“It’s just that they rarely catch sight of the plane,” apologized the head of the rural school. “They only ever hear it landing with its cargo at night.”
In Viesca, I had an encounter that turned out to be providential. I was coming out of the Cultural Center after one of my talks (still wearing my gunman outfit) when a Ford Lobo with tinted glass braked suddenly beside me. The driver opened the window. He was in his early thirties, blond, dressed in black, and wearing shades.
“What’s up, Prof?”
I recognized him immediately: about ten years before, he’d been one of my journalism students in a graphic design college that was finally closed down for being unaccredited. I recalled his features but not his name.
“Just earning a buck. I’m on a lecture tour.”
“Dressed as a rodeo clown?”
He was trying to get my hackles up, but something in the shining block of darkness behind his sunglasses gave me the feeling that the unruly, mule-headed kid I’d known all those years ago had turned into a sleekly terrifying animal.
“That’s what they asked for …,” I replied in justification.
He smiled.
“I get it. Good luck, Prof.”
He closed the window and pulled away, burning rubber.
The really big drain on Esquivel’s finances was the presence of Violeta Vallardes—Camargo and I renamed her Violeta the Violent—a Nicaraguan stripper based in Sabinas who had joined us halfway through the trip. She looked just like a chubbier version of the porn star Lucía Lapiedra. One evening when we were alone at a restaurant table (Esquivel had gone to the restroom), I said:
“You look just like Lucía Lapiedra.”
She glared at me and spit into my glass.
“Forget it: that dumb broad’d suck me off if I so much as looked at her.”
She must have found out from the TV or the internet in Cuatro Ciénagas that, after hooking up with a sports commentator, Lucía Lapiedra had quit her porn career, gotten married, won a reality show, and turned herself into the tenderhearted and popular Miriam Sánchez Cámara. That really did turn Violeta on: she invited me for a moonlight swim in Los Mezquites and offered up what she’d initially refused.
We lived in a paradise of open-air stages, broken microphones, outdated costumes, and amazing landscapes. But then the money ran out. Esquivel must have realized what was coming better than any of us, because during a pause in the tour (we were staying in a trailer park motel near Sacramento), he came to my room and threw a folder crammed with photocopies onto the bed.
“I’ve got an idea for making more cash,” he said. “All we need is a well-designed plan and your baritone voice.”
“What’s all that stuff?”
“Data. Telephone numbers, bank statements, home addresses. All women’s.”
“So?”
“So I’ve done my part. Now it’s up to you to cold-call and threaten them. You tell them we’re an armed commando group and we’re just around the corner from the house. And we’re gonna kill them unless they hand over a given sum of money.”
Without giving me even a moment to protest, Esquivel dropped a packet of crack the size of a guava next to the folder.
“Consider this an engagement ring,” he said with a smile before walking out of the room.
It’s not as easy as it might seem. The important thing (I didn’t learn this from any criminal but from my nephew who works in telemarketing) is to have a detailed script. Scenarios: “If the prospective client says x, apply interaction three. If the prospective client responds y, follow the steps laid out in interaction seven down to the last word.”
“Good afternoon, señora.”
It’s almost always women who answer.
“This is Comandante Marcial Lafuente Estefanía of the Federal Police. We’re following up on a report made from this telephone number.”
The aim is to prevent the woman from cutting off the call by any available means.
At first we worked catch-as-catch-can: making calls on the road between performances of our Western show, holed up in the restrooms of gas stations, in motel rooms with the television on mute … As the business began to grow, we thought it would be a good idea to set up an office. Esquivel got hold of a dilapidated shack in the communal village of La Pócima, halfway between Cuatro Ciénagas and San Pedro de las Colonias. We moved in as soon as the tour finished.
“Are you sure you didn’t make that call, señora? The communications people say we have a woman’s voice on tape.”
Most Mexicans are genetically incapable of distinguishing between a criminal and a policeman, which is why this interrogation method is so effective. Thinking aloud, trying to come up with an answer, the prospective client gives essential information that, a few minutes later, will allow her to be blackmailed: the number of people living in the house, their ages, when they come and go, any people who are employed in the house … On good days, with a talkative prospective client, you can even learn the color of the house, the children’s first names, and the make of the family car.
There was no electricity in La Pócima. After dark we had just two oil lamps. By day, the landscape bordering the highway is like jeweled folds: green and blue mountains, white dunes, mounds of exposed virgin rock that made you think of giant hands emerging from the land of the dead to punch the sun. At night, that beauty is put on pause: it’s all just black cold and a wind that tastes of road metal.
The shack was built of unfinished cement blocks, had a corrugated cardboard roof and joints reinforced with railroad ties stolen from the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México by the former owner of the property. It was a basic one-story building, set at an angle to the highway, with a door of cracked wood and a window that was in fact a huge hole looking out onto the white, gritty flatlands. To gain a little privacy, we hung a sheet over the hole and piled up the boxes of inactive files Esquivel brought from his city hall office to create the illusion of a two-room house. Beyond this division, in what could be called the bedroom, were a couple of folding cots, where we slept in shifts. Under the window was an orange futon belonging to Violeta that could be used only with her authorization. Beside the futon we installed a large trestle table, piled with directories, notebooks, and disposable cell phones. Finally, positioned precisely parallel to the doorway, as if standing guard, was Esquivel’s old, heavy metal writing desk.
We never returned the Suburban that Bonilla lent us for the tour. Camargo had a DVD player in there on which we watched old urban Westerns starring the Almada brothers, Deadly Enemies, or Champions League games that a barman in San Pedro recorded for us. Sometimes we’d venture out at night to the strip clubs in Torreón; they were almost always empty. The city had been under siege since the government gave the plaza to Los Señores, sparking a war with the cartel controlling Durango. The Nazas River had become a frontier drawn with blood. Gunfire could be heard night and day to the west of Avenida Colón. The area around the Alianza Market, once the heart of the most sordid joys, was a ghost town. Urban legend had it that any kid who dared to cross the river to buy drugs in Gómez or Lerdo would be a corpse by sunrise.
“We’re absolutely certain that the call was made on your telephone. My boys lost two pickups and one of them has been arrested. So tell me, where do we go from here?”
You have to reveal yourself at just the right moment, when the prospective client seems most confused. The best way is to use a mix of drama and restraint without lowering the bar to violence.
“Do you know what the last letter of the alphabet is, lady? Well, that’s us. Our men are just around the corner from your house, awaiting instructions.”
Esquivel ordered us to carry handguns. He bought a Smith & Wesson 686 Nickel with a dark wood grip for himself. Violeta got a really useless kitschy pink Lorcin. Camargo carried a well-worn .38 Super that had acquired a gray patina from all the grease. I was offered a Beretta Cougar, but refused it. I preferred to hang on to my old Remington.
> Although we sometimes changed roles, the functions of each member of the group were well-defined. Esquivel was always in charge of logistics, administration, and the agenda; he was the brains behind the operation. Camargo’s remit was transportation, purchases, and security, plus he brought the list of potential clients that Bonilla obtained from some obscure private-education coordinating body associated with the SPE. I was the public face (or rather voice) of the business: the sales representative. Violeta the Violent’s mission was one for which her conventional beauty proved most useful: debt collection. We received the payments via money orders deposited in branches of Western Union or Banco Azteca. While I was working the client from a disposable cell phone, Esquivel would be on another telephone coordinating our girlfriend’s movements.
We’d begun to openly share Violeta’s affections toward the end of the tour. To my surprise, and that of Esquivel (he’d already had his suspicions that something was going on between Violeta and me and had thrown that accusation in my face during a euphoric stopover in the Hotel Rincón del Montero), she was also with Camargo. Esquivel didn’t find the situation funny in any sense, but neither did he take it to heart. We came to an agreement that Camargo and I would contribute a percentage of what he’d paid Los Lenones, the sex-trafficking cartel that had sold her in Sabinas, and after that we split the profits of our savage telemarketing operation four ways. Camargo proposed that we seal the deal with a group sex session. He ended up with Violeta and I got Esquivel. We never again mentioned or repeated the affair.
“Don’t even think about showing your face, you scumbag, or you’re screwed. I’m watching you from here: one more wrong move and I’ll shoot out the fucking windows.”
The delicate part of the procedure is managing the hysteria. I consider myself a master of that particular art. There’s a moment when you have to start shouting at them, using the dirtiest words in your repertoire, making them feel that their lives mean nothing to you. That part isn’t complicated. The tricky thing is to convince them, from a distance of five hundred miles, that you’re at the door of their home, watching them. The majority cut the call at the first sign of a raised voice. You have to make fifteen or twenty calls before someone takes the bait. But one hit’s enough: when panic sets in, you can squeeze the very last cent out of them. It’s just a matter of keeping them on the line during the long-drawn-out bank transactions. Those can take hours. The failed calls, on the other hand, waste five or ten minutes of your time.
To keep myself alert and aggressive, I’d alternate telephone numbers with crack bombs. At first the urge for the next smoke was so overwhelming that on a couple of occasions I came close to losing a sale that had already gone through. Once, when I had a man inside his car in the middle of traffic, on his way to the bank, I said:
“Don’t speed up, you bastard. I’m watching you.”
“But I’m stopped at a red light.”
I hung up.
With practice I learned how to play my cards. To smoke the soda between interventions without the sound of my inhalations sneaking through the microphone. To use the hands-free headset like an invisible video game screen. In that way, I could, on average, close two forty-thousand-peso deals between eight in the morning and four in the afternoon: over a million and a half a month. In the business, that made me the fastest cell phone in the West. Don’t judge me: it’s the same scam convicts used to pull, offering nonexistent prizes in exchange for phone cards so they could talk to their families for free. I didn’t vote for the change. I just altered the script, adapted it for the country you chose.
A shame that things weren’t always so sweet. At night, after sleeping a couple of hours to recover from the crack tremors, I’d feel like any old rapist who messes with women because he’s afraid to try it with men. If it was my turn, and we were both in the mood, I’d have sex with Violeta in the open air or inside the Suburban. I always tried to do it gently, with all the tenderness I was capable of, thinking only of her comfort and pleasure. It was my way of asking forgiveness of the women I’d abused during working hours. My job gave me the same sensation I got from smoking rock: something close to ecstasy when I was holding in the smoke, but absolute horror the moment I exhaled. My colleagues used to make fun of me because I’d wake in the early morning crying after a nightmare in which I’d tortured my deceased mother, putting the black barrel of my gun in her mouth.
I’m forbidden from writing their name. We call them Los Señores or La Compañía, La Gente, Los Patrones. They are (east of the Mapimí Basin and west of Laredo) the law for those who follow the path of lawlessness.
Camargo had warned us from the start:
“You can’t go doing whatever you please. You have to give advance notice and ask for their blessing.”
We didn’t listen. I frivolously decided that it wasn’t part of my job description: that it was Esquivel’s territory. He opted for discretion and exemption: he’d gone back to fulfilling his mayoral functions (at least in theory) and was on good terms with both the state and federal governments. We were told that the details of the tour were not to be revealed under any circumstances. But a Suburban parked alongside a desert highway and DVD recordings of all the Champions League games made by a small-town barman aren’t things that can be easily hidden. So they found us.
They didn’t even take the trouble to turn up at night. It must have been around four in the afternoon. The beginning of November. The sun was beating down but a wind stirred the air. Esquivel was napping with his feet up on the desk and the Boss of the Plains tipped over his face. Violeta was lying on her futon reading a magazine. I’d taken a break between calls to smoke my bomb, sitting on the cot behind the inactive-archive wall. Camargo was outside, scanning the highway in both directions through binoculars.
He came into the shack, holding down his baseball cap with his left hand. Something was clearly worrying him.
“They’re coming, Doc. It’s a metallic blue Pathfinder, stopped at the roadside. Tinted glass. The roof’s covered in GPS gear.”
Violeta and I rose from our respective beds.
“Relax,” drawled Esquivel in a drowsy voice. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Probably,” replied Camargo. “But you don’t see wheels like that around here.”
“Probably just passing through, if it is them.”
“Probably, but this isn’t their territory. There’s an army roadblock in Ciénagas.”
Esquivel took his Smith & Wesson 686 from a drawer and laid it on the desk under some papers. Camargo released the safety of his pistol and positioned himself opposite the door with his right hand behind his back. Violeta put the Lorcin down the front of her dress. Without any real conviction, I followed their example, fetched the Remington from the trestle table, and put it on my bed.
“How much cash have you all got on you?” asked Esquivel.
“About six thou,” I answered: I always tried to have more than enough in my billfold to buy crack in rural watering holes. Violeta and Camargo didn’t reply.
We waited.
I chain-smoked two bombs. Then, finally, we heard the vehicle: an engine gradually slowing down.
“I’ll take them out,” said Camargo to no one in particular and headed for the door.
“No way,” ordered Esquivel. “We’ll negotiate.”
The engine hadn’t even died when a bullet came through the door and hit Camargo in the right shoulder, knocking him back and spinning him around.
“Drop it, you bastard,” shouted a voice from beyond the door. “Drop the weapons.”
Violeta and Esquivel didn’t move a muscle. I threw the Remington under the cot and curled up on the floor. From there I was able to see what happened next through a crack between two boxes.
A fair-skinned man with a shaved head, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, came through the door. I recognized him immediately: it was the former student I’d come across in Viesca. What was his name?
“Drop it,” re
peated my student to Camargo. He was very calm.
Camargo obeyed. He knelt on the concrete floor and raised his uninjured arm above his head. My former student picked up the .38 Super and put it in his belt. He walked toward Esquivel, while, behind him, another two men in black tees and dark blue jeans stood on either side of the door, one outside and the other inside the shack. The man outside, who had a cadaveric appearance and a straggly mustache, was carrying a pistol. The other—older, with sparse graying hair—had a Kalashnikov.
“You the mayor?” asked my former student.
“Yes, boss. Mayor Esquivel, at your service.”
Esquivel made to stand but was commanded to stay where he was with a casual movement of my former student’s hand.
“Where’s your rodeo clown?”
“Pardon?”
“Prof,” he (what was his name?) shouted. “Come on out, Prof.”
“Would you like a shot of brandy?” offered Esquivel, making another attempt to stand. “Just to help the negotiations along.”
“I don’t negotiate with ghosts.”
The pale-skinned guy fired two bullets. Both hit Esquivel in the face and he fell to the ground, grasping a few sheets of paper. The Smith & Wesson lay uncovered on the desk.
Violeta took the Lorcin from her cleavage. Camargo gave a cry and, passing with exasperating slowness between the two guys guarding the door, fled painfully toward the scrub. Violeta managed to let off two shots: one hit an oil lamp and the other went into the wall. Then the Lorcin jammed. My former student loomed over my lover, grabbed her throat, and deftly pushed her back against the boxes. He smashed the barrel of his gun into her face and, with the other hand, punched her in the stomach. The boxes moved. For a moment his eyes crossed with mine through the crack in the inactive-archive wall.
I straightened out and slid to my right until I found another chink in the archive wall. Through the window, I could see Camargo running toward a distant mountain. He was stumbling across the loose white earth. By looking through the crack at a different angle, I could see what was happening to my left. I watched the cadaveric gunman standing by the doorjamb take aim at Camargo and fire three times. I turned my eyes to the window and witnessed Camargo gradually decelerate until he fell flat on his face. He was clearly dead.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino Page 3
