by Alex Gilly
Before getting into his truck, Finn noticed a card under his windshield wiper. He pulled it out. Garrett Smith from the Times, a note on the back of the card: “Let’s talk.”
Finn crushed the card in his fist and threw it onto the dash. With a sinking heart, he drove over to the cargo terminal and reported to the Office of Field Operations. He was about to do the most deadening thing he knew of: spend the day in front of a computer monitor. This particular monitor was in a cramped, airless cell built onto the bed of a special-purpose eighteen-wheeler. The truck was the much-trumpeted crowning glory of Homeland Security’s technological push against fake Vuitton bags and Golden Triangle heroin. Everyone in the CBP knew it by its acronym, VACIS—for Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System—and it worked like this: the truck traveled slowly alongside a row of inbound containers lined up along the dock. A hydraulic arm attached to the top of the truck scanned a gamma-ray gun through the containers, feeding images into the computer and ruining Finn’s life. He spent three hours staring at one X-ray image after another of container-loads of athletic shoes, iPods, automotive parts, flat-packed furniture, guitars, motorcycles, roof tiles, LED tubes, soft toys, and, above all, clothing. At lunchtime, he shut down the machine, pulled out his cell, and dialed a number in Mexico City.
“Policia Federal Ministerial, digame,” said the voice that answered the phone.
“Vega? It’s Finn.”
“Finn. How’s it going?”
“I need to track a name. You think you could run it through your database for me?”
There was a slight pause on the line. “You know we just elected a new president, right?”
“Congratulations.”
“So things have changed. We’re supposed to do everything through official channels now. You got a request for information from us, then you gotta send a form to the National Drug Intelligence Center, who’s gotta liaise with—”
“I don’t have time for official channels, Vega. I got twenty-four hours, tops.”
“I don’t know, Finn. Things are different. Everything’s gotta be by the book.”
“I won’t say where it came from. And I’ll owe you.”
Another pause. Then: “Cabron. Give me the name.”
He’d only just clicked off the call when his cell rang.
Mona.
“I found someone you should talk to,” she said.
“Where?”
“The Self Help.”
Finn stepped out of the VACIS control room, squinted in the bright sunshine, and stretched his back.
“I’m on my way.”
He’d be damned if he was getting back in that airless coffin.
* * *
The Self Help was a two-story building that took up half a block on East Chavez. It had a curved portal painted sky blue, same as the corner blocks. The ground-floor wall was inlaid with shiny stones. The upper wall was earth-colored. A big sign, SELF HELP GRAPHICS AND ART written in fancy letters, hung beneath the second-story windows. A store in the mini-mall across the street advertised itself in two languages: “hardware” and “ferreteria.” On the wall enclosing the adjacent block, someone had painted a vast mural.
At the center of the mural was the Virgin swathed in pastel robes, her hands clasped in prayer. She gazed with gentle eyes upon a motley crowd of Mexican archetypes—mustachioed revolutionaries with bandoliers across their torsos, indigenous women in head scarves carrying infants, factory workers in blue overalls, peasants under giant sombreros, a couple dancing, musicians strumming guitars—all of them striding toward an oversize, monstrous Aztec sun god with a grotesque face, cruel eyes, a mouth wide open, and a big pink tongue spilling out over sharp teeth.
Finn parked at the curb and stared at the work through the windshield. An uncanny sensation came over him, and for a moment he felt as though he was being drawn to the same place as the striding Mexicans, being sucked into the same devouring mouth.
He shook off the feeling, entered the building, and followed the signs up the stairs and down a corridor to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. The young woman at the reception counter had half her hair shaved, the other half long, a long-stemmed rose tattooed up her neck, and a metal bar through her eyebrow. She scowled at Finn as though he were smoldering sulfur.
Mona appeared from a door behind the counter and rolled her eyes.
“Jesus, Nick, you should’ve changed out of your uniform. You’ll freak everybody out.”
He followed her down the corridor.
“You think I’m the freak? Where do you find these kids, anyway? The circus?”
“She’s a good kid. Just a bit aesthetically challenged.”
She stopped outside a door.
“The lady you’re about to meet is a legend in the community. Everyone calls her La Abuelita, ‘Grandma.’ She’s an artist, been exhibiting at the Self Help since before you and I were born, lived here forever but prefers to speak Spanish. That’s not important. The main thing is, she knows everybody who’s anybody in L.A.’s immigrant community. They say that if La Abuelita doesn’t know about it, it never happened.”
“Does she know Perez?”
“Just listen to her story. You need to hear it from her.”
Mona opened the door. Finn saw a very old woman sitting in front of a desk. She looked older than anyone he had ever met. A lightweight cotton dress with little flowers printed on it hung loosely from her ample frame. A gold crucifix rested on her bosom. Her shoulder-length gray hair framed a face with deep lines contoured around a large nose, thin lips, and bright eyes that looked far younger than the rest of her.
La Abuelita held a cigarette between two hard-worked, arthritic fingers, the knucklebones protruding like bubbles on giant bubble wrap. The cigarette surprised Finn—the last person he remembered smoking indoors in L.A. was his father, decades before, and he knew Mona hated it. He figured that La Abuelita’s venerable age gave her impunity to antismoking pieties.
Mona said something in Spanish and the old lady fixed her unflinching gaze on Finn.
He smiled, said hello. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him like she was reading his face. He sat in a chair facing her. Mona sat by her side.
“Nick, I’d like you to meet Señora Gavrilia,” she said. “She’s from Sinaloa State. She lives here now.”
Finn knew better than to ask about her legal status.
“I’m going to ask Mrs. Gavrilia to repeat the story she told me,” said Mona.
She said something in Spanish. La Abuelita started talking, her voice raspy, her cadence slow and deliberate. She spoke like a woman used to speaking without interruption. Mona interpreted.
“My husband’s cousin, Felipe, lives in a small village in Sinaloa. He is a fisherman. He despairs for his son, also called Felipe, who is … flojonazo.…” Mona repeated the word in Spanish before continuing. “It means he won’t work.
“My cousin tries to interest his son in the profession of fishing, but the boy doesn’t like it. Then he tries to help him find other work, first with a fishmonger, then as an assistant to a marine mechanic. But the boy won’t work. Finally, the father gets angry and kicks the young man out of the house.”
“What was the name of the village?” asked Finn.
“Puerto Escondido,” said Mona.
The old lady dropped her cigarette into a coffee cup that Mona had provided. The coffee cup had FOLGERS printed on it. A cloud of smoke hovered around La Abuelita.
“One day during holy week, my cousin is at the bullfight in Mazatlán. He looks down and sees Felipe, his son, sitting in the expensive seats in the shade, down by the ruedo.
“He is sitting with some men the father recognizes because they are infamous. They are Caballeros de Cristo.”
Mona looked at Finn. The Knights of Christ were one of the biggest cartels in Mexico.
The old lady continued, with Mona interpreting. “He becomes scared. He doesn’t want his son to be involved with men like these. After the bullfight, he seeks
out his son outside the arena and begs his forgiveness. He asks him to come home.
“But the boy laughs at his father. He is wearing expensive clothes and has a thick gold chain around his neck. He humiliates his father in front of these men.
“My cousin’s son goes home to his village. His heart is heavy.
“Then one day some people come to the village. Enganchadores offering money to villagers to go and work in the United States. Felipe sees that with them is his son. He sees that his son is working for the enganchadores. He sees his boy offering money to the young men he grew up with, who he went to school with and to Mass with, to go to America and work. He is offering large sums, which many young men don’t resist. My cousin’s son tries one more time to reason with his boy, but again he is rebuffed.
“Early one morning, Felipe is on his boat preparing his nets, getting ready to leave with the first light. He sees a boat arrive at the dock. An expensive boat. He hides beneath his nets, because no one has that kind of boat in that part of the country except cartel men. From his hiding place, he sees the villagers who were recruited by the enganchadores go aboard the boat, along with his son, Felipe. He counts five of them. The boat heads out to sea.”
Here, the old woman paused, lit another cigarette, and gazed out the window at a big sign that read CHECKS CA$HED and then at the mural on the wall next to it. A minute passed. The room got smokier. Finn slumped in his chair. He felt tired and frustrated. He wanted to open a window. He wished she’d get to the point. The woman turned back to Mona and continued her story.
“Felipe never heard from his boy again. He went to the families whose sons had gone with the enganchadores. No one had heard from any of the boys who boarded that boat.
“Felipe wanted to know what had become of his son. Even if the boy was dead, it was better to know. He learned from the other families that the boys had told their parents the boat was taking them first to Los Angeles, where a truck would be waiting to take them to the orange groves. When Felipe learned that they were to come here, he called to see if I had heard anything.
“I asked everyone I knew if they had heard of five boys from Escondido arriving on a boat and going to the orange groves. But no one had heard anything, not in Los Angeles and not in the Central Valley.
“Then last week I saw on Univision the news bulletin about the migra shooting that man on the boat.”
The woman looked intently at Finn now.
“I remembered that the name of the boat Felipe’s son and those other boys went aboard was La Catrina.
“I called my cousin and told him I had seen this boat on television. He went on the computer and searched for the story. He looked at the photograph of the boat on the newspaper on the Internet. He telephoned me and told me the boat in the photograph was the same boat that he had seen at the dock. It was the boat that had taken away his son.”
Finn was sitting up straight now.
“Those boys never touched the shore of America,” said La Abuelita through Mona. “If they had, they would’ve contacted their families.”
A moment passed. Finn looked out the window at the mural, at the Aztec god’s inhaling mouth. Five young men disappeared into the sea. He thought about the floater, the stumps.
The old lady’s story confirmed that Perez was a bad guy, but it wasn’t evidence. Finn needed more. He turned to Mona.
“We need to find the cousin. I can ask Vega to send someone to Puerto Escondido, show him a photo of Perez. If he fingers Perez as a Caballero, we’ll blow the bullshit lawsuit out of the water.”
Mona spoke to the old lady.
The old lady shook her head.
“She says if you send someone from the capital, the cartel will certainly kill her cousin,” said Mona.
In other circumstances, Finn thought, he could’ve played hardball. He could’ve brought up Mrs. Gavrilia’s immigration status, put pressure on her to give up the cousin.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. Maybe Diego had been right: maybe Mona was turning him into a bleeding-heart liberal.
He looked out at the mural again, deciding what to do.
“Le gusta?” said the old woman.
“She wants to know if you like it. The mural,” said Mona.
“I was looking at it before I came in,” said Finn.
“Mrs. Gavrilia painted it. It’s called The Fifth Sun.”
“Why?” he said.
La Abuelita started speaking again.
“It’s from a Nahua creation myth,” translated Mona. “Before ours, there were four other cycles of creation and destruction. To make sure the fifth sun burned, the young god Nanahuatl threw himself bravely into the fires. In this picture, the Virgin is blessing the people who have thrown themselves into the fires so that the light should remain for those who come after.”
Finn nodded.
People were always so afraid to be alone in the dark.
He turned to the old woman and said, “If your cousin wants me to find his son, he must talk to me directly. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
The old woman gave a spluttering laugh. “I did not come here to ask for your help,” she said in English, “I came to help you.”
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning before sunrise, Finn slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake Mona. He stood by the bed for a moment and watched her sleep. The evening before, they had gone for dinner at a Korean crab place near the pier at Redondo. Mona had had a glass of wine and something inside Finn had seized up. He’d found himself resenting her without reason, and had pulled away a little. He’d woken in the middle of the night and lain in the dark next to her with his eyes open, listening to her breathe, wishing away the part of himself he’d kept from her.
Now he put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes and headed out the door into the pale, predawn light and ran toward the sea.
When he got to the beach, he took off his shoes and socks and put them under one of the legs of a lifeguard tower. Then he hit the cold, hard sand down by the water. A bleakness had crept into his heart after he’d shot Perez, a dark mood that left him feeling restless and ill at ease all the time. It was a familiar feeling—he was a teenager the first time it had inhabited him, after his father’s suicide—and for years he’d dosed himself against it with alcohol, until he’d found that he was allergic to alcohol, and that his way of drinking was incompatible with marriage and the kind of steadiness that marriage is supposed to beget.
He’d tried to ignore it, and to carry on as normally as possible, doing one thing and then the next, day after day, waiting for it to pass; but the pall had remained stubbornly in place—if anything, it had reached deeper into him after the Internal Affairs hearing—and the urge to dose himself against it was growing stronger, and this was the thing that frightened him, so much so that he was having trouble admitting to himself that it was even real.
This was also the thing he was keeping from Mona. He knew that if he told her about it, she’d say it was all the more reason to go talk to that counselor, and Finn knew that that counselor would want to talk about everything, especially all the things he’d made a habit of never talking about. His father’s suicide, for instance. Finn never talked about that.
Ever.
He didn’t talk all that much about what he called his “lost years,” either, by which he meant the five years between the ages of sixteen, when his father had died and Finn had dropped out of high school, and twenty-one, when he had signed up for the navy.
Finn had always had trouble reading—in school, he’d felt like it came much harder to him than it did to other kids. It hadn’t mattered so much in junior high, where the teachers had been kind. But in high school, with its overcrowded classes and overwhelmed teachers, and with no support at home, Finn had sunk to the bottom of the curve and settled there. On a skateboard or surfboard, he’d been peerless; in class, however, he’d felt ashamed, angry, and ultimately bored by his own incomprehension. Ye
ars later, when Customs and Border Protection had obliged him to sit through Spanish-language lessons during training, Finn had felt the same shame and anger at his lack of proficiency at learning new words and conjugation tables as he had at school, and by the end of it he came out with only a tenuous grasp of elementary Spanish—only just enough to qualify for the job. It was only during on-water training that he’d felt competent. Out on the water, he always let his patrol partners handle the conversations with the people they intercepted. Finn figured his job was to handle the boat.
He had thrived in the navy—its discipline had helped keep both the black mood and his drinking contained, and there’d been none of that Dr. Phil kind of talk. We don’t give a damn as long as you get the job done, the navy had told him. Which had suited Finn fine. He’d discovered that he was very good at getting the job done.
From the navy’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force to becoming a marine interdiction agent had been one small step—Finn had followed other guys into it; and even though the CBP was nominally a civilian organization, so many agents were ex-military that the culture had a militaristic feel to it, especially in the Office of Air and Marine, where, with its high-powered boats and planes and helicopters, the testosterone levels were especially elevated. Finn saw a lot of similarities between what he had done in navy gunboats guarding Iraqi oil terminals and what he now did in CBP Interceptors patrolling the waters off Southern California. Mona was forever trying to remind him of the differences, forever telling him he wasn’t in a war zone anymore, which was fine for her to say, but he was the one out on the water, and for him the similarities trumped the differences, no matter what she said.
The difference that had the greatest consequence for Finn was that his job in the CBP had let him drink in a manner he would’ve found impossible while serving in the navy. People smugglers and drug traffickers put to sea at night, so that’s when marine interdiction agents went looking for them, and there was nothing unusual about Finn’s sleeping through the day. For years, his schedule had let him hide his binge drinking.
Nor was he an alcoholic of the most hopeless variety. In some areas of his life, he retained complete control. He never let his drinking impact his work, for instance. Even after his worst benders, Finn abided by one rule: he never, ever stepped aboard a boat inebriated, or drank while at sea. His alcoholic father, of all people, had taught him that.
