The Black Minutes

11

He pulled up to the city archives as the employees were getting back from lunch. Now that he had three days off, he would do things a little more slowly. When he asked for newspapers from twenty years ago, the clerk didn’t know what to answer.
“I’m new here. Let me see where they are.”
Cabrera wondered what case from the seventies had caught Bernardo Blanco’s attention. Was it corruption in the Oil Workers’ Union? The activities of the September 23rd Terrorist League? The founding of the Cartel del Puerto? Any of those three subjects would mean some thorny territory.
The girl came back with three dusty tomes tied together with a rope, and he could see the job was going to be grueling and long. Literally, he was going to dust off a case that others already considered buried and forgotten.
He examined the first volume: January through February 1970. The majority of the articles seemed to repeat themselves in the same stilted, overwrought language of low-budget provincial newspapers: SEASONED SMUGGLER; OBSTINATE THIEF; PICKPOCKET ARRESTED; IMPRISONED FOR STEALING LIVESTOCK—invariably followed by a picture of a guy looking sad and, next to him, a thoroughly outraged OX—and, again, SKILLED SMUGGLER; OBSTINATE THIEF; PICKPOCKET ARRESTED; IMPRISONED FOR STEALING LIVESTOCK and then the picture of another sad guy, another cow.
Since Cabrera didn’t have an exact date for the issue Bernardo was interested in, he began by examining the papers from 1970 and then the following year, advancing year by year. An hour later he thought he’d found something. By six that afternoon he had no doubt: eight months of newspapers confirmed his fears. Puta madre, he thought, what have I gotten myself into? At times, he felt like reality actually consisted of several layers of lies, one piled on top of another.
Back then there were two newspapers that copied each other’s designs, logos, and corporate colors. The leading one in sales was La Noticia, owned by General García; it was a weak newspaper, and obedient, always backing the dominant Institutional Revolutuionary Party and critical of its enemies. Its competition was El Mercurio: an independent paper, faithful to the official version of events and, more than anything else, utterly sensationalist. It was easy to confuse the two, because both were tabloid size.
Judging by the pictures, the city went through one of its most prosperous periods in the seventies. New oil reserves were being discovered, the government promoted private investing, and there was a boom in commerce. During that time of growth, the dollar exchange rate was at twelve pesos and fifty centavos, and because of the proximity of the United States, people would go to “the other side” as if they were picking something up at the supermarket.
Kraft cheese was everywhere. Brach’s candies. Levi’s jeans. Nike tennis shoes. Gringo aspirins. New neighborhoods were built in front of the lagoon. Hotels and restaurants were opened. A new hospital was built with the most modern equipment for the Oil Workers’ Union.
One night Mr. Jesús Heredia killed a tiger weighing more than four hundred pounds at his ranch. His horse reared when it saw two eyes stalking it in the bushes. Heredia barely had time to turn his flashlight on and shoot at the shape. They needed two donkeys to hang the cadaver from a tree and take the picture published in the papers.
The article next to that one reported on a young mechanic who tried to abuse two teenage girls. One of the girls managed to escape and get help. The passersby almost lynched him. The image showed the mechanic with his lips swollen and a black eye. The headline read: VICIOUS JACKAL and it was the first time the word, jackal, popped up that year. In tabloid slang, jackal is used to refer to people who attack those smaller than them, like a predatory animal. The case didn’t cause any great commotion. Back then, three rapes a week made the news. The rest didn’t make the cut.
A hurricane hit that year and killed hundreds of livestock. Many of the businesspeople in the area lost everything they had. There was a minor fire next to the refinery, which was at first kept secret.
A livestock farmer was kidnapped, and two secret-service policemen liberated him three days later. It was the first time the paper mentioned officers Chávez and Taboada, Cabrera’s long-time coworkers. Remember, he said to himself, that journalist in suspenders, Johnny Guerrero, wrote that the agents following the case were in cahoots with the kidnappers.
Then a new governor came to office, José “Pepe” Topete, a fan of spiritualism, pyramids, and herbal medicine. He only trusted a few of his staff members: the deplorable Juan José Churruca, his government minister; and Licenciado Norris Torres, member of a dynasty of dinosaurs in the office. The beginning of his term coincided with that of two mayors: Daniel Torres Sabinas in Paracuán and Don Agustín Barbosa, the first opposition mayor of Ciudad Madero. A little while later, the governor would put one of them in prison. That year, 1978, Don Daniel Torres wanted to put on an unforgettable summer carnival, the port’s main celebration commemorating the second founding of the city of Paracuán.
Kojak was on television.
In the movie theaters, 007’s Live and Let Die, Papillon, The Exorcist, El santo oficio by Arturo Ripstein, and El llanto de la tortuga with Hugo Stiglitz.
There was a porn movie theater, the Hilda, that had Emmanuelle, Bilitis, and The Story of O, but most of the time they were showing the same movies over and over again: Elsa the Pervert; Ubalda, All Naked and Warm; The Gestapo’s Secret Train, College Girls Have Fun, My Lover Is a Puppy (parts I and II), and other movies that mixed sex and geography: Asia the Insatiable, Khartoum, Sensual Nights; Samsala, Voracious Tongue. Understandably, the bishop attacked these movies during his Sunday sermons.
These are the ads: Rigo Tovar Premieres his New LP; Listen to La Hora de Roberto Carlos on XEW; José José and His Friends, Juan Gabriel and Guest Stars; Come to the Cherokee Music Disco Nights and dance to the sounds of the Jackson Five, Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, and the Bee Gees. Meet the pretty people and dance to the YMCA.
Social News, January 8: “The distinguished beachgoers in the photo have arrived from Germany. The tanned young ladies have traveled all the way from the Rhine to visit our greatest tourist attraction, Miramón Beach. They are, from left to right: Inge Gustaffson, Deborah Straus, and Patricia Olhoff.”
Local news: GREAT RISK OF MALARIA INFECTION: VIRUS MIGHT COME IN A TOMATO TRUCK.
Sports: CASSIUS CLAY SHOWS OFF AT A PRESS CONFERENCE.
International: KISSINGER THREATENS ECONOMIC EMBARGO. ALARM IN THE MIDDLE EAST.
Local news: “For four consecutive days, Paracuán PRI supporters distribute pamphlets condemning the stones thrown at President Echeverría at the National University.”
Social news, airport: “John and Jack Williams travel to our sister city, San Antonio. Family and friends see them off.”
Local news, blood and gore: QUINCE?ERA ENDS IN BESTIAL BRAWL; DISGRACEFUL MAN BEATS HIS OWN MOTHER; HUSBAND ABUSES WIFE FOR NO REASON; EPILEPTIC MAN RUN OVER BY BUS; SHADY CHARACTER WITH STUNTED MIND SPENDS FREEZING NIGHT IN THE SLAMMER.
That was the situation in the progressive city of Paracuán, state of Tamaulipas, always interested in the more spiritual aspects of life (while at the same time condemning the more carnal side). But then the port’s two papers begin to take different tacks: in the following days, their coverage was almost identical, except for the tone of the articles and the style of the headlines.
The first news related to the killer appeared on Thursday, January 12, as a small paid insert, along with the day’s television programming: DIFFICULT SEARCH: A GIRL IS MISSING. A photo was included, taken from a yearbook, and next to it appeared the following text:
The young girl in the picture, Lucía Hernández Campillo, disappeared last Monday while on her way to Colegio Froebel. She was wearing a blue skirt and a white shirt with black shoes. Her distressed parents, Everardo and Fernanda, will provide a reward to anyone with information on her whereabouts.
Twenty years later, the headlines from the following day actually seemed more like omens: LA SIERRA DE OCAMPO BURNS; DROUGHT CAUSES ANXIETY IN PORT; DAMAGE EXPANDS TO CENTER AND NORTH OF TAMAULIPAS.
TWO SECRET AGENTS ACCUSED OF ROBBERY. Once again, agents Chávez and Taboada. Cabrera shook his head. El Desconocido premiered with Valentín Trujillo.
At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 17, there was a horrendous discovery at El Palmar. A couple rowing around the lagoon found the body of a little girl, Karla Cevallos. The body was badly hidden under branches and dead leaves on a little island, just a few yards away from the busiest avenue in the city.
Ah, Cabrera concluded, so this is what it was. How could I forget? We were working forty-eight-hour shifts to find the killer; I’d just joined the police force. Unfortunately, all the work led nowhere, and the newspapers published a number of editorials about the first girl’s disappearance: LUCíA STILL NOT FOUND: PARENTS DISMAYED.
On March 17, thirty days after Karla Cevallos was found, El Mercurio noted, GRUESOME DISCOVERY DOWNTOWN. On his way into the bathroom at the Bar León, right in front of La Plaza de Armas, office worker Raúl Silva found the remains of a second girl. But it wasn’t Lucía, it was Julia Concepción González, who had disappeared just a few hours earlier. The resemblance between the two deaths was obvious, and the police had to accept the existence of just one killer. POLICE LOOK FOR INDIVIDUAL ACCUSED OF SERIOUS CRIMES.
JACKAL STILL ON THE PROWL: Agents of the Secret Service focus all their resources on the difficult search for the person who carried out kidnappings and attacks on several young girls in the last few days.
Newspapers speculated that the offender was passing through the city. It was said he was mentally ill. Both papers interviewed Dr. Margarita López Gasca, a psychiatrist from the health center in the nearby city of Tampico, and at their request she worked up a profile of the killer:
We are dealing with a person unable to function socially, who lacks a moral conscience and who repeats the same acts compulsively, because his greatest satisfaction is to be found in the punishment awaiting him.
She is credited with another comment, obviously inserted by the journalist at El Mercurio: “All evidence suggests he will attack again.”
Collective hysteria unleashes in the harbor. Teachers warn their students about the danger, and surveillance is doubled.
That same week in March, when the police announced they had a firm lead in the case, another singular fact occurred, but due to the horror of the crime it went by almost unnoticed: the French archaeologist René Leroux announced he had finally discovered the exact location of the legendary and mysterious pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell. Anyone who has lived in the harbor knows that the legendary pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell was located in the garden behind Mrs. Harris’s house. The mound was about thirteen feet tall and covered by a thick layer of grass. According to the French archaeologist, those thirteen feet were just the tip of the iceberg. According to the legends in the area, the pyramid was four thousand years old and over three hundred feet high and might be home to important treasures. To support his claim, he said all you had to do was ask the residents of the neighborhood how hard it was to build their houses’ foundations and have them show you the clay objects found during the construction work. The mound’s neighbors, including Mrs. Harris, didn’t want to hear a thing about it, so the pyramid stayed buried for more than twenty years.
Just a few days apart, both papers published incendiary editorials, demanding that the killer be arrested and suggesting that if the offender were still free it was because he was a person with power. As popular resentment increased, the weather report augured that the situation would remain the same for the next few hours: “Threat of rain. Gale-force winds blow in from the northeast.”
At the beginning of March, an anonymous donor had offered twenty-five thousand and then later fifty thousand dollars to anyone who helped find the jackal. Attracted by the reward, amateurs, ex-cops, and detectives had invaded the city. The race for the reward began.
Popular anger had not subdued when, on March 20, a group of Boy Scouts, entering an abandoned construction site, found the bodies of Lucía Hernández Campillo and Inés Gómez Lobato. El Mercurio spared no details or unpleasant pictures, and general rage was unleashed: TWO MORE GIRLS FOUND; TODAY AT 5, PROTEST IN THE PORT.
From Mexico City, the head of the National Professors’ Union announced that, if no one intervened in the matter, they would call a national strike. The union, with four hundred thousand professors, was one of the most powerful in the country. The governor intervened in the case, and finally, on March 21, the killer was arrested; he gave an immediate confession. Cabrera could only follow the story up to this point, because the files in the archives were incomplete. Judging by what he read, it was obvious that the trial was full of irregularities. The defense attorney insisted important evidence had been covered up, evidence that would have led the investigation in a different direction.
A few days after the trial began, La Noticia stopped covering it, and El Mercurio did the same a day later. That weekend La Noticia published a photograph that had impressed Cabrera a great deal back then. It was the image of a bearded man, dressed in white like an ancient Christian, with a gigantic piece of fabric over an immense expanse of water: “Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff covers King’s Beach, Massachussetts, with over 40,000 square feet of white fabric.”
From that moment on, the papers didn’t mention the subject again and the crime section went back to normal: JAWS OPENS; CONSTRUCTION WORKER’S DRAMATIC SUICIDE; THIEF NEVER GIVES UP; SKILLED SMUGGLER. On June 20, the minister of health, on a visit to the port city, confirmed that the region was no longer at risk of malaria. But looking through the crime section for the following months, it was clear that even though the killer was tried and locked up, the bodies of little girls kept turning up in the northern part of the state. Cabrera tried to get more information, but the files in the archives stopped there.