Tequila Blue by Rolo Diez Page B

“traditional Bacardi” rum. I decided I’d eat with my friend Rivas Alcantara, who lives in Colonia Viaducto Piedad. He’s someone everyone is scared of for the same reason they’re scared of spiders. He owes me a favour, and he’s in charge of an amazing archive, where there’s more information than a man can absorb without gossiping about it from time to time with a friend he can trust.
    I cruised around the neighbourhood until I found his address. I saw several cops on the lookout in their cars with the lights out; and plenty of people who would look a lot better behind bars. When it comes to physiognomy, I’m with Lombrosio. Forgetting Quasimodo, who’s a friend of mine, in this city some of the drunken bums you see roaming around have mugs which immediately tell you that if they haven’t just killed a manor raped a woman or robbed a store, they’ll be doing so in the next quarter of an hour or so. That’s what happened with Cruz. My expert eye was not mistaken, and if I hadn’t been forewarned and had my gun trained on his midriff, I’d be the one dead right now, and the ’tecs would have shared out my watch and the few banknotes I had on me. I saw quite a few delinquents of around the same age as Carlos behaving stupidly and noisily under the yellow lights on street corners; and I saw young girls like Araceli who ought to have been at home rather than rubbing themselves up against some guy or other in dark doorways. I found a public phonebox and called San Pedro de Los Pinos. It was engaged, so I knew at least one of my kids was where they should be. Fifty per cent of my worries were over. I called Quasimodo’s apartment, and no one answered. I felt frustrated at seeing the place in darkness and my friend obviously not there. I called the Archive, and Quasimodo answered. That man works as if he were well paid, or didn’t want to go home. I told him I’d call in on him, and drove off again as if I too were paid to do so.
    *
    â€œThis is interesting, Carlitos!” We were finishing our meal; I had managed to get through to my kids and tell Gloria that something unexpected had come up. A few men and women were walking along the aisles of the Archive, adding to the feeling of museum and eternity that is typical oftemples to memory. “So the Jones case led you to Cruz . . . Let me tell you: we’re surrounded by useless cretins who don’t know their arse from their elbow.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œI don’t mean you.” Quasimodo waved his arm in the air, as if to fend off any protest on my part. “Do you want to know the secrets behind a proper investigation?”
    I bit my tongue. At eleven-fifty at night, after a day working like a galley-slave, instead of being flat out on my bed with a glass of rum and a cigarette, reading a novel or watching a film on TV, here I was wasting my time on a guy with a face like a cockroach who was insisting on showing off. Quasimodo had carried on chewing the whole time as he listened to what had happened at the Portales building and now was using his home advantage to teach me lessons about police procedure.
    â€œIf you would be so kind as to explain . . . ”
    â€œThis is the first,” my friend said, patting the folders he had shoved to the side of his desk to make room for the ham, sausages and so on. “A good archive: proper files with reliable information. Get everything down on paper, because you never know what might come up. The second is knowing about the butterfly effect, and the concatenation of contradictions.”
    â€œMeaning . . . ?”
    â€œMeaning that everything is related to everything else.”
    The Quasimodo show. And Hernandez the patient spectator. What else could I do . . . ?
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œSo, Jones is in another file, related to another unsolved death.”
    That was different. I almost forgot about