We drove south on 111, past Indio and the wine-dark surface of the Salton Sea, a forty-mile-long testament to man’s stupidity. One of the guys asked about it, and I told them its history.
Around 1900, engineers had diverted the Colorado River for irrigation, but the water jumped the dikes and poured into a dry seabed. It took two years before they could stop the water flow. When they finally did, the poor town of Salton lay submerged forever beneath sixty-five billion gallons of water.
To me, it was a metaphor for the whole week—human carelessness creating an uncontrollable, spreading disaster—all of it preventable.
Vito said he hoped that we’d have better luck than those engineers. I told him luck struck me as a piss-poor thing to pin your hopes on, adding that I’d rather heed Virgil’s advice: Fortune favors the bold.
* * *
We made Calexico in two hours, stopping on the American side for gas and to double-check the weapons we’d stashed in a hollowed-out area of foam in the backseat. Lino kept the attendant busy while Vito made sure the guns were still secure and well hidden.
I walked away from the pump to burn a Lucky, stopping at the edge of the service station, just out of the light. I lit my cigarette and gazed into the wasteland, where the gravel faded into brown dust and midnight.
A warm breeze was blowing across the open desert, tumbling brush and spinning up tiny dust devils that danced like pocket tornadoes across the arid plain. Those annoying green crickets were chattering away somewhere in the darkness. I hoped there was a spider waiting for each one of them out there.
The lights from a couple of squad cars winked in the darkness. They were parked along the side of the intersecting road several hundred yards away. Some policemen were walking around in the dark, sweeping the ground with their flashlights, the beams bouncing off the dirt, making sinuous shadows on the surrounding scrub brush and cactus. I watched them while I smoked, wondering what in hell they were rooting around for out there.
I finished my cigarette, stepped on the butt, and walked back to the car. The police were forgotten by the time we hit the border, another ephemeral moment buried forever in the dunes of memory.
We got lucky with the Federales. Three “fishermen” with hard faces—one of them wearing a hat pulled down low—crossing the border at midnight usually invites a little scrutiny. Maybe they bought our story, or maybe it was the twenty bucks Lino slipped the agent when he handed him his driver’s license.
We took Highway 2 west toward Tecate. Lino did all the driving while Vito and I sat in back and shot the shit. He’d been in the United States ten years, but the H in his vocabulary apparently didn’t make the crossing. Other than that, he spoke well, and intelligently. For a guy involved with the Mafia, I found it hard not to like him.
He grew up in Italy, near Montese. Hill country. I had relatives there on my father’s side. We knew some of the same places, probably some of the same people. We switched back and forth from English to Italian. It was a nice conversation, the kind they have in Vanity Fair. I almost forgot what we were doing in Mexico.
I dozed off awhile. When I awoke, Vito was drinking from a hip flask. He smiled, his teeth matching the shock of white hair above his tanned face, as he offered me a drink.
“Che cos’é?” I asked.
“Aquavit’ di Montese,” he said. “Try it.”
Aquavita. The water of life—grappa. I grabbed the little cask, took a belt. It was strong, burned a little. But it was good.
I took another swig, let the fire roll around in my mouth, chugged it. The swirling flames lit my furnace all the way down. I was having a shitty week, but the booze was a tiny oasis of comfort, if only for a moment.
“Grazie,” I said as I handed the grappa back to him. When he reached for it, I noticed a nasty scar on his chiseled upper arm that looked like a bullet wound.
“Take that one for Roselli, Vit?”
“Dees? German sniper. In the hills near Vignola. I was with the Tenth Mountain Division when dey come up from Roma in ’44.”
“No shit? You were in the American army?”
“No, I was partigiano. I ’elp you guys through the montagne. I know ’em like back of my hand. We kill a lotta them fucking Nazis, let me tell you. I hate those blue-eyed jackals.” He grinned broadly, then drank.
Yeah, I thought as he handed the flask back to me, I like this guy.
59
From Tecate we took Highway 3 south through the mountains. We made the coast about three a.m., then stopped at the first big town. The boys looked surprised when I told them it was our destination, but of course, that was the first time I’d told anyone other than Frank anything.
Spazzo didn’t want his location revealed when he sent the telegram, so he had Western Union omit the transmitting exchange. It was a smart move, but it told me something—Spazzo didn’t have the muscle lined up or the logistics in his favor to make a ransom transfer go smoothly. Even in Mexico, it takes a few days to line up the local authorities and direct bribes to all the appropriate parties. I figured he was playing for time while allowing Frank the necessary few days he’d need to secure the hundred grand in greenbacks he’d be sending down to La Frontera. Clever.
But I was smarter than Johnny Spazzo on my worst day. That dumb bastard could never have dreamed that I knew that the six-digit code on the front of a telegram indicated the exact exchange from which any telex message was sent. Western Union used it as a kind of zip code to confirm senders and recipients.
It was a fairly new technology, but I’d read about it in the Long Beach paper some time back. God knows why it was in the paper, but it was the kind of thing you file away in the back of your head when you run with the crowd I do.
It took me about five phone calls, but I finally got someone who was able to tell me the exact location of the sending exchange—Ensenada—about two hours south of San Diego on the Baja coast.
Ensenada had a storied history of prostitution, blue movies, and hard drinking going back to the days of American Prohibition. It wasn’t as wide open as Tijuana, but it was farther down into the Mexican Frontera, a place where brass balls bought more than American dollars—exactly the kind of place a simp like Johnny Spazzo might go when he was in a spot. I still didn’t have anything close to a position fix, but as far as dead reckoning goes, it wasn’t bad.
The Western Union in Ensenada was the only one south of TJ for a hundred miles. It was a fair bet that Spazzo would return there to send his next message. And if it turned out that he had moved farther on down the line, at least we were already in Mexico on the hunt.
I was gambling as usual, but for once I had the loaded dice.
60
The telegraph office was just off Plaza de Agustín, two sloping blocks up from the waterfront. It didn’t open until nine so we grabbed a couple of rooms at the Hotel Bahia and knocked off for a few hours.
At nine a.m. sharp, I was standing outside the office, the first—and only—customer in line. Around 9:15, a clerk appeared from the back room with a sheaf of papers in her hand. She ignored me. I waited an impatient minute, then knocked lightly on the door.
The clerk looked up, raised a pair of cheaters to her eyes, and gazed out at me with Latin indifference. I looked at her and she looked at me for a moment, then she broke into a grin and disappeared under the counter. She reemerged a moment later, heading toward me. The lock clicked and then the door swung open, the little bell tinkling gently as the clerk motioned me in with a sweep of her hand.
She was dusky, maybe thirty, with a predator’s eyes and breasts like ripe mangos bulging from the top of her low-cut blouse. “Buenos días, señor,” she said, in a singsong cadence.
“Igualmente,” I replied.
I kept my eyes on her as I followed her to the counter, the second act every bit as good as the first. She popped up behind the counter, leaning over toward me as I neared, her ample charms on full display. I decided to forgo the formalities.
“Señorita,” I said, fishing a ten-peso note from my pocket and holding it up, “I have a couple of questions and I was wondering if you might be able to help me?”
“Claro que sí, amor,” she said, giving me a look that would have gotten her knuckles rapped in Catholic school.
Without breaking eye contact, she took the note from my hand, running her fingers gently across mine. Then she buried the money slowly in the abyss between her breasts and adjusted them for my benefit. I tried not to look down her blouse as she did, but there was just so much to not look down at.
We leered at each other for a second, and then I asked her name. She said it was Esperanza, Spanish for Hope. I laughed out loud when she said it.
I flirted with her some more to gain her confidence. It was pleasant enough work, and I needed the practice anyway. Then I looked around outside and asked her about any telegrams sent in the last few days, particularly one sent by an American with a broken nose.
She said she didn’t recall anyone like that, but a shifty-eyed local had come in the day before and sent a telegram to the United States, requesting that the sending station be omitted.
In her opinion the man was probably employed by one of the area jefes, or warlords, since he had a gun clearly visible in his waistband. She added that it wasn’t that uncommon in those parts.
I handed her another ten pesos and thanked her for her help. She told me I could always find her at the telegram office by day and at El Faro bar in the evenings, just down the street. I was pretty sure I knew what she did at her second job.
I leaned in close, into the fecund air around her, said, “Gracias, amor. Nos vemos,” winking for effect.
I was laying it on with a trowel, but I knew my audience.
* * *
I met the boys back at the hotel. Spanish was a snap for all of us due to it being a cousin of Italian. They had asked around and gotten the skinny on the Frontera. Baja was a fairly lawless land, even by Mexican standards, with a number of crime kings of various enterprises slicing up the region.
Ensenada was apparently more or less neutral ground where the various jefes could come and go as they pleased. But that didn’t mean they could waltz around without bodyguards. To do that would be to invite a hit. There were, of course, local police and Federales, but they were just so many palms to be greased. It reminded me of the Chicago I grew up in, when Capone ran the show and Mayor Thompson did everything in his power to stay the hell out of the way.
Outside Ensenada, a number of small towns were flung out along the coast and into the mountains to the east. Some of the warlords were said to live in these villages or in fortified haciendas nearby. The whole setup was almost medieval.
It was going to be tricky going around asking about Spazzo without drawing attention to ourselves and incurring the wrath of one of the barons. Then again, so much slime oozed through the streets of Ensenada on any given day that a few more questionable players drifting into town might not even register with anyone. We were fishermen anyway, after all.
Toward that end, we grabbed some coffee in the cantina across the street, making loud talk about all the fish we were going to catch, even asking a few questions of the waitress about who we might see to charter a boat down at the wharf. We did our best to look like dumb Americans down for a little recreation, libation, and sensation. It wasn’t that much of a stretch for two of us.
After we ate, we ambled down to the waterfront and found a nice lonely place by the fishing boats to talk. It stunk of dying fish and brine, but we had it all to ourselves.
I sat down on an ancient overturned dinghy, scoping the piers for any signs of trouble. Vito strolled onto the nearest dock, hands on his sturdy hips, marking a weathered black freighter with his piercing stare as it limped out past the breakers. Lino just leaned back against a gullshit-stained piling and pulled out a cigarette, handing another to me.
I sized up Lino. Maybe five seven, with a center of gravity just above the ankles. Broad through the beam and low on the waterline, he had the look of a longshoreman—hands to match. He seemed comfortable down on the dock, a muscle guy all the way. Lino didn’t talk much, but his silence told me enough.
They were a funny pair—Vito gregarious and brutally handsome, Lino quiet and just brutal. I needed them both, but they answered to Roselli, who didn’t need me at all or even particularly like me. I never let that thought leave my mind.
When my smoke burned down, I tossed the butt in the water, stepped up on the splintering boat, and signaled Vito over.
A pelican went knifing into the harbor a dozen yards away, disappearing with a sploosh beneath the gray-green water. I watched to see if he came up with anything, then launched into the game plan.
“Guys, the ransom telegram was placed from the office here in Ensenada—but not by Spazzo. When Ratello went down, that mammaluke Johnny knew he was out of friends and out of his league, so he scatted on down here where he probably has some protection. If we play this right, we can make him or his accomplice when they place the next telegram, tail ’em right to their hideout. With that advantage, we’ve got a pretty good chance of getting Helen out of there without firing a shot.”
“What happens if we don’t see nobody?” Lino asked.
“Then we probably have to pay the ransom, but I don’t like that one bit, not down here. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t just kill all of us once they have the money. Spazzo knows he’s a dead man if he ever shows up in Vegas again, so he’s got nothing to lose by greasing a couple of Roselli’s men and some no-name pilot.”
“And the signorina, Joe?”
A gull screamed overhead and swooped by in a dirty white flash.
“Something happens to her, there’ll be no place on earth for Spazzo to hide. If not me, then Frank, but somebody will make sure he dies. I don’t think he’ll hurt her, though. Frank Sinatra can afford the money, so as long as Helen comes out of here alive, Spazzo’s in the clear.”
Lino scrunched up his face, said, “But I …” then stopped.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“The money …”
“Yeah?” I could see the gears spinning toward high rev in his mind, practically smell the grease as they overheated. His eyes darted toward Vito, then back to me.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
“I don’t think we’ll see the money down here before late tonight. Frank and Johnny were sorting that out when we left. I imagine someone’s coming down with it from TJ or Mexico City. Probably won’t wire it in, too many tracks in the sand.”
“Okay, Joe, now what we gonna do?” asked Vito.
“Let’s head back. One guy watches the telegram office, the other two guys can ask around some more, see if we can get anything on Spazzo. We’ll meet back at the hotel after the Western Union closes. Capisce?”
“Sì,” they said together.
We walked back up the cobblestone landing toward the plaza. I thought we’d covered our bases pretty well, but Lino’s asking about the money threw me a little. It seemed like he knew something I didn’t.
Slowly, and very subtly, I began to feel like a guy taking a walk down a dark alley. We were only seventy miles from the United States, but it felt like a thousand.
61
We stopped in front of the telegraph office on the way back and I rapped out a greeting on the window. Esperanza looked out through the blinds at me, shook her head, and said, “Nada,” then gave me another one of those obscene looks. I matched it while zigzagging a finger between the boys and myself to indicate they were with me.
Lino took a seat on a shaded bench in the plaza close enough to keep an eye on the office. Vito and I walked on. He said he’d work the waterfront, where there was never a shortage of cons in the know. I decided to work the nightclub district a few blocks away, no bastion of moral rectitude, either.
Spazzo was probably off the radar in Ensenada, like us. That would make him difficult to find, but it also meant he w
ouldn’t warrant any particular loyalty from anyone who did know of him—just another gringo grafter, either way. Five bucks American from me was as good as it was from him. Money always talks—especially in places like Ensenada, where virtue and vice were turned upside down.
Armed with this heartening take on humanity, I waded into the dirty streets of Ensenada, an open sore of a town in a diseased region. Barefoot children played games with sleeping drunks in alleyways, and disheveled women in flimsy dresses watched me impassively from crumbling bar fronts as I passed through the neighborhoods, ever watchful for anything, anything at all.
I stopped in every bar and cantina, inquiring about a dark-haired American woman and a guy with a broken nose. I got a lot of shrugs, a dozen flat-out no’s, two offers of all the pleasures I could imagine and one, “Why don’t you go pound sand?” I didn’t know they had that one in Spanish.
On Helen and Spazzo, I got bupkes.
I took five for a smoke, had a short discussion with myself, wondering just how in hell I’d ended up in another no-win deal in another dead-end town. Last time, Buonomo, last time, I told myself. I flicked the butt at a cockroach and moved on to the next dead end.
About noon, I decided to grab a bite—any taqueria would do. At the next corner, I spotted a passable walk-up taco joint just across the intersection.
Avenida de las Águilas was a major boulevard and actually had a light and enough traffic to make a guy on foot respect it. When the light changed, I stepped off the curb. At once, all my senses fired off in danger mode.
It rose up fast in my peripheral vision—a large dark limousine—coming on like a charging bull, the driver laying on the horn as if he were the best goddamn mariachi in the whole world. Instinct took over.
I jumped back on the curb as the limo whooshed past me and on through the intersection without slowing a bit—might have missed me by two feet. Before I could muster a curse, another identical limo shot through behind it. Then another. There were five in all—each one zipping by at fifty miles an hour. I rubbed my chin a few times in curiosity while my reflexes retired from battle stations.
One for Our Baby Page 18
