Woes of the True Policeman

health, whether the family was well, whether so-and-so had died or so-and-so had disappeared, then he said good night, ladies and gentlemen, and hurried out, followed by his driver who looked asleep.
    Pancho and Don Pedro sat in the backseat and the Ford rolled slowly along the dark streets of Villaviciosa.
    “Damn it, Gumaro,” said Don Pedro, “I forgot all about the streetlights for this shithole town.”
    “What lights, boss?” said Gumaro without turning.
    That night Pancho slept at the house of Don Gabriel Salazar, a Santa Teresa businessman, in one of the rooms built onto the gardener’s house, a room with four bunks and the smell of sweat and tobacco. Don Pedro turned him over to an American called Pat Cochrane and left without a word. The American asked him a few questions and then gave him a Smith & Wesson and told him how it worked, how much it weighed, how to engage and disengage the safety, how many clips he should carry in his pocket at all times, when he should draw it, and when he should only pretend to draw it.
    That night, the first that Pancho had spent away from Villaviciosa, he slept with the pistol under his pillow, and his sleep was fitful. At five in the morning he met one of his roommates, who came in drunk and stared at him for a long time, muttering incomprehensibly while Pancho, huddled in the upper bunk, pretended to be asleep. Later he met the other one. They didn’t like him, and he didn’t like them.
    One was tall and fat and the other was short and fat and they were always seeking out each other’s eyes, exchanging glances as if to confer silently about each new situation. They were from Tijuana and they were both named Alejandro: Alejandro Pinto and Alejandro López.
    The job was to protect Don Gabriel Salazar’s wife. They were her private bodyguards; that is, bodyguards of the second rank. More seasoned men were on call for the protection of Don Gabriel, gunmen who came and went with a swagger, men better dressed than Pancho and the pair from Tijuana. Pancho liked the work. He didn’t mind waiting for hours while the mistress visited her friends in Santa Teresa, or leaning on the white Nissan, waiting for her to emerge from a boutique or a drugstore flanked by his two comrades, who on such occasions, out in the field, tended to confer with their eyes even more than usual.
    Of the other bodyguards—the boss’s—he had only a vague impression: they played cards, drank tequila and vodka, were laid-back and swore a lot, at least one of them smoked weed. Their jokes were delivered like remarks about the weather, as if they were discussing the chaparral, the rain, relatives crossing the border. Sometimes, too, they talked about illnesses, all kinds of illnesses, and there no one could match the two tubs from Tijuana. They knew everything, from the different kinds of flu and adult-onset measles to AIDS and syphilis. They talked about dead or retired friends or comrades, afflicted by all kinds of ailments, and the sound of their voices didn’t match their faces: their voices were soft, bereaved, at times murmuring like a river that flows over sandstone and aquatic plants; their gestures, however, were broad and self-satisfied, they smiled with their eyes, their pupils shone, they winked complicitly.
    One of the bodyguards, a Yaqui Indian from Las Valencias, said that death was no laughing matter, much less death from illness, but no one paid any attention to him.
    The bodyguards’ evenings stretched on almost until dawn. Sometimes Pat Cochrane, who spent his nights at the main house, would show up at the gardener’s house to gauge morale, offering words of encouragement when spirits were low, and if he was in a good mood he would even put on water for coffee. In the mornings almost no one talked. They listened to Cochrane or to the birds in the yard and then they went into the kitchen, where Don Gabriel’s old cook made them dozens of fried eggs.
    Though Pancho didn’t trust his two comrades from Tijuana, he soon got used to his new life. One of the gunmen from the big house told him that every so often Don Pedro Negrete supplied new recruits to certain local outfits or power brokers. The food was good and they were paid each Friday. It was Cochrane who assigned tasks, arranged life in the gardener’s house, scheduled guard shifts and escort duties, and paid them at the end of the week. Cochrane had white hair down to his shoulders and was always dressed in black. From