Death in Veracruz (29 page)

She began to cry and fell back onto the bare mattress.

“Tonchis,” she sobbed, rubbing her arm.

“It was delivered at school?”

She nodded her head between sobs. He'd gotten it yesterday.

Once again I was dizzy, breathless and overcome by tachycardia, confirming that now as before, alive or dead, I was tied inextricably to Rojano's mate. I was her accomplice and her victim. Everyone else—Tonchis, Mercedes, and me included—was secondary. As usual, I'd underestimated Rojano's hold on Anabela, the degree to which, ever since Chicontepec, the one force that kept her going was the urge to regain what had been ripped away from her that night. Her children were simply an extension of herself, and I was just another resource to draw on in her quest for vengeance. Or for something more specific and real than vengeance: self-destruction in a new and chilling bid to share the fate of her beloved spouse.

I called Mexico City in search of my contact. He claimed to have spent the whole day trying to find me.

“I'm in your custody in Cuernavaca,” I said.

“Hidden in plain sight,” he replied. “May I expect you in my office this evening?”

“Please don't make me leave here,” I answered. “There's been a new development.”

“Have you new information to support your charges?”

“Information, yes,” I said. “Charges no.”

“That's more realistic,
paisano.
I'll see you there this evening.”

I got bread, cheese, ham, and paté from the refrigerator, poured refills of vodka, and took the whole lot to the bedroom. I dialed Marjorie Miller in Houston, but no one answered. I checked my calls at the newspaper in Mexico City. There were messages from my
paisano
and two from the correspondent in Veracruz, which I immediately returned.

“They're not in Poza Rica,” he said, sounding upset. “There's no sign of them. The prior source had nothing to add. I went to the Quinta Bermùdez and got all the way to Pizarro's office, but he's not here. I tried talking to his girlfriend, but she's gone too. The mayor refused to see me and just sent word that Pizarro had gone to Houston for a routine checkup.”

“Then where is he?” I said impatiently.

“Not in Poza Rica,” the correspondent said. “He could have gone to Mexico City.”

“Why Mexico City?”

“The Valle del Bravo local has a rest house with a heliport.”

“Can you check that out?”

“I can ask around here and see what comes up.”

I called the paper again and asked for the reporter who covered the airport. I asked him to check the passenger lists of flights from Houston the night before as well as the noncommercial hangars—especially PEMEX's—for flights to
Houston in the past 48 hours.

Tonchis and Mercedes got home shortly after 6:00. Anabela had put on a white caftan with gold piping. She'd put a Virginia ham basted with pineapple, cloves, and cinnamon in the oven.

“Negro,
why haven't you been around?” Tonchis said.

“Because I've been preparing a trip for you.”

“Ah, damn. Hot damn,” Tonchis said.

“Mom, Tonchis sad a bad word,” Mercedes tattled.

“A great big trip to Los Angeles to your Aunt Alma's,” I said.

Anabela's only sister, Alma Rosa Guillaumín, bought a condominium in Los Angeles two months after Rojano's death. She'd moved there with her husband, a Tamaulipan from Brownsville who was in the real estate business.

“Is that where Disneyland is, Uncle?” Mercedes asked with her perfect diction.

“And that s.o.b. EJMog,” Tonchis added with an exaggerated Veracruz accent. He was nine by the calendar but years older according to the glint in his eyes and his muscular body.

“That's where Disneyland is,” I told Mercedes.

“And when are we going?” she asked.

“I'm getting tickets for next Monday,” I said with a sideways glance at Anabela as she set the supper table.

There was no reaction, not the slightest wince.

“But, Uncle, on Monday school won't be out yet.” Mercedes sounded worried.

“We'll let the school know.”

We ate the Virginia ham at 8:30, and Tonchis went to watch television after we finished. Anabela and I stayed behind in the sala, and Mercedes curled up next to me. She had a finely shaped oval face. Her childlike features bore a strange resemblance to those of a grownup woman. She had
a very wide forehead, high cheekbones, and sharply defined chin and mouth. Her eyes looked out at the world from behind lashes so long and black they seemed false.

I began to play with her, pretending to nip at her arms and cheeks.

“You're not going to grow up to be like your mother, are you?” I said.

“Like my mother?” Mercedes said, clearly articulating each word in her child's voice.

“Your mother's crazy, and she lies,” I told her.

“My mother does not lie,” Mercedes said, “and you smell of liquor. You're drunk.”

“When you grow up, you're going to be like
el Negro,”
I said.

“Like you?”

“Like me. Drunk and with no place to hide.”

“No place to hide?”

“No place to hide one thing while saying another.”

I nipped at her cheek and then her buttocks.

“I'm biting you to make sure you grow up like
el Negro.
Except for one thing.”

“What's that?”

“The one way you're going to be like your mother.”

“What way is that?”

“You'll fall in love with a total jerk.”

“With you?”

“With me, no. With the jerk who will be your one and only love.”

“With you,
Negro.”

“
No, not with me.”

By 9:00 the children were asleep, and Anabela began turning off all the lights in the house.

“Not so fast,” I said. “There's company coming.”

“More goons?”

“One more.”

“The one making our travel plans?”

“Your children's life insurance.”

“They don't need life Insurance.”

I took her hand and sat her down on one of the wicker sofas. It had a high back that resembled a crown. I sat on the footstool in front of her and held her cold hands in mine. She was unbearably beautiful and remote, striking more sharply than ever the key she'd always struck in me.

“I don't get it,” I said, “but let's suppose I do. You want to go all the way to the bitter end, and for you the end is letting Rojano drag you down with him. First, he beat you up, then he had you under house arrest with his kids, then he hauled you off to Chicontepec. Now he's forcing you to flee just like your emissary. The question is, are you going to flee or not? It doesn't matter if you do or if you just let Pizarro decide. With you Rojano always gets the last word.”

Her eyes misted but didn't shed a single tear.

“I don't get it, but a few hours ago I resigned myself to fate,” I went on. “I also resigned myself to this: it isn't the fate I bargained for, and I'm going to do what I can to change it. And it better not include the children.”

“They're my children,” Anabela said.

“It's your fight,” I said. “But now I'm fighting too. I've been in this fight all along, but I never understood the rules. Now I do, but I don't like them, and I'm going to try to change them. But you're not betting the children.”

“I love you,
Negro,”
Anabela said.

“Not the way I'd like you to.”

“I do too.”

“No. But I'm getting the children out of this. This coming Monday they're going to Los Angeles.”

“Yes.”

“And then we're dealing with the legacy of Rojano without the children in the middle.”

I checked to see what the reporter at the airport had learned about aircraft activity. There was only one flight he'd yet to verify, a non-commercial plane belonging to the Rural Credit Bank that appeared headed for Iowa, not Texas. There was no sign of Pizarro. I had the reporter book tickets for unaccompanied children on Mexicana with arrangements for them to be delivered by airline personnel directly to Mrs. Ana Rosa Guillaumín at the airport in Los Angeles. Then I had Anabela explain the situation to Alma and promised that in two weeks I'd be there myself to give her a full explanation during the Christmas holidays. Then my contact arrived. It was 11:00 at night on Friday, December 9, 1979.

Anabela received him seated on her enormous wicker throne, impassive and serene in her white caftan like the queen in a deck of cards. My contact solemnly greeted her, and we proceeded without further conversation to a tense conclave whose significance I stressed by placing on the table in the middle of the sala a box of cigars and a tray with cognac and goblets that rang like tuning forks when they brushed against one another.

My contact took a cigar and accepted a cognac. Though he was wearing a vest and a light woolen suit in the mild but constant heat of Cuernavaca, there was not so much as a bead of perspiration glistening on his brow or cheeks. The toll taken by a day's work was discernible only in the slight growth of his meticulously trimmed mustache, a bit of swelling under his reddened eyes, and a few wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Otherwise, he was impeccable: shirt, collar, tie, and an unmistakable aroma of lotion and Mapleton tobacco. That night, for the first time, I could see that beneath the fastidious exterior was an actor at pains to preserve his
image. He must have bathed two or three times a day and maintained a small portable wardrobe with private stores of toiletries as if grooming were the key to his credibility and efficiency. His persona, with its macabre combination of gloom and good manners, came across simply as the adult incarnation of a civics lesson.

(“In this business your hands get dirty all the time,” he once told me. “It's not all that important. You wash them in dirty water at the office, then with rosewater when you get home so they'll stay clean.”)

The cigar and the cognac heightened the pink of his lips. “It's a pleasure to meet you in person,” he said to Anabela. “What can I do for you?”

“You had urgent information,” I said. “Can you tell us what it's about?”

“At your request we did an investigation of the Edilberto Chanes accident,” my contact said. Anabela's face darkened with anger. She stared down at the floor. She looked at me, at the wall, and then back at our informant. “His trail leads all the way back to the Quinta Bermúdez in Poza Rica.”

Anabela took a long drink of cognac.

“Edilberto Chanes tried to seize the Quinta Bermúdez by force last Monday,” my contact went on. “He had nine people with him. Five died in the attack. The others were captured and died on the highway, including Chanes himself.”

“They were executed,” Anabela stated.

“There were also casualties on the other side,” my contact pointed out. “Pizarro and his chief aide left the country on Tuesday to seek treatment for their wounds.”

“What wounds?” Anabela asked.

“The attack nearly succeeded, ma'am,” my contact said. “They got all the way to Pizarro's office, and they held him for half an hour.”

Anabela took another long drink of cognac.

“That's the information I have for you,” my contact said. “What do you have?”

He looked not at me but at Anabela, who stared into her cognac.

“Pizarro's leather warning pouch arrived yesterday,” I said. “They had it delivered via the mayor's older child.”

The news appeared to disconcert him. He asked to see the pouch, and I went to the bedroom to get it. I placed it in his hands with the motto
Whoever knows how to add.
..directly in front of him. He opened and closed the dividers, running his manicured nails and his fingertips bathed in rosewater over the leather.

“Does it mean the usual?” He sounded annoyed as if his assumptions had turned out to be badly flawed. “Is it addressed specifically to you, ma'am?”

“My son brought it home from school,” Anabela answered drily.

“That's not what I'm asking,” my contact said. “I'm talking about the name of the addressee.”

“Us,” Anabela said.

“Was there anything written inside?”

“No,” Anabela said. “But you know perfectly well what the message is.”

“No, I don't,” my contact said. “I need to know exactly what you received.”

Clearly, he was confronted with a fact that went beyond his expectations. He couldn't have been more upset by the appearance of this piece on the chessboard.

“I must tell you this.” My contact struggled to maintain his self-control. “Edilberto Chanes and his men almost killed Pizarro.”

“Pizarro left the hospital yesterday,” Anabela said.

“To go to another hospital,” my contact replied.

“And on the way he sent us the pouch?” Anabela said
sarcastically.

My contact got to his feet and hastily traversed the space from his chair to the bar.

“I don't mean to offend you,” he said, “but as an objective outside observer, I need to tell you some things that should help guide your decisions and let you understand what's at stake. Bear in mind that early Monday morning an attempt was made on the life of the most important mid-level leader of the most powerful labor union in the country. It was the work of a hired gun named Edilberto Chanes, who lost his life in an automobile accident while fleeing to Tulancingo. Due to the indiscretion of an accomplice,”—he looked at me as if asking leave to continue—“the Mexican government is now in a position to discover that Chanes was in the pay of the widow of the former mayor of Chicontepec.” He looked at Anabela as if he were now asking her leave to go on. “The widow had long attributed the lynching of her husband by the people of Chicontepec on June 9, 1978, to the machinations of the oil workers' boss. The main propagator of this tale is a well known journalist who turned out to have been the widow's lover in the year prior to the mayor's death, the very columnist who had been the mayor's friend since both were in their teens.”