Spiral

by David L Lindsey

  "Do you have any names?"

  "I have rumors of names. In Mexico there are mutual support groups, parents and family of the desaparecidos ." She looked over at him. "Do you know that word? In translation it has a hauntingly passive sense to it: 'the disappeared.' One suddenly becomes nonexistent. Lost."

  She paused, as if contemplating the meaning again for herself, as if she were counting a rosary with a single bead.

  "We meet regularly and compare notes," she continued. "To coordinate ways of protesting to the government, initiating efforts to find our missing. It is a frustrating task. Mostly fruitless. However, over a period of time we have compiled considerable information. Some of it is from eyewitness accounts. Some of it is circumstantial, placing persons at certain places when certain things occurred. Some of it is speculation. Most of it would not hold up in a court of law, perhaps. But we are parents and husbands and wives, not federal prosecutors, and we do what we can do. It is not a sin that one's efforts amount to so little; the sin is to do nothing."

  "Do you have access to this information?" Haydon asked.

  She nodded. "The reason I am in Houston is to try to organize support for our work on this side of the border. There are families here who could help us. There are legal pressures that can be brought to bear in some cases. People need to know."

  "What can you give me?"

  She was quiet, looking past the salmon cinder blocks that had faded even more, everything going pastel, colors washing away in the thin, warm summer light.

  Without speaking, she rose from the deep seat of the old wooden chair. As quietly as she had come onto the porch, she disappeared through the screen door into the darkness of the house. Haydon waited, and after a few moments heard the sharp click of a lamp switch. Through the gauzy screen of the open window next to his chair, he saw a doorway beyond the front room, a sallow light falling across the back of an open door like an old painting yellowing with aging lacquer. He saw her bending shadow against the paneled door. The light went out. He imagined her bare feet beneath the hem of her long dress as she moved through the darkened room.

  Another lamp came on, this time in the living room. Haydon looked through the window again and saw her sitting in an old armchair in a cone of dull light, a thick expanding folder in her lap. She was going through it, flipping through papers, pulling a scrap out, looking at it, putting it back, going through others. Finally she paused, holding what appeared to be an envelope. She was holding it lengthwise, reading something from it, as if a note had been jotted there. Reaching down to a low table by the chair, she picked up a pencil and wrote something on another piece of paper she had also gotten from the table, then continued looking through the file,

  Haydon waited.

  After a while the light clicked out in the living room and she emerged once again from behind the screen door. She walked over to Haydon and handed him a piece of paper, though it was too dark for him to read it. She did not sit down again, but stepped to the edge of the porch and picked one of the flowers from a begonia, toying with it as she looked out to the dying light in the courtyard. Crickets filled the quiet, throbbing in their familiar, alien language. Her simple dress and long, unstyled hair transformed her into the indio woman she might have been. In the graceful pitch of her hip, darkly outlined against the deepening evening, Haydon saw a woman of the Grijalva.

  After a moment she said, "Only occasionally do we come across any connection to the States. Usually it has to do with someone who has fled from the teco fear in Mexico, and come up here to live with relatives or friends. Even though they cross as illegals, we help them when we can. We don't think of international relations, or of immigration quotas, or of going through the process of requesting political asylum. As you know, that doesn't seem to be working for the Latin Americans right now anyway."

  She was referring to a painful truth. A person was far more likely to be granted political asylum if he was coming from Poland or Iran than if he was coming from Guatemala. A refugee had to be fleeing from the "right" evil government.

  "However, this man—this Rubio Arizpe—whose name I have written on that piece of paper has on two occasions pursued his victims into Texas. He killed one in San Antonio, one here in Houston."

  "You're sure about this?"

  "The same way I'm sure about the rest of the information. We are sure. I couldn't prove it in court."

  "Have you checked with the police?"

  "Both killings are unsolved. A friend, a lawyer, in San Antonio checked with the homicide division there to see if they could trace this name. They checked their computer, the National Criminal List or something ..."

  "The National Crime Information Center."

  "Yes, that. But there was no mention of this man."

  "Did they check their local intelligence files?"

  "Yes. Nothing."

  "How about here?"

  "Yes. Mr. Garner did that for us here. Nothing."

  "What do you know about this man?"

  "Only that he is from Guadalajara, and has been identified sev-veral times by the families of desaparecidos."

  "Do you have a photograph of him?"

  "No."

  "Why do you think he was the one who pursued these people to Texas?"

  "Probably because he has spent a lot of time here, and knows his way around."

  "But he's a Mexican national?"

  "As far as we know."

  "Have you checked to see if he has family here?"

  "Yes. There are only eight Arizpe surnames in the telephone book, but none of them admit to knowing him."

  "The same in San Antonio?"

  She nodded.

  "If you don't have a photograph of him, how are these people able to identify him?"

  "As I told you, we compare notes. This man was recognized by someone in Guadalajara who knew his brother, and had seen them together. So we knew his name. From there it was always easy to know when he participated in something—that is, if there were witnesses. They always described him as the man with un labio muesca, a notched lip. His lower lip, near the center. A cut, I think, not a natural deformity. A double misfortune for him, because he is always recognized."

  "Is there anything else about him that is distinguishing?"

  "He is an Indian. He is not very tall, and quite dark. That's all I've ever heard about him. Except for the things that only wives and daughters and mothers care about."

  "What's that?"

  "That he is cruel."

  Haydon looked at her. In the dying light he could see the muscles in her throat. They were taut, strained, and he guessed that this woman had not known a peaceful night for a very long time.

  "Thank you," he said. He was quiet a moment and then asked, "How long have you been doing this?"

  "Three years." She hesitated, looking at the small flower in her fingers. "My 'personal tragedy,' Mr. Haydon, is that I have lost a son and a husband to the tecos. I have lived in that shadow for six years. I know what I am talking about."

  Haydon heard the word again. Lost. It had never struck him so peculiarly as last night on the gritty sidewalk of the Belgrano, and here, now. Morally or spiritually without hope. Lost. Wasted, as of time or opportunity. Lost. As of defeat. Lost. If a thing is gone, but can be found, it is misplaced. But if a thing is gone, and cannot be found, it is ... lost. As of Mooney. As of husbands and sons. "Lost is the lost, thou knowest it, and the past is past." The mystery of never again.

  In the deep violet light that suffused the porch, Haydon still could distinguish the flowers of the bromeliads, and the lighter blooms of the begonias. He still could distinguish the passive Mayan profiles of the clay urns, and the sorrow that had no end in the eyes of Renata Is

  Chapter 22

  IN half an hour he was slowing the Vanden Plas a block from Gamboa's, passing a parked car he recognized as surveillance. He pulled up to the drive, his shield already out, holding it up to his lowered window as he turned in, and was immedia
tely stopped before his rear wheels were even off the street. There were the same figures in front of his headlights, the same glimpse of automatic weapons intentionally displayed, the forms of other men moving, turning, and looking toward him from the darkness outside the beam of his lights. The flashlight again, playing across his face; again he held his anger.

  "Will you use only your parking lights, please?"

  Haydon cut his beams.

  The man at the window peered at Haydon's shield. He was a different man from the night before, slightly paunchy, with tight skin, a heavy mustache.

  "Can we help you, senor?" He lowered the flashlight beam.

  "I would like to talk to Mr. Negrete. Mr. Gamboa said he would be happy to help me."

  "Is he expecting you?"

  "No."

  The man stood up out of the glow of Haydon's dash lights and spoke to someone on the other side of the car. Haydon watched the man's neck work inside his tight collar, his head lost in the dark. There was a good deal of back-and-forth conversation, and Haydon wondered if there had been any kind of instructions from the police about him. The car idled. Several men in conversation now. A radio transmission. Finally the man's face came down into the glow of the dash lights again, framed in the window.

  "Senor Negrete asks if ten o'clock tomorrow would be a good time for you to meet him."

  "No."

  The man frowned, and bent closer as if he hadn't heard Haydon correctly. "Pardon, senor?"

  "I said no. Tomorrow is not a good time. Right now is a good time. This is not a social call. It's official police business."

  The man stared at Haydon a moment, and then his head went back up into the dark again. A shout across the lawn, the crackle of the radio again, another shout coming back. The man's face in the window again.

  "If you will follow this man," he said, and directed the strong beam of his flashlight to a figure in front of Haydon's car.

  Haydon idled the Vanden Plas along the drive, its amber parking lights glowing on his escort's back. This time, however, they went a short distance past the lighted steps of the loggia across the front of the home, to a narrow drive that opened up through a wall of shrubbery. The escort turned and stopped, motioned for Haydon to cut his motor and parking lights. He came around to the door and opened it.

  Haydon got out of the car and the escort was already at his side, closing the door behind him. Without either of them speaking, they started down the drive through an arbor of trees, the escort carrying his machine pistol casually at his side, a small buckle on its strap clinking rhythmically. It was the only sound other than their footsteps on the pavement as they walked toward the pale, sea-green glow of landscaping lights at the end of the drive. They emerged into an open area with a lighted pool, the water as motionless as a sheet of aqua-tinted glass. Sidewalks meandered through lush foliage flanked by tiny lights which indicated their course long after the walks themselves had disappeared into the dark.

  They proceeded between the near end of the pool and a tiered terrace at the back of the house, turning and following the pool edge toward a bathhouse at the far end. Two or three additional guards lounged in cabana chairs in the bathhouse, smoking as they watched them approach, their swarthy faces reflecting the aqua light from the pool.

  Haydon's escort spoke to them in Spanish, and they responded tiredly. The boredom of encamped soldiers. Just as Haydon thought they were going to enter the bathhouse, they turned right into the dark along one of the lighted walkways, continuing through stands of banana plants and hibiscus. There were fireflies out in the darkness, flickering, as if some of the tiny sidewalk lights had detached themselves and floated free.

  They came to a dimly lighted bungalow with a stone patio in front covered with a palm-frond roof. The escort spoke to two guards in bamboo chairs, and without pausing opened the front door, stepping back to let Haydon precede him.

  The bungalow was rustic only on the outside. Inside there were the familiar television monitors and panels of electrical paraphernalia for the surveillance equipment that guarded the houses and grounds of many of Houston's wealthy. There were telephones, spare sets of portable radios lying on top of a filing cabinet. A pot of coffee, looking strong and not fresh, sat on a hotplate near the door. Two machine pistols and a suit coat hung on a nearby wall rack. The room was almost cold with air conditioning, and was full of shadows. The only light came from a couple of low-wattage desk lamps, and the ashy luminescence of the television monitors. It stank of stale cigarette smoke—strong tobacco, long-dead butts, smoke on top of rancid smoke.

  The escort closed the door, and Haydon found himself alone with a thin man in his late forties who stood behind a desk in a tie and white shirt, looking at Haydon from slightly swollen, red eyes that seemed unusually large for his head. His face was long and narrow, with an equally narrow nose that was prominently beaked. His upper lip was small, slightly pinched toward the center, and in the low, unnatural light, he appeared considerably darker than most Mexicans, though he did not have Indian features. He wore his straight hair well oiled, cleanly parted. A large handgun was clipped in a shoulder holster under his left arm, and he was smoking a cigarette from which he puffed twice before he spoke.

  "I am Lucas Negrete. How can I be of help to you?" He extended his hand to Haydon, but the sobriety of his expression did not mesh well with his words or actions. His handshake was firm, and he gripped Haydon's hand a moment longer than seemed necessary, looking intently at Haydon as he did so.

  "I need to clarify a few things regarding your position in our investigation," Haydon said, pulling his hand away. The strength of Negrete's clasp stayed with him.

  Negrete looked at him without expression. "Are you confused about something I said earlier?"

  "I don't know," Haydon said. "I haven't read the report."

  Negrete's face remained passive. "I do not understand."

  "The detectives who spoke with you today are conducting the formal investigation of this shooting," Haydon explained. "But the 'incident' has various levels of complication. So there are various levels of the investigation."

  This indirectness was not going to be lost on Negrete. Mexicans had invented the fine art of dissimulation, as Negrete's boss had ably demonstrated the previous evening. For them, it was the natural way to deflect confrontation, or to gloss unpleasant hard facts, or simply to lie. Directness implied commitment. One had to be flexible in life; circumlocutions left the options open. Haydon expected that this cultural familiarity with indirection would work in his favor. Negrete was not likely to question Haydon's unorthodox procedures. That was something else with which he felt sure Negrete would be familiar.

  Negrete nodded, slightly closing his eyes, and took a last drag on his cigarette before he extinguished it, with precise attention, in a glass ashtray already filled with butts.

  "Please sit down, Mr. Haydon," Negrete said, offering a chair opposite the desk from his own. He sat down also, and leaned his forearms on his desk. His slight frame gave the impression of taut sinew, lean muscle.

  "When I spoke with Mr. Gamboa last night," Haydon began, "he indicated to me that he had no idea who might want to kill him. He told me a little about his work in politics, mentioned that all politicians found themselves with enemies, and could only guess that, perhaps, the threat came from someone harboring a political grudge. Is that your assessment also?"

  "That is certainly a possibility," Negrete said. "Of course. But, really, it is not so much my business to know the ideologies of someone who might want to harm Mr. Gamboa. That would be impossible in any event. I am his security officer only. It is the duty of my men and myself to protect his life, and that is our sole concern."

  Negrete had picked up a hand-held radio when he sat down, and while he answered Haydon he slowly pushed the end of its extended antenna with the palm of an open hand until it had completely disappeared into its case.

  "You have no suspicions? You don't have any idea who might ha
ve launched this attack?"

  "I wish I could help you," Negrete said. He laid down the radio and reached for the pack of cigarettes on his desk. He offered one to Haydon, who refused, took one out for himself, and ran his fingers along its sides, smoothing the paper, watching his fingers smooth the paper.

  "Los tecos de choque," Haydon said, watching Negrete's face, "seem to be implicated here."

  "Really?" Negrete was not surprised, and did not act surprised as he lighted his cigarette. After he spoke the single word, he left his mouth slightly open, allowing the inhaled smoke to leak out of his lips and nostrils like one of those cast-iron skull ashtrays Haydon had seen in the house of a murdered biker.

  "You had no suspicion of that?"

  "None, senor."

  "You know who they are?"

  "I have heard of them."

  "What have you heard?"

  "Only gossip and rumors."

  "About what?"

  "I have only heard the name," Negrete said, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand. "I do not even remember the circumstances, the reasons." He paused. "Maybe, I think, they are some kind of communist terrorists."

  This last remark was almost an afterthought of insolence, but it told Haydon that Negrete knew, and it gave him his first glimpse at the way the man's mind worked.

  "Do you know if the tecos have ever operated in the United States?"

  "How would I know something like that?"

  The lamps on the desk were at an unfortunate height for Negrete, throwing uncomplimentary shadows on the peculiar proportions of his features. As he drew on his cigarette, his long cheeks sucked in, emphasizing his protruding cheekbones. The mannerism, together with the irregular configuration of shadows, created the effect of rapacity.