Read The Uncomfortable Dead for Free Online

favorite poem—he would recite it for his students every so often. I wound up doing the same because of him.”
    Héctor lit up another with the butt of the prior; the dog didn’t protest.
    “Why would Alvarado, Alvarado’s ghost, or someone trying to pass himself off as Alvarado, be sending you these messages? Who are you, Monteverde? What do you do for a living?”
    “I work for the government in Mexico City. I’m a special investigator for the Department of Oversight. It’s kind of a delicate job, particularly these days, that’s why I freaked. Otherwise I would have laughed it off. You can’t imagine, recently things have become very murky …”
    “What are you working on now?”
    “I’m sorry, that’s confidential, and furthermore it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the dead guy’s calls. I sound like some half-baked Charlie Chan,” Monteverde concluded with a smile, “don’t I? But the fact is, it’s delicate, what with all the goddamn corruption they had during the PRI administrations and the shit those bastards left us.”
    “And are you corrupt? Forgive me for asking, but since we don’t actually know each other …”
    Monteverde squeezed out a sad smile. “You can only buy what’s up for sale. Me? I’m made of steel, friend, stainless steel, incorruptible, a bit of a jerk and very far to the left. I don’t insult our dead.”
    The sad expression was becoming something else and there were a few sparks in his eyes. Even the dog seemed to respond and lifted his head.
    “So, are you for sale?” he asked the detective.
    “My friend, I don’t want to wake up one of these days with my mouth full of ants. Me, I bend but I don’t go down,” Belascoarán answered, tapping his knee where he had a steel spike implanted that set off every metal detector in every airport around the world. “Who have you told about this?”
    “Only Tobías,” Monteverde said, pointing to the dog.
    “And the bin Laden story, do you believe that?”
    “No. But it’s a hell of a story. I’m just sorry I didn’t come up with it myself.”
    Belascoarán returned to the Alec Guinness routine, but it didn’t work. Monteverde was off thinking about something far, far away.
    “How about you, when did you become an insomniac?” the detective finally asked.
    “When we lost the elections in ’88, the day the system crashed, the election fraud. For some reason I got the idea in my head that during the night they were going to come and kill us all … How about you?”
    “It was a few months ago. One night the woman who sometimes comes over to sleep with me didn’t show up, but I waited all night for her, and now I don’t sleep,” the detective answered, a little embarrassed. His own explanation couldn’t stand up to Monteverde’s; his insomnia paled in comparison to the historic insomnia of the literature-teacher-turned-progressive-official. “Who gave you my number? Who suggested that you contact me?”
    “We have a common acquaintance working in the office of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas; his name’s Mario Marrufo Larrea. I told him I had some really weird things going on and he said you specialized in weird things.”
    “Well, I ain’t the only one in Mexico.”
    And they celebrated by downing a couple of Cokes, Belascoarán’s with no ice.
    It’s already becoming a cliché, this notion of being tied to the city by an umbilical cord, trapped in a love-hate relationship. The sleepless Belascoarán was looking out his window on the neon night and reviewing his own words. He was feeling like the last of the Mohicans. He averred, confirmed: There is no hatred. Just an immense, infinite sensation of love for this ever-changing city that he lives in and that lives in him, that he dreams of and that dreams of him. A determination to love that goes beyond all the rage, possession, and sex, and dissolves into tenderness. It must be the demonstrations, the golden hue of the light at the Zócalo, the book