The Black Minutes (34 page)

Of course I know Paracuán. That’s where the biggest criminal case of my career started. It was when I was helping my uncle out, before I found my destiny and was shot off into infinity.

I was at the ripe old age of twenty-two . . . or it could be a little less, because at the time I was still looking for myself, and I was going to say, I only found myself because of my uncle. He was the chief of police in Paracuán, a tropical port that had problems with smuggling and drug dealers. Like Juan Gabriel said,
Pero, ¿qué necesidad?
Why does it have to be this way? The first time I found out about this crap was at a Christmas dinner. My uncle was never really into all these family things, but his wife, who’s my mom’s sister, made him spend the holidays with us. So we’re all stuffed in there, all the relatives together. I decided I wasn’t going down to eat dinner because all that stuff is such a drag, especially because they wanted me to put on a suit and tie, so I locked myself up in my room. I should probably be clearer: I didn’t live with my parents anymore, I lived in the Distrito Federal, and I only went back to see them at Christmas or for Holy Week. That night I was thinking I’d just pretend I went to sleep early, but since
I had to go to the dinner, I took a hit from La Clandestina, a special pipe that doesn’t leave any smell in the air, put a couple drops in my eyes, and went downstairs, prepared to deal with my folks. I was especially sensitive, you can probably imagine, so I went and sat down on the carpet in the living room, ready to listen to it all.

My dad took advantage of the fact that my uncle had gone off on one of his long, never-ending tangents and asked him to tell the story about the Chinese mafia, a shoot-out in the port that was so insane it made the papers. And wham! My uncle told a story he never would’ve told if he were sober. Even though his wife and kids tried to shut him up, he started to tell them the story: they had to take on about two hundred Orientals. And the asshole said it like it was funny, like if he was saying how many ants he had stepped on, just cracking up. Everything started when two agents that patrolled the Laguna del Carpintero detained a very respected old man from the Oriental community. If the rumors about the patrolmen were true, they probably stopped him because they didn’t like him or because he refused to give them a bribe; but of course, my uncle didn’t say that. He hadn’t drunk
that
much. The problem was the old man turned out to be a respected martial arts professor at the Instituto Kong, a respected older man who knew all the Chinese in the port by name, so a sizable portion of the Oriental community organized a protest outside the police headquarters, from seven in the morning till noon. Since they didn’t release him, the situation got more and more tense, and my uncle ordered them to keep on fucking with them until they left. But two police officers who passed by there decided to start yelling at a Chinese girl and flirting with her. Their catcalling got louder and louder, and her boyfriend came out to defend her. Despite what the elders recommended, the boyfriend challenged the policemen to a fight right there, in front of everyone.
Since the officer thought he looked skinny, he said why not and took off his shirt: an inexcusable mistake, because the skinny guy sucker-punched him like a boxing champion. He kicked him twice and broke his face in, and each time the officer tried to get up, the Chinese guy sat him back down with another punch. He didn’t even sweat when the officer tried to hit him with his belt. The bad thing is that in the meantime the officer’s partner called for backup from the department. In a few minutes, all the available officers in the area had closed the avenue on both sides. Arrogant and cocky, they stepped out of their cars with rifles in their hands and the standard-issue semiautomatic pistols clipped to the front of their pants. They wanted to grab the guy, but the community made a barrier, and since they wouldn’t let them get through, they started to massacre them in the middle of the street, as the Orientals retreated toward the entrance to the police headquarters. At first, the older men called for order, but when they saw that the cops had no code of honor, and that they were beating the young men with their nightsticks, the elders got into the fight, too. So the police fired off smoke grenades and under cover of all the chaos, they started to shoot. The Chinese didn’t know where all the bullets were coming from and they ran toward the police headquarters and started to go in through the door and the windows. You know how the cops are, always waiting for a chance to shoot, so just imagine, as soon as they saw people running in they thought the worst and
boom
! They reacted according to the logic of “Shoot first, ask questions later.” I was transfixed by my uncle’s story, among other reasons, because I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I imagined everything he was saying in complete detail, so that instead of everything happening over there in the port, the Chinese were actually coming into
my
house, through the windows with Ninja swords, Bruce Lee style. The hit I took from
the pipe had knocked me out. The truth was, my uncle wasn’t the best conversationalist, and even less so when drunk, but that night he was the only one who could tell the story of what happened in the police department, and he had us all listening—until my dad said to my uncle, “Oh, yeah? Well, in your public statements you said something else,” and my uncle turned white in the face. It even killed his buzz.

But me, I just said to him, Right on, and started to sketch out a plan. I knew right then what I was going to do for my final project at the Ibero. As we were carving the turkey, I was thinking about how to find my place in the world, and more than anything else I was thinking about New Journalism. I’d found out about it on a recent trip to New York, and I remember a talk that Monsiváis gave at a conference at college about how all of us communicologists had to get busy, and then all of a sudden it hit me. There was a lot of movement at the table, the cups of red wine and whiskey came and went, but I was completely calm, because I saw the truth. With each slice of turkey my mom cut, certain dark clouds that had prevented my growth as a human being simply disappeared, each slice she took off the turkey was like another obstacle she took out of my path, and suddenly I saw my future so clearly it scared me. That night, I decided I would be an undercover agent working on behalf of the New Journalism. I was going to write a book about Paracuán. So as soon as I could, I went to the port to look for my research subject. I got there on the first morning bus, took a taxi to my aunt’s house, and said hi to her.
What’s up, Tía? I just got here, didn’t my mom let you know?
Of course no one had called, but that was part of the plan. In a few minutes, I had her convinced that we had talked about it at the New Year’s dinner and that her husband had said yes. My aunt made a face like she was going to get upset with her husband for not telling her anything, then she
went into the living room and called his office on the phone. Her husband hadn’t gotten there yet, so while we killed time, she made me breakfast: scrambled eggs, orange juice, and coffee. I took the opportunity to get up to speed on the news from the port in the last few days, and she told me that her husband was really worried about a problem with a drug dealer that had just shown up on the radar screen. Like always, my aunt started complaining about the newspapers, about how the reporters were always twisting everything around, especially that Johnny Guerrero. Of course, I thought, if they only read Tom Wolfe. . . . There was a busy signal at police headquarters, and my aunt recommended I go look for my uncle in his office, so as not to lose time. I left the house, walking with my own special style—laid back but steady, cool and calm, no problems—and I took a cab downtown.

Are you familiar with the police headquarters in Paracuán? It’s that old white building, just two floors, that’s right off the plaza. I got there in a few minutes. I was a very efficient agent. I have an incredible ease with directions; they could drop me off in the middle of the Kalahari, and I would always find my way home.

The secretary told me that the chief was about to head out to the state capital, but that she would try to reach him, and since I was his nephew I could wait for him in his office. There wasn’t that much to see, and the majority of the drawers were locked, so I started to spy through the window. But all of a sudden I felt really worried, out of place, uncomfortable, like my uncle’s office was full of bad vibes or like the place was sliced through by all kinds of dark energy currents—just like what happens in
The Exorcist
when Max von Sydow goes into the girl’s house for the first time. Who knows what kind of stuff was going through there, but the officers looked like they were used to it and didn’t even notice. But I did. And every time some officer stuck his head in
looking for the boss, they’d give me some weird look, like I was a suspect or they didn’t like how I looked. Since I have never been able to deal with pressure, I waited until the coast was clear and then took a toke off my pipe. I needed to have everything in good working order; I didn’t know what I was up against. Intelligent men like us need to have an open mind, a heightened sensibility, and a body ready to react.

Since no one arrived, I opened my backpack and started to read a Moebius comic. I was totally getting into one of the characters, DogHead, when my uncle came in with one of his detectives. It was Rangel, the biggest badass in the secret service. The first impression I had was that the character from the comic had come alive and that Rangel also had a dog’s head and the look of a canine: sharp teeth, rabid, ferocious. But a Super Agent of New Journalism can’t get carried away by his impressions. I said, Good to meet you, man! And I shook his hand.

Rangel was well-known as my uncle’s best officer, a goddamn bloodhound. He was a decent man, an honest and determined officer, so he didn’t get along well with his coworkers. As soon as he came in, Rangel puckered up his nose and sniffed at the air. I thought, He caught me. I know he was going to ask me what I was smoking, but right then my uncle explained to me that I had come at a bad time, because the governor had given him an ultimatum: he had to arrest a murderer in forty-eight hours, and, as if that weren’t enough, he also had to go to a meeting in the state capital. Oh, shit, I thought, a murderer? That could be a great idea for my final project at college, the subject for my book. A crazy man who killed three girls, my uncle explained. Two titles came into my head:
M: The Vampire of Düsseldorf
, and, of course, Hitchcock’s
Psycho
.

I was too young for Woodstock and too little for Avándaro, I said to myself. The Beatles split up, Janis Joplin died, they killed
Che, Bob Marley disappeared. The only utopia left is New Journalism, and I’m going to focus on that.

I convinced my uncle to let me stay, and he asked Rangel to be my escort. The bad part is that they sent me off to shave and to get a hair cut. Yeah, man, just like that. I was wearing bell-bottoms, an open shirt showing half my chest, several necklaces, and I had sideburns and an afro. Rangel and another agent they called the Blind Man told me that if I didn’t want to be noticed, I’d have to change my look. You’re in the secret police, goddamnit, not in the Atayde Brothers Circus. I was really into my look, and I hated the idea. Even so, I understood that I was now an agent in the service of New Journalism, so I went to a barber and—snip, snip, snip—I said good-bye to all of it.

While I was getting my hair cut, the Blind Man was messing with me. As soon as I was done, I said I’d like a Colt Cobra .38 or, if possible, a .357 Magnum. What’s up? You guys aren’t gonna give me a gun? The officer didn’t say anything. He was a decent guy but just real serious.

So I looked in the mirror: shaved, hair cut, and with no chains hanging from my neck, I looked like a different person. And I asked myself if the port was ready for a detective like yours truly.

From the beginning, I showed a remarkable talent for doing this kind of work. I found relationships between concepts that other people weren’t aware of. If I had stayed in the port, and above all after my conversation with Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, criminology would’ve evolved millions of years in a matter of minutes. I would have developed a way to detect murderers before they decided to kill their victims, like in that Lars von Trier movie,
The Element of Crime
.

But just as I was starting my mission, I realized that Rangel was trying to shake me; the Blind Man insisted that I go for a walk
with him; Vicente was going to the airport to pick up a specialist who had come to teach a course for the officers. Can I go? No, man, there’s no reason for you to go. You’d get bored. What’s the course about? Criminology, with Dr. Quiroz Cuarón. Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, the great detective? Hey, I said, now that’s what I’m talking about! Dr. Cuarón was a leading figure on an international level.
Time
magazine referred to him as “the Mexican Sherlock Holmes,” because he had captured literally hundreds of criminals, beginning in the forties: feared murderers like the lunatic Higinio Sobera de la Flor, who killed on a whim, picking his victims at random, or Gregorio Cárdenas, the Tacubaya Strangler. He also apprehended Shelly Hernández, the most wanted con man in Venezuela, a real chameleon of a man, and Enrico Sampietro, an amazing counterfeiter who worked for Al Capone and decided to establish himself in Mexico. Sampietro was so good, he could counterfeit himself. In addition to a lot of other police units, Interpol and the FBI were after him, but the only one who was able to bag him was Dr. Quiroz Cuarón. As if this weren’t enough, the doctor also had the honor of clearing up the true identity of Jacques Mornard, the man who killed Leon Trotsky. Do I wanna see him? Damn yes, I told him, sure as hell I do.

OK. The Blind Man scratched his head. We’ll let you go to the meeting, but you have to keep quiet. If you don’t, I’ll send you back where you came from. Whoa, I said, no way, but I accepted. I was the epitome of an irreproachable agent.