The Uncomfortable Dead (7 page)

“Samuel who?” Belascoarán asked, but Fritz had already hung up.

He ordered tacos at the stand across from his office, but they were too dry and the sauces didn’t help much. Back in the office, he proceeded to waste his time looking though the Mexico City telephone directory, trying to find one of the 12,000 Moraleses, as if merely looking at a name, address, or number was going to give him the clue he needed. He asked a friend of his, part-hacker and part—curiosity psychopath (which in the ’60s was called a nosy parker), who the Moraleses were with the most hits and who were the strangest, but half an hour later he lost heart when she called back.

“Belascoaráncito, listen, Google had 3,700,000 hits for Morales. Can you be more specific? Poems by Lolo Morales? Cooking recipes by Lola Morales? Morales Undertakers?”

“Could you try
Morales
Mexican?”

“Okay, hold on a minute,” Cristina Adler replied, and he could hear her fingers on the keyboard.

“We got it down to 870,000. The Morales Hacienda? Martirio Morales, aunt of someone who gave someone else a drawing.”

“Can you tie it in with the year 1971?”

“I can, Belascoruddy. I can …”

Silence. Coughing.

“Okay. We’re down to 64,000 hits. Is this guy Mexican?”

“Yes!”

“Let me limit this to news reports in Mexico.”

Héctor waited, trying not to make any noise that might break Cristina’s concentration.

“Great, we’re down to 9,510 and heading for a score … Hold on, I’m going to exclude a restaurant, the Morales Hacienda, all the Moraleses in lower-case text, auditors … Damn, Elba Esther’s full name is Elba Esther Gordillo Morales … a soccer player who wears the number 7 … a printer in Chihuahua—”

“That’s no good,” Héctor interrupted. He still didn’t know what he was looking for.

“Mexico City! Let me narrow it down to Mexico City … 815 hits. Now that’s a reasonable number … Let me get rid of the address on Insurgentes Sur, which appears lots of times. Okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“671 hits.”

“Check the police,” Héctor said, growing desperate. Too much information was a lot like—too much like—too little information.

“Okay,” Cristina mumbled into the phone, “171. Pretty decent. What did you say you were looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me read this to you: veterinary police, a photographer … There are a couple of Morales brothers in the Enforcer Brigade of Lucio Cabañas’s Party of the Poor. What is that, Belasco-man? I wasn’t born yet in ’71. Then there’s a deputy chief of Traffic Police whose second family name is Morales, a haute couture shop that makes uniforms for the cops …”

Héctor sighed so hard he almost damaged his surfer’s eardrums.

“That guy is just dumb, he’s a jerk, that’s all, and we’re condemned to be governed by crooks or idiots, one after another, and right now we have an idiot,” lectured Javier Villareal, an engineer also known as the Rooster, an expert in deep drainage and other subterrainities.

“I’m closing on twos,” said Gilberto Gómez Letras, plumber by trade, as he slammed a domino tile on the table. “But the worst thing is when they’re idiots
and
crooks. I pass, of course.”

“Buttocks!” announced Carlos Vargas, illustrious upholsterer, playing the two-four. “Haven’t we had two idiots in a row?”

Héctor winked and gestured left with his arm. He passed. Gilberto should have stuck to his twos.

“What’s so bad about this idiot?”

“He’s always saying we’re growing, that the economy is growing, that we did seven percent, five percent, thirteen and a half. Where does he get those figures? They don’t jibe with anyone else’s. If that asshole were head of the national lottery, nobody would ever win. Whose economy is growing? His, probably, the prick,” said the Rooster, who wasn’t usually vehement about politics but knew a bit about mathematics.

“We’re out of here, buddy,” Gilberto told Héctor, and then, turning to his opponents, “Count them up, gents,” playing his last two.

The game of dominos is an exact science, just like the Marxism of Engels, Plekhanov, and Bukharin. There are twenty-eight tiles distributed around the table and seven rounds to play them. In theory, if you study the first plays and take into account the tiles in your own hand, it is relatively simple to deduce the tiles in anyone else’s hand. That, like Marxism, is the theory. But a social revolution did not take place in nineteenth-century England, despite the fact that it was crawling with horrible little factories and a hard-fighting, beer-drinking proletariat; the dictatorship of the proletariat never actually defended the proletariat, and sometimes quantitative leaps produced qualitative regressions. In dominos, as in life, the chance factor plays a role, sometimes the starring role, and if that isn’t enough, there’re four morons around a table trying to dupe one another.

That Friday night, just like the past forty-five or fifty, in compliance with a New Year’s resolution, the Francisco Villa Club, made up of the four office mates, got together to play dominos and talk politics, the two main factors in the education of any Mexican worthy of the name.

“How’re we doing?” the Rooster asked.

“Badly! Didn’t you say you can’t even trust the numbers anymore?” answered Carlos Vargas. “It’s sixty-two to forty-two. Straight-up numbers with no presidential shuffling. We’re losing!”

“Stop crying, engineer man, and shuffle the tiles.”

Villareal began to move the tiles around the table in slow circular movements.

“The trouble with you is that the free-trade agreement has no impact on plumbers.”

“If you say so, but then how come I’ve been working half-time for the better part of a year? If those assholes out there get a leaky faucet, they don’t call a professional, they patch it up themselves with Durex and rubber bands.”

“Damn, that’s why Bejerano wanted so many rubber bands—to repair his plumbing,” Belascoarán commented, referring to a high-profile corruption case where a leader of the PRD had been videotaped stealing thousands of dollars, and was later caught with rubber bands in his briefcase.

They lost. Furthermore, in the last two games, Carlos and Villareal, the engineer, had murdered them, actually humiliated them. That was why he was almost happy that he had to go out into the chill night air of downtown Mexico City to find his Chinese guy. He caught a taxi to the Colonia del Valle funeral parlor. The sky was gray, the color of lead, and traffic was a bitch. He couldn’t really tell if there were more antennas, but he was certain that there were more cars. What the hell did the people of the capital do when they had nothing else to do?
Les go, man, les go see what the traffic is like,
or, as they say on the radio, what the
vehicular congestion
is like.

Héctor tried it out on the taxi driver.

“So tell me, what’s the vehicular congestion like?”

“Vehicular congestion, my ass. It’s the friggen middle class in this friggen city who don’t have any money to go shopping in December, so they just pretend to go shopping. Before they used to go to the movies, but now they just go to the mall parking lot and then sneak back to their houses,” the driver replied, demonstrating remarkable sociological insight.

“But they spend money on fuel and parking meters, tips for takecarofits, valet parking, and the keepercomins,” added Héctor, showing off his own sociological acumen regarding the new city fauna he had discovered.

The takecarofits had appeared in the last few years. You would park your car on some lonely street and out of nowhere would appear a character with a flannel chamois over his shoulder and a broad smile, saying,
Takecarofit for ya, boss,
with the implicit threat that every malediction in the Talmud and every earthquake in Mexico would befall your car without his protection. Valet parking was not what the word suggests—Bolshoi dancers on strike—but private parking attendants at restaurants. The keepercomins were a lot like the takecarofits, but they were a lot younger and would appear when you started to back into a parking space. The kid, always smiling and wearing a baseball cap backwards, would stand by you and offer guidance:
Keepercomin, chief, cut a little, now keepercomin.

Héctor was more of a pedestrian and fervent user of public transportation, so he hadn’t had many professional dealings with these most recent offspring of Mexico City’s endemic economic crisis, but their appearance could not escape his trained eye.

“Instead of the PRI fucking us with the gasoline money from PEMEX financing campaigns for their asshole candidates, I think it’s better for the PEMEX staff to steal it,” concluded the driver, who had presumably voted for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas the last few times around.

The Gayosso funeral parlor was relatively empty. It was cold in the early evening. Mexico City is aggravating to bone aches when the sun doesn’t shine, Héctor reminded himself. He looked up and found a
Samuel
among the deceased, then walked over to one of the chapels. This Samuel didn’t appear to have very many friends, or else it was too early, since there were only half a dozen men and women, all over fifty, around the coffin and the tables littered with ashtrays. He approached the only Chinese person there, an extremely thin man, wrinkled and leathery, wearing a rust-colored suit and a black tie.

“Fuang Chu?” Héctor asked as he neared the man.

“Martínez, everyone calls me by my mother’s name. How can I help you?”

“Would you know if José María Alvarado might still be alive?”

Fuang Chu stared hard at Héctor. “And who might you be?”

“Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective,” he answered, and getting his first good look at the man’s face, he was instantly sorry he had come.

“You must be breaking my balls,” the Chinese man said, drawing the words from deep inside his soul.

CHAPTER 5

SOME PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

T
here are live ones and dead ones. The dead ones are better than the live ones.

That’s what El Sup told me when he was giving me instructions before going into the Monster. He was explaining about the drops, the citizens’ drops—cause there’s also mountain drops, which is when we do it with medicine, food, weapons, ammo, equipment, books. That’s when you don’t want to go carrying everything around all at once, so you hide them in different places according to the plan. Mountain drops are very tricky and you have to go around checking them cause the rain or the coons can maybe get into them, spoil them, that is. But it’s not the same in the city. They have rain in the city and some say they even have coons, but it’s not the same cause in the city the drops are used for leaving and picking up messages. So in the city they have live drops and dead drops, and the dead drops are when there’s nobody to take or give the message, and what you do is you leave the message for somebody to pick up and you don’t have to have a meeting between the one who drops and the one who picks up. So a dead drop is where there’s no people, just places and things, and the live drop is where you have a real person who receives messages or gives them or both. You call it a live drop cause there’s a real live person that receives things and holds onto them awhile and then delivers them to another person when that person gives the right password.

Thing is, El Sup went on explaining about how the dead drops were better. And I say he’s right.

That was before I went into the Monster, Mexico City. It was real difficult. Getting around in the Monster, that is. The
pesero,
the microbus, that is, kept taking me around and around cause I was gawking at everything stead of looking where I was going, and sometimes I even went around three times cause of staring at a big old street called an avenue cause it was so big and all, what with cars going every which way, and a body can’t be diddling around cause you can get deceased out there. Well, in my case I’m already deceased, but maybe the cars didn’t know that, so I waited till there was a clearing and then ran like hell to the other side.

In the metro, well, that’s different cause the metro runs under the streets and there’s no cars … yet. As I was saying, I was already in Mexico City, the Monster. I think it was El Sup who said that the ground grows upward, but I think that’s because he hadn’t walked around there, since the simple truth is that the ground grows down. What I mean is, on the ground there’s only cars—well, cars and a shitload of antennas with buildings growing out of their feet.

The Monster has big houses and small ones, tall ones and little bitty ones, fat and skinny, rich and poor. Like people, but without hearts. In the Monster, the most important thing is the houses and the cars, so people get sent underground, to the metro. If people stay up there in car country, well, the cars kind of like get very pissed and try to gore them, like bulls would.

In the city, they don’t really know how to speak the language, cause they don’t even know the difference between a mare and a stallion; they just call everything a
horse.
Then there’s
cool.
When city people don’t know how to explain how they feel or when they’re angry or when they’re happy or anything like that, they just say
cool.
Like the other day, I was on a
pesero,
which is a microbus, and there was a couple of youngsters looking really in love and all, and the youngster boy asks the youngster girl if she really loves him and she says
cool,
but you could tell in her eyes that what she meant was
you matter a lot to me.
And then they kissed and all. But on a different day, the driver all of a sudden had to stomp on the brakes and this little old guy went flying into this big guy who caught him, and the old guy says
I’m so sorry,
and the big guy says
that’s cool,
which you could tell in his manner meant
it don’t matter none.
So I figger
cool
means a whole lot of things and city folk don’t have to learn a lot of words after they learn
cool.
Maybe that’s why they have their heads all mixed up like me, Elías Contreras, Investigation Commission, Zapatista National Liberation Army.

Well, like I was saying, the people who get around walking, or how city folk say, by going
pedestrian
—the cars seem to want to run into those pedestrians. So if you don’t have a car, you really have to be quick so’s they won’t make you deceased, so you can take the
pesero,
or just go straight down and take the underground way, which is the metro. So when I got off the second time around from the
pesero
and I was on the street again, I figgered I had to get down there and take that metro. Now, the metro is like a lot of cars tied together with a kind of chain, and the one pulls the others. When the metro finally arrives, the people outside all bunch together real tight and the people inside all bunch the same and some want to get in and others want to get out. The one who pushes the most wins. In the beginning, I thought this was the way city folk did their exercises and I got into the spirit of things, urging them on with, “A people united can never be defeated,” but I finally decided it wasn’t that, and that they were just like that, pushy, I mean, at least the pedestrian ones, cause the ones in the cars are all different. They just cruise around all the time and holler
blow it out your ass
at each other, or
asshole,
like they was really pissed, but they’re not, that’s just what they do, blow it out their asses, I guess. The other day, I asked Andrés and Marta what there was more of, cars or people. They said people. So I got to thinking why cars were more important than people, cause you could see plain as day that the city was made for cars and for antennas, but it sure ain’t made for people. So since they don’t all fit together—cars, people, and antennas—they had to dig a hole under the city, that is, under the ground. And down there you have a lot of people. There’s men and women and children and old people, and they even have policemen. They have people of all kinds and sizes same as up top. But what they don’t have down there is rich people.

One day I went and took the metro to a station called … called … Gimme a second here so’s I can check the map … Got it, it’s called Azcapotzalco. After I got there, I went to catch another
pesero
that took a long time, and I finally got to a place that looks like a paddock but ain’t one. What they had there is a thing called a
circus,
and I went to see where it was that the giraffes lived. As it turns out, those giraffes are a lot like cows, meaning they have horns and all, but their heads are way up on the end of a real long neck that looks like somebody stretched them too much when they were being born, or maybe they just want to see real far and they stretch their necks far as they can, or maybe they just want to look like the houses in the city. So you might say that giraffes are like cows, but with antennas.

Okay, now, back to the point, cause I didn’t really want to see no giraffes, what I had to do was see a comrade who was going to be seeing the giraffes at exactly 7 p.m. and who was going to have blue hair—the comrade, not the giraffes. The guy was a youngster, and you know youngsters don’t really mind much if they don’t get where they have to be on time, but he finally got there. In the Monster, you know, youngster boys and girls sometimes like to dye their hair different colors. Sometimes they dye it red or yellow or green or lots of colors, and sometimes blue. So the youngster who came late had blue hair. I went right up to him, but not too close cause you never can tell if he ain’t the one. Then I says real soft without looking at him, “The giraffes walk like they’re rock ‘n’ roll dancing.” And the young man answers without looking at me, “Giraffes united can never be defeated.” So I could tell he was the one, and he left his bread bag by the fence and walked away without another word.

Guess you’d like to know how I knew I was sposed to go find the youngster with the blue hair, right? Thing is that the clues, that is, the instructions, came coded in the communiqués about the Broken Pocket, in the greeting to Don Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, and in the communiqué about the giraffes. El Sup had already told me that the communiqués would let me know where I was sposed to pick up or drop messages. Sometimes they would be live drops and other times they would be dead drops. So with the codes I could tell when and where I was going to get a message. I guess I’ll let you figger out how the codes went. That last one was easy. The difficult ones were in the communiqué about the
video you must read.
I had to go to this real uppity place called Santa Fe that’s real fancy and look behind a latrine, I mean behind the toilet, in a place that sells tamales.

There was a message there from El Sup and I found out I had to pick up another message from El Sup on the 8th and deliver my report on the 15th at that same drop, meaning the latrine in the tamale place. Then there was the time with the communiqué about the
speed of dreams,
when I had to go to the Oceania metro station and find a shoe shop with a number 69 on the door and they gave me a pair of shoes that didn’t really fit too good on my left foot, but I looked inside and saw that there was a piece of paper with a message and that’s why I couldn’t get my foot in, so I read the message. With the Miguel Enríquez communiqué, I wound up right in the middle of the Monster, on a street called República de Chile, looking for a sign that said For
Sale,
and I stuck my report behind it for somebody else to pick up, so this was one of those good dead drops.

All in all I had a real hard time in the beginning, but then later I began to understand city ways and I kinda liked it. El Sup had told me that if you want to know the Monster, you have to walk it.
Walk through it,
he told me,
and you’ll see that the city is built on the people who can save it.
So that’s what I did, I walked all around that city. And I went everywhere, and everywhere I went I ran into people like us Zapatistas, which means people who are screwed, which means people willing to fight, which means people who don’t give up.

Okay, like I was saying, the youngster with the blue hair left a bread bag by the gate where the giraffes are, at the circus called Circo Unión. Then I moved in close and grabbed the bread bag that didn’t have no bread, but instead a message from El Sup addressed to me and saying only, Find
Mamá Piedra.

The Barcelona—La Realidad—Monster Axis

Stay alert, keep moving, trust no one.

That was the general recommendation I gave Elías before he left. With that, I was repeating what Che Guevara said in his book
Revolutionary War Passages;
it was also what each one of us was told when we had to move alone. I spoke to him about Mexico City too, or rather, what I remembered about the capital. And I’m not talking about the generous and caring city that welcomed us for the Indigenous Pride Demonstration. No, I spoke to him about the city I left more than twenty years ago, when I came to the mountains. Though according to what I heard later, that city has nothing to do with the one there now.

Elías’s visit had been in the works since Pepe Carvalho brought me some papers written personally by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. The papers came with a brief note from his son:

Subcomandante,
     When looking through my father’s papers shortly after his death, I found these notes which I imagine might make some sense to you.
My regards,
Daniel

One of the papers contained a sort of diagram, all interconnected with arrows, lines, circles, and squares, that read as follows:

•B
ARCELONA
.
Hotel Princesa Sofía. Plaza Pio XII, No. 4, Financial Center, Diagonal Avenue; María Cristina metro station. Morales.
•D
IPLOMATIC
POUCH M
EXICO
-M
ADRID
-M
EXICO
.
Check flights 1994-2000. Morales.
•D
ISAPPEARED
—D
IRTY
W
AR
. Morales.
The White Brigade.
•A
CTEAL
.
General Renán Castillo. Morales.
•M
ONTES
A
ZULES
. Morales.
• Z
EDILLO
-C
ARABIAS
-T
ELLO
. Morales.
•B
IODIVERSITY
—T
RANSNATIONALS
. Morales. Checks.
Accessories?
• E
L
Y
UNQUE
. Morales.
Reactivation of the paramilitary.
•MURO.
Re-edited?

Another piece of paper contained a series of questions:

1. What was Morales doing in the suite at the Princesa Sofía? Was he staying there alone? What was he doing in the Financial Center?
He
went in at 21:00 and left at 22:00. What about the María Cristina metro station?
He
entered at 22:30 and left at 23:00. The hotel.

2. What was Morales up to with those continuous trips between Mexico and Madrid? Never twice in a row on the same airline. No apparent pattern.

3. What was Morales’s role in the Dirty War in Mexico? White Brigade? What about Acteal?

4. What was Morales doing with the Montes Azules materials he carted around in his briefcase?

5.
Why was Morales at that dinner with former president Ernesto Zedillo, Julia Carabias, and Carlos Tello Díaz?

6.
Who or what was the final destination of the briefcases full of euros that Morales carried from the Financial Center to the María Cristina metro station in Barcelona?

7.
What was Morales’s specific role in the new structure of EL YUNQUE in Mexico?

The third document wasn’t really a document, just a napkin with the following:

Barcelona exhausted. Answers … in Mexico? In Chiapas? A Barcelona
—
La Realidad
—
Mexico City axis?