by Carmen Amato
“You didn’t tell him about yourself?”
“Not about being a muchacha, of course.”
“Who did you tell him you were?”
“I didn’t really say anything. He was . . . is . . .” There was nothing more to say. She was sorry, sorry, sorry and wanted absolution. Maybe then she could get the image of Eddo Cortez Castillo out of her head. “Father, what is my penance?”
“Your penance for what, Luz de Maria?”
“Father,” Luz said impatiently, returning to her chair. “I have confessed to the sin of sleeping with a man to whom I was not married. What is my penance?”
“Let us consider.” Father Santiago folded his hands. “If he hadn’t left the money and didn’t, as you claim, think you were a prostitute, would you still be sleeping with him?”
Luz looked at the heart on the misty glass. “Yes.”
“Luz de Maria,” Father Santiago said. “You cannot expect absolution for a sin for which you do not feel remorse.”
“Of course I’m sorry for what happened.”
“You feel remorse because he misunderstood who you were pretending to be. Isn’t that true?”
“Well, yes,” Luz said uncertainly.
“So if that misunderstanding didn’t exist you would still sleep with him.”
Luz stared at the old priest. He was right; she couldn’t very well claim to be sorry for the sin of having slept with Eddo if she still wanted to be committing the sin. But that meant Father Santiago was not going to give her absolution.
“It’s not a sin to love someone, Luz de Maria,” the priest said gently. “You deserve to love someone and have him love you. But the real sin here is that of false pretense. Maybe if you’d been more honest about yourself none of this would have happened.”
“I couldn’t have told him,” Luz said. “Someone like him would never be with a muchacha.”
“Did you give him a choice?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Luz faltered.
“But you believe he wanted to be with you?”
“Yes, but only because he didn’t know I was a muchacha.”
“And being thought of as a prostitute is somehow better?”
“No, I hate that’s what happened.” Luz’s head began to pound.
“Luz de Maria, you are not being fair to this man,” Father Santiago said sternly. “He ought to know who he was truly with, rather than thinking he was with a prostitute. Because by letting him believe that, you led him into sin, too.”
What she’d done was sounding worse and worse. Luz found a tissue in her jeans pocket and waited to hear how many rosaries she was going to have to pray for her penance.
“You must talk to this man and explain who you are.” Father Santiago reached out and patted her arm. “As your penance you must make your peace with him.”
“What?”
“You need to be honest with him, tell him who you really are and make sure he understands his mistake.”
“This is my penance?” Luz blinked at the old priest, serene in his apparent insanity. “Father, wait. I can’t go back and talk to him!”
“Do you know where he lives? Could you see him your next weekend off?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Luz babbled. “My next weekend off is in two weeks. But Father, no. I’ll say a thousand Hail Mary’s, Father, a thousand Our Fathers, as many prayers as you like. But I can’t go back there. I can’t face him. Please. What would I say?”
Father Santiago gazed at her mildly. “God will guide your words, Luz de Maria. Let us pray the Act of Contrition together.”
Chapter 27
Anahuac was about two hours southwest of Nuevo Laredo, a congregation point for ilegales who wanted to cross into El Norte and the coyotes who guided them. The drug routes into the United States followed the ilegale routes and vice versa. The rival cartels and the street gangs that served them fought over the routes and anything along the way, ranging through the once sleepy town in open warfare.
On the ragged eastern side of town, Eddo met the Financial agent in a boarding house popular with migrants. Javier Sotos Bild had been told that Banco Limitado was suspected of cartel activity and that Eddo was an Army officer working cartel issues.
Sotos Bild was young and aggressive and made it clear that he regarded Eddo as an old crank from Mexico City. The night they’d met Eddo sat stoically while Sotos Bild lectured him on the proper way to conduct a financial investigation, never realizing how close he was to having his nose broken.
They cased the area around the bank for several days, just another two machos looking for day jobs or a cheap way to get across the border. Banco Limitado was on the top floor of a narrow 2-story building. It overlooked a strip of stores on a main street in the combat zone where everything reeked of urine. The first level of the building was occupied by a tailor shop, a fruit and vegetable stall, and a small hardware store that was no bigger than a closet, with rope and chains and plastic mats spilling onto the sidewalk. There was a doorway between the tailor shop and the hardware store with a number and an intercom plate screwed into the concrete wall. When the door opened they could see a steep stairway leading to the second floor.
There were more businesses along the street but then the commercial section gave way to a trash-strewn vacant lot on one side and a cement block shantytown on the other. During the day the area was busy. Battered cars lurched down the street as pedestrians hustled across in the dry heat, bent on getting their errands done before something bad happened. The area closed at dusk, when whichever gang that currently owned this part of town came out to play. Eddo spent each night in the boardinghouse with the Glock in his hand, listening to the sporadic gunfire and assessing its distance.
An alley, nothing more than a narrow strip separating cement buildings, ran parallel to the main street. Sotos Bild was furious when he realized that Eddo meant for them to pose as itinerant garbage-pickers but he went through the motions as they gradually crossed the vacant lot and accessed the alley. There was a rickety iron staircase on the outside of the Banco Limitado building leading to a second floor door criss-crossed with security bars. A truck was parked at the base of the iron staircase with a couple of guys, almost certainly cartel sicario foot soldiers, smoking and playing cards on the tailgate. As Eddo got familiar with the street’s routines he realized that various trucks came and went in the alley but there was always one parked in it, guarding the stairway.
Only one person appeared to work at Banco Limitado. A painfully thin woman in her mid forties arrived each day around 10:00 am, used a key to unlock the door between the shops, and left in the late afternoon.
A few other people occasionally went into Banco Limitado after announcing themselves via the intercom and waiting for the door to buzz open. They were all men, dressed in jeans and boots like the coyotes roaming the bars or the card players in the alley. A few carried backpacks which looked lighter when they left and Eddo marked them as cartel couriers.
The best vantage point for Eddo and Sotos Bild was a pool hall half a block down on the opposite side of the street, a dark cavernous place where there was a knife fight every few hours. There were four pool tables in back, where the air was so smoky it was hard to see. In front, tables spilled out onto the sidewalk by a low wall decorated with torn posters advertising a parade in honor of Santa Muerte. The patron saint of death’s black skeleton face leered from the faded paper.
Anyone sitting outside the pool hall had to deal with beggars and kids selling everything from pencils to their sisters. In contrast to the rest of the street, the place never seemed to close. Eddo suspected that the owner paid protection money to all the gangs.
The night of the third day Eddo hid a tiny microphone in a crack in the concrete by the Banco Limitado doorway while Sotos Bild drank a beer outside the pool hall with the receiver and a digital recorder in a backpack. The next day they captured several brief conversations between the woman inside the building and men at the door;
in each instance they gave her the same password after which she buzzed open the door.
They talked through their next step that night. Bild was out of patience with Eddo’s slow and methodical casing and Eddo wasn’t sure how much longer their migrant cover would hold. They’d had to continually avoid fights and brush off the coyotes and Eddo couldn’t hear one more scared teen boast how he was going to outwit La Migra.
The plan was simple. Sotos Bild would try to open a bank account at Banco Limitado with the money and false identity that had been provided for just that purpose. He’d get an account and set up wire transfers to another bank, which Financial could hack. With the information Financial got from the operation, they could potentially trace the bank’s other transactions. Although Sotos Bild did not know it, Financial’s chief would then personally work with Eddo to trace where the funds from Hugo’s accounts went next.
“Do it just like we rehearsed,” Eddo warned late the following afternoon. They were slouched on a street corner, both in jeans and cotton shirts and backpacks. The woman appeared to be alone in the bank. A group of couriers had just left; they’d almost certainly been the last of the day. The truck in the courtyard had changed about an hour ago when a new crop of card players had taken up their vigil at the base of the iron stairs. “I’ll be waiting for you at the pool hall in an hour,” he reminded Sotos Bild and nodded toward the shantytown. “The grocery is the emergency meet. Use your radio if there’s any problem.”
“I know,” Sotos Bild muttered. He was shorter than Eddo, with light brown hair and a square jaw that bespoke a German ancestry. “Here we go, abuelo.”
Eddo watched the kid cross the street by the tailor shop. Sotos Bild was an insufferable asshole but he was smart with numbers and he had balls, too. He was armed with a cell phone with a push-to-talk radio feature and a small automatic he’d probably never fired before. Eddo was betting the kid was glib enough not to need either.
Eddo’s Glock was a reassuring pressure against his side in its shoulder holster under his cotton shirt as he ambled down the street. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sotos Bild speak into the intercom. The door swung outward and Sotos Bild disappeared inside.
Eddo loitered at the hardware store. He bought a lottery ticket, then drifted back and skirted the alley. The truck was still there, with four men looking bored and slapping cards down on a makeshift table in the truck bed. Another urinated against the wall of the adjacent building.
Parched in the dusty heat and listening hard to the street noises for anything out of the ordinary, Eddo made the block and went into the pool hall. He bought a beer at the bar and carried it outside to one of the small plastic tables with a view of the Banco Limitado door. The drink was lukewarm but helped to wash down some of the grit in his throat. Eddo wondered if he’d ever feel clean again.
“Eh, amigo.” A boy of nine or ten sidled up to him and showed him a couple of bootleg CDs. The covers showed masked men with long guns holding a scantily clad woman. “Narcocorridos,” the boy said. “The latest. Ten each CD.”
Eddo shook his head. Narcocorridos were banned songs extolling the drug cartels and their opulent lifestyle, mostly recorded by amateurs but sometimes by well-known musicians.
“They’re cheap, amigo,” the boy said but stopped his sales pitch when a hand gripped his shoulder.
“Move along.” The speaker was a short wiry man, made leathery by sun and hard work. He wore jeans, a plaid shirt, expensive tooled boots, and a dirty New York Yankees baseball cap. His expression was wary and confident at the same time.
The boy slipped inside the pool hall and the wiry man sat on the edge of the other plastic chair at Eddo’s table. He had a Coca and raised it to Eddo in kind of a salute before taking a swallow.
Eddo said nothing, his brain churning. He and Sotos Bild had definitely seen this man go inside the bank two days ago.
“You looking for work, amigo?” The wiry man wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You hiring?” Eddo replied.
The man grinned as if Eddo had said something funny. “Nobody here has work.” He slid his eyes away then back again. “But other places, yes.”
“How much?” Eddo asked.
“Depends.” The man scanned the street. “Do you have a family?”
It was a strange question for a coyote or cartel courier to ask. “Today I’m alone,” Eddo parried.
“But you have children?” the man persisted. “How old?”
Eddo watched the activity around them as well; it was if they were both talking to the street rather than to each other. “You starting a school?”
The man grinned even more broadly this time. “Sure.”
Eddo felt the blood thump in his ears. If this asshole was selling kids into prostitution he was going to pull his head off. “Where?”
“On the way to--.” The man broke off as a big blue truck lumbered past, the bed full of swarthy men. He stood up. “Go tomorrow to the house behind the church of Santa Agneta,” he said. “Bring your children.”
He walked off swiftly, disappearing into the shantytown and Eddo watched as the shops all started to close, even as the sun continued to glint off car fenders and bake the sparse grass. A woman with a bale of secondhand clothes scurried past, panting as she went. The rolling door of the hardware store clanged shut. Precious inventory was left on the sidewalk; chains, rope, a stack of blue plastic buckets. A watermelon rolled into the street, the fruit vendor in too much of a rush to pull everything inside before closing the shop.
Pedestrians melted away. The street was suddenly deserted and noiseless.
The big blue truck came down the street again and the eerie silence was broken as the men in the back whooped and shouted and fired into the sky.
Eddo threw himself out of his chair and onto the ground, rolling toward the bulwark of the wall behind him. Men boiled out of the pool hall in a shouting, tangled mass of confusion and anger. The street erupted into violence, the chaos doubled by the long afternoon shadows.
A different truck screeched around the corner and Eddo saw it was the one most recently on guard in back of the Banco Limitado building. It skidded to a halt in front of the pool hall and a man who’d been standing in the truck bed screamed and pitched out of the vehicle backwards into the trash on the side of the street, his neck spouting blood. The gunshots were no longer sporadic but a pitched battle for control of the street. Another truck skidded around the corner. Several men started beating on the doorway between the tailor shop and the hardware store with rocks and a metal baseball bat.
An unmistakable sound pinged off the wall behind Eddo. He scrambled to his feet, snatched up his surprisingly intact beer bottle, and sprinted for the shantytown, aiming for a street that ended in the alley behind the bank. He heard another shot and footsteps behind him and ran as if he was playing Toluca for the title, dodging, weaving, his feet barely touching the broken pavement, the backpack on his shoulder nearly horizontal behind him.
He darted into a gap between two crumbling cement walls, waited a beat for his pursuer to catch up then stepped out, ramming the moving man under the chin with an elbow. At the same time Eddo brought the bottle down hard on top of the man’s head. The man gave a low gurgle from his mangled windpipe and collapsed onto broken glass.
Eddo hauled out the Glock, wheeled around and ran for the alley. There was only one person on guard, a skinny youth with a long gun held inexpertly, and Eddo was on top of him before the kid could react. The barrel of the Glock cracked against bone and the kid was suddenly unconscious in the dirt, his head streaked with blood. Eddo grabbed the long gun and took the winding iron stairs two at a time. He slowed halfway; the iron was only loosely fastened to the concrete wall and the whole thing swayed as he went higher.
The door was locked but cheap. Eddo blasted out the lock and shoved the door inward, using it as a shield against the boom of buckshot as he rammed into the room. Eddo fired around the edge of the door a
nd an older man with a shotgun slumped to the floor.
Eddo stepped out from behind the door and managed to shove it closed. He found himself in an office that had been touched by a tornado; two desks were intact but at odd angles while broken lamps and chairs and electronic equipment littered the floor. The thin woman they’d seen going in and out stared at him mutely, her face contorted with fear.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Eddo said rapidly. “Who else is here?”
The woman didn’t move or speak.
Sotos Bild was a bloody figure on the floor behind a desk, cell phone in one hand, gun in the other. Eddo felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. An older man in a denim shirt was also dead, sprawled on the opposite side of the room, a gun still clenched in his hand. The man Eddo had shot was still alive but unconscious. Raucous sounds of looting filtered up from the floor below.
“They came. All of a sudden,” the woman said. “They broke down the door while that man was here and . . . and . . .”
A door on the far side of the room was barricaded with a filing cabinet. “Why didn’t you leave?” Eddo jerked his chin at the battered doorway he’d just come through.
“I don’t have the key,” the woman whimpered.
A thunderous crash from the other side of the barricaded door announced a renewed assault on the bank. Eddo kept the Glock in his right and rifled through Sotos Bild’s pockets with his left, scooping up everything and dumping it in the younger man’s backpack, leaving only a false identity card. Eddo would find the body at the morgue later; make sure Sotos Bild was laid to rest properly.
He stood up and grabbed the woman by the arm. “Get your files and let’s go.”
She seemed frozen and he gave her a shake. “Banking files,” he barked. There was a laptop on the floor and he snatched it up, yanking cables out of a router as the banging on the door grew more intense. The file cabinet fell over with a crash, spilling out folders.
The woman jerked into life. She grabbed the folders off the floor. Eddo grabbed the rifle and eased open the door to the iron staircase. He peered into the alley. By some miracle the rival gangs hadn’t taken the fight to the back of the building. The guard was still unconscious where Eddo had left him. Eddo half shoved, half dragged the woman down the stairs and into the maze of streets in the shantytown.