We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  And, after all, she has some leverage; their interests are allied. She needs a gun — or thinks she does; he is in the business of providing them. And if he is scamming her, well, she knows where he works. Even if he is in cahoots with his boss, neither one of them will enjoy her coming back with Jorge to pitch a fit.

  She decides to let this film noir moment play out.

  In for a dime, in for a dollar, she says to herself.

  The boy darts down the street and disappears into an alley. The waitress has just brought Ariana her coffee when he returns, a bit winded. He slides into the booth, facing her.

  Without discussion, she realizes that the arm he is extending under the table top offers the revolver for her inspection.

  Would she know a derringer from a cap gun? She takes the weapon and sets it on the seat beside her, the side closer to the wall. It has the heft she might expect of a real gun. She glances at it furtively; it looks lightly used, if not brand new. Now her partner in crime is signalling for her to hand it back to him under the table. She does so, and he returns it to her, this time with the cylinder ajar. It is not a cap gun.

  In for a dime, in for $250, she says to herself.

  She pulls her wallet out of her purse and puts it in her lap. She leafs through the bills, counting out the requisite six Diego Riveras, worth 500 pesos apiece. She folds the wad of paper in her hand and slides it across the table. The clerk delicately takes delivery and the money disappears into his shirt pocket. The transaction is not complete, however. The clerk now pulls a small box from inside his jacket, a box about the size that staples come in. He lifts the lid and Ariana is treated to the sight of a dozen copper-jacketed bullets.

  Ciento cincuenta, the boy says. A hundred and fifty pesos — about twelve bucks.

  Ariana produces the additional cash, slips the purchases into her purse and without further ceremony rises from the booth.

  She finds the hotel where Jorge said to meet her. He is there already, in the lobby with his cigarettes and a glass of bright red juice: jamaica. They catch each other up on their day thus far. Ariana considers mentioning her purchase, the revolver now lurking in the depths of her purse, but decides not to. Jorge will think she’s truly off her rocker. She produces the binoculars as evidence of a morning spent constructively.

  The next morning finds Ariana alone in the kitchen, recuperating from her trip to Mexico City. She is into her second cup of coffee and checking her messages: voicemail, email, texts. There among the emails accumulating on her cell phone is an alert from American Express. They are checking on some atypical purchases, asking if she made them. “If not, please contact us immediately.”

  In two words: Oh, shit.

  She remembers the xeroxed statement she had returned to her desk drawer from the kitchen counter as she dials the number. The dubious charges are not huge but they are completely bogus: a bill from a restaurant she has never heard of, some clothing purchased not in Mexico City but in Guadalajara. She will need to cancel the card. She will be amazed by the rapidity with which American Express is able to get her a new one. This has happened before. It could have nothing whatsoever to do with Schuyler’s disappearance, or with the paperwork left out on the counter. It could have everything to do with it.

  She hears a knock at the door and then the rattling of keys in the lock. She freezes. She has forgotten that Friday is a Gabriela day. The cleaning woman has a set of keys, for times when no one’s home. (Is this crazy? A friend returned ahead of schedule from a month abroad to find that her cleaner had been entertaining a lover in the master bedroom. But clearly there are vulnerabilities more dire than that.)

  It’s a little after nine. Efraim is with his mother — his attendance has been intermittent recently. Gabriela sets him to work raking up fallen leaves and twigs in the garden. From there he will hose down the courtyard and the garden terrace and walkways. With Efraim dispatched, Gabriela declines a cup of coffee — maybe later — and bustles upstairs to throw a wash in the machine and do the bathrooms.

  Ariana takes comfort in the predictability of the routine. But there is also something eerie about it: the way routine of any sort clashes with a life turned upside down. When Gabriela comes back into the kitchen, Ariana watches her too closely. Has she accepted the explanation for Schuyler’s absence — the emergency visit with a sister in Connecticut? Is Gabriela ever so slightly on guard this morning? Ariana catches herself; she must be projecting her own anxieties onto a faithful cleaning woman.

  And then it hits her. Not for one minute does Gabriela buy the trip-to-the-States scenario. She probably knows more than I do about what has happened to Schuyler, Ariana thinks to herself; all Patzcuaro probably knows more than I do, the Mexicans, that is. She retreats into the mundane, mentions some ironing that she wants Gabriela to do, if she has time. As Gabriela again passes through the kitchen, Ariana looks up from the counter where she is reading the morning paper and holds up the coffee pot. Gracias, just a little: un cafecito. Ariana fills a cup part way. The suspicions are all in my mind, she decides. They have to be.

  Soon Gabriela is pulling up rugs, putting chairs on tabletops and in other ways signaling that she is about to mop the tiled floors in the kitchen and entrance hall. Ariana retreats to a far corner of the garden with coffee and her newspaper. She settles into a lawn chair shaded by a stand of papyrus that Don Pablo, the once-a-week gardener, planted earlier in the year. As she reads, she watches Efraim finish up on the patio and the porticos along that side of the house. Is he trustworthy? Could she enlist him as an ally in a mission to track down Schuyler and then … Well, what then? A midnight raid, a terrified wife taking on a nest of well-armed sicarios? Would money buy Efraim’s allegiance, or would a fatherless young man’s yen to impress local gangsters prevail over greenbacks? (Not that he couldn’t play both sides of the street; impress the sicarios and take some of her money, too.) Now Efraim spreads out a piece of canvas, rakes his pile of twigs and leaves onto it and carries the bundle over to the compost pile. He works slowly and methodically, apparently in no haste to finish one task and expose himself to whatever his mother might have in mind next. Does he know about Schuyler? Is he reading Ariana for signals that he can carry back to a cabal of thugs holed up somewhere?

  She and Schuyler were disappointed when Efraim knocked up his girlfriend and dropped out of college. Disgusted would not be too strong a word. College was going to be a great gift for Efraim. They faulted Gabriela for letting a baby derail her son’s shot at escaping from the poverty in which she had reared him. In all of that Ariana saw sloth, or call it fatalism, Mexico’s undoing: the chronic inertia that’s bred in the bone by the Catholic church, “the peace that passeth all understanding.” Ariana has spoken of this in idle conversation with Jorge. She didn’t expect such a vehement rebuttal. “I think you are forgetting something,” he said. He paused for a minute and looked at her: “You’re unaware what that family has been through?”

  Jorge went on to tell a story that Ariana knew only in part: that some months back one of Efraim’s cousins — the son of Gabriela’s sister in Guerrero — had got caught up in campus radicalism at one of the provincial teaching colleges. And then suddenly, he was among the missing, the desaparecidos, the generation who live only in the memories of loved ones.

  “That’s what Gabriela knows about higher education,” Jorge said. “Who could blame her for caving so quickly and welcoming Efraim back home. She’ll fuss about the baby, but secretly it comes as a relief to her to have Efraim back under her roof.”

  “Babies plural,” Ariana said, reminding Jorge of Efraim’s increasingly well-populated nursery.

  “The more the merrier, Ariana. They are Mexicans, my dear. Breeding is a season in their lives, not a trip to the sperm bank to pick out the family they want.”

  And of course Jorge was right, as he so often was in explaining Mexico to her.

  The story had not ended with Efraim’s return to his mother’s home. Fully a year p
assed before DNA testing by a forensics lab in Chilpancingo confirmed the worst: Body parts of Gabriela’s nephew — to be precise, part of one foot and a bone fragment from his staved-in skull — had been among the remains of seven young men and women hacked to death, dumped in a ditch and, in an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the evidence altogether, soaked in gasoline and set on fire.

  “Didn’t you hear about that? The DNA results came back only a few weeks ago.”

  Ariana owes condolences to Gabriela — and an apology for not having heard the news until now. But maybe she can use the information more usefully in dealing with Efraim. When she speaks of it, Gabriela will break down and Ariana will find herself trying to soothe the woman in her halting Spanish. Efraim’s grief takes the form of the sullenness that Ariana has seen come over him while tending bar at gringo cocktail parties. Sullenness mixed, she senses, with fury. When Efraim passes near her with his rake, Ariana breaks the silence by saying both she and Señor Schermerhorn are deeply sorry for the family’s loss. Efraim mutters unintelligible oaths, which Ariana takes to mean he might be willing to talk a little more — as she had hoped in bringing up the cousin’s death in the first place.

  “Who did this terrible thing?” she asks. “The government? The sicarios?” (This was a year or two after the horror in Iguala and the revelation that the local police, with army support, were implicated in mass murder of the 43 uppity normalistas, young people in training to become teachers.)

  “Who killed your cousin?” Efraim has no answer. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I think the cartel will find out, the Caballeros, and then they will kill the killers.” This is a new one for Ariana: the first time she has heard a local citizen vest his hope for justice in a cartel — unlikely as it is that any self-respecting cartel would trifle to eliminate a student, however irksome. Before that moment, she supposed all but those directly involved saw the cartels as implacable predators — the foes of any right-living, hard-working Mexican family. Efraim is no fool, but he must be at least weighing the possibility that the cartels — some of them, anyway — are emerging as an alternative to a thoroughly corrupted government. He would be awed by the power of the cartels, awed and afraid, but only that much more susceptible to recruitment. Joining a cartel might seem to place him in the ranks of men trying to strip away the last husks around the rotted cob of Mexico’s official ruling class. Or maybe it would be nothing more than a paying job, no small thing in an economy with little to offer a young father who had yet to find gainful employment more dignified than assisting his mother, a housekeeper.

  Three days later, Ariana runs into Efraim on the street. It’s an improbable encounter. The only time she sees him anywhere near her home is when he’s working there. His presence makes her uneasy. She notices a livid, gash across the cheekbone just south of Efraim’s left eye. She wonders if he was caught with another man’s woman.

  “Pendejo!” Efraim says, dismissing his enemy with an all-purpose pejorative, adding, mostly in Spanish, “He couldn’t fight his own fucking fight.” Efraim seems to realize he has said too much and might as well keep going. The incident, insofar as Ariana can follow Efraim’s slang-rich account of it, stemmed from jealousy, but not jealousy over his way with a woman. It seems that he had drawn the interest of a would-be mentor, a patron, one of the men who rule the streets and the markets, making a mockery of the elected government and its gendarmes. Efraim hints that he is being groomed for advancement as one of the patron’s protégés. And this has infuriated a rival for the big man’s favor. They were drinking; words were exchanged and soon gave way to threats. With help from an accomplice who pinned Efraim down, the rival protégé grabbed him by the hair, wrapped one arm around Efraim’s neck and with the other drew the knife across his face, with a warning that next time he would draw it across an eye.

  Efraim changes the subject: Have I heard from Don Schuyler? Something tells Ariana to drop the visiting-his-sister story.

  “What do you know, Efraim?”

  Efraim brings his cow eyes — jet black, oversized — to bear on the gringa. Is she asking him for information about her own husband, information she should have, not he? Then it seems to dawn on him that she is merely trying to determine how much of the story he already knows before filling him in on the rest.

  Ariana rephrases the question: “What have you heard?”

  What she doesn’t know is whether Efraim has put himself in her way — on the streets of her neighborhood — because he wants to talk, to confide in her? If so, she has blown it. Her question is too blunt. He has lost his nerve. He answers evasively.

  “Yes, I will tell you if I hear something. Don Schuyler is very, very good to me.”

  Ariana says nothing.

  Efraim continues: “There is peoples here that is very bad.”

  “If Schuyler is with them, where would they be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know these type of things.”

  Bullshit, Ariana thinks to herself. This kid is probably neck deep in the cartel culture, or very much wants to be.

  Ariana shares her suspicions with Jorge the next time she runs into him, which is later that day: “He knows something but is afraid to tell me.”

  “Who could blame him,” Jorge says. “But cool down, Ariana. You need to figure out a few things about Efraim before you trust him with anything more than taking out your trash. Schuyler helped him with college, now just a sour memory of personal failure. And so Schuyler may walk on water in Efraim’s and Gabriela’s book, but Efraim still needs water wings. If he was pacing the neighborhood, trying to summon the courage to knock on your door, he’s working an angle. That’s how it is with these young hombres. And wouldn’t you? — if you had a wife and kids and were sweeping floors for a cut of the pittance you pay his mother? They’re desperate. The cartel is his only real chance. He may know which faction grabbed Schuyler. He may be ready to tell you. But it’s not because he’s devoted to you or to some fucking mafia. It’s just a way he sees to get ahead, maybe put some money in his pocket. Your money? The cartel’s? Ni modo!”

  “You don’t know that, Jorge.”

  “No, but you need to.”

  day nine

  The DEA is prompt, if not effective. Agent Forrester shows up in Patzcuaro — or rather a man who claims to represent him shows up. He rings and when Ariana opens the door he looks her in the eye and says softly, “Forrester sent me.” He is Mexican and has arrived in a delivery truck bearing the logo of a Morelia department store, a logo but not much else. The washing machine-sized carton the man hefts out of the truck and brings inside turns out to be empty. Thank god he didn’t show up earlier in the week when Gabriela and Efraim were here. Ariana offers coffee, which the agent/delivery man accepts. “May I look around?” He cases the house quickly, taking notes whose utility Ariana cannot imagine. He hands her a clipboard and marks the place where she is supposed to sign, as if for the delivery — a flourish as unnecessary to this pantomime as the stage-prop carton he carried in with him. As she hands back the clipboard, he says: “An agent will be at the basilica for the ten o’clock mass tomorrow morning. Sit in the back, please. We will find you.”

  Pews in the basilica’s vast nave — exalting, overwhelming — are divided into two blocs, front and rear, separated by the transept that runs from a chapel on the north side to a doorway out into the walled church grounds. The day is nothing special and there are not more than a hundred worshippers at the ten a.m. mass. Only the oldest and lamest of the devout are in the rear bloc of pews. Ariana takes a seat. From the stink of smoker’s breath she is made aware that a man has settled directly behind her. Now on his knees on the prayer rail, he whispers tobacco-brown words into her ear:

  “Don’t look around and don’t call us. We’re doing what we can. The cartel has you under surveillance, 24/7. Meeting like this, away from the house, makes it easier to see who’s following you.” Ariana wants this strangely theatrical encounter to end quickly and, evidently, so
does the agent. She hears the creak of the prayer rail as he sits back up in his pew. Minutes later, in the hubbub of parishioners approaching the altar rail for communion, she feels his hand on her shoulder, and he is gone. The word “tomorrow” lingers in the air.

  Ariana is no longer a Catholic, let alone a churchgoer, but she supposes the narcos would not think it strange for a woman with a kidnapped husband to seek solace in the bosom of the Virgin Mother. La Virgen de Guadalupe is Mexico’s ultimate authority, greater in Her glory even than the DEA. The narcos would be powerless to prevent their victim from seeking Her succor. In any case, Ariana returns to the basilica as instructed the next morning and the one after that. Nothing. No agent makes his presence known to her.

  More than two weeks have passed since she was last with Enrique and Ariana wakes up aching for him. She needs his companionship, the simple warmth of his body. She also yearns to bring another confidant in on her ordeal, Schuyler’s ordeal. Enrique would have insights. He’s Mexican. He’d know the lay of the land. (No, you are the lay of the land he once said to her. She had tried to look offended, but suppressed laughter burst forth from her like a sneeze.)

  Enrique is the one who usually initiates their trysts, the prerogative of Mexican manhood. Typically, she finds a message on her cell: a date, a time of day, usually in the morning. Nothing more. There is no need to name a hotel because it is always the Iturbe. Now and then she sends him an email, an empty one — no subject line, no message — a reminder that she exists, that her day is a blank slate, his to write on as he wishes. On this occasion, the blank message draws an almost immediate response. And by late afternoon, they are in each other’s arms. He is back early from wherever his business trip took him. His wife is with her mother in Uruapan. He and Ariana stay together through the night — a rare privilege. In the morning, she wakes up to the unspeakable pleasure of this man moistening her labia with his tongue, his lips, his open mouth, sucking and caressing. She has begun to moan when he pulls her to the edge of the bed, flips her on her stomach and fucks her roughly and hastily.