How lovely,” she says, trying to end this particular drift in their conversation on a note of irony. “Mexico at last has achieved parity with the States.”
Outside Morelia, they are stopped at a roadblock by men displaying assault rifles, a routine experience. Sometimes you must produce your car registration, with a 50-peso note folded inside — worth about four bucks U.S. More typically, they just wave gringos through. Are they state cops? Federales? Soldiers? Members of the locally dominant cartel kitted up in soldier drag? Is there a difference? The line of traffic oozes steadily through the chokehold, then bursts beyond it, accelerating aggressively.
They check in at a staid British hotel near the American embassy — a little more money, but not really pricey. They go out for drinks and an early supper, then Ariana leaves Jorge to whatever he cares to make of a night in the big city. She is in bed by midnight. She lies there for a while sorting out the blended sounds: voices in the street, the whoosh of the elevator down the hall, the clatter of what sounds like a sanitation crew working blocks less crowded with cars at this hour. The murmur of a TV set rises through the air shaft behind the toilet and does not entirely muffle the grunts and moans of a couple making love.
Aching for sleep. Instead, she is pulled back to the memory of a game she and Schuyler used to play after sex, a kind of structured pillow talk. He had named it: What If? As in, what if Hurricane Andrew had drifted a few degrees south into the Gulf, costing Ariana the reporting opportunity that vaulted her over the local competition in Miami and on to New York.
What if, sidelined by flu or a trip out of town, Schuyler had not showed up at the press event where they just happened to meet.
It’s a way they’ve found to be emotionally intimate, without having to exchange sweet nothings. The language of love — the spoken language — is alien to them and always was. Ariana has never told Schuyler she loves him, for example, and after the passage of so much time it would be very strange to start now. She thinks she knows why the two of them have been skeptical of words. It’s because they made their careers in the communications business, learned the plasticity of language, how easily it could be put to use by liars and frauds.
The what-if game is a way of digging into the foundations of their past — the shared part, the separate parts. It can also be used to forecast their future: trips they might take, professional challenges they might like to meet. Doing the book on expats for Jorge came out of pillow talk like that. It was the tepid distillate of a more dangerous fantasy. Before becoming the expat book, it was going to be exclusively about cartel predation: interviews and photo-portraits of the victims of kidnappings and other kinds of extortion.
Given Schuyler’s predicament, that moment in the book’s evolution is wretchedly ironic. One of the fantasy scenarios they came up with one night had Ariana going undercover. She would penetrate the treacherous landscapes of Narcolandia and the cartels that rule this forbidden place. She would dazzle New York with a late-career scoop: a lengthy article for a prestige magazine — maybe The New Yorker — by a 50-something former television personality no one had thought much about for a few years. But how to pull it off? That was part of the pillow talk. The most obvious — least imaginative — ploy would be to inveigle some cartel boss, jefe, into romantic intrigue. Ariana Altobelli as Mata Hari. But how do you even get into the room with a jefe? How do you catch his attention?
They had been smoking pot the first time they drifted into this riff. (It was back in the early days in Mexico, before Schuyler got sober.) As if he were sitting propped up against pillows in the hotel bed beside her now, Ariana can see him pinching the last half-inch of a joint off her fingertips, filling his lungs and beginning to speak, his voice squeaky like a rubbed balloon, a ritualized Cheech and Chong way of signaling that he’s relishing the hit. “Here’s how you bring it off,” he squeaks. “You don’t go to him; you make him come to you. You start nibbling around the edges of the assignment.” (Ariana and Schuyler spoke of these fantasy scenarios as “the assignment.”) “You talk with shopkeepers and cab drivers and low-level municipal officials. You ask clumsily if they can put you in touch with someone of importance, a cartel boss, a jefe. La Tuta, perhaps.” (Schuyler refers to the head of los Caballeros (formerly la Familia de Michoacan). the locally dominant amphetamine, cocaine and extortion racket.) “The Mexicans you talk to are, of course, horrified by so rash a request — scared for you. They quickly say they have no idea how to make contact with La Tuta, ubiquitous though he may be in their fears and on their television sets.
In due course — rather quickly, Schuyler figures — one of the shopkeepers rats you out. Word reaches the bad guys that some ridiculous gringa is asking nosy questions.”
Days later, el jefe puts himself in touch with you. You are striding across the plaza when the proverbial SUV rolls up, the tinted window rolls down and someone points at you, asks your name. Are you Ariana Altobelli, the journalist? Are you serious about wanting to interview el jefe? Maybe you’d care to step into the car.”
Three days later you stumble back into the pale of civilized life. You have paid for the interview with your body.
But why stop at an interview? “What about me getting kidnapped and released?” Ariana had rhapsodized — “like the Colombian woman — Betancourt? Wasn’t that her name? — the one who got taken by the FARC guerrillas down there?”
“Vanity Fair would kill for your story,” Schuyler agrees. “Cover billing: SICARIOS KIDNAPPED ME; Ex-TV anchor endures six weeks as a cartel sex slave! Photo credit: Annie Leibowitz!
So much for the fatuous pot riff. Ariana has come to see how absurd it was. Yes, within a year, Sean Penn will manage to inveigle an interview with El Chapo himself. But a faded TV personality securing the same access? Unlikely. The pot riff has been superseded by reality, and whoever grabbed Schuyler is proving to be a lot less accommodating than the jefe in her What if? scenario. Ariana drifts off to sleep and then wakes up with a start an hour before daylight. The reality is that Schuyler is the one who — not willingly, but for sure — has penetrated the heart of Narcolandia. He is the one who will return with an astounding story. Ariana’s sweat is, in fact, cold. She asks herself: What in hell am I doing, lying here? My husband has disappeared. Extortionists are on the phone. Her response is robotic, the way she has always dealt with overwhelming anxiety. She needs to greet the dawn. She pulls on some clothes. The streets around the hotel are largely deserted. A man approaches her, raising his eyebrows as if to ask whether she’s available. She looks away. He mutters something and walks on.
Ariana and Jorge meet in the hotel’s ground-floor café for a light breakfast at eight, then walk the few blocks from the hotel to la Reforma, the grand boulevard that slices across Mexico City, from the Zocalo, at its very heart, past the glorieta that circles the golden Angel de la Independencia, high on her pillar, to Chapultepec, Mexico City’s Central Park. Jorge cuts loose and heads off to the metro for coffee with one of his clients. He and Ariana have agreed to rendezvous around three at a hotel bar off the Zocalo, the part of town where Jorge has the second of his two meetings.
Ariana walks four blocks up la Reforma and there it is, the embassy of the United States of America, a white fortress maybe seven stories tall. It stands behind an additional layer of metal fencing that looks like you could throw a switch and it would pulse with a lethal electric current. The windows are sniper-proofed with reflective glass, bringing to mind a blind man, a movie star in shades — or, it occurs to her, an SUV with tinted windows. Ariana does not expect much from the State Department bureaucracy and that’s what she gets: not much.
A fifth-floor receptionist — a Mexican woman — asks Ariana her business. She says she needs to talk to someone involved with the security services, with crimes against Americans. How about someone with the DEA? When the receptionist asks her to be more specific about her problem, Ariana tells her she’d rather get specific with a security official. The receptionist see
s fit to punish Ariana for her snide remark, or so Ariana concludes. She is directed to a waiting room down a long corridor. Through a glass wall she can see, but not hear, democracy at work: the desk jockeys chinning by phone with unseen others, the secretaries (mostly women) delivering coffee to the (mostly male) seat warmers at their desks. Mouths move and grin inaudibly. She has cooled her heels for maybe 45 minutes when Ariana decides she has had enough of it. She rises to leave. She is alone. She is afraid. For Schuyler. For herself. Frustration adds to the doubt she’s had all along about the wisdom of turning to government authorities for help. She has stepped out into the corridor when someone says her name. She follows the woman, an attaché, she supposes, back into the honeycomb of glass offices.
In fairness to DEA Deputy Agent Bruce Brandon Forrester, Ariana should not have expected a more vigorous response than she first got. (But of course she did expect more — why else would she have driven all this way?)
The attaché shows Ariana into Forrester’s office. He greets her respectfully and then immediately starts in on the Sgt. Friday routine. He asks how she can be sure that her experience, as described, is the work of the Caballeros — or any other cartel?
He goes on without waiting for her answer. “Help me with this, Ms. … is it Altobelli? How can you make me certain that a kidnapping has even happened?”
Yes, at least since the era when Hollywood still meant glamor, Mexico has been a magnet for men or women stepping off Los Angeles flights and looking to slough off unsatisfactory mates. In truth, there’s no way Ariana Altobelli can prove that, in lieu of a quick divorce, she has not arranged the elimination of the missing man and is now attempting to build a plausible alibi by reporting a disappearance, a kidnapping.
And wouldn’t it be even easier for Forrester to believe that Mr. Schermerhorn simply took off on his wife? Then staged the kidnapping to throw her off track?
Ariana’s failure to come up with glib answers to these questions — or any answers at all — appears to satisfy Forrester that she is not in on some scam. There’s no proving she’s not the victim of one, but Forrester, having put her through the third degree, now softens. He jots down notes as they talk, asks Ariana for contact information. He says he’ll be in touch. “You will be largely unaware of whatever gears we set in motion,” he adds. “At our best, we operate pretty much invisibly here in Mexico. Or if not invisibly, then as far behind the scenes as we can get. We defer to the Mexicans as much as humanly possible, Ms. Altobelli.” He warns that pestering him for progress reports will only put her husband at greater risk. Forrester rises abruptly from his desk, signaling that the meeting is over. As Ariana moves through the waiting room, she glances back into the honeycomb of glass boxes. Forrester is already toiling over paperwork that he had stacked and pushed aside as she walked in fifteen minutes earlier.
Ariana has time to kill. She could call Jorge and see if there is any chance of pushing his meetings forward and heading back sooner than three. Instead, she squeezes herself into a very crowded subway car and steps out several stops later at the Zocalo, the huge square that is the very heart of Mexico — the city, the nation itself and, before that, the Aztec empire that the Spaniards eviscerated. In one corner stands the pyramid-shaped altar on which the Aztecs offered their gods the still pulsing hearts they had cut out of the chests of enemy warriors with blades of obsidian, hurling the rest of the corpse down the perilously steep staircase, an act of religious catharsis that electrifies a ravening crowd.
Ariana pauses as she always does to savor the long, centuries-old, frequently modified building that runs along one whole side of the enormous plaza. It’s a piece of low-rise architecture — just three stories high (and the third having been added only in the 20th century) but with the visual impact of a towering skyscraper. The power, by her analysis, lies in its extraordinary length — along the whole east side of the Zocalo, and the dramatic redundancy of its upper-story balconies, each backed by French doors and shaded from the torturing sun with a private awning. The building, from which Mexico’s presidents preside, breathes with the corrupted grandeur of Latin governance even more tellingly than the famous murals by Diego Rivera on its stairwells and corridor walls. She can envision Porfirio Diaz, the late 19th-century dictator, stepping out onto one of those balconies and waving to the mob before retreating with a cigar into the velvety comfort of the office in which he has made Mexico’s upper echelons — and himself — enormously rich. It would be the same office in which, a hundred years later, the Harvard-educated Carlos Salinas — the chupacabra, the blood-sucking demon that he became at the hand of political cartoonists — either conspired with his brother Raul to ship ill-gotten millions to a private account in London and Geneva, or chose to overlook Raul’s ability to bank $110 million on an official salary that never exceeded $190,000. (The Swiss eventually returned $66 million to the Mexican government — which no doubt skimmed off a goodly part of the unexpected windfall, Ariana thinks to herself. Raul’s bigger problem was an ex-brother-in-law who got in his way and turned up dead.)
She ducks into the Metropolitan Cathedral, its nave bristling with scaffolds as Mexico attempts to halt the building’s relentless subsidence into what, at the time of the Conquest, had been, not dry land, but a shallow lake traversed by causeways.
Now she heads for the cluster of bookstores, three or four blocks worth of them, not far from the cathedral’s rear facade. They are islands of musty calm that have always called to her. She browses in the English-language section of a couple of shops, summoning to mind titles mentioned in the press that have caught her eye recently. A clerk shrugs and gives up on finding the one she asked for, and she peruses other books on her own. This takes concentration, a mental faculty in short supply just now. She is too restless for bookstore browsing.
Out on the street, she picks up a coffee-to-go at a small cafeteria and then strolls idly down Avenida Cinco de Mayo. She pauses by the window of a hunting goods store: sheath knives, binoculars, fishing gear, archery sets, even spring-triggered hunting bows — everything except the assault rifles, pistols and shotguns that dominate a display like this in any red-blooded town, city or suburb in the States.
Not here. Travelers are warned at every airport and border crossing that mere possession of a firearm is grounds for arrest and incarceration. Not that illegal guns aren’t increasingly available. Ariana thinks with disgust about Operation Fast and Furious, the Washington scheme to track guns by selling them illegally into the Mexican underworld. At least a couple of thousand assault rifles made it across the border.
Binoculars. Schuyler has mentioned more than once that he’d like to have a really good pair to keep by the window looking out over all creation. Ariana steps into the store.
She abandons her attempt at a Spanish transaction when the woman answers her in serviceable English. The binoculars will be 300 pesos, little more than 20 dollars. On a whim, Ariana mentions that she has had reason to fear for her safety. She knows guns are hard to come by, but wonders how one goes about getting one — a pistol, perhaps — in cases of urgent need. The woman looks at her quizzically.
“We have a strict firearms law,” she says. “It is reinforced by poverty. It is why Mexican men settle their differences with knives or tire irons or their fists.”
At the shop owners behest, a clerk retreats to the back of the store and wheels a stepladder along a wall of inventory stacked floor to ceiling. He spots the binoculars and nimbly climbs up several steps to ease the box free without triggering an avalanche.
The boy places the box on the counter, then disappears into a side room, restoring privacy to the conversation between the two women.
“Of course there are ways,” the shop owner says — as if the conversation about guns had not been interrupted. “It all depends on how much you are willing to pay.”
Ah, Mexico.
Ariana leaves with the binoculars — perfect for their treetops view of the plazas and the lake in the dist
ance. She is half a block down the street when she stops and almost doubles back. Who knows where this is going. The sicarios will have tried to shake every detail they can get out of Schuyler: where her jewelry is stashed, hours in the day when she’s in and out. It’s just a matter of time before she hears a noise in the night, walks downstairs and finds someone rooting through table drawers in search of bank statements. (She is mindful once again what a fool she has been not to use the shredder Schuyler bought. Both of them have ignored it. The damn thing jams if you try to run more than two or three sheets through it at a time.)
A gun? Come on, girl. You don’t even know how to use one.
She has pressed forward toward her rendezvous with Jorge when she picks up on something: the sound of footsteps nearing her from behind. Her pursuer is a pace or two behind when he starts to speak:
-Puedo ayudarle.
He is offering to help.
Busca á una arma …?. (You are looking for a gun …? )
She glances over her shoulder and sees the clerk, as she knew she would. Was this how the sporting goods shop routinely handled a customer’s request for weaponry? Or was it a sideline developed behind his boss’s back by an ill-paid young man?
Either way, Ariana was struck by the seamless integration of Mexico’s black market with its official ways of doing business.
Un revólver le costaria tres mil pesos en efectivo.
Ariana doesn’t know a revólver from a pistola, but with the peso at about 12 to the dollar just then, she knows that three thousand pesos is about $250.
She is brushing off the clerk when she catches herself, and like any good salesman, in her hesitation he spots opportunity.
Espere cinco minutos. Mire, hay un café. Sientese; volveré pronto.
What the hell. She has five minutes to spare, and coffee sounds like a good idea. She is not being asked to follow a stranger into some den of iniquity where she is as likely to be robbed as to leave with an illegal revolver.
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