City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  But his prayers, like those of most people, were not answered. The wounds abided by nature’s course, not God’s, and continued to close.

  It is always at our greatest moment of despair, when we have renounced all hope and given up completely; it is always then that we find that which we have stopped seeking: salvation. Respite.

  Deceit.

  Vicente was pacing his room, lost in his anguish, when he cut his bare foot on something sharp protruding from the floor. He bent down and touched the wooden planks to see what had caused the accident. A protruding, loose nail.

  Sharper than a pencil. Easier to conceal. Vicente started to sob uncontrollably. Not out of fear or pain or sorrow as in the past. Out of relief. At last, he was saved.

  16

  Fuentes

  Fuentes is standing in a corner of a Tijuana kitchen, aware of the potential threat to his jacket from two industrial deep fryers that are beginning to roil beside him, the shouts of the restaurant staff echoing off the white tiles as they strain to be heard above the anarchy of warring pots and pans.

  His informant Adán, an ex-heroin addict who reformed when he found Jesus with his new Guatemalan girlfriend, looks up and down the kitchen gallery then shakes the water off his hands, layers of amulets and charm bracelets chiming musically. He dries his hands on his apron, then passes Fuentes a piece of paper from a child’s exercise book, neatly folded along the blue ruled lines.

  It is the first time he has held paper like this since it happened, and it hits him the way memories associated with bereavement always do. Unexpected. Hateful. They aren’t just hard, the memories are harmful. His blood pressure plunges; vision blurs. For a moment the world exists, and then it doesn’t, the way it must feel when you’re having a stroke.

  Fuentes squeezes the paper inside his fist, as though crushing to death all those emotions. He has just slipped it into his jacket’s breast pocket when the wall opposite him erupts outwards in an explosion of white powder and tiny shards of porcelain, a lacerating cloud consuming his face.

  The first thing he thinks of is an earthquake.

  But then he hears it, hammering insistently in the suddenly hushed kitchen, and hearing it, realizes it was always the only explanation that made any sense …

  Automatic gunfire.

  He drops to the floor, spots the terrified eyes of the kitchen staff down there with him, hunks of tile continuing to shatter across them all as the gunmen rake the open kitchen indiscriminately, as though in a desperate hurry to run out of ammo. Unholstering his weapon with one hand, wiping the ceramic grit out of his eyes with the other, he elbows his way fast across the floor to the shelter of a retaining pillar and slowly stands and peers out into the restaurant. Muzzle flash in response within the newly imposed darkness; then the screams of trapped clientele hovering under tables. The open kitchen is a spotlight, drawing bullets like moths.

  And he is a target illuminated on stage.

  He looks around for a light switch and sees Adán, both arms slumped in adjoining frying vats, his head resting on the draining pan between them. Fuentes reaches forwards, grabs Adán’s body by the scruff of the collar and hauls him backwards, freeing his arms from the scalding oil. And that’s when he sees them, tumbling like battered shrimp inside the deep fryers, the perfect outline of two whole hands, the skin freed from the flesh, filled like gloves with the turbulence of oil, the fingernails crisping golden and dark.

  Fuentes wakes from his dream with a start.

  Tijuana, Baja California.

  Sex and sea.

  A terrain of cliffs and sirens, of shipwrecking rocks and pools of desire hidden within fast currents. A treacherous landscape negotiated by criminals and tourists alike. Every day, Americans leapt into the town’s dark and urgent offerings and were carried, gasping and satiated, back up to the surface by local swimmers before being returned to the dry, flat world across the border.

  A world of suburbs and family cars. A world of superiority. Their reality. Not Mexico’s.

  Tijuana. Where Fuentes fled after the car accident, losing himself in the murky tide of the city, the ebb and flow of crime and punishment. Cops and robbers. Kill or be killed. He was immersed in work. It made him feel safe because there was no time to think. And then the attack at Lolita’s Restaurant; the way the melted wristbands had tightened and shrunk, cutting through to the bone, the remnants of Adán’s flayed hands knuckles up on the floor.

  Fuentes stepped out from behind the pillar and started firing. When the shooting first began, it seemed as though it had already lasted an eternity. It possessed all the heightened tension of ambush, that confused, then panicked awareness of attack, of the unexpected arrival of death that always prolongs time, freezing each action into a tortured pause of indecision; each response into elongated hesitancy.

  But once full comprehension descends, the opposite always happens: time doesn’t just unfreeze, it accelerates, helped by the screaming knowledge that in seconds, maybe less, the situation will be resolved. One way or the other, some people were about to die.

  So you focused on the Now.

  They were two.

  He was one.

  They had an AK-47 assault rifle and a 9 mm CZ 75 ST.

  He had a Colt Python.

  They were fueled by a carburetor mix of fear-induced adrenaline and drugs.

  He was a sober marksman.

  One, two, three quick shots.

  Two dead gunmen.

  Time resolved itself back into the mundane tick of twenty-four hours. It could have been a lot worse. No customers were injured. And only one kitchen hand killed; a man who, authorities were quick to point out, was a heroin addict and known to the police – defamation always being the first line of defense.

  It was seven hours afterwards that Fuentes finally remembered the sheet of cuaderno paper Adán had given him. He’d had a lot on his mind. He kept thinking about Adán’s hands, like bloated corpses, rising to the surface of the oil. He remembered the shock as his face was blasted by the opaque shrapnel from tiles obliterated by bullets. He remembered seeing the flames from the barrels light up the darkness in tortured strips of fire. He remembered the screams of the diners between bursts, and then the silence when his bullets had hammered home.

  The paper Adán had given him revealed the address of a crystal meth lab on the outskirts of La Gloria. It also gave the location of a tunnel entrance in Castillo that came out on the other side of the border, under a house near Dairy Mart Road. Interesting information, if mundane in the general run of things. Nothing to lose both your hands over, let alone your life.

  But when Fuentes saw the final piece of information, he felt the same dislocating disruption he’d experienced when the wall had leapt into powdery animation and burst all around him, as if for no reason. It was the name of the person controlling both the tunnel and the meth factory. Fuentes’ immediate superior, José-María Sánchez Ribeiro.

  A man he would have trusted with his life.

  The man who had sent the sicarios to kill him.

  The tunnel was the easy part. Fuentes simply picked up the phone and called Charlie Addsen, his contact in the DEA. He didn’t even bother to ask Charlie for any favors in return. The lab would be dangerous but doable, even on his own. Meth factories had short shelf lives due to the combustible nature of both their product and their owners.

  The hard part was Sánchez Ribeiro. His brother was an advisor to the governor of Sinaloa. His sister was married to a first cousin of Ramón Arena Gallardo, one of the most violent chiefs of the Tijuana cartel. His father was a council member at the Ayuntamiento of Rosarito.

  In other words, Sánchez Ribeiro was untouchable. And Fuentes was now the exact opposite.

  They say that Mexicans have a unique relationship with death.

  It’s not true. Mexicans die like everyone else. But what is true is that the Mexican attitude towards death is different; at least compared to that of their northern neighbors. Americans fea
r death the way they fear aging. It might happen to other people but it should not be allowed to happen to them. Mexicans fear death the way they fear hunger or unemployment. It happens to other people and it could therefore easily happen to them.

  It was that logic that applied to Fuentes’ decision. He had no choice. There was no alternative. He had to kill Sánchez Ribeiro.

  He couldn’t do it himself, he was not a murderer. And even if he were able to go against his nature and kill his own boss, he couldn’t just rely on an alibi, no matter how steel-clad: he’d need to be so removed from the crime that his name would never come up.

  Not at the funeral. Not at the wake. Not during the investigation.

  Not ever.

  And not ever was a concept that just didn’t exist in Mexico.

  17

  Fuentes

  He thought about his problem for a week and still had no solution. Fuentes was almost reconciled to the only action he could realistically take – inaction – when the answer presented itself to him with stunning clarity.

  He called Charlie Addsen again. There was a favor he needed after all. Charlie was delighted to assist Fuentes. The only thing that helps a career more than doing a good job yourself is helping your fuck-up partners do a good job as well.

  They arranged the bust on the meth factory for midnight, when there was a far better chance that his men would be reasonably sober than during an early morning raid. Fuentes had once seen one of his policemen shoot off three of his own toes during a dawn arrest.

  Sánchez Ribeiro didn’t ask a single question on the drive out. He was pleased to have the US TV crew along for the ride, showing the gringos that the Mexicans were pulling their weight in the War on Drugs.

  Fuentes knew Sánchez Ribeiro wasn’t stupid, so it could only have been hubris. He didn’t even look worried when they turned into the street. And when they pulled up outside his meth house – well, it was all too late then. He tried to cancel, but Fuentes had made sure they were the last car, and the gringos were already filming his men going through the doors.

  Even meth chemists have to sleep. The factory was unguarded except for three kids who gave up without a fight when confronted with a dozen armed men wearing balaclavas, gas masks and body armor, backlit by TV klieg lights. Fuentes’ men were filmed as they handcuffed the kids. They were filmed as they unplugged all the refrigeration and freezer units. They were filmed as they recovered nine hundred kilos of crank. Twenty-seven million dollars, the excited gringo journalist said into the camera. One of the most successful raids in recent times, and evidence of the growing co-operation between the two nations. ‘This war can be won,’ he said, turning to Sánchez Ribeiro, who tried to pull away from the camera. ‘Tonight is proof of that.’ Fuentes saw the look on Sánchez Ribeiro’s face and almost felt sorry for him. It was a solemn look.

  A familiar look.

  A Mexican attitude towards death look.

  The ride back was very quiet. Fuentes told Sánchez Ribeiro about something that had been tormenting him for days. The way Adán’s hands had rolled and turned in the fryers, inflated by the boiling oil, the fingernails crisping at the top. What did he make of that? Was it normal to be haunted by such a scene, or was he just going soft? Sánchez Ribeiro said nothing, staring straight ahead, the lights of the dashboard floating ghostly across his reflection in the windshield.

  Sánchez Ribeiro was killed two days later, coming out of his mistress’s house with two suitcases loaded with cash, though by the time the suitcases made it to the evidence room they were empty. Fuentes paid a visit to Sánchez Ribeiro in the morgue. It wasn’t pretty. Headshots. He’d instinctively put his hands up to his face. They looked like those of the crucified Christ.

  Fuentes went to the funeral. How could he have avoided it? He stood two rows back. The respect of a colleague for his boss; present but not too pushy. He watched everyone and was the only one to notice: he was being watched himself by Sánchez Ribeiro’s brother. It wasn’t a sideways glance. It wasn’t a glare. It was what you’d expect from an advisor to a governor: careful; aware. Afterwards the brother broke from the family group and walked up to Fuentes, the cops around him going silent. He shook Fuentes’ hand not in greeting but in assessment, as though searching for something. And not finding it. Fuentes felt like a guilty man who had passed a polygraph test.

  Relieved and a little smug.

  He knew he was safe.

  A short time after the funeral, Fuentes got the call. Anti-union duties. He counted himself lucky and took it. It was the biggest fucking mistake of his life.

  Fuentes peers outside his bedroom window, then lowers the curtain and walks into the kitchen. He stops in front of the refrigerator, staring at a piece of paper held there by a magnet. It’s a child’s crayon drawing of a house standing under a blue sky full of yellow stars and a crescent moon. A black cat sits on the rooftop.

  He takes it off the refrigerator door and opens a cupboard, slipping it on top of a pile of other drawings. He slides another one out from the bottom of the stack. It’s a picture of a man and a woman holding hands with a child. He puts it up on the fridge, making sure that the magnet holds. He runs a finger across the paper, tracing the outlines of the three figures.

  Fuentes crosses to the kitchen sink and gets himself some water, leaving a smudge of colored wax on the glass. He stares out at the eastern horizon, waiting for the moon to build up enough courage to rise; to even dare to show its fucking face.

  18

  El Santo

  El Santo is trying to find network coverage, scanning the night sky with his StarTAC. He needs to get his asshole broker on the line, and fast. Everyone’s talking about a dotcom bubble. Even the local radio stations are on to it – and that means it’s practically too late.

  He has a stack of fucking phones at home, sitting on top of each other like poker chips, but what good are they if he can’t even use them? They cost a bomb too. Every phone call he makes is a thousand bucks. Some spook who used to work in CIA told him never to make two calls on the same phone. Buy a brand new phone from an untraceable source; make a call; toss it. The way Jaime Santiago figures, the real crooks are Motorola and Nokia. And out here in the middle of fucking nowhere, trying to get a signal is like trying to get a hard-on for Mother Teresa. The last thing he needs is all this screaming in the background. He turns to El Feo. ‘Can’t you stop for one fucking minute?’

  ‘It’s not me – he won’t shut up. I haven’t done a thing to him for an hour.’

  El Santo steps into the hot electric light of the barn, moths twirling around the overhead lights like they’re dancing to the thumping rhythm of the generator. He stares down at the kid. Sixteen, max. Old enough to know when to shut up. The kid had shown up at the hospital after the car bomb to see how his friends were doing. El Feo made the snatch. Too easy, even for him. Moral of the story: never care about others. ‘Did he tell you what you need to know?’

  El Feo shrugs non-committally. ‘Maybe he’s lying.’

  ‘No one keeps lying after that.’ The kid’s tied to a chair, his Levi’s pulled down around his ankles. El Santo stares at the metal shims that have been hammered through the flesh and wedged between his kneecaps and his femurs.

  El Feo sucks his frog lip in doubt. ‘Once, there was this guy coming out of …’ El Feo’s voice rattles on, but El Santo has already jumped off the trolley car. All these old stories; always the same bullshit. Narcos are addicted to them, like families glued to their telenovelas. But if you tried explaining to a moron like El Feo that Jesús Malverde never even existed, he’d triple-cross himself, kiss his fucking scapular, then blow your brains out for blasphemy.

  El Feo’s into all the crazy legends. The mariachi walking out of the Sonora desert with a machine gun inside his guitar case. The bandido who claws his way out of a fresh grave and fills the empty hole with a village-load of corpses. The guy who peels off the faces of dead men and sticks them on his own like a mask, so no on
e ever knows what he really looks like.

  There are even bullshit stories about Amado – how his dog sits on his tomb and howls at the moon, and kills anyone who approaches.

  It’s crazy. Amado doesn’t even have a grave.

  It doesn’t matter. People like El Feo lap up the legends, the more insane the better. All of the best tales date back to before everything started going down the shithole. Before Nixon and Operation Intercept. Before the gringos torched the poppy plantations in Sinaloa and destroyed Rancho Búfalo. Before the fucking Colombians arrived. The ‘Good Old Days’.

  Before the cartel wars.

  Before Amado.

  Those days are long gone but no one has any new stories to tell, because that would take one iota of intelligence, and you’d be more likely to find that in the termite nests outside than in a narco like El Feo.

  El Santo swears to God, sometimes it feels like the sun is that stupid fucking eye logo from Televisa, and all the people who pass under it every single day are just characters from the oldest telenovela in history – Mámame La Verga – Go Suck My Dick.

  He turns back to El Feo, who is still talking. ‘Will you shut the fuck up with that bullshit.’ El Feo splutters in shock and starts to protest but he talks over him. ‘He never existed.’ He points to the prisoner. ‘But this kid exists.’ For the moment. ‘What has he told you?’

  ‘They were heisting cars, and one of them went boom.’

  ‘The newspapers could have told me that. Who were they stealing the cars for?’

  That look on El Feo’s face. The one that says he forgot to do something important, like take a piss or chew his food before he swallowed it. Sometimes he’ll catch El Feo just standing there, staring into space, and he has to hit him on the back because he knows El Feo has forgotten to breathe. El Santo turns to the kid. ‘Who are you working for?’ The kid’s in so much agony, he can’t even hear the question. Nothing exists outside his pain. El Santo crouches low and grabs an ear in either hand. The only thing that can break through the suffering of torture is the threat of worse to come. He juggles the kid’s head with his hands, adjusting the level of his face until they’re both finally looking at each other, eye to eye. ‘Who are you working for?’