Tequila Blue (9 page)

Not bad going for a shop assistant in a cheap store. My job was to catch her.

I called in at several bars before I found him. Sitting with a plateful of pork tacos and a mamey juice, Silver Bullet looked pleased with himself. When he saw me, he ordered a beer from the waiter. This pleased me, because it's always nice to see one's disciples are learning and discover they know it's important to keep their superiors happy.
I had to give him instructions about the way to deal with the Cuban, so I sat on a stool next to him. I began by downplaying what he had achieved so far, to keep him in his place. Nothing is easier for people than to give themselves airs. Everybody seems to need to feel they are in charge of something, to boast “It was me who did it”, “I'm the number one.” So I confirmed he would get his share of twenty per cent, and not the thirty per cent he was asking for, and informed him that yours truly had been busy adding noughts to the right-hand side of that twenty. I told him about Cruz and his death. Silver Bullet never once left off eating but did offer me one of his tacos. You have to know my assistant to grasp the importance of a gesture like that.

“That makes it more complicated with Valadez,” I explained. “Tell him that Cruz is dead. Tell him ‘Hernandez is trying to impress his bosses, and you're next on his list.' Ask him for three times as much and make sure he doesn't leave the city.”

I didn't have the time, so I was forced to send Silver Bullet to the Buenos Aires garage to ask for next week's payment in advance. (Anyone who knows Kiko will be aware that this is Mission Impossible, so if the boy pulled it off, he would deserve his fifty per cent.) I didn't say a word about the Three Marias because I had no doubt he would ruin the arrangement by accepting all payment in kind. Besides which, I needed to talk to Rosario urgently.

When I left him, he was doing his best to look
like James Bond. Sucking determinedly on his mamey juice through a straw.

*

I like sitting with Rosario at one of the outside tables in a Zona Rosa bar. I can sense how jealous the stupid passers-by are, and see how their rutting wolves' eyes stare at my girl. I like the way she hangs on my arm, laughs out loud, brings her face close to mine and tickles me with her curls. As well as enjoying this for its own sake, it gives me intellectual satisfaction of the Pygmalion kind, because as the weeks go by I can see how she is honing her skills. And I'm the best proof of this there is, because I can't spend five minutes with her before I get an erection. We had a quick drink and finished our conversation in a hotel. What Rosario said left me very confused. My protégée had better information than me on Jones. She and, according to her, all the whores in the Zona Rosa knew that the gringo was making porno movies. He recruited women for fiestas and had a ranch near Hidalgo where he held orgies, to which he invited important personalities. Jones's reputation fluctuated between bad and worse. Apparently, he was a dangerous pervert. Some women who had worked with him disappeared; others turned up dead with signs of torture. Among her acquaintances, Rosario had heard stories of bestial abuse, of floggings, tattoos carved out with knives, rapes with a wide range of objects. In the Zona Rosa none of the women would work with him anymore.
They had held meetings and discussed denouncing him to the police, but since nobody ever listens to whores, and seeing that the gringo had powerful friends who were politicians and judges, they decided to let him be, but to protect themselves by warning everyone so that nobody else would fall into his clutches. They considered Jones's death an act of justice. They were pleased that a cockroach like him had been cleared from the streets. Rosario and, in her view, none of the other girls she knew on the game had the slightest idea who could have killed him. She knew the hotel in question and even knew girls who had been there that night, but none of them had seen Jones or the blond man, or had heard anything at all. This might or might not have been true, but they had talked it over and that was that. The only thing certain was that they were all delighted.

I pondered on an intelligence network based on keeping your legs open and your ears pricked, and after experiencing a mixture of humiliation and amazement, I suddenly felt so relieved and happy that, with the money Rosario had given me for her insurance policy – I always tell her: I'm your insurance policy – I took her for a meal and then left her at a cinema with instructions to get more information.

I bought toys and chocolates for the kids, a bottle of Carlos I for myself and a small box for Gloria's earrings. A healthy desire to do nothing crept over me. While I was driving to the Mixcoac apartment I had a brilliant idea: vacations for
everyone. I'd book a good hotel for Gloria and the midgets in Acapulco, and offer myself the pleasure of discovering Cancun. One room for me and Lourdes, another for Carlos and Araceli.

I woke at nine to a beer and a caress of my head. The caress was ten out of ten, the beer a little colder than I normally like, but I hadn't the heart to tell Gloria that, given the love she was showing me. I know the tricks the female mind can play, but I also know how important it can be for a man – especially if he isn't a hairdresser or a bureaucrat – to get a bit of tenderness first thing in the morning. Malinche must have woken Hernan Cortes in exactly the same way. That's why we're all losers, whether we end up crying under a huge tree like Cortes did, or sitting in the living room glued to the TV.

“Up you get, sleepyhead!” she said with a smile, as though it wasn't her who was waking me up.

“I should be at work by this time,” I complained, showing her the alarm clock. “I asked you to wake me at eight.”

“I did call you at eight. You answered that only spastics get up early, turned over the other way and carried on snoring.”

“This beer is too cold.”

“It was better at eight.” Gloria wasn't smiling any more.

I drank in silence, pondering on how fickle
women can be. How they can adore the man who loves them, then the next morning treat him like garbage. I watched Gloria coming and going. I know that manoeuvre. Gloria was putting on the performance known as “I at least work”. I could feel myself getting annoyed the way I always do when I see a woman feeling so superior because they think the stupidest of tasks is important.

“Do you want something to eat?” she said, as if she were talking to one of her children, as if somehow everything goes better when you eat.

I looked at her patiently. There was no doubt that Gloria was fine to visit once a week.

“I'm going to the hairdresser's today. Would you like me to keep it straight like it is, or should I have a perm?”

“I want it as curly as wool, lots of curls falling into your eyes so I can pull them back and see your face when you're making mad passionate love to me.”

“Do you love me?”

“No, I hate you, because you're a cheap whore and have a face like a sick giraffe.”

Ah, these indispensable morning bedroom farces. We continued our philosophical debate, lulled by the sound of the vacuum cleaner, until it was half past nine and I decided to get washed and dressed.

As soon as I got out of the bathroom I phoned the office. Maribel wanted to chat, but I didn't. Silver Bullet hadn't arrived yet.

I called the widow's house and the maid from
Oaxaca replied. I would have loved to do my dirty call trick on her. I would have done if Gloria hadn't been around.

“The mistress hasn't got up yet,” the maid told me.

“Fine, I'll be straight round,” I said. “It's a quarter to ten now. I'll be there at around eleven. Tell your mistress when she wakes up.”

“Yes, sir. Atyourservice.”

“Are you coming this evening?” Gloria asked, looking the other way as she did so.

“I don't know, woman,” I said, stealing up behind her. “I've got a lot of work, and Carlos and Araceli are due back today. I don't know whether I'll be able to come.”

I kissed her on the neck. Gloria stiffened and turned her face away. I realized I had hurt her feelings and felt terrible. I had a sudden revelation: the world was a mess; I was a brute to force such a loving good woman to be no more than a mistress to me. I would have kneeled to ask her forgiveness, except that my sense of the ridiculous would not allow me to. I stroked her hair as she tried to pull away. I promised that if Lourdes did not return, nobody would be able to budge me from Mixcoac. I'd make our two families one. I wanted to grow old by her side.

Gloria laughed:

“I want you young,” she said. “When you're old I'm going to put you in a home.”

She has a sense of humour and what's what, the cow. That's why I love her, among other things.
Seeing I still wasn't dressed, I decided to take her back to bed and make it up to her. Sometimes I wonder what on earth will become of me in ten years' time.

*

“The mistress is not up yet,” the maid repeated mechanically. Above and behind her, the curtains twitched at a first floor window. Someone was spying on us. But since the Commander wants the case closed as quickly as possible, I needed to get something out of the widow – she might or might not be the murderer, but she was definitely hiding things. Some of which I already knew about.

The maid from Oaxaca looked at me dismissively. I stood staring up at the window until the curtains opened properly, and I could see Estela Lopez de Jones staring down.

“The mistress has got up,” I found myself saying.

And found myself entering the house.

Estela Lopez de Jones was wearing another of her elegant gowns and a discreet amount of makeup. She was polite in the manner of someone who has slept well, is not forced to go out to earn a living, and is receiving a visit from the law, with whom it's never a good idea to fall out.

“If you don't mind, I'll have breakfast while we talk,” she said, smiling warmly at me again as if she were my sister rather than an adulterous murderer. “I'm having coffee and cakes. Would you like some, or would you prefer something else?”

I preferred beer, but I accepted coffee.

We made small talk until the breakfast had been served, and the widow had sent the maid off to put a load of washing in the machine.

It was up to me to make the opening move, and since I had no idea what I should or should not mention, I decided to be brutal and reveal that I knew all about the four-handed game of billiards she and her deceased husband used to play with Mr and Mrs Accountant. I soon confirmed that what the accountant had said was true, because in my trade you can tell the answer just by looking at people's faces. I could tell she was hesitating, wondering how much I knew, calculating what she ought to tell me, what she should keep to herself. I knew I was going to be served stuff well past its sell-by date, and that's what I got. Nothing fresh. A crime is a conflict of interests resolved by force, and no one should expect honesty where a conflict of interests is involved. Fortunately for him, Sherlock Holmes could go around with his magnifying glass, spot a mouldy red shirt button and from it deduce that its owner had escaped from a clinic in the East and suffered from dreadful headaches due to a hereditary disease. But, of course, in Mexico Shirley would never even have got a licence, thanks to our laws on the possession and consumption of drugs. Be that as it may, a Mexican policeman at least has the consolation that he is one of the cleanest men in the world. The proof lies in the fact that after he has taken a statement from anyone who is part of a conflict of interests.
the said policeman has to have a bath, so great is the amount of garbage thrown at him.

Estela Lopez de Jones told me about Jones's inclination to betray her with any woman he happened to meet, about the life of a twenty-year-old girl with a drug addict thirty years older than her, of his love affairs with the models he hired. She gave her own version of the explosions, the abuse, the fights, the times Jones treated her in the same way as any of his maids or model-whores, or threatened to throw her out onto the street without a penny, thousands of miles from her home in Bogota. She said the story with the accountant's wife was the last straw, creating a humiliating situation all the time, sometimes even in her own house. It was her story, so she told me how she decided to get revenge in the most obvious way, with the cuckolded accountant himself, someone so dreary that no pleasure, no emotion could possibly contaminate her vengeance. All this drama coincided in Estela's mouth (small and round; selfish and perverse) with slices of toast covered in jam that she had no problem forcing down. She told me – it was her story – about Jones's fury when he discovered her revenge, his shouted threat to kill the accountant and leave her at the first bus terminal. She mentioned secret conversations between the accountant and her dead husband. Then each returned to their original couple. Some time afterwards, Jones organized a kiss-and-make-up party for the four of them. From then on it was pandemonium, everyone and no
one in charge, sex swapped and drunken sessions until the early hours. She spoke of her determination to get out, to leave him, to return to Bogota. Of her fears, the cowardice which paralysed her and brought on terrible depression. Of how she had got used to an easy life, her panic at the thought of becoming a shop assistant again, of going back to Colombia a failure, carrying a single suitcase of clothes and having to start from scratch once more.