Mexico City Noir

So for the novelist Jose Daniel Fierro, the call from the top dog in Mexico City’s government wasn’t a good thing, no matter how unusual it was, in spite of the fact that the only things he liked lately were unusual.

“Fierro, what can we do with Mexico City’s worst corner, the most dangerous one, the one with the most crimes?”

“Give it to Los Angeles. Aren’t we sister cities or something like that? Hollywood would love it.” Jose Daniel heard a chuckle on the other end of the line, then tried a couple of other proposals. “You could move there, rent an apartment. With your bodyguards you’d scare them off to the next corner… Or send all the cops on vacation to Acapulco and then watch the crime rate come down.”

This time the chuckle wasn’t as hearty.

“I’m serious,” said the government official. Jose Daniel had known German Nunez for years, since the dark days of the PRI when they’d been beaten up together at a political demonstration. He’d had his right eyebrow sliced by a blade and German had been kicked in the nuts so hard he’d had to stay in bed for a week putting up with his friends’ jokes.

“And you called a novelist for this?”

“Exactly. A writer of detective fiction. I’m sending you a dossier with a bike messenger. You’re going to love this story.”

Jose Daniel Fierro, novelist, and Vicente Manterola, cop, analyzed the cursed corner for the reasons already stated. But they didn’t have the same data. Fierro reviewed a study with a statistical appendix. Manterola had a pile of files that went back a couple of years. Perhaps because they were notably different people, from different cities, with different skeletons in their closets and disparate personal histories, they reached different conclusions.

“If I could fuck with two of these gangs of car thieves, I could take down half the damn robbery pins, easy, and maybe some of the assault ones, because when they don’t have cars to steal, that’s what they do, and maybe even some of the yellow pins too, because half the time they’re fighting each other,” Manterola said in a low voice to the head of the Ezcurdia squad, who stared at him with no love lost, since one of those gangs gave him a cut so that he’d always make himself scarce.

“If you fuck with one gang, I’ll tell the other to go steal someplace else, to go rip off cars in Toluca for a month,” the squad leader said in response. “I don’t want any problems with the head of government.”

“Let’s have a festival on that corner, a cultural festival,” Jose

Daniel suggested to the head of government. “Do you want some meat, my royal sir?”

“If I want meat, I’ll go to the supermarket, pendeja,” Manterola said to a transvestite, whose real name was undoubtedly something like Manolo-or Luis Jorge or Samuel Eduardo, because now, thanks to those fucking Venezuelan telenovelas, it had become fashionable to give babies two names. The guy didn’t actually look too bad: nice legs, even nicer ass, and no question that if he’d run into him in the dark, he’d have given him a whirl.

Manterola knew all too well that more than one of his colleagues liked to be with queens, but always with their macho thing of who-fucked-who. If you did the fucking, you weren’t the fag in the picture. The puto was the other guy. Lord have mercy, what assholes his colleagues could be. Like the dude who said he was disgusted by the whole thing but that his body “asked for it” sometimes.

It was getting dark. To get rid of the faggot, Manterola just ignored him and leaned up against a lamppost at the corner of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde, right in front of a grocery store called La Flor de Gijon which shone its neon through a swarm of flies. He watched the movements inside for a while: maids buying bread, two kids who went in for soda carrying a huge plastic bag. An s.o.b. with the face of an s.o.b. buying cigarettes. Some dude, Cuban or coastal-impossible to tell the difference in the dark-mouthing a cumbia and lazily picking up a six- pack of beer. The old man at the register looked like he’d opened the store after being left back from Cortes’s first expedition. Having absorbed all of this, Manterola entered.

“Good evening.”

“Fuck, that’s the first time in my life a cop has greeted me with a good evening,” said the old man-pale like a Spaniard-with a toothless smile.

“How many times have you been robbed?”

“None so far,” replied the old man, with an expression that made it clear he expected nothing good to come from a police visit.

“Even though you’re on the most dangerous corner in all of Mexico City,” said Manterola.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re gonna gimme that story too?”

“Who else told you that?”

“A writer.”

There’s going to be a cultural event of some sort on your corner. It’s a kind of party, a festival, but sponsored by the government. You have to speak with a man whose last name is Mechupas, said the note scribbled on the Post-it on his desk. Manterola put his hands on his head and discovered his hair was wet with sweat. He’d never heard of such a thing.

He put his files in order, with the one for Fermin Huerta on top. That was the guy, El Mandarin. That was his Saint Peter at the gates of heaven. But what the fuck was this about a party?

Mechupas was obviously the writer Jose Daniel Fierro.

“Well, my esteemed officer, if you don’t like it, you can call Mexico City’s head of government yourself,” he said, offering a worn business card. “Here’s his number.”

Manterola eyed the Boss of Bosses’ business card and read the message on it: This is the information we discussed.

Later, he checked in again on the novelist. He was a big guy, with a mustache like Pancho Villa; it was probably best to just be straight with him.

Jose Daniel, who knew a lot about shady characters, saw the doubt in the cop’s small eyes right away. Let’s see if this guy learns to respect those of us who don’t wear ties, he said to himself.

Let’s see if I can learn to respect people who don’t wear ties, Manterola said to himself at that same moment, even if they’re a bunch of lazy pendejos.

“So?”

“We’re going to have a festival, and you’re not going to arrest anybody, nor raid anything, nor insult anybody, nor shoot anybody, nor bother anybody, nor fuck with anybody on that corner, which I understand is under your jurisdiction.”

“Senor Fierro, we have a very important investigation underway,” Manterola said ceremoniously.

“Well, you can shove it up your ass,” said Fierro, who wasn’t much liked by the state police anyway, and who was seeing red because Manterola had come into his life asking what the fuck he was thinking throwing a party on his corner.

“So what is my role here then?”

“Work with me. And if you have any questions, call the head of government, or your boss, or the Boss of Bosses,” said Fierro while lighting a delicate filtered cigarette and smiling.

Manterola surrendered for the moment. “What do you want me to do?”

“Help me find El Mandarin,” said Fierro, who’d done his homework.

He was called El Mandarin, not just because he was Chinese but also because he had dyed a red streak in his hair that made him look like a peeled mandarin orange. Manterola knew he wasn’t a car thief; the guy was a middle manager in the acquisitions department of a large and growing enterprise that included various parking lots, a half dozen garages, about a hundred employees, an office with multiple bookkeepers, connections with public officials in three different states who supplied fake papers, a customs chief in Veracruz and another in Coatzacoalcos, and even space on various marine freighters. What he did wasn’t even a crime-a crime is stealing from old women, beating up your wife, kicking a baby-this was business. El Mandarin knew that if all the cars stolen in one year in the Valley of Mexico were lined up, they would reach Cuernavaca, more than seventy kilometers away. That was why it was great business.

El Mandarin was eighteen years old, the senior member of his gang, which was an immense responsibility, so he didn’t steal cars on Tuesdays or Thursdays because he was too busy studying Russian. He’d heard a few things: that Volkswagens sold well in North Africa because they were air-cooled instead of water-cooled; that