North of the Border

by Judith Van GIeson

  I waited.

  “You could track down those phone calls.”

  “I could get myself killed.”

  “Oh, God, Neil don’t do that.”

  “I hope you’re leveling with me.”

  “Of course I am.” About as level as ten-thousand-foot Eagle Lake on a windy day.

  “Then tell me what you’ve done to attract all this attention.”

  “Nothing. I’ve done nothing but adopt Edward.”

  But you’ve done everything, I thought. You’ve set criminals free, put innocents in jail. You’ve betrayed your wife and probably your lovers as well. You’ve represented environmentally destructive corporations and presented yourself as an environmentalist, and what has it gotten you? Power, money, prestige.

  “Neil.” He smoothed the velvet back down. “Do you think I should withdraw from the race?”

  “Why? You’re the perfect candidate.”

  “Maybe it’s not worth it.”

  “Running away won’t solve anything.”

  “Then you’ll do it.” He sighed with relief. “You’ll check out those numbers.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I hope you will. It’s important to me—more than important. It’s critical.”

  “Before I do anything, there are some questions I want to ask you. Your father-in-law, for instance.”

  “Peter? What’s Peter got to do with anything?” Carl began looking around him nervously, as if the walls had ears.

  “I want to know his story.”

  “His story? He owns Esterbrook Farms, he owns racehorses. He’s got import interests, export interests, communications interests, mining interests. You name it. Peter’s involved. Celina is his only child. He dotes on her.”

  “Not that. What I want to know is, what’s his story?”

  “If you mean his past, he came here from Austria in the forties by way of South America, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.” He began smoothing an imaginary wrinkle in his suit in preparation for reentering the party.

  “Austrian. That’s funny. He doesn’t have a trace of an accent.”

  “He’s been here almost forty years, Neil. He’s had plenty of time to lose it.”

  “Most Europeans don’t lose their accents,” I said “They cultivate them. It gives them an edge.”

  “Whatever Peter’s past, he hasn’t held onto it.” Carl kept looking around him as if Don Quixote were bugged, but I couldn’t see what he was worried about: it was obvious that Carl wasn’t the one to reveal any secrets Peter Esterbrook might have had. “He had a flair for languages and for business. It wasn’t long before he started making money here and soon after he married Celina’s mother. She was quite beautiful. Celina cherishes her photograph. She died when Celina was young, and Peter never remarried.” Carl looked at his watch. “Look, I’ve got to get back to the party.”

  “Aren’t you afraid that something out of Peter’s past might turn up and harm your campaign?”

  “No. It’s been forty years and Peter has a lot of influential friends and besides I have no reason to think there’s anything shady in his past. Probably it was just sad or traumatic. Peter is a deeply religious man, you know.”

  “No, I can’t say that I do.”

  “Now, Neil, I must be going. I’ll call you Monday. We’ll talk.” He began edging toward the doorway, but I wasn’t ready to let him get away just yet.

  “How does Peter feel about your candidacy?”

  “He’s all for it. I’m supporting the WIPP project and—”

  “The WIPP project?”

  “I can’t be against the WIPP project in this district and hope to get elected.”

  “Why not? And the question is not whether you can or can’t be, anyway.” My voice was getting louder, but I couldn’t stop it. “The question is whether you are.”

  “There are pros and cons,” Carl replied with infuriating patience. “On the one hand, it will bring a number of jobs into a sorely depressed area.”

  “It will bring a number of jobs into a sorely depressed area,” I mimicked him in my snottiest attorney voice. “What about the long-term effects? We’re talking about nuclear waste that’s going to be lethal for thousands of years. Isn’t that reason enough to be against it?”

  “Not necessarily. Everything’s not black and white, you know.”

  “Everything’s not gray, either,” I said.

  10

  THE WIPP PROJECT. Carl Roberts would come out in favor of the WIPP project, one of our government’s more dubious efforts. There’s a lot of nuclear waste floating around this country, by-product of nuclear power plants, the residue of making bombs. It’s detrimental to the health, lethal for thousands of years, full of potential disaster in the wrong hands—in any hands. Nobody ever planned what they were going to do with it when they started making bombs or building nuclear power plants, but now the time has come to find these deadly stores of plutonium and uranium a home, and the home the federal government had chosen, apparently, was the Mother Lode in Lagrima.

  It was relatively safe seismologically, far away from urban centers where more damage would be caused if and when something went wrong, and there were fewer people around to complain. It is a remote area inhabited mostly by rattlesnakes and mining engineers. Who cared about it? The Mother Lode—they stood to make millions, as nuclear waste is now worth more than gold. And also the town of Lagrima. They thought WIPP would turn their sleepy little one-saloon town into the Los Alamos of the southwest and put them on the map—if it didn’t blow them off it. But once the construction work was completed and the construction workers—most of whom would have to be shipped in from elsewhere, as there weren’t enough skilled workers in the Lagrima area anyway—had left, what would Lagrima get? Trucks rolling through, unloading their nuclear waste, drivers stopping maybe for a hamburger or a beer.

  But Lagrima wanted it, they wanted the distinction of being the biggest and most lethal garbage dump in the country. It had to go someplace, why not where it was wanted? It was safer than most places. What did I or anybody else care? Maybe New Mexico was tired of being the garbage dump for the federal government. Sometimes you have to let them know that a bad choice, even if it’s the best of the available choices, is still a bad choice.

  Lagrima wasn’t in Carl’s district, Albuquerque was. In Lagrima they liked the WIPP project, here the feelings were mixed. Carl didn’t necessarily have to be for the WIPP project to get elected in this district, but he did have to take a stand. He himself probably didn’t care which stand he took. Each side had an interest, lawyers represented interests, all interests had valid claims, it was the one with the best representation that won. There weren’t any rights or wrongs in this world, only interests.

  I was at my desk drawing little diamonds on my yellow legal pad, filling in the spaces between the lines. Maybe someone was threatening Carl because he was the only candidate for the WIPP project, but why anyone would bother beat me. If Carl won the election—and he had a very good chance of winning if nothing unfortunate happened—he would probably talk loudly about the WIPP project on the evening news and do nothing about it on the House floor.

  I took out the list of Menendez’s phone calls, which I now kept in a file marked Auto Insurance in my bottom drawer. I looked at the numbers again.

  Having been rearranged by Carl in chronological order, the first slip of paper recorded a call to the number Carl said was Peter’s. It was dated April seventh and was twenty minutes long. I dialed it.

  “Esterbrook residence.” The female voice was careful, Mexican.

  “Is Mr. Esterbrook there?” I asked.

  “Not at this moment,” she said, coached no doubt by Peter. “May I tell him who is calling?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ll try later.”

  The next four pages were more calls to Peter, May eighth, May fifteenth, June third and fourteenth, three minutes, eight minutes, two minutes, fifteen minut
es. The adoption took place on June seventeenth. What else had they talked about? The price of tomatoes, the ripeness of fruit?

  On May eighteenth there were three calls to numbers in Mexico; three minutes, two minutes, four and a half minutes. Hamel and Harrison doesn’t have a computer to keep track of our calls, so I wrote down each number as I called it, just as Menendez-Jimenez had done. I intended to bill Carl for these calls, time and charges. The first call was to a hotel in Mexico City, the next to a restaurant in Mexico City, the third to a hotel in Acapulco. Either someone connected with this case was visiting those places or someone unconnected with it was. It wouldn’t be the first time an attorney billed a client for his own calls. Hotels and restaurants were not much of a lead, but every other week throughout May and early June there was a call, a few minutes in duration, to another number in Mexico. It wasn’t Mexico City or Acapulco; that was all the number told me.

  I dialed it. A very polite young man answered, “Buenas días. El teléfono.”

  I already knew that it was daytime, that this was a telephone. “Buenas días,” I replied, and then I asked him in Spanish whose number this was.

  “Many people’s,” he said.

  “But who? Someone called me from this number,” I lied, “and I don’t know who it was.”

  “Yes, señorita, it could be anybody. We are el teléfono.”

  Then I got it. They were the answering service, el teléfono, one of those little offices with the green and white sign where gringos hang out waiting to place their calls back home. Since telephones are outrageously expensive in Mexico and the assumption was that if fate wanted you to contact somebody, you’d run into them on the street, very few people had their own phones. You made your calls from el teléfono and could arrange to pick up your messages there.

  “Do you know the name Menendez-Jimenez?” I asked.

  “There are so many names,” he said.

  I couldn’t find out who Menendez-Jimenez called, but I could find out where. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.”

  The state of Guanajuato, the alto plano, the high plain, the area the conquistadores loved most, and having spent some time there, I knew why. It was high desert surrounded by twelve-thousand-foot-high mountains, and it reminded the Spaniards of where they came from. It reminded me of northern New Mexico. The Spaniards built their most beautiful cities here, and San Miguel was one of them. Easter was approaching, the trees would be in bloom, the town would be celebrating Semana Santa, Holy Week, Mexico’s most celebrated holiday. Menendez-Jimenez had called San Miguel de Allende every other week. Maybe Eduardo’s mother lived there, but what prayer would anybody have of finding her if she did? Should I ask el teléfono if they’d seen a pregnant girl four years ago? Five minutes ago would be more like it.

  “Muchas gracias,” I said to the boy.

  “It’s nothing,” he replied. “At your service.”

  I’d done it. I’d made Carl’s precious calls, and what had I gotten for my effort besides forty-five minutes of billing time? Peter Esterbrook—it wasn’t any secret that he knew Menendez-Jimenez—one restaurant, two hotels, and this, el teléfono in San Miguel. San Miguel has an international population. Anyone who lived there might use el teléfono; so might anyone who lived anywhere else and happened to be floating through. Why somebody would break into my office to steal a list as unrevealing as this was a mystery to me. I found myself back at point zero. The only way to get any information in this case was to go to Mexico and bribe someone. I wrote down my time—one hour—including fifteen minutes for the aggravation—and then I called Carl.

  “Neil,” he said, dejected as a dog that had been beaten and whipped and then had spent the night in the rain, “I’m glad you called.” That was Carl for you, high as a candidate on Sunday, low as a pup on Monday. I was supposed to notice this and ask how the poor boy was.

  I didn’t. “You’ll be happy to know that I made your calls for you,” I said, all business. “And here’s what I found. There were five phone calls to Peter Esterbrook, three to restaurants and hotels in Mexico City and Acapulco, six to an answering service in San Miguel de Allende. What does that tell you?”

  “Not much. What does it tell you?”

  “That Peter Esterbrook killed Menendez?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, then it tells me that these numbers are useless and that whoever stole the file is a fool.”

  “There’s got to be more to it, and you’ll find it. I know you will.”

  Flattery, flattery—what did he want now?

  “I got another note, Neil. It was in the mail this morning. It says… ” There was a pause and I imagined him reluctant to unfold the note, holding it like an origami bird, hoping it would flutter its wings and fly away. “ ‘Get rid of the chick,’ ” he read.

  “Get rid of the… chick?”

  “They must mean you.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Jesus, Neil, what am I going to do?”

  “Do what I told you in the very beginning,” I said. “Go to Mexico and bribe someone. You can afford it. You’re wasting your time with phone calls.”

  “I can’t go to Mexico in the middle of this campaign.”

  He could, but he wouldn’t—not alone anyway, and not with his family, and certainly not with me. Carl hadn’t done anything alone since the day he was born.

  “Right,” I said.

  “You could do it for me, Neil, couldn’t you? You’re good at that sort of thing.”

  Better than he was, I’d admit it.

  “I’ll pay for it, whatever it takes.”

  “That’s not the issue. There is an element of danger here, you know. Certain threats have been made to my person. I’m lucky I still have my arms and legs, not to mention my life.”

  Carl was quiet for a minute, like a little boy caught red-handed at something. “I know that, Neil, and I’m sorry.”

  Sorry. Of course he’d be sorry—but that wouldn’t stop him from asking me to go. There was another issue; maybe he wasn’t quick enough to raise it, maybe he knew he wouldn’t have to. The issue was would the “chick” let someone scare her off by writing notes? Would she let some scumbag threaten her and not even find out who?

  “Skip it,” I said. “Just be there with the money if I need it.”

  “Of course. You know I will.”

  11

  ANNA GOT ME on a plane to Mexico City that left at six in the morning in the dark. People shouldn’t start trips in the dark, they shouldn’t get up in the dark. It’s not natural. But Anna didn’t know about that, as she never got up before nine herself. Since she was too busy to pick up the plane tickets, I went to El Viaje Travel Agency to get them. I asked the agent if any new method had developed to get from Mexico City to San Miguel.

  “There’s only one,” she replied, “the bus from Mexico City. Have a good trip.”

  Mexico was a trip all right. Like taking a certain once popular drug, it can be frightening at first. There is too much to take in, too much noise, too much confusion, too many people, too many animals, too many short men walking around with long machetes. But after a while it becomes the norm, and when you look back at where you came from, that begins to seem like a dreamworld; menacing cars, hostile people, restaurants that pass out paper and plastic, space. One country is the other’s dream—and nightmare—but which is day and which is night depends which side of the border you’re on.

  Mexico City had grown by several million since I’d been there last and the yellow cloud that hung over the place had dropped about fifty feet closer to the ground. If it got any lower the birds would fall out of the sky. It’s an ecological disaster. The city’s present population is about fifteen times the entire state of New Mexico and it grows every day. In New Mexico space is the constant, in Mexico City it’s people.

  The new citizens live in the hills in cardboard houses with open sewers fl
owing past the door. It’s hope that brings them here.

  A cab took me through the maze that was Mexico City. We were an hour getting from the airport to the building where the records of adoptions were kept. I tried to keep track of whether the cabdriver was deliberately wandering to rip me off, but it was hopeless; one street led to another and another and another. I’d get there when I was supposed to and when I did, the fare was only five dollars and the driver was impeccably polite.

  The records building was enormous, the information stored there voluminous: births, deaths, adoptions, marriages and dissolutions of same. The hard part wasn’t finding anyone to sell me information, it was finding someone who had the information I needed. Everyone was eager to please, no one knew anything. I was sent down halls, up stairs, past a computer room that hummed in a controlled environment. I sat on hard chairs and waited, stood outside offices and waited. If la mordida ever fails in Mexico, there is one last resort—tears. Waiting will do it to me, and tears of frustration were close when I finally connected with my informant. His name, he said, was Pablo. He was hidden away in a room full of files, a slender little man with a sharp nose and grasping fingers, very nervous about something, but not la mordida, the little bite. He was an expert on that. It’s a way of doing business in Mexico, a payment here, a payment there. Salaries are low, the bite helps. A lot of gringos object to the system, but it doesn’t bother me; you usually get what you pay for.

  In this case, the bite was not a little nip, it was a gouge, but it was Carl’s money, the place was about to close for the day, and I wasn’t eager to start all over again tomorrow. I had worried about whether my Spanish would rise to the occasion, but I needn’t have. As the Kid says, “English, it’s the language of business.” Pablo understood business. When I told him what I wanted and we’d agreed on the price, he scurried into his files and came out again, eventually, with the name Los Niños de los Angeles, the children of the angels, the church-run home for unwed mothers, where Edward came from.

  “Many thanks,” I said, “but I’d also like the name of the mother.”