No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Author:Paco Ignacio Taibo II [Taibo, Paco Ignacio II]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, Thriller & Suspense, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense
Amazon: B008ND0KJ2
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2012-07-18T12:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Halcones

If anyone is suspect in this country, it’s the police.

—Luis González de Alba

This shadowy, violent organization had shown evidence of its existence before. The first time was during the Ayotla Textile strike, when a paramilitary group appeared out of nowhere, shooting and beating the picketers before the laughing gaze of the police. Later on there were hints of what was to come during the demonstrations at the Politécnico leading up to the tenth of June, 1970. But to the innocent eye of the student left, these warning signs appeared as nothing more than a further indication of the continued growth of the right-wing student gangs in the dreary days since the debacle of 1968. None of it seemed to go much beyond the small gangs that then held sway on campus, dealing drugs and financed by the university administration itself. Gangs of eight, ten, fifteen lowlifes who would get drunk and run wild, mugging, raping, hazing—and then justified their existence by doubling as a glee club during football games. So when the decision was made to take to the streets again on the tenth of June, nobody expected to have to face more than the standard, sullen-eyed riot police, the dark blue stain, bolstered now by the purchase of six new Molotov cocktail-proof armored vehicles, to which campus mythology attributed any number of extraordinary powers and advanced weaponry: tear gas, rubber bullets, machine guns, water hoses, deafening sirens, infrared night vision, plus, in a more exotic vein, the ability to spray paint, play the national anthem, and even fart, not to mention the obvious capacity to run down anybody stupid enough to get in their way.

And sure enough, there they were, painted a dull grayish blue, taking up positions around the Politécnico campus at the Casco de Santo Tomás. And backed by two battalions of riot police, revitalized over the last three years (after the massive desertions of ’68) with new recruits from the countryside: landless peasants from Puebla, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, who had survived the brutality of training camp and were just beginning to enjoy the petty powers, the impunity, conferred on them by their uniform. They’d been indoctrinated to see themselves as the last bulwark of the fatherland, arrayed against the godless, communistic students, who, so they were told, hated the Virgin of Guadalupe and sought to destroy Mexico itself. They hid their fear behind our own.

But they were only there to scare us, really. Anyone who pisses his pants over a couple of thousand riot police hasn’t lived. If they were really going to clamp down, they wouldn’t be so obvious about it. So we marched right past them, looking them in the eye, accepting the challenge, staring down the prodigious technicians of evil.

There was a rumor going around that if you jammed a potato up the exhaust pipe of one of the new antiriot vehicles it would blow up like a squashed toad. We tried to guess the diameter of the exhaust pipes as we

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