Mexico City Noir by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

When there was enough blood on the pavement, he went through my pockets.
    “Who brought you in, cabrón? It was that asshole Rojas, right?” He repeated his questions as he went through my papers. He took his time. I don’t think he’d ever finished elementary school. He gave them back to me with a grunt. “A maricón gringo detective! That’s all we need!”
    He checked out my car; he went through everything. I watched him toss out my Los Castros record, a bra whose owner I couldn’t remember, and an empty bottle of tequila.
    “Where’s the money?” he asked. Just so I understood him properly, he made his point by kicking me again.
    “I have three dollars and twenty pesos in my wallet,” I blathered.
    The gorilla bent down until we were almost face-to-face. If I’d been a romantic guy, I might have kissed him. But he wasn’t my type: blond and curvy.
    “You fuck with me and I kill you. Do you understand me, gringuito?”
    “I’m Mexican,” I managed to say. But he didn’t hear me. He took my dollars and left. It took a good while for me to get up. I don’t use a watch so I had to depend on my bladder. When the need to pee became greater than the pain, that’s when I made my move. The street was still empty. All I could see were the big doors on the mansions. I unzipped and began to unload my bladder. I had barely started when I heard a police siren. They’re never there when you need them. But they fined me on a morals charge.
    I recuperated with five tequilas. There might have been more. I slept for two days straight and, when I got bored with the game shows on TV, I went back to work. I checked out the address on the paper the secretary had given me. It was in the Condesa neighborhood, just a few steps from the Roxy ice-cream parlor. I drove to an apartment building in front of a beautiful park with big trees and a duck pond. There were Orthodox Jewish mothers in the park with their baby strollers and old Spanish Republicans too, smoking aromatic cigars and still dreaming of killing Franco. It was an island in the city’s chaos. A sigh for immigrants.
    There was a bike repair shop next to the side door of the building. They were also for rent, those machines which cause only pain and tears. An employee was reading La Prensa while eating tamales.
    “Good afternoon, how you doing?” I asked as if I had nothing better to do.
    “Bad, but it’ll get better when school lets out,” the bike mechanic said without a pause in his sacred lunch. In Mexico City, the lunch hour is blindly respected. Even if there were a war between Soviet and American missiles, everybody would still go out for lunch and get something greasy and spicy.
    “I’m looking for a friend. She lives in this building. Maybe you know her: Andrea Rojas.”
    “Miss Rojas? She lives in apartment 202. She’s sleeping,” he said, still chewing.
    “Must have been quite a night. Drinks, partying …”
    The guy opened his eyes wide as tortillas and laughed.
    “No time for that! Don’t you know she’s in school and works too? She was drawing the whole night, doing her homework. I got her dinner so she wouldn’t lose any time.”
    I must have looked like an idiot. My inkling had been a bust.
    “I better not wake her then,” I said as I left. The mechanic continued eating.
    I bought some ice cream, pistachio. I played lookout from one of the park benches. Andrea Rojas emerged a couple of hours later, after a herd of kids had rented some bikes and entertained themselves by leaving pieces of their knees all over the pavement.
    She left the building and waved at the mechanic. He said something to her and pointed at me. Andrea Rojas turned toward me; I could see her better. Well, it sure was a pleasure to look at her. Her hair was black, very dark. Pine nut—colored skin highlighted her eyes. A slender but firm body. Every curve was where it should be. Dressed in a miniskirt, wearing black stockings. She also wore a beret tilted slightly