Angelo threw his arms wide open and his flashlight fluttered like pale bats around the warehouse, as if telling Paco Herbert the answer to the riddle was right in front of them. Standing there, Paco Herbert was aghast. None of the stillborn unicorn corpses in the troughs were decomposing, and he got the feeling of being inside a large, abandoned estate, with old sheets covering up rotting, old furniture crawling with worms. He felt nauseous and Angelo said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Driving away in the Lobo truck, Paco Herbert took a long look at Angelo and thought to finally bring up something Oswaldo had said: “You’re a Phantom Recruit.”
“I am,” Angelo replied. “Which is why I reached out to you. That warehouse is gonna be discovered and disposed of very soon. I wanted somebody to see it.”
“The Border Protectors don’t know about it yet? Then how is it that you do?”
“Well. Because for now it’s only us Phantom Recruits who know. In the underground. See, it’s hard to act on something unless an actual client gets involved, because like with any organization, especially a private one, we have to make money. We have people working covertly for us everywhere. As you can see, huh? You can call us spies if you want, but I see us more like Robin Hoods. People in power are starting to learn the extent of our reach. When big things go missing, the Phantom Recruits can track it down. Remember the sign in Auschwitz I, ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ when they stole that a few years ago? We knew who was responsible for the theft before a client even came to us. And with absolutely no violence we acquired the sign and returned it. Three years ago, you remember when the trend with the syndicates was to steal statues of great Mexican figures from all over the country, right out of their town centers? They took them all, Benito Juárez, El Padre Hidalgo, Emiliano Zapata, just to show the world they could do it and get away with it. They did it as a status thing, the kingpins wanting to one-up each other and have the statues displayed in the gardens of their supposedly hidden homes. Well, one time they stole the statue of the composer Juventino Rosas, from this rich old man who had stock in Wall Street. This rich man’s father was a failed violinist and the tune he remembered him playing most was ‘Sobre las Olas,’ the song Juventino Rosas is most remembered for. When we found the statue, it was on the small island of Tinieblas, by Costa Rica. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you how we retrieved it. But I’ll say this. Because we just got our biggest client yet. You want to guess who this client is? Come on, please take a guess. It’s Mexico. The Mexican government has hired us to find, guess what? The Olmec heads. Everything’s woven closer than you think, Mr. Herbert. Only it gets hard sometimes to add up. But, whatever the case, it’s already happened. We found them. At this moment, the Olmec heads are en route back to where they belong, in southern Mexico. It hasn’t been publicized because this is a sensitive issue. Remember the name of the man who owns that lot back there, Mr. Herbert. Leone McMasters.”
* * *
PACO HERBERT retrieved his notebook from the bar and the following morning fled South Texas. He’d established a reliable connection with an orange-uppers dealer at Baby Grand Central and needed to get away from all that to gain perspective and clearheaded insight into his report. After driving all nine and a half hours straight from MacArthur in a rental car, he checked into a room at the Fifth Crown Motel by the south-side airport in Houston. He’d brought with him his notebooks, his collection of newspaper clippings, and little else. On the second day there he found his narrative thread within the story. There was a coffee shop half a block down called Serve’s Up, where he ordered quad-shot tall Americanos, and picked up the habit of paying a couple of extra bucks to smoke Herzegovina Flor cigarettes, which he admitted tasted better. His article was developing an environmental slant; piecing together his research and notes, Paco Herbert noticed everything pointed to grave environmental consequences the filtering syndicates and their underground market had created. Experts who’d been running tests on the changing life spans of wildlife, global warming, and bird migrations all over the world were coming to hazardous conclusions that couldn’t continue being ignored.
Thinking back on the unicorns in the troughs, he regretted not having touched their horns, and concluded this must’ve been some kind of sacrilege. He also wondered how much a rich person would pay to have a living unicorn in their home, even if it only lived for a few weeks.
Paco Herbert sat on a vintage Irvine chair in the motel room and dialed twenty numbers, then eight, then two more into the telephone. When he got patched through to his boss and they’d exchanged quick formalities, Paco Herbert said, “Good news, Cecilia. I finished the story—”
“Wire it to me,” she snapped.
“Uh, the wire where I’m staying is out of commission. I’ll send it tomorrow.”
“Run across the street, and pay whatever it takes to wire it from there.”
“Um. I can’t. Their wire is out of commission there, too.”
“Francisco, that’s impossible.”
“You’ll get it in the morning, Cecilia. Promise you.”
Paco Herbert hung up and unhooked the telephone.
There was no replica in the motel room, which he liked, but Paco Herbert started to wonder what else was going on in the world, what he was missing, and if the recovery of the Olmec heads was breaking news yet.
Paco Herbert put on his shoes and left the room, the evening cold like railroad steel. What had started as a five-thousand-word story about illegal dinners was now much bigger, and he felt a walk around the block for some coffee would do him some good. He remembered the name Leone McMasters, along with the idea of power and complete control. Once any kind of power is discovered, the thing that follows is the usurping of it. It’s what every great tragedy is about, he said to himself. Paco Herbert didn’t know how he was going to do all that writing without the orange uppers, and for a moment regretted leaving South Texas, and his dealer. But he planned on staying up all night and finishing a draft to wire his editor anyway. He had the story worked out in his mind from beginning to end. That’s the hardest part, knowing the structure. The easy part is sitting down and actually writing the thing. Paco Herbert even had a working title: “Tears of the Trufflepig,” a reference to the unexplained residue the Trufflepig emitted from its eyes.
Under his breath Paco Herbert sang:
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when Trufflepigs do cry;
On the bat’s back I do friggin’ fly;
After summer, merrily,”
and he chuckled sardonically.
On his way back to the motel room, Paco Herbert took a different route, walked under a loud, busy overpass. It was close to midnight, and the bottom of the overpass was covered in graffiti, with new, spray-painted designs over the old—a cycle among the street artists that probably went back decades. He studied a newly spray-painted image. It resembled a giant Trufflepig and took up the length of the cement embankment that held the overpass. Its body was painted purple, its beak and hooves gold. The scales all over its body were black, and the rendition of its eyes made it appear strung out on the drug crystal-kind. Paco Herbert held his quad-shot Americano cup in silent awe of the design, as cars zoomed by overhead.
NINETEEN
The morning Oswaldo was laid to rest, clear across the other side of the Valley, thirteen Olmec heads stood together under one roof for the first time in history. They sat on rubbery slabs on top of large pallets, where the Gargantua forklifts inserted their hooks. The metal screen doors were shut and locked. There was no other merchandise inside Warehouse #8QA.
Aside from four warehousemen, there to assist in prying the shipment open and operating machinery, there were six armed traffickers, each wielding an automatic weapon and a holstered handgun. Leone McMasters was in his lion’s-skin coat with the Astrakhan collar. His gray hair was slicked back and he had a perfectly trimmed silver mustache. Manolo Segura, the head detectiv
e of Reinahermosa, played with a toothpick in his mouth and paced around with a quiet anxiousness.
The Olmec heads slowly lulled everybody with their hypnotic stare, the stare of time and all the slaughter of the centuries. Nobody present could resist touching the giant monuments, their lips, eyes, sticking their fists up their noses, running their hands along them as if they were a pod of calcified beached whales.
McMasters regretted the failed acquisition of the remaining five Olmec heads, and said to Manolo, “How much do you think they’ll go down from their bid? Since the other five heads remain at large?”
“Ni madres,” Manolo said. “Damned if they’re getting away with lowering their price. What do they think is going on here? This isn’t your regular real estate sale. It’s not as easy as stealing half the Titanic from the ocean floor and placing it on the auction block. Plus, these men are men of business. Pansy collectors. They don’t have muscle, and they’re not thugs.”
“Let’s hope you’re right on that. Sometimes people like these are the kind of thugs who don’t need to muscle anybody. They do what they want and get away with it.”
“What are you doing over there?” Manolo yelled angrily at the four warehousemen. They were sitting on old swiveling office chairs close to Olmec head Q, unwrapping sandwiches, opening bags of chips, and uncapping bottled Cokes. One of them, in a defensive, indignant tone, replied, “It’s lunchtime for us, jefe. They give us one hour.”
“Oiga, a bunch of fucking lazy Poblanos that work here, right, McMasters? What a bunch of pi-po-pes they got here in this place, don’t you think? You know what I mean when I say pi-po-pe, right? Pinches poblanos pendejos. These fucking lazy Indians. And that’s because they know how much their heads are worth, if somebody would only chop and shrink them—”
“Enough,” McMasters interrupted. “I don’t want to listen to your racist chatter. It disgraces the men. They work hard, deserve their lunch, and I don’t like it.”
Unfazed, the four warehousemen ate their lunch, making the armed traffickers feel jealous and hungry.
“It’s so damned cold in this warehouse,” McMasters said. “Probably colder in here than it is out there. What do you think, Manolo? Look at them. All these dead kings looking at us, like the way the stars look down at night. We made history here. Well, the Indians made history. And we took it. That’s the way of the world, huh? But. I’ll say. You know what would be wise? For a person to invest in the production of Olmec heads. People will want them, imitation Olmec heads sitting in their front yards. No, no, listen to me, listen to me. These monuments have come to the attention of the public. Like when they stole the Mona Lisa out of Paris all those years ago. If somebody could produce a bunch of Olmec heads and sell them for, say, the price of a new truck, then they’d be in business. I mean, this proves it right here, right? This here proves there’s a demand for Olmec heads. Don’t you think, gentlemen?”
The armed traffickers, not expecting to be acknowledged, shrugged, then slowly nodded and scratched their heads in agreement. One of them, thinking McMasters was comical, grinned, and asked Manolo, “Qué dice este güey?” because neither he nor the other armed traffickers spoke English.
“One day,” McMasters added, “we’ll even take their pyramids.”
Outside, in the mountainous distance, a hallowed mechanical whirring was followed by a siren and spurts of gunshots. In that moment of confusion, the four warehousemen who were on lunch break really moved. Two of them tackled a couple of armed traffickers, took their guns, and shot them in their faces, and the warehouseman who had done the talking jumped into the air like a winged rodent, toward Manolo. In the moment Manolo unholstered his pistol, he got an ice pick right in the head. Bullets resounded inside the warehouse, from the guns of traffickers and the now-armed warehousemen.
McMasters was shocked. Being unarmed and frightened, he hid behind Olmec head 53. There were gunshots firing and ricocheting in a rhythmic pattern. At first, McMasters thought the warehousemen were shooting at him; then it became apparent the person shooting wasn’t aiming at anything and was shooting haphazardly around the warehouse. He peeked his head out and saw Manolo down on one knee, like singers of rancheras are known to do in the middle of performing a dramatic, sentimental number, only he had an ice pick stabbed in his head. With one hand Manolo was desperately trying to grab the ice pick but seemed unable to reach it, though it was sticking out of his frontal lobe. With his other hand he was shooting the pistol at random, all the while spinning in circles on one knee, his muscles spasming and operating on frantic, ebbing instinct.
Then, echoing throughout the warehouse, the small, grinning warehouseman in plain English yelled out, “Leone McMasters. You are surrounded. We are the Phantom Recruits. We know you’re unarmed, old man. Give it up and come out with your hands in the air. We’re not here to harm you. You have brought turmoil to our international community and will be brought to justice.”
McMasters was staring down the pipeline of consequences. If he could have, he would’ve burned the warehouse down. If he’d been armed, he would have turned the gun on himself, and that would put an end to everything. He peeked again as bullets shot from Manolo’s pistol, and saw him spinning, still unable to reach the ice pick in his head, blood dripping down his face and neck. Soon he’d run out of blood and bullets. One of the shots ricocheted from the ear of Olmec head 24 and came close to McMasters, but it clipped off the nostril of Olmec head 53, the one he was leaning on. Struggling to breathe, as if the air had turned to mud, McMasters stared into the eyes of the Olmec head with the clipped nose, and in that moment the last of Manolo’s bullets resounded. McMasters thought to himself something similar must’ve happened to the disfigured nose of the Sphinx.
TWENTY
The world around Bellacosa had turned acidic, as if the great blue rind of the atmosphere had peeled back, its smell drying out everyone’s tongues. At a loss for what to do, and having just buried his brother, he instinctively wanted to pay tribute to the dead before heading home and dealing with the Trufflepig in his bathtub.
When Bellacosa was a boy, his friend Domingo was struck by a car and killed at ten years old. Domingo was a window washer, working a busy intersection when it happened. At the funeral, Domingo’s older sister and mother sang a song that was dear to their family and was Domingo’s favorite. It was a song about Mexico that Bellacosa had come to relate to with a terrible sadness that wrung him by his roots, and on the way to Dorita Zepeda Children’s Cemetery, he sang some of the lyrics:
“Ya se cayo el arbolito, donde dormía el pavo real
Ahora dormira en el suelo
Porque no hay otro lugar
Ahora dormira en el suelo
Como cualquier animal.”
He stopped at Smiling Suns Flower Shop, and, like a somnambulist, entered the store. The sister proprietors were having some kind of disagreement, which they dropped to build a nice flower arrangement for a young lady, like Bellacosa had requested. After a moment, Bellacosa saw they hadn’t been arguing, just having a loud discussion about the weather. They were thrilled it had snowed the previous night, but it was bad for the plants, too, they said. The sisters sold him a bouquet with three different colors of roses, and Bellacosa thought about getting coffee and pie, but felt a linger of Catholic guilt, knowing one must always go to a cemetery on an empty stomach.
When he got to the cemetery, he thought of his brother’s sons, Luis and Ricardo. They were already young men, enrolled in universities, and their mother had remarried. Bellacosa felt ashamed to think the truth: that Oswaldo’s family would get along fine without him. Then he said to himself, But I am getting by, too. Sometimes barely, but I’m also getting by without my family.
It took Bellacosa twelve minutes to find her headstone: Yadira Graciela Bellacosa Aguirre. A child who’d been born wise, he thought, my own child, made out of my own mother, my own wife, que en paz descansen todas mis bonitas, mis hermosas. He couldn’t help but think abo
ut his experience with the Trufflepig—and seeing his daughter as if she’d grown to be a teenager and hadn’t died when she was still a girl. Bellacosa deeply regretted having buried Yadira at this cemetery, since it was so colorless and gray. They had strict rules about how long flowers and offerings could remain at the gravesides here. He wished they’d buried her where his boyhood friend Domingo was buried, at Cementerio San Felipe in Reinahermosa, which even from the street seemed more like a celebrated memorial-garden than a graveyard. But what did he know of death and burying children when this happened? He was proud he’d had his wife cremated, her ashes scattered all over the shores of South Padre Island, among the dolphins.
Bellacosa thought of a saying: “The undertaker also has mouths to feed.”
He set the roses down on Yadira’s grave, and felt very in touch with the love he still had for his daughter and his wife. He looked up at the trees, where herons were known to find refuge in the mild South Texas winters of years past. He didn’t remember paying attention to those birds before, but now that he never saw them he definitely noticed their absence. Herons or not, his daughter would always be buried here, and he couldn’t forgive himself for it.
Strangely, after a moment’s silence, instead of feeling sadness, Bellacosa felt a mild comfort for the first time. Thinking about his daughter, he wasn’t remembering her suffering, the treatments she’d gone through in her final year, the year that wasted her away. He now had an image of Yadira as a teenager, the way he’d seen her in his dream with the Trufflepig, and he felt grateful.
Bellacosa crossed himself and decided to take a stroll around the yard, not to look at the headstones, but to get a feel for this clear blue day. All the gray with the occasional flowers in the graveyard reminded him of the jagged skyline of Reinahermosa. He could see the crowd of workers and old ladies heading to the market, waiting for the bus that carried them to Colonia Doctores. He could see the mangy scavenger dogs walking confidently out of alleys, the paleteros, eloteros, and limosneros. He saw the young boys playing all the old games during the day, and teenagers kicking a soccer ball in the evenings. From second-story windows daydreaming young girls with braided hair looked down on them. The fences were tall, with broken glass sticking over the mortar, the vehicles passing smoky and loud.
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