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his Westerns.
    So for the novelist José Daniel Fierro, the call from the top dog in Mexico City’s government wasn’t a good thing, no matter how unusual it was, in spite of the fact that the only things he liked lately were unusual.
    “Fierro, what can we do with Mexico City’s worst corner, the most dangerous one, the one with the most crimes?”
    “Give it to Los Angeles. Aren’t we sister cities or something like that? Hollywood would love it.” José Daniel heard a chuckle on the other end of the line, then tried a couple of other proposals. “You could move there, rent an apartment. With your bodyguards you’d scare them off to the next corner … Or send all the cops on vacation to Acapulco and then watch the crime rate come down.”
    This time the chuckle wasn’t as hearty.
    “I’m serious,” said the government official. José Daniel had known Germán Núñez for years, since the dark days of the PRI when they’d been beaten up together at a political demonstration. He’d had his right eyebrow sliced by a blade and Germán had been kicked in the nuts so hard he’d had to stay in bed for a week putting up with his friends’ jokes.
    “And you called a novelist for this?”
    “Exactly. A writer of detective fiction. I’m sending you a dossier with a bike messenger. You’re going to love this story.”
    José Daniel Fierro, novelist, and Vicente Manterola, cop, analyzed the cursed corner for the reasons already stated. But they didn’t have the same data. Fierro reviewed a study with a statistical appendix. Manterola had a pile of files that went back a couple of years. Perhaps because they were notably different people, from different cities, with different skeletons in their closets and disparate personal histories, they reached different conclusions.
    “If I could fuck with two of these gangs of car thieves, I could take down half the damn robbery pins, easy, and maybe some of the assault ones, because when they don’t have cars to steal, that’s what they do, and maybe even some of the yellow pins too, because half the time they’re fighting each other,” Manterola said in a low voice to the head of the Ezcurdia squad, who stared at him with no love lost, since one of those gangs gave him a cut so that he’d always make himself scarce.
    “If you fuck with one gang, I’ll tell the other to go steal someplace else, to go rip off cars in Toluca for a month,” the squad leader said in response. “I don’t want any problems with the head of government.”
    “Let’s have a festival on that corner, a cultural festival,” José
    Daniel suggested to the head of government. “Do you want some meat, my royal sir?”
    “If I want meat, I’ll go to the supermarket, pendeja,” Manterola said to a transvestite, whose real name was undoubtedly something like Manolo—or Luis Jorge or Samuel Eduardo, because now, thanks to those fucking Venezuelan telenovelas, it had become fashionable to give babies two names. The guy didn’t actually look too bad: nice legs, even nicer ass, and no question that if he’d run into him in the dark, he’d have given him a whirl.
    Manterola knew all too well that more than one of his colleagues liked to be with queens, but always with their macho thing of who-fucked-who. If you did the fucking, you weren’t the fag in the picture. The puto was the other guy. Lord have mercy, what assholes his colleagues could be. Like the dude who said he was disgusted by the whole thing but that his body “asked for it” sometimes.
    It was getting dark. To get rid of the faggot, Manterola just ignored him and leaned up against a lamppost at the corner of Doctor Erasmo and Doctor Monteverde, right in front of a grocery store called La Flor de Gijón which shone its neon through a swarm of flies. He watched the movements inside for a while: maids buying bread, two kids who went in for soda carrying a huge plastic bag. An s.o.b. with the face of an s.o.b. buying cigarettes.