City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

Pilar tries to shelter her from the blows. Someone swings a plastic bag at her head, the can of drink inside striking fast and hard above her ear. There is the eruption of skin, the fast-traveling stain of blood, shoes kicking her on her way. The bus driver watches, the false smile on his face masking his growing concern for his own safety, the chaos making the vehicle shudder. He opens the front door and Pilar and Ventura are pushed out, landing on their hands and knees. The whole bus cheers. And then the door snaps shut.

  The driver turns to address the women, but he doesn’t exist; the women are all jeering through the windows at the figures of Pilar and Ventura still on the ground, as though trying to hide inside the cloud of dust they’ve raised. He sits down fast and pulls away, not daring to even glance in his rearview mirror, the women cheering as they leave Pilar and Ventura behind on the side of the road.

  Ventura helps Pilar to her feet. Blood pulses through her hair. Pilar watches with both despair and anger as the bus draws away, folding itself into a plume of diesel fumes. She turns to Ventura, who is shooting the bus as it abandons them. ‘It’s all your fault!’

  Ventura slowly lowers her camera, amazed. ‘Pilar … It’s nobody’s fault.’

  ‘Bullshit! Taking photos right in front of their faces. Like they’re animals in a zoo.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘I was just trying to help.’

  ‘Help? Don’t you understand?’ Her voice rises into an anguished cry. ‘No one can help us. No one even wants to help us. We’re way beyond help but you’re too fucking stupid to see it.’ The sob rips through her body, forcing its way out against Pilar’s effort to swallow it. Ventura touches her, and Pilar pulls away fast. ‘Why do I even bother? I must be as stupid as you.’ She starts walking back towards the city center, leaving a soft trail of blood after her. ‘Where are you going?’ Ventura calls out. Pilar stops and turns. ‘It’s over,’ she says.

  ‘For those women, maybe. But there are thousands of others. That’s what you said. That’s what you’ve been saying all along.’ She hails a passing bus. It roars past, blasting them with grit.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m going to finish the job we started.’ Ventura steps out onto the road and tries to flag a car down. It accelerates, using its horn as though it were a club as it rushes past, only just missing her. Pilar wheels on Ventura, her hand pressing against her temple, shouting above the furious noise of the traffic.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’

  ‘If you can do it, so can I.’

  ‘You’re nothing like me.’

  ‘I know. I don’t give up.’

  Pilar goes to strike her, but controls herself. ‘You’re pathetic.’

  ‘And you’re not?’ She holds up her camera. ‘At least I can do my job.’

  Pilar opens her mouth to respond, but then just shakes her head and starts walking back towards town. Ventura watches her go, anger creasing her face. She runs after Pilar, shouting over the traffic.

  ‘What makes you think you’re better than me?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘My job is the most important one there is.’

  ‘Selling beauty products in magazines? Making women look good enough for poor bored men to fuck? Very important.’

  ‘My job is telling people what’s really happening,’ Ventura says, running in front of Pilar and blocking her way. ‘Giving them the truth.’

  Pilar waves futilely at the buses roaring past. ‘What truth? That workers are getting screwed? You think that’s news? Who needs someone to tell them what every single worker knows? People care about the food on their table and the education of their children and the health of their parents. No one gives a fuck about abstracts like truth.’

  ‘I do, and I’m not the only one. There are millions like me.’

  ‘Millions like you who don’t work in the maquiladoras, who live in gated communities with cars instead of buses, and maids and nannies instead of bosses. But there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions like us, who do the shit work because we have no choice and who pay for your private schools and vacations and dental work.’

  ‘I’m not like that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter – you act like you are! And you attract attention – look at Mayor, he can barely keep it in when you’re around.’

  Ventura grabs Pilar’s arm. ‘The people you want to help just tried to kill us.’

  ‘Because they’re poor and afraid.’

  ‘Because they’re ignorant.’ She lets go of Pilar. ‘If they had the facts; if they knew what was really happening to this country …’

  ‘And an amateur like you is going to enlighten them? It’s laughable.’

  Ventura’s voice rises above the shriek of vehicles. ‘I’m going to tell this story, whether they want to hear it or not.’

  Pilar looks at her, at the way her whole body is trembling, poised for fight, poised to defend her camera. Her work. Her values. She sees something she’s never seen before in Ventura; something that astonishes her.

  She sees herself.

  Pilar has never lived a life of moderation or restraint. Her fury deflates as fast as it rose. She feels the shame of her anger. ‘It’s okay.’ She moves towards her but Ventura steps back towards the road, speaking with a trembling voice. ‘I’m going to tell them. You’ll see!’

  Pilar takes her wrists and pulls Ventura slowly away from the road. ‘Then don’t say it, do it.’

  Just then a car horn sounds, loud and close. The two women turn, startled. A white pickup has stopped in one of the lanes going back to town. The driver leans out of his window with a gap-toothed, happy smirk. ‘Hey, sweethearts, you need a ride?’

  Pilar glares at him, then shakes her head.

  A bearded man in the passenger seat cranes forwards. ‘We’ll even let you suck our dicks.’

  Ventura whirls on him, brushing hair from her eyes. ‘If you need it so bad, why don’t you keep it simple and suck each other?’ Both women burst into laughter. The leers of the two men vanish, unveiling what was on their faces all the time: violence. The driver points his hand at them like it’s a gun. ‘You’re already dead.’ The truck accelerates with a screech, nearly hitting a motorcycle as it pulls out into the traffic, does a U-turn and speeds away. It turns off into a gas station two hundred meters down the road.

  They wait until they see the men going round to a garage at the back. And then they both start running.

  64

  Ventura

  Ventura stands behind a payphone. In the far distance she can still see the gas station. Pilar hangs up. ‘He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.’ She points across the road to a little church. ‘It’ll be safer to wait over there.’

  The interior of the church is dim even when the daylight follows them inside. Ventura quickly closes the door behind them, then glances around the internal gloom. Behind the altar, a flickering fluorescent light forms half a crucifix. The horizontal tube is dead. A framed reproduction of La Tilma is displayed in a modest side chapel watched over by a brace of small votive candles. Mainly stubs; all long extinguished. Ventura lights them, one by one, watching their reflection flickering on the dusty glass protecting the portrait of the Virgin, like stars in a veiled sky, not radiant but straining to be seen; hovering rather than glowing. Her camera whispers inside the church, a gentle, reassuring murmur of approval.

  Pilar sits in a single column of sunlight on the edge of a confessional box, on the ledge where people normally kneel, smoking a cigarette. The thought is absurd to Ventura, but she can’t help thinking it even though she would never say it aloud: You shouldn’t be smoking here. Only where is here – a bleak and lonely place with dead leaves and plastic bags gathered against the base of the altar railing, blown in by the rush of cars or a sudden storm and then left to slowly decompose out of sight, like a retirement home at the edge of a village. Here could be just another embarrassed failure of
belief; a monument to superstition, manipulation and the fear that ignorance always engenders. Or here could be a refuge – both spiritual and, in their particular case right now, physical – that gives up its mysteries to the faithful who have the courage or simplicity to seek them. Ventura can’t be sure, but she feels the puzzling duality of here is on display right at this very moment. Here for her is there for Pilar, and vice versa. ‘Do you ever go to church?’ she asks.

  ‘Not since my mother’s funeral. And you?’

  ‘Only at Easter and Christmas, although not for the last few years. Sometimes, I stop at the cathedral and watch the people praying and take their photos.’

  ‘Do you pray, or just watch?’

  Ventura caps her camera and sits in a pew in front of Pilar, her legs joining the sunshine. ‘I sort of pray … sometimes. I try to remember to say thank you for what I have, but I always end up asking for something. How about you?’

  ‘I prayed when my mother was dying of cancer. When she died, I stopped.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  Pilar laughs and offers a cigarette to Ventura. Her inner voice says don’t but she takes it anyway, only noticing then how badly her hand is grazed. It must have been from when they pushed her out the door, and she fell protecting her camera, not herself. The match flares, creating a nimbus around the shadow of Pilar’s head, and then it’s gone, the silhouette too. Ventura holds the cigarette towards the door, but the smoke snakes like incense back into the church.

  Pilar pulls a leaf of tobacco from her tongue, contemplating whether to share an intimacy with someone who is, after all, a stranger to her world, but perhaps the proximity to the confessional works its dark guilt-magic. ‘When I was in Tijuana, we did a lot of work supporting people with AIDS. Junkies. Sex workers, both male and female. They prayed too. Most of them died.’

  ‘You’re saying everything’s hopeless?’

  ‘I’m saying I don’t expect God to do my work for me. I’m saying it’s more important to get NRTIs to patients and condoms to schoolgirls and needle exchange programs started than it is to spend hours in anguish in front of fucking candles.’

  ‘I understand that. But what I was asking was do you believe in God?’

  Pilar gives a short bitter laugh, gazing at the smoke from their cigarettes, wafting through the single beam of sunlight. ‘How many women called out to God to save them when they were being kidnapped – when they were being raped and tortured? All of them. And how many did he answer? Not one of them. If that’s God, then why believe in him – and it has to be a him, because a her would never have stood by and done nothing.’

  ‘My mother died when I was eleven. The only thing that kept me going was the belief that she was watching over me in heaven, sitting by my bed while I slept.’

  ‘It’s nice for children to have such things. Children need reassurance.’

  ‘Of course, but the thing is, I still have that feeling. It stays with you, even as you grow older, even as you learn about life and let go of all the other childhood beliefs. It’s like an inoculation against fear of death. If I didn’t have that sense of an afterlife, I don’t know how I could go on. It’s that powerful.’

  ‘You don’t realize it, but you’re exaggerating your dependence. You’d be able to go on without it. You’re like me, you’re lucky – you love your work. You don’t need to pray. That’s why all the women in the maquiladora pray to the Virgin – because their work is killing them. Faith is the only thing left for them: the promise of a happy future – in a happy afterlife.’

  ‘But if you don’t believe in God—’

  ‘If you don’t believe in God, there are only two ways in which to conduct your life. The first is to enjoy yourself as much as you can – fucking, drinking, dancing! – without regard to the rules and constraints of society. Of course seeking pleasure solely for oneself is socially irresponsible. If you carry such selfish desires to their logical conclusion, it means having no regard for anyone else; seizing pleasure at the expense of others, whether they want to give it to you or not. The murders are the ultimate outcome of this way of thinking: I demand pleasure and I will take it if you don’t give it to me becomes the only pleasure I have left is harming others as I take it …’ Pilar sucks on her cigarette then sends it spiraling out onto the porch. ‘Most people are selfish, but luckily for us, most are not natural psychopaths.’

  ‘And the second way?’

  ‘The second way evolves out of the first, when you’re tired of servicing your own pleasure; when you’re looking for something more than your own ego. It’s when you decide you have to try to make the world a better place, because there’s no God to do it for you.’

  They hear it at the same time: a car pulling up outside. ‘He’s early,’ Ventura says.

  Pilar is already on her feet. ‘If it’s him …’ She looks around, then snatches a large prepared candle of La Santísima Muerte that’s propped against the wall, and holds it like a weapon. A card slips from the top: el corazón. She motions with her eyes for Ventura to go over to the shadows on the other side of the porch entrance.

  The door swings inwards, blinding Pilar with sunlight. One hand goes up to her eyes, the other raised to strike. The door flaps shut, slowly concertinaing the dazzle of daylight. ‘Bless me, sisters, for I have sinned.’

  Pilar lowers the candle with relief. ‘Cabrón! … What took you so long?’

  ‘Please don’t overwhelm me with your thanks, it makes me sentimental.’ Juan Antonio turns back to the door, holding it open for Pilar, letting traffic noise in. ‘Where’s the girl?’

  ‘Ventura? It’s safe.’

  Ventura steps out of the shadows and follows Pilar out, the door banging slowly, listlessly to a halt, like a spring rainfall ending before it even began, robbing the church of sunlight, leaving only the hesitant flicker of candles, and the rustle of something behind the altar.

  65

  Padre Márcio

  Joaquín Lázaro Morales didn’t disappear; he didn’t just run away and vanish. That implies something which is there and then is removed. This was not just nullification, it was more an evanescence, a cessation of existence, both future and past. It wasn’t gone for good. It was never there in the first place.

  His son, Amado Lázaro Mendez, showed up one day, picking up the conversation where his father had left off the last time. And that was it. As a manifestation of the transition of authority, it was comprehensive and terrifying. Padre Márcio realized then the enormous forces he was up against. It wasn’t so much evil power or even absolute power; it was the only force that truly exists, for it annihilates everything else – the brujo’s ultimate intent: sovereignty over reality.

  In the first years of his reign, he and Amado laundered billions. When first Nugan Hand and then BCCI collapsed, they created alternative laundering routes by funneling cash into a host of small casas de cambio, then wiring the money overseas in confusing loops to accounts across Europe, via respectable institutions. They used the US branch of the Order to continue to launder money via high-end property purchases. They ‘borrowed’ money from the Vatican Bank at will, playing on the goodwill and naivety of the increasingly infirm Polish pope. Padre Márcio calculated that if his fraud continued at the current rate, the Vatican would be completely bankrupt by 2019.

  Then one day Amado drove him to a ranch outside of Ciudad Real, close to the border.

  They were unaccompanied and a sense of dread descended as Amado turned off the road and followed a dry river bed. The isolation felt immense, as though the landscape had swallowed all life; dispensing with any need for movement, let alone humanity. They passed a crumpled rock buttress, like a staircase rising up to a ruined pulpit from which a sermon had been delivered to the damned before it had been struck by lightning. A Rottweiler prowled the other end of a perimeter fence, rapping its snout in a rhythmic display of aggression.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’

  ‘To see the future …�
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  The ambiguous response would prove to be typical of the enigmatic nature of Amado, but he didn’t know that then; it was as if he were being led to his execution. So he felt a large degree of relief, tempered somewhat by shock, when he saw a prisoner tied to a chair in the center of the kitchen, his bare feet stained with blood. There but for the grace of God … except it was by the grace of Amado that Padre Márcio was standing and the prisoner was sitting in a puddle of his own piss and blood.

  He was still alive, although that was not immediately obvious to Padre Márcio. Amado explained that the captive was an American citizen, a former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, who had become aware of Padre Márcio’s dealings with several banks under the direct control of the agency. He had foolishly threatened blackmail. Fortunately, Amado had quelled his initial impulse to murder him, and subjected him to sustained interrogation with interesting results.

  The American spoke of a cash reserve of $16 billion that covert US operatives had assembled via drug smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, people smuggling and illegal arms sales in Central America and the Middle East. The money had been destined to fund the Contras as well as death squad operations in both Central and South America, but had been siphoned off by three associates of the American, Roberto D’Aubuisson, Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega. The cash was spread across at least 117 different locations. Amado had already seized funds from two of the locales.

  Silence ruled the room. Padre Márcio and Joaquín had been partners for many years – but partners after the fact. Now Amado had done something his father never had; shared intimate knowledge of one of his illegal operations prior to committing the act. It made Padre Márcio an accessory.

  More importantly, it made him an equal.

  After what seemed like an eternity of introspective contemplation, Amado finally spoke. ‘Times are changing. New rivals are appearing. There is a war coming, the consequences of which we cannot know. This is why I want to keep this windfall separate from our other operations. We need to retain this as hard cash.’