The Black Minutes

9

He opened his shotgun and made sure it was loaded. As he left, he heard an engine start. A black pickup, parked on the opposite side of the street was moving in his direction. He’d seen that truck before: it was outside the hospital when he left to stake out Fritz’s office and get the keys. Holy shit! The priest is right, he thought, they’re following me.
From the end of the street came a very strong gust of wind. It was a sign that the storm, the worst of the storm, was about to arrive. Well, he thought, that decides it. As he turned the corner, it started to pour. His shirt and suit coat were completely drenched.
He got onto a bus on Avenida Universidad. Every time he turned around, the pickup was still there. When the bus got to the Flamboyanes neighborhood, he got out in the middle of a group of people and crossed the avenue. The pickup had to stop at the light, so he took advantage of the opportunity, turning the corner and limping to the house. As he got out the key chain, his hands were trembling. Holy shit, he thought, holy f*cking shit. The key wasn’t working, and the pickup was getting closer. He could tell by the unmistakable sound of the tailpipe. When the truck turned at the corner, he made it inside. El Macetón waited for a minute, then stuck his head out the window and saw the pickup driving away slowly.
As soon as he had carefully locked the door, he went upstairs to look for a jacket, as he was trembling either from fear or from the cold. As he could see, Bernardo had set up his studio in the main room. A large simple desk, a book with photos from the seventies and another with film posters, but there was no sign of his papers and his report. They had taken everything, including the computer. As he got closer, he noticed that where the computer should have been, a layer of dust outlined the shape of the hard disk perfectly. A noise from far away caught his attention and he looked out the window. Because they had knocked down the trees, he could see the lagoon from an unusual perspective.
To the east, there was a long row of trucks parked: people drinking in their cars, boom-box car culture, volume all the way up, alcohol and beer. The ones who were most restless walked around in circles, checking out who had what car, what girl they were going with, what rims they had. To the west, where the lagoon ended, there was a huge highway stretching into the horizon. A straight highway, he could make out an enormous expanse of it but with no beginning or end, with no interruptions except for a group of palm trees and huisaches. El Macetón watched as two eighteen-wheelers sped along and noticed a third, parked on one side of the road, that was having trouble. This third eighteen-wheeler had its hood up and the driver was looking over the motor. He thought: the truck is just like me, stalled. He stood there until he realized his mouth was dried out and went down for a glass of water.
There weren’t many books in the living room, but they painted a complete portrait of Bernardo: chronicles of the recent past, political scandals, self-help and personal improvement books, the occasional legal thriller.
Next to the CD player, he found a small album with old photos. There was one of Bernardo’s Texan girlfriend, but the most common were pictures of the young man alone. In a compassionate gesture, Cabrera took out the beautiful girl’s picture, the same picture he had found in the bus station, and put it next to one of the pictures of the young man.
Right then, the telephone started to ring. Without knowing why, El Macetón picked it up. An unknown voice said, “You’re going to die,” and the line went dead.
The next thing he did was to call the bus station and ask what time the next bus to Mexico City left.
“At ten tonight, but there are no more seats.”
“And the next bus?”
“Tomorrow at seven A.M.”
In other words, he would have to stay there that night, so he went back to look at the lagoon. The truck was still stalled.
The wind howled all night long. About eleven-thirty, the window moaned like someone was trying to get in, but he got up to look out, and if there was someone, he didn’t see any trace of them. It’s going to be a long night, he said to himself, hopefully there’s coffee.
He called his girl’s apartment, but he didn’t get her. He called his wife’s colleague at work, but she hadn’t made it in. Then he started to get worried. Shit, he said, I hope they haven’t gotten to her. Mr. Obregón was capable of kidnapping her and taking out his revenge on her.
He put his rifle on the floor and collapsed onto the sofa in the living room. He fell asleep at the same moment he lay down. A while later, he opened his eyes and was scared it was past seven o’clock. Damn, he thought, I’m going to miss the bus, I have to get up, but he couldn’t. The weather was perfect and the sofa was tempting him to keep sleeping.
A few minutes later, he had the impression that someone was circling around the outside of the house. He felt a presence looking in the window, walking around the backyard, and pulling on the doorknob. He knew that shape well. A second later, the back door opened and Bernardo Blanco walked into the living room and looked at him with surprise.
“Thanks for coming,” said El Macetón.
“It’s nothing,” said the journalist. “You don’t have to thank me.”
He went straight to the album and picked up the picture of the blonde girl, or at least that seemed to be the case. He was wearing the same clothes as the first time El Macetón had seen him: light blue pants and a white shirt. A very soft light could be said to irradiate from him. The boy put the photo away in his shirt, and El Macetón got up the nerve to ask, Hey, Bernardo, just between you and me, why’d you decide to write crime stories for a living? The answer was so simple, he couldn’t believe it; he spread his arms apart to show how astonished he was.
Suddenly, he understood the whole mystery about Bernardo. This is important, he said to himself; I have to remember this. And despite that, as soon as he had the thought, he felt his resolve vanish in thin air. Look, the boy told him, when you wake up, you’re going to have a very important visitor. It’s a question of life or death, so be ready.
El Macetón jumped up and decided he wasn’t going to sleep anymore. He drank a cup of coffee, then another and another; he spent the rest of the night sitting on the sofa in the living room with the shotgun pointing at the door, ready to react. Dawn came slowly, and a clamor in the neighboring houses rose soon after. Beginning at 6:30, he heard a number of cars leaving garages and rolling down the street.
At 7:15, he heard someone knocking on the front door and opened it cautiously. A six-year-old girl, dressed in a school uniform, pointed to a black pickup.
“My dad says Padre Fritz wants you to have this book.”
“I didn’t think I’d find you,” said the man driving the truck. “Fritz said you might be here.”
“And you are?”
“Tito Solorio. They call me El Chícharo. But open the book,” he insisted. “Fritz told me: ‘Don’t come back until you see the look on his face.’”
He took the book and opened it with curiosity. It was the lost volume from the newspaper library: June and July, 1978. As soon as he opened to the first page of the ancient, dusty tome, an almost musical feeling took over his body. Staying up all night was having its effects.
“Did Bernardo know about this book?” he asked. “Did he ever hold this book in his hands?”
“Yeah, that’s what the catalog card says; look at it.”
It was true. His name was on the card.
Wow, he said to himself, I can’t believe it. He had the solution to the mystery. He was so excited he walked to the backyard where a tow truck seemed to be pulling away and a group of people were checking out the eighteen-wheeler’s engine. That’s good, he said to himself, it was about time. He stood there until the sun poked out and then he went to the edge of the yard.
A shiny object stuck out of the earth upturned by all the digging. Cabrera pulled out a bottle of Cola Drinks from before World War II. What a coincidence, he said to himself. What a coincidence that it appeared right now, and he threw the bottle far away.
Well, he said to himself, I need to go back home, I have to prepare my statement. He told himself it had to be as succinct as possible, he needed to make himself disappear, take his own hands out of the story completely. But where do I start? And who do I write for? For Bernardo, he said to himself, answering his own question. I have to start with Bernardo. So he made an effort and imagined the journalist sitting at the desk.
He imagined him with a jumble of photocopies, maps, plans. He imagined him writing his book. The book dug deep into a crime that had occurred more than twenty years ago, when Bernardo was learning to read. He imagined that with his perceptiveness, it wouldn’t have taken him long to figure out the conditions that, twenty years previous, had enabled a psychopath to kill four girls in the city. As El Macetón could attest, Bernardo’s investigation suggested that they pinned the blame for the murders on an innocent man, and politicians were implicated in the farce.
As Bernardo was finishing his work, he received a series of threats that made him fear for his life. It had been a long time since he left safe ground, and he knew from a good source that the people implicated in the cover-up were out to get him. At first, he wasn’t scared off, because the signposts weren’t clear and he couldn’t figure them all out, but one night they must have scared him, and from that moment on he stepped up his precautions. After getting the testimonies of Romero and the undercover agent and after reliving the girls’ tragic ends, Bernardo knew that he was very close to unraveling the identity of the killer, and he thought it was his duty to locate him.
He imagined that Bernardo avoided going out of the house for a while and started to transcribe the interviews. He would wake up often in the middle of the night and it would take him hours to fall back asleep, a kind of lost soul, wandering around the house. He took to spending the afternoons sitting on his patio in an armchair looking over the lagoon, drinking beer as he watched the rustling marsh grasses, the occasional appearance of raccoons, nutrias, or fish, and the movement of the boats. But above all, he watched the highway, straight and unending as it disappeared into the horizon, with the tiny eighteen-wheelers rolling back and forth, busy crossing that landscape of palm trees and huisaches. Instead of finishing his report, Bernardo spent his time watching the water snakes slithering around a handful of white, deserted streets, built on land that twenty years earlier had seemed impenetrable.
He imagined his amazement the day he went to the newspaper library. Because a color photo on the front page was a reproduction of his own house, the house in front of the lagoon, the house where Bernardo lived his entire childhood. When he was able to move again, instead of reading on, he remembered what happened. In a nearby photo, he must have recognized the face of Lucía Hernández Campillo, his first playmate, his neighbor, that beautiful girl, his first love, and remembered the sense of expectation he felt before he would see her, this little girl who was a gymnast, with her black hair and her gorgeous smile.
Then, if his imagination was right, Bernardo must have discovered why writing crime stories had obsessed him his whole life.
El Macetón pondered the way that love lives on in one’s memory, but that isn’t important. Of course, he said to himself, one of the victims was his neighbor, a girl he played with. The journalist would have been five years old, and his obsession with her never went away. That’s why he spent his whole life writing crime stories. Wow, he said to himself, who woulda known.
He went out to walk around and realized the eighteen-wheeler was still parked there. Without noticing, he stood there almost an hour, watching how a mechanic, hunched over the hood, made the final adjustments. The mechanic said good-bye and left, leaving the driver and his truck. A group of trucks passed by loudly for a few minutes, and finally it was just the driver and Cabrera, one on each side of the lagoon. From far away, he reminded him of Bernardo. Suddenly, he noticed that both of them were looking at each other with their hands in their pockets. Well, my friend—he looked at the truck—we can’t spend our whole lives parked here; we’ve got to get moving and keep on going. As if he’d heard him, the driver got into the cab and accelerated down the highway. El Macetón stayed there a few minutes, watching as the truck faded into infinity.