headquarters, Rangel left me in the care of a suspicious character who couldn’t have been on good terms with the law: you could smell his criminal history a mile away. “Dr. Quiroz Cuarón? I recognized you from the photo at the end of your book; it’ll be quite an honor to work with the Mexican Sherlock Holmes.” I replied that Sherlock Holmes was a fraud, a simple literary invention, not a real police officer. I’ve never seen anyone resolve a case like Sherlock Holmes, without doing scientific work. As soon as I could, I called Rangel aside and asked him, Is that your lackey? He sighed—
Yes, he’s my assistant
—so I told him that assistants like that one give you more problems then they solve. Your uncle never had assistants, he always worked alone or in a team with other policemen like him.
I’d love that!
The young guy said,
but the way things are now, I can’t trust my coworkers. At least I know that this guy’ll support me for money
.

I said to myself that if Vicente couldn’t trust his own colleagues, things were worse than I thought. Rangel needed help, but I wasn’t sure I could support him. It’s been years since crime became completely transparent to me. . . . There are a small number of story lines about criminals and detectives, and I’ve seen each one of them so many times, in all their variations, that I can recognize them immediately. I suppose that’s the advantage of experience. Just by seeing a situation, I can predict how it’ll end; that’s why it’s so hard to keep hope alive.

The way I see it, everything went downhill starting with President Miguel Alemán. The bureaucrats were only looking out for
their own advancement, there was endless fraud. The idealists like us who started out during the time of Lázaro Cárdenas, people like me, who were looking for justice, we had a tough time just getting our jobs done. It was so much work to find that counterfeiter in Tampico! And to find the guy who killed Trotsky! The way I see it, everything started to come apart when Alemán was president, things got worse with López Mateos, and ended up completely rotten when Echavarreta came to power. We moved from knives to pistols, then to machine guns, then to kidnappings and massacres. I remember when I quit: Look, I told the president, I don’t have anything to do here, I’m leaving and I’m taking my team. We left en masse: Carrillo, Segovia, Lobo, yours truly. We couldn’t keep on like that.

That’s why, when I heard Vicente, I thought I’d just head back home immediately, but in the end he was Miguel Rivera’s nephew and he was asking for my help: an idealist in a sea of corruption. If I accepted the assignment, it was in memory of his irreproachable uncle.

I studied all the evidence that they had. Even though I was tired, I examined all the circumstances of the crimes one by one and visited the crime scenes. It was true, there was no concrete evidence, just one or two inferences that could be made. As I ate lunch with Vicente, it occurred to me to try out my equation. I asked the young man who he thought, out of all the powerful people in the port, had certain characteristics that could predispose them to committing sexual crimes. Who frequented certain places, who was famous for certain excesses, who among them had a criminal history of sexual offenses with a minor? Occasionally, Rangel mentioned an interesting idea and I noted it down in my list. As I made my notes, Vicente got more and more aggravated, because
he didn’t understand my system. He was disturbed by the fate of the little girls, and he wanted to do something quickly. Vicente was a good person, but if I tried to explain my theory about the criminal equation, we would lose precious time, and I was starting to feel tired, so I said to him: Look, Vicente, I’m going to look over the information and later I’ll explain my conclusions; right now, I just want to relax. I was planning to review the possible explanations in light of the system that I myself invented.

He stood up to make some calls and said to me, Sometimes I don’t know why we’re in this, if everything is going against us. Perk up, I said. Sometimes the isolated actions of an individual can change the society at large. That’s what I said to him, and I still regret it. Enthusiasm can provoke delusions.