Some Clouds by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Author:Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2012-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“I’m thirty years old, my hair’s going grey.

I’m not tired.”

—Ernst Toller

As he moved into the fifth day of his investigation of the Costa family’s destruction, Héctor found himself out of sorts. Almost completely useless. What was next? He had Anita under cover in the hospital. Cautiously, he was getting back in touch with the city. He’d fixed his record player when he’d gotten home. And now, after struggling through a black night, he was at a dead end.

He’d woken up soaked with sweat, wrapped inside his sheets like a mummy, the muscles of his left arm tight and cramped, his jaw tense, his breath irregular. He’d come back to the city of his worst nightmares and, like before, he was finding it hard to wake up, a thick sleep clinging to him, dragging him down into the depths of the public and private hell of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne.

He found some bottles of soda pop in the kitchen. He opened one and, trying to keep his unbuttoned pajamas from falling down, went back to bed to smoke and reconstruct his conversation with The Rat. Half an hour later he called his new friend the writer on the telephone.

“Everything okay?”

“To quote the guy who fell off a thirty-story building, when he was halfway down: so far, so good. I went out to the store and now I’m playing tic-tac-toe with my daughter. I still haven’t decided what to do.”

“That makes two of us.”

“How’s your friend in the hospital?”

“I’m going to go see her in a while.”

“I think I’ll write for a couple of hours and then cook up some serious food.”

“Sounds good. By the way, I liked the Mailer book.”

“I told you you would.”

***

He dove into downtown Mexico City like a scuba diver into the past, repeating the same questions in the three Costa furniture stores. He was looking for a connection between the deceased owner and someone, prior to August 1977. Maybe an old acquaintance, a friend or client. Someone who at some point had become the link that turned Costa into a personal banker for someone who wasn’t able to use the services of the Bank of Mexico. It wasn’t going to be the mob, because the mob had its own system. It would have to be someone in the government, someone in a position of power, who suddenly had a huge amount of cash on his hands and no way to move it, to hold onto it. Someone who had to bury his money deep enough so that his superiors, his friends, his co-workers, the press, wouldn’t know it was there. Someone who could pay an occasional visit to a downtown furniture store owner and pass him an envelope full of cash.

That was his first objective. The second was an account book with a record of where the money had come from. According to Vallina it could be anything from a little five-by-five-inch notebook to three encyclopedia-sized volumes. And, while he had hopes of finding out something about Costa’s associates, the account book seemed like a hopeless proposition.

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