The Dogs of Mexico (7 page)

“Fifty dollars.”
 

“Fifty dólare? This impostor, he is shake down the good peoples of México and keep the money for himself. This is not how we do. And we don’ hire gringos for our distinguish police. Fifty dólare? You think I am estúpido?”

“I think you are very smart. I think you would like to have fifty dollars and be rid of this man who eats up your food and disgusts you.” Helmut was pleased with himself, realizing how rational he was, though realizing it only after the fact.
 

“This man, he owe me a large amount of money.”
 

“You must know he cannot repay you here?”

“I make his life miserable. This is payment enough.”

Helmut studied the lieutenant, swimming a little in his vision. “I see. You are keeping him for your own pleasure then?”

Lieutenant Garza colored. “Tú eres un gringo estúpido!”

Helmut forced a smile. “Fifty dollars.”

“One hundred. You take him and I never see you again. All of you.”

“Fifty. Take it or leave it.”

“This is an insult to my position.”
 

“Not to mention your integrity also. Ja
.
”

“Helmut,” Ana said sharply, “that’s enough.”
 

“I lock you all up. This cripple woman also. Cohecho
,
this is a very serious offense.”

Helmut pulled himself together. “Very well. Whom shall we contact? The consulate? The municipio comandante?”
 

The lieutenant threw his hands up in exasperation. “Fifty dólares.
Take your queer maricón
and get far from my sight.”

Helmut turned to Ana. “Do you have fifty dollars?”

“No,” she said from behind her handkerchief, visibly bewildered.
 

Helmut frowned. “How did you free me?”

She moved the handkerchief aside, cool, aloof. “Perhaps the lieutenant likes cripples more than he lets on.”

Helmut knew she was angry, tormenting him from spite, nevertheless he felt a prick of jealous anger. “No, my dear Ana. Your indiscretions are not so flagrant.” He turned abruptly to the lieutenant, ignoring Ana’s wounded look. “You must accompany me to the
ATM
, for it seems we are short of funds.”

Jinx gave the lieutenant a taunting lipstick-smeared grin. “I’m gonna miss you, boss.”

The lieutenant turned on him. “You want I should call in my special friends to take care of you? It is not too late!”

“What we really want,” said Helmut with alcohol-induced bravado, “is to give you fifty dollars and never to see you again.”

What he
really
wanted was a stiff shot of brandy.

 
8

 
Gift Basket

R
OBERT PICKED OVER
his dinner under a stuffed crocodile on the wall above his table in a restaurant just off Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues in Mexico City. The crocodile was a dried brown, its toothy grin yellow with age.
 

Whether it was the croc or the abrupt transition from sunny Miami to the smoggy bowl of Mexico City, it all came back—a kind of unsettling déjà vu—the secretiveness, the suspicions. It was a business in which when all was said and done one learned to negotiate compromises with one’s own values. Not even Tricia had known what he did in those long absentee periods
.
A consultant for Halliburton, he had told her, dealing with the company’s foreign enterprises where trouble was always breaking out.
 

It was Trish and Nick and the land that embodied what little integrity he may have retained in those years, the month or two between assignments, nourishing the desiccated roots of his character. That had been the one true thing. Then they were gone. Nick. Tricia. The ranch.
 

He punched another
Vibramicina
out of the card in his shirt pocket and chased the capsule—a guard against Montezuma’s revenge—down with a last half-inch of brandy. He thumbed his plate back, laid a few bills on the table and went out. A last throb of red light lay dying in the west, darkness closing down over Mexico City.

He stepped into a little hole-in-the-wall kiosk and bought three prepaid Telex phone cards, then went on toward his hotel, picking his way through the crowds that gathered each evening to idle on the sidewalks after the heat of the day had cooled a little.
 

Up ahead, a ragged Indian squatted in the shadows away from the streetlight. A tiny child hung limp over his shoulder. The beggar’s small eyes and upturned hand followed pedestrians going either way on the sidewalk. He whispered in a pleading voice as Robert passed. Robert walked several yards beyond, then stopped and looked back.

The Indian wore a coarse-woven pullover that may have once been colorful, trousers frayed below his knees, rough brown toes splayed on the sidewalk. The child's arms and legs hung limp from a shapeless rag over his shoulder. There was little flesh on her bones, elbows and knees swollen.
 

The Indian lifted his hand like an upturned claw, mumbling in an unfamiliar language as Robert walked back toward him. Robert gestured at the child in an attempt at sign language. “Sick?”
 

“Enferma,” the Indian mumbled, raising his shoulder so that the child's head rolled to one side—obviously a practiced gesture to best reveal the child’s pitiful condition. Seeds of white matter had collected in the corners of her eyes. Her lips were thick and scabbed, her coarse black hair matted.

Robert studied the Indian and his child, then removed a hundred-peso note from a roll in his front pocket, the equivalent of about ten US dollars. As in all developing countries, it was helpful to carry a pocketful of small bills, not for beggars, but to grease your way through the endless bureaucracy, the
mordida
, or
bite
as it was called.

“Eat,” Robert said, holding the money in one hand, pointing at the child with the other.
 

The Indian rose to his feet, staring at the note. Robert shoved the money at him, but the Indian stepped back, as if afraid to believe or take this large amount. Robert dropped the money on the sidewalk and walked away. He glanced back to see the beggar snatch it up.

Robert continued along the poorly lit street. He turned onto Motolinia where it intersected Juarez, and entered the Hotel Lafayette, whose promotional material boasted: “A modest, comfortable and clean hotel with hot water all day long.”
 

A Mexican wearing a yellow blazer over a purple shirt and a green tie sat in a club chair near the admissions desk. On his lap he held a large gift-basket wrapped in blue cellophane and festooned with an orange bow. He stood as Robert walked toward the elevator. “Otis T. Baker?”

Robert stopped short.
 

The man’s gaze lingered a moment on the bead of fleshy tissue high on Robert’s forehead. “Ah, yes. The scar,” he said, visibly relaxing. “Compliments of Mr. Flax.”

Had Robert not been expecting the basket, he might have dove for cover. Even so he accepted it with trepidation. He reached for his wallet but the man lifted one hand in polite refusal. “It is taken care of,” he said. He nodded once, a faint bow, then turned and walked out without looking back.
 

Robert followed to the entrance and watched as the courier flagged a taxi. Robert visually scoured the street in each direction, then took the elevator up to his room.
 

He switched on the light, pulled the shutters closed, removed the cellophane and placed the fruit on the dresser. Underneath the straw lining he found the expected packet tied with cord. He unwrapped a Bersa Thunder .380 semiautomatic in a clip-on holster—a little abbreviated nylon job—and a box of Cor-Bon 90-grain cartridges. He field-stripped the weapon and determined that it had seen very little use. The action checked out, smooth. Normally, other then the heavy stuff, his weapon of choice had been the FN FiveSeveN, a 5.7 millimeter designed by the Belgium based FN Herstal, its ammo capable of penetrating body armor. The gun was designed for military use, special agents and some
SWAT
teams. Of course it had been adopted by drug cartels as well. However, the ammo wasn’t always easily available, and the Bersa .380 was a reliable weapon, an acceptable compromise when concealment was an issue.

He dumped a few cartridges on the bed. Then, of old habit, put his hand in a sock so as not to leave prints on the brass casings and fed six into the clip. He shoved the clip home with the heel of his hand, jacked one into the chamber, then removed the clip and thumbed in a replacement. He flicked the safety on and clipped the gun above his right hip, under his Hawaiian shirt.
 

After folding and repacking his clothes in the black carry-on, he wiped the room clean of prints with the room towel and checked both trashcans for telltale debris. He left the fruit and the basket on the table with fifty pesos for the maid, and, after a final look around, took up his bags, rode the elevator down, and checked out.
 

A taxi let him out on Santa Veracruz in front of the Hotel Hidalgo, a dozen blocks from the Lafayette. It wasn’t an impressive neighborhood, but while the Hidalgo’s lobby was small and not very trendy, it looked clean. A small dining room opened off the lobby.
 

He checked in using a credit card and a Louisiana driver’s license identifying him as Edmond Haywood. Unknown to Duane Fowler, those good Cuban boys who had arranged his Miami license and the ID for his pickup had more recently provided him with this new identity, including a letter-perfect passport, for a price, of course. Degrees of separation: the name of the game. Edmond Haywood, just one more obscure gringo in a city of twenty million souls.
 

The registrar took him up the elevator and let him into the room. When the registrar left, Robert threw the bolt, switched the light off, made his way in semidarkness to the window opposite and opened the blinds. Night pressed down on the city beyond, black and starless. On a rooftop below, a barefoot woman in a red wrapper stood alongside a tin shed in the thin light of a single bulb. She lit a cigarette and began taking wet laundry from a plastic bucket, hanging items on makeshift lines strung across the roof.
 

He closed the blinds and turned the light on again. He hung up his clothes, then dumped the contents from the maroon carry-on onto the bed. He cut a slit in each end of the bag’s liner under the two-inch expansion flap. He then cut a series of parallel one-inch slits in four eight-by-eight-inch rectangles of shirt cardboard he had brought along for this purpose. He inserted cartridges in the slots like a bandolier, alternating, one on one side and one on the other so the cardboard remained relatively flat. He placed the loaded cards in Ziplocs and inserted them into the slits in either end of the liner between the metal reinforcing bars. He taped the Ziplocs to the reinforced wall, then taped the slit in the lining shut and pulled the expansion flaps down so it didn’t show. Finally, he rolled the holstered gun in the face towel and stowed it in the carry-on with the other hardware.
 

Tired from the bus trip down, he poured himself a brandy and sank back in the club chair. He had flown into Laredo, Texas. From there he had taken the bus across the Rio Grande because of the lax entry into Mexico. American Customs seldom checked buses leaving the US; they were mostly interested in those entering. As for entering Mexico, in this particular case, no one checked anything, not even his tourist card. The “official inspection” consisted of two men in street clothes boarding the bus at the ten-mile checkpoint. They came down the isle, baseball caps proffered, collecting a dollar from each passenger—commonly known as “hurrying the process.” Fail to cooperate, and the jefes
find reason to detain not only you, but everyone.

His thoughts returned to the beggar, the stick-thin child draped over his shoulder. Against his will, he was once again transported back in time to Nick’s room. He took a deep breath, then went into the bathroom and took another Vibramycin with a slug of mineral water. Probably running a fever. A touch of the bug. He wet a washcloth with cold water, pressed it to his temples and tried not to look in the mirror.

9

Sojourner

R
OBERT WAS UP
early. He showered and dressed, then packed his bags and went down for breakfast.
 

The dining room was empty but for an older couple lingering over coffee. Robert took a table. The waiter appeared.
 

A second couple entered and seated themselves nearby. The woman looked to be in her early thirties, hair the color of terracotta, intelligent almond-shaped green eyes set like jade in the bronzed tan of her face. She wore a blue cotton shirt and white jeans with a colorful Mexican sash. She exuded an air of contained elegance, as though she had just stepped out of a European travel poster—a bit upscale for the Hidalgo and its meager dining room.
 

The man swung a leather satchel off his shoulder, seated himself and lit a cigarette. He looked solid, a square face with even features, blondish hair wet-combed straight back from a rather high forehead. He held the cigarette backward, between thumb and forefinger so that he cupped his chin in his palm when he took a drag—like a character in one of those old 1930s movies—dashing except for the surly expression behind small, metal-rimmed glasses. He grumbled to the woman in an undertone. She looked away with pursed lips. The man took a newspaper from his satchel and began to read.
 

The waiter poured Robert’s coffee then poured for the newly arrived couple. The woman ordered for herself and the man. Robert ordered in turn and the waiter left.
 

The woman glanced up unexpectedly and caught him looking at her. “You’re from the States?” she said. Her eyes held his. Intelligent. Aloof.
 

He smiled briefly. “Right. And you?”