Windows To The World

No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
My rating: 4 of 5 stars




Héctor Belascoarán Shayne tells us that he decided to become a detective because he didn’t like the color his wife picked for the new carpet. He had been an engineer. He got his license by mail. He had never read a British mystery novel. He didn’t know a fingerprint from a finger sandwich. He could only shoot something if it didn’t move very much.

Héctor is a usually a taciturn, enigmatic man who is an unrepentant teetotaler with a penchant for Pepsi's. He shares an office with three characters, a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewer engineer.

One day a murdered man dressed as a Roman soldier is found at his office and then he gets a mysterious message to ignore was he saw and along with the message there was a plane ticket to New York City. All Héctor really knew at this point was that he loved his home, Mexico City with a passion and if he waited the killer would show his face.

In this case the detective is correct and it appears that there is more than one killer and that they are from the police. Since this is Mexico, the question is whether they were from the secret police, the auxiliary police, the judicial police, the special, the bank, the preventative, the traffic, the federal?

Héctor uncovers links from these men to a very unsavory incident in Mexico City’s recent past. What it has to do with him appears to be serendipity but he is caught in a web he cannot escape. His life is on the line and he is very like a gunslinger of the old West shooting first and asking questions later.

This is a very intriguing character and the people in his life are also worth knowing. The prose is somewhat Hemingwayesque and I look forward to reading more of this writer.

This story refers back to a real life incident that took place June 10, 1971 in which student demonstrators were massacred in  a square by a paramilitary unit that was secretly  trained  and funded by the government. Initially nine student died but the final death count was closer to thirty. Taibo postulates that this unit was possibly disbanded and re assimilated into the Mexico City Subway Police. The deadly June day was just one year later than the May Massacre of the four Ohio State Students by the Ohio National National Guard which resounded all across the US. It was also on a beautiful June day in 1989 that hundreds of students again were the targets of the military in China on Beijing's Tienanmen Square. There  were no happy endings on any of these occasions.