The Black Minutes

6

When he found out Cabrera didn’t have a car, his young colleague insisted on giving him a ride to the cemetery. Cabrera suggested that they pass the funeral procession.
They arrived long before the cortege and sat down to wait beside a wall. Immediately they began to sweat. The few palm trees around provided no shade, and it was hard to see into the distance with the sun rebounding off the whitewashed tombs. Cabrera’s shirt was sopping, and sweat trickled down his back.
The first to arrive was a fat fellow of about fifty, who wore suspenders. He asked if they were waiting for Bernardo Blanco, and the young colleague said yes. Before he sat down with them, the man looked the detective over.
“You’re Ramón Cabrera, right? The one who solved the fraud at Gulf Insurance?”
Cabrera tried to avoid it, but the fat man sat down facing them. “I haven’t heard anything about you in the news since then. It’s been quite a while since you were at the press conferences.”
“The best policeman is an invisible one,” he growled.
The fat man handed them his business card. “Johnny Guerrero, crime reporter for El Mercurio.” He asked if they knew anything about the case.
Cabrera didn’t say boo, but countered with, “Why don’t you tell us what the rumors are. You must be better informed than I am.”
“I haven’t got anything for a fact,” Johnny explained. “I think it was the Colombians. They’re squeezing out the local dealers. First they did business with them and learned their routes and contacts into the United States, and now they’re eliminating them, only instead of marijuana, they’re thinking of transporting cocaine. The deceased knew all that, I hear, and maybe he was going to be writing on the subject. What’s your opinion?”
Cabrera was intent on wiping away the sweat that trickled into his eyes. As much as he tried, the journalist couldn’t get the detective to put forward a different motive for the crime. Cabrera lost interest in the conversation and would have kept answering in monosyllables, when all at once the reporter said something that got his attention.
“Do you know what Bernardo Blanco was writing about before he died?” Cabrera asked, and he scrutinized Guerrero closely.
“I haven’t a clue,” the reporter confessed. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said in English. “That’s the key to the crime.”
Seeing the procession approaching, the journalist got up.
“Uh-oh, here comes Father Fritz. That priest is crazy, and he can’t stand the sight of me.” And Guerrero walked off in the opposite direction. Cabrera noticed he limped on his left side.
“Hey,” he asked Columba, “do you know who the blonde was who came in at the end?”
“The blonde? Cristina González, Bernardo’s ex-girlfriend.”
By his account, Cristina and the journalist met in San Antonio, when the two were studying there, and were together all through college. Then Bernardo decided to return to his home-town and broke off the relationship. “Why would he do that?”
“I have no idea.”
How strange, he thought. If I were in his shoes, I would never have left a good job in San Antonio to come back to this port town. Or left a woman like that.
“So what have you heard?” Cabrera asked his young colleague. “Was it the dealers who killed him?”
“I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “Didn’t you hear about the Chato Rambal business?”
“What was that?”
“El Chato, of the port cartel. Bernardo interviewed him a year ago, because he was writing a piece about drug trafficking here.”
According to Columba, El Chato wasn’t at all upset by Bernardo’s article, since it was critical but objective, and from then on Bernardo had become the cartel’s protégé.
“Once, he was about to be mugged in the market—you know how dangerous it is in Colonia Coralillo—and Bernardo told me the muggers suddenly stopped, their eyes bugging out, and slunk off, all apologetic. When Bernardo turned, a cowboy with a pistol tipped his palm-straw hat and walked away without a word. With protection like that, nobody would get up the nerve to do him any damage. I don’t think it was the dealers.”
“Who knows, don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe he wrote another article, attacking El Chato.”
“That’s impossible.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Bernardo stopped writing for the paper. Over six months ago.”
It seemed to him that at the grave site, a small cloud took shape in that section of the cemetery and rose elegantly into the sky.
“And do you know why he quit?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“If he wasn’t working for the paper anymore, what was he doing at the port? How was he making a living?”
“I don’t know . . . I suppose he had savings. . . . Bernardo was a hermit: just like that he’d disappear for weeks on end and hole up to write. I hadn’t seen him for over six months when I found out he’d died.”
“And you don’t know what he was writing?”
“No idea.”
“Did he know anybody with the initials C.O.?”
Columba shrugged and, as Cabrera said nothing, stood up. There was a stir among the funeral party.
As they were lowering the journalist’s body, a tiny nun who looked to be a hundred years old shouldered her way through the crowd to the center. She tuned an ancient guitar and, as the coffin descended into the grave, began to sing, before anybody could stop her, a Christian version of “Blowing in the Wind,” in an adaptation so free that the only thing left of Bob Dylan’s song was the original melody. In place of Dylan’s lyrics the sister sang a song of protest, religiously inspired. Something on the order of “Know ye He will come / Know He will be here / Meting out His bread to the poor.” Her voice was no good, but she did sing loudly, and as she repeated the chorus some of the mourners wept, especially the dead man’s relations. Cabrera was a roughneck, but even he felt a lump in his throat: burials depressed him. To change the subject, he said to Rodrigo Columba, “If the deceased were here, he’d request a different song.”
“Don’t be so sure,” the young man answered. “Bernardo loved Bob Dylan. He loved anything that had to do with the sixties and seventies; he was obsessed with all that.”
None of this jibes, thought Cabrera: Bernardo Blanco had a job and a girlfriend in Texas, a promising stable future, and suddenly he decides to leave it all to come here, write tabloid journalism, risk his life. Cabrera would’ve liked to know what the reporter was really up to, though most likely he’d never find out. As Bob Dylan’s song echoed through the cemetery, the cloud above broke up into ever smaller pieces, until it dissipated completely.
“Time to get back to work,” he growled.