POR CONVENCIÓN ZAPATA
The General’s car stops in front of Lupita’s place, which in a slum area of unpaved streets, looks like an abandoned warehouse. The door is opened by an old skull-faced pistolero with his black jacket open, a tip-up 44 Smith & Wesson strapped to his lean flank.
The pistolero steps aside and we walk into a vast room with a high-beamed ceiling. The furniture is heavy black oak and red brocade, suggesting a Mexican country estate. In the middle of the room is a table with platters of tamales and tacos, beans, rice, and guacamole, beer in tubs of ice, bottles of tequila, bowls of marijuana and cigarette papers. The party is just starting and a few guests stand by the table puffing marijuana and drinking beer. On a smaller table syringes are laid out with glasses of water and alcohol. Along one wall are curtained booths.
Lola La Chata sits in a massive oak chair facing the door, three hundred pounds cut from the mountain rock of Mexico, her graciousness underlining her power. She extends a massive arm: “Ah, Meester Snide … El Puerco Particular … the Private Pig…” She shakes with laughter. “And your handsome young assistants…” She shakes hands with Jim and Kiki. “You do well by yourself, Meester Snide.”
“And you, Lola.… You are younger, if anything.”
She waves a hand to the table. “Please serve yourselves.… I think an old friend of yours is already here.”
I start towards the table and recognize Bernabé Abogado.
“Clem!”
“Bernabé!”
We go into an embrace and I can feel the pearl-handled 45 under his glen plaid jacket. He is drinking Old Parr scotch and there are four bottles on the table. He pours scotch into glasses as I introduce Jim and Kiki. “Practically everybody in Mexico drinks scotch.” Then he laughs and pounds me on the back. “Clem, meet the Iguanas … this very good friend.”
I shake hands with two of the most beautiful young people I have ever seen. They both have smooth greenish skin, black eyes, a reptilian grace. I can feel the strength in the boy’s hand. They are incredibly poised and detached, their faces stamped with the same ancient lineage as the shop proprietor. They are the Iguana twins.
Junkies arrive and pay court to Lupita. She rewards them with papers of heroin fished from between her massive dugs. They are fixing at the table of syringes.
“Tonight everything is free,” says the Iguana sister. “Mañana es otra cosa.”
The room is rapidly filling with whores and thieves, pimps and hustlers. Uniformed cops get in line and Lupita rewards each of them with an envelope. Plainclothesmen come in and shove to the head of the line. Their envelopes are thicker.
Bernabé beckons to a young Indian policeman who has just received a thin envelope. The policeman approaches shyly. Bernabé pounds him on the back. “This cabrón get cockeyed borracho and kill two people.… I get him out of jail.”
Other guests are arriving: the glamorous upper crust and jet set from costume parties. Some are in Mayan and Aztec dress. They bring various animals: monkeys, ocelots, iguanas, and a parrot who screams insults. The machos chase a terrified squealing peccary around the room.
A rustle of excitement sweeps through the guests:
“Here’s Mr. Coca-Cola.”
“He’s the real thing.”
Mr. Coca-Cola circulates among the guests selling packets of cocaine. As the cocaine takes effect the tempo of the party accelerates. The General turns to a spider monkey perched on top of his chair.
“Here, cabrón, have a sniff.” He holds up a thumbnail with a pinch of cocaine. The monkey bites his hand, drawing blood. The cocaine spills down his coat. “CHINGOA YOU SON OF A WHORE!” The General leaps up and jerks out his 45, blasting at the monkey from a distance of a few feet and missing with every shot as the guests hit the deck, dodge behind chairs, and roll under the table.
Lupita lifts a finger. Fifty feet away across the room, the old pistolero draws his long-barreled 44, aims and fires in one smooth movement, killing the monkey. This display of power intimidates even the machos and there is a moment of silence as a servant removes the dead monkey and wipes up the blood. A number of couples and some trios retire to the curtained booths.
Another contingent of guests has arrived among whom I recognize American narcotics agents. One of them is talking with a Mexican lawyer. “I feel so sorry for these American boys in jail here for the cocaína,” the lawyer says. “And for the girls, even sorrier. I do what I can to get them out but it is most difficult. Our laws are very strict. Much stricter than yours.”
In a search booth, which is also one of the booths at Lupita’s party, a naked American girl with two uniformed police. The General and the lawyer enter from a door at the rear of the booth. One of the cops points to a packet of cocaine on a shelf. “She have it in her pussee, señores.” At a gesture from the General the cops exit, grinning like monkeys.
“We feel so sorry for your pussee—frozen in the snow,” says the General taking off his pants. “I am the beeg thaw.”
A giggling macho pulls aside the curtain in front of the booth. “Good pussee, cabrones?”
Two Chapultepec blondes nudge each other and chant in unison: “Isn’t he marvelous? Never repeats himself.”
The macho pulls aside the curtain of the next booth. “He fuck her in the dry hole.”
“Never repeats himself.”
In the end booth Ah Pook, the Mayan God of Death, is fucking the young Corn God. As the curtains are jerked aside they reach orgasm and the young Corn God is spattered with black spots of decay. A nitrous haze like vaporized flesh steams off their bodies. The macho gasps, coughs, and drops dead of a heart attack.
“Never repeats himself.”
Lupita gestures. Indian servants load the body onto a stretcher and carry it out. The party resumes at an even more hectic pace. The gas released by the copulation of life and death acts on the younger guests like catnip. They strip off their clothes, rolling around on mattresses which are spread out on the floor by wooden-faced servants. They exchange masks and do stripteases with scarves while others roll on their backs, legs in the air, applauding with their feet.
The Iguana touched my arm. “Will you and your two helpers please come with me? We have matters to discuss in private.”
She led us through a side door and down a long corridor to an elevator. The elevator opened onto a short hall at the end of which was another door. She motioned us into a large loft apartment furnished in Moroccan and Mexican style with rugs, low table, a few chairs, and couches. I declined a drink but accepted a joint.
“The postcard vendor tells me you can help us locate John Everson,” I began.
She nodded. I remembered that I had not heard her brother say anything. He had nodded and smiled when we were introduced. He sat beside her now on a low couch looking serene rather than bored. Jim, Kiki, and I sat opposite in three cedar chairs from Santa Fe.
“We have many places here.…” A wave of her hand brought the benzoin smell of New Mexico into the room. “It was a lovely place but they had to spoil it with their idiotic bombs. Oh yes, John Everson … such a nice boy, modern and convenient. You found him so, of course?” She turned to her brother, who smiled and licked his lips. “Well, he is in Durango with relatives … in excellent condition, considering the transfer of identities. Such operations may leave the patient a hospital case for months. This generally means that the operation has not been skillfully performed, or that discordant entities have been lodged in the same body.…
“In John Everson’s case, there have been no complications. We had to give the Mexican identity sufficient time for a transfer to take place. Now it only remains to blend the two and he will recover his own identity, with fluent Spanish and a knowledge of rural Mexico which will be useful in his profession.
“In this case, the two identities are so similar that there will be no disharmony. And the spirit of El Gringo now has a home. He could not enter the cycle of rebirth because his karma required a duplicate death. This was done by electric brain stimulation which seems completely real to the patient. As you know, a difficulty in organ transplants is that they are rejected as a foreign body. Drugs must be administered to suspend the rejection. In this case, the shared experience of being hanged will dissolve the rejection that would otherwise occur, giving rise to the phenomenon of multiple personalities, where only one personality can occupy the body at one time. The hanging experience acts as a solvent. The two personalities will blend into one. John Everson will contact his parents, and tell them that he suffered a lapse of memory owing to a light concussion but is now completely recovered.”
I leaned back. “Well, that wraps that case up.”
“You have been retained to act against the Countess … thirty thousand dollars. Does that seem enough to you?”
“Well, considering what we are expected to do—no.”
“And considering that you are all inexperienced and susceptible, this is virtually a suicide mission. I am prepared to retain you at a fair price and provide contacts which will give you at least some chance of success.”
She led the way into a bare room with chairs, a long table, and filing cabinets along one wall. I recognized the room as a replica of the room in back of the postcard vendor’s shop. She went to the filing cabinet and handed me a short pamphlet bound in heavy parchment. On the cover in red letters:
CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT.