I tasted salt in my mouth.
I started moving and tried to sit up. I grabbed the woman and pushed myself into a sitting position. The movement caused me to get dizzy and increased the pounding in my head, but I managed to stay sitting up.
I counted to ten. I felt happy. I was able to count again. I didn’t want to go back to sleep; I wanted to stand up. I knew I had to look for somebody, but by the love of God, I could not recall whom.
I had salt and sand in my eyes, mouth, ears, and nostrils, and hair all over me, both on my inside as well as my outside, and I felt cold. It seemed like morning, and a light rain was falling.
I tried to stand up. I immediately felt dizzy and nauseous. I started to throw up. I was on all fours. Nothing would come up from my stomach. The convulsions from the dry heaving had left me weak and trembling. I tried to stand up again. On my third try, I managed to stand up. The woman was not a woman. The woman was a big, reddish dog covered in sand. The dog looked at me and barked. The bark started a piercing headache.
“Go away,” I shouted. The strange dog looked at me and yawned. I touched and felt myself. I had a huge bump on the back of my head. I had a sudden image of a short, chubby man hitting somebody in the head with a bottle. I couldn’t remember whom.
I saw a nightmarish landscape. I was on the beach next to a wet mattress full or rips and stains. Around me were the carcass of a dead pig, shoes, plastic bags, and all kinds of trash. Far in the distance, I could see some people looking among the litter. The dog kept on looking at me quietly. He seemed to understand that his barking hurt me.
I had a strong feeling that somebody was waiting for me, but I was unable to think whom. I breathed hard. I knew I had to. I took a few steps. I felt dizzy again. I stopped and inhaled long and deep breaths. My mind began clearing and my headache receding. I felt I could start thinking again. I started walking without feeling too bad. I knew I was a little psychotic and that I was not thinking straight, but I had to keep on going. Somebody important depended on me, even though I couldn’t guess who.
Walrus, golem, and Charlie
That was my first concern: to look for and find the person who was supposed to be with me. I started walking and looking around.
In the corner of my eye, I saw movement near where the waves were breaking on the sand. I stumbled down toward the movement. Something was trying to come out from underneath a wet cardboard box, palm leaves, branches, clothes, and other trash. I thought it could be an animal, but I saw a hand in the middle of all that heap of trash. The hand was attached to an arm, and the arm was attached to a huge walrus trying to stand up. I thought, walruses don’t walk. Do they?
As I got closer, I could see it was not a walrus but a big man made of sand—a sandman. It could be the golem, I thought. The closer I got, I seemed to sense that it was not a monster. It was a man. A name came to the tip of my tongue. Charlie, I thought.
“Where the fuck have you been?” the golem asked me.
Seeing and hearing him brought other names to my consciousness. I asked, “Where are the others? You know, Valentina, Caleb, Juliette, and Camille.”
Charlie made a guttural sound from deep inside of him, a primal cry of pain and anger, and shouted, “Fuck, I don’t know. I have been here unable to move, unable to remember, unable to think. I don’t know where we are, how we came here, or why we are here!”
I said, “As far as I can tell, we were drugged and beaten. The rest is a complete mystery. I also don’t know how we came to be here. I don’t know where the rest of them are.” I was telling him this while I was helping him stand and added, “If we are here, the others shouldn’t be far away.”
“Where?” asked Charlie.
“We will know when we find them,” I said.
He said, “I get it, I get it. Let us look for the others. I’ll go right, and you go left.” He turned right and started walking, looking back and forth.
I shouted, “Charlie, Charlie, stop! Let us walk in circles from this spot, increasing each circle by a couple of yards each turn. I am sure that we were dropped together. Therefore, it makes sense that we all ended up close by.”
“Yes, yes, let’s get on with it,” he said in an irritated and anxious voice.
I knew he was also worried and a little psychotic, just like me. I also had a feeling that little by little, our faculties were returning.
We started walking among the wet trash, animal cadavers, and dead fish. Occasionally, the red dog would bark at something moving; usually, it was a snake. The dog kept walking at my side. Despite being covered in sand, he looked well fed and in good shape. I figured he had probably fallen from one of the yachts.
Charlie asked me, “Who is that?” referring to the dog.
“I don’t know. It woke me up, helped me to stand, and now is helping us look for the others. I’ll take all the help I can get!” I responded.
Trash, Valentina, and Caleb
We had been walking for ten long minutes when we saw a couple squatting next to what appeared to be a human body. We hurried to them, and as we got closer, we could see that the body was a female. The couple was searching through her clothes. As I got to them, I could see that the woman was Valentina. I shouted to the couple, “Get the fuck out of here now!”
The man stood up and shouted back, “We saw her first!”
I was not in the mood for talking to scum who stole from the dead and the injured. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back. He opened his mouth, and I hit him with my open palm underneath his chin. His lower and upper jaw came abruptly together with a strong click and crunch. I had broken several of his teeth. He grabbed his chin with both hands and started running away from us. His female companion was surprisingly ugly, with tiny brown eyes set tight together as bottoms, a long twist of a nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, and long, lank hair plastered to her skull. She started screaming hysterically, and Charlie slapped her across the face. She fell down, stood up, and walked away quietly.
Valentina was far from the breaking of the waves, closer to the avenue. She weighed less than we did, so probably the tide and waves had carried her farther inland.
As far as I could see, she didn’t have any broken bones. I knelt next to her and put my cheek close to her nose. I needed to know whether she was breathing. I did not feel anything. I cleaned her eyelids with my fingers and opened one. I could see a sudden contraction of the iris. She was alive. She looked in bad shape, but probably no worse than Charlie and I had looked when we came to. The problem was that she was not regaining consciousness. Charlie and I been able to do so faster because we had a larger body mass, and we had been able to purge some of the drug. Also, the speed of our metabolism during the fight probably had burned off some of the drug.
Charlie stood up and started looking around. He saw something and started running. The dog stayed with me.
Charlie dropped to his knees and started digging in the trash. He had seen Caleb’s shirt, and Caleb was still wearing it. Caleb too looked unconscious, just like Valentina. His massive chest moved up and down almost imperceptibly. He was alive. Charlie didn’t know what condition he was in, but he was alive. Thank God for small mercies!
I lifted Valentina in my arms and started walking toward the avenue. I heard Charlie shouting my name, and I stopped and looked back. Charlie was helping Caleb to stand up. He was talking to him. He put Caleb’s arm around his neck and started walking toward me. As they got closer, I could hear Charlie telling Caleb, “Wake up, you sissy! How long are you going to sleep while we do all the work?”
I was sure the three of us had been zapped in similar manner, perhaps Caleb a little harder than us. I seemed to remember a little chubby man hitting him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle.
Charlie had his head next to Caleb’s and said, “Come on, Caleb. Snap out of it. I need you!”
Caleb raised his eyes and mumbled something unintelligible.
“What was that?” asked Charlie.
“Where are am I? What happened?” asked Caleb more clearly—the usual questions anybody would ask after coming around following a knockout.
“Good, you’re finally back. Always late to the party!” said Charlie with a big smile.
As we were walking toward the avenue, Charlie started to tell him as much as we had figured out. Little by little, Caleb began walking by himself until he was matching our pace. When we reached the edge of the beach, I laid Valentina down and told Caleb to sit with her while Charlie and I went to comb the beach in search of Juliette and Camille. For fifteen to twenty minutes, we searched, sifting through the debris and asking the scavengers on the beach whether they had found any other bodies washed up onto the shore. Charlie and I returned to where Caleb was sitting with Valentina, who was still unconscious. We decided to get Valentina to a hospital immediately and then resume our search for Camille, Juliette, and the Russian girls.
The avenue was littered with broken-down vehicles, and several inches of brownish water covered the paved surface. It looked like a war zone. We had gotten used to the constant drizzle, and I knew where we were. Five blocks away was a clinic. The good news was that the clinic was on the upper floors of the building, reducing the chance of flood damage. The building housed most of the medical specialists, and there was always medical staff in attendance, even though it was just a small clinic. The building also had a pharmacy.
Santa Cruz Clinic
We walked the five blocks to the Santa Cruz Clinic. It did not have an emergency entrance, just one general entrance. About thirty people were milling around a receptionist, who looked overwhelmed.
I had come here two years earlier to see a dermatologist for a skin irritation. I remembered her name. I asked Charlie and Caleb to walk ahead of me and make an opening in the crowd through which I could carry Valentina.
As soon as we got to the receptionist, I asked for the dermatologist and told her that she was expecting me and that the girl in my arms was her daughter. The receptionist looked at me, and tough she probably knew that I was lying, the fact that I had mentioned the name of one of the doctors in the building counted for something.
She stood up and opened the doors to let me into the facility.
The dermatologist was on the second floor, so we took the stairs. We couldn’t trust the elevator. We went into her office. There were five patients in the waiting room and two nurses running the office. I told one of the nurses that we urgently needed to see the doctor. The nurse went into the doctor’s office, and Dr. América Puiggrós came out. She saw me and said, “Hello, Santi. What is your emergency?” Without waiting for a response, she went to Valentina and opened her eyelids and told me, “Put her on the examination table.” She then added to the nurse, “Please go and ask Dr. Díaz to come down here immediately, because I have a patient in a coma.”
We followed Dr. Puiggrós into her office. She looked at us and said, “You all look like you need treatment. However, before that, please tell me what happened to this girl.”
I told her as much as I could. While she was examining and washing Valentina, Doctor Díaz arrived and took over the examination while shooting questions to Dr. Puiggrós and us.
He told us that Valentina needed to be transferred to the fourth floor, where he could examine her better. I lifted Valentina in my arms, walked up to the fourth floor, and placed her on a bed. Two nurses started attending to her. Doctor Díaz asked us to leave the room while the nurses undressed and finished cleaning Valentina. He then took us into his office, where he proceeded to examine each of us.
He told us that probably we had been drugged with a roofie, probably Rohypnol, a sedative for deep sedation. We had then been hit on the back of the head with a blunt object. He then asked each of us some questions independently, concluding that Caleb was suffering from a mild concussion. He told us that he needed to keep him under observation for the next forty-eight hours. Caleb said that he was feeling fine, but Charlie said, “Caleb, we need you in good shape, so please stay here until the doctor says that you are good to go.”
“OK, mommy,” said Caleb. “I will stay, but only for twenty-four hours.”
The doctor said, “Forty-eight hours would be preferable, but twenty-four is better than nothing.”
A nurse came and took blood samples from each of us. The doctor told us that in a couple of days, he would know what kind of drug we had been given, but because of the symptoms, he was almost sure that it was Rohypnol. Caleb was taken to a private room.
After an hour, Dr. Díaz came and told Charlie and me, “Valentina was sexually abused by more than one person. We also found foreign objects inside of her.”
I had a weird taste in my mouth. I asked, dumbfounded, “Foreign objects? What do you mean foreign objects? What kind of objects? Where did you find them?”
Dr. Díaz answered, “They found two ten-peso coins in her vagina and a twenty-peso bill rolled up in her anus.”
I felt as if I had been slapped in the face.
He told us that they had the rape kit and that we should go to the police and inform the authorities.
I was speechless. The doctor left us. I fell into a dreamlike state.
Charlie said, “Santi, snap out of it. We need to focus. We still need to find Juliette, Camille, and the Russians.”
We left the clinic. Outside, the reddish dog was waiting for me. We managed to get a taxi, and as we got in, the dog jumped right in. I asked the driver, “Do you have any problem if we take the dog?”
“No problem with me. I love dogs,” said the taxi driver. He asked, “What breed is it?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea. We just met this morning. He adopted me,” I responded and immediately added, “Would you please take us to the Papagayo? Could we hire you for the morning?”
“Yes, no problem. But I am charging double because of the conditions.”
“OK by us. We believe in the law of supply and demand,” I said.
As he drove to the beach in front of Parque Papagayo, he continued, “It looks like a big Rhodesian Ridgeback. Look at the stripe on his back. The hair is running counter to the rest of his mane. That is a feature of those African dogs. The South Africans developed the breed to hunt for lions.”
“You certainly know a lot about dogs,” said Charlie, his interest piqued.
“Yes, I do. As I told you, I love dogs,” said the taxi driver. “However, this is the first time that I’ve seen a Rhodesian up close and personal.”
“If these dogs are from South Africa, how come they are called Rhodesian Ridgebacks and not South African Ridgebacks?” asked Charlie.
“Because the South African who developed the breed was living in Rhodesia at the time, and the Rhodesians registered it as a breed,” said the taxi driver.
“You know,” I said to Charlie, “this keeps on getting stranger and stranger by the minute. My mother called the house in Acapulco Azania because she liked the sound of it and because it means South Africa, a bastion for free people, for all the tribes: Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaner, English, colored, etc. And now, on top of it all, an African lion hound has joined the group.”
***
The taxi took us back to the beach. We needed to look for our Canadian friends and the Russian girls. As we arrived, we saw several soldiers walking among the clutter. Two bulldozers were lifting the debris onto dump trucks. The area where we had been had already been cleared. We went to see the major in charge of the clearing operation and asked him if they had found five girls. He told us that they had not found anybody, not a single person, dead or alive. We asked him how long it was going to take to clear the beach. He told us the beach should be cleared by tomorrow, but if the rain continued, the floods would be carrying more garbage into the bay. So he expected the cleaning effort to continue nonstop until Manuel had passed through.
We went back to the taxi. We knew then that Juliette, Camille, and the three Russian girls had either drowned or were still onboard the ya
cht.
The taxi driver knew Acapulco well, so he found the streets with less water and fewer cars. Eventually we made it home, about two hours after leaving the clinic.
When we arrived, Sandra came out and paid the taxi. We didn’t have any money on us. Probably the goons on the yacht had taken all our valuables before dumping us on the beach, or perhaps the same couple who had been searching Valentina had searched us and taken our valuables.
Sandra was concerned, but she was happy to see us. I told her what had happened to us. She called my mother and passed me the phone. I explained to my mother all that we could remember. The more we talked about it, the more we remembered. I told her that we were going to the police station to report the incident. She said, “Yes, I guess you have to do that, but be careful. We don’t know how far the influence of these people extends. They might have penetrated the police. Just in case, call me from the station or in two hours.”
I responded, “Yes, Mom. I will call you.” We then said good-bye and hung up.
We took a shower and dressed in clean clothes. We drove to the police station in the CR-V.
The prosecutor
We parked the car and walked to the station. I asked to see the prosecutor, “Agente del Ministerio Público.” While we waited for him, Charlie and I continued to recall the events of the previous night. We recalled arriving at the yacht, being greeted by the captain, and meeting the group of five, including the host and the two Americans. We remembered their names and how many people were in the main cabin. We remembered the expensive hors d’oeuvre table and the three Russian girls. The rest was still a little fuzzy, but it was becoming less so.
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