City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  ‘I think Gomez is clean.’

  ‘Times have changed. Think is not good enough. Not anymore. Think is just another linguistic evasion. We need facts. We need to know Gomez is clean.’

  Fuentes sighs. ‘His place was staked out this morning. We were tailed to the airport.’

  Valdez is suddenly sitting upright. ‘By them?’

  ‘What I’m wondering is: are they here to investigate us, or are they here to stop our investigation?’

  Valdez studies him. ‘What do you believe?’

  ‘All I know is someone is in trouble.’

  ‘Who could that be?’

  ‘The person who guaranteed Paredes’ safe passage.’ Fuentes gets up and goes to the door. ‘That person is either dead, or about to die.’

  Valdez calls after him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find out if we got lucky.’

  35

  Ventura

  ‘Deserts …’ Mayor mutters, switching on a ceiling fan. The stillness of the early afternoon begins to waver under the awakening blades. ‘The only thing crueler than their afternoon heat is their nocturnal chill. No wonder I was so sick as a child.’ He places the folder with Ventura’s notes next to her coffee. ‘But then again, I suppose I should be thankful: all good writers begin their careers as sick children.’

  Ventura stares down at the folder, a few protruding loose papers fluttering in time with the fan. ‘So what do you think of my angle?’ she asks, trying not to sound too desperate.

  Mayor sits down opposite her, refilling her cup from the macchinetta. ‘When you were at school, did they ever tell you about the soldiers who died in the dunes outside of town?’

  Ventura palms her hair away as she leans in to the proffered match. ‘I don’t remember.’

  He gives a nostalgic sigh. ‘It was quite a story. They were irregulars hoping to join up with Pancho Villa’s troops, but got hopelessly lost amongst the dunes.’ He pauses for just the right dramatic emphasis. ‘When they finally found the soldiers’ bodies, they discovered that their mouths, their throats, even their stomachs were full of sand.’

  ‘They were caught in a sandstorm?’

  ‘Except there is no record of such a storm. The answer to their mysterious deaths is something both obvious and incredible: they drowned in a mirage.’

  ‘You mean they mistook sand for water?’ Ventura asks, unable to hide her skepticism.

  ‘It’s more complex than that. When we accept one reality, by definition we exclude another. But mirages are a facet of the reality we accept, not an alternative to it. That’s why they deceive and confuse. A mirage is like a mirror: an ideal paradox. It reflects exactly but imperfectly. Left becomes right and backwards becomes forwards. And so, within the logic of reflections, of Fata Morganas, a person who says I love you actually means I hate you. And life becomes death.’

  He picks up a single cube of cane sugar and drops it into his cup, delicately stirring it into nothingness. ‘Imagine the extreme conditions those soldiers found themselves in: lost in the desert, dying of thirst, in pain and despair. The victims from the maquiladoras were just like those soldiers. All of them encountered their mirage at the time when they were most vulnerable. They all found themselves unable to answer that most essential question: which side of the mirror am I on?’ He leans over and taps Ventura’s folder. ‘You’re on the wrong side of the mirror. You’re following mirages.’

  Ventura has just slept for seven hours straight. But instead of feeling rested, she has been anxious and irritated ever since she woke up. And now she has to defend herself against riddles. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘You need to stop looking inwards, mesmerized by reflections.’

  Ventura gets up, going onto the terrace outside. At dawn that morning, the air was cool; invigorating. Now it’s hot and humid and scaled with desert dust when she breathes it in. Ever since she started working, it has been this way: men telling her what to do, or men telling her that what she’s doing isn’t good enough. She turns to Mayor, who has followed her out onto the terrace. ‘When I chose this story I knew I would no longer be a photojournalist but a war correspondent. That’s why I asked you for help. I need allies, not people telling me I’m following fantasies. It may seem like that to you, but I’m a woman, and like all women here, I know what reality is: it’s being unable to even guarantee my own safety. Just going out on my own at night is a risk. And now, thanks to Carlos, I can’t even go home.’ She grabs Mayor by the wrists. ‘I need something concrete from you; something more than riddles.’

  ‘That’s why I’ve arranged this meeting tonight. These people will help you and what you learn from them will inform your story. And together all of us will protect you. It’s normal to be afraid.’

  She steps out of the shade of the terrace, immediately feeling dizzy in the sun. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that women want a better normal?’

  Mayor laughs, taking an old straw hat from the corner of a chair and handing it to her. ‘Come. Let me show you how to save a dying lemon tree.’

  She watches him cross the courtyard and pass under a terracotta arcade, disappearing into a citrus grove striated with black shadows and the gloss of green. ‘Hey,’ she cries out after him. ‘What about my story?’ She waits for a response but there’s nothing except for the pulse of the sun and the distant throb of insects, calling her into the darkness.

  36

  Padre Márcio

  Pablo Grande watched the sky, reading the movements of the clouds and the fast passage of the birds, their numbers revealing sequenced secrets. He felt the wind when it rushed through the leaves of the stone pines, humming with dark awareness of the past and warnings of the future. He listened to the bees pulsing with prophecy above the honey mesquite, and followed the scything ascension of the hawks, rising on great plumes of heat from the cliffs, cresting and cautious in the swollen heavens, then plummeting fast as a shooting star towards their hidden prey.

  He was aware.

  He was awake to possibilities.

  And thus he was prepared.

  So when the bishop’s car appeared on the horizon, heading towards the ranch where he was working as a cook, he had already changed to a diet of garlic, lime, apple, honey and ginger. Fortified against the poisons about to be unleashed.

  The driver’s message was designed to flatter anyone with an ego but Pablo Grande was immune because his world was so large that his ego had been lost within its vastness. The bishop was dying, the chauffeur said; only one man could save him. Pablo Grande got into the car knowing it was a trap. He was like a pearl diver placing his hand inside a giant clam – trusting his reflexes to survive.

  The bishop had aged poorly, the fate of all men of good will with weak natures. Pablo Grande saw instantly that His Grace was beyond cure but that his terrible pain could be alleviated enormously. He prepared a potion of activated charcoal and basil and then gave him a sleeping draft after his bowels were cleared. The bishop would have benefited from a limpia, but Pablo Grande knew the pious priest believed such healing ceremonies crossed the frontier into the territory of witchcraft. Besides, he had not been summoned to the palace to treat the bishop, but to be confronted by the most influential man in the state. Padre Márcio was a priest, but he was also a politician who understood that the only thing more powerful than a miracle was a public scandal kept private.

  Padre Márcio had continued his dramatic exposés of the corrupt church he ostensibly served, taking over dozens of orphanages, schools and hospices for the dying, and punishing the criminals who had previously run them. Faced time and again with the crimes of the clergy – raping children, unmarried mothers and housekeepers; stealing money from building projects, charitable funds and even common poor boxes; driving limousines, drinking French wine and paying a fortune for renovating presbyteries – the civic fathers had continued to capitulate to the holy man. Padre Márcio’s wrath was like Christ’s in the Temple. He turned over t
ables, whipped the guilty, kicked in doors and let the light of day expose the hidden, suppurating crimes of vice and avarice.

  The more horror and corruption he discovered, the more power the city’s leaders ceded to him, for they lived in terror that he would one day turn his X-ray eyes to their affairs: their stuffed bellies, soiled bedsheets and swollen bank accounts in Switzerland and Panama. Better to offer Padre Márcio every ecclesiastical head he demanded than to risk him running out of clerical victims and looking for secular ones instead. His ascension was a simple mathematical algorithm. The more the civic leaders capitulated to Padre Márcio, the stronger he became.

  And strength is always measured in silence.

  Padre Márcio owed much to the silence of Pablo Grande. Therefore it was essential for Padre Márcio to destroy him.

  The weak can be subverted, but the strong must eventually be opposed, if not today then tomorrow, and Padre Márcio knew that although he had become dominant amongst weak men, he had not yet grown powerful enough amongst the truly strong. Pablo Grande was not only the mightiest man Padre Márcio had ever encountered; he also knew the secret behind his stigmata.

  Padre Márcio’s plan was brutal in its simplicity. He would poison the brujo and bury him face down above the vice-rector’s coffin. That way his eyes would be forever staring at the past, not the future, and, freed of their knowing gaze, Padre Márcio would be able to embrace his destiny: to start his own Holy Order, the Army of Jesus, and take control of first the state, then the country, and then …

  Arrogance is only the prerogative of the powerful or the ignorant. It was Padre Márcio’s mistake to believe he could poison Pablo Grande. Pablo Grande accepted the coffee offered to him in the palace reception hall knowing that for any normal man, the dosage of white arsenic contained within would be fatal. But he had prepared for this moment. He gazed at Padre Márcio. ‘I am not afraid of death,’ he said. ‘I am only afraid of lies.’

  Padre Márcio held up his hands. ‘You were not afraid of these.’

  ‘They were not lies when I helped you. They were a manifestation of the truth.’

  ‘A truth I have exposed.’

  ‘And yet you wish to conceal the truth that resides in the drink you just gave me. The violence you have suffered has ended. And it has been avenged. That doesn’t change your past, but it changes your future. Always remember, you didn’t have to do this.’

  Just then, a cloud raced across the face of the sun, causing the daylight in the reception hall to dip suddenly, plunging the room into momentary darkness before the sunlight returned, more fervent than ever.

  Through that intense, dislocating instant of traveling shadows, Pablo Grande never took his eyes off Padre Márcio. He drank the cup of coffee in one gulp, then carefully placed the empty cup on the ornate service table between them. ‘You have made a terrible error,’ Pablo Grande said. ‘I do not need you. But you need me.’

  ‘I need no one, least of all a dying man,’ Padre Márcio said, sipping from his own cup then returning it to its saucer with a gesture of delicate satisfaction, exaggerated by his fingerless lace gloves.

  ‘We are all who we are – children born into this world with one purpose alone: to perish. I am not afraid of dying. Let us see if you are …’ His eyes descended fast to the priest’s cup, like the hawks he had watched for months, swooping pitilessly towards their prey.

  Padre Márcio froze, the cup beginning to tremble as his hand holding the saucer started to shake with the horror of understanding. Very slowly, he leant forwards and peered into his cup. There, at the bottom, amongst the dark silt of coffee, was the bleach-white stain of the arsenic. The saucer tilted in shock, the cup shattering the stunned silence of the room.

  ‘For a man of some ability, you were surprisingly easy to hypnotize. You must be able to feel it still; that pain behind the eyes, as though you’ve just bitten into ice? And a warm flush at the base of the neck, not unpleasant.’

  Padre Márcio snatched Pablo Grande’s cup from the coffee table, its interior thick and dark with the brown, even slur of grains. He leapt to his feet, knocking over the coffee table, panic rushing through him. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘I simply exchanged cups when I put you to sleep.’

  ‘You’re lying …’ But even uttering those words, Padre Márcio could taste the truth in the back of his throat.

  Pablo Grande noticed the reaction and nodded. ‘If you are as intelligent as I give you credit for, you will already have identified the antidote.’ He stepped out of the palace’s reception hall into the garden that he used to tend with such loving care.

  Fury unlike any he had ever experienced overtook Padre Márcio. Seizing a poker from the fireplace, he strode after Pablo Grande, sheltering his eyes from the sudden photophobia, the first advanced symptom of his poisoning. He looked all around the garden, the glare blinding him. And then he heard it – the call of a crow from a Montezuma cypress. Standing hidden within its cape of deep shade was Pablo Grande. Padre Márcio charged him, striking hard with the poker, leaving a furrowed scar in the tree’s trunk. Pablo Grande had vanished. He scanned the sun-leached landscape in disbelief. Acute tinnitus left him feeling dislocated and queasy, as though he were standing on a floating dock with a rising wind sending dozens of halyards rocking and ringing in alarm. It wasn’t just an internal aural phenomenon; it was a rupture in the fabric of the atmosphere around him.

  He looked up and saw a crow break cover from the tree. The poker slid from his hand as he watched Pablo Grande flying away.

  37

  Fuentes

  There was a strange, mournful atmosphere back at headquarters in Tijuana, as though the home team had just lost the Cup Final in the last minute of extra time. Faces weren’t just brooding, they were hurting.

  Twelve rurales, the bus driver and four stable boys were all packed into the largest holding pen. Fuentes watched their old boss, Abarca, sitting in the corridor trying to smoke, despite the angry coil of handcuffs tight around his wrists. Each time he gathered his fists to his lips to inhale, it looked as though he could almost be praying. Except no one could pray with such palpable rage on his face; not even Satan.

  Fuentes knew the dark mood at the station wasn’t because a handful of officers would have to be sacrificed: that was one of the only positive outcomes of the arrests at the stables. It gave the top brass the chance to purge disruptive personalities and overtly corrupt cops. And maybe try to settle scores with hot-shots and troublemakers. People just like Fuentes.

  Fuentes’ superiors would have liked nothing more than to be able to blame everything on him, to put him under the spotlight of an interrogation room or the local TV station. But he had not only been exemplary in his conduct during the raid; more importantly, he had been impeccable afterwards. Normally they tried to get off on a procedural error. There was none here. Fuentes had smashed a kidnapping and sex-slave ring that had been festering under the nose of the authorities, saving the lives of six local girls, not to mention the female union activists, and he had the evidence to prove it. For the moment at least, he was untouchable. He was in fact that most contradictory and elusive of things in a Tijuana police station: a hero.

  Of course his colleagues all hated him for what he had done. They didn’t see girls and young women who had been saved. They saw money flying out of barred windows. They’d grown used to Abarca’s largesse. He ran whorehouses and crooked card games. He sold weed and meth to tourists, and provided underage cocaine mules to the cartel. Through a winning mixture of law enforcement greed and incompetence, Abarca had been allowed to become a big man in a little town. As a consequence, he lacked all perspective, especially where he himself was concerned. He had thought he would always get away with whatever he wanted to do. He displayed the surly arrogance of a man without imagination.

  Now he sat in a cramped posture, hunched over cuffs, muttering curses to himself like a greedy diner impatient for dessert. Well, fuck him. Fuentes kicked the old
man through his hand-stitched cowboy boot.

  Abarca looked up at him, his inflamed eyes framed by gray hair and white moustache. It wasn’t the arrogance of the stare that annoyed Fuentes, it was the disbelief. He kicked him in the ankle again, harder this time. ‘Wake up, viejo!’ There was fury in the old man’s gaze now, but something else besides, something Fuentes had been longing to see.

  Fear.

  At last, it was sinking in.

  Fuentes grabbed him by the arm and paraded him past the crowded lock-up, speaking to the miserable faces of the incarcerated. ‘Make no mistake. You’re all going to jail. But anyone who signs a confession stating that they were coerced into committing their crimes under threats of violence from this old fart will get an immediate sentence reduction for co-operating with authorities.’

  Seventeen hands shot up. This was what Fuentes wanted the old man to see. Total mutiny. He was alone, and would die alone. He shoved him into a narrow cell at the end of the room. Abarca held up his fists. ‘Free me.’ It was not a request, it was a demand. ‘Let him shit in his pants,’ a voice from the holding pen shouted. Laughter filled the space between the cells. Fuentes felt the power of the collective humiliation pressing hard against the man, making him wilt. It was as if he had just aged five more years. ‘That’s what you did to the women. Jeered at them. Humiliated them. Tortured them. I want you to remember that when you’re being tortured in prison. You think you’re too old?’ He shook his head with a savage laugh. ‘Think again. Someone will know someone who had a woman out there today. And when it happens, remember you brought it upon yourself.’

  He saw the emotional indecision ripple across the old man’s face. He’d told him the reality of the incarceration he would be facing. Fuentes didn’t care whether Abarca killed himself or not. One way or the other, Abarca was going to pay for his crimes.