by Abel Salas
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Picador USA, $13 paper Drinking gin by the case,
an emaciated Stan Laurel watches from the window of a Juarez hotel as the
legendary Pancho Villa is brutally gunned down in his
automobile. Still an English vaudevillian trapped in a less-than-lucrative
North American comedy circuit, Laurel has yet to begin the collaboration with
Oliver Hardy that will reduce him to a one-dimensional character in a slew of
successful films.
This unlikely scene sets in motion a rollercoaster thrill-ride through
international intrigue, the crystal nostalgia of International Brigade veterans
who came together idealistically as in pre-Franco Spain, unsavory drug lord
shenanigans, and shadowy CIA operations during the worst of the Reagan/Bush
covert excesses. And, as the book’s chief spook says tellingly, it all points
to a single, inspired observation: A good journalist does not believe in
coincidence.
In Four Hands, the new novel by Mexico’s preeminent crime and mystery
writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, two cynical, though not yet jaded journalists are
pitted against a brilliant psycho mastermind known as Alex, who runs his
dubious core of government agents -dwarves, as he calls them during a Disney
mode – from a Manhattan rathole. As the intricately developed and poetically
unfurled plot thickens like spiked gazpacho, Julio Fernandez, an overweight
Mexican lovingly referred to as “Fats,” and his writing partner Greg Simon, a
Jewish New Yorker based in Los Angeles, inadvertently (or so they think)
stumble onto the nearly indecipherable traces of global high-jinks.
Unfortunately, they are merely two unwitting pawns in a glittering game of
manipulation, murder, and mayhem helmed by the enigmatically creative Alex, a
rebel working for the greater glory of U.S. military-industrial capitalism and
who uses the Cold War as his own convoluted canvas. Along the way, Taibo’s
command of historical fact is flawlessly woven through a cast of fictional
characters and real-life figures that gives new meaning to bizarre. Add to the
mix several cameo appearances by Houdini and the psychiatrist who treated him,
an aging socialist-activist-turned-Hollywood-actor named Max Lewis, a Bulgarian
communist who weathered Stalin’s purges and maintains his poignant belief in
the triumph of liberty, equality, and the end of exploitation by the world’s
moneyed classes, and you have a remarkable, if incendiary, novel.
Gleefully sinister and disturbing to a genuinely frightening degree, a CIA
operation affectionately called the SD (Shit Department), is right there behind
the suicide of a Polish labor leader, the assassination of a renowned
Salvadoran writer by his own cadre of guerrillas, and the murder of Benjamin
Linder, the young American engineer who died in Nicaragua at the hands of the
Ronald Reagan/Oliver North-funded contras. (Name just about any other
illogical or unexplained fall-out among the ranks of left-wing leaders during
the Eighties and the novel makes you wonder if Alex or his real-life
counterparts weren’t actually involved. Scary stuff.)
Taibo’s acute knowledge of film, literature, and world political history make
for a fascinating adventure throughout the events and activities which came to
shape destinies and continue to play themselves out on the contemporary
chessboard of world power and military balance. His heroes and heroines are
human; his villains are complex. Their individual trajectories are understood
in a reality where there are never any simple answers.
Into this dark fray come the old guys, the Bulgarian communist and an
octogenarian Spanish anarchist whose expert forgery skills have allowed him to
erase his existence. Luckily, the wily Spaniard pops up again decades later in
a Mexico City loony bin with a keen eye on the sights of his ancient revolver,
accidentally foiling a $600,000 ploy to discredit a much-loved Sandinista
vice-minister. Unaccounted for and undetected, the appropriately named
Saturnino is just the coincidence Alex and his self-consciously stylish goons
could not have predicted. Our intrepid pair of journalists, meanwhile, walk
through revolutions with cameras and tape recorders, discovering a previously
unknown spy thriller novel (written by Leon Trotsky under an assumed name) in
the process. Racking up prizes and bylines in periodicals across the planet,
the two are a lean, mean, four-handed writing machine.
With Four Hands, Taibo consolidates his mastery over a form which
rarely sees the kind of innovation and clever tweaking he manages to instill.
It is the book you’ll feel compelled to read on a lonely highway or in
mid-traffic, the paperback propped dangerously up against the steering wheel as
you periodically check gauges, speed, or oncoming cars. Capable of bringing you
to the edge of your seat in a way a screenplay based on story by John Grisham
never will, it is the perfect hyper-espionage thriller to restore your faith in
the formula.
It is also a touching and tender look through the eyes of revolutionary
dreamers, poets who marched alongside Che and fought back Franco’s tanks,
street-hardened militants who, despite the hopelessly infinite onslaught of
corruption and bureaucracy, have neither lost their ability to love nor their
child-like wonder at a field full of daisies. n
This article appears in September 15 • 1995 and September 15 • 1995 (Cover).