The Dead Women of Juárez

by Sam Hawken

  “That was when we met Paloma. I knew her years before you did, Kelly. She and the other women, they made flyers for Ana and Ofelia and pressured the Procuraduría for answers. It made no difference to them that I was a policeman; they wanted only to help… and bring my girls home.”

  He was silent a while then, just listening to the hushed functioning of the machines. Somewhere down the hall two nurses talked about another patient and then went on to complain about long hours and scheduling. Sevilla supposed such conversations were the same everywhere, even here.

  “I wish you could talk to me, Kelly,” Sevilla said, and then he left.

  SEVENTEEN

  ORTÍZ AND GARCIA ATE A LONG lunch together and then they parted. Enrique followed Ortíz; Garcia would go back to his office now and spend the afternoon with the internet. Enrique burst with questions he wouldn’t be able to ask.

  He tried to call Sevilla, but there was no answer. The black truck led Enrique away from the tourist centers and away from the crowded heart of the city and even away from the colonias clinging to the desert edge of Juárez. It passed westward along roads that grew less crowded and wound among hills dotted with trees and hardy grass. He saw tall, black-painted bars of a long steel fence marching parallel to their route and coils of barbed wire like the kind that guarded Juárez’s civil buildings.

  The more open the drive became, the farther back Enrique fell until the truck was barely visible ahead of him. He almost didn’t notice the truck turn until he came closer and closer to where it stopped. There was nowhere else to go; he pulled over onto the shoulder and hoped no one would look back.

  A bright white gatehouse broke the line of the steel fence, the roof cupped and spired like a little church. An armed guard in a uniform went to the truck’s window and even from a distance Enrique recognized Ortíz speaking to the man. A moment passed and the ornate gate swung wide. The truck passed through. The way was closed behind.

  Enrique turned his eyes to hills. There were more trees here than anywhere along the way and the rolling terrain was greened. Great houses were stashed here and there among the woods, shockingly bright lawns carved out of mesquites and live oaks to go along with white pillars and many windows. There was also a long pool of grass that could only be a golfing fairway. The black pick-up vanished up the road and didn’t reappear.

  The gatehouse held three men with truncheons and rifles. They looked out through green-tinted windows at Enrique’s car as it approached and this time two emerged when he drew to a stop before the high gates.

  “Excúseme,” Enrique said.

  “Turn around,” said one of the guards.

  “I was wondering: what is this place?”

  The guard drew his truncheon from his belt. The other one held a gun. “I won’t tell you again, pendejo. Back up and turn around.”

  “I’m with the police.”

  Enrique showed the men his identification. The one with the truncheon stiffened. The second retreated to the gatehouse. Enrique saw the third talking on a telephone.

  When the second man returned, he was no longer armed. He spoke quietly to the first and the truncheon went back in its loop. “What can I do for you?” the guard asked then.

  “What is this place?”

  “Los Campos,” the first guard replied.

  Enrique nodded. “I’ve heard of it. Listen: I’d like to ask you about the truck that came through here before.”

  “We don’t talk about visitors,” the second guard said. “It’s not allowed.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any secrets; I know it was Señor Ortíz,” Enrique said. “I just wanted to know, does he live here?”

  The guards smirked at each other. The first shook his head. “No, he’s only visiting.”

  “May I ask who?”

  “He comes to see Señor Madrigal,” the first guard said, and the second elbowed him sharply. “Though I didn’t tell you that.”

  “Your secret is safe with me,” Enrique said pleasantly. “As long as you can keep a secret for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t mention I was here.”

  “I don’t even know you,” the guard replied.

  “Very good,” Enrique said. He put his car in reverse. “Thank you for your help, gentlemen.”

  He turned away from the gates of Los Campos and felt the guards’ eyes on him as he pulled a u-turn in the road. They were still watching him as they shrank away in his rear-view mirror, and then both the men and the gate were gone.

  Enrique did not know Los Campos specifically, but he knew of communities like it. They dotted the territory around Ciudad Juárez, well away from the unpleasantness of the city center, the crime and the violence. The big houses were owned by the men who ran the maquiladoras or made it in some other business. Some were ranchers whose holdings were hundreds of miles away. Others still made all their money across the border in the United States, but kept their wealth away from American tax collectors.

  Ortíz was not wealthy enough to live in one of these places. This Enrique knew before he even asked. The men and women of the gated communities drove Bentleys and Mercedes and didn’t share the cab of a pick-up truck with anyone. It was doubtful any of them had even so much as touched the seat of the pick-up truck, or would even come near one.

  He tried calling Sevilla again, but again there was only voice mail. “Call me when you have a chance,” Enrique said, and tossed the phone back on the seat beside him.

  Enrique was excited, but he also felt a fool. He was full of inquiries and mismatched information and names and faces he didn’t know. For hours Carlos Ortíz was a ghost to him and then suddenly he was there, dining with Captain Garcia and patrolling the city as if he were tax collector to some great lord who owned all he surveyed.

  The thought gave him pause. Enrique looked toward the fence still rolling past him, marking off land no one visited and where no house was built. There were not even roads leading there to make the promise of new life. The people of Los Campos owned the space because they could own it and not for any other reason.

  He wanted to call Sevilla a third time, but he would wait. Instead he drove.

  EIGHTEEN

  AT EL CERESO EVERYONE GOT A little and no more: a little space, a little time, a little safety. Even those prisoners injured in one way or another got little attention, though the most serious were kept in a segregated unit of eight beds. Estéban was one of the eight, shuffled to and from the mess hall on a staggered schedule that kept the badly hurt inmates from being caught in the crush of the meal line, but still dining among the rest.

  They were the walking wounded of El Cereso, with their broken bones and stitches. Estéban’s cast reached from the tips of his fingers to the middle of his upper arm. He hobbled because his legs were still sore from the beatings and his joints ached from being twisted until they nearly came loose of their sockets.

  Eye contact was frowned upon in any part of the jail, and the medical exceptions were doubly bound. The others knew that these men had more space, more freedom, more quiet, than all the rest. Those who had little hated those who had more and it did not enter into their minds that abundance was bought with extreme suffering.

  Estéban balanced his food tray on the artificial bend of his cast arm. He couldn’t hold it out the way the others did and the men behind the steam trays grumbled and cursed because this meant a smidgen of extra work. “Why don’t you break your other arm already?” one of the mess workers asked and then slopped black beans on the tray. “Then some pretty nurse can come feed you.”

  To this and other things Estéban said nothing.

  He was gone from El Cereso and the interrogation rooms and the prisoners and the guards and the police. He was gone from the city entirely. His body operated automatically, put food into itself without any guidance and did the little things to maintain itself simply because some part of Estéban’s brain knew they needed doing. He was by the concrete skate ponds o
f Parque Xtremo, shaded by the climbing tower. He ate spicy tamales, drank beer or got high and he talked to his best friend, the gringo.

  Sometimes when it was quiet and Estéban had no demands except to lie on his bunk and be alone, his talks with Kelly roved far and wide. Sometimes they were fanciful. He imagined there was a wedding in Kelly’s future, and though it seemed a womanly thing to do, they talked about who would be there and where the honeymoon would be and then, when all the pageantry was over, when the children would come.

  “I’ll be a good uncle,” Estéban said. “I’ll spoil them terrible. ‘¡Tío Estéban, Tío Estéban! ¿Qué tú nos trajó?’ And I’ll give them candy and all kinds of shit. That’s what uncles do.”

  Kelly agreed that was what uncles do. They gave knee rides and brought puppies as surprise birthday gifts. They took nephews fishing and sometimes for their first, secret beer. These were the things Estéban looked forward to doing when Kelly and Paloma were married.

  In the mess hall Estéban sat with the other invalids and ate his food. He stared past the tray and past the scratched metal surface of the table and to a winding, sun-soaked road leading south toward warm water and beaches and Mazatlán. Sometimes he saw cliff divers when he got there and tourists parasailed behind speedboats among great rocks that looked like sailing ships on the high seas.

  You want another beer? Kelly asked Estéban. Of course he did.

  The beer was bright and refreshing and perfect. Heat waves rose from the concrete ponds of Parque Xtremo. The skaters were still at their avocation despite the heat. They lipped the ponds and turned in the air as if gravity was temporarily of no concern and then down again out of sight.

  Estéban put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder and squeezed it.

  What’s wrong?

  “I wanted to make sure you were still here,” Estéban said. “Sometimes… sometimes I feel like this is all a dream. I don’t want to wake up, carnal. This is where I want to be.”

  They had Sunday lunch together at the house. Paloma served them while wearing her light dress that caught the sun. Today Estéban chose not to smoke afterward and the three of them sat talking in the front room within sight of their painting of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Seeing it used to make Estéban uncomfortable, but he wasn’t bothered by it anymore. Not now. Now it meant he was home and not somewhere dark and filthy and terrible.

  Two men raised voices to each other at another table. The benches and the tables themselves were fixed to the floor and the flatware was made of flimsy plastic, so they used the trays as weapons and then their feet and fists. A pair became a quartet and then a dozen. Food splattered and was trod underfoot. Imbalances left long unaddressed were suddenly and violently corrected. Estéban saw none of this.

  “I knew you were the kind of man I could count on,” Estéban told Kelly in the Parque Xtremo. “I knew it from the first time, you know?”

  They sat on the little couch in the front room. Paloma had limonada set out already. Estéban could hear her in the kitchen with the pots and the dishes.

  “I’m glad you’re getting married to my sister. I’m glad we’re brothers. I always wanted a brother like you.”

  He wanted to hug Kelly, but that was too much emotion for two men. They bumped knuckles. Estéban had some of the lemonade. It tasted like beer.

  “I think we should all go down to Mazatlán together,” Estéban said.

  Around him the invalids were up and the guards waded among warring bodies with clubs and shouts. Estéban sat sightless and deaf even as a prisoner stabbed him through the neck with a sharp piece of steel. He toppled to the floor and didn’t see the blood pooling around him; only the house fading and Paloma coming from the kitchen to be with them and Kelly smiling in the sun until the sun went black.

  PART FOUR

  Justicia

  ONE

  THE CHURCH WAS CALLED IGLESIA del Anuncio, the Church of the Annunciation, and it was not the ugliest such building he had ever seen, though it was close. The neighborhood around it was crumbling into sun-scorched dust and so was the sanctuary inside and out. Frescoes were faded and even the great crucifix above the altar was chipping and flaking. When there was not money or manpower enough to tend to Christ, Sevilla mused, a church was ready to die.

  He sat away from Ella Arellano though he saw her well enough. She wore black like the cluster of women around her. They assembled before the church at the appointed time. Sevilla didn’t approach them, but he knew Ella was aware of his presence.

  The battered old confessional was near Sevilla and during the long service his eyes were drawn to it. He hadn’t been inside one since Liliana passed, and it was just as well. When he needed to confess, he confessed to her. If his sins were too much for Liliana, then no priest could hope to understand.

  Out of habit he said the prayers and from memory he sang the hymns. When it was time for Communion he stayed in his pew, though he put two hundred pesos in the plate as an offering. Afterward he lit a candle for Estéban Salazar. The old church made him feel sad because it was unloved. Half the place was empty and the other half was growing irrevocably aged.

  When the mass was all done, Sevilla trailed outside behind Ella and the women. Ella came to him in the narthex while the women greeted the priest in turn. She wore a veil like the others and seemed much older than Sevilla remembered her being. “Thank you,” she said.

  “There’s no need to thank me,” replied Sevilla. “I wanted to see you.”

  “Do you have a car?” Ella asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Meet us. We’ll go on foot.”

  She gave Sevilla an address and he wrote it down. He didn’t know the street, but he knew he could find it.

  “Who are they?” Sevilla asked of the women in black.

  “They’re like you,” Ella said. She went back to them.

  Sevilla left the church and went back to his car. He made two wrong turns finding the address, but he got there before Ella and the women in black. Sitting behind the wheel on the sleepy Sunday avenue he felt stupid and exposed, but there was no one watching him.

  Eventually he saw them coming, a little processional for some cause or saint unspecified. When he left his car he saw them hesitate as a group, like a horse shied from sudden movement on the ground, but Ella calmed them. “Come inside,” she told Sevilla.

  The house was small and poor like the others around it. There was barely enough room for all of them, but they moved as if they had long practice doing so. Only Sevilla was out of place. He was always excusing himself and moving here and there because he was forever in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

  After some time there was food and drink and the women settled. Before they talked about the things poor women talked about: families and money and the news of the neighborhood that would make no difference to anyone from the outside. This was something Sevilla was not a part of, but now they looked to him as if his next words meant everything.

  “You left your home,” said Sevilla to Ella.

  “They’re watching.”

  “Who?”

  “The men with the black truck. The ones who took Paloma away.”

  Sevilla was stung coldly. He fumbled for his notepad and it seemed a long time before he had it firmly in his hands. “You saw someone take her?”

  “Yes.”

  Ella told Sevilla the story, about the mothers of the missing, about Paloma and how the men in the black pick-up came. She showed Sevilla the last of her fading bruises. All the while the mothers listened in silence like stones bearing witness.

  “Did they say names?” Sevilla asked. “Did they talk to each other?”

  “No names.”

  “Did you see a man, he’s called Ortíz.” Sevilla described him, but the mothers shook their heads no.

  “Three men,” Ella said. “Big. Strong.”

  “They are cowards,” said one of the mothers. “Who else but a coward can beat a woman?”

  Sevilla p
ressed, “Have you ever seen this man I’m talking about? What about the license on the truck? Did any of you get it?”

  Another one of the mothers raised her hand slightly. It was a schoolgirlish thing to do, but she was no longer young. “I’ve seen him.”

  “You have? Where?”

  “Not for a long time,” the woman said. “But years ago he used to come and talk to the local girls about going to parties. We knew this was just a story, that he was taking girls to the brothels, but some still went with him.”

  His heart beat quicker, but his hands were steady. Sevilla realized he was not thirsty for a drink. His head was clear. “How long ago was this? Did he always come alone? Tell me everything you can remember.”

  The woman did, but it was very little. When the subject turned back to the black pick-up truck and the big, strong men there was nothing else to add. The men struck like lightning and were gone just as quickly.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?”

  Ella shook her head. “We did.”

  “What? You did?”

  “Yes. We went to the police right away and they made us give a report. All of us here told the story.”

  They gave Sevilla the station number. He knew it, and had even passed it on the way to the church. It was a small place with only a handful of policemen assigned to it for a neighborhood as heavily populated as any near the city center, but the poor paid little tax.

  “I don’t understand. All of you made statements on the day?”

  “Yes. But the police don’t listen. They never listen. Even before the drug wars they wouldn’t listen to women. Women have no voices.”

  Sevilla sat back in the little upright chair he’d been given. He rubbed his eyes for a moment to think, to hide behind the action and let his mind catch up. When he looked again, the mothers of the missing were as sober as they had been before, though he sensed their anger.

  “I saw no report,” Sevilla said. “But I’m a state policeman.”

  “Then you can do nothing?” asked one of the mothers.