by Lewis Shiner
“Oops,” Madelyn said. “Sorry.” They slowed their pace, and Madelyn said, “Can we get rid of the elephant in the room? Or in the street, as the case may be? Cole and I never had very much in common. We were a couple of kids in love with the idea of being in love. I’ve seen the two of you together, and it was never like that for us.”
“It’s a tad weird, that’s all.”
“Tell me about it. Alex and I raised three kids, none of them with the same two parents, none of them with both our dna. Are you religious?”
Sallie shook her head. “Raised reform Jewish, couldn’t even sustain that.”
“I’m Christian, something I tend to keep to myself around this crowd. Still, I have to say this. I feel like there’s some kind of destiny operating here that brought all of us into each other’s lives. Maybe that’s an artifact of having been born when we were born, that sense of fatedness. Or maybe the mess we’ve made of everything really is just the transition to a new age. A new sun, as they say down here.”
Sallie laughed. “People used to talk like that all the time. I kind of liked it. What happened?”
“Not enough money in it, I guess. How did you get to be a songwriter?”
Sallie told her, and that led to Dave and the rise and fall of her career, and the rise again with Krupheimer, and the long fall again after. By that time they’d arrived at the Van Gogh Restaurant and gotten seated at an outdoor table facing the square.
“I loved that Krupheimer record,” Madelyn said. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so. It was the right record at the right time for so many women. It showed us we could be powerful and vulnerable and that both were okay. It was the first music that a lot of us felt was ours.”
“I’m always flattered when I hear that,” Sallie said. “And yet the album was produced by a man, the other musicians were men…”
“Sure they were. But in the end they were serving you, serving your songs. I can’t help but compare that to what we’re doing here. Sometimes I worry that the whole Ark Project is white paternalism, that we’re just colonizing Guanajuato. Even though Alex has legitimate roots here. It comes down to who’s being served, right? At least I hope it does.”
They ordered dinner, Sallie managing to do it in Spanish. Madelyn’s Spanish, she noted, was fluent and virtually without accent, though her English carried a hint of Texas twang. When Sallie complimented her on it, she said, “Years of work. The things that used to come easily have gotten so hard now that I’m old.”
The conversation, however, was effortless, and Sallie was impressed to learn that Madelyn had been on hand for the SoHo art underground in the early seventies. They talked painting and literature, and after Madelyn snagged the check and paid it, she said, “There was one other thing. Would you consider teaching a songwriting class?”
“At the University? I don’t know if I’m qualified. I did one at the Ninety-Second Street Y…”
“Actually,” Madelyn said, looking embarrassed, “it would be at the free school. The school was part of my price for coming here. We set it up so the board is all locals, and most of the teachers are local too. This friend of Cole’s, Félix Gutiérez, is teaching guitar, there’s classes for basketmaking and silversmithing, there’s agronomy classes, all at no charge.”
“Well, sure, I’d love to. But Cole is a songwriter, too.”
“If Cole wants to be part of it, that’d be fine, but he’s going to be plenty busy. It was you the board specifically asked for.”
Madelyn walked her home. Sallie invited her in, and Madelyn said, “No, I shouldn’t have kept you out as late as I did. Take care, and I’ll see you soon.”
“You’re okay walking home by yourself?”
“This is a very safe city,” Madelyn said. “It’s one of its many charms.” Her smile fell away. “I hope we can keep it that way.”
*
Three black suvs belonging to Miguel “El Cicatriz” Ortiz came to a hard stop outside La Alhóndiga, the old grain warehouse where Alex had his offices. Their tires cried out in a chorus that sounded nearly human. Two gunmen each got out of the first and last vehicles and stood at attention in front of the flight of steps that led from the cobblestone street to the main door. They wore black from caps to boots, with Kevlar vests, M-16s, and holstered Glocks. The Christmas wreath hanging from the railing provided a touch of incongruity.
You didn’t see los narcos on the streets of Guanajuato, and a crowd immediately formed at a respectful distance. Another gunman got out of the middle car, followed by Álvaro in jeans and a bright green hooded sweatshirt bearing the logo of the Mexico fútbol team. The two of them climbed the steps and the gunman pounded on the door with the heel of his fist.
Alex had been watching it unfold from the time the trucks entered the tunnel that opened into the southwest corner of the city. The room was crowded. Rosa, his deputy mayor, was in the seat next to him and Cole and Sallie stood behind him.
«Should I let them in?» Rosa asked, «or do you want to do it yourself?»
«Go ahead,» Alex said. «Bring Álvaro to my office and give the sicario a cup of coffee.»
They both stood up and Alex saw the look of dread on Cole’s face. “It’s okay,” he said in English. “All the guns and trucks and bullshit are just for intimidation.”
“It’s working,” Cole said.
“Alex?” Sallie said. “I want to make this really clear. If anything happens to Cole—I mean anything—you better pray you don’t come back here alive. You guys may be pacifists. I’m not.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to either one of us.” She was bristling and he knew to keep his physical distance. “I promise.”
Cole hugged her and said, “I’ll call you after I get there if I can.”
“I love you,” Sallie said, with an edge of defiance.
“I love you, too,” Cole said.
They passed through the reception area, where Madelyn was curled on the couch with a book.
“How can you read at a time like this?” Sallie said.
Madelyn’s smile was more crooked than usual. “Easy,” she said. “I don’t plan to remember any of it.” She reached up for Alex’s hand. “What’s the appropriate wish, here? Break a leg?”
“I think ‘good luck’ would be okay.”
“Good luck,” she said. “Come back to me.” She glanced at Cole. “Both of you.”
Álvaro was admiring the office stereo when Cole and Alex walked in. Cole embraced him first, than Alex. Álvaro ran one hand over the stubble on Alex’s head. «With the short hair and the mustache, you look so much like your father.»
«That was the idea. To remind everyone. I did it for the election and I guess it worked.»
Álvaro nodded. «You boys ready?»
Alex unlocked his desk drawer and took out an attaché case. «Andamos.»
They had to pass through the reception area again. The sicario sat on the edge of an easy chair, gloves off, drinking coffee and laughing with Rosa. He jumped up when he saw the look on Álvaro’s face, slopping some coffee on the floor. Rosa told him she would take care of it.
Alex had stressed to Madelyn and Sallie how important it was to not make a fuss in front of Álvaro, and they both did their jobs. Madelyn waved and said, “See ya,” and Sallie kissed Cole without lingering too long over it, and if her eyes were a little intense, maybe Álvaro didn’t notice.
The sicario opened the rear door of the middle suv. Cole got in first, then Alex and Álvaro. Alex put the attaché case on the floor and fastened his seat belt. The drive to Guadalajara, where Ortiz had his ranch, would take three hours. He tried to get comfortable.
«Music?» Álvaro said. He didn’t wait for an answer. He snapped his fingers at the soldier in the front seat, and Trio Los Panchos began to sing “Celoso” over the audio system. The suv eased into motion, tight behind the lead truck, and they were off.
*
Within two months of his father’s death, Alex had made his f
irst moves, buying more and more solar and wind turbine companies and taking some risks to pile up short term gains. He bought a private jet to take him to Guanajuato, spending more time there than in Dallas, renewing his father’s relationships, spreading money around, planting seeds both figuratively and literally as he bought up abandoned lots on the upper slopes of the city and bulldozed them into terraces and got alfalfa growing there. He convinced a few of the University professors to put solar panels on their roofs and sent Ava, now on the company payroll, to install them at cost.
The only people who knew the entire plan were Ava and Madelyn, and Madelyn had been a tough sell. “Why would I want to teach in Guanajuato,” she’d asked, “when I’ve got a shot at a fellowship here?” This was a week after Ava had pitched Project Ark to him, and only a few hours since he’d realized that he was going to go through with it. It was a Saturday night and they were eating take-out Chinese at the kitchen table.
“Because instead of teaching the sons and daughters of white privilege, you’d be teaching kids with a real hunger to learn?”
“Nice try, but you know as well as I do that the majority of those kids are the sons and daughters of corrupt officials and narco profiteers and capitalist exploiters of the poor, to borrow a phrase of yours. They’re privileged in ways these smu kids could only fantasize about. Plus I’ve got my esl classes at El Centro.”
“Okay, how about because it’s only a question of time until there’s a mass shooting at smu? Until smu goes broke because the middle class has no money and the ultra-rich believe that education is treason? Until the drought gets so bad that only the rich have water? Until there are tornados every week? Until there are armed vigilantes roaming the streets and stopping anybody who doesn’t look like them?”
Madelyn opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.
“It’s not unreasonable to think we could live another twenty-five, thirty years,” Alex said. “Long before then, this country is going to be divided into red zones and green zones. It’s happening already, with gated communities and these exclusive subdivisions that have their own restaurants and shopping and private schools and security patrols. Hell, we’re living in our own green zone here. I don’t want our kids and our grandkids to grow up in that world.”
She pushed her food around the plate without eating any. “You’re determined to do this, aren’t you?”
“If you can talk me out of it, please do. I don’t think you can. This is life and death, mine and everybody I love. Maybe even the death of western civilization. Ava called it the Ark for good reason. This could be our last chance to preserve books and music and cultural diversity and art and science and all the other things that we cared about when we were growing up.”
“And that’s your hole card. Ava. If I don’t go along with this, I won’t see her anymore.”
“You’ll see her. As long as it’s possible to travel to Mexico.”
He read the pain and despair in her face. He wanted to be a comfort to her and didn’t know how. If he tried to touch her, she would submit and nothing more. “I need to think,” she said.
Alex tried to project love and sympathy. “There’s time,” he said.
How much time was anybody’s guess. The need to move slowly and carefully tied him in knots. Yet by 2014 he’d been elected mayor of Guanajuato and had stepped up the solar conversion, charging homeowners what they could afford, adding what little tax money he could divert to it, and making up the rest out of his own pocket. Gwyn and Ethan and Ethan’s wife and daughter were ready to move down when he gave the word, and their commitment had sealed Madelyn’s as well. Still he couldn’t go all the way, not to the wind turbines, not to sending invitations to everyone he cared about, not to the withering away of capitalism itself, not until he solved the problem of los narcos.
On his darker days he’d had a fantasy. He could buy a hundred Kalashnikovs on the black market, train a militia in secret, plant explosives in the tunnels. If one of the cartels tried to take over the city he could trap them and massacre them, and on some angry days he let himself picture the bloodbath vividly.
The fantasy always gave way to practicality. To unleash that kind of violence would be, as they said in Spanish, to open a box of thunder. Taking the guns back from the militia afterward would not be easy, not once they’d tasted that power and been hailed as heroes. And he would have a pile of corpses on his hands, his own personal Vietnam. He had to find another way.
Ortiz was the key. His star had been steadily on the rise since Alex and Cole had first met him at Jesús’s wake, and he now controlled several thousand square miles of territory centered on Guadalajara. He was not the bloodiest of the narcos, not given to making statements with his corpses like hanging them from highway overpasses or carving messages in their flesh. Instead he was seen as efficient, killing when he had to, bribing when appropriate, a known quantity, a man who kept his word and therefore could be dealt with, a man it was not necessary to eliminate, and so, in the end, a man who’d become too powerful to eliminate. Ortiz had only minimal influence in Guanajuato because Guanajuato had its own economy—tourists, the university, the gm plant in nearby León. Drugs were around if you wanted them, supplied by Ortiz, but no gun battles in the streets or heads impaled on wrought-iron gates.
When Alex was ready, he put out the word that he wanted to talk. The next night he got a call at home from Álvaro. Ortiz had invited him and Cole to a poker game at his ranch, ten thousand dollar buy-in, each, in cash. They could discuss Alex’s business while they played.
Alex said that he himself was willing, and that Cole was not part of the discussion. Álvaro was friendly but firm. The invitation was for Alex and Cole both.
Alex met with Cole the next afternoon.
“Fuck,” Cole said. “What do you think he wants with me?”
“I have no idea. All I know is, this is the last piece. Without it we’ve got no future. I’m not going to tell you there’s no danger. But I can’t see any advantage he’d get from killing either one of us. If he wanted to kidnap us, he could do that any time he wanted.”
Cole’s eyes held a sadness Alex hadn’t expected. “I’m in,” he said. “Sallie’s not going to like it. I’ll just have to make her understand.”
*
Cole measured his days by the memories they brought. He might wake up thinking about the chain glittering in the sunlit air above the drilling platform, or the cold porcelain of the tub as he fought off his overdose, or the hiss of the bus’s airbrakes on the endless night after the concert at the Wiltern. They never lost their edge, those memories, unlike the shadows moving on the white backdrop at the Dylan concert, or the taste of spinach leaves pulled straight from the soil of Eden Farm, or the cheers of the audience at his first New Year’s Eve gig with Sallie, memories that had worn down like coins that had passed through too many fingers.
That morning he’d woken up remembering the massed voices of mariachis and drunken diners on that enchanted night when he’d first met Álvaro. Then he remembered the ordeal that lay in front of him and he wished he could wish away the past and the future both.
He couldn’t see the ranch house from the first perimeter stop, a gate in a ten-foot-high hurricane fence topped with razor wire. The gate guards checked each truck individually before waving them in. Cole practiced his poker face.
The rainy season was half a year away and the scrub oaks were gray-green, the long grass brown. They were a mile above sea level, a thousand feet lower than Guanajuato, the air still thin and clear, higher mountains visible in the distance.
They passed through a second checkpoint a hundred yards from the house. «At night,» Álvaro said, «the dogs run loose between the two fences,» as if Cole might be considering an escape. He pulled out his iPhone, tapped it twice, and said, «We’re here.»
The building itself was inspired by the long, low, adobe ranch houses of the past, recast in cinderblocks and painted tan. Instead of red ti
le, the roof was composite shingles the color of dried blood. An elaborate set of flower boxes, also cinderblock, surrounded the house, all of them containing cactus. Broad, pointy-leafed maguey, sausage links of cholla, spherical barrel cactus covered in thickets of yellow thorns, tall, iconic saguaro, flat pancake clusters of prickly pear. How like Ortiz, Cole thought, to find decorations that helped make the house impregnable.
They climbed stiffly out of the truck and filed past the guard at the front door. The interior was traditional Mexican with an overlay of nouveau riche—red tile floors covered with Persian carpets, rattan furniture with white leather cushions, Remington-esque paintings of cowboys in massive nineteenth-century frames.
Ortiz met them in the den. He wore a crisply pressed, long-sleeved white shirt, black suit pants, and shiny shoes. If the cares of his business had aged him, Cole didn’t see it. He seemed genuinely pleased to see them, shaking both their hands. «Come in, come in, my house is yours. I’m sure you’ll want to refresh yourselves from the trip. Valeria will show you the way.»
Valeria was a petite, radiantly beautiful woman in black leather pants and a loose white blouse, her shiny black hair in a ponytail. She was one of four women arrayed in front of a big screen tv where an action movie was frozen in mid-car-chase. The only other occupants of the vast room were two black-uniformed soldiers, standing at ease by the far wall, eyes glazed.
The bathroom was something out of a four-star hotel. Marble floors, gold fixtures, huge fluffy towels with “El Cicatriz” discretely embroidered on them in white on white. After he eased his aching bladder and washed his face, he called Sallie, told her so far so good, and promised to call later if he could. “But don’t freak out if I don’t, okay?”
