“Well, Araceli, this is really something.”
Aguirre was enjoying herself, practically giving off sparks of adrenaline. Ever since they had been students together, he had wished that she were not quite so fearless. She still looked more like an underfed university student than an admired public official with a bright political future. She wore round glasses. Her short hair revealed her silver earrings, one shaped like the sun and the other like the moon. Only the pronounced circles under her eyes gave her brown, fine-boned face some gravity.
“I want you to hear his story,” she said. “Some of it fits with what we already know. Some of it is new. If it’s true, this is even worse than we think.”
“We would need his testimony to seriously consider prosecuting Junior and his uncle,” Méndez said. “What does the Colonel want?”
“He thinks you can get the Americans to save his hide. He fantasizes about their witness-protection program. At minimum, he wants a transfer to a prison as far from Baja as possible.”
“That’s not easy. When we do we see him?”
“Tomorrow. Saturdays are especially charming at the penitentiary.”
“Short notice. I know you won’t like this, but I think it would be wise to bring Isabel Puente on this little safari.”
“Ay Leo, please. The gringa cubana? That woman is imperious and insufferable.”
“You are unfair to my friend Isabel.”
“You have a strange weakness for her. The last thing I want is her stomping around in that prison.”
“If the Colonel really thinks the Americans can help him, it would be a perfect incentive. And we might be able to get them interested in a deal with him.”
Aguirre tapped with a pen. She realized he was right, but she didn’t like backing down. He continued: “Even if she doesn’t say a word—”
“She better not!”
Méndez relaxed. “She doesn’t have to. Her presence will appeal to his appetites.”
“Very well. But if anything happens to her, don’t blame me. If she plays the pushy cubana in there, they might decapitate her and play soccer with her head.”
The cold returned Saturday morning, along with gray skies.
In his readings about the U.S. penal system, Méndez had come across the term “extraction.” It referred to operations in U.S. penitentiaries when a rebellious inmate barricaded himself in a cell and responded to appeals to reason with threats, violence and hurled excrement. Four guards would put on helmets and body armor, arm themselves with clubs, shields and mace, and charge into the cell in a tactical formation to subdue and “extract” the inmate as rapidly and safely as possible.
Méndez wondered what term the yanqui correctional experts might come up with to describe a visit by the Mexican authorities to an inmate chieftain in the penitentiary of Baja California.
Méndez, Athos, Araceli Aguirre and Isabel Puente arrived at the prison at 11 a.m. They had brought Porthos and two of the largest, meanest-looking officers in the Diogenes Group. Méndez, Aguirre and Puente had a quick strategy session in the car. It mainly consisted of Aguirre giving Puente a stern lecture. Puente sat next to Méndez in back, chewing gum, impassive behind sunglasses. She was dressed down in jeans and a ponytail.
“Forget about American prisons,” Aguirre said, twisted around in the front seat. “You never saw anything like this. The inmates have guns. Children live inside. The capos build houses, hire servants, bodyguards, whores—”
“I know about the prison,” Puente said tonelessly.
Aguirre ignored her. “Don’t trust the guards. The inmates will harass you for money. And they will tell you what they would like to do to you. Put up with it. No hard looks. No stupid confrontations. And for the love of God, you’re in a foreign country. So no guns.”
Aguirre got out, lecture over, slamming the door. Puente reached down calmly to adjust the top of her boot; Méndez looked away when he saw the concealed holster. He did not intend to be the one who tried to disarm Isabel Puente.
“Warm welcome,” Puente said.
“You have to understand,” Méndez said soothingly. “Araceli has worked hard to gain trust in there. It goes against her principles to bring an American agent inside.”
As they crossed the gravel parking lot, Méndez saw that Athos had an AK-47 assault rifle slung across his shoulder. He gave the weapon a pained look. Athos raised his eyebrows over his sunglasses in response.
“That zoo in there is a sniper’s paradise, Licenciado,” Athos said. “If it were up to me, I would have brought the whole unit. You are putting yourself in the mouth of the wolf in there.”
It was visiting day. The lines of families were especially long. Among the features that made the prison unique in Mexico and the world were the hundreds of wives and children who lived inside with the inmates. The families went to work and school and returned each day like commuters, blending with the crush of visitors. The prison had been built as a city jail for five hundred inmates, but it housed several thousand: federal and state offenders, incorrigible convicts and wrongly accused suspects, hit men and purse snatchers, drug lords and drug mules, men and women, the vicious and the hapless, the privileged and the indigent.
A guard with a sallow face, a scarf around his neck and an Uzi strapped over his shoulder let them in. He looked eighteen at most. Another guard stamped their hands with red ink insignias, like a nightclub bouncer. The guard with the Uzi walked them through a yellow-walled office area and told them to wait. The madhouse racket of the prison yard reverberated off tiled floors and cement walls: shouts, children laughing, Vicente Fernández crooning, construction hammers pounding, the bark of a good-sized dog, and three small explosions that Méndez assumed were firecrackers because nobody paid any attention.
Wrapped in a multicolored shawl, Araceli Aguirre stamped her high heels on the tile. Méndez couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the cold or the anticipation. She leaned against him with a giggle and whispered, “We might as well just move my office into the prison, we spend so much time here. This is a human rights apocalypse.”
The deputy warden led them down a hallway. The noise got louder. In the watch commander’s office, two guards studied a bank of video monitors. A third stood by a sliding gate with a shotgun across his chest. The chunky, shaven-headed watch commander slumped behind a desk, blowing listlessly into an empty paper cup. He glanced at them, unimpressed. He nodded at the guard with the shotgun, who unlocked the gate.
The prison yard was reached through a cage filled with relatives, lawyers and other visitors, the red stamps on their hands distinguishing them from the inmates, who were also in civilian dress, on the other side of the chain-link fence. Méndez’s expeditionary force advanced to a second gate. They were met by a lanky inmate in a San Diego Padres cap and a leather coat. Méndez recognized him as a former state police detective whom the Diogenes Group had arrested along with the Colonel.
“Rico, you probably remember Licenciado Méndez,” Aguirre said without a trace of irony, as if they had run into each other in a supermarket. “Shall we?”
Four grim-faced prison guards led the way. Whenever Méndez entered the yard, he felt as if he were stepping into a hallucination. It resembled the plaza of a bustling and thuggish village. A basketball court was surrounded by two-story blocks of housing called carracas with spiral staircases leading to outdoor catwalks. The walls were painted in green, orange and maroon and decorated by murals of historical figures, religious images, zoot-suited pachucos, Aztec monarchs, Border Patrol helicopters swooping over figures running through canyons. Most of the buildings were occupied on the ground floors by ramshackle businesses with hand-painted signs: restaurants, grocery stores, a barbershop.
Years earlier, the prison administration had found itself overwhelmed by an excess inmate population of migrants from all over Mexico. Politics had made the federal government disinclined to lend a hand; the opposition party was strong in Baja, so the mess at the prison had be
en a perennial weapon for the ruling party of that era. The authorities decided to let the inmates fend for themselves. The inmates created their own businesses and mafias, built their own homes—townhouses that sold for forty thousand dollars, cubicles that sold for two hundred. A microsociety blossomed within the walls. At night, the guards only dared to venture into the internal “streets” the way the police entered the toughest colonias of the city outside: in platoons and girded for combat.
It took longer than Méndez had hoped to get to the Colonel. The Saturday crowd was thick with strolling families, timid backcountry migrants, tattered heroin addicts who prowled and scratched and hustled. The phalanx of VIPs caused a commotion. A human whirlpool encircled the human rights commissioner. The inmates shouted her name or simply “Doctora.” They jostled close to shake her hand, appeal for help, steal a moment of her time.
Méndez realized that Aguirre was not going to brush them off. She was unruffled by the size and noise of the swarm. She inched forward, the shawl draped over her willowy long-backed frame. She hoisted and inspected a toddler with a respiratory disease. She nodded gravely at the semicoherent patter of a bleary-eyed convict on crutches who wore multiple vests, a watch cap and an Artful Dodger overcoat that looked as if he slept in it. Aguirre was doing her job.
Athos stayed by Méndez, AK-47 at the ready, eyeing the crowd, the balconies and rooftops. Porthos shadowed Aguirre, shoving away inmates violently but surreptitiously, his hands low so the human rights commissioner wouldn’t notice. The crowd ebbed and swirled. A group of women shouldered forward. They had an elderly female inmate in tow—bent over, gray-haired, grandmotherly-looking. They wanted Aguirre to see her: Exhibit A for the injustice of it all. Can you believe they arrested this poor old comadre for smuggling drugs, Doctora? She was just in the wrong car at the wrong time. Can’t you do something for her, Doctora? Aguirre pulled the woman aside, a comforting arm around the frail back in a mangy green sweater. Aguirre and the woman took turns speaking into each other’s ears, straining over the noise. Aguirre pulled out a pad and took notes.
Athos sidled up to Méndez and murmured: “Listen, Licenciado, perhaps it would be best to cut short the tourism, what do you think?”
Isabel Puente’s look suggested wholehearted agreement.
Méndez shrugged. “What do you want me to do? Every time I came here when I was commissioner, it was the same. They all want you to make them a miracle.”
Aguirre leaned over a counter into a wooden hut that was a handicrafts store and, judging from the mattress and bassinet on the floor, a tiny residence for the inmate entrepreneur and his family. The ponytailed owner was an artisan who decorated belt buckles with images of curvaceous women, AK-47s, marijuana leaves. After handing Aguirre a folder containing documents about his court case, he tried to make a sale.
“Perhaps your husband would like another one, Doctora, or one of the gentlemen with you,” he said in what sounded to Méndez like the cadences of Michoacán. “This is really a complicated design, I call it the Sinaloan Phantom, the skull with the cowboy hat requires an infernal amount of detail…”
Méndez noticed a scraggly inmate with buzz-cut hair and a cotton workshirt shoving his way toward Aguirre, rasping her name. The inmate wore a necklace with a bullet as a medallion. Méndez did not like what he saw.
“Porthos,” he called.
The big commander was way ahead of him. By the time Méndez reached them, Porthos had intercepted the inmate and applied a crushing one-handed grip to his throat. Clearing a path in the crowd with his free arm, Porthos pinned the inmate to a wall beneath a dragon painted on a food stand run by Asian smugglers.
The inmate squawked and gurgled. Porthos tightened his hold. Some inmates laughed, others yelled insults. Méndez cursed. They were like hyenas in here.
Méndez fought his way to Aguirre’s side and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Araceli, please,” Méndez said. “I would gladly spend the entire day here, but…”
They followed Rico down a narrow walkway behind a cell block to the Colonel’s compound. It was a cement yard half the size of a tennis court: two picnic tables, barbells around a weight bench. A slobbering pit bull strained a leash. The open space fronted a two-story block of housing that had been custom-built for a drug lord years earlier and purchased by the Colonel for himself, several of his imprisoned former police officers, and henchmen and servants he had hired from the inmate population.
Two stern inmates in cowboy hats manned the gate of the compound. Two more stood sentry on a second-floor walkway of the building. Like Rico, they wore long coats or bulky jackets. Several did not bother to conceal the pistols in their belts, declaring to the world that the prison had turned reality upside down.
The Colonel himself was on hand to greet his visitors. The dutiful host stood at attention in the middle of the cement patio area, arms spread magnanimously. He was resplendent in a brown-and-gold Fila jogging suit with a brown scarf tucked around his throat and into the warm-up jacket. He was thickset, with a long torso, long arms and disproportionately short legs. He wore a baseball-style cap adorned with the English word “Skipper.”
“Doctora Araceli,” the Colonel called, and embraced Aguirre.
Then he swiveled toward Méndez, who noticed Athos tense next to him. The Colonel made the most of the moment. He advanced slowly, ceremonially, his hands wide and upturned.
“Licenciado Méndez,” the Colonel boomed. “It is sincerely a pleasure to see you. I would like to welcome you. I would like to thank you humbly and profoundly for accepting my invitation and taking the time to come see me.”
The former police chief gave him a big hug with the requisite double back slap. Méndez smelled cigarettes, tequila and Old Spice—the same aroma the Colonel had given off the day they had arrested him. The day the Colonel had warned Méndez that Junior Ruiz Caballero would avenge this insult by cutting off Méndez’s ears and making him eat them, one at a time.
The Colonel disengaged. His laugh echoed in the compound.
This man is even more of a psychopath than I remembered, Méndez thought. But he’s shrewd. He’s using us and this scene out here in the open, making people think he has new allies.
“Good morning,” Méndez muttered.
Araceli Aguirre leaned close to the Colonel and spoke in his ear, gesturing briefly at Isabel Puente. The Colonel’s eyes brightened. With a mischevous smile, he stepped forward, took her hand and bent over it with a flourish.
“Welcome, señorita,” he murmured, all gallantry and discretion.
“Thank you,” Puente said, attempting a polite smile.
“I invite you all to come upstairs and have some coffee,” the Colonel declared. “Please, this way.”
The Colonel reached the base of the spiral stairway. He paused. A young woman had emerged from a door on the second-floor balcony. She began a wobbly, hip-swinging descent. Her pointy heels rang on the metal steps. She had billowing, pink-streaked blond hair and a heart-shaped face that looked fifteen years older than the rest of her. She wore a pink windbreaker zipped to her throat and, despite the chill, tight denim shorts over sinewy legs.
The Colonel gave the woman a look of homicidal fury that stopped her cold. She gripped the stairway railing, one foot in the air, hair tumbling. The Colonel turned his glare on one of the henchmen on the balcony. The man hurried over and reached to help the startled strawberry blonde pick her way back up the stairs. He steered her into a doorway and slammed the door behind them, cutting off the strains of a song by Los Plebeyos.
The Colonel wheeled with parade-ground precision toward Aguirre. Her face had registered uncertainty for the first time since their arrival.
With a big smile and a little bow, the Colonel said: “After you. Please.”
A recent layer of lemon scent melded with musty and unpleasant smells in the Colonel’s windowless quarters. Méndez, Aguirre, Puente and the Colonel sat on wood chairs around a metal folding table in
a narrow living room area. There was a television on a high shelf, a portable stereo, a cell phone hooked to a charger, a samurai sword on a little table near the short hallway leading to a sleeping alcove. Whiskey and tequila bottles stood on a tray. A bulletproof vest hung from a hook. A velvet tapestry depicting a colonial church in a country landscape covered one wall; photos of the Colonel with relatives, soldiers and policemen filled another. The Colonel was a career army officer in his fifties. He had been appointed chief of the state police when the theory held sway that the culture of the Mexican military insulated its officers from corruption and made them the ideal reformers to clean up civilian law enforcement.
By some silent accord, the four prison guards remained outside the compound. Méndez doubted that any guard had come through that gateway since the Colonel had moved in. Two Diogenes officers were downstairs in the yard. Athos checked the interior and stationed himself outside the door on the balcony. Porthos settled his bulk onto a low couch near Méndez. Rico stood behind a counter in the kitchenette. A short youth with Mixteco features, wet-combed hair and a Georgetown sweatshirt served coffee. He wore a black thread crucifix around his neck.
“The ironies of life,” the Colonel said. “When I was a young captain, I had the privilege of serving as warden at a problematic prison in Chihuahua. I can assure you that by the time I was done, there was order, respect, dignity. And now, I find myself in this inferno. This zoo. National Geographic would love this place. In this warped institution you have all the degradation and the degeneracy that our society has come to, my friends. An enormous sea of shit. If you’ll pardon me, Doctora. And señorita.”
Triple Crossing Page 8
