Black Orchid

by Vaughn C. Hardacker

  “First, what is an extranjero and second, what did you tell him about me?”

  “An extranjero is a foreigner, an alien. I stuck with our story … you are a policía who was caught taking bribes. Now you are involved in other types of business.”

  “Do you think he bought it?”

  Manuel shrugged. “Who knows? All these matón are paranoid.”

  “Matón?”

  “Hoodlums …” He looked over Traynor’s shoulder and added, “I think we are about to get an answer.

  The hood returned and stopped beside their table, leaning over and saying something with his mouth so close to Manuel’s ear that Traynor heard nothing. Manuel nodded and the messenger disappeared into the foggy room.

  “Well?”

  “Señor Treviño has agreed to speak with us.”

  Traynor looked at the door between the stages and saw there was no one there to enter the code and give them access. “We won’t be meeting him here,” Manuel said. “He will send someone to tell us where later. Until then, we enjoy the tequila and watch the show.”

  They were there an hour before the matón returned. Without saying anything, he handed Manuel a slip of paper and walked away. Manuel read the paper, shoved it into his shirt pocket, and stood up.

  “Do we have a meet?” Traynor asked.

  “In two hours. Before then, we have to go to our rooms and get something.”

  Not one to belabor the obvious, Traynor followed him out of the club.

  The last place Traynor expected to meet with a member of Mexico City’s mob was a church in a small village on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. As they drove down the unpaved street, he studied the adobe huts and hardscrabble yards. “Looks like someone modeled this place after a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.”

  Manuel grinned. “Most of Mexico is small towns and villages.”

  In the headlights Traynor saw a tree with flat green leaves. “What type of tree is that?”

  “It’s not a tree, it’s a paddle cactus.” Traynor did not answer him, but he had always thought that all cacti were either a small melon-sized ball of thorns or like the Saguaro variety common in the Arizona desert. He turned his attention to the buildings. The headlights illuminated a cathedral-style church that was the most imposing building he had seen since they had left the city. “Are you Catholic?” Traynor asked Manuel.

  “Why do you ask that? It’s not relevant to anything.”

  “I don’t know, I thought I’d ask to make conversation. I know a lot of people down here are Roman Catholic.”

  Manuel kept his eyes to the front and shrugged. “I’m a none.”

  Traynor almost laughed. “You don’t look like a nun to me.”

  “But I am.” Manuel’s gaze was penetrating and Traynor was starting to feel uncomfortable. Suddenly Manuel smiled and said, “When it comes to religion, I got none, don’t want none, and ain’t about to get none.”

  Traynor replied, “Yeah, me too.” He studied the puissant village and said, “Still, it amazes me how the Catholic Church builds these huge monoliths to Christ in the middle of all this squalor. Christ was a pauper, who lived on the charity of others. I can’t help but wonder what he would think about these monstrosities. They could feed this village for years on what that cost.”

  “Would Jesus wear a $1500 watch?” Manuel said.

  “What?”

  “That was the question I asked when I saw my first television evangelist. He was wearing a Rolex.”

  While Traynor mulled over that idea, they stopped in front of the church.

  Manuel put his pistol under the driver’s seat. “They’ll frisk us,” he explained. “Remember they’re all paranoid. We won’t get in with our weapons, so we may as well leave them here rather than risk leaving them.”

  “Why’d you have us bring them?”

  “This meeting is the easy part.”

  “You wanna explain that?”

  “These assholes won’t try anything in a church—it’s sacred ground. But once we leave … it’s no holds barred. So slide it under, but not too far back that it’ll be a pain in the ass to get to.”

  Traynor also slid his Glock under the seat.

  They exited the rental and climbed the stone steps to the church entrance. Two of Treviño’s goons suddenly filled the doorway. When Manuel held his hands out to the side, Traynor did the same. The goons came out and patted them down. When Traynor felt hands pat the insides of his thighs, near the groin, he was inclined to bust the matón’s chops and make some remark such as: “Ohhhh, I didn’t know you cared …” However, given the situation, he maintained his composure and kept his sarcasm to himself.

  The goon stood up and glared at him. Traynor lowered his arms, now fighting back the urge to offer his hand to be kissed.

  The matón must have sensed something and said, “Etraño.”

  The pat-down completed, the hoods stepped aside. Once they were inside the door, Traynor asked Manuel, “What did Big Boy call me?”

  He grinned. “He called you gay.”

  “Really?”

  “Actually, he said you were queer.”

  Two men occupied the front pew, sitting before an array of candles—many of which were already lit—in front of a statue of Jesus Christ. Neither spoke nor looked their way. Traynor recognized one of them as the matón from the club. Manuel walked around the pew and stopped before the candles. He placed a bill in a small glass vase that was there for that purpose, then lit a long wax wick from one of the candles and used it to light a prayer candle. When he finished, he stood in the center aisle, genuflected, and then made the sign of the cross. Traynor thought it was a good act for a “none.” The oblations completed, Manuel turned and sat beside the second man. Traynor flopped down beside Manuel, as far from the matón as he could get.

  The man Traynor assumed to be Treviño sat between the hoodlum and Manuel and was a real Dapper Dan. His suit was impeccable and had to cost twice that of his bodyguard. His black hair was slicked back and glistened in the candlelight. He half turned sideways and looked at Traynor. “Señor, you have no loved ones for whom you would light a candle and say a prayer?”

  “I don’t see a need for it.”

  “But there is always someone who is in need of our prayers.”

  “It’s been my experience that God is too busy with great things to listen to me—lighting a candle seems a waste of time to me.”

  He stared at Traynor for a few seconds and then said, “I am going to speak with your compañero. Unfortunately, I find it easier to talk business in our native language.”

  “I understand.” Traynor smiled, hoping it came across as sincere. “I sometimes think that we North Americans are the most linguistically backward people on Earth.”

  Treviño returned the smile and then turned his attention to Manuel. For Traynor, the next ten minutes were like watching a foreign film without subtitles. He knew the discussion was serious, but had no clue how it was progressing. During the entire discourse the only word he understood was “Toledo.” Finally, Manuel shook Treviño’s hand and stood up. Traynor followed suit, except when he offered his hand, Treviño ignored it. Traynor assumed it was due to some papal decree against acknowledging a non-Catholic heathen and did not push the issue. He followed Manuel down the aisle and out of the church.

  They got in the car and immediately retrieved their weapons. “Well?” Traynor asked.

  Manuel turned slightly and stared at him for a few seconds. “What’s eating at you?”

  It surprised Traynor that Manuel had picked up on his disgust; he thought he’d been doing a good job of keeping it hidden. “How did you stand eight years of dealing with scum like this?”

  “One does what one must—after all, it was my job.”

  “I take my hat off to you, man. I was a cop for over twenty years, fifteen as a homicide detective. I’ve dealt with killers, drug dealers, pedophiles, and just about every form of lowlife there is—or
so I thought …”

  Manuel started the car and pulled away from the church, where the Mexican mobsters stood on the steps staring after them. Manuel remained silent, letting Traynor vent.

  “But these assholes are something else. They murder for their own profit and to entertain a clientele that should be exterminated—then they go to church, light a fucking candle, and pray like they’re pious, God-fearing Christians, worthy of a papal audience.”

  “They’re no different than the Italian mobsters of the thirties and forties. They would conduct business and then go to their victim’s funeral and grieve over them.”

  “Yeah, but they were preying on each other, not innocent, naïve young women …”

  “Ed, there’s only one way to bring these sons-of-bitches down and that is to get in with them and tear their organization apart from the inside. In order to do that, you swallow your disgust and play their game … or at least make them think you are.”

  “Doesn’t make it any more palatable.”

  “No, it doesn’t. We’re soldiers, Ed. Only our battleground is the streets on which we live. Like soldiers we have to be willing to make sacrifices—even if it means giving our lives.”

  Traynor knew he was right, but the conversation made him weary and he changed the subject. “What do we do until he contacts us?”

  Manuel said, “Now we wait. He’ll talk to Toledo and get in touch.”

  “And,” Traynor asked, “in the meantime, how do we occupy ourselves?”

  “Hang out at the hotel bar and bolster the local economy.”

  Outside of war zones, more Americans have been killed in Mexico in the last decade than in any other country outside the United States, and the number of US deaths jumped from 35 in 2007 to 113 in 2011.

  —CNN, June 9, 2013

  20

  The call came two days later. Traynor was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant when Manuel entered and sat down. “We have a meet,” he said.

  “Where and when?”

  “We’re having dinner with Toledo this evening at a restaurant called La Gruta.”

  “Doesn’t gruta mean grotto? That’s a strange name for a restaurant.”

  “Not in this case, it is a cave…. Actually, I’m sort of glad they chose it. It will give me a chance to introduce you to a culture that existed around the time of Christ and show you some of Mexico City’s prime tourist attractions.”

  “Okay, let me finish eating and I’ll be ready.”

  They drove from the hotel and wove around some twisted streets that had Traynor reminiscing about the narrow roads through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. As they passed a plaza, he noticed a statue with a large building behind it. “What’s that?”

  Manuel glanced and said, “The building is Chapultepec Castle.”

  “Really? Every Marine knows about Chapultepec. The red stripe that noncommissioned officers wear down the trouser legs of the dress blue uniform commemorates the blood of all the NCOs who were killed storming this place during the Mexican–American War. Is the statue a monument to the battle?”

  “It’s called Monumento a los Niños y Castillo de Chapultepec. In English it means Monument to the Young Heroes and Chapultepec Castle. I’ll bet the Marines didn’t tell you that most of the castle’s defenders were children.”

  “I can’t say they did.”

  After that they passed the city limits and the landscape changed to desert and small villages until they came to Teotihuacan—or what Traynor knew as the Aztec Pyramids—about forty kilometers from Mexico City. Manuel was quick to let Traynor know that the Aztecs had nothing to do with the dead city. In fact, he informed him, Teotihuacan was inhabited from 100 to 700 AD, long before the Aztecs founded what is now Mexico City. “If the Aztecs didn’t build it, who did?” Traynor asked.

  “That has been and is still being debated. Possible candidates are the Nahua, Otomi, or Totonac ethnic groups. Some scholars have also suggested that Teotihuacan was a multiethnic state.”

  They strolled along the main street, called the Avenue of the Dead, which Traynor thought sounded more than a little ominous, past the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (which Manuel said was one of their gods). They climbed sixty meters of stone steps to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun and looked over the valley. From his perch at the pyramid’s apex, Traynor saw the stone foundations of thousands of homes that had existed long before people of European descent stopped living in hide tents.

  “You wouldn’t think there would be a city of this size here in the high desert,” Traynor commented.

  “It wasn’t always a desert,” Manuel replied. “There were even lakes then.”

  They dallied the afternoon away and as the sun set in the west, Manuel said, “Let’s head for the restaurant.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “It’s part of the site,” he said. “You can see the Pirámide del Sol from the parking lot.”

  As if the dead city of Teotihuacan was not enough, Traynor thought that the restaurant was incredible. They entered through a portico and down a set of winding stairs. He looked into the cavern and saw a dining area that, according to the brochure, seated eight hundred, as well as a huge dance floor on which the Ballet Folklórico of Mexico performed traditional dances from the various parts of the country.

  “Impressive,” Traynor commented.

  “That’s what Queen Elizabeth and President Kennedy, to name a couple of the more distinguished visitors, felt.”

  A maître d’ met them and after Manuel spoke to him in Spanish, he led them to a secluded table ringed with multicolored chairs. They ordered drinks and waited for the arrival of Holy Toledo and whomever he brought with him.

  Twenty minutes passed before they saw the maître d’ lead two men to their table. Manuel and Traynor stood.

  When the shorter of the two men studied Manuel for several seconds, Traynor thought that the meeting was over before it began. Suddenly, the man seemed to relax and he asked, “Señor Vegas?”

  Manuel held out his hand and spoke in Spanish.

  Traynor waited for Manuel to make the introductions in Toledo’s native language with his impatience threatening to get the best of him. If he was going to get everything secondhand, it was going to be a very long evening. He almost exhaled with relief when Manuel said, “My colleague speaks very little Español. Therefore if you have no objection, I would like to speak Inglés.”

  “That is fine,” replied the short man. He was built like a brick wall, undersized but wide. However, it was evident to Traynor that he was not soft.

  Manuel half turned toward Traynor and said, “Señor Giuliano Olivas Toledo, may I introduce you to Señor Eduardo Traynor.”

  Toledo held his hand out, and when Traynor gripped it, it felt cold and dry—like a snake’s skin. He struggled to hide his loathing for Toledo. No matter how expensive his clothing and polite his speech, he was still a scumbag and predator. It was going to require his best acting job if he was to hide his distaste throughout the evening. He forced a smile and said, “My pleasure, Señor Toledo.” Traynor applied as much pressure as he could to his grip, hoping to see him flinch. He did not.

  Manuel nudged him and he released Toledo’s hand and smiled. “Shall we sit?”

  Traynor noticed that Toledo made a point of sitting across from Manuel during the conference. He knew that Toledo’s choice of seating was intended as an insult and kept staring at him. Toledo sensed the attention, and every few seconds he would look at Traynor out of the corner of his eye. Traynor studied Holy Toledo and found himself making some assumptions about the drug kingpin. While he might be a dangerous man, he was clearly not the poster boy for courage. He was the type that would pay someone, like his companion—who looked like a bodybuilder—to do his wet work2. Traynor remembered the movie and knew Toledo had not been Mindy’s leading man. If he survived, Traynor vowed he would find the actual killer, and when he did, the guy was not going to have to worry about legal fees. He wondere
d if Skidgel had been remanded or made bail and decided to call McMahon that night to find out.

  Toledo made small talk for several minutes, inquiring about the state of the Los Angeles Dodgers (as a diehard Red Sox fan, Traynor did not give a damn, but Manuel played along). Finally, Toledo said, “I understand you have a business proposition for me.”

  Traynor sat up straight and hoped his excitement did not show as Toledo nudged at the bait like an inquisitive fish. Manuel glanced around, pretending to check that no one was close enough to overhear. “We have been told that you are a provider of a quality product.”

  Toledo sat back and stared at Manuel, then at Traynor. “Maybe it would help if you were a bit more specific.” A schoolboy could see that he was suspicious.

  “My companion and I represent a very wealthy investor, who has a problem that he has hired my companion and me to solve.”

  “What sort of problem does your investor need solved?”

  “He has a need for cash … a lot of cash.”

  Toledo was still unsure of them and replied, “How much cash? I believe you said he was wealthy, did you not?”

  “Yes. However, he has lately discovered that he needs a lot of money, fast. He has been told that you are a person who could be a great deal of help to him.”

  Toledo was not about to give them the benefit of an easy agreement. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  Manuel looked Toledo in the eye and leaned toward the drug lord and whispered in his ear.

  Toledo sat back and covered the lower half of his face with his hand as if he were in deep thought. He leaned back and said something to one of his bodyguards and then turned back to Manuel.

  “I fear you have been misled by someone. I do not deal in such … a product.”

  Manuel sat back and looked at Traynor. “It seems that we have been misinformed, my friend.”

  “So it would seem,” Traynor replied.

  In unison, they stood and Manuel said, “I ask you to forgive us for wasting your valuable time.”

  Toledo remained sitting. “Please, sit down, gentlemen. Just because I haven’t dealt with something doesn’t mean that I am not interested in a viable business proposition.” They settled back and he continued. “I have contacts who … shall we say, have resources that are available to a very, very discreet clientele. For a price they will provide a qualified customer with anything …”