We Have Taken Your Husband

by Angel Sanchez

  A phone call late the following morning, two weeks and two days after the first, was by this analogy the segunda llamada. Ariana is directed not to a theater seat but to a bench in the Plaza Chica. “Be there at two.” She sits where she has been told to sit. The enticing aroma of the curbside grilles and braziers eases her nerves. A young woman — barely a teenager — settles on the other end of the bench and soon begins nursing a baby hidden in the furls of her rebozo. Mother and child have been at it maybe five minutes when the girl rises abruptly and vacates the seat. As she moves away, the baby whimpers, a rare sound in Mexico, where infants and children are generally as stoic as their elders.

  A man now takes her place. Ariana wonders idly whether the nursing mother was sent ahead to reserve the seat for this man. Equally likely: the man is known and feared across the Plaza Chica, such that a hard glance from him is all it takes to roust a young mother and her baby from a seat he wants. His English is as bad as Ariana’s Spanish — far worse than the urbane extortionist she dealt with on the phone — and his manner is more abrupt.

  “We have given you enough time,” he says. “What have you got for us? How much is your husband worth to you? A lot — am I right, señora? That’s why it has taken you so long. You have needed to beg money from every relative you have, from here to Nueva York. Am I correct?”

  Ariana wonders if they are being watched and if the watchers are also being watched — by the DEA, by the people reporting to them. (Or has her anxiety flipped over into delusional paranoia: the sense that the world is a weave of schemes and secrets known to everyone but her?) Thinking the DEA has engaged might be as much wishful thinking as brain-warped paranoia. Not that it makes much difference. Even if they are closely monitoring her interactions with the kidnappers, what are they going to do? — arrest this go-between and trigger the execution of a hostage who has turned out to be more trouble than he is worth?

  Ariana begins this way: “Yes, of course. I am giving you everything I can put my hands on.”

  “How much?”

  “I have thirty-five thousand in a bank account in the States.”

  “What good is that? We are not in the States.”

  “I have made arrangements for it to be brought here, a courier. Thirty-five thousand dollars. Mas que cuatro cientos mil pesos.” (More than four hundred thousand pesos.)

  The man lapses into Spanish because she has:

  “No es suficiente.”

  He stands up and walks away. Ariana knew her offer would be rejected. It establishes a floor for these negotiations, she tells herself. The question on their minds, as well as hers: How high is the ceiling?

  No doubt they have badgered Schuyler for the same information. Maybe they did not need to badger him. Ariana wonders what he might be saying. She also wonders what they might have done to him to make him say it.

  Very little, she dares to hope. They would not turn to torture. Sequestration and a dread of what might lie ahead would be coercion enough, right? Schuyler is a practical man and clever. With his life on the line, he would not be as tightfisted as he habitually is. For her, an old age pinching pennies would be a fiasco. For Schuyler it would be no more, nor less, than life’s concluding adventure — assuming they make it to old age, and just now that’s not a certainty, least of all for him.

  It is with a sense of relief and uncertain possibilities that Ariana spots Margaret Aldrich pulling into a parking space alongside the Plaza, a car washer vigorously waving his rag as though she needed his help guiding the Land Rover into line with the vehicles on either side. (He will offer to wash the car, and for a few pesos will do the job quite thoroughly, hauling buckets of water from the fountain in the center of the plaza.)

  Ariana is at the driver-side door as Margaret’s long legs descend toward the cobbled street. “Oh my god, Ariana. What a pleasant surprise.”

  They agree that coffee would be lovely before Margaret runs her errands. They shun the Surtidora in favor of a less crowded café, and even before they reach it, Ariana has had a chance to bring her confidante up to speed: the rejected offer of ten thousand pesos en efectivo (cash); the extortionist’s declaration that she would need to come up with a multiple of that — in dollars, not pesos. And fast.

  Ariana: “They want the money by the weekend.”

  The coffees are on order. “Twenty thousand dollars, you said. That’s what they want?” Margaret speaks sotto voce in ritual acknowledgement of the gravity of the moment, though there is no one other than Ariana within earshot. “You’ve been in touch with Schermerhorn people in New York, have you not? I assume you’ve been able to pry a good deal more than that out of them. But at least twenty thousand is a place to start.”

  Ariana acknowledges the hasty trip to New York, but then — without quite knowing what’s going on — slides into a bit of a white lie. The money is being couriered down here, she says, as though she hadn’t just carried $100,000 in cash through customs. They didn’t want me to risk bringing it myself. I just hope it’s here by the weekend.”

  “Darling, let me help with that. I can advance you the money; you can pay me back when the Schermerhorn money gets here. The only fly in the ointment: we’ll have to drive down to Uruapan to get it.”

  Ariana knew that Margaret had some kind of ranch in Uruapan, or at least a partial interest in one. She must have mentioned it when they talked that night at Villa Mujica. Over their coffees, Margaret places a cell call to her business partner or overseer or whatever Marco is. Ariana ritually protests the disruption a drive to Uruapan will be for Margaret. “Not to worry,” Margaret says as she waits for the call to ricochet over the sierra and find Marco in the valley below. “We keep a cash reserve in a Bancomer branch in Uruapan. I can put off my errands.” Shortly she is instructing her overseer to withdraw the specified sum of money, and put the pesos in the safe.

  She clicks off the phone: “But Ariana, where does this end? These boys will bleed you dry!

  “By the way,” she continues.” I chatted with Mario after your visit. In a roundabout fashion, of course. Lots of feints and parries.”

  Ariana looks over at her, waiting for more.

  “He claimed to know nothing about Schuyler. And maybe that’s the truth, though it would not surprise me — this kind of thing has happened before — if he comes back to me with information and an apology for holding back. He’ll say he needed to check with his colleagues to be certain of what he had heard before passing it on.”

  Of course there is much expostulation about “poor dear Schuyler.” Margaret says she is “in agony” worrying about him. “Now they are playing you,” she says. “Of course you realize this won’t end at twenty thousand, maybe not even close to that. How much did you say was coming from New York? A hundred? You may wind up needing most of it.”

  Ariana silently excuses herself for being not quite forthright with Margaret, for not revealing that she already has a lot of cash to carry her through these negotiations. It’s a further symptom of how distraught she is, Ariana says to herself. And then she has another thought: that she is instinctually wary of Margaret, reluctant to give her a fully candid account of her situation. Margaret is too close to the traffickers, she tells herself. Besides, she thinks, I need all the cash I can get. Another twenty thousand won’t hurt, and I’ll pay her back as soon as this is over.

  Uruapan is a sprawling commercial and agricultural center an hour or so west of Patzcuaro and about a thousand meters lower in altitude.

  “Tierra caliente,” Ariana says, just to keep her mouth moving as they cruise over the continental divide, Margaret at the wheel.

  Tierra caliente — the hot zone. It’s a nickname that refers to the much warmer, indeed fiercely tropical climate as western Mexico sheds altitude in a long cascade toward the Pacific. But lately the term tierra caliente does double duty by describing the political situation in this part of Michoacan. It’s turf that is more and more hotly contested by the cartels because of its central p
lace in the export market in avocados, not to mention the fecundity of its soils and the narcotic strength of its opium crop. And along with fertilizers and pesticides, the sicarios regularly mix the blood of their rivals into the rich dirt. (Of course, some of those fertilizers, the ones containing anhydrous ammonia, lend themselves to the concoction of yet another drug: methamphetamine, the all-purpose alternative that has begun to replace pot and smack as the drug trade’s reserve currency.) Ariana has not forgotten an article in the Times a few years back that began anecdotally with a man walking into a cantina along Uruapan’s main promenade and upending a laundry bag. Five severed heads rolled across the floor like coconuts, each of them until recently attached to the necks of men well known to the cantina regulars who looked on in horror.

  “I have a financial interest in the harvest, but I leave the farming to my business partner, a Mexican,” Margaret explains as they drop down off the forested Sierra in a series of nerve-wracking hairpin turns. “His wife was doing some accounting work for me — they’re educated people, middle class. She mentioned that the property had hit the market. Her husband was pining for it, if only he could raise the money, a few million pesos. That was in 2009, the bottom of the crash. I came out for a look, fell in love with the land and the adorable little ranch house, and agreed to split the cost. He pays me a portion of what he gets for the crop, and I come down here for a change of scenery. In the worst of the winter, when Patzcuaro is raw, la tierra caliente lives up to its name.

  Margaret’s “little finca,” her farm, turns out to be an extensive hacienda, a vast estate maybe a thousand acres — a whole mountainside clear-cut and replanted in avocado trees, neat trim rows of them reaching up the mountain slopes and into the clouds.

  The ranch announces itself in classic Mexican style: an epic cast-iron gate framed by two-story towers. They look like adobe; more likely they’re concrete painted to look like adobe. The house, down a quarter-mile drive, is less pretentious than the gate. It’s furnished in a rustic style: clean, simple, just a few sticks of furniture. The managers house is behind the barn. Margaret mixes a small pitcher of martinis on a tiled kitchen counter.

  Ariana wonders if her companion has fallen off the wagon and is going to join her in drinking gin. She says nothing, but evidently Margaret reads her mind. “No doubt you could mix your own martini,” she says. “Forgive me for indulging in nostalgia.”

  She garnishes Ariana’s martini with a cocktail onion, then pours herself a glass of gaseous mineral water. They take the drinks out onto a verandah. It’s flanked by low, flowering shrubs, now in bloom, but the eye is drawn past them, across a paddock and adjacent meadows to a forested ridge.

  “That’s the western boundary,” Margaret says.

  The more startling view, less picturesque — less of a postcard — is to the north, where the mountainside, easily a half-mile to the peak, has been shaved and then stippled with the avocado trees that Ariana saw from the road.

  “The environmentalists squawk about deforestation. And no doubt their concern is legitimate. But we have planted five thousand trees. How is that deforestation?”

  A flatbed truck works the eastern edge of the plantation, the long, precise rows of avocado trees with the bottom three or four feet of their trunks painted white. To repel insects?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Margaret says. “That’s what Marco would tell you, but I think it’s more tradition than meaningful agronomy, a rancher’s way of asserting his domain, like a dog lifting his leg on a hydrant. After all, besides calling in the crop duster once or twice a season, there isn’t a great deal to do between spring pruning and the harvest. That’s the beauty of avocado farming.”

  Closer to hand, ducks splash and spin about in a small pond bordered by a mix of iris and hibiscus. Now and then horses can be heard stomping and neighing in their stalls. In due course, horses fed, the hand who looks after them emerges from the stable. Margaret engages him in a few minutes of chitchat about various barnyard issues, as best Ariana can tell, given his difficult tropical accent. She can’t help noticing that the man does not look her way during the exchange with his employer, not once.

  He takes his leave and Margaret and Ariana talk about this and that before returning, inevitably, to the question of the cartels.

  “This is a fairly high-profile operation — am I wrong?”

  “You mean, have I been visited by the Caballeros? Of course I have. …” As she speaks, Margaret rises from her seat and holds up her empty glass by way of asking if Ariana would also like a refill.

  Guest follows hostess out into the pantry. There is a good inch or two left in the pitcher, but the ice has begun to melt. Margaret dumps the diluted martini into the sink, breaks out fresh cubes and pours gin followed by a whiff of vermouth. She refills her glass with soda water and picks up the lesson where she left off.

  “OK. So where was I … The day I signed the papers on this place — Marco and I did the paperwork in a lawyer’s office, then we picked up his wife and drove out here to celebrate. A bottle of champagne, some strawberries. I stayed in a hotel in Uruapan that night and when I came out the next morning for a more orderly look around, two hombres were waiting at the gate. Except for my driver, I was alone. They suggested we step into the house, and they got right to the point. They said they would shield us from less ethical sicarios and overly officious government agents and make sure our harvest got to market. We hadn’t cleared the mountainside yet, but the older avocado grove was already yielding a good crop.”

  She nods toward the east side of the property.

  “In exchange, they said they wanted 10 percent. I decided to test them, call their bluff. Marco said I was stupid. I said, no, I’m American; I resent this and I don’t want to be party to this kind of extortion. I mean, where does it end? (Marco: ‘It doesn’t.’)

  “The first few incidents could have been accidents or even just coincidences. The trucker we hired has a blowout on a steep grade along the cuota outside Salamanca and half the crates slide off the flatbed. Avocados rattle down into the ravine, an avalanche of them. I think we were able to salvage about a sixth of the crop. We sold the bruised avocados for next to nothing to a factory that bottles guacamole. Then there’s trouble with the migrants, mostly Guatemalans. They follow the harvest north like locusts.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “They were …” Margaret makes air quotes with her fingers: “ … ‘held up.’ They just didn’t show up for the first week or so. Marco contracted with one of the outfits, paid part in advance as custom requires, but the delays were extended and by the time they showed up the fruit was getting soft — delicious, but the whole idea is to get it into the U.S. while it’s still hard and then let it ripen in the warehouses and on supermarket shelves. Whole Foods. Walmart. Whatever. And then, of course, when we bought a truck and started trying to get the harvest to the border ourselves, to Juarez or Tijuana: delays, pesticide issues with the inspectors — too much spray, too little.

  “We had to wonder: Was the cartel harassing us? Or were these just the realities of trying to do business in a competitive market. The Caballeros bided their time. The season was over, but they let me know the offer was still on the table. Ten percent plus costs began to seem like reasonable price to pay for delivery of our next crop to a broker. Then comes the Calderon presidency — to cheers from Washington. There’s a big escalation in the ‘War on Drugs.’” (More finger quotes.)

  “Looking back, you’d have to say the Calderon years came to nothing. For all the arrests, the crackdowns, the raids and the many, many thousands of lives snuffed out in the night, the people ‘disappeared’ — los desaparecidos — it’s been a dud. Interdiction? Pot, poppies, the pass-through traffic in Colombian and Peruvian cocaine — the market is flooded. U.S. prices have actually fallen when they should have tripled. That’s how effective interdiction has been. But for a while there Calderon had the cartels on the defensive. It looked like he might actu
ally make a difference — not just dance to Washington’s tune, show the scalps he had collected and pocket more aid. I mean the cartels were on their uppers. Now it was federal agents, not cartel types, showing up at my gate.

  “They told me I didn’t have to worry about the Caballeros any more. ‘That’s over,’ they said. ‘No bribes, no mordidas.’

  “Oh, but there was the matter of a wee tax on the harvest. And you know what the tax came to — the impuesto federal? Fifteen percent. Fifteen! Half again what the cartel had wanted, and the cartel at least provided a service. The army was all over the tierra caliente during the Calderon years, but the army didn’t harvest anybody’s crop. They didn’t arrange safe passage to the border or anywhere near it. Soon enough I was having to pay the cartel separately for each of these services, and that was over and above the fifteen percent. And I doubt much of the impuesto made it to the federal treasury. The cartel probably got that, too.”

  “So how is it going under Peña-Nieto?” Ariana asks, referring to the latest sticky-fingered political hack to have become president.

  “Better. The Caballeros — or whatever they call themselves these days — they’re still on top. I pay my 10 percent. The government still wants its 15 percent. But it’s 15 percent of net. The accountants can reduce net pretty much to nothing, with deductions for labor, for shipping. We even deduct the cartel payoff. We join them in calling it ‘security’ rather than extortion. For a good accountant, some things are the same on either side of the border. Am I wrong?”

  Ariana has heard this before, the rough outlines of what it is like doing business in Mexico, but hearing it from Margaret makes it real. She is providing an education. She is also running a risk. She assumes Ariana will know how to use the information without anyone being able to tie it to her, to the particulars of her finca. It’s a trust Ariana knows she must try very hard not to betray.