Mexico City Noir

“This way,” he said as he entered the warehouse. Lizzy followed, leaving behind her escorts and the warehouse security guards.

Bwana guided her through narrow corridors of boxes labeled with Korean characters. Pancho walked behind them, a few meters back, with a canvas backpack on his shoulder that caught Bwana’s attention.

Lizzy had specified that the walkways be designed like a labyrinth. Only a few people knew the way to the center. The architect, a gay old maid who used to walk his dogs on Amsterdam Avenue, had been found dead on the freeway to Toluca after he’d finished the job.

The cholo was saying something to his boss but she found it impossible to understand because of the rapid mix of Spanglish and border slang. Every time they reached a door, Bwana keyed an access code into the electronic lock that protected the crossing.

When they arrived at the center of the warehouse, Bwana entered another code. This time, a trapdoor opened, revealing stairs that led to an underground chamber; these were covered by a layer of high-density foam rubber, just like a recording studio.

Moans could be heard coming from below. Barely audible, more like murmurs.

“Welcome to special affairs, boss,” said Bwana.

Lizzy descended the steps. The basement was dark. A switch was touched and a light went on, revealing where the sounds were coming from.

A man and a woman were tied with barbed wire to vinyl chairs and gagged with cinnamon-colored gaffer tape. The woman had a ruptured eye. They were covered with dry blood, a pool of excrement gathered at their feet.

“They stink,” mumbled Lizzy.

Pancho obediently sprayed both bodies with the Lysol he carried in the canvas backpack. The man and woman twisted from the sting of the aerosol.

Lizzy approached the woman and looked with curiosity at her ruined eye.

“You said she was with him when they got him?”

“Correct. She’s his bitch. Bad luck.”

The Constanza cartel boss turned toward the bound man.

It was Wilmer, assistant to Imenez, the Colombian capo with whom Lizzy had been negotiating just weeks before. Bwana’s people had discovered they were bringing Brazilian amphetamines on their own into the country.

Bad idea.

Wilmer had been the person in charge of the operation. Then, he was a real mean motherfucker. Now, what was left of him whimpered like a kicked puppy.

Lizzy noticed a tear sliding down his filthy cheek.

“Deep in shit, everybody’s the same.”

Then she kicked the man’s jaw aikido-style. She felt the bone crack under her foot. The blow knocked him to the ground. His scream would have echoed in the chamber had it not been soundproofed.

The woman began to struggle, trying to shout from under the tape sealing her cracked lips.

Lizzy tore the tape off in one quick move. In the process, she also tore off a good bit of skin.

“What did you say?”

“Please… pu… pu-leeze… you… I have… a daughter…”

On the ground, the man sobbed. Lizzy flipped him over with the tip of her boot. “Cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend as man,” she said, then reached her hand out to Pancho.

The bodyguard removed a wooden bat with a Mazatlan Deers logo from the canvas backpack; it had a dozen fourinch steel nails sticking out of it. Lizzy had inherited it from her father.

“We deal with amphetamines here,” she said to the man on the ground, “and I don’t like sudacas who get in the way. This is what happens to anybody who tries to horn in on my market. Consider this a declaration of war.”

She advanced toward the man with the bat in her hand. Pancho was silently thankful to have only one eye and to have the scene play out on his blind side. Discreetly, Bwana turned his gaze to the door.

When the woman in the chair saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably.

THE CORNER BY PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II

Doctores

Don’t even think you’re making me happy, okay? Don’t even think it. Don’t say a word, just shut up, puto. Don’t even open your fucking mouth or I’ll shut it myself… Everything is your fucking fault.”

The last two words didn’t actually come out like that, but more like “foshin foolt,” because of all the blood in his mouth. Then he spit, half vomiting, half choking. And then he died. Of course he had to die like that, like a pendejo, trying to blame somebody else.

Agent Manterola approached the dead guy and took his car keys, his wallet, and the pair of very big, very dark sunglasses off his head that made him look like a Mayan mummy. Then, after thinking about it, he dropped them back on the ground near the body. Manterola grabbed the guy’s nose and pulled on it. Dead guys aren’t so scary. He took off one of the guy’s shoes, just for the hell of it, and put it on his belly. He didn’t even glance at the other body, that stupid fucking corpse, because it had been that one’s fault that the whole mess started in the first place.

Now it was the fault of the fucking pins with the multicolored heads. Fucking diaper pins, Manterola muttered to himself. And he was right. Modernity had arrived at the Office of Urban Crimes, but only in the form of two old computers, though they had somehow managed to get their hands on a huge map of Mexico City, where they marked crime scenes with the multicolored pins. Red for murder, pink for sex crimes, yellow for altercations, green for assaults, blue for kidnappings, lavender for robberies in taxis, orange for carjackings. The Boss of Bosses had passed through the office earlier in the day and had been furious when he saw that that fucking corner couldn’t take one more fucking pin.

So when Manterola got to work, with his funeral suit on-in other words, the same old gray suit he wore every day-with new huevos a la Mexicana stains on the lapels and a black band on his sleeve, he wasn’t surprised to find the commander there staring at the map, waiting for him.

And he wasn’t surprised by what he said either: “What do you think I, the commander, or the chief, or the head of government, thinks when he sees that fucking corner can’t take one more fucking pin?”

Manterola knew he was going to have to pay for not taking better care of his partner, for letting him go ahead on the raid where he ran into that wacko with the machete in his hand.

“What do you want me to do, boss?”

“You tell me. And whatever it is, do it alone. I’m not assigning you a partner because they always get killed. But whatever you’re going to do, just do it. Silvita will deal with the paperwork.”

Manterola gazed over at the map with the intensity of a Japanese tourist standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre.

The cursed corner, focus of everything. The intersection of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde in a neighborhood of doctors, just two blocks from the Viaduct. A lower-middle-class neighborhood which had turned destitute and disenfranchised during the crisis in the ’70s, when auto-repair shops became stolen auto-parts dealers.

There was no glamour here. It was a symbol of sleazy and desperate times. It had no relation to the great criminal corners, like the one behind Santa Veracruz in the ’50s, or Loneliness Square, where a homeless death- squad drank industrial-strength alcohol until they dropped, where it was said they’d steal your socks without touching your shoes. It had no relation to the edge of Ixtapalapa, very near Neza, where the Mexican state police committed their crimes in the ’80s. It was the kind of place that Leone would have filmed one of his Westerns.