The Hidden Light of Mexico City

by Carmen Amato

  Eddo put the CD into the drive of his computer and pulled up a list of files. There were over 1000.

  “Madre de Dios,” he said again. He hit a button on his phone, told the senior secretary to only put through emergency calls or those from the minister, then double-clicked to open the first file.

  It took him a few minutes to realize what he had. Each file was the record of either a deposit or a withdrawal into various banks accounts attributed to members of Hugo’s family. There were several joint accounts for Hugo and his wife Graciela, and a joint account for Hugo and his son Reynoldo. The amounts in those accounts were substantial and relatively stable; there wasn’t much activity. The accounts were in large, national banks.

  But as Eddo kept clicking open files he saw other accounts in the name of either Hugo de la Madrid Acosta or Reynoldo de la Madrid. The accounts were in a bank called Banco Limitado.

  Eddo got out a yellow legal pad and a pencil and started four columns: Reynoldo deposits, Reynoldo withdrawals, Hugo deposits and Hugo withdrawals. Toggling between files and the paper, he copied down the date, amount, and bank account number from each file on the CD and put the information under the correct column.

  By the time he finished, the sky was dimming into twilight outside the big window behind his desk. Eddo took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes, wanting the pattern on the legal sheets to be wrong.

  Several times a week deposits were being made into four different accounts held in Reynoldo’s name. Each deposit was sizeable but not large enough to cause alarm. No two deposits were the same amount. It always varied; a thousand pesos here, a few hundred pesos there. The deposits appeared to be cash or money order, although some were wire transfers from a business called Montopa in Panama. Withdrawals were made only a little less frequently than the deposits. The withdrawals were never the same amount as any of the deposits and they were all for different amounts but by and large the same amount that was coming in was also going out.

  The money withdrawn from Reynoldo’s accounts was appearing within a few days in Hugo’s accounts, the amounts modified by a few hundred pesos each time. About 80 percent of what came into Hugo’s accounts was withdrawn within a week.

  Eddo wrenched himself away from the desk and started to pace the length of the office. Hugo was obviously trying to disguise the movement of the money by using multiple accounts and tinkering with the amounts. It was a classic money laundering scheme known as layering.

  “Cartel money, Hugo?” Eddo muttered angrily. Layering was usually the middle step in the laundering process. “Where’s it going next?”

  The office was a big space but tonight Eddo felt closed in and suffocating under the weight of what he didn’t know. He stood in front of the big window and looked down on the other buildings in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc business district. The Office of Special Investigations occupied the entire twelfth floor and the view was his only decoration. He’d never ordered any artwork or brought in any personal items. The place was as sterile and impersonal as it had been the day he’d walked in as the chief pitbull of the newly created anti-corruption office.

  A long black car, followed by a black SUV, left the underground garage of the building across the street.

  Eddo threw himself back into his desk chair. He unlocked the cabinet behind his desk, revealing a safe. He worked the combination and took out the list of userids and directions given to him that day in Los Olivos.

  Miguel had uncovered a timestamp on the directions. They’d been created two weeks before the first deposit into Banco Limitado.

  Eddo rubbed his eyes and thought about next steps. Getting an informant inside the El Toro cartel or Hugo’s bodyguard cadre was next to impossible. That left the money trail; investigating Banco Limitado and tracing the Montopa company in Panama. It was a long shot but maybe Hugo’s hard drive could be scanned for evidence of communicating with the cartel as Hh23051955.

  Eddo dialed the private number to Los Pinos, identified himself, and despite the late hour got Betancourt’s executive assistant, Ernesto Silvio. The Betancourts were in Guadalajara for the weekend, Silvio reminded him. They were dedicating the extension to the airport there.

  Lorena’s first salvo against the mayor of Guadalajara, Eddo thought. “When will the president be back?”

  “I can get you in for breakfast on Monday,” Silvio said. “It’s the holiday and his morning schedule is pretty open. Seven o’clock?”

  “That’ll work,” Eddo said. The two men knew each other well enough to preclude any questions why the head of the Office of Special Investigations needed to see the president so quickly. After a few thin jokes about working too late the two men hung up.

  Eddo had just grabbed a bottle of water and a protein bar from the stash in his desk drawer when the door handle turned. “Yes?” Eddo barked, heart suddenly pounding.

  It was the cleaning supervisor; the night shift cleaners were already making their rounds. “Oye, señor.” The man ducked his head sheepishly. “We’ll come back later.”

  It took Eddo well past midnight to finish. The report, along with the deposit and withdrawal charts, went into a blue folder labeled “PEMEX” that was a permanent fixture in his briefcase. All bags were inspected going into and out of the building; the guards always saw the dogeared folder and never questioned the contents.

  Eddo used a flash drive to run a program to erase his computer’s cache and digital evidence of the bank records; hopefully it worked as well as Miguel claimed. He dropped the flash drive and the CD into his office safe, spun the dial and locked the camouflaging cabinet. The last thing he did was smear a bit of clay across the edge of the keyhole. Any attempt to open the cabinet would leave a mark in the clay.

  Chapter 12

  The week passed with agonizing slowness. On Thursday Hector took Luz to the school to help out in Victoria’s classroom. It was the class’s combined Halloween and Dia de los Muertos party and the children screamed and shouted, fueled by too many chocolate skulls and candy muerto skeleton figurines. Victoria ate so much chocolate Luz was afraid she’d throw up during the swim lesson but she didn’t.

  '

  Luz got to the American Embassy at 8:15 am Friday morning, feeling like a pretender in the Dolce and Gabbana jeans and the elegant black sweater from the trash bags. The entrance to the visa pavilion was easy to find; the crowd swirled from Reforma onto a side street that ran alongside the embassy building. On the other side of the street Luz could see the Sheraton Hotel, several shops, and a small restaurant. The sidewalks on that side were crowded with relatives and street hustlers.

  Luz shook her head at a man trying to sell her a folder as she went to the end of the line. Someone jostled her as she stood there, but she held her ground, her palms damp with nerves. She kept her arm clamped over the Prada tote, sure that someone would try to pickpocket her. No one in line talked to anyone else unless they had come with them but the people on the street sometimes darted in and out of the line, trying to get someone’s attention. Luz was jostled again and her nervousness ratcheted up.

  At about 8:45 am the line started to move. Luz found herself in a bare reception area where a clerk exchanged her bank receipt for a form on a clipboard. She was also handed a number like she’d gotten in the Banamex bank.

  Luz passed from the reception space into the main room. The visa pavilion was huge, clean, and efficient. There were more than a dozen booths along the far wall, like tellers in a bank, except that there wasn’t any glass and the tellers were sitting down. There were chairs in front of each teller. Dividers separated each booth so that the person being interviewed had a modicum of privacy. A big digital counter was mounted over each teller booth to direct number-holders. The center of the room was full of hard plastic chairs bolted to the floor like in the bus station. They were all placed at right angles to the far wall so that the counters could be seen from any seat.

  Excited and scared at the same time, Luz looked at the number in her h
and. 314. She fumbled her way to a seat and took out her pen. The room was quiet except for whispered questions and the scratching of pen against paper.

  Luz filled out the form giving the address in Soledad de Doblado and her cell phone number. She put down “New Life Blooms, New York City” when asked to give her address in the United States. She wrote “Dee Rodriguez” as the point of contact.

  Her number came faster than Luz thought it would. Her knees practically knocked as she walked up to the booth. She sat down in the chair and slid her clipboard and the copies of her documents to the young blonde norteamericano woman on the other side of the desk.

  “Hello,” Luz said tremulously in English. “How are you today?”

  “Buenos dias,” the woman replied automatically in Spanish. “Why do you want to go to the United States?”

  “To work,” Luz said in surprise. Why did anyone want to go to El Norte?

  The woman sighed and skimmed Luz’s form. “Is this where you’ll be working?”

  “Yes,” Luz said. “New Life Blooms. It’s a flower store. In Manhattan. I’m a florista.” She pointed to the copies of the floral school certificates.

  “You have a promissory letter?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A letter from, uh, let’s see, Dee Rodriguez attesting to the fact that you have been offered employment in the United States with her company.”

  “No, I don’t have a letter.”

  “Are you working at present?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Soledad de Doblado?” The woman stumbled a bit over the unfamiliar name.

  “No. Here in Mexico City.”

  “As a florist?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you worked for your present employer?”

  “Six years.”

  “Do you have a letter from your present employer regarding your intention to return to Mexico and resume your employment following your travel to the United States?”

  “No.”

  “How long do you plan to work at New Life Blooms?”

  “I don’t know.” Luz held onto the Prada tote with both hands to keep from shaking. The session was not going at all how she’d imagined it.

  The woman wrote something down on Luz’s form and rifled through the document copies. “Thank you for your application. You’ll be notified by certified letter to your address of record as to the determination of your application. Have a good day.” She rattled it off as if she had said it hundreds of times before.

  Luz looked at the woman blankly. It was over? “I’m fluent in English,” she blurted.

  “I’ll note that on your form,” the young woman said crisply. “You should have your certified letter in four to six weeks.” She shuffled papers, clearly suggesting that Luz should leave.

  “Will the letter tell me when to come back to get the visa?” Luz asked. Surely there was more to getting the visa than this. They should take her picture, give her a receipt, something.

  “The letter will notify you as to the status of your visa application.”

  “Status?” Luz blinked in confusion. “But I’ve already paid 850 pesos for the visa.”

  The woman looked at her impassively, neither unhelpful nor sympathetic, like Hector. “The payment was for the appointment.”

  Payment was for the appointment. The words echoed as if Luz’s head was suddenly hollow. The next interviewee was standing there, waiting for the chair to be free. Luz gathered up the Prada tote and moved away. A man in a uniform directed her to the exit.

  '

  Luz found herself walking through the Basilica neighborhood, where virtually every shop was full of religious curios. She ignored the street vendors hawking rosaries and holy pictures like the one in the living room in Soledad de Doblado, and went through the giant gates of the enormous Virgin of Guadalupe religious complex.

  The Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe was built at the base of Tepeyac hill where Mary had appeared to Juan Diego, whom the late El Papa Juan Pablo II had finally made a saint. Mary had appeared to Juan Diego as an indio, with cherubs at Her feet, and had left Her image on Juan Diego’s garment, a shapeless poncho called a tilma.

  As Luz crossed the huge Basilica plaza the diorama mounted on an enormous H-shaped pedestal started its show. Every half hour or so the diorama opened and a puppet theatre took place, with a recorded narrator telling the story of Juan Diego seeing the Virgin and trying to convince people, including a stiff-necked Spanish bishop, of what he’d seen. Luz went past the two old churches that each in their day had held the precious tilma but were now badly damaged by earthquakes, and went into the new Basilica, an architectural mix of church, theater, and spaceship.

  Mass was always going on there, an endless loop of prerecorded consecration that took 20 minutes or so to play each time. There was no one on the altar until the priest came out to serve communion. Luz slipped into a pew that let her see the simple tilma in its glass case behind the altar and listened to the tinny recording start the Prayer of the Faithful. She tried to make her mind listen to the prayers, to find the comfort in the familiar words.

  But the place was noisy and full of movement. Visitors cruised around, bringing flowers to the communion rail, gawking at the tilma, or staring upwards at the rafters that looked like lace stretched across the ceiling. Some people actually stayed on their knees the entire time they were inside the Basilica, mouthing prayers as they kneeled their way to the communion rail to gaze upon the tilma and murmur their devotion to the Virgin.

  Luz stumbled out and found the path that wound up the hill behind the Basilica to the actual site of Mary’s visitation. She got most of the way up to the tiny capilla at the very top before she ran out of adrenaline and oxygen and sat down on a bench. Only a few other people were braving the hill in Friday’s sopa and it was quiet. Luz sat there clutching the Prada tote, refusing to cry, trying to convince herself that she still had a chance at a visa, that she hadn’t just wasted 850 pesos. As long as the norteamericanos didn’t actually call Dee Rodriguez in New York she’d be fine. She tried to pray, to ask the Virgin to intercede, but all she could think of was how thoughtless and impulsive she’d been. When the tears came it was hard to gulp them away in the thin air.

  Before she started back down the hill, she got out her cell phone and called Señora Velasquez who ran the abarrotes snack shop across from the Alba house. When Luz didn’t come home, Maria or Juan Pablo would check for a message and pay Señora Velasquez 10 pesos for it. Few people in the barrio had telephones. Señora Velasquez probably made as much with her message service as she did selling soda and gum.

  Chapter 13

  “My grandmother,” Tomás panted. “Could have played better than you today.”

  Eddo pulled two bottles of water out of the carton he always kept in the back of his SUV and tossed one to Tomás. “Nobody’s better than abuela Hortensia.”

  The back hatch of Eddo’s SUV was open, affording the two men some shade from La Marquesa’s Saturday afternoon heat. Both were streaked with sweat and grime from the dry dust of the soccer field.

  Tomás drank down half a bottle in one swallow then wiped his mouth with a muscular forearm. “We got a new problem?” he asked.

  Eddo pulled off his sweaty shirt, poured water into his hand, and rubbed his face. “Later.”

  There were still too many players there. More than a dozen cars were parked in the dirt next to the soccer field. The other players were all police and as dirty and sweaty as their captains. They traded water and sports drinks and good-natured ribbing about the game, which Tomás’s team had won easily.

  “Hey, jefe, next week we’ll teach them, eh?” Diego, one of the best players, saluted Eddo with a wet towel. Eddo shook hands, clapped a few players on the back, forced a laugh about trashing the other team next week. Players shouted farewells and cars left the lot.

  Finally Eddo and Tomás were the only ones left from the marathon game. “Bernal Paz came t
hrough with the bank records,” Eddo said

  “It’s not good,” Tomás surmised.

  “Hugo’s laundering money like an amateur,” Eddo said. “Using accounts in his name and his son’s. Money comes into the son’s accounts, transits Hugo’s and mostly disappears.”

  “Big money?”

  “A couple of hundred million pesos so far.” A few new cars drove into the lot. A group that looked like an extended family got out and started kicking a ball around by the far goal. “All in small chunks. Started a couple of weeks after the land sale in Anahuac and after the directions for how to use those userids.”

  “Por Dios,” Tomás swore. “And nothing from his bank wondering what the fuck is going on?”

  Eddo shook his head. “Probably isn’t a real bank.”

  “Vasco can check.”

  “I’m meeting with Betancourt first thing Monday morning,” Eddo said, watching the father and sons and cousins. He slumped against the rear seat of the SUV and let his feet dangle over the taillights. Played like shit. Missed two shots on goal he could have made when he was five.

  “Monday?” Tomás wiped his face with the tail of his tee shirt. “You can tell us how it went at Ana’s charity event that night.”

  Eddo stared at this friend, his brain sputtering. Finally it caught. Tomás’s wife Ana was an architect and her firm had designed the new wing of a children’s hospital. Eddo had promised weeks ago to attend the opening on behalf of Marca Cortez and make a company donation to the hospital. “Sure.”

  One of the children on the field missed a kick and the ball rolled toward them. Tomás hopped off the SUV’s bumper and kicked it back, his cleat making a dull thwap as the ball connected. The child grinned with delight and ran after it. Tomás nodded in satisfaction.

  “Come back to the house and have dinner with me and Ana,” he said. “We’ll hash out this thing. Figure a way to come at it that you haven’t thought of yet.”