Woes of the True Policeman

he couldn’t have me, he’d had his chance and now he’d lost it, he’d put me with two faggots who weren’t worth even a bullet in the back of the head, his man Pat Cochrane was worthless, and I wouldn’t be coming back. I gave you the boy, Gabriel, he said, and you almost got him killed. This time I’m keeping him. That was how I quit working for Don Gabriel Salazar. Don Gabriel wasn’t too happy with Don Pedro’s explanation, but when he said goodbye to me he gave me an envelope of money, from his wife, he said, who’d been a wreck for a week but who was still grateful for my services. With the money, I bought myself clothes and rented an apartment in Colonia El Milagro, on the south side of Santa Teresa.”
    “You’ve never invited me to your apartment, sugar,” said the whore.
    “It was my first place and it’s still the only place I’ve ever had. It’s on the third floor and it has a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. It doesn’t get any light, which for me is an advantage because I usually sleep during the day and I like the dark. When I turned eighteen I bought myself a ’74 Ford Mustang. It was an old car, but it was pretty and the engine had been tuned. You could say that it was almost a gift. One good turn deserves another, Pancho, they told me, and I said okay.”

4
    Pedro and Pablo Negrete were born in Santa Teresa in 1930. To the surprise of their family and the amusement of the neighbors they turned out to be monozygotic twins. Until they were sixteen they were identical and only their mother could tell them apart. Then life changed the brothers radically, though beneath the surface a keen student of human physiognomy could see that their physical differences were like the reaction of each to the other. Thus, Pedro’s mustache and Pedro’s eyes, his strong hands, his steady pulse, his gut, the belly of a man who likes his food and drink, found their perfect counterpart, their ultimate elucidation, in the bloodless lips and thick glasses that Pablo had been stuck with since his sixteenth birthday, his manicured hands and his flat and ulcer-plagued stomach. Until well into adolescence both were of medium height, thin, dark, mild-looking. Then Pablo grew two inches taller than his brother and acquired a perennial expression of perplexity. Pedro, in contrast, remained the same height—in fact, as he got fatter he seemed to shrink—but his features grew stronger and his face filled out and his meekness was exchanged for an effortless congeniality, a deceptive congeniality that actually inspired respect or fear. By the time they were seventeen they were completely different. Pablo decided that he wanted to go to college and Pedro joined the Santa Teresa police force, thanks to the good offices of an uncle who was a sergeant. It was the first time that the twins had been apart.
    Pedro, shoehorned into a shiny blue uniform, spent his days wandering Colonia Juárez, especially Calle Mina, home to streetwalkers and the strangest stores in the city: hardware shops that looked like gunsmiths’ shops, gunsmiths’ shops that looked like jails, doctors’ offices that cured impotence and all kinds of venereal diseases, tiny bookstores where mystery novels, romance novels, and books about World War II overflowed onto the sidewalk, taxidermist shops that displayed leopards and eagles on their high, dark shelves, cantinas and pulquerías frequented by shady-looking characters.
    Pablo, meanwhile, embarked on the study of law and at night he washed dishes at an Italian restaurant on Calle Veracruz, between Colonia Escobedo and Colonia Juárez. The owner was a former teacher of his, a professor of rhetoric, and the restaurant was the only Italian spot in Santa Teresa, at least in those days. Later there were pizzerias and hamburger joints and even soda fountains, everything to suit the tastes of a modern city, but back then there was only one Italian restaurant, one Basque-French restaurant, and three Chinese holes-in-the-wall. Everywhere else the food was Mexican.
    The first years weren’t easy. A certain tendency toward melancholy and a reasonably happy childhood did nothing to prepare the two brothers for the world of work, but at the core they were tough and they soldiered on. Little by little they got ahead and managed to adapt to their circumstances. Although Pablo Negrete soon realized that the law bored him more than it interested him, a small amount of scheming got him