Death in Veracruz (27 page)

She poured herself another shot of vodka and drank it in
a single gulp. She went to my desk and sat down behind it with her hands in her hair and her elbows on my typewriter. She sobbed convulsively and groaned with rage. “Imbecile. Imbecile. Imbecile.”

She slept in the room with the children, and I slept alone in my own room. Early the following morning, I was awakened by the commotion echoing through the apartment. I heard Anabela's voice issuing orders to Tonchis and the babble of Mercedes coming and going in the hallway. As I looked out, Anabela scurried past with a suitcase on her way to the sala. She had on what looked like tailored overalls and had tied her hair in a bandanna. She came and went, kissed me on the cheek, and left a perfumed fragrance in her wake. I caught up with her in the room where she was tying a bundle and got her into my room.

“What's going on?”

“We're going back to Cuernavaca,” she said with a smile as fresh as her perfume.

“You can't go back to Cuernavaca,” I said.

“Yes, I can.”

“You've got Pizarro on your tail,” I reminded her.

“When you get right down to it, the only one who's ever been on my tail is you,” she joked.

“I mean what I say.”

“And your breath smells awful.”

“You can't go back to Cuernavaca. Staying in Mexico City is bad enough.”

“I'm going to Cuernavaca with my children and without your goons. I have nothing to fear, and I fear nothing. How do you think it looks for me to be cooped up in your apartment surrounded by your goons?”

“It's not a question of appearances. Pizarro is not an appearance.”

“I have no memory of Pizarro. Have you forgotten that I'm the merry widow?”

“Last night you were just a widow, period.”

“I wasn't myself last night. Erase last night from your memory.”

“You can't go, Ana.”

“I'm going,
Negro.
It's for the best, it's safer. Do you really think those three idiots outside with their walkie-talkies can stop Pizarro?”

“They can make it difficult for him.”

“It's not a matter of difficulty. Is he out to get us or not? That's the question. Once his mind is made up, you can put every officer in the Federal Security Directorate outside, and he won't care. He'll find a way.”

“The difference is making him have to find it.”

“The difference is I'm not afraid. That's all you have to understand. And love me.”

She got to her feet, took my face in her cold hands, and looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were clear and unclouded without a trace of last night's fever and devastation. “And love me,” she repeated.

I couldn't stop her. I asked Comandante Cuevas to guard her in Cuernavaca, and two hours later, around ten in the morning, I went to the offices of my contact in Plaza de la República.

“I want to apologize for what I'm about to tell you,” I said.

I proceeded to recite in every detail the saga of the emissary. He wasn't annoyed. He slowly took a white card and his gold pen from his jacket pocket. He wrote a few lines on the card and rang the bell hidden beneath his desk drawer. His gigantic aide appeared with the aplomb of a ballerina.

“For Raul,” my contact said as he handed him the card.
“Have him dispatch a detail today.”

He took out another card and wrote on it. “Whatever there is in the files on this.” He passed the card to the aide. “And get me the office in Veracruz right away.”

He swiveled his chair so he was sideways to me and stared out the windows that looked down on the Plaza de la República.

“I don't like hearing about things after the fact,” he said, twirling his pen between his fingers. “I don't like your attitude or how far this has gone. What do you want from us?”

“Friendship and understanding,
paisano.”

It was the first time I'd appealed to our shared origins in Veracruz since the days when I was doing favors for Rojano. My contact took it in with a grimace that bordered on a smile.

“I hope you understand the seriousness of the situation,” he said. “Tools are like magnets,
paisano.
They attract users. This being the case, we can assume that the response from Poza Rica is on its way.”

“It could be.”

“We have very little time, and I don't know if we'll succeed,” he said, turning his chair back towards me. “What I want you to understand is this. You and the widow have gone beyond my range of operation. We'll certainly keep the guard detail in place, we'll even reinforce it. What I have to tell you, though, is if the train has left the station, the guard detail won't be enough to stop it.”

“I know.”

“I hope you keep it in mind. We'll investigate exactly what happened and try to negotiate with Pizarro. But it's now up to him and not us to decide. Everything depends on them now. Stay in touch with the guard detail throughout the day. Make sure they always know where you are so that I'll know. And check with me every afternoon to find out
what we've got.”

He escorted me to the door and put me out of his office without saying goodbye. By going beyond his range of operation, I'd come under his authority.

I went from there to the newspaper. I needed urgently to track down our correspondent in Veracruz. It took three phone calls to catch up with him at the mayor's office in Xalapa.

“I want you to run a check on Lázaro Pizarro in Poza Rica,” I told him.

“Right away. Are you after anything special?”

“Just find out if he's in Poza Rica. See if there have been any recent incidents, if everything's in order, if there have been any rumors of something out of the ordinary. All you need to do is run a check.”

“Right,” the correspondent said. “If you give me a number where I can reach you, I'll get back to you in an hour.”

I gave him the phone number of the bar in Les Ambassadeurs Restaurant on Reforma and had him give me his number. Though it was 11:30 in the morning, I headed for the bar. It was empty at that hour, recently swept and redolent of air freshener. I ordered a whiskey on the rocks and let the sensation of being caught in a countdown sink in. I imagined for the thousandth time the emissary's confession in front of Pizarro after his capture, and how Pizarro might go about sending a return message. On what number of the countdown were the emissaries with the return message? Internal Security's investigation got under way that same morning, but the fact remained that it was starting late. I also couldn't discount the possibility that the emissary had been taken out early on, well before he could talk. Pizarro may have considered the whole affair nothing more than the
settling of an old score, in which case all the morning had accomplished was to tie me to Anabela once and for all in the black hole of Internal Security's confidential files.

Two whiskeys later, my imagination remained stalled on the same track, obsessively recycling the same sets of variations until the call came from the correspondent in Xalapa.

“Everything seems to be in order,” he said, “but Lacho's not in Poza Rica.”

“Where is he?”

“No one knows. I asked for his aide Roibal, but no one could find him for me.”

“Find out where he is.”

“From here in Xalapa, that's hard to do, sir.”

“Then go to Poza Rica.”

“That's what I was going to tell you. The union local is giving a dinner for state government officials today in Poza Rica. The secretary of internal security for the state is going and he's taking a helicopter from here in Xalapa in half an hour. If you tell me to, I'll sign on and be in Poza Rica in half an hour.”

“Get on the helicopter. I'll talk to your editor.”

“I was going to ask if you would.”

“I'll tell him.”

“And where do I call you from Poza Rica?”

“Right here. I'm not going anywhere.”

I called the newspaper and explained to the editor what I needed from his correspondent. He wasn't fond of done deeds either, but he agreed. I got to my fourth whiskey before checking with Anabela in Cuernavaca. It was nearly one, and she and the children had arrived two hours earlier without incident.

“Your goons have already taken over the yard and the entrance,” she said, pretending to be more annoyed than she
really was. “And reinforcements arrived just a few minutes ago. Did you tell the other side something?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “I'm checking on Pizarro in Poza Rica.”

“Very good,” Anabela said, “because if he's in Poza Rica, we can send him flowers. Are you going to keep me abreast of your investigation or do I have to resort to feminine intuition?”

I gave her the bar's phone number so she could give it to the guards.

“Don't worry,” Anabela said. “If I get killed, you'll find out anyway.”

“That's not the point.”

“Of course not. But do you realize how long it's been since we've screwed? I've just been thinking that if Pizarro's on the rampage, he better not catch us with any sexual accounts pending.”

“Yes.”

“So then what's the mystery, what's to investigate? Send Pizarro some flowers, and come here where it's warm.”

The Ambassadeurs bar seemed warmer for the moment. It showed early promise as a place to run to, and served as an undercover center of operations.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon a couple of radio reporters and Miguel Reyes Razo, who at the time worked for a major Mexico City daily, showed up at Ambassadors. Though they'd come to eat, they joined me at the bar for an aperitif, which naturally led to my ordering a fifth whiskey. Half an hour later the next call from Poza Rica came in.

The dinner had gone off without Lacho Pizarro, the correspondent said. Loya, who was by then mayor, had attended as his representative. Loya made the appropriate excuses but said nothing to explain the absence. His silence
triggered rumors and speculation, but neither the union or Pizarro's own people knew anything.

“The rumor is that he made an emergency trip to Houston for a checkup,” the correspondent said.

“An emergency checkup?” I said. “What about Roibal?”

“He's not here either, sir. They left together.”

“Is there a way to verify the Houston trip?”

“No, because, as I said, no one's talking. I got it in an aside from one of the guards.”

“Offer that guard money and get him to tell you what he knows,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And call me right here as soon as you have something. I'm not going anywhere.”

Reyes Razo and his friends invited me to eat. We took a table in the rear next to a Cuban piano player whose nightly repertoire was a mix of Agustín Lara and Cole Porter. They ordered steak and wine. I had a shrimp cocktail and my next dose of whiskey.

“You're drinking quite heavily, esteemed master,” Reyes Razo said.

“Fellow travelers are welcome, good sir.”

“You have me at a great disadvantage, esteemed master, but I will allow myself to journey with you a ways.”

He called for the head waiter. “Don Lorenzo, my esteemed master here has been drinking alone for many a half hour. Does such self-absorption seem fair to you, such disregard for basic solidarity?”

“By no means, Don Miguel. It's absolutely unfair.”

“What suggestion have you to remedy this situation? Because the situation is intolerable.”

“I suggest that you drink with him, Don Miguel.”

“Then you agree that a situation of this sort must not be tolerated?”

“Under no circumstances, sir.”

“Then bring me a double whiskey over lots of rocks.”

We drank in solidarity with one another during the meal at a ratio of two whiskeys to one, Reyes Razo's doubles to my singles. We'd reached the dessert when another call came in.

“He's at Methodist Hospital in Houston,” the correspondent said. “He apparently got sick and fainted.”

“When?”

“Early this week.”

It was Friday. The car Chanes and his henchmen were traveling in crashed early Wednesday morning. The assassination attempt must have been Monday or Tuesday. Had they gotten to him?

“What else did the guard tell you?”

“Nothing else. There was no need for money. That's all he knew.”

I thought I recalled a stringer in Houston who occasionally sent stories to my newspaper. I tried to look him up, but two months previously he'd moved to Los Angeles. I returned to the table with a fresh whiskey provided straight from the bar where the phone was. Its tranquilizing effect was giving way to a bout of active euphoria followed by an insatiable and unquenchable thirst.

“Has your reverence's paper a correspondent in Houston?” I asked Reyes Razo.

“Only in Falfurrias, Texas, your reverence.”

“Seriously, have you got someone?”

Reyes Razo laughed.

“It's all they can do to hold onto me. Do you need a connection in Houston?”

“Urgently.”

“Then ask, esteemed master. Say, ‘I need a connection in Houston.' What would my paper be doing with a stringer
in Houston? It's all they can do to remember where Toluca is. You know how our correspondent in Durango datelined his first story? Seriously, you know what he put? He put ‘Durango, Dux., such and such a date.' Durango, Dur! Do you think we'd get someone in Houston just so he could put
Houston, Hous.?”

“Seriously, your reverence.”

“Seriously, your reverence. The other day for purposes of publicity and my own information, I asked the front office what our circulation was, and I got an answer from the director himself. He acted insulted and annoyed as if I'd called his mother a bad name. ‘And what difference does our circulation make to you, Reyes Razo? Are you our advertising agent or are you going to place an ad to sell your fleabag hound, your used wife, or your defunct Packard? Circulation figures are a state secret at this paper, Reyes Razo. You don't play around with them, they're sacred.' So it turns out that circulation is sacred. Damn, I start back to the newsroom and on my way past the presses I run into
El Ulalume,
the chief pressman Don Pedro Flores Díaz.
El Ulalume
is jet black, an ex-alcoholic who never stops preaching. ‘I've now gone ten years eight months and twenty-five days without a drink, Miguelito. I'm a new man, I swear I'm a new man' and the next day, ‘You know how long I've gone without a drop of the poison, Miguelito?' ‘Well, yes,' I tell him, ‘you've gone ten years eight months and
twenty-six
days, Don Pedro.' ‘That's right, Miguelito. I see you keep track for me.' I got him a watch so he could count the hours too. I really did. So I'm going from the front office to the newsroom and on my way by the presses I run into
El Ulalume,
and I say, ‘What was last night's press run, Pedro?' And he says, ‘Well, last night 30,000 complete copies came off the presses, Miguelito, 3,603 to be exact plus 312 for the night watchmen to sell on their way home. So that comes to 3,365 copies of your paper, Miguelito.
But if the information is for advertisers or the general public, I have the latest memo from the front office right here. It's dated May 31, 1979. It says weekday circulation 152,300; Sundays 224,150.' Just think,” Reyes Razo went on, “that was the paper's state secret. And if I were to ask
El Ulalume
for a copy, he'd keep the copy and give me the original. So, your reverence, what makes you think such a paper would have a stringer in Houston, Hous.? If what you need is a connection, say so, and get it over with. Do you want a connection?”