City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  Sensing a presence, Pilar glances up and sees the two guards now watching her. She hurries away, cutting back through the rows, the guards following. Pilar begins to run, crossing to the next room, but one of the guards grabs her.

  Leaflets flutter to the floor. She is yanked hard into an office.

  The guard who caught Pilar hands one of the leaflets to the night manager, who wears a blue dust jacket over a white singlet. He takes an incredible amount of time to read the flier.

  Finally he looks up from the leaflet to Pilar, who is standing, disheveled, between two of the guards, the sleeve of her work tunic torn at the shoulder. The night manager’s eyes are full of contempt, but they are also full of hot alarm. He knows someone’s job has just been put on the line, and he’s not thinking of Pilar. ‘Empty her pockets.’

  The guards pull out her cigarettes, the cell phone that Juan Antonio gave her. A palmful of coins. The night manager opens a desk drawer and sweeps them all inside.

  ‘They’re mine.’

  He smiles at her, the way his father used to smile at him when he came home drunk. Right before a beating. ‘Who sent you here?’

  Pilar raises her chin. ‘The women of this city.’

  He slaps at her arm with the leaflet. It is an ineffectual gesture, as though he were brushing a bee out of his way. But it’s still enough to open a door to the anger he’s been able to contain until then. ‘I’ll ask you one more time. Who sent you?’

  ‘Your wife, your mother, your sis—’

  He strikes her hard across the cheek, then holds his hand as though the blow hurt him. ‘Get this union whore out of my building!’

  ‘I want my phone.’

  ‘So you can call your communist friends?’

  ‘I need a lift!’ Pilar lurches forwards, trying to open the drawer. The guard who first caught her pulls her with such force that he tears the ripped sleeve clean off her tunic. He throws her against the wall, then grabs her arms, twisting them behind her back.

  The manager turns to the other guard. ‘Search all the women when they leave. Fire anyone who has this propaganda.’ The two guards exchange a look, satisfied with the orders. Maybe this worm of a night manager has a pair of balls after all. He senses the approval and calls out to them as they go. ‘Who’s winning?’

  ‘Real Madrid.’

  The night manager curses. ‘Always the same – fuck the rich!’ The security guards nod in complete agreement. The night manager sits down, his mind overflowing with hate – a trickle threatening to turn into a noxious explosion. Fuck Real Madrid. Fuck all its rich supporters who sit in their office towers in Monterrey and their condos in Miami and Dallas. Fuck their maids and their nannies and their drivers and their bodyguards. Fuck their villas in San Cabo and Acapulco and their spoilt children with their teeth braces and perfect English and ski holidays in Colorado. Fuck them all, while I have to work graveyard shifts and live in a house next to a polluted stream running like an open sore right where my children play. Fuck the narcos and fuck the cops. Fuck Televisa and their idiot fucking programs. Fuck the PRI. Fuck PAN and the PRD. Fuck the Church and its stupid Polish pope. And fuck that union bitch for making me think.

  He slides open the drawer, pushes Pilar’s phone angrily aside and pours pills into his fist. But above all, he thinks, fuck my fear of unemployment; fuck me and fuck my luck, to have nothing better in my life than this: being the tyrant of the night to women just like my mother and my sisters and my wife. He swallows the pills with a gulp of cold coffee, then puts his face in his hands.

  45

  Padre Márcio

  Pablo Grande had of course been right. Padre Márcio had researched the antidote along with the poison and had thus been able to save himself. But it had been a traumatic, life-altering event. The tinnitus lingered permanently, a drone that resounded even in his dreams. His eyes had also been damaged, remaining hypersensitized to sunlight, so that everything he saw was leached one tone of color.

  At first he was full of rage, but after several weeks his intellect overcame his anger and he realized that he had been lucky to survive an encounter with such a powerful curandero. He knew that Pablo Grande would not return for a long time; not after publicly demonstrating his therianthropic abilities. Only a brujo of very high degree could have enacted such a transmogrification, especially in daylight. Even a year after the poisoning, Padre Márcio might have pursued Pablo Grande, if only in an effort to understand and attempt to acquire his powers. But he abandoned the arcane and esoteric for the blunt force of market law when, the following Christmas, he first encountered Joaquín Lázaro Morales at the bishop’s palace.

  Joaquín’s face had been calcified by desert sun, mountain wind and the multigenerational indifference of the government towards the poverty of its nation’s farmers. But despite his calloused hands, ranchero clothes and the patina of silver-colored dust permanently ingrained into his boots, there was none of the groveling piety the poor normally displayed in the presence of his miraculous lesions. Joaquín possessed the stern dignity of an executioner, solemnly waiting to trigger the scaffold’s chute. A small boy hovered in his shadow, silent but aware.

  Joaquín explained that his son had lost his mother in a dispute between some warring gomeros in the highlands of Badiraguato. Would Padre Márcio see to it that Amado found a place in the orphanage in Ciudad Real, far from the dangers of Sinaloa? He pulled a large parcel wrapped in newspaper out from a woolen moral shoulder bag, watching with the sibilant eyes of a serpent as Padre Márcio slowly opened it to reveal wads of high-denomination bank notes.

  Of course Padre Márcio would have said yes anyway, but he didn’t offer to return the money. There was simply too much to seriously consider doing that.

  It wasn’t the amount that he thought about that evening when he dropped the boy off at the Army of Jesus orphanage in Ciudad Real. It was where the money came from. He was used to clean donations from guilty landlords and corrupt politicians seeking tax credits, not money from rural bandits and drug producers that was literally dirty from mountainous drives.

  In 1961, marijuana and poppy plantations were not good business so much as the only business available to many of the farmers working the ejidos. The field work was hard; the risks high. The profit margins solid if unspectacular. But compared to the alternatives – working as a busboy in Dallas, or a fruit picker in the Salinas Valley, or a fisherman in the gulf – the money was monumental. More than the money was the prestige of being a respected local gomero instead of a nameless peón toiling in Texas. Padre Márcio knew what the rich never could: that the poorer your background was, the more self-esteem mattered. And he could tell that it mattered a great deal to Joaquín.

  Three months later, Joaquín returned with three more children – this time a boy and two girls, all under seven. Were they siblings? ‘More cousins,’ Joaquín said, a fluid notion in the sierras. ‘Anyway, all orphans come from the same family.’

  Padre Márcio should not have been surprised to hear such a sentiment expressed by a gomero; after all, he and Joaquín were themselves linked – not by grief, but by cunning. ‘I never forgave the man who made me an orphan,’ he said, perhaps not recognizing the spontaneous confession for what it was – the first sign of complicity.

  ‘Tell me his name and I will take care of him.’

  ‘Is that what you do, take care of things?’

  ‘A man in my position …’ More than anger, even more than jealousy; pride was always the hardest sin to conceal. Joaquín silenced himself with a knowing lift of the chin. ‘I would be happy to take care of the man who made you an orphan.’

  ‘God already has …’

  Joaquín shrugged the way powerful men do – with feigned modesty. ‘Even God needs help.’

  ‘Resisting just one evil act advances God’s work more than a thousand good deeds,’ Padre Márcio said, thankful that hypocrisy was the easiest sin to hide.

  ‘But if you had already committed a thousand ev
il acts, wouldn’t that make your one good deed all the more powerful?’ He nudged the children towards the priest. ‘Please think of them as three good deeds.’

  ‘How do you think of them?’

  Joaquín smiled without warmth; without humanity. It was the smile not of a living person but of a graven image, pagan and remote. ‘Isn’t it better to threaten murder, rather than to actually commit it?’ Just then thunder stirred in the distance, beyond the mountains that hid the promise of another way of life far from this desert reality of flaying heat, shifting sands and hostile borders. Padre Márcio sensed the thunder’s significance, but couldn’t tell if it was a warning blast or a solemn augury of future triumph. ‘We both know that if you are chosen for a mission, there are sacrifices that must be made; crimes that must be forgotten, if not forgiven,’ Joaquín said, handing him a weighty suitcase. ‘It is not the way of God, but it is the way of the world … our world.’

  Over the next ten years, Joaquín delivered many more children to the orphanages along with many more suitcases crammed with cash. Sometimes the children were the sons and daughters of men he had killed, or of men who had died fighting for him. But mainly they were passive hostages – a strategy aimed at bloodless conquest. What was it that made him break with tradition and seek to control rather than kill fathers, at the same time sparing the lives of their children? For in the land of vendettas, you did not take a man’s life, you took a clan’s. Otherwise, future reprisal wasn’t a risk, it was a certainty. Was there surprising compassion within Joaquín, or a reckless pride that ignored the threat of revenge? Or was he simply an innovative strategist who realized it was easier to win hearts and minds than to brutally extinguish them?

  As the 1960s collapsed into the 1970s, Joaquín’s marijuana and poppy plantations grew in size and profitability. Drugs which had previously occupied a narrow band of traditional users bloomed into mainstream society on the other side of the border. America’s hunger for drugs seemed even greater than its hunger for sugar and war. And every time Joaquín returned with more children, the donations grew larger. Until one day during Lent he came without any children at all. For the very first time, he came alone. ‘I want to buy your palace,’ he said.

  Padre Márcio surprised himself with his own reaction. He was offended. ‘This has always been the home of true servants of the Lord.’

  ‘True servants of the Lord do not hide in palaces.’

  The simple truth of the admonition was crushing. Padre Márcio had no response to either it or the inconceivable amount of money that Joaquín was offering; for this was not a donation. This was not even a purchase. This was laundering.

  And Padre Márcio was about to become a master at it …

  46

  Pilar

  Given the violence of the guards when they detained her, Pilar’s expulsion from the actual premises is remarkably restrained. She is escorted through the gates without further physical contact. Not even a shove in the back, let alone a kick, which is always the final farewell – that cowardly concluding assault before the door of the police wagon or prison cell is slammed shut.

  There isn’t even a verbal insult as she’s locked outside the gates.

  She watches the two guards silhouetted against the light from the sweathouse entrance as they hurry back, disappearing inside; gone in seconds. Perhaps they want to get back as quickly as possible to their football game. Perhaps they have girlfriends or wives or sisters Pilar’s age, working in other maquiladoras. Perhaps their fathers used to be union members, back in the old days when it still counted for something. Or perhaps they are simply anxious about becoming accessories before the fact. Expelling a lone woman outside in the middle of the night could easily sentence her to death. Being a witness is a terminal condition in Ciudad Real. The cartels punish talk, even on subjects that don’t concern them. Terror of the narcos has rendered most of civic society mute. Censorship is preferable to sensory mutilation. Tongues are bitten off voluntarily when the other option is to have them torn out with red-hot pliers. And now that same fear is imposing itself across all commercial activities; even inside family homes. Silence is the first ally of the tyrant; the crueler they are, the more absolute the silence. The guards know this.

  So does Pilar.

  Or perhaps it is even simpler. Perhaps the guards are as afraid as Pilar of being alone at night.

  She feels as though her very presence outdoors is like a scream of defiance, waking up the monsters feasting on the town: the killers and the narcos, the politicians and the factory owners; the fearful and the dispossessed.

  Pilar looks around the deserted landscape. The only place she could flee to in an emergency is back to the very maquiladora that has just expelled her. She knows now why they locked the gates after her. It wasn’t to keep her out; it was to keep out the thing that stalks the night.

  The beast.

  Pilar walks quickly along the road leading back into town. On one side is the river and the border. On the other side, she can see the great trucks of NAFTA torpedoing along the highway that connects two countries, two systems; two realities. One expansionist and confident; dominating. The other self-effacing yet full of guile; adept at survival. She can hear them on the near horizon; see the white of their headlights magnifying the dark, then ceding it forever, leaving behind the hypnotic coil of retreating red. There is no movement on the road she follows, no light except from the moon, cowering near the hills, like her afraid to show her face in this trembling landscape.

  Pilar thinks she hears something. She stops and listens.

  There is a sound she recognizes instantly; a sound she has dreaded hearing but somehow always knew she would: an approaching car.

  She glances ahead. Nothing. She looks behind and sees two headlights lancing towards her. Coming from the direction of the maquiladora. Is that why they let her go so meekly, then hurried away – to collect their cars and hunt her down on a lonely road? Away from witnesses.

  Pilar looks for salvation on the empty road and finds it in a concrete culvert just ahead. She runs towards it in the blind night, trusting her feet, the sound of the car swelling towards her. She hurries down a ditch to reach the culvert opening, almost tripping on the stony ground. Just as she is about to enter, an animal darts out, brushing her leg – a rat or cat, or even a rabbit. Something small; just as frightened as her. She screams in shock, choking it back into her throat, hating herself for the betrayal of her location; listening to the newly heightened quiet.

  Lights dart across the fields nearby. Pilar ducks her head inside just before the culvert’s opening is engulfed by the car’s headlights.

  The car drives by very slowly, its engine vibrating in the nocturnal stillness. Pilar risks a glance as the Lincoln Navigator passes; exhaust coiling angry and red in the right taillight. The left taillight is broken.

  She is staring after the car, trying to read its license plate, when it brakes with a shriek like an animal snared in a trap. She pulls back into the cover of the culvert, her breathing amplified inside. She listens.

  Nothing.

  The car glides forwards a few feet as if towed by the weight of the pending darkness just beyond its beams. Then it brakes again; the red light cycloptic and final.

  A searchlight is switched on from the driver’s side of the car. The beam darts across the scrap-strewn fields; a terrain devoid of shelter. Weeds bow, shamed by its inquiry. The light settles on a nest of trash. There’s the tremor of movement – the beam holding intently until something undulates, then breaks fast for cover, the plastic bag escaping high in the wind.

  The car inches slowly forwards … then accelerates quickly as though answering a secret call. Pilar waits, watching the car vanish into the velvet wall of night. She steps out of the culvert, trying to decide what to do next: move on, or wait in case the car comes back.

  She gives it half an hour. They’ll have realized by then she couldn’t have traveled that far on foot. Perhaps they figured she’d
cut across the fields to the highway. If they thought she were hiding, surely they would have come back before then.

  That is, if they were really looking for her.

  Pilar struggles up from the gully, steadying herself against the slipping rocks with her hands, climbing up onto the lip of the road, walking back towards town, alone except for the coward flash of the setting moon fast and insubstantial on the river’s stagnant water.

  She slows as she turns a curve. There’s something on the road. A tan and white dog. She approaches cautiously, afraid that it might attack, but when she’s closer she can tell by the way it’s lying, by the misshapen curve of its hips, that it’s hurt. Pilar speaks in a low, caressing voice and strokes its brow between the flattened ears. At first there’s no reaction, just a gravity in its eyes. A knowledge. And a fear. Then it looks up with a gaze that seems to strain through the night for a final glimpse of something urgent and important, settling on her eyes. There’s something breathless and faint that could have been a whine, and then the eyes roll backwards with a swift, effortless grace. She can almost feel the tangible release of life. A movement passing through her hand.

  She starts to sob, a whisper of tears in the wilderness, then finally stands and lifts the dog up, placing it against a small boulder far off the road.

  Pilar walks on towards the city, dazed by a cunning mixture of determination and self-deception, removing herself from awareness of anything except the next step, the next second; anything that will kill the moment and take her a little closer to the end. If she could see herself, walking in the dark, her feet and legs powdered with the dust that she has raised, she would be anxious. She would realize that she stands out more than she could ever imagine, a silhouette targeted across the bow of the road’s horizon.