by Tim Baker
‘I’ve got something to show you …’
Gomez leaps to his feet. ‘I don’t want to see it.’ Fuentes walks towards him, holding a large manila envelope in his hands. Gomez pushes him hard in the chest. Fuentes topples backwards into a display case, cracking the glass, trophies rocking and falling on their shelves inside. ‘Get out of my house before I throw you the fuck out.’
Fuentes pulls a sheet of paper from the envelope and holds it up in front of him like it’s some kind of protective talisman. Gomez stares at it, then staggers backwards as though hit by its force. ‘That’s right,’ Fuentes says. He drops it on the floor, then pulls out another. ‘Remember Byrd?’ He tosses it across the room towards Gomez. ‘Or him?’ He walks up to Gomez, holding the color photocopy right up to his face.
Gomez looks at it sideways. ‘I’ve seen him somewhere …’
‘It’s that asshole manager at the maquiladora, López. The victim looks like half his workforce. She looks like Pilar. Remember what he said when he fired her? “There are thousands like her, just waiting to take her place?” He should know. He’s been helping kill them.’
Gomez snatches the paper from Fuentes, staring at it hard. ‘I remember this motherfucker …’ He rips the paper in half then tears it again and again, bunching the torn ribbons into a fist and squeezing as though it were a telegram announcing the death of the only person he ever loved. He hurls the damp ovoid of hate at Fuentes, tears in his eyes. ‘What is it, snuff films?’
‘Blackmail hiding behind an initiation rite. You want to make money, you want to get ahead in this town? Then join the club. But the entrance fee is taking a woman’s life in front of a camera.’ Fuentes leads him to the kitchen table and starts pulling out all the photocopies from the first envelope. ‘Blackmail. Control. And guaranteed silence.’ Gomez leafs through some of the sheets and cries out. ‘Nepo Dossena! Fuck me, we all knew he was corrupt, but this? He was a state fucking senator.’
‘Retired?’
‘Dead, maybe five years ago? Who knows. No one gave a shit.’
‘Listen, you’ve lived here all your life. I need you to look through all of these, tell me who you recognize. Who you can name.’
Gomez opens the freezer compartment and slides out a bottle of vodka. He pours some into Fuentes’ juice, then takes a long swig from the bottle, shuddering.
‘This is fucked up. We should be putting together a team.’
‘Everyone’s working on the Heartbreak. Besides, I’m through with the Force. You know that.’
‘That won’t last long.’ He takes another slug, wiping ice from his lips. ‘Wait till Valdez …’ Fuentes passes him a photocopy. Gomez’s whole body jackknifes in an involuntary spasm. He rushes over to the sink and throws up the vodka, shuddering as he starts to dry-heave. He turns on the tap, scoops water into his shaking hands and brings it to his face. ‘Dios mío ayúdame. We are so royally fucked.’ He straightens, his hand shaking as he picks the bottle up by the neck and takes a short sip. ‘So Valdez knows the killer?’
‘Valdez is the killer. One of many. But he knows who’s behind all this.’
Gomez takes another sip, longer this time. ‘Tell me everything.’
‘Where are my things that I gave you at the border?’
‘Why, you don’t trust me?’ Gomez gets up and goes over to a drawer in the living room, taking out the two handguns, the knife, cuffs, ammo and holsters, slamming them on the counter top. ‘You afraid of me now?’
Fuentes removes his jacket and slips on his shoulder holster. ‘I’m afraid of the next thing that comes through that door …’
Gomez takes his own service weapon out and puts it on the kitchen table. ‘Where did you find these photos?’
Fuentes waits such a long time to answer that Gomez steels himself with another sip of vodka. ‘Marina’s …’ Gomez slowly gets to his feet. ‘Paredes hid them there. The only place he thought they’d be safe.’
Gomez stares in the direction of the bedroom. ‘Where is she?’
‘On a bus to Dallas. She’ll be safe. She has friends there.’
Gomez pulls a seat out, the legs scraping against the tile floor. ‘We’ll never see each other again.’
‘She’s safe, I swear it.’
Gomez stares at him, his eyes luminous. He takes another long swig. ‘I wasn’t talking about her, man.’
74
Ventura
Things had progressively deteriorated after the interment when, despite the protests of Juan Antonio, the mourners continued to march down the streets, this time without the cover of a coffin.
Ventura had stayed within ranks during the funeral procession and listened to the arguments between Juan Antonio and the outsiders, debating terms like social utility, deontology and momentum and employing labels as though they were insults: utopian; reactionary. What struck her most was the total absence of Pilar from the dispute. She stood in a place Ventura had never seen her occupy before – the sidelines: not so much distracted as bereft; abandoned not by the others but by herself.
The outsiders forced a vote and of course they won, moving past Juan Antonio with raised, triumphant fists, as though he were the enemy. Banners were relocated to their rightful position at the front of the march, the demonstrators escorted by their buses – both protective and intimidating.
Given the changing circumstances, Ventura feels free to break from her assigned role of mourner and roam ahead for her shots, framing the heroic activists against the desolation of wasteland and distant border. She chants their brave slogans as she walks backwards, her camera channeling all her intelligence and instinct.
Pilar has lamented the numbers but Ventura thinks they are perfect: large enough to impress but small enough to retain a sense of individuality; of intimacy. She feels joyous and alive moving through the presence of a group of young people like herself, all clamoring for change. It sends a message out to the city, the entire country: this is what is needed most now. Not cynicism. Not anger or hate. Idealism and commitment.
Hope.
‘It’s a fantastic turnout.’
Pilar studies her face for irony. ‘There’s only a few hundred.’
‘That’s all Garibaldi had to start with.’
Pilar looks away. Garibaldi was a fantasist from a paternalistic, feudal society. He had about as much relevance to today’s maquiladoras as a harrow. ‘They promised us thousands.’ The subtext is left unspoken, which is always the way with implicit truth: they lied.
Ventura disengages, standing off to the side, one of the buses almost brushing her as it throbs slowly after the demonstrators with the menacing heft of a bodyguard, alert and anxious. Juan Antonio follows on the heels of the procession, like Pilar more an observer than a participant. ‘Children …’ He says it the way other men say women. ‘Being led into a trap.’
Ventura lowers her camera. ‘If that’s what you believe, you have to stop them.’
He gestures to the marchers with a dismissive lift of the chin. ‘I tried. They wouldn’t listen.’
‘Make them.’
‘That’s not the way it works.’ He takes a cigarette and offers one to Ventura, who declines. ‘Every demonstration quickly develops its own destiny. Once it is formed, it is impossible to change.’ Fire leaps, is sucked in; blown out. ‘My uncles were at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 1968. The flares dropped from the helicopters weren’t a signal for the massacre to begin, like people think today. It was more a simple confirmation of what everyone there already knew, because everyone – not just the soldiers and the presidential guard and the secret police, but the students too – everyone knew that evening would end in terrible bloodshed. I asked my uncles, “So why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” And you know what they said?’
Ventura shakes her head.
Juan Antonio stops in his tracks, fixing Ventura with an intense stare, a look of transmission that sends a shiver through her. ‘They said, “Because we were trapped wit
hin history.”’
He laughs, breaking the solemn spell, and starts moving again, trailing a procession he doesn’t believe in. ‘I didn’t know what that meant until many years later, in 1995, when I was in Aguas Blancas to support the Campesina de la Sierra. And one morning we woke up and what my uncles had spoken about was there, surrounding all of us; a sense of dread combined with a powerful – no, an irresistible – inevitability. It was an overwhelming force, as though every possible narrative had already been written, and the blood had already been shed. It was transformative. We were no longer sentient beings, we weren’t even spectators. We were puppets; archetypes dancing to a song that had been sung since the beginning of time. Sacrifice.’ He freezes, staring not at Ventura, but at something on the far horizon of his memory that still adheres to the stanchion of his soul. ‘My entire career has been predicated upon didactic logic, but there are moments, like chasms in space, when rationalism no longer exists and one is compelled to face the greatest mystery there is: the extent of human savagery.’
He nods to Pilar, moving listlessly with the group. ‘She feels it too; she has the experience; the innate awareness. She and I are meteorologists. We feel the change in air pressure before it even happens. But the students here are innocent children at a picnic. They will feel it eventually, but only when the lightning is already in the treetops. And then it will be too late …’ His hand trembles as he takes the cigarette out of his mouth and crushes it underfoot. ‘The secret allure of martyrdom is not that it’s irresistible. It’s that it’s inevitable.’
He picks up his pace, quickly joining Pilar and linking arms with her. Ventura watches them catching up with the others, joining the students, losing themselves in the mass of demonstrators. Further down the road she notices for the first time the flashing lights of a police roadblock. Without even knowing why, she runs after Juan Antonio and Pilar, searching for their faces in the crowd.
75
Fuentes
Fuentes had made three photocopies of every photograph before he had gone to find Gomez, forcing the night staff of the print shop to leave the room for three hours while he worked. The first set he had already Fed-Exed to the immigration lawyer he had retained for Gloria in El Lobo, with instructions to forward them to Charlie Addsen at DEA in Washington, DC, in the event of his disappearance or death.
The second lot he had secretly stowed inside Marina’s luggage with a note before he drove her to the border. If he had told her about it, she would have given off all the wrong vibes crossing over. She would have been stopped and the photocopies would have been located and seized. She would have been detained as an accessory and somewhere along the line – probably during transfer to a federal facility seventy-two hours later – she would have been removed to a dark corner, where she would have been interrogated until she named names, and then killed.
The copies with Marina were addressed to an investigative journalist in Mexico City, Ruíz Coronel, who wrote for La Jornada, the Guardian and Le Monde. Fuentes knew him from his time in Mexico City when Ruíz Coronel was under police guard following a story he had published on the death of Amado Lázaro Mendez. The journalist’s home was firebombed. It didn’t stop him. His police guard was withdrawn due to ‘necessary strategic and logistical redeployment’. Total bullshit, but he kept writing anyway. Fuentes recognized the journalist’s tenacity in a cellular way – after all, they were both the sons of the same moral parents: the massacres of 1968.
The third and final set of copies was for Fuentes and Gomez’s own investigation, to allow them to identify as many of the perpetrators as possible. The actual photos themselves would be delivered later that morning to the only person in Ciudad Real capable of keeping them safe, with the understanding that they would remain sealed for forensic purposes.
Gomez was satisfied with the arrangements. Their only other challenge was how to gain access to, and remove, the files of all the female victims. This had to be done before Fuentes’ possession of the photographs became common knowledge and the files seized and destroyed. The operation was hampered by the fact that all of their current colleagues appeared in the photos.
‘Hernandez. I accepted a cigarette from that motherfucker only this morning,’ Gomez says, his voice raw from the vodka and coffee that have kept him going through the first inventory. They have identified 280 perpetrators. Another 130 are known to at least one of them – usually Gomez – by sight though not by name. In less than twenty-four hours, they have gone from the unknown to the classified; from supposition to confirmation.
Of course Fuentes knows that the battle is not yet won, but if they target the first arrests correctly, and coerce co-operation from those initial suspects, they will create an irreversible process: for fission always takes place when a large nucleus – in this case the conspiracy surrounding the murders of the women – begins to fragment; the effects of the disintegration providing massive energy to the investigation and an irresistible, accumulating impulse to continue to divide, to the point where a chain reaction finally occurs.
For the first time, Fuentes can see the end game.
But the entire Ciudad Real police force stands in his way. Gomez’s phone rings again. This time he answers. He listens in silence, then hangs up. ‘Insane …’
‘What is it?’
‘Valdez is taking everyone off the Heartbreak and putting them on sentry duty outside the maquiladoras. All because of some fucking strike.’
Fuentes starts shoving the photocopies back inside their envelopes. ‘This is our chance.’
‘My chance. If he sees you, Valdez will have you arrested.’
‘He’s not going to see me, because he’ll be out of the office.’
‘Since when has Valdez ever done field work?’
‘Since he’s been scared …’ Fuentes opens the refrigerator door, slides out the crisper shelf and pulls out the photos, bundled inside plastic evidence bags, that he’d hidden under carrots and corn. Gomez stares at him. ‘You fucking hide them in my place without asking permission?’
‘What would you have said, no?’
‘That’s not the point. The point is to ask.’
‘There was no time to ask.’
‘That’s exactly the time when you should.’
Fuentes lifts the corner of a curtain, peering up and down the street. ‘If I had known you were this touchy, I never would have taken you on as my partner.’
‘Fuck you too. Do you have the shotguns?’
‘We won’t need them.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. Do you have enough ammo?’
‘Sixteen boxes.’
‘That’s a lot for someone who’s not going to need them.’
‘Always be prepared.’ He slides open the kitchen window. Gomez curses. Fuentes glances back at him. ‘Why take chances when we’re this close?’
‘You know what I hate about you?’
‘That I’m always right?’
‘That you make even the easiest things difficult, man. Why do you do that?’
‘A natural talent?’ Fuentes drops from the window.
‘More like an affliction,’ Gomez calls out, climbing up onto the sill, then disappearing from sight.
76
El Santo
It got worse, if that were even possible, when they started finding the bodies upstairs. Who would have thought that the Heartbreak doubled up as a hostel for illegal immigrants? Not that El Santo really cares – how could he with this pain in his guts. The soft puffiness that had slowly inflated around the stitches yesterday has solidified overnight into a bulbous tumor, as though some fucking ostrich has laid an egg inside the bullet hole.
Oviedo gets all domestic, slipping on dishwashing gloves before he removes the bloody bandage. Just the weak tug of the plaster being lifted from his inflamed skin causes swooning agony. Oviedo gingerly touches the purulent cords around the wound, like a fisherman testing to see if the eel in his trap is dead, pulling away as if
bitten when El Santo bellows. ‘It’s golden staph, boss. You’re totally fucked.’
Not exactly music to his ears. ‘So now what?’
‘You got to drain it fast, otherwise the poison and the pus will be sucked up by your organs, like a milkshake through a straw. If it gets down there, it’ll melt them all to shit.’ Obviously Oviedo has never done a course in bedside manners. ‘After that, we got to put you on special antibiotics to stop it coming back.’
Coming back? ‘You just said we have to drain it out.’
‘That’s to stop it killing you now. But then we have to stop it killing you later. This kind of infection is like a counterfeit note: once it gets in the system, it just keeps coming back until you put it out of circulation.’
Goddamn doctor … He probably did it on purpose. Not to mention that live-streaming stunt. The press is all over it too. Oviedo hands him a shot glass. ‘What’s this for?’
Oviedo helps him to stand up. ‘The pain, boss.’
El Santo groans as he drinks, just the lifting of his arm making his stomach feel as though it’s stretched to bursting. But the tequila works its sullen charm. He holds the empty glass out for another shot. ‘What about this plan of yours, this Belgium shit?’
‘I got it covered, boss. We’re going to massacre all these fucking agitators today; you don’t even have to worry about it.’
That’s where Oviedo’s wrong. If there’s something that El Santo has learnt in the last three days, it’s that all you can ever do is worry. Worrying is part of the human condition, like money, power and drugs. You can never have too much of it. ‘You heard the radio this morning. One hundred and forty-two dead! Even the president of Honduras is sticking his nose in, like it’s some act of war.’
