Mexico City Noir (4 page)
“You have them with you?”
“Correct.”
“I’m going to give you a kiss on the nose, like Scooby-Doo,” Lizzy said before hanging up.
She got in the BMW and asked to be taken to the warehouse.
Pancho silently directed the car toward the warehouse that MDA, their ghost company, had leased in an industrial park in Vallejo. They did not exchange a word during the trip.
The security team at the warehouse waved them in, surprised by the late hour of the visit. A heavy steel door slid open to let the BMW and the Windstars pass.
Bwana, Lizzy’s lieutenant on the north side of the city, received them. He was a cholo, an ex—juvenile delinquent who had learned something about chemistry during his years as a science student. A violent type, he had been raised on the streets of East L.A.
Secretly, Lizzy found him attractive and was fascinated by the wild beauty of his indigenous features; his athletic body, always clothed in baggy jeans, was like a basketball player’s; his naked torso was covered with tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Santa Muerte; his nipples sported rings.
Sometimes, in her deepest dreams, Lizzy allowed herself fantasies about the muscle-bound cholo. Fantasies that vanished as soon as she woke up.
“What’s up, boss?” said Bwana in greeting just outside the warehouse. He had a .38 sticking out of his pants and a green bandanna covering his shaved head.
“I want this over with. Where they are?”
“This way,” he said as he entered the warehouse. Lizzy followed, leaving behind her escorts and the warehouse security guards.
Bwana guided her through narrow corridors of boxes labeled with Korean characters. Pancho walked behind them, a few meters back, with a canvas backpack on his shoulder that caught Bwana’s attention.
Lizzy had specified that the walkways be designed like a labyrinth. Only a few people knew the way to the center. The architect, a gay old maid who used to walk his dogs on Amsterdam Avenue, had been found dead on the freeway to Toluca after he’d finished the job.
The cholo was saying something to his boss but she found it impossible to understand because of the rapid mix of Spanglish and border slang. Every time they reached a door, Bwana keyed an access code into the electronic lock that protected the crossing.
When they arrived at the center of the warehouse, Bwana entered another code. This time, a trapdoor opened, revealing stairs that led to an underground chamber; these were covered by a layer of high-density foam rubber, just like a recording studio.
Moans could be heard coming from below. Barely audible, more like murmurs.
“Welcome to special affairs, boss,” said Bwana.
Lizzy descended the steps. The basement was dark. A switch was touched and a light went on, revealing where the sounds were coming from.
A man and a woman were tied with barbed wire to vinyl chairs and gagged with cinnamon-colored gaffer tape. The woman had a ruptured eye. They were covered with dry blood, a pool of excrement gathered at their feet.
“They stink,” mumbled Lizzy.
Pancho obediently sprayed both bodies with the Lysol he carried in the canvas backpack. The man and woman twisted from the sting of the aerosol.
Lizzy approached the woman and looked with curiosity at her ruined eye.
“You said she was with him when they got him?”
“Correct. She’s his bitch. Bad luck.”
The Constanza cartel boss turned toward the bound man.
It was Wilmer, assistant to Iménez, the Colombian capo with whom Lizzy had been negotiating just weeks before. Bwana’s people had discovered they were bringing Brazilian amphetamines on their own into the country.
Bad idea.
Wilmer had been the person in charge of the operation. Then, he was a real mean motherfucker. Now, what was left of him whimpered like a kicked puppy.
Lizzy noticed a tear sliding down his filthy cheek.
“Deep in shit, everybody’s the same.”
Then she kicked the man’s jaw aikido-style. She felt the bone crack under her foot. The blow knocked him to the ground. His scream would have echoed in the chamber had it not been soundproofed.
The woman began to struggle, trying to shout from under the tape sealing her cracked lips.
Lizzy tore the tape off in one quick move. In the process, she also tore off a good bit of skin.
“What did you say?”
“Please … pu … pu-leeze … you … I have … a daughter …”
On the ground, the man sobbed. Lizzy flipped him over with the tip of her boot. “
Cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend as man,
” she said, then reached her hand out to Pancho.
The bodyguard removed a wooden bat with a Mazatlán Deers logo from the canvas backpack; it had a dozen fourinch steel nails sticking out of it. Lizzy had inherited it from her father.
“
We
deal with amphetamines here,” she said to the man on the ground, “and I don’t like sudacas who get in the way. This is what happens to anybody who tries to horn in on my market. Consider this a declaration of war.”
She advanced toward the man with the bat in her hand. Pancho was silently thankful to have only one eye and to have the scene play out on his blind side. Discreetly, Bwana turned his gaze to the door.
When the woman in the chair saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably.
D
on’t even think you’re making me happy, okay? Don’t even think it. Don’t say a word, just shut up, puto. Don’t even open your fucking mouth or I’ll shut it myself … Everything is your fucking fault.”
The last two words didn’t actually come out like that, but more like “foshin foolt,” because of all the blood in his mouth. Then he spit, half vomiting, half choking. And then he died. Of course he had to die like that, like a pendejo, trying to blame somebody else.
Agent Manterola approached the dead guy and took his car keys, his wallet, and the pair of very big, very dark sunglasses off his head that made him look like a Mayan mummy. Then, after thinking about it, he dropped them back on the ground near the body. Manterola grabbed the guy’s nose and pulled on it. Dead guys aren’t so scary. He took off one of the guy’s shoes, just for the hell of it, and put it on his belly. He didn’t even glance at the other body, that stupid fucking corpse, because it had been that one’s fault that the whole mess started in the first place.
Now it was the fault of the fucking pins with the multicolored heads.
Fucking diaper pins
, Manterola muttered to himself. And he was right. Modernity had arrived at the Office of Urban Crimes, but only in the form of two old computers, though they had somehow managed to get their hands on a huge map of Mexico City, where they marked crime scenes with the multicolored pins. Red for murder, pink for sex crimes, yellow for altercations, green for assaults, blue for kidnappings, lavender for robberies in taxis, orange for carjackings. The Boss of Bosses had passed through the office earlier in the day and had been furious when he saw that that fucking corner couldn’t take one more fucking pin.
So when Manterola got to work, with his funeral suit on—in other words, the same old gray suit he wore every day—with new huevos a la Mexicana stains on the lapels and a black band on his sleeve, he wasn’t surprised to find the commander there staring at the map, waiting for him.
And he wasn’t surprised by what he said either: “What do you think I, the commander, or the chief, or the head of government, thinks when he sees that fucking corner can’t take one more fucking pin?”
Manterola knew he was going to have to pay for not taking better care of his partner, for letting him go ahead on the raid where he ran into that wacko with the machete in his hand.
“What do you want me to do, boss?”
“You tell me. And whatever it is, do it alone. I’m not assigning you a partner because they always get killed. But whatever you’re going to do, just do it. Silvita will deal with the paperwork.”
Manterola gazed over at the map with the intensity of a Japanese tourist standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.
The cursed corner, focus of everything. The intersection of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde in a neighborhood of doctors, just two blocks from the Viaduct. A lower-middle-class neighborhood which had turned destitute and disenfranchised during the crisis in the ’70s, when auto-repair shops became stolen auto-parts dealers.
There was no glamour here. It was a symbol of sleazy and desperate times. It had no relation to the great criminal corners, like the one behind Santa Veracruz in the ’50s, or Loneliness Square, where a homeless death-squad drank industrial-strength alcohol until they dropped, where it was said they’d steal your socks without touching your shoes. It had no relation to the edge of Ixtapalapa, very near Neza, where the Mexican state police committed their crimes in the ’80s. It was the kind of place that Leone would have filmed one of his Westerns.
So for the novelist José Daniel Fierro, the call from the top dog in Mexico City’s government wasn’t a good thing, no matter how unusual it was, in spite of the fact that the only things he liked lately were unusual.
“Fierro, what can we do with Mexico City’s worst corner, the most dangerous one, the one with the most crimes?”
“Give it to Los Angeles. Aren’t we sister cities or something like that? Hollywood would love it.” José Daniel heard a chuckle on the other end of the line, then tried a couple of other proposals. “You could move there, rent an apartment. With your bodyguards you’d scare them off to the next corner … Or send all the cops on vacation to Acapulco and then watch the crime rate come down.”
This time the chuckle wasn’t as hearty.
“I’m serious,” said the government official. José Daniel had known Germán Núñez for years, since the dark days of the PRI when they’d been beaten up together at a political demonstration. He’d had his right eyebrow sliced by a blade and Germán had been kicked in the nuts so hard he’d had to stay in bed for a week putting up with his friends’ jokes.
“And you called a novelist for this?”
“Exactly. A writer of detective fiction. I’m sending you a dossier with a bike messenger. You’re going to love this story.”
José Daniel Fierro, novelist, and Vicente Manterola, cop, analyzed the cursed corner for the reasons already stated. But they didn’t have the same data. Fierro reviewed a study with a statistical appendix. Manterola had a pile of files that went back a couple of years. Perhaps because they were notably different people, from different cities, with different skeletons in their closets and disparate personal histories, they reached different conclusions.
“If I could fuck with two of these gangs of car thieves, I could take down half the damn robbery pins, easy, and maybe some of the assault ones, because when they don’t have cars to steal, that’s what they do, and maybe even some of the yellow pins too, because half the time they’re fighting each other,” Manterola said in a low voice to the head of the Ezcurdia squad, who stared at him with no love lost, since one of those gangs gave him a cut so that he’d always make himself scarce.
“If you fuck with one gang, I’ll tell the other to go steal someplace else, to go rip off cars in Toluca for a month,” the squad leader said in response. “I don’t want any problems with the head of government.”
“Let’s have a festival on that corner, a cultural festival,” José
Daniel suggested to the head of government. “Do you want some meat, my royal sir?”
“If I want meat, I’ll go to the supermarket, pendeja,” Manterola said to a transvestite, whose real name was undoubtedly something like Manolo—or Luis Jorge or Samuel Eduardo, because now, thanks to those fucking Venezuelan telenovelas, it had become fashionable to give babies two names. The guy didn’t actually look too bad: nice legs, even nicer ass, and no question that if he’d run into him in the dark, he’d have given him a whirl.
Manterola knew all too well that more than one of his colleagues liked to be with queens, but always with their macho thing of who-fucked-who. If you did the fucking, you weren’t the fag in the picture. The puto was the other guy. Lord have mercy, what assholes his colleagues could be. Like the dude who said he was disgusted by the whole thing but that his body “asked for it” sometimes.
It was getting dark. To get rid of the faggot, Manterola just ignored him and leaned up against a lamppost at the corner of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde, right in front of a grocery store called La Flor de Gijón which shone its neon through a swarm of flies. He watched the movements inside for a while: maids buying bread, two kids who went in for soda carrying a huge plastic bag. An s.o.b. with the face of an s.o.b. buying cigarettes. Some dude, Cuban or coastal—impossible to tell the difference in the dark—mouthing a cumbia and lazily picking up a six-pack of beer. The old man at the register looked like he’d opened the store after being left back from Cortés’s first expedition. Having absorbed all of this, Manterola entered.
“Good evening.”
“Fuck, that’s the first time in my life a cop has greeted me with a
good evening
,” said the old man—pale like a Spaniard—with a toothless smile.
“How many times have you been robbed?”
“None so far,” replied the old man, with an expression that made it clear he expected nothing good to come from a police visit.
“Even though you’re on the most dangerous corner in all of Mexico City,” said Manterola.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re gonna gimme that story too?”
“Who else told you that?”
“A writer.”
There’s going to be a cultural event of some sort on your corner. It’s a kind of party, a festival, but sponsored by the government. You have to speak with a man whose last name is Mechupas,
said the note scribbled on the Post-it on his desk. Manterola put his hands on his head and discovered his hair was wet with sweat. He’d never heard of such a thing.
He put his files in order, with the one for Fermín Huerta on top. That was the guy, El Mandarín. That was his Saint Peter at the gates of heaven. But what the fuck was this about a party?