Tequila Blue (11 page)

I've no idea how many glasses the barman served me, but I know he must have been a magician because all of a sudden he made Madonna appear at my table. I've no idea either why there are times when it's impossible to say “no”. And anyway it was already almost eight by now, and it didn't seem a good idea to turn up for Lourdes looking like an advert for Alcoholics Anonymous.

When the taxi travelling along Rio Churubusco crosses La Viga and carries on five hundred yards towards the airport, two dark-coloured cars without licence plates appear, block its path, and force it to a halt. Four men armed with submachine guns and sawn-off shotguns leap out of the cars. They pull Valadez out of the backseat, throw him into one of the cars and speed off. The taxi driver is a statue nobody wastes any time on.

At six that evening, the accountant and his wife return to their hotel with airline tickets for the night flight to Miami. They go into Room 402, and Mr Accountant comments: “Well, that's the end of that.” When they hear this the two men hiding in the bathroom grin at each other. Then they burst into the bedroom. They are carrying pistols with silencers.

Presenting Beauty to the Beast, I explained to Rosario's younger sister that for the rest of the day she would be Esmeralda like in the novel, and that my friend had a beautiful spirit. There was nothing untrue in what I said, and the girl's silence showed how intelligent she was. Her job was to keep the monster happy. Lobster, squid, maguey worms or whatever else he might fancy to eat, the best alcohol and a honeymoon worthy of the Virgin Mary. In other words, whatever he asked for and was up to. “Be a guiding star for him.” Carlos Hernandez knows how to look after his friends, and what that guy had just given him was priceless.

It's true that the information was common knowledge among the whores of the Zona Rosa, but now – the most important thing! – the police had got wind of it too. Once upon a time there was a ranch, bought in the name of a gentleman from Los Angeles, whose owner had never been traced. The police searched for his whereabouts for a whole month before giving up. The case was so cold it might almost be called frozen, like the beers my women offer me when they forget to bring them warm, and yet those in charge of it – “I can't say a word about any of this,” Quasimodo
dixit, with a wonderful grin on his lopsided mouth – had evidence that Jones frequently went there, and that every fortnight there would be huge celebrations. Limos, celebrities, females like luxury felines. They would start arriving on the Saturday morning and leave late on Sunday.

Parties, drugs, pornography: Jones. A well-signposted road. Situations that led to – and here was the mystery – an exit in the bullet hole in the back of the gringo's head.

Rosario had told me about the ranch. But now I knew its name and location: a turning off the road to Hidalgo, beyond a rustic wooden arch proclaiming “Rancho El Porvenir”. Which in Jones's case might just as well have read “The Worms”.

Quasimodo could not tell me anything because it was not me who was investigating Victoria Ledesma's death, and since it was being dealt with by another police force I could not get a search warrant which would allow me to raid “El Porvenir”. In any case, it had already been searched by our police colleagues. Not forgetting the fact that there are useless and blind people – as well as blind people who don't want to see – the whole world over.

I needed help to get anywhere, so I went to see the Commander. His opening salvo was to tell me that Valadez was dead, riddled with bullets and dumped at the side of a road, and that Mr and Mrs Accountant were also dead, murdered in their hotel room with shots to the body and head. You need to know the Commander to realize that this
news was much more important for my relation to him than for anything to do with the Jones case. I was the slave, he the master – Hernandez-knownothing versus Commanderknowall, Subordinateuseless versus Commanderuseful – showing yet again my inability to find out something which, since I was in charge of the case, I ought to know about better than anyone. The fact that it was he who – sitting comfortably in his chair – could give me the news proved various things, all of them essential: 1) he was the one who had the information and the power; 2) without him I was nobody; 3) therefore it would be best for me to devote the rest of my life to making sure he got his kickbacks; 4) if I did that, he could perhaps bring himself to excuse such monumental slackness; 5) would to God that I could understand some day that the individual is nothing, it's the institution that is everything. This last point had an equally essential corollary: it was true in my case, in that of Hernandezmisternocount, but not in his, that of Commandermisterbigboss. I smoked my way through an entire cigarette while I deduced all this.

When he heard my news the Commander looked at me strangely and wanted to know who my sources were. I told him about Estela Lopez de Jones, the accountant and Valadez, and though his poker-face did not slip once, something in the effort he was making to stay calm told me I was entering forbidden territory. When I asked for permission to search the ranch he gave so many
excuses, raised so many problems of jurisdiction and proper authority, who was responsible and other kinds of crap, that the only thing I understood was that he didn't want to see me there. I would have to act on my own.

The case was beginning to interest me.

Paying a visit to the ranch secretly all alone one night, going inside with a revolver in my right hand and in the other a dim torch (that's what they always call them in novels, though to me the word says more about the people carrying them) and exposing myself to getting my very own bullet-hole in the head is what cops do in all the films. What Hernandez did was call Quasimodo and tell him my boss did not seem interested in me nosing round the ranch. Perhaps because his vital juices had all been poured out as libations on erotic altars, my friend was very cautious. “If there's money involved, there's danger too.” And he gave his judgement: “Being a poor cop is better than having two quarts of mud in your lungs.” He was right, but so was I. In my defence, I quoted the example of Christopher Columbus, who, if he had been put off by the legends of sea serpents that devoured ships, of the children of darkness lying in wait for him in the
Mare Tenebrosum
, would have stayed in Madrid playing dominoes and drinking a brandy chaser in his local inn, and nobody would be celebrating him or accusing him of genocide five hundred years after his adventure.

In the end I managed to convince him. The only drawback was that he didn't have any
jurisdiction or authority to get into the ranch either. He was just the man who ran the Archive. Besides which, he had hardly slept, and was still recovering from the mystic powers of the gypsy Esmeralda. He did, though, know one of the cops investigating Victoria Ledesma's death, an individual by the name of Arganaraz, who, if there was money in it, would be more than happy to collaborate in the undertaking and earn himself a third of any profits. I had been thinking of keeping seventy per cent for myself and giving thirty to Quasimodo, so such a sudden reduction in my percentage took the wind from my sails. I looked on the bright side when I considered that the protection money I got from Kiko and my protégée was barely enough to keep me in cigarettes, whereas even a third of such a big deal could mean I was no longer poor.

The next day we had breakfast and swapped card collections. Arganaraz said everyone in the police knew about Jones's pornography racket, that there was a film everybody had seen, although no one knew what had become of it, in which a whore played Snow White, and the dwarves had done everything apart from fuck her in the eye sockets, that the case had got nowhere because the gringo was protected from high up, the big chiefs, his embassy, and who knows where else. Short-arsed and skinny, a typical Mexican “race of bronze” type, Arganaraz looked so greasy and slippery he could have been in one of those Hollywood films where the Mexicans are always
the double-crossers. I told him my theories about the blond assassin, and he doubled up laughing. He and his colleagues had already solved the case. Jones had got above himself and tried to blackmail someone he shouldn't have. “An untouchable, get it?” He lost out, of course. “You can't beat an untouchable.” Legally, there was nothing to be done. But whoever found the video-cassettes was onto a fortune. They had searched the ranch until they were tired of it. It was full of French champagne and other imported liquor, which strangely vanished in the course of the investigation; there were immense round beds; waterbeds and others that moved up and down, ideal for fat slugs or those afraid of a heart attack; opposite the largest bed there was a two-way mirror, one of those you can see through from behind and film without being seen. To complete the picture there were all the usual accoutrements in places like these: porno magazines and films, rubber dildos, whips, handcuffs, black leather jackets with metal spikes, everything you could imagine. Regular visitors included important politicians and police chiefs, ambassadors, men and women who spoke English. By sheer chance no one had seen the Pope there. As I listened to him, I was thinking how people find it necessary to exaggerate: no one can describe how they had a coffee without embroidering the story. But even allowing for this, what was left sounded juicy enough, and exactly what I had been expecting.

“The caretaker knows me and will let me in,” Arganaraz added.

“Fine, but what are we looking for?” Quasimodo looked at us as though we were behaving oddly, as if we were drunk and forcing him to stay sober. “If they've searched the place and taken everything away, what exactly are we after?”

I seized the opportunity to put Mr Race of Bronze in his place.

“Jones was killed, and it can't have been for his failings as a host,” I said. “It's possible the gringo made a habit of blackmailing his friends, filming them from behind the mirror in not very saintly positions, and that's why he ended up with a hole in his head. We don't know, sweetheart. It's my hunch. But just imagine I'm right. If it is, what we're looking for is a secret hiding-place where he kept the photos and films. If we find nothing, it's simply another day wasted. Like all those we spend snoozing in a bar or in the office. And if we find something, we're made. By the way,” I said, addressing Arganaraz this time, “is the place behind the mirror concealed or visible?”

“Concealed.” When someone with a double-crosser's face smiles, it only makes it worse. “It's a tiny room about five-feet square that you get into via a wardrobe.”

“That fits,” I said.

We chatted for a while about the risks of being a blackmailer, the importance of bearing in mind what had happened to the gringo, the accountant and his wife and Valadez, and we agreed if we
found any stuff we would take into account both the dangers and the possible price tag. We also tried to shake Quasimodo out of his gloomy mood and make him feel more optimistic about the adventure. “Running an archive means you classify information and draw realistic conclusions from it. Nothing good will come of this for us,” he said. I realized that if we put things off for too long, Quasimodo would find an excuse to back out. So I insisted there was no time like the present, and that a man of action doesn't spend his life mulling over everything but leaps in and gets what he wants out of it. Arganaraz agreed with everything and was even more enthusiastic than me, talking about the fortune waiting somewhere for those brave enough to grab it, plus other nonsense you only ever hear on TV, and although his treacherous face still worried me, for the moment I needed him on my side. Quasimodo kept silent, a silence so deep that even without looking at him you could see his scepticism and understand that the habit of spending his life shut up in an archive had, begging his pardon, softened his brain.

We drank a tequila to help settle our breakfast and set off for the ranch.

A few miles before we reached our destination, someone started shooting at us. They were hunting us down from a wood to the left of the road. It was a well-chosen spot, far enough away from the ranch to avoid any relation to it, so that the headlines in the morning newspapers could report our deaths without any link there. For example, “Three policemen die in hail of bullets on side-road.” Or one of us at least, because I was hit in the head and can't believe I'm still alive. We pulled up on the right and returned their fire flat out on the ground behind the car. Our revolvers were useless at that range, and the bastards took advantage to shoot out all the windows of the Atlantic. (More work for Kiko.) We could hear them laughing and shouting: “You'd better turn back, assholes. We're going to finish you off. You've really messed up this time.” And more words we didn't catch, because we were busy putting as much distance as possible between us and the source of the shouting and the gunfire. This went on for some time, with them firing and us crawling away as fast as we could, until we came to a gully and threw ourselves down it, commenting on what had happened
to us. “We're fucked.” “They were lying in wait for us.” “Great idea of yours, Carlitos.” “So great they tried to kill us.” “Not to kill us, just scare us off.”

All of a sudden our debate was interrupted by the explosion of three grenades and flames rising from what once had been my faithful Atlantic. After that we heard the sound of cars racing away. We decided they had all gone, but that it would be better not to try to find out if they'd left anyone behind to check our movements.