Tears of the Trufflepig: A Novel Read online

  After this experience, he found two cassettes at the Tejano music shop Voy y Vengo, in a tiny cubicle they had labeled as the Classical/R&B section, and filed under “El Chopin.” One as played by Hottinger, another by Rubinstein, and after a few weeks of listening to both Bellacosa came to the conclusion that Germans have no business playing Chopin. Nobody did, in fact, except Jewish pianists. Only Jewish pianists could capture the elegant despair in the nocturnes, the Jewish pianists and this young girl from the old neighborhood. She couldn’t have been Jewish, but the quiet magic of those old streets in the Reinahermosa of his boyhood helped her capture the right mood of that nocturne. And Oswaldo standing there, seduced by this tune. Bellacosa remembered all this again as he sat on the living room easy chair by his altar, and Rubinstein played Chopin like he was the Great Dane Hamlet himself, wandering the hallways dressed in black and plotting his revenge.

  * * *

  LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the new atrocities buried all talk of the death of El Gordo Pacheco. With demand for exotic feathers, king conch tortoises, and angel hair llamas growing in Australia, Helsinki, Tangier, New Hampshire, and all Asia Minor, syndicates were now at full-blown war for complete control over the filtering market. Sindicato Unidos and Los Pacificos, which dealt primarily in the shrunken heads market, were now competing to become the only real filtering syndicate to rival Los Mil Condes, who were rumored to be the heirs of Pacheco’s market.

  Every morning the headlines sought to outdo the tragedies of yesterday. Along the border, the Mexican reporter Melinda Gaitán, on her way home from picking her kids up from their drama class, was sprayed with ivory bullets along with her eight- and eleven-year-olds. News anchor Zacharias Zamarripa was confirmed poisoned by the venom of a pinstripe rattlesnake, known to be filtered for such purposes by Los Mil Condes. The famous tenor Eduardo Guillermoprieto, during his set in the Camargo State Opera, denounced the fur of filtered animals in the fashion world and the popular black-market dish of yspiri birds, cooked a variety of ways, but meant to be swallowed whole. The next day he and his entourage were found hacked to pieces in an ice cream truck looping the tune “Swipesy,” at a Soriana parking lot. The bodies found in an unmarked grave earlier in the month were confirmed officially through DNA tests to be those of the missing biology students from Universidad la Reforma, and the nation declared twenty-one days of mourning, a day for every student. There wasn’t a science lab in the world that didn’t extend its solidarity to its martyred colleagues. The Mexican president made a televised statement scolding the cowardly guilty parties, demanding they come forward to face their heinous crimes before the law, or else live in fear for the rest of their lives. He vowed to come after them and called on all Mexicans with any information to report it immediately to a twenty-four-hour hotline established specifically for this case.

  Off the coast of San Diego, California, a Soviet-era submarine shoddily rigged with satellite control emerged on the private Feneon Beach unmanned, filled with seventy-eight rotting bodies of eleven-inch-tall iringiré Amazon new world monkeys. Presumably, the vehicle was destined to some underground port for a private zoo and the smugglers had lost satellite control. Judging by the stage of decomposition, they’d been dead no less than five days. The monkeys were incinerated to prevent the outbreak of disease, the American government hauled the submarine away for further investigation, and the private beach was put on the market at a discount, by its record-mogul owner.

  The new trend with the filtering syndicates was to cease spending on building labs at hard-to-access locations like mountains, hidden valleys, or private islands; instead, old warehouses left over from the drug wars were taken over and converted to laboratories in plain sight. These filtering labs were now ubiquitous but not being reported by citizens out of fear for their own and their families’ safety. Three governors in the southern states of Mexico fled the country after they’d been linked in various ways to El Gordo Pacheco, and were rumored to be hiding out in Switzerland. Fingers were pointed at many officials who aided in their escape and who also did their best to look the other way. One afternoon in broad daylight, members of Sindicato Unidos and Los Pacificos crossed paths near an elementary school and stray ivory bullets shot through the walls of the building, killing fifteen children and wounding twenty-three, along with an elderly janitor from the state of Guerrero.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE WEEKEND AGAIN, and the grocery/retail store Hatfield’s Supercenter that operated throughout the south was having a Valley-wide 20 to 40 percent off two-day sale on all its products, which varied from groceries to hardware, horticulture needs, children’s toys, electronics, clothes, cosmetics, medicine, and home improvement. People traveled like an exodus from Mexico to attend these first-come-first-serve yearly sales, often waiting for hours to cross the congested international bridges. The pedestrian toll-crossing line in Reinahermosa was eight kilometers long by six in the morning, and old, repainted school buses provided transportation from the border to the nearest Hatfield’s and back, with people returning carrying bulging, heavy bags, ready to pay the taxes to cross American products into Mexico.

  Bellacosa, not counting the money meant for the 7900 Rig that needed to be paid back in full to his client Don Villaseñor for failing to provide his service, was low in funds. Without a doubt, he needed to return the fifteen grand in full, and felt a little bad he hadn’t kept Don Villaseñor abreast on anything that had happened. The fact was, Don Villaseñor had been his primary client for going on three years now. Every piece of machinery the man needed to fulfill contracts in his construction company, from a horizontal MLE to a dirt-sifting tractor, Bellacosa had found in less than a week, and at a discount. More important, both of them had always been honest and straight with each other. So Bellacosa wasn’t too worried. Including the money he gave Manolo for the situation with Oswaldo, he’d spent just over a grand and a half of it, which was less than his fee would have been had the deal gone through. He was starting to wonder what the odds were he’d find another 7900 Rig so he wouldn’t have to explain a thing to Don Villaseñor.

  He thought about the connection he had with the Oswaldo situation in Reinahermosa, the head police detective Manolo Segura. Bellacosa didn’t quite trust him. Manolo’s father had been a Bible salesman and former horse swindler from southern Mexico. Bellacosa tried to picture him in the days of the old neighborhood, and could see even then he’d felt uneasy about Manolo and his kin. Bellacosa had given him a lot of money, racking his brain to come up with it fast, to possibly negotiate his brother’s release. It was a shame Manolo was the only person he knew who could help. Whereas before Bellacosa felt desperate to get the money to Manolo’s hands, he now felt ripples of a mysterious distrust and cold anger, anger for his brother getting kidnapped, anger for Manolo, anger because he definitely could have used those twelve hundred dollars. Bellacosa cursed Manolo, wished all sorts of evil inflicted upon him.

  Though he rarely let it happen, Bellacosa was feeling glum, very untaken-care-of by the universe. He took out the black-and-white replica he kept in his closet and balanced it on his kitchen table, adjusted its ears to find the recording he wanted. Bellacosa found it difficult to watch the replica, could rarely sit through a picture, but there were a few older pictures he kept recorded specifically for when his spirits were down and there wasn’t much business action out in the world. He poured himself a bowl of bran cereal with clusters of oats and 2 percent milk. With the replica on the table, Bellacosa watched a picture with his wife’s favorite actress, Tallulah Bankhead, titled Guinevere in Manhattan.

  The picture opens in Arthurian times, with Tallulah in the titular role. It’s a time-travel plot device, where, after denying Lancelot a parting kiss, while being carried by the good nuns back to her chamber, and hearing Lancelot wail like a stormed beast, Guinevere falls into a glowing crack in the crumbling earth. She pierces space and time in a sequence filled with double exposures and camera tricks, and appears in Manhattan to an e
erie score by Bernstein. Guinevere befriends a community of homeless folks, and ends up falling in love with a failed long-distance runner in Central Park after inadvertently saving his life in an armed mugging. In the end, the long-distance runner goes off to war, and Guinevere falls into an open sewer and appears back in Arthurian times just in time to die and be buried royally by her husband, whose name is never mentioned in the picture.

  The recording had already started, so Tallulah was already in Manhattan, and having her first emotional connection with the long-distance runner. Bellacosa ate his cereal and paid attention with the volume up high, until the credits faded out and the ones for Lifeboat began to roll.

  Bellacosa put the replica back in the closet and drove his old Jeep into downtown MacArthur to check his bank account, just to make sure his figures lined up again. When he saw there were twenty-five dollars more than he estimated Bellacosa walked a few blocks to Baby Grand Central and sat at the yellow counter. It was a slow news day; no atrocities had been reported yet.

  At the opposite end of Marselita’s yellow counter sat the man Bellacosa called Tcheco. He was the only other customer and was chatting up the young waitress, Colleen Rae, who was laughing and enjoying every bit of the interaction. The right half of Colleen Rae’s head was buzzed closed to her skull, revealing auburn roots, while the left half was dyed dark blue and tied in a pigtail. She wore red prescription glasses and drank out of a plastic cup filled with iced tea as Tcheco gulped his warm coffee. They both said hello to Bellacosa as he sat down.

  Tcheco said, “Check it, hombre,” and handed Bellacosa a small pink flyer that read: THURSDAY THE 24TH @ CANTINA PRADO ON THE RIVER: HORSE DRAWN MARRIAGE, THE NAHUALETTES, UNCLE SAM BOTTOMS, AND STAMPEDE FORENSICS, with an image of what appeared to be a creature put together with magazine cut-ups of other creatures.

  Bellacosa didn’t even pretend to understand what it meant; he simply admired the many-hooved creature with many mouths, many eyes, and many wings, then politely handed it back.

  “Guess which one is her band,” Tcheco challenged him.

  “Ah, okay. This is an advertisement for a concert? One of these is your band? You’re joking with me.”

  “Why, you see a young woman working as a waitress and you assume she’s a single-mother high school dropout?” Collen Rae said, teasing.

  “To be honest I don’t think about your life outside this place at all. That goes for everyone else here. To me, all of you belong only to this place and never leave. I have a feeling I’m not the only one. I hope I’m not being offensive.”

  “Jesus, when you say something derogatory all nice and pretty like that, how could I take offense?”

  Bellacosa remembered the article he’d read about today’s youth rediscovering sarcasm, and though he rarely had contact with young people, he believed it.

  “The Nahualettes,” Bellacosa said. “That one’s got the most character. People can remember it. That one is your band.”

  Colleen Rae busted out her guest checks and asked, “You want your usual soup? Made hot? We don’t have fish, he’d have to use the cauliflower, is that okay?” and wrote the ticket without looking.

  Tcheco scooted over to the stool next to Bellacosa as Colleen Rae handed the order to the cook in the back. Though Bellacosa planned to read the day’s edition of The Bugle of Plenty and felt slightly intruded upon, he really didn’t mind Tcheco today.

  Tcheco, on the other hand, had already read the paper. He’d read the third of a series of anonymous reports on the Calle Veinte Boys, an organized crime network in the city of Tixtla, Guerrero, of boys no older than seventeen wanting to build their own headhunting syndicate. They’d taken over the entire Calle Veinte in the span of eight brutal months, only to be shot and bombed down by Sindicato Unidos, using outdated equipment left over from the first Gulf War and acquired illegally from the American military. Members of Sindicato Unidos were hopped up on the synthetic drug crystal-kind and zoomed up and down Calle Veinte in MV-1300s, shooting down the kids and bombing homes and buildings using grenade launchers and assault rifles. By the end no two bodies were recognizable.

  Tcheco picked his teeth with a splinter and while pointing his middle finger at the kitchen in Marselita’s said quietly to Bellacosa, “That vertical stick of meat they got back there, what is that? Shawarma? Al pastor? Look at this guy lighting it. Unmistakably native, short and brown, hustling his ass off back there for minimum wage to feed us our tacos and fries. It’s crazy, how the shrunken heads market has steadily grown, right? People pay good money for those little heads. And if you, as a dealer, can prove a shrunken head is of indigenous descent, made by another person of indigenous descent, you got it made.”

  Bellacosa watched as Tcheco wadded a napkin into a ball with his fist. “And I don’t have to tell you how much those fuckers make. In Switzerland and Venice, rich people who are far away from this culture have convinced themselves it’s an art. They even have a rating system, like they used to have to determine how mixed your blood was. I bet those people look at a shrunken head and can’t even imagine that it was once a living, breathing human, with desires and loves. That poor cook back there knows he’s worth more with his head cut off and sold on the black market, with a plaque of authenticity and everything, than being a slave here, working in kitchens, sending money back home to his mother and father, and probably wife and kids, too. Hoping it makes a difference. Meanwhile, in his village, all the young people keep vanishing. Either to be slaves up here, or slaves for the syndicates, or killed by the syndicates, or lost as shrunken heads, with their souls trapped forever in that tiny ball of skin and skull. Sick. Revolting, Bellacosa. We’re lucky, people like us. Our heads aren’t worth a thing. Our indigenous blood has all but washed away. With what? With America, compadre.”

  When Colleen Rae brought Bellacosa his meal, Tcheco moved back to his original stool and smoked his own brand of cigarettes, ashing in a fish-shaped brass ashtray. Tcheco had his blue one-subject notebook and he scribbled notes to himself. He seemed to regress into an inward state, deep in thought and detached from his surroundings. When Bellacosa was almost finished Tcheco slid the open notebook his way. Without giving it any thought, he read what it said: “Don’t look now but those two guys eating at the taqueria, sort of facing us? A few times I’ve noticed that when you arrive they arrive. When you leave they leave, too. Do you know them??”

  The spiciness of the soup got to Bellacosa; he blew his nose on a napkin and placed it on his lap. Then he sneaked a look at the men as he drank water. Tcheco took the notebook and quietly tore the page up, wadded it into a ball, and put it in his bomber jacket pocket. At the Frutería Feliz, the short owner with the comb-over and squinty eyes balanced a small color replica on a chair and turned it to a Croatian soccer match, the mono speaker piping an excited commentator’s voice low and clear.

  Tcheco paid Colleen Rae his ticket and she said, “Don’t forget to come to the show.”

  “I won’t,” he said, and took the flyer from the counter. He stood next to Bellacosa and looked over at the soccer game, then leaned in and said, “There’s probably a soccer match to allegorize every great battle and war. Well, amigo, I have to be off. But I have something to say. I have an assignment tonight and need somebody I can trust. Doesn’t pay much, I can probably give you a hundred in American. It comes with a free, classy meal, too. What do you say? Interested? Let’s talk about it.”

  SEVEN

  Moments later Bellacosa and Tcheco exited baby Grand Central and walked along Broadway together.

  Tcheco said, “Let’s keep an eye out for those cuates, okay?”

  “Sure. Why would they be following me?”

  “I don’t know, I was just gonna ask you that.”

  When they reached Tcheco’s rented Centaurus, Bellacosa hesitated getting in, but, unable to resist an opportunity to make a few dollars, he did, regretting it immediately. Bellacosa hadn’t been a car passenger in a while, and this fact, on top of th
e thing with the goons, made him uneasy. He looked around with fluttering suspicion as Tcheco sped away from Warwick Avenue, downtown, and said, “I’ll bring you back to your car, don’t worry. I’m just gonna drive around so we can talk for a minute. Your name is Esteban Bellacosa, right? Don’t freak out. Haven’t you wondered how I know your name? You must be very trusting of people. How unlike the trend of the day, amigo. I’m a reporter. That’s my job. How I make a living, and I try to do good by it. It’s important to have good people in journalism, especially today. Hardly anybody is worth a shit anymore. The poets are as much at fault for what the fuck’s going on in the world as the politicians.

  “My name is Paco Herbert, see. Here’s my international press card,” he said, showing Bellacosa. “I have a syndicated column that runs in three different papers, in Buenos Aires, Prague, and La Jornada in Mexico City. I’m the one who exposed the big issue with the crystal-kind drug among people in the syndicates, and street kids who get it dirt cheap. A lot of them even cook it now. Last year I ran a series also about a Father Canchola. A priest originally from around here in South Texas, that now teaches English to kids in Costa Rica. He speaks French, too, and also teaches verse. Very interesting story about this priest, which is why I couldn’t run only one column. When he was a boy he and two friends started crossing drugs across the river on a horse. Before the Border Protectors got souped up by the government and they built those fortress walls along the border, had tanks set up, the infrared watchtowers and all that. Anyway, one of his friends was named Freddy Santos, and together with another kid, they got connected with bad people. From Mexico they crossed what must’ve been hundreds of pounds’ worth of drugs back then. And they were just kids, before things got really bloody and savage in the days of the drug wars. The people up top still had that old-world code of honor. But these boys weren’t really a part of that, they weren’t criminals in their minds. The way I understood the story from Father Canchola, anyway. These were just kids, like I said. There was less paranoia in those days, less surveillance and technology. The mythology of the old west and revolutionary bandits was still fresh. These boys made a lot of money, and when the times changed and the dead bodies started piling up, all three of them quit the business. All except for Freddy Santos, who ended up killed for trying to steal money from a deal he made with one of the big families down here, supposedly. Rogelio Canchola, when the weight of the evil he participated in seeped into his spirit, joined the seminary, to become a Catholic priest. He moved to South America and even got a college diploma. He supports himself well teaching English now and is able to travel the world. The third one. Their friend. He stayed down here. And. Well. You know what happened to him.”