The Black Minutes

19
Report of Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, Detective

We were drinking coffee when the phone rang. My sister Consuelo answered and then hung up. It was another case, she told me, they want your help with another case, but you need to rest; remember what the doctor said. And it was the truth, the cardiologist said I needed to take a vacation, preferably at sea level. As soon as Consuelo left, I asked myself if it wasn’t time to retire, and the dusk light seemed to confirm my fears. It would be a pity to stop now, I told myself; at this rate I’ll soon have enough material to finish the book, and to do that I’ll need more cases. I was telling myself this when I looked out at the street and oh, what a surprise! There he was: the man in black, as I’d taken to calling him.
Of all the guys who have followed me, this one is the least discreet. Who knows who’s monitoring me now? I’ve been followed by the Chinese Mafia, the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs, Batista’s police, a certain faction of the CIA, that French guy with the knife, and three dozen fellow detectives; it’s part of the job. I must have done something, I thought, to make this boy stand there outside. In my head, I went over the cases I was working on: the bank fraud, the counterfeit stamps, the businessman’s disappearance, but none of them seemed important enough to justify the sentry out there.
It could be the government, I said to myself. Since I quit, the president has been keeping close tabs on me. When he or one of his friends is interested in a case I have, one or more agents from the Federal Safety Administration take shifts to follow me, agents that sometimes I myself trained. Of them all, the easiest to notice is this stubborn young man who spends hours in front of my house. He peers inside, making no attempt to conceal his interest, waiting for the moment that I head out into the street. Well, now he’s f*cked, I said to myself, it’s going to start raining and I have no plans to leave the house.
I was looking outside when another phone call came in. A voice that I seemed to recognize identified himself as a police officer from Paracuán, Tamaulipas: Vicente Rangel, at your service. The voice reminded me of someone and I couldn’t remember who. Paracuán, Tamaulipas? I asked, “Does Miguel Rivera still work there?” He was my uncle, said the young man, he was my uncle, but he passed away. “How is that possible? When did he die?” The young man said: Three years ago. “That’s a shame,” I said. “I had a lot of feeling for Miguel Rivera.” Yeah, he’s really missed, the young man said to me, we could really use his experience right about now—and I understood that the young man’s voice sounded familiar because he had the same voice as Miguel: a firm, friendly voice. “Believe me, I’m very sorry,” I told him, “your uncle was an amazing individual . . . how can I help you?” Quite the opposite of what I’d expected, Miguel Rivera’s nephew had not only inherited his uncle’s kind voice, but also his vocation, and he had read my books. He was calling on behalf of the mayor of Paracuán, who wanted me to assist his agents in the course of an investigation. Rangel summarized the case: two little girls dead, both killed in the same excessively violent way, two murders without witnesses or leads. “Don’t get your hopes up,” I told him. “When dealing with a perfect crime, the only way to find the perpetrator is if someone calls in a tip. Look for someone else because I’m already retired.” It’s important, he said to me. “I know it’s important, but a man my age simply doesn’t have the same strength.” Rangel insisted and I said to him, “Look, I’ll think about it. Call me back in one hour.”
Two voices battled in my head. One told me: Don’t do this, Alfonso, you have to relax, and the other insisted: You have a responsibility, damnit, do it for Miguel Rivera, your friend, who helped you so much. A guy who murders girls, I thought. From what I’ve heard, the case reminds me of what happened in Mexico City with Gregorio Cárdenas, the guy who strangled women. The case in the port would be a difficult one to solve. Although, on the other hand, if organized well, it would undoubtedly be a leap forward for criminology. I could even prove the system I propose in my book, the criminal equation. Why not? I said to myself. I know the port and I could find the perpetrator. If all goes well, I will contribute something and also confirm my theories; besides, Consuelo can’t get upset: I’m just following my doctor’s advice, I’m going to the beach. Little by little, that line of thought won out in my head, so when the officer called again, I accepted and prepared my bags to travel that afternoon. I only insisted on one condition, the same one as always since I retired: that I would investigate at my own expense, independently, and that I would continue the investigation to its full extent, without considering the interests that might be affected. Rangel accepted and I set out on my trip.
I reviewed the notes from my book in process, The Criminal Equation, without a doubt my most important work since I wrote the Treatise on Criminology; I packed three shirts and left out the back door in order to evade detection by the lookout. I’m more than seventy years old, but I can still avoid the watchmen if I set out to do so. Over the years, I’ve developed a flawless technique.
Nothing notable happened during the flight, but when I got to headquarters, Rangel left me in the care of a suspicious character who couldn’t have been on good terms with the law: you could smell his criminal history a mile away. “Dr. Quiroz Cuarón? I recognized you from the photo at the end of your book; it’ll be quite an honor to work with the Mexican Sherlock Holmes.” I replied that Sherlock Holmes was a fraud, a simple literary invention, not a real police officer. I’ve never seen anyone resolve a case like Sherlock Holmes, without doing scientific work. As soon as I could, I called Rangel aside and asked him, Is that your lackey? He sighed—Yes, he’s my assistant—so I told him that assistants like that one give you more problems then they solve. Your uncle never had assistants, he always worked alone or in a team with other policemen like him. I’d love that! The young guy said, but the way things are now, I can’t trust my coworkers. At least I know that this guy’ll support me for money.
I said to myself that if Vicente couldn’t trust his own colleagues, things were worse than I thought. Rangel needed help, but I wasn’t sure I could support him. It’s been years since crime became completely transparent to me. . . . There are a small number of story lines about criminals and detectives, and I’ve seen each one of them so many times, in all their variations, that I can recognize them immediately. I suppose that’s the advantage of experience. Just by seeing a situation, I can predict how it’ll end; that’s why it’s so hard to keep hope alive.
The way I see it, everything went downhill starting with President Miguel Alemán. The bureaucrats were only looking out for their own advancement, there was endless fraud. The idealists like us who started out during the time of Lázaro Cárdenas, people like me, who were looking for justice, we had a tough time just getting our jobs done. It was so much work to find that counterfeiter in Tampico! And to find the guy who killed Trotsky! The way I see it, everything started to come apart when Alemán was president, things got worse with López Mateos, and ended up completely rotten when Echavarreta came to power. We moved from knives to pistols, then to machine guns, then to kidnappings and massacres. I remember when I quit: Look, I told the president, I don’t have anything to do here, I’m leaving and I’m taking my team. We left en masse: Carrillo, Segovia, Lobo, yours truly. We couldn’t keep on like that.
That’s why, when I heard Vicente, I thought I’d just head back home immediately, but in the end he was Miguel Rivera’s nephew and he was asking for my help: an idealist in a sea of corruption. If I accepted the assignment, it was in memory of his irreproachable uncle.
I studied all the evidence that they had. Even though I was tired, I examined all the circumstances of the crimes one by one and visited the crime scenes. It was true, there was no concrete evidence, just one or two inferences that could be made. As I ate lunch with Vicente, it occurred to me to try out my equation. I asked the young man who he thought, out of all the powerful people in the port, had certain characteristics that could predispose them to committing sexual crimes. Who frequented certain places, who was famous for certain excesses, who among them had a criminal history of sexual offenses with a minor? Occasionally, Rangel mentioned an interesting idea and I noted it down in my list. As I made my notes, Vicente got more and more aggravated, because he didn’t understand my system. He was disturbed by the fate of the little girls, and he wanted to do something quickly. Vicente was a good person, but if I tried to explain my theory about the criminal equation, we would lose precious time, and I was starting to feel tired, so I said to him: Look, Vicente, I’m going to look over the information and later I’ll explain my conclusions; right now, I just want to relax. I was planning to review the possible explanations in light of the system that I myself invented.
He stood up to make some calls and said to me, Sometimes I don’t know why we’re in this, if everything is going against us. Perk up, I said. Sometimes the isolated actions of an individual can change the society at large. That’s what I said to him, and I still regret it. Enthusiasm can provoke delusions.
The rest of the afternoon, I was mad at myself for being so short with Vicente. I went to give my talk, and I realized Rangel wasn’t there. I should have given him some advice, I told myself, after all, he is Miguel Rivera’s nephew. I even wrote a long list of tips that I was planning to give him, I really didn’t rest at all, writing that list of pointers, but when the talk was over, despite what I had expected, his gofer the Blind Man was the one who came to pick me up. And Vicente? I asked. Vicente had to go out, he replied; he went to investigate the death of a colleague. How strange, I said to myself. Doctor, the man asked me, what do you want to do now?
I asked him to take me back to my hotel. I had to think. So I took out my notebook and started to insert the concrete data about the crime into the abstract structure of my equation. I had it all ready, but I was missing names, profiles.
I went up to my room and tried to sleep. Half an hour later, the phone rang and the Blind Man asked me if I could join him in the bar: New evidence had been uncovered. I had to go down, even though interacting with the Blind Man bothered me. We sat at an out-of-the-way table and I didn’t let him speak until after the bartender had left. So, what’s the evidence? I asked. I wanted to tell you some things I didn’t tell you in front of Rangel because he doesn’t like rumors. So, what is it? I took sips off my caipirinha as the Blind Man explained the dark side of the port, stories in which several of the most powerful men of Paracuán played a role, but no concrete leads. At two o’clock, I looked at my watch and took my leave. How awful, I said to myself, a city so small with such murky depths. What the Blind Man had told me put me in a bad mood, as always happens when I’m about to solve a case. I went to my room and felt like something strange was going on.
When I looked at the wood grain in the door, the lines started to quiver and shake, like an army of ants were moving them little by little. I saw blue spots sparkling in front of my eyes and I thought, They drugged me; there was poison in that drink. I staggered over to my bed, opened my suitcase, and got out a first-aid kit I always carry with me. I drank an antidote as if it were water and waited. It took forever to recover my breath. Damn, I said to myself, if the poison had taken effect when I was downstairs, I wouldn’t have been able to come up.
I was beat. I should have called an ambulance but I didn’t have enough strength, so I stayed in bed. The situation is more complicated than it seems, I thought. Someone does not want me to work on this case and is sending me very clear messages. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t remember a moment when the Blind Man touched my glass, so I decided that the poison came from the bartender. Or perhaps they were conspiring against me; I can’t trust anyone in this city, I said to myself.
I took out my pistol and prepared to wait: the first person to open the door was going to find quite a surprise.
The windows were open. They looked out over the patio on the inside of the hotel; not exactly the best idea in terms of security. I should have got up and closed them, but I was exhausted. As I slowly got my strength back, I kept pondering the situation, lying on my back in bed. The names of the suspects began to parade through my mind. On one side were the suspects’ names that Rangel’s man had mentioned to me; on the other was the equation I came up with to identify murderers. The different possibilities clashed with each other, but suddenly, before I could even finish the process, I knew who the murderer was, it was as clear as day. My intuition, which never fails me in these cases, slipped in the name of a person that the Blind Man mentioned in passing, without knowing that he was related to the case. Wow, I said to myself, the equation does work. Among the suspects, there was only one person who could have killed those girls and gone unpunished. Memory might get worse with age but the system just gets better. I have to publish that book; the equation works!
At that moment, I was able to sit up on the bed. I had to see a doctor soon, but I said to myself—how naive I am—that the crisis had come to an end. I was standing up to close the curtains when I realized that the man in black was spying on me from the interior patio. It’s not possible! It was not possible that he was there, staring at my room. I don’t know how they found me, I said to myself, but the investigation is in danger. It’s never been a good thing to be close to the Federal Safety Administration.
I went out into the street with my pistol in my hand, covered by my suitcoat, and hailed a taxi. Take me to the airport, I told him, take me to the airport immediately. I thought of calling Rangel from Mexico City, finishing the investigation there, informing the independent press, but I had to hurry to move faster than the people following me.
I barely made the first plane of the day. In Mexico City, with all my stuff and my suitcases, I hailed another taxi to Balderas and climbed the three flights of stairs, gasping for air. I went to the Ministry of the Interior and went directly into the main office.
“Dr. Quiroz Cuarón, in person,” said the personal assistant to the minister, a conniving, impertinent young man who was smiling for no reason; “it’s an honor to have you here.” Thank you, I said, but time is of the essence, I must speak with Gutiérrez. “He’s on vacation,” he said, “he left for the Gulf of Mexico.” To the Gulf? I just came from there. “You can tell us all about it, Doctor, but before you do that”—and he took out a document—“the Minister would like you to sign this statement supporting the president in the incident of October second.” How presumptuous, I thought, I was already familiar with the document and had refused to sign it. I didn’t come about that, I told him. I came to report injustice. What you people want to do is a crime, if you don’t stop now, I’ll report you to the president. “Doctor,” he said without dropping his smile, “there’s no use insisting, the president isn’t going to listen to you. Don’t waste your time.” I understood that he was serious. Look, I told him, tell the president that he does not have my support, I’ll never sign that paper—and I left, slamming the door. I had broken with the government once and for all.
When I got to my house, I felt I was about to explode. I called and called but no one answered in the president’s office. The last secretary who answered the phone, a rude and offensive woman, made such a sarcastic remark that I hung the phone up violently. On few occasions had I felt as irritated as I did that morning. It was hot, and I was sweating. I should relax, I said to myself, I’m stressed out; the heat from the Gulf has followed me here. When I moved to take off my shoes, I saw that my left arm was trembling. Argh, I said to myself, this time I’ve overdone it. I breathed in deeply, but it was too late, soon the pain was intolerable and I lay down to relax. I couldn’t feel my arm below my shoulder and I knew I was in trouble, I’d brought on another heart attack. Suddenly, boom! It reached my chest. The pain increased minute by minute, it was like giving birth. I couldn’t beat it, until I said to myself, Enough already, Alfonso; you’ve overcome bigger challenges in your life, don’t give up. Deal with the pain. That’s what I told myself, only instead of resisting I relaxed my body, as if the pain were a river and I was swimming in the middle of it, and I lost consciousness as I floated in its current.
I woke up the next morning. The sun shone through the window and everything seemed incredibly real. I called my sister. Consuelo, I’m exhausted, and I told her what had happened. But I was so tired I couldn’t be sure if I actually called her on the phone or if I had just imagined that I did it. Nothing happened the rest of the day. I had no strength to move. Luckily, there was a bottle of water on the bedside table, and that allowed me to survive.
The next day, my sister and her children came to see me, but I was so tired I couldn’t get up to open the door. I shouted to them: Use your key! I’d given them a copy before, and they were able to come in. As soon as they saw me, they said we had to call a doctor. No, no, I said to them, I’m not so bad off, I just need to rest, but they didn’t listen to me. Consuelo stayed by my side and I slept like a log. Once, my sister stood up and said to me, “Alfonso, I love you a lot, and I was angry with you when you left for that port, but I understand you had to do it, your vocation is stronger than your body.” Consuelo, I told her, you’re my sister and I love you, too. There’s no need to apologize, just the opposite; you’ve always been very kind to me. But now it’s midnight and I’m very tired. I need to sleep.
The next morning, I woke up before her and her children. I felt like new. I even put on my shoes without feeling out of breath. Rest, I said to myself, I needed the rest. From here on, I’ll rest every weekend.
I wanted to surprise everyone by going out to get the newspaper, so I headed to the door and opened it. How strange, I thought, the paper isn’t here. I thought about going to buy one myself at the corner and I headed that way, but then I saw the kiosk wasn’t there. And not only that: there wasn’t anyone in the street. The largest city in the world was suddenly empty. Where was everyone? I thought. Is there another protest? Or is it really early? As for the kiosk, they must have moved it somewhere else. So many things happened in two days! That’s what I told myself and I headed to Avenida Insurgentes, where there’s another kiosk. Only when I turned the corner, I saw the same guy as always: the man in black. This is too much, I thought, this is just too much, and I went up and confronted him.
Look, I told him, I’m fed up with your following me. Why are you doing this? He didn’t respond. Who do you work for? The young man stayed quiet and took off his dark glasses. Up close, it was obvious he was very young, you know, with long hair like those singers from Liverpool. Why are you following me? I persisted. The young man smiled. “Because you’re dead, Doctor.” What? Me, dead? What are you talking about? And he showed me the death certificate: On said day at said time Dr. Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón passed away at his house at 54 Río Mixcoac. “You died in your bed, after coming back from the port.” Are you sure? “Very sure, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for the past few days, but you have been very clever and I haven’t been able to reach you. You’ve even been able to live your last few days three times.”
For a minute, I thought it was a trap set by Echavarreta and the Federal Safety Administration, but the young man’s calm demeanor gave the impression of being beyond question. So, what am I doing here? “I suppose you wanted to solve that case, you’ve been very busy.” Oh, yeah, I said, the girls. I almost forgot. “It happens when you’re old, don’t worry.”
All of a sudden, I realized what I was doing was utterly ridiculous—me, one of the most brilliant minds of my generation—and my legs gave way. I feel bad, I said, I think I’m having another heart attack. The young man took me by the arm. “The stars, Doctor, look at the stars.” Even though it was a gorgeous day, I could see the stars as never before; I could see the constellations and the planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars—and all of a sudden the pain dissipated.
“It’s over?” Yes, it is, he said. It was very simple; in the end, it was very simple, I feel much better. He looked at me and smiled; he was actually wearing white. I understood intuitively that I should have kept quiet, but I said to him: There’s one thing that worries me, it’s about the case. “There’s no time anymore, Doctor: it’s time to go.” That’s a shame, I said, I had it all solved. . . . At the very least, wouldn’t you like to know my explanation? Two minutes, just give me two minutes, and you’ll know what really happened. And I explained the whole case, detailing the system I had developed over the years, the foolproof criminal equation. When I was done, the young man gave me his opinion. “Impressive,” he said, “a little bit like Sherlock Holmes.”
Sherlock Holmes was a fraud, I said, a huge fraud. I lost it like I always do when I hear that name, but that time I didn’t have the sense of conviction, as if a gigantic hole had opened up in the middle of my sentence and all the resentment had just flowed out. And then I understood that the mystery, the real mystery, was just beginning for me.