Tequila Blue
Authors: Rolo Diez
Rolo Diez, born in Argentina in 1940, was imprisoned for two years during the military dictatorship and forced into exile. He now lives in Mexico City, where he works as a novelist, screenwriter and journalist. A number of his novels have been published in Spain, France and Germany. Rolo Diez was awarded the Hammett prize for best crime novel in Spanish in 1985, and won the Umbriel Prize at the Semana Negra festival of crime fiction in Spain in 2003. This is the first time he has been published in English.
Rolo Diez
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
First published in Spanish as
Mato y Voy
by
Ediciones B, Mexico City, 1992
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England
© Rolo Diez, 1992
English translation © Nick Caistor, 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral right of Nick Caistor has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-9085-2419-5
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk
For Myriam
Chapter one
Snow White looks eighteen going on fifteen, with her short skirt and plaits, breasts like apples and 110 pounds of a mixture of innocence and sensuality all wrapped in tissue paper. There are only four, not seven dwarfs, and they are not real dwarfs, just very short men. Half-hidden behind false white beards, their faces are vicious and disturbing. The opening scene shows them having a meal in a clearing in a wood. One of the dwarfs is serving wine. He offers it to Snow White but switches the bottle without her realizing it. The four freaks wink and make obscene gestures to one other. They watch lasciviously as the woman-child sips from her glass. As she finishes her drink, Snow White falls into what appears to be a catatonic trance. The dwarfs pull a mattress out from under the table. They lay Snow White down on it and start undressing her.
Lourdes woke me at eight with a beer and a sour look that I had no intention of responding to. I twisted and turned in the bed until I was more or less upright and could take the first swig.
“I went to bed at four,” I told her. “This beer is warm. I don't want it frozen, but it should be cold. I've told you a thousand times.”
Lourdes is the only person in the world who can launch into four different topics at once:
“You told me you were leaving at eight; we haven't paid the kids' school fees; there's nothing to eat; why do you have a family if you can't be bothered to look after them?”
Lourdes is thin, the nervous type, her beauty ruined by her irritation. I contemplated a reply, but it sank without trace in my desire to go on sleeping.
“Put the beer in the freezer and call me again in fifteen minutes.”
Lourdes walked off complaining, but I wasn't even listening any more. Cops like me can sleep standing up, when we're on duty, covering some guy whose footsteps are bound to wake us up.
An hour later I was out of the house. The sun
hurt my eyes, and the fumes from Avenida Revolucion clawed at my nose and throat.
I stopped off at a taco bar and had a quick breakfast. A soup with bread and lots of chilli in it â the perfect indigenous remedy to improve the way a hung-over guy sees the world, the human condition, and Mondays, to help persuade him he has to go to the office â then chopped steak and several coffees. The bar owner, Luis, wanted to know the price on .38 revolvers and 9mm pistols.
“I've got someone interested in buying,” he said with a wink. “I could order five or six, if there's something in it for me.”
“I'll look into it,” I told him. “I'll tell you tomorrow.”
I was thinking of talking to Amaya, who can get rods cheap. If each of us made a hundred thousand on each gun, that would mean half a million for us and we could still sell them at a reasonable price. Not business for its own sake, but to fight the debts that insisted on piling up at the end of every month.
Red was not at the money exchange: he had a business breakfast. And the envelope for my boss wasn't there either. That scumbag Red: the Commander wasn't going to be pleased at having to wait. I'd left Red thirty thousand dollars on his behalf, first-class Colombian stuff that even the White House would accept. And he was supposed to pay up today. He knew that, but here he was, playing games with cops . . . as if we couldn't screw his business completely if we felt like it.
“What time is he coming?” I asked.
“He won't be long,” his secretary said.
A nymphette, a looker. Hot stuff, but not as hot as she thought she was.
Her office was all glass, wall-to-wall carpet, paintings and diplomas. I undid my jacket. I was sitting so that little miss pretty couldn't see the grease stain on my trousers. I used to be able to sit with my jacket buttoned, but these days my stomach seems determined to put on a display of forty years of tacos and beer.
“Has he been in touch?” I said, putting on my stern policeman look. I know these dames. If you so much as let on you've noticed their attractions, there's no end to their little games of seduction. Not because a tart like her gives a damn about someone like me, but simply because it's their way of showing their power. The only power they've got: flesh and their shiny veneer.
“No,” with a flutter of rings and bangles. “But he usually comes in about now.”
“I need to talk to him urgently,” I said, handing her my card. “Please tell him to call me as soon as he gets here.”
“Yes, Mr Hernandez,” she said, looking at the card.
I buttoned my jacket and stood up. I leaned over to shake hands, and found myself staring down a plunging neckline. She saw my look and smiled.
*
When I got to the office they were serving coffee. The Commander was having breakfast in the Sheraton with a judge and a member of Congress. Convinced that public relations are all about having a full stomach and a full diary, the boss doesn't stint on breakfast. He devotes his mornings to other people's careers and tries to choose the right people.
Maribel brought me coffee. She stroked my hand and asked for my office contribution: fifty thousand pesos.
“You owe the last two payments,” she said, her voice as sweet and fake as her expression.
Maribel is as hot as her native Veracruz, and is battling against time. Her hair is dyed and teased at the salon. She has good legs, adolescent children she prefers to keep hidden, a baker husband, and the soul of a whore. Just because she's the boss's secretary she thinks she can intimidate and lay â or at least try to lay â all the males in the office. I think of her every time I hear a feminist banging on about the sexual harassment of women in the workplace.
Maribel put on her best tropical smile and slid out the tip of her tongue: a promise of fellatio that set my stomach tingling.
All I had in my pockets was a fifty-peso bill. All I had to face a long day, feed myself, and find another ten of the same to calm Lourdes's nerves. Not to mention Gloria: I haven't been to her place in four days, and although she's patient enough and understands how difficult things can be, she's
got kids and all the rest to take care of just like in any family. If I hadn't forbidden it, she'd be on the phone to me right now.
Maribel's knees closed in on mine. Laura and the cleaning woman exchanged knowing smiles. I didn't move.
“Wait till tomorrow, I'll pay you then,” I said.
“Poor you! You've got so many problems.” When they come over all tender, tarantulas must look exactly as she did at that moment. “How about going out for a drink, then you can tell me all about it?”
“The boss might arrive,” I said half-heartedly.
“We've got an hour,” whispered Maribel, with all the naturalness of someone who behaves in a Mexican police office as if she were Marlene Dietrich in a Cairo cabaret. She accompanied her words with increased pressure of her knees against my left leg, which I had to push against the floor to steady myself.
Seeing that the whole office was having fun at my expense, and considering a gentleman should never disappoint a lady, especially if he doesn't want to be thought of as a queer, I decided it would be less costly to have an early-morning fuck in a hotel at her expense than have to give her all I had left to pay my contribution.
In the elevator Maribel gave me a playful lipsticky bite that I returned as best I could.
“Beast!” she groaned with satisfaction.
“Don't leave any marks!” I told her, imagining Lourdes's face twisted with jealousy, and her
mania for examining my neck and back for signs of someone else's nails and teeth. Lourdes is a self-taught forensic expert, and I'm always the man in the dock. We've had real arguments over it, and it's incredible how she spots these things!
On the way to the hotel in my hostess's Caribe, I was suddenly worried my trouser tool might not be up to it, or might be up to it then duck out halfway through the performance, or I might come too soon, as occasionally happens, especially when I have to examine a new body that's poring over mine. And even though Maribel was no stranger, I was worried about my size. I'm forty years old and see myself in the shower every day. Yet I'm still not sure whether I'm hung like a horse and make every woman swoon, as I sometimes think, or if what I've got is nothing more than the tiniest shrivelled up little bean in the world, not big enough to satisfy a cat on a diet.