The Black Minutes (26 page)

“For the coffees,” he said to him, making sure no one else could hear, and left before the Blind Man was able to respond. His gofer stood there, like an abused dog who couldn’t understand kindness.

El Chicote was in the parking lot. Rangel wanted to give him a piece of his mind: Why’d you do that? How could you do that? Why ruin all the time he put into the investigation?

“What’s the deal, Chicote?” Rangel asked. “Were you in on it, too? How much were they going to give you?”

El Chicote was stunned. He didn’t say another word. The Blind Man came up to him, holding the envelope’s contents tightly, and said, “Jokes. Jokes are a fact of life at headquarters.”

Rangel turned on the car radio and heard the sound of mysterious drumbeats. It was the voice of Rubén Blades: “The roar of the roiling sea / the waves break at the horizon / the blue-green of the great Caribe glistens / in the majesty of the setting sun.” Since he stopped playing and dedicated himself to his current work, Rangel’s only pastime was listening to music, certain music that helped him disconnect from everything: Rubén Blades, Willie Colón, Ray Barretto, Benny Moré, disco music, soul, Aretha Franklin, the sappy songs by Marvin Gaye, blues, Eric Clapton, the rhythms of Creedence, the harmonies of the Beatles, but no
corridos
or Rigo Tovar, even if they were in style. He had lived without a record player ever since that ill-fated Sunday when he decided to kick it to pieces because it reminded him of a certain person. He didn’t get another one until he saw the sales at Mr. Guillén’s store, but he hardly ever used it. Now his time for daily leisure activities consisted of the songs that he listened to in his Chevy Nova, while going to or coming from the office. But something must really be going wrong, the policeman reasoned, when even his last refuge had become unbearable. The Panamanian’s lyrics had taken on another dimension:

The shark goes out looking

the shark never sleeps

the shark out on the prowl

the shark a bad omen
.

Holy shit, thought Rangel, this case is really getting to me.

Anyone else would have gone home and focused on his own life, but Rangel was a good and decent police officer and felt obligated to arrest the person who was guilty. Against the advice of his uncle, he was becoming obsessed with these girls who’d been killed.
Look, Vicente, you have to toughen up so your work doesn’t affect you so much. Get a thicker skin; listen to what I’m telling you and don’t dick around. You gotta understand you can’t get involved in your cases and keep your objectivity. When you make a job into a personal issue, your blind spot grows, you can’t see clearly, and that can get really dangerous. You have to work from outside, like it’s someone else who’s dealing with all this stuff
.

The fog is getting thicker, Vicente thought; as far as he could see, the street was empty. It looks like a ghost town, he said to himself. Whenever there’s fog, it’s always the same; everyone runs to their houses to escape the heat. It’s what I should do myself. He was exhausted. The only thing he wanted to do was roll into bed and sleep eight hours. Get rid of his worries, forget the pain in his hands, the fight with El Travolta, the accumulated tension. But sometimes we make tiny decisions that change our lives, without even noticing it. Just when Rubén Blades sang,

And the horizon swallows up the sun

and the volatile sea begins to calm

you can hear the mermaids’ lullabies

captivating the sky with their song
,

Rangel turned to the right, looking for a way out.

When he got to the corner of Ejército and Aduana, he saw the outrageous neon lights at the Cherokee Music Disco, a second-rate club that was going from bad to worse. He said, Oh, shit,
and parked. He had enough money to down a few drinks, even to leave with a bar girl, and still be able to eat like a king the following day at breakfast at Klein’s. Besides, today was a show day. Every Tuesday, starting at eleven, the Cherokee Music Disco attracted a good number of hookers, and there was a show where they danced in bathing suits. Rangel decided he wasn’t going to take one home, but he thought he should distract himself for a few hours, send his brain on vacation, forget about the case for a while.

It was past eleven. Before turning off the car, he heard some more Rubén Blades lyrics:

The stars are shining in the night

the moon rests in the silence

only the shark is still on the prowl
.

He was just getting out of his vehicle when two kids ran up to him: “I’ll take care of it, man” and “You want it washed, chief?” Rangel shook his head and headed to the club.

El Watusi and Juan Pachanga were guarding the main entrance to the Cherokee. El Watusi was a black man from Jalapa, almost six and a half feet tall, who had previously been a fisherman. Juan Pachanga was the administrator, always a little tipsy, a few whis-keys above sea level. Since they knew Rangel by sight, they let him go in without searching him, like they should have done. For sure, they can see how tired I am, thought Rangel. A sign was hanging off his face that said:
DON’T BOTHER ME
.

He pushed aside a beaded curtain and waited a second while he got used to the contradictions of the place. Even though there was one of those mirror balls spinning nonstop at the center of the dance floor, the music was a salsa by Roberto Roena: “You’re loco-loco . . . and I’m chill.” The decoration was leftover from
the prior owner, Freaky Villarreal, a disco music aficionado who went bankrupt and had to sell the business. Another person bought the club and salsa pushed the Village People aside.

The bar had started to liven up. Four bar girls danced on the floor, and their mistress, Madam Kalalú, was mingling with the regulars, leaning on the bar in a wispy red dress, with her customary cigar in her mouth. As soon as she saw him, she sent him two bar girls, who went to give him the traditional welcome. As soon as someone came into the Cherokee, one or more of these scantily dressed women would rush to stroke him suggestively a little, so the new guy would buy them a drink. The ones who hugged the detective now, wrapping themselves around him like a pair of boa constrictors, were very disappointed, because Rangel sent them away with an ugly gesture. He had walked over to the bar when he heard someone talking to him.

“Jackie Chan!”

It took him a minute to recognize the butcher from the Colonia Coralillo, the black man he had almost arrested with his uncle. He didn’t seem to have any hard feelings and raised his glass to toast him. He was at a nearby table with two other guys and three bar girls. As he remembered the circumstances of their last meeting, Rangel moved his head discreetly to say hello and continued on his way. Two steps from the bar, he heard someone else shout his name—“Rangel!”—and saw that the Evangelist was motioning to him from another table close by. Rangel accepted the fact that the solitude he longed for was not possible and went to sit with his colleagues.

Wong and Cruz Treviño were with the Evangelist. A bar girl was comforting Cruz. There was a half-empty Bacardi bottle in the middle of the table, about the size of an elephant’s foot. Since the Evangelist had a Coke in front of him, Rangel assumed that
the rum was flowing through Cruz Treviño’s six-foot, three-hundred-pound frame. Cruz hadn’t even seen him come in. The Evangelist offered his hand, and Rangel did the same.

“What’s up, John One Four?” Every time they saw each other, Rangel rebaptized the Evangelist with a verse from the Bible. “I thought you didn’t drink. Aren’t you condemning yourself?”

“Of course not. I’m just taking care of this sinner, making sure he doesn’t get himself killed.” The Evangelist pointed to his partner, who was trying to explain something to the bar girl.

“Hey, man.”

Rangel said hello to Cruz Treviño, whose head swayed until his eyes focused on the musician; then he extended a huge hand, with a lot of effort, and finally crashed it into Vicente’s palm. Then Cruz Treviño pointed at him with the other hand and said a few words under his breath. Rangel didn’t understand a thing. Even though his relationship with the giant was passable, Rangel always kept a certain distance to avoid problems. Just like El Travolta, Cruz Treviño had some kind of teenage problem, always about to explode. That was his personality. He’d get red with anger at the slightest affront.

“What’d he say?” the Evangelist asked him. “I didn’t get it.”

“He’s fed up with his boss,” the bar girl mumbled, so drunk she swayed back and forth. She was a fake redhead in a green sequined dress. “He says he’s a fucking asshole.”

The giant nodded his head in agreement.

“Who knows what’s going on?” shouted Wong. You had to scream to be heard in that club. “They’re saying the Federal Safety Administration is going to come.”

Rangel felt a shiver make its way up his spine; the FSA was the Mexican president’s personal police force. The last time agents from the Federal Safety Administration had visited the port was
in 1971, during the repression of the student movement. That was the year Rangel got to the port, but people told him that his uncle had had to do everything he could to stay clear of their abuse. They called a student who witnessed the massacre to make a statement, and as soon as he sat down, one of the agents, a deaf mute, stood up and punched him in the eye.
There’s no need to hit him
, Lieutenant Rivera had said,
the young man came of his own volition
. They let the student go, but things were really tense for months, and people thought the government agents would retaliate.

“Get yourself a Coke,” the Evangelist told him, “it’s the only nonalcoholic drink in the bar.”

Rangel was still deep in thought, and since he didn’t respond, the Evangelist took a cup that looked clean, poured the petroleum-colored liquid, and offered it to Rangel, but before the drink reached its destination, Cruz Treviño grabbed it from him, dumped its contents on the floor, and filled it up halfway with rum. Then he handed it over to the new guy with an animalistic roughness.

“No, compadre, what’s wrong with you? Our friend wasn’t going to drink, I don’t want any craziness,” the Evangelist protested, but the giant lifted a finger and pointed at Rangel, as if to say it was an order. “Fine, fine,” said the Evangelist, and whispered to Vicente, “Let him have his way; he’s already bent out of shape.”

At that moment, the song ended and they heard a screeching noise that nearly burst their eardrums. Then a voice started to test the sound equipment with a tap on the microphone and the traditional “Testing . . . one, two, three . . . testing.” There was one last screech and the DJ announced to the
elegant clientele
that the Cherokee Music Machine was pleased to present that night’s show: a contest between the elegant ladies of the Mulatto Dancing Club, direct from our sister republic of Chihuahua, here to entertain you with a few classy melodies. They put on “El Bodeguero,” and the dance
floor filled up with artificial smoke. In the darkness, a half dozen girls did their best to reach the dance floor without being pinched.

“They’re spring chickens,” said the bar girl, and since Rangel didn’t respond, she added, “I already saw them, they’re not professionals. They don’t know how to move their hips, and they don’t show their breasts.”

As soon as the girls came out on the dance floor, the policeman noticed something was wrong. There were six presentable young ladies, wearing tight outfits. There were two artificial blondes, two long-haired dark-skinned girls, a black, and a Chinese. They didn’t look like conventional hookers; the oldest one was about twenty-five years old and the fattest one weighed about 130 very-well-distributed pounds. In terms of their clothes, they looked straight out of an Olivia Newton-John movie.

“Sinners,” said the Evangelist.

Just like the announcer had said, the girls fanned out on the aerodynamic dance floor and started doing a supersonic dance. Rangel thought that the choreography was too structured for a show in a place like this. They didn’t move in a sexy or provocative way, and so, as they always did when something reeked of culture, the distinguished clientele of the Cherokee started to yawn. Insults would follow quickly.

One of the dancers lifted her hands and arched her back as she fell to her knees on the dance floor. Her gesture would have had better luck in a TV program, not on this well-used floor, designed for dancing to Jackson Five songs. Up until that moment, Rangel didn’t understand what was going on: It’s modern dance, he thought; they’re modern dancers. As he realized this, he imagined what would come next: the humiliation of the dancers and widespread booing. Poor girls, he said to himself, that’s what’s gonna happen.

Rangel took the glass the giant offered him, added two ice cubes, and drank half. He put the glass back on the table. Let’s see, he said to himself: the chief doesn’t want to mess with Jack Williams. Instead of assigning me to the case, he orders me to take crime reports and gives the case to El Travolta. Then he chews me out like I had anything to do with those fucking flyers; Congressman Wolffer shows up in his office, and he gives me a huge tip. If Uncle Miguel were sitting here, with his customary white shirt and shoulder holster, he would have snorted and leaned toward him:
Ah, you’re so stupid, Vicente. Did they only hire you because you knew somebody? Look at the facts; that’s where you’ll find the answers, if you know how to think it through
.