The Demands of the Dead (5 page)

After passport control, I was lucky enough to not be selected for an additional 'random' check as I went through the green-lighted doorway. My delay at Mexico City's Benito Juarez airport was short – just a few hours at the airport before catching a connecting flight to Tuxtla Gutierrez, where my contact from Seguridad Publica would be waiting. I would get a cup of coffee and put myself in Walter's head and try to think through where he would be. Or so I planned.

As I walked out into the crowded Benito Juarez airport lobby, a young, pretty, red-haired woman in a gray skirt suit turned from idle conversation with a man built like a linebacker who'd skipped a couple of meals: tall, wide, thick arms, thick neck, but a small waist. As their conversation stopped and they focused intently on me, I recognized him, though he had both more muscle and less fat now than I remembered. I'd broken his thumb three years before. I saw the recognition, and the anger, flash across his face.

“Mark Brown?” The woman asked.

I nodded.

“My name is Alexis Kenney, and I believe you know Joe Marchese, also formerly of the NYPD. We are with the office of the political attache at the Embassy here in Mexico City. We're here to take you to your briefing.” Her handshake was firm, and I got the distinct sense that she thought she was here to help me, not the other way around. There would be no coffee right now, and no time to think before flying to Tuxtla either. Whether Hoffman had booked this while I was on the plane, or forgotten to tell me, the right move was to play along.

Marchese tried, not very hard, to crush my hand, but I pointed my index finger down his wrist and turned his hand up so his thumb faced me. “Ah, nice to see it's healed completely. Sorry about that, again.”

He smiled and let go, shrugging. “Ancient history,” he said. “Good to see you here, buddy.”

I started teaching unarmed combat seminars as an apprentice to Mr. Manley, but I started teaching cops when some of them saw me working out and asked if I could show them what I did. I just taught the lessons Mr. Manley learned in Brazil before Americans knew about them. Challenges usually went like this, a pattern familiar to those who have seen jujutsu at work, with slight variations: I'd maintain distance with a front kick, choose a moment to do a double leg takedown, mount, take the back, and do a rear naked choke. In the seminars, I would have to modify this for cops: you can't go to the ground with multiple attackers, you can't go to the ground if the other guy has a knife, much less a gun, so there were other tricks for different ranges. Every so often, a big strong bruiser would be determined to prove that his strength, or surprise, or dirty fighting would prevail, and that my techniques wouldn't work in real situations. Marchese and his partner were two such bruisers. The partner went down in the standard way, but on his turn, Marchese resisted the takedown, so I pulled him down, a technique called pulling guard, and tied his arms and upper body up with my arms and legs. At that point, he tried to stick his thumb in my eye, and had he succeeded, he would have discredited me and left me permanently disabled. So I broke his thumb. He grunted once but kept fighting, so I pulled his arm and head into a triangle and choked him unconscious with my legs. Afterwards, it was in both our interest to chalk it up to an accident, play like it was all in good fun, and I never saw him again. Until now.

I turned from Marchese to Ms. Kenney. “Thank you very much, Ms. Kenney. My connecting flight is in...” I looked at my watch, “...four hours. Is there time?”

“Sure there is, Mr. Brown. The car is waiting.”

They didn't ask me about the case, didn't mention Hoffman, and if they knew what I was doing there, they didn't let on. Instead, there was a lot of small talk. Traffic wasn't too bad by Manhattan standards, so it was racing by Mexico city standards, and the route was direct enough, Avenida Rio Consulado to Paseo de la Reforma, both big multilane streets. The embassy complex itself was next to the Sheraton, and not far from one of many monuments to Mexican independence. Perhaps there was some irony there, probably lost on my hosts.

The embassy took security seriously. Backpack checked, handbag checked, metal detectors, shoes, belt, and then Marchese disappeared and Kenney escorted me to an air-conditioned briefing room with no windows. I accepted the offer of coffee and Kenney waited with me. The political attache arrived within five minutes.

She stood tall, almost my height, and was thick set, with straight blond hair going to grey and pale skin, about fifty. The standard blue skirt suit she wore matched her very sharp blue eyes, which she turned on me. “Jane Hamilton,” she said, with a strong handshake.

“Mark Brown.”

“Apologies,” she said, “the Ambassador would have met you himself but he had a number of other appointments this afternoon.”

I smiled. “I am very happy to have had the chance to meet with you, Ms. Hamilton.” Even though I had no idea who scheduled the meeting or what it was about.

“I'm sure you know what this meeting is about,” she said.

I nodded seriously.

“We are very appreciative that the Mexican government has chosen to work with an independent US organization to handle this case. While we are uncertain about how or exactly who in the government made this decision, we think it is a very good sign of confidence in us.”

“I am sure that if we can deliver an impartial report, it will be in everyone's interest.” I said, watching her eyes.

“Indeed. And given the importance of impartiality, we will not be rendering you any assistance beyond what we would offer any other US citizen here in Mexico.”

“And likewise,” I said slowly, “we won't have any kind of ongoing communication with the Embassy during the investigation. But when I make my final report, I am sure we will make it available to you as well.”

Hamilton paused and looked at me for a long moment. She nodded quietly, almost to herself. She exchanged a glance with Kenney. Then she smiled again and said: “Excellent, Mr. Brown. So, perhaps we can give you a bit of background about the political situation here. We believe we are heading towards a very significant election...”

The rest of the meeting took place in polite briefing mode. Maybe they had been hoping that I would volunteer to cooperate with them, perhaps in exchange for resources? But I couldn't do that, couldn't give up our independence within thirty minutes of landing in the country. So maybe they just wanted to make sure they pulled me in, maybe plant a bug on me somewhere (I would have to re-check my luggage), get a sense of what kind of person they might have to be cleaning up after? I was carefully watched as Kenney and Marchese escorted me back through the embassy compound, and not just by them. Even after they drove me back along Paseo de la Reforma to the airport, I couldn't shake the feeling, one that would only get worse in Chiapas.

I caught the connecting flight. Hoffman had arranged for someone to meet me at the airport in Tuxtla.
I was looking for a man in uniform, a lieutenant in
Seguridad Publica
. Hoffman had assured me the lieutenant would take me around and introduce me to the police contacts I needed. I had his name and he, no doubt, had mine. I figured he’d know me on sight. I was pretty inconspicuous in Manhattan, not too bad even in Mexico City, but here I stuck out. My reasons for being in Tuxtla could be guessed by anybody keeping their eye on passengers coming out of the gate. Whatever trouble I might have recognizing him, Teniente Sergio Chavez would, no doubt, pick me out easily enough.

Chavez hadn’t gone to great lengths to disguise himself either. He wore the blue-black combat outfit of the Seguridad Publica, including a Glock-17 as a sidearm and every outward indication that he knew what to do with it. Only slightly shorter than me, and perhaps five years older, lean but powerful, like a soccer player or a runner, clean and severe-looking. He was moving as soon as I was out of the gate and intercepted me immediately.

“Brown?” he asked.

“Usted debe ser el teniente Chavez. Mucho gusto.”

He didn’t smile as he shook my hand. Hard.

“I know English, Mr. Brown,” he replied. In English.

I said nothing. We had a moment of silence in the hall of Tuxtla’s small airport, me standing there with my bags while people coming off the same plane were forced to walk around us.

“What would you prefer to do first, Mr. Brown? See the bodies here in the city or go to straight to the countryside, to the Hatuey base, to the crime scene?”

It didn’t really matter. The bodies were still in the morgue but the funeral was planned for the next day.

I did not have much doubt about Seguridad Publica's ability to investigate the crime scene or the bodies, and Hoffman didn't either. Our doubts were whether they would tell the truth about what they had found. I needed to see both for myself, so that I could compare notes with what they wrote.

“Bodies,” I said, switching back to English too—he’d made his point—“let’s stay for the funerals. We’ll go to the base tomorrow.”

“Of course,” he repeated in English, his face a mask.

We went to see the bodies.

I wasn’t one of those Americans who never left the US. I had seen a bit of the world, but I had never worked outside of New York. So when I thought of the morgue I thought of the antiseptic halls and fluorescent lights that I knew from my years in NYPD Homicide. Tuxtla was a different. There were still fluorescent lights and the bodies were still in freezers. But the halls were narrower, the place was less sheltered from the elements, and it was less euphemistic - more obvious what the place was really for.

On the other hand, it seemed the examiner was more skilled and sophisticated than most of those I’d worked with back in the US. Dr. Mesa wore thick glasses, a thin beard peppered with white hairs, and a confident, forty-something, mid-career, unassuming manner.

He had orderlies pull the bodies out of the freezer for us to examine.

“I’ll show you Gonzalez first, as I am told he was the first victim,” Dr. Mesa said in perfect English.

“How do you know?” I asked.

Chavez answered my question. “From the configuration of the bodies, the angles of the bullets. Gonzalez never fired his weapon, but Diaz did, and remember also that Diaz was shot many, many more times than Gonzalez was. All of this suggests that Gonzalez was surprised and killed first.”

It was obvious that Pablo Gonzalez had died fit and healthy. He was tall, handsome, and built like an athlete who worked himself hard. Maybe he was on the same soccer team as Chavez was, their builds were so similar. A tattoo of an eagle with a snake in its talons - Mexico’s national symbol – spread across his chest.

“The eagle?” I asked.

“Some of the boys get them—it has to do with his graduating class at police school.” Chavez replied in Spanish, obviously shaken.
He knew the victims
, I thought.

“The bullet that killed Gonzalez hit him in the forehead, here,” Dr. Mesa continued. There were also holes in his legs and in his left arm. “He was hit in the legs first. The shot in the head would have killed him instantly.”

Gonzalez’s expression retained the pain of someone who had known death was coming, but there were no wrinkles on his young face. His expression was wrong. It looked closer to despair than fear or battle-rage. The instinct of a soldier, of a fighter, isn't despair –
tell that to Mr. Manley –
so something was wrong here.

“One of the interesting things about the wounds in his legs are the angles of entry and exit. The first bullet entered from the back of his leg. The next two entered from the front, as did the last shot in the chest. He was ambushed, but he died facing his killer.”

Mesa took us over to the body of the second victim. Diaz was less of a physical specimen—smaller, softer, carrying more fat. The cadaver was marred with a lot more bullet holes than Gonzalez’s, including one in the neck. He had several tattoos—dragons on his chest, a Chinese character on his back, a scorpion on his shoulder.

“Are there photos of the tattoos?”

“They should be in the report,” Chavez said quietly and evenly his mood more detached, more professional, from one body to the next.

“Yes, they are all in my report. The Chinese character means ‘Happiness’, I’m told. This one died in a fire-fight,” Mesa said. “He was lying down and firing his weapon when he was hit. It was the bullet in the neck that killed him, but as you can see there are other wounds in the shoulders and chest.”

The reports said Diaz was 24 and Gonzalez 25, but Diaz looked older. Even his hands looked like they had done more
. Both are younger than Shawn was. Seen even less of the world.
I remembered suddenly that Walter was alive. But such thoughts were not for this moment.

“Can I keep a copy of your report, Dr. Mesa, if it's ready?” I asked.

Mesa went to an office and returned with two copies. We took them and left the morgue, Pablo Gonzalez, and Hernan Diaz,where they lay.

As he drove us to the base, Chavez was completely silent. I didn’t know him well enough to read that silence, but I did know that between the two victims, Gonzalez was a friend of his, and Diaz was not.

The Seguridad Publica base in Tuxtla presented a barbed wire fence to the world. Behind it were four buildings: quarters, a mess hall, and two office buildings, all new, simple white shells of red brick and concrete with small windows. There were two officers on duty at the entrance and two dozen walking around inside. Chavez escorted me straight to my quarters, left, and returned a minute later with a stack of photocopied papers. “Now you have the same material we have,” he said. “I'll get you for dinner in an hour.”