He met him on the third day of the second week after he opened his psychology practice on Rio Mississippi Street in mid-January, 1973 when his receptionist, Luisa Mercedes Rodriguez opened his office door, came in, closed it and said:
“Doctor Manning, he is here!”
“Who is ‘he,’ Luisa?” glancing down at his appointment book and seeing nothing written there for that hour; “A walk-in client?”
“No, doctor; he, that cop; you know, the one I told you about? ¿Sì?”
“Oh, you mean the one that collects protection money from people?”
“Yes, that one! He wants to see you. And he won’t wait.”
And then, as if to prove the truth of what she said, the door opened and there he stood, Sergeant Pedro Alfredo Gomez of the Mexico City Police Department, all five foot five lean muscular feet of him, dressed in khaki slacks, an open-neck light blue sport shirt, black shoes spit-shined like mirrors, hair and mustache neatly trimmed and brushed, staring at the psychologist with the flat, predatory eyes of a snake.
“Well?” His eyes flicked to Luisa. “My weekly payment, señorita, tell him; three thousand pesos. In a plain brown envelope.” He met Joseph Manning’s eyes: “You have three thousand pesos, señor, no?” He looked at his watch. “Don’t waste my time, gringo! I have a lot of work to do.” He looked at Luisa, who looked away. “It’s too bad she isn’t younger and prettier, doctor; I’d charge you less and come back more often.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Now we both lose; I prefer younger and prettier women,” taking the small manila envelope that Joseph Manning handed him, “to money.”
Then, slipping the envelope into his right front pants pocket, he was gone without making so much as a whisper of sound.
Each week, from then on there was an identical small manila envelope containing three thousand pesos waiting for him when he came through the outer office door. Each time he slipped it into that same pocket, turned without a word and left, leaving behind him a feeling that was a mixture of dread and relief at having weathered his visit with neither comment nor uproar. And each time he left, Luisa Rodriguez touched a button under her desk that indicated that the sergeant had transacted his business and gone. Then the psychologist, the patient he happened to be seeing and his receptionist could breathe easier. For another week.
Having heard the scuttlebutt about Sgt. Gomez from business owners in his neighborhood, he had hired an older receptionist on purpose. “The guy is a brute, señor Manning, with ice in his veins. He’s like a snake; you never know when he might strike, or at whom. Be careful!” Luisa Mercedes Rodriguez was a roundish, fifty-year old mother of seven with a pleasant manner and a reputation for knowing how to handle herself. And she did. Whenever the sergeant walked in to collect what he called his insurance fee, she handed the envelope to him, smiled pleasantly and buried herself in her work, thankful of her age and the fact that of her seven children, not one of them was a girl.
~~~
After meeting Sgt. Gomez for the first time, he began asking questions here and there around Anzures, and between there and the Language and Cultural Institute on Hamburgo. Sgt. Gomez was known everywhere as Snake.
“He came by here for the first time about twenty years ago when he was just a young punk.” Andrés Carbajál, the cobbler with a shop on Ejercicio National cleaned an ear with a fingernail. “I mean, he was just a kid. I could tell from looking at his eyes that he was trouble. You couldn’t keep your wife or daughter around, and if you hired a pretty young thing, well, you never knew when he was going to show up to collect his ‘insurance’ as he calls it. I only hired young guys. Then he started calling me a faggot. Some guys quit or moved their business to another part of town. I don’t know anyone as bad as him.”
“Why do you stay?” the psychologist asked him.
Giving a shrug of his shoulders, the cobbler replied: “I like it here.”
Another time when he was talking to the owner of a little sandwich shop in the Zona Rosa, he found out that Sgt. Gomez had killed a neighboring shop owner who tried to kill him for harassing his wife and daughter. “His name was Alonzo Covarrubias; he owned a little upholstery shop on Rhin. He was losing sleep because Snake kept bothering them. He swore that if he made one more pass at his wife or daughter, he would kill him. The next day Snake ambled into his shop and pinched Alonzo’s wife on her butt. ‘Hey, cholo!’ he said, eyes flat above his grinning mouth, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Your daughter better be here!’
“That night Alonzo lay in wait outside Snake’s favorite cantina, holding an ancient Colt 45 in his hand, planning to shoot the bastard the minute he stepped out of the doorway. But when Alonzo leveled his gun three feet from Snake’s face, it misfired. By the time he could pull the trigger a second time he was lying dead in the street in a pool of his own blood, Snake looking down at him.
“Everyone calls him Snake, señor. We also call him el Diablo and a few other choice things that would fry your ears if you heard them. He’s heard every one of them, and they make him laugh. ‘The worse things people say about me,’ he says, ‘the better off I am. Let them piss in their pants every time they see or think about me. It makes my life easier.’ The shop owner’s face clouded over. “You know what the bastard did to make an example of Alonzo? The son of a whore marched to his house and raped his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter while the rest of his poor terrified kids looked on. Then after buttoning his pants, he told them he’d be back the following week for a repeat performance. The next morning, Alonzo’s widow and her children moved out of their house with only what they could carry with them, and disappeared. No one’s challenged him since. And that was fifteen years ago.”
“What did the police do about it?”
The sandwich shop owner gave a disgusted snort. “Not one thing, señor, not one fucking thing!”
Gerardo Pulido, the old shaman whom Joseph Manning had met at Chapultepec Castle a year earlier, warned him not to ask so many questions about the policeman. “Watch out for that brujo, señor,” he said, wagging a gnarled finger in his face; “you are asking too many questions.”
“How do you know, Gerardo?”
“Brujos know each other, señor; and Pedro Gomez is a bad one.”
“He can’t have always been the way he is, Gerardo; I wonder how he got that way?”
“It’s a long story, señor. His mother was an angel; but his father,” the old shaman shook his head, “he was no good. He liked to drink and beat his wife and son. It went on that way until the no-good left when Pedro was eight years old. When Pedro was sixteen, he found him and kicked him to death.”
~~~
Tuesday, June fifth 1973 was one of those bright miraculous days in Mexico City when the old Aztec god Tlaloc pushed the smog over the western ridge of mountains leaving the vast valley of Mexico and the huge sprawl of Mexico City bathed in clarity and light. Even at one o’clock in the afternoon the smog had not returned, as a light but steady breeze had blown from west to east since early in the morning. Joseph Manning turned right off the Paseo and hurried down Estocolmo toward Hamburgo, where he turned left toward the Language and Cultural Institute, running late for his afternoon English class. For some reason that afternoon, Hamburgo was deserted except for Pedro Gomez, who was ambling along some ten feet ahead of him. Shopkeepers, seeing him coming, retreated into their shops; the few who were unable to get away in time smiled and gave him a perfunctory “Good afternoon,” which he pretended to ignore. He would return later and collect what they owed him … and more.
~~~
Snake was an undercover cop who had an unparalleled reputation for efficiency and evil. With his protection insurance business he terrorized residents and businesses in a swath a mile on either side of Reforma from Chapultepec Park to the Zócalo, extracting money from businesses and plucking the most succulent young women he could find to do with what he wanted. In his job with the police department, he terrorized criminals and ordinary citizens in his territory in Coyoacán and around the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Just that morning he had celebrated twenty-one years as a member of the Mexico City Police Department, and his thirty-eighth birthday.
Early in his career people complained about him to his superiors, but stopped when the police raided their businesses and shut them down. Snake was not only an exceptionally effective police officer, who always filed his reports on time and kept the growing population of drug dealers in line, he was part of the police department’s unofficial money pipeline that supplemented its officers’ low pay. People learned to pay him and keep their mouths shut. Joseph Manning found out from his building manager to expect Snake to drop around. He also learned that only a third of the three thousand pesos he collected each week went to the police department; the rest Snake kept for himself.
In the opinion of nearly everyone, Snake was way past due for taking out. Only no one had the balls to do it. It wasn’t from want of scheming that no one had killed him, it was from fear of what he would do if the plan failed. The story of what happened to Alonzo Covarrubias lived in the collective memory of everyone between Chapultepec Park and the Zócalo, and it kept them in line, as he knew it would. Sensing danger, he moved quickly and silently as a snake, even when he appeared preoccupied, off-guard or sound asleep. So people paid their protection money and kept their miseries and resentments to themselves.
Joseph Manning slowed his pace on the sidewalk so as to not catch up with him, hoping that the policeman would step into a shop so he could get to his class without being later than he already was. But Snake kept up his laconic, swaggering walk down the sunlit sidewalk, heading for his favorite cantina a block or two away. Enjoying the fact that the sidewalks were clear of people because they were hiding from him, he flicked his reptile eyes slightly from side to side to catch a glimpse of people in the shops pretending to be busy. The psychologist sighed, resigning himself to being late for his class.
The sun beat down on the street casting the angles of the buildings in sharp relief. Ahead, a man happened into Snake’s path and paid for it by shelling out a few thousand pesos for getting in his way. Slipping the money into his wallet, Snake slipped the wallet back into his left front pants pocket, tilted his head slightly, and laughed, then continued his laconic walk down Hamburgo almost as if he knew he was making the psychologist late for his teaching job.
It was then that the sky overhead suddenly darkened. With a deafening clap of thunder, the sky opened up behind Snake and let go a jet of water that swept him off his feet, into the street and down an open storm drain so fast he didn’t have time to do a thing but swear and scream “NOOOOOOoooo-ooooooo!” as he was swept down the drain and into the sewer, his howl echoing off the buildings for blocks around. It was the first time in his life that Pedro Alfredo Gomez had been caught totally unaware and off-guard. And it was over almost as soon as it started, the black cloud vanishing as the last of the water gushed into the sewer, and the sun shining down through rising clouds of steam.
For a few moments there was utter silence. Joseph Manning stood rooted to where he had been when the storm swept the police officer into the storm drain so fast he had no time to grab anything to save himself. Then people came out of their shops and stood peering down into the manhole as steam rose around them from the drying street and sidewalks. Then everyone looked at each other, jumped into the air, and cheered. Pedro Gomez, Pedro del Diablo, Pedro the Snake was no more!
“The little shit is history!” someone said, slapping his neighbor on the shoulder.
“Our daughters will be safe from now on, praise God,” a woman remarked to her neighbor, crossing herself. “No more rapes by that bum!”
“Where did the storm come from?” someone else said, looking up into the bright blue sky in which not even a hint of a cloud could be seen.
“It hardly ever rains this time of year,” someone else remarked.
“That wasn’t rain, you idiot!” another person said, laughing joyfully; “That was God taking that horror to face his maker!”
“You’re right,” a neighbor put in, “who else would have removed the cover from that manhole when there was nobody around? Huh? Answer me that! And where is it? It ain’t anywhere around.” And sure enough, the manhole cover was nowhere in sight.
“¡Por diós!” everyone said together in astonishment. “It must have been God’s doing.” As they returned with smiling faces to their shops, Joseph Manning hurried on his way to the Language and Cultural Institute still a block and a half ahead, his head filled with the image of the storm as it washed Pedro Gomez, screaming, into Mexico City’s ancient sewer system. What had caused it? Who really knew? No one had ever seen a small, violent storm appear so suddenly out of a cloudless blue sky, aim itself at a man who happened to be one of the most feared men in the city, and disappear as quickly as it had come.
The questions that occupied everyone’s conversations were repeated in the news media all that afternoon and for several days after, but ended up nowhere. The police department found no trace of Sgt. Gomez, because it expended a minimum of effort before shrugging its collective shoulders and giving up. In spite of the fact that Pedro Gomez was an exceptionally effective undercover officer, he was neither trusted nor liked by anyone. They were better off without him. That said, they went back to their work and forgot about him.
By the end of the third day, you couldn’t find a word about the event anywhere in the news. People looked at each other, shrugged, crossed themselves and went back to work, happy to be rid of the nemesis that had haunted them for the past twenty years. And above, the sun continued its bright course across the Valley of Mexico in a clear blue sky, as if nothing had happened at all.
~~~
But in a small house in one of the poor neighborhoods that surround Mexico City, an old woman sat grieving the loss of her grandson.
~~~
“You look thoughtful,” the voice said; “Or is it morose? It’s hard to tell from back here.”
Joseph Manning, seated on a wrought iron bench in Alameda Park, awoke with a start from the reverie he had drifted into, and looked around behind him.
“When did you arrive?” he asked the old shaman, standing behind him with an amused smile on his face.
“I’ve been here for nearly thirty minutes, señor Manning. It’s interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
The old man laughed. “Well, watching you wander up, sit down, look up and down the street as if you were looking for someone, and then drift off.” The old man gave a low, dry laugh and sat down next to the psychologist. “What are you thinking about that makes you look so thoughtful?”
“Pedro Gomez.”
“Oh. He’s dead and gone. You’ll never hear from him again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m a shaman, remember?” The old man regarded him with a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Well, all the same, I can’t get him out of my mind. He troubles me.”
“He troubled a lot of people, señor. In fact,” looking thoughtful himself, “he’s been troubling most people since he was eight years old. “
“How do you know that,” the psychologist replied, giving the old shaman a puzzled look. “Have you known him for that long? Or only known about him?”
“Both,” the shaman said, giving an elaborate shrug. “I might as well tell you about him so you won’t have to worry…”
“I wasn’t worrying, Gerardo… I was thinking.”
“You could have fooled me,” the shaman replied, not looking the least bit fooled. “I have known Pedro Gomez since he was a baby, señor. His mother was the daughter of an old friend. His father” he said, making a face, “was a drunken brute. Pedro was a quiet child, very bright, bright enough to stay out of his father’s way when he was in a bad mood, which was most of the time. But one day he was with his mother when his father came home in a drunken rage and exploded at her for not making what he wanted for his meal. He threw his dinner in her face and kicked her to death in front of the boy. Then he spit in Pedro’s face and left and never came back. Pedro didn’t see him again until he was sixteen, and that was an accident.
“His mother’s name was Alisa, señor Manning, was a good woman, an angel. I warned her about Francisco Gomez when he first set his eyes on her. He was always a drunkard and a violent man. But,” shrugging his shoulders and giving a wry smile, “an old man’s advice seldom competes well with a young man with warm eyes and a line of sweet-sounding, empty talk. Even a brujo like me has no influence when it comes to a young woman falling for a good-for-nothing’s line of bull.”
~~~
Pedro’s father came home at eleven o’clock the morning of June 23rd, 1943, drunk and raging about a fight he had gotten into and lost in one of the many bars he frequented. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home raging after having lost a fight, and if Pedro and his mother had been gone, Francisco would have taken out his rage on their small house and fallen asleep covered with a soiled blanket and his vomit. But this day was different, because Alisa was home “spoiling her worthless brat of a son, her precious Pedrito,” as Francisco used to say, and seeing them together, the boy smiling sweetly at his mother and her smiled sweetly back at him, enraged him. On top of that, instead of having his lunch ready for him to eat, she was just preparing it, and it was not what he wanted. That is what pushed him over the edge.
“Why don’t you ever have it ready for me when I come home, bitch!” he screamed, shoving his son aside with the back of his hand. “Why did I marry such an irresponsible whore like you? You and that goddamned brat of yours!” He picked up the pot of food from the stove and threw its contents in her face, making her scream in pain.
“It’s what you deserve, whore!” he shouted at the top of his lungs so that everyone nearby could hear him. Then he knocked her to the floor and began kicking her. When eight-year old Pedro tried to intervene to protect his mother, Francisco kicked him across the room. Then he kicked her until she stopped breathing, and left. The neighbors called the local priest and prepared Alisa’s body for her funeral and burial.
No one called the police, as it wouldn’t have done much good. Poor people killing each other isn’t of much account when the police have other, more important things to do. But Pedro didn’t know that, and always blamed the neighbors for not caring about his mother or himself. The next day he went to live with his grandmother in a nearby colonia. He attended school and, being very bright, he graduated with honors. At sixteen, he heard his father’s voice coming from a cantina. Curious, he went in, looked around, and saw his father, drunk as usual, kibitzing with a couple of guys and eyeing a woman seated nearby. Just then his father turned to see who it was that had come through the door, recognized his son, and called him a bastard and son of a whore.
Pedro walked calmly across to where his father stood and, without a word or making any other sound, knocked him to the floor and kicked him to death. Then he turned and walked out the door and went home to his grandmother’s and forgot about it.
But there was something different about him. His eyes, which had always been indrawn and guarded, grew flat and cold like a snake’s. It was as if something already broken had snapped, disconnecting him from himself and from the world around him. His grandmother saw it and asked him what had happened to him. “Nothing, grandmother,” the boy replied, “I’m fine. Nothing’s changed. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of you, just like always. And,” smiling, “I’ll finish high school and get a good job with the police department, just as I’ve talked about since I was a kid. You’ll see.”
“That makes me happy, Pedrito. You’re Alisa’s son. I want you to make her proud, Pedrito, and to be happy. In her memory.”
“Yes.” It was all he said before going into his room to study. But his eyes grew darker and more distant as the days, weeks and months passed. And he became more introspective, silent and alone.
At seventeen he applied for the police academy where, much to his grandmother’s delight, he graduated at the head of his class. His classmates, instead of teasing him about it, nearly deafened everyone with their cheers. They learned early on not to tease him about anything. They saw what happened when one of their classmates teased him about his aloof nature — Pedro froze him to the spot with a hard, venomous stare. The kid didn’t show up for class the next morning, and soon afterwards dropped out of the academy, moved away from Mexico City, and enrolled in the police academy in Mérida.
It was Pedro’s flat reptilian eyes that people first noticed about him. His brilliance and attention to detail was the second. And his reliability in his job was third; that and his ability to get results. “This guy”, the higher-ups in the Mexico City Police Department said, “is someone we can count on to get things done and to do it quietly without leaving messes lying around.” And they were right; Pedro fulfilled their expectations marvelously.
~~~
Because of his nondescript appearance and ability to move about without attracting attention, he was assigned to do undercover work, becoming the standard against which other undercover officers were measured. If you wanted something done quickly, efficiently and effectively, you called on Pedro Gomez to do it. Yet, in spite of his accomplishments and awards, he became increasingly dissatisfied and bitter. On the outside, he did his work efficiently and with brilliance, but inside his resentment and bitterness grew with each passing day. Socially, he kept to himself in his small, spare apartment in Ciudad Satelite where, even after twenty years, no one knew him. He maintained an almost daily contact with his grandmother, as he had promised to do, and he supplemented her income with contributions to a trust fund that he set up in her name. She never knew where the money came from, and she knew better than to ask him.
He started his “insurance” business a month after he became a police officer. Smart and self-protective, he located his business territory as far away as possible from where he carried out his undercover police work. He chose Ciudad Satelite for his apartment, because it was as far away from both areas as he could go and get to work on time. When news of his disappearance came out and reporters began nosing around his neighborhood showing photos of Pedro, his neighbors were shocked to learn that he had been their neighbor for twenty years. No one had ever seen hide nor hair of him.
“It was Pedro’s bitterness that made him cruel,” the old shaman said. “Watching his father kill his mother and being unable to do a thing to protect her turned him inward, and believing that their neighbors didn’t care enough to intervene to save his mother and call the police to arrest Francisco, made him bitter. When he killed Francisco, his soul died. After that, his life had two purposes: to protect himself, and exact revenge for what happened to his mother. He made everyone around him pay for what had happened to her because he blamed them for it. In his mind, no one was innocent. How would you say it señor? He became pathological. The old shaman shook his head. “He never understood that giving up his bitterness was his only salvation. In his mind, it was his bitterness that kept him safe from harm. Instead, it killed him.”
“How does the storm fit into all this Gerardo?”
“Pedro was a sick and lonely man, señor Manning. He had begun a final act of vengeance: to kill his customers, the people he worked with in the police department, and all of the higher-ups with whom he had contact. He began three days before he died. Andrés Carbajal the cobbler was found that morning in his shop, dead of a knife wound. Then he killed one of his police commanders. Both were executed efficiently, coolly, without a shred of evidence that might lead to him. In fact, the evidence seemed to lead away from him. Then he was going to kill himself in a way that blame would fall on one of the criminals he was investigating.”
“And so,” removing his hat and running his fingers through his hair, “I arranged with the old rain god Tlaloc to remove him. I couldn’t allow Pedrito to carry out his plan and cause so much pain to so many people, including yourself, señor Manning, and doña Luisa.” The old man let out a long sigh. “I loved him, señor Manning. He was like a grandson to me. But he never let me in. That is the way with resentment, señor Manning; it is a soul poison that kills everything it touches, including its host.”
“Why was he going to kill Luisa and me?”
“He saw you as happy people. And he couldn’t stand anyone being happy, when he was so tortured and miserable.” The old shaman closed his eyes for a long moment. “Now he isn’t unhappy any longer. Now, at last, he is at peace.”
“Most of the people he dealt with think he is rotting in Hell, Gerardo.”
The old man shook his head; “No, he is at peace for the first time in his life. I reassured his grandmother that I would bring him peace.”
“So….she knew..?”
“She knew what he was planning to do. She asked me to do something to stop him. I made it as natural as possible, señor, so he could not blame it on anyone. All he knew when it was happening was terror. In the end, all he felt was peace. That is what both his grandmother and I wanted. He is at rest now.” And, getting to his feet, he walked away and disappeared into the crowd.
~~~
In a small church in one of the neighborhoods that ring Mexico City, an old woman lit a small white candle, which she placed on the altar beneath the image of Mary and her son Jesus. Then she got to her feet, crossed herself, walked out of the church and went home, where she lit a second, smaller white candle and placed in front of her grandson’s Police Academy photograph. Then she sat at her kitchen table, poured herself a small cup of coffee and sang a lullaby in the nahuatl language of her people. Her Pedrito, her baby had gone home to his rest, and she was happy.
“Xicochi, Xicochi, Conentzintle,” she sang; “Go to sleep, go to sleep, little babe.”
* Author’s note: This story about Pedro Gomez will appear in my forthcoming novel, “The City Has Many Faces”.
Loved it.